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Brandon Sanderson / Re: Official Fan Art Thread **Don't create new threads**
« on: March 08, 2009, 07:59:39 AM »
mking, that's fabulous. My favorite of yours so far.
News:
A lot of people describe Scalzi’s Old Man's War novels as military science fiction, but I would classify its sequel Zoë’s Tale as a space opera. It’s a story about, well, Zoë, a teenage girl whose parents are invited to take leadership roles in building a colony on a new planet. Zoë is an enthusiastic member of the group sent to colonize Roanoke, despite the risks—and the risks are considerable even before the political machinations of greater powers boil to the surface. Continue reading Zoë’s Tale
Review by Silk
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812
Howard Tayler / What's speed got to do with it?
« on: March 08, 2009, 05:10:19 AM »
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20090308.html
Is the Touch-And-Go trying to escape a gravitational field or something? There shouldn't be any forces associated with going fast. Accelerating, maybe, but when you're already at speed...
Is the Touch-And-Go trying to escape a gravitational field or something? There shouldn't be any forces associated with going fast. Accelerating, maybe, but when you're already at speed...
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Howard Tayler / Re: RIP Brad
« on: March 07, 2009, 11:21:13 PM »
The storyline in question begins here.
I still just don't see the UNS sending a secret as valuable and well-guarded as Laz'r'us with a group as volatile and uncontrollable as the Toughs. However, if I were to further argue the point, I'd just start repeating myself, so I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
I still just don't see the UNS sending a secret as valuable and well-guarded as Laz'r'us with a group as volatile and uncontrollable as the Toughs. However, if I were to further argue the point, I'd just start repeating myself, so I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
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Howard Tayler / Re: RIP Brad
« on: March 07, 2009, 09:35:08 PM »
Are you talking about mindripping? I'm pretty sure that requires removing the brain of the victim a piece at a time.
Go back and read the memory-alteration story again. IMO it's absolutely, unambiguously clear that the Laz'r'us nannies are what's doing the memory wiping.
Remember that the whole point of altering their memories is to erase the knowledge of project Laz'r'us they gained through interrogating a rebuilt Xinchub. Given that that's the case, why would they then leave each and every Tough in possession of a full complement of Laz'r'us nannies - the very thing they worked so hard to prevent them from knowing existed? And if they were going to remove the nannies from the Toughs' systems (as I'm rather sure they did), why inject them in the first place, unless it was to alter their memories?
As for Schlock, I have a couple of theories:
1. As his post-alteration retrieval of memories from an eyeball suggests, he may have realized that consenting to the memory alteration (and not blabbing about his preservation of unaltered memories in an eyeball) was the only way to keep the UNS from killing the lot of them. He therefore would have simply allowed the nannies to do their dirty work.
2. Petey gave them "recipes" to adapt the nannies to all of the alien races in Tagon's crew...including, presumably, Schlock. It's possible that this allowed them to make the nannies resistant to Schlock's immune system.
While 2 is possible, I find 1 more likely.
Go back and read the memory-alteration story again. IMO it's absolutely, unambiguously clear that the Laz'r'us nannies are what's doing the memory wiping.
Remember that the whole point of altering their memories is to erase the knowledge of project Laz'r'us they gained through interrogating a rebuilt Xinchub. Given that that's the case, why would they then leave each and every Tough in possession of a full complement of Laz'r'us nannies - the very thing they worked so hard to prevent them from knowing existed? And if they were going to remove the nannies from the Toughs' systems (as I'm rather sure they did), why inject them in the first place, unless it was to alter their memories?
As for Schlock, I have a couple of theories:
1. As his post-alteration retrieval of memories from an eyeball suggests, he may have realized that consenting to the memory alteration (and not blabbing about his preservation of unaltered memories in an eyeball) was the only way to keep the UNS from killing the lot of them. He therefore would have simply allowed the nannies to do their dirty work.
2. Petey gave them "recipes" to adapt the nannies to all of the alien races in Tagon's crew...including, presumably, Schlock. It's possible that this allowed them to make the nannies resistant to Schlock's immune system.
While 2 is possible, I find 1 more likely.
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Howard Tayler / Re: RIP Brad
« on: March 07, 2009, 07:59:38 PM »
What happyman said, although I disagree that Brad could have Laz'r'us nannies and be dead. Remember that they brought Xinchub back after his head had been completely vaporized.
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Howard Tayler / Re: RIP Brad
« on: March 07, 2009, 09:22:34 AM »
Heh, I remember when I finished reading the archives. The pacing seemed absolutely glacial until I readjusted to only reading one a day.
Anyway, I don't remember the strip ever explicitly stating that the nannies were removed, but I do think it's the sensible thing for the UNS to have done. Had they left those nannies in place, they WOULD eventually have been discovered (like, the first time a Tough gets injured), rendering the whole exercise of modifying their memories moot.
Anyway, I don't remember the strip ever explicitly stating that the nannies were removed, but I do think it's the sensible thing for the UNS to have done. Had they left those nannies in place, they WOULD eventually have been discovered (like, the first time a Tough gets injured), rendering the whole exercise of modifying their memories moot.
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Brandon Sanderson / Re: New Elantris Audio Edition
« on: March 05, 2009, 11:11:02 PM »Surely this format costs quite a lot more to make than a typical audiobook. You'd have to pay multiple readers instead of one, and they would need more rehearsals and more takes of each scene, then you'd have to get all the sounds mixed in. And before any of that, you'd need someone to make the abridging decisions. Yet it sounds like the price they're asking is comparable to that of a regular audiobook, so they must have a pretty small profit margin.
Sure you have to pay more readers, but you have to pay each one for less; I'd bet it's not that much more expensive than a single reader. I imagine the biggest expense difference is in editing, since the various tracks must be spliced together. But, even then, I bet it doesn't take much longer than editing a single reader's performance. You already have to edit out the mistakes, and with a multi-track editor it wouldn't be much additional work to also make sure various performances line up correctly.
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Howard Tayler / Re: RIP Brad
« on: March 05, 2009, 07:42:15 AM »
I've been wondering who would get the axe this time around. Howard always kills at least one of the toughs on every campaign. Under the circumstances I'm surprised Legs pulled through.
He had a good run.
He had a good run.
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Brandon Sanderson / Re: Thoughts and questions about Elantris (spoilers too)
« on: March 01, 2009, 08:07:47 AM »820
Brandon Sanderson / Re: Thoughts and questions about Elantris (spoilers too)
« on: March 01, 2009, 07:48:58 AM »
Oh. I didn't know there was a "middle grade"; I just assumed it meant "middle school".
So, I'm reading the annotations, and this popped out at me:
Emphasis mine. So, the Shaod did not begin with Elantris. Why, then, did the chasm break the Shaod? My best guess is that the giant Rao was, like all other post-Reod Aons, completely non-functional, and the Shaod wasn't broken, it just returned to the way it used to work before Elantris. Like the Reod-Elantrians' too-weak Aons, perhaps the Dor just couldn't get enough power through the divide to accomplish its purposes without a little help.
It must have taken a serious genius, like a Newton or an Einstein, to figure out that building Elantris would so enhance those taken by the Shaod.
So, I'm reading the annotations, and this popped out at me:
Quote
Only Elantrians can draw Aons in the air, so someone taken by the Shaod must have developed the writing system. That is part of what makes writing a noble art in Arelon--drawing the Aons would have been associated with Elantrians. Most likely, the early Elantrians (who probably didn't even have Elantris back then) would have had to learn the Aons by trial and error, finding what each one did, and associating its meaning and sound with its effect. The language didn't develop, but was instead 'discovered.'
Emphasis mine. So, the Shaod did not begin with Elantris. Why, then, did the chasm break the Shaod? My best guess is that the giant Rao was, like all other post-Reod Aons, completely non-functional, and the Shaod wasn't broken, it just returned to the way it used to work before Elantris. Like the Reod-Elantrians' too-weak Aons, perhaps the Dor just couldn't get enough power through the divide to accomplish its purposes without a little help.
It must have taken a serious genius, like a Newton or an Einstein, to figure out that building Elantris would so enhance those taken by the Shaod.
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Brandon Sanderson / Re: Thoughts and questions about Elantris (spoilers too)
« on: March 01, 2009, 05:30:29 AM »
I didn't mean to imply that I thought the original Elantrians were still around. I figured there would be records of what the Shaod is and why it happens, and that these things would be taught in "AonDor 101" at the university. I also assumed the knowledge would trickle out to the common people, considering how deeply embedded the Aons themselves became in their culture.
That said, I'd buy that the original Elantrians would consider the reasons for the Shaod a state secret, lest other nations develop the means to equal or surpass Elantrian might. Beneath that assumption, it's easy to see how the secret could have been limited to a select group or even have died with its creators.
Edited to add: I think we learn that only Elantrians can make working Aons out of physical objects in the chapter where Raoden and Galladon climb up to the top of the city wall. (That's also where we learn that only Elantrians can destroy a permanent Aon.) Were it not so, all that Aon jewelry people wore would have been active, and anyone could have duplicated the wonders of Elantris.
On a somewhat unrelated tangent, did anyone else hear the voice of C-3PO whenever Ashe spoke?
On a very unrelated tangent, I just finished Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and was a little sad to see it end so quickly. I think Brandon may have overshot his audience just a bit. It's marketed to middle schoolers, but the plot is a bit simpler than that - there's only one little caper instead of the dozens we get in books like Mistborn. It could be that I'm odd, but I was reading Wheel of Time in middle school. Heck, I was reading Tolkien in 5th grade. In 3rd grade, this book would have about hit the spot.
That's not to say I don't think adults can read and enjoy this book. I just wish there'd been a bit more meat in it (on the order of something like Leven Thumps, for example).
That said, I'd buy that the original Elantrians would consider the reasons for the Shaod a state secret, lest other nations develop the means to equal or surpass Elantrian might. Beneath that assumption, it's easy to see how the secret could have been limited to a select group or even have died with its creators.
Edited to add: I think we learn that only Elantrians can make working Aons out of physical objects in the chapter where Raoden and Galladon climb up to the top of the city wall. (That's also where we learn that only Elantrians can destroy a permanent Aon.) Were it not so, all that Aon jewelry people wore would have been active, and anyone could have duplicated the wonders of Elantris.
On a somewhat unrelated tangent, did anyone else hear the voice of C-3PO whenever Ashe spoke?
On a very unrelated tangent, I just finished Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and was a little sad to see it end so quickly. I think Brandon may have overshot his audience just a bit. It's marketed to middle schoolers, but the plot is a bit simpler than that - there's only one little caper instead of the dozens we get in books like Mistborn. It could be that I'm odd, but I was reading Wheel of Time in middle school. Heck, I was reading Tolkien in 5th grade. In 3rd grade, this book would have about hit the spot.
That's not to say I don't think adults can read and enjoy this book. I just wish there'd been a bit more meat in it (on the order of something like Leven Thumps, for example).
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Brandon Sanderson / Re: Thoughts and questions about Elantris (spoilers too)
« on: February 27, 2009, 09:10:58 AM »Quote
The answer to your question is really a simple one. When something works, people just accept it. Over time they forget about it because it simply is. If something always works you don't question it, so over the millenia they just forgot what caused the Dor to work. All they remembered was that it was connected to the land.
I'm not sure I agree. The Elantrians seemed like a pretty scholarly bunch, and not prone to just forget stuff like that. They could have just not cared enough to bother teaching the common people, but it seems a bit egregious for (for example) Galladon not to know all the Aons when he grew up in Elantris with an Elantrian father.
Quote
Well...yeah, that's kind of the point. Except that it was probably Dilaf who caused the earthquake. However, I don't think most people reading the book had any idea that the earthquake caused the Reod until the end of the book; the standard assumption was that both things were symptoms of the same natural disaster. If you got it right away you're very smart.
I wouldn't accuse me of too many smarts. I'm usually pretty dim about stuff like that. In fact, I most certainly didn't "get it" right away - I was antsy the whole book for someone to go down and check that crack out, thinking surely the answer was somewhere inside.
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Site News / Re: Introduce yourself - right on!
« on: February 27, 2009, 07:05:19 AM »
Hey guys. My name's Ryan. I'm a Computer Science student at BYU-Provo. Besides computers, I like amateur astronomy, snowboarding, watersports, writing, reading, and video games (not necessarily in that order). I found my way here because I'm an incurably huge nerd, and as such I was reading annotations on Brandon's site when I stumbled on the link to these forums.
(gdb) bt
Starting Backtrace:
I started reading Brandon's books because of the Writing Excuses podcast, which I found through Howard Taylor's Schlock Mercenary. (I notice there's a forum for Howard here too.) Unfortunately, I'm not likely to start reading Dan Wells's stuff any time soon (sorry Dan; it's nothing personal. I just don't like horror). I found Schlock Mercenary through a link in the Erfworld forums at Giant in the Playground games. Though I have little interest in tabletop RPGs of any sort, The Order of the Stick and Erfworld are both excellent. I *think* I found OoTS through a link in the Ars Technica forums, where I'm known as Ryan B. Oh, and Ars? That was a link from Wes Felter's Hack the Planet blog, which is the first blog I started reading. I found that blog, I think, through a link from UserLand Software, makers of the once-great Frontier.
Don't even ask me how I found Frontier. That was, like, 12 years ago. I think.
Other interesting facts about me that nobody asked to know:
(gdb) bt
Starting Backtrace:
I started reading Brandon's books because of the Writing Excuses podcast, which I found through Howard Taylor's Schlock Mercenary. (I notice there's a forum for Howard here too.) Unfortunately, I'm not likely to start reading Dan Wells's stuff any time soon (sorry Dan; it's nothing personal. I just don't like horror). I found Schlock Mercenary through a link in the Erfworld forums at Giant in the Playground games. Though I have little interest in tabletop RPGs of any sort, The Order of the Stick and Erfworld are both excellent. I *think* I found OoTS through a link in the Ars Technica forums, where I'm known as Ryan B. Oh, and Ars? That was a link from Wes Felter's Hack the Planet blog, which is the first blog I started reading. I found that blog, I think, through a link from UserLand Software, makers of the once-great Frontier.
Don't even ask me how I found Frontier. That was, like, 12 years ago. I think.
Other interesting facts about me that nobody asked to know:
- I've been a Mac user since 1994, though a part of me died with Commodore in that year.
- I like music almost entirely too much. Right now, I'm listening to The Squirrel Nut Zippers.
- I'm doing this instead of studying for a test like I should. Guess the name of this site is appropriate...
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Brandon Sanderson / Thoughts and questions about Elantris (spoilers too)
« on: February 27, 2009, 06:40:52 AM »
Hi guys,
Sorry if you've already talked Elantris to death and I just missed it. I made a good-faith effort to find old discussions about my questions that came up pretty dry, but if you're all tired of this stuff feel free to beat me off with the noob stick.
That said, I just finished Elantris, and now I want to talk about it.
First, GREAT BOOK! I loved it all the way through. I did have one issue while reading it, though, and it came when Sarene tells Raoden and Galladon that the Aons represent the land. As soon as I read that, it was immediately obvious to me why the Aons weren't working, and it seems odd to me that it took the characters a few more chapters to figure it out. That's a minor quibble, but it leads me to other questions:
That's about it. I don't mean to sound overcritical here, because as I said, I loved the book. I'd love it even more if these questions had good answers.
Thanks for reading my rather TLDR first post.
Sorry if you've already talked Elantris to death and I just missed it. I made a good-faith effort to find old discussions about my questions that came up pretty dry, but if you're all tired of this stuff feel free to beat me off with the noob stick.
That said, I just finished Elantris, and now I want to talk about it.
First, GREAT BOOK! I loved it all the way through. I did have one issue while reading it, though, and it came when Sarene tells Raoden and Galladon that the Aons represent the land. As soon as I read that, it was immediately obvious to me why the Aons weren't working, and it seems odd to me that it took the characters a few more chapters to figure it out. That's a minor quibble, but it leads me to other questions:
- Why did Raoden need a Teo to tell him that? Wouldn't an Arelene, living as he does in the shadow of Elantris, already know it?
- I also wonder why nobody told the people that Elantris and the surrounding cities formed a giant Aon Rao, and that this fact causes the Shaod. It seems like something you'd teach your schoolchildren in history class.
- Assuming it was considered a sort of Elantrian proprietary secret, why then didn't the Elantrians make the connection between the chasm and the Reod? I mean, they're presumably the ones who thought this stuff up. Fixing the Shaod turned out to be incredibly easy. We know that at least one Elantrian survived the upheaval after the Reod, and I assume he wasn't alone. How did it never occur to any of them to draw a line in the dirt?
- The Shaod's connection to Elantris presents a sort of chicken-egg conundrum. I assume that since fixing the Elantrian Rao fixed the Shaod, then there was no Shaod (and no Elantrians) before its creation. But, only Elantrians can draw Aons. So...?
(I'll admit there are a few hints about this in the book. The Derethi priests appear able to access the Dor through sacrificial means, and the Jindo through ChayShan focus and motion. We also see that an incompletely-transformed Elantrian (Dilaf's wife) was created by an improperly-drawn Aon, implying that a full-blown Elantrian could be made with a properly-drawn Aon.
Or, the characters' belief that only Elantrians could craft Aons and have them take effect might simply be wrong.) - Finally, a more random note: I assumed throughout the book that Wyrn was somehow behind the earthquake that caused the Reod, and the book gives no evidence either way. Am I off base here?
That's about it. I don't mean to sound overcritical here, because as I said, I loved the book. I'd love it even more if these questions had good answers.
Thanks for reading my rather TLDR first post.