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Kilson posted:They made a skimming gateway horizontal for the Gholam, didn't they? Nope. That was a regular vertical gateway, then the Gholam fell off the Skimming platform. There was absolutely nothing special about the skimming gateway used for that.
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Oct 5, 2012 22:41
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evilweasel posted:Nope. That was a regular vertical gateway, then the Gholam fell off the Skimming platform. There was absolutely nothing special about the skimming gateway used for that. Man, for some reason I always thought the gateway was over the floor of the room, instead of the doorway into the room. 
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Oct 5, 2012 23:02
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Cartoon Man posted:http://twitter.com/dragonmount/statuses/254318523130736640 River of Souls? That's the name of a lovely Babylon 5 movie.
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Oct 6, 2012 00:07
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keiran_helcyan posted:River of Souls? That's the name of a lovely Babylon 5 movie. And yet it was Martin Sheen's best gig in years, until he got The West Wing a few months later.
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Oct 6, 2012 00:52
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Ok, here's a bit more detail. http://www.dragonmount.com/index.php/News/book-news/unfettered-announced quote:The anthology will be available in Spring, 2013, after A Memory of Light is released. Proceeds from the book will benefit Shawn Speakman, a notable member of the fantasy community, who has been struggling to pay the overwhelming costs of his medical bills. About twenty-four well-known authors are contributing their talents to help him out. From the Grim Oak Press website: Kind of sad, good to see Brandon stepping up and doing this. My guess is that it will probably be a quick short story based on some notes of Jordan that couldn't make it into the final book due to space. Like they speculate, it will probably run parallel to some event in the final book. As for the title, I have no idea where River of Souls could fit into WOT lore...
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Oct 6, 2012 10:32
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It could have something to do with the forging of Thakan'dar blades.
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Oct 6, 2012 11:21
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Here's Brandon tweeting about it.Brandon Sanderson's twitter posted:I've been getting questions about "Unfettered," an anthology next year with a wheel of time story in it. Blog post next week, but (more) Well that clears up a few things at least.
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Oct 6, 2012 14:16
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As far as the whole "horizontal gateways" thing goes, I believe it once got answered by RJ with something like "yes, it is possible, but nobody in this Age knows how or has thought of it". Yep, here we go: http://linuxmafia.com/jordan/node/97.html
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Oct 7, 2012 04:03
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The prologue and chapter one are awesome, I can't wait for January. I'll be following my usual pre WoT release ritual I've followed since the first WoT book I've had to wait on (KOD). I've booked 3 weeks annual leave, I'll be reading the entirety of the Wheel of Time, starting with New Spring in the two weeks leading up to AMOL day. A wheel of time book is about 9-12 hours reading, so I'll be popping off a book a day. On the day AMOL comes out, I'll be rushing out to buy it, and should have a copy by mid afternoon. I'll be taking it home, plonking myself in a chair, and not getting up until it's done, except to use the bathroom/get more snacks. If the past few years are anything to go by, I'll be done by 6 or 7 the next morning. Then I can start rereading it. I can't begin to compare myself to the people who've been waiting 20 years for this, but WoT has been such a massive part of my life for the past 9 years that I really can't imagine what life will be like after it's finished.
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Oct 7, 2012 14:20
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The Lord Bude posted:The prologue and chapter one are awesome, I can't wait for January. I'll be following my usual pre WoT release ritual I've followed since the first WoT book I've had to wait on (KOD). Insanely jealous of the time off you have but this is basically my schedule. Everytime a new book has come out since book ...7? I have reread the series.
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Oct 7, 2012 16:04
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Cartoon Man posted:Here's Brandon tweeting about it. I think the bigger story here is that material actually gets cut from WoT books for pacing reasons.
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Oct 7, 2012 18:26
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They'll be releasing WoT anthologies for decades to come, entirely composed of minor side characters entire life-stories and reactions to the cleansing of Saidin.
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Oct 7, 2012 21:32
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500 page dossier on the practice of skirt smoothing and an general 1000 page overview of the intricacies of badger easing.
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Oct 7, 2012 21:39
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750 page manual on correct heraldry and ranking insignia for Cairhinen nobility.
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Oct 7, 2012 21:48
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A seven volume series fully explaining ji'e'toh and Aiel culture. Each volume's content contradicts everything in the previous volumes.
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Oct 7, 2012 22:38
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A seven volume series explaining Aiel humor.
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Oct 7, 2012 23:43
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Aiel humor was easy, I didn't get the joke Rand told about the farmers, the tree and the pond.
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Oct 8, 2012 00:24
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api call girl posted:Aiel humor was easy, I didn't get the joke Rand told about the farmers, the tree and the pond. The farmer who fell out of the tree, Hu, says "Why would I speak to [the other guy]? I passed him a minute ago and he didn't say a word to me." The joke is that Hu "passed" the other farmer as he was falling out of the tree, making it ridiculous that he's getting pissy about not being spoken to as he fell.
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Oct 8, 2012 02:02
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Yes, I know that's what that is, but to me it's nowhere near as funny as the Aiel jokes.
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Oct 8, 2012 02:05
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It is a pretty good example of small town humor, though.
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Oct 8, 2012 03:30
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The Lord Bude posted:The prologue and chapter one are awesome, I can't wait for January. I'll be following my usual pre WoT release ritual I've followed since the first WoT book I've had to wait on (KOD). I've done multiple one-day reads of WoT books, but only one at a time. I can't imagine how you stand this. The last few books would be a complete blur to me, where the only things I could pick up on are 'EXPLOSION, *character* dies, swordfight.' Anything past that level of complexity would just be gibberish.
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Oct 8, 2012 05:56
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Democratic Pirate posted:I've done multiple one-day reads of WoT books, but only one at a time. I can't imagine how you stand this. The last few books would be a complete blur to me, where the only things I could pick up on are 'EXPLOSION, *character* dies, swordfight.' Anything past that level of complexity would just be gibberish. The very first time I read through the wheel of time, book 10 had just come out, so I took out all 10 books from the school library and read them back to back over the two week September holidays. (My family took me on a week long beach/fishing vacation and I hate both beaches and fishing with every fibre of my being.) I honestly believe you haven't experienced the wheel of time properly until you've read the entire series back to back in as short a space of time as possible, and I feel not doing this is why so many people dislike the book 8-10 block... I can understand that when you have to wait for each book to come out, having a book of mostly buildup could be vexing; but because of the way I've read them I've always enjoyed every book thoroughly. (It helps that I really like reading about Aes Sedai politics and Elayne's struggle to claim the throne). In any event I feel people need to experience the Wheel of Time as a single condensed stream at least once.
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Oct 8, 2012 06:16
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The Lord Bude posted:(It helps that I really like reading about Aes Sedai politics and Elayne's struggle to claim the throne). You are a unique flower. I like the books and all, but reading all of them back to back a day at a time just sounds miserable. I guess I'm just not goony enough, but I like to see some of the world outside of my house each day.
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Oct 9, 2012 14:50
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subx posted:I like the books and all, but reading all of them back to back a day at a time just sounds miserable. I guess I'm just not goony enough, but I like to see some of the world outside of my house each day. Yeah, same. Also, there is a 100% chance that I would burn out on the series when the slump hit.
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Oct 9, 2012 15:26
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Tor's running a promotion right now, the "From the Two Rivers" ebook is on sale for 99 cents. In one sense this isn't worth it because it's just half of Eye of the World, but on the other hand, it has the "Extra" prologue chapter, "Ravens," which isn't really anywhere else and is a nice little slice of Rand & Egwene's childhood.
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Oct 9, 2012 19:19
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The Lord Bude posted:I've booked 3 weeks annual leave, I'll be reading the entirety of the Wheel of Time, starting with New Spring in the two weeks leading up to AMOL day. A wheel of time book is about 9-12 hours reading, so I'll be popping off a book a day. On the day AMOL comes out, I'll be rushing out to buy it, and should have a copy by mid afternoon. I'll be taking it home, plonking myself in a chair, and not getting up until it's done, except to use the bathroom/get more snacks. If the past few years are anything to go by, I'll be done by 6 or 7 the next morning. Then I can start rereading it. Similar to what I'll be doing. When I read the AMOL Prologue/1st chapter, I had to look up too many secondary characters that I didn't recognize afterwards. Haven't read any WOT material since Jan '11, when I read the series for the first time. Gonna start my re-readathon sometime in December.
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Oct 10, 2012 05:31
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Look at this goon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtHQbOMiD-k
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Oct 10, 2012 22:17
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Holy poo poo. Brandon got fat.
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Oct 10, 2012 22:19
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wellwhoopdedooo posted:Holy poo poo. Any more stories you can think of about him, even if they don't have anything to do with WoT, I'd love to hear them. If he was my cousin, he would have hated me. I'd have literally never ever ever stopped asking him questions. Hexaemeron posted:Calenth: I don't know if I'm jealous, since I likely would have bugged the everloving poo poo out of him and I would have been strangled by the time FoH came out. He was actually really intimidating when I was a kid, in a really nice and entertaining sort of way. He once told me he was going to "introduce you to my set of flaying knives" after I made a particularly bad pun. (I had to go home and look up what "flaying" meant). Six foot five guy, after all, vietnam vet. Lots of folks forget the whole helicopter-door-gunner background. So I didn't ask that many questions, for fear of wearing out welcome -- usually just one or two each time I saw him. I remember asking him after Eye of the World if the next book would be the next Age or if it would continue the story of Rand etc. I also asked him if Thom Merrillin was really dead or not and he wouldn't tell me. AFter TGH I asked him if Lanfear was a deliberate allusion to H. Rider Haggard's She and he said not consciously, that he hadn't read She since he was a child. I'm still working my way through a slow re-read of Eye. It really is just weird -- I keep getting flash backs to reading the book on my parent's old couch two decades ago, or finishing the first book that summer afternoon and thinking "wow." It's also really striking how much Thom Merrillin reminds me of him, especially of Jim's public persona. He was the sort of person who'd be telling stories in the corner of a party (one in particular I remember centered around his history of being physically incapable of lying to women, and the problems that caused him) and after an hour or so he'd just have a ring of twenty people around listening in. If I had to point to two author-insert characters in the series, it's definitely Thom and Loial, with Thom his public persona and Loial what he saw as his private persona. He and his wife are the only two people I've ever met who I had real problems just keeping up with conversationally -- they'd throw out so many jokes, references, etc., in their conversation that I had to mentally "run" in my head just to keep up with them. Harriett gets a lot of flak from fans but she's extraordinarily sharp and deserves a lot more credit than she typically gets for the series' success. Their house was & is a little bizarre, but in a good way. They kept a large chinese gong in the front hallway instead of a traditional doorbell. Most of every wall was & is covered in books -- I remember him estimating to me that he read about 400 books a month. For a while in my teens, I'd head over there every month or two and they'd give me a pile of books -- either second copies of things they'd purchased by accident or leftover promotional copies they'd been sent. Sometimes I'd just go over and hang out in his library for a while (I read most of the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin series that way). There were usually swords and other weapons piled everywhere; once I was talking to Jim and he casually picked up a rapier (out of the pile of rapiers, no joke, on the table in front of him) waved it around, and whipped it down to point at my fly, which was undone; that's just how he chose to inform me of the fact.
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Oct 10, 2012 23:10
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Kilson posted:Man, for some reason I always thought the gateway was over the floor of the room, instead of the doorway into the room. I've only read that part once, but that was my interpretation as well... Sir Ophiuchus posted:As far as the whole "horizontal gateways" thing goes, I believe it once got answered by RJ with something like "yes, it is possible, but nobody in this Age knows how or has thought of it".
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Oct 11, 2012 00:50
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There seems to be a special trick, or even a specific "talent", when it comes to making gateways on a different axis from the starting point. The only person who can do it so far, might be Androl, the Asha'man who uses gateways for amazingly complicated yet trivial things like sewing. Back to the difficulty, I don't think anyone has done it before, because making gateways on different heights, axis, and over moving platforms is one of the big problems that the Sea Folk are still trying to figure out, because as it is they haven't been able to travel reliably between ships. So if anyone starts doing it in the next book, it will probably be the Sea Folk, Androl, or the Seanchan just so they can be extra dickish (maybe Mat will get them to start sending To'raken carrying cannons through them in time for the last battle.)
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Oct 11, 2012 02:34
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Calenth posted:If I had to point to two author-insert characters in the series, it's definitely Thom and Loial, with Thom his public persona and Loial what he saw as his private persona.
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Oct 11, 2012 02:50
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Algid posted:Is this just something you picked up, or has he said that that was what he was conciously going for? I've always thought that the books were presented as though they were written by Loial. I don't think he ever explicitly said so, no, at least not to me that I specifically remember. It's just . . . if you ever saw him in a public setting, he was Thom, injured-leg-limp and mannerisms and wry humor and all. His Loial side didn't show up as often, was more private, but equally there. I don't think it's an accident that the two characters who are explicitly storytellers are the two most directly like him in personality, though. He knew what he was doing. There was a little of his personality in all his male characters, of course. It's just the least filtered/altered in Thom and Loial. One more story that even I never really understood: I went over there once to give them a present, a "cuddly chthulhu" toy I'd bought several of to give as gifts and then realized I only knew like three people who would appreciate them. I walked into the back room in the back house while he was writing, only time I ever walked in on him while he was writing. He was seated in his large wooden throne, at the computer, wearing a fez, and listening to japanese timpani drum music. Never really did figure out what he was writing just then, though I suspect a Seanchan scene. Calenth fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Oct 11, 2012 |
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Oct 11, 2012 03:13
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terminal mehmet posted:Holy poo poo. Brandon got fat. He must eat when he writes.
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Oct 11, 2012 03:33
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Obligatory "must beat GRRM on every level" joke.
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Oct 11, 2012 03:39
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Well, if he's been writing a lot lately that's a lot of sitting. Easy to let yourself go.
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Oct 11, 2012 04:59
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I hope this is the right thread for this question, but I'm wondering if it's worth it getting back into the series. I think I last read maybe book 8 or 9 back when I was in late middle school/freshman year of high school, and remember vague bits and pieces from the series. But now that the final book is out, I've got a small hankering to see if I can finish this series (especially since I'm on a fantasy kick after binging through the 5 Game of Thrones books). Would it be worth it to re-read the books leading up to the last one? Or will it never be as cool as it was when I was 13 and should I just let sleeping dogs lie?
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Oct 12, 2012 09:17
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Donny J posted:I hope this is the right thread for this question, but I'm wondering if it's worth it getting back into the series. I think I last read maybe book 8 or 9 back when I was in late middle school/freshman year of high school, and remember vague bits and pieces from the series. But now that the final book is out, I've got a small hankering to see if I can finish this series (especially since I'm on a fantasy kick after binging through the 5 Game of Thrones books). Would it be worth it to re-read the books leading up to the last one? Or will it never be as cool as it was when I was 13 and should I just let sleeping dogs lie?
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Oct 12, 2012 12:59
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Donny J posted:I hope this is the right thread for this question, but I'm wondering if it's worth it getting back into the series. I think I last read maybe book 8 or 9 back when I was in late middle school/freshman year of high school, and remember vague bits and pieces from the series. But now that the final book is out, I've got a small hankering to see if I can finish this series (especially since I'm on a fantasy kick after binging through the 5 Game of Thrones books). Would it be worth it to re-read the books leading up to the last one? Or will it never be as cool as it was when I was 13 and should I just let sleeping dogs lie? Re-read them all. As was mentioned, the book 8-10 slog still sucks. But if you make it past that, the last 3 books are GOLD. The teases that we've gotten from the final book...  Holy poo poo, wait till you see where Lan ends up. 
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Oct 12, 2012 13:23
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Anyway, with apologies for filling up the thread --just finished my re-read of Eye. A few thoughts as I try to separate my years-long relationship with this book from the book itself as a story: 1) Wow, the last third or so of this book reads like a comic book/ manga. There are a lot of descriptions, especially of Caemlyn, the Ways, and the Blight, that just pop into my head in illustrated-panel format, I don't *think* that's an artifact of years of fan art -- I've never actually read the Eye of the World comic book. Just really iconic, precise, colorful description. When Moiraine blasts Machin Shin or Rand watches plants decay in the Blight, it just reads like a splash page illustration, somehow. 2) When we first run into her in Caemlyn, Elaida mentions "Unbelievers." Struck me as a really odd useage, perhaps one of those first-book artifacts. Who are the unbelievers? What do they un-believe, precisely? Religion in the WoT universe (or more precisely, the narrative treatment of religion in WoT) would be interesting subjects for papers. Well, interesting to me. 3) I know this is going to sound incredibly stupid to EVERYONE, but it's bizarre to think back and realize that I was still arguing with my brother over which of Rand, Mat, and Perrin was the Dragon Reborn as late as the publication of The Great Hunt (I remember my brother getting mad about the cover of tDR because he said it was a spoiler). Admittedly I was in fifth grade then and my brother was my brother but still, I can't believe I was dense enough that I speculated. 4) I know I'm biased but I still think Eye holds up really, really drat well for a fantasy novel with 20+ years of age on it. Parts of it are a little dated -- it's still, after all, a "rural farmboys go on Epic Quest to Save the World! With a magic sword! And a wizard!" story -- but maybe it's just that I still remember how crazy it was in 1989 to read a story where the Epic Prophesied Hero was someone everyone feared, or hell, just a story where the Wizard Mentor was a woman, and not only a vagina-haver but one with a developed, complex personality and goals which had nothing to do with dating a male protagonist. I don't know how a modern modern viewer would react to it -- it's had so much influence on the genre that it might have lost some of its initial impact -- but at the time I remember thinking it was just fundamentally new and different. A "novel" in the sense of a new thing.
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Oct 12, 2012 18:42
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