For whatever reason I’ve seen people say they don’t consider The Lost Metal a critical part of the second arc (maybe because it happens or was written a few years later?). I would disagree wholeheartedly and think it makes the series. It’s what finally pulls the second era to a comparable level to the first era for me.
I’m a big fan of quality leatherbound stuff, though I can’t actually afford any of it. I do really enjoy the art on the regular Stormlight books especially, but I just like leather. Warbreaker would also be a good case for a leatherbound version because I don’t particularly like that cover.
It’s all pretty silly when the reality is that there’s not a very good reason to have any physical books because I read them all as audiobooks, but since I started I can’t seem to help myself. It’s a good thing I have no shelf space or I’d really be in trouble.
$350 for a thin client locked out of doing anything useful and requiring a subscription to function?
The story is building up towards me being tempted to buy the fancy leatherbound version. The secret archives are kind of in between, and the Stormlight Archives are the ones I’d really want, but I seriously can’t justify $250 apiece for those.
That purple is sexy though.
Finished Mistborn and most of the Arcanum stories that aren’t tied to Elantris. Have that borrowed to read soon-ish, but am reading Warbreaker right now and will probably read the Stephanie Plum book (Now or Never) that released today next.
I couldn’t get into some of John Scalzi I tried, but I really liked the interdependency series. It’s not a masterpiece but it’s a fun ride.
Shockingly, your brain and productivity improve when you get regular downtime.
(Yeah I know most people want something shorter than a book. It’s a solid read though.)
As dumb as LLM nonsense is generally, using one to handle actual personal interactions for you is using it wrong.
And when it’s junk out of the box because random no-name Amazon cables are universally terrible?
It’s $10 and high quality. How much do you think you’re saving with a junk off brand one?
That’s a helpful perspective. I appreciate it.
I still have a lot of work on the underlying math because I didn’t put in near the effort I should have in any of my actual classes, but I do genuinely want to get over the hump.
lol the problem with Destiny is they turned it into a treadmill and stopped putting the work into character and level design.
Elden Ring can easily take more than 100 hours on your first playthrough, and different builds significantly change your play style.
BG3, similar deal. Subsequent playthroughs are probably going to be accelerated, but there are a bunch of different story choices you can make that feel different, the party members have their own story lines, there’s a special custom character called Dark Urge that’s intended for a later playthrough that has it’s own twist, and you can change the strategy of encounters a lot with different party constructions.
Rimworld calls itself a story generator because you’re going to fail and have people die and whatever, but every game plays out different, there are a good couple scenarios, and there’s expansions and mods you can add on top of that for variety.
Just the first couple that come to mind. I’m not near 1000 hours on any of them, but they all have a lot of content.
I think speculation and guesswork is perfectly fine. It’s part of a path towards an answer. However, that speculation and guesswork needs to have its uncertainty clearly indicated.
As “analytics” have emerged, everyone has their own model to give a guideline on decisions. This is done using things like “win probability” of all the possible choices and outcomes. You can do out the math, using a model, to say something like “going for it gives you a 35% chance to win, and kicking the field goal gives you a 33% chance”.
And that sounds great. But, all the numbers that go into that math are incredibly noisy, with very small sample sizes. A great kicker has a better chance of making a field goal than a bad kicker, and they can account for that, to a point. But they can’t really account for that, plus the specific weather conditions, plus the kicker is a little sore today, …
And the chances of a stop, and of scoring if you’re successful, etc, are even worse, because it’s specific to how your offense matches up to that defense, plus the context of the game, the context in the game/moment, etc.
It’s perfectly fine, and reasonable, to use a model as the best indicator you have and make a decision aided by that model. But the correct way to present statistical models is provide some guidance on how uncertain it is, in addition to the raw number. If you phrase that “35% +/- 10% if you go for it, 33% +/- 10% if you kick”, you realize that there’s a significant range where a better model might tell you to make the opposite decision, and it’s a lot closer to a toss up.
But despite the inherent uncertainty due to the limited sample sizes used to create the models, you see “analytics experts” all over the place calling coaches morons for decisions that are pretty ambiguous because their specific model gives one decision a small edge and it didn’t work out. If they had explicitly evaluated and acknowledged the uncertainty of their model given the factors it can’t account for, they would have a much clearer picture of what the decision actually was.
Make guesses. Speculate. But make it clear (to others, and yourself) what you’re doing so the guesses aren’t given more weight than they deserve.
That’s less “seeking help on homework” than “having it do your work for you”.
But it’s incredibly bad.
All the time.
Pretty much never intentionally, though. I’m just bad at keeping up with people.
Your general explanation is all good, but it never seems like any of the platforms built for live events really have issues delivering content. I don’t think the issue is so much that streaming live broadcasts is insurmountable as it is that Netflix specifically doesn’t have their architecture managed in a way that works well with big live events. They lean heavily on having their content cached close to the end users and don’t have a lot of experience at real time.
I said it elsewhere but it felt like he meant for the final empire to be standalone, then was scrambling a bit in the well of ascension to keep the plot going.
But then some of the part I thought felt slow paid off in the conclusion, so IDK. I like the pacing in most of the rest of the stuff. It’s just the introductions. Like Tress of the Emerald Sea, for example, it took so long for her to actually start her adventure.
I love his work and bought physical copies of all of Stormlight, Mistborn, and just a couple days ago the pretty “premium” hardcovers for the secret projects, just to have on my shelves.
My one thing is that his introductions are almost always slower than I’d like. Though ironically he did better in the Wax and Wayne Mistborn arc and I like the Vin arc more.
I’m on the lost metal (7) and everything I’ve seen is flavor. Descendants of characters in the first arc, mythology around characters in the first arc, some involvement of ones who aren’t impacted by time the same way, etc. You won’t be missing plot points if it’s not fresh.
I also read secret history after 6, and I honestly couldn’t tell you the “minor spoilers” of the second arc he says it has. (Maybe an awareness of one character you’re already aware of if you’ve read Stormlight or secret projects.) I’d personally say you’re safe reading it without the second arc, and the different perspective on some key points in the first arc were pretty impactful.
Right now I’m way down a Brandon Sanderson rabbit hole, so I guess the Cosmere? I’d say Stormlight Archive, but Mistborn is really cool because they’re set at the inflection points in the planet’s history. The first arc is excellent, and it changes the world. The second arc is set in the future, with mythologies based on the first arc and scientific progress based on secrets uncovered in the first. The changes in the use of magic are really cool. There’s a third arc planned to be set in the future from there.
But the Cosmere as a whole shares some core concepts and characters can move across it, and that comes into other standalone works like (3 of 4) secret projects and a bunch of other stuff.
The percentage of the population that’s illiterate is way higher than it has any business being.
Like “can’t read at an elementary school level”.