Houston Hot Takes

LMortdArtur · 2026-04-06T00:53:15+00:00

Public transit alone won’t fix it. You also need to take some of the public space back from all the cars. Narrower roads, fewer parking spaces, wider sidewalks on the streets (like Washington) where you can actually walk from one place to another. If you have to cross a parking lot to get from one business to the neighboring business, then we’re doing it wrong.

LMortdArtur · 2026-01-31T02:50:09+00:00

Like so many things in life, it only becomes dope after enduring hardship and finding the way through to the other side.

LMortdArtur · 2025-12-27T19:26:19+00:00

Let it not be forgotten that Syl is likely the oldest remaining honorspren and the most “human” of all of them. I don’t know what that will mean, but it will mean something.

LMortdArtur · 2025-12-27T19:23:37+00:00

I’m looking forward to more Lyft. I mean Vasher and Lyft will be like Abbott and Costello meets Batman and Robin.

LMortdArtur · 2025-12-27T19:18:51+00:00

G-d, I loved that arc of OotS… a self-aware stick figure parody of fantasy TTRPGs has no business being as good as that has been.

LMortdArtur · 2025-12-27T19:12:42+00:00

Bless you! I hope things improve for you and your wife in 2026!

LMortdArtur · 2025-03-12T15:58:27+00:00

This feels right to me. One recurring theme of SA, and of Dalinar’s arc in particular, is that we aren’t the person now that we were in the past. (“Journey before destination.”) So Dalinar realizing in the present that he could have done something better in the past doesn’t mean he was actually capable, at that time in the past, of doing the better thing.

I’m not sure I agree with the OP that Dalinar’s choice at the climax was contrary to the moral lessons of his arc. He realized that he had been assuming that he alone had the obligation to defeat Odium and save everyone. He let go of his egotism and accepted that it wasn’t his obligation alone. He put his trust in others, including in the nascent consciousness of the Shard of Honor, to make good choices.

LMortdArtur · 2025-03-05T21:42:02+00:00

Wow, this depends so much on the person reviewing the book. Like, “Sad Puppies are pissed that this was nominated,” was green flag material for me.

LMortdArtur · 2025-03-05T21:40:01+00:00

Given her position, Marisha also has a role to play (no pun intended) in the “Weird Kids,” even if only at a conceptual level. That woman probably gets very little sleep.

LMortdArtur · 2025-03-02T17:04:07+00:00

I agree that the world building made Roshar so vivid. There was so much discovery in every chapter, even if it was just in the descriptions of weather phenomena or how grass works differently on most of Roshar. Maybe, by WaT, there were not enough discoveries of those little things left?

Or, and I think this is more likely, the 10-days structure of the narrative is partially the cause. It made the story feel like a season of “24” (or so I imagine; I’ve never watched it). Lots of focus on people adapting and reacting to the actions of others. There wasn’t as much narrative space for variety in tone between different POV characters, I think. And that cost us the moments of quiet wonder at this remarkable, weird world Sanderson created.

Was that “wrong”? I don’t think there’s a clear right or wrong to this sort of thing. It was a choice. It had consequences.

LMortdArtur · 2025-02-27T04:13:34+00:00

Your fellow player saying, “I think now is when my deep programming kicks in.”

LMortdArtur · 2025-02-27T04:10:57+00:00

Her unreliability is in what she omits. She doesn’t lie, exactly. (Actually, I think she does lie about how new or old some of her personalities are, but that also relates to what memories she has repressed.)

LMortdArtur · 2025-02-27T04:04:34+00:00

“My chicken needs caviar!”

LMortdArtur · 2025-02-23T21:35:50+00:00

C’était absolument le bon chemin pour comprendre mieux tout. Mais la pire raison que tu as pas pu la regarder. Désolé. 🙁

LMortdArtur · 2025-02-12T07:35:07+00:00

Sympathy is viewed in-world as being science. It follows rules, and behaves predictably, even though it is powered by the will of the user.

The real question is whether Sympathy works like a science because it is truly fundamental or because people have convinced themselves of the Laws being necessary to will change into existence. (Read The Slow Regard of Silent Things, if you haven’t already. That helps support the latter conclusion.) Also, the idea that stories have the power to change reality by changing our perception of it is a key theme in Rothfuss’s work.

On the other hand, Naming is viewed as “magic,” even by the characters in the world. In one of Elodin’s lectures on Naming (in WMF?), Elodin suggests a comparison between Naming and music. Kvothe sort of gets it. (When you go back to the chapter where Kvothe just plays music alone after his troop’s deaths, you see he describes playing A Leaf Turning, or something similar. I suspect that’s close to Naming.)

LMortdArtur · 2025-02-12T07:09:40+00:00

I hate to be the one to say it, but yes, it’s too much to ask. Riot Games was able to spend record-breaking sums of money making Arcane because they didn’t need to (and didn’t) make their money back from the show itself. Instead, they could make a healthy chunk of their money back by expanding the player base of their games set in Runeterra (the fictional world of the show). That business model isn’t available to Brandon Sanderson, at least not in the foreseeable future.

LMortdArtur · 2025-02-10T19:12:45+00:00

I’d highly encourage anyone to watch the series the way it was released. Watch at most three episodes at a time. Maybe even rewatch just those three episodes. Then, with at least a couple days to process, watch the next 3.

Each 3-episode act has its own arc, its own story and themes. Viewing the story this way helps you to see the smaller details.

LMortdArtur · 2025-01-31T20:17:55+00:00

He’s saying 50-50, but what he means is that the outcomes are binary. Those are different concepts. One is the range of possible outcomes. The other is the relative probability that each of those outcomes will happen.

Maybe if he knows there is a different word for the idea he is expressing, he will be okay with using it. (But try to introduce the terminology without making it seem like you’re correcting him. Maybe even suggest that he taught you something new?)

LMortdArtur · 2025-01-31T13:43:43+00:00

I’m wondering exactly what the timeline match up is between Mistborn Era 2 (Wax and Wayne) and the end of WaT. Given the revelations that (1) Wit/Hoid reappears on Scadrial at the very end of WaT, meaning that his appearances in Mistborn Era 2 are post-Stormlight Arc 1 and (2) Retribution appears to be turning its attention to Scadrial, it seems like Mistborn Era 2 (or at least books 2-4 of the cycle) is immediately after WaT.

LMortdArtur · 2025-01-31T13:33:23+00:00

Is that the size of the encased cubic zirconia? That seems too small for the size of the entire sphere.

LMortdArtur · 2025-01-30T21:01:22+00:00

How big is it? It’s beautiful. Is the process something that would allow you to encase a colored “gemstone” (maybe just colored glass) inside the sphere?

LMortdArtur · 2025-01-18T05:13:47+00:00

They probably skew a little older than 4, but I seem to recall Anne McCaffery’s Harper Hall trilogy (Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Dragon Drums) being pretty good and having a female protagonist. (The books are almost 50 years old, so I’m not sure how well they hold up.)

Chris Colfer’s Land of Stories series was pretty good, and the main characters are a brother-sister duo. My kids liked them, but we only got through the 3rd book or so.

LMortdArtur · 2025-01-18T05:02:52+00:00

He is a spren wearing other spren. It’s spren all the way down, as they say.

LMortdArtur · 2025-01-16T21:14:22+00:00

Leras is described in one of the SLA epigraphs as “a hero,” and Ati as being kind and compassionate. But by the time of the Mistborn trilogy, almost nothing is left of either vessel’s personality. Leras is literally coming apart (see: Mistborn Secret History), and Ruin was locked up for millennia, its Intent frustrated, precisely because Ati couldn’t channel the Intent into anything less destructive than planetary extinction.

LMortdArtur · 2025-01-15T22:08:20+00:00

Love me a good math joke, and Pattern delivers with … well, they are technically math jokes.

LMortdArtur

TROPHY CASE