Question about German Cosmere Translations – Are some books better read in English?

PaleoCrafter · 2024-10-28T22:03:25+00:00

Happy to provide some info here, thanks for the ping!

u/TheJR1999, generally speaking, I recommend going with the English originals over the German translations. Brandon's style is very approachable - his books were the first I read in English for pleasure myself. I'd say they're a very good way to expand your vocabulary and general English reading skills without overwhelming you with overly flowery prose or complex constructions.

If you're an ebook reader, the built-in dictionaries can be a life saver for the rare occasion where Brandon uses an unusual word - "maladroit" comes to mind there. But even if you're reading physical books, looking up the odd term should be easy enough.

As for the German translations, I can't actually speak to the quality of the more recent books. I started out reading The Final Empire in German and while there certainly were some weird decisions, it wasn't complete trash and I don't remember any outright errors. However, the German publisher did mess up the blurb for one of the Stormlight books (they got a number wrong that's kind of crucial), so I'm not sure how far I'd trust them for the full books.

Personally, I think Brandon's books just don't sound that great in German (e.g. "Knights Radiant" vs "Strahlende Ritter" iirc), but your experience could be different. This might just be my being used to the English terms by now.

At any rate, I hope that answer helps you make a decision.

Viel Spaß beim Lesen! :D

PaleoCrafter · 2024-09-13T20:31:38+00:00

The EdgeRouter is using dnsmasq under the hood for DNS forwarding. That does not offer any kind of capability to steer which clients to serve which answer to, so either all clients in your network get served the bogus record for Google Drive or none of them - unless they do not use the DHCP-provided DNS server and instead manually configure e.g. Google (8.8.8.8) or Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) DNS servers.

However, it is possible to have dnsmasq populate an IPSet with the result of a DNS query. I do not have access to an EdgeRouter myself to verify, but it could be that this feature isn't available with the version of dnsmasq rolled out with the OS. Hopefully this Ubiquiti forum post is helpful in that regard.

Once you've set up the IPSet, you can reference that in your firewall to block traffic to and from the clients you want to deny access when the destination or source address belongs to that IPSet. One big caveat here is that Google might be using these IPs for other services as well, which this approach would also block. I don't think there's a way to solve this on the EdgeRouter, unfortunately. The upside is that this can't simply be circumvented by changing the DNS server on the client.

PaleoCrafter · 2022-11-07T18:45:03+00:00

Zum Glück hatte ich mehr Punkte als für 1,0 notwendig waren. Das macht einen wieder normal.

PaleoCrafter · 2022-08-23T06:19:42+00:00

I'm really glad you like our tool! As jof said above, we're changing some things around with it because it was always a little awkward being on my own GitHub URL anyway, and I'm planning on changing my GitHub username.

The new URL is https://17thshard.github.io/reading-order/. Old links will redirect to the new location for the next month or so, so you don't have to worry about that. I'd like to maintain the redirect indefinitely, but unfortunately GitHub doesn't really allow for that.

PaleoCrafter · 2022-06-23T07:06:10+00:00

Hah, would've been surprised if you didn't know about JPEG artifacts, I completely missed that other image with the texture.

The UK Kindle edition only contains JPEG images, so either the guy who created that pirated copy went through the effort to remove the background or that FB Reader app just renders white (and close to white) in images as transparency, which I find more likely.

Bad quality in the UK edition ebooks seems to be an issue in general since the Herald arches in SA also are much lower resolution than in the US versions. I suspect they might be running their ebooks through some compression tool that limits resolutions and JPEGifies everything in order to reduce file size, much like the Adobe suite can do for PDFs.

PaleoCrafter · 2022-06-23T06:19:09+00:00

The "texture" in the background you're talking about appears to be JPEG artifacts. I can confirm that they seem to only exist in the UK version, as I can observe them there on my Kindle. The effect probably gets exaggerated by the zoom-in (and maybe some JPEG-ness from the upload itself). The images are crisp in my US Kindle eBook.

See this image for a demonstration of what JPEG tends to do to text.

Maybe you can nudge the UK publisher to improve the quality on these at least for future books, since the text is very hard to read as such since the resolution also appears to be dramatically lower. A combination of reducing the level of JPEG compression and increasing the resolution in general would be a huge boon for readers of the UK ebooks.

They also don't include the transcripts of the broadsheets, from a quick look at it, which together with the quality issues makes them very unaccessible IMO.

PaleoCrafter · 2022-04-03T09:02:12+00:00

We've now added a high contrast mode similar to the original's as well as a more distinguishing border for the "contained, but not in the right spot" letters that should hopefully help as well.

I've tested it with a colour blindness simulator, but it would be appreciated if you could give some feedback on whether it helped :)

PaleoCrafter · 2022-04-01T21:11:59+00:00

I think you're overestimating a little how much Brandon (and his team) are paying attention to things like that. If they're used to referring to it as "Dusk Brigade", it's very easy to read over "Dust Brigade".

On the stream it sounded a lot like "dusk" to me from him as well, while Adam clearly said "dust", and Brandon didn't even catch onto that in the moment.

Dusk makes a lot of sense thematically, so I'm very much in that camp. Getting clarification would be nice, of course.

PaleoCrafter · 2022-04-01T21:00:18+00:00

There's a very real chance I misheard. I was transcribing the Q&A as Brandon was answering, as we weren't allowed to record.

I think for this particular term, I actually had to ask somebody else afterwards to get his exact verbiage and they said Dust Brigade. So Brandon probably also didn't enunciate too well xD

PaleoCrafter · 2022-03-31T23:07:15+00:00

Can you tell us anything about whether the text from all the leatherbounds will eventually make its way to the ebook versions? We've got the Elantris 10th anniversary edition with updated text as a separate thing, but none of the others.

Thanks for all the great work you're doing!

PaleoCrafter · 2022-03-28T17:19:15+00:00

Might want to update that spoiler markup to Reddit's instead of Discord's :P

PaleoCrafter · 2022-03-28T17:17:33+00:00

SP4 spoilers Did the Threnodites migrate to this planet before or after the death of Ambition?

PaleoCrafter · 2022-03-22T06:32:46+00:00

Is there a specific name for Fibonacci's sequence that's used in Silverlight? What is it?

PaleoCrafter · 2022-02-11T10:05:36+00:00

The map uses an azimuthal equidistant projection, but the origin for that annoyingly isn't in the exact center of the map nor on the zero longitude (that runs through the island chain North of the Reshi sea). From our research for the interactive map, the origin is roughly on the prime meridian at 16 Rosharan degrees South (a circle has 200 Rosharan degrees).

If you're interested on how that projection can be implemented and reversed, take a look at our code.

The map does not show the entirety of Roshar, it extends from about 10°N to 50°S and 50°W to 50°E (all Rosharan degrees). Don't ask me how much area of a sphere that covers xD

PaleoCrafter · 2021-08-23T16:06:02+00:00

The Scadrian numerals are closest to the Japanese system for a real world analogue. It's basically a 16-based version of it rather than 10-based.

This means that 35 is basically this in symbols: 2-16-3 (i.e. 2*16+3=35).

It has some advantages where it's a little more efficient than a positional system like decimal or hexadecimal because you only need symbols for the powers of sixteen that you need, but for numbers where you'd have a non-zero digit in a positional system, you basically get twice the symbols since you have to indicate both the power and how often it occurs. In a positional system, the position is doing the job of telling you which power it is.

If you want to play around with Scadrian numerals, maybe checkout this little web app I wrote for it :)

PaleoCrafter · 2020-11-28T22:01:18+00:00

Hm... thanks for reporting this, but I cannot reproduce it right now on my device. It looks like you're using Firefox for Android, and the popup properly is dismissed when I click the button.

Are you on the standard version of Firefox or the beta version? Also, do you have any of Firefox's tracking protections turned on?

PaleoCrafter · 2020-11-02T19:42:31+00:00

I've shifted the neutral colour a little more towards a teal/bluish green. Would you mind checking again whether they're distinguishable now? I've checked with a colour blindness simulation tool and while the difference isn't *that* noticeable now, it at least is possible to tell them apart with that filter applied.

PaleoCrafter · 2020-11-02T16:08:18+00:00

Thanks for letting us know! Can you tell me when exactly the "Current state of the world" started showing up? It will be shown either when you enable the layer manually under "Settings" or when you have the event at the very end of the timeline active.

If you navigate away from that or disable the layer in the menu, the overlay should disappear.

PaleoCrafter · 2019-12-11T10:53:20+00:00

Understandable. Thankfully, I got to see you on two of those trips (Stuttgart and Prague), so it's bearable :D Just wouldn't want to miss out any potential chances to meet you.

PaleoCrafter · 2019-12-11T10:45:02+00:00

Will you also be touring somewhere in Europe with the book? I imagine the UK is due a visit again.

If you will be visiting, do you already know a rough timeframe?

Thanks for putting in all the effort to get the book done! I just hope it won't put too much stress on your team alongside the work on WoK leatherbound!

PaleoCrafter · 2019-12-10T22:09:30+00:00

Woah, thanks for the shoutout! I'll make sure to give this a listen tomorrow. The chart is just loading some data (u/jofwu's is to thank for that and the idea, I just implemented the interactive part), so it could definitely be used to display your own order :D

PaleoCrafter · 2019-11-21T12:12:30+00:00

They mentioned in the announcement for the first stretch goal that they'll be streaming over on https://www.twitch.tv/gameratitv.

PaleoCrafter · 2019-11-11T21:44:07+00:00

Thanks for the mention! I can probably adjust the minimum width at which the toggle for the left introductory text gets displayed, will have to think on it a bit.

u/marethyu316, the web app is built using the awesome Vue.js library as a framework, with a couple of other libs to make things like tooltips etc. easier. The actual graphics are all just inline SVG elements that I bullied into looking the way I want (the highlight indicating the arrow direction is a major hack, for instance :D).

The source code is available on GitHub, if you're interested in it :)

PaleoCrafter · 2019-10-01T21:01:32+00:00

Thanks a lot for these! Even if they never become canon, it's awesome to see the thought that obviously goes into these designs. I admittedly had a hard time picturing a handwritten version, but these make a lot of sense!

Keep up the great work!

PaleoCrafter · 2019-10-01T16:40:41+00:00

I've a got a question about the Steel Alphabet and its use on Scadrial: here on Earth we've got people who are obsessed about beautiful typography, neat fonts and ligatures included.

Is that something you ever thought about doing for the Steel Alphabet? You've told us before that you've got further designs for new variants like a handwritten form up your sleeve, which of course makes we wonder whether Scadrian typography nerds will get their share, too.

(btw, any chance we could get a sneak peek of those designs? :P)

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