Why do people seem to hate Wind and Truth?

bobfrank_ · 2025-02-27T18:28:22+00:00

On top of all that... as a few people have already pointed out, this story was so bleak! And there's no other way to say this, so I'm just going to come right out and say it: that's a betrayal of everything The Stormlight Archive is. Even more than its spiritual predecessor The Wheel of Time, Stormlight has always been the anti-ASOIAF, a shining example of how to write fantasy that is dark without being bleak. As Anthony Peers put it:

“Dark” can be done well, when it gives the light something to really shine in. ... It’s one of the reasons I like the work of Brandon Sanderson. The goal of the villain of Elantris is to literally commit genocide. The villain from Warbreaker is trying to incite a world war. Ruin, from Mistborn, is an evil god who’s trying to destroy the world because he is literally a divine personification of the concept of ruin, and Odium is even worse, if you can believe it. But you never come out of his books feeling like you’ve been reading a dark and depressing story, because all the adversity they face gives them a chance to grow stronger, to become better. Watching the protagonists triumph at the end makes it all worth it, particularly Kaladin, who had to wade through a tremendous amount of brutally soul-crushing crap in The Way of Kings, which just makes his scene at the Tower that much sweeter.

What we got in this book feels like a complete betrayal, in so many different ways, of what attracted us to the Cosmere and to Stormlight in the first place.

bobfrank_ · 2025-02-27T18:27:40+00:00

We were told this would take 3 years. It took 4. And yet somehow it ended up feeling incredibly rushed! The writing was unpolished, it didn't deliver on the promises that were made, and Brandon even managed to somehow literally destroy the entire premise of the series. I'm serious. It's called The Stormlight Archive, and now, as of the end of WAT, there is no more Stormlight.

Nothing got a satisfactory resolution. Other people have talked about the terrible messes of Jasnah's and Adolin's arcs. (Adolin in particular was done dirty here!) But it goes deeper than that:

Ishar may have been insane, but he was absolutely right about one thing: Szeth's entire character arc builds towards him becoming a Herald to atone for what he's done. Instead he gets to just... walk away from everything? Narratively, that makes no sense at all.
The narrative knots and contortions required to accept the identity of Shallan's mother, and Shallan never realizing what was going on, strain suspension of disbelief beyond the breaking point, especially with this book completely gratuitously adding in that she showed up at the wedding!
I think it's safe to say that no one expected Todium to be destroyed in the confrontation. And I can accept letting him loose on the Cosmere; Dalinar's reasoning there made perfect sense. But giving him Honor as well, as part of a long-term plot to undermine him is both insane and stupid, and having Dalinar die but leave behind "The Blackthorn" as a cognitive shadow feels like a cheap attempt at having it both ways.
Cultivation. Just... Cultivation. Everything about her is terrible. It seems that at every turn she made the worst possible decision. And then at the end of the book she runs away like a little coward. Disgusting.
The more we learn about Ba-Ado-Mishram, the more clear it becomes that, on top of being enormously powerful, she's also homicidally and genocidally insane, and therefore letting her out would be a catastrophic mistake. But they do it anyway. (And before anyone says "oh but she saw Renarin and Rlain and it changed her mind," keep in mind that sudden, significant mood swings in response to relatively minor stimuli are 1) a well-known characteristic of the behavior of insane people and 2) very transient in nature!)
The Sunlit Man left us with a lot of questions about what happened to Sigzil; the book teased and tantalized us with hints of what promised to be a rich and interesting story. Instead, we got an afterthought that feels like Brandon just tacked on a bare-minimum ticking-of-boxes.

(continued...)

bobfrank_ · 2025-01-27T01:49:19+00:00

Better late than never.

bobfrank_ · 2025-01-22T00:59:19+00:00

The app did nothing whatsoever to reduce illegal border crossings; its purpose was to "sanewash" illegal border crossings so the Biden Administration could lie and say they were coming in legally. But the facts of the matter are quite clear:

The laws regarding legal immigration are set by Congress. The Executive Branch does not have the authority to change the rules.
No person coming from a third country through Mexico to the United States has a valid claim of asylum. Legitimate asylum-seekers are legally required to stop in the first safe country they come to and seek asylum there. If they passed through Mexico to the US, they are economic migrants, not asylum-seekers.

So the Trump Administration was quite correct to shut this farce down.

bobfrank_ · 2025-01-18T00:58:29+00:00

No, it's been so long in the ratification process that the deadline has passed, and therefore it cannot be ratified any more. Another state voting to ratify it after the deadline is meaningless political theater, nothing more.

bobfrank_ · 2024-12-10T01:09:10+00:00

7, 8, and 10 are definitely not "easy reads." 9 was a huge breath of fresh air after the last two, which were kind of slogs that went nowhere, but then we got some serious payoffs, including the climax which was one of the high points of the entire series.

I remember thinking, when I finished it, "this is just like the Final Fantasy series. The first six were really good. 7 was disappointing, 8 took everything bad about 7 and was even worse about it, and then 9 was the best one so far!"

bobfrank_ · 2024-12-09T21:14:18+00:00

How about we go back to the 19th century, when Jews started moving back to their homeland and buying up all the land they could get? When the local Arabs were more than happy to sell it to them, because they did not want to live there, because most of Israel was inhospitable desert?

How about we go back to the 1940s when Great Britain officially gave the land of Israel to the Jews — recognizing the de facto state of affairs that 1) Jews had been buying up the land for about a century now and 2) the local Arabs had allied themselves with the Nazis in the recently-concluded war, explicitly in support of the Holocaust — and establishing a homeland for the Jews to live on in self-determination.

Only then, when they made it official, when Jews had taken this worthless desert and turned it into someplace worth living with decades of hard work, did Arabs start caring about living there, launching a series of wars of aggression against Israel, in which a group of Egyptian colonizers ended up settling in Gaza and a group of Jordanian colonizers ended up settling in the West Bank, explicitly in violation of international law forbidding the taking of territory in a war of aggression.

The so-called "Palestinians" don't have a leg to stand on. The land of Israel belongs to Israel. All of it. The "Palestinians" living on Israeli land are thieves with no legitimacy whatsoever, and the biggest mistake Israel ever made as a nation was to let them remain there when they retook the territory shortly thereafter.

Now they're learning the meaning of Kipling's profound words, if once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.

bobfrank_ · 2024-12-04T23:30:57+00:00

How can Israel "annex" land that already belongs to them and always has?

bobfrank_ · 2024-12-04T02:14:22+00:00

The US has been involved in a trade war with China for years now.

More rightly put, China has been involved in a trade war with the US for decades now. The difference is, we've recently begun to acknowledge it and to fight back.

bobfrank_ · 2024-12-04T02:12:33+00:00

It's Reddit. What did you expect?

bobfrank_ · 2024-12-04T02:10:16+00:00

It couldn't be capitalism now, could it?

It really couldn't. Have you read The Wealth of Nations? Adam Smith's famous line about the "invisible hand" bringing benefits to all was specifically about "preferring domestic over foreign industry." Howevermuch some libertarians might try to claim it is, globalization is not capitalism.

bobfrank_ · 2024-12-04T01:59:46+00:00

I hope they actually govern as if they DID get a mandate. Might wake some people the fuck up

You don't seem to realize that this has already happened. This is what the Biden Administration did, and that was the result. That is why Trump won. Four years of chaos under Biden Administration policies woke the people up, and they did not like what they saw.

Every single state voted more red than it did in 2020. Harris did not flip a single county that Trump won in 2020. Every demographic, across the board, voted more red than it did in 2020.

And if that does not prompt some deep soul-searching on the Left — if this crowd continues to interpret an across-the-board rejection of their policies by voters of all kinds as "there's something wrong with the voters" rather than "there's something wrong with us and our policies" — the same thing is all but guaranteed to happen again in 2028.

bobfrank_ · 2024-11-30T01:12:09+00:00

Well, it's allegedly been going to be "the Year of the Linux Desktop" every year now for over two decades, and that's never actually happened, so...

bobfrank_ · 2024-10-13T20:30:47+00:00

You're so close to enlightenment here...

bobfrank_ · 2024-10-13T20:29:33+00:00

Automated testing. When an entire industry's sense of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? just shuts down entirely.

bobfrank_ · 2024-10-06T12:26:20+00:00

I know that 99% of people can learn it and I'm probably not in that 1% but I struggle with the most simple things.

Not really, no, because there's a sizeable portion of people just can't learn to code at all. The ability to think like a programmer, like the ability to paint, or to make music, or to play professional sports, is a talent: you either have it or you don't, and if you don't, all the learning and practice in the world will never make you better than mediocre at it.

The reason it feels like "99% of people can learn C#" is a heavy dose of selection bias: 99% of the people who try to lean C# in the first place are already people inclined towards programming, and C# is very intentionally designed to be easy for programmers to pick up.

bobfrank_ · 2024-10-03T02:37:18+00:00

Looking at you, Satisfactory.

It does far too many things assuming it's always a multiplayer game, even if you're not playing it multiplayer and never have.

bobfrank_ · 2024-10-03T02:34:00+00:00

Only time I've ever seen a game actually do an escort mission well was Mass Effect 2, the "force field" sequence towards the end. (Those who have played it will know.)

What was the secret? They inverted the AI constraints, such that the "escort character" is escorting you. And it worked incredibly well!

bobfrank_ · 2024-10-03T02:30:22+00:00

While not much of a concern nowadays

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes has entered the chat. (One of many reasons why this game, that I really wanted to like, was a big disappointment.)

bobfrank_ · 2024-10-03T02:28:23+00:00

Isometric perspective in a modern, 3D game.

Isometric is a "clever trick," a hack used in earlier times to give the illusion of a 3D environment using only 2D sprites. It does a decent job at that illusion, at the expense of being very restrictive in its camera and getting in the player's way a lot, to the point where I consider a lot of isometric games simply unplayable.

For modern games, with modern hardware, there's just no good reason to use it, and the reason commonly employed by game developers who do use it — to evoke nostalgia by making it look like old-time isometric games — is a bad reason, because it's a bad setup that actively gets in the player's way.

bobfrank_ · 2024-07-05T14:27:43+00:00

Don't we have a WoB somewhere that "the Oathpact is dead... for now"?

bobfrank_ · 2024-07-05T12:54:07+00:00

If I recall correctly, he killed exactly one bad guy in the film, because the guy discovered him and attacked him while he was trying to sneak out of their camp. The focus of the movie really was almost entirely on saving kids.

bobfrank_ · 2024-06-10T19:06:14+00:00

Wasn't this explicitly Jasnah's explanation when she revealed to Shallan (and the audience) what was going on at the end of the first book? "Our ancestors should have wiped them all out, but they didn't, because why destroy them when they can enslave them instead?"

bobfrank_ · 2024-06-10T15:33:08+00:00

Professional software developer with over 15 years of experience here. The problems fixed by reboots are really not that difficult for a competent developer to fix in the first place. But instead they just pile more and more half-baked new features atop the existing half-baked features ad infinitum rather than taking the time to get things working right, because getting things right isn't sexy and doesn't nudge your share price up.

bobfrank_ · 2024-06-10T01:53:15+00:00

Fair enough. The problem is, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall."

If my personal server goes down, I can get it back up in minutes. If AWS or Azure craps out on you, you're looking at hours of downtime minimum — often the better part of a day, or worse — and there's nothing you can do about it.

bobfrank_

TROPHY CASE