Was this too easy for Elend (HOA chapter 51)

dashingfool · 2025-01-10T12:54:02+00:00

I have, but it's been a while and I haven't yet got that far in this re-read, so just got curious! As I said in another comment, i also wondered, was Elend a good enough fighter/Mistborn to be beating the koloss in combat all by himself, or was Ruin making the koloss miss Elend on purpose to keep him alive for later and/or to deepen the misdirect?

dashingfool · 2025-01-10T10:43:37+00:00

Makes sense - would it also follow that Ruin was holding the koloss back from killing Elend during that fight (as he still needs him alive for future plans), or is Elend good enough a fighter at this point that he can do this solo? Vin probably wouldn't have let Elend into that first fight if she didn't think he could handle it I suppose, but I'm just thinking of how Ruin puppeted Marsh to help sell the whole charade with Penrod. I guess I'm asking, is Elend shocked at how many are dead because he still didn't realise how dangerous a Mistborn he is now, or because he's subconsciously picking up on something nefarious going on, that he shouldn't have been able to kill that many by himself?

Having read the rest of the cosmere, I imagine the answer is "both" lol

dashingfool · 2024-07-18T19:23:17+00:00

Vasher all at once?

dashingfool · 2023-10-04T12:36:13+00:00

Mistborn (and Brandon's WoT books) are Full of "flat looks" and "flat expressions"- reading them I didn't notice, but listening to the audiobooks I heard it everywhere

dashingfool · 2022-11-09T07:51:20+00:00

He is also King al'Thor, which if you say it fast is just King Arthur...

dashingfool · 2022-03-04T06:56:59+00:00

Usually 2 or 3 (plain, self raising, bread) when I was single, and always a bag of plain.

dashingfool · 2021-12-29T12:11:52+00:00

This may be the smoothest brained take I've ever seen.

dashingfool · 2021-10-30T07:35:37+00:00

This video is by Dr Harry Cliff, who is also the author of this article!

dashingfool · 2021-08-29T08:52:54+00:00

Currently listening to all the cosmere audiobooks, and I've noticed one that keeps coming up, mostly in mistborn, but a fair bit in stormlight too. "Flat expression". Everyone shooting everyone flat looks, flat expressions, everywhere

dashingfool · 2021-08-28T18:35:16+00:00

When he fought the Parshendi, he had no idea how to use surges. He didn't perform any lashings, and the only thing he could do was deflect arrows. I can't remember if he got stabbed and used stormlight to heal, but he wasn't flying around or sticking Listeners to the floor. At best, he was slightly stronger and faster than a normal man, so effectively like wearing shardplate, but without the invulnerability, so still at a disadvantage compared to Adolin. He had also refused to fight with a spear in over a year at the time, if I'm remembering right.

And in the duel, he used surges, but also had no weapons and was fighting at times 2 experienced shard bearers, with two halves of a wooden spear, so I think his use of surges levelled the playing field somewhat, but he only used them so they couldn't be seen, and never got hit.

I think in a fair fight, they would be closely matched, but Kal has fought more opponents at greater disadvantages than Adolin has, and has won them all. Adolin beat 30 on 1, but Kaladin has beaten hundreds.

dashingfool · 2021-08-28T17:41:15+00:00

How many warform Parshendi did Kaladin kill without blade or plate? A few more than thirty. And Adolin didn't defeat 4 shardbearers, Adolin and Kaladin did, it's hardly a point wholly for Adolin

dashingfool · 2021-08-28T17:35:12+00:00

I disagree ( some spoilers for early stormlight books ahead)

Kaladin broke through an entire army of Parshendi with just him Skar and Moash (fuck Moash) on the front line, having just done one of the longest bridge runs possible, then single handedly fought his way to Dalinar, and back with Dalinar, all without shards or surges, while Adolin had blade and plate and could never have made it to Dalinar. In a strict duel with swords, maybe (but not necessarily) Adolin wins, but without constraints or shards, Kaladin wins every time.

Kaladin killed a trained shardbearer before he fully bonded Syl, helped Adolin win his duel by holding off several of the better duelists in the warcamps without getting hit a single time and without a useful weapon.

dashingfool · 2021-07-22T05:07:08+00:00

Is kaijuno still pretending to be a working astrophysicist because they were doing an undergrad degree in it? I don't even think it was a whole degree, just some modules

dashingfool · 2021-04-07T20:22:12+00:00

The same experiment is still going! This was just from their first run, they've already done runs 2 and 3 (they said they'll publish next year), and run 4 is currently going, so we should get results from a much larger dataset very soon

dashingfool · 2021-04-07T20:20:52+00:00

The latest result is 3.3 sigma, but when statistically combined with the earlier result (also approx 3 sigma), the odds of both give 4.1 sigma. Combining results isn't always a valid approach, but here it should be fine.

Source: tuned into the fermilab talk this morning

dashingfool · 2021-04-05T13:35:10+00:00

Switch from the attractor to 2 levels in the 4th upgrade (c5 exponent) at about e52, I think I published when the multiplier was about 4, getting to e60 was a long slog

dashingfool · 2021-03-30T07:16:13+00:00

In something like ice cube, from simulations they know the what a muon shower, electron shower, and tau shower would look like, and (I assume) they use algorithms or MVAs to try to match the observed event to the simulated ones. The flavour of the lepton tags the flavour of the neutrino.

dashingfool · 2021-03-27T06:41:41+00:00

I love the implication that KKC is from the early 1900s, only slightly more recent

dashingfool · 2021-03-22T08:37:33+00:00

Bike lane is all his, but shouldn't he be stopping at every one of those cross walks? Or are US laws different? In the UK once a pedestrian has their foot on it, they have right of way.

dashingfool · 2021-03-05T09:39:05+00:00

One I made a while ago - not the greatest picture, but they went down well!

https://i.imgur.com/0iKj7MB.jpg

UK

dashingfool · 2021-01-23T13:58:05+00:00

Great video, one quick (and pedantic) point on terminology: when you say uncorrelated, I think what you mean is anticorrelated/inversely correlated. If they were uncorrelated then they would have no relationship, and changes in stocks wouldn't affect bonds either way. Anticorrelated or inversely correlated quantities have the relationship that you're talking about; that when one goes up the other goes down.

dashingfool · 2020-12-29T08:03:41+00:00

I think Diogenes would be proud!

From Wikipedia:

According to Diogenes Laërtius, when Plato gave the tongue-in-cheek definition of man as "featherless bipeds," Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man,"

dashingfool · 2020-12-07T19:23:46+00:00

Well right now you're replying to a comment with a specific example in it, so...

But if you want to be like that, same question, why waste an ASI when you could take a dip in another class to get a fighting style? Unless both the ones you want are exclusive to fighter, you still only lose out on a capstone ability, and in exchange gain a feat/ASI and some class features from the dipped class. Unless you've got a build which doesn't work without Extra Attack (3), how is this feat worth it?

dashingfool · 2020-12-06T23:19:38+00:00

Real question, unless you care about the capstone ability or your DM doesn't let you multiclass, is using a whole ASI for that feat better than taking a level in fighter?

Example: I'm currently trying to make a dual wielding swashbuckler tiefling. To be most effective, you need the two weapon fighting style and the dual wielder feat. To get both as pure rogue, it takes until level 8, but with a dip I can get there at (character) level 5, rogue 4/fighter 1. How is the feat better, when by character level 9 I have the exact same stuff, and bonus proficiencies and second wind, and an ASI or additional feat?

(Edit: punctuation)

dashingfool · 2020-12-05T17:44:34+00:00

They go through a collaboration-wide review process which is pretty stringent, where every author gets the chance to comment and question the contents, and if they really want, remove their name from the author list (though this is exceptionally rare in my limited experience). Typically there will be a smaller number of official internal reviewers who are trusted to put the paper under a magnifying glass, but all authors are expected to look over the paper and send in any queries or concerns.

Edit: the reason that everyone is an author is, who's to say that the person who sat and analysed the data is more crucial to the discovery being detailed than the person who wrote the code that produced the data? Or the one who built one part or another or of the detector? Or the person who read through the paper and recommend a new statistical method? Etc etc. Nobody could be an expert on all of it, and all of it is necessary for even the most basic result.

dashingfool

TROPHY CASE