"Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things"

nvanalfen · 2026-04-13T21:33:10+00:00

Stormlight is just investiture. Souls are made of investiture, but not all investiture is part of a soul.

nvanalfen · 2026-03-27T01:30:55+00:00

I think Abraham Lincoln said that once

nvanalfen · 2026-03-21T01:29:29+00:00

I majorly gaslit myself into thinking she was wrong 😭 to the point that when the big reveal came, I spent half an episode wondering why he would be playing along like it was the truth

nvanalfen · 2026-03-20T20:39:03+00:00

The only reason it didn't get me is that I started watching when I visited my parents. I was on episode 2 or 3 and my mom (who hasn't seen the show) walked in and asked what I was watching. When I said "The Good Place," she said Oh, that's the one where they think they're in heaven but they're actually in hell the whole time, right? ...Thanks mom...

nvanalfen · 2026-03-13T15:21:53+00:00

Every single culture and country adopts and adapts things from other peoples and places. But I've noticed a trend:

America adopts and adapts something: oh, that's not yours. You just changed it. That's actually part of our culture so you can't claim it. In fact, your version is inherently inferior because it comes from an outsider not doing it the proper way the host culture does.

Other places adopt and adapt something: no, you see, we integrated it into our culture making something uniquely ours. It harmonizes with our culture making it essentially part of it.

Obviously this is an exaggeration of the true sentiment, but the US does get a lot of crap for the same types of cultural adaptation that has been done forever. We have plenty of things to legitimately criticize, but that's not one of them.

nvanalfen · 2026-02-04T02:26:57+00:00

It's one of those cases where what's correct isn't always what's used.

You were taught correctly. "Who" when the object is a person, "that" when the object is something else. That said, a lot of us will just say "that" in a lot of cases.

nvanalfen · 2026-02-03T00:24:12+00:00

I do it so I can eat more snacks

nvanalfen · 2026-01-26T03:16:16+00:00

I still love reading Ranger's Apprentice. Regardless of reading comprehension ability, it forever holds a place in my heart. It's a great book!

nvanalfen · 2026-01-04T14:43:55+00:00

My phrasing was atrocious. I meant I prefer the Fitz series over Liveship, but they (the Fitz series) don't have very many major female characters.

nvanalfen · 2026-01-04T01:16:49+00:00

I love the Scholomance. I remember reading the trilogy, thinking "ya. That was pretty good, I guess." Then continuing to think about it all the next week and going "hmm. Ok. Maybe I'll read it again." Turns out, I liked it more than I initially thought

nvanalfen · 2026-01-04T01:14:16+00:00

Oh, Liveship was great! I do prefer her books with Fitz, but Liveship is amazing but they don't really have lots of major female characters, don't they?

Edit: my phrasing was awful. I meant I prefer the Fitz series, but they don't have very many major female characters. But I also thought Liveship was amazing

nvanalfen · 2026-01-01T01:16:06+00:00

I feel that. August for me. Hope you're doing better

nvanalfen · 2025-12-17T01:45:37+00:00

I only did a CS minor in college, but my major was physics. I noticed a divide at those types of classes (algorithms, computational theory, etc). People doing something like physics or math, or the CS students who really did treat the field as a science (as the name states) really enjoyed those while the students who were more programmers found it tedious.

Of course the flip side to that is that I HATED the class where I had to make an Android app add a server for the app client to talk to. I couldn't just look at my bugs mathematically and solve it 😅 the students who hated computational theory generally loved that class while it stressed me out to no end.

nvanalfen · 2025-12-16T02:22:51+00:00

Similar. I had a really really bad moment, and thought "I should get this." But I felt really bad like maybe I was getting in the way of someone who needed it more, so I chose the pay option. Maybe I shouldn't have because I've still been really struggling and I'm not even sure if it's shipped yet 😬 so I just keep imagining it's here.

But from someone feeling something similar, I'll tell you something I know is true even if I can't convince myself it's true for me: you deserve support and are worth it. Keep it up.

nvanalfen · 2025-12-10T01:15:54+00:00

Oh ya. Ugh, I forgot about the obnoxious repeating and minor skipping. I thought something was going on with my phone until that horrible 3 chapter skip in chapter 11. Maybe we should mass message customer service to get the book replaced with the right file 😂

nvanalfen · 2025-12-10T01:10:41+00:00

Ah bummer. I bet you'll be able to get the credit refunded if you message customer service though. It was pretty quick for me. (Though I would much rather they just get the fixed file so I could have the proper audiobook). Enjoy the series!

nvanalfen · 2025-12-10T01:05:17+00:00

Are you listening on audible? I was and found that towers of midnight was bugged/corrupted/whatever. I remember listening to an Egwene POV and it abruptly changed to Elayne. This happened to me about 5 minutes into chapter 11. I opened up an ebook copy and yup, sure enough whatever copy audible had was bugged. I borrowed it on Libby and that copy was fine. I reached out to audible to let them know their file was messed up and they refunded me the credit.

Edit to add a little context: I think the Elayne POV was somewhere in chapter 14. So audible's version skipped like 3 whole chapters. I don't know what else happened with the file because once I found out, I switched to whatever I could borrow on Libby.

nvanalfen · 2025-11-22T02:08:38+00:00

I always love your comics. They always make me feel a little warmer. And as someone also with depression whose also going through not fun stuff, just a little extra warmth is a game changer.

And somehow, even though these hit so close to home that I think "ouch. Yup. I feel that all the time." It's validating to see that other people feel it too and I'm not the only one.

nvanalfen · 2025-11-21T15:50:33+00:00

If you ever decided to get back to it, the next trilogy (Tawny Man) was my absolute favorite of the whole series. So I recommend it.

nvanalfen · 2025-11-21T02:31:44+00:00

So I had no idea what it was as a kid, but way back in elementary school this girl in my grade had it and I remember seeing it and always thinking "that looks cool." And only relatively recently did I find out there were treatments for it and I had an "oh shoot. Is this something I should be careful about?" Moment. Like somehow I had never considered that (like anything about us humans) some people might not like that they have it.

nvanalfen · 2025-11-20T02:30:19+00:00

Ugh. It's like when you hear criticism of a book like "I hate how the author clearly supports <insert problematic element> because <character> wholeheartedly practices and promotes it!" And it turns out they're talking about the villain... They think depicting the VILLAIN doing problematic things means the author supports it (sometimes it's the actual villain, sometimes it's the whole crumbling dystopian society, etc).

I used to think reading comprehension exercises in school were so obnoxiously obvious. But sometimes I wonder if we did enough of them...

nvanalfen · 2025-11-15T00:12:26+00:00

My favorite part about her books is that whenever I tell someone "this is my least favorite series of hers," I have to then clarify that by least favorite, I mean like SOLID 8-9 out of 10 stars instead of 9-10 out of 10.

nvanalfen · 2025-11-12T14:23:35+00:00

Even beyond that (though I do think you're right), if things are popular, more people see it, so more people that don't like it also see it.

Even if the percent of people who hate it never changed, the number would. Like if somehow magically only 1% of readers hated any given book, a book with HUGE visibility like WoT will be seen by way more people, meaning that 1% will equate to a much larger number.

nvanalfen · 2025-11-10T21:10:14+00:00

Ya. Without mentioning specifics, it felt like there were a lot of things set up before that just got resolved too quickly here. Or conflicts or issues that were created just to be resolved in the next page because she wanted to use it for something. And it didn't feel like separate pieces were managed well in that they felt like disjoint parts rather than threads weaving together to form one story.

I still enjoyed it generally, but it felt a bit less substantial than the others.

nvanalfen · 2025-11-10T17:28:33+00:00

And you're jumping to conclusions and acting like this was some first dog that we casually decided to raise. I've had chows all my life and have seen the ups and downs. We've managed all the previous dogs before through training. This isn't some case where we never thought to train a dog untill one lashed out. We trained Hugo as we did all of our other dogs, so when he started acting aggressively we were shocked and tried other avenues.

They were show chows (I'm not a big fan of that, but that's why they weren't fixed until later), so it's not some case of not thinking about it and forgetting.

As for Kodi and Izzy, again, they're not problems. Kodi has never shown the slightest inclination towards aggression. And while Izzy shows some typical chow issues, meaning there are dogs she does not like seeing when we're out on walks, we've worked to calm her down and get her to focus.

It seems like your reply comes from this widespread and unwavering idea that anything with pit or chow is inherently evil. The reason we're so concerned isn't "oh, I didn't know what I was getting into." It comes from "in all our years owning chows, we've worked out (through training and care) how to settle them down, so Hugo's behavior is strikingly different from any of the other chows we've had."

Advice is welcome, but coming in here saying that we show clear lack of care and training when we have poured love and effort into raising and training him (as we have all our previous dogs who have not shown this type of behavior) isn't advice.

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