The Engineer, Chapter 38. Varic Slinks Into His Chair. I Imagined That He Also Scrunched Up His Hood

Oh interesting, so is this going to be set with like… the return of the Radiants and stuff? Big open world where Stuff Is Happening? Sounds neat!

hey. you're interested in the stormlight au rp server i'm making where you get to do stuff in the sunmaker's empire that spans from azir all the way to eastern roshar because he bothered to choose an heir. i wish there was a more concise way to describe it but it sounds so fun doesn't it you get to experience worldbuilding and do roled play with ocs quick let me know if you would want an inviiiiite............. fades away like a force ghost

there’s a website where you put in two musicians/artists and it makes a playlist that slowly transitions from one musician’s style of music to the other’s

it’s really fun

Shallan “Let Go Of All Your Parshman” Davar very much does not have any slaves :P She owns those people’s writ of slavery, but allows them to do literally whatever they want. Slavery in Alethkar is a legal punishment, so if she just… let them go they’d be captured again.

Don’t worry, you can root for her <3 She’s very definitely helping those people in the best way she can, and they are completely free - legally - by the end of the book.

Me reading Oathbringer, waiting/hoping Mr. Sanderson takes the time to talk about Shallan no longer having any slaves so I can root for her again. I miss when I rooted for her before...

I have a gut instinct telling me this butler character is gonna be a highlight. His sass. His attitude. His barely constrained urge to strangle Wax… It’s beautiful.

If ur not obsessed w ur girl then wyd

a. he did.

Oh Dalinar you didn’t, did you. Please tell me you didn’t.

God fucking dammit. I hate being right so damn much what the fuck.

Mmmm…. Elhokar death flags. He’s too likable. I think I’m starting to see the patterns and I don’t know if this is good or not.

Okay so this is Pain Book: The Book That Makes You Feel Pain

What I’ve Been Reading Lately: Cradle

Fundamentally, every work of art, every story, is an attempt at communication. The author chooses to ask us a question, and we find the answer in the dialogue between the author and ourselves.

Cradle is a series that asks the question “If one dude did magic kung-fu to another dude so hard he exploded, would that be sick or what?”

And we, the readers, answer “Absolutely the FUCK yes.”

Cradle is a world where everybody has the capacity to practice the Sacred Arts, which are primarily the discipline of using mystical energy to be as bullshit awesome as possible. You aren’t allowed to be a major character in this series until you have committed at least one (1) act that would look sweet as hell if it was airbrushed onto the side of a stoner’s van. 

At one point we meet a member of a king’s landscaping staff. Her job is to mow the lawn, trim the hedges, and keep those damn slugs out of the vegetable garden. She can also command trees to rip you apart and devour your life force for herself, because fuck you, it’s Cradle. People just do that here. 

The main character is a young man by the name of Wei Shi Lindon, who has a natural deficiency that makes him extremely weak in the Sacred Arts, and is therefore banned from studying them. He responds “respectfully, no” and proceeds to spend the following ten books learning Sacred Arts and punching everything. 

It’s a little rough around the edges, but I had fun reading it and the author clearly had fun writing it, so I think it succeeds as a series. Would absolutely recommend if you just want to have a good time reading something. 

(Naturally, I got deeply attached to the biggest bastard in the main cast, because he’s hilarious. This man is a bitch and I like him so much.) 

As a delightful bonus, unlike most action series, the treatment of the female characters is genuinely excellent. The author is not here for fanservice, he is here for FIGHTSERVICE, which is when EVERYONE FIGHTS SO HARD THE LAWS OF PHYSICS GIVE UP. We’re ten books in to a twelve book series and I have yet to see a single woman’s boobs described on-page. 

In Cradle, when a teenage girl is worried about her body changing, what she means is that she’s unsatisfied with the amount of swords she can use at one time, so she’s going to grow six extra arms to hold six extra swords. Surprise! THE NEW ARMS ARE ALSO SWORDS, because the time spent picking up a sword to fight with it is time you didn’t spend swordfighting, and that is unacceptable to her. Now she and her eight swords are going to suplex a dragon, because on Cradle we know no gender politics, only THE BLADE.

Also, there’s a turtle.