Kyll.Ing.

Or it could mean he has managed to set up an arc for the POV characters, and is tallying in his head: "To resolve all of this, I need five more chapters featuring Daenerys, six or seven more with Jon, four with Bran, eight with Brienne if I decide to go for that side arc ..." and so on for all his POV characters, and concluding that there will be a whole lot of chapters left to write even if some of them feature multiple of the characters. And then there's deciding whose POV to use in those cases, and in which order characters will meet ... That is not to say he is necessarily far from finished. The above is a sort of worst-case scenario. It's just that the statement is consistent with pretty much every interpretation on the scale from "the book is almost finished" to "he has only drafted a rough outline". In short, we could read anything into it, and thus should read nothing into it.

I think there is a chance that he at some point gets a burst of inspiration and a burst of not-caring at the same time, and manages to patch together something fit to publish. Mostly by sticking with things he'd otherwise have scrapped and rewritten, and bridging the fragments with a few contrivances. But then none of the resulting pieces of the story would be anywhere near where they should be for A Dream of Spring, never mind the conclusion of the tale, and that's where the series is finally abandoned. In other words, best case scenario is that he manages to shove Winds out the door (in a state he's not entirely happy with, but it's the best that could be finished) before officially giving up. Worst case scenario, he continues to care too much to be unhappy with what he writes, and too much to let others finish the story after him.

Sadder still, I think, is how this view is really starting to solidify throughout the fandom. Even among the fans, few seem to seriously believe we will see Winds, and almost none have hope for the completion of the saga. Even these forums seem to be permeated with the view that ASoIaF will remain an unfinished tale and that the many mysteries will never have an official answer. The hype balloon is deflated. Future expectations are grim. At this point, I think I'm just checking these forums out of habit.

Descending? We've been at this level for a while. I've seen many Rothfuss threads come and go over the years, and I can't really recall a single instance of us actually discussing the books. We usually manage to fill twenty pages of talk about how the next book is never coming. The conclusion tends to be that it's all Rothfuss's fault.

The other characters I was hoping to see again would be the father-daughter pair of Praxidike and Mei Meng. Prax was last seen shortly after the attack on Earth, before the time skip. He leaked the genome sequence of his super-modified yeast and effectively saved billions on Earth from starvation. For this he got into some trouble with the Free Navy, but was released after they misunderstood his confession. The Free Navy ceased to exist shortly after. Whatever became of Prax after that? Previously, his daughter Mei had been involved with the protomolecule at a very young age. Presumably not in direct contact, but still, she has to have known how close she came to infection. How did that affect her, growing up? After the time skip she'd be a woman in her early thirties, probably starting a career around the time the Laconians invaded ... I think her perspective would have been interesting to witness, even though she might not have had any influence on the events that unfolded. Likewise, Annushka Volovodov was last seen boarding a colony ship headed for the ring worlds. Her daughter Nami would have been able to provide another interesting POV of the Laconian war from the perspective of a colony world. ... or perhaps it would just have extended the book further without adding anything to the story, I guess. Half the trick of writing good fiction is to leave the audience wanting more, after all.

There has to be a lot of Nagatas around if nobody ever thought "That Naomi Nagata sure is making a name for herself as a leader of the underground resistance ... and I know a Filip Nagata. Wonder if they are related?" And it's not like Filip has a lot of ways to hide either. He's a (multi-generation) Belter by birth, which means he's bound to a life in space or in weak gravity. He could not have found a planet to settle on and hid away in the crowds, but had to stay on ships and stations, of which there aren't that many. Doesn't the prologue of the first book say there were only ever about fifty million Belters at the very most? Add perhaps a few million Earthers and Martians living part-time in space. If Filip frequently traveled through ring space, or did so at all, his name would probably be picked up by someone in the Rocinante's orbit. Tall Belter named Nagata, there can't have been so many of those around that nobody would find it interesting. But if he stayed in the Sol system, well ... still only a limited number of places for him to be, and a limited-size crowd for him to hide in. And it's a crowd where his mother has a sizable network of connections. Then again, I suppose he could have died or changed his decisions shortly after we last saw him. Perhaps he walked a few hundred meters down a corridor, saw Naomi on a wall screen somewhere, realized he'd be asking for trouble if he kept open about his identity, and hastily changed it to John Smith or something.

Hmm ... it has been a fair few years since I read the books as well, but I think they went something like this: Book 1: Kvothe is a grumpy old bartender in the present, but was a child prodigy in the past. Something he did in the past set up the current mess the world is in, and made him take up bartending. We learn that he had a rough childhood, but got into university and did well there, but that he never had any money. He also encounters a rival there, who may be someone important. He starts unraveling a strange mystery with an ancient group of evil monsters, and discovers that his girlfriend/soulmate is doing some strange business on the side. He leaves university for a while and has an adventure. Book 2: Kvothe is still a grumpy old bartender in the present and we still don't find out why. Past-Kvothe goes back to university where he still does well but still has no money. His rival might still be someone important, but we don't get to know why. His girlfriend is still doing some strange business on the side, but we don't get to know why. The ancient group of evil is still ancient and evil, but we don't get to know why. Kvothe goes on a new adventure involving a lot of fighting and honky-tonky, but comes back to university afterwards. The book ends in approximately the same situation as the first one, with none of the mysteries being any closer to a solution. It's a gripping read, but after a while you look back on it and think "wait, did anything in this book even need to happen?" As far as I can remember, I got the impression a while ago that the first book had set up two situations on either side of a time gap, but lacked a way to build a bridge between them. Book 2 made very little progress towards that bridge, it just repeated the set-up. The difficulty in constructing that bridge is, I suspect, a major part of the reason why Book 3 doesn't yet exist. We know the story begins here and ends up here, but like the Pan-American highway there is no good way to build a connection across the gap (Darién Gap, look it up. Interesting story). Book 1 presented the problem, but Book 2 postponed doing anything about it, and now with Book 3 it needs to be addressed. The gap needs to be bridged, without it there's no Book 3, but the author still hasn't figured out how to build the bridge and so Book 3 is stuck in limbo. It was an issue that should have been addressed in Book 2, but it wasn't for whatever reason, and now the essential problem has caught up with the series.

Donations: USD 381,324 as of this writing. Ender Dragon: Still flying, alive and happy. Now let's wait and see about those chapters ...

They're two thirds of the way there already, at least. Not sure about his Minecraft progress, though ...

Oh, definitely. I will look fondly back on its various depictions of space battles the most, I think. Star Wars-style dogfights may have their place, but nothing beats the submarine-like tension of battles in The Expanse. (I still maintain that its depictions of railguns is a little unrealistic, though - they are portrayed mostly as "hole punchers" creating a neat hole through the entire ship and exiting on the other side without slowing down much. That's a huge waste of kinetic energy for a weapon. Realistically, you'd want the round to fragment and start knocking parts of the ship about in a huge cascade, so a good hit would end up turning the ship inside out. But anyway, hole punchers work too for tension) And of course, the ending was good too. Overall, I really liked this series, and if I ever nitpick about it it is with the understanding that what I don't criticize, I really like. Speaking of nitpicks, though ... or perhaps just a general observation, as I don't really dislike how it was done:

Ahh, curse my gloomy jaded-ness clouding my vision. I swear I only read: "If the goals are met, I will do one of three things". Okay, this suddenly got a lot more exciting.

I would have been hyped for this if not for the third option. It is a much lower-hanging fruit than the other two, so to speak. It is the opt-out option for Doors of Stone content, allowing him to pick something down from his shelf instead of opening the locked cabinet, as it were. I think I picked up this series in 2014, and the seven years of bad news have jaded me a bit. Some say The Doors of Stone barely exists as a rough draft of ideas that haven't been touched for years, and this news wouldn't do much to quell those fears. It's like a cryptozoologist offering "I will show definite proof of the existence of Bigfoot, or a living, breathing unicorn, or pictures from my summer holiday last year!" The existence of option three suggests the two others weren't ever realistically considered anyway. That being said, it's a pretty good thing to raise so much money for charity, so it's not all doom and gloom. He's almost up to $150,000 already.

Aha. Nice to hear that sense prevailed in the end, at least. Did they provide any justifications or reasons why they stopped that policy, which may be of help swaying the admins in here too?

But this was back when forums were coded on potatoes and running on server hardware that would be put to shame by a modern wristwatch, wasn't it? I could see it being a somewhat sensible choice when long threads caused lag for users, but now that's no longer a problem. I've seen forum threads longer than 10,000 pages filled to the brim with pictures, running like clockwork. Back in the days, such policies were required to prevent lags caused by limitations in computing power, to benefit the user experience. Currently, this forum is running on near limitless computing power, but policies are causing conversations to lag and hamper the user experience. We've somehow gone full circle but ended up in a reverse direction along the way.

Increasingly, I am. I spend less and less time here. Shame, because it's a good community. There are good discussions to be had. But the moderating policies are like a handful of gravel in the cake of the forum, so to speak. It really sours the fun in the long run, as it's a hassle to stay subscribed to relevant topics (particularly with the other policy of auto-locking threads after a year), the padlocking really kills the discussion, and threads with interesting content are buried in the depths of the forum with no good way to retrieve and revive them. Anyway, the term I was looking for was "hostile design", but it seems I didn't manage to word it properly. The policy in question is one that hampers the user experience for no real benefit, apparently kept in place more out of stubbornness than because it makes any sort of sense to have it there. You refer to "evidence" based on years of practice, but what kind of evidence are you seeing from this? What is the feedback? Do many people bring up "I really like that threads are closed after 20 pages for no real reason?" or is the feedback more of an "aw balls the old thread was locked so here's another writeup of the opening post, please subscribe to this thread and try to remember what we were talking about" type of thing? I don't have any concrete examples right off the bat, but I seem to remember a lot more of the latter and none of the former. It's a feature people might tolerate and respect, but not like. I think there is a pretty good reason why I have never even heard of any other forums with this type of policy anywhere on the Internet. It can't just be "my opinion" that it is a silly policy, because then it'd be a lot more widespread. Instead, if you go to literally any forum without this policy and suggest it be implemented, you'd be the laughing stock of the board within minutes. Or let me put it this way: Why was not this very thread locked on page 20, to be replaced with "Board Issues 5"? Heck, we'd be close to Board Issues 9 by now if the policy was applied consistently, yet here we are in a 77-page thread and the server hasn't melted down yet. Could I postulate that the old thread is kept because it's a hassle to remember to lock it, write up a new opening paragraph, and get all the moderators to subscribe to the new thread every time the treshold is reached? Case in point.

Does this update mean that the insufferable and stupid "20 pages only per thread" rule is revoked? Once again there are no good reasons to keep it other than "that's how things are done", and it's a really hostile rule from a user experience perspective.

Yeah, I think you mean "Crazy World".

Haven't found time to comment in here in a while, but I consider Maskerade and Feet of Clay among my favourite Discworld novels. I must admit I'm not entirely sure why. It may have something to do with the atmosphere of these stories, the way they seem to take place in a world that lives its own life around them. Or it may have something to do with quantum. I'm not sure, but at least I know that I like them.

As long as the book ends up being published at all, I don't care much for how many parts it will be split into. Although I suppose the publisher would rather have people buy two books at $30 apiece than one book at $45.

The "Cripple mr. Onion" scene?

It's on YouTube too, albeit probably not legally: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hogfather Hm, looking it up, so is The Colour of Magic and Going Postal. The latter is the only of the adaptations I haven't seen. Might as well watch it later, before it is taken down.

I remember watching that a couple of years back. I liked it fine, the characters all used dialogue from the book, looked like themselves and behaved like themselves (wonky animation issues aside) but something felt like it was missing. Then I realized it. A big character was left out: the narrator. The narration - Pratchett himself explaining what's going on in a way only Pratchett could explain - is completely essential to Discworld. There needs to be somebody to explain that the Ankh is a river that oozes rather than flows, but that it's considered to be a very clean river on account of all the kidneys it has passed through. Somebody to say that scumble is the type of drink that can also be used to unblock drains. To tell the reader that Ankh-Morpork is considered the pearl of the circle sea - an annoing piece of debris wrapped in thick layers of mollusc secretion. That the Librarian doesn't mind being an ape, because then he can read the things Man was not supposed to know (as those ancient curses rarely have stipulations about orangutans). All the little jokes, observations, and the clever wordplay that delivers them is what makes Discworld work. It's not just fantasy in a flat world atop a turtle. And these things are very difficult to convey or deliver in other ways than prose text with a narrator. I know there are very good reasons why narrations aren't easy to do on film (what are the characters supposed to be doing while the narration is being delivered, for instance?), but it's such an essential part of Discworld that the works feel flat without it.

Hey, no dissing of The Last Hero. Those illustrations are magnificent. I agree the plot moves a little too fast for its own good, though. I didn't find Unseen Academicals that bad, actually. Snuff I could see some arguments against, as it pretty much gives Vimes a new superpower out of nowhere and completely sidelines the rest of the Watch. In terms of the weakest Discworld books, no obvious candidates stand out, but Moving Pictures might receive an honourable mention, at least. Oh, and in terms of strange timelines, I always found Rincewind's backstory a little strange to fit in. He first appears as a rather ordinary, if inept, wizard in The Colour of Magic where he has his adventure with Twoflower. Then he ... faffs around the University for a while (?) until the events of Sourcery, where he has another adventure that ends to him being banished to the Dungeon Dimension. He gets back from it in Eric, returns to the University. He spends some more time in blissful quiet at the University until Interesting Times takes him to the Counterweight Continent, whereafter a teleportation accident sends him to Fourecks in The Last Continent. After returning from there, he apparently stays full-time at the University. But in the latter book, Rincewind is suddenly mentioned to have visited most of the Disc being chased around by people. Some of this happens "on-screen" in the aforementioned novels, but not nearly all of it, and we never see any implications of when it could have happened off-screen either. Later books (and appendix books such as the Discworld Emporium) mention him to have visited Nothingfjord, the Great Outdoors, Klatch, and a hundred other places we've never seen him have time to visit. Apparently he has had many chased-by-everyone adventures of the type we saw in The Light Fantastic, but when? For most of the timeline, his location is known and accounted for. He does not come across as well-traveled in his first appearance either. When did he have time to be chased all over the Disc, again?

How did I miss this thread? I just finished reading the last Discworld book around a month ago. Almost for the entire duration of my PhD work, I've bought and read one of the books every month. The initial deadline for my thesis is today - fortunately, it doesn't seem like I will miss it by that much. For the questions of "which is the best book?" and "which book should I start with?", I have no good answer. But I'll try anyway. I agree that The Colour of Magic is definitely not the best of them. I actually read that one a year or so before I got The Light Fantastic, as the loosey structure around separate story threads that were completely abandoned afterwards put me off a little. But even so ... I'm not sure if the other starting points are much better either. I think it's fair to start with The Colour of Magic, but with the awareness that the tone of the books shifts massively for the better starting from the second book on. For the best book ... nah, it's hopeless. I enjoyed all of them, although Eric! is a low point for the most part. I have a soft spot for Wyrd Sisters, Feet of Clay, and Maskerade, although technically I think other books could outdo them ... but then, which? Somewhat uncommonly, I think I'll highlight an appreciation for The Last Hero. It's an illustrated book, and although its plot is rather on the short side, it packs a large amount of fun into the limited space it has. But I wouldn't say it's the best book either, or the one I like the most. I honestly can't give a good answer to that question.