Time is a flat circle

Loved this premiere. The only cast member I knew ahead of time was Sue Perkins, but it’s always great to come away with great feelings about the whole cast.

I did not expect Lucy to be the weird comedian. I figured it’d be Sam, especially after the “Pinocchioooooooo,” but man, she really is out there this episode. If I’m betting, her and Julian fight for last place; Lucy due to just being a bit of a bowl full of nuts and Julian not giving a shit, both on the best ways.

Sam surprised me with the hair lateral thinking; though they didn’t really need to cut their hair off, it worked out for them. That plus his performance in the live task makes me think he’s going to do a great job of thinking his way to a great showing. He’s my pick for finding the hidden task, if that’s a real thing. He’s also funny as hell.

Sue and Susan are also fantastic and should be a great team. I think Sue might have the edge in performance - she had a great idea with the duck task just didn’t hustle enough. But any of the three contestants whose name starts with S winning wouldn’t surprise me!

Puka Nacua looks like he might be the real deal. Getting peppered with targets and performing real well as a possession receiver. It’ll be interesting to see what happens once Kupp comes back, but I doubt he fades away entirely.

No, no, he has a point. It’s Patrick’s fault Toney couldn’t catch Covid 19 at an anti-vax convention the way he was playing last night. 🙄

You know this is a crazy take, right? Mahomes won MVP last year with essentially the same quality of offense. Of course they’d struggle a bit with his #1 playmaker on offense sidelined.

This is a “regress all Mahomes TDs to the mean” level hater comment. What’s more likely, Mahomes is average at best and has been propped up by playmakers on offense (including last year without Tyreek), or Mahomes is great and has seriously subpar talent to work with on offense?

Hang on, is this Kadarius Toney making this post? Shit, now it makes sense.

“Fuck!!! I should have lied! I hate this game. I hate this game!”

We’re not there just yet, but Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere books will be blending magic and tech as they go on. He keeps promising to deliver FTL travel using the magic systems he’s embedded in his worlds.

Without getting spoilery, the Cosmere is a shared universe for the majority of his book series and novellas. Each series deals with a magic system that was “splintered” in a way from a main source of divine power. While each series or novel is pretty well self contained, they more you read the more you notice overlaps between the series; it’s possible for powerful and talented beings to travel between worlds in the Cosmere without going through space.

Each of his main series has tech developments and time jumps built in where we see tech developing more and more. In one series, he has three or four eras planned, with the first and second eras already published. The first era is your typical dark fantasy setting, and by the time of the second era “magi-tech” (or “fabrial” tech might be a better in universe term) has developed to be about old west levels. The next era is supposed to be at a 1980s tech level, and I think the last era will be future tech.

There have also been indicators that beings that are aware of more than one planet in the Cosmere being concerned about tech level and the rate of technological progress occuring in a given world. There might be a conflict brewing in which a magi-technological arms race matters, so each series is getting a healthy injection of tech development.

All that is to say, don’t pick up a book set in the Cosmere today and expect robots and spaceships. But the current work is all clearly laying the foundations for such. Might take a few more years to really get there, but Brandon is nothing if not a prolific author.

Well that certainly answers a question from the end of RoW. Guess we know who tricked who.

The Tenni-bator. A guy would approach the tennis courts from the woods in a trench coat and beat his meat to tennis practice. Male or female, if I remember correctly. When they’d try to catch him, he’d disappear into the woods. I don’t think he was ever caught.

As a Toney owner in dynasty, this is the least surprising headline I’ve ever seen. Gotta hope he gets healthy a bit, keeps up some camp hype, and I can ship off his fragile and talented boay to another team.

She’s not here to give social media pointers. Get that through your thick skull.

Good ole Breezewood, PA. It’s impossible to recognize this mess of a stretch of road / drive through truck stop

Yeah, what would we ever do without today’s billionaires? I can’t imagine a world without guys like Elon Musk spending their endless money on controlling narratives on social media instead of contributing a much larger share to social programs and infrastructure. He’s always finding ways to innovatively call people pedos, and without that, we’d be much worse off as a society.

I really like it so far. I’m a bunch of chapters into part 2, and I feel like we’re getting a lot of payoffs for stuff set up forever ago in some cases. I felt like book 1 dragged more for me - you could tell what was coming for Kaladin hundreds of pages before we got payoff there - and even book 2 had some slowness for me right when part 2 started.

Maybe it slows down later, but at the moment I’m getting detailed answers to questions that have been there since the start of book 1, which is great. I also have stayed off Coppermind for the most part for anything related to Stormlight, though. Could be what I’m finding satisfying answers and exploration of theories now was heavily discussed in the community at the time. It’s one thing to get confirmation of an individual theory about the book, but it’s another to read a few hundred pages about something the community has picked apart and already settled on the right answer to. Not saying this is what happened, just guessing based on what I know about the community and the depth of detail discussed in places like Coppermind.

I finished the last 3/4 of Words of Radiance and Edgedancer this week and am ~300 into Oathbringer. I know I’m late to the party, but I should be done with my Cosmere read through this year. I have Mistborn, Warbringer, Elantris and their associated Arcanum Unbounded novellas down, just the rest of Stormlight Archive, the White Sand Omnibus, and a few of the other AU novellas to go, plus the secret projects. When I say it like that, it feels like more than a little, but I have some free time on my hands the next few months.

This is the right tip. If you can’t dry brine with salt overnight, then salt right before you hit heat.

That being said, give me a 24 dry brine plus reverse sear any day.