Wheel of Time - COMPLETE!

Damn this feels good:


Considering I was reading Lord of Chaos back in November of 2010, these progress bars have been up on this site for almost a year now and I'm finally done with them! I read the last book, Towers of Midnight, in only 14 days which is pretty impressive for me (for over 800 pages).

Now I need to clear the progress bars on the right and figure out what I'm reading next!

Re-Employment, Year One

Exactly one year ago today is when I started posting to this blog more regularly with the great news that I'd gotten a job after 7 months of unemployment (here's the post if you didn't read it then). Thankfully I'm till employed and I'm positively loving my job, it's been great for the last year and I hope that it continues like this for some time to come!

I can't decide if it feels like a year has passed or not, but I'm okay with that because there have been some great times and it was definitely an eventful year. Probably most notably Becky and our friend Josh threw me an amazing birthday party at a friend's house with Battle Tag laser tag in the back yard (using cars as terrain and obstacles) and a very awesome in ground pool to take the edge off running around for hours in 90 degree weather. It was a fantastic time and the most fun I've had in a while, and Battle Tag was a better present than I could have imagined.

On the reading front, I've finished up through Crossroads of Twilight, the tenth book in the Wheel of Time series and am already half way through the prequel novel New Spring (which is only 330 pages). I'm very pleased that I can now read a 300 page book in just a week or two whereas they used to take me a hell of a lot longer to finish. After New Spring I feel like I will be on the home stretch of the series with only three books left that have been published and the final book on the way early next year.

After I catch up on Wheel of Time I'll be moving on to the 2nd Game of Thrones book (Song of Ice and Fire, whatever) and starting Dark Tower as well. I'm very interested to read something by Stephen King because so far I don't believe I've ever read anything he has written. Beyond those, I'm interested in checking out some classic Sci-Fi series like Foundation by Asimov, Ringworld by Larry Niven, and Lensman Series by E.E. Smith.

End of February Update

Two days ago I finally finished reading Wheel of Time book 8, The Path of Daggers. I've started into book 9 - Winter's Heart and hope that I can finish it pretty quickly because I am eager to get into the first Game of Thrones book before April when the TV show comes on HBO, and I also have the first Dark Tower book that I've borrowed from my friend Josh that I am very excited to read. Of course after Winter's Heart there's still 5 more Wheel of Time books, but those will be handled in the rest of 2011 I think.

Just over a year ago Becky and I were both greatly enjoying being home all day together and watching the Winter Olympics, but we were also quite stressed with my unemployment situation. This year there's a bit of stress due to the government supposedly cutting a lot of funding for programs and even potentially not passing last year's budget which would cause gov't wide furlough days. Either way this is an issue for my line of work and I'm concerned but trying to stay positive and not let the stress get to me that much.

Other than those things life has been going really well and pretty steady lately. I'm enjoying doing web development and programming work every day as much as I enjoy doing architecture and design so my job satisfaction at the moment is very high. I'm also looking forward to using the knowledge I'm gaining on personal projects developing web-apps and other things that I've wanted to work on for a long time but until recently didn't have the knowledge to do it.

On the gaming front we've slowed down on how much we have been playing WoW but hopefully will keep playing it enough that it is worth while as an expense. I've gotten into the beta for the game Darkspore which I hadn't heard about until last week and it's incredibly fun, and will hopefully be getting into the early closed beta for Rise of Immortals which looks interesting as well.

January Update

I'm in the process of learning PHP/MySQL (and Javascript) for my day job so that I can help out with the web development stuff that my company does on a regular basis. It's interesting and as usual incredibly fun for me to be learning something new in programming (and my first professional training in any kind of programming).

Coincidentally, only a day or two before I found out I would be doing this for my day job, I got back into map editing for Starcraft 2 pretty intensely. It's a very interesting thing to get back into because I was doing a lot of map editing back in March-May while I was unemployed so it feels almost nostalgic to be doing it again.

Also last Thursday, January 13th was my first day attending Bushikai training for Nihon Jujutsu here in Frederick. In quite certain terms - I got my ass kicked. I couldn't even get through the warm ups (including a minute of push ups, carrying people around, all the fun stuff) and my body has been sore all over for the last few days. However I'm planning on going Tuesdays and Thursdays to start, adding Saturdays in once I'm a bit more in shape and hopefully even doing Mondays regularly as well. When I'm in shape I should be able to handle 4 days a week, I hope!

Reading Update: I am now 33% through book 8 of Wheel of Time, The Path of Daggers. For anyone that hasn't read the book series through book 8, I'm about to discuss a spoiler: It is on exactly page 207 of book 8 that the first mention of the weather finally getting cooler again occurs (mentioned by Faile). Now I just need to go back and re-read and keep my eyes open for when Jordan introduced the first real indication that the weather was staying warm into the fall. My guess is that it's sometime in book 4 (or even book 3) because that was the book that I read over a course of 9 months and so explains why I don't have a very good recollection of when it first started.

Overall that's probably one of the largest "plot" arcs that's happened in the books so far, really taking place over the course of 4-5 books, whereas most other things (so far) have generally lasted only 1-2 or at most 3 books excluding some of the largest plot points that are arguably in every book. To me that's pretty exciting, and is helping me propel through the middle of this book.

The Marathon Method

I'm coining the personal term "Marathon Method" for my complete domination of reading in the last 6 months. I set out to read all of the Harry Potter books before the last movie, giving myself a deadline and a tough but still reasonable increment to complete each book in (1 month per book) and as you may remember I came in at least a month early. I even finished the last book, The Deathly Hallows, in 2 days! I'm fairly confident in saying that 700+ pages in 2 days is the most I've ever read in my life in such a short period.

Now I've moved the method on to the Wheel of Time series, and it's working wonders. I don't have a good record of when I was reading or finished the first two books in the series, but they were easily within the 2006-2008 time frame. That's 3 years for TWO books! I'm sure I read other books mixed in there, but still, I know for a fact I would finish one of those books in about 6-8 months if I was lucky. With my confidence built from the Harry Potter marathon, I set roughly the same goal for Wheel of Time - 1 book per month - in the hopes of finishing before the final book comes out. The book was supposed to be out in late 2011, but has been pushed to 2012 so I will easily be able to meet this goal.

I finished the 3rd Wheel of Time book, The Dragon Reborn, around 12/1/2009. I finished book 4, The Shadow Rising, on 9/30/2010. 10 months for one book. Book 5 - the Fires of Heaven - was finished on 10/27/2010 and book 6 - Lord of Chaos - was finished on 12/4/2010. I've taken what used to take me 6-8 months and relatively easily brought it down to roughly a 1 month task. The greatest part of this is that I don't really feel like I'm spending that much more time reading than I used to.

Lately I've been brainstorming how to apply this concept of getting myself motivated and moving on things to other parts of my life. I'm still working out how to apply it to my drawing, but I think applying it to gaming could be a pretty direct correlation to reading. Issue #1 is that there are a LOT of videogames that I want to play and beat, some from years and years ago that I just never got around to beating.

Here's a list of the games, most of which we already own or have borrowed from someone (Josh most likely) and that's why I'd like to get through them finally:

• Metroid Prime (and I'd love to beat it with 100% completion)
• Other games in the Metroid Prime series (2, 3, etc)
• Fallout 3
• Assassin's Creed
• Assassin's Creed 2
• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
• Mass Effect
• Mass Effect 2
• Dragon Age
• Bioshock
• Bioshock 2
• God of War
• God of War 2
• Little Big Planet

These are the games that I'd like to continue playing, or play more, but aren't necessarily a "beat it and be done" scenario:

• World of Warcraft
• Starcraft 2

I am thinking about simply progressing down the list above, because I know for certain that I'd start with Metroid Prime because that's one of the oldest games I have yet to beat. I need to steal a wii controller from my in-laws house first!

Reading Update: I've been breezing through A Crown of Swords finally, almost making up for how slow I was going back in late December. I'm now 86% through the book and I fully expect to finish it today or early tomorrow. Then I think I'll move right on to Path of Daggers, and then maybe after that book I'll jump over to the first book of the Dark Tower series and/or A Game of Thrones.

Recap of 2010

Last January I attempted very briefly to fill the void that a lack of a job gave me with doing a lot of my hobbies - drawing, writing, and playing games. I set some basic goals and I didn't even meet one of them. This year is a hell of a lot different, but I'm not to the point of setting up goals and certainly not to writing them online as even an unexpected promise to whoever reads them. Instead of setting goals right now, I'm working on accomplishing the ones that don't even need to be set for me to know they're there. Perhaps they were set years ago, or have always been there, but I'm doing them.

That may sound like I didn't do anything in 2010 then, if I didn't reach my goals. I know that's not the case. With that in mind, instead of goals for 2011 let's look back at some of the things that I accomplished in 2010:

• I GOT A JOB!

That could really be the end of the list right there and I'd be happy, but there are some other (less important but quite fun) items that I'm going to attempt to quantify in some way here. Possibly in some semblance of chronological order:

• Experienced one of the most enjoyable Winter Olympics ever with Becky, since we were both home all day/everyday - so much so that I'll consider taking vacation time for the next Winter Olympics
• Determined that my marriage to Becky is even more special than I could have imagined, since we could spend all day, everyday together and still have a LOT of fun and not ever get that mad at each other. I've had numerous couples tell me they can't imagine doing that and how much they would kill one another.
  
• Played a LOT of the Starcraft 2 beta, didn't play as much once it hit retail (but that may change soon) - also designed an awesome custom map for SC2 which I want to re-do for the retail build
  
• Ran 15 adventures of my D&D Campaign - I'd certainly love to do more, but greater than 1 per month is not a bad number!
• Attended a Bonsai beginner's class and actually learned how to pot, grow, and care for Bonsai properly (hint: I was doing a LOT of stuff wrong)
  
• Attended GenCon 2010 and had a blast
  
• Read through the entire Harry Potter series (for the first time) in preparation for seeing the last movie
• Read 1984, and realized I (and all of my friends) should have read it years ago
  
• Finished The Shadow Rising (Wheel of Time book 4) in September, finally, after almost a year of very slowly getting through it. Then finished books 5 and 6 in roughly one month each, and got half way through book 7 in December
• I started and continued the Architect DM series at Critical Hits, which has been insanely fun to write and seems to be received quite well too
• Movies we saw in theaters: Iron Man 2, Inception (twice), RED, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, Tron: Legacy (maybe some others, will update if I remember)
• Becky and I resubbed to World of Warcraft for Cataclysm (god help us) in early December - and we're loving it

Reading Update: I am currently 67% through Wheel of Time book 5 - A Crown of Swords. My progress stalled for a week or two during the holidays for various reasons. We were pretty busy, but also I got several new books before the holidays and as Christmas presents so that naturally slowed down my progress because I wanted to read them a bit instead of just focusing on Wheel of Time. The very last Wheel of Time book was also pushed back to a 2012 release date, which means I have more than a year to read the last 5 books and one prequel which is more than enough time. I'm going to throw a few other books in the mix but will also try to get through WoT as soon as possible so I can talk things over with Becky without fear of spoilers.

Wheel of Time Character Mapping

So I've been thinking about doing an experiment by listing the characters that appear in each chapter of Wheel of Time as I read it (starting mid book 7 because that's where I am now). Partially this comes from the fact that now there are so freaking many noble and Aes Sedai secondary characters, many with very similar names, that even I can't keep them straight!

Also this is because I generally try to avoid spoilers, because I know of at least one person that reads this blog sometimes that hasn't read all of the books. In my opinion listing the characters as they appear won't be any kind of real spoiler, but still I'll keep things as spoiler free as I can. Here's a bit of what it would look like, but in practice I'm not sure it gives much without spoilers and would be a lot of work.

Book 7 - A Crown of Swords

Chapter 11 - An Oath

• Egwene Al'Vere
• Meri - mean servant of Egwene's
• Romanda - Aes Sedai, rival of Lelaine
  
• Lelaine - Aes Sedai, rival of Romanda
  
• Sheriam - Aes Sedai, on Egwene's side
  
• Lord Gareth Bryne
• Theodrin Dabei & Faolain Orande - Aes Sedai
  
• Halima / Aran'gar
• Tiana - Aes Sedai?
• Siuan Sanche
• etc.
  

I'm thinking that having my own wiki for Wheel of Time might be easier and better in every way. I'd build it as I go through the books and hopefully because of that it would be much more comprehensive than the other wikis that are out there. I would contribute to them, but I can't at the moment because they are riddled with spoilers so I just avoid the existing wikis as a practice. However, Becky tells me there isn't any one wiki that is as informative or comprehensive as they should be.

Reading Update: I am 41% through book 7 and now very happy to be almost 50% of the way through the series (minus the final book which isn't out yet). Towers of Midnight coming out set me back about 3% in total but I caught that up and more over the last two books.

Is it technically Winter yet? I'm pretty sure it is but for some reason it still feels very much like Fall to me even though it is super cold outside. Also, it doesn't feel like the week of Christmas at all, but it still feels MUCH better than last year for obvious reasons! :)

Wheel of Time Thoughts

I am now 51% through Wheel of Time book 6 - Lord of Chaos and I'm starting to progress a bit faster (as usual). It's usual because right around half way through most of Jordan's books he starts to really pick up the action and build to the finale (go figure, right? Who would structure a book that way? Oh, everyone? I see...) so I'm naturally inclined to keep reading and to read more often through out the day.

I generally avoid talking much about what I'm reading in WoT because I want to avoid spoilers for anyone reading this, but my continuing discussions with Becky are enjoyable and I'd love to have some of those here as well. The other big problem is I really don't want anyone in comments here or in discussing it to spoil anything for me, so please keep in mind that I am only half way through Lord of Chaos and I'll probably have Becky read any comments here first (though I'm assuming there won't be any, so no big deal) just in case!

For today I'm not going to spoil anything big, but still if you don't want any spoilers from WoT up to and through book 6 don't read the rest of this paragraph. Minor Spoilers now: I find it very fascinating that Jordan waited until about 380 pages (38% through the book) into the 6th book of the series to finally reveal that Tigraine was Rand's mother. You find out in book 3 (IIRC) that his mother was a wetlander that entered the waste and became a maiden of the spear, and that his father was an Aiel, but the reveal in this chapter of book 6 is pretty damn important. It's important because you also find out that the Aes Sedai Gitara Moroso was the one that foretold the Dragon being reborn, and that she sent Tigraine's brother (Luc, OMG another big thing that I can't wait to find out more about) to the north and she then sent Tigraine away from Caemlyn so that Rand would end up being born on the cliffs of Dragonmount (or wherever). This is all super important not just because it explains the events that led to Rand's birth, but also because after that Gitara Sedai is the one who set Suian's and Moiraine's plans into action which is really the whole set up for the beginning of Eye of the World. Thus, to me this revelation of events is really what began the whole series of books and so to me this is easily one of the most important chapters of the series so far.

Spoilers aside and done with, I just like looking at the fact that Jordan waited until this book to reveal the beginnings of the events in Eye of the World. I'm not saying I think he should have done it sooner or later, just marveling at how and where it was done. Also that it was done in a sort of casual sense with just a noble woman in Caemlyn talking to Rand and mentioning something to him. Other things that really interest me are how much the Forsaken are characters in these later books, and how the only holdovers from the 2nd age are essentially the bad guys.

All of that just makes me want to read faster, so that's what I'm doing! I won't be finishing this book by the end of November (only 2 days away, geez) but I should wrap it up sometime in early December. This time of year is always rough for scheduling and running D&D, and I am amazed that right around this time last year I was struggling so much with scheduling that I was on the very brink of canceling the whole campaign. Thankfully (VERY thankfully) Josh rallied his roomates and came up on December 5th last year for their first romp into the Elemental Chaos, which was extremely fun and resolved me to keep things going. This year I am content to keep it going even if I don't run once in December, though I very much hope I can.

In other news Thanksgiving was very fun this year, we went to Becky's grandmother's house and had a fun time with all of the family and especially hanging out with their cousins. I'm hooked on the Sam Adams Winter Variety boxes - not just to get the 2 bottles of sweet, sweet Chocolate Boch that the O got me hooked on (thanks Andrew :P ) but also because I love the Winter Lager and pretty much every other variety in there.

Numbers Game for Wheel of Time

It's basically a theme here for me to talk about obscure and practically (spell checked to piratically at first, awesome) meaningless math and numbers, but here I go again. I'm not sure why I do it, but inevitably if I'm looking at a spreadsheet or doing something progressive I begin to break it up and analyze it probably too much.

When I set my goal to read all of Harry Potter within a few months, I set up an excel spreadsheet that listed each book, the page counts for them, and let me input my progress and see % completion for each book as I went as well as the entire series. With 7 books most of which were roughly 700 words, this was a daunting task for me at first but actually went very quickly. I finished a solid 2 months early, which is better than I ever expected to do! After that, Becky challenged me (again, it's always her fault) to do the same with Wheel of Time so that I would be set to read the final book by the time it comes out in late 2011. The pace that needs to be set for that to happen is roughly one Wheel of Time book a month, and so I created a spreadsheet and have even gone one step further and I've begun tracking my progress by date every few days in the same spreadsheet.

The result of this tracking is that I am finishing roughly 1% of the entire series (counting only the 12 books that have been released so far) in about 3 days. I'm currently 42% of the way through the 5th book, and at the moment it syncs up nicely that I'm reading 10% of the book in 3 days that is the same as 1% of the whole series. Right now, including the four books I've finished previously, I am 35% of the way through the entire Wheel of Time series (released to date). When the newest book is released in a week or two that number will be skewed somewhat by the addition of ~700-800 new pages, but that's not a huge deal when looking at the whole. To be more precise if the new book is exactly 800 pages that will only set my series completion back by 2.5% but it will make my overall progression go a bit slower. If I assume that after that I will be completing 1% of the series every 4 days, I'll still be finishing up in roughly 260 days which is well before the 1 year mark.

I'm very happy with this information, because it means I should easily be able to throw in a book or two in the next year that isn't from Wheel of Time and still reach my goal pretty easily. Perhaps I just use numbers and math to make myself feel better?

Autumn in Maryland

Autumn is definitely my favorite season of the year, I was a bit hesitant about it this year because Winter, Spring, and then Summer seemed so awesome but late September and October so far have really sealed the deal. Of course now it's gotten to the point where it's starting to get "OMFG Cold" by most MD resident's standards, it's fine because we all started complaining about the cold a month ago when it was actually super nice out.

And now something that I did back in May/June and am just now getting around to:

A blogger that I know through RPG blogging, Darvin, posted this "Random Music Album Cover meme" back in May and I thought it was a very interesting idea so I did it back then, and with my typical lazy nature I didn't post it but the results amused me so much I had to save them in my e-mail somewhere. So I present to you now, the results and the instructions for the meme! I'd love to see others if you do it for yourself.

1 - Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random... Read More”
or click en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Quotations Page and select "random quotations"
or click www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

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I think the fact that my random wikipedia page ended up being "Fecal Fat Test" was amazing, and knew that I had to post this sooner or later. The absolutely stunning photo, which I unfortunately had to Photoshop the word "Fecal" onto was found randomly on Flickr and belongs entirely to Flickr user jennyBunz, I hope she doesn't mind because that photo would actually makes a really kickass album cover!

Other news: updated my slow as hell progress through Wheel of Time book 4, from 31% to 37% complete. The group just got into the Aeil Wastes so now I'll probably pick up the speed and hopefully be finished the book before the end of the year. Yes, again, I read incredibly and horrifyingly slow. I know this.

Also a week ago I posted a quick photoshop sketch I did on Parallax Perspectives, and I hope to be doing at least one of those a week as I start picking up more freelance art jobs that require me to keep in practice.