This was an interesting world, but I didn’t care for many of the details of how the powers worked. It was all very contrived feeling. I did like the story a good bit, and the action sequences were very nice. I think this is one of Sanderson’s less well developed stories.
Steph and I met up with Tommy, Joe, and Jim for diving in Monterrey. We got up around 5:30, and I drove us to the dock. We got on the Escapade and headed out to Hopkins Deep and Macabee. The first dive was very nice, but very cold. It got down to 47F at the bottom. During the dive we saw some big ling cod, as well as a sea lion swimming up to Steph under water. She got a big surprise out of it, since it came up on her from behind. I had a good time on the dive, and need to remember to not have any of those 5 hour energies before diving. The vitamin B in them increases circulation, which can increase heat loss.
Iliya and I sat down to try a game of Civ V against a good number of computers. I chose the nation of Polynesia, since I hadn’t played them before. They are able to embark and go in the open ocean from the start. I was able to use this to explore a ton before most others were able to. I got ahead on science and then got ahead on religion. The religion part started making me lots of money, which was very nice. We had to stop eventually, and we’ll finish the game some other time.
Stephanie and I biked into Palo Alto for a wonderful Saturday morning. We went to the Chocolate Garage and tried some new chocolates. We then went to Cladio Corallo chocolate, and got some more of the best chocolate I’ve had. We walked around a bit and ran across some people from Paypal giving out money. They had an offer, where if you used Paypal to pay they would cover $5 of the order. This meant that we got free ice cream sandwiches at Cream and I got a coffee for Michael. It was interesting to see them handing out so much money, with about $60 total possible to spend.
I went to dinner with Stephanie, Adam, Jeremy, Lindsay, and about 6 other people. We went to Agave on Castro Street, and the food was decent. this was mainly to celebrate Lindsay being back in town. After dinner we went over to Lee’s place and had some of the Japanese candy that Lindsay had brought back from her trip. She had a few really good ones, and a few strange ones. Everyone else settled down for two movies, but I went to Amit’s for poker. I lost pretty quickly, but got to show off the system, and the reaction was very positive.
This was a fun game, with Dan, Adam, Tina, and myself. I ended up winning, but by a very narrow margin. I was Russian, and that made it easy for me to steal techs. Since I was able to steal techs I got ahead, and people didn’t question me getting my armies close to other peoples cities, since that is how I could steal. The end of the game came about when I dropped everything and got military bonuses. This game me a total of +16 on the attach, and Dan didn’t have much in the way of defenses. I was very close to a tech victory as well. It was a fun and well played game of Civ.
More of Sanderson, and I must say that I’m still really impressed with his writing. This story was nice, although not as complex as the others. This was also much shorter than the others contributing a good bit to it. There are points in the story that show a less developed idea of motivation than in the later books, and there is only one bad character that is redeeming. The evil characters are pure evil, which is something he gets over in his later books, giving them the concept of doing something evil for some ‘greater good.’ I like the ‘greater good’ idea since it is morally ambiguous. In this book there was a clear evil and clear good, with a character converting from one side to the other being his transformation. I like the dead city concept, as it was very refreshing.
Steph and I joined Lindsay, Jeremy, and one of Lindsay’s friends for a dance cardio class called U-Jam. It was a good bit of fun, and I was able to keep up once I saw the patterns of repetition. After the class we went to a nearby restaurant for lunch and got lots of American breakfast food since Lindsay had been in India for a couple months and wanted it. She was nice and got me a very pleasantly scented piece of soap.
This is a very interesting take on the question of god and done in a unique way. There is a great story set around aliens making contact, and their beliefs in god. The style of belief seems very strongly correlated to Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. The god here follows a strange belief that I already held, that god can collapses the wave-function; meaning that god chooses the outcome of uncertain events. I had previously held that this was on an event by event basis, but the belief put forward in this book is that it is done on a ‘frame’ by ‘frame’ basis. These ‘frames’ consist of a single instance in the entire universe. It is a different take on why bad things happen to good people in that the god entity can’t make everything good, but can only choose the next frame of the universe to have the best possible outcome.
It's an Exciting World 