Denna almost certainly dies. She’s not with him now and there are multiple references to her being sick with something (tuberculosis, maybe?). One of the story arcs in the third book is likely going to be her illness; however, she will die because of another reason before it claims her. Perhaps it is a freak accident, a misunderstanding, or one of Ambrose’s antagonistic actions gone wrong, but somehow she is taken before her brief time is over. This likely causes Kvothe to snap, doing things he later regrets with lasting consequences.

It may be because of this that he becomes Kingkiller. However, I also like the idea that he finally catches up with some of the Chandrian, and that some king is being manipulated or controlled by one of them. While it appears to be an assassination to the ignorant world, what Kvothe does is in the service of his mission and is justified. It doesn’t seem like that mission is yet complete, though, because Bast is still very much afraid of naming the seven.

Remember how Kvothe’s mom ran off with his dad, one of the Edema Ruh, in a fairytale romance? Now, the Maer’s new wife Meluan Lackless is a noblewoman who is bitterly angry at the Edema Ruh for stealing her sister away. The Maer’s wife’s sister is totally Kvothe’s mom, making Kvothe both Edema Ruh and a member of the ancient Lackless family.

One of the heirlooms of the Lackless family is a sealed, lockless box. Kvothe inevitably figures out how to open that box, but he also learns how to make one of his own – this eventually becomes the thrice-locked chest he keeps in his room. This also makes it likely that Kvothe has a family connection to the Amyr. It is unlikely that any of the known contemporary Lackless are Amyr, but it seems likely that some of them were connected with the warriors in the deep past. Now, there could be somebody waiting to step up, like Aragorn, and Kvothe could be that person.

That thrice-locked chest contains Kvothe’s name. After doing whatever he did that caused a war, earned him the name Kingkiller, and made him go into hiding, he was so intent on leaving his life behind that he sealed himself as Kvothe into that box, taking on the name and identity of Kote the innkeeper. Normally this might be entirely symbolic, but because Kvothe is a namer, this action actually has power. He has actually changed who he is, which is why the townspeople so readily accept him as nothing more than an innkeeper, even when in one case he directly tells them he is not. This is also why he is unable to defeat the marauding soldiers nor perform the feats of naming necessary to reopen the box. Thus lies the predicament he is currently in – even were he to wish to reopen the chest, he cannot (as evidenced by him trying and failing).

Even so, he is still Kvothe, so it is possible that him telling his story, using his real name and remembering his real identity will help him regain enough of himself to open the box and unlock his full potential again. Something along these lines likely happens toward the end of the third book. The question then becomes, “What next?” If he decides to go out setting things to rights, there is space for a second series of books. While this is certainly possible, it’s been made pretty clear that this is a trilogy, leaving several potential outcomes:

• “Setting things to rights” simply involves Kvothe facing up to who he is and turning himself over to some entity, likely ending in his death.
• Kvothe finishes the story, becomes himself again, and sets out into a new future, which is where the story ends.
• Wrapping up what Kvothe does after he opens the box doesn’t take that long, and is left to an epilogue or a few final chapters.
• The tragedy of Kvothe’s life really is already completed, and he will never be able to reopen the box or even attempt to fix things. Thus, his waiting to die is based not merely on his perception of the truth, but actual fact. There really is nothing else for him to do but wait to die.

It really seems like there is more for Kvothe to do after his story catches up to the present. As mentioned earlier, Bast still seems to be very much afraid of the Chandrian, meaning all or some of them are still at large. It may be that they really are impossible to defeat, but it may also be that Kvothe’s actions, either rash or calculated, forced him to go into hiding so that he is now unable to do anything further against them. Following that path to its conclusion seems like enough material for an entire additional trilogy though.There’s that rhyme about the rings Kvothe supposedly has on his fingers. His left hand had stone, iron, amber, wood and bone, while his right hand had blood, air, ice, flame, and one that could not be named. When Fela learned how to name stone, Elodin had her fashion herself a ring. Thus, it seems like the rings could represent names that Kvothe knows, as well as being symbolic. The bone ring is the one the Maer’s servant gave to him. He has to know the name of wood to be able to work with Lackless boxes, while air is the first name that he is learning to use. The nameless one might be his own name, or perhaps that of Felurian (he is able to name her during their encounter).

Note also that Felurian let Kvothe go only because he promised to come back – but he is not currently in the Fae, and he hangs out with Bast, a fae, who doesn’t seem to be trying to bring him back there at all. Perhaps when Kvothe is running into hiding, he slips back into the Fae. At this point, though, he’s much too powerful for Felurian to keep him there, so once he decides to take on his innkeeper disguise he simply leaves. He may also just ask her about the Chandrian, as she swore that were he to ask about that she would drive him from Fae. She may also be the one who sends Bast with him, either because she wants him to learn from him, protect him, or both.

Naming at its core is about seeing into the heart of things. This is why Elodin always seems to be looking into people, and why when Kvothe names Felurian he sees into her soul, gaining a full understanding of her. Auri also seems to have this ability, although she is much more in touch with it than Kvothe. Whenever she sees something, she refers to it based on things that may have happened in their past. It’s not nonsense, it’s naming. When she looks at something she sees those aspects of it and speaks – it is natural for her. She may be a kind of prodigy or savant, where her ability prevents her from fitting in to normal society. She may also be Elodin’s daughter or relative, which would explain why he keeps watch over her.

That’s all I have for now. As before I can’t wait for the next book. It’s called The Doors of Stone, which suggests that if nothing else, Kvothe will get his stone ring.

My friend Jeff first introduced me to Scott Pilgrim when we were still in Maryland. Jerks that we are, we moved before the movie came out. It seemed like a good film to invite my fellow first year MD/PhD students to come see with me, but it turned out they were in Canada, Japan, and Thailand, or in other words not California. “It’s okay,” I thought, “we’ll try again when the DVD comes out.”

That was November, and this week we got the delinquents (and a few others) together and finally made it happen.  I don’t know if everybody connected with the movie’s geek cultural humor, but I think they enjoyed themselves regardless.

Scott Pilgrim is a movie that does a good job bridging mediums. It stylistically incorporates the effects, comments, and abrupt transitions that made the comic book so quirky and unique. The fight scenes and integration of comic book-style sound effects into the live action were particular highlights. They also included Knives’ “Chau down” line, one of my favorites in the whole series.

In addition to the myriad video game references, the environment of the movie has a lot of neat little nods to the plot, one of the most obvious of which is the appearance of numbers as Scott fights his way through the evil exes. The first time I saw the movie I didn’t think to start looking for them until I saw the giant four in the club where he fights the fourth ex. The second time I remembered to start looking for them at three (Todd has a three on his shirt, is in a three-piece band, violated vegan code three times), and this time I started at two (Lucas Lee has two Ls making up his logo, there’s a two on the car and trailer, he has the help of stunt doubles) so I still haven’t seen anything for one. I also haven’t noticed anything for seven, but I may just not be counting fast enough.

While it has nothing to do with the movie, thanks to our friend Matt, our party featured ice cubes shaped like brains. This is now on the must-have list for the ice tray category of my geek kitchen collection, along with pi symbols and Lego bricks. Of course, when I have the money to stock up on stuff like this I’ll probably also have a fridge that can make its own ice. These are the problems I must face.

Did I mention that there is a grill in the center of your table? The restaurant did an “all you can eat for $9.99″ special for lunch, so being grad students we rolled in with a ten-person crowd thirty minutes before “lunch” ended and started ordering meats like crazy. I was a little confused at first, but lucky for me we had several Asians with us to act as Wise and Helpful Guides. Although I don’t really have anything to compare it to, I thought the food was delicious and had a great time. Parking, though, was terrible. There’s a whole shopping plaza with maybe one or two spaces per storefront, so we just parked at the much larger shopping center across the street and walked. Space is such a premium that the stores use cones to barricade those spaces for their customers. I suppose the cell phone store expects potential customers to run inside and request that the spot be opened?

The biggest faux pas of the trip was finding out that our one friend and her boyfriend were vegetarian after we got there. There was salad for them to eat, at least, but it was definitely an “oops” moment. I thought my car made good time on the way back, but it turns out the other car recovered and used some kind of “back streets” voodoo to bypass all the traffic jams. Around here, something is apparently considered “close” if it’s under an hour drive, but until I learn these dark traffic-dodging arts, a lot of things are still mentally off-limits. What can I say, I was living in Baltimore where I was routinely either very close to my destination or traveling against the flow of traffic, and I got spoiled.

Several of our friends got delicious meat dishes heavily seasoned with cumin. As it turns out, the spice is numbing agent, especially in large quantities, producing a very different effect from chili peppers. Confirming cumin’s anesthetic properties by searching our collective knowledge produces some interesting results, and has been known to make users say “Oh, Google” while patting it on the head.

Friends moving to the area take note: It was good enough to make us come back with my family only a few days later. I actually made an account on Yelp so I could leave a review. Unrelated anecdote: Rachel dropped a chunk of piping hot bean curd, which I caught thanks to my catlike reaction times. Her reaction went a long way toward counterbalancing the handful of saucy tofu I wound up possessing.

We’re moving in less than two weeks. How did this come up so fast?

One of the key strengths isn’t the real-time chat around a document – that feature is already a part of Google Docs – but the ability to do version control and change tracking. In MS Word, the de facto document editor, track changes quickly gets out of hand, taking up increasing amounts of space until whole pages are dedicated to margin comments. Additionally, once changes have been accepted, there’s no way to see the history of the document’s changes over time.

Wave’s playback feature hints at this functionality but it’s terribly arcane. It automatically places the cursor at the beginning of the timeline, not the the end with the most recent changes. There’s also no way to toggle recent changes in the main document view without loading up the whole playback interface.

Wave also has a hard time handling inline images: It cannot wrap text around them, you can’t zoom in from the slideshow view, and while you can toggle between thumbnail and fullsize view, if the image is larger than your screen you can’t minimize it without zooming out via the browser.

Finally, to be an effective academic authoring tool, Wave needs something like Zotero’s plugin for Word and Writer to manage citations, or at the very least, a smooth way to transition waves to and from office software that does support them. Ideally, in this setting Wave would act like an upgraded version of GDocs. Collaborators on the Wave could gather around a central core of documents, leaving comments, live chatting when necessary, and gaining a robust ability to monitor and track changes. At any point the collaborators could export the document portion of the wave to another format for printing, emailing, and distributing.

Wave’s strength is that there are almost always multiple contributing authors on a paper like this, all of whom want to see what’s going on and make changes. You have to discuss things in meetings and incessantly trade files back and forth via email. Having been through this before, I thought Wave was going to be the perfect solution; it seems expressly designed for this scenario. Unfortunately my collaborators eventually became frustrated enough that I had to abandon it. Hopefully the service will improve to the point that I’ll be able to try again on my next paper – emailing files is so naughties. When did you think this was, 2009?

Some context: A while back I was encouraged by Artwiculate to try crafting wit with arcane vocabulary (as my twitter followers will corroborate with a regretful sigh). Over the past month, I’ve been more intensely reviewing all kinds of words in preparation for the GRE.

It seemed like every time I resurrected a new word, it appeared in the next page of Lolita. Such seemingly effortless use of a vibrant, wide vocabulary is astounding. It’s entirely unlike the loquacious use of “vocab words” by authors transparently employing right-click -> synonyms in Microsoft Word, rather it is the artful placement of linguistic jewels flowing liquidly from his pen. The story is a beauty to read for that value alone, but it also creates contrast with the plot.

One of many bits that made me laugh out loud was Nabokov’s discussion of having sex outside. “…in the Wilds of America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart’s buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of potential snakes-que dis-je , of semi-extinct dragons!-while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike.”

Nabokov does scatter a lot of French throughout the novel. Having never studied it, everything not already part of the common parlance was lost of me. I feel like I might of missed out on some humor, but at least there’s something to please those silly people who took French instead of Spanish.

Writing like this is impressive and inspiring to me. In my experience, maintaining such language requires near-constant application. Otherwise I tend toward “favorite words,” ultimately at the exclusion of others. Not only is Lolita excellent writing, it tells a tragic story worth reading. This is definitely going on my shelf of all-time favorites.

View all my reviews on Goodreads.

With an army of rabidly loyal fans at his command and a good number of people enthusiastically backing up his creative efforts, Whedon is in a good place to ditch the film “industry” entirely and market his work directly to fans. He’s already proved he can do it with Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, releasing the shows for free online while selling them through iTunes and with extras on physical DVDs. Unfortunately the shows aren’t still online via the main site, a move that only discourages potential fans from becoming interested.

He’s only scratched the surface of what’s possible. Using a tiered support model, his team could offer anything from signed physical copies of shows and tie-in merchandise to time with the actors or old set props. Many in his audience would devour such offerings as though it were a final meal.

In addition, he gains the creative freedom to tell his stories the way he wants to, unfettered by preposterous demands of stodgy network executives seeking meaningless ratings increases. Money received from fans also goes directly to those involved in creating the art they enjoy.

As for the Dollhouse story, what an ending. The ear-mounted imprinting devices reminded me of Neuromancer, with Ambrose and Harding swapping “suits” much like the sleeves in Altered Carbon. The only major gripe I have is with Boyd Langton. His Master Plan was seriously to allow the world to be destroyed so he and his handpicked favorites could rule over it? To what end? The lord of a billion mindless slaves doesn’t have much of a swagger.

Honestly, it had the same level of ridiculousness as one of Lex Luthor’s inane schemes, blowing up the California coast or creating a new landmass so he can…sell waterfront property. It seemed much more likely to me that Rossum would cause the tech to get loose through a wanton pursuit of profits. Making Boyd insane or stupid didn’t seem like the best story path to take.

On a more minor note, a massive pulse that “resets” everybody back to how they were? I was under the impression that the imprinting process made essentially permanent changes, hence the data backups. What happened suggests more of an overlay that can be removed to reveal the original person underneath, seemingly in conflict with previous statements.

The show got off to a tediously slow start, but I think Dollhouse had a smashing second season. It’s a shame that once again a show gets shut down midstream just as it begins taking off.

First of all, Paranormal Activity is excellent. Rather than subscribing to standard horror movie fare featuring a hot chick and CGI models of ugly things, this low-budget film leaves just about everything to the imagination. For somebody whose imagination threatens to fission into a separate entity altogether, that makes for an actually suspenseful movie. Your mileage may vary, but judging from the Tomatometer, chances are you’ll agree they made some great decisions. Turns out your multimillion dollar budget doesn’t make a good movie, good filmmaking makes a good movie. Whowouldathunkit?

Rachel and I also hung out with some of our friends to play poker and Guitar Hero/Rock Band. In poker, Rachel ended up playing for somebody who had to leave, meaning that of the last three players two of them were named “Castello.” In retrospect, we could have worked out some kind of betting collusion to garner lots of moneys from Player 3, but instead he won and I got second. As a household, we’re up $5. Go us!

I ended up singing not one, but two songs. The first was Still Alive from the Portal game, which I said was the only song in all of the games I would risk singing. The rest of the party insisted did not exist as a playable song, so naturally, I had to locate and download it to prove them all wrong. Go ahead and bypass the “easy” bit and look at the “100%.” I’m making a note here: BIG SUCCESS.

Somewhere amid all of this I noticed that a certain song with which I have a very special relationship was in one of the newer games: You Give Love a Bad Name. I blame Rich and his compulsion to put it on repeat for as long as his car’s tires are on the Jersey turnpike. I’m sure the remaining party guests blamed him as well.

One last thing: Health care reform is finally moving along so be sure and show your support for something that will actually help American citizens receive superior, more affordable health care. It’s important to ensure that this goal remains intact through the final stages of approval.

After watching this I’m further convinced that the majority of Hollywood “writers” aren’t there because they have any particular semblance of talent, but due some series of unfortunate accidents that places them in a position to mutilate otherwise healthy media. Clearly my “nine” movie should have been of the district variety.

I always love how these older Sci-Fi books get some predictions so uncannily correct. This book featured flat screens, home theater systems with their booming audio, headset radios, and, my personal favorite, ear buds.