Fantastic are Sanderson's books particularly his Cosmere works.  I love how everything is connected in the background and I bought the Dangerous Women and Shadows Beneath anthologies just to read his short stories that take place in the Cosmere.

Especially connected is Wit/Hoid. He shows up in all the Cosmere stuff to be enigmatic and witty, and I want a book that is just about him going around to all the worlds to mess with the characters. He's apparently supposed to be important for the overarching Cosmere metaplot, but we've been given so little about him...

Maybe he'll get his own book someday.  I remember Sanderson has written in his blog before about The Liar of Partinel which is supposed to be a book about Hoid's origin story.

Yeah? I don't generally read author blogs, so I miss a lot of stuff like that. I'll have to track that down at some point. But not right now. I'm supposed to be packing right now, and I don't know how much longer I'm going to have internet access for. I scheduled it to be turned off on Saturday, but I don't know if that means at midnight tonight, or at like, 8am or what.

That's sad.  I take home internet access for granted.  Hope your move goes well.

Likely we won't be more than 24 hours without, since the tech is supposed to come out to the new place tomorrow morning to help us connect the router and whatnot. I'm still awake and trying to get things packed up, but my room looks like a disaster area and I don't know how I managed to do this last time...

Each move I've had has been crazy and procrastinating makes it so much crazier.

Really it was quite a nightmare. We're most of the way done now, just had to buy some stuff today and then we need to unpack everything... or most of everything, but we turned in our keys to the other place, so we're done with the actual moving part.

That's great!  Hope you got everything moved correctly.  I've been fairly lucky on that part except for a box that had my SNES, N64, and cartridge collections for them.  It's not like I'd been playing them a lot, but it was still sad considering the nostalgia factor.

Rather, we had the moving company deal with our furniture (the new place is a 2nd floor walk up, with stairs inside the apartment as well), and transported and carried all of our boxes ourselves. I didn't want to take any risks with my nice, flatscreen TV or my video games and systems, nor my books, clothes, etc. Also having them move the boxes would have made it more expensive, and we're kind of on a budget.

This has been a very expensive couple of weeks for us because of the move. We should be done with the excessive spending for now though. Which is nice.

Everything seems better when you don't have to worry as much about money.  Is it a close location to where you lived before?  I always found finding a new group of friends to be the hardest part about moving.

Good thing I don't have any local friends then. This place is about three miles from our last one, but I honestly don't have a social life. It's basically work -> home -> internet -> sleep -> repeat. I take one weekend per year to go out to Boston and see my friends from school, and one of my friends from college has standing permission to drunk text me on Saturday nights (he asked permission, and when he does it, it ends up being rather interesting depending on his level of drunkness), so it's not like I'm a complete recluse, but I have no real interest in getting out and socializing with random people. I don't make friends with people very easily, and I find that having no interest in mainstream shows or events such as popular sitcoms and reality shows or sporting events and concerts, severely limits the number of people I'm willing to converse with for any length of time.

I also have a rather mean sense of humor, riddled with sarcasm, and most people don't seem to get that.

That's a bit sad but warranted.  It's hard meeting people with similar interests when not in school where you can just drop by the gaming or anime clubs (or whatever else you're interested in.)  I haven't had to deal with those problems yet, but I'm glad I can at least stay in touch with some older friends over the internet.  That would have been almost impossible just 30 years ago.

Oh how true. When I started college Facebook was just getting off the ground and gaining popularity. I'm lucky in that respect, as it allows me to keep in touch with friends from all ages of my life (elementary through college... I refuse to friend any of my coworkers), and to keep abreast of the developments in their lives. And honestly, I don't feel like I'm "disconnected" or whatever. The internet and social media are wonderful things.

So they are.  And it's not as if talking is the only social interaction over the internet.  I can play videogames and synch watching movies/tv with friends from around the country which make up most of the social interactions I have with friends in person.  All they need is a way to virtually go out to eat and that's about everything.

Got to wait until at least the 24th century for that. Then we should have transporters and replicators just like Star Trek tells us.

Seems cool but don't the transporters actually kill you and make a copy of you somewhere else?  I don't like the sound of that.

That's not how it works at all. Not in the Trek-verse, anyways. What they do is they take a copy of your "pattern", basically a map of how you're built and your other physical data, plus all the chemical and electrical processes that make up "you", then break you down into your component molecules, using the pattern to put them all back exactly where they were, just in a different physical location. The patterns are stored so that they only need to be updated each time.

The Heisenberg compensator protects the molecules from the observer effect, and makes it so that nothing except the location changes between point A and point B.

But doesn't the transporter not actually move the molecules?  I remember an episode of TNG where some of the characters turn into children during a transportation accident.  Wouldn't that mean it's somehow basing the teleportation off their DNA and not actually moving the molecules?  If so then the original physical form is destroyed.

Don't be silly, that was only because the patterns were corrupted during transport. I assure you that transporters are completely safe when the Rule of Drama does not apply.

You seem fairly confident about this but is there any evidence that the molecules move from point A to point B and it isn't just the pattern constructing something new to exactly match something it destroyed?  Maybe it's in a book or something, but I don't remember it being mentioned in TOS or TNG.

Got to extrapolate from the minimal data provided in the series. But think of it this way: if the end result is indistinguishable from the original in form, thought, and action, can you truly say that it is not, in fact, the original itself?

For the definition of copy, doesn't that satisfy?  It's like the teleporter from The Prestige, but it destroys the original.  I think the same molecules have to be used for it to not count as a death, and even then I think there's a good argument that it kills the person and then creates a life identical to them.

Maybe you're overthinking this. The actual working teleporter that they've actually made in our universe transports the SAME atom from one point to another. The range is short, but the fact remains that you're quibbling over something that is clearly not an issue. :)

Excuse me?!  We have a working teleporter!