Maple, the David Chang-backed delivery service that planned to revolutionize home food delivery, has ceased operations after two years in business. The service sent word to customers this afternoon that they were closing down citing "many challenges to overcome." [ more › ]

I have a theory.

First, watch this spooky piece of teevee history, about a conman who promised to save a town from ruin, if only they’d build a wall. That man was named ‘Trump.’

Circa 1958

Not enough to rattle your cage?

Back in 1990, Heavy Metal comics published a story about Trump, who at the time was famous in NYC. In this story, named The Wall, he convinced the people to follow him to overthrow the rich establishment shills in charge of the city.

The result was Trump in charge and people writing ‘Dump Trump’ on the wall. Oh, by the way, part of his strategy to gain popular support was to hand out Trump hats. One of this key supporters was Mike Tyson, who, incidentally, was a vocal supporter of Trump this election.

Here is the 12 part series.

So are these incredible instances mere coincidence or are we living in a simulation and simply living out a script like in the HBO show Westworld?

The post EXPLAIN THIS: A Man Named ‘Trump’ Starred in 1958 Show Promising to Save Citizens by Building a Wall appeared first on Trading with The Fly.

In American restaurant culture, chicken wings are nearly as ubiquitous as french fries. They’re piled high at restaurant chains, tossed into baskets at late-night bars. Heck, Americans consumed 1.3 billion of them during Super Bowl weekend alone.

But with all its deep-fried popularity, why is it that we still fumble with the tricky chicken wing part known as the wingette?

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Brandon Sanderson has completed the first draft of Oathbringer, the third novel in The Stormlight Archive sequence, following on from The Way of Kings (2010) and Words of Radiance (2014).



The novel will require extensive rewrites and editing before publication, which is currently scheduled for November 2017. The novel currently clocks in at 461,223 words, which is actually too large to be published in one volume. Sanderson anticipates the word count to come down in the edits, so the novel is reduced to something more easily publishable.

If the current word count stood, it would make Oathbringer one of the longest fantasy novels ever written, behind To Green Angel Tower by Tad Williams (520,000 words), Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle (493,000) and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (473,000) but ahead of A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin (424,000) and Sanderson's own Words of Radiance (just over 400,000).

Oathbringer is the third of ten planned novels in The Stormlight Archive sequence. Sanderson's original plan was to release the books at 18-month intervals, but the actual release dates are working out at between three and four years per book. If Sanderson is able to release each future book at precisely three-year intervals, that means that the series will not completed until 2038, or twenty-two years from now. However, it would be considerably longer than this since Sanderson plans to take a long break between Books 5 and 6 to write the Mistborn II trilogy, pushing the completion of the Stormlight series comfortably back into the 2040s.

It'll be interesting to see if Sanderson (who turns 41 next week) starts making the books shorter or reduces his other projects to get Stormlight done faster, or if he accepts that this is just how long the books are going to take.

The writing time of the Stormlight books may also become problematic if DMG Entertainment's planned film adaptation of Sanderson's Cosmere mega-series (which Stormlight is just one part of) is a big success and they want to start cranking the films out faster. But we'll see how that goes.