the outstretched shadow CH 5 through 8

CH 5 the courts of nightmare pg 97

There are demons that live underground.  There are also elves that live in the forest.  There's also dragons.  The queen demon has this idea to trick the elves and humansinto fighting and when the war is over, she'll just sweep over whoever wins cause they will be weak by then.

The demons get their magic power from the suffering of others.  If they torture someone it makes them magically stronger.  The queen Deming has tortured another demon to the point where all thatsleft is a gooey pouch that she drinks kinda like a Capri sun.  The prince demon has brought a mage into their inner sanctum cause the mage said he could get His hands on a dragon.  He did not so the prince demon is gonna torture him to death.

CH 6

Kellen is bored with his normal studies.  He wants to know what's beyond the city walls.  He goes to the main public library and doesn't really find anything useful.  So he gives wild magic again.  He ends up in the artists section of the city.  The magic directs him to clean up an old cistern.  He cleans it up and then fills it in.  He's done a good thing for the city.  In doing so,he makes friends with an old man who's a writer.  In fact, the very writer who kellens dad refused and burned his latest book.

CH 7

Kellen us excited to get a start on the day so he gets up early and dresses nice and heads down to breakfast.  He overhears some servants say that his new writer friend is dead.  He's too sad to eat now so he heads to school Early.  He has math class.  He likes math class.  He's always the first to arrive And the last to leave.

Switch viewpoint to Kellens dad.  He searches kwllwns room and finds the books.

Kellen has his math class intruded by a messenger giving him a summons to the mage council.  He feels doomed so he spends his last bit of freedom at the docks.  He goes to the council and his dad yells at him cause of the books.  He goes to jail for a while and his dad comes down and tells him the straight dope about wild magic.  It's the demons tool to lure mages down into their rhelm.  We know its the truth cause we know demons exist and they are horrible.  Kellen doesn't know shit, so he calls the truth his father gives him BS and tells him he'd much rather run the risk of dieing out in the world beyond the city walls than be his son.  Then His dad tells him banishment is a lie.  You don't really get to leave.  What you get is a one night head start before they ride out to find you and kill you. Dad also says something about Kellen being just as bad as his sister.  Kellen doesn't have any memory of having a sister.

CH 8

Kellen is really getting banished.  He's thrown out of the city when the night bells are ringing.  This would be a cool scene in a movie or TV show.  They give him bread and water and a thin cloak that labels him as a criminal so everyone he interacts with know he's done crime.

Kellen is feeling a bit hopeless.  There's some more description of what's gonna come kill him.  Its a thing called the wild hunt and its a golem that looks like a dog.  If it catches him, it's tear him apart real quick.

Kellen decides desperate times call for desperate measures.  So he does a wild magic spell asking the magic to get him outside of the city boundaries before morning.

A unicorn shows up.  There's a unicorn in this book that has a unicorn on the cover.  The unicorn shows up and tells him he's willing to help him case he's a virgin and the price for the unicorns help is that he has to stay that way for another year.  Kellen doesn't think this is gonna be a problem so he agrees immediately.  

He gets on the unicorn and they are running impossibly fast.  It's hard and painful just to hang on with the unicorn going this fast.  To make matters worse the unicorn isn't all that focused on staying on a trail or anything.  It's just running as fast as it can.  Kellen is getting whipped by branches real bad.  It has torn his criminal cloak to shreds.  He's fricking freezing cause no cloak and also the unicorn runs through a stream.

They stop for a bit.  Kellen offers some of his bread to the unicorn and it's like, Nah, you're gonna need alla that.  Then they're back to running.

why zebras don't get ulcers preface to CH 6

Preface

Lots of thanking people for their help.  Explanation that this book is about how this book is about how stress makes us more susceptible to certain  diseases.

CH 1 why don't zebras get ulcerz pg 1

This book is all about stress.  There are certain disorders where the body doesnt release the chemicals it should during stress and ut really sucks.  But theres lots of diseases that are made much worse because of stress.  We're gonna focus on some of those deseases chapter by chapter.

Ch 2 glands, gooseflesh and hormones. Pg 19

One of the four F's is sex.  That made me giggle.

The pituitary gland is important.  It secrets important hormones.  But it's not making those decisions, different parts of the brain send signals to the pituitary gland to have it secret the right hormones at the right time so our body has the ability to properly respond to stress.  Lots of science went into figuring out how that works and the folks that did it won a Nobel prize for it in 1976.

The adrenal gland does something similar.

CH 3 strokes, heart attacks and voodoo death pg 39

The heart is a bit of a one trick pony when it comes to stress.  Pump a lot of blood to the extremities so you can fight or flight or whatever.

CH 4 stress metabolism and liquidating your assets. Pg 53

The body does some fun stuff with energy when under stress.  It shuts down digestion and starts pulling fat and protein from non active muscles to use as energy for the muscles that are fighting for fighting or whatever.it also blocks insulin reception cause it wants all the energy it can get.  This is fine if you're glucose typical.  But if you're diabetic isucks super hard.

CH 5 ulcers colitis and the runs

I really enjoyed the part where they explain that diahrea is due to the large intestine evacuation asap without doing its primary job of reabsorbing the liquid.

Ulcers sound like they suck and I didn't get any sort of good idea as to what I should do about it.

CH 6 growth pg 80

Babies and children in general need to be touched.  Lack of touch causes stress, which results in lack of growth.  Interestingly the body does something weird.  It doesn't stop with the growth hormone as much as it has an anti growth hormone it secretes.  There's tons of accidental human evidence of this.  Then there's tons of experiments on animals to prove it as well.  If you have a baby, touch it tons.

The Outstretched Shadow (the obsidian trilogy book 1) ch 1 through 4

ch 1 in the city of golden bells pg 11

The main character is named Kellen.  He's a mage in training in a city run by mages.  It's safe and prosperous and generally a good place to live.  But its all very well regulated to the point of being oppressive.  Kellen is in the market and is just sorta bored with it.  Some Mage comes through and ruins everything by stopping traffic and making it annoying for everyone else.  So Kellen decides to go the low market.  Maybe he'll find something new there.  There's nothing new in mage city.  It's the same as it was five hundred years ago and will likely be the same five hundred years in the future.  In the low market Kellen finds  a fun old knife rester that has unicorn heads on the ends.  He's super duper looking forward to using it and getting disapproving looks from his stuffy cold oppressive father.

He also goes to a book seller hoping to find old copies of his mage textbooks.  His desire is two fold, first, if they're old and beat up, it's OK for him to write notes in the margins.  His dream would be to find books that some other student long ago wrote their one notes in the margins.  He is successful in this.  He also finds three books that seem kinda fancy, leather bound but thin.  Books of the sun, moon and stars.  They appear to be hand written magic books.  When he goes to pay for them the shop keep asks if he has kids.  The fancy books look like children's books to him.  Curious.

His dad is the HMIC.  They're very wealthy and they have a large house that his dad rarely goes to cause he's busy with work.  It a cold and clean and has a large staff to keep it that way.  His dad always has the servants make Kellen a cold bath in the hopes it will encourage him to learn the fire magic he needs to heat the water.  This far all Kellen has managed is to light some candles.  He eats all alone in silence at the scheduled meal time cause his dad is at work and even if he wasn't they would still eat in silence cause he doesn't tolerate talking during meal time.

Having his domestic affairs taken care if he goes to his dads library to see if he can find any reference to these fancy books he found.  He does, they are banned books as they are wild magic.  There's something about this magic and women that's unclear but hints that this oppressive society is also Male dominated.

He's trying to read the banned books but is finding it hard to find the magic in the banned magic books.  Thus far they seem mostly philosophy books.

Also, Kellen isn't happy.  He doesn't even know anyone that he thinks is happy.  Especially his A hole dad.

ch 2 dark lightning pg 38

This chapter is to make you aware that Kellen's dad is a dick.  A classist mesoginist jerk face.  His job (like most high level burocratix jobs) is mostly paper work.  Then his assistant comes to tell him that he needs to deal with an important thing.  A rich family is having sorcery problems.  Its their daughter.  She's got magic powers. The prevailing theory is women can't be mages cause they can't control it cause of all their emotions.  So after a brief tall with the family he uses his magic to burn away the parts of her brain that do magic.  He also removes all her memories of ever having done magic and replaces them with memories of doing music so she's got something to focus on.  He's very worried that if any memory is left she will come after him or his assistant or Kellen for revenge.

ch 3 The books of Wild Magic pg 54

Kellen has been reading the books of qild magic and seems to like it better than his usual magic studies.  He's being tutored by his dad's assistant and its a lot of memorizing and repeatedly writing symbols.  The assistant tells him a secret about the city mages that do civil service work, they take magical power from common folk and use it.  They never use their own power unless they absolutely have to.  This upsets Kellen and he runs away.  He decides to change into grubby clothes and head down to the docks hoping to get the straight truth of things from people that aren't part of the city's power structure.  He overhears a ship captain talking to a would be sailor.  The sailor is sad cause when he told his family he wanted to be a sailor they were all like go then, you're not part of our family anymore.  The captain explains this is a good thing.  The family could have said no, you have to stay and then the magic walls in the harbor that keep the bad weather out would have stopped their ship from leaving.  Kellen is all psyched to hear this as he has long suspected the powers that be stopped people from leaving the city.  Suspicion confirmed.

ch 4 Music in Chains 74

Kellens dad is running council meetings, which are mostly about oppressing the masses.  People come with some new thing they want to sell or art they want to perform and most are told no.  Mage city is all about keeping the status quo.

Kellen goes home and is all prepared to sneak in the garden door.  But he can't find the key.  He does wild magic to find the key.  He starts walking and realizes its the magic making him walk. It takes him to a court yard with a crying girl.  Her cat  is stuxk in a tree.  Kellen climbs the tree, gets the cat and falls down.  But he is miraculously unharmed.  Beneath his fallen body he finds a birds nest.  In said birds nest he finds his key.  

He let's himself back into the house.  His dad is there and yells at him for skipping out on his lesson with dad's assistant.  Then he yells more about how Kellen better shape up, cause he need a a man and his heart is set on you.  Kellen does his best Dawson impression and gives him the ole I don't want your life.