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Aleph-Naught

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About Aleph-Naught

  • Birthday January 3

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  • Member Title
    Attorney
  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    The vertices of Seattle, Austin and Spokane
  • Interests
    In no particular order: philosophy (jurisprudence, metaethics, mathematical logic, moral theory, Plato, Hume...), cognitive psychology (memory, problem solving and decision making, abnormal psychology), math, music (guitar and piano), reading, games, researching all of the aforementioned.

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  1. I ordered the omnibus May of 2023, directly from Dynamite--I never heard anything from them. I sent a follow-up email in November of 2023 inquiring as to the status of the order--they never responded. It is now March of 2024 and I'm starting to get extremely irritated.. and there's little that is worse for a company than an angry/frustrated lawyer, who doesn't have to worry about the costs of litigation because it's what they do for a living.
  2. I think this is an interesting question as well. It may be that since he can't hurt anything, reforming all the 16 shards could create a "god" that would not be able to meddle with people the way the current shards are able to; a way to be the kind of god imagined in a mechanistic philosophy of religion: setting the universe in motion then stepping aside.
  3. The first thing that came to mind with the "bone spore" reference was the Fain on Yolen. Overall I liked the book. Like some people I was a bit concerned about how the narrative name dropped colloquial terms / ideas that I always felt Brandon tried to avoid as much as possible. This concern was ameliorated a bit when he mentioned The Princess Bride inspiration for the book--if I recall correctly, that book also had a tendency to purposefully let modern day references seep into the narrative; talking about the "felony murder rule" was probably the most egregious (and I think unnecessary) example of this. My gripe could just be the criminal defense attorney in me having a fit, but there was a better way to get to the same result without simply name dropping the "felony murder rule". Brandon could have talked about the concept of transferred intent, something that this book points out is very important to realmatic theory. The felony murder rule isn't applicable in all states, England abolished it, Scotland doesn't have it, and it suggests that the Cosmere: 1. has an equivalent to English Common law, and 2. that the law most likely has a hierarchy when it comes to the alleged seriousness of the criminal behavior (i.e. misdemeanors vs. felonies). But English Common Law isn't the only possible system of jurisprudence, and it feels like a constraint on the possibilities within the Cosmere to so blatantly suggest that's the system in place. But this may be a necessary evil because there was also more hints about what "contracts" may entail in the Cosmere, and despite the arguments I have made in the past about the misunderstood malleability of a contract--how they're formed, defenses to the formation, defenses to enforcement of them, etc.--it looks like Brandon is choosing to be more rigid when it comes to their creation/enforcement, most likely as a narrative necessity. Oh well, I'll still devour the prose regardless.
  4. Ursula K. Le Guin is phenomenal. I read A Wizard of Earthsea for the first time just last year and it was incredible to realize just how influential that book has been.
  5. Life is random, cruel, and stupid--the bad almost always outweighs the good. I inevitably find myself contemplating others who have commented on this far better than I ever could hope to. Seneca the Younger wrote that: But trying to live the life of a Hellenistic Stoic philosopher kind of makes life suck even more. And y'know what? People should be able to complain about their material conditions--especially if those condition's origins can be easily and directly traced to being the victim of an utterly unfair and imbalanced system that has exploited you and enriched itself in the process. So then I think about Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote: Granted, Kurt Vonnegut then went on to rightfully say that: The past couple of days--as I struggle to endure the noble misery of my job and things outside of it that threaten to overwhelm my family--I have found myself thinking of David Milch, who managed to summarize the struggle against life's relentless awfulness in a monumentally succinct way when his character from the show "Deadwood", Jane Canary, simply stated:
  6. I think of it in this way: a person holding a single shard is able to access investiture, like a person opening a door or window slightly, but a person holding two shards is able to open that door/window a little bit more; ultimately, the amount of investiture is the same, but perhaps Sazed/Harmony is able to access/utilize more than a singular shard can.
  7. Since the prologue's in the books are incredibly similar, I can't help but feel a little underwhelmed.
  8. Username checks out. Shallan looks like my type, but I get very annoyed by conversation that is more interested in being clever/sarcastic than earnest/sincere. I like Steris a lot.. but Raboniel intrigues me as well..
  9. Completely dropped the ball/missed the boat on this, and it is very frustrating.
  10. To keep the metaphor going, you'd be surprised: to most people inside a prison, it is their whole world--it may as well be an entire planet--and it definitely has an impassable "storm" barrier, of guards and automatic weapons.
  11. I don't think it's Mercy. The Coppermind entry on Trell lays it out: (emphasis added) I feel assured that the shard laying siege to Scadrial is Autonomy, with help from TOdium (since Wax and Wayne takes place after Stormlight 5).
  12. Unless something changed dramatically on Braize in the intervening 8 years after this flashback takes place (such as, as this thread's hypothesis posits, another Herald shows up on Braize after being killed), the following exchange between Ulim and Venli seems to be pretty solid evidence that Taln did not break, and that the Everstorm was created to circumvent the Oathpact out of a concern that Taln would never break: -Rhythm of War, Chapter 73, "Which Master To Follow"
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