Jofwu

Since this topic was double-posted, I'm merging the one from General into this topic in the Stormlight forum.

Potential continuity error caught by u/NKMEstadullo on Reddit, regarding where Wayne shot Telsin at the end of Bands of Mourning: In BoM: In TLM:

Hi everybody, Joshua here. My best friend in preschool tended to pronounce that as "Jof-wuh" and in middle school I figured "Jofwu" would make a great AIM screenname, so here we are. Middle school was also when I started reading the Wheel of Time, which quickly became a new favorite. I was too young to participate in the online fandom, but I liked to lurk... Fast forward to 2015, where somehow "Jofwu" had become a Reddit username and Brandon Sanderson's completion of Jordan's epic series made me give his books a shot. I fell in love with The Way of Kings a few pages in, and decided then and there that I wanted to go all-in on the fandom thing this time. I spent so much time on the Cosmere subreddits that they made me a moderator, then started editing Coppermind articles and helping with Arcanum until they spiked me on 17th Shard in 2017. The years since have been everything I hoped they would! I live in South Carolina with my wife and three kids. When I'm not spending time with them or doing Sanderson fandom stuff, I enjoy reading sci-fi/fantasy by other authors, playing RPGs, and indulging the occasional video game / television show obsession.

Just want to emphasize people should look for the one on the second page. The initial post was pre-TLM and the new world map that came in it.

On page 42 missed a lowercase "physical realm" that should be capitalized.

Welcome, HappyWhitespine

FYI, I'm moving this to the "New Cosmere Releases" forum, on account of the Tress reference.

Hey Requiem17, good question! This isn't the sort of encyclopedic content that's fitting for a Coppermind article, so you won't find it there. People are welcome to use User pages on Coppermind for something like that, but I'm not aware of anyone who has collected this information there. (You're welcome to.) It's totally possible someone has made a list of this elsewhere on the internet, but I couldn't point to one. Have you tried looking around the forums? If you can't find one, and want to get one started, I would make a post in the Stormlight or Cosmere forum about it.

Ah, thanks for the catch. That would have been written prior to RoW, and we didn't go back and scrutinize every event detail in the RoW update. I'll make a note to get it updated. (probabyl into something more ambiguous so that it isn't spoilery)

I think the answer to that will vary wildly by person, so it's difficult to answer. It's a function of how much you like the story, how much you might like the changes (I think everyone would agree it was changed for the better, but not everyone would agree on the extent to which those changes improve the story), how those opinions translate to money you're willing to spend, how much a published prose version in the coming years might change the equation for you, etc. In my opinion, definitely worth it. Strongly agree.

I can't imagine there will ever be revisions to the Omnibus, but it feels wrong not to make a note of typos and continuity errors. Page 10, Glossary - "A'Kar" should be capitalized as "A'kar" (several other Ars Arcanum pages use the latter, K is only capitalized here it seems) Page 119, big speech bubble from Kenton - "Los'een" should be "Los'seen" Page 143, final paragraph - "influencial" should be "influential" Page 241, line by Jon Acron beginning "Just before Baon came back..." - is missing a quotation mark at the end of the line Page 291, paragraph beginning "I've read about the Dayside phenomenon..." - "After a four hours" should be "After four hours" Page 362, top panel - Kenton says Khriss "once said Dayside was primitive". She did in the original version I believe, but this was removed in the Omnibus. She no longer says anything about Dayside being primitive. Page 408, Aarik in the first panel - "nevermind" should be "never mind" I think. (still got to do the last 100 pages or so, so likely I'll be back to add one or two more)

Sure, you can go that route if you want. I don't think Brandon is playing with that kind of pedantry. The point of being Earth-like is "it is what it looks like". Maybe I'm wrong to assume that, but I'm comfortable with. I don't know off the top of my head, but I'd be extremely surprised if it's not 24 SI hours. See above regarding that assumption. Agreed there. But there's more flexibility to explain it away than the Norhterners and Southerners had at least. If it happens. But it doesn't have to mean there's people out there. Could just be unclaimed land.

There was a Cosmere.es interview from a bit before the TLM release where Brandon said we would get a new map but it would NOT be a map of the whole planet. And probably by Era 3 we would. So there must be more. Now, it's possible the only thing left is the land at the edges of this map and no telling how extensive those get... Regardless, I feel like it must imply there's *something* notable out there. It is interesting that the AoL broadsheet mentions "a strange seafaring people." I would have assumed it's the Southerners... But maaaaybe there's other people out there???

You're not really disputing that point though, because the encounter from the Alloy of Law Broadsheet was "300+ years later" But anyways... I realized tonight: "Duh. We have the scale on the Elendel Basin map which largely prompted this whole post in the first place." So if you look at the Elendel Basin map, the distance from the center of Elendel to Bilming is almost exactly equal to that 100 mile scale at the top of the page. I'm using those two points because they're relatively distinctive on the new Scadrial map and because if we want to measure a greater distance as a baseline then we start adding more error in to the measurements. So anyways, let's assume that Scadrian miles are the same distance as a standard real-world mile. Which given the whole "Scadrial is like Earth" premise is probably a safe assumption? When I pull up the new Scadrial map, I'm measuring somewhere between 14.3 and 16.8 pixels from the center of Elendel to Bilming. Just sort of depends on which pixel you measure to. This is going to be the greatest source of error in all this. So from here we back up and measure the distance between lines of longitude, which are equally spaced, and for that I get 125 pixels. This tells me that the distance between lines of longitude is between 745 and 874 miles if we extrapolate our Elendel to Bilming scale? We have to be careful here because the scale on a Mercator projection increases the further you get from the equator. That scale factor is pretty small if we're under 30 degrees latitude though, which seems like a pretty safe bet here. All that to say, that's some more error... but probably not much compared to the error we're already working with. Now again, "Scadrial is like Earth". We're basically 100% confident that Scadrial is Earth-sized, which means it has a circumference of 24,901 miles. If 745 to 874 miles is 15 degrees as I had been assuming, that means it has a circumference of 18,000-20,000 miles. So there's two possibilities: (1) the scale on the Elendel map is slightly off or (2) these lines of longitude (and latitude) have some other spacing. I do want to emphasize that (1) is VERY POSSIBLE. There's a scale on the original maps of Alethkar in The Way of Kings. They removed it from the leatherbounds because they realized it was wrong. I actually spoke with Isaac a little bit about it at JordanCon in 2021 and he made some comments about how it's always a bit of a gamble putting scales on these maps. They look nice... but they don't always have these things worked out decades in advance. And if something comes up and they want to make a change... They will. I think it's abundantly clear that the GRID on the Elendel Basin map was made up just to look cool and doesn't really fit into this new "world map" in a logical way. So blindly assuming the scale must be correct is a mistake. But with that as our only thing to work with, and because this is fun, let's assume it's correct. For the measurements we have, it suggests the longitude lines are spaced at 10.7-12.6 degrees... out of 360. Now, they could be spaced as 12 degrees. It wouldn't be the most unreasonable number to go with... But it IS odd. And we've been wondering about the possibility of Scadrians using a different number of degrees in a circle... Well, if we back up just a tad, what I'm getting is that there must be 28 and 34 lines of longitude (at 745 to 874 miles spacing). Hmmm... Suspicious that 32 is within that range... Guess what? If Scadrians use 256 Scadrian degrees (let's call them Sdeg) in a circle (that's 16 squared) that gives you 32 spaces at 8 Sdeg each. That's RIGHT within our margin of error. To be clear that's 8 Sdeg out of 256 Sdeg. So 8 Sdeg is equal to 11.25 degrees (out of 360 deg). What that means is the whole map needs to be scaled down even more than what I had before... It actually puts the Northern and Southern continents COMBINED as roughly the size of Africa. And frankly that's enough to make me skeptical about this. Anyways, here's what I come up with adjusting to that scale. I'm... not 100% I can just scale it like this... Someone more familiar with map projections might want to weigh in. (I was assuming the lines at 15 deg and had the grids matched up. If they're supposed to be 11.25 deg now, that means I had to scale the Scadrial map down by 11.25/15--or in this case scale the underlay of Earth up by 15/11.25) Just to be clear, if you suppose the lines are at 16 Sdegree spacing out of 256 Sdeg, the following is what you get. It seems like the Final Empire region is probably too large at that size to me? And that means the Elendel Basin map scale is off by a factor of 2. If I had to put money down, I'd still suppose that the lines are at 15 degrees and the Elendel Basin scale is slightly off. The size of the land just... feels more right to me in that one and I'm not sure I have enough faith in the Elendel Basin scale with the "fake" grid on it. But hey, maybe they're using 256 degree circles and I'm onto something. @Otto Didact When you've got some free time maybe looking at this map would be fun.

Yeah, I don't think there's anything weird about the Southerner climate. I don't think there's any implication that their own climate is significantly more suitable than the north. Kelsier found them "freezing to death" and needing medallions in their own homeland. I actually see no reason to suppose that they are different from an actual Mercator projection at this point. I was supposing other ideas to try to make sense of the grid on the Basin map, but I don't see any rhyme or reason behind that grid now. I'm left imagining that it's some alternate grid system. I'm going to assume they're using 360 degrees and the map has 15 degree spaces until evidence to the contrary shows up. Certainly it could be a situation where they're using 256 degrees per circle, so 16 spaces of 16 degrees? Actually, that particular idea I'm skeptical about. Because that puts the southern tip of the southern continent almost at the geographic south pole, and I doubt that's the case. I mean, maybe they use... 16x24=384 degree circles??? Maybe. Here's the map on top of a Mercator projection by the way, assuming the lines are at 15 degrees:

Seeing as people want to talk about this and the topic is pointless to proceed without the new map in TLM, I'm going to move this topic to the TLM spoiler board.

TLM

I've been sitting on an idea for a few months now, and I figure it's finally time to throw it to the whitespines... It began even further back, with the Stormlight 5 prologue reading, which left us with one shocking discovery: "The Stormfather could lie?" Many people of course have been interpreting the Stormlight 5 prologue as teasing that "the Stormfather" is not really himself. Some have proposed that the being we see is actually someone else entirely, such as Ishar, somehow pretending to be the Stormfather. Others have supposed that he is being manipulated to some extent. But I'm one of those thinking that we are seeing the real deal. Stormfather in the prologue is the true Stormfather. If the Stormfather that we "know and love" is different, I would submit that it's because his bond with Dalinar has changed him, because the Words of Radiance Stormfather seems entirely compatible with the SA5 Prologue Stormfather to me. Then in August of this year, on an episode of Intentionally Blank, Brandon did some teasing his plans for the ending of Stormlight 5. Obviously he didn't want to spoil things by getting into specifics, but he said one thing in particular that really wormed it's way into my brain: "When you read it, I think it will recontextualize a ton of important other moments in the series." My brain went into crazy mode trying to think... what would be the craziest thing that could be recontextualized? I came up with a few wild ideas, but with the Stormlight 5 prologue still bouncing around in my head there was one in particular that really latched on. If the Stormfather could lie... What if Honor has been lying? About what? Who knows... But wouldn't it be crazy? Maybe it's not even an explicit lie he's told, but simply a withholding of key information. The potential implications are wild. We take his word for granted on so many things. What if, for example, Honor was interested in the "greater war of the cosmere" as well? What if Honor and Odium made a deal to work together to build an army for some purpose and then they had a falling out? Could that have been the underlying cause of the Recreance--people realizing what their god had secretly been planning? Okay, I'll reign it back in. I just want to give an example of how wild things can quickly get if we consider that Honor didn't give us the whole truth... I do want to get ahead of the objection that "Surely Honor can't lie?" After all, bad things can happen to Shards who break their promises. But those two aren't the same thing. Can a Shard lie? You bet. Brandon actually just addressed this in the latest spoiler stream! Can Honor promise to tell the truth and then not? No, that would be against his very nature. But if he made no such binding promise... why not? Certain spren may find this difficult to swallow, but then Tanavast is the mind behind Honor and he was no spren. Brandon has always been careful to leave open the idea that "honor" is not an inherently GOOD THING. Odium says as much as well: Now, this is Odium speaking and he has is own agenda here. We need to take this with a grain of salt, yes. But I think it would be foolish to completely dismiss his claims outright. Anyways, I think you get the idea here. If Honor has lied in some way, things could get pretty interesting. Personally, I really like this whole terrifying idea. I particularly like the crazy ideas about how we have been misled by Honor regarding things like the Recreance, the Oathpact, and the Desolations. I'm not going to go too far down into the weeds exploring one of these ideas here. I guess part of me is hoping some of you will be interested enough to do so, because when you start breaking down assumptions around Honor and, well, recontextualizing everything we know about the past... there's a lot of moving pieces! But there's one other cool idea to dig into first... Consider THIS particular thing that Honor told us: I'm not going to try to argue that Tanavast was lying here. We've seen plenty of claims that Honor died from others, and we've seen plenty of evidence that it's true. Both from the books and from Brandon himself. And yet... Death in the cosmere is not necessarily final. And, uh, both Brandon and the books have been screaming at us that Tanavast's death was not final. To be clear: Tanavast died... and he became a Cognitive Shadow that attached itself to Stormfather. Every Cognitive Shadow that we have known retains some sense of its identity, right? The singers who became Fused didn't completely lose their identity. The Heralds certainly didn't. The Returned lose some memories, but their identity is still in there. We've got the Lord of Scars of course... Even the Shades on Threnody seem to retain a piece of their mortal selves. So why should this case be any different? Well, okay, there is a reason for it to be different... The Stormfather was a powerful spren long before Honor died, with... SOME level of sentience? Perhaps it should be no surprise that if a Cognitive Shadow binds itself to a sentient piece of Investiture then things might not go quite the same as what we've seen elsewhere. But... how can his identity be gone completely? I don't think that's the case. Yet we continue on like Tanavast has gone to the Beyond. I think the issue here is that... we've never really seen something in Stormfather that we can identify as distinctly Tanavast. (despite the fact that we have no reliable point of comparison and there's evidence that Stormfather wasn't entirely sapient prior to Honor's death) And of course Stormfather has repeatedly denied that he is not the Almighty (because he's mostly not... in a sense). And of course we can trust Stormfather, right? Right? So here's what I propose. The soul of the mortal who held Honor was not killed by Odium and did not go to the Beyond. When Honor was Splintered he attached himself to a Stormfather who was quite different than the one we know. Less sapient. More a force of nature. And his mind is still in there. He's still scheming. He's still got plans. And he will lie to achieve them. We need only look at his interactions with Gavilar in the Stormlight 5 prologue to see this. As for what happens next, I can only guess. To be clear, I do imagine that Stormfather's own nature greatly colors what we see. We haven't been dealing with "just Tanavast" all along. We've been dealing with a mesh of the two. I only want to argue that Tanavast is much more part of Stormfather than we generally imagine. And he's been lying about some things, and holding some things back. I also think that his bond to Dalinar has changed him--that it is changing him. So it will be interesting to see where that leads.

If you haven't visited Arcanum today and seen it for yourself, we've made some updates which we think will be really helpful for everyone! Let's talk about what those changes are. Readings Page While most of the content of Arcanum is focused on Words of Brandon - which typically take the form of a brief Q&A - readings are also extremely popular. When Brandon does a reading of an upcoming book or an old one that was never published, we make sure to capture it on Arcanum and get it transcribed. Unfortunately, it has always been a bit tricky to discover this content unless you know which event it happened at. They also have a tendency to drown out and interfere with regular entries in search, due to their size, and for this reason we began excluding them from search results. This had the unfortunate consequence of making them even more difficult to find. We're happy to say that this should no longer be a problem! You can find the new Readings page under the new Discover menu (discussed further below), and from there you can access all of these readings! There are four sections on the page: Readings from Upcoming Stories - The latest readings Brandon has done from books with an upcoming publication date. Readings from Trunked or Potential Stories - The latest readings Brandon has done that are either from trunked books (those he has no intention of publishing) or other potential stories (those which might be published one day, but don't have a specific timeline on their release). Other Available Unpublished Content - These are external links to books or excerpts that Brandon has posted online or made available elsewhere. This content isn't on Arcanum, but we want to make it easy to find alongside the other readings. Readings from Published Stories - These are pre-publication readings that Brandon did for books which have since been published. We've got a record of those here in case anybody is curious about prior drafts. We're willing to bet there's something on this page you haven't seen before, so check it out and let your friends know! Help Pages As you'll see below, we have created SEVERAL new help pages which we hope will be a lot easier to find and navigate than digging through old forum posts! Most of these are under the new Help menu, and they focus on common questions we see from regular users of the site. "Welcome!" has some basic information about the site and an FAQ section, which is a great place to start if you have any questions. The other help pages here will go into details about how to use the site to find and view content. For example, there's a lot of neat tricks you can do in the search bar to narrow results. While this information can be found in a forum topic, the new Search Help page should make everyone's lives easier! Note there's also a few help pages under the new Contribute menu. These are specifically focused on helping people post new content to the site. Whether you're trying to share new audio, help transcribe audio, or add a Word of Brandon that you found, this documentation should be a big help. If you see others wanting to help out, make sure to point them at these pages! If you feel like our help pages are lacking somewhere, be sure to let us know! Updated Menu The main menu on the site has been overhauled so that we can make information and links more accessible. We previously had just a few direct links. Now you will find topical dropdowns with submenus that contain several useful links each. Here's what they include, with new things in green: Discover - The Discover menu is where you can find links that help you dig into the content on Arcanum. Events - This is the same old Events page, where all events are listed (in chronological order by default) Recent - And this is the same old Recent page, where you can find newly created entries (chronological by creation date by default) Tags - Tags is another familiar page, where you can access the tags used to categorize entries. Readings - This is a brand new page where you can access readings and excerpts from books, both published and unpublished. More on this later. Contribute - The Contribute menu is a new hub for people who want to help add and maintain content on Arcanum. To Do List - The To Do List is a list of audio snippets that need to be transcribed. So if you have time to help us transcribe audio, this is the place to look. Note that you need to be signed in to your Arcanum account to access this page. Style Guide - This is a new help page which covers everything you need to know about the conventions we use for the content included on Arcanum. We encourage everyone who contributes to be familiar with this page. Creating Entries - This is a new help page that walks through all the steps of creating a new entry. If you want to add a new Word of Brandon, this page will help you through the process. Recordings - This is a new help page about recording events and uploading audio. Links - The Links menu simply contains links to several important related websites. Discord - This invite to our 17th Shard Discord server will take you directly to to the #arcanum channel. Forum - This link to the 17th Shard Forums will take you directly to the Arcanum Discussion forum. Wiki - This link will bring you to the Coppermind wiki. GitHub - For those who want to help with coding, this link will take you to the Palanaeum project on GitHub, which is the software we've created that Arcanum runs on. Help - The Help menu contains several new help pages that should cover all kinds of questions people have about using the website. Welcome! - A simple welcome page with some basic information about using the site. Navigation Help - Details about navigating the website. Search Help - Everything you wanted to know about using search on Arcanum. Collections Help - Information about how to make and use the Collections feature. Coding - Curious about contributing to the software we use? See this page for more info on how you can help. Arcanum Bots - Details about using bots to access Arcanum. Staff Info - Contact information and a history of the website. With the new menu, we hope that accessing and using the site is easier than ever!

@kaladin x happiness FYI, this is about big spoilers well outside the scope of Mistborn alone, so I'm moving this to the Cosmere Discussion forum.