Slaybalj

I want to be clear: as spam goes, this one feels relatively minor. A spammer was able to send me a single email when they began to follow me. They could not get my email directly or pursue additional communication (as near as I can tell). I suspect the primary use was for that initial 'you've been followed' email, and that almost the entire problem is due to the fact that those emails are turned on by default and cannot be turned off until you receive your first subscriber, which you have no control over. Now that I've been followed, I have sent those messages to spam and no longer see them. When I reported it to backerkit, they removed the user within 4 hours or so. During those 4 hours though, my account involuntarily hosted a link to an adult website and would have been available to anyone who viewed my followers page. The next successful spambot to follow me will do the same. And the one after. And the one after. If this sort of spam takes off, my followers page will simply be a litany of the same stuff that clutters a bad spam folder unless I constantly peruse it and contact Backerkit and ask them to remove the bad actors. Since I don't use this feature in backerkit, this is someone else's problem. i have not investigated how well following someone on backerkit could be used to stalk someone. This could be a serious issue for some people. Overall, it's given me a very negative view of backerkit, but I also know I am having an extremely high reaction to the level of inconvenience this has actually caused me.

I've had this discussion several places, I am posting it here. Specifically, there are two threads in the Backerkit discussion for Sanderson's current campaign. Spammers have discovered that the default settings in Backerkit will send email notifications to users when they get followed. They create bot accounts in Backerkit and follow thousands of accounts, causing those users to receive an email with a suggestive title and a suspicious website. Then, the 'followers' page for that user on Backerkit involuntarily hosts a link to that same website. There is no way to turn off these emails until you get your first follower, after which you can unsubscribe from the email or send the notifications to spam. There is no way to prevent people from following you or boot followers from your profile. The only solution is to email support at backerkit and report the user. If you're pledging secret novel 5 and this concerns you, reach out to Backerkit and let them know. If you're seriously bothered, consider depledging before the campaign completes as you won't be able to delete your account while you have a pledge project unshipped.

Liss says she sold him to a slaver a few weeks before the assassination.

But..... According to risyn, there arent spren in Shinovar...... For that matter, since the highstorm peters out at the border, could the Stormfather have given visions to Szeth?

It might be worth noting that when Ivory tests Jasnah the night of Galivar's assassination there are other spren on hand observing as well.

Ok...from the coppermind wiki... “111​825​101​112​712​491​512​101​011​141​021​511​711​210​111​217​134​483​111​071​514​254​143​410​916​149​149​341​212​254​101​012​512​710​151​910​111​234​125​511​525​121​575​511​123​410​111​291​512​106​153​4” —Pattern 15[3] This is a code that translates to "Hold the secret that broke the Knights Radiant. You may need it to destroy the new orders when they return."[4] The key is found in Pattern 1 of the Book of the 2nd Rotation, each letter is represented by the number corresponding to the first instance of that letter in Pattern 1, i.e. "h" is 11, "o" is 1, and "l" is 8.[5] The secret is valuable in some way because it can be used to destoy the new radiants. So sure.. He may not need to recreate it... But the secret itself _is_ a weapon.

Forgive me if this was mentioned earlier, but if i recall correctly, the encrypted section of the diagram ( chapter 84, WoR) was translated by somebody and reads something like "hold the secret that destroyed the knights radiant. You may need it to destoy the new radiants". This implies that whatever caused the recreance can be made to reoccur or that the current crop can potentially be manipulated into making the same decision...presumably knowledge of what actually occurred would help them avoid a similar event. safari is currently refusing to cooperate so i am unable to track down the link.

I have been operating on the assumption that the heralds ( at least one of them, anyways) were responsible for giving the oathstone to the parshendi ( or at least, giving them The means to direct szeth). I dont really have a stong justification for this, it was just the conclusion i leapt to for why so many are present the night of the assassination and for the conversation jasnah overhears and when she asks the one "is everything alright?" And He replies "no."... Implying he knows szeth is just starting to rampage. ( i dont have the books with me to reread the relevant section for exact wording)

Is there? I always assumed it was lined paper. I guess that would work without lifting the pen, though it still seems sloppy to me.

An odd one i suppose.. But the alethi phonetic alphabet really bothers me. I get that its supposed to resemble waveforms and that symmetry is very important to the alethi, but it looks like an utter pain to write. you could encode the same amount of information by just writing the top half of each letter, which would take half as much room, you could write it without lifting your pen, and since many of the letters are similar writing the symmetrical letters could be ambiguous if your'e a little sloppy about the symmetry. Why hasnt anyone just shorthanded it?

@dream eternal accidental down vote. Someone give me a hand? ...and then a double post... Stupid fat fingers....::sigh::

@dream eternal accidental down vote. Someone give me a hand?

while not particularly satisfying, the following passage gives me chills ( and is also relevant to the current discussion of shallan) "Here's the thing, the lies we tell, the dreams we create, they're not real. We can't let them be real. This might be the hardest lesson you have to learn." She turned to Shallan, her expression having gone hard, all sense of relaxed playfulness gone. "When a good con woman dies, it's usually because she starts believing her own lies. She finds something good and wants it to continue. She keeps it going, thinking she can juggle it. One day more, she tells herself. One day more, and then..." Tyn dropped the cup. It hit the ground, the wine splashing bloodred across the tent floor and Tyn's rug. Shallan isn't a con woman the way Tyn thinks she is, but she is still a con woman, and the lies Shallan tells ARE ones she believes can be real.... She's let Dalinar know she's a radiant, but she's letting him believe her radiant-mission (so to speak) is to complete that which Jasnah started. She hasn't told him she's infiltrating secret societies and he may not have even realized her illusions are perfect for spywork. She's going to try to get deeper into the Ghostbloods without actually giving them useful information ( without even knowing what their goals are). She is trying to keep Adolin while avoiding letting him know about her personal family history (which is going to be even more difficult when her brothers show up with their myriad of problems). She'll be trying to keep her brothers from imploding as always ( and I bet at least one of them will be manipulated by the ghostbloods). And probably she's going to be trying to continue Jasnah's work at least until Jasnah herself shows up. She's juggling a lot of balls right now and when they start to fall, noone is going to trust her.

See, i dont see shallan picking sebarial random at all... Sure, she picked him because he was the only highprince not entering the political fray, but she recognizes that his outrageous rudeness is how he keeps himself out of it. it appears that even jasnah never bothered to look past it. She also recognizes that his comments are meant to discomfit the others and put them off balance..... By inviting herself into his entourage she is providing an opportunity to muck with all the other highprinces, by quoting an exorbitiant salary she is indicating to him that she is, in fact, a very valuable commodity, by claiming a family relation she is probably playing on alethi social conventions and since probably everyone knows its a lie, she is also indicating to everyone in the room that she cannot be lured away to another camp, and lets not forget..... In the carriage ride back, sebarial comments that she appeared much younger during the meeting... She was almost certainly using lightweaving to make herself look like someone who desperately needed protection from all the whitespines in the room. And in the carriage ride back, sebarial does mention wanting to renegotiate her salary... Perhaps he didnt want to seem like a cheapskate during the meeting? She knows she is taking a big risk, but all her other options are worse and,in my opinion, shallan is enormously good at reading people.... Which makes sense because the safety of everyone back at the davar manor was almost directly related to how well she could judge her dad's moods and probable reactions.

First, I want to say I really enjoy reading your posts Maxal... they're generally well thought out and presented and interesting to read. This topic has given me a lot of time to think about _why_ Kvothe and The Kingkiller Chronicle just didn't work for me when some of the traits I claim to really dislike in Kvothe are onces that I enjoy or can forgive in other characters. ( For instance, Jasnah is also a brilliant, workaholic, perfectionist who is proud and would never minimize her own accomplishments. Will Hunting is another example of a brilliant, cocky kid who has a 'me against the world' attitude. ) I guess part of the feeling I get from Kingkiller is that one of the things that he is so proud about himself is how clever he is... I get the feeling he's not really proud of the fact that he wins so often, it's that he's proud of how he wins by bending the rules, outright breaking them, or tricking people and then claims that since it was the only way he could have won it's OK to do so. To me, he is the opposite of a Radiant... he puts the destination before the journey. I don't admire this. I think he's supposed to come off charming enough for the reader to at least sympathize with him.. but it didn't work for me. This whole attitude really gets under my skin.. I feel like if I were trapped in an elevator with him for any length of time I would just lose my temper and start screaming at him... and even worse, his response wouldn't be "Gosh, I really got her mad... I wonder why" it would be "Wow. She's a hateful #(&% who clearly can't understand me" Honestly, I think maybe the other characters in the book are flat because in his mind he ( and Denna ) are the only real people in the world. The only thing that matters about anyone else is how they respond to him. Innkeeper-Kvothe is little more approachable to me because he finally seems to have realized that his need to 'win' has consequences for everyone around him... but seriously, he basically has to destroy the lives of everyone else on the continent for him to realize that. :sigh: and now, I think I need to be done with this topic. It's been truly fascinating to try to reason out what's going on in my head, but it's also keeping me from doing things I need to do and since it's also requires dwelling on a person who irritates me, it's negatively affecting my mood as well.

I suspect we are missing that part because some of the lies that drew pattern to her are going to be significant to the plot... by the end of WoR she is ready to face the truth about her mothers death... But i dont think shes anywhere close to accepting that the rosy picture of her family she paints for herself before her mother died is not accurate. in kaladins backstory, we slowly become more understanding of the events that make kaladin who he is and our mental picture of him becomes aligned with his mental picture of him...... To get the full backstory on shallan right now would actually make us less aligned with where she currently is because it means we know more about her than she does. I think the next books will give us a more information as shallan digs into the secret societies in Roshar and discovers how Helaran and her mom were involved. Since her brothers are supposed to be coming, we and shallan should get ample opportunity to compare her memory of early life at the davar household to that of her brothers recollection.

Wow, i think that might have just summarized why i hated the books. I know enough people like this in real life ( minus the actual genius part) that i dont want to spend time with kvothe in my private reading time.... And since he is the narrator youre stuck with just his pov for the entire blasted series.

I remember reading a line a while back that was something like: "hope is the belief that no matter how many times you fall, you can get back up again, so long as you keep trying; that nobody is so far gone that they cannot return home". For me, what shallan is doing is reminding people of this... She showed them their potential.... They still had to choose to live up to it. I am rather fond of her, personally.....

Actually, i sort of see shallan as the most likely to lose her spren.... She almost did it once and when pattern confronts her at the end of wor, she says "i hate you. i dont want revenge. I want my family". After everyone has saved the world, I could see her married, with kids, and basically saying "i'm done. I am going to raise my family, study natural history, and spend the remainder of my life not thinking about all the bad things that happened to me." In my mind, I dont think radiants get to retire....they go until they die or break their oaths..

I found the plot of the first just interesting enough to convince me to give the second book a shot, but the things that irritated me overwhelmed my curiosity. Plus, i went in knowing rothfuss was a slow writer, and after getting burned on GRRM ( started reading game of thrones about 19 years ago) the book would have had to have been phenominal to get me invested... Rothfuss seems like a decent guy though.... Just not a writer for me.

I know i am in the minority, but i disliked kingkiller chronicle. kvothe mostly irritated me, every time the love interest showed up i thought ' really? Here too?' And the Adem just dropped me out of my suspension of disbelief so much it ruined the rest of the book as well... I am not sure if i have met anyone else who shared my opinion of the books though... So it might be just me.

Well, in kaladins case, he probably ended up in the shattered plains because his history as troublemaker and instigator meant no more reputable slaver would have anything to do with him and because Tvlakv knows sadeas will buy ANY slave.

Shallan confronting Jasnah at the end of way of kings. ( chapter 70)

I meant the fact that psychohistory fell apart when a mutant with the ability to manipulate people appeared because it didn't account for something that wildly outside the norm. it's been over a decade since I read the books, so I could be misremembering much of it......

Hmmm... Unfortunately for taravangion, there are probably a lot of 'Mules' running around roshar. And thats about as far as i got in the foundation series, so i have no idea how much the diagram is supposed to parallel psychohistory after that.