Aleph-Naught

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

I'm currently trapped in Spokane, Washington, USA.

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.

Since the prologue's in the books are incredibly similar, I can't help but feel a little underwhelmed.

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..

Completely dropped the ball/missed the boat on this, and it is very frustrating.

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.

Most jails/prisons have telephones.

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).

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"

Legally, if you are manipulated into entering a contract, then the contract is almost certainly not binding. There are numerous defenses to contract formation, especially if you have been manipulated into entering it; a contract doesn't have to specify that coercion isn't allowed, just like how a contract doesn't have to specify that you're not supposed to break the law to perform it--being coerced into signing a contract specifically would fall under the defense of entering into a contract under duress. Your example about parents threatening to disown their children if they don't enter into a contract may not, necessarily, be illegal--it's kind of ambiguous--but it almost certainly wouldn't be a valid contract. Source: I am a lawyer.

I have really disliked the theory of children champions as well--and more generally Taravangian exploiting some kind of loophole. Some good reasons why, that allows us to escape accusations of being superficially critical, revolve around the hypothesis that the Cosmere seems to follow rules of contract law that are analogous to what we have in the English Common Law. ROdium makes an oblique reference in RoW about agreements made by Shards following the spirit of the contract rather than a strict reading of it; this coincides with the legal concept that a contract cannot be valid if there was no "meeting of the minds." Similarly there is the concept that a contract cannot be valid if some intervening event has made performance of the contract impossible or impractical to one of the parties, e.g. by having TOdium springing a surprise child champion on Dalinar. It seems to me that TOdium would be making a grave error by trying to monkey around with the agreement due to some imperfect wording because it should, theoretically, allow Dalinar to void the contract entirely and expose TOdium to an attack (ROdium says that any broken agreement would leave him vulnerable to being killed by a strike from Cultivation). Another well-known concept in contract law is that minors lack the capacity to make a contract; a minor who signs a contract can either honor the deal or void the contract. So I see no way for Oroden or Gavinor to be a part of any agreement, that wouldn't just involve them unceremoniously canceling the contract. There is some nuance to this: a minor can void a contract for lack of capacity only while still under the age of majority, but I don't see such a exception playing any serious part in the Stormlight Archive--it would be ludicrously anti-climactic. An old philosophy professor of mine used to say this: "You elect Utilitarians, you do business with Kantians (Deontologists), and you date Virtue Ethicists."

Squatter's don't take property unjustly though--they "adversely possess" land that was abandoned, disused, underutilized, etc. through a ridiculous and convoluted legal process. The "right of conquest", and underlying notions of "sovereignty" or "discovery" that comes with it, is also fraught with difficulties for reasons that have required entire dissertations; see, for example, John Thomas Juricek, English Claims in North America to 1660: A Study in Legal and Constitutional History, Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1970.

Thank you everyone, for that WoB! It's ridiculous, but I feel a palpable sense of relief knowing that the number of dawnshards is, definitively, four.

The direction of my thoughts, as laid out in the post below, are that Cultivation's influence on Taravangian--even as he holds the shard of Odium--endures and probably insulates her from any attack on her that he may be plotting:

Do you mean to say that we know Hoid was at the Shattering and it's possible that Frost was as well? This is something that gets said over and over again, but as far as I know Mr. Sanderson has deliberately avoided confirming the number of dawnshards. See, for example the following exchange: We know that the Sleepless think there are four dawnshards, and there is a very neat symmetry to the number of them being four--particularly with the way the mural is depicted--and the sixteen shards, but relying on that kind of elegance feels like a trap. So until I see a WoB definitively confirming the number of dawnshards as four, my sanity would really appreciate it if everyone would stop treating that number as definitive.

My dad's side of the family is LDS, my mom's side is Catholic, my wife is Lutheran, but I've always identified with the following quote: I joke that, "I'm an atheist, but I'm not an asshole about it."

My unsubstantiated hunch is that Cultivation regrets the Shattering and is working to remedy it in some way--Rayse as the vessel of Odium would have always been an impediment to that goal; revenge just strikes me as too narrow when it comes to someone of her vision.

This was on my mind again after seeing a couple of WoBs and re-reading Oathbringer to my wife. The WoBs went like this: In Oathbringer, when Dalinar goes to meet with the Nightwatcher but Cultivation takes over she makes a curious statement: (emphasis added) I think this provides a small but not insignificant piece of evidence that, even after his ascension, Taravangian is still vulnerable to Cultivation's boon/curse in some way--she has a piece of him, and that makes him vulnerable to her. So it could be that Taravangian will genuinely work with Cultivation--either willingly, or because she will make it clear to him that she has some power over him, even though they are both shards now--or he may try to destroy her and find himself unable to because of his prior deal with her.