Nitpicking

I suddenly remembered that I know Moshe Feder, Brandon's editor, slightly. He is getting it fixed.

Any beta readers, or others who have access to someone on Brandon's team? The "Pre-order the book" page (https://read.macmillan.com/torforge/the-stormlight-archive/ ) has a "Pre-Order Now" dropdown and a "Buy the Stormlight Archive" dropdown. The Pre-order dropdown has a link to Indigo, which is selling, quote, "Tor Fall 2024 Title to Be Announced". None, zero, of the preorder links let me buy a DRM-free epub. That's what I actually want, so .... The Buy dropdown is worse. There are two Barnes & Noble links. One goes to Apple Books, and one goes to nowhere, because the URL in the hyperlink runs two bookstores together. The Apple link leads to Books-a-Million. The Books-a-Million link leads to BAM as well. The Target link leads to Indigo. It's a real mess. I realize that this is a Macmillan site, not Dragonsteel, but a call from, say, JABberwocky (Brandon's agents) would definitely wake them up. Note that I did try the Contact page at https://brandonsanderson.com, but Cloudflare times out without showing it. Thanks.

Eric has no ego! His favorite secret project isn't the one that namechecks him. Sig has found a way to hack the Torment, which Hoid in all his millennia seemingly never has. Will he share the trick? So both Tress and Sunlit Man have a climax in a spaceship? My favorite moment: Sigzil recreating years of the Scadrian scientists' work in minutes while they keep asking if he read their notes. Around 1:25:50, David's talking about the Shades forming a giant mass ... if you put enough Investiture in one place, it develops sapience, says Brandon. Would the Chorus (made of mostly-mindless shades) develop a collective intelligence just by virtue of having so much Investiture gathered together? The planetary core is apparently super-dense because of so much Investiture. So wouldn't it become sentient or even sapient? For that matter, why aren't Taldain's and Canticle's stars sentient? Or are they? Eric (1:43:29), you don't think Brandon is heavily foreshadowing Cultivation dying? Or at least Koravellium Avast? She has really good futuresight and she's putting a lot of work into making an heir .... Least favorite point: the Cinder King is the weakest villain I've seen from Brandon. He's so two-dimensional you should be able to see through him. Compare, "I'm insecure so I need all the power" boy to the Lord Ruler, or Bluefingers, or Torol Sadeas. The 'casters don't think that was important, of course.

Yes. In fact, it originated before the Shattering, when Virtuosity was a component of the living Adonalsium.

So ... does it seem to anyone else that the Shades of Threnody, the Nightmares of Torio, and the creatures of the Midnight Essence are connected? Nightmares and Shades are both the Cognitive Shadows of people who died on that world, and remain to prey on the living. They both have visual similarities to the Midnight Essence, which strangely can be created by the Unmade Re-Shephir and (in Tress and the non-canon Aether of Night draft) by a black Aether.

Actually, Lightweaving would seem to be a Virtuosity thing that other Shards copied, now that you mention it. I wonder which Shard first started sending souls back to the Physical (like Endowment sends the Returned) and having other Shards (e. g. Honor, maybe Autonomy) copy that.

Wouldn't mind seeing it, but it certainly shouldn't be part of SP4.

Yeah, manifesting a Shardpaintbrush while in the Cognitive Realm isn't using Investiture at all. /s Painter spends the entire book being terribly, terribly underestimated. Including by himself. (That's one of the main themes of the book.) This is the planet of Virtuosity! That is, the Shard of artistic excellence. Being a great painter there would inevitably mean being highly invested. (This, after all, is why Yumi is so highly invested--she's the greatest rock-stacker ever.)

Notice that Painter-as-temporary-Cognitive-Shadow made a shardpaintbrush without even bonding a spren. Unfortunately, only Hoid in the entire Cosmere knows that this happened.

That's one of my major complaints about this (and other recent Brandon): slow start. This (and RoW) could have stood another draft, removing 20-30% of the current word count, mostly from the beginning (but also at least two of the incredibly hard-to-read "Yumi is miserable and a fish out of water in Painter's world" scenes. We didn't need or want entire chapters of Hoid explaining things that could have been better included in the actual story (or just left out).

I propose that this book could be called Jessie and the Math Teacher. I am in no way trying to intrude, but Jessie and Eric were pretty open about how they met virtually while living in different worlds (North America and Australia), and communicated a lot over electronic media (Connection) while being physically unable to be together due to the Shroud (global pandemic), but have had a happy (courtship storyline) ending. I have to think that, consciously or unconsciously, Brandon was inspired by their long-distance relationship when writing Yumi. IIRC he did attend their wedding celebration. (I'm really not prying, Eric talked about it on the podcast.) I am in no way saying that Jessie is anything like Yumi, or Eric like Painter, but the situation has similarities, yes?

Please do not apologize for someone else's actions, sir! I didn't even want an apology from Reinhart, just a reason. I was sincerely confused and unsure what to do, so I figured I'd ask. I've done much more Wikipedia editing than Coppermind, and I didn't want to presume that the culture here is the same (and of course, it isn't). I'll un-revert after work today, then. Thank you (and your fellow Keepers) for taking the time.

I figured out (I think) what happened after posting. I thought the article was about Bondsmiths. It isn't. It's about "The Order of the Bondsmiths". There is no article about people who are Bondsmiths, that is, have the Surgebinding abilities associated with Bondsmiths. I actually don't disagree with reverting my change, now that I figured that out. I do wish @Reinhartmax had just said that as a reason for the reversion, so I wasn't confused. I am also still curious about why the talk page was deleted. Would it have been a problem to recreate it?

So ... I added Ishar to the list of canonical [[Bondsmiths]]. My edit was reverted with no explanation. Rather than edit war, I figured I'd ask why on the talk page ... which is deleted. And the page says, "The deletion and move log for this page are provided here for convenience:" Then there's nothing after the colon. Can anyone perhaps tell me why my edit was reverted by @Reinhartmax? And why the talk page was deleted? And why the deletion log is invisible to the wiki's own code? Thanks.

Hey, is the Overlady going to read Tress? Because I'm very interested in her reaction. Big fan.