askthepaperclip

LOL pretty awesome! My only complaint is that you have silly Billy twice, instead of silly Billy and Billy silly, so it doesn't QUITE work...so close though! If you just change the 2nd line to "Billy, silly, that's no art" it works :-D Well done!

Beautiful phrasing, and evocative imagery! Does the breakdown of the five segments need to be equal forward and backward though? I always assumed so, which makes things much harder. If this is legit though, bravo!

Am I the only one that thinks we are overthinking this whole f.nicrosil paradox? In BoM, we are shown repeatedly that the medallions don't work unless you know what they are. In other words, you need Intent, which we know is a very important part of magic in the Cosmere. It's a little bit circular, but if you have a medallion that is invested with the investiture needed for anyone to use f.nicrosil, it makes sense to me that you just need the Intent to use it. We also have WoB that using a nicrosil medalmind works more like a coppermind (take it out, use it, put it back), than like a pewtermind, so some of the questions of how to make and refill an excisor can be easily resolved So to make an excisor, the Sovereign would simply need to use f.aluminum to store his identity, then f.nicrosil to store all of his investiture granting him allomancy and feruchemy except for for f.aluminum and f.nicrosil in a separate nicrosil metalmind, then put a little bit of his remaining investiture in the excisor. Then take back all the rest of his power from the first nicrosil metalmind and his identity from the aluminum metalmind. (this may not be necessary if you can store specific parts of your investiture for certain powers, which I assume you can if it works like a Coppermind. I will assume you can below). Next, you hand an empty brass/nicrosil metalmind and the excisor to a nicrosil ferring. They put on the excisor, dump their identity into an aluminum metalmind, put a little bit of their f.nicrosil investiture into the brass/nicrosil metalmind, then take back their identity. Now you hand the brass/nicrosil metalmind to a brass ferring. They dump their identity into aluminum, then put a little bit of their f.brass investiture into the brass/nicrosil metalmind, then they take back their identity. Now you have an unsealed brass medallion. The only issue I see here, is what happens when you take off the unsealed metalmind? Does it automatically take back the f.nicrosil investiture? Could you use Intent to keep the f.nicrosil investiture and effectively re-seal the medallion and make yourself a permanent nicrosil ferring? It would be pretty funny if that is what the Southerners did to the medallions before "gifting" them to Wax...lol The other issue is that you would eventually deplete your nicrosil ferrings. It is possible that the original excisors were super loaded with investiture, so they have just been tapping off of those to make medallions, and will eventually run out. Or nicrosil ferrings are common enough that they have been able to spread it around enough to still work. Alternatively, I'm overthinking this too. Perhaps the mere fact that you have stripped all the identity away means that the investiture stored is basically pure/blank/whatever investiture, like a skeleton key. The fact that it is stored in a metalmind makes it feruchemical investiture, and thus gives all the feruchemical powers of whatever the other metals in the metalmind are. That could explain why there is a limit to how many can stack; just pushing the hack too far.

I wrote this for my wife, who has metastatic breast cancer, and often struggles under the pressure/expectation to put on a brave face: Persisting, struggling from noble courage, / the woman perseveres. / Thrive, / persevering woman! / The courage, noble from struggling, persists. I stayed super slavish to the rules, including placement of things like articles (the, of, a, etc), since all the ones from the books were that way, but I notice a lot of fan Keteks are looser...I feel like I could do a lot more if it didn't have to be EXACTLY symmetrical except for verb tense. Do we have any WoB on how strict they need to be?

I'm really interested in these shardcast discussions, but for various reasons the podcast format doesn't really work for me...are there any plans to make transcripts available?

I did a search on the forums and haven't found anyone asking, who is "the series" that Suit mentions near the end of BoM? Is this maybe the off world red eyes organization, and the set is the on world branch? Or is it simply another rank? I also can't help but notice the math/numerology language: series, set, sequence, array...(suit is the only small outlier, but I just might not know the reference). Does this smell like autonomy? ....maybe?

I HIGHLY recommend buying the hard cover as well (I get nook version too for SA, for practicality sake). This is a GORGEOUS book. Plus, double sided full color dust jacket map?! Whaaa??!

Just got my delivery from Weller, a day early! (#559!) So much for "do not deliver before..." lol Also included, an epic bookmark! (Check out the lower right corner...LOL) (hope that isn't considered a spoiler??)

Does a shard blade only cut with the edge? How does it distinguish? Will a shard hammer not pass through things? I was wondering how she got the pancake on the fork at all...the only thing I can think is that only the tips pass though anything, and the sides of the tines act normally. If that's the case, I guess that answers the question about the flat of a shard blade. Maybe involves intent?

Well, that is a pretty good reason! :-p

Really? The phrasing seems too similar to the WoB about one shard just wanting to hide to be a coincidence. And if khriss says that there SHOULD be a shard there based on evidence, but she thinks there isn't, occams razor says that there is (but he's probably just hiding!) Where is the stretch?

Did anyone catch this from the table of contents post? "Some of these planetary systems are familiar to the reader, some are almost entirely new, and some have apparently been hiding a great deal from their observers…" Based on this and the excerpt, sounds like Drominad is home to the survival shard!

I think Brandon might have been having some fun with the spren poop comment. We know that crem is used as fertilizer, and poop is, well, also used as fertilizer. There might be deeper Cosmere meaning (possibly with correlaries on other planets? Come quickly white sand!), but at the least I think he is saying that crem is literally BS...Lol Seriously though, sounds like it must be coming from Cultivation, given its uses. Do we know if there are crem spren? If there aren't, that could give some interesting clues its nature.

Sweet, we are leaving a pub near the tower in 5!

By a strange twist of fate, I will be in London for this, and managed to convince my wife that it is a valid use of our vacation time :-) I will be wearing a green polo and jeans and will be walking around with a very pale blond lady in a black dress if anyone wants to say hi!

Woah Woah Woah....The Lopen is AUSTRALIAN in the audio books?! That's crazy! He was very firmly Mexican in my mind...I can't even imagine how to say "gancho" with an Australian accent! Weird. (Also, all that other stuff! So much info, but the Lopen thing really threw me.)

OOOO WoB SLAM!!! Well played, well played. I cede! Upvote for you!

@harakeke: I wasn't trying to say the glyphs were not decipherable, nor to imply that you are wasting your time in doing so (if that is what you thought, you seemed a little offended), because you are clearly awesome at this and are making progress. :-) I was merely expressing doubt that the glyphs could be read phonetically, even if you spoke perfect alethi (ie, knew that shash means dangerous). More evidence: Shallan seemed shocked/scandalized that Amaram was stringing glyphs together phonetically. If she was used to reading glyphs phonetically, I don't think this would have been at all surprising to her. Again, that is not to say that some glyphs, such as the fundamental ones, would not be based on some common phonetic symbols, because they likely share a common ancestor and hey, you have to start somewhere, but the phonetic system must break down at some point, else Shallan would not have been so surprised. My completely uneducated guess for how they might work is as follows: let's try to write a glyph for "monkey." You the glyphs for "man" "hairy" and "small" and pile them up. Even if you could read those components phonetically (maybe representing some basic building blocks of glyphs), reading out "manhairysmall" phonetically does not sound like the word for monkey. Rather, the joint concepts of the words give the impression of a monkey. Not a great example, but I hope you can understand my meaning. Alternatively, maybe it is phonetic, but backwards. Maybe kholin kinda sounds like the alethi words for tower and sword put together, so to write the glyph for kholin you draw a picture of a tower and a sword on top of each other. That way you see the pictures, say what you see, and get the sound of the meaning of the glyph. (Remember bend+ knee+ feet= benefit from that old I love Lucy episode?? Lol) The point is, glyphs are supposed to be legible to relatively illiterate people; if random symbols represent sounds and you add those together to make words, I would now consider you literate. I am sure you are correct that there is a logic and structure to the formation of glyphs, and you are obviously on to something with the similarities between thayln script and glyphs. I'm just trying to help by suggesting some non phonetic ways that they could be structured, which will hopefully spark your genius and save you some time and frustration :-)

First, this is an amazing thread, and you should all be commended. 2nd, I think the reason you are having trouble with the glyphs is that I highly doubt they can be read phonetically. I have three reasons for saying this: 1) it is said again and again that glyphs and writing are different. Just making the shapes for each phoneme different sites not make it a different system. Otherwise I think all the women would be sniggering behind their safe hand whenever a man said "it isn't reading, it is glyphs! " 2)I think glyphs are another example of the influence of Brandon's time in Asia. in general, Asian characters cannot be read phonetically, or even logically, with a few exceptions (like the Japanese character for bamboo; put two together, it means tree, put three together it means first). The fact that you are seeing tantalizing correlations is probably related to the fact that they share a common background, but are not one to one translatable. 3) Navani's thath glyph is pretty damning. If it were phonetic, it would be one of the simplest glyphs: only one phoneme, mirrored. Yet is it described as complex. My guess is that the "meaningless" "screw you lines" are actually the decorations that turn writing into pictographs. So even if you could parse out the phonetic thath from amid the lines, you wouldn't necessarily be able to read the glyph. You would have the word, but not the meaning. Kind of like how in Chinese the same sound (say, "ma") can be represented by many different characters with many different meanings. (Even with the same tone). Just like asking a Chinese person what ma means is silly without giving them context, I'll bet asking an alethi what thath means will get you a puzzled look, unless you give them some context or show them the glyph. It is kind of like the difference between Chinese characters and pinyin. (Uh, I realize this example is breaking down as I get into it, but I need to get to work, so maybe focus more on my earlier points...lol)

Thanks for posting these! Very interesting about the Thrill; from the text, I had assumed that the Thrill was a well known and deeply embedded cultural thing for the Alethi. That does not seem likely if it has only been around for 10-15 years or so. In fact, now that I think about it, don't we hear Dalinar talk about almost killing Gavilar when in the grips of the thrill when they were courting Navani? We know that happened long before the Parshendi expedition. Plus, I suspect that the whole "predicting the future is of the Voidbringers" thing is associated with the death rattles in some way. I think both of these phenomena have been around for much longer than you mentioned.

I'm a little sad he moved the "foreign magic" scene out of the epilogue and back a few chapters. I get that he probably wanted a similar feel as the last epilogue, but HOO BOY what a closing line that would have been!

Arrgh, something for work has come up, and it looks like I won't be able to make the trip down :-( I hope everyone has fun!

Update! (Sorry for the double post, but the last one is pretty old, and I don't know if the thread comes up as having new content if I just edit...) Brandon answered my question with the following: "yes (I think)" This is not my particular area of specialty, but I think this has some interesting implications. Maybe Peter can confirm/deny this, if he sees this post?

I agree with Shardlet, you should savor it! Don't feel pressured to rush through to ask better questions for us. There are plenty of signings on the tour for that, plus keep in mind, we have at LEAST a year before the next SA book, so there will be plenty of time for theorizing and pestering Brandon for clues! :-D Just enjoy the ride, especially the first time through.

Regarding people saying "Peter wouldn't let them put this in if they really died": From earlier in the thread: Could this be the glimpse he was referring to? Or will we know that one when we see it...?