[Spoilers ALL] Compendium of Weird

[emailanimal he/him]

So, I noticed Brandon calling Nazh's knife and Silverlight weird in Chicago signing and it got me thinking, what else in Cosmere has he ever called weird.

I went back through Theoryland WoBs to about 2013 (at which point most WoBs switched to being about Perrin and Mat), and looked for things he called weird. For a more complete list, I should have probably looked for "bizarre", "odd",  and "strange" as well, and I intend to in Version 2.0.  In the meantime, below is the Compendium of Weird. I list an item/object/notion/person/event from Cosmere, and a phrase of phrases with date attribution confirming the weirdness.

Why do this?  It helps uncover patterns in Brandon's thinking. If he called something weird in the past and we know now why it was weird, we can determine why the new things he calls weird may be weird.

The compendium is under the spoiler tag largely to separate it from this introduction.

 

Spoiler

The Cosmere Compendium of Weird. Version 1.0

Cosmere Events, Things, Notions and Features that are weird to Brandon Sanderson

• Nazh’s knife

  • “The knife is weird” (Chicago 2016-12-06)

• Silverlight

  • Silverlight has...weird (Chicago 2016-12-06)

  • Silverlight is really weird. (Chicago 2016-12-06)

• Shadesmar

  • Shadesmar is cool and weird (Chicago 2016-12-06)

  • and there’s some weird, twisted geography going on there  (Chicago 2016-12-06)

  • The cognitive realm is this weird thing… (Denver, 2016-02-19)

 

• Hemalurgy

  • it is weird that way. (Utah Humanities Book Festival, 2016-10-08l)

• Elokhar’s queen

  • “...seems weird.” You are, um, thinking along proper lines. (Jordancon, 2016-04-26)

• Hemalurgically spiking a Shard

  • Not without something really weird happening (OdysseyCon, 2016-04-08)

• Hoid’s spirit web

  • but it would be weirder than a savant (OdysseyCon, 2016-04-08)

• What Wax is changing (weight or mass)

  • o he is actually changing his mass, in a weird… (Austin, 2016-02-25)

  • it’s one of the weirdest things we do (San Jose, 2015-10-9)

• Lift

  • So Lift is a really weird one   (Seattle, 2016-02-17)

  • Some really weird things are going on (Seattle, 2016-02-17)

• Old Magic

  • And then the Old Magic is kind of its own weird thing. (Seattle, 2016-02-17)

 

• Roshar’s atmosphere

  • So Roshar's also high-oxygen, which does some weird things.  (Brookline, 2015-10-14)

• Wayne

  • When I get in his viewpoint, the weirdness takes over and it's great. (Oak Brook, 2015-10-12)

• Allomancer eating a  Forged metal

  • that's going to get really weird (Oak Brook, 2015-10-12)

• Non-Harmony spike

  • what you’re seeing there is a weird intentional hack of the magic system that I built in (San Jose, 2015-10-9)

• Piercings being burned off.

  • I bet that seeing that happen would look downright weird (Kansas City, 2015-05-22)

• Szeth not healing (after battle with Kaladin)

  • More the weird thing is not that Kaladin healed it’s that Szeth couldn’t. (Chicago, 2015-02-20)

• Shai summoning a putative Shardblade via Essense Mark

  • It would create some weird implications (West Jordan, 2016-01-05)

• Cutting off Lord Ruler’s and Hoid’s heads and switching them

  • That's… really weird. (JordanCon, April 16, 2014)

• Lifeless

  • Lifeless are kinda weird, (Salt Lake City, 2014-03-29)

 

• Aluminum interaction with Thugs

  • There is some weird interaction (Collegeville, PA, 2014-03-21)

• Exiting a speed bubble

  • So exiting a speed bubble, while it's going, has weird ramifications on lots of things  (Collegeville, PA, 2014-03-21)

• Aluminum

  • Aluminum has some weird properties on all of the magic systems (Collegeville, PA, 2014-03-21)

• Parshendi developing a form using spikes

  • Wow, that would be a really weird hack of the magic system that would be theoretically possible. (McLean, 2014-03-20)

  • But that's a really weird one. (McLean, 2014-03-20)

• Mraize’s sand

  • Now there's something odd about that sand. (Seattle, 2014-03-8)

 

• Slivers after letting powers go

  • But it also works the soul in weird ways, (San Diego, 2014-03-04)

 

 

The plan is to make a few more compendia following off of Brandon's standard figures of speech when he is responding to questions.

Edit: Argh.... Misspelled Compendium in the title. )-:   This has been fixed.

Edit: Per @Spoolofwhool below, excluded the "piercings being burned" from the list.

Edited December 13, 2016 by emailanimal

[Spoolofwhool]

15 minutes ago, emailanimal said:

Piercings being burned off.

• I bet that seeing that happen would look downright weird (Kansas City, 2015-05-22)

Brandon didn't actually say that would look weird. The weird comment in parentheses, now removed from the WoB, was a comment made by the person who asked the question.

[emailanimal he/him]

22 minutes ago, Spoolofwhool said:

Brandon didn't actually say that would look weird. The weird comment in parentheses, now removed from the WoB, was a comment made by the person who asked the question.

Someone needs to update Theoryland then. (-:

[Spoolofwhool]

1 minute ago, emailanimal said:

Someone needs to update Theoryland then. (-:

It is updated. That's why I'm telling you. It was updated with the last couple days, I think yesterday. 

Quote

KAYMYTH

OK, so in the signing line, I asked the question about chromium vs a Compounder with both invested and uninvested metals in both their stomach and piercings.

BRANDON SANDERSON

1) Yes, the piercings will get burned off.

2) The noninvested metals go before the invested ones. He said that because invested metals are harder to effect, it takes a little extra time and effort to get them to burn off. So a Leecher trying to clean out a Compounder would have to get a good grip and hang on for a few seconds.

3) Chromium burns about as quickly as duralumin, so if you're trying to burn off a lot of metals, it is possible to run out of chromium before your target is clean. This would probably only be an issue when dealing with larger pieces (like jewelry) rather than your standard metal-flakes-in-the-stomach deal.

FOOTNOTE

Sorry I don't have exact quotes, but there was a line and no easy way to take notes. But what it boils down to is this

 

Edited December 13, 2016 by Spoolofwhool

[emailanimal he/him]

5 minutes ago, Spoolofwhool said:

It is updated. That's why I'm telling you. It was updated with the last couple days, I think yesterday. 

You are right. I grabbed it two days ago, so yesterday must've been it.  Removed from the list (or stroken  through to be exact)

Edited December 13, 2016 by emailanimal

[Sam Script he/him]

This is the best compilation that I have EVER seen in the forumXD!! Brandon was basically weirding everything lol

[skaa he/him]

You can change the title of your post.

Nice list. It seems Brandon uses "weird" to mean any of the following:

• It is not intuitive (Shadesmar)
• It is a magic system hack (spiked Parshendi)
• It does not belong to the categories that he has revealed so far (Old Magic)
• It involves mechanics we haven't seen yet (how Skimmers change their mass)
• It may seem ordinary, but it's not (Nazh's knife)
• It is just absolute bonkers (Cutting off Lord Ruler’s and Hoid’s heads and switching them)

Some of those things overlap in some cases. Anyway, I can't wait to see what theories you'll make based from your list.

[VirtuousTraveller he/him]

3 hours ago, skaa said:

You can change the title of your post.

Nice list. It seems Brandon uses "weird" to mean any of the following:

• It is not intuitive (Shadesmar)
• It is a magic system hack (spiked Parshendi)
• It does not belong to the categories that he has revealed so far (Old Magic)
• It involves mechanics we haven't seen yet (how Skimmers change their mass)
• It may seem ordinary, but it's not (Nazh's knife)
• It is just absolute bonkers (Cutting off Lord Ruler’s and Hoid’s heads and switching them)

Some of those things overlap in some cases. Anyway, I can't wait to see what theories you'll make based from your list.

What an incredible summary of this information @skaa!  Upvote for you!

This is a great idea!  I wish we could open source the Theoryland database so we could do some consistent tagging of the WoBs.  I bet there's a lot of hidden information like this there that the Excel wizard in me would love to digest like this!  Kuddos to @emailanimal - Upvote for you too!

[emailanimal he/him]

34 minutes ago, VirtuousTraveller said:

This is a great idea!  I wish we could open source the Theoryland database so we could do some consistent tagging of the WoBs.  I bet there's a lot of hidden information like this there that the Excel wizard in me would love to digest like this!  Kuddos to @emailanimal - Upvote for you too!

Thanks!

This specific round was all free time and manual searches, but looking at the HTML, it is pretty parseable, so the next round is probably going to involve Python, BeautifulSoup and NLTK.

 

@skaa: 

Quote

You can change the title of your post.

Yeah. Got it. Was looking at the wrong place.

Edited December 13, 2016 by emailanimal

[Argent he/him]

This is, undoubtedly, one of the weirdest topics I have read in a while...