Chaos

1. Haven't read it or seen it yet. I'll get to it... eventually... hopefully... It'd be nice to read something non-Brandon or non-Janci sometime. 2. I'm not opposed to like, having more time, but eternally more time and actually living forever? No thanks. Things have value because they are limited. I think life would become boring and meaningless given a long enough timespan. If there's no option to just end your existence eventually, that sounds terrifying. Endings are not an inherently bad thing. I don't know. I mean, there's at best very weak evidence for the afterlife anyway, so I don't suspect this will be a problem, but are people who believe in the afterlife really sure it's great? That seems like... a lot to swallow. I don't think I could be so confident about anything, even stuff I had tons of physical and demonstrable evidence for. "Trust me, it'll totally be great over here, guys." Meanwhile there are so many scifi / fantasy stories talking about the problems with immortality that I just... don't have any confidence that this afterlife would be different. Regardless, though I imagine it's theoretically possible there is such a thing, there's been no evidence for souls yet, and lots of evidence that your personality is very directly linked with the neurons in your brain. If there was a magical special essence to your being, why can head injuries permanently change your personality? That seems so incongruous with the notion of a soul to me that it seems perclusionary. How does the soul attach to the neurons in the brain, because we know for sure affecting the neurons definitely affects your sense of self? What's the mechanism or interface between meat-stuff and soul-stuff? Maybe there is one, who's to say, but betting on souls has not led to positive evidence so far, so I would bet against it, personally. I'm willing to be convinced, but it needs to be very strong evidence, and neuroscience doesn't lend any credence to it. Of course we don't know how consciousness works per se, but that's not a reason to think "I have a special essence, different from my brain, that contains my sense of self" or something. Anyway, so an afterlife is interesting to think about, but it's not like I actually worry about it. The afterlife seems more a reflection of what people want to happen, and the fear of mortality, than anything actually real. And that's super understandable, but... that's not good enough for me. I can be persuaded about crazy, wild claims--just think how crazy and wild quantum mechanics is--but I need the goods before I can care at all. 3. Nope. Unfortunately, video game time is just Eric-isn't-writing-time, so I don't get to play video games anymore if I want to get things done. Hollow Knight doesn't really feel like my kind of game though. I don't want to play challenging games anymore, and Metroidvania games have never really appealed to me. It is very pretty though and well made, no doubt about it. 4. I mean they have to get up to cumulonimbus heights for sure, and be kind of the most extreme variety of those. Those things can be up to 10km high, so 32,000 ft. Uh, good luck surviving up there, Windrunners. 5. I'm not sure I have one anymore, honestly. I do legitimately spend far more time on the Discord than the forums. The religion threads are interesting to me, but a big time suck. I'm glad! Grace (thegatorgirl) wrote it, based off my original blurb, and she's very good at them.

Oh, I have no idea what's going on and that well goes over my head completely, but I can send it to Paleo. Ultimately it's probably a "will this even matter with the software update" but hey.

I got one yeah but not when Useewa tried it on the tech support thread.

The editor bar. And no, I did not get pinged for that. That's the explanation

...Would you like to provide any context as to how it happened, who was involved, etc. on that? That might be helpful...

I don't think editing in a mention has ever pinged anyone. So that is likely the thing.

Yeah, wow. And you're totally right, because I did really start working on the book in earnest in 2023. In 2021 I just had written the prologue, in 2022 I wrote the first three chapters of Alessa and one of Kumori. In 2023, I had finally finished part one and really got into it. By the end of 2023, I hit 98,000 words, which was longer than my half-finished manuscript of a different project I did in college, but that was just about a third of the length of the book. Then, I finished in 2024. Revisions took a long time, as I wanted to do it very thoroughly. I am very proud of it! I right now have a very small crew of alpha readers who are ravenous for the sequel. If none of these get published, it's genuinely awesome that people are looking forward to it. But hey, maybe a publisher will pick it up.

Oh no, it's been a long time since I've been over here! Not surprisingly, my absence mostly corresponds with when I was working revision for The Prophet King. I cannot truly explain to everyone just how much life admin I have completely ignored since last January to solely grind through this. (I did get two concussions last year, which didn't help). Anyway, I am partially back here to answer stuff, but also to announce the 2.0 draft of the book is done as of yesterday! I had, uh, a Taravangian level of transcendence over my spring break, and I did... the last ~27% of the entire book in 11 days. That's 71,000 words, by the way. (Tress, by comparison, is 107,000 words entirely.) By comparison, the first quarter of the revision took 205 days (concussions suck, take care of your head), the second quarter, 151 days, and the third quarter 75 days. Sooooo doing that last portion was a lot. I'll be doing a beta starting in May or early June and last for threeish months. I probably have too many betas already but I am ready for more people. I'll be putting a more official beta callout eventually with some particular things I need but in case anyone is interested, here's the back of the book blurb thingy: It has tons of the things you'd like from a Brandon book, with rules based magics and high magic, a very strong plot and an avalanche of an ending (I did the entire ending in days, it's so good), and is queerer. It is pretty long, at 262,000 words. My plan now is to do some line editing so it should trim down... some. But, feeling really good about this. My alpha feedback was very positive and this draft is far superior, so I'm ready to show it to a wider audience. Okay, now for questions. Sorry cheeseman! Man, what do I choose here for books? Mistborn or Foundation's Edge were awesome and formative books for me. But maybe Oathbringer? I love the lore we got there, but there's just something that is so awesome of learning what the hell is going on in practice that does take a bit of the mystique out of later books. I also think Oathbringer's ending is just spectacular, though. Movies... hmmm. Honestly, K-Pop Demon Hunters. It is genuinely the movie I have seen the most in my life, and may be favorite movie, but the pure euphoria of seeing it the first time was unparalleled.

No dedicated timeline. Anyway, I just approved it. I didn't even get an email notification, sorry about that.

I just moved it to the wrong spot.

Hah! My opinion is from the draft I originally saw, which didn't have my tuckerization in it yet, and I still remember my beta opinions (which were pretty similar to my thoughts now). I was quite surprised to see the reference to me in the later draft.

Hey, so I don't think you're a spam bot, but you absolutely cannot post a topic with a contextless link. It really makes you look like a spammer, which happens frequent, and we can and do nuke such accounts from orbit. You may want to like, explain what it is. Still, sketchy links are probably inadvisable for people to click.

Please note we will not be making exceptions to the number of nickname changes that can be made for memes! It is perfectly permissible to do, but I just wanted to make that clear.

Just FYI, Arcanum Discussion is for the WoB archive, at wob.coppermind.net. I have moved this to Cosmere Discussion.

These are reasonable, though I think it makes sense that Dajer underestimates Dusk, who he feels is just so far lesser, but it is very much moustache-twirling colonial antagonist. I can see it though. I sometimes imagine what the fandom temperature would be like if we had none of these secret projects and we went from RoW to TLM and WaT. Oof. I liked RoW and though I can very much understand people not liking WaT, I did like it. But certainly all of those were far more mixed (WaT especially) than I'd like. Emberdark's quite fun though! I enjoyed it a lot.

If you are trying to register and don't receive a validation email, it is possible your mail server is outright rejecting 17th Shard's emails. This has happened a few times, where people try to use the Contact Form, and I have had both my 17S email get rejected, as well as my regular Gmail. Essentially, if this is happening to you, your school administrators have heavily locked down your school email address. Please remember school / organization email addresses are monitored. They will restrict these to educational/organization purposes. In addition, when you eventually are not a student, you will often lose access to your school email address very quickly. (At the college I teach at, a student would lose their Gmail after a semester of not taking classes.) This means you will be locked out of many accounts if you use to register for many sites. For these and many other reasons, we do not recommend you use such emails for personal accounts. It is free and easy to register for a Gmail account, or Outlook account, or any number of other free services, like Proton. To the teens on 17th Shard: I cannot emphasize enough the importance of registering a personal email account that you will keep for years. If I could make a suggestion, I would also recommend you choose an email address that sounds professional, and that you will not be ashamed to give to potential employers or other official things. I say this as a person who needs to convert from my dorky "Chaos" email address to something more professional near the end of college, particularly when it's connected to tons of accounts (and in my case, Google Docs). I know that sounds far away, but it'll happen faster than you assume! If you would like to maintain anonymity online (which is a very wise idea), register a more professional-sounding email and use it for some purposes, and then have a pseudonym for things like 17th Shard/Reddit/Discord. Anyway, that's just a PSA for the day. Thanks for reading!

It is ominous, because they have been banned.

I was making a Veden character for a Stormlight RPG game I'm playing in. I found the list of Veden names in the World Guide to be extremely lackluster, and Category:Veden on the Coppermind was also horrifically small, with just around forty characters. It wasn't really enough for me to fully understand the conventions and create two Veden noble house names. So, I thought hey, maybe this is a thing ChatGPT would be good at, synthesizing a bunch of stuff to give me some points to jump off from. I asked it for more Veden names... "Here’s a list of original Veden-style surnames I’ve crafted for your RPG character, inspired by canonical names like “Sadeas,” “Torol,” and “Meridas”" Yeah... no. Those aren't Veden, ChatGPT! Any time I try AI--which is rare--I feel like it immediately face plants. (Admittedly, it's not like there's a lot of Veden source material for it to draw upon.)

Yeah, these aren't real people. They have become far more numerous with the advent of generative AI these days. Lots of people want to harvest as much data as possible. We have had to block so much on the Coppermind because they kept slamming that server, to a degree that the site wouldn't load. Pay no mind to these.

:ShallanOhNo: Okay, I promise I'm not trying to sound mean. This is just my personal vibes, rather than having the mod hat on. This... is actually painful to read. Maybe that's the point, that you don't want the old people to read (though I will note, I thought this same thing when I was a teenager). I'm just saying, maybe someone might look at your silly posts sixteen years from now and you might want to make sure they are something you won't be embarrassed by at that point. I don't know. Of course, you can do what you want. I would just point out that this is a forum for an author, where people read millions of words. I do think there's a sizeable proportion of the population who would look at this and absolutely judge this negatively and not want to engage with you as much. I do enjoy conversing with you, but this is painful, and I don't want to engage with this. At all. Again, if this is your style, and there are good reasons for it, sure. It's not against the rules. I guess I'd just hope on a forum based off books that people would... care. And of course, this is a chill thread, rather than a more serious book discussion topic, so does it really matter? Not really, but... Might just be me. I know you're capable of using your words and sentences. I mean, flagship Android phones are about the same. I realize most people probably buy midrange phones, and they are pretty good these days, but this completely depends on what phones you're comparing, rather than a general rule. I mean, you can argue that language and spelling is descriptive rather than prescriptive, sure. But words do mean things, words are spelled certain ways. If you have to mispell things to get across tone, that sounds like more of a skill issue? You can get across a huge array of tones and feelings with words spelled correctly and grammar done correctly, like every author ever does. You shouldn't even need emotes or emoji, for example. I was certainly a physical keyboard phone person (give me that Droid) because I knew I could always spell correctly and I didn't need a computer to tell me what was correct, but good autocorrect is absolutely essential to have a virtual keyboard work. I can't say I have a lot of sympathy if you just want to write worse xD As far as the crimes of big tech go, that's not one I'm worried about That said, GBoard's autocorrect is absolutely getting worse, so hey. Large tangent: It is also possible my desire for precision and correctness is because I am a math professor. I'm currently grading exams, and people are making notation mistakes. Do I know what they intend? Sure. I know exactly what they could write to make it correct, and I have told my students this. Many get the right answer. I still take off points. The end result doesn't matter. It's how we think about things. Our logic, our problem solving abilities. (I also know that particularly in this class I'm teaching, I have to be a jerk about notation because they must have good habits when they get to the much harder part of the class.) The way we write things shapes our thoughts and ideas themselves. It clarifies, it solidifies them. Language is exactly the same way. Writing anything correctly means you are practicing your craft of writing text, even being here! I always aspired to be an author, so that was always important to me, but you will still write paragraphs, no matter what field you are in. Everyone will have to write something important where you have to communicate the exactly right tone, and getting it wrong will matter. You are practicing with every word typed. Imagine you have a crush way out of your league. He/she/they are incredible. Beautiful, brilliant, well-educated. Charismatic. Just a stunning person, intimidatingly so. You match in a dating app, or you have their number. This is your time to take a shot. It better be a damn, damn good one. Because you know what? You may just have that special something they are looking for. "But Eric," you say, "of course I'll write properly then, when it matters." I don't know. My students tell me this when they work on their math homework in my math tutoring center. "I'll write it correctly on the exam." Yes, I'm sure in the stressful environment you'll totally do it perfectly... I personally think it might be better to practice to be ready for when it matters. Of course, this is a chill forum thread, and it doesn't really matter. I'm sure many of you do write correctly in plenty of spaces, and maybe just want to chill. Sure. But I don't know. Every sentence you type makes you better at communicating

Thanks for the kind words. I'm not actually that scary, but it is fun to play up my "Eye of Sauron" reputation particularly for people like that troll. Also, I'm procrastinating from doing actual work, so hey, hah.

You are killing me with the "u's" and the "ur". What is this, 2005 with T9 texting? It's not that hard to spell properly! (That said even then I hated that xD I have always been an old soul.)

I have no idea. Whatever IPS defaults to. It's varied, and things like the leaderboard are even odder. I'd test but frankly I don't have the time or motivation to answer it.