Chaos

This has been resolved. Sorry for the delay!

I think you're being pretty pessimistic here, unduly so. The cosmere is his primary love, and his primary work. His top priority in his life is to finish the cosmere, and I have no doubt that he is excited to do so. I imagine a huge amount that he is excited about in Stormlight back half and later space age cosmere are so amazing, exciting, and awesome, but he literally could not tell us about it because they are huge spoilers. Stormlight is designed as his truly "big" single series, and I guarantee you, he loves it. Please note that after every book, Brandon says, "I am sick of this book and I'm glad to have that over with." Revisions are brutal. These books are massive. But rest assured, he does get pumped for Stormlight drafting. I think you only need to look at the Stormlight 5 prologue to see how excited Brandon is to write a killer conclusion. But that doesn't mean it isn't a ton of work. It's just so, so much, and the timeline of drafting Stormlight to getting that final draft is actually very fast given how huge it is. It's like eighteen months of straight work. If you spent eighteen months on a single project day-in, day-out, with Brandon's work ethic... yeah. I think you can see why he wants to work on a few other things after he finishes such gargantuan books. He's pumping out nearly a Lord of the Rings sized tome every 3-4 years (yes, really, LotR is 480,000 words long), and doing 5+ drafts of it. I'm sorry, I think it's absolutely insane to imagine that that isn't exhausting work, even if you think this story is the coolest thing ever. Like, if you have a job you like, even love, you can get burnout. Purely on a numerical basis, I think it is completely reasonable for him to be, "wow, that was awesome, but I am so glad to work on something else for a bit." So I think it's really important to keep that perspective. I am worried the amount of time he devotes to doing adaptations and potential showrunning. That will take a long time. But Brandon has an entire story to tell in the cosmere, and he is going to make it work. Brandon has proven his work ethic. He comes back to every Stormlight book energized and ready to go. I guarantee you, if he wasn't into it, he wouldn't bother pushing the boulder up the mountain at all. He does it because he does love it. I think he said the in-world time between the two is a decade, not that the break between those books would be a decade.

Oh right, I do need to fix this. Thanks for the reminder!

Nah, it's all good. This thread, understandably, is very heavy on the religious/believer spectrum (though it really seems like the forums these days skews much more religious than the Discord server, interestingly), so I hope you don't mind me correcting you there on some things about non-belief. You're welcome! I mean from my perspective, though I can understand why someone would feel comforted with wanting something out there, it's pretty much the opposite to me: why do you need something out there? This doesn't affect my day-to-day life at all. When I was briefly agnostic, I felt at best there could be an entity outside of spacetime that can watch us, and maybe set this all up, but fundamentally couldn't act. But I don't know. It doesn't practically make a difference to me. I'm definitely at a solid, "I don't care at all and it would change nothing to me." (Also helps that I think it's so unlikely that I don't even need to worry about it.) It doesn't help that I actively think that any afterlife is inherently a cruel thing. Our lives and existence should end and that does not need to be sad thing. These two things (a god and an afterlife) tend to go hand-in-hand, and both of these are extremely strange to me. Us being alone is empowering. We have one life. One Earth. We legitimately could be the only life in our visible universe. So we have a critical duty to the universe itself to not screw things up and make sure we can thrive. If we're just some chess pieces on some grand game between entities we can barely fathom, I feel like that duty is immeasurably lessened. Someone else will take care of it, so our actions and decisions don't have consequences. Like, people have been saying for centuries the end times are near. Any year now! I feel like that tendency is really damaging. You don't think of the future if the end is immediately apparent. We absolutely need to think about the future generations and the next thousand or million years of our species and make sure they live. We're all that there is. Let's make it count.

I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the lack of religious belief, one that religious people often repeat about atheism that is not true. Atheism is fundamentally about a lack of belief and faith, rather than anything affirmative. This is a very different dynamic. Atheism does not seek to explain anything. It is not a leap of faith like religion requires. Atheism simply rejects the idea that there are gods, period. No more, no less. Seems too far-fetched for us (it really is a truly huge claim, after all). I think this website puts it well: For another sort of example, would say if someone doesn't believe in ghosts that this is a "belief"? It's the lack of one. If you think the moon is not made of cheese, that isn't a belief system. That's just you saying, "No thanks, I'm good." Another comment that religious people say--which you did not say here, of course, but I wanted to add to this because this is another misconception of atheism--is that atheists "worship science" or "believe in science," which is also not true because science does not require religious devotion or belief. Scientific facts don't require my worship. It is simply taking data and testing hypotheses to match that data. The great thing is that science doesn't care what I think, what you think, or what anyone thinks. They are there completely independently of what you know or think. No one "believes" in general relativity. It is just an incontrovertible fact (with some asterisks where things break down). If I studied the subject, I could learn those details as well. I don't currently, but let me tell you, there are a ton of academics trying to show Einstein is wrong, and have been since its inception. If they made a better theory--that matched the predictions of GR and predicts more, and we can verify those new predictions as accurate--they get a Nobel prize and are remembered in science forever. I don't have to believe in it--I know it works, because your GPS depends on it. Same with evolution; you can certainly see if you look with an open mind that things have a common ancestor, and you need only look to this current pandemic to see viruses and bacteria being naturally selected right now, all the time. I'm not a biologist but there's no conspiracy going on here. This stuff has stood the test of time. One way to think about this is that religion and science go at things from a totally opposite direction. Religion starts with a premise and seeks to explain data based off this premise. Science lacks the preconceived notions and looks at the story the data says. This is the difference between seeing sea fossils on mountains and assuming it was the Flood versus a more complicated, but nonsupernatural explanation that spawned the entire science of geology, which has been pretty useful! I can tell you are definitely a religious person from the way you speak here. That is totally fine, of course. Certainly if you get fulfillment and happiness through religion, that's great! But here's the thing. Nonreligious people feel exactly as fulfilled and happy, all without any god or anything. I don't mean to speak for all nonreligious people, but I can say from my friend group that god would not solve any problems we actually have. I don't have to make any sacrifices there at all! This is a false dichotomy. Why not believe? Well, firstly, you have to pick a god, which in itself seems completely insurmountable to me. There are lots of them and I could never be certain if I'm right or wrong--that's the leap of faith I'm talking about before, which atheists don't need to do. What if I'm wrong in picking my god of choice? See, if you simply look at scientific facts, I don't have to make any faith-based choices. And if there's some god/gods out there, I can say, "hey, at least I knew these things were certainly true, to the best of our abilities and I wasn't corrupted by all this other stuff." Secondly, I think it is very easy to argue that though religion can certainly create fulfillment and happiness for sure, people themselves have done horrendous things for religion and gods. Tremendous hate, judgment, and bloodshed throughout history. I think there are many, many reasons why people would want nothing to do with any religion for these reasons. There are a lot of reasons why people would think this is an extremely dangerous thing. I would strongly prefer to look at the world as it is without preconceived notions, look for the facts in data, and simply treat others with kindness and respect. That's all I need. Of course, the "treat others with kindness and respect" part is always challenging and is always a quest, but I don't need any god to help me with that. That isn't a necessary requirement. There is nothing wrong with believing there is a god though! I'd just personally say, "hmmm, that seems like the hugest assumption, seems a bit much to me." That's atheism in a nutshell.

Because society tends to work better collaboratively. There doesn't need to be any external source for morality. When you do something wrong to someone, you can witness the pain you inflict. No divinity is required. I'm not really interested in how this conversation is progressing, personally. This sort of philosophical navel-gazing is very pointless and irrelevant in my day to day life. I am happy to answer questions about non-belief, but I don't feel appreciated with people trying to dig in and effectively trying to "gotcha" me, which is what this feels like, and I don't think you need to do that. It is very frustrating, in fact. I don't feel the need to try and nitpick and find the logical inconsistencies in other people's beliefs, so I'll please ask you to respect my (lack of) belief. Needless to say, many things religious people believe is required, and I'm doing just fine without God, sin, and any of that. It's utterly irrelevant to my day-to-day life. For any religious person or Christian reading here, I'll just say nonreligious people don't even think about sin as a useful concept at all. Never comes up.

Subjective. Proving something is objective is impossible. But generally we agree that certain things are bad. Really it comes down to, for me: be nice to others and don't hurt others. If you're hurting others, that's bad. Don't be a jerk to others. Obviously, causing genocide is very high up on that list. Morality is not absolute. Ultimately it's what we all decide is moral or not. Our world is very different than one three thousand years or even two hundred years ago, and what was scandalous then need not necessarily be scandalous now. Don't be a jerk and overall you'll be okay. You can't have objective morality without being totally certain your beliefs are correct. If this is any of you, well, all I'll say is that there are millions or billions of people who don't care about your exact definition of morality in the slightest. Don't judge, be nice. Oh, also importantly: if someone is being a total jerk to you (or, you know, attacking you) you are under no obligation to be nice to them anymore. Same reason that people have rights, but your rights do not extend to screwing over others in a variety of ways. Pretty simple morality. I prefer it, because I feel like a lot of problems come from people feeling morally righteous to others. I'm not excluded, but I sure to minimize it.

Hi, the 17th Shard Discussion board is for discussion of website matters itself, not book discussion. I have moved this to the Stormlight board.

I can merge the accounts if you like. PM me.

I mean, I don't work at Cloudflare nor know where you live, so I don't know how much I can illuminate things

Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network which helps on a variety of things. Probably is easiest for me to just link this: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/what-is-cloudflare/ It would indeed have nodes all over the place so would display a city near you. That's how it works.

Paleo went to bed and left me with a few instructions. I believe the situation has been resolved perhaps now. For some additional context, our particular node we were on was hit with some heavy IO failure of some kind, and moving us to a different node seems to have resolved things.

I'm moving this to the Cosmere Discussion board because I expect spoilers to be very plausible.

Awesome movie! Jess and I watched the original a few days before seeing Maverick, and man, the original was just okay. All in all, Maverick was a far superior film, and a better execution of the first film's concept. It having a central plot really helped to ramp up the tension, and the plane sequences were incredible. I don't have too much time to watch movies, but I thoroughly loved it and would recommend it to anyone.

Yeah, this is a daily occurrence. Report them and we have easy ways to nuke them, but reporting notifies every moderator there is a problem, and we can get rid of them quickly.

Yeah I am moving this to the secret project board. Not a big deal though.

Secret Project stuff can only be in the Secret Project forum. I have moved this.