Kurkistan

It was my professor, actually (she did have a thing for basic grammar). Either way, it is a side issue. I'll mark it as "possible" in my post.

I'm having more trouble finding a definite source than I thought I would, but I'm fairly sure it's just true. I think the water is muddied by it kind of being a gray area to use "either" for more than two options, but that shouldn't matter. Either way, the internet has betrayed me, but I could have sworn that I learned that, if the verb applies to both options, you say "either" after the verb. A reason for this, to reinvent the wheel, is because the use Brandon uses opens us up to ambiguity. You can say "you either have to be famous or buy a ticket to get backstage" because the "either" is acting on both subject-verb pairs. When you say "you either had to be important, or rich to attend", the "to be" looks to be only acting on "important", leaving the second option all sad and lonesome by itself, with the possibility of a new verb coming in, such as "you either had to be important or wallow in riches to attend". EDIT: So the very fact that you can add "had to be" to the last option is a problem. Ye gods, I know this is a rule, I just can't find anything to back me up. This is a bit sad/frustrating.

Okay, just double checking there. Good thoughts on malatium.

Your post is quite insightful. I can get on board with that. One question is the degree to which you you know the "branches" that lead to the shadows of your self, for the purposes of making a soulstamp. At the very least, though, an Augor should know that their shadows are valid end results, even if they need to do some work to figure out the intermediate steps. I don't think we need to focus 100% on "choices", though. Simple happenings or events can be just as important. I imagine that a Forger could "change" the outcome of a coin-flip if he wanted to.

It occurs to me that we could use a thread to list typos to be fixed for the next release. I'll start off with a few things that jumped out at me early in the book. EDIT: It has been brought to my attention that I may be in error, and this could be a valid sentence construction. During the duel between Fitch and Nalizar (pg 18-19 in the eBook), there are 4 separate instances of the word "board" being used for the floor. I know Brandon originally had this fight take place on a chalkboard on the wall, then changed it to the floor, so I imagine this is just an artifact.

No, that is news, and is good to know. Thanks.

Here you go.

That is an important distinction, Senor. I'm tempted to say that it's actually a mix of the two. What if Forgeries are always "procedurally generated", but the Forger has relative freedom over how strict the parameters are? So Shai could say "...and then that artisan made a stained glass window" or she could say "...and then that artisan made a stained glass window of an X type of pattern".

I don't have the time to read/reply to this in full just this moment, but we've recently gotten yet another statement on the nature of the three Realms, if you want to take a look: Link You could take this and interpret this as people's Cognitive aspects being approximations of their "true" selves in the Spiritual Realm, to a certain extent. So the Cognitive is based on the Spiritual and is more malleable while the Spiritual can (very slowly) be changed by the Cognitive, but is generally fairly unmoving. I've touched on this in my Forms thread.

Thanks Nepene. Have a rep. I guess we know now why Brandon was so willing to tell us about Taravangian's "condition", since it wouldn't be a secret for long.

Well now I feel like a horrible human being. Oh yes, congrats on a baby too. In my defense, I didn't talk about it because it was "old news".

Joel sounded exactly like an exasperated Sharder for about a page there. EDIT: @Chaos As for the ending, I may have come off a bit too harsh in my post. The ending doesn't come anywhere close to "bumming me out" like the AoL ending did for some, I just thought it had some flaws, so far as pacing and whatnot goes. It's not so much that it's a sequel hook, just the way its executed that jars me a bit.

Maybe, *sniff* maybe. Maybe the "personality" stored in Aluminumminds is somehow more fundamental while the Cognitive is fleeting, or Brandon's focus on "genetics" for that quote cast things askew. Or he changed his mind after a year or two. Or he misspoke at one point and/or Crafty made a mistake. Here's some more definite stuff on the soul being Spiritual, if you want to be 100% sure: http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=428#80 http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=622#64

AoL Spoilers, kind of, but not really* First of all, I think Bloodmakers may run into problems dealing with Cognitive wounds, actually, since Healing is based on Cognitive aspects. Based on that, I think any extrapolation which says "feruchemical health doesn't care about whether wounds are physical or cognitive" has some explaining to do. If it helps, I would visualize the difference between Healing different types of Spiritual wounds as how actual physical healing works in the normal world. Normally, we'd expect that simply making someone heal faster would just scar over missing limbs, as opposed to regrowing them. If you have a cut, though, we expect the healing process to reattach the two parts. I'd simply posit that Spiritual Healing can only heal "normally" in the sense of reattaching essentially whole entities, as opposed to Physical Healing's regrowth powers. This is not necessarily demanded by our current understanding or Realmatics, but is sensible enough. Quite frankly, even a handwavium explanation would be sufficient if its stops a Bloodmaker from giving off infinite Hemalurgic spikes. Someone's gonna figure that stuff out, or we'll think their stupid for not figuring it out. At the very least, the AoL Ars Arcanum author has the motivation. Sorry, but this is incorrect. Though Brandon was talking about heritability at the time, he says (paraphrasing) "Biological DNA, Personality/Cognative self, Spiritual Soul". I'm fairly sure I've seen other such examples, but this one pretty much covers it.

As for the first, not really, I don't think. The only one I can recall is Gaotona's "you're implying the wall has a soul" when Shai talks about the wall having a conception of itself as a wall. Everything else is more less Cognitive and connectiony (and thus Spiritual). I am a bit biased in this case, since I have an inordinate amount of theorizing that posits the Spiritual aspect as the primary target of Forgery. On the second count, I don't think so. I've been chatting with Satsuoni about this a bit--and some theorizing has also occurred in the past--theorizing that the extent of the damage that Shardblades do to limbs is simply "severing" some Spiritual connections without harming the "nucleus" of the soul. So where Hemalurgy rips off the piece of the soul connected to some bindpoint, a Shardblade would just sever the connection. Like cutting a rope instead of yanking out what it's attached to. In that case, we're looking at quite a different kind of damage: reestablishing incidental connections versus regrowing a missing chunk of soul. A Bloodmaker might only be able to do the first. Even if it isn't Realmatically necessary, I think it's necessary on the level of writing books, and this, at least, gives us a plausible out besides a simple "the author couldn't do that because it would break the series" ala how channelling was necessarily underutilized in the Wheel of Time.

Hey guys and gals, A lot of you are probably already signed up for the newsletter, but I imagine a few aren't, so I'll post it in it's entirety here. Big news is that the prologue for Steelheart will be online sometime tomorrow and that WoR might be pushed back a bit, depending on stuff. Personally, I feel like WoR has been sneaking up on us all this time, so I'm fine if it slows down a bit. Also, the Stewarts (of Inkwing fame) have joined Dragonsteel Inc., so congrats to them!

An interesting theory, and plausible on the face of it. Sadly, I don't think you're on the right track here, given some (mildly obscure) pieces of evidence. *Warbreaker Spoilers* First of all, we know that the black smoke from Shardblades is related to Nighblood's black smoke. Given that Nighblood's thing is eating Breath, and Breath are most likely Spiritual, that implies that Shardblades do some Spiritual damage. Second, we've recently received confirmation that Shardblades damage souls. Now Brandon may be playing fast and loose with our understanding of the word "soul" here, but, particularly looking at how it's treated in TES, it's fairly likely that someone's "soul" is exclusively or at least primarily Spiritual. So if Shardblades cut souls, they cut the Spiritual aspect of objects.

I read too fast... Oh yes, spoilers in this spoiler thread, just to be clear. Including mild AoL spoilers. I liked it. I could definitely see a difference from Brandon's non-YA works, in terms of writing and the fact that everyone didn't die at the end (well, the first end, before that second ending happened). I agree with Senor that the pacing was thrown off by the ending. It was made of awesome, don't get me wrong, but I feel like we were supposed to be in denouement territory, not "let's RUMBLE!" territory. On that selfsame end, I felt that it was a bit too much sequel-hooking, though that might be a symptom of YA. We didn't need Nalizar to be all "yup, inscrutable evil is me", I think a short, sweet, flashback/thought process from Joel followed by a horrified revelation and seeing the evil in Nalizar's eyes (with perhaps an simple knowing smirk at Joel's shocked silence, not a full monologue/discussion), would have done the job better, and a bit more naturally. Now I know I've defended the "next time, on..." sequel hook in AoL before, saying that it was akin to a preview for the next "episode", since the plot was all neatly wrapped up by then in AoL. I just think a bit too much time was given to realizing Nalizar's evil (okay, maybe not evil, what with ambiguity and all, but you get it) and listening about his evil and foiling his evil, and thinking more about his evil, and.... Where AoL gave you a glimpse of the future as you were nudged out of the door, Rithmatist draws the reader back in before rudely throwing them out. I have other thoughts, I'm sure, but I'll let them simmer for a bit. P.S. Also, excellent artwork (as always) by Inkthinker. It really made things more clear a few times and was quite well done in its own right. As a side note, doesn't he deserve an "Official Artist" group title or something at this point?

Actually, wait a second. *10 seasons... 214 episodes... 45 minutes each... 9630, 160.5, 6.69...* Wait. A WEEK! NOOOOO! Peter, whatever you do, don't introduce Brandon to SG-1!!!! All the writing he won't do; all the writing... ( )

A true shame. It is hard to draw people into that show, though, given how. . . different the first season or so is.

^No, not really, since the goal is to be able to walk around without a spike but still with the appropriate Identity. If you're okay with keeping the spike in, why bother doing all the splice and dice? You could just have a normal, non-freaky spike doing its normal, freaky alterations to your spiritweb without needing to tear off a part of your soul and bind it to the spike itself.

Slight problem with this. Though Brandon has waffled a bit on what burning a spike does, his most recent answer was that the sDNA of the burner would get spliced into the spike, not the other way around. Now if Brandon misspoke and it is the way you suggest, I agree wholeheartedly that this would be a good way to pick up new Identities on the cheap. Assuming what we have is accurate, though, not so much. 2009 2011

Hello, I'm making my "threads I really should have read earlier" rounds. I like this theory as a whole, though I think that magic was likely regionalized before Odium made his house call. As far as the side discussion about Breaths goes, I've always seen them as primarily Spiritual. They're little bundles of energy that do some augmentation on the side, and though you could describe some of their effects as "mental", I don't think that automatically entails Cognitive, in the strict sense. "Life sense" is almost certainly related to Connection in the Feruchemical (Spiritual Feruchemy, recall) sense, and ties into a conception of the Spiritual as chalk-full of meaningful "connections" between people and objects. Even Returned's shapeshifting, while dependent on how they view themselves Cognitively, seems to flow ultimately from the Spiritual Realm.

While I hadn't noticed that awesomeness was there, a quick search of "brandon sanderson stargate sg-1" doesn't turn up any references, so I'm guessing he's either an exceptionally stealthy fan or it was incidental.

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but I'm working through my backlog of "I should really read these theories" threads. I have to say that I like this theory quite a lot. So far as the distance question goes, there is a certain point where things just stop working. We have this quote: The first answer could be saying either that stamps grow prohibitively weak or that they stop working altogether, while the second is more definitive, at least at interstellar distances. Given that the second question/answer was framed as a clarification, I'm tempted to think that Forgeries just flat-out wouldn't work in Elantris. The last "that's very interesting, isn't it?" is disturbing to me in regards to KChan's theory, actually. I've been taking this as a de-facto "yes" for awhile now, but such an answer might undermine both KChan's theory. As a way to get around this (other than simply dismissing my assumption that Brandon was sneakily saying "yes"), I would suggest a slight alteration to KChan's theory. How about 2 levels of magic for each "Dominion"? On the one hand, you have the manifestation of this singular "magic" as a multitude of systems, each unique to a region: Bloodsealing, Forgery, AonDor, etc. This part is locked down by Identity, as the OP posits. On the other hand, though, you have a second consideration: where the raw power is coming from. A Forger can never practice AonDor, then, but they could use Aon Aon as their "setting stamp" and draw their power from Arelon. That power manifests as Forgery because of the Dominion that determined the Identity of the user it's being filtered through, but needn't be dragged all the way from poor MaiPon first. This is somewhat in line with my original "region-locking" thread. As a side note, I'm curious as to how you explain citizens of the Rose Empire being able to use Forgery, if its base (and thus the Identity of its users) seems to be based in MaiPon. Could Forgery be a multi-region magic? Incidentally, I also think the two D's probably cooperated and/or pooled their power before Odium came. Ruin and Preservation were capable of working together as (essentially) one power, they just "hated" each other.