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Tinfoil theory: Dragons have pupils rimmed in a silvery metallic substance (presumably "dragonsteel"). Metals glow in the Scadrian Cognitive Realm. Ergo: Hoid is a Dragon.

Nothing truly "definitive" and the Timey Whimey nature of the spiritual bonds involved makes it even more difficult to pin down. Shallan was very young, one of the first chronologically. Szeth mentioned hearing a voice in his head in his youth, which many of us believe was a spren bond; however he wasnt made truthless until age 27 (two years before WoK) so it may have been more recent. Jasnah has had hers for a long time as well, it had begun by the time of Galivar's death based on her shadow acting weird, but she didnt seem to know what was happening at the time. Kaladin is more recent but Syl mentioned memories of him as far back as Amaram's army, which mean it either began long before he actually spoke any words, or the Spiritual Bond provided retroactive knowledge. Dalinar has only been since Gavilar's death, since the Stormfather sent Gavilar the visions first.

It's a running gag in the Allyverse RP, various groups offering cookies with hemalurgic spikes "hidden" in them, and other offering supposedly danger-free cookies. It's the Alleyverse equivalent of "Dont Take Candy From Strangers". https://www.17thshard.com/forum/forum/92-alleyverse/

Huh, so Renarin in the one in teh back with the one-handed blade? I had been assuming he was the one with the shardblade in front, since he's the other radiant. But being Moash kinda makes sense too, he's the only one lacking the Bridge 4 patch on his right shoulder.

Y U gotsta crush my dreams? (I didnt know that, thanks!)

With zero evidence to support it, I prefer to think that Felt is a dragon.

Sure thing: The blessing spikes to awaken Kandra are specially made, and the Kandra do not know how to make more they relied on the Lord Ruler to provide them. So while it was always theoretically possible for Kandra to use Blessing spikes that granted Allomantic powers, it hadnt happened before. And for some WOB on the topic:

As I understand it, different Orders glow different colors relative to their Order's associated Essence. Which once again makes me hopeful that Rlain is going to be the Sibling's Bondsmith, which is one of my favorite theories

There are several datapoints to look at, but so far the actual mechanisms at play have been RAFO'd until he writes the sequel. We know Color has some realmic component that is at play. It' the reason if a person with Perfect Invocation bleeds an object white it cannot then be used by a normal awakener to go grey back and forth indefinitely. It has something to do with the eye color change on Roshar, and probably something implications on why the rosharan gems that are essentially the same from a chemical standpoint have wildly different effects from a magic standpoint. We know that different colors dont matter in Awakening, but mostly just because Awakening already had a lot of restrictions and he didnt want to add more Also worth noting that, as of now at least, you cannot Awaken with stormlight, all it can do is keep a Returned alive instead of feeding it the weekly Breaths. Vasher has not figured out how to use stormlight to awaken, though he has tried. WOB says that the easiest way would actually be to turn stormight into breaths, then use those to awaken, which is something that not even Hoid knows how to do.

Maybe, but she was definitely getting a bit lost it in at the end of OB, between the time she was fluctuating randomly between them until Adolin pulled her out of it, to the time that all three were there holding hands but apparently Radiant had the actual body. Granted from an outside perspective it would be pretty hard to tell the difference between her body healing itself to a new physical state and employing her solid illusions, at least until the stormlight runs out. As another implication, suppose she eventually absorbs/reintegrates one of the other into her core self. Radiant seems the most likely as she's basically just a more confident adn controlled version of Shallan herself (as compared to Veil that is intended to have a wildly different look, background and upbringing). So if Shallan reaches the point in her life that she she's herself as the same controlled and confident Kngiht Radiant that she created Radiant for, I could very much see her taking on the physical traits of that Radiant persona, or at least merging them into her own.

A thought occurred to me, and Im curious if there is any evidence either way. By the end of OB the Veil and Radiant personas were very strongly established in Shallan, to the point that she was switching between them almost without control. How deep do those alternate self images go, do you think? If Veil is in control and she uses Stormlight to heal, do her eyes ans skin physically become darker, independent of an active Lightweaving? Would Radiant's bust actually, physically become larger (being the primary physical difference that's been mentioned) as a function of the Stormlight healing and the way it aligns your Physical with your Self-Image? Or would the fact that she's accessing the power via Pattern (an external, nominally objective observer) and Speaking Personal Truths insulate her from those differences and keep her anchored to the "Shallan" spiritual/Platonic ideal? Thoughts?

Not if she decides he being Ignored and Forgotten.

Or at least sneaking Szeth snacks in his cell

Kabsal's perception doesnt factor in at all, he is not involved in the Soulcasting. The only perceptions that will have any noticeable impact the Soulcasting are Jasnah, Ivory, and the object of the soulcasting itself. And the objects is presumable the least impact given that Jasnah can soulcast fully sentient people into flame, so it's primarily just Jasnah and Ivory. That part of the equation has to do with the Investiture, which is what give them the leverage to actively overide the base-level reality. As far as how it compares to other magics, the statue was significantly older with (presumably a more settled identity, having been observed and perceived as that statue for generations relative to the short time it had been broken (and was still being perceived as a broken whole rather than separate things). Regarding forgery, that's a Dor magic on a different planet (and thus a different cognitive framework) and Dor magics are notorious for requiring more minutia to work, such as how Bloodsealing requires that you actually know the placement of every vein and sinew. Consider instead other Rosharan examples: Shallan found a single Bead that was an entire Keep, and as @Pathfinder mentioned that soulcaster savant going to Aimia noted that it takes significantly more skill to be able to affect only a part of the whole, not the other way around. At the end of the day Soulcasting's effect and capabilities vary widely with the skill and understanding of the Soulcaster in question, and those skills seem to be somewhat silo'd into each of the ten essenses. Jasnah is damnation good at it, which is the only reason she was able to Soulcast Shallan's Blood without turning her into a pile of goop. In that scene she admitted she didnt know much about strawberries which limited her ability in that instance; had it been a material she knew more about, she might have been able to separate the poison from the Jam, but without knowing details of both she just defaulted to the easier soulcasting. Similarly we have WOB that a skilled enough Soulcaster should be able to make complex foods with real taste, but the vast majority are only able to make the tasteless grub we hear about in the warcamps.

She just misunderstood Kabsal's scheme. She thought the poison was in the jam, so she Soulcast it into something else entirely thinking she was getting rid of the poison. In actuality the Poison was on the bread itself, and the Jam had the antidote. His scheme was that he and shallan could eat the the bread with jam, and be cured of the poison, but since she had said she didnt like jams, she would not eat her bread with it and would get just the poison. As far as her being able to perceive the Poison as a separate thing from the Jam, I doubt it. For one thing inanimate objects adjust to their new state relatively quickly, so unless the antidote was added very recently it would have just been incorporated into the "Jam" mixture as one of it's many ingredients, which she soulcast away when she dipped her finger into the jam jar. Had it been poison sprinkled onto a fresh fruit or somethign more "pure" it might have been different, but jam is already a mixture so I imagine it was easier (and thus quicker) to accept the addition as part of it's whole.

For what it's worth, Spiritual Connection to a Singer can theoretically do it as well. So a Bondsmith's ability to learn languages via Adhesion should be able to pull it off, and we arent actually sure a Windrunner cant pull it off, though we havent seen any direct indication of one using Adhesion spiritually that way yet.

Outside of the lack of reaction from the Stormfather and Syl, both of whom have had direct personal interaction with her and not reacted the way they did when they met Heralds (Syl's whole You're in the presence of divinities line in OB) I think the biggest clue that she wasnt a herald was hope legitimately interested she was in the information she was getting from Dalinar's visions. She was ecstatic to get a look at the radiant era Fabrials, something a Herald would have already been entirely familiar with.

Best we can tell, yes.

If it is possible, I would strongly suspect it would only be able to work if you were in Shademar and could grant it to the Spren in their natural state, the same way you can use hemalurgic Spikes on a spren there but not in the Physical Realm.

I was wondering this just today, whether there was any godmetal on Sel. We have it confirmed that Ralkalest is Aluminum. Regarding Soulstone, I really dont know. On the one hand we've been told that Investiture in the solid form is nearly always a metal, not this sort of crystal mineral. On the other hand the Investiture surrounding Sel is already realmically unique so if there was a planet that could break the patter it would be Sel. Soulstones are also the second best thing to make a Stamp out of next to actual Crystal (which is significantly harder to carve). Especially with the WOB below, I think I lean toward it being just a peculuar stone that is notably easy to carve, kind of a Jade analog, because he enjoyed the carving he saw in Taiwan. The way he describes Godmetals on Scadrial as being directly tied to their respective Vessels rather than the Shard itself makes me suspect that the Dor does not have a Godmetal at present.

Short update (Since I havent done a whole lot of work on this since the plague began): After a bunch of digging into the components on the pre-built driver circuit pictured above, Ive decided not to use it, and instead step back to build my own driver circuit. The square chip on the right side is the main controller chip. It's great in that it has in-built protections and frequency feedback, but it has two major downsides: the biggest is that it has a maximum duty cycle of 50%, meaning I would not be able to run the transformer at 100% capacity (it prefers something in the 30-40% range). The other issue is that the way it was configured for this driver module it requires an external frequency-based control signal, and if Im having to provide that I might as well cut out the middle man and just do the driver control directly, as that sort of frequency controller would involve many of the same components. The chip has a mode that would eliminate that need, but to change it's mode would require re-working traces that are about a half-mm long, and frankly my hands are not that steady with my current caffeine habit Messing with SMD components and working at those sizes take a whole different soldering method than what I have the tools to manage. I did manage to dig out an old test apparatus of a (really rough) marx pulse generator I built a few years back to run some experiments on the corona discharge, but I fear that a grounding short may have fried it's primary transformer so I wasnt able to get glow-to-power requirements I wanted to pin down. It was never particularly strong or efficient, with hand-twisted spark gaps and those tiny capacitors (compare to the soda can size ones in the large picture above)

Agreed, I get the impression that Preservation was actively controlling the mists so I dont think anyone could draw on them without the active approval of Leras, even if they didnt have Spikes that would push it back the way it did with Vin when she had her earring in.

Im not talking about the effects of a given use of magic, Im talking about how the Focus of the magic system itself is determined for a given shardworld.

I think too much talk about Scadrial would be spoilers for the OP, but yah I stand by my statement there too.

For the most part the magic systems arent the direct result of the Shard's vessel themselves, it's sort of emerges from the interaction between the shard's investiture and the cognitive realm expression of the planet (and it's population) as a whole. The shards have immense power so they are able to modify and tweak things. And Roshar is a little bit of a special case in a few ways. Some of what's present there, such as the whole Investiture-in-Gems thing, predates the Shard's arrival.