BeskarKomrk

I would say Wayne does subconsciously think alcohol is poison. He may enjoy drinking it, but there's probably a limit to how much the brain can override the body's natural inclinations, even in matters related to the Cognitive Realm. Additionally, in the scene where Wayne burns off the alcohol using his Gold Feruchemy, isn't he intentionally trying to sober up? I don't have the book on me, so I can't check at the moment.

The last book in his Alcatraz series is finished and being released this year. In addition to the Lift novella, we're also getting a bunch of background information in the short story collection that the novella is part of, which I personally think is really cool. As far as I know, that's basically it unless Brandon writes a quick short story or novella to refresh himself during the SA3 writing/editing process (which is always possible). I think it's silly to rule out being excited for books in the back five focusing on characters you don't care about now. Those characters will change enormously by the time they are featured in the books, and then will have huge arcs within their books as well. Just think of how much Kaladin and Shallan have changed, or Dalinar for that matter (who hasn't had flashbacks yet). I trust Brandon to come up with interesting characters and put them in interesting situations. And even if you aren't super excited for a character by the time their book comes out (ten years from now or whenever), there are so many other featured characters that play huge roles in these books. As he has said many times, SA books are basically four or five novels that are all bound into one volume. As for the number of projects he has, Brandon has also said many times that working on different things is a nice change of pace that makes it easier to be passionate about his longer projects when he dives back into them. I believe he specifically said that we would not get the books any faster if he wrote nothing but SA books; instead, each book would take longer for him to write because he wouldn't be as excited about the project. This also would probably mean the quality would degrade, and I again trust Brandon to know his process and deliver great books in a way that satisfies him as a writer, as he has consistently done in the past. One thing to remember with regard to the comparison to ASOIAF or WoT is that neither GRRM nor RJ knew when starting the series how many books it would ultimately take to tell the story. Both of those series got longer and longer, with the end seeming increasingly distant. I wasn't part of the WoT fandom but I'm definitely in the ASOIAF fandom now, and a large part of the frustration comes from the way he keeps adding viewpoints that increase the length of the series, but don't necessarily get us closer to the end of the story. Many people were disappointed in AFFC, for example, because it was slower paced with many new characters and not as much development, while at the same time GRRM increased the length of the series from the initially planned five books (IIRC) to the current seven books. With SA, at least we know that there will be ten books, as Brandon has already outlined the plot of the entire series. So if book four or book seven happen to be a little slower, I won't be nervous because that means there will be more plot movement in another book (I believe he also said later books would be shorter as there is less setup that needs to be done as the series goes along). Finally, let's take a step back and remember that writing is a thankless job, and there is simply no way Brandon will be able to please all of his fans. There are people on these forums who don't care at all about SA, and are upset that the next Mistborn book won't be out until 2018 at the earliest. I've seen people post here that they don't care at all about Mistborn and simply want him to write Stormlight faster. Brandon said that he won't be touring much, if at all, this year because he doesn't get much writing done on tour and he really wants to get SA3 done and released. When he made that announcement, people complained that he wasn't going to many cons because they wanted a chance to meet him and get books signed. Yet here in this thread, we're worried that he may start going to too many, as happened with GRRM. It is simply impossible for him to give all of these fans what they want. And he doesn't have to. Brandon's job is to write stories that he enjoys writing and that he thinks are good, whether that's SA, Mistborn, Reckoners, or some other idea that we haven't even heard a rumor of yet. I have yet to find any books of his that I haven't enjoyed (currently rereading Elantris and going through the Reckoners Trilogy for the first time as I wait for SA3, haven't even touched Alcatraz yet), but if his other works aren't to your taste, that's totally fine. You aren't obligated to like everything he writes. But there's no denying that Brandon has written more words of consistently high quality than almost any other author currently working. Why don't we just let the man do his job?

Well, to create an unkeyed metalmind in the first place, you have to store your Identity. I think that this would essentially also remove your Connections, or at least allow you store "blank" Connection.

This WoB is actually very interesting to me. It's hard to tell because it's a verbal interaction and not written down by Brandon himself, but it seems to me like he's using Connection here in the Cosmere sense. This leads me to believe that Odium himself is not Trell, but rather an entity or being Connected to Odium is Trell. This could potentially be a lot of other beings depending on how strong the Connection is (I'm thinking of how Kelsier was Connected to Ruin despite not intentionally supporting him).

There were no Mistborn before The Lord Ruler ascended so it's likely that atium was essentially worthless, as (essentially) nobody could use it.

I finished the graphic novel earlier today. I have a copy of the prose version but I haven't actually read it. I would consider myself a fairly avid reader of comic books and graphic novels. With all those caveats: I very much enjoyed the graphic novel. It's not the best graphic novel I've ever read, nor is it my favorite Sanderson work. However, I thought it was generally well done, with a few specific problems. A lot of this thread has been fairly negative on the book. There are definitely some problems, but I would hate to discourage anybody from reading it. I felt like the pacing of the book was the biggest problem. It was generally very fast paced without any breaks, and it was difficult to tell how much time passed during the scene transitions. This isn't a problem that this graphic novel is alone in; even some graphic novels I enjoy very much have this problem. This ties in with another issue that someone pointed out. Despite this being a graphical medium, most of the pages are devoted largely to speech bubbles. I understand the desire to use as much of the original prose as possible in this sort of adaptation. That isn't a bad thing in and of itself. The problem is that almost every page is like that, which can impede the ability of the pictures to tell the story. I would love more panels of scenery or travel times or beats in conversation, but it's all very compressed down and there just doesn't feel like there's enough room for the story to breathe. I'm sure they need to compress a lot to fit the story into three graphic novel volumes. I was honestly pretty shocked when they announced there would only be three, rather than five (or eight as someone else suggested). The art was decent if a little inconsistent. Some panels were very clear and visually impressive, while others were cluttered and unclear. There seem to be a lot of extra lines on the faces which, at least for me, distracted from the scenery without adding any emotion to faces in the process. The unconventional panel structure was also distracting at times, especially when there were arrows telling me which panel to read next. You should never need arrows to direct the eye in a comic. The structure of the page is part of the flow and pace of the story. It would be like reading a page in a prose novel and having an arrow tell you to skip down to the paragraph at the end of the page and come back. I have a few other specific complaints, but overall I honestly really liked the story. The characters are strong, the magic is cool (though as of yet unexplained), the world is interesting. It's a little unfortunate, but I feel like the book is in a really awkward position. Fans of the Cosmere who aren't graphic novel readers will be disappointed by the inability to include the detail in the worldbuilding and magic systems that we expect from a Sanderson novel, while more experienced graphic novel readers who pick it up will likely consider it subpar graphic novel. Frankly, I think expecting to get either a novel's worth of information from this or a masterful graphic novel is foolish, let alone expecting to get both. It's an impossible task to balance the depth of worldbuilding in White Sand with the graphic novel form in the amount of space they allotted, just like it would be for any movie adaption of a Cosmere novel. There are legitimate criticisms one can make, and many of them have been made here already. I'd still say it's worth getting.

You can listen to the recording to confirm, but he doesn't specify Khriss in his statement. He says Taldain is currently inaccessible.

New England Sharder here! You can add me to Cambridge, MA if it pleases you.

These two threads are very helpful. They have the same list of Easter eggs but different discussion points.

I was just skimming through here and noticed that the post above says there are three Cosmere questions in the recording, but only two are listed in the thread anywhere. I listened to the recording and found the third (it starts around 11:35 in the video). The question is related to questions that have been asked in the past about how certain people living on Roshar are managing to live on Roshar. The question specifically asks if it would be possible for such a person to live on Scadrial instead of Roshar. Brandon: "Scadrial would be a lot harder, because getting the investiture out of things in Scadrial is tough. There are ways you could do it, but it would be much more difficult." Follow-up: "Does that have to do with the investiture being more directed?" Brandon: "It's more that the genetic component is a big part of it. The directed component - in Roshar it's just flowing around all over the place. If he could get to a Shardpool, he could feed off of that. But then he's at the Shardpool and that's kind of dangerous. Roshar is really the easiest place in the Cosmere for him to consistently get this kind of stuff. Taldain would not be bad either but it's inaccessible currently in the Cosmere."

Upon further inspection, it does actually seem like all the buttons share that behavior. The Shardcast one is just the one I'm near the most.

I'm not sure exactly how to phrase this, but it seems to me like the Shardcast button on the menu bar has a larger click-box than it really should. For example, in this thread, I'll go to the top and put my mouse on the forum name (17th Shard Discussion). Sometimes (not all the time) when I do this, the Shardcast button will light up as well, and clicking then will bring me to the Shardcast page. If you really want met to listen to the Shardcast this badly, you could have just asked

This is something I actually gave some thought to in a different context. There was a thread a while back discussing the differences between the Intents of various Shards, with one example being the differences between Ruin, Preservation, and Cultivation. The question boiled down to: since both Ruin and Cultivation are Intents that promote change, what exactly is the difference between them? The way I like to think about it is in terms of a quote from Hero of Ages regarding Ruin. It's from the Chapter 8 epigraph: I think of Cultivation as being the opposite of this: willing to destroy one thing if it means getting to build two more. In real life terms, Cultivation can prune flowers, destroying bits of them so that the entire plant grows and stays healthy. My personal theory on the boons/curses follows from this interpretation of Cultivation's Intent. I think that the curses that come with the boons are ultimately helpful, in the long run. It's hard to prove this since we only have about four specific examples of curses. From Coppermind and Way of Kings (Baxil's Interlude): 1. Dalinar can't remember his wife 2. Av's brother got numb hands and couldn't feel anything with them 3. Av's father saw the world upside down 4. Taravangian is dumb sometimes Even the fourth one here is implied rather than explicitly stated. I will admit that Av says most of the members of his family regretted their curses, which would imply they weren't helpful. I also want to point out, aside from my theory, that we really don't have much information on how the boons and curses really work. Unless the Nightwatcher specifically says "This is gonna happen from now on, and that's your curse", I think it's very possible that people feel certain effects but misinterpret the precise nature of the curse. A running theme of Brandon's books is that the characters don't usually fully understand the magic systems, and our information is always filtered through their eyes. In any case, I'm fully ready to be proven wrong when Oathbringer comes out.

This isn't specifically design related, but: what's the spoiler policy for the new Q&A board? The intent seems to be that new readers can browse pretty freely, which would imply tagging and hiding pretty much all spoilers. However, I think people are used to the Q&A thread which, by virtue of being on the Cosmere Theories board, did not need to have spoilers tagged. Either way, I didn't see it established anywhere.

Ah okay that makes sense. For some reason I just couldn't make sense of it.

Part 4, chapter 4 (Page 81 in the nook version supposedly) has the following: "As if he could harm even me" I'm not positive but it seems like "harm even" should be "even harm".

It's the one about accelerated aging. You linked to my original post here already, which was helpful as I had completely forgotten about it.

I think that the frame of reference of the source of the bubble (whether human or cube) must come into play somehow. In all the examples we've seen, the source is moving along with the bubble and the vehicle is either large/fast enough to Cognitively dominate (the train) or it isn't (the carriage). If the source stays still (relative to the planet) as in your example, I'm not sure that the bubble would get dragged along with the train. Now, if they were floating in a bubble above the train and then dropped onto the train while still inside the bubble, that might be a different story. The timing on that might be difficult though. Aside from all of that, which is essentially baseless speculation on my part, the bubble would pop as soon as the person moved outside it. So even if it gets dragged along with the train, it wouldn't be very useful without the person moving along with it. Also, it was really cool seeing my own question to Brandon cited in this thread. Feels like I've accomplished something with my life.

In Warbreaker, we learn that only the Awakener who Awakened the object can retrieve the Breath from it. Bands of Mourning spoilers:

We were actually discussing this in another thread a few days ago, and the only conclusion that satisfies me is that tapping Iron Feruchemy alters your interaction with the Higgs Field (which is the origin of mass as far as we know). Any other method of altering mass would seem to have side effects that we don't observe in the novels.

I have two potential theories here. 1. Bleeder was talking to Harmony through Wax. She wants to tell Harmony something, but obviously doesn't want to spike herself and communicate with him directly. She knows that Harmony can hear when Wax thinks, so she puts the message through Wax. In this case, the cross-talk is obviously intentional. 2. Bleeder was talking to whatever entity gave her the spike of the unknown metal (Trell? Autonomy?). It seems reasonable to me that, in light of the theories here on the forums that the new metal is a god metal, whichever being created the metal would also be able to communicate through it as Ruin and Preservation can. In this case, I don't believe the cross-talk is intentional, but Bleeder could be allowing Wax to overhear. Actually, that gives me another idea. 3. Bleeder wasn't talking to anybody, but she wanted to freak Wax out, so she claimed to be talking to someone else. I think, in any of these cases, Bleeder is talking about Wax. She is saying Wax is just another pawn of Harmony's. This fits in very well with the rest of the conversation and the ending of the book, where she tries to show him exactly that.

Yay for physics degrees! (Graduating next May with my B.S. in Physics). Changing the interaction with the Higgs Field seems like the most self-contained way of altering the mass without altering the overall picture of Newtonian Dynamics that seems to hold in the books. So I guess, continuing the trend of pedantism, rather than saying we have F = µ*m*a, where µ depends on the world and the magic system, we may have something more like F = m(µ)*a, where the overall relationship isn't altered but now m is some function of µ. This would allow for an asymptotic relationship in Feruchemy like Kurkistan suggested. I'm trying to think of a snappy name to call µ in this idea; I guess it represents, abstractly, the amount of magic you're using? Since there isn't one coefficient for all of Feruchemy; you can decrease or increase your mass by different amounts.

I'm a little late to this party, but I hope you won't mind if I join in on the speculation about Hemalurgic effects. I posted this last night after doing some thinking: So that's easily reconciled by saying that gold steals only the second quadrant of Physical Feruchemy (referred to as the Hybrid Quadrant on the wiki page), which comprises gold, electrum, cadmium, and bendalloy. All good here, right? Not quite. I found the answer to one question, but came up with a few more in the process. Gold steals the other quadrant of Physical Feruchemy; great. But gold is a pulling metal, whereas all the basic metals that stole Metallic Arts were pushing metals. Same thing for Aluminum: pulling metal, but it steals Enhancement Allomancy. I had managed to convince myself that the information about Hemalurgic Gold came from the RPG, so it may not have been correct. But the information about Hemalurgic Aluminum comes from Hero of Ages! So the pattern of pushing metals stealing Metallic Arts may not hold for higher metals. I'll cut to my point here. It really seems to me like the table of Hemalurgic attributes doesn't make a lot of sense. There is a pattern to the way that it works for the basic metals, but not only does that pattern not hold for the higher metals, there doesn't seem to be any kind of pattern at all. I don't know how much I believe the listings for Gold and Duralumin, but the attribute for Aluminum I can't dispute. What it seems like it should be, to me, is that the pattern is switched for higher metals and the attribute for Duralumin is just wrong. It seems to me that they should read like the following: Gold - Steals Physical (II) Feruchemy Aluminum - Steals Enhancement Allomancy Extrapolating from this, I would guess that we also have: Cadmium - Steals Temporal Allomancy Chromium - Steals Spiritual Feruchemy Then the other four higher metals steal human attributes. Is this something that has been discussed before? Any relevant Words of Brandon that I've missed? I'm relatively new to the forums here, so it feels more than likely that this has already been answered somewhere. I checked my books once I got home tonight, but there hasn't been an updated list of Hemalurgic abilities including the metals discovered since Hero of Ages. Thoughts? I think the pattern you have extrapolated also could be very possible. It personally seems more organized to me to follow the pattern of "one metal in each base-alloy pair takes human abilities, the other takes Metallic Arts", but I think that's just a personal bias. I have no evidence to support this over your pattern. It's unfortunate that Shadows of Self didn't tell us anything new about this table, but only added in a whole new realm of Hemalurgic ability to try and figure out.

Definitely as good a reason as any to be pedantic. It is weight in the Ars Arcanum, but as those are in-universe resources, I don't know that the writer of them knows the difference between weight and mass (we got an expy of Tesla in SoS, does that mean there already was one of Newton?).

Okay, here's a follow up for you. I'm not entirely sure if this is the place to discuss this, so feel free to suggest a better forum for this topic if there is one. It seems like there's something strange going on with the way the metals work Hemalurgically (obviously there's a lot of information we don't have at this time, which complicates things). Here's what I've been looking at: For basic metals, all the Pulling metals steal human attributes and all the Pushing metals steal the Allomantic/Feruchemical powers of that quadrant (e.g. Physical metal steals Physical Allomancy/Feruchemy while the other basic metals steal Mental Allomancy/Cognitive Feruchemy). Now, what got me started looking at this was that gold also steals Physical Feruchemy, and I thought it was weird that Physical Feruchemy would be doubled up. After a bit of research (read: I looked at the sources on The Coppermind), I found this WoB: So that's easily reconciled by saying that gold steals only the second quadrant of Physical Feruchemy (referred to as the Hybrid Quadrant on the wiki page), which comprises gold, electrum, cadmium, and bendalloy. All good here, right? Not quite. I found the answer to one question, but came up with a few more in the process. Gold steals the other quadrant of Physical Feruchemy; great. But gold is a pulling metal, whereas all the basic metals that stole Metallic Arts were pushing metals. Same thing for Aluminum: pulling metal, but it steals Enhancement Allomancy. I had managed to convince myself that the information about Hemalurgic Gold came from the RPG, so it may not have been correct. But the information about Hemalurgic Aluminum comes from Hero of Ages! So the pattern of pushing metals stealing Metallic Arts may not hold for higher metals. I'll cut to my point here. It really seems to me like the table of Hemalurgic attributes doesn't make a lot of sense. There is a pattern to the way that it works for the basic metals, but not only does that pattern not hold for the higher metals, there doesn't seem to be any kind of pattern at all. I don't know how much I believe the listings for Gold and Duralumin, but the attribute for Aluminum I can't dispute. What it seems like it should be, to me, is that the pattern is switched for higher metals and the attribute for Duralumin is just wrong. It seems to me that they should read like the following: Gold - Steals Physical (II) Feruchemy Aluminum - Steals Enhancement Allomancy Extrapolating from this, I would guess that we also have: Cadmium - Steals Temporal Allomancy Chromium - Steals Spiritual Feruchemy Then the other four higher metals steal human attributes. Is this something that has been discussed before? Any relevant Words of Brandon that I've missed? I'm relatively new to the forums here, so it feels more than likely that this has already been answered somewhere. I checked my books once I got home tonight, but there hasn't been an updated list of Hemalurgic abilities including the metals discovered since Hero of Ages. Thoughts?