Jozomby

I think a big question here is "would two different vessels of the same shard have metals that act differently?" As far as I know we don't have an answer to that. If the metal reflects the vessel, then yes, I would expect ettmetal to be more "harmonius." But if the metal is just a manifestation of the power itself in physical form, regardless of who holds the power, then it wouldn't surprise me that it's more "discordant." Given the way ettmetal acts it seems like the second explanation is more likely. It seems likely that anyone who held Ruin and Preservation would have highly reactive ettmetal as their godmetal, regardless of how they interpreted the shards. But I don't think we have confirmation on this either way. Rhythm of War Spoilers:

In regards to forging to become an Elantrian, we have this wob: As far as other magical abilities go, we have this: (I cut out a bunch because this is a long one) As far as stealing stamps via Hemalurgy, I'm not sure. We do know that forging rewrites your spiritweb, and Hemalurgy rips off pieces of your spiritweb, so I would be inclined to think that you could steal the effects of a soulstamp with Hemalurgy.

Here's the wob:

I think I've got another way to phrase this - let me know if I'm wrong. Imagine that I slow down time for everything around me. I can now walk around, interact with stuff, etc. and to everyone else it looks like I'm moving super fast. On the opposite side, if I speed up time for everything around me, now everyone else sees me moving super slowly. I think this is what the OP is proposing - the idea that storing/tapping "speed" is simply changing the way time flows for you, so that you interact with the world on a quicker or slower scale. I think one way to support this theory would be to look at mental speed. If this really is the way feruchemical steel works, then they would also be thinking "faster" (or slower) during this time. Since time slows/speeds up for them, everything they do (motion, thought, metabolism, etc.) would be effected. Do we have confirmation on whether tapping physical speed also speeds up your mind? I would assume so, since if your thinking didn't speed up you'd probably just crash into all sorts of stuff. But the fact that mental speed is a separate attribute that can be stored (zinc) makes me uncertain.

Perhaps a stretch, but this has me wondering if this alien in the armor is a singer speaking to the rhythms.

Given how many creatures here have close ties to the cognitive realm (mind hunting) I wouldn't be surprised at all if the cognitive realm here was seriously wonky. Maybe these creatures reflect on the other side as well (as full monsters, rather than the normal floating lights) or maybe there's something else happening. But the cognitive and physical seem unusually close here.

I have chickens! Well, my wife does. Three of them, though I don't know the breed (they came with our house lol).

+1 to the skybreaker, also because of the flying. I wonder if the box used with the shard gun was some sort of ammo pack, to get over the issue with the spren needing to stay in a single piece. Maybe physical bullets, or maybe just investiture.

I definitely read this at first as "Give me your pain" but with a certain character swapped out for an evil Math Overlord instead

Are you actively trying to take down the site? I don't know anything about what this site is running on, but as someone who builds websites for a living, my immediate reaction is "they're trying to DOS the site!" But kudos for planning this where the site maintainers can see it, that way they can plan for it. And just to be clear, this isn't an attack on you. It was just a funny reaction I had to this post - this doesn't really seem harmful.

Ooh, I like this. Even though we can just handwave most things that shards do and say "they're practically omnipotent" I love it when things conform to the rules that have been set up. It would be really cool, for example, if we were to find out that when Rashek was moving Scadrial around that he was using a god-powered version of the gravitation surge, or allomantic push/pull, etc. So who knows if Brandon had time bubbles in mind when he had shards creating/reshaping worlds, but that's the most satisfying idea I've heard so far for how geologic-timescale-constrained things could be happening in shorter periods of time.

This seems relevant, since there seems to be some disagreement about whether Roshar is artificial, and whether it has volcanoes and plate tectonics: I will note though that this doesn't state the whole planet is artificial, just the continent. This wob seems to say that the entire planet is artificial, though, given the unstable orbit: As for Nalthis, I don't know of any wobs saying it is artificial, but if it's a natural planet, the only way there would be no fossils is if it was completely barren, and then changed suddenly by a shard to support life. Which really isn't that different from being artificial, since any coal, oil, etc would still have to have been created by the shard, rather than naturally.

Agreed. I suppose what weirds me out here is that (presumably) Ruin & Preservation created coal deposits on Scadrial, but Endowment didn't create fossils on Nalthis, and Vasher doesn't think Adonalsium created fossils on Roshar. Since coal and fossils develop in similar ways, it seems a bit strange to have one but not the other. Not saying the shards wouldn't do this, it's just a bit weird. But I expect that there's probably quite a few weird effects like this, since so many planets were created artificially. A couple other ones that come to mind: - Mountains on Roshar. Brandon has stated that there's no tectonic activity, so are these mountains all sedimentary? Not likely. More likely Adonalsium just put them there. - All animals on Scadrial. Ruin & Preservation kind of "poofed" them all into existence, so following any kind of evolution record back would be impossible - Gemhearts. I don't know enough about natural gemstone formation to state this unequivocally, but it doesn't seem super possible for gemstones to form naturally on Roshar. So we've got this strange bio-gemstone-formation instead. The more I think about this the weirder creating a planet "in media res" is. You have to make sure the atmosphere is stable, there's the correct natural processes to support it, the orbit is stable (or in the case of Roshar, stable enough for now) the ecosystems are balanced, the resources needed are there, etc. I suppose it's not surprising if the shards skipped over placing something unnecessary (fossils) and just plonked down the needed end products instead.

That's a good point about the coal. It makes me wonder how that developed. The timelines for coal, natural gas, and petroleum are still mind-numbingly long - longer than we have any reason to believe the Cosmere planets have been around for. Petroleum: ~50 million years Coal: "millions" of years Natural Gas: Appears to be quicker, and I couldn't quickly find a number for it. And Zahel clearly is talking about fossils, not just cephalopods: Right there, he states that Nalthis is too new to have the thing that he's holding. Ergo, not enough time for fossils to develop. It's pretty clear that he's talking about fossils in general, not just the one specific animal.

In Chapter 15 of RoW Zahel talks about fossils, and how Nalthis doesn't have any, and Roshar likely doesn't either. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that Scadrial (and any other artificially-created worlds) probably won't have fossils either. On one hand this is obvious, due to the timelines involved, but hey, who's to say a shard couldn't just create the fossils at the same time they created the rest of the planet? Apparently, though, assuming Zahel knows what he's talking about, they didn't. I was thinking about this, and I realized that, unless the shards deliberately created them, there aren't going to be any fossil fuels either. No petroleum, natural gas, coal, etc. This is super interesting, because it's going to really impact the way Cosmere societies develop. I would propose that Rosharans are creating fabrials, and Scadrians allomantically-powered-machines, not because that was easier than doing what we did on Earth, but because they can't do what we did. They don't have the natural resources to have a good-old earth-style industrial revolution with coal-based steam power and such. And then moving forward, are we going to see plastics and other materials that are based off petroleum? I'm trying to imagine Mistborn era 3 without plastic, and it's a bit tough to wrap my mind around. I'm even more interested than before to see how these societies are going to develop technologically. It's going to be weird and awesome.

Ok, here's a wob on the size of the beads: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/174/#e8533

So I was reading up about random topics, as one does, and I came across the topic of grain entrapment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_entrapment Apparently this is a decently common workplace hazard - the wikipedia article says 26 people died from grain entrapment in 2010. It seems it's much harder to escape from a pile/pit/container/etc. of grain than I would have expected. The article states a few things that are interesting (and perhaps even relevant!): Apparently if you are submerged above your knees, you cannot escape the grain unaided. This blew my mind. I don't know the physics here, so if someone wants to chime in with an explanation that would be awesome. (Or I'll probably just end up looking one up ) Apparently the force from the weight of the grains is seriously intense. Again, I'm just going off that Wikipedia article, but people described not even being able to wiggle their toes inside their shoes, the pressure was so great. So of course, after reading about this, my first thought was Shadesmar. I'm no expert here, but it seems to me like a similar phenomenon might occur to someone submerged in beads. Obviously, though, from the sequence in Oathbringer when our characters are walking across the bottom of the bead ocean, this is not the case. Of course, it's possible Brandon just got the physics wrong. Assuming he didn't, though, here's a few things that might mitigate the effects of the "bead entrapment": I believe the beads are perfectly spherical. Do we have confirmation on this? Regardless, they're smooth and probably aren't going to have a ton of friction with each other. I imagine this will mitigate the effects of entrapment, though I really don't know. The beads are larger than grain. At first I thought this might resolve the problem almost completely, but apparently over half of grain entrapments occur in corn (maize), and corn is a fairly large grain. I believe the beads are still larger, but it makes me wonder. How dense are the beads? They need to be dense enough for buoyancy to work (since ships sail on them) but perhaps if they weigh quite a bit less than grain, then that might assist here. It could just be magic. People think about the shadesmar beads like an ocean, so they behave like a liquid. The more I try to make everything work in my head (especially the buoyancy bit) the more likely this seems. This makes me really want to fill a large container with marbles and see how hard it is to move around in.

That's a good point about the highstorms - my understanding is that on Earth the reason limestone is from ancient seabeds is because that's where the shells and such are. On Roshar, we've got plenty of cremlings, corals, etc. all on land, all being covered in layers of crem fairly rapidly, so yeah, I imagine that would facilitate the formation of limestone. Also, after I posted this I remembered a yeasted batter-based flatbread that I ran across a while back. There's an Ethiopian flatbread called Injera that's made with teff flour (a gluten free grain) and uses wild yeast to rise. It's definitely a flatbread - it's more "spongy" than "fluffy" but it's closer to a pancake than, say, a tortilla would be. But it just means that a yeasted batter is definitely possible. I honestly don't know - I'm not familiar with the chemical processes either. A quick read over the Wikipedia article for nixtamalization makes me think this would be weird at the very least - it sounds like the process dissolves at least parts of the cell walls, and replaces/mixes around nutrients in the grain that would have been used to let a plant grow from the seed. I'm conjecturing here, but I suspect that a pre-nixtamalized grain wouldn't be able to germinate. Then again, this is Roshar, where things are weird.

So my shower thoughts this morning ended up on Roshar, specifically the grains on Roshar. Forgive me if this is something that's already been discussed, but I had some interesting (to me, at least) thoughts about what we've been told. Now the good news is that there are no huge issues here. There are a couple things that don't add up to me, but there are ways for Brandon to resolve all these - it was just interesting to think about and wonder if he considered this when world building. I mentioned this to my wife, and she thought you all might appreciate this. So here goes: To start, we're told that lavis corresponds roughly to Earth corn, and tallew to Earth rice. https://wob.coppermind.net/events/409/#e13805 Unfortunately I couldn't find a wob for tallew, but here's the coppermind article that mentions it being similar to rice: https://coppermind.net/wiki/Tallew#cite_note-The_Way_of_Kings-37-chapter-1 Now the first problem we run into is that neither corn nor rice contain gluten. For the most part, Brandon has stuck to foods that don't require gluten. He mentions boiling tallew, using lavis for flatbreads (think tortillas), etc. And this mostly works, except for nixtamalization. If you're not familiar with it, nixtamalization is the process where corn is cooked in lime (the mineral, not the fruit) to change it into something that you can actually use for flatbreads. Ground corn on its own (cornmeal) doesn't hold together very well. In order to use a corn-like grain on the scale we're talking about in Roshar, and for things like chouta, you're going to need to nixtamalize it. For a bit I thought that the lime would be an issue, but then I figured that they mine enough stone on Roshar that it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to assume they've mined limestone and figured out how to extract the lime. (Of course, that assumes that limestone, a sedimentary rock formed in ancient seabeds, would be present on the Roshar continent, even though we've been led to assume that this continent was created more or less as it currently exists, without ever having been on the sea floor. But I'm making some assumptions there, and I'm not a geologist, so I'm going to ignore that.) Alternately, since rockbud shells burn, and I believe there's soap on Roshar, I'm going to assume that they have access to rockbud-ash lye, and they could also use this for the nixtamalization process. I don't think they would use wood-ash. Wood is too valuable. Once they've got the nixtamalized corn, then they need to grind it. And this is a wet grind, producing an already-hydrated dough, perfect for flatbreads. Not super portable, though, so there would need to be mills in the warcamps (and everywhere else too, obviously. Just maybe should be more noticeable in the warcamps), as well as areas where the grain was nixtamalized (assuming you can't soulcast pre-nixtamalized pre-ground lavis. I honestly have no idea if this is possible.) So that's quite a bit of text to say that yes, flatbreads are possible with Rosharan resources, but they require a few processes that we haven't seen on-screen and that tbh Brandon may not have considered. So on to the issue that I referenced before - gluten. Now, I'm just going to get this out of the way and admit that Brandon can fix this by saying "actually, tallew contains gluten" or "every gluten-containing bread you've seen onscreen is made with wheat exported from Shinovar" or some such. But for our purposes, given that pancakes were everywhere in Yeddaw, I'm going to assume that they're making them with lavis or tallew. If that's the case, I don't have any good explanations for this. Given that these are not described as flatbreads, I initially thought it was safe to assume that they're fluffy. Which would mean some sort of gluten structure. Or additives. It's possible that they're using xanthan gum or the like, though this seems like a stretch to me. Still, it seems like the likely solution to this is either "tallew contains gluten" or "they're using whatever that Thaylen buckwheat stuff is, or another grain I haven't told you about, since they're out West." (Or, see below, another solution could be "these aren't pancakes, they're just flatbread.") Last one, then. How are they getting these pancakes to rise? Now, this one is a little less of an issue, since he's actually addressed it: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/394/#e12998 This leads me to believe that either he forgot about the pancakes when he gave this wob, and they're doing yeasted pancakes (which sounds weird to me, but could work. idk, I've never tried) or more likely they're really just another form of flatbread, and they're not fluffy. Which ruins my image of Lift running around the city stealing piping hot fluffy bread disks a little, but I can live with it. (I will note that it's highly unlikely that these are the quickbread pancakes we're familiar with, which use bicarbonate of soda, which in our world wasn't used in cooking until the mid to late 19th century. Given differences in progression of technology, it's possible they would have this, but I would be surprised if it was an ingredient commonly available to the masses.) So there you have it. Nothing earth shattering, (or plains shattering? eh? eh?) but just my morning muses. I don't think anything's "broken" here, per se. Brandon has addressed the gluten and rising bits mostly satisfactorily, but I think there's still a bit missing around the nixtamalization. And just to reiterate, all of this could be easily solved by Brandon just saying "oh, yeah, things are different on Roshar." Anyways, I think it's just a fun little corner of the world building that hasn't been completely fleshed out, and would require a couple logical jumps to get working.

Huh, that's really interesting. I wonder if eventually you would reach a point where it was difficult to patrol and monitor your construction. I'm imagining something like the following series of events: Group of people gets the idea to create a massive geographic construction granting them godly levels of power Said group of people works for a long time setting all this up They become the most powerful (by a long shot) people on the planet, and as such make enemies These enemies come and try and break down walls, or divert rivers through roads, etc. Depending on how large the construction is, and how may people are in the group, the group may have a difficult time keeping a constant eye on the entire thing and protecting it all. There's definitely some counters to that, though. For example, this presupposes that everyone in the world knows how the city of Elantris works. Which, as shown in the book, they do not. So if nobody notices the huge construction project, or associates it with the massive jump in power, then I can't see any problem with this. I mean there's always room for Brandon to jump in and establish a "max bandwidth" on the amount of investiture one can draw, but I'm not aware of any rule like that up to this point. Anyways, my two cents. I could also imagine the logistics of getting a group of people to work together on a massive undertaking increasing exponentially with the size of the project. But hey, in the real world we built the pyramids, so clearly projects on that scale are possible.

Whoops, my mistake, sorry about that

Here's a wob for using regular duralumin and surgebinding together: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/381/#e12774 So by extension, it seem like compounding duralumin, which makes duralumin's regular effect even stronger, would also work, resulting in an insanely strong surge.

Yup! Here's the wob: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/134/#e2031

Is anyone else still seeing the progress bar on his website display 47%? (I've confirmed it's not browser cache) It's a tiny little thing, but has been bothering me

While I can see Venli flashbacks being a lot of fun from a "cosmere-nerd" point of view (read: all of us) I worry that doing flashbacks for Venli rather than Eshonai could adversely affect the earlier books. To be clear, I'm talking purely about narrative flow. I think it could feel really strange for someone reading the series all the way through (at least once the first 5 are complete) to spend so much time with Eshonai in the earlier books, only for her to die and never show up again. It makes it seem like the earlier books were misplotted, with narrative threads that kind of just... hang. I was ok with Eshonai dying specifically because there was the promise of more information about her with the flashbacks - Brandon always talks about fulfilling your promises to your readers, and he's promised more with Eshonai. To be clear, though, I don't think that Eshonai flashbacks are the only way to fulfill this promise. They might be the cleanest, but I think that other ways are possible (showing Eshonai in the Venli flashbacks, having characters refer to her, etc.) So I hope that if he goes the Venli route, he finds a way to wrap up the narrative promises he's made with Eshonai.