digitalbusker

1 hour ago, Vissy said:

Put Shallan in a room with Mraize and 10 out of 10 times Shallan is going to walk out of there with an eyeless Mraize lying on the floor behind her.

Certainly if Shallan (or whoever) manages to maneuver him into that situation, Mraize has already lost. That's not where the actual contest is.

Despite the way the WoB is worded at the top, I think what we actually know is that strawberries are red, not that tomatoes are strawberries. Metaphorically speaking.

ETA: Not that that's necessarily a problem for this theory; it's certainly true that not all of the spren "enlightened" by Sja-Anat are red. Personally I think that's because the corruption is over. If we could watch it happen, there might well be a red flash.

It's an interesting idea, and I do think there's something going on with the Origin.

I see a couple issues. I'm not sure any one of them is fatal, but:

We see one can opened, and it happens to contain fish. That's not enough to say "most" of the canned food available in Roshar's Shadesmar is fish. 

Azure certainly would have mentioned this if she knew about it, which means the only worldhopper in a position to foreshadow this just happened to come to Roshar in a nonstandard way.

You're too quick to dismiss the possibility that the canned food is being imported from somewhere else. Preserving food for weeks or months of transit and then storage is literally what canning is for.

3 hours ago, Isilel said:

The skyships probably not yet, but they might very well build fabrial barges that float a foot or so over the ground and can be towed by men. That would already greatly increase the speed of shipping of goods overland, as chulls move much slower than humans, as well as allow them to test and refine part of the technolgy without mortal risk

The thing is, they don't have a "hover a foot off the ground" fabrial. Assuming they're using something like the archery platform setup, the altitude of the barge will be independent of the elevation of the ground under it (although presumably there'll be some frame-of-reference tricks to keep it from just tangenting off into space).

11 minutes ago, SallyA said:

[OB] ... Speaking of Pattern, I did not notice at which point he became separated from Shallan and she did not miss his presence!

. . . AND THEN  . . Pattern had to be rescued from the palace (which was being deconstructed) by Wit! 

Its a nice piece of writing, I just totally missed the reasoning behind it!

 

That wasn't Pattern. That was another Cryptic. Presumably the one trying to bond Elhokar.

Drive by Thread Necro:

Miniature Giant Space Minks!

1 hour ago, Subvisual Haze said:

An incredibly conspicuous giant spren that regularly performs a weird magic thing on local humans seems about as likely to be The Sibling as Vivenna is.

Oh, see, that's a common misconception, but it's just article confusion. Vivenna is a sibling. HTH!

I think it's probably a mistake to assume we know everything Jasnah can and can't do with Transportation.

1 hour ago, Hsien99 said:

Do you think Radiants can give birth have a family etc?

The Chapter 59 epigraph:

The myth of the Tranquiline Halls has two parts:

1. We had to leave the last place we lived...

2. ...because of an invasion.

Actual human history fits 1 but not 2.

Actual Listener history fits 2 but not 1.

They're both applicable, but they're both inaccurate.

That said, while I appreciate the desire to highlight Vorinism's appropriation of Listener culture, I find the assertion that Roshar is the "real" TQH to be needless semantics.

I'm not sure why people keep bringing up emotional Allomancy as especially useful against Kaladin. If anything, the guy with Major Depression should be better at fighting through that than average. Depending on what you did, he might not even notice.

That's not to say that a skilled emotional Allomancer like Breeze or Allrianne couldn't seriously mess with Kaladin. But Kelsier's not that.

When the Lopen is visiting the wounded soldier in Chapter 121, he shows him how to open a bottle of beer one handed.

Quote

Lopen rolled up his trouser leg with one hand. He pressed the bottle—top first—to his leg and then, with a quick flick, twisted off the cap. He raised the bottle toward the man.

I didn't think twice about this the first time though, but on my reread: why would Roshar have metal bottlecaps? How long has that been a thing for us?

On 1/31/2018 at 7:46 PM, Mistborn Surgebinder said:

Meanwhile, our female hero is also grappling with possible feelings for a brooding but witty lowborn who also has innate powers and is really good with them, whose name starts with K.

Wait, what? Who? You don't mean.... Ew! Gross.

I'm choosing to believe that it's just been a while since you read Mistborn.

Also: here, you dropped this. *hands you a slightly dented microphone*

I will always divide my tips with the back of house staff!

1 hour ago, Calderis said:

@digitalbusker the reason I take the Feverstone keep vision as meaningful is that the events are based off of real events. They are memories turned into an interactive program.

And more recently. 

So while the characters that Dalinar steps into, and the actions in reaction to him, are fabrications, I believe that the version of events shown is close to truth. 

I think you're right about that, but it's important (to me, anyway) to remember that the Stormfather visions are reenactments, and as such we're getting them with the biases of not one but two narrators baked in.

I get thematically why we assume the Fourth Oath will be something about accepting failure, but all the other oaths have been affirmative and external. "I Will $do_something."

How do you adjudicate an oath about how you feel about stuff?

The problem with using the Feverstone Keep vision as evidence for a theory of the Recreance is the glyphs in the corner of the screen for Dramatic Reenactment.

Now I do think it's more likely than not that something like that did happen, more or less. Honor doesn't seem like he'd be big on dramatic license. But I'm still way of any sentence that starts with "Feverstone Keep shows..."

4 hours ago, CrazyRioter said:

Humans are fond of sweeping generalizations really. It's hard to stop.

#notallhumans

1 hour ago, Weltall said:

We don't know it was caused by surgebinding as such, but Brandon did make an annotation on someone's map at a signing that pointed to the Plains and said 'great magic unleasehd here' which more or less implies manipulation of the surges in some way, whether it was human surgebinders or Odium-aligned voidbinders. Same fundamental forces being manipulated, just by different means. Either way it doesn't really matter because the humans who fled Ashyn weren't using the exact same magic system as the Rosharans but they still ruined their world with it, it all comes down to evidence that magic can have cataclysmic effects if misused. But as others have mentioned, it's likely to have been a number of factors adding up rather than any one thing that drove the Radiants to do what they did.

Probably not Team Odium, per the WoR epigraphs:

Quote

"They blame our people / For the loss of that land. / The city that once covered it / Did range the eastern strand. / The power made known in the tomes of our clan / Our gods were not who shattered these plains."    Song of Wars, 55th stanza

Just driving by to say: anybody who feels the need to repeat the old saw about high intelligence and people skills not going together, please, just don't.

It's a cliche, it's toxic, and even if it's true (which I do not grant), who benefits from spreading it? What possible good is brought into the world from this idea, aside from giving people an excuse to feel better about their perceived lack of Attribute X by consoling themselves that at least they still have Attribute Y?

Take people as individuals. Don't get into the habit of believing you can infer things about somebody from one small piece. That way lies darkness.

I'm open to the idea that some of the things whose causes we think we know are actually part of some Shardic long game, but inducing a bunch of his acolytes to break their oaths, or even appear to, seems sufficiently against Honor's Intent to rule him out as Secret Recreance Chessmaster.

42 minutes ago, Blackace said:

P.s. I think when Sanderson referred the Parshendi as Neanderthal, I think he means the difference in brain power between humans and a dull form Parshendi

That is outdated science, I'm afraid. Neanderthals were not dumb, as best we can tell. They were outcompeted by Cro-Magnon for reasons that probably had to do with dietary requirements, environmental changes, and hunting techniques.

The fact that most humans think of parsh as lesser beings, despite the fact that there's been small but significant interbreeding, is actually a pretty good Neanderthal parallel by itself.

20 hours ago, Leyrann said:

I thought that he maybe thought the Roshar acceleration constant wasn't "0.7 g", but rather "0.7 m/s^2", with him talking about the "double digit" Lashings.

I see. No, I just wasn't showing my work.

The Wikipedia entry for G-LOC says that somebody who is trained and fit and wearing a g-suit shouldn't start having trouble until about 9g. I figure without the g-suit we can knock off a couple, which gets us to 7g, which, coincidentally, is 10 lashings on a world with 0.7g gravity. Hence "double digit lashings".

Tada!

On 1/29/2018 at 4:36 AM, Doomdrinker said:

I wonder if lightweaving could be used to make you invisible, that could certainly be useful in a battle.

Probably not, except in the perfect camouflage sense of putting an image in front of you that shows what's behind you, which would be too much for a mere mortal to manage in a battle situation.

There might be some kind of super advanced Illumination application that bends the light around you or allows it to pass through you but then you're blind.

That last part goes for @hoiditthroughthegrapevine's concealed archers, too, although making a view slot in the blind would work, and still be really hard to spot from any distance.

ETA: Show up for a plateau run with what looks like twenty bridge crews, ten with full armor and ten in vests and sandals. Actually, each of the ones that look unarmored are just one guy in armor with a really big shield holding a gem. The ones that look armored aren't, but they do have an actual bridge.