Morsk

But if Hoid is a dragonsteel compounder anywhere, even in a world with near-zero canonicity, he can still compound canonicity and become more canon than WoB.

The edges probably aren't sharp, since at one point Joel was poking through holes in a broken line. That would be really stupid to do with something like broken glass, and Joel is knowledgeable enough and old enough that I don't think he'd do it if it were that dangerous.

I haven't read GRRM, but there's gore and sexual violence in Malazan, and I find it less disturbing than the WoT characters because of the context. Malazan presents those things as tragic, or the horrors of war; I don't like it, but no one's saying I'm supposed to like it. While in WoT, the characters engage in huge amounts of bullying, hazing, narcissism, and other cruelty, and it's presented as normal, even admirable. So WoT actually encourages the reader to treat people poorly, or at least to look the other way when others do, and I don't like that at all. Maybe the negative stuff in WoT is easier to "tune out" since it's not graphic. It's made me genuinely upset dozens of times though, far more than any other story.

Or even use something like a drawbridge, and send chalkings across it. I worry that the rock thing might be beyond anyone but Melony, since the chalkings would get confused, but a drawbridge is still simple. I wonder what happens if chalkings are drawn on posterboard, not on the ground. You could do some pretty annoying things with mobile Lines of Forbiddence.

I saw this too. Maybe they draw it with two hands, and the line doesn't activate until they take the chalk off the ground? Also I think there was even a special name for it once, "Mark's Cross". Although I could easily be misremembering the phrase or what it refers to, because I only read it once. But then why not do the same thing, to reinforce corners in the times Rithmatists boxed themselves in inside squares? I can be really sloppy and still make something that looks effective...

I bet the h in "Valhav" is silent, and it's just there to avoid spelling it as "Valav" in English, which we'd be tempted to pronounce differently.

Wow, I thought of this too when I was going to sleep last night. I would've forgotten without this thread. I don't understand whether acid permanently destroys them, or just disrupts them for a while. The ones at the end of the book were able to reform from acid, so a moat might just slow them down. But there's also the story of how in South America they used acid to keep chalkings from getting in from the north.

Are the Tor chapters exactly what's in the book, or was there more editing afterwards? I'm thinking about rereading those now, and then picking up the book later in the day when stores are open here.

I don't think we know. For the longest time, the series was going to be called the Way of Kings. I thought it was a bad name for a fantasy series, since it doesn't suggest anything fantasy or even action-oriented. (It could be 10,000 pages of old men whining to their sons about leadership...) It was a terrible fit for a world as exotic as Roshar, so I'm glad the series was renamed to something that sounds exotic. There's a thread with links to downloads of chapters, etc. It's huge so search for "liar". And that's just a theory I posted. Some people found it interesting or appreciated the attempt to make some sense out of Hoid's mysterious quotes, but I wouldn't say it's generally accepted or anything like that. (Dr. Who wasn't an inspiration for it, btw. I have nothing against the show but I don't watch television so I don't know a lot about it.)

My favorite part of Warbreaker was the fictional religions, and different characters' approaches to them. From D&D settings I developed a huge pet peeve against fictional religions where the existence and motivations of gods are obvious, and it loses all relevance to real religion. (If I woke up in a D&D universe, I'd seriously just pick the religion with the best afterlife and/or color scheme, and it would feel more like kissing up to a manager in hopes of promotions than anything religious or spiritual.) In the Warbreaker something obviously magical is happening, dead people returning to life, sometimes with visions. But there's significant room for doubt and interpretation, leading to very different experiences for different characters. Warbreaker didn't make me resort to "suspension of disbelief" for how characters can take the religious controversies seriously.

Isn't it just that all noblemen are beaten to the point of near-death as children? The culture really is that thorough in doing it to everyone. The only part I don't understand is what happens to a noblemen whose power was too weak to come out from a beating, but could still be snapped by the Mists?

In addition to that, if Shards were blind to waveforms they'd be blind to everything. It seems a bit much. I think it's gems because of something in Mistborn However! The "waveforms" thing is onto something in a cosmere sense, where sound and wave terminology has come up on every Shardworld so far. It's just not Roshar's focus. It might not be any deeper than hand-waving, with "waves" instead of "strings". I'm not expecting much from it; however good Brandon is with details, even he has to stop somewhere. But maybe we'll see something. What would insights about "waves" be good for? If it's good for something and not just terminology, there'd have to be a way to use refraction or interference or other wave phenomena to do ... well, something.

Szeth isn't a counterexample until we know how he got the magic. If he has Odium instead of a spren, or if the Shardblade has a spren simulator inside it, that fits not having a spren, without changing how magic works on the planet. On Scadrial we don't stop saying magic is genetic just because Hemalurgy creates exceptions. I don't see any significance in the vagueness of Brandon's "in tWoK it depends on what some one has done" except that he was being vague to avoid spoilers. I like your theory that it's actions that matter not decisions, but it's still possible that "actions" is just a spoiler-free way of saying "bonding spren".

Brandon originally had the idea of multiple mist spirits, before deciding that there was only one spirit that was the remnant of Leras. I figured he just left that one description of multiple spirits, since it's alright for it to be wrong because it's Alendi's PoV and he's seeing it from a distance. But that's a complete guess on my part; this is a great question to ask.

You haven't missed anything yet at Chapter 60. In general, Brandon's stories pack huge amounts of new information and surprises into the endings. Chapter 60 may feel like it's "near the end" but there are a ton of things left to happen still.

What were the old names? Now I'm dying of curiosity!

Oh, yeah I agree that's a good question. I like the inference the Coppermind draws based on that [30] source, but it would be nice if we could get a clearer answer too.

I think it's pretty weird, although it's explained well enough by Hoid being very old, and also by him liking word games. The "words on a page" quote is the one that makes me look for a magical explanation before anything else; it's so weird that it suggests a magical explanation, while the others are only encouraging because they're compatible with magical explanation. I don't really want an answer from Brandon, at least not now. He gave us so much stuff in TES and the Reddit AMA; I'd rather wait for Stormlight 2 at this point, since it's likely to give us more about Shadesmar and Hoid. Then maybe ask "Did Hoid have a mother? A childhood?"

I'm glad some people liked this. It's pretty weird, but Hoid's quotes are so weird that it's hard to come up with anything that fits. I just reread the Coppermind's page on Hoid, and it has another weird "identity issues" quote from Warbreaker. I'm going to quote the whole section because the page makes an interesting observation based on an interview too: So Hoid is either referring to himself in the third person, or saying his master also had a strange identity issue. It's not giving me any new ideas, or confirming the theory, but at least it fits and doesn't contradict anything which is encouraging.

I guess I was merging Jasnah's comment and what the Ars Arcanum says about "Blood, all non-oil liquid" being under a single category. Maybe they wouldn't say that water is a kind of blood, but just that it's close enough to blood that Soulcasting can be used to create it?

Oh, I forgot that whole magic system! Instead of Lightweaving, we could take a white cat and give it 10,000 breaths to make rainbows. Or put any color cat inside a pop tart with white frosting.

I used Linux for a few years in college, because Windows 98 was crashing several times per day and ruining my productivity. But I went back to Windows in 2000 because the new version was stable enough, and I trust Windows Update to apply security updates. It's been something like 15 years though; I might try Ubuntu one of these days and see if the user experience isn't better than what I remember. I find Apple products extremely creepy. I get the feeling that Apple is trying to make the user experience "fun and rewarding", in the same way video game and junk food companies try to engineer products to be addictive. I doubt it's harmful, and maybe I'm just weird for getting this impression, but it creeps me out and I don't like it at all. I prefer something more straightforward.

I haven't been thinking of my allergies as chronic illness, but after this last weekend it's probably better that I do; I'd planned all week to visit my brother and his friends and had to leave after 2 hours because I was just too sick there. And I suppose I've let myself be treated poorly by people who think I "hate" their pets or their house, or that I'm being "picky", or something like that. If I'd thought of it as chronic illness, I'd probably present it in a way that seems more legitimate to people.

Have you avoided spoilers? Maybe what we're lacking is a simple, spoiler-free answer here. You can get an idea for how much we know and how much we don't by reading the Coppermind or other forums, but you're bound to come across spoilers for other series in the process. Here's my try at a non-spoiler answer that I'll submit to the FAQ thread if you think it's helpful. Q: What are Honor and Odium? Some type of gods? Super-powered aliens? A: Honor is another name for the god that calls himself the Almighty in Dalinar's last vision. The clue for this is the Chapter 2 title, "Honor is Dead". He mentions a goddess Cultivation in the same scene, and of course there's Odium. Exactly what a god is in this setting, and its limitations, and the origin of its power, is a mystery so far. Before dying, Honor briefly mentions other worlds, with other stars going out in his vision. Odium is once called "most dangerous of the sixteen." The Letter in the chapter epigraphs mentions Odium killing gods called Aona and Skai on another world. So there are other gods, but at this point it's all backstory about what makes Odium so menacing. Some of those gods show up in Brandon's other fiction, but the topic is a mystery that's pieced together from scattered bits of evidence. (And we still don't know very much.) It's not told "in order", so there's no need to read other books before Stormlight to experience it. You can read Stormlight first, and then ask "Is this another god like Odium? Is this something Odium did on another world?" when reading other books, just as well as someone who reads Stormlight later can ask those things in hindsight.

Create the Nyan Cat by using Hemalurgy to give Windrunning and Lightweaving to cats. (I say this is useless, because the appropriate use of Hemalurgy is Catquisitors, not Nyan Cats.) edit: For those tragically unaware of the existence of Nyan Cat And the best part is Hemalurgy is open-ended, so if we get sound-based magic capable of creating a live soundtrack for Nyan Cat, we can spike that in later, and maybe add Soothing to explain how people can watch Nyan Cat for hours without getting bored.