Hoiditthroughthegrapevine

That's pretty cool, but leave it to the bug world to take it to the next level. The Bombardier Beetle, using Hydroquinone, Hydrogen Peroxide and an enzymatic catalyst can create an explosion within its abdomen to shoot out the boiling hot, caustic mixture from its backside. (Image below spoilered because it's a looping gif). From the KQED Deep Look article about the Bombardier Beetle The world is indeed a weird and fascinating place.

These are great! Here's one that's not milky, or dark, but rather bittersweet. The Wake "Grandpa always said he wanted to go out like that, but I never thought it would happen". Placing a rose upon his chest, she smiled looking at his beatific face, the corners of his mouth stained brown. "100 candy bars in a single hour. Yep, death by chocolate."

Granted. You're put in stasis for a thousand years, and the executors of your estate have dutifully placed a copy of everything that Brandon ever wrote during his lifetime in your cryogenic vault including photostatic copies of grocery lists, random musings on the back of envelopes while he was on hold on the phone, etc. After your thousand year sleep you see your mountainous accumulation of all the works Brandon ever created ( even the hundreds of titles co-written by Brandon-bot in the 2050's). Your cryochamber includes a food synthesizer, so for 3 solid months you do nothing but read and reread all of Brandon's books. All the secrets of the Cosmere are laid bare, all you questions have been answered with satisfying resolutions. You are completely content. When you emerge from your cryo chamber, what looks to be a mac classic on a hover board swerves within inches of your face. You struggle to see as your eyes adjust to the bright light of day. All around you see metal structures, and to your left the crappy, tinny sound of a robotic bird pierces your ear. The bird is perched on some sort of strange metal tree. You flag down a passing hover car, and when the window rolls down you see no one inside, then the car rudely yells "Get back, you'll scratch my paint flesh-bag". You have read all of Brandon's works, but you have no one to discuss them with. You are in fact the last human on earth. The good news is that Brandon-bot is still around and putting out books faster than you are biologically capable of reading them. Most of them are surprisingly good except the Fridge-Light Archive, those are total garbage. *Edit* Doh, Ninja'd. @SirWolfe I wish for an unsealed bronze metalmind. Granted. You are the proud owner of an unsealed bronze metalmind that has been promptly resealed through the process of vitrification in a 3' x 3' solid cube of glass. Quite the handsome paperweight you got. I wish hotdogs were health food.

Oh how nice! There are six suited florists here to give me some flowers, but why is that guy loading a bullet magazine into that bouquet and attaching a silencer to that rose? The Nightwatcher says "Awwww, that's so sweet", and suddenly you find that you are looking out of your sister's eyes...it was her request to get a 17th shard account, but it's your account! Now your sister, after she swapped into your body did age 6 months, but unfortunately you'll have to wait 6 months to setup a new account. But since you were so sweet the Nightwatcher gave you an everlasting lollipop. I wish that I could, without dying, travel past the event horizon of a black hole, with a firefly traveling companion ( who likewise wouldn't die) and see what happens to the light it emits.

Granted. The Nightwatcher, looking more pale than usual, suddenly starts talking to about packet routing, internet latency and many other such abstruse particulars about how the internet works. Finnally she shows you the following image highlighting the problem (Spoilered below) if you look closely, your entry is above mine, but your reply hadn't registered before I submitted mine. Your post says clearly "posted 2 hours ago" while mine says "posted 1 hour ago". This seems to be a network latency issue, but it is bizarre. You might want to mention this on the 17th Shard tech support page if it keeps happening. Your bane was that you had to listen to the Nightwatcher drone on about IT issues. I wish that I had winged shoes like the god Hermes.

That was as good as the first half, fun stuff. This was the first time I watched a ship it or rip it (shipping's not really my cup of tea) but it was really fun. I was dying during the Rashek and Alendi one, Gray's one liner was classic, and that was such a funny pairing with Human and Sarene. I was suprised the rip it crowd didn't mention that Sarene probably couldn't have handled the weeping bloody tears in Human's skin (ick). I'm definitely going to have to go back and watch the ship it or rip podcasts now. I like the idea of livestreaming during the release of Rythym of War, don't know if it would possible with Twitch and if dragonsteel would ok it, but a livestream during a major signing where you get updates from a field reporting Sharder would be awesome.

Granted. You're even a full allomancer, only problem is you're turned into a never-aging baby. Pre-speech, but you can army crawl and cruise using furniture. You get enough zinc from sucking on pennies and brass from sucking on door knobs that you can soothe and riot your parents so you always get to pick whats on the TV. Granted. Only problem is that your head is now dark brown and circular, and surrounded by a bunch of bright yellow petals and small green sepals. You look like a sunflower, but boy is that sunlight invigorating! I wish that tanning booths were really covert entry points to underground CIA laboratories.

Granted! You appear above Siua Island in Indonesia directly over the center of the actively erupting volcano Karengatang. As you plummet you notice you have two good sized lumps of metal in your stomach and you intuitively know they are cadmium and bendalloy. As you plummet towards the fiery heart of the volcano you realize that the Nightwatcher is ever the stickler for details, because you could use your allomantic powers to burn the cadmium (speeding up relative time), or the bendalloy (slowing down relative time), or you could simply plummet to your fiery death. Anyway you do it you'll be burning those metals for sure. I wish dandelion seeds could be used as money.

Granted. You now are the most prodigious sweater the world has ever known. Seriously buckets of sweat. Wiping sweat off your brow makes you burst out into a fresh sweat, but you never overheat so it's not all bad. I wish I had real life DM powers and that I could influence external events by rolling a 20 sided die (and I would show the Nightwatcher a 20 sided die to disarm the ambiguity in the word "die")

Granted, apples are now all enlivened, but only the bitter ones. You get a particularly brutish one that follows you around waiting for you to screw-up so he can give you "sauce". I wish I could tap dance like Skimbkeshanks the railroad cat from the Cats movie.

Granted, your brain is now in your stomach, so now you get stomachaches. I wish that I could tap dance like Skimbleshanks in the Cats movie.

granted, you've mastered the Kazoo. I wish that I had a very large kangaroo, that knew it's way around the city, and I could ride like a Joey in it's pouch when I went grocery shopping.

Granted, you get buried under a mountain of letters from the dead letter office filled with Christmas wishlists. I wish for world peas.

I got sucked into the Fandom during the run up to the release of Oathbringer when TOR was pre-releasing the chapters. Like a Stormlight junkie, I would park my car after dropping my kids off at school and devour the week's new chapter. The thing that got me through to the next chapter release was discussing the chapters on the TOR chapter forum, and there was some great speculation to be sure, but in researching specific items I kept coming across theories on the 17th shard, and the proverbial scales fell away from eyes. I realized at TOR I was taking a community College level course in the Cosmere, when the whole time I could have been studying at the Cosmere equivalent of Oxford. So I joined the Shard, and went to my first Signing, driving 4 hrs in a day and getting back home at 2 in the morning. It was the Oathbringer release, and I got my first WOB about Awakened Toupees. I also got to see what an amazing person Brandon is too, I think he's a large part of why this Fandom is so amazing. The people that participate in discussions here, and who run this site, have the 4 qualities I value most, in equal measure, they are intelligent, kind, funny and amazingly creative. I don't really participate in too many forums, but the 17th shard is special. One of the things that keeps me coming back too is Shardcast. I love the times it spirals into pendantic-cast because the nuance and details they explore are important. High level stuff. My favorite thread, the one that kept pulling me back into the Shard life is Tornament: Cosmere Character Roast Battles. @Zath roasts with Spook burning other Cosmere character's in High Imperial, @Archer roasts as Allomancer Jak roasting people with corrective Handerwyn footnotes, @Herowannabe roasts as Human the Koloss (with awesome custom koloss emojis) and @Paranoid King roast as Tilluane the butler are some of the funniest things I've ever read. Solid gold. The Shakespearean exchange with @Toaster Retribution in the Roast thread about returning his Oryginal Folio Had me dying. When I first came to the shard and was speculating wildly based on intuition instead of facts, I really appreciated the incredibly nice way that @Calderisand @RShara would point out a theories flaws, always with lightning fast WOBs. You know you've got a decent theory it if makes past those two. T is a plant still makes me laugh. @Jofwu post on the Moons of Roshar, and his comprehensive timeline are amazing. @Pagerunner post on the Physics of Allomancy was incredible, and later in that thread the work that one sharder did on creating simulations of different physics models for steel pushing for a video game that he was making (can't remember his username) were really great). Pretty much any thread that @Argent puts out. The thread were you could see the work that went into cracking the women's script. I basically love all the threads (and there really are too many too count) that could be college level thesises with supporting WOB citation. I'm getting really excited for the RoW release! My theory (that's since been debunked) that the Aimians were agents of Cultivation. I got a signed book WOB that put a nail in the theory's coffin, but it was a fun ride until it was over. I have some MP3s that I was recording using the Soundmapper on my computer when that theory was still actively being discussed and they are full of notification sounds that someone replied to that thread, and when I listen to those songs now and hear that little notification burble noise it makes me smile. I loved the time right after OB's release when the theories were coming in hot and fast. My only friend who loves Brandon's work is 400 miles away, so the Shard is where I go when the need to talk about the Cosmere. Thankfully I can relive those times this coming November and I'm super excited y'all will be there! Congratulations on the 10 years! With Brandon's long term plans for the Cosmere in my mind, hopefully I'll still be around to congratulate you on your 50th anniversary!

So cute! It's nice to see the pets behind the sharders. Here are my two boys, setup in the obstacle course pattern my wife refers to as "having to wade through the Labrador Sea" The big guy in the back is Chewy and the littler guy in front is Sergeant.

Lilacs in the spring, the smell that only yellow roses get, candy cap mushrooms (they smell like maple syrup only stronger), the smell of fabric softener coming out of the outside vent, anything sauted in butter and garlic, the smell of dog shampoo on one of my freshly scrubbed and tubbed dogs, the smell of piles of musty old books in my favorite used bookstore, cilantro mixed with lime, the smell of a freshly opened pop when the CO2 laden effervescence tickles your nose, the smell of wisteria at night, the smell of freshly harvested basil, the smell of barbecued corn on the cob, all the smells of food at the fair (especially the smell of the grease tour de force that is the gigantic block of curly fries), fresh churrros, the smell of the bed bath and bodyworks products that my wife uses, the cucumber smell of kumomoto oysters, and so many more. What a beautiful world

Anguish to me seems to be too arresting in its effect to be a driving force, but something that implies a sense of perservance and struggle to persist which can nonetheless color all perceptions would work. I think Grief would be an awesome shard. We know that Hoid has lost someone dear to him, perhaps the shard of Grief was the one that he turned down.

This is an incredibly interesting theory, and a better explanation for the Recreance than what we got in Oathbringer. I really like the idea that normal spren might function as conduits for investiture, and that it's not just the Radiant spren that grant the power of the surges. Your ecological analysis seems spot on, and it's interesting to think of the all the spren being both cause and effect, and that their manifestation might be a sign that a small amount of investiture has been used to some effect. In the case of say, the attraction of creationspren, they are drawn to the singular-ness of the act of creation, but maybe their arrival is also a small dispensation of additional investiture which then would further fuel that creation. That they are playing a vital role in the ecology of Roshar, and that specifically each one is a small thread leading back to Cultivation is a really cool theory, and that furthermore that the Radiant's use of their surges upsets this balance and is itself a direct attack on Cultivation is ingenious. With this knowledge, Tanavast himself might have encouraged the Recreance to save his beloved Cultivation. The ravings and madness might have been a canned act to spur the dissolution of the Knights Radiant, and in this light Nale might once again be a hero, by stemming the resurgence of the Knights Radiant. This is all very interesting to think about, and I'll definitely have to give this more thought, but off the top of my head the one seeming flaw with this is that Human's and their society routinely draw spren. Humans are not native to Roshar, so doesn't this imply that this might in and of itself upset the ecological balance by drawing power away from the Ecology. This might be answered by the fact that power draw for emphasis spren is less than what a Knight Radiant would use by several magnitures, but the net effect of this divergence of energy would surely have some sort of effect. I'm hoping that we get some scenes from Jasnah's POV in book 4, specifically her grilling the Cryptics about exactly what is going, I think those would be awesome to read and would ultimately clear up a lot of the ambiguities that still exist. Currently out of upvotes, but I'll get you one later, this is a really fun theory!

This is one of my favorite of your poems! So hauntingly beautiful, this repeated refrain is seriously amazing! I also love this stanza, so good! Are you sending these out to get published, this one totally rocks! *EDIT* will get you an upvote for this one for sure when they trickle back in.

Hahhahah, no problem, I might make a shirt that says "Typos Hapen" Look at my post, You can "Re-alloy nice work", always trying to stamp out typos, but they keep cropping up.

Super pretty! It's funny, I went on a road trip with my brother last weekend and he was just talking about petrichor and the was the first time I'd ever heard of it. A truly sublime scent, one of the finest things in life. Currently out of upvotes (I was looking at some gallery posts that I hadn't checked in awhile), but I'll definitely be getting you one when they come back in). Realloy nice work @BringerOfLight! *EDIT* I think you have a typo, you forgot the n in "Schnoz"

Hahahahahaha, so good! Tip of the hat to you @SirWolfe, well played, well played. This is the other bit that made me almost spit out my pop while I was reading your hilarious and awesome post: Once in a world, not far away, the gods lived high atop a mountain peak. The children of these gods, jealous of their power, flung them from the peak and burnt their divine bodies to ash. The fallow fields left from this horrendous act were seeded with the gods magical power, and these slayers of their own gods created their own children from these fields. And their progeny likewise turned upon them in time, once again sowing the fields of Cornucopia with the ashen remains of their creators. Having redressed the original atrocity, the 3rd generation of denizens of this world found that the Cornucopian fields had strange and wonderful properties. Anything that was planted in this soil, would bear fruit and multiply. Anything that one could make, could be planted and made manifold. This led to some very strange crops indeed. The fabled Cheese Tree of Hyperia was grown from a discarded rind of Brie, and now there are majestic orchards of soft pale white cheese growing across the land. Once a crop has been established, the resulting progeny can be transplanted to any field and continue to flourish. This world now has vast fields filled with the nodding stalks of Tennis shoe corn, bushes that flower with little single serving packets of ketchup, and trees that hang with the pendulous fruitings of Bowling balls of all regulation weights. Truly this is now the land of plenty. Bowling Magic

Using the well established trade routes of the Scadrian Subastral (that the Lord Ruler obviously knew about), he secretly smuggled a Soulcaster (both the fabrial and the practitioner) into the Final Empire that was capable of transmuting substances into metal. Through trial and error and using the advanced metallurgical knowledge of the Final Empire, the Lord Ruler discovered an investiture hack for powering the soulcasting fabrials, namely creating a gem shaped crucible composed of Tantalum Hafnium carbide that could fit perfectly into the gem sockets of the soulcaster. By merely touching the Tantalum crucible while the subject metals were being burnt at insanely high temperature, the Lord Ruler could provide the necessary access key to the investiture, and alter the pathway of it's manifestation to directly power the soulcaster. Using his Soulcaster, the Lord Ruler was able to finally create the ultimate concealed metal mind, namely he turned a pair of tighty whitey underwear into a solid gold health sink that he could wear at all times. (Just in case you were wondering, clever hatches were designed to allow the Lord Ruler to go about his *ahem* business in a more or less regular fashion). There has been quite a bunch of talk amongst the skaa, and I highly suspect that the rumours are true, that like Drax, the Lord Ruler made famously large Ashmounts. Dysian Aimians and Ambition

In the near future humans will have access to magical devices that can heat large quantities of chlorinated water to a temperature that at once both soothes and relaxes their tired mortal shell, thus allowing their spirits to lift to never before imagined heights. This relaxation magic will grant world weary souls the fortitude to continue parenting children, the ability to perceive the inherent beauty of oceans, lakes and rivers (if the magical hot tub is suitably positioned), and last but possibly most important of all (if the water jets are sufficiently engaged) this relaxation magic will allow the practitioner to magically pass gass publicly yet covertly. (It always comes back to fart jokes) Just to pick the low hanging fruit, and I do mean low, how about Fart Magic or if that offends anyone's Victorian sensibilities, how about Civility Magic

Yay! It's back on like Donkey Kong! Can't wait to see the new roasts!