king of nowhere

He always had that autority, as nobody would have ever dared to contradict the blackthorn. He was just trying to play nice before.

So, no kaladin's chapter, but a longer version of the first flashback. I can't say that I'm surprised at dalinar's reaction to sadeas' death; almost makes me feel for him.

Whatever. there are so many things I'd like to see, that any of them will be welcome

I'mm really curious to know how "reverse lashing" could become "leningrad"

Agreeing that some blades are lost and some are store, a better question may be, how many? We saw 400 radiants in the vision, and they were only part of one order. We ccan estimate the number of shardblades existing at a few tens of thousands. there are now about 100 accounted for. So, how many more are secreted somewhere? A few tens? A few hundreds? Several thousands? This could totally change roshar's geopolitics

even if we don't, we 'll get the rest of the chapter. Unless I missed it, it was ony parrt of a chapter we got before

Wait, so you guys are telling me we don't have any WoB on it? I can't believe nobody ever asked this thing to brandon!

It is most likely both explanations are correct. WIthin millennia, some blades were surely lost to the bottom of the sea, or buried somewhere and forgotten. On the other hand, we've seen organizations with good access to blades. So, some were stockpiled, some were lost. A similar argument must be made for soulcasters. When szeth is taken by taravangian's minions, the guy who speak to szeth then soulcast a wall to smoke. Yet officially mr T doesn't have soulcasters, he needed to hire jasnah's to free his nepew from the cave-in. Unless mr T controls some radiant, which seems unlikely. so there must also be soulcaster caches.

Because we know he can heal easily from a shardblade, but a shardblade cut, nightblood completely vaporizes the target. It may be the one thing capable of killing him. Do we know if it would work?

I don't know if this has already been mentioned,as this thread is growing faster than I can read it, but does it mean there are two balc spehres? gavilar told eshoonai that she could keep the black sphere. then as he died he gave a black sphere to szeth. did eshonai refuse to take the sphere? did gavilar had 2 (which may explain why he gave one to eshonai so easily)?

I'm also very curious about the source of gavilar's knowledge. I doubt odium sent him visions, if he did he could have contacted venli similarly. but then, maybe he did. And given his conquering, he was certainly attuned to odium enough. Huh. In fact the idea that gavilar's visions actually came from odium actually makes a lot of sense. it would be a huge coincidence if dalinar got visions from honor just shortly after his brother got similar, but warped, visions from odium, but it's the kind of curveball brandon throws at us. it's not like he never had a shard interfere with profecy before...

I don't know the details of the copyright laws. Are you even allowed to sell art derived by sanderson's intellectual property without his autorizatiion?

On the other hand, it could be a good writing exercice for bradon to write a man in an altered state of consciousness. In order to add realism, brandon would get mightily drunk himself (there must be some loophole into the mormon code; after all, he would be doing it for science) while writing the scene (EDIT: put an emoticon to clarify that I wasn't serious)

I got my honorary big sister and my (real) favourite aunt to get sanderson, and they both loved it. Unfortunately, they are not good enough to read it in english. Whenever I enter into a librry I llook if there is some translated sanderbook (did anyone ever used that word? I call dibs on it) for them. I also got one of my honorary cousins (son of my honorary big sister; I tend to give the title of honorary relative to my best friends) to read sanderson in english; his english is excellent, and I've seen him make casual conversation with foreigners, but reading in english tires him. I lended him shadows of self seven months ago, he still has 100 pages to go. Still, I hope to get him used to it.

the problem with that is the square/cube law. if you double the size of anything, its surface increases fourfold, while its mass increases eightfold. This affects particularly a creature's strenght, since it is proportional to the section of the muscles, i.e. its surface, i.e. it increases less than its mass. So basically the bigger a creature is, the weaker it is compared to its weight. That's why insects have tiny tiny legs and can carry around one hundred times their weight, humans can carry another human on their back but they find it tiring, and elephants can't carry other elephants. the bigger animals, whales, only live in water because on the ground they would not be strong enough to move. The bigger land animals were around ten times bigger than elephants, and that's pretty much the limit; they are theorized to have lived in lagoons or lakes, where water would help them support some weight. So, make it too big and it can't realistically move. Even if you stop at a realistic size, the creature would still be horribly slow. Elephants, rhinos, hippos can't run very fast. According to studies on bone structure and muscle mass, t-rex couldn't really run, at most trot. its prey, though, was even slower. So your big creature, especially when weighted down by all its armor (and metal is much heavier than organic matter), would at most be able to walk slowly, and therefore it would not be able to chase anyone or anything. It would have then to rely only on eating vegetables, that cannot run away. More or less like elephants do. And elephants already spend most of their time eating to support their mass. So your big creature would eschew cities and instead roam forests, where it can find enough nutrition. Until it chopped down the whole forest, that is. And if it attacked a city, while impervious to handguns, it would still be very vulnerable to a cannon; even if not immediately lethal, an explosive round would deal enough damage that the creature is bound to die of infection eventually. As for spitting acid, that's less effective than generally assumed. Acid takes time to corrode stuff, and living tissue has built-in protections against it. Once a guy fell into a vat of concentrated nitric acid (one of the nastier stuff as far as corrosive power goes), and another guy jumped to rescue him, and while they both remained partially submerged in the concentrated acid for minutes, they survived with bad chemical burns over their body. If your creature spit acid at something, that something would not dissolve and die; it would run away, and if it could jump in a stream it would probably get away with limited damage, and even if not, at most it would die days later as a result of the chemical burns, but hwen it's too far for your creature to eat it. Alas, reality doesn't let us do any of the cooler stuff. Anyway, you can improve your beast by making its shell organic. Silk is stronger than steel, and so are many other proteins and organic tissues. Kevlar itself is organic, and it could be synthesized by living organisms if they had the right enzymes. So, make the creature's armor from some proteic compound, and you can already save a lot of weight on it. Teeth are best left of metal, though; it's generally less flexible and better at cutting and piercing.

I don't know. Actually, it will be pretty interesting to see what amaram (and the sons of honor) will do. Their goal was to push for a desolation so that people would be united. Well, they did achieve part 1. Now comes part 2, "unite them". And attacking dalinar would really go against all it. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if now the sons of honor actually wanted to ally with dalinar and the radiants, much to the incredulity of the latter. I can definitely see amaram try to convince dalinar that all his actions so far made sense.

without any wob, I would argue that all worldhoppers are (mostly) ageless, and most of them do not have access to atium - or allomancy. Logic dictates there must be an atium-free way to achieve agelessness, regardless of what demoux is actually using

By the way, any idea on when those sample chapters will become available?

Well, it's true that you will still have to wait as you're unlikely to read all the book in one go, but at least you'll be able to read more than one or two chapters at a time. and you won't have to wait weeks between oone chapter and the other.

sometimes brandon rafo innocent stuff just to keep us guessing on what may or may not be important. other times it's unimportant and he never bothered to decide it, but again, he doesn't want to say it's unimportant. then again, there are lots of things going on with elokhar that we don't know of. he was seeing spren at some point. so, it could reallly be anything EDIT: ninja'ed

I used to prefer physical books until a few years ago. They just feel better in my hands, and they are moore comfortable to flip pages. Then I learned that I can balancce my laptop on top of my chest/belly while laying on my bed, and soon enough it became the only way I could use a pc. I even learned to fast type and do other complicated stuff with my hands in such awkward position. Anyway, that became my new favourite reading position, especially in cold wiinter nights; feeling the heat of the pc and keeping your whole body underneath the bed sheets (including the hand holding the mouse, which you use to scroll pages) is incredibly relaxing, and I can do it for hours without discomfort. While all my favourite positions to read a paper book become uncomfortable after about half an hour. Despite that, when I can choose, I still read the paper book. There's just something extra about holding stuff with my hands. But reading from my laptop is a close second.

I also would prefer to read the whole book at once, but I lack the willpower for it "Ok, you see on the internet your favourite writer has released another chapter of his new book" "I do not read it" "Make a will saving throw" "Rolls... 17! Success! I do not read it!" "You sure? when you picked up the phd class, you dumped your wisdom to get more intelligence and a higher knowledge(chemistry) check" "C'mon, it's not that bad. I rolled high enough" "Did you also factor in that you took "butter will" in exchange for increased gaming proficiencies?" "I did, I did. I still saved." "Ok. Tomorrow you have to make another will save, though. With a cumulative penalty because resisting today was very taxing" "damnation. When will I be high level enough to cast summon extended job trip?" Also, I have been playing dungeons and dragons lately

forests of hell. danger is similar, and at least life in the forests of hell has a purpose. Would you rather brandon leave the stormlight archive unfinished, or the mistborn saga unfinished?

It builds anticipation. it keeps bringing people back wanting more. if you release all at once, people are going to read, comment a bit, and then activity will stop.

So, I've been thinking about units of measure in the cosmere. So far, every planet uses feet, steps and those kind of things, which is quite natural. the first units of measurement developed by man were linked to his body, and the first way to measure distance was counting the step, or putting one foot in front of the other, or using a cord and then rolling the cord around your arm. Thus an aphazard measurement system is created, where you can have several different units to measure the same concept (like terrestrial miles and nautical miles when you're always measuring a distance) and all those units are unrelated. When a world hits the scientifical revolution, it will develop a metric system, and it will adopt it; right now, the US is the only nation stil refusing to undergo the conversion, and even there metric units are the ones used for science. So, when scadrial will hit the modern age, and even more in the future, we can expect it to use metrics. In fact, it should already have developed such a system in the wax and vayne era, but change is difficult to enforce; one big motivation to adopt the international system was overcoming national differences in measures, which in northern scadrial is not existing. But I definitely think it would add to realism if future scadrian books will use metrics. what do you think?