king of nowhere

not surprisingly, having godlike powers and facing no serious threat whatsoever for a millennia tend to do that. Heck, when playing chess, I only have to play one afternoon against much weaker opponents before I start making the kind of mistakes that they won't notice but a player of my level would never let unpunished. I can't imagine how much that would compound over a millennia. By the way, notice how tlr first instinct as a response to being surprised or uncertain was to tap zinc. He was also totally unprepared to taking decisions on the fly. I think if wax with the bands had faced tlr, wax would have won easily, on account of him being used to actually fighting.

not liking some of sanderson's works? totally justified, tastes are tastes. Being insulting and dismissive towards those who like them? totally injustified. If he's trying to persuade us to his point of view, it's definitely the wrong way.

I haven't heard about germany wanting to leave. Bur for sure, in spain the party that was for leaving lost a lot of votes in the elections that were held a few days after brexit, and that can hardly be a coincidence. As I said, maybe seeing UK facing economic problems because of brexit will make other european countries less likely to leave. In fact, according to a poll over a million people who voted for "leave" regretted it. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few more years UK asks to rejoin.

Nobody else commented on how farage admitted just the day after the vote that they intentionally spread lies to get people to vote for leave? That alone should be enough to remove him from politics and call for a new vote. I mean, if I was a british who voted leave, I would call it a fraud and ask for my vote to be nullified. At least we italians don't have to feel bad about berlusconi anymore. He was using his political position to embezzle billions and get aquitted, but at least he wasn't causing strife with old allies. And while he was lying all the time, he was skilled enough that he always avoided admitting it. Farage should have taken his example: instead of answering the questions, he should have complained about communists and changed the topic.

I don't know, it felt a natural assumption to me, and not from a reader perspective. Maybe because sophia's personality fit well with melhi's known motivations. Maybe because that backstory seemed just too real to be a fabrication - and the best scams are those that rely on a lot of truth, so it would also make sense to use the real backstory.

yes, i feel exactly the same. The worst part is when the first 6-8 chapters are revealed, it ruins reading the book: you either have to read them again, or to start a book from the middle. I decided to stop reading excerpts, except for those revelaed with great advance and that answer some significant question about the previous book. For example, the jasnah excerpt, that explained what happened to her. the problem is that in order to do that i need to not read the chapters every day. while to read them, i must only give in once. So far I had some limited success: the first 6 chapters were revealed of shadows of self, and i only read the first 4.

right, could be. and in that case, he may have been an allomancer all along.

she implanted thoughts in wax head with the spike. but she could not listen with it. wax was actually talking to answer her, and he was speaking softly to try to lure her close and recognize her.

at the end, the wode said to kai about melhi that "she will be punished". that's the only clue about melhi's gender. many speculatedthat sophia's personality was closely matched on the real person who made it.

yeah, but she was on the other side of a large room full of people talking. I'm not sure spook-savant could have listened to a man talking softly in those conditions.

yeah, i fully agree with that, and everyone i talk to is more or lesss in the middle ground. But the politicians only express polarized opinions, and so they are not proposing solutions. At least not in italy; they make great declarations, but they don't actually do anything. Basically, in italy the immigrants are rescued in the sea, then they should be brought into specific housing structures where they should be identified and admitted or rejected. Except those structures are all full, and so the immigrants are sent wherever it happens, mostly in hotels (there's plenty of people getting rich by working in the assistance to immigrants). They should be detained until they are accepted or rejected, but it is illegal to detain someone who is not guilty of a crime, so they can leave quite easily. Then there is the commission that should decide whether the immigrants are to be allowed, but they are revising two or three persons every day. While one thousand arrives on average. And even when one immigrant is declared to be irregular and expelled, all they do is give him a piece of paper that says that he has to leave the country. Of course the guy will just hide. Even if he were caught again, all it would be done would be to give him another piece of paper with written that he has to leave. Basically, there are big holes in the laws that should regulate how immigrants are handled, and those legislative holes lead to newly arrived immigrants doing more or less as they please. It doesn't help that italian law is very soft on petty crime, which is the kind of crime mostly committed by immigrants. This is not exactly an immigrants-related problem, but it is becoming seen as such more and more. Petty crime is generally punished with fines, but since the irregular immigrants officially own nothing, they cannot be punnished. In my city there was a woman who almost every day was stopped by the police for robbery or theft or minor acts of violence, and every time the judges would let her go. she committed well over one hundred crimes before she was finally put in jail. And the left-wing politicians are proposing even more tolerance towards petty crime. Right-wing politicians talk racism, but they often are the guys who are making money out of assisting the immigrants. I hope your countries have better laws on the subject...

Well, I have a few comments to make on this 1) I have mixed feelings about the vote. I totally support european unity and I'd rather britain have remained, but I am fairly sure they leaving the union will have negative consequences, and so I hope seeing britain suffer as a result of leaving the EU may shut up other eurosceptics movements in other countries. With some luck, this vote may actually help the cause of european unity in the long run. 2) I expect both sides of the argument to have wildly exaggerated on the consequences of the vote. Britain will likely lose a few % of GDP over the next few years, but the world will mostly go on as it did. Proponents of this or that cause have always claimed apocalypse if votes won't go their way, but I've never seen it actually happen. 3) My main fear is that other countries may leave EU soon, pushing on emotional reasons. That's dangerous if those hypotetical votes are held soon, because the negative consequences of brexit are long-term and other counntries may vote for leaving on the basis that nothing bad happened to england in the first few months. 4) there will be less changes than those who votes "leave" think. For example, they complained about european regulations, but europe is the main trading partner of britain, so if they want to sell in europe they still must respect european regulations. And britain never really wanted to integrate in europe: they didn't adopt the euro, they rejected most european standardizations, they kept driving on the left and they demanded exemption from a number of european laws (europe is quite peculiar because it make laws that should be binding for all members, but in practice the individual states can choose to ignore european regulations with little or no practical consequences). I went to britain a few times, and I got the impression that it has never really been part of the EU but in name. 5) This is the direct result of europe failing on many fronts, first and foremost on immigration. And we face a big problem with immigration because the political debate has extremized in two positions: idealistic naivety on one side, and racism on the other. I've heard plenty of politicians make big ideological claim on sinking the boats of the immigrants (yeah, killing hundreds because they are inconveniencing us, that's totally acceptable; this includes paying the african countries to make those immigrants disappear and then pretend to not be responsible for what they do), or on giving them a home and a job as soon as they arrive (because absolutely there are jobs and homes for everyone. It's not like there's a large part of our own citizens that are already unemployed and would be treated better by their own nations if they painted their face black and pretended to be foreigners). I've heard nobody proposing realistic solutions. Controlled immigration brings benefits. Unchecked immigration brings crime and unemployment. As long as the idealistic front will keep being naive, people like trump or farage will keep getting more votes. Frankly, if the alternative is people who will pretend the problem does not exist, I'm not sure which is the lesser evil.

I thought back about it, and I realized there were a lot of strange things happening in retrospect whose answer is not clear. At first glance, it appeared that the waiter was paalm, that she had a coinshot spike to escape and she listened to wax by enhancing her ears with normal kandra body skill. nothing is thought about it anymore. Then at the end of the book we learn that paalm had been impersonating the governor for some time. And the governor was at the party. So - paalm could listen to what wax was saying. yet she was on the other side of a large, crowded room, way too far even for tin. how did she do it? - the waiter was clearly a minion of paalm. he jumped from the window and they didn't find assorted gore in the road, so he was spiked with either asteel or firon. Still, the servant, when escaping wayne and the constables, showed cospicuous fighting skill. notice that this debunks the idea that the waiter was listening with thin and somehow reporting to paalm; he already must have had a spike for a power other than tin. - the servant could still intimidate a random cab driver in a way that made it seem like a kandra had revealed itself. now that i write my thoughts in an organized manner, it doesn't seem as strange as it did, but still the question of how paalm could hear wax talking stands.

I found out it was me, and I apologize. I assumed we were in the calamity spoiler board. I don't know how I mistakenly assumed from your post that you'd already read all the three books. Anyway, if it makes you feel better, I can say that it wasn't that big of a spoiler anyway. I'd explain why it wasn't that big of a spoiler, but I'm afraid that by doing so I may spoiler even more.

ah, sorry, i confused this with the calamity spoiler board. didn't look, i just assumed somewhat. well, i'll edit the post, but the damage has been done already.

EDIT: i should have inserted the spoiler earlier, but i mistakenly assumed we were in the calamity spoiler board. My fault. I can't unspoiler to the spoilered guy, but at least i can avoid other people being spoilered in the future.

kai mentions at some point that he's a brain in a jar, but i doubt that's a problem: if they have the medical knowledge to take the brain of a fetus and keep it alive and develop it in a jar - and compress all the medical devices needed for that, and the computational power needed to recreate a perfect virtual reality simulation, into the size of a watermelon - then they can surely clonate a new body for them or make a robotic one, and stick the brain into it. That's the main difference between sci-fi and fantasy: in sci-fi, if the people has some technnology, you can guess they must have other simpler or related technologies. While in fantasy, is something can be done with magic, you can say nothing on what else can or cannot be done with magic.

if there is a relation between highstorm visions and death rattles, it's not an easy one. among the epigraphs of the first book there is one death rattle coming from a person who reportedly had visions during highstorms. So, multiple people had visions from the almighty, and they can produce death rattles. but clearly not everyone who makes death rattles has visions too: they wouldn't have marked out the guy who had them otherwise.

wow, it really seems to call for a sequel. which would be quite interesting in concept. it's a bit like the rebellion from matrix, except that here the matrix is benevolent and hurting nobody, and if everyone wanted to be freed, there wouldn't be the resources to feed them all anyway. many potentials for good conflicts there.

I always liked her because she's an engineer/scientist tipe. That's enough to ensure that I like her as long as she doesn't do anything terrible. Yeah, I'm biased towards my category. But then, most scientists I met are good people who want to do something useful for society, so the bias comes from somewhere. But even ignoring that factor, I don't see her "wow is me" and "my life is so hard" vibes as being worse than those of most people. Virtually anyone I ever met will talk about them and complain that their life is hard. I do it myself simply because hardship is a more interesting argument of conversation that lack of hardship. Maybe next time I read the stormlight archive I will pay more attention to navani's conversations.

It's difficult to find works that are not inspired by what came before. Brandon was inspired by robert jordan. As for jordan, I'm now reading Dune and I'm surprised by how many similarities there are between the aes sedai and the bene gesserit. the human imagination, after all, melds in different ways what it already knows. Me! Me!

this seems just like when they said that kandras could not use the metallic arts. or that there were no atium mistings, or that you could not awaken stone or metal. Based on previous brandon stories, it's exactly the kind of thing that I expect can be gotten around with the right knowledge.

Yeah, but I'm not sure about one detail there: it is said that you have "some time" where you can still be brought back, and that you'll take "some time" to go beyond, and so I assumed that you could be healed until you go beyond. Normally there's little difference, except for kelsier who managed to not go beyond. But I don't know if there is some official answer if it is just a matter of time, or of passing beyond. Anyway, time may require that the connection be repaired, and that a metalmind be brought into the cognitive realm, but I don't see those as unsurmountable obstacles.

you need a prependicularity if you entered the congitive realm in a worldhopper fashion. you have no need of perpendicularity if you are healing yourself back from the dead.

Duly noted. So I'll revise my first theory as "he got a spike for connection to the physical, and another for healing". the general idea stands, though.