king of nowhere

thanks for the effort, but that i know already. it's the finer details that are lost to me. i even googled images of the dresses, but i can't really fix them in my head.

well, i never paid much attention to clothing because i don't know the specific lexicon in english, so i didn't understand much of it. actually, i know very little of clothing, so i would have paid little attentiion to it even if the books had been in my native italian. but also that has a tendency to feel like it's much more than it actually is. the descriptions weren't nowhere nearly as rambling as i remembered them from my previous reread. of course, by the time i'll start another reread, i will probably remember them as overly long and be again surprised at how much shorter than i actually remembered them they are.

re: the slowness, i have noticed it, and i keep noticing it every time i read the series (which has been four times now). except that it's not real. the reason the books feel slow is that the half-dozen main characters that are introduced in books 1-3 graduallly split, and by the middle books they are all in different pplaces doing different stuff separately. for example, i used to rememer the perrin arc in the south dragging for six books and countless chapters. but when i went and looked at the actual amount of chapters? well, for start, perrin only got there in book 8, not in book 6 as i used to remember. and then, there are 5-6 perrin chapter per book, at most. All the painful trudging through the political situation of ghealdan? two chapters. the awful trip in so habor? one chapter (still one of my most disliked chapters in the whole story, but fairly short anyway). the trials and efforts of faile when she was separated from her husband? two chapters, spread in two books. the same goes for every single other "dragging" storyline. I remember someone complaining that some characters got stuck with a circus for "half a book", but it was only a couple fo chapters. I think it must have to do with jordan's style, it makes you feel it is longer. you read of a character in a bad situation, and you get the impression that he's been like that for a long, long time, then you realize it was only a handful of pages. it's somewhat opposite to brandon in that sense actually; when rereading the stormlight archive, i am always surprised at how many chapters it has. But anyway, if you like immersive worldbuilding and a huge scope, then this is the work for you. the magic system isn't as hard as the ones of sanderson, but it is detailed, well-explained, and mostly consistent. Wot was actually the story that made me realize I crave exactly those things; I remember flipping through scores of books when i was younger, but almost never reading the same twice. I realize now that I was looking for something, something i could not define and that I wasn't even aware i was looking for. with wot, and sanderson later, i found it. since then, i hardly read anything else.

sanderson is writing better books as he get more experience. people are looking for the holy grail, so they can get sanderson to drink from it, and enjoy the extremely good stories he'll write when he'll be 200 years old.

by the way, do we know what kind of powers worldhoppers have? if one hid among the bridge crews, he must have a way to avoid arrows. healing won't do, getting a couple arrows in the chest and then walking back to camp will tend to blow your cover. also super reflexes are likely to blow your cover, although maybe in the middle of the battle your side really won't notice that one of many bridgemen is moving at super speed. annyway, i remember a word of brandon where he said drehy is based on a firend of his. not sure how much we can deduce from it.

yes, which is exactly the reason he would send away his hired muscles after they incapacitated their victim. so, you're only showing themm how to slow down a kandra. but really, knowing that a kandra need the bones of someboody to imitate him, I suppose anyone with some wits can figure that out, so no big deal. Just as anyone should be able to fiigure that if kandra can rearrange themselves and heal cuts, the way to hurt them is with fire or acid. or lock them in close confines and let them starve. it shouldn't be such a big secret. anyway, a kandra without bones can still move like an amoeba, so you're not teaching anyone how to hurt a kandra permanently if you teach to crush bones. this merely inconvenience the kandra.

nothing forbids terrismen from being long-limbed genetically in addition to also being long-limbed as a result of castration. which would mean a terris eunuch would be very long-limbed indeed.

tensoon said that he killed oreseur alone, not that he was alone when he captured him. ambush him with a bunch of helpers armed with mallets, break his bones, and call it a day.

they say it in the books itself; either prof or david thinks that calamity is a sort of super-gifter

I don't know about mechanical resistance. there are pieces of gold-covered ironwork in the versailles palace, and while the place is 400 years old, they are still in good shape. so they can at least take rain. also, on occasions in europe we get fine sand in the rain when wind is blowing on the sahara, so it resisted the occasional mechanincal corrosion of that sandy rain too. i don't know how the ashfalls of scadrial compare to sand, and they are much more frequent, but i wouldn't expect gold to corrode mechanically from those before a few centuries. As for barnacles, I am reasonably sure they use the rock's natural asperity to anchor to them, so they would be unable lo latch on a sheet of gold. Not 100% sure, though.

you are forgetting how malleable gold is. quoting from http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/gold/incomparable-gold/gold-properties and most important, it can be flattened that thin with manual techniques. I've seen it done; they hammer on a gold sheet, then they fold it in two, cut the side, put a piece of paper between the two sheets, hammer again, fold again the bigger sheet, and so on. So, you could coat a whole sheep keel or rooftop with a kilogram of the stuff or two. Since it won't corrode or leak, that thin sheet is enough. Although I'll give you, it takes a lot of work to make gold so thin and apply it as coating, so even if gold was unexpensive using it for cover would not be cheap.

in the wheel of time instead people sniff. that proves that wot is not cosmere.

the corrosion resistant thing make me think, it gold wasn't so damnation rare it could have a lot of application. think about coating with gold the keel of a wooden ship to avoid it rotting. or making roofs with it. so gold is bound to be valuable.

you also have to take into account that shardbearer fighting and sword fighting are two very different techniques. sword lenght is much different, and with shardblades you can make all the fancy swordplay that you see in movies that, if done with real swords, would cause them to go blunt and break really fast. you can also let yourself be hit for other tactical advantages, which you cannot without plate. it could be that different poeple are best at diffferent specialties.

gold is rare. it's not just rare on earth, it is rare because there is few of it in the universe, because the element heaveir than iron are produced in supernovae and a nuclear phisicist will be able to explain exactly why. while most of the value it's given on earth is cultural, rarity allone would ensure that it has some value. certainlly it would not be so cheap that they would make small coins with it. even if they did, using it for coins because it doesn't rust is a value by itself, and would ensure gold is precious enough.

it may be denth, although we cannot be sure. he has centuries of practice and some supernatural enhancement, but swordfighting is a seondary skill to him. adolin instead did nothing else but train for it. So i wouldn't be so sure between the members of the kholin family and denth. It's pretty underwhelming when you think of it. Denth may be the best swordsman in the cosmere, and all he got to show for it was skewering a couple of random lowlife thugs.

Analyzing it from a biological point of view, I would say that a small enough chunk of kandra flesh would be unable to support itself and would die. It would, of course, take some time. Human flesh can survive a few hours, to the point that if you have a finger cut and you run to the hospital, there is a good chance that they can sew it back and it will work again. I suppose kandra flesh would survive longer than human's, because of its adaptability. It would probably be possible to preserve kandra flesh indefinitely in the right medium, some kind of nourishing and protective solution; again,like for humans. The kandra would of course lose mass, but it could recover it by eating. Also, kandras must have their minds somewhere, and if they have a diffuse brain - or if all their cells are also performing some brain function - cutting enough of its flesh may remove some of the kandra's memories. In any case, the smaller you cut a kandra, the dumber the piees become, until at a certain point they have no mind and will just lie still. If a kandra was cut in enough pieces, it should die, if nothing else because those pieces would not have enough of a mind to get back together by themselves. If they are recompacted quickly, they may meld together and the kandra may recover, but it has to be done quickly. anyway, if the pieces were small, the kandra would probably be unable to recover without external help. That's what can be surmised by making realistic assumptions with what we know about kandra biology. it may not be accurate, as this is, after all, a work of fiction.

the point is not having feruchemical powers or allomantic powers, the point is having new powers. those inquisitors had new spikes. they'd take time to learn to use those new powers to the greatest effect, regardless of whatever combination of allomancy and feruchemy they had before. also, i don't remember the inquisitor that kell fought having Feruchemical pewter. he could heal, but i don''t remember his muscles swelling.

I think you are misinterpreting that quote from sanderson. he states that the inquisitors were ineffective because it take practice to learn to use allomancy and feruchemy together, but that does not need refer to compounding. I think it refers simply to coordination and getting used to having more power. It's like if you could grow two additional arms: that would make you much better at boxing, but you'd take time to practice to use them at best, because you're not used to having tow extra arm, you're not used to controlling them, you dont even think much about them normally, and you don't know how to coordinate the movements of all four arms. or, if you play LoL, think about suddenly having four additional abilities for your favourite champion; at first you'll only use the first four skills, the ones you always had, because you're used that way. it will take a very long time before you can actually make good combos with all your 8 skills. that is unrelated to other wob where he may have specifically said it takes time to figure out compounding.

I forgot about that, but here's another time when steelrunning affected something outside of the feruchemist. Turning a door handle at that speed would break it, or jam the mechanism.door handles are not made to take those kind of stresses. In general, trying to interact with any object outside of yourself can have drastic consequences for the object. It would on the feruchemist too, but feruchemy protects from those. On the plus side, you wouldn't need a gun, you could make people explode just by punching them.

speaking of hero of ages, given that inquisitors had Feruchemical steel, i wonder how they could possibly fail to spike vin or elend as ruin wanted. they could not compound, but just storing for a day or two and tapping in a few seconds would be enough to move so fast that eeven atium won't help.

i'd always assumed allomantic alloys were only binary, made of two elements. but i could be wrong

yeah, i also have no problems with the idea that she had three guns. but wax talked like steel allowed her to fire a single gun three times fast. maybe i don't remember well. i would look on my ebook, but i can only open that from my tablet, and i cannot use a search function from it. so zinc doesn't make you think faster, it makes you smarter - and a bit faster, but mostly smarter. the the only thing really standing out is friction. anyway, steel is still an incredibly powerful power. much more powerful than any other allomantic or feruchemical effect we have seen. i just feel its power level doesn't fit well with the rest of them. i mean, all the other metalborn are still human. they can be resisted or countered with mundane means. hazekillers are pretty effective against allomancers, and other feruchemical powers give you a boost, but nothing that would make you outright invincible. even miles' gold compounding would still leave him vulnerable to being tied up; also, a large scale dismembering would have probably still killed him. None of that works on a steelrunner. he just moves so fast that you cannot hit him, trap him, or resist him in any way.

cause people are still going to pay to see it. they learned that lesson pretty well, considering that the movie that did not exhist earned almost 800 million dollars. I hate what money did to the entertainment industry. Even acknowledging that said industry would not exhist without money.

I was really surprised at how powerful steelrunning is depiicted in the book. brandon normally writes his power as well-rounded. they have effects, but they also have limits, and those limits make sense. steelrunning doesn't seem like his style. let's see all the things it does, and some comments 1) steelrunning strenghten your body. running at that kind of speed would break your legs. it doesn't. and the flow of ari does not hurt your eyes (yoou ever tried to stick your head out of a car window?). ok, that's a fairly common secondary power for feruchemy; normally, feruchemy gives you the secondary powers needed to use the main power anyway. 2) steelrunning also makes your mind faster. bleeder not only gained superhuman speed, but also reflexes, a capability of his brain to react faster. there are two distinct feruchemical powers that deal with speed: steel and zinc. Steel makes your body faster, zinc makes your mind faster. I had assumed that tapping steel would make your body movees fast, but without enchancing your capability to control it. I seem to remember (can't check on it) that sazed needed to tap both powers to move faster and see what he was doing. instead, in SoS, steel also makes your mind fast, as fast as your body. I wonder what's the point of zinc anymore. that was maybe the biggest surprise for me 3) steelrunning increases your friction with the floor. if you have you ever tried to run on a smooth floor, you'll know you can't take steep turns, or you will slip on the floor. when bleeded runs in the governor's house, she was able to run along the corridors. What we should have seen was skid lines and pieces of kandra splattered all oover the wall at the first turn. I would have expected attrition to be the most straightforward limitation to steelrunning. in a car, the faster you drive, the greater space you need to brake or turn. steelrunning doesn't seem to be affected in the same way. I want to stress that this is not a chance about you, it is a change about your shoes andd the floor. it doesn't make sense. feruchemy does not work that way; is internal, it only changes you. It would be like feruchemical iron making the floor harder so you won't crash through it. 4) steelrunning also affects your equipment. when wax and wayne are investigating the shootout when the governor's brother was killed, they say that the at-the-time-unknown steelrunner had tapped his speed and shooted three times, from three different positions, so fast that the other people only heard one single detonation. That was the thing I found it hardest to accept. a gun has a limit to how fast it can fire, because all the mechanics in it take some time to move in the position where it can shoot again. how can Feruchemical steel make your gun fire faster? It doesn't make sense, because again, feruchemy only affects you. Feruchemical pewter makes your body bigger, but it doesn't make your clothing bigger, and you will rip out of it. I'd be real surprised if Feruchemical zinc would make your iphone processor faster. Feruchemical iron don't make your clothing heavier, or more resistant. but steelrunning makes your gun fire faster. basically, the way steelrunning has been described, it works like a bendalloy bubble, without all the limitations. it only affects you, it follows you, you can shoot out of it. I can't stress how unhortodox that is for a feruchemical power. it should not affect your environment. I wonder why it behaves so differently from other powers, or if sanderson slipped a bit with his writing.