king of nowhere

my chalklings would look like shapeless blots, because I'm terrible at drawing. But, assuming I could draw, I would draw themm as a futuristic soldier with powered armor, particle accelerator rifle, and jetpacks. What? Why everybody is limited to medioeval fighters? Yeah, I doubt it would work as well as that equipment would work for real. I wonder if chalklings can even shoot, if drawn with ranged weapons?

there is nothing mystical in that. feruchemy lets you store an attribute you already have. the more you have, the more you can store. say, a normal person can lift 50 kg over their head, they can store the ability to lift 30 kg, they lift 20 kg. a body builder may be able to lift 100 kilos, he may store the capability to lift 40 kilos, he's storing more than the normal guy and he's still stronger than the normal guy would be without storing. same would go for all other traits. walking around storing strength would be akin to what some people do of strapping weigths to themselves to make more effort. your muscles have to do more effort, so you will excercice more. so yes, it would be a perfectly viable bodybuilding strategy to store more instead of using more weigth. although I'd say pewter feruchemy is more the dream of sedentary people than bodybuilder. Being sedentary reduces your muscles because you don't use them at their full extent. if you are sedentary and store stregth to the point that you have to put effort even to stay in bed, then you won't get reduced musces for it. annd you get to store a lot.

only four? well, i haven't reread aol in a few years. what i remembered is that they took a woman at every robbery, and sometimes two. anyway, they must have a much greater pool of potential targets. So, if they stop a train and take a woman, clearly the whole noble female population of elendel won't be on that train. either they were tracking movements of women and trains, which seems a huge effort of resources. plus, how likely is that a given noblewoman will take a train in a misty night? how much can you plan in advance for that? won't it be easier to just have a few hundred names and stop the train and hope at least one will be there? They may only need a dozen women for their plan, but they must find those women in the right circumstances, if they want to kidnap them while making it seem a robbery. We also don't know how strict are their requirements. they're not just looking for someone descending from spook. With the number of ancestors going up exponentially, i expect virtually everyone on scadrial has spook among his ancestors. they are looking for strong connections. How many women fit their criteria? one in ten? one in a hundred? so you see, even if they only want to take a few, they must researched a large number. which gives at least a passable chance one of those number was marasi just because of statistics. welll, what else would you suggest? The explanation jumping to mind is that their father is a member of the set, so he knows their lineage and he knows when they'll be available for kidnapping. But he really seemed broken when his daughters were kidnapped. Either he's the best actor in the world, or that's not the explanation. Also, if he was a member of the set, why trying to arrange a marriage between steris and wax only to kidnap steris shortly afterwards? didn't the set wanted to avoid wax's attention if possible? I'm sure i can come up with even more reason steris' father cannot be a member of the set. So, discarded that, what remains? i really can't think of anything reasonable. As for coincidences, those are the coincidences that are called for by a story. I mean, the bandits take a hostage, and who better suited to that than the protagonist's love interest? was there any real doubt that, for story reasons, the vanishers would have kidnapped steris or marasi or both? But hey, I think I may have another explanation for you: Harmony set up the events and influenced the research so that the set would kidnap steris and marasi, in order to get wax involved. Remember, harmony has been actively trying to involve wax, to the point that he said "I did something to stop it. I sent you". harmony had been pushing wax around ever since he sent melaan to convert him. Still, I don't buy this theory. Seems needlessly complicated, especially when there's a good chance wax would have wanted to be involved anyway.

filling a goldmind may weaken your immune system, but it certainly causes you to display symptoms of illness even if you have no viruses at all. consider: a virus or bacteria, once it enters the organism, have a time window before you realize you have it. that's because it must replicate for a while before it starts to deal significant damage. instead, filling a goldmind causes you to fall ill immediately. impossible if it is only caused by external factors.

well, i''ll address the "why bother" point very simply: because they are not targeting one single woman, they are aiming for many of them. they have kidnapped what, a dozen women now? and when the vanishers were at the wedding, they had portraits of potential targets. so it's clear the set has many women in mind for their plan. they must have been selcted somewhere. if I remember correctly, there were, like, 600 people at the marriage. yet the vanishers took two. it means they must have researched a lot of women to single out those few, to come up with the list. Maybe they didn't research every single noblewoman in the city - your math is sound, i'll give you that; it would cost a lot of resources - but they certainly researched a lot of them. heck, maybe they just picked a few families at random? if they knew that one woman in one hundred would fit their criteria, and they needed a couple dozen, then they set up to research about 2000 women. and they restricted their search on the most prominent families, that of steris and marasi being one of them (they are not very important nobles, but the way nobility works, maybe they are related to spook through women, so the "nobility" does not carry but the allomancy does). Maybe the information about the real father of marasi isn't that difficult to find; maybe it is registered in the official act correctly, but it's not told about - after all, who checks the official acts? maybe the set just stumbled on the information when they researched steris. there are dozens of possible innocent explanations. EDIT: i realize now that my argument about the number of people at the wedding and the fact they only took two women does not prove anything. it may be that they had made no research on most of the women present. Still, I think it's likely they researched at least a significant number of women to make their list.

yes, which is why those kind of plots tend to fail in real life. in stories, not so much. Consider that every single one of the bandits thei hired knew at least they were there to kidnap women, if not the exact reason. a single one of them talking would mean the police being informed that the kidnappings weren't casual. Which was the whole point of faking the robberies. Consider how many people were needed to work the train-stealing barge. consider how many people are needed to guard and care for the kidnapped women. And when they start making children, even more people will be required. people who will have to know those women should not be allowed to roam free, so you cannot take an unsuspecting servant. Compared to that, what's hiring a few clerks to make inquiries on the ancestry fo noblewomen? especially when it's a totally innocent curiosity. they could justify the research in a variety of absolutaly acceptable ways. It's nothing illegal. The worst they could do if they are discovered would be to complain for infringement of privacy.

I have at least two simple explanations for marasi's being on the list: 1) we know the set is composed by very powerful people. We know marasi's parentage is a secret supposedly known to few. But it wouldn't be too far-fetched that one of those who knows is a member of the set. This "set" seems like a conspiracy of noblemen. Surely we've seen many of them without realizing it. Surely many of them were at the wedding. Those guys are like the black ajah. now I'd like to bring the oath rod on them. 2) could they have made accurate research on all noblewomen of the city? Yes, why not? They have plenty of resources. They are looking for women of good allomantic bloodlines, so it wouldn't be surprising if they hired a bunch of clercks to research the genealogy of every single noblewoman in the city to track her lineage all the way to the final empire and see how many metalborns she has among her ancestors. It's the kind of thing you can afford doing when your group owns a significant fraction of the city. In fact, compared to all the other people they hired, and to all the effort they put in their plans, it would be a pittance.

make a circular hemalurgic spike so that you can spike yourself in a continuous loop

sorry, edited. Although there was nothing really spoilery; i wasn't referencing to anything happening in those chapters, just to some things that were hinted. if I thought I was going to spoiler something major, I'd have used a spoiler.

what if it is a middle ground? maybe lirin has gotten really depressed, but he's still doing his best as the surgeon of heartstone. maybe roshone hasn't become a better man, but he dropped his grudge, feeling he got his revenge. Or what if lirin has been broken, but with the help of kaladin he will put himself back together and will manage to attract a spren? From what I remember he was a very selfless man with a strong desire to help, like the guy who was killed by nalan in one of the interludes. I consider lirin becoming a radiant to be unllikely, but not impossible.

basically, what kaymyth said. I got the impression that gender roles are similar to what they were in our own world at the time, i.e. the men worked outside and the woman took care of the house, except that women can also decide to follow the path of the warrior, metaphorically. All in all, I suppose they are discouraged only with choosing a middle ground: you are either going to be a career-seeker, or a housewife. I find intriguing in marasi that she is both badchull competent and a girly girl; I like girls that can do both, but I suppose the scadrial society frowns on them. This does not apply in the roughs, where people do more or less as they please. It is also possible that it does not apply with the common population, we've only really seen nobles and criminals so far. P.S. What does "self-actualized" mean?

after reading the available chapters of shadows of self, I think (P.S. Nothing major in the spoiler, just a name that gets dropped a few times in those chapters)

Are yoou sure about that? because i don't remember in all of wor that a lighteye woman was introduced and hadn't had a relation with adolin. adolin literally dated alll eligible women in the camp. happened because his social standing is such that pretty much any girl wanted to date him, but girls of high enough standing to date adolin also had their sort of honor requiring someone behaving differently from adolin. which is what comes of dating people based on considerations of social standing. but then, aristocratic marriage on those soocieties is no more than a contract for the exchange of offsprings, money, and sometimes cattle. people are not supposed to love each other in those kind of marriages. but it seems that vorin society expects people to pretend that they do. Also, in ancient society, virginity wasn't much a matter of purity but of certainty to track the bloodlines. those ancient nobles thought they were better than anybody else and they were triying to breed their offspring as if they were horses. They did too much inbreeding, and they ended up with plenty of hereditary diseases. Sometimes karma works. Anyway, the point is that female virginity was considered very important, and not being a virgin could disqualify a marriage; women were considered little more than property of the husband, and a non-virgin was considered of less worth liek manumitted merchandise. Male virginity on the other hand wasn't required. But in vorin society, women are also important. because they do plenty of stuff men can't do, so maybe things are different there. EDIT: @ kaladin and syl: while I leave open the possibility that it could be possible to have a romantic relationship with a spren under exceptional circumstances, I don't see it happening between those two. they don't seem to have that kind of interest.

i also agree that there was no need: it's not like kaldin killed szeth after he surrendered, he was still in the middle of the fight and suddenly szeth refused to parry.

well, holding a sword or an hammer just isn't the same thing... but then, pleasure is much more a pshicological thing than something connected to actual physical sensation. I'd much rather hold an incorporeal girl-shaped syl than caress the handle of a shardhammer. I have strong protective instinct towards her frail-sad-sweet-girly-girl form; I do not have the same kind of instincts towards a sword, even knowing it's the same entity. @ "left-overs": I have the belief that people are different and have different needs, and they will find a partner with whom they reciprocally fulfill each other's needs. Or maybe they'll never find the right person and remain single, which is vastly preferrable to having a partner that doesn't fit. The idea that people have a "ranking" for partner's value, and that people of the higher ranking will get each other and people of lower ranking will get what is left... well, i know there's many people believing like that, and even a lot of cultural pressure for that kind of idea (concepts like "that girl is above you" or "that guy is a good catch" or the whole idea of "trophy wife"). But I find it horribly sad. What kind of menaingful relationship can you have with somebody who has nothing in common with you except being beautiful and rich? Must be the reason why the celebrities keep hooking up and breaking up with each other. EDIT: @ hoid is dead: if there was a clean break and no attachment left, I don't see how previous relationships could be a problem. In fact, I'd rather have a girl who's been around: she tried a few (several?) partners, and she didn't liked them, but she likes me, and that has to mean something. While a girl at her first experience (especially considering I'm 29 and a potential match for me should not be much younger) may as well have hooked up with me because i was the first to show interest in her, or because she was afraid she'd go old without having anyone. @ maxal: yeah, they can't neither cuddle nor have sex. Is that really an impassable obstacle? Suppose, as an hypothesis, that your husband has an accident and remain paralyzed below the neck. Then he becomes unable to have sex with you (yes, I know that, depending on the exact disbility, there may be ways around that, but let's just pretend for the sake of the hypothesys), but I don't think you'd dump him for that reason. You can think of dating syl as dating a person with a physical disability: if you care enough for that person, you make it work somehow.

i don't think kaladin is ready for a relationship right now. He's been hurt a lot in the past, and he reacted by closing in himself. To have a relationship, he'd need to learn to trust people again, and also to let down his defences, become vulnerable, let someone in. It will take time. The first step is to have freinds again. He haven't had one in a long time, only underlings and people he was trying to protect. Not to say there is no way he can get into a relationship, but I don't see such a relationship go well. kaladin's attitude would cause a lot of strain. It would definitely be weird, but not necessarily impossible. Right now, the spren are not human-like enough, but all the ones we're seeing are getting more and more human with the progression of the bond. If they got human enough, then I, for one, would have no problem dating my spren. Yes, the lack of physical contact would be frustrating, but to me love is directed towards someone's personality, and therefore it does not require a physical body. The main limitation i see to this is how human-like the spren can eventually become. Can a spren even return love? can it feel romantic love as something different than the sharing of a nahel bond? I made a thread on that one year ago www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/17057-loving-a-spren/

Also, let's assume adolin confesses everything: then what? as the best shardbearer of the army, they cannot afford to jail him, or worse, execute him. The very right thing to do would be what perrin did in the wheel fo time, i.e. "II'll submit to the sentence, but only after the last battle has come and gone". However, you cannot always count on the legal system giving you such a leeway. perrin managed to do that because he had a big army behind him, or he would have been hanged straight away. But then, honor is not the only framework for one's actions. what is good, what is right, what is legal, what is honorable, what is pragmatic, what is necessary, what is reasonably possible, what is the lesser evil, what simply works, are all different way to evaluate an action. In an ideal world, all those would agree, and in fact they normally do. In our everyday life, we generally manage to take choices that are good, right, legal, honorable, and they work. In fact, one of the purposes of society is to provide an environmment where it is so. However, when lives are on the line, the neat moral system of right and wrong that we use abitually tends to fall apart. I'd say adolin's choice was not good, not right, not legal, not honorable, but it was pragmatic, it may or may not have been necessary (it is uncertain how much damage sadeas would have done otherwise), it definitely was reasonably possible, it was the lesser evil, and it worked. And I am not going to hold it against him. Sadeas had the power to kill thousands at a time when humankind is risking extinction; such a circumstance calls for pragmatism more than morality.

welcome to the club

actually, they are speculation. brandon said that alllomancy enhables ftl travel, but we still have no idea how it's done.

you know what, your definition is somewhat better than what i would have given. yes, i suppose "a person who is willing to do the right thing, even when it's uncomfortable for him" would fit. With an especial emphasis on keeping your word (within reason: honor before reason is not honorable in my book) and being trustworthy. Although i disagree on the point that the person has to sacrifice something for an action to be honorable; most people rarely have to make real sacrifices in the name of good. willingness to do it if it was necessary is the requirement. Also, I have another, different concept of honor related to sports. it entails playing fair and treating the opponent as a worthy opponent, so it is somewhat related to the other, greater concept of honor. For example, in chess I feel insulted by people who refuse to surrender a clearly lost game, because it implies they think i may fail to win, therefore it denies my status of worthy opponent.

it's a good question. do colors that clash do so because there's something innate in most of us that make us dislike those colors put together, or it is purely a social construct? in the first case, perfect color recognition may enhance your fashion sense, otherwise it would not.

the question, at this point, is why they don't kidnap the women in their homes. it would me much easier, and they could reach all of them. but then, faking a hostage taking during a robbery is better for misdirecting the police

Then I suppose I'm demiromantic, since I need to befriend a girl first in order to develop other feelings for her later. Or, in the worst case, I need to fool miself into thinking I'm more friend with the girl than I actually am. But c'mon, that seems way too specific a label to me. I mean, it's like we're taking everything that is slightly diffferent from what is considered "normal" and we're making up a name for it. And then we're taking all the possible variations in that, and naming those too. Do we really need all those names? We're seven billion people, no one is exactly normal, everyone is an individual, I feel we're soon going towards seven billions different terms. Is naming all those subtle shades important? I am me. I am a particular person. I am unlike anybody else I ever met. I know a few people who come fairly close, but the existance of others similar to me doesn't make me anything more or less than I am. Well, I think that's the problem here. The need for a label. The need for identification. The need to be part of a group. We tell young people that they should grow up a certain way. Maybe we tell them they can choose a few templates. If they don't fit, they think there's something wrong, until they find a different template, one that fits them. Oh, I've been through it myself. I struggled for a few years with the idea of being a nerd, as the concept is loosely defined and generally disparaging. I ended up realizing that whether I accepted the tag of nerd or not, it wouldn't change a whisker on the person I actually am. That's just a name. A tag we put on people to try to understand them. It doesn't make us what we are.It is no part of our identity. Maybe we should just tell our young that they will grow up and gradually find their identity, in all things, and whatever it is it will be fine, unless they will be robbers or such, and if they happen to find others like them, great, but if they won't, then their life will be a bit harder, they will have to make choices, but there's nothing wrong with them. Maybe the problem with finding an identity is that we tell people that they should pick a label for themselves. Or maybe not. The instinct to form tribes and clans is strong in the human race, so maybe the instinct to fit in a group is innate and not just rooted in culture, so people would still struggle to find acceptance. Maybe I got over it because I like to think about my feelings, analyze them, dissect them, root out their causes, consequences, and relations to other feelings, and then if I find something to be stupid, or contradictory, I can stomp on it easily enough. Like getting crushes for people I don't know, based just on how they look. I used to do that as a adolescent. But I decided it makes no sense. f you love a person you want to live with her, and living together is much more than just looking at each other. I once met a girl who was beautful, sweet and nice, and I fell for her, and it took me six months to realize that even if she had actually wanted me (she didn't) it would have never worked anyway, because we were too different on everything that matters. Ever since, I stopped getting crushes on girls jut because they're nice and pretty. Instead, I develop a different kind of feeling, which I call "interested", and it makes me want to know more about her. As I get to know the girl more, it gradually evolves into friendship, or attraction, or nothing, or a few other shades I have. Yes, I consciously decided to alter the emotional way I respond to people because I analyzed my old way and didn't like it, and it actually worked. Most people I talked with can't understand the concept of changing how you feel because of how you think. Sometimes I feel like I'm some sort of alien. Good thing I accepted that a long time ago.

not really, that's my point. For homosexuality there is a clear discriminating factor: you find people of a certain sex to be attactive, or not. You see dozens such people on a daily basis just by walking out of home. You can't think "well, maybe I never found an attractive girl (keeping with one gender for simplicity)", because you have seen literally thousands of them, and you can tell a girl is attractive at first glance. If you like girls, you certainly will see several you find beautiful. On the other hand, in order to find someone romantically attractive, you need to know them. If you're a loner, you may have known enough to judge only a couple dozen girls. It is fully possible that you never found an attractive one in such a small sample, especially if you are a person that doesn't fit the mold. Then there is the fact that aromanticis is a continuum. there are people less romantic than others, and you can find gradually less romantic ones until you reach aromanticism. But where do you draw the line? I don't feel aromantic at all, but a good third of the points in lord claincy's list do apply to me anyway. Some of those because I don't have much interest in a quick fling but I rather look for something stable, some because I am very affectionate towards my female friends, some because I befriend very few people, some because I am generally a rational, as opposed to emotional, kind of person, and some because I'm just terrible at reading body language. Yeah, ok, I realize that also for identifying with a gender it is impossible to draw a line. realizing your sexual attractions is easy, the romantical ones are more difficult, in general. I suppose aromantic gradually merges with straight, and there's no way to draw a clear line. In the end it all boils down to what do you feel you are. But you can recognize you are homo- or bi- as young as thirteen, while you would not realize you're aromantic before your early twenties.

I wonder: how do you figure out whether you're aromantic or you're never found the right person? I am into online gaming, and I have other friends who do, so I should add my own metaphorical two cents. 1) most gamers are ok. while it may seem to the casual gamer that those communities are full of trolls, in fact they are a minority. Unfortunately, if you are playing with ten people, you are going to notice the one or two who flame instead of all the other ones. 2) communities for different games are very different. I've seen plenty of angst in League of Legends, while there are a few problematic people in civilization IV and I've never seen anythhing but politness in widelands. Unfortunately the latter two games are only played by a few dozen individuals. I have a friend who plays starcraft, and he says he only found one bad guy in months of playing. So, it depends. 3) there are also strong differences in the same game among different skill levels. In League of Legends, bronze games are full of people who will harrass or misbehave, in silver they are frequent, but I have a friend who rose as high as diamond and he said it was very different there and people were nice. they realize you must be a good player to have gone so high, and if you're ahving a bad game they'll support you instead of bashing you. In ogame I never found any toxic player ammong the skilled ones, while there are many among the unexperienced (mostly people who did not read how to play the game, did not try to listen to explanations, and then are blaming other people if they are defeated). 4) I have seen the second applied to men. Many times. The "you're not good enough" is a common argument especially in team games, where there are people always ready to blame the team when they are losing. or, in community, the accusation of being a poser. I've never seen the first being used on a girl. Never seen people making that assuption. I think the worst I've ever seen as sexual harrasment is "you're a girl playing videogames, you must be hot". Which is not all that bad. 5) many men will poke at each other in jest, for fun. we do that a lot in civilization. I do it even more with my real life chess buddies. Again, it's something that depends heavily on the community. However, the written language of a chat is humorless. So, sometimes people who are not experienced with those communities may take as offensive something that was intended as a joke. To sum it up, gaming communities are very different environments, do not despair on finding the right one because of a few bad experiences.