king of nowhere

intersting idea. on the other hand, we don't know of any epic whose weakness is another epic, and i am fairlly sure that the rules of the epicness states that your weakness would potentially allow any normal human to kill you. I don't think your weakness can be a specific person or groupp of people.

I think that brings a good point: different people mean different things with votes. for example, i almost never upvote to say i agree. that vote would be indistinguishable from an upvote for any other reason. instead i upvote to reward posts that bring some solid facts into a discussion. people linking to some relevant word of brandon generallly get an upvote from me, and peple using math properly also get upvotes. sometimes i also may upvote a post if it is well argumented, and that's coompletely unrelated to whether i agree with the post or not. of course, i also upvote a post if it makes me laugh. anyway, maybe some of the difference of opinions come from the fact that we mean different things with votes. i givve votes to the construction of a post, not to the content. other people do the reverse. the most thorough way to deal with it would be to use separate votes, like "i agree" "i disagree" "this was funny" "this was rude", but it would become unnecessarily byzantine. anyway, maybe that's the simplest explanation for unmotivated downvotes: people new to the forum, coming from other forums where downvotes are a way to express agreement, who just downvoted because he disagrees. it is a bit like a foreigner meeting you and doing a rude gesture at you because in his country it has a completely different meaning.

I think trackable votes woud be a bad idea for several reasons. 1) the downvotes are already used very seldom. that's because they are taken as something terribly personal. think, if downvoting would point a red arrow at you, how even less used downvoting would become. we may as well abolish it completely. sometimes anonimity is good because it protects people from retaliation. it is no chance that every democracy has secret vote. 2) downvoting would be used even more rarely than now, but, given how personal it is considered (and how it would be considered even more personal because it would be used even less) it would strongly encourage making revenges. you don't even have to do it blatantly, you can just follow all your "enemy" posts and downvote at anything controversial that you would ignore from anyone else. or you can just stop upvoting him. even the argument that the kind of person that would start a downvote war prefers anonimity is not that strong: the kind of person who would downvote in spite would never know who to downvote if its downvoter was anonymous. And may not even care enough, if he doesn't have a quick way to see the culprit. 3) knowing who upvotes you would too easily lead to seeing upvotes as an exchange of favors, vote for being voted. Which in my opinion is even worse than people starting downvote wars. people would start upvoting each other reciprocally just to increase their counts. I remember a few months ago somebody started a thread "upvote me and I'll upvote you", and it got well over one page in the few hours before it was deleted, with people enthusiastic at getting free upvotes. really, I think this is a wonderful community, and I am deeply disappointed that there are so many people willing to inflate their reputation that way only to look better to other forumites. What's the point of reputation points if you hadn't earned them yourself? Journey before destination, and all those things. 4) the chance to add an explanation after downvoting could be ok, but it is redundant. if somebody makes and offensive post, almost always someone will reply and tell what was wrong with it. if it wasn't self evident from the start. or you could always send a pm. 5) I don't want to know who upvotes or downvotes me. It may lead me to take it personally, and I would never want my opinion of them to be influenced by something like that. And of course, if there was the chance to see who downvoted you, I would look at it. I trust that if other people have a grudge with me, and it is important, they will tell me. if it is not important, if they are willing to look over it, then i trust that it will not be a problem, maybe they just had a bad day, let it all end there. If i was running for a contest and my ffriends were voting, I'd want them to be free to vote somebody else anonymously, because I'd trust that they had a good reason for it. Basically, I prefer to trust people and not second-guess them. If somebody uses my openness to take advantage of me, I just cut contacts with him, and consider whatever harm he's done to me a fair price to pay to have isolated him out. So far, I'm 28 and I never regret having done it. having an upvote and downvote list would harm this policy of mine. 6) And most important in my opinion. Reputation is a silly counter of a sort of approximation of popularity on a silly forum for fans of a writer of fictious stories. If you care enough about it to want to know who upvoted or downvoted you, then you are taking reputation way too seriously. Luckily, I've never seen anyone argue "I have more reputation than you, so I am right and you are wrong", but I think tracking votes like that would only encourage people to take reputation more seriously. and that would be bad. heed my plea, and not change the voting system.

the way shards have been scheming with mortals, i definitely think there are other ways to bring them down. they would not take such care in those schemes if they could not be harmed by them

I think you are grasping at straws here. if you know about horses, you can come on top by betting on horse races. mat cauthon could tell you how the whole race would unfold after looking at the horses, and it was always explicitly stated that it was his knowledge of horses, it had nothing to do with his ta'veren luck. furthermore, if he really had been a spinner, then he would have had his best interest in storing when betting, not tapping. he had no need of money. he owned a few % of all the real estate in elendel, he was rich beyond belief. think about somebody owning one or two square kilometers of manhattan. I'm not sure bill gates could afford it. he was practically like a small king, and while he also had great expenses because he had to pay tens of thousands of wages, getting huge sums of money was no big deal for him. in fact, as the butler mentioned, while he made a small fortune in horse races, he lost a big fortune in mishandled deals. if you wanted to make money, wouldn't it make sense to use your stored luck when doing those deals? and since he wanted to lose money as a part of his plan, why winning at horse races? would it make sense to use your luck on something so trivial, when you have such big plans in motion? Consider that edwarn was anything but a fool. As for exhibit 2, I don't think luck feruchemy works that way. you store it, and a loved one dies? feruchemy is all internal. i doubt it affects other people like that. even people who are dear to you, or who are part of your plans. furthermore, the "bad luck" in it was only that wax would eventually become house lord and ruin the plans one year later. You store luck, and something random happens that is apparently of little import at the moment (I doubt he cared much for his son, he had his daughter kidnapped and impregnated) but will lead to consequences that will ruin your secret plans one year later? I'd definitely say that's far too indirect to be the effect of luck feruchemy. As a last piece of evidence, alloy of law is a book. a work of fiction. I challenge you to name me a work of fiction that does not rely on unlikely coincidences to advance the plot or simply to set the scene.

c'mon, it's not so bad. I mean, black magic? love potions? lol! it's just so ridiculous I can't help finding it funny. However, it's getting old, the same joke over and over. I'd like them to spam for something else, something just as stupid if possible I am consciously trying to ignore the implication of there being people in the XXI century and with an internet connection that still believe in that kind of stuff.

epic superpowers don't follow much the laws of logic. not the strict kind of logic at least.

why vashikaran uses only black magic? can't he use white or asian magic? is it a form of racist discrimination?

when a girl gets bonus points with you for looking like shallan. no, not because shallan is pretty and her lookalike was also very pretty. she got bonus points for being pretty and she got more bonus points for looking like shallan. It's a pity she playes chess openings that i absolutely loathe to play. now i don't know if i love or hate her.

I think the majority of downvotes are from people genuinely misclicking. many people use tablets or similar devices where it's hard to press precisely enough. the few cases when it's done intentionally are generally clear. alternatively, if there is only one user who decided to downvote, and your post stands there with a red mark, any user who does not believe you deserved a downvote will generally upvote to cancel it. heck, I remember a time something I said was mistaken for sexist, and when i was called for it I got pissed because it was really quite light and used mostly in a joking fashion, and I don't like the way some people seem to be overly sensitive over comments that are clearly meant in an innocent way, so I gave a snarky answer. the day after, i was at -7. I realized i had exaggerated, so i apologized and explained that i answered thusly because i felt offended by the implied accusation of sexism. the day after, there were no downvotes on my post. people decided i didn't deserve the downvote anymore and upvoted me to cancel. there were also a couple of posts answering me in tone, and they went through a similar cycle of being upvoted before i made my explanations, downvoted after i made my explanation, and upvoted again after those posters made their explanations too. in the end there were no hard feelings left, and no downvotes. I'd say the voting system worked pretty well. the only time I see posts consistently downvoted is when they are accidentally ruder or nastier than intended (in which case it's a single post, no harm done). I remember a case of a user who was consistently downvoted and he eventually got banned, because his posts were very assertive and full of stuff like "no sane men could disagree" "no real man would allow that" and stuff like that; it was clear he came from a very sheltered environment where everyone had similar opinions and he never had contact with world visions much different from his own. I think the environment of this forum may have been good for him in the long run.

I would like to hear how the aiel chants sound like. they sound positively badass and besiddes personal appreciation i can think of several uses for them to create an atmosphere. i tried a search on youtube, found a few wot-related songs, but not what I was looking for. I was thinking in particular wash the spears -while the sun climbs high wash the spears - while the sun climbs low wash the spears - who fears to die wash the spears - no one I know and life is a dream - that knows no shade life is a dream - of pain and woe a dreamm from which - we pray to wake a dream from which - we wake and go Anyone can help me? does anyone ever tried to sing and record them? I tend to imagine them as some kind of stadium chant, both because it fits the rithm and because it does not require instruments. is there even a canon for how they are sung, or is it left to free interpretation? Also the way they rattle the spears on their shields would be nice. Thanks if someone can help me

I come from another world where that happpens, which is the one of chess. chess is not dependant on physical growth, and the kind of brainpower you need for it apparently develops quite early. I've been the strongest in my club since i was around 14, until recently when i lost the title to a couple of 16-yo. so it is a place where you can see adults and adolescents interact as equal. I got the impression that most young adults (say, 14-18, sometimes extending down to 12 for particularlly smart kids) are actually indistinguishable from adults most of the times. Up until the point when they do something supid and/or immature, and sometimes you'd think they were 8. then they revert to being undistinguishable from adults. But you can't tell until they do something stupid. and most of them will do only under specific circumstances. the one I know better (I've been friend with his parents since I was 8 and they weren't married yet. I consider him and his brother as acquired cousins) becomes very aggressive when he loses at something, but as long as he's winning (or if you're not playing a game) you could not tell him from an adult. So, I'm not surprised that there are young people here and I can't tell their age from their posts. And I am in the abit of treating them as near peers until proven otherwise anyway. I have to say, the thing that mostly surprises me about dealing with adolescents is the fact that several adults actually behave much worse, but they get away with it. Something for which a young would be called out, if ddone by an adult will elicit comments like "he's too old to change". or maybe it's just the fact that there's nobody with the autority to send an adult to his room.

welcome to the club. Just a quick note, the women you've met until now (egwene, nynaeve, moiraine) are all short, but there are plenty of tall ones in further books.

When I read the thread title, I immediately wanted to answer with something snarky and cinic, like "the 17th shard is awesome because we all have overinflated opinions of ourselves". Because it's easy to forget how nice this place is. After reading a couple of comments, I was reminded of it. Yeah, the way people here are accepting is amazing. I used to hang around in the forum of the order of the stick, but they gradually banned all discussions that were flamebait after seeing some bad cases, and eventually it arrived at a point where you could discuss anything except "i think character x is going to do y in the future". But being careful to not put any moral judgment on that. here i feel like i can discuss everything. In particular I am always surprised at finding profoundly devoted christians who are ok with other people being atheist and are even supporting of gay marriage. I don't know any strongly religious person, except maybe my grandmother, but we never talked about the issue. Most people in europe feels that religion is a private matter and it is somewhat embarassing to display it (or its lack thereof) openly, so I don't have experience of talking to other people about religion. And I found some on other forums, which are strawman bigotic fanaticists, the kind that invoked fire and brimstone on anyone slightly different from them. Heck, some of them even called me down for being a scientist, because only god knows the truth and my attempt to figure out more about the cosmos is a sin of pride or something like that. And I got a few pieces of hate for saying that I do not base my morality on the bible, containing all the old clichès like atheists having no moral whatsoever and being unable to make moral decisions, like animals. And I'm not even fully atheist, merely agnostic. Anyway, the point is, this forum is the only place where I found people who are strongly religious but also accepting of others who are not. Without you, I'd be probably convinced that all religious people are intolerant fanatics - which in a subtle twist of irony would have made me an intolerant fanatic myself. Instead, I just think that the intolerant fanatics are the only ones who are outspoken enough to be noticed. So, thank you for helping me being open-minded. EDIT: I should probably also add that this is the only place where I can find people who are even more nerds than me, so I don't feel the weird one.

but then how do you explain that he's selling all of them in ebook format? Also, my favourite reading position is laying on a side with the book on the bed. so it doesn't matter how heavy the book is. but it does matter how big it is, because they don't fit well in front of me and i have to keep moving my head to see the corners of the page. overall, they are quite uncomfortable to read.

as moogle explained, the diagram is pretty accurate. however, it was made five years before, and the future cannot be predicted perfectly. So, I'd say the diagram is flawed already, and it probably needs adjusting. Taravangian himsellf is aware of it. However, he also believes that hummankind has no chances on its own. so he keeps trying the plan, hoping he can still make it work.

i think kaladin has to take charge of the survivors. he is certainly a much better leader than roshone. he can certainly put roshone in his place without breaking any of his wows. if roshone triies to fight him there is the chance kaladin may be justified in killing him. another possibility would be that kaladin saves roshone, and roshone has a change of heart and repents his past misdeeds. that could be awesome, but it stretches believability. he definitely looks like the kind of person who, upon being saved by the man he hates, will think "i can't believe how stupid this guy is" and go on plotting against him. as for laral, i would like for her to respect kaladin and find happyness. i don't care if she becomes a love interest or if she's left behind, but she spent hher whole life as a bargaining chip and i wish she got something better than roshone. Of course, if this was the song of ice and fire, then both kaladin''s parents woud be dead, roshone would be dead, kaladin would save laral from the voidbringers but she would die from the flu she got standing out in the cold and rain. brandon however doesn't write that way. The laws of narrative are a fine line to walk: they exist because, when you analyze them, you see they make for a better story, but if you foollow them too strictly you are predictable and your story is a clichè. you have to respect them enough to get a good story, but violate them enough that the reader won't know what to expect. so, it is perfectly possible one of the four characters set up from kaladin's past - his parents, roshone and laral - was only meant to be randomly killed. however, all of kaladin's backstory smells of unfinished business. i think it will get a sense of closure

it falls on one point, which is the shadowblaze. normal people don't know it exist. so if they escaped from rithmatists, and everybody is a rithmatist, then everybody would see one and they would not be secret. other than that, it fits with everything and it explains some unlikely coincidences (the chances of four brothers being all rithmatists are one in one thousand billions). So, if it was a working hypothesis in my work as a researcher, i would rate it unlikely but worth investigating further.

laws of narrative make it likely that his parents, roshone and laral will be alive. i mean, you don't normally set up characters like that just to drop a bridge on them. there are of ccourse exeptions, which is why i merely said "likely".

well, making and splitting molecular bonds involve energy transfer, so i'd say lancing does that. we've seen with lancing kai can make ston platforms fly and manipulate matter at atomic level, sso i'd say, it does pretty much anything. it is a broken, overpowered kind of magic. the kind that would let you pass yourself as a god. no wonder he conquered the world.

i can'timagine the world without the 17th shard. but then, i can't imagine my life without having new sanderbooks to look forward to, yet i started reading him no more than some 5 years ago...

huh, i can see the inquisitors getting stuck when going through doors...

she uses ten heartbeats simply because she has hidden to herself the nature of her blade. she went her whole life trying to deny or hide her past, and not acknowledging her blade was one oof the things she did related to it. you may notice she also is reluctant to think about it, or to use a blade when it would help her. although she doesn't need ten heartbeats. she summons the sword faster when the con-woman tries to kill her. EDIT: doublee ninja

sorry you took offence. i never implied there's anything wrong with the way you guys speak, it's just enough of a different language that i have difficulties with it. as for america being a big place and having many different accents in many places, i am aware of that, but i had difficulties with all those I came in contact with (new york, washington, something my father picked up from working for the american army, what they use in movies, and brandon when he makes youtube videos). although, aside from the new york accent, the other accents i can manage to understand passably after a while, and i'd say brandon's is the one i understand better. but the point is, i find difficult to understand all the different american accents i heard, if some more than others, so i felt safe enough in generalizing that. again, there was no bad intention on my part.

on the other hand, it triggered good character development. i'd say, it is good to be pushed out of one's comfort zone every once in a while. it can lead to greater enlgihtenment, and if it doesn't it generally does no more harm than the waste of a few hours.