king of nowhere

oh, man, I wish I was still in contact with my high school english teacher to show her that. I'm sure she'd love it.

damnation ninja, I was just going to say that (EDIT: and huh, like a half dozen comments popped out in the time I took to write this). yes, alcatraz explains a lot of things on how fantay literature works, and it's also lots of laughs. even if it weren't, I'd consider it worth reading just for the part about dead dogs and mothers (you'll see it). Anyway, as many others have said, it is unavoidable. sometimes people pick up books in the middle of the series, because they don't care much about it. sometimes they do it by accident: it happened when my brother started the wheel of time from book 9, thinking it was a standalone episode in a loosely connected series - because really, no one sane would try to write a single story in 9 books that big - and that's how we discovered the wheel of time. Sometimes people pick up the book after years and need some refreshing. sometimes people haven't paid much attention as they are only superficial readers. there are many reasons why recpas are needed. they do happen in any medium with a continuity. I understand about feeling insulted for it; it happens to me too, not for plot recaps but for other things. For example, by advertising that assumes I'll buy their product if just they show me a pair of boobs. I guess I'd feel insulted by continuous plot recaps too, if I didn't see the reason for it. If it makes you feel better, you can think that those are there because other people aren't as smart as you (it doesn't mean very much, just that you are above the very lowerst tier of people reading those books, but hey, it's supposed to make you feel better, not to be accurate). It's what I do for the aforementioned advertising.

but hey, brandon is not the only one with paranormal powers here. let's not forget his beloved fans, who also scored nice achievements. sanderfans are so dedicated, once one of them fished out brandon's shopping list out of the trash bin. he sent it to a publisher, and it became a major editorial success. about two thirds of the fans said it was a brilliant masterpiece, while another third believed that "shaving cream" should have been put before "apples" for better pacing. much speculation has been devoted as to whether the banana was a worldhopper, and if hoid was impersonating the milk. sanderfans are so dedicated, they routinely manage to read every book that sanderson writes. twice or more. that's a far bigger achievement than it sounds at first. sanderfans are such epilectic trees, that if sanderson accidentally sneezed at a convention, someone will notice that the sneeze actually sounded like some obscure phrase in a dialect spoken by a few dozen people in the deep amazon basin, and threads will pop up to interpret the meaning of this "secret message". sanderfans are so dedicated, they are researching a time machine so that they can get his books before the release. Sanderfans are so dedicated, their proposal for bringing world peace is to walk into war zone and gift sanderson books to all soldiers, so that they'd be too busy reading to kill each other. and sanderson is so awesome, that it may actually work.

Brandon sanderson is so thorough in his research, he once walked into a police department and punched an officer, all so he would experience a few weeks of prison to better write the related chapters in wor. Brandon sanderson is so thorough in his research, to figure out how to write a dyeing character point of view he once died himself. He was then confronted by god, who asked him "what will happen in alcatraz 5?" and brandon said "rafo". So god resurrected him to finish the books. Brandon sanderson is so thorough in his research, he tried to experience kaladin's exhaustion in carrying the bridge by running around for hours with a backpack full of stones. unfortunately, it didn't work for him: he found out he could rest from running around with stones by simply running around with different stones, so he never got tired. Brandon sanderson is so thorough in his research, to figure out how to write secret societies he once joined the freemasons. After climbing up to the highest echelons, he persuaded them to be good by telling them some radiant ideals. then he went back refining his writing of the ghostbloods. Particularly prolific authors are rumored to use ghostwriters. Those ghostwriters are brandon sanderson. he writes a few novels every year for other guys as an excercise in adopting different styles and genres. but even sanderson cannot be that prolific without a ghostwriter. that ghostwriter, of course, is still sanderson. when he is tired of writing as sanderson, he relaxes by pretending he's someone else who's ghostwriting for himself. If brandon had actually continued his studies as a chemist, there would be plenty of people reading specialized scientific literature, namely his academic papers. without understanding anything about it. they'd simply read it because they liked the way it was written. Man, how I wish it was so! scientific papers seems written exactly to be boring and difficult to understand even to someone who actually is trained in the field, whose job is to read them and is intersted in the content. writing them differently would seem "unscientific" brandon does not breathe. if you analyzed the frequency of it you'd realized he is dictating another book in morse code. Brandon's books are thick enough to stop bullets, and the army had tried issuing them as body armor. it didn't work. it turned out those books were so prized, the soldiers preferred to shield the books with their bodies rather than the reverse

he said he never was above 7th nahn. he wouldn't have been a low darkeye if one of his eyes was light. also, there is no reason for it whatsoever.

maybe they were counting the numbers only for direct line descendants, while in the 23 alcatraz there are brothers and cousins included

I doubt the "was once living" aargument has any merit. if that was the discrimination, then charcoal, coal, and even most inks would work equally well. And I doubt it's crystal structure either. there are plenty of salts with the same crystal cells of calcium carbonate. I suppose it's just something arbitrary.

I think the "coming soon" simply means that the page is still work in progress. Then, it is possible that there will be announcements about movies or videogames, but I don't expect much conclusive. talks about a sanderson movie had been going for at least five years, and we're still nowhere on it. Granted, with the kind of success he's having, I think the chances some of his work sooner or later will be adapted into a movie are actually good. But I don't see it happening now. It's sort of like sending a men on mars: it will happen, but not in the foreseeable future.

shardpools aren't that big that they could fuel an entire army of lifeless. Generally I don't see reasons to theorize complicated magic means when mundane ones are perfectly viable. In all likelyhood ichor-alchol is just some kind of formaldehide solution. it would be perfectly viable with the tech level of the time

a feruchemically active metal may not be good for a weapon. a gun is subjected to significant wear and tear because it hosts a small explosion in it. it is mentioned in the book that aluminium guns are not as good as regular ones. so haveing a weapon with sub-par performance may be a poor exchange for only limited resistance to allomancy

You are to be commended for the work done, but alas, I'm afraid it was pointless. I'm sure there are other recollections of death rattles somewhere in the forum. for wok I'm 100% sure, and probably wor was included too.

vinducation was not made of aluminium. Push and Pull could affect it. I don't know why they didn't. anyway, neither of them was killed by the gun, so it matters little.

intersting idea. yes, the stuff about viewing all the nanobots as a single entity is certianly the most tricky one. all the other problems ccan be gotten around with some effort or creativity, but for this one, it either work or it doesn't. I wouldn't say it's impossible. vasher made a puppet with straw, so the loosely assemmbled pieces of straw still counted as one unit. nanobots could be viewed as one unitary thing - a single entity working towards a purpose, just like all the different molecules in your body are a sinlge entity working towards a purpose. but then, a single nanobot could perform the same function of the many, if slower, while the same does not hold for your body, or even for a straw puppet. There are also other possibilities. if you have nanobots in your blood healing you, they may be regarded as part of your organism after a while. so they may be more effective iff you have more breath. they may be recreated by stormlight. if there are nanobots in the body of a lifeless, they may get the enhancement as part of the lifeless, even if it wasn't possible or practical to awaken them alone. I suppose the only way of knowing that would be to ask brandon.

You know, after that announcement on bands of mourning, the joke becomes much more realistic in retrospect. Now I wouldn't put it past sanderson to come up with some announcement this fall like "I completed the first draft of SA 3, but since I could not get back into the series after a year not writing it, I also wrote book 4 to get back into it, so now they will be published together after revision. Oh, and since I needed to rest, I took pauses during which I wrote the new mistborn trilogy. And one night I couldn't get asleep, so I got up and wrote the elantris sequel. By the way, my wife divorced because she said I was writing too much and "forgetting about the family" (now that's crazy, I could never forget my beloved... huh, what was her name again?), but she let me take the laptop with me, so that won't affect my future output."

I'm trying to think of some witty and/or meaningful comment to add, but all I can say is WOW!!

It's not because my theory was right. theories are mostly guesswork, and I don't feel like taking much, if any, credit for them. it's because I worked on that allomantic friction with mathematical calculation. In my mind, that authomatically makes it serious business requiring real knowledge and skill, which would make it worth bragging about. In general, I have a concept of what is a significant achievement for which I can feel proud, and what is just luck/happenstance/no-more-than-what-I-am-supposed-to-dowhich is quite peculiar and make sense only to me. But I do feel proud of calcullating a mathematical theory of steelpushing.

Nah, your schoool will never recommend those. There are too few dead dogs and mothers to make them meaningful books.

YAY! My reasoning was sound! Must... resist... urge... to put... it... into... signature!

well, that's something we already strongly suspected, because adonalsium didn't shatter himself, there must have been something opposing him. But it's good to have confirmation. mmakes everything built on it a bit more solid.

if adonalsium was the human holding all 16 shards, then adonalsium was the union of all shards. the two are the same.

but see, that's the problem: they didn't start binding themselves after the breaking. they started somewhere between the trolloc wars and arthur hawkwing. that's over 1000 years after the breaking. there were a few thousands aes sedai at the time, and they were even more powerful than they are at the time of the books.

I think the main reason for most people to be excited about a sanderson movie is that, as sanderfans, we'd get excited over everything concerning sanderson's work. I mean, I am an italian working in finland and reading sanderson's books in english because I like them better than the translated version. But still every time I go to buy food I stop by the library that is along the way just to see if they translated words of radiance in finnish. I don't even speak finnish, but I'd get excited to see sanderson's books translated into it. And when I go to vacation in italy, if I stop by a library I go in just to see if they have sanderson books inside. even if I don't care to read them in italian. Even if I already own them. So, I'd definitely be excited about a sanderson movie, even if I proobably won't like it, and that probably applies to most of the fandom. But my main personal reason for liking the idea is that I'd like to see the graphical aspects of the stories. It's like the drawings inside words of radiance, but a thousandfolds. I'd like to see on a screen the spren, the highstorms, the palaces, the breath auras, all that stuff... then yeah, the plot would suck, it would almost be unrecongizable from the books, they'd have to put in love stories and fanservice and greatly expand on the stuff blowing up while sacrificing character depth... but I don't care. I already read the books for the story. I am watching the movie only for the visual representation of it. they could make a movie of the characters of the book doing nothing but sitting and drinking tea, I'd still appreciate it because I'd be able to put faces on them (well, ok, that's an exaggeration, but it conveys the point). myself, I've grown disillusioned with the movie industry some ten years ago, when I started to really notice the common cliches and pitfalls, and how the plots were either shallows or too over-the-top and handwaved. And then there are movies who attempt to tell a story, but a book is better for that. nowadays I only watch comedies. the only movie that is not strictly a comedy and that I still enjoy is back to the future. Still, I'd like to see sanderson movies. MY only worry is that they may suck so much that many people will not want to try reading him after that.

I thought kaladin sent two letters home; one after tien died, a few months into the army, and one after four years, to say that he won't be coming back. anyway, he mention spending a week's pay to have a letter sent, so he wasn't much in contact with home, whether he sent one letter or two. I suppose his parents don't know he was made a slave or anything else. As for laral, I'm not sure she will be that important except for narrative conventions. I mean, I remember a few girls I liked when I was 12-13, but nowadays they mean nothing to me and I wouldn't even recognize them. One single exception for a girl with whom I'm still friend because I kept regular contact later. Whatever happens between them, I doubt they can build much over the "we were friends as kids". especially considering how laral shut kaladin down later. they will have to restart from scratch, but I doubt it will happen. I expect sanderson to write something that I'm not expecting. One thing I'm picturing in my mind is kaladin swooping in and being a hero, laral falling for him (also, spending six years married to roshone will have lowered her standards considerably), but him wanting nothing more with her. except that now I'm expecting it, so it won't happen

that's something that has been bugging me for a long time, but I never bothered to write about it until now. the aes sedai don't know that the ageless look is caused by the oath rod, and they don't know it hallves their life expectancy. But it is mentioned that the aes sedai started to swear on it somewhere between the trolloc wars and the war of the hundred years. there had been a time - a long time - when aes sedai weren't ageless and did live up to 600 years. So, how could they miss it? when thoose aes sedai first decided to bind themselves with the rod, they certainly noticed that they developed the ageless look within a few years. even if they don't talk much about age, they must have noticed that they lived much less, also. and if they knew, how did they forget? aes sedai keep very meticulous records, they'd never forget something like that. Then there is the case that they intentionally forgot, that they kept the information secret so that new aes sedai wouldn't refuse to swear. but even then it would be strange that they completely forgot. they could have classified that information as sealed to the flame, or sealed to the hall. yet siuan, who has a very deep knowledge of secret histories, does not know it. would they go as far as striken mention of it from the 13th depository? unlikely. And that's not mentioning the likelihood that a brown would find out for herself, doing some research, that some aes sedai in the past is mentioned doing something and then doing something else 500 years later, or that there is no mention whatsoever of the ageless look before a certain point in time. So, how is it possible that no aes sedai knew about the collateral effects of the oath rod?

I've seen somewhere in this forum the picture of a couple who tattoed the symbols for ruin and preservation on their forearms, to say that together they become harmony. Not in the mood to search it, however. it's probably in the "you know you're a sanderfan" thread, and that's 70 pages long.