king of nowhere

So, you are arguing that it's unlikely that torturers would gouge the eyes out of someone. You are proposing instead that a worldhopper with a shardblade killed him - a random thief crewleader who just had passing contact with the main characters but knew next to nothing about them - and then gouged his eyes out to cover the source of the killing - despite the fact that no one would know the work of a shardblade on scadrial, and no one would care to make inquiries for a skaa crewleader. No, I see the first option as the less unlikely of the two, by a fair bit. also, ripping eyes is a good torturing technique, if you don't have much time for it. if you can devote weeks to breaking a prisoner, you favor techniques that gives no permanent damage. but if you can only spare a few hours at most, you do your worst and hope he'll break immediately. and he probably did; he knew he was going to die anyway, and he had no reason to withhold any information; it's not like he cared about another thieving crew.

well, it's a problem of semantics here. maybe i should call him dishonorable but kindhearted. the fact that he prefers to treat people well when given the chance do not qualify him for being honorable if he also is willing to betray people when it is fit, but it should still count for something in differentiating him from a cold-blooded sociopath who only cares about himself. I think it is clear that amaram definitely prefers to do the right thing if he feels he can, he's not just faking for public relations. there's definitely something good inside him and I can't think of a really appropriate definition. He is, of course, still an assassin. As for a good example of how someone can be a leader in a realistic world and still be honorable while not getting people killed for his naiveness, I think Elend in the hero of ages was doing it pretty well.

yes, but that actually supports the idea. if he won't face any bad consequence for it, he prefer to act honorable. he regrets having been honorable the time it had backfired

Well, mediterranean cultures are pretty close to each other. especially italian and spanish, to the point that at every international student i've seen or heard of they banded together. I've never known any greek, so I'm not sure how much they'd fit into it, but from what i hear they also should be quite similar. ao, whether the herdazians are of hisppanic or italic or greek inspiration, the difference is comparatively small.

so, if you call fighting two of the best sllethi shardbearer duelists by himself unarmed and unarmored and eventually forcing them to surrender "mediocre", you need to revise your evaluation scale. His other fights in wor were against szeth, who is the writing equivalent of a cheat character, and zahel, who is actually vasher from warbreaker, he was already an excellent fighter at the time (don't be confused by the fact that he was slightly worse than denth; denth was one of the best in the world and just resisting a few minutes against him is a great achievement) and has who knows how many centuries of extra experience to top that. I was also surprised, but it makes a lot of sense. in wok kaladin had to protect his crew against lighteyes machinations, and his best traits could shine. in wor, he had to trust people utside of himself and his crew, and most notably lighteyes. Plus,he had almost made the decision of confiding in dalinar, when amaram arrived. that arc brought out the worst of kaladin, and yes, he seemed like a different person, but he is not, just like two sides of a coin seem different but actually belong to the same coin. kaladin is good at inspiring people and being a leader. he is not good at dealing with lighteyes he can't bribe or stay away from. he is not good at trusting his own leaders. You can see how he acts all the time like he's in charge even with the kholins. that's no different from how he behaved in the first book; remember how he was always paied only token respect to his superiors, even in amaram army he bribed them to be free to act on his own. nothing of that changed. it's just that in wor found himself in a totally different situation where his old instincts were no longer good.

Herdazians are hispanic. I remember reading in an interview somewhere Sanderson saying that it was his wife to give him the idea. She noted how most fantasy cultures are based on feudal europe, or feudal japan, or the roman empire, but she can't recall any based instance of one based on hispanics. Brandon tought about it, and herdazia was born. I guess that's also part of the reason I'm seeing it as a tortilla instead of a kebab or gyro or even a piadina. Althoug the difference isn't so great: virtually every culture devised some kind of food made of a slice of bread wrapped around meat and sauces. If I recall correctly, the meat is finely minced and into a semi-liquid stuff, making me think it could be a close equivalent of ragù. Ragù is normally eaten with pasta, not as filling for a bread-based thing, but it can be used that way - in fact, I did eat exactly that for five days in a row a few weeks ago, after making three kilos of ragù and finding out my freezer could only keep two.

from the description, it seems similar to tortilla

the "iron into infinite energy" thing is not as cool as it appears. true, it can teoretically generate infinite amounts of energy, but in practice you need a feruchemist and it can only generate so much. if my calculations are correct, you can teoretically generate up to a few hundred watts. even if they are wrong, i seriously doubt a feruchemist could power more than a single household. so, unless you have three feruchemist in each house working 8 hours/day in three turns, you won't be able to power anything relevant with that trick. it's just a matter of scale.

the way i understood it, Feruchemical iron breaks conservation of momentum. for example, wax pushed himself towards the lamps, then increased his wheight and pushed the lamps, shattering them. he didn't slow down. tapping Feruchemical iron while moving effectively increases your momentum.

I wonder how much the sons of honor really know about the radiants. They appear to be a secret sect with a lot of secret knowledge, but it's still millennia-old second hand knowledge. they may have forgotten a number of important details, have accumulated subtle-but-deeply-misleading inaccuracies. Compare to the group sigzil was part of. they also knew a lot about radiants, but what they were trying to do would never work. putting a radiant into a deathtrap would never work to reveal his powers unless the radiant is already quite advanced. if it''s the wrong kind of radiant, the trap would kill him anyway: i think for example of the falling boulder. lift would have no way out of it. kaladin may lash himself away, but if he has that kind of freedom of movement he can roll away without problems, so he must be tied in place; in which case he can't really escape the bounds and can only stop the boulder for a short time before his stormlight runs out. So, I expect the sons of honor to have many things wrong. maybe they really are trying to attract spren, but are going about it the wrong way because of their limited knowledge.

you can't fly by pushing a ring in your hand, because of action and reaction law. the best you could achieve that way would be to rip off your finger. the best way i see of flying as a twinborn would be to have a metal anchor cconnected to a rubber band, you push on it while tapping wheight and the anchor goes away pulling the rubber while you move very little, then you stop pushing and start storing wheight, so when the rubber band pull back this time you move significantly towards the anchor. I'm not sure you could accelerate enough to beat gravity that way, so you'd probably also need some helium ballon. but if you have a helium balloon you can probably put a helix on it. it's probably more trouble than it's worth. On the other hand, it could be useful to move in space without fuel. it would be painstakingly difficult to get any fine control, though.

I guess so. though the nervous system is redundant, and I expect the kandra to be extra redundant as an adaptation. when tensoon is wounded in combat, he don't look like he lost memories afterwards, so losing small chunks of tissue has no effect.

I think that the cut flesh would die, but nothing would stop the kandra from simply regrowing the arm from the rest of his flesh. depending on their metabolic efficiency, tthey could eat their dead arm and use the extra mass gained to make a new arm with little loss. the bone would probably cut. beheading should not be fatal, but it's tricky because a physical beheading is nothing to a kandra, but a spiritual beheading ccould actually hurt. So, anyway, slash a kandra with a shardbalde once, he'll be temporarily weakened. slash enough times, he'll die.

ah, it's difficult to find trustable reading advice. I got a few poor calls myself from my brother, most notable the sword of truth. But my brother is also the guy who got me to read jordan and sanderson, so it's still worth listening to his advice and getting a few bad books along the way. I am glad that sanderson and peter are giving occasional advice, as they are people i trust. Unfortunately, city of stairs is not available at my local library, and I require more than the advice of a guy I trust before paying for transoceanic shipping. That actually happened to me with movies. Ever since I started reading wot, I gradually stopped watching movies because, for time reasons, the plot is always simplicistic and the characterization is sloppy (only exception are comedies, that don't need intricate plots). For example, I remember watching Thor (my brother advice), and I was actually liking it for the first half; I mean, the arrogant warrior that must learn wisdom to be a good leader, who must learn to fight to protect instead of figthing for glory, is hardly a new concept, but it's more archetypical than clichè, and there are good stories and character developments that can be made with it. But then, he basically completely change personality overnight, and the second half of the movie is basically a whole fight scene where he becomes a mary sue. I remember thinking 'what a total waste of a perfectly good opportunity for some great character development' and was completely disappointed. If only they could have added another hour of movie to show some realistic gradual change in the cjharacter instead...

well, you appear to be quite rare in not complaining about books 7-10. I also am perfectly ok with them, but most people say they don't like how they slow down, and some quitted reading there, so i always feel like i have to either defend them against the views of the majority, or take the coward way out and shut up. as for the rest, well, i'd like to respond point by point, but there''s really too much stuff there. suffice to say that i also would have liked to see more of far madding, and as for cannons and magical warefare... well, the last book definitely won't disappoint you.

I see you have a deep knowledge of ya romance novels. The only question is, if you obviously have such a low opinion of them, how did you ccome to read so many as to know them so well?

well, the lord of the rings is basically what invented the genre. now we see it as clichè, but we must remember that those cliches didn't exist at the time, they were created by lotr. it seems clichè only because it was so incredibly succesful that a lot of people went apeing it, poorly. I like to think of it like some piece of obsolete technology, say the telegraph.sure, now it seems useless cause we have broadband satellites communications, but when it was invented it was the only way to communicate at distance, and we'd never have invented the satellites if we hadn't started with it. Same with the wheel of time: it marks the transition between that old fantasy and modern fantasy. If you don't like them, it's only because you are already experienced readers and have read a lot of similar stuff. Annd if sanderson can write better stuff, it's because he had those examples to set his path. Like galilei said, 'i'm standing on the shoulders of giants'. That said, I liked the lord of the rings a lot when i first read it; it's one of the first fantasy books I've read, and the first one I deemed worth the time spent reading it. I've been rereding it regularly too, before i discovered wot. then i stopped reading lotr. Now I'd probably still appreciate it, even if I got used to harder magic systems and am quite frustrated with powerless protagonists caught up in a world they don't understand, just less than before. I've had that problem reading neil gaiman, and while I recognize that his books are great for a certain audience, I also see that I'm no part of it. Anyway, once I had wot i started rereading wot regularly, and while i slowed down later to make room for sanderson's books (which are taking the greater share of my reading time nowadays) i intend to continue with it, i just started my fourth reread two days ago. I have absolutely no problem with wot being long and slow. I am a man of extreme tastes: if I like something, I like it a lot and can never get enough of it, otherwise I simply don't like it. So if I like a book I don't give a damnation how long it is, it's better cause it last longer, and if i don't like it then making it shorter won't fix the issue. I just like reading through it, even when the plot feels stagnating and the characters make me want to bash them with a baseball bat. I can't really pin what I'm liking more about wot. Still, while it has boring moments, i accept them as a necessary part of the story. It's intersting to note that, aside from wot and sanderson, and partially lotr, I have never found any other piece of fantasy i really appreciated. certainly nothing worth reread, which is the hallmark that I actually liked something (remember, I have strongly polarized tastes. If i don't like to reread something, then i didn't really like to read it the first time). Well, except for pratchett, and the order of the stick, but those are parodies, not strictly fantasy. While like 90% of what i read nowadays is fantasy, I don't consider myself a fantasy addict, merely an addict to the work of two people. who luckily for me left me enough stuff to read.

I don't know what she was, but she was important. like, really superimportant. she was so important the hero of the ages himself was her butler.

i think there's no real world equivalent. the chasms are only a few meters wide, and while there are probably canyons that narrow, i highly doubt there's a whole system of them crisscrossing. So yeah, I'd go for the green room. Took me a couple seconds to figure it out, by the way

hoid got his lerasium from the well of ascension shortly before vin. when, in the second book, vin comes into the well, she sees footprints. we have wob somewhere that those were hoid's. so there were two lerasium beads, hoid got the first and vin the second.

well, not so simple of course. maybe once you get spiked the spike loses power if someone else is spiked with it. as long as you are the only one using it, it won't decay. maybe when you are spiked you bond the spike in some way, and as long as it is near to you (note that both vin and wax always kept their earrings with them even when they weren't using them) it won't decay. You can probably argue that wax's ring hadd passed many owners during its 300 years of life; but in fact, that earring wasn't a powerful spike at all, it only gave wax a moderate boost, and needed the mists to fuel. I know, it's not a perfect explanation, but it's the best one available

Personal hygiene. You store by showering when you're already clean. BY tapping, you can clean yourself istantaneously, shave your beard, trim your hair. I'd much rather do all those stuff in bulk every once in a while rather than having to do them every day

I don't remember ever seeing a word of brandon about it anywhere. Hoid is always around for cosmere-important events, and the ascension of rashek definitely qualifies. As far as we know, hoid was already around at the time. So, did Hoid get involved in Alendi's quest and the events that ultimately lead to the ascension of the lord ruler? Or was he caught by surprisee as he failed to see the changed prophecies? And what was his plan for scadrial? Was hoid trying to help alendi, or did he favor rashek because he already figured what needed to happen one thousand years later? If we don't know, that' definitely something someone should ask brandon.

A critical mass of plutonium is simply a mass of plutonium of appropriate size and geometry, and not exceedengly large. the nagasaky bomb only had 6.4 kg of plutonium. the reason atomic bombs are so complex is that a critical mass will sppontaneously undergo fission, so it has to be split in several pieces and those pieces must be reassembled together to detonate the bomb, by mean of accurately controlled conventional explosions. but if you can simply soulcast the fissile material, you don't need all the other stuff. And I believe soulcasting a pure element should not be that difficult.

you guys all made good arguments and convinced me, like, two months ago.