Pagerunner

It's true. I showed up with a single giant fish stick, and I could only get one book signed.

This isn't just a signing, right, it's a convention? So that might mean there's more time than at a signing - the one I was at, it was a huge rush to get everyone through (and Brandon still was there for over 6 hours!). If you wait 'til the end of a signing, you can slip more questions in - I didn't know that at the time, and went early and only got a couple of questions, but I hung around anyways and got tips from those who'd been there before and knew how to get 20 or more questions in. But, even though he kept the line moving, if a question was worthy of a good discussion, he'd take a couple minutes to talk it over (and one person, he had to call back up 'cause he wanted to clarify something he'd told them). I didn't see him write answers in anyone's books; it was all discussion, I think. But that was a release signing, so who knows if conventions are the same or not. You might have more time to pick his brain, go down a good tangent. If you're looking for a good yes/no question having to do with this theory, here's what I'd say: Is harmonium's extreme chemical reactivity due to having subatomic particles which are individually either of Ruin or Preservation? That communicates the core idea, doesn't get too specific, and is hopefully worded carefully enough to not trigger his troll mode. You can also name-drop electron shielding, since it would be a similar principle. If he doesn't say no and starts to open up, some good followups would be (in order of mostly-RAFO to total-RAFO): Are the subatomic particles made out of Investiture? Or are they normal particles which have Investiture attached to them? Does harmonium share the electron configuration of a real alkali metal (like cesium)? How does that balance out, since they all have an odd number of electrons? Is a harmonium atom an atomic fusion of a lerasium atom and an atium atom? Does a lerasium/atium alloy have different Allomantic properties than harmonium? When harmonium reacts with water, does it leave behind an oxide, or maybe a hydroxide? Is that reaction product Invested? What happens to the Invested electrons that are transferred away? Are all physical forms of Investiture (god metals, Shardblades, mists, Perpendicularities) formed this same way, with Invested subatomic particles that form a normal atomic structure? For now, I'd steer clear of questions about nuclear instability, whether or not the new interactions would change the overall electron configuration, and the details of the force balance (although I do have some math on the previous page, if you want to print it off and look impressive to the other people in line.)

I don't recall having heard anything of the kind. He's implied that the three Bondspren correspond to the three Rosharan Shards (unless they're not). We also received a specific "no" for whether or not it had to do with Ambition. I recall him speaking of how it'd be difficult to worldhop with a spren, since they're tied to that planet's region in the Cognitive Realm, so I don't think it's likely the third Bondsmith would be a worldhopper (especially considering the Radiants are helping the Heralds, who are tied to the Rosharan system, and that Stormlight is only available on Roshar).

In my last post, I talked about the kinds of information I'm gathering and how it's structured. But the interface you saw there isn't very conducive to quick browsing – the WoB text field would need to be obscenely wide, there are some fields we don't particularly care about most of the time, and the information was spread across several tabs. Thankfully, there's a better way built into Access to view information in a table: Forms. In an Access form, you basically view a single row at a time, but spread the fields in that row all over the page. You can make them bigger, you can make them smaller, you can add in text boxes with explanations, you can choose which fields you don't want to display on that particular form. But, at the end of the day, it's still a direct way of getting at the data in a table, it just looks different. Here's the WoB input form I've been using: If you look back at the table, which I included in my last post, you'll be able to identify that all the fields and checkboxes in the top part of the form correspond to columns in the table. But that's only half of the form; what's going on with the tags at the bottom of the form? One other huge thing you can do with forms is create subforms, that will pull in data from a second table that is connected, in some way, to the first table. This lets you look at multiple tables at the same time – absolutely essential, since as I said in the post about the back end, I need work on 8 tables at once when adding WoBs (the WoB database, and the 7 Junction tables). I made subforms for each Junction table, and threw them on the bottom. So, when I open up the form, I'm looking at a particular line from the WoB table. Each WoB has a unique WoB Number, which is what's referenced in the 7 Junction tables. So, when I set up the subform, I designed it to only include the lines where the WoB ID in the Junction table entry matches the WoB ID in from the WoB table. That means it also brings up every line in every linked table that shares that WoB ID. Access is actually incredibly smart when you know just what to ask it to do, so when I add a new tag in a subform, it automatically includes the WoB ID of the quote I'm looking at on the form at that moment. It makes my job much easier – no need to remember the WoB Number, remember who the quote is about, then open up the WoB/Character table and type in the number and the characters, then go back to the quote and do the same thing for the other tag categories. So, that lets me get information into to the WoB database in a timely manner. Copy-paste the quote, click a couple checkboxes, put in the sourcing information, and then type in any tags I see. All from one screen. That's all well and good, but how do I get stuff out of it? I can use something called a Query. A Query will basically build me a new table out of pieces of other tables. I get to say exactly which pieces come along: bring columns A, B, and H, and only bring rows where the date is in 2016. This lets you combine pieces from multiple tables, as long as you properly define the relationship. So, I can also say, bring along the Interview Date column, and for any individual row it would match the Source. I have a lot of work to do on actual implementation of queries, but I've developed a couple of simple ones so far that are a 'proof of concept,' to show that the database structure will allow for these searches. Here's are two views: first is how I'm telling Access to run that query, which pieces to pull from which tables, and the second is what the query returns. So, here's the Character Search Query: When I bring up this query, it prompts for a character. When I type in a name (say, Kelsier), it looks through the Character/WoB Junction table, finds all WoB Numbers associated with Kelsier, and then displays information about those WoBs. Right there, every WoB that I've tagged about Kelsier. (It doesn't actually display the character on the final table, since that would be redundant. It just uses it to filter. But that output sheet is hard to read, isn't it? When I had that problem earlier, with my Tables, I made a Form for easier viewing. Can I do the same thing here? Of course I can! Here's my Character Search Form: This form utilizes an Access function called Split Forms, where half of the form is the original table, and half is the form itself. This can be used to quickly browse through the results, without having to click through each one individually. (Still some functionality to be worked out; I'm thinking of adding a short description for each WoB, something that will fit easily in the table. That will involve a lot of rework, but I'll most likely have to make a second pass through everything, anyways, to double-check my tags.) One thing you might be wondering about if you're astute and paying attention (nice job!) is the date and the hyperlink. A WoB can have a source from the Source Table, or just an individual hyperlink. The WoB table has a spot for the date, as well; how do I avoid duplicating information? You're right, those are duplicate fields for anything from a signing, and the Source field isn't important for stuff directly from Twitter or Reddit. For interviews, I leave the Hyperlink and Date empty for the individual WoBs; that information is taken care of by the Source. For stuff from social media, I made an entry in the data table for "N/A," because I had problems with an early query when I left that field blank. I wanted to leave all WoB's, social media and signings, all in the same table; otherwise, each WoB wouldn't have its own unique WoB number. (There'd be Reddit/Twitter Row #1, and Interview/Signing Row #1). When I run a query, though, I can combine these columns into a single field. In Excel (which I'm sure more of you are familiar with), you have all these calculations available to you. In Access, calculated fields are very bad to have in tables (although they are possible), because if you change information the other data might not automatically update correctly. But, when we run a query, we're building it fresh every time, so I design a query to look at the WoB Type and then choose whether to look at the WoB's date or the Source's date. I've done the same thing for the hyperlink, but it doesn't work right. Hyperlinks are apparently a wonky kind of data in Access, and don't play well with calculations. I'm looking into a 'combined query,' where you can pull two separate lists and then add them together, as long as their column types match. So, I can pull a query for Reddit/Twitter with the individual date, run a query for Interview/Signing with source date, and then just stick the query results together end-to-end. That wouldn't use a calculated cell, so the hyperlink should work. I think. There's a lot up in the air with queries and interfaces. The reasons for this are twofold: advanced queries require coding experience I don't have, and I'm not sure how well these queries would carry over if I find a suitable method of sharing this database. First, advanced queries. Obviously, I'd want to be able to say 'show me everything about Vasher in the Stormlight Archive,' if I'm looking for what Brandon has said about Vasher on Roshar. I could throw in all the parameters into a single query, but then there would be, like, a dozen prompts for each search, which is way too many keystrokes to be reasonable, and I'd have to include instructions on how to fill in the prompts to not filter that column. I could design individual queries for each combination... but that's 7*6/2 = 21 different combinations. And then there's a triple intersection, which has 35 combinations. Quadruple also has 35, and the pattern reverses from there, so that would be 64 queries. But, each of those queries would need to have the ability to filter archived posts, RAFOd posts, Conflux posts... it gets messy. Access lets you write and run code, which I'd probably use to take the first option (a ton of prompts) and have Access do all the work (of filling in those prompts based on which boxes you check on a form). (Like I said above, it's very good at doing what you ask it to, as long as you know how to ask. I don't know how to ask it to do what I want. I know how to ask people to do it on their own when they search, but it's too much work. Access won't complain about having to do all those clicks, but I know you all will. No offense.) Only thing is, I don't know how to code, so VBScript is 100% unfamiliar to me. I'm sure there are tools to learn online, but that's a big time commitment. I'll save it for later, but if you can use Microsoft VBCode, feel free to reach out to me. But the second reason is, even if I get an advanced search query operational, I don't know if it will carry over if I find a way to share the database. Access itself can publish a database as a web app (I don't have anywhere to host it right now, which is a separate problem), but it doesn't appear to have the exact same functionality with regards to forms and queries. I might also look into a third-party database software that can import stuff from Excel, in which case the back end will probably look very similar (it's just tables!), but the front end (forms and queries) might be drastically different. Whatever solution I might be able to come up with for a working desktop database, I might have to redo completely for an online implementation. And, if I don't get anything online, if it turns into my personal repository, I don't need this particular functionality; I'm very comfortable with the filtering, like in Excel, so I know how to do everything I want to do. But the functionality is possible, which is what's important for now. The input form, that's something only I'm getting a ton of use out of building the database in Access, so it's paid for itself already in time savings. I know that, wherever the database winds up, there will be the ability to query it, but I'm waiting to do a lot of the detailed query work until I get to a point I'm evaluating how to bring the database online. Part of me hopes that I use existing Access forms and queries in my final solution. At my job, I interact with my company's central database, which has obscene amounts of data in it (thousands of tables and reports), and I've seen a lot of really cool functionality. It's not Access, it's something much more powerful, but it's phenomenally easy to navigate between financial transactions, asset structure, and maintenance scheduling, all by just clicking on fields. As an engineer, and not an IT guy, I find moving around this massive, massive database is... well, it's still a pain at times, but I'm getting better, and I could easily see how it would be a lot worse. For Access, I know you can tell it to do stuff when you click on a field or push a button; I would need to learn a lot about coding stuff to utilize that functionality effectively. Part of me hopes I find something that does it all for me. Because that's a lot to learn. And I have enough to learn already. Even a lot to unlearn; at work, I've used Microsoft InfoPath to add and interact with some data before. InfoPath basically lets you make forms, it's all front-end, and all the functionality is buttons and what happens when a cell gets populated, so it was very easy to make buttons and commands. The coding for that was very simple, but limited to the choices it presented. Also, because it was separate from the tables you were working with, you needed separate commands to call data to view or to submit data to a table. So, it was a paradigm shift for me in Access, because there's no middle step, when you open a form you're directly editing the data. But Access also is much hard to get buttons to do exactly what you want, since they all do it in VBCode. Very powerful if you know what you're doing, but InfoPath was better for me as a fairly uninitated user. Okay, that's enough of me rambling. The front end isn't as well developed as the back end, but that's intentional. I'll probably need lots of time to get it where I want it to be, or maybe find someone much more knowledgeable than me. For now, I can put data in and get data out, but I'd want it to be much easier to do the latter if I find a way to make this publicly available.

Hey, is this offer still on the table? If you need any help on phrasing particulars, I'm here to help. A further update, I have the audio files, but I am unable to get a full transcript. I blame the acoustics of the room we were in - a classroom that's designed to bounce the professor's voice out to the audience will also bounce all the audiences' voices back to the professor. So, there are like a hundred people on the recording. It's a mess. I'll do a little more work on cherry-picking specific phrases, but I could make out that he called it "reactive, not unstable."

Doesn't Dalinar's sequence of visions in WoK end with Honor telling him "I am dead. Odium has killed me"? Also, the Highstorms predated the arrival of Honor and Cultivation on the planet of Roshar. Their arrival did fundamentally change some aspects about the highstorm and the spren, but the Highstorm might go all the way back to Adonalsium (or even before, if there was an un-Invested storm before Adonalsium created the continent).

Amazon says the eBook comes out on the 17th.

I think I finally found your quote.

Remember, this is just a 'hypothetical situation.' I've heard that when they came to GRRM to ask to adapt the books, he made them tell him who Jon Snow's real parents were. When they gave him the correct answer, he gave them permission. Might just be an urban legend, but I like the story.

I gotta say, this sounds awfully authoritarian.

Looks to me like it might have been Team Sanderson dropping the ball on this one, or maybe Brandon was just a late addition to the agenda. This wasn't even listed with the events on his website until very recently. So, I think you've done everything right, but this might have been a less-than-optimal situation.

Just spit it out already! Oh, right... this is a purely hypothetical situation. I'd tell this hypothetical person to 'just spit it out already.' You can't spoil future events with a theory. By definition. Brandon is intentional about laying clues, and if you've picked up on all those clues, then more power to you, and I'd love to hear your interpretation. But don't give your (hypothetical) self too much credit - it's not like, if you posted an accurate prediction, everyone would come on board 'cause there would be no reasonable alternative, and it would fundamentally change the community. I was just reading Brandon's comments about Taimandred, a Wheel of Time theory where a controversial view is that Robert Jordan started writing a character (Mazrim Taim) as secretly being a bad guy (Demandred) in disguise, but switched it after the fans figured out all the clues. The official story, anything actually said by RJ and Team Jordan, is that Taim was never meant to be Demandred. But similar questions to yours have been raised (as conspiracy theories, true), about what to do if people figure out the foreshadowing too soon. Brandon said that changing plans could be more damaging than proceeding with something someone has figured out, because it's undermining the foreshadowing in the book at the expense of a particular facet of the fan community. Being able to correctly guess the twists 10 years or more in advance isn't a flaw, it's a feature. Brandon's foreshadowing is intentional. If you think you've got it figured out, good for you. But there is a lot, A LOT, of potential ways to take this foreshadowing, and I guarantee you posting an overarching theory like this hypothetical one would not stifle discussion, but would expand it. (Some pretty accurately predicted how harmonium would function in the mechanical Metallic Arts well before BoM came out... I think it was @Kurkistan. I can't even say with certainty who it was, because regardless of the truth of the matter, nobody believed it!)

Ooh, boy, it's time to tread very carefully. I wouldn't be so quick to call it ethical and humane. In real life, euthanasia is a fairly controversial idea, hinging on the difference between allowing a life to end and actively ending a life (which is what Hemalurgy does; even if the person gets spiked without dying, they are 'worse than a drab') and on the societal ramifactions and pressures that legalizing it would place on certain communities. The utility of those powers, great though they may be, does not change the underlying ethics of whether or not it would be moral to end the life of another, even according to their wishes. I expect, if Hemalurgy ever enters common knowledge like Allomancy and Feruchemy, that it will be viewed by a large number of people as inherently immoral, that the action of tearing apart someone else's soul is outside the authority of mankind to do to one another in any circumstance. Brandon has had his characters espouse things that are outright immoral before within the context of those stories. Kelsier was a murderer. Stormlight characters are racists. Brandon writes flawed characters, so it's important to not filter a moral exploration through the lens of 'the main characters are always the good guys.' I think we will see a lot of beneficial applications of Hemalurgy going forward (the Southerners, especially, and Kelsier himself of course), but that doesn't mean the ends justify the means. I've been an eager proponent at times that I think the Southerners need to use Hemalurgy (calling spikes Excisors) to create and fill their medallions with any level of effectiveness. But I also think it's an atrocity; I held the same views towards expecting the Mistborn serial killer planned for Era 3 to not be a natural Mistborn, but to be an artifical one created by Hemalurgy. (Not sure if I espouse that anymore, because of BoM revelations.) It's a likely plot and worldbuilding hook, but in-universe, it is a bad thing. You can look throughout history to see things that were considered beneficial to the community at the time, but are now considered immoral. (Uh... let's try and pick something that's not too controversial at this time... how 'bout eugenics? There are better examples, but they'll probably be distracting, so feel free to insert an accepted-at-the-time atrocity of your own.) There are ways to practice Hemalurgy that minimize or even eliminate human suffering. But does everyone agree that is the goal of ethics?

Pretty sure that's straight out of Bands of Mourning.

Oh, yeah, that 'filtering' could work, too, as long as you don't do it to the point you're damaging yourself. That might limit how quickly you could transfer beyond a reasonable amount of time. There are a couple of different approaches I've seen to how Nicrosil Feruchemy actually works, and both of them would require a lot of people to make medallions without compounding. Nicrosilminds store abilities like copperminds store memories. Take off a piece of your spiritweb, put it in the mind, someone else pulls it out and uses. It would mean, for each medallion ability, you would have to have had a person lose their abilities to create it (two people for a heat medallion, three people for a heat/weight medallion). It doesn't increase the total number of Mistings or Ferrings in the world (although it could split a Full Feruchemist or a Mistborn into 16 other users). Nicrosilminds store a time-dependent version of Allomantic strength. If you are a 1/2 Allomancer for 1 hour while storing, someone else could be a full strength Allomancer for 1/2 an hour. This, again, limits you to how many people you have making the medallions in the first place. I did some math when Bands first came out to estimate how many man-hours of F.Iron ability was needed for the airships to function, and I think it was 3 man-months for every 5 minutes of flight, or something obscene like that. I'd have to go back and check. But it would make them impractical unless they had a lot of metalbon (which we know they don't) or they had compounders. If the entire culture keeps from freezing to death because of these medallions, and Feruchemy can only repurpose what is there (not create new), then they'll definitely need nicrosil compounding to create the ability to use brass feruchemy, the same way they need brass compounders to create the heat that isn't there.

The Southerners' medallions have more going on with them in regards to unkeyed F.Nicrosil. All they need to do to create an unkeyed goldmind is spike F.Aluminum into an F.Gold ferring, or vice versa. My understanding of the medallions, you also need an Identity-less Nicrosil compounder with that Feruchemical ability (to fill up the nicrosil portion of the medallions). The Set wasn't able to figure out how to refill the heat medallions, which should be straightforward if they know how an unkeyed metalmind works. Unless they don't know how to refill the nicrosil portion, just the brass portion. Interestingly enough, that reminds me of something. I've theorized Firemothers and Firefathers are compounders that fill the heat medallions. (Without compounding, medallions aren't heat generation, they're merely heat storage, which I don't think would solve the problem the Southerners were originally facing). They would need two kinds of compounders: F.Aluminum, A.Nicrosil, F.Nicrosil, (to fill the nicrosil, with possibly F.Brass required as well), and F.Aluminum, F.Brass, A.Brass (to fill up the brass). If they're made using Hemalurgy (Excisors, as I think the Southerners call them), then you might need a natural Misting to keep within the 3-spike limit that the Set identified. To store 2 kinds of Investiture in nicrosil, to make the heat/translation medallions you'd need to have a twinborn. (F.Aluminum, A.Nicrosil, F.Nicrosil, F.Brass, A.Duralumin) with a separate person to fill up of the two other parts of the metalmind. To get three kinds of abilities in a single medallion and use fewer than four spikes, you'd need a full Feruchemist, and then spike A.Nicrosil and whatever other two Allomantic abilities you want. Allik has seen triple medallions, but they're rare, and they'd be limited to what your Full Feruchemist has. This spike cap could easily explain why the medallions rarity is what we've seen; Kelsier must have natural abilities (to create the Bands), but anyone else who would want to get close would need way too many spikes, so they settle for a lot of double-medallions for military expeditions and single-medallions for the general population. Then again, it's possible that, if the Southerners use Hemalurgy to create the people who create their medallions, they also intentionally spike them up to the point they could be controlled by another person, and then have F.Duralumin and A.Brass/Zinc minders 'oversee' the compounders.

I remember this came up before, right after the book came out. I was confused by this sort of approach, that there's some deep dark secret behind this phrase. The Set has the ability to create unkeyed metalminds, like the gold one that Wayne was using. This matches up perfectly with what Edwarn is saying; someone is weak, storing in the metalmind, and someone else is using the stored power to gain the benefit. Textbook feruchemy, you're weak to gain the benefit later. With Aluminum ferrings, you can mix and match who's doing each part. That being said, there is some precedent to different number of spikes controlling people. With the humans, it appears to be four, which is why they limit themselves to 3. With Kandra, it's two; Bleeder was still only using one Trellium spike at a time (IIRC; I know there was some clarification that we were looking for at the time, and Brandon made us wait just to be cruel), and then the earring bullet was #2. Without their spikes, Kandra have less of a mind than humans, so it might be why they need fewer spikes. So, the same principle could be applied to the chimeras, they only need 1 spike because they've had most of their mind stripped away. Maybe by Hemalurgic means, maybe some other phenomenon. I like the path it's going down. But, I don't think you can connect the two. Edwarn's quote makes plain sense if he's referring to the unkeyed metalminds, so that's what I'm sticking with.

We learned from the Scadrial essay in Arcanum Unbunded that all the Shardworlds except two were inhabited before the Shattering: Scadrial, and one other one (I suspect Nalthis, because of the Breath phenomenon). Either the same kind of human life 'naturally' developed on dozens of planets, or something prior to the Shattering was copying the humans from Yolen. That 'something' was most likely Adonalsium, (I found a follow-up WoB that said Roshar wasn't the only one created this way, and we know that Adonalsium has an 'intent' of creating sentience). If Adonalsium didn't create Yolen (big if, I know), then of the 10 other Shardworlds we have seen, exactly one has nonhuman intelligence on it. So, it's not like Adonalsium is creating kinds of life that fit with the natural ecosystems; it's always humans, regardless of the craziness of the world (like tidally locked Taldain), and in the vast majority of cases the planet's flora and fauna look a lot like Yolen's (which, I understand, is an earth analogue). Actually, Roshar and Taldain are the only two that are drastically different, and Taldain is by necessity, since an Earth-like ecosystem wouldn't be able to survive there. It seems like a classic case of Yolish colonialism, which is why I lean that Adonalsium is from Yolen, changing the universe to look like Yolen. If the planets were all uninhabitable before the arrival of Adonalsium, then there's no harm, no foul. But if it's overwriting existing life to make planets habitable for new life (like, say, what if the Dysian Aimians were there before Adonalsium arrived), then I can understand why people would have wanted to stop it. So, the pieces all fit that Adonalsium was going around the cosmere, transforming worlds and creating life. The original origin of Adonalsium doesn't much matter. But, here's the image that popped into my mind: It gets even creepier if Adonalsium isn't creating new humans, just terraforming worlds for humans to settle. But I don't think that's consistent with what we know of Adonalsium.

I stumbled across this WoB on Reddit, about the map of Roshar: I must have missed this the first time around, and the implications are staggering to me. It puts a totally new spin on Frost's admonition to Hoid, that the worlds they tread now bear the touch of Adonalsium, and maybe even gives us another concrete reason for the Shattering: to stop Adonalsium from terraforming planets. It further cements, in my mind, the idea that Frost is a Shard; he wanted to stop Adonalsium, and took a piece of the power to keep it out of the hands of someone who will use it. It also challenges my assumptions on the history of the Parshendi. I knew the continent was relatively new (which is why the ecosystem looks like a coral reef), and that the Parshendi had been there before the humans, and that Adonalsium had been there, but I had assumed that Adonalsium hadn't created the Parshendi, merely imparted spren to make them sentient. This doesn't seem to be the case, though; if Adonalsium created the continent, he must have also created its inhabitants, right? So Adonalsium creates life. We know that Yolen is the original human homeworld, but other worlds were populated before the Shattering; it stands to reason, to me, that Adonalsium came from Yolen, creating human life as he went, until he was Shattered. But where do the Parshendi and Aimians fit into this timeline? Did Adonalsium stop creating humans, and start creating something else, and the Vessels decided they needed to make sure that didn't happen again? Was Adonalsium actually behind the human diaspora, or was it something alien that came crashing into Yolish worlds? Or did Adonalsium create the Parshendi first, then go to Yolen, where it took humans as a pattern instead (a true betrayal of the Listeners)? So, I'm not sure any of this is groundbreaking, but I just hadn't put the thought into it yet. I didn't see any deep threads about pre-Shattering history; anyone else have ideas to share?

So, let's learn some more details about exactly what I'm gathering and how I'm structuring it. First, we'll start with the actual tables and relationships that I used to construct the database. (A Microsoft Access database is, at its core, a collection of tables. Lines from the different tables can be linked together, to reflect connections among those tables. Microsoft actually provides some pretty good training videos, if you don't know anything about Access. ) So, the centerpiece of the database is the WoB Table, which stores the quote itself. It also holds several other pieces of information, namely the type (Reddit, Twitter, Signing, Interview, and Signed Book are the five Types I have now), the date, and the hyperlink. (For some, but not all. More on that later.) Here's an image of the table, split into two parts because it's wide. So, you can see it's a lot like Microsoft Excel. A big difference is that there are some check boxes, a data type that I'll be able to use for a couple of all-purpose filters. RAFO - marked if a question is only answered with a RAFO. Still want to document it, but want the ability to exclude them from searches. Conflux - this is more of a personal filter. I don't particularly like coming across all these "what if you Awakened a fabrial" questions, so I want the ability to filter them out. This might not actually go anywhere, but it's easier to build in from the get-go, rather than try and add it after the fact. Paraphrase - mark if the text of a WoB is paraphrased Juicy? - again, more of a personal filter, for quotes that I feel everyone should be aware of. I'll probably call these "Notable" WoBs when I get a better interface, but I'm a little afraid to try and rename columns at this moment. Archive - there are a lot of old questions that were great when they were asked, but aren't so important right now. I won't want to delete these going forwards, but I would like a way to mark them. The other data fields you see are mostly about sources. There are two fields (date, hyperlink) that each entry has. But, wouldn't that get tedious, if I'm adding from a signing, where there are 100 questions that all have the same date/time? It certainly would be, and that's what the Event field is for. When I click on that field, it actually brings up a drop-down list of another table: the Sources Table. This table has a line for each signing, its date, and the hyperlink to the forum link for that signing. (And a couple of housekeeping fields I'm using to keep track of things.) By connecting a WoB to a Tour, I can avoid repetitious data entry, and also have a nice way to identify all WoBs from a particular event. The last field I haven't talked about in the WoB table is "Keywords." You may have noticed it looks a little empty, with good reason. It's just a catch-all field for stuff that doesn't fit in any of the other seven tables. That's right, there are seven other tables. But these tables are pretty simple; they're really just lists. They only have one column apiece. Here's the Character Table. So, not too bad, it's just a catalogue of characters who I'd like to use as tags for WoBs. (I'm adding as I go, so there are still a lot of characters missing.) But these connections are not as simple as the sources; I can't just use a single column in the WoB table, since you can have multiple people for each WoB. This is taken care of with a Junction Table for Characters and WoBs, which categorizes every single connection that can be made between WoBs and Characters. So, this table shows that WoB 1 is just about Kelsier, WoB 2 and 3 aren't about any particular characters, and WoB 4 is about both Kelsier and Marsh. This lets me assign a whole mess of tags to any given WoB, while maintaining a structure and not leaving the Keywords field super cluttered up. It also lets me ensure that I'm being consistent with tagging - am I can't tag Wax as Waxilium, 'cause it's not in the table. So, that's one category of tags I'm using to divide up the WoBs. The other six are: Groups (like organizations or countries), Magic (systems and other manifestations), Realmatics (for topics about the underlying philosophy of magic), Planets (for worldbuilding and history), Series (a broad category, to pull together, say, all the Stormlight WoBs; includes Crossovers as an option), and Shards (which includes Adonalsium). The Keywords field from the WoB table isn't structured the same way; it's just a field you can type whatever you want into. I'm thinking about making a Miscellaneous category, for stuff like Future Plans and Languages, but for now I'll just leave it as it is. (Incidentally, the Groups and Realmatics were late additions; I had been adding stuff like Cognitive Shadows and Worldhoppers as Keywords, but there were a lot of them, so I decided they needed their own structure.) Each of these tables has its own Junction table. And, yes, that turns into a lot of tables. Here's the total arrangement of all relationships and tables in the database: In the center, you see the main WoB table. Around it are the junction tables (which will connect a particular WoB with specific items in the tag tables), and then the tag tables themselves. The lines represent relationships, where the values on the "1" side are used for the cells on the "infinity" side. If you're anything like me, you start seeing all these other connections between tag tables. I can say which Magic systems come from which worlds and which Shards, say which Characters appear in each series, etc. Which could be a fun exercise in database design... but, ultimately, they don't help me organize WoBs, so there's no good reason to spend time building them. But, still, that works out to 16 tables to take and categorize the WoBs. It's a lot, but if you remember at the top, I called this the Back End. This is all the behind-the-scenes structure. Actually getting at the data looks very different, 'cause I don't want to have to tab through a dozen different tables for a single WoB, and this isn't intuitive for using. That's for the Front End, which I'll talk about in another post. And it looks a lot simpler, don't worry.

They think it might be stable. The analogy I read in my article was diamonds - it takes a lot of energy to make the transition from graphite to diamond, but once you've done so, the diamond won't fall apart. If it's not stable, I have a hard time imagining it's gonna be of any use in room-temperature superconductors or rocket fuel.

Is this an Allomancy question, or a chemistry question?

They just maybe synthesized a metallic form of hydrogen. It takes obscene amounts of pressure to create, but it might be stable once created (like graphite vs diamonds), and can have a ton of applications, like the fabled room-temp superconductor or a rocket fuel 4x as powerful as what we've got now. The pressures to create it are well above anything on Earth... but scientists theorize that the conditions it needs may exist in the larger gas giants of our solar system. So, depending on the size of the Scadrian gas giants, they might have it. I don't think it would be very good as a burnable metal (much more violently reactive than an alkali metal, and I don't think anyone expects to see Harmonium burnt by an Allomancer anytime soon). But it could greatly enhance the Scadrian technological development, if they have an easy way to 'mine' metallic Hydrogen from their gas giants using Lurchers and Nicrobursts, rather than having to develop the technology to effectively produce it in laboratories. Anyways, it's cool news that made me think of Mistborn. It's not every day we learn about a true new metal.

I'm in favor of this thread. The great thing about the Q&A subforum is that a bunch of people can answer a question, and the best ones get voted up, and then the best questions get voted up, so it's a good archive. I don't think this thread actually needs to have a WoB archive in it - it's more a collaborative space for people looking for a particular WoB. It's a narrow focus, to connect with certain individuals, and I think it fits much better with the 'feel' of the Cosmere Theories forum than the Q&A subforum, in terms of depth of discussion.