jamesbondsmith

23 minutes ago, LewsTherinTelescope said:

There's one single minor character lol, there's plenty to praise SA for but I dunno if any form of queer representation is really it.

That's what I was getting at. I didn't know of any non-cisgender characters at all, so when I saw a 'he' from a character usually referred to as 'she' I thought 'maybe this is it'.

I kind of agree that queer representation isn't exactly a focus, but BrandoSando seems to be attempting to make some minor improvements there.

(Edit: Re: trans characters, I meant I didn't know of any at the time I was reading ROW without having read Dawnshard. Still haven't yet, but that bit got spoiled for me)

Based almost solely on what may well be a typo and a misinterpreted internet comment (should be noted I'm a cisgender male):

Formless is referred to as 'he' occasionally. Shallan is gender diverse (is this the term?)/otherwise not purely cisgender, and she is repressing it because of Vorinism's strict gender roles. It might also explain why in the earlier books she hangs so tightly to stuff like 'only women should read', acting scandalised that Tyn eats 'men's food' and the whole 'safehand' business.

I legitimately thought this might be her big secret in ROW, partly because I'd read someone praising the Stormlight Archive for its representation of transgender people before I'd read ROW, and I didn't recall any trans characters (it probably referred to a character in Dawnshard though).

BTW, I've used female pronouns as it appears that so far Shallan seems to identify as a woman, but if my tinfoil theory is correct that might change.

22 hours ago, Modal Seoul said:

Free Guy is a movie in theaters now and it was fine. I found it funny that one of the screenwriters, Zak Penn, also helped write Ready Player One, a movie that is essentially a worse version of this. Free Guy wisely does not try to take itself very seriously and its humor is especially funny. I would say that is the strongest thing about this movie.

Ryan Reynolds is delightful as always and a lot of the best jokes are either his or involve him. Jodie Comer is also very good in the movie and I hope this means she'll be in more movies now and not just Killing Eve. Taika Waititi didn't feel very genuine to me and unfortunately, he is not very funny nor threatening as the villain.

There are also a lot of cameos in this movie and some of them work and some of them don't. Tina Fey and Channing Tatum have absolutely hilarious cameos. But several YouTubers and streamers like Jacksepticeye, Pokimane and Ninja appear in the film and they were all super distracting. And they weren't very entertaining either.

It's a fun movie to watch with friends and it's very entertaining overall. It's no masterpiece but it's pretty good for what it is. 7/10

I felt having gaming streamers as cameos made more sense than having famous actors, considering it's a movie about a video game. I didn't know any of them, but it made sense.

What's something weirdly specific that you like?
For me, it seems that I'll just throw my money at game developers who let me run around a somewhat abandoned city with guns and superpowers and discover what happened to it through letters or recordings. I've loved the Bioshock and Dishonored series, as well as the 2017 Prey and Control (if you count a space station or eldritch building as a city). It occurred to me that this is how a Mistborn game would probably end up, and I'm here for it.

I also realised that I like scifi/fantasy because I can experience things I'll never see in real life (magic, aliens/prehistoric animals, superhuman abilities) but I'm also really interested in seeing how these fantastic elements affect how people do boring things like get to work in the morning or go through the daily grind of studying at school. I don't know why, but the idea of something like working a desk job when the filing cabinet might walk off when you need to get something out of it is really cool.

45 minutes ago, Iarwainiel I said:

Soundtrack for Wax & Wayne, out in the Roughs:

 

Soon may the Dawnshot come

With a vial of steel in a shot of rum

One day when the bandits are done

He'll take his leave and go

I had to put my cat down today, and I feel I'll be listening to this one a few times when I feel brave enough

Gotye - Bronte (Official Music Video) - YouTube

And another Gotye song, because I feel he might be considered a one hit wonder outside Australia

Gotye - Hearts A Mess (Official Music Video) - YouTube

I'm rereading the series right now, and I noticed the covers don't really seem to correspond to the characters (judging by the 'first published in Great Britain in 2016' I have the UK version). For example, Dezia is the archer, yet the archer on the cover of Shadow of What Was Lost is a man. 

Possible spoilers:

12 hours ago, Shaukan-son-Hasweth said:

I don't think their oaths are going to be that literally connected to truth. Willshapers are all about freedom but they are described as providing infrastructure. Related but not exactly the same.

Infrastructure provides a lot of freedom by getting rid of things in your way (i.e. providing negative liberty). Roads and public transport allow freedom of movement, a roof over your head means some level of stability and not having to fight over which bit of dirt is less likely to be destroyed in a highstorm. 

Supposedly, both Truthwatchers and Elsecallers are considered to be 'scholarly'. There are a gazillion ways to be scholarly, even if it's just down to the Jurassic Park, science/humanities question of 'reasons why we could vs reasons why we should'. 

On 7/21/2021 at 3:04 AM, Spren of Kindness said:

The Hanging Tree from The Hunger Games.  I wasn't expecting it to be so haunting.  I've never seen the movie, so I don't know what's happening in the scene, but having more voices join in on the last verse (repeat?) really worked.

Not at all coincidentally, I'm now back in my 'worldbuild by writing songs phase'.

It's way more haunting in context (in the spoiler box if you want it). I literally wrote about this for my university dissertation on mass media in the Hunger Games.

I really like seeing how songs from books are interpreted, as I don't know of any where the author has written a melody for it.

As you may or may not be aware, Scarlett Johansson is suing Disney for lost revenue. Basically from what I understand, her contract said she got a cut of theatrical revenue for Black Widow (which I haven't seen yet, FYI), and the decision to release it on Disney+ cut into the cinema takings, not to mention their taking from this supposedly comes to US$60m.

Obviously, it seems a little callous for a millionaire to be complaining about not making money due to something that is based on public health advice. But Disney do have a history of not respecting payment obligations; they apparently decided that they 'inherited the rights but not the obligations' of the contracts Lucasfilm had made with Star Wars Legends authors, so they didn't pay royalties to those authors.

While I understand the reservations, if they don't have to pay one of the most bankable film stars of the current era, what reason do they have to pay the far less financially stable writers or other creators they work with, who have far less power to contest this?

I feel like they could at least compromise by donating a certain amount to some sort of charity for creatives who have lost income due to Covid. Both parties have bad press from this lawsuit, and this could mitigate multiple issues going ahead. 

I'll hedge my bets with a few options:

I will protect myself in order to protect others - can't protect people if you martyred yourself last time, or if they get unintentionally abandoned mid-rescue.

I will give people the means to protect themselves - this ties into leadership, teaching and empowering people.

I will make a world that people don't need protecting from - this is one of the least combat focused options, and could be hard for such a combat focused order to swear.

I will extend protection to each according to their need - not sure about wording, but basically embodying a concept of triage.

I agree that it should be hard to swear, and each option is hard for a frontline, protective person to live up to (short vs long term, letting people do it themselves, going behind the scenes, choosing who should be saved with limited resources).

I think multiple people in the Creators Corner are working on some kind of video game.

I'd like to see a Dishonored style Mistborn, with Copper letting you track Allomancers through walls. The general vibe of Dunwall and the Outsider powers do have some parallels to Mistborn.

Apologies if this one has been done, I made a typo while writing Oathbringer and thought of something along these lines.

2 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

There are a couple of indications. None of them definitely proves anything, but together they are suspicious.

• Rhythm of War strongly suggests that neither of the Terrispeople in question was a Ghostblood
• How do you recruit Terrispeople from Scadrial without Harmony or Thaidakar knowing?
• The Terris of Scadrial were pacifist hippies to an extreme degree at that time
• We have depiction with multiple rings. That suggests a full Feruchemist
• One of them was good enough with Connection to pick up a language from another species. Years before the time of The Way of Kings and that was years before The Bands of Mourning when the more exotic forms of Feruchemy were still ill understood on Scadrial and duralumium must have been worth a fortune. And in Northern Scadrial the only known foreign language was the Terris language at that time. How would she have trained?
• She fled off plaet, hence was not directly working for Odium

And finally during the early days of the Final Empire every Terris man had two very good reasons to flee. (Sorry, I could not resist that).

Who says Harmony/Thaidakar didn't know? Gavilar's Terriswoman bailed because she was found out by another party, but I don't recall any specifics on who that other party was. I don't feel like there's any reason why she couldn't have just been good enough to slip off Scadrial and wasn't detected until later, and the other Terrisman was killed by Mraize, so it's not as if he had spent his entire time under the radar.

We have the very famously non-pacifist non-hippies in Wax and Wayne, not to mention the psychos that Wax has dealt with

Even if they were a monoculture, there would still be outliers.

The multiple rings could be for a multi-faceted attribute like senses, or just to have backups. Besides, if I was a Ferring I might well wear decoy rings made of metals I couldn't use. 'Haha, I stole your goldmind!' *gets face bashed in by a Pewter Ferring*. This could also tie in with the Connection issue. 

Continuing with connection, First Era Stormlight is 15-ish years before Wax and Wayne, so there's plenty of time for them to have figured out Duralumin feruchemy (edit: may be misremembering bits with regards to the more spiritual feruchemy and how widespread it is, but I'm pretty sure the southerners were good enough to have unkeyed duraluminminds).

As for fleeing off-world, I don't see why that means she can't be Scadrian born (or a generation or two removed). Besides, we know Gavilar was trying to bring about a Desolation for his own sinister/religious nutjob reasons. Why wouldn't he have procured the voidspren?

Edit: @Bejardin1250 covered some things too.

On 6/17/2021 at 2:46 PM, Phlipz1 said:

I doubt that's the case. In the RoW (may have been OB I forget) letters, Sazed mentions that he needs a 'sword' to attack with. Bleeder (shadows of self spoilers) was a bigger threat than miles and I would have thought he would have used Ruin to attack her if he could. 

And while I love sazed, awesome character, I doubt that one shard battle will be enough to offset the millennia of experience any vessel of odium has over him in splintering

Though I would love to see harmony Vs odium at some point 

 

I think the point was about the magnitude of the threat. At the end of the day, a single kandra or twinborn is no match for a single Shard, let alone a combination of two. But Sazed can't do much against them because they are so insignificant compared to him.

But if an outside threat invades, backed up by a Shard or two, then that is an even enough battle for the Shards to work together. He needs a 'sword' to work against mortal beings but when something in his weight class comes in he can cut loose. Although in terms of scale it would be more like two Pied Pipers setting their rats on each other while they duke it out themselves.

On 6/19/2021 at 10:44 AM, Xaladin said:

Sorry, but this image dominated my mind as soon as I read this.

 

Skybreaker: 'I will not join Odium.'

Nale's Skybreakers: 'It's treason then.'

I still think that Gravitation and Division will lead to weaponised sandstorms. Divide the rock into sand then use Gravitation to direct it.

Why wouldn't the Feruchemists be from Scadrial? I understand the point about which Shard would take in refugees, but why do we need to assume that the Terris went bouncing around planets and not just assume that they came to Roshar from the planet they already lived on?

2 minutes ago, Lunu’anaki said:

For every day use... certainly. For a single bullet in an assassins' gun? It might be a valid strategy...

I still feel like an aluminium bullet (not mispelled, I'm Australian) would provide a similar enough effect that it would be a waste of a metalmind. I could imagine steel/pewter/gold would help with escaping, tin could remove the need for a scope or alert them to threats, bronze/bendalloy/cadmium/zinc/electrum could help with stakeouts in certain circumstances and chromium would probably be invaluable for someone who makes a living on taking out a high-value target and getting away with it.

Now I think of it, if they could figure out how to create an unkeyed metalmind that taps its attribute from whoever it touches, that would be a boon to an assassin. Stab or shoot someone with one of those goldminds, and they're never healing from that.

3 minutes ago, Lunu’anaki said:

Yeah, I think you'd only need the metal placed in your body in a way which it couldn't easily be torn out. It wouldn't need to fully encase your bones.

I think this was more to emulate Wolverine in the Cosmere than anything properly canonical.

I just had a flash of Szeth and the Freebird solo, inspired by the church scene from Kingsman. I suppose it could work for Vin and Kelsier's rampages too.

One by Metallica reminds me of Kaladin's internal state, if not his physical one (although let's be honest he'd have ended up like the guy in the song without Stormlight healing).

I like the interpretation of Nine Inch Nails' version being about a young man in the process of ruining his life and the Johnny Cash version being about an old man looking back on his life. Perhaps Moash at the start of Oathbringer for the former and Vasher, Taravangian or Dalinar for the latter? Kaladin fits well for the general vibe of the NIN version, but he lacks the 'I did it to myself' for me.

71) Not allowed to wear a moustache and glasses and insist I am actually 'Tiw'. 

       71b) This also applies to Dioh, Zapot, Suidim etc.

72) Awakening doesn't help sleep deprivation. Therefore, creating sentient caffeine will not end well.

Apologies if any of these have been done before

General Sanderson/fantasy books

Final Empire

WOR

OB

General Stormlight 

With weapons there would be the obvious issue of losing access to your feruchemy if you're disarmed. Armour might work better, but if my history knowledge is correct people rarely wore armour straight against the skin. I'm pretty sure feruchemy requires physical contact, so it may not work too well in that case either.

As for shooting a 'bulletmind', it seems like a poor tradeoff for just being harder for a Coinshot or Lurcher to manipulate.

If you could alleviate those problems it might be cool. Now I'm imagining a 'onesiemind' and feruchemical Wolverine claws. That last one could actually approximate Wolverine if it weren't for gold being kind of soft.

I was a little confused about the epilogue too. Having read this thread, I like the idea that Hoid was distracting Odium.

I feel like it might be to help Design become 'Enlightened'. I seem to recall someone's theory that Renarin's futuresight is how the Enlightened Surge of Illumination is expressed, so he might be trying to see part of the future so he knows what he has to do in a location once his Fortune plonks him there.

This might conflict with the theory that he became a Lightweaver to fill holes in his own Yolish Lightweaving. Alternatively, he could either have been satisfied with his original lightweaving all along and been planning Enlightenment all along, or could have just decided it wasn't as good as he thought and wanted to swap it out for futuresight.

It may even be possible that Enlightened Lightweavers can use both forms of Lightweaving. After all, there may be something to the fact that Lightweavers are the only Radiants who share a name with a one of their magical practices (unless that's just Shallan being all 'I'm a Lightweaver therefore what I'm doing is Lightweaving).

Edit: When I first read the epilogue, I thought Hoid had been trapped in a Groundhog Day time loop by Odium.

3 minutes ago, Honorless said:

Frustration's referring to the fact that who the Nazis are would be common knowledge in the US and their name is used in pop culture to simply refer to racism, so he's assuming that the other guy isn't American

And Nazis are just unheard of anywhere else, are they? 

Regardless, to me Nazis are obviously tied to racism, but also to extending that racism to genocide of 'undesirables' and general fascism. They were also anti-lgbt and sexist.

I can understand the parallel between the Fused wanting to wipe out humans, but many ordinary Singers just want to live free and with their minds intact. I must have missed the human death camps that they set up. 

To bring it back to the original topic, I agree that Todd won't get killed off so soon. I could have been fine with a Moash redemption arc post-OB, but killing a friend to drive another to suicide crosses so many lines.