AquaRegia

I have a BS and an MS in chemistry. It was actually my nickname in college... I was a big fan of 3 HCl : HNO3. But I am aware of the Sleep Token song as well.

hahahahaha yes I've been out of school long enough that that never occurred to me.

Nothing super important here, and I'm sure the overlap between Sanderfans and baseball fans may be small (or just me LOL), but I'm watching a Miami Marlins game and their new uniforms are giving some big hion line vibes:

Oh, absolutely. I've never even looked at those forum subsections. I stick to Cosmere, Coppermind, Brandon, and a few General topics that catch my eye, like math/science, puzzles, fountain pens, and this one!

Simply because most "modern" social media involves images, or video. If I - a 58 year-old dude - am on snapchat or instagram engaging with the content posted by (or interacting with) 17 year-old girls, a) that's creepy AF and b) my wife is going to have some opinions. In a text forum like this, we talk about literature, or religion, or philosophy, or fountain pens, and the age/gender/appearance issue is pretty much eliminated. I imagine there might be other social media platforms where people mix freely and it's not weird, but I don't know of any.

Oathbringer, the Battle of Thaylen Field. Dalinar: "Do you have a weapon?" Lift: "Nope. Can't read." I can't explain it, but in a series just chock full of perfect moments, THIS ONE sticks with me more than any other.

I would like to welcome Jult to the 17th Shard and give proper mad respect to this absolute storming masterwork of understatement: I have died, become a cognitive shadow, and passed into the Beyond.

I think perhaps you have already answered your own question lol

I'd really love to participate in this discussion, but it's practically impossible due to it being in the "No WaT" antispoiler forum, and it's hard for me to remember now what parts of Shallan's story I know from WaT and what I knew before. I'm not a system, but my wife is, so I do have some direct experience of how things can go. I don't think any of the following observations are spoilery in terms of plot, but I'll cover them up just in case. **POSSIBLE MINOR SPOILERS REGARDING SHALLAN'S INTERNAL REALITY IN WaT BELOW**

I am not sure I'm qualified to propose a full definition of the concept of "art"... but I do feel strongly that any definition must include EMOTIONAL RESPONSE. Art is something people do to produce an emotional response. Said response may be in an audience, or it may only occur in the creator; it may be pleasant or unpleasant; it may be intentional or accidental. I'd argue any activity which a) entails no emotional investment and b) provokes no emotional response should not be classified as art.

I still only own one pen: I like it a lot; it lives at work, since I have a (mostly) private space and I do most of my writing there. I have found recently that on some office paper, the ink spreads to a disturbing degree, while on other sheets of (as far as I can tell) the same paper, it stays nice and tight. Is it possible that humidity/moisture content will affect how paper takes ink?

I’m venerable in one sense: I graduated from high school in 1985. Not so much in the 17S sense - I joined this forum in 2021. I have enjoyed Sanderson’s works for many years; I think I started looking things up on the Coppermind during the pandemic and eventually that led me here. I immediately loved the feeling of community, the enthusiasm for the Cosmere, and the depth of knowledge demonstrated by the folks here. It’s a very welcoming, positive, and fun ecosystem, reminding me of some of the game forums I was part of during the infancy of online BBSs way back in the late 1900s. I got a chuckle out of because that’s the part of the Shard that I loved the best in the beginning! As a science nerd, I really respect and appreciate Brandon’s worldbuilding and hard magic systems, and I really dig exploring the ways the magic “rules” can interact with real physics to generate cool story mechanics. I also love discussions about characters - motivation, emotional reality/believability, values, and consistency. Like @Treamayne, I much prefer explaining and understanding what's already happened, rather than predicting future events. I enjoyed being a (very small) part of the 17S puzzlehunt team for a few years; unfortunately, the mechanics of using Discord seem to evolve too quickly for me to keep up. Every time I think I have it figured out, something changes and I’m bewildered again. I agree that Discord in general is a bit chaotic and distracting, and I much prefer text. I also appreciate the fountain pen writers topic here! One of the great features of a text-based forum is that the age of the participants doesn’t have to be a natural barrier; anyone can participate in any conversation, at any level, with any other users, regardless of the actual calendar ages involved. I’ve found that I tend to assume anyone I’m interacting with to be a young adult (say, 25), and I’m occasionally surprised to find that someone is instead 15, or 60. Certainly in other kinds of social media, it’s weird or even creepy for old guys like me to be chatting with 17 year olds, and I agree that young people benefit from having their own spaces in which to interact without “old heads” butting in. As the years have passed, my participation in the 17S forums has declined, not so much because of anything here, but because I’ve been somewhat disappointed in the recent books. Other than that, I don’t think my “ways of engaging” with the Shard have changed, mostly due to the fact that I was already old when I joined. I don’t expect to “outgrow” or permanently leave this forum, I simply check in less frequently and spend less time. I think it’s likely that your experience has more to do with just how much a person changes between ages 15 and 30 than with anything else.

I think it's extremely likely that the "golden-haired" people described in TLM are the Iriali. The appearance of chouta in the novel clearly supports the idea of increasing numbers of people moving from Roshar to Scadrial. I suggest not getting overly analytical about the detailed timing of events; keep in mind that what we have here is MAGICAL FANTASY. There is an almost endless number of ways BS can handwave a supernatural explanation for things being the way he wants them to be for narrative purposes. Everything we know of the Iriali indicates that they have, each time, moved en masse from one land to the next when the time came.

I assume that what @Nitpicking means is that once his physical body was dead, Rashek didn't attempt to cling to Cognitive-Shadowhood like Kelsier did. He showed no inclination to stick around any further, no desire to continue influencing events. He asked neither mercy nor forgiveness. He simply accepted his time was done and went to the Beyond like a civilized person.