Argent

I wonder about the format of the books...

I assume you haven't read Words of Radiance, so I am just going to say that there is something very special about Shardblades, and from what we understand (read: not much), this specialness doesn't apply to Plate.

Yea, I was catatonic after I finished it, couldn't post here...

We agree that Plate is (heavily) Invested, but that is pretty much the only thing we agree on... From what I understand, you were making the claim that because fabrials are an "invention of men", and Plate is "inherently Invested," then Plate cannot be a fabrial. Which makes no sense to me, because Nightblood is both an invention of men and a pretty Invested object. So there's that. Then, you think that because Plate is Invested, it has to have come from the spren bond - which I agree with, but not in the way you do. I do think the bond is responsible for the Plate, but it's solely responsible for it. I find it more compelling to believe that each Radiant crafted a more-or-less regular suit of armor (perhaps with fabrials here and there, effectively turning it into a Half-Shard), and then used the Nahel bond to uniquely augment / modify / power (up) / Invest the suit and turn it into the Shardplate we see in Dalinar's visions. Ignore the Ryshadium point, I think we misunderstood each other there big time.

I know somebody was pioneering the idea that aluminum has special properties on all the Shardworlds (which we have a WoB for, but that person had examples). Shardblade guards and ralkalest were two of the examples brought up, though I don't remember the Oathgate lock being mentioned.

I wouldn't say "lightly scratched:" I am calling it impervious.

Pfft. Heretics. The Stick permits you to try this thing, for It is all-loving, but it is futile and you will eventually come back into its Fold Stack. Also, I should mention that Julia was a dude - this is his last name. The first one is Gaston, Gaston Julia.

Oh, herp derp. Completely forgot to check the official page for more info...

Hmm, I don't follow. Keeping true to your Order's Immortal Words is what allows for a spren to come and stick a Nahel bond in your spiritweb - a bond that stays there as long as you don't violate the Ideals. Where is all the stuff about Plate being inherently Invested object and gaining another level of Investiture coming from? Also, I don't see how fabrials being man-made affects anything - the Ryshadium don't come from the Radiants or their spren either, but the knights were pretty happy using them, why would Plate be any different?

My problem with the abbreviated form is that it could very easily cause ambiguity - and as artistic as the glyph writing system is, it's supposed to be readable. Which is not that much of an issue in your current key, because I don't see any other letters that look like enough like the lower half of n to concern me, but it's something I won't discard just yet. The worse part is that if we assume n can be cut, then there is very little reason not to start cutting all the other letters as well - and therein lies madness.

Lightweaving, at least the Rosharan kind, only creates illusions. It doesn't matter how good of an illusionist you are, you can't hide a dragon of stereotypical dimensions in a cellar. But maybe there is some shapeshifting going on - it's a popular draconic ability.

The "different ratios" thing is - was? - a popular fan theory. In fact, I asked something similar back during the Steelheart tour: Brandon's response, in retrospect, was not as illuminating as I thought back then...

We really need a proper list, maybe a collab document somewhere...

I think it's almost entirely safe to rule out the option that Shardplates are the Radiants' spren manifest in the physical realm. I, however, maintain that it's still very possible that the Plate is either a fabrial or a fabrial-like construct, but powered by the living spren, not one trapped inside a gem + Stormlight.

Eh, 2 is better than 1, and 3 is better than 2. The problem you are having is that Jordan doesn't quite the "in late, out early" thing - especially the "in late" part. So you don't get to see Rand, Mat, Perrin, and Egwene be awesome off the bat (and become even more awesome throughout the books), you start with them not be awesome, but embarking on a journey to become awesome (spoiler alert: they become awesome). Which happens at different times for all of them, but generally 1-3 are about them discovering what they can do and what they are good at, and 4-6 (maybe 7 too) are about them use those skills they've acquired / developed. Journey before destination indeed.

Here's what I consider a pretty simple explanation of the Julia set. Take a mathematical function f(x). Choose a random number x0, from the domain of that function. Find out what f(x0) is (let's say f(x0) = x1), then feed it back into f. Find out what f(x1) is. Feed that back into f to get x2. Repeat to infinity for all possible initial numbers x0. All the original numbers, or seeds, that give you a sequence x0, x1, x2, x3, ... of fairly similar numbers are something we'll call "prisoner set of f;" all the seeds that give you erratic sequences x0, x1, x2, x3, ... will be the "escapee set of f." Well, the Julia set of the function f is the set of those seeds that form the border between the prisoner set and the escapee set. Here, let me edit with an example. John Carroll University has a really nice vignette on Julia sets, so I am going to use their example - it's clear enough and it saves me some work. Let's take our function to be f(x) = x2 - 0.5. We now need to look at all the possible x0 we could feed into this function - which, in this case, means all (real and imaginary!) numbers. To illustrate the prisoner and escapee sets, however, we'll only look at a couple of numbers. If we take x0 = 0 (0 is always nice, makes math easy), we get the following sequence x0, x1, x2, x3, ... : x0 = 0 x1 = f(x0) = f(0) = - 0.5 x2 = f(x1) = f(-0.5) = - 0.25 x3 = f(x2) = f(-0.75) = - 0.3086 ... [May 2, 2016] Edit: My numbers were off, I was using two different formulas to compute x. The final result was still qualitatively the same, but the numbers are now correct. If we continue this, we'll see that the numbers we get never move too far away from the original x0 = 0. This means 0 is part of our prisoner set. Now, we take a different x0, let's say 2. Do the same thing: x0 = 2 x1 = f(x0) = f(2) = 3.5 x2 = f(x1) = f(3.5) = 11.75 x3 = f(x2) = f(11.75) = 137.563 ... Unlike the case where x0 = 0, here it's easy to see that the numbers will continue growing (exponentially). This kind of behavior means x0 = 2 is a part of the escapee set of f. It's also easy to see that any number greater than 2 will also be a part of the escapee set, by the way. Now all you need to do is repeat the same thing for all the numbers (keep in mind, the example I gave doesn't even touch the imaginary numbers / components), plot them, see which one(s) form a boundary between prisoner and escapee sets, and voilà - Julia set! If you are curious, here's how the Julia set of our example function looks like:

I call this book hangover, and I get it after every one of Brandon's books (though it's easier with the smaller ones). I usually wait a little to see if it goes away (it doesn't), and if it doesn't, I reread something that I know is really good. Which sometimes backfires, because it sends me into another book hangover, but it usually fixes the problem.

It's possible that the Heralds had no part in the Recreance, but instead showed up after it and only then did they lock the gates.

I was thinking more along the lines of "Hoid's spiritweb is so modified, it doesn't look like that of a "regular" human." But yea, same idea.

Uh, somebody made a thread a couple of weeks back, we had the entire thing figured out back then. Ah, it was RShara - here.

You can't just skip a few books and get to where it "gets better." The Wheel of Time is very much about momentum - books 4-6, which are usually considered the best (if you don't count Brandon's contribution to the series), are half-meaningless if you don't know how the characters have changed in books 1-3. So no can do, I am afraid you will either have to suck it up and force yourself through the first book or two, or give up on the series as a whole. Because without 1-3, 4-6 will feel almost as bad to you.

So, some Firefight goodness! That Monday announcement is finally coming in. If you don't want to / can't go to the article itself, here's the quick infodump: Sexy cover Release date: Jan 6, 2015 (/sadface) The "preview" part is really just an extended pitch kind of thing - a hook to the plot (David leaves Chicago, focuses on Epics research, you should read it, I am not going to summarize a summary) See the original post on Entertainment Weekly

Spooktober is the best.

N bothers me. I don't have my notes with me at work, but I am starting to suspect that the glyph for n just doesn't correspond to the Thaylen n as well as most of the other letters. In some cases half of the glyph is truncated, that seems pretty extreme to me. Going off your current key, it looks like the lower half of the n-glyph is present in both nahn and the Kholin & Roion glyphpairs. The top half is never fully drawn, and while it seems to be completely missing from Kholin and Roion, its vertical line is drawn in the simple glyph nahn. Which is a really annoying conflict - the drawing of nahn is pretty clear, but we have two glyphpairs in which the n-glyph looks different... Either way, I am going to work under the assumption that your current version of n, while a logical choice, is wrong - based on empirical evidence. I am going to play with a version that doesn't have the slanted line on the top, making the glyph something the Internet told me is known as "Canadian syllabics ya" (except mirrored, obviously). (this is the left side)

I've thinking about Mraize being a dragon for a while now - for pretty much the same reasons you listed up there (predominant use of words like "hunt" and "prey," as well as general personality traits). I don't buy into Hoid being one, but I would not be surprised if Mraize ended up as such.