Argent

I am not sure if you are asking about something, or just expressing general displeasure. Either way, I sympathize with your frustration, but the only advice I could give you is to maybe just walk into your local bookstore, pick up a copy of Bands, and look at the broadsheets right there.

A note regarding Vax - we don't actually know it's a planet. It's very strongly suggested, but when I asked Brandon he corrected me by emphasizing that it's been strongly suggested it's a place. So while I still believe Vax is a planet, and Brandon is just being sly about it, it's worth mentioning this. As for its mention in the Ars Arcanum, there is only a brief note about how initiation works there. I don't remember whether it works differently from most things we've seen, or similarly to another world (either way, no details were provided). Nothing really. He tried and failed. He had, apparently, been trying to turn into an Elantrian for some time, and we see him decide to give up on that and (presumably) enter the Cognitive Realm through the pool We don't actually know that. There could've been a dozen Shardworlds he has visited before Sel - Sel is the just the first one with a book in it. We don't.

Well, it would. The endsheet glyphs are simply the ones from the frontsheet, but their symmetry changed. Eyeballing, tension and progression look like you could get one from the other.

Fascinating! You say this doesn't apply to the others though?

Here is the picture (I assume) OP is talking about. I think Dalinar's beard is not quite so magnificent, but otherwise it's a solid depiction, I like it.

A few decades is what I remember. I think the gap between Elantris and its sequel is supposed to be about 30 years, and the gap between Elantris and The Emperor's Soul a little longer than that.

Finished rereading Alcatraz 1-4, the new editions.I love the new illustrations! I also think I liked the first two more than the last two (and rereading all of them was the next best thing to reading them fresh, I barely remembered anything!). Then, as is natural, I moved on to The Dark Talent. It was not what I expected - it was, in many ways, so much more. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out a way to review it without spoiling anything, but it was - unsurprisingly - worth reading. I am not sure what I'll read next...

Oh, definitely. I wasn't keeping track of them, but I must've spotted at least a dozen or so changes like that one.

Well, that was a shocker. This book didn't turn dark quickly, it turned dark instantly. It was just... everything was going fine, and then nothing was! Did not expect that. I expected death, and I expected darkness, but not of this magnitude. I am glad for a Bastille book. Alcatraz, while a fun character, is not as much my type of character as I imagine Bastille would be. So I am looking forward to that.

In my experience pop culture often gives robots - or tools in some cases - similar names, where the name of the "product" is something that sounds one part awesome and three parts silly, and is then followed by a "model number." Blingtron 5000, for example, in the (still!) popular game World of Warcraft.

I cover it here. The theory itself is outdated, and I haven't considered how much of it is made obsolete, but it does talk about the symmetry of those glyphs - though, at the time, I didn't think to describe it as symmetric about the origin (which is what it is).

It feels like this is something that someone would've spotted before - we've spotted more hidden things - but I can't remember seeing this. It's an interesting discovery. I don't know what to think about it. We don't know what the glyphpair could signify on the sketch (though I can accept something related to the Dawncities), and we don't know what it could signify on the chart - because we don't know what the chart is! I hate working with so little information...

I am pretty sure someone would've noticed and remarked on this, had it been the case.

Something to do with the lerasium bead is my best guess as well. It has been hypothesized that he is keeping the bead somewhere inside his body (though I'll be the first to point out that it's a flimsy theory), so it wouldn't be entirely outside of the realm of possibility that it's allowing him to use Feruchemy similarly to how burning lerasium turns a person into an Mistborn. I could, perhaps, think about the Spiritweb is affect in all three Metallic Arts, and try to deduce whether it is reasonable to believe that lerasium could affect in a manner... parallel to how it affected Elend's. But I am so very tired right now...

Yeah, I figured he was using Connection, but not in the way the Southern Scadrians are. Who knows what kind of mojo he has access to?

I don't think I see it. I think the strongest piece of evidence we have available is the symmetry about the origin in each of the smaller glyphs. I don't know what it is evidence for (I argued that the entire chart depicts Voidbinding, and used the symmetry as one of my arguments for this hypothesis), but given how significant symmetry is on Roshar, it has to be some kind of a clue.

I've been chatting with Brandon over at Reddit about Hoid's ability to speak any language, and more specifically a case where this ability fails him in a way that is now very obvious to me - in The Way of Kings when he uses the word "coin" (instead of sphere) a couple of times. I hadn't really noticed this discrepancy until recently when somebody on the forums pointed it out, but it's been a bit of a sore thumb for me since then - why would Hoid's magic make sure an obvious mistake? Going as far as to use a word that doesn't even exist in the target language? The hound/axehound blunder I've been able to accepted, but this stranger. So I asked. And got some answers. Furthermore, /u/Torrieltar asked whether this is how puns work and also got a lengthy response: So there you have it, folks. Not a lot of new stuff, but interesting (at least to me) to see these explanations in as much detail as is available here.

I recently had a conversation (which you may have seen in other threads*) with Brandon over at Reddit about the nature of Hoid's "magical translation" - the way he can speak seemingly any language. As an aside to that conversation (which I will post in a different thread for completeness' sake), I asked about the infamous woman on The Way of Kings endsheet - you know, the one we've speculated to be Cultivation, her Vessel, a Herald, I think I even saw somebody suspect she is Dalinar's wife. Well, turns out she (probably) isn't anyone specific. Crud. * I like the idea of spawning dedicated threads to new Words of Brandon, to promote visibility. Hence this thread.

Hmm, no, this is definitely interesting. I did a search for the word "soil" in The Way of Kings, and there are only a few places where the word appears - and some of those places are ones where it makes sense (e.g. when Vstim is talking about the actual soil in Shinnovar). So let's go over those. So this is coming from Tukks, Kaladin's... I don't remember, some kind of mentor?, from the army. Perhaps it's worth looking into him a little more? Interlude 4: Rysn has three references to "soil," but all of them are proper - e.g. Vstim telling Rysn that the soft ground under her feet is called soil, Rysn musing about its strangeness, and Vstim instructing her to get plenty of soil for her grass. So we'll skip those. Interlude 6: Szeth has Szeth thinking about his time back in Shinnovar, with buildings "built with clay and soil." He also wonders how the people in the East could avoid walking on stone, since they have no soil here. So nothing odd here. This is the passage @Sand Master was referring to, obviously. The ardent in question is not thoroughly described, so here's what we know about him from the previous couple of pages: He is "short white-robed ardent Dalinar didn't know" He takes offense in Au-nak's (the Natan man Hatham was talking with) comment that "religion is but an excuse. Or perhaps a justification." He has some knowledge of Sesemalex Dar and the Emuli. In his words: “The city’s pattern is central to the Emuli religion,” the ardent said. “They claim it is their ancestral homeland, a gift to them from the Heralds. And the Tukari are led by that god-priest of theirs, Tezim. So the conflict is religious in nature.” He mocks and/or insults Au-Nak, referring to him as an "insufferable bore." Dalinar calls him bold for insulting "a man Hatham wants to do business with." It turns out the ardent belongs to Hatham and was playing a political game when insulting the Natan. And this is where something interesting happens... It is very possible that we are overthinking things here, but I think it's certainly possible that that the ardent here is not referring to the ardentia when he talks about "our goodwill" or that "we will speak with you again"

Allomancy, like all other magic systems (that we know of) not coming from Sel is independent of location. If you can use the Metallic Arts in one place of the Cosmere, you can use them in all of them. This is (and these are my own words) because the power, the Investiture, that fuels these magic systems comes from the Spiritual Realm (or, in the case of Feruchemy, from oneself), and in the Spiritual Realm time and space have almost no meaning. The Sel magic systems are an exception, of course, because there the power comes from the Cognitive Realm - where the Dor is - and location does matter in there. 's why I asked.

I am rereading the Alcatraz series. It's been a while since I read them, and since we don't talk about them here as much as we do about Cosmere books, I don't remember much. I am doing this so I can jump into the last one, of course.

Caught up on updating this thing. Both There are release dates for both The Bands of Mourning (part 1/2) and Words of Radiance (part 1/5). Added links where appropriate (and fixed the Warbreaker ones, which were all pointing to the cover pages, not the GA ones). Also changed the format a little bit - still not happy with it though. I really wish we had more covers, they are really pretty.

Interesting. Makes sense though, right? Knowing that cracks in the Spiritweb can allow for Investiture to seep in, and that Hemalurgy does crack (i.e. rupture) the Spiritweb, it makes sense that it would make it easier for other things to sneak in too. What's new and interesting - and not terribly surprising - is that the Investiture has a say in the matter. Good, solid WoB, I like it.

Cool! It's a nice name too. Vorin names are pretty.

Sourcing your WoBs is good, @The One Who Connects @Amaror, here's another fun tidbit to sleep over. While absolutely everything in the book pointing to the fact that the man who arrives at the gates of Kholinar at the end of The Way of Kings is the Herald Talenelat'elin (a.k.a. Taln, a.k.a. Talenel), Branon - to the best of my knowledge - has never referred to him by name. It's always something like "the man who calls himself Taln."