Argent

I've been keeping track of her YouTube stuff for a while now (since Crystallize, I think). Pretty original stuff, I am happy she is as successful as she is.

There is a very nasty overlap between the new WoW expansion and this game. I need to prioritize...

I don't think it's been mentioned before. I think it's likely a writing technique that gives you a little bit of worldbuilding without directing telling you about it (e.g. we already know a story about a maze and a string, so we draw immediate parallels between Ishathon and it).

We have a forum for questions like this This, being an introductory forum, is not a very good place because you can spoil some things for some people.

Hmm, okay. There is definitely something weird about Hauka's identification of the smuggler's crimes. Too specific. But the way it's explained, and the way Nissiqquan just accepts it, that's also weird. So I am not convinced she is an incipient Skybreaker, though there is certainly some evidence towards that hypothesis; I think her PoV was included mostly so we see Lift in a different light, so we are not stuck in her head for the entire novella.

Yeah, I've been thinking about the Ten Fools on Roshar and the Hundred Fools on Taldain. I wonder if both of those stem from some other Fool-related belief originating all the way back on Yolen, before the Shattering.

I didn't read that part! I am revisiting the excerpt right now, and I am seeing a ton of stuff I hadn't noticed before, I don't know what's going on. But it's like a second newsletter for me right now, more new content!

Remind me again, where do we see this Hauka? The name rings no bells right now...

Consistently, ever since the Big Update not too long ago, I notice that the White Sand (Prose) forum keeps forgetting me. I think this is happening consistently after each weekend (maybe because I don't usually log in during the weekend). What's weird is that I can still see activity from that forum when I am browsing the Unread stream; but when I click on a topic there, it takes me to (I think?) an error page. I can manually navigate to it, input the password, and then everything is fine, but it's a tiny bit annoying that the forum can't remember me...

Funny, I am inclined to distrust his judgment, at least sometimes. He feels like the kind of person who would hold a grudge for silly reasons. Reliable when it counts, but not necessarily otherwise.

Cheeky.

Oooh, you don't know who Zahel is, this is awesome! He is from a different book, go reread his chapters, see if you can figure him out

You are correct, but iron is not the only metal produced during stellar nucleosynthesis. Lithium, magnesium, and copper can (I believe) all be produced in different types of stars, and those should be visible to an Allomancer (sans the distance).

The popular belief here is that there was once a spren, the Rider of Storms as the Parshendi call him, that merged somehow with Tanavast's Cognitive Shadow and became the being we now know as the Stormfather.

I will offer the other side of the argument then - there is only so much you can learn from the books, regardless of how many times you reread them. I feel like the bulk of our knowledge comes from Brandon directly - signings, events, online presence, answers in books' personalization requests. That is how I learn most things - discover a WoB (and sometimes I would just read the Theoryland database for hours), ponder it, try to think how it fits in the bigger picture, form a theory, and let others poke at it. The actual books I've read no more than 2-3 times each. I am due for a reread soon though, I find myself forgetting basic details from the earlier ones...

Allomancers, even powerful Mistborn, seem to be constrained in how distant sources of metal they can sense. It's not an eyesight restriction either, we've seen lines disappear off into the mists. So I doubt anyone can detect the metals in the cores of stars.

I am pretty sure the significance of the number 16 is one artificially created by Preservation to guide humanity to notice certain irregularities in the world. Ultimately the purpose of this number was for Elend to notice that exactly one sixteenth of the population fell sick, and exactly one sixteenth of that fell really sick; which in turn let him to the deduction that the latter were atium Mistings, and allowed them to burn all of the atium in the Trust, stopping Ruin from getting it. This was, I believe, Preservation's plan - throw the number 16 everywhere he can, and hope the humans notice it, correctly assume that it's weird, and look into it. I do not believe 16 has a greater significance in the Cosmere (though Leras may have chosen it because it is also the number of Shards).

Finishing a book, especially one as large and involved as a Stormlight book, still leaves a lot of time until the book is released. Edits, revisions, art, etc.

This was a part of it. I updated my reply with some more details and my (personal and final) verdict on the matter - i.e. if ettmetal is a metal we are familiar with, it is cesium, not lithium.

I've seen this theory before. I don't remember the details, but I think I saw a pretty compelling piece of evidence against it. I just don't remember if I saw it here or on Reddit... Hmm, after a quick search it looks like the counter evidence was not as compelling as I thought it was. It looks like I was pretty sold on the idea that ettmetal is lithium for a number of reasons. Then @Ari suggested that it's probably cesium because it actually explodes when it comes in contact with water. After a quick Google-powered research session just now, it turns out that lithium reacts too slowly to generate an explosion. Cesium, on the other hand, according to the same source "explodes on contact with water, quite possibly shattering the container". Furthermore, while lithium release more energy per mole, it releases it slowly, and this prevents the spectacular effects we see described in The Bands of Mourning. In conclusion, I am not firmly sold on ettmetal being cesium, assuming no magical metals are involved.

Foreshadowing? Almost certainly. Of what? I don't know. I've added this to the list of questions I want to eventually ask Brandon.

Doesn't have to be a different magic system - just a different manifestation of one. We haven't spent much time in worlds with only a single Shard, but I think the closest analogue we can get is Sel where the Dor kind of acts like a single Shard, but manifests differently in different places. Nalthis would be the obvious place to look, but I hesitate to use it as an analogue because we've seen only one small piece of the world there, and who's to say magic doesn't work differently elsewhere? I will concede that it's possible for Darkside to be illuminated by reflected sunlight, but I think Brandon has hinted at something a little more complicated (and interesting). It's probably safest to stay away from conclusions for now.

Considering that the Darkside has a different source of illumination, they could be getting their Investiture from a completely different place - in fact, I think they must be.

This is some quality information, @teknopathetic! It not only suggests that Taldain's sun shines Invested sunlight (and is likely Invested itself!), it also points towards the lichen which covers the sand being able to feed on, or at least process in some way, Investiture. Which is a pretty cool thing to have in the Cosmere.

People spotting this discrepancy is probably one of my favorite things in Words of Radiance.