Ryan

Gray is indeed the color you'd expect when mixing a human and a koloss. Ever seen an inverted photo (or, heck, a photo negative) of a person? Their skin is blue. If you add a color to its inverse, the result is white. However, we're not dealing with exact inverses, so it's reasonable to expect a mottled gray to emerge instead. Also, if you add a color to half its inverse, the result is a neutral gray, so maybe he's a quarter koloss.

I kind of want Wax to marry Marasi, but only if she can get over her fangirlishness. Also, someone pointed this out in the comments on the chapter: Wax and Wayne. Teehee. Lastly, Steris' name is similar enough to Sterrance that I can't help but see the latter when I think of the former.

Technically, the first three books were pre-apocalyptic. Also, the second trilogy will be set at a similar level of technology to today, and the third will be set at a futuristic/sci-fi level, with space ships and whatnot.

Oh, duh. I'm slapping my forehead now. There's a hole in Wax's theory about the baddies gathering allomancers. What good are unwilling captives in a war? But if they are hemalurgists... This was a brilliant chapter. A wonderful, beautiful chapter. I usually count myself among the ranks of the theory nuts, but this time, I find myself not caring to pick apart the mechanics at all. I just see a lovingly crafted fictional religion and a lovely portrayal of one of its devotees. I know that Brandon always puts religions into his books, but this is the best I've seen from him yet. I also know that he usually has a goal in mind for his use of religion; for example, IIRC in Elantris he wanted to use the terror of religion misapplied. Might we now be able to speculate on what his goal is in this book? My personal theory is that he is simply writing a parallel of the state of religion in the real world. Or, well, a parallel of the Mormon view of the state of religion in the real world. We have the Path, which is a true religion worshiping a real god the way he wants to be worshiped; and then we have a number of other religions, the Survivorists being the only one we've yet seen, which have a portion of the truth but have been distorted by the philosophies of men. So far it's exceptionally well done—the first trilogy (and, indeed, the entire cosmere) have set the stage for a portrayal of religion that would be hard for other books to match, but it exists as subtext that a non-religious person could miss entirely and still enjoy the story. I could go on gushing about how great this all is, but I should stop before I derail the thread into a discussion of religion. Also: probably only interesting to me. In conclusion, LOL at rational and effective tin foil hats.

My first thought is that Marasi is simply a smoker, but that is a little dull. I like the idea of her being a Slider a lot more. Also, no red shift inside the bubble, just a "haze in the air". Also, to whoever proposed that a bubble of quick-time could be used as a shield, I seem to remember Brandon saying that that would be very hard to pull off. You'd have to time it perfectly, right as a shooter fires, because if you put one up in anticipation of a shooter firing, you'd have to wait too long for them to pull the trigger and your bendalloy would run out. (At least, from what little we saw, it looked like bendalloy burns very quickly.)

Let's see. One to Kelsier—seems silly to leave him out. Probably one to Vin, since she was so important to the original Survivorists. Probably one to Spook, who attained prophetlike status in book three. The fourth...I can't think of any one single person that fits. Or maybe they aren't to anyone, and are just part of some ceremony we haven't been shown yet. It's pretty clearly Preservation mist. It's not tied to humidity, and Wax's use of allomancy excites it. About a million, if memory serves. I wanted to say how cool this whole thing is. I've never seen this done before, where by "this", I mean that an author takes the conditions of a world-reshaping conclusion to a series, extrapolates them out a couple hundred years, and then writes about it. I am a little sad that Mistborns no longer exist, though. Interesting that Koloss are still around. I wonder if they are still using the same spikes from the Lord Ruler's time, or if they figured out how to make their own, or if there are still hemalurgists in the world who are making them.

I'm not sure what you're talking about WRT the disk space. I just checked, and we're using a bit over 500 MB. I doubt we'll need more than a few gigs long-term. Also, checking our usage, we could fit just fine on MediaLayer's basic plan, with the odd overage on unusually busy months (which overages are billed very reasonably).

If we're voting, I have said before and will reiterate the opinion that we should move to steadfast.net. I've heard great things about them and I like the cut of their jib. Also, you don't need to be nervous about migrating data. I've done it dozens of times. It's a fairly straightforward if tedious process. Just make sure you let me know when it's happening so I can help out. Edit: crap, I just looked again and it looks like Steadfast got rid of their shared hosting plans and are now VPS only. Which, well, we may want. I didn't realize our traffic was so awesome. I'll have to do some more research in order to make good recommendations. The problem we're going to run into is budgetary, of course. Cheap hosting plans with ridiculously high usage caps tend to suck. It's funny, but a cheap plan with reasonable usage caps almost always offers a vastly higher quality of service than does a same-priced plan with essentially unlimited usage. Take MediaLayer for example. Their cheapest plan costs $10/mo. and offers 10GB/mo. of transfer and 500MB of storage space. I've got a site hosted there, on that plan, and the servers are rock-solid, extremely fast, with excellent support. Contrast that to our current plan, which costs less per month, has usage caps so high as to be indistinguishable from unlimited, and has, to quote Strong Bad, crap for brains. My personal site is hosted on Nearly Free Speech. It is a pay-as-you-go host. You literally only pay for the bandwidth, storage, and other server resources you use, and nothing more. The service has been very reliable, and while the speed didn't used to be that great, it has made great leaps in the past year. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them for our site. I'll need to do more research, and hope that we haven't gotten so big as to be unable to afford a quality hosting plan that fits our needs.

Funny you should post this literally the day after I posted my own personal theory on this, in another thread:

My best guess is that it's written from the point of view of a sentient spren. Spren seem to be immortal, or at least extremely long-lived, as evidenced by Syl's eventual recollection of the days of the Knights Radiant. They seem to be keeping an eye on the four key players, as evidenced by the symbol-heads watching Shallan and Syl finding Kaladin. They would have an intimate knowledge of the magics of Roshar, would feel the loss of those magics as acutely as any human, and would feel betrayed by Radiants and Heralds both when they called it quits. AFAICT, nothing in the text contradicts this theory. I don't know if there's a lot that supports it, but I can't think of anyone else that fits.

I'm trying to come up with something compelling, and have come to a conclusion: hard facts of this will never happen aside, Brandon's works just aren't very suited to theme-park adaptation.

I bow to your superior knowledge of the subject. However, I did think of another effect that hasn't been mentioned. Namely, that nobody's mentioned the effect of stuff inside the bubble on shifted radiation. For example, let's say a bubble is created that shifts visible light into the microwave range. This would pass through the allomancer, perhaps getting slightly scattered and absorbed, then get shifted back up on the other side of the bubble. This would turn the allomancer into a blurry shadow from the perspective of outside observers. Also, a shift of visible into x-ray would let people see the allomancer's bones, perhaps in technicolor. Slight shifts would change colors observed in the bubble, since for example if the allomancer is wearing a red shirt, and green light gets shifted down to red, then the shifted green light will be what the shirt reflects, changing its color to green for outside observers.

Would a time bubble affect the flux of photons into the bubble? I'm not sure it would. I know certain materials affect the speed of light, but I don't know if gravitational redshift does. I think the change in wavelengths would compensate for the time change, instead of a change in flow rate. Otherwise you'd get a buildup of photons on the surface of the bubble, which really would cook the caster when he lets the bubble go (depending on how long he held it, that is). As for cooking people with a flashlight, I don't think it works that way. The energies are too low. You might give them radiation sickness if you hold the beam on them long enough, but I'm not even sure of that. Especially depending on how conservation of energy works with this magic system. If the allomancer imparts no energy to photons entering and leaving, then the intensity (amplitude, I think?) of the radiation from your flashlight will decrease in order to compensate for the shortening of the wavelength. Radiation exposure in direct sunlight might be a problem for the allomancer, though. You might find that cancer rates are much higher among bendalloy mistings... Vision in different spectra would give you all sorts of cool abilities, though. You'd be a great doctor, provided you had a source of x-rays to shine through people...

Well, the female Radiant who healed Dalinar in the vision declined to heal his subsequent more minor injuries, because she wanted to conserve the power for more critical cases in the village. I think her words were that she wanted to "save regeneration". Assuming the regeneration power works off Stormlight, then at least one of them was concerned about conserving it.

I don't recall how much of Hemalurgy is explained in Final Empire (or even if it's given a name), but I knew the earring used the same magic as the Inquisitors' spikes in book 1, yeah. In book 1 you learn that making inquisitors involves killing people and putting metal spikes into other people. You also are shown how Vin got her earring. It's not too huge an intuitive leap to connect the two, and once connected, it's pretty clear that the earring is the source of Vin's coppercload-piercing ability. (In case that came out wrong, I'm trying to be humble here. ) In fact, knowing as I did that Vin's earring was a spike, I found most of Vin's struggles in HoA to be frustrating. I mean, of course Reen's voice in her head was actually Ruin. Of course the earring was the reason the mists avoided her. I know that Vin the character couldn't have been expected to figure all that out, because she didn't have as much information as I did, but still, I found it frustrating. I think that frustration greatly diminished my enjoyment of that book, and made me prefer FE that much more.

Really? You saw that coming? That's quite extraordinary, you know. And here I was proud of myself for figuring out that Vin's earring was a hemalurgic spike in book 1.

I'm gonna guess "possibly" to that. We know that TLR suppressed knowledge of certain Allomantic metals, but we don't know for sure which ones.

I think Final Empire tops them all. It's got the best conflict, best character arcs, best battles, and biggest emotional "oomph" of them all. Of course, I really loved the TenSoon arc in HoA, and the series finale probably tops anything in FE. But as far as being consistently incredibly amazing and compelling, chapter after chapter, I'd pick FE bar none.

She discovered what I jokingly call Gerenid's Certainty Principle. Namely, that measuring and recording an attribute of a spren fixes the spren in the measured state. It's like the opposite of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

While I'm certainly not an authoritative source of information on Things Brandon, I don't recall that. Just a mention of a bendalloy misting. You may be thinking of the 20th-century-tech-level second trilogy, which is still years away. This book strikes me as a relatively-unplanned momentary diversion that ballooned to book length by accident.

I believe you're on the right track. The glowy shard armor is almost certainly due to the Stormlight-weilding abilities of its bearers. Szeth can't use his abilities while in Shardplate. There could be any number of reasons for this, but my pet theory is that it's because he hasn't spoken the Words. Something about this Shard's magic requires certain attributes of its wielders, and I see the Words as a way of bringing those out.

I'm just glad I didn't delete the file. I almost did you know, and don't quite remember why I decided not to. I do feel a little bad that so many other typo reports that were on TWG haven't resurfaced. I'm not sure what went wrong with the forum, but if it isn't outright full database corruption, someone who knows their way around a mysql client could probably pull the post out of the DB for you. I'm sure you have someone, but if not, I'd be happy to help.

Also that it's set in a late-19th-century technology level. Guns and trains and steam, oh my!

Here's the list I posted to TWG. Or rather, these are my raw notes that I jotted into my phone as I read. When I posted on TWG I added formatting and comments; sorry for not having time to do it again here. 33 standing...got to his feet. 55 sat down to floor 150 nearly enough stop them 170 you asked right questions? 193 when dalinar and the king rode up, and adolin spoke quickly before Sadeas could speak. (Not sure what I was thinking here. It may be I didn't like one of the ands in the sentence.) 251.3 "Oddly, he noticed a group older boys gathering..." 260.5 "I saw some of reeds of it growing..." 281.6 He'd given both to Elhokar to award to a warrior... 334.7 'Highprinces and lighteyes,' Elhokar's suddenly proclaimed. 390 Kaladin lights his torch twice on this page: once immediately after touching down, and again after Rock and Teft arrive. 416.14 "The longer her worked, the more people gathered..." 421.2 "Well, I do have reputation to maintain." 432.4 "It had been five months since Vstim become her babsk..." 469.15 "A true scholar must not close her mind close on any topic." 584.11 "Was it angry at being forced belong the horizon?" 593.5 "That wasn't what decided it for her, however, The truth was..." 604.8 "Kaladin knew what happening to him." 609.2 "...what was hope it except another opportunity..." 691.10 "It will take time, but promise you if we staet here..." 694.11 "Maybe you'll you happen upon..." 695.4 "...capable in stances they had only been just been taught... 698.15 "Jasna's quieter, move justified anger was no less daunting." 703.8 "Coreb's fell to his knees and began to beg." 730.10 "They ran shoulder to shoulder, not a single one of place." 731.1 "That meant so far as he knew, there were less than hundred Blades..." 732.8 "Dalinar He caught up to the..." 733.8 "I have said I that cannot be of much help to you." 735.13 "That was very same reason they didn't let..." 745.4 "He looked up with as Kaladin and the members of..." 760.9 "I haven't give up on you yet, Dalinar." 770.7 "You're not going be like Rock..." 773.8 "...and a group of many-legged cremlings scuttling along along the wall and slipped into a fissure." 779.6 "So if Sadeas could arrive first, then hold out long enough for Dalinar get his men across..." 793.14 "He could the use extra men..." 924.1 "'He wanted them to bunch up against us,' one the spearmen said." 935.1 "Ahead, he could make out a figure in scratched blue Shardplate, fighting at the front of group." 936.10 "Adolin cut down through multiple men at once..." 940.12 "Adolin and last of his troops filed along behind him."

Brandon has said that one of his goals for the series is to show the invention of magic