Ryan

I'm not sure I buy that the highstorms only started after the death of the Almighty. For one thing, that doesn't leave enough time for the flora and fauna to adapt to their presence. Even if it's been as long as 5000 years (and I think it's been less), in evolutionary terms that's a blip. The counterpoint to that is divine intervention. They Almighty seems to have anticipated his own demise, so he may have prepared the world for his passing, either through his own actions or by asking another shard to lend a hand. Second, a pre-highstorm Roshar would conceivably look a lot like Shin. From the one look at Shin we get, we find that the place is alien to citizens of the rest of the world. Things like soil or grass that doesn't retract are called out as remarkable. Dalinar notices none of those things in the three visions that show locales from the past. Lastly, an event as world-changing as the start of highstorms should conceivably leave some sort of impression on the folklore of the people, as well as the historical record. We find no such impressions in the (admittedly limited) glimpses we get of folklore and history in the novel. So, I think highstorms have been around for a long time, possibly for as long as Roshar has existed as a shard-hosting world.

I thought the same thing until I recalled that Nohadon talks about them, and then I dismissed the idea. It never occurred to me to assume that honorspren and the symbol heads (which I will call cognitionspren until we're given an official name for them) were somehow different than other spren. I do think it's interesting that, of all the spren we've seen, only honorspren and cognitionspren exhibit intelligence. If they are in fact not like other spren, then I think it's highly probable your theory is right. The more interesting question then becomes, what exactly are they?

Gemstones might be foci. They store Stormlight. It's hard to say what foci exist on Roshar. Air might be the focus for stormlight, based on how surgebinders operate, and the fact that it comes from storms with very high winds. But then, whatever god whose power is the source of stormlight would be quite blind on Roshar. Also, what of spren? There's a spren for pretty much everything. My somewhat-unfounded conjecture is that the focus of power exists in the spiritual realm. People hold stormlight, though imperfectly. Gemstones seem to have some sort of spiritual power on Roshar. Shardblades damage the soul. Or does it exist in the cognitive realm? Shadesmar is very obviously linked to soulcasting. Gah. I know too little about realmatic theory to effectively theorize about this.

They did say that the barracks had been soulcast from air. And I seem to recall a mention of laying down layers when soulcasting from air. It seems implausible to me that they can somehow bring in enough air to make usably dense stone all at once. Also, Remember that when she did that, the air pressure in the room instantly rose noticeably. Clearly, soulcasting follows some sort of conservation of matter, because soulcasting a boulder produced a much larger volume of smoke than the source boulder occupied. This lends further credence to the idea that soulcasting from air has to be done layer by layer, because the volume of your soulcast stone will be much smaller than the volume of air you used to produce it.

It can be done. True, you can't remove a part of a border, but you can make the tab overlap the table border.

The main reason I haven't done that already is because I don't know what Will has in the works for those tabs. The current tab look is just a placeholder. Once we get prettier tabs, I'll definitely make sure they're polished. Also, the difference in size you've noted is due to a different font being used, because I forgot to link the Google font into the forums when I put up the navbar. Thanks for pointing that out; I don't know if I would have caught it.

I honestly have no idea how hard it would be, but I imagine it's not too terribly difficult since support is built into the software.

The most exact polar opposite to Odium that I can think of is Charity. Does that fit what we know of the Almighty?

Wordpress can host multiple blogs with a single installation. I'm not convinced it would benefit us to organize it that way, though. My conception was that we'd all have our own user accounts from which we can post to a single blog. Will and I already have accounts, and I took the liberty of putting up the first blog post. Honestly, I can scarcely make the time for my own blog. If you gave me my own personal blog on here, I doubt I'd ever use it.

I suspect they're cognitionspren. They seem to be attracted to thinkers and associated with the cognitive realm. Also, it seems that association with them grants soulcasting abilities, which also seems related to the cognitive realm. (Which doesn't make any sense to me. A case of mind over matter maybe?)

HTML is the easy part. ;D

Absolutely. That's planned. It's just a matter of me getting the time to do it. (Actually, I may do that tonight, since it shouldn't take long.)

What Zayde said clicked something in my brain. The Parshmen probably leave their dead out to be taken by the storms. Highstorms appear to be associated with the divine, both in actuality and in many religions on Roshar. Leave the dead where they met their end, because...well, who knows. But leave them out to be taken by the Stormfather? Sure, I'd buy that. We just need more data. As Voidbringers, the Parsh-races must be associated with Odium in some way. Maybe like how Ruin had power over the minds of the creations of Hemalurgy, Odium can exercise influence with the Pashmen when he so chooses. I would expect the Parshendi religion to revere Odium, but not knowing how his power affects Roshar, I couldn't say what form their rituals might take.

It's not just you. I hate everyone who's been able to read it. But mostly Eric. I'm just bitter because I took my time getting around to checking it out. I wouldn't even need interlibrary loan, because it was sitting in my own university's library. And then some selfish freak decided to keep it. This board doesn't have a smily angry enough to express my frustration with that person. What's most frustrating is that the paper trail exists to track the book down, but it wouldn't be considered important enough by anyone who could. It's only important to us rabbids.

Well, he's yet to explain himself, so we don't know for sure, but based on what he said in his first post, it seems it was an alternate English script. Except, instead of simply replacing letters (which would have been an easier nut to crack), it created new letters for the English phonemes. So, a decoding process would go something like this: guess phonemes for letters that have some visual context hinting at their meaning. Apply guessed meaning to other instances of the symbol, and infer the meaning of the missing symbols from context (like playing Wheel of Fortune). Repeat until you've decoded the entire alphabet. I wish I'd thought to try this myself. I assumed the invented script was paired with an equally invented language, and would therefore be completely indecipherable. Guess I was wrong.

I would have the ability to forget why I opened things. Refrigerators, drawers, doors, laptops

If he does have a significant role, I suspect it will be in helping that's Jasnah/Shallan figure out what the Parshmen really are. He's almost certainly not going to be on the Kaladin-led Dalinar protection squad; he'll probably get folded into Camp Kholin's Parshman workforce, where he may or may not distinguish himself by behaving differently than other Parshmen, causing Jashallan to notice him.

I'm fairly sure the Almighty held Cultivation.

You're assuming that Hoid must have the Element in his possession. I don't believe that's true. He says that he's "found a good home for it". That and the fact that he feels he must go out of his way to assure his audience that it is safe lends me to think he doesn't carry the thing on his person.

I will note for the record that, should a vertical bar be desired between links, it should be added with CSS and not explicitly, because this improves accessibility for those who use screen readers. In other words, it prevents them from having to listen to "Unread Posts vertical bar Unread Replies". Though, come to think, this theme is probably quite inaccessible anyway, so I'm not sure how much difference it would make.

BTW, these days CSS gradients make adding gradients easier than ever. They have wide browser support, and it's one of those things that degrades quite gracefully for those that don't support it. In fact, I used one on the main site... As for rounded corners, those are also easy these days thanks to CSS. Unfortunately, no version of Internet Explorer currently supports them. Again, that's no big thing; they degrade gracefully, and IE 9 looks to be addressing many of IE's shortcomings as a rendering engine, so I'm looking forward to that. You know, I haven't really given any feedback myself. Really the biggest thing I don't enjoy about the current forum design is the gap between the header table and the main table. It looks so tacky to me, and it's so easy to remove.

The real front page is coming very soon. Basically all that's holding it up are some server configuration issues (like ruby refusing to find my gem, or me sucking at mod_rewrite). If you noticed the site was broken at around midnight last night, that was me attempting to put up the new page. The theme I made for the main site makes what I consider to be a very tasteful use of red and yellow accents. If feedback is good, we may want to consider adding some to the forum.

For the record, I was made an admin in order to help resolve the session verification error. I don't really need power over an Internet forum and would not consider it a demotion if I were made a moderator again. That said, I'm glad people like my silly stick figure drawing. 8)

I wasn't going to do this 'cause I figured I'm boring, but Will has forced my hand. ;D In case you suffer from a chronic lack of attention, my name is Ryan. I'm from Colorado, but I'm going to school at BYU. I should graduate with a BS in CS this coming April. By day I go to school, and work as a web developer for BYU's English Language Center. By night, I work on entirely too many projects, of which this site is but one. Occasionally, I post to my blog. From 2002 - 2004, I served an LDS mission to Nicaragua. If you see me on the street and shout "chele!" at me, you'll make me feel at home. I landed the lofty position of Codemonkey for the 17th Shard by tweeting entirely too much about web development while Eric was listening. So far, the best benefit I've received from this is the chance to use my real name on these forums, because I was able to get here first. On TWG I'm ryos, and on Twitter, cheleball, but here, friends, there are no nicks between us.

Post your WoK fanart here! I'll get the ball rolling: (Yes, I drew this as a joke. What of it? ;D)