Mason Wheeler

Do what you can to get in shape. If you're in an area with no car, you're likely to be walking around 10 miles a day. Your first few months will be a lot easier if you can handle that before you go out into the mission field. (Go on, ask me how I know...)

It's so strange. A few days ago, I heard the news that the Church had announced he's suffering some health issues. And this random thought crossed my mind, "he's not going to make it to General Conference." And I thought, no, that's stupid, of course he will. And then this morning we get the news...

Relevant official Church policy: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/general-handbook/38-church-policies-and-guidelines?lang=eng&id=title_number118-p836#title_number118 https://assets.churchofjesuschrist.org/1d/76/1d76991533df11efbaeeeeeeac1ed7e66fbf94a7/general_handbook_guiding_principles_for_local_leaders.pdf

Or The Time Is Far Spent. I remember singing that one to the tune of The Spirit of God on my mission; it really messed with a few of my companions' heads!

Oh, lucky! I wish I could have gone to that!

That's the thing. There was plenty of darkness in earlier books, but the darkness gave the light something to shine in! Both The Final Empire and The Way of Kings were all about a hero facing horrible circumstances and triumphing and making things better. That was not what Wind And Truth was about, and this story tells us that all of that "making things better" comes to naught in the end, that Scadrial and Roshar do not improve in the long run but both turn into horrible places.

That was something that really bugged me about this story. It feels like a continuation of something very bad we saw hints of beginning in RoW and exploding onto the scene in full force in WaT: bleakness. Virtually everything about the wider milieu of this setting sucks. The Malwish have turned into evil imperialist overlords and conquered half the Cosmere. The Rosharans under Odium are conquering the other half and seem to legitimately consider it generous to tax their subjects at a rate of 99% and "let them keep" the last 1%. Nazh is dead. Frost is missing, presumed dead. Hoid is locked up, unable to help anyone. Though we don't know the exact details, it's clear that the dragons exiled Starling for something involving trying to be compassionate to mortals rather than lord over them as a draconic tyrant. The Evil overran Threnody and is now spreading anti-Investiture monsters throughout the Cosmere. And so on... It almost feels like Brandon is forgetting that so many of his fans read the Cosmere, and not trash like ASOIAF, because it is not trash like ASOIAF. Bleakness and "grimdark" have no legitimate place in epic fantasy, and the Cosmere was one of the best refuges from that ugly trend. Was.

Probably Manti. It's one of the oldest temples in the Church, and its design is just beautiful. I love the way it has multiple ordinance rooms for the different stages of the Endowment, that you progress through as you go. I wish we hadn't stopped building temples on that pattern.

Don't forget the mention of people from Vax who are a whole new race, not human or ShoDel.

Haven't finished it yet, but... apparently one of the leaders of the Arcanists at Silverlight is named Argent.

I'm honestly surprised that there are still so many people who aren't familiar with the whole DHMO joke. I remember it was making the rounds back when I was in high school, in the 1990s. Here we are 30 years later; how has everyone not heard of it?

I'll always remember one time when I was young, on our way back from a youth temple trip, our Bishop told us that he had once been doing baptisms and the name that came up was Ronald MacDonald. He said everyone there just couldn't help themselves and cracked up laughing, right there in the temple, for a good minute or two.

Twice. There's the big obvious one in 1940, of course. (Which largely came as a direct result of measures the French government set up in the Treaty of Versailles, which led to the economic instability in Germany that brought the Nazi Party into power.) After the war, the Fourth Republic was established, and didn't make it even 15 years before it collapsed into a violent crisis, with a military coup bringing the nation to the brink of civil war. In the end, about the only thing Parliament could agree upon was that they were unfit to handle the mess, so they voted to dissolve the entire system, put war hero Charles Du Galle in power to resolve the problems (a "dictator" in the classical sense!) and get someone else to set up a new constitution.

The Constitution was written 2 years before the French Revolution began, and ratified the next year; in historical terms, they were essentially simultaneous. In the intervening time, how many times has the government of the USA collapsed and had to be rebuilt from the ground up? Zero. Are you simply trolling at this point, or do you legitimately not understand the difference between reform and collapse?

Just look at how many times it fell apart entirely. There's a reason the current government is called "the fifth republic." Brandon has said that he took inspiration from the French Revolution for Misborn. Well, look at the rest of the metaphor: the people who proved skilled at destroying the government proved far less skilled at establishing and running a new one, and in the end it turned out that they were unwittingly serving Ruin all along. Barbarians have been destroying civilization since the dawn of time. I cannot for the life of me understand why this particular instance of it gets so glamorized.

I'm not. Why are you taking me out of context? I'm saying that whatever the (very real) problems may have been, 1) they were legitimately working to fix them and 2) the French Revolution proved to be an abysmal alternative that left France a wreck of a nation for centuries. You can't fix a problem by making it worse.

Yes. Sadly, this was a thing that happened a lot before the invention of modern chemical fertilizers and agricultural techniques. Most of the time, it did not result in cultural suicide.

Twain's "minor terror, the momentary terror, so to speak" was anything but, and his "older and real Terror" is vastly overstated. The truth is, the French Revolution was one of the greatest political catastrophes in human history. No sooner had the revolutionaries seized power than they turned on each other in an orgy of violence that they themselves — not their political opponents, as one might expect for the origin of a name like this — called the Reign of Terror. And it's true that this period lasted less than a year. But the scars lingered for centuries. The destabilization of the French Revolution left France a perpetual basket case of a nation that kept falling apart over and over and over again. The current French government, the Fifth Republic, dates to 1958. So we can blame one French collapse on the Nazi occupation, but even after that ended, more than a decade after V-E day, the government fell apart yet again and had to be redesigned. And the truly crazy thing? None of it was necessary. Far from the callous "let them eat cake" persona that the libelles smeared her as, Marie Antoinette was a kindhearted ruler who gave generously to the poor and to charitable causes helping the most vulnerable. Yes, there were real problems, but the people in charge were aware of them and were actively working to resolve them.

The people who tried to make massive social changes by fiat, all at once, of course. If there's a single example anywhere in history of that being a thing that has ever ended well, I'm not aware of it.

Had the Singers not demanded massive, society-destabilizing changes immediately, they'd have probably gotten a more worthwhile outcome. To put it in real-world context, there was a massive wave of abolitionism throughout a great deal of the world in the 19th century. A whole lot of nations that had formerly been OK with slavery/serfdom decided to get rid of it, all fairly close together. Most nations set up some sort of program of gradual integration, where slaves would gain freedom over the course of several years, while being taught how to be normal, productive members of society, the sort of stuff that free-born people pick up in childhood but slaves, for obvious reasons, had never been taught. And it worked pretty well. There were two notable exceptions, nations that decided "we're just going to free them all instantly and leave them to fend for themselves:" Russia and the USA. In both cases, it was a catastrophic failure, leading to decades of civil unrest and leaving scars that linger to this day.

Exactly this! The Voidbringers are the followers of Odium. A long, long time ago, that was the humans. Now it's not. Now it's the Singers. Either way, the Voidbringers are evil and are a threat to peace and stability on Roshar. Honestly, this is something that really bugged me about Oathbringer. The notion of collective guilt spanning millennia even though the facts on the ground are completely different today is utterly bizarre from a factual perspective, and from a moral perspective it simply cannot be squared with the religious doctrine that Brandon is supposed to adhere to, that "we believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for [an ancestor's] transgression." Neither the Radiants of old nor the people of modern Roshar should need Honor to set them straight on this point; it's obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. Between this and Syl telling Kaladin that he needs to do the right thing but she has no guidance as to what that actually entails, (despite being a self-proclaimed "piece of God,") and that he just needs to figure it out for himself, in hindsight it's looking painfully clear that Stormlight started going off the rails long before Wind and Truth, and the writing was just good enough that we were willing to overlook a lot of it. Until it finally wasn't.

I know! I've been keeping my ear to the ground and hearing a lot of reactions from a lot of people, and it seems like a common thread: "this book does things that I read Brandon because he does not do. This book betrays the whole point of being a Cosmere fan."

Yeah, my sister and her whole family came down here from Idaho because they managed to get tickets to the first session. Kinda jealous!