Mason Wheeler
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Posts posted by Mason Wheeler
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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...
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1 hour ago, Hawks said:
Ok
*thinks* top surgery included? Some people get it for medical reasons so is that an exception?
also really?!?! They do!?!?
Relevant official Church policy:
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On 8/22/2025 at 2:56 AM, Slowswift said:
We sang The Spirit of God to the melody of Now Let Us Rejoice; another perfect match.
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!
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19 hours ago, Slowswift said:
I was at the 5000th Music & the Spoken Word today! I had to get up earlier than usual and I slept for basically the rest of the day, but it was so worth it.
Oh, lucky! I wish I could have gone to that!
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12 hours ago, Oltux72 said:
As opposed to worlds where regularly 90% of the population die in war or its aftermath? Or where the underclass consists of slaves which are regularly culled in mass executions? Or worlds where deeply inhaling can kill you? Or worlds where religious fanatics use people as fuel for ritual magic?
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.
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6 hours ago, Koloss17 said:
I also found the idea of the space age superpowers fascinating, but also deeply depressing. Like one of the things I often do when reading is imagining what it would be like living in such a world, and in most other Sanderson works, I could see the silver lining, but this particular part of the Cosmere timeline seems like a terrible time to live in. Which is a neat concept, but is also kinda sad.
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.
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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.
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On 7/1/2025 at 8:56 PM, Pagerunner said:
It's going to be a book well worth the reread for the lore, though. I didn't take a ton of detailed notes on my first pass, but we've got dragons, a Dawnshard, Silverlight (where are the other two places the Nexus goes?), lodestars, Grand Apparatus, Nalthis subastral, Harmony as the only living Shard who has performed the--, a hint that Dominion and Virtuosity have un-Splintered, the golden Investiture of Cakoban... lots of stuff to dig into.
Don't forget the mention of people from Vax who are a whole new race, not human or ShoDel.
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Haven't finished it yet, but... apparently one of the leaders of the Arcanists at Silverlight is named Argent.
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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?
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On 5/30/2025 at 10:24 PM, Wasing the want of this said:
I went to the temple earlier and this was one of my names!
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.
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42 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:
Do you think France collapsed at some point in the 20th century?
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.
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13 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:
This is a baffling way to measure a country that I don't know how to extend to any other region
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.
47 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:Why do you think the reform of the state is somehow a black mark on it?
Are you simply trolling at this point, or do you legitimately not understand the difference between reform and collapse?
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10 hours ago, ParaTulip said:
France was one of the great world powers of the 19th and 20th centuries. ... I don't know how to respond to the idea that France has been a ruin in the last 300 years.
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.
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9 hours ago, Negative_Null said:
Cultural suicide? Why are you defending monarchist France like it was some kind of bastion of culture?
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.
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10 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:
While you are right to be critical of the propaganda put in the time period, you should understand that there were actual shortages of food in France before the revolution.
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.
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4 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:
Well, that's a relief.
Back to posting I guess.
I am sorry that you think this is obvious, but it is not to me. I always found this quote from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court a bit helpful for getting my views on this across. I hope you don't mind the continued focus on French history but french scholars as a fondness of mine
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
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.
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29 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:
Those scars you are describing, who's fault are they?
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.
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10 hours ago, ParaTulip said:
If the humans of Roshar had responded to the awakening of the Singers like someone whose disable child was suddenly given their missing faculties, this probably would have all gone differently.
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.
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57 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:
i cannot symphatyze with a group bent on subjugating and enslaving others on behalf of an evil god, despite their other circumstances. I especially cannot get worked up over something that happened 2500 years ago and that nobody alive remembers or understands, no matter how atrocious.
especially because we know the leaders of the human coalition are reasonable people and an agreement could have been reached. an agreement was about to be reached, in azimir, before the fused show up.
it's not a happy ending for the singers anyway. they are going to get used as fodder for the future cosmere conquest.
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.
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8 hours ago, Kheran said:
Finally finished the book this week, and my first reaction was.... All this for this ? The ending was very disappointing, especially with the character I loathe the most becoming one of the most powerful entity in the Cosmere. This trope is upsetting, and one of the reasons I never liked Game of Thrones, where the baddies win.
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."
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11 minutes ago, SpiritOfWrath said:
Oh! My uncle went in person…. I wish I could but… I’m not in driving distance.
Yeah, my sister and her whole family came down here from Idaho because they managed to get tickets to the first session. Kinda jealous!
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints corner
in General Discussion
Posted
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...)