Mason Wheeler

I'll second that one. For all the talk about her positive attributes--her intelligence, her beauty, her charisma, etc--when you look at her actual character, at what she does rather than what other people say about her, what you see is a really horrible human being. She's cruel to others around her, she plays mind games with people, she's horrible to Kaladin, and her first instinctual response to any problem always seems to involve killing somebody. (The alley thugs, Kabsal, a Herald, Renarin, the entire Parshman race, etc.) To be quite honest, she comes across as a psychopath of the charismatic, prosocial variety, the kind that ends up leading cults. (Or Fortune 500 companies.) This is by no means somebody who is going to make a good monarch, and I'll be very disappointed if she magically metamorphoses into one without really earning it!

Keep in mind that this is Brandon Sanderson we're talking about. This may have been completely coincidental and just timing, but remember how The Wheel of Time had been suffering from that for many, many books under Robert Jordan, and then Brandon took over the story and immediately characters started coming together again, talking to each other about things, and actually resolve plot threads that had been dragging and getting nowhere pretty much forever? Somehow I doubt he'll make that same mistake in his own epic.

The latest Shardcast talked about the Dawncities, and how they had to have been built by the Dawnsingers. Cymatic patterns suggest there was music involved, so one of the hosts raised the theory that a bunch of them would stand around in a big circle and chant the Song Of Cities or something. I heard that and thought, there's only one way to pull something like that off: We built this city! We built this city on rock and stone!

WRT the question of which world will get into space first, Brandon has said that the next Mistborn era will have a technology level analogous to our 1980s time period. By that time, we'd been going into space for a couple decades... but Earth and Scadrial have one crucially important difference in this regard. A major motivation for the American space program was specifically to get to the moon, and Scadrial doesn't have any moons! I wonder how that will affect their development...

The title really says it all. Do we have any official word on whether a person can Soothe or Riot their own emotions, should they wish to do so?

Sure. We know that happened once in the past. The question is whether the "more directed ways" includes anything less extreme than a Sword of Adonalsium Shattering. (Which is unofficially officially what the original Vessels used, until we find out how it actually happened.)

WRT the question of how enmeshed Sazed's two Shards are, I asked Brandon several years back at a signing event whether, if Sazed were to be killed, he would drop the two Shards Ruin and Preservation, or one single Harmony, and Brandon said he would drop Harmony.

May the Farce be with you!

So people were asking questions about the Sleepless... in Seattle?

Just realized something: Dalinar's fatal flaw is his rage and his addiction to the Thrill. Evi's fatal flaw is her naivete. Tanalan's fatal flaw is his pride. Everything collides at the Rift to produce a horrifying problem for Dalinar that isn't truly anyone's fault, simply the inevitable result of everyone acting according to their character. It gets resolved through the personal intervention of one of the Gods. The Oathbringer flashback sequence is a classical tragedy.

What does that even mean, and more to the point, how did anyone manage to discover that in the first place?!? (Also, this power is less awesome than it sounds, because what if you manage to steal the destiny of someone who had a really bad destiny?)

Roshar?!?

Holy crap, that's a scary thought! With the WOB we just got about how Hoid wants to avoid Nightblood because he believes/worries that it's one of the few things that could actually kill him, it makes me wonder if he's aware of this power...

Didn't we have a WOB from a while back to the effect that yes, you could do exactly that, but it would be incredibly wasteful as, with a smaller amount of lerasium than it would take to make a spike you could already make someone a Mistborn?

Never heard of this book, but one thing is sure: no one but a Mormon could have produced The Hero of Ages. When you know what you're looking at, thematic elements of Brandon's religious background are everywhere in that book in particular.

Just picked up my copy at the BYU store, and wow, it's beautiful! Not just this chart, but all the artwork inside... wow! Now I have the whole trilogy, and Elantris! Looking forward to Warbreaker, which will hopefully come out this year.

Also... what happened to the ending? In both the SoundCloud and YouTube versions, it abruptly cuts off during clue #1 of the second Cosmere Character.

Argent said Hoid is a person of interest. Victim or perpetrator? Also, the next question (about telepathy) was one of mine, and you glossed over what I intended to be the central point of the question when I asked it: is telepathy only something Shards can do--as what we've seen so far--or is it available to ordinary mortals as well? "Do corrupted spren act differently in fabrials?" Isn't that kind of implicit in the whole mess we saw with the Oathgate?

I once asked Brandon a similar question, if the Weeping was caused by a specific alignment of the moons. He said no; it's from the planet's orbital position around its sun.

Yay! You used my Cosmere Character and it didn't get randomly guessed on the first round! I was half-expecting that it would, just by someone automatically guessing "Hoid" as a stock first-round response.

I also read faster than I listen. Despite this, I enjoy listening to Graphic Audio books, because I listen much faster than I can read while driving. Also, I'm another of the ones who is disappointed with the schedule because I want to see The Lost Metal more than I want to see Stormlight 4. (Which is not to say that I'm not interested in more Stormlight. I definitely am. But at this moment, Scadrial Era 2 is even more interesting, with the way Bands of Mourning left things...)

The bit about shielding powerful processors isn't about AI, it's about radio. Having electrons wiggling around in very specific patterns at very high frequencies is how CPUs work; it's also how radio transmitters work. Electronics can generate a (very small) amount of radio waves as an unintended byproduct of their basic operation. This is the source of the unfortunately all-too-persistent myth that portable computing devices can cause radio interference that can cause a commercial airliner to crash. (The truth is, the amount of radio waves produced are several orders of magnitude below the level of interference that an aircraft's systems can tolerate, which ought to be obvious if you think about it: if it were really possible to bring down a plane with something that ubiquitous, some terrorist would have done it years ago!)

The question came up, is there anyone who doesn't like Jasnah? I'd have to answer this one with a yes. When I think of her character traits, the first one that comes to mind isn't her intelligence or her scholarship, it isn't her Radiant powers, her beauty, or her humor. It's her cruelty. Everyone hurts other people from time to time. It's part of being human. But Jasnah is portrayed as someone who derives far more satisfaction and enjoyment from it than remorse. And that's not someone I can respect or enjoy.

Woah! That's a great WOB there! Congrats on getting it.

I have fond memories of this place. I was living in Western Washington when Brandon got started, and my first signings were at this church. If anyone needs a question, could you ask this on my behalf? I didn't get the chance to ask him at the release party. Q: You've said in the past that Hoid has had many love interests over the millennia. Does that mean he's got a bunch of distant descendants running around the Cosmere? A: (I'm assuming the answer to this is yes.) Q: Is Kaladin one of them? This is my theory, and I'd love to get a yes or no answer to it, if someone would be so kind... Rationale: When bantering with Kaladin, Hoid at one point said "perhaps you've got a bit of Wit in you afterall." (May not be an exact word-for-word quote, but close enough.) I think this may be literal.