Mason Wheeler

I'm just glad I don't know what being bit on the arm feels like.

Fun fact: the Conference Center has a ton of backend infrastructure, including multiple floors of office space and a large number of apartments. The apartments are for non-local General Authorities visiting for General Conference to stay in, so that they don't have to find some place to stay for the weekend.

Yup. Once you know Brandon's a member of the Church, a lot of stuff in Mistborn, particularly The Hero of Ages, feels really obvious, in the sense of "no one who's not LDS could have written this." And, sadly, a lot of the stuff in Wind and Truth looks a whole lot more confusing. How could anyone who is LDS have written that?

I don't know the data, but that second figure doesn't surprise me. We always talk in the Church about how big of an event serving a mission is, that it gives someone so much new experience and maturity. Well, what are the implications of that? If you're not the same person when you come home that you were when you left, if you've become much more mature, broadened your horizons, and gained a deeper, wiser perspective, why would you expect that the same qualities you valued in a partner and in a relationship before your mission would remain your highest priorities afterwards?

Sorry, that was the last I ever saw of him. I kinda wish I knew too. I know! But all's well that ends well. This one I have kept in touch with. He's married now and has a great family that loves him.

Sadly, closer to normal was what happened to my second companion. Great guy, he was a big, lovable teddy bear, one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. And he had a girl back home. Or at least... he kind of thought maybe he did? He hadn't heard anything from her since he was in the MTC. Several months later, I ran into him at a mission-wide conference event. He was right about to head home, and he was all broken up. He'd finally heard back from this girl: she was married now, with kid #2 on the way.

OK, you want craaaaazy? One of the Elders I knew on my mission was in a relationship with a girl who's a little bit older than him. When he left on his mission, she started to go a bit stir crazy, and after a while she was like, "OK, enough of this. I'm going to put in my papers too." So she did. And then she got assigned to our mission! While she was in the MTC, she had quite the singing voice and so she got selected to be a singer at a devotional. And as part of this she was talking with the visiting Seventy who was going to be giving the devotional, and she mentioned her situation to him, and he was like, "oh, that wouldn't be a good idea at all. I'll see what I can do." And so she ended up being reassigned to the mission next to ours instead. But it was still close enough that they used the same major airport to get in and out, and it turned out that she came out exactly 6 months after him. And so they were going to end up on the same plane home! He told me that he just knew it was going to be the worst temptation of his entire life.

That's not what Brigham Young said.

Did anyone else from here catch the inauguration yesterday? I was a bit surprised to see, towards the end, a military band and choir performing, very specifically, the Tabernacle Choir's version of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. That's a very distinctive arrangement, and a famous one; the Choir won a Grammy for it!

Cool! This Sunday in my ward, one of the speakers was a heavily pregnant sister. She opened with, "when the Bishop asked me to speak to you this week, I told him I would unless the baby decided to come first. It seems God has listened to his prayers more than to mine."

From the article: This seems less than perfectly credible, for one very simple reason: if you've read it, you'll know that the Renarin character in Way of Kings Prime dies in the first book, before he ever gets much of a "path" at all. No exploration whatsoever is made of his love life or sexual preferences. The thing that really worries me is that he's said (elsewhere, not in this article,) that these are his beliefs and he wants the Church to come around to accepting them. From a purely objective standpoint, that I really don't want to apply to any specific person but the facts are what they are, that is basically the very definition of apostasy. And that kind of freaks me out.

Here's a point I don't think I've seen anyone mention so far: just because it was wrong to imprison BAM back in the day, does not mean it was right to release her now. We've clearly seen that the millennia of isolation have driven her homicidally insane. Renarin and Rlain and Shallan clearly saw this as well, and understood it. So why in the world would they free her, knowing that? Unjustly imprisoned or not, they just loosed a monster on the world, one who's always had the capacity to commit atrocities and now has the inclination and desire to do so without reservation. That was one of the biggest "facepalm" moments of the book. The atrocities that she goes on to commit now are at least partially on their heads.

Honestly, I don't see any real problem there. Adolin did the right thing, quite possibly the only right thing he could have done. Sadeas had just confessed to — boasted of, even — being a traitor with every intention of committing future acts of treason. In times of war no less! As a Highprince, there was no realistic way for the law to hold him accountable. Dalinar, the one person who might have been able to deal with him lawfully, was too blinded by his past friendship for the man to do so, and Adolin knew this. Summary execution was the only way to stop him, and he had to be stopped. This was not true for the bandits. They were not Highprinces, or otherwise people whose social status put them above the law. If Jasnah could find them, or make them find her, she could easily have found some way to incapacitate them and deliver them to agents of the law, rather than murdering them. The existence of plausible alternatives makes it reasonable to judge her actions more harshly than those of Adolin.

I would respectfully disagree, and point to 1 Cor. 13: 11. I knew some missionaries who remained attached to childish attitudes while in the field. Four immediately come to mind. I had three of them as companions over my two years and the fourth served in the same district as me, and each time I was with one of them, we weren't able to really get anything done in terms of teaching people and doing the work of the Lord, because they were too busy screwing around. Two of the four ended up being sent home early, one of them due to injuries sustained in a recreational activity he probably should have known better than to try, and the other due to some really egregious violations of mission rules and Gospel rules in general, the sort of stuff that could well have also cost him his membership. If you're about to put your papers in, grow up. Learn to be a mature adult now, so you'll be ready when you find yourself needing to out in the field. Because you will need to. Satan is real, and he will throw opposition at you in ways you never expected. So put your armor on and get used to wearing it, so you'll have it when the time comes.

That tracks just fine, really. You're expecting introspection and self-reflection, the sort of thing that makes perfect sense for a normal person. But that's not how a psychopath thinks.

That was another thing I found a little bit underwhelming: we saw two characters both take the fifth oath, and we still have no idea what it does. 2nd oath: Surgebinding. 3rd oath: Blade. 4th oath: Armor. 5th oath: ???

Would it have? Odium had human followers before the Singers. And the Thaylens to this day believe in The Passions. It might have taken longer — or it might not have, if he hadn't spent millennia on a project targeting the Singers — but he almost certainly would eventually have raised up a different army.

Well, let's not forget her contemptuous explanation to Shallan at the end of the first book, condemning her ancestors for enslaving the "useful" parshmen instead of doing the right thing and genociding them.

"There are thieves mugging wealthy people in town. Let's go murder them." "I don't like my brother's fiancée. Let's hire an assassin 'to keep tabs on her.'" "There's something wrong with Renarin's spren. I should kill him." "The Voidbringers are coming back. We should find and kill a Herald." Jasnah's first instinct to solve any given problem, whether or not it relates to a war of annihilation, always seems to be to kill somebody.

This was actually one of the better parts IMO. I've been saying for years now that Jasnah's requisite Radiant mental condition is psychopathy, that her go-to solution to every problem is murder. Even if she doesn't always go through with it, it's the first thing she thinks of: "resolve this problem by killing somebody," for any given value of "this problem." It was good to see someone in-universe force her to acknowledge just how terrible and evil that is. If only it could have happened under better circumstances.

1. In an earlier POV, Shalash is surprised that the Alethi/Urithiru people are circulating accurate images of the Heralds as people they're looking for. I'd have to double check, but I seem to recall that it's either implied or stated outright that these were drawn by Shallan, who got them from Dalinar pulling her into a vision of Aharietiam. 3. We were? Where? I don't recall ever seeing that at all and I've been over the book multiple times. Yes, Tanavast said that. Tanavast, we have seen, is not the most reliable of people. What we also know is that Edgli treats both Hoid and Rayse with outright contempt, and has concocted at least one and (judging by the letters in this book) more than one long-term scheme to destroy Odium if he becomes troublesome, because apparently sending Nightblood to Roshar wasn't enough. (Which, OK, it kind of wasn't. But still...) And Valor has been revealed to be the mysterious Shard who Brandon has alluded to for years now who is all about hiding from Odium. Hiding so thoroughly that none of the other Shards can locate her, as it turns out. In other words, a coward who displays no valor.

One thing that struck me in the discussion of the Shards is just how unsuitable so many of the Vessels are to their Shard. It's specifically called out that Aona, who held the power of love, was a gentle healer. OK, so far so good. But then we have: Honor was taken up by a guy who never cared all that much about keeping his word Ruin was taken by someone who's a very good and kind man Valor was taken by a coward Odium/Passion was taken by someone who preferred to plot and scheme and be clever rather than rage and be emotional Endowment was taken by a spiteful individual who's full of schemes to destroy her enemies This just makes me all the more curious to get the story of Adonalsium and the Shattering. What was the process by which the Shards got divided up among the Vessels? And how did so many of them get taken by people who were poor fits for their Intent, when we've seen multiple examples in the Cosmere of a Shard's power rejecting someone who is not well-Connected to its Intent?