Mason Wheeler

One time at a signing, I asked Brandon how to deal with writer's block. He said, "have ninjas suddenly attack. Write something ridiculous just to get something out there, get the ball rolling, and then once words are flowing again you can come back and fix it." While I don't recommend putting a ninja attack into a talk for church, the basic principle remains sound.

Ask your Bishop what the duties associated with your calling are. This is best done in an email, so you can get a written response that's easy to save and refer back to later. Once you have that, talk with your YW President and say something along the lines of, "the Bishop says this is what I'm supposed to be doing as secretary. What are the things I should focus on, that you need the most help with?" Once you know what you're supposed to be doing, get to work. Keep the basic Gospel principles of action in mind: come up with a plan, then pray for confirmation (D&C 9:8-9) liken the scriptures unto yourself for guidance in relevant situations (1 Nephi 19:23) love is the fulfilling of the law (Romans 13:10)

Careful. This is what put my sister off Stormlight, seeing Kaladin get beaten down too much. To convince her to keep reading I told her the exact opposite: that his situation does improve over time, that his story is ultimately a hopeful one rather than a bleak, ugly one, and that the point of all the darkness he has to slog through is for contrast, to give his light something to shine in.

Preservation? It's closer to Ruin than you'd expect...

1:04:24: "Even if [Moonbreaker] is the best possible game [of the type] that it is, I probably wouldn't be interested." This. 100% this. Watching the video where Brandon introduced it, I just kept thinking over and over "how is this a Brandon Sanderson project?" Maybe it's just my biases or perceptions showing, but I'd kind of imagined that the story would be central (not just some tacked-on audio script) to any video game bearing Brandon's name.

16:02: "Brandon's spoken about, the front five are more focused on the Radiants, and the back five ... on the Heralds." This is true. It's also true that Brandon has been known to troll the fanbase in his answers from time to time. And if there's any truth to the conversation we got in the book 5 prologue, an important part of the Stormfather's plan is to establish new Heralds and not just new Radiants. So I can't help but wonder, will the Heralds that it focuses on in the back 5 necessarily be the old Heralds?

Instincts are something very different from intelligence. Take the smartest person in the world, put them in a high-adrenaline situation where base instincts take over, and they won't behave particularly different from anyone else unless they also have training on how to handle such situations, which is also a completely different thing from intelligence.

Given his long history of magical experimentation, all the way back to his origin as "guy trying to figure out how the local magic system works," I'd say he's at least somewhat of an engineer.

It's what Hoid mentions in his narration towards the end about Riina: even if there's only a low probability that she could beat him, you don't live to an old age by taking a lot of low-probability risks that you might die.

Please finish reading Tress of the Emerald Sea before reading this. Unmarked spoilers ahead! Brandon didn't mention it in the author's note at the end, but this story in many ways felt eerily similar to Brandon's incomplete story I Hate Dragons. World geometry: IHD is set on a cubical world, where each of the six faces has its own different style of magic. Tress's world has twelve regions, each pentagonal in shape, implying that it is a dodecahedron (d12, for all the D&D players out there) where each pentagonal face has its own distinct type of magical spores. Moon worship is common to both worlds. A main antagonist in both stories, the first one encountered, is a dragon. Intelligent and capable of speech, the dragon engages in verbal sparring with our protagonist. Skip was presented to the dragon as bait by dragon hunters; Tress was presented to the dragon as a gift by someone "hunting" for a boon from the dragon. The second main antagonist is a sorceress, known in both stories simply as "the sorceress." She comes from a different face from the protagonist and has quite unusual magical powers. Both sorceress's homes are named after a time of day: the IHD sorceress is from "Dawnface" whereas Tress's sorceress is from the Midnight region. A defining character quirk of both protagonists is their love of collecting an unusual thing: cups for Tress and words for Skip. We only have 3 IHD chapters, so the fact that there are so many close parallels is rather suggestive. Anyone else think Brandon must have drawn from IHD in writing Tress of the Emerald Sea?

That's not really a theory; it's explicitly stated in the text. One of the Unmade (Re-Shephir?) tells Shallan that they were "made" and then Odium unmade them.

There's plenty of wiggle room between "not having big holes in the armor" and "airtight seal."

In one of the Adolin POVs in Words of Radiance, we see that the visor of his Shardplate helmet turns translucent, making him able to easily see out of it. It even auto-compensates for Stormform lightning, even in the dead-plate version. So why in the world is there a need for the potentially-lethal vulnerability that is an eye-slit? In the same vein, when Adolin is training with Shallan in Oathbringer (I think,) he offers to get her a blade-edge strip. These were created by the Radiants, to dull the edge of a Shardblade so that it can't actually cut people. Shallan says no, she doesn't need one of those, and proceeds to use her Blade's intrinsic reshaping ability to simply dull itself. If the Radiants had this power, why was there any need to invent blade-edge strips? Do we have any WOBs addressing either of these questions?

I just had a look at the Dragonsteel 2022 schedule, and noticed something rather disturbing. At the bottom of the first day, 10 PM timeslot, it says "THE LOST METAL BOOK DISTRIBUTION". I really, really hope that that doesn't mean what it appears to say, that no one's getting their book until 10 at night. While that may make some degree of sense for people who fly in and get a hotel room a block away, Brandon also has a pretty strong local fanbase, but local doesn't necessarily mean "Salt Lake City." Heck, Brandon himself is based out of the Provo general area, nearly an hour's drive away. So am I, and no one wants to make a drive home like that after 10 PM! And while you could theoretically take the train, a glance at the schedule says you're almost guaranteed to need to wait another hour and won't make it home before midnight. Will there be any provisions for people who have difficulty staying around until unreasonably late at night?

As far as I'm aware, the Church still isn't allowed to operate inside of China, so building a temple there is extremely unlikely.

Guacamole. From the Spanish moler (to grind or smash up) and guàcala (slang: eww! Gross!)

As am I.

I'm amused by that because I once heard someone ask Brandon about other series he might be willing to finish up in case of the author's unfortunate passing, and he mentioned that one as something he specifically would not do because he just wouldn't be able to match the author's style at all.

I'm laughing way too hard at this...

There probably are. OrangeJedi is the one I know because he and his mom @JoyBlu are friends of mine who live near me.

Our very own @OrangeJedi has been serving in Florida for the past two years. He's less than a month away from returning home now.

I wasn't referring to any specific change; only to Brandon saying that changes had happened. Personally, I'm completely neutral on the Taimandred theory. I can see that happening, but I could also see that rumor being a bunch of embarrassed Taimandred theorists who saw that they were wrong and said "well we weren't really wrong; we were just too clever for the author and he changed it out from under us." Hard to say what really happened without any solid confirmation.

In the most recent Intentionally Blank episode, Brandon said that, from his access to Robert Jordan's notes, he's about 95% confident that Jordan changed the plot of The Wheel of Time based on feedback he received from fans. Brandon's always been fairly tight-lipped about Robert Jordan's side of writing WoT. Has he ever mentioned this before? Because I was pretty surprised to hear it! (Not surprised to learn it; it makes sense. But I'm surprised to hear Brandon actually say it.)

Does anyone else look at the blue/gray radiating pattern in the 17th Shard background image and see Moai heads in profile?