Mason Wheeler

We shall see. It's in the Lord's hands, not ours.

Ugh, sorry, I didn't realize that it had quoted the entire post. I only highlighted a part of it. (That would be nice to fix too!) What I meant was the emails. When I get an email saying there's a new post, it's nice to have the entirety of the new post in the email.

Just wanted to second this. The way it is right now is extremely irritating. Please fix.

When I read this, the first thing that comes to my mind is the Sermon on the Mount. If you have anything in your life that's dragging you down spiritually, whether it be substances, media, relationships with others, or anything else, and it's not within your power to fix it through personal effort and/or repentance, then it is "profitable for thee" to get rid of it. The other posters have some good advice about how to try to improve things through personal effort. Try those things, hope they work, but always keep in mind that we're still dealing with other people's agency here. They're free to not change, and if they don't, the change needs to come from you, to "go ye out of Babylon" and free yourself from bad influences. Also, I looked up antonyms for "peaceful" in a thesaurus, and the one that stood out was "contentious." Check out 3 Nephi 11: 29-30 for the spiritual significance of this.

Never have so few been led by so many!

Not exactly a typo, but something that I immediately noticed "this looks wrong:" in the illustrations list right before the Table of Contents, there's an entry called The Cinder King, presumably dealing with a character with the same title. Is Dragonsteel aware that they're kinda stepping on Critical Role's toes with that? The Cinder King was the title of the red dragon Thordak, one of the most memorable bosses in the show's history.

On the one hand, that's kind of a cool idea. On the other... who needs a horse when you can fly?

Agreed. It's not like a temple recommend interview at all; more of "do you really feel ready and feel like you need that guidance? Let's take care of it then." In my case it really helped that the stake Patriarch was an old family friend and lived in our ward, so he was nearby and someone I knew pretty well.

Math is about right, yeah. Attending a con out-of-state can be expensive. But remember this is a once-a-year event. (And you don't have to go to all of them, so it could be less frequent for you.) So the question is, is the experience worth $500/year to you? If it is, come. If not, stay home.

I'll be there too!

"The real voidbringers" are who they always have been: the followers of Odium, who cast their emotional complexities into his Void to more easily commit atrocities. The fact that someone else used to do that doesn't make the people who do it now any less real. The Stormfather makes this clear: in the past, Honor was able to help them put this in perspective so that they didn't draw the wrong conclusion from a shocking emotional revelation, and it was only when he began to lose his grip and was unable to do this effectively that everything went off the rails.

Not sure why, but this is a bit weird to me, that we've got fans on here who were born after Elantris was published.

No, that's Alma 30:44.

We all do. Just keep 2 Nephi 9: 28-29 in mind. This was written for our day!

Remember, everything makes no sense until you understand it. If there are things you don't understand yet, all that means is that you still have new stuff to learn. Are you sure you understand "the laws of the universe"? A lot of people who make claims about science, and the physical laws underpinning it, do so with far more confidence than the experimental evidence can actually justify. Keep learning more, by study and also by faith, and you'll see the discrepancies gradually melt away as your understanding deepens. The church doesn't "follow science." That's certainly not the way the pioneers of science saw it! The prevailing attitude, as late as Newton, was summed up quite effectively by Kepler's declaration that "science is the process of thinking God's thoughts after Him," that God had created the world around us to run after defined rules, and science was about figuring out how he had arranged things. Far from God and His church following science, science was explicitly designed to follow after God! It's only fairly recently that some later scientists lost sight of that.

Oh, definitely! I was out in Pennsylvania when the Philadelphia temple opened, and I got called to work there. I helped with everything from ordinance work to the front desk for about six months, until I had to ask to be released because I was moving away, and it was an amazing experience!

No

I must have missed that part. Can you elaborate?

Possibly, but the fact that that Letter does mention would seem to provide evidence against this idea.

Just to clarify, did we even know that Virtuosity was the name of a Shard before this book? It's not listed in the Big List Of Shard Names in the Rhythm of War letter, and the Coppermind article doesn't mention any references to this Shard outside this book. And in the book, we find out Virtuosity is dead right up front, in the first chapter, in the very first mention of her. When that's the very first thing we ever learn about the Shard, it seems to me that that can't really be considered a spoiler any more than the knowledge that Marley was dead to begin with.

Argh, I came here to say that and you beat me to it!

Page 240: Should be "scream".

The book mentions repeatedly that this occurred near where the shard Virtuosity "splintered herself," and mentions "pieces of a dead god" just to make it clear. Does it seem a little bit on the nose to anyone else that the Cosmere had a literal Goddess of Artists, who committed suicide?

Just happened to hit a kind of scary freeze-frame on the latest Intentionally Blank.

I heard an interesting talk at church a few weeks back. The speaker had recently moved here (Utah) and told about something that had happened to his previous Stake President. The Stake President was in Utah on a business trip one time, and decided to check out the skiing for which the area is known. While he was on the ski lift, the man beside him started talking with him, and before long asked if he knew anything about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. "Yes," he said, "I'm actually a Stake President in the church." "Do you live around here?" "No, I'm here on business." "What do you do?" "I'm a sales manager at a [whatever] firm. What about you?" "Oh, I work for the church." "Yeah? What do you do?" *grinning* "I'm Elder Bednar." I heard that and just had to wonder. Would I recognize one of the Apostles if I happened to meet them in a completely different context, where they weren't wearing a suit and I wasn't expecting to see one?