SheepAreFluffy

My assumption was that feruchemical zinc for mental speed would be more useful, for things like reaction time and being able to quickly calculate or judge the trajectories needed. That said, I don't remember what the exact abilities of f-steel and f-zinc are or if we've ever had them explained to us in full, so maybe you are right and steel would be the more useful one. But either way, I want to use feruchemy to improve reaction times.

Pair it up with feruchemical zinc in a twinborn, then.

I may be misinterpreting here, but from the way he spoke on his most recent weekly update on YouTube, it sounds like he thinks he'll be able to get the Ghostbloods books out by the dates he originally intended but contrary to what he'd previously said, he won't be writing them all before any of them are published and won't be building up a buffer like he wanted to. Which is a bit of a downer, honestly. I liked the idea of him being able to spend more time on these books and fully work out the continuity of the trilogy before any of it became set in stone metal. This is exactly my feeling as well. An oft-quote aphorism in the video game world applies equally as well to books: a delayed book is eventually good, but a rushed book is forever bad.

One thing I've wanted to see pretty much since I first read The Final Empire is an exploration of how the direction of motion isn't the same as the direction of force. Think orbital mechanics. The earth is always being pulled towards the sun by gravity, but that doesn't mean that we go flying straight into the sun. Rather, we have enough sideways velocity that the gravity is only enough to bend our path and put us in an orbital path. Imagine a highly-skilled lurcher who can do similarly with projectiles. She fights alongside her friends and colleagues, pulling any bullets or steelpushed projectiles that are aimed at them, but instead of pulling them hard enough to hit her (or her shield), she instead deflects them, has them slingshot around her, and then stops pulling with exact timing to fire them off in a direction of her choosing.

Purely going off the reviews/ratings (out of 5) I left on StoryGraph when I initially read them: With the benefit of hindsight, I think those are mostly about right. Alloy of Law is definitely my least favourite and The Emperor's Soul is definitely my favourite. Neither of those are in any doubt. The single book that I think I'd change the rating of the most is probably The Sunlit Man. I liked it, but I don't think I liked it that much. Somewhere around 3.75-4.0 is probably a more realistic take on how I feel about it now. Others might get nudged up or down a little bit, but not by that much.

My two most anticipated/hoped for are The Grand Apparatus and the not-mentioned-here potential story from the Dark Side of Taldain. In general, I'm more interested in seeing the random stand-alones than the big multi-part epics that tie into the Deep Lore. We're already going to be getting plenty of the latter with Mistborn and Stormlight, so I'm excited for the books that aren't like that. With the stand-alones, Sanderson is free to come up with interesting worlds, magic systems, and characters without havign to worry overly about how things fit into continuity. The Grand Apparatus specifically seems like such a cool and interesting concept to me, and could have been tailored to meet my own tastes and preferences. The tiny hints of it that we got in Isles of the Emberdark only served to whet my appetite further. The Dark Side book does go somewhat against this desire, since it's more entwined with the core of the Cosmere, but I really want to see more Khriss, and am interested to see how Star Marks work too. My two least anticipated are Night Brigade and Dragonsteel. Dragonsteel because it's just too far in the future for me to care about it yet. It feels like it's almost certain to get written but almost certainly not for over a decade, so it doesn't seem worth my while to have any particular thoughts or feelings about it yet. Night Brigade is right at the bottom of my list because I didn't really enjoy Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell and don't really care about seeing more Threnody. The general aesthetic of dark fantasy and horror just isn't my jam.

Realistic answer: nobody; I'm not particularly good at acting, nor do I think that I would enjoy being a part of a big Hollywood production. Fun answer: Design, Raboniel, or the Sibling would all be good options for me. The non-human characters are much more appealing to me. Partly just because it removes any of the concerns of matching up ethnicity, age, and gender. But beyond that, I'm just attracted to the idea of inhabiting these more eccentric and esoteric characters. If I'm Design then I get to be as weird as I want to be, and who's to tell me that I'm wrong? Design is just weird, after all. Getting full Hollywood makeup and prosthetics to turn me into Raboniel is definitely appealing, and I'd definitely love to have the photographs of that, but overall, I think I'd probably prefer to be one of the spren.

(Well, I've never read Scythe (YA dystopias aren't really my thing), but hopefully that isn't necessary to understanding your main point.) I understand what you are saying, but it doesn't change the way that I feel. It's not the "what" of heaven that I have a problem with, it's the "how long". Eternity is just a horrifying idea to me. Heaven sounds like it would be a pretty great place to spend a few million years, but a few million years is 0% of eternity. Billions of trillions of years is 0% of eternity. The Poincaré recursion time of the human brain is 0% of eternity. The Poincaré recursion time of the observable universe repeated Graham's number times over is 0% of eternity. Heaven for as long as I want it and then I get to stop existing when I'm done? That sounds great. That is something that I would want to believe in. Not something that I would believe in, but something that I would wish were true. But heaven that lasts for eternity and I have no choice? That still horrifies me.

[Context: I was raised as a loose and minimally-practicing Catholic, but these days would describe myself as an atheist and a secular humanist, though with some wrinkles and nuances to those descriptions.] So, the first thing to say here is that whether I want to believe in God and whether I do believe in God are entirely different things. There are plenty of things that I desperately want to be true and want to believe in, but for many of them, I don't. I want to believe that widespread acceptance of transgender people is going to happen any time now, but I don't. I want to believe that my aging father's health is fine and I have decades left with him, but I don't. I want to believe that humans will make contact with intelligent alien species in my lifetime, but I don't. And so on and so forth. If I thought that God existed, I would believe in him regardless of whether I wanted to; since I do not think he exists, I disbelieve regardless of what I want. As for why I don't believe, I think that the most concise summary would be to say that I don't believe because I have never experienced anything that would cause me to believe. I think that disbelief (in anything; not just God) is my default state and that I will only change that when I have sufficient evidence or personal experience and I just don't have that for God. For instance: I have never seen anything attributed to God that cannot adequately be explained by other causes. I can happily and easily explain everything I have experienced without having to resort to divinity. God is unparsimonious. He goes against Occam's razor. He is an entity multiplied beyond necessity. There are, of course, written accounts in the Bible that -- if taken at face value -- are hard to account for through naturalistic explanations. However, given the age of the Bible there's a whole lot of room for interpretations there. There's been more than enough time for misinterpretation, transcription errors, biased reporting, and so on and so forth. If the Bible is literally true then there are plenty of events that my philosophy cannot adequately explain and that would require the addition of some sort of supernatural actor. But I would treat all historical texts of that antiquity with a healthy amount of scepticism. From experience, this is the sort of thing where both sides are going to think that the other is engaging in circular reasoning, and it mostly comes down to what we take as the null hypothesis. I take the null hypothesis to be that God does not exist. Does the Bible contain evidence to disprove this? No, of course not. Based on my null hypothesis, I don't have any reason to believe that the depicted miracles are historical fact, so I'm not faced with anything that can't be explained without God. And if you tell me otherwise, then you are engaging in circular reasoning: you believe in God which means you believe in the accuracy of the bible which means you need to explain the miracles which you can only do so by believing in God. But I equally recognise that the same accusation of circular reasoning could be leveled at me: I don't believe in God, therefore I see the Bible as not being divinely inspired, therefore I don't see the miracles as requiring any explanation, therefore I don't believe in God. Both positions are internally consistent but neither is going to convince many people who don't already hold them. It all depends on your starting point. As another for instance: I have never had what I would describe as a spiritual experience. Even back during my Catholic upbringing, nothing there ever felt sacred or numinous to me. The church was always just an old building, the Bible was just a book of interesting stories, the communion host was just a wafer. Never once did I feel moved. Never once did I feel the Holy Spirit, either during religious practice or outside of it. There has, admittedly, been a single moment of my life where I experienced something somewhat close. I was out walking in the rain and my mind was wandering and I thought about the raindrops and the fundamental forces holding together the molecules and fundamental particles; and I thought of the water cycle and what those particular water molecules had been through to get to the point where they were raining down on me, through rivers, seas, erosion, plants and animals, over millions of years; and I thought of the universe and nucleosynthesis within stars that formed the oxygen in the water molecules; for a moment, I held all of this in my mind at once, and being rained on was the most glorious thing. Now, personally, I would be inclined to describe this as a moment of wonder at the scale and intricacy of nature, but even if I were to consider it a spiritual experience, it definitely wasn't one that pointed me towards the personal God of the Abrahamic religions. If it was anything, it was a pantheistic experience, and could only lead me away from a Church that derides pantheism. But! With all of that said, it would also be intellectually dishonest of me if I didn't also admit that I don't want to believe in God. I don't believe that this desire is strong enough to prevent me from believing if the evidence were there, but I can't truthfully say that I'm entirely unbiased. There are certainly aspects of Christian doctrine and theology that I find personally distasteful. I don't want to dwell too much on this because there's a danger that it can come across as bashing on other people's religions and that is absolutely not my intention. But to give some quick examples: I cannot imagine eternal existence to be anything other than ennui and stagnation and do not want to exist forever; I find the concept of a hell in which people receive eternal infinite punishment for finite transgressions is fundamentally at odds with my own sense of justice; I don't like the abrogation of personal responsibility that is inherent in having an ultimate moral authority. And so on and so forth. But once again, the fact that I don't believe is very distinct from the fact that I don't want to believe. If I thought the evidence was there, then I absolutely would believe, no matter how much I didn't want to.

Random thought that occurs to me: some way down the road, this opens up the possibility that we get yet another edition of White Sand, because three prose versions and two comics versions just isn't enough. For maximum cursedness, I'm just going to assume that there will be a movie and then a director's cut of the movie, and a screenplay, and then maybe a video game... Fandom will change, for sure. In addition to what others have already said, I foresee a change to fanfiction and fanart, to conventions and other in-person events, to the sort of questions Sanderson gets asked at Q&As, etc. But even as someone who doesn't care much for screen adaptations, I'm not really worried. People will still be out there engaging in fan activity that is specific to the books. They might be a bit harder to find, but they aren't going to go away entirely.

Unless this just quickly blows up and nothing comes from it, I do think it's pretty much inevitable that this is going to mean that Sanderson releases fewer books. There are only so many hours in a day and Sanderson is already something of a workaholic so I can't imagine that he could squeeze in writing screenplays and overseeing adaptations and still do all the work on books that he was doing before. It just doesn't seem possible. The question here is what ends up getting sacrificed. I think that we will still get the big important central Cosmere books. Mistborn eras 3 and 4 and the Stormlight back half both seem sure things. They may end up happening more slowly than they would have otherwise, but they will probably still happen. I think that Sanderson is just too committed to seeing his work through to a conclusion that he won't be willing to drop these. I also think we'll still get stand-alones and secret projects popping up here and there. These seem like they'd be the easiest (least hard?) books for him to find time for in the middle of other projects, and Sanderson is always going to keep on having cool ideas for stories that he's just itching to tell. What I really worry for are the books in the middle ground between these two. The ones that are said on the major shard worlds but aren't as integral to the main plot lines of the Cosmere. I'm thinking things like the potential cyberpunk Mistborn books, Nightblood, The Night Brigade, Horneater, maybe the Elantris sequels, and so on. To me, these feel like the corners that are most likely to end up getting cut. And honestly, I'm a little bit sad about this. I'm not really that much of a watcher of either films or television, and if I had to choose between any of those books or these screen adaptations, I would choose the books, easily. Brand new stories excite me more than retreading old ground, and I just prefer books as a medium to the screen. I may still end up watching and enjoying the adaptations, but they definitely don't excite me as much as new books would... ...but that's OK. Sanderson does not owe me anything. He should spend his time how he chooses to, not how I want him to. I mean, this is an incredibly obvious thing to say, but given some of the online discourse around certain other authors, it is apparently something that needs to be said. Regardless of how we all individually feel about this news, I mostly just hope that we can all be respectful of people with differing opinions and of Sanderson himself.

I didn't outright hate the debate, but I would say that it didn't really work for me, and I've been trying to figure out why. I think that, ultimately, my problem is that it's trying to do too much in too little space. On the one hand, it's supposed to show Jasnah as a genius level intellect who valiantly argued with a god and only narrowly lost; on the other hand it's suppose to show a crushing humiliation that makes her question the very core of her philosophical outlook. In trying to do both things, it failed to properly demonstrate either of them to me. Part of the problem is that we just haven't seen much of Jasnah's scholarship previously. We've been told that she's an amazing historian and philosopher, but we've not seen it. Compare Jasnah's arc in this book with Adolin's. With Adolin, we've seen multiple examples of his martial prowess over the past five books and been able to follow his own personal journey in coming to terms with the idea that shardbearers were no longer the be-all and end-all on the battlefield. So when he gets stomped on by a thunderclast, it's fine for him to just get resoundingly beaten by something that's bigger and scarier than he is. It doesn't hurt his character because we've seen his bravery, technique and strength countless times before. But with Jasnah, I think that the idea here was for her to be knocked down so that she could come back even stronger, having rebuilt herself with a different, stronger philosophical core. And this is fine and good, except that it felt to me that she was knocked down without having ever been properly built up previously. So we're trying to both build her up and then knock her down in the same conversation. I don't have the book at hand this second to go and check details, but from memory I believe that we're told that she nearly won and it was a slip of just one wrong word at the end that changed Fen's mind. And I believe as well that Taravangian complimented her on being such a strong opponent. And if this is the case, why is she so down on herself afterwards? If I got into a debate with someone who is effectively a god and came within millimetres of winning, I wouldn't come away thinking that I needed to re-evaluate my life. I'd be proud of doing so well in an impossible scenario. But at the same time, I don't think that I agree that she actually did do well. She went about the entire argument the wrong way, failed to come up with rebuttals that I (definitely not a genius) could think of, and generally wasn't particularly impressive. To summarise, my problem is with the dissonance and dichotomy that I was left with. It's difficult for me to pull everything together to form a coherent whole. Unless I'm supposed to believe that Jasnah has always been overhyped and has never been particularly smart to begin with? But I'm fairly sure that that is absolutely not the authorial intent here.

Agreed. Furthermore: The "el" morpheme is present in multiple names, such as Elhokar and Raboniel. It shows up across cultures in the Cosmere, not just on Roshar. As two extremely prominent examples, it's also in Elantris and Elend. We know that Elantris was originally going to be called Adonis; that is containing part of the name of Adonalsium. Theophoric ("god bearing") names are pretty common in the real world, including many that contain "el" (Daniel, Elizabeth, Nathaniel, etc.) Aon Ela means "focus, center", which to me seems closer in meaning to "god" than to "bond".

My "it probably won't happen but what if it does?" idea from reading this: What if Shallan ascends to Honor? Would her dissociation help her to resist the corrupting influence of holding a shard in the same way that Taravangian's dual nature is (at least somewhat) helping him resist Odium? Radiant certainly has a strong Connection to Honor. And she is now stuck in the Spiritual Realm, so she's in (sort of) the right place for it.

The repeating motif of walking away from things is coming across especially strongly now. Most obviously in Nohadon's words in the epigraphs and in Kaladin walking away from his role as a soldier. It's always been a big Stormlight Archive thing, though, being the basic idea behind both Aharietiam and the Recreance, as well as more minor instances like Raboniel wanting an end to the war, Hoid giving up his Dawnshard, etc. This is also related to Honor as a shard, which is largely opposed to this sort of walking away from things. Honor is about being bound to things, choosing to stay the course, never walking away. Which is being presented to us as a harmful way to look at things. I believe that a big part of the ending will see our characters choosing to walk away from something, or otherwise reframe the question they are asking. I am getting progressively more speculative as I go on, but my guess is that this will involve the fight against Odium. Rather than winning or losing, they will realise that they need to walk away from the fight. Which, yes, will unleash Odium on the rest of the Cosmere, but for how long can he be the problem and responsibility of Roshar and Roshar alone? After all, "I accept that there will be those I cannot protect". Both Jasnah and now Lift have brought up the possibility only to be shot down by Hoid, but what if they're right? What if keeping him trapped longer just means that he'd have more time to consolidate and his eventual victory would be more complete? Basically, what if Roshar as a whole needs to repeat on a larger scale what Kaladin is doing, and take some time to just recover from the trauma?