skaa

(Shadows of Self spoilers!) Also, I need to re-read a certain very long Word document...

Well this is interesting. Welcome to the 17th Shard, ma'am. I look forward to reading your Cosmere analyses. There's not much critical thinking going on in my own theory posts, I'm afraid, as I make them purely for fun. But I do enjoy reading the more serious contributions to Cosmerology every now and then, provided they are readable enough. Enjoy your stay!

This is true. I read the book already. I won't say which things I got wrong/right, but I will say that I enjoyed thinking them up anyway. The great thing about making wild speculations in fantasy discussions is that it's tons of fun all on its own; and even more so when you get a few things right.

I preordered the eBook from Google Play Books yesterday and received it almost half-past midnight Philippine Time (so, a bit less than eight hours ago). Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep. I'm going to pay for this later in the office today when I doze off during a meeting, for sure. *looks for some coffee*

Well, it was apparently noteworthy enough to be mentioned twice in the same chapter, so I just thought it would be cool if there was a deeper meaning behind it. That's all.

Does anyone have an idea why port in particular would be favorable to someone like Idashwy? All I could think of is that the higher sugar content of port wine might help Steelrunners feel more normal while storing speed. Also, some types of port are stored in steel tanks after fermentation, but that seems like a stretch. Well, we're very near the book release, so I suppose there's little point in adding to the speculations now, but I'll still do so anyway because what the heck. I believe Idashwy was killed before the massacre, and that the golden-haired girl was another woman with Terris blood who is working with Edwarn, the Set, and "Tan". Note that blonde females are not that rare in the story: Steris, Sophi Tarcsel, and that one constable who called Wax "Dawnshot" are all blondes, so the hair color may just be a red herring. Here's what I think happened: "Tan" (or whoever that creature is; might be a kandra) was tasked by the Set to hunt down Idashwy and collect her power for their little project, which is to give one of their members multiple Allomantic and Feruchemical powers through Hemalurgy. This member of the Set, it turns out, is a female of both Terris and Noble descent, one who is still relatively young and, unlike her brother, was successfully brainwashed by her uncle into embracing the Set's philosophy. I think Telsin Ladrian will become a villain. Now I will happily wait to see each of those speculations proven wrong.

I vaguely remember Alaxel. I thought Frosted Flakes was pretty cool back when he joinedmade his account early this year (I enjoyed his Stormlight Archive Reread thread). I even found a post he wrote about bigotry that seemed counter to his more recent statements. Then he disappeared for a while and when he returned he was no longer the decent person I thought he was. Too bad, indeed. As for my good news, I finally found a washing machine small enough to fit my tiny apartment. Woohoo! *chirping sounds* Well, it's not exactly cool news, but it's still good news to me!

@natc: I did say it's not yet confirmed. Oh, and in hindsight I should have upvoted you when I saw that downvote. *gives natc a belated upvote* I admit I mentioned Nicrosil only because I didn't wish to entertain the possibility of storing Allomantic Investiture in a metalmind other than Nicrosil, but still wanted to defend the newbie. Now that I've thought about it a bit more, though, I'm starting to see the coolness factor in being able to use any metalmind as a store of its associated Allomantic power. I hope we'll get some clues regarding this next week!

I think djini1 is talking about Nicrosil Feruchemy. If you were a Steel-Nicrosil Twinborn, you could theoretically Burn a bit of steel at a time, storing the power inside a Nicrosilmind along the way, until you get a sizable chunk of steel's worth of Steelpush stored. Then you tap all that in a single gigantic burst. This has an advantage over Duralumin Allomancy in that Duralumin is limited by how much metal your body can hold at one time, whereas with Nicrosilmind storage you can go swallow->burn->store->swallow->burn->store and repeat that as many times as you want or until the Nicrosilmind is full. Your only limit is your Nicrosilmind's capacity. Of course, this assumes that Nicrosilminds can store Allomantic power, which makes absolute sense but has not been confirmed in the books yet (and no I don't really see MAG as canon).

Those evil, spoiler-loving enemies of the Free Kingdoms! *shakes fist* *Reads-up on how to be a librarian*

Welcome to the 17th Shard, Nethseäar! I look forward to reading your theories.

It's actually the opposite. It's Cohesion that governs strong interaxial forces. Tension is for "soft" interaxial forces. Regarding Cohesion, the hand-imprint thing sounds like malleability-control (I believe Moogle already theorized that), but I think that's just one aspect of it. For example, I've always thought that the Dysian Aimian ability to rearrange their body parts as well as the behavior of conjoined fabrials are both related to the Cohesion Surge. I believe it grants the ability to handle permanent change (plasticity) while still remaining spiritually "whole". So, using Cohesion, it is easier to deform something even beyond its normal breaking point, and if you manage to divide it the pieces will still act as a single entity. Tension being described as "making soft things rigid" might have confused some people a bit into thinking that Tension is the "strong" one, which is understandable. "Soft" forces don't really come to mind when thinking of rigidity. I think that the "soft" and "strong" descriptions can best be understood by thinking of these Surges in terms of the concepts of Identity and Change. Here's my theory: Tension offers a softer protection to an object's Identity because it is merely reactive to change. It is a resistive force against changes to an object's physical aspect, but this resistance can be overwhelmed. And once the protection of the Tension Surge on an object is broken by a stronger force, the object is simply destroyed. Cohesion, however, embraces change in the object, but ensures that the Spiritual connections making up its soul remains intact, so that destroying its outside appearance does not destroy its Identity. The protection it grants to the object's Identity is therefore conceptually stronger than Tension's protection.

Complies with new signature policy, and is an Erasmus quote. 10/10

While I agree with the others that there is nothing wrong with a woman being the leader in a relationship, it's obvious that your leadership role is something your wife happily accepts, and I find nothing wrong with that either. Congrats to both you and your wife for being able to thrive in gender roles that align with your culture's tradition. I think labeling creativity and learning as either masculine and feminine only works in an environment where these traits are actively encouraged only in one sex, or is actively discouraged in the other. Personally, I see no value in calling Hildegard of Bingen, Murasaki Shikibu, Emmy Noether, Marie Curie, and every single learned and creative female I know "masculine" in the way they think, even if female scholars have been a minority for various reasons all throughout history. But I appreciate people like you who proudly proclaim their love for intellectual pursuits, no matter their sex or their professed gender. Also, I think it's perfectly fine to acknowledge the differences between the sexes: after all, animal physiology and behavior are greatly influenced by hormones, and men and women usually differ in that area. Nevertheless, I think it would be better for society to also acknowledge that rigid gender roles (leadership for the males, nurturing for the females, etc.) do not strictly follow from these sexual differences. Because while these roles may be convenient at times, it's important that those people who cannot or will not fulfill them shouldn't be made to feel somehow incomplete or less human.

The Reputation tab is useful when you just want to know if your most recent posts got upvoted/downvoted. But if someone recently modded one of your posts from several months or years ago, assuming you've made plenty of modded posts since then, unfortunately the Reputation tab becomes next to useless in showing you that kind of information. If only there was a way of ordering the entries in the Reputation tab by date modded, rather than date posted. That would be great.

An actress named Willa Holland implied in the comments section here that she's the model for the woman (presumably Marasi) in the Shadows of Self cover. I don't know about anyone else. Why isn't this in the Mistborn forum? Do you want us to discuss the people in the covers of other Sanderson series besides Mistborn? According to this, Michael Whelan took photos of himself holding a staff to help him paint Kaladin in the Words of Radiance cover.

(I was just gonna leave you hanging, but I'll explain the bad joke to make it worse: There's nobody there when you open the door. ) Next, here's a bad limerick: There once was an X from place B, Who satisfied predicate P, Then X did thing A, In a specified way, Resulting in circumstance C.

I have a very bad joke, and it goes something like this: Knock, knock.

We'll find out for sure when the new edition of Elantris arrives.

*shouts "Bridge Four!" like one of Lopen's cousins* Welcome back, Frosted! Any new theories to share?

Oh, look. Apparently I'm a wireless hifi audio standard.

I take it you really enjoyed OmegaRuby/AlphaSapphire, then? I am also a fan of the video games, not so much of the anime and the card game, but I did watch the anime back when the first movie came out.

I would love to be a Hama-level Waterbender, but I'm too uncoordinated for the required graceful moves. In fact, I suck at martial arts in general. This leaves me with only one choice... I am Sparky Sparky Boom Man.

Thanks for expanding on your ideas, Gargoyle! Yes. For example, I've read about how some Soviet leaders used their positions to enrich themselves to the detriment of others. This is why in my system (I still need to think of a good name for it, by the way), I chose a moneyless form of communism. The problem with this kind of communism, though, is that you can't ethically force everyone to give up their hard-earned money. It has to be voluntary. That's where I got the idea of only giving political power to those who volunteer to sacrifice all financial privileges for the sake of serving others. The rest of the populace can have money, but cannot become politicians. I think this could be a good way of deterring the greedy from positions of power. And since there will always be greedy and vain people who don't even have the advantage of being technology innovators, I tried to find a way to make these people useful to society somehow, perhaps even change their ways. My solution is the "Empire", a pompously-named entity meant to lure such people with promises of celebrity, wealth, and glamour, and then sending them to a life of military discipline that they will be conditioned to embrace. The Empire is more complicated than just being a bunch of militarized celebrities, though. It also controls finance and real estate, and is also responsible for preserving the country's cultural and artistic heritage. For me such things, while valuable, just aren't as important as the food, medical, scientific, and technological industries, so handing them over to the Empire would be my way of making people focus on other more fruitful career opportunities (like agriculture, engineering, or scientific research). Finally, the Empire would exist to prevent the communists from getting resources they should not have, e.g. money (the communists should not be allowed to have bank accounts) and heavy artillery (government enforcers should not be militarized).