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Sorry, ThirdGen. Just checked that out on Wikipedia. Thanks for helping my cultural literacy. :-)

There is a thread cataloging the ones we know from Roshar so far: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/7204-swearing-in-roshar/ I'm not aware of any lists for the other books, but they may be out there. Thanks for remembering those ones from Alcatraz, Curiosity! I had forgotten about those. What kind of comments were you hoping for, yokie?

Thanks for all the hints. I definitely have the genre, and perhaps the character, but I just don't read/watch much of those, so I know I won't get it. Someone else?

Moogle, that is an excellent framework. The impressive part is that at the beginning I was disagreeing with you a lot, but the more I read the more I thought, "Wait, no, Moogle is actually right here." The gut response is (was) that the elaborate theory is unnecessary. As you noted, Brandon didn't seem to get your question. Granted, he didn't have the context of your thought process, and hopefully he will respond to your followup question. However, that seemed to indicate to me that he doesn't recognize the apparent contradictions that you've pointed out, and so he hasn't built a bridging mechanic in. I get the sense as consistent as his mental mode is, it has a bit more "Zeroth Law" going on, looking for what's awesome rather than what would strictly follow from a set of rules. That said, I really do like the theory you present here! It makes a lot of sense, and I only have a few one objections. I'm not convinced that burning a metal is required to initiate the trough. What about Snapping? On your "savantism" scale, a non-metalborn or a pre-Snap protoallomancer may have no trough yet, but a Snapped Allomancer does not start out at "0". I think that when Vin Snapped, she had all 16 basic metal troughs broken open to some degree, so that if she had known to try (or had time to experiment with the mists) she would have been fully capable of powering cadmium, etc. I was going to agree with Darkness here and say that doesn't follow, but then I reviewed the quotes earlier in the thread and saw that I'd missed this one: So I guess you are on the right track with that after all.

Happy Pi Day to you! To celebrate I am making apple pie cookies to take to a friend's pie party. I will probably also make some with nutella filling. This seems like a genius, low-effort take on the whole bite-size-pie idea. I can't wait! I am not a pi aficionado. I liked to think I was (got out to 75 digits at one point ). But then in middle school, when I met a real one. I realized that I didn't care about pi nearly that much, and it wasn't important enough to me to pursue. (And in middle school age it was mostly about showing off, not about interest in the number theory, so I won't pretend getting shown up wasn't part of that.) A few decades later, I still don't care much, but reciting it enough times apparently made some of it stick. I can get out to the first 0 (just checked, that's 32 digits).

My phone downvoted you when I wasn't looking, sorry. I have some thoughts but they will have to wait until I'm on a real keyboard. Watch this space! (Or maybe not this space specifically. I'll probably just make a new reply at that point.)

Basically, yes. I was thinking RIven (favorite computer game experience besides Portal) but BoA covers it. Way to go!

So close! The father-in-law has a pet fish that he feeds regularly.(Good job getting to the MYST franchise. I had some punny clues in mind like "Age difference makes it hard for the father to communicate with his son" that probably wouldn't have helped at all.)

I hope it's not too much of a hint to say this is a similar medium as my last one: A struggling writer seeks to keep his daughter-in-law, who styles herself a freedom fighter, apart from his book-burning son.

Lord of the rings

Halo is correct! Again, I apologize for the bad descriptions. (I know that's the name of the game, but these have been unintentionally worse.)

ThirdGen has the correct medium, but the wrong title. In sequels, it is revealed that the destroyed property was not unique. Edit: I didn't intend this to be that difficult. I just checked Wikipedia and apparently my memory of the story elements is not quite accurate, making my clues misleading. Sorry about that! What I had characterized as a security system seems to have just been a latent threat. I can try revising the clues, or just post the answer and let someone else take a turn.

Hint: it's not a movie, but it is presented visually.

Not Atlantis.

Good guess. That's not it but there are definitely similarities.

Okay, let's try this one: A violent confrontation over access to abandoned real estate takes a turn for the worse when the contested property's security system gets triggered. Attempts to turn it off cause significant damage and ultimately result in the destruction of the property.

Gravity. (I almost said Portal, but it doesn't quite fit.)

Yes! ;-) Sorry that was a hard one. You're up, ThirdGen.

Now that you bring it up I can see how the 'rape culture' claim would seem like an over-reaching assertion, since the blog post itself doesn't go that direction. However, these are issues that Hale has brought up repeatedly in her blog, and in the context of that ongoing conversation it seemed to me to fit very well. If you are interested in what she's had to say in the past, her previous posts have often been thought provoking. Regarding her work (since someone above mentioned they wanted to check it out), Book of a Thousand Days is one of my all time favorite stories. It is a fairy tale retelling, which I'm a sucker for anyway, set in Mongolia with some beautiful characterization. Her more recent Dangerous was also fun, and on the raphic novel front Rapunzel's Revenge is delightful.)

Yes, though I'm interested to see how it actually plays out. Given his abilities, Szeth being killed by the storm smells slightly off suicide, an action forbidden to him and one he has avoided in the past. On a separate note, Brandon's explanation surprised me because this is not the message I took from that final sequence, and I don't think I've seen it postulated here on the forums either. Edit: double ninja'd! Obviously we're all thinking the same thing.

Nope. Hint#2: The governor who orders the assassination turns out to be the "killed" roommate's father, though neither of them knew it. He also orchestrates the (actual) death of that person's her half-sister to draw them her out of hiding Hint #3: The assassin's two weapons are a domestic residence and a container of cleaning liquid

Two roommates become political enemies, forcing one to fake their own assassination. HINT: The supposed assassin is from out of town and is as taken in as everyone else. (by the way, Eol, it would have taken me a lot longer without your hints. I had totally forgotten about the de-orphaned part)

Little shop of horrors

I believe he is seeing Szeth's surgebinding. It sounds very similar to the way Allomantic copper senses investiture, with different patterns corresponding to various types of power. Stormlight is a much flashier power, so it is visualized rather than heard/felt. (That visualization could also be a function of realm compression, per Moogle's suggestion, though it makes sense to me that it is at least partially because of how stormlight works.)

Very interesting proposal. Yes, definitely. But didn't we just say that the blood has to be in motion to do it's thing? I want to use a scene from WoA (when Marsh basically gut-shoots Sazed with his own metalminds, who then uses them to heal himself) to refute the part of this idea about the hybrid state, but I can see how it may not necessarily apply. Sazed ends up with an abdomen full of metalminds (touching his blood), and he apparently has no difficulty using them either then or after he took them back out. To me, the fact that he didn't seem to have any trouble with "leakage" after the metalminds had been in contact with his blood suggests that simply being in contact with blood ex vivo does not convert a metalmind into a leaking spike. However, intent being all-important in these things means that your system (by a knowledgable practitioner) may be possible.