I'm here, just not very active. 

On 5/6/2021 at 9:30 PM, Asha'man Shar'aman said:

That really sucks. They are ridiculously expensive too, for not looking like the real thing. 

That's awesome! Yeah, it might be. Plus, if you wear the Sword and Dragon, then people will clearly know you are a WoT fan!

I'm thinking about getting a tattoo. Something like this:

I also made a wallpaper with a quote from Lan:

I used a file sharing service because it wouldn't let me upload it.

https://app.blackhole.run/#a9b8e0a13f13DA79z7rtf2gscNmvDHgPGr51UtUQyZ6K

2 minutes ago, Elder_Haman said:

Tolkien is the OG. He's really the pioneer of the genre, which before that was classified mostly as fairy tales geared toward children. But there's no real question that Harry Potter's popularity eclipsed any of Tolkien's works - the movie adaptations included. 

 

Sigh, I guess so. My stubborn ass can't seem to wrap it's head around the fact that Harry Potter really did bring a lot of people into the fantasy genre.

Just now, Elder_Haman said:

I consider anything with magic to be fantasy.

I guess, but it just doesn't have that OG fantasy feeling...

Just now, Elder_Haman said:

It's up next in my Audible cue! I'm excited.

Hell yeah! I got the signed edition! It's taking a special place in my shelf.

On 1/11/2021 at 8:08 AM, Elder_Haman said:

Harry Potter - made fantasy mainstream

Wow, it'd be good to have a friendly (mostly) debate on who really made fantasy a mainstream genre. What the hell happened to J.R.R Tolkien?

My top five are:

WOT

The Inheritance Cycle (Don't judge, I'm a kid at heart)

The Belgariad

Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn

GOT

And to everyone who chose Harry Potter, do you consider it a fantasy series? It seems kind of difficult to consider it to-the-bone fantasy when it has modern settings such as Great Britain. 

(I should probably prepare to get schooled, I'm not very knowledgeable concerning the world of Harry Potter. Having only read the books once)

On 1/11/2021 at 8:08 AM, Elder_Haman said:

Off the list, but likely to join:

Stormlight Archive

Hey, not sure if you know but book 4 came out not too long ago. It's called Rhythm of War, and I have to say it's pretty badass.

On 6/20/2020 at 6:37 PM, SinisterDeath said:

If I had a super power, it would be spotting fake accounts, spam bots, etc.

Like, that hot girl/guy on facebook that sent you a friend request?
Total bot. STILL see people just blindly 'accepting' those invites. 
 

 XD I fell for that one about 6 years ago. Luckily it didn't get far.

Why not something like this. It doesn't have to be 3 dimensional. A helix-like shape. The dots represent time converging. The colored lines represent two Turnings. The should be much more than 2 colored lines. Apologies for my shitty drawing skills, I'm using a mouse.

Blood and ashes, that's the longest post I've seen yet! 

3 minutes ago, Thrasymachus said:

This is one of those interesting threads where it turns out that the topic isn't really Wheel of Time, per se, but the Wheel of Time plays a useful role as an example in a discussion about the nature of knowledge and science.

 

The reason why Randland can't be "the same planet with a different model of time" is because models aren't reality, they're just representations of reality.  Think of it like a map.  If I were to draw you a map to my house, there's lots of little ways that someone else can come along and change or improve my map.  They can do things like add locations of gas stations or other landmarks along the way.  They can re-draw it so that the distances between the things drawn on the map are spaced out in a way more precisely accurate to the way they're actually spaced out in real life.  They could translate it into another language.  Or they could use different symbols to represent things like distance.

 

But there are also things they can't change.  If, for example, my map indicates that my house is three miles west of some landmark along a particular road, and someone else came along and changed the map to indicate that my house was three miles east of that landmark, along a completely different road, then that new map would be completely useless as a tool to use to try to get to my house.  Indeed, it would no longer even be a map to my house, and if you tried to use it to get to my house, you'd get lost.  What it wouldn't do is move my house.

 

For Randland to be "the same planet" as ours, it's "map of time" would have to be substantially the same as our map.  It could have the kinds of improvements I mentioned earlier, marking events (landmarks) that are different than ours, or improving the accuracy of their positions.  But it can't fundamentally change the "locations" of things that are in both maps. 

 

A model of circular or cyclical time is even more problematic that that, though.  Imagine I asked you to draw me a map to your house such that it didn't matter whether I held the map right-side up or upside down, it would still work to get me there.  Your reply would, or at least rightly ought to be, that you can't.  In order for such a map to work, we would have to live in a world where it wouldn't matter if you turned left or right, a world where there was no difference between left and right.  But we don't live in that world.  If you were to hand me a sheet of paper with some symbols drawn on it, claiming that it was a map to your house, and that it didn't matter which way I held the map, it would still work, I would be able to conclude one of two things: either you live in a world wholely unlike mine in some pretty fundamental ways, or you're crazy and just handed me a sheet of nonsense. 

 

Cyclical time has a similar problem.  If you were to draw a circle, and put two points on that circle, you wouldn't be able to tell me which point on the circle comes before the other one.  It would depend on where you started, and which direction along the circle you went, and even if we stipulated the direction, it would still depend on where you started.  A circle has no natural beginning point (there are no beginnings to the Turning of the Wheel).  Cyclical time has no way to distinguish between before and after.  There's also the problem of how to distinguish between the same event on different cycles, or more generally, how to count cycles.  All of this gets very deep, and implicates even the nature of causality itself.

 

RJ, perhaps cleverly, gets around this metaphysical and philosophical problem by stipulating that in his world, time isn't really cyclical, (though he would probably object to that phrasing).  Events in subsequent Turnings don't really repeat, they just rhyme very strongly.  Events aren't really the same in each Turning of the Wheel, it can just be made to look sort of cyclical if you if ignore a bunch of details.  There are differences between Turnings such that you can distinguish them, you just have to look for those small differences in detail, and therefore you can have "befores" and "afters." There still have to be some cyclical things, of course.  We can't keep turning iron into cuendillar and not expect to run out of iron, after all, unless there is some cyclical process that removes the cuendillar and refreshes the iron somehow.  But time itself isn't cyclical, even in the Wheel of Time.

Blood and bloody ashes, that's the longest post that I have ever seen. Anyways, yeah that does make sense. Although, doesn't the Horn of Valere call back heroes the have been in every Turning of the Wheel, doesn't the Dark One always comeback, which signifies the end of one Turning, and Bridgette is always reunited with her husband, Gaidal Cain?

Yeah, that's a pretty good way to view it. I doubt that RJ and BS had put that much effort into making  Randland's timeline converge with our Earth's timeline.

Never have, but it'll happen from now on.

On 8/26/2020 at 10:54 AM, Robert Laurel said:

I remember seeing a map that the two continents were joined by a long peninsula at the equator.

Do you recall which book that was?

On 8/26/2020 at 8:32 AM, SinisterDeath said:

The easiest way I look at it is this.

It's "Earth" but it is not Earth. 
Time operates in a completely different way.

How the universe, Galaxy, Sol System, and Earth came into fruition are completely different. Evolution, biology, it's all different but similar.

Couldn't it be the same planet with a different model of time or is that not possible? The amount of intelligence in the topic is huge and I could only minimally understand what most of the stuff here meant. I still haven't read A Memory of Light so if there are any spoilers just try your best to keep them out. Thanks!

Hi WoT Fans! I just joined this community and decided that some wallpapers of mine should be shared! (Both of these are completely original except for Mat's logo!) These are based on Matrim Cauthon's quotes. I hope you enjoy them! If you have any custom wallpaper requests I would be happy to make them for you (Just DM me you request that includes your: theme, text, and style of font (if any)).