king of nowhere

i was hoping for more on the mistborn movie. one year ago he said he'd be surprised if he didn't have anything to share next year. now he mentions a mistborn movie being on hold, which by itself implies there is something a lot more solid than just selling rights to somebody. but that's all the info i can find

they didn't "one day just decided to call them back". they were under extreme pressure when they decided it. they also weren't sure at all of what would happen. it's been millennia, and all they have are vague legends. they may not even have been sure of which forms were safe and which weren't. anyway, faced with unsustainable attrition from the alethi, the listeners tried to do something dangerous. seems reasonable enough. by the way, you will gradually learn they were also thoroughly manipulated by forces way beyond their control. when you'll get listeners flashbacks, you'll get some more pieces of the puzzle. incidentally, if they had just denied any involvment with szeth and his assassination ("how can we possibly be related to a shin shardbearer? on the night when we are about to sign an important and favorable treaty, no less"), then everything would have been different.

I do not remember any indication that the mass of the object or the allomancer affects push strenght, only allomancy strenght and distance. Hence I would say F=O*f(d) I further believe f(d) must be some kind of exponential decay, not a quadratic one like gravitation or electromagnetism, because allomantic strenght remains approximately constant at close range (up to 10-20 meters) and it becomes basically zero relatively fast after that. Still, I'm not writing d<R because there does not seem to be a specific upper range, you can see larger metal objects at greater ranges.

I think the history of canticle mostly disproves that notion, though - or at least proves it to be minor. we know that those threnodites came to canticle after the evil appeared. we don't seem to have strict chronology for when it appeared, but it was much after the shattering. centuries, not millennia, before the current timeline. the beaconites know of threnody because of the chorus, but they say it's been long enough that they have no oral memory of it. so, many generations. centuries. so, you see the problem. the threnodites left their planet no more than a millennia ago, and they spent no less than two centuries on canticle. if your theory was right and nomad/sigzil spent his day on canticle while months passed on the outside, then the threnodites should have felt they were on the planet by a generation at most, probably less. instead, we could rule out any time dilation effect greater than 5 to 1. this, in turn, mostly removes time dilation as an explanation for why the night brigade came so quickly. my pet theory is that they track him by reading some kind of residue where he skips to the next planet. last planet they were very close, and he had to skip in an emergency. but the brigade was right after him, and they could quickly calculate his new destination, and get there as fast as their spaceship could travel. normally, nomad could lose himself in a planet, and the brigade would spend months to find him. also, while he has visited tens of planets (how many are there in the cosmere anyway?) nothing forbids him from having visited the same planet multiple times.

very possible, yes. it would explain how they would awaken a machine without deeper knowledge

I am surprised by how, at the time of warbreaker, a returned with 2000 breaths was an amazing, incredible amount, and now sigzil is holding as much and complains how low that is. then again, it makes sense as a result of progress. a few centuries ago a horse was a powerful, expensive transport vehicle, and now we have the power of several dozen horses on our cars and we think those are low power engines. a stark comparison, though: nightblood only required 1000 breaths. those spears are twice as invested - i'm still in the early chapter so i don't know what they can do, however it seems to me like those uses of investiture are highly inefficient. people in the past could do a lot more with much less investiture

it'll be explained before the end of the book

well, there's no doubt whatsoever that shallan is losing her mind. let me rephrase the question: is she losing her mind more than usual?

remember three quarters of our planet are literally covered in hydrogen oxyde, for a depth of kilometers. there's no shortage of hydrogen for fusion. let's make the generous assumption that it takes 100 hydrogen fusions to power up the formation of a gold nucleus. one liter of water is 55 mols, which make 110 mols of hydrogen, with which you make 1 mol of gold. which is 200 grams, because gold is heavy. so, under that assumption of 100 hydrogens for 1 gold, you can make 200 grams of gold for a liter of water. if you can also recycle the oxygens, you make more. really, how much gold can you really need? that's unlimited for all practical purposes.

There's also some deeper stuff that's only said by brandon in questions from fans. This book should give you all the pieces, but it's quite hard to make out unless you are keeping notes or unless you go look in the coppermind

the fact is, it's not a technological machine. I'm not sure we ourselves could build one like that. It was a machine made by magic. specifically, hoid mentions that the machine was awakened, which refers to a specific type of creation, mostly used in warbreaker. can't spoiler it in this thread. suffice to say that made it possible without any sensor and motor, because the magic was providing that. the machine only needed to be able to bend in the proper ways, the investiture would take care of the rest. anyway, we see no other instance of awakening in yumi's world, so it is pretty clear those scholars were advanced in manipulating investiture and had access to magic yumi had never seen. so, yumi had a limited perspective on her world. she never saw the capital, where probably was the most advanced stuff. it's also possible those scholars got their extra knowlege from a passing worldhopper, or from a spirit

yes, please! all foreign english speakers would definitely love being able to forget pronunciation

I don't know how viable those are. the problem with many technologies is that they require certain other prerequisites in society that are not obvious. for printing press, I think some early idea of printing - engraving a page in wood, inking the wood, then making multiple copies of the page - already exhisted. mobile letters easily interchangable are probably the most key idea, however the whole machinery is going to require some level of mechanical proficiency. and a major problem is that for the whole thing to be worthwhile you need some scale economy. you need to make many hundreds of copies of a book. with paper being made of animal skin, rare and expensive, and with low literacy, it's hard to reach that scale economy. printing made possible an increase in literacy, but it was first an increase in literacy - and mechanical technology, and cheap paper - that made printing possible in the first place. as for the steam engine, you yourself said it, they had some prototipes already in anciet rome. the problem is that those machines were very inefficient, and ultimately much more expensive than horses or slaves. the steam engine was made possible by further advances in mechanical technology, and by the availability of cheap coal. without massive coal mines digging up cheap coal, the steam engine is just not convenient. not saying it cannot be done, but it's hard to accelerate progress. heck, even my idea of hygiene can backfire spectacularly; with lower mortality from disease, population would grow unchecked, until there is either some massive famine, or some massive war over food resources, or the higher population density overcomes hygiene and gives rise to a new pandemics.

no, not really. sure, gold prices would go way down, because gold would no longer be so rare. on the other hand, oil prices would stay the same. because there is plenty of oil in our world too, the problem is digging it up from deep underground and transporting it. those costs don't go down with parallel earths. same with iron, aluminium, timber, agricultural products... by the way, we already have a society that's post scarcity in some areas: most notably, digital entertainment. we already have more books than anyone can possibly read, more movies than anyone can possibly watch, more videogames than anyone can possibly play, all available completely for free because they are a couple decades old. and guess what? people keep paying good money for those things.

why would someone decide to use painting against a nightmare in the first place? I wonder how they discovered painting was effective; who was the first person who, confronted with a nightmare, decided to try and paint it. on the other hand, someone trashing and hitting a nightmare with the first object available, and that object being silver, is a lot more likely to happen. if there is silver around. but that's a tangent.

we know silver works against the cognitive shadows on threnody. silver generally has good properties against a lot of invested entities. would silver have worked against nightmares? there are strong similarities between the shades on threnody and the nightmares of komashi we don't know what aluminium does to the shades of threnody, but it does affect investiture, blocking or negating it. would a wall of aluminium be able to keep the nightmares out? mind you, it is fully possible that the nation of kilahito had no access to either. many rare metals are only available in a handful of places on the whole earth, and with kilahito only consisting of a few cities surrounded by the shroud, i'd bet they totally lacked a good half of the periodic table. silver is not too rare, but it is fully possible they just had no silver ores anywhere in their land and didn't even knew the element. there is no reference to silver anywhere in the novel, except in the end with silverware, and I doubt it means the eating implements were made of actual silver - it wasn't that posh of a restaurant anyway. as for aluminium, while aluminium ores are ubiquitous in planetary crusts, kilahito derives all its advanced technology from hion. even though it mostly resembles 1950s, they could absolutely not have discovered aluminium smelting.

By the way, i'm wondering how the nightmare painters started. As the survivors of the shroud started rebuilding civilization, nightmares started to manifest. And somebody first had the idea to paint them. Imagine the scene. There is this eldritch horror. Weapons pass through it. And somebody painted it. It must have taken a very unusual person.

weird. off the top of my head, I can't name a single one in a cosmere book - ok, my last point if you consider it as such. after checking book by book, I can list a handful, but still rather rare considering the sheer amount of books he's written. like, I can list it once every 3-4 books. also, there's a strong dependence on the amount of foreshadowing involved; I mean, in most fake deaths you have enough details that will let you know it was fake. As I said, I never expected yumi could possibly die for real in this book. If you catch the hints, does it count as a fake death? and if you don't, but after the fact it makes sense? I'll bring a couple of examples from the reckoners trilogy because I'm rereading it right now and it's fresher in my memory: reckoners big spoilers so the question is, do those count as fake deaths, or not? for me, they don't. if for you they do, I can see why you'd be annoyed. sorry about that

I never bought into the fake death, because at some point near the beginning hoid says that yumi and nikaro narrated the story together (can't find the exact point). meaning they are together when hoid is "defrosted". so i never felt that kind of emotional whiplash from that. i always knew yumi was not gone for good. ! Cosmere spoilers !

well, it is a bit more complicated than that. having been wronged in the past does not make one right. you will see.

well, for once, answers will be forthcoming. although I'm sure the answer will leave you with more questions. my take is that she wanted to practice acting like a though action woman. everyone knows roguelike action heroes always meet in pubs and have hard drinks, and never go beyond tipsy for that. she underestimated how difficult it is. surgebinders do NOT feel less pain. though knowing that you will get better immediately helps a lot in dealing with pain. and after a while, i suppose you'd get used to it. more tehcnically, it seems like the healing process reduces pain; I remember other characters in the middle of magical healing feeling less pain once they start. Finally, shallan is crazy. she can do that kind of stuff.

hemalurgy requires driving a spike into a person. the nightmare draining nikaro was stabbing him with claws or something similar. nikaro and yumi were touching. this soul draining effect seem to always require touch. it's not the "turning souls into investitures" part that leaves me puzzled, but the fact that it worked at distance over an entire planet. the fact that they made it work at a distance over an entire planet by accident. it's a bit like trying to assembled a toaster in a workshop and accidentally producing a fighter jet.

Can't help wondering though: why it's yumi and the nightmare painter instead of nikaro and the girl of commanding primal spirits?

it's a disputed theory, apparently not very consistent with the most recent climate models. furthermore, back at the time humans only lived in east africa as hunter gatherers. not something that would give high population density; I would be surprised if there had been one million humans total at the time

although none of them is nowhere near on the scale of fantasy apocalipses. the balck death was the most lethal and it killed one third of the global population. on scadrial and komashi, we're talking 1% survival rate