Jump to content

Shaggai

Members
  • Posts

    927
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Shaggai

  1. The continent is an image taken from a frame of an animation on Wikipedia. There's no actual mathematical significance to its shape, because it's a 2D projection of a 3D slice of a 4D fractal, and the angle was chosen by whoever uploaded the animation and has no significance, while the particular frame was (presumably) chosen entirely because it made it look cool.
  2. I thought that one was the sailor refusing to tell them anything.
  3. Given that Adonalsium is known to have created Splinters even before the Shattering, I'm not convinced. It certainly disproves the "imperfect Shattering" narrative, but not the substance of the theory.
  4. Do you have any source for that claim? We know pretty much nothing about the organization. I don't think you have nearly enough evidence to be as certain as you sound. Sure, full-sized Shards. That doesn't preclude the existence of a bunch of Splinters which, combined, are nearly as powerful as a Shard.
  5. Cultivation is neither simple survival, nor unrestrained growth. Cultivation is flourishing, or improvement. When you cultivate something, you make it better or more useful. You don't simply focus on its survival, nor on its growth, unless those are the sole criteria of utility (utility used both in the literal and ethical sense). If you have a garden, and you cultivate it, you don't just care about the survival of the plants. You want to maximize their yield. But this isn't just growth, either, since you'll have to trim and prune them to get the most out of them. Odium isn't just aggression, either. Odium is the divine hatred, separated from the other qualities that direct it. The difference between Odium and Ruin is a matter of different objectives. Ruin is impersonal, and seeks a vast goal of ultimate entropy. With Odium, on the other hand, it's personal. Hatred is directed at things which are perceived to be wrong on some level. For Odium alone, separate from other Shards, there are no other qualities to determine what is wrong or right, so everything is considered wrong. Ruin doesn't have any particular dislike for anyone or anything, but everything is made up of substances which could be in a more entropic state. Odium doesn't care about the entropy level of anything, as long as it gets to destroy you. And everyone and everything. Aggression doesn't quite get at that, because aggression is more about methods than objectives. You can help someone in an aggressive way. You can't help someone in a hateful way, unless you believe that your help will be harmful (which doesn't count as help). You can help someone you hate, if you've got a good enough reason, but you'll help them reluctantly rather than hatefully. The other characterizations of the Shards don't look obviously wrong.
  6. It's not war, any more than evolution is war. What you're getting at is basically memetic theory, except embodied in a quasi-physical state. I may add more to this response later, once I've gotten through the implications. Edit: Actually, sentient ideas has massive implications when it comes to memetics. Azathoth, I'm really glad I don't live on Roshar. This could be the basis for some serious horror material somewhat similar to the Tragedy of the Three Shards theory I have in my sig. Edit edit edit edit: Deleted the other edits. They're not really relevant. I'll get the full analysis up at some point eventually.
  7. I would like to point out that, canonically, there are pretty strong reasons to believe that the Gonne existed as a concept before Leonard, and simply used him as its vessel. Discworld's narrative causality is very substantially different from the way the Cognitive and Spiritual interact.
  8. I'm not going to try and address this entire thing, but there are a few points that I don't think are correct. The most obvious, and probably the most trivial, is that there are almost certainly not different Cognitive realms for each planet. There's a lot of evidence pointing to the idea that the Cognitive is the most common method of worldhopping, which doesn't work if it's not unified. Second, and more importantly, I don't think that the Cognitive is the fundamental. Nearly everything we've seen involving the exercise of Cognitive power uses the Cognitive to alter a pre-existing substrate. Forging and Soulcasting work on the Physical realm, Cognitive healing works on the Physical and Spiritual, and AonDor and Awakening are complicated but work on the physical and probably the spiritual. There's nothing we've seen that implies the Cognitive is prior to the other realms, and a bunch of things that imply that the others are prior. I suspect the basic order is Physical -> Spiritual -> Cognitive*, but once each of the realms has been instantiated there's a lot of interplay and feedback so that things get more complicated. In any case, the inherent order of the realms isn't necessary the order required for magic. And we can't really assume that magic is ordinal, either. Magic is Cognitive intent acting on Spiritual power to affect the Physical realm, but the Intent can't exist without Spiritual power to work on, and neither of them can do anything without the Physical realm to affect, so what's the real order? Thirdly, I don't think Investiture comes from outside. It transcends the different realms, because it's more than any one of them. Investiture is Spiritual power, imbued with Cognitive Intent, and invested in the Physical. It transcends the Spiritual, because it contains Cognitive and Physical elements. It transcends the Cognitive and the Physical, because it contains Spiritual elements. *Explanation provided on request. More may come later, as I look over the rest of your post. But this is a start.
  9. Theme song for Scadrial under the Lord Ruler: Yaotl Mictlan: Nada Verde Crece Aqui (Nothing Green Grows Here)
  10. My previous interpretation was that they're the fundamental forces on Roshar, because there's a Shard there messing with things. Except if you can Surgebind outside of Roshar, that doesn't make sense.
  11. http://www.theoryland.com/intvsresults.php?kwt=%27surgebindings%27 http://www.theoryland.com/intvsresults.php?kwt=%27surgebinding%27 For the second one, ctrl+f "fundamental" without the quotes. I'm not sure how to link to specific quotes.
  12. What. Just what. There are several fundamental forces that are required in order to Surgebind, and none of them are fundamental forces without the intervention of Investiture. I guess the Cosmere is weirder than I thought.
  13. Alright. I started earlier, and I've added some stuff just now. I think I'll try and get all the obvious information in, and then give it an actual format.
  14. The Stormfather page is in pretty atrocious condition, unless the one I've found is a duplicate. I'll probably add a lot of stuff to that.
  15. Nice! I'll certainly be editing some pages.
  16. Oookay. That's interesting. I wonder what that means for Ideals that are connected to concepts that are location-variant. Perhaps they're filtered through the Cognitive? That would make sense with this WoB. The real question is how far out the Ideals extend beyond the Cognitive. Do they include all potential views of themselves, or just all of the ones available to humans or other sentient entities, or just the ones that actually exist? Like, is there an Ideal for beauty that is completely alien to anything alive? Do the Ideals for color stretch beyond the visible spectra of all living creatures?
  17. I think that Connections are defined by both parties. The "string" is attached to both ends. Someone on one end can let go of the string, thereby breaking the Connection. Changing strength is a bit different, but it's an analogy and analogies are never perfect. Maybe it's multiple strings? If so, that would imply that Connection is quantized. This is really cool. The formula doesn't seem to act like the behavior of energy, though. I decreases smoothly with distance. The formula looks more like gravity, which doesn't change in strength depending on whether there is contact or not. Perhaps it would work better if we replace d2 with C, where C is the strength of Investiture transfer (corresponding potentially to the user's Spiritual connection to the target), and say that C = 1 on contact (because resistance to Investiture doesn't just go away upon contact) and d2 + s outside of contact (s > 1, s is a constant depending on the type of Investiture and how good it is at radiating). Furthermore, getting rid of d2 removes the need to separate m and p, and I'm not entirely sure why k is in the denominator (surely "larger numbers mean more Investiture required" would describe a variable in the numerator?) which means that potentially a better equation would be IT = pmCk, which means that IT = pmk upon contact and I = pm(d2 + s) at a distance. Also, T = I0/pmCk where T is the amount of change that the Investiture can cause and I0 is the amount of Investiture provided.
  18. That's got a lot of interesting implications. I'm kind of disappointed that it's not separate ideals for separate aesthetics, but this is nearly as cool.
  19. I'm pretty sure Peter confirmed it. Let me go dig up the post exactly. Edit: Here it is.
  20. Okay, that's actually really cool. I wonder what that means for Ideals. If two cultures have different ideas of beauty, what happens to the Ideal? Are there two Ideals? That could open up a lot of interesting things with magic that involves different aesthetics.
  21. Julia sets aren't higher than calculus. Although I'm not sure about quaternions. Apparently the fundamental formula is i2 + j2 + k2 = ijk = -1, which isn't that complicated, but there might be more than that.
  22. @Moogle: Wow, that's a big post. The WoB about troughs kind of messes up my initial response, but that's quite interesting. I'll see if I can come up with a response at some point. They're not all different systems on Scadrial. They're just analogous to different systems.
  23. Well, I see why it's not very useful, and I see why he interpreted your question the way he did. But I think that a good point here is that Aons are like metals in that they aren't powered by themselves. They're powered by the Dor, and they allow Elantrians to draw on that power in specific ways (as defined by the Aons). I think the relevant analogy for different Aons isn't different metals, but the same metals with a different "charge" (Allomantic or Feruchemical). Someone with the same sDNA can use different Aons, but they're limited to AonDor. The analogy for different metals is different Dor-based systems, because they require different sDNA.
  24. If you view metals as having two Investiture-interacting components, it makes a bit more sense. One component allows Investiture to flow into the right sort of Spiritweb, and the other component shapes it. The second component can be changed through Feruchemical storage, thus changing the effect without making it impossible to use..
×
×
  • Create New...