Chaos

I am extremely jealous of you, Eero. For both the cash and the books. In other news, I would like to announce that car alarms have only one positive use: annoying burglars so much that they don't want to steal your car. Otherwise, I'd say it's at least ten times more likely to be utterly annoying.

Actually, there's a legend at the bottom of the topic list. I didn't see it there for a bit either...

Sorry, I couldn't resist, but we have over nine thousand posts on the forums. I think that's pretty dang awesome.

It's not renewing the domain name, they are switching DNS stuff around.

It'd just be really handy to have all the PNGs in one place too, if you could zip them up, is all I'm saying. For us Photoshoppers who can't open SVGs in our favorite image editor...

Same thing!

It just got back, I guess. But Howard did tweet yesterday that the Writing Excuses website did go down. Since Brandon, TWG, and Writing Excuses are all on Jordo's servers, it makes sense they all went down. For once, our server was a bit better than Brandon's! Ha!

I agree. They are a lot easier to edit that way. Why not include both?

That's basically my stance--Breath are unique to Nalthis. I would think that Realmatically, the Cognitive and Spiritual Realms are distinct on some levels. Of course, that idea has some problems, since the power of Breath gave Nightblood a Cognitive aspect. However, realize that with Breath, Brandon designed them to not be terribly unique. Good point, the Tears of Edgli must have something to do with this, and we're just not seeing it.

Excellent point; I didn't even think of it like that. That's brilliant.

I'm double posting because this is a fun little factoid. Nightblood pretty obviously obeys the Principle of Intent. He is to destroy evil, and hey! That's what he focuses on. Sounds Principle of Intent-y to me.

Emphasis mine. I was talking with TimeMaster today, and this was what we came up with, in the bolded text there. It's too much of a stretch for me to say that everyone, regardless of world, has Breath. Reading annotations about Warbreaker has made me realize just how magical Breath is. It prevents disease, etc. Magic comes from Shards, so I think Breath are directly related to Endowment. Sure, no one has extra lifesense, but follow me here for a moment. Assuming Endowment created Nalthis, and everyone has had Breath, similar to that fragment of Preservation in people, how would anyone know about Breath? It seems to me that if everyone had equal Breath, they would never notice anything different in the world. The origin of Awakening, then, is hardly mysterious. They simply never figured out the Commands to transfer Breath around. It's that imbalance of Breath which makes the lifesense (or lack thereof) noticeable. And really, how could you guess the Commands if you never knew Breath existed? Not only do you need to guess the Command, but the Intent of the Command is important (heh, Intent... that's interesting in itself). It's only when Vo, the First Returned, appears with his powerful Divine Breath that people notice something is different. In order for a Returned to heal someone, he would need the Command to give the Breath away, so I think it's likely that people learned the first Commands from Vo. From there, some people could get more Breath than others, but it would still take centuries of tinkering (which, TimeMaster recalls it has been 600 years since Vo Returned. I don't remember this figure, but I imagine he's right) for Awakening to come into its own. If Vo Returned 600 years ago, and the Manywar happened 300, I'd imagine 300 years is enough trial and error to get some basics of Awakening down. I like this explanation for why Awakening is "new" the best. It doesn't assume that people were already on Nalthis when Endowment arrived (I can buy one origin world, but if there are two, then there can be many more than two, and that's hard for me to swallow). The only question it doesn't answer is, "Why is Endowment Returning people?" I don't have an answer for you on that, but I imagine Brandon is going to keep a tight leash on that one. This, of course, doesn't explain why other people on different worlds would ostensibly have similar lifesense. But let's think about it. If Endowment wanted to create people, like people he has seen on the origin planet, let's say he wanted to give them this lifesense ability. In effect, Endowment in his Shardy glory would think, "How can I emulate that to make them into humans?" Eventually, he decides that giving them Breath would make humans into the way he wants them. What I'm saying is, Breath is the way Endowment decided people should be built. Breath is one way to get lifesense, but other Shards could emulate a similar effect without the need for Breath. It's only because Breath--in line with Endowment's Intent--can be transferred that Nalthisean people even care about lifesense. We only notice the little things when they are taken away from us. I espouse this idea. Breath is some essence of Endowment's power. (And by the way, Endowment is confirmed to be that Shard )

I asked Brandon (via Mi'ch) once what the origin of Feruchemy was. He didn't seem to understand what I was saying, but he said that Terrismen typically kept the genes in their own population. So typically, they mated with other Terrispeople (he apparently compared it to Jews, who despite the diaspora, kept fairly insular). Hence, the power of Feruchemy never had room to split. I guess it splits once the Terrispeople start breeding outside of that ethnicity.

Oh, duh, Joe, that makes this way easier. For there to be a "mixed" magic system, Shards must share a focus. That was easy. Though I guess we'll have to see how the magics in Stormlight Archive work to be more precise about this.

That matches my recollection of the magic.

And now you don't even get to sell that textbook back. Silly laser eyes.

That's my thought as well. However, what makes me second guess that a little is the fact that if they are paired, shouldn't this theory predict an Honor-Odium magic system?

All of this sounds remarkably straightforward. Want to do my Advanced Calculus or Abstract Algebra final? Unless I see a proof, I don't believe you

The Silence Divine is a standalone novel that I don't think has been written yet. It is cosmere, and the planet that novel takes place on is located in the same solar system as Roshar. I don't remember the magic system well enough to describe it, but Josh and Mi'ch probably remember. They are the ones who told me about it.

I just find them to be entertaining coincidences. Brandon's great, but he's not omniscient.

Blasphemy

I remember my teacher telling us about that one. That blew my mind. Of course, now that I am in Advanced Calculus, where we exclusively do calculus proofs, that statement becomes a whole lot clearer. It's easy to show that .99999... is within epsilon of 1, so the limit is certainly 1. Good enough for me. It's imprecise, exactly, to call it 1 (it's the limit that's 1) but from a heuristic standpoint, they are the same. You can also do the proof with geometric series, which is a neat trick. I did a similar problem which said to use geometric series to express 1.99999... as the quotient of two integers. The answer? 2/1. Neat, huh? Calculus rocks. (And now I'm looking up algebraic proofs of the same fact. They are pretty neat, too) EDIT: Five minutes into this and I cannot deal with the misunderstanding. I've read fun things like "infinity is a concept, not a number," and then there was a person who, in defense of .9999...=1 referenced spirituality and God. I'm not quite sure what that was. They seriously need some advanced calculus.

I was talking with my friend Jeremy (he's TimeMaster11 on here) about what magics on Roshar are of which Shards. Is Surgebinding just of Honor, or a mix of Cultivation? It was interesting to think about, though there are no easy answers, since we don't know much. But it made me think about Feruchemy, and how it was the balance of Ruin and Preservation. I recall a topic on TWG where happyman was deciphering the "30 magic systems" of WoK, and he basically used some math to find all possible combinations of Shards to get you to 30. Well, we know this way of thinking isn't right. There are just three Shards on Roshar. I think it's likely that the "30" magics are the smaller magic systems. There are, after all, ten Surges in Surgebinding. I wouldn't be surprised if other magics, like Voidbinding, have ten powers as well. That is what the back cover seems to convey. Anyways, it doesn't matter how you count them; that's not what my thought is. I was thinking more about, if Surgebinding is of Honor, and two other magics of Odium and Cultivation, respectively, why aren't there more magic systems? Feruchemy is a balance of Ruin and Preservation, shouldn't there be combinations of these Shards too? Just going through combinations of it: Honor Cultivation Odium Honor-Odium Honor-Cultivation Odium-Cultivation Honor-Odium-Cultivation So that's seven theoretical magic systems... We definitely don't see that many (by magic systems, I'm referring to big things like Surgebinding, not individual Surges, just like I count there to be three magics in Mistborn: Allomancy, Feruchemy, and Hemalurgy, not 3*16 of them). That possibly suggests that not all Shards can interact to form a new magic system. Why would this be? Well, I think we forget sometimes that Ruin and Preservation are a special combination. They are perfect opposites, and that particular interaction lent a "balance" very easily. Not all Shards have opposites like this. Endowment doesn't. Perhaps it isn't just the mixing of two Shards' power that grants a third magic system, but the mixing of two compatible Shards. If you stuck Preservation and Endowment on a world, would they necessarily create a third magic system from that interaction? I don't think so. The Shard Intents don't seem to mesh well enough to form a particular magic. That's all I really had for you guys today, but I can't resist mentioning a possible categorization method for Shards. Kerry and I were talking about this a while back, so give her plenty of credit for this scheme, too. Let's first assume the Shards split into four quadrants, similar to Allomancy. Since there are sixteen Shards, this is certainly a possible orientation. There are three divisions we currently noticed (so we don't have any idea what the last quadrant would be). Ruin and Preservation feel very elemental, dealing with physical things. Endowment and Cultivation, while maybe not necessarily paired, feel quite like Enhancement Shards. In one quadrant we thought was filled, we have more mental, emotional powers, because they seem to deal not with growth or direct change, but with human feelings: Honor, Odium (hating things is certainly an emotion!), and whatever Aona and Skai are. When my theory of Love and Devotion was around, that made the quadrant extremely "emotional," but now we're figuring it is more like Devotion for Aona and possibly Unity for Skai. Either way, they are much more similar to Honor than Preservation, in that like Honor, it deals with a human, cognitive characteristic. I liked the names Elemental, Emotional, and Enhancement (because I thought it was cool to have three E's) and Kerry preferred Physical, Mental, and Enhancement for those three categories. I have to agree with Kerry, there, because it feels more like Allomantic categorization, which is a cool symmetry. (Although we're both baffled with what a "temporal" Shard could be, so take this all for a grain of salt) So a possible categorization could be something like this, down below. Mind you, we have no idea if there is an "external" or "internal" dynamic to this table. If you want, just look at the Table of Allomantic Metals and imagine we are dealing with Shards instead of metals, and disregard which Shards are on the outer ring or inner ring. Physical: Ruin, Preservation (definitely paired) Unknown, Unknown Mental: Honor, Odium Aona--probably named Devotion, Skai--potential name of Unity, maybe. Third Quadrant, all unknown. Enhancement: Endowment, Cultivation Unknown, Unknown. A couple of notes: 1. Endowment and Cultivation certainly don't need to be paired, and 2. Kerry also thought Honor-Aona and Odium-Skai seemed like a more natural pairing. Take your pick. I didn't really have much of a point in sharing this, except that it may not be necessary for all combinations of Shards to form a new magic. Perhaps paired Shards can, but Brandon has said that not all Shards have an opposite like Ruin and Preservation do. A long, rambly post aside, I think I made my point: Ruin and Preservation's interaction is special among Shards, and we shouldn't create generalizations about additional magic systems because Feruchemy exists.