Kurkistan

...of course they are. Because apparently even setting up a glorified Word document for others to do all the work on is beyond me. Thanks for pointing out the error. *checks* Yep, both hyperlinks are the same, but the actual text of the link is different. I've updated the link in your post using my godlike mod powers, Zmann; I hope you don't mind. -- The doc should be updated now.

We see Miles grow back blown-off hands multiple times, not to mention whatever amount of damage that stick of dynamite did to him. So it looks like cosmere-healing is indeed capable of providing new biomass. I suppose it's possible that his healing factor is powerful enough that the blown-off flesh never fully detaches and is just hauled back in, but that seems a bit extreme. Also I would be not at all surprised if Lopen had a full arm as soon as he got enough stormlight: he got a nub when he breathed in the light from a single gemstone.

Well I guess if no one else feels like it... Here's a Google Doc to host the transcribing effort in. I'm a bit busy at work (and have found I have not the best amount of patience for long-haul transcription), but anyone's free to jump in and start transcribing. Use Comments and the like to note where audio's unclear, etc., and try to be verbatim wherever possible, I suppose: standard best practices. EDIT: Actually allowed others to Edit it. Sorry about that.

So long as the animals are cats, I have no principled objection to the idea. Depends a lot on the details of how Feruchemical nicrosil works.

This Shawn Speakman? I'm seeing videos (three of them) but no transcript. So are your Q'a/A's just from watching the videos?

Link:

By Harmony you're right.

Real topic title: Are all Elantrians secretly always zombies? So the Ire (or at least the leaders of them) are Elantrians. Interesting. But they look weird. They're all old-looking and shriveled and bald. They still glow a bit and in fact seem to need the super-special light in the fortress to survive, drinking it in passively from the fortress while they're there as well as drinking their glowy-liquids both casually in the fortress and seemingly as a way of staying alive while out on the expedition that Kelsier crashed. So can we talk about why they look like this? And, much more importantly, why Preservation describes them as "the ones who died, but did not"? Because according to Brandon Elantrians should just stop looking Elantrian if they get too far from Sel: nothing about them looking like wrinkled old prunes. We could just say that they're really old or something, or have been away for too long, but how does that explain the "the ones who died, but did not" line? -- The crazy thought that popped into my mind when I was thinking about it is that all Elantrians are dead people. At least to an extent. The Shaod usually comes at night, it's said. And we've always theorized that it keyed into people that are particularly Devoted to something. What if the Shaod takes people at the moment of their death, perhaps people who feel that they have something they're Devoted to that they still need to be around for? Someone dies in his bed of a stroke, boom Shaod. As an example: Some have argued that Hrathen's Dilaf's wife (who got post-Reod-Shaod'd before the Reod actually happened due to a botched healing when she was dying of some terminal illness) was in fact taken by the Shaod right then and there, but that the healing somehow interfered with it. What if she actually died, and that triggered it all? An alternative, of course, is that these might all be mid-Reod Elantrians who got Shard-pooled, and they were that way when they got there. So if a pre-Reod or post-restoration dropped by the fortress, they'd look fine. This seems like a pretty thin line to straddle, though. - I haven't read Elantris in a while and feel like I'm missing some WoBs. Also I don't know whether Elantrian immortality being particularly taxing comes into it. Thoughts?

Cool. These were PMs, I'm guessing?

He got that spike back, though, as we saw at the end of AoL.

The quote's a bit obscure, but someone from Team Brandon once noted that the use of the dots in the AoL era is reserved for more "formal" writing: so normally when writing you won't see any dots. EDIT: Oh, who am I kidding. *takes 5 minutes to find quote* Moving the dot to distinguish vowels is a modern innovation, within the last 100 years by ALLOY OF LAW. I suspect that dots may be gone entirely (except for the two changed vowels, and maybe "capital" letters) in many fonts by the time you get to the second trilogy. Numbers might get a moved dot too. The placement of the dots in the original symbology has to do with Allomancy, but they're largely superfluous in writing. The Feruchemical symbols (which are in the RPG) are evolved from the same root (the ancient symbols you can see in MISTBORN 3), but I don't know about their use in modern writing. It could be something like the hiragana/katakana distinction. But that's just speculation right now. So it looks like I misremembered, what with "Numbers might get a moved dot too". That or they just don't have the dot in numbers as of the AoL era, or the bad-handwriting man also skipped out on the dots.

One is forced to wonder how bad that guy's handwriting was to make a 3 (Tin) look like a 4 (Pewter). I guess if it was sloppy/slanted...

I've had a thought on how to describe the idea that a post "deserves" some number of upvotes. It perhaps describes the two different approaches: -A post is of quality X such that it deserves ~Y upvotes, quality-wise -A post is of quality X such that you'd expect 1 out of every Z people who see it to give it an upvote. Those who use the first method of evaluation might find "offsetting" downvotes quite justified, particularly if the number of upvotes a post has is significantly greater than Y. Those who use the second think that the more people see a good post, the more upvotes it should ultimately accumulate, into infinity.

@Irule *Puts on mod hat for a moment* It is the impression you're giving. I'd advise that you dial it down. Right now so far as I see you're deliberately trying to provoke Kobold. If not, my apologies for misreading you and let's keep things more unambiguously civil.

I beg you consider for a moment, Kobold, the possibility that this is not the only way to think of upvotes. I accept that this is how you see them, but others have differing assessments.EDIT: To expand, I invite you to explain why we should view upvotes this way, rather than having us take it as a given.

Taking off my moderator hat for a moment here and sharing my own thoughts on the subject. There won't be any smiting for those who disagree. I'd like to say that I support Meg's general sentiment, and thank her for voicing it. Yes, things evolve over time. Rep as I have experienced it is different from how it is today or as it was a year ago. Despite this, I feel that the community as a whole was better served by how rep was generally used up until ~2 years ago versus what it's morphed into now. Just as Meg did, I myself, to some extent, used post:rep ratio as a quick measure of the quality of a member. While we'd all like to award our full undivided attention to every post and theory, the truth is time and attention must be rationed, and it's unreasonable to expect most users to have their own opinions of the expected quality of any given member's input if they have to choose between reading thread A and thread B. Such rules are thumb and shortcuts aren't really possible now. If we're to say now that +1'ing a post was like smiling at someone, it could be said that it used to be the case that hitting that green arrow was like firmly shaking their hand for a job well done. It was done sparingly, but sincerely. Part of this was that there was a general sentiment towards the total number of rep a post had being important: if that post has 2 rep (which already indicates a very good post), then it's not really necessary to give it a third—the post already had an appropriate amount of praise. EDIT: To be clear, beyond the utility of being able to do quick post:rep judgments, I found this more sparing, more weighty view of rep to be better than what we have now, and more fulfilling to interact with. -- This is a sign of nothing better than vanity on my part, but I used to take the time to bookmark (in my rat's nest of bookmarked WoBs) any post of mine that got 10+ rep and became "Popular" (something which would only happen to any post maybe half a dozen times a year). I don't bother anymore, and I doubt such a concept would even cross the mind of someone who regularly sees 20+ rep for memes. I understand that, as things stand now, this is not how rep is seen. Someone sees a post with 20 rep that makes them chuckle, there's another for 21. A page with only one or two upvotes is seen as a "field of gray apathy" rather than being an average lively discussion. And so on. But at the very least it is worthwhile to acknowledge that this is not always how it's been on this forum, and perhaps ask whether it would be worthwhile to try and shift back. P.S. And yes, to clarify, this is all me talking about how much I value internet points. It is all rather silly when one takes the long view. But what we place value in tends to have value by that very belief, so I suppose I value my internet points.

There was never any announcement, so no worries. It's a matter of a few extra seconds if you report posts instead of users, but they do add up 50 love magicians later.

There's a "Report" button at the bottom-right of every post that you can use. If you want to be even more helpful, you can go to the member profile of the offending poster (just click on their username) and click the "Report This Member" link in the bottom-right. We deal with spammers by flagging the user, rather than the individual threads, so it's faster for us if you do it that way rather than reporting individual posts.

Re: Speed bubble occupancy In general, objects are either all-in or all-out of time bubbles. For people in particular, anything living that even touches the bubble is included in it. Note that this "inclusion" doesn't meant that the bubble glorps out and swallows them or the like: rather, the bubble's border stays in place, but the bits of people that are outside of it are still going "fast".

@Moogle Yeah, a tad contrived. But at the very least in this case (if the contrived reading is right) that first Breath is more of a small exception to the general rule—something that Brandon would have had to go out of his way to explain in the middle of his answer—rather than something more glaringly omitted. Not my favorite way to go, though. Yeah, I think we've reached a point. Thank you for your thoughts as well. EDIT: In reply to your edit... Yes, I agree that "pure power" implies raw investiture. EDIT 2: In reply to your edit to your edit... Yargh, 100% raw would indeed imply that it's unformed, making things like "strength spikes" rather impossible. Though I suppose... What if all the human-attribute spikes actually pull out the same thing, but the metal type changes how the spike affects the recipient? So if you could somehow transmute *coughsoulcastcough* an iron spike into a copper one, while retaining its charge, would it grant mental fortitude? Finally replying: sorry, I was rude in overlooking Yurisses' post earlier. So far as Hemalurgy (at least for recipients) wounding the soul goes, it may be simple enough to interpret it more as wedging something into the folds of your soul, rather than tearing/damaging. The spike will distort things while it's there, and do it's "hot wire" thing as well, but once you remove it there's no lasting damage and your soul returns to its normal shape. Like if you short-circuit an electrical system (assuming that the short-circuiting doesn't cause secondary damage): remove the conductor that's allowing the current to flow incorrectly and all will return to normal. Makromag had some quite interesting thoughts on how Gold/Malatium could interact with soul forgery, awhile back.

You are correct that my model allows (demands, really) that you be able to steal a single Breath—or at least the Breath-correlate part of the soul, assuming some transformation into a Breath-proper takes place when it's transferred out of a person. If we want to be really generous to Brandon, technically that WoB isn't contradictory with the idea of that first Breath being melded into the soul. Let's read it again (with emphasis for fun): Okay so let's get as reverse-nitpicky as possible here: Technically that whole WoB was about Breaths. Note the 's'. The conversation in general seemed to be about large-scale Breath transfer/theft, more so than about the small-scale question about whether everyone's first Breath (particularly the one that they're born with) is "melded" as part of their soul. If we must, then, this WoB is interpretable as meant to talk about the larger number of Breaths common in Awakening, rather than small-fry one-Breath-at-a-time concerns. -- So far as Hemalurgy being able to stuff more stuff into your soul while I would say Breath can't, two answers: 1. It could just be intrinsic to the nature of the magics and we leave it at that. Arguments could be made about how 1 Breath is "natural" and accepted while more isn't, etc., but ultimately it boils down to authorial fiat why things work the way they do. 2. Hemalurgy isn't really in the business of super-charging souls. Hemalurgy is pretty low-power, relying more on making hot-wire changes and loopholes in existing souls than tacking on huge new portions, at least by my reading of this WoB. I'm inclined to take the easy route and look at your last paragraph there. Just call it elan vital, but I don't really have any problem with the soul being at least partially composed of stuff that makes everything go. Sure there's connections and whatnot, but something needs to be keeping the lights on. By this understanding, lose some of that "something" and things start to run less well: this just happens to manifest as decreased life sense, color perception, etc. I wouldn't be shocked if this wasn't somewhat unique to Nalthis and someone on Scadrial who lost a corresponding part of his soul would feel less well or something instead, but that aspect isn't particularly important. Were you referring to this Feruchemy WoB? Because it has the line: "[A person's Spiritual aspect is] a mix of their connections to places, people, and times with raw investiture. The soul, you might say." So raw investiture is baked right into that definition of the soul/Spiritual aspect. I would be frankly shocked if everyone had some Physical investiture equivalent to 1 Breath lurking in their bodies.

Source: This was the quote we'd use to say "See! Scadrians aren't Drabs!" before the more definitive one turned up. Zas's WoB fairly definitively shows that everyone has the "life force" that makes people non-drab; not just Nalthians. So we're left with the question: are we going to say that every cosmerian has some fundamentally Physical investiture loitering about somewhere in their body, providing a health boost, life sense, etc. but otherwise completely non-interactive? Or are we instead to say that everyone just has a Spiritual soul, and Nalthians are special because they're capable of splitting off a portion of their own soul and endowing it into other people/objects? Alternatively, I suppose we could say that Nalthians actually have worse souls than everyone else, but that they're propped up by Physical Breaths. So by "a life force" Brandon here was being sneaky, and Nalthians have a distinct kind of life force in the form of Breaths. I rather doubt this. If Nalthians are running around with sub-par souls propped up by Breath, then we need to explain away everything looking completely identical from the outside for Nalthians vs. Scadrians despite operating using different mechanisms. -Not to mention that Brandon does refer to this "life force" that can't be used for Awakening as breath in the later WoB. Leaving us to choose between the "everyone has a Physical Breath" model or the "by default no one has any Physical Breath" model. ---- I found that WoB after a fair amount of argument/typing, so below the cut here I'll leave most of what my post would have been: I think we're better off discounting the new WoB where we have to, or at least cutting down on how broadly we interpret it. That WoB you linked to on Hemalurgy is particularly compelling: it takes a fairly contrived reading—one we're perhaps forced to under certain readings of your newest WoB, but contrived nonetheless—to read it as saying anything but that what amounts to a Breath can be stolen through Hemalurgy. I've got no trouble with Breath being fundamentally physical/gaseous: I don't think it particularly matters for this discussion, though. What I care about is what happens while it's in a person. To clarify my model/thoughts, I don't see any problem with a Breath taking another form (in this case being boosted up to the Spiritual realm and melding into a patchy soul) in any drab it finds itself in. "Breath", then, is most properly a special, somewhat unnatural, form of soul-stuff, the shape it takes when it's in transit or in an Awakener or Awakened object. Once it gets where it's going and finds a nice under-powered soul to meld into though, there's no reason it shouldn't go back to normal. I'm afraid I might not quite be parsing you here. To clarify what I said, at least: -Drabs are less healthy than is the norm because a part of their soul is gone. This is practically verbatim from Brandon in the Annotations. -1-Breath people are exactly as healthy as the norm because they have a complete soul. -People with >1 Breath are more healthy than the norm because <some mechanism that's distinct from why Drabs are unhealthy: perhaps simply holding onto gaseous Physical investiture a la Stormlight is enough, as you suggest> The main problem, to reiterate is that we need to reconcile everything we know about Breath and health not only with various WoBs (the vast majority of which would have us believe that Breaths are chopped-off portions of souls), but with a 1-Breath Nalthian looking functionally identical to a muggle Scadrian.

Ah yes, I hadn't properly incorporated that surprising little fact into my models. Hmm... The problem is that we have from Brandon that your Breath is "part of your soul". So we need to reconcile this with Breaths not being part of your soul otherwise. Myself, I think it's a rather simple solution: Anyone at a 1-Breath level (AKA, any normal Nalthian or non-Nalthian) has that single "Breath" incorporated into their normal soul. Anything above that, then, results in "over-saturating the solution", as it were, and the Breaths stay in the Physical realm; perhaps because there's no "room" for them in the already-complete soul. With Divine Breath, though (as Brandon hints at in your WoB), the Returned actually get an "augmented" version of their original soul back. It's "melded"—explaining neatly why consuming their own Divine Breath will kill a Returned, since they're eating their own original, core soul along with it. It's not just a matter of running out of power, but also of them "coring" themselves: There was the instance of Lightsong going grey when he gave up his Breath versus Blushweaver staying normal when she died of blood loss, similar to the work of Nightblood or Lifeless. If we're to use the same language, then, the single Breath that Nalthians/everyone is born with is "melded" into their soul, and if they become Drab and then go back to normal afterwards then that first Breath they get back will be slotted back in, "melded" with the rest of their (previously-reduced) soul. -- So that covers why Drabs are sickly, but not why those with more Breath are more healthy. Also why the "boost" is (presumably) a lot smaller going from 1 Breath to 2 versus that initial jump from 0 to 1, going off of Brandon's "[Drabs] get sick much more easily". It takes ~2,000 Breath to get to the Fifth Heightening and achieve perfect health. That seems a bit much. I see two broad options, then: -Any Breath beyond the first makes you more healthy almost entirely by virtue of the whole "bringing you one step closer to [the idea of being endowed by Endowment]" thing. So the health benefits from your first Breath are of an entirely different kind from those of the rest afterwards. Except for Returned, who get far greater versatility/benefits from their Investiture because it's all incorporated. -Non-incorporated Breath are just less efficient at it than that first Breath, like how (I would say) you get power leak when Awakening any non-human construct. So that 2nd Breath only gives you 1% of its normal health boost, for instance. The apparently stark difference between being a Drab and being normal, versus the implied-not-too-stark difference between having 1 and 2 Breath, would seem to support his. Personally, I'm leaning towards the first option, but couldn't really say either way just now. P.S. Lightsong going all gray/Returned having "melded" versions of their original souls might be the kind of thing worth talking about on the Awakening Mechanics thread.

UPDATE: An interesting WoB just popped up on reddit. Source: More of the same, to an extent. It does give us an interesting tidbit on the normal interactions of people's parts, though. Historically I've been assigning the soul a bit less active of a role in the day-to-day, needing magic to get involved before it tries to do anything. But here we have Brandon saying that it's "a constant force pushing your body to match it." Then we have that "[y]our perceptions are the filter through which this happens, however, and many of the magics can facilitate in interesting ways." I would wager that magical healing works by supercharging specific "make the body better" impulses from the soul, then. In that way it serves as a "facilitator" by enabling the soul to do what it's already working (and failing) at. This versus just giving the soul the extra "umph" directly, or giving it "typed" Investiture that can only be used for healing. Any are valid options, though. In the normal course of things, then, we could say either that normal healing in the cosmere is in fact at least partially a function of soular impetus (explaining Drabs getting sick more easily, actually...) or that the soul is just consistently failing to push the body into health any time magic isn't involved. I'm inclined towards the former, if only because of Drabs having weakened immune systems. -- P.S. Second update, from Chicago. Source: So yes Feruchemical gold and held-Stormlight are functionally the same. I neglected to inquire after Regrowth because I got caught up in the moment, though. :/ EDIT 2: This WoB about TLR's aging seems fairly definitively to be saying that it's intrinsic to his own soul, rather than relying on a Form forcing it onto him. Source:

My thanks for the reference. Today I'd probably talk about the Command-giving as more of a purposeful sending of "intent" rather than copying, given our more recent understanding of how the Cognitive/magic is all intenty. Also this WoB on the relationship between shard-severing and lifeless may be useful. Source: