Kurkistan

Excellent question. Have a rep. EDIT: Sorry, that was a bit cruel. I just couldn't resist, though Reputation is a lasting, forum-wide measure of how the amount and degree of "good" posts you have made. When you look at a thread, each post will have green and red arrows in the bottom-right corner. Click green to upvote, red to downvote. Individual posts will record their net reputation, which will count towards the rep underneath each member's avatar. We've had some discussions recently about the proper use of they system, but suffice it to say that, at least from my perspective, you ought to upvote posts you "see as particularly funny, witty, helpful, or insightful" and downvote with extreme caution. Generally, people only downvote truly "bad" posts--not offensive, since we normally just "Report" those, but the kind to which the only reply even vaguely possible without inciting a flame war is "dude, just no". Do you understand now? EDIT 2: You can also see what posts have negative or positive rep on users' "Reputation" tab, accessible on profiles. Here's mine, for instance, and here's yours. And here's Brandon's, if you want to be blown away.

http://coppermind.net/wiki/Chronology

Does stormlight retention and radiation follow the square-cube law? If so, do broams radiate for ~3 times longer than chips? Would an embedded Brass metalmind melt at high temperatures? What about one that's completely buried in the skin? -Probably: Water in your stomach oughtn't to boil away.

The same basic operation: Source

*Puts down pitchfork and torch* Welcome to the forums! *keeps torch nearby, on second thought. This one is tricksy...* Brandon has answered a question about a fight between Marsh (or Zane) and Szeth: all things being equal, Szeth likely loses. WoK is amazing, and you're lucky you read it for the first time so close to WoR's release (if you count 6 months as close, and we do at this point). Sadly, we won't be getting a Hoid book any time soon; there is one tentatively planned, it's just very very far out on the horizon.

Though my post is unrelated to the main point of the thread as well, I'd hardly say we must needs categorize Rithmatics as "soft". Brandon likes his hard magic. If it was Cosmere, I'd throw the Cognitive Realm and Forms at chalklings so fast that they wouldn't know what hit them. As it is, I've no doubt that the perceptions of the drawer/the local population/humanity at large/THE UNIVERSE plays into how chalklings work.

Thanks Soother! I was feeling all sad before To clarify the Nicroburst comment, you mean that If Nick the Nicroburster tries to Nicro Frank the Ferring (or full Feruchemist, just no allomancy), it won't do anything as of now? I can't say I'm enthused about this news on the prolouge. Granted I haven't read it yet and it is Brandon, but I do not have positive associations with retreading the same ground from different perspectives. . . Crossroads. . . *shudder* That being said, I'm willing to give it a shot, and if worst comes to worst it will only be a minute fragment of each book.

Brandon apparently had signings and Q&A's and whatnot, but I can't find even the smallest tidbit of information from any of it. Was all information sucked into a black hole shortly after the convention, or is it just the sad case that no one on any fan websites or youtube posted anything?

You do that one two three times, and no one ever lets you forget it.

I really wish people would click on links more often . For the third time, here is the Coppermind page on Awakening. Under the Tenth Heightening section it says: "A third ability granted is the ability to give commands mentally (Mental Command), although this is said to be difficult to learn. This is the ability that allowed the God Kings of Hallandren to pass on their breaths after their tongues were removed."

Electroplating was just one way to make sure it all stayed in place. I think a mold would have the same (non-) effect: ignoring the aluminum and getting at the metal beneath. I can quite easily imagine Brandon having gone another way with it, and letting aluminum "shield" other metals, but the events and exposition of AoL suggest that he did not.

The Tenth Heightening (as I linked to in my first post about this) is not limited to just color-drain: it also gives you "(Color Distortion), a Awakener gains the natural and intrinsic ability to bend light around white objects, creating colors from them as if from a prism." and "the ability to give commands mentally (Mental Command)" as well as the "Perfect Invocation" that we've been talking about, "draw[ing] more color from the objects they use to fuel their art. This leaves objects drained to white, rather than grey". The naming convention even fits: Perfect Pitch, Color Recognition, and Invocation. So it's likely a case of plateauing gradual gains in how much color you can drain off. The drain of color in Awakening is not (just) a random side-effect. It's necessary for it to happen at all. An Awakener without any color to draw upon cannot Awaken anything, no matter how many Breaths they have. The more color you can draw from any given object before it becomes unusable to you, then, the better off you are. As an aside, you don't need to be at the Tenth to use black: Vasher does it quite easily, leaving behind gray patches. It seems, then, that it's the white/gray side of the scale that's normally unusable.

Sorry about that coming a bit out of nowhere. I've seen that assumption bandied about on several threads by now, so I may have overreacted a bit. I hadn't known electroplating was so finicky for aluminum, but I think that's the kind of problem you manage to work around by the time you get to the point when it's a choice between finding a way to sheathe you gun in not!gold versus making the entire gun out of not!gold. EDIT: I forgot to mention it when I first noticed it, buy your avatar is far less creepy now that it's not flesh-toned, Shardlet.

Forgive me if I've missed a quote or passage, but why does everyone seem to be convinced that plating a metal with Aluminum would "shield" the metal from Pushes/Pulls? If that were the case, Miles could just have used electroplated weapons instead of making everything out of some solid through-and-through, rarer-than-gold aluminum alloy.

It's simply one of many effects, and doesn't "cost" the Breaths used to get to the Tenth Heightening. I imagine that all Awakeners utilize a tad more of the color of objects as they gain more Breath, and the Tenth Heightening is just where it plateaus at its maximum value, like with perfect pitch or health.

As for Kaladin and Amaram: Spear in the knee. That is all.

Also, here's the essay by Brandon that I hazard happyman is drawing from. Either way, it's worth reading.

I'm not sure what the problem is. Awakeners of the Tenth Heightening are able to fully utilize the color of various objects when they Awaken. This allows them to get more bang for their buck: while a normal Awakener can't use a gray scarf to Awaken, one of the Tenth Heightening can. It's an unadulterated benefit.

I do apologize for the length. I did warn you . If you really want to have fun, though, just keep reading up to my 30-post battle with Nepene. Okay then. I can see unskilled Awakeners being less efficient, but I would like to note that I wouldn't be shocked beyond words if that's not the case; if a Command either works and takes X Breath based on its target/Command or it doesn't. You mean draining all the color out of objects, and thus leaving them white?--which is the 10th Heightening, btw. I did not put enough analysis into the effects of the various Heightenings back in the day when I wrote that thread up. Nepene gave us an idea of "intuition" to explain Instinctive Awakening, and I've since considered that Forms might come into it somehow, but it's altogether a bit muddled on my end. It seems, though, that many of the effects of the Heightenings, particularly the higher ones, deal with your interactions with the rest of the world. Sure you get some health and agelessness to begin with, but everything else deals with perceiving or magically interacting with the outside world. Breaths might have an effect of super-charging the depth and breadth of Spiritual connections between their holders and other objects. This is all absurdly vague and unhelpful, and needs deeper analysis, but you could start off talking about an Awakener of the Tenth Heightening might be a deeper connection to an object by which to siphon off its color, just like they gain the ability to understand the "harmonics" of different colors and sounds at lower levels.

I'm unsure where you're getting this talk of salt from. Diamonds aren't salt, amethysts aren't salt, rubies aren't salt. . . The composition of the different gems apparently just serve as a "key" to the magic system, so I'd imagine that the "how" of it is less mechanistic and more similar to how metals are the "focus" on Scadrial: it is just in the nature of Roshar that gemstones of certain types are attuned to and hold stormlight.

Kind of late in the day, but I was skimming AoL and found this quote. Wayne has just put up a speed bubble: "Everything outside slowed--bullets stilled in the air, shouts vanished, the waves diffusing as they hit the speed bubble. That did strange things to sound." So yes, speed bubbles actually actively do weird things to sound. It seems, even, that they make sound go away. "Diffusing" could either be a case of the sound dispersing or of frequency being down-shifted so far that it isn't audible any more.

Interesting theory. I like it, though I'm not sure if Hoid would have had the resources/opportunity to buy them.

@Doc So far as complex Commands go, we get a direct mention of this in the book (pg 455 in the pdf from Vivienne's perspective). I also have a fair amount of argumentation (warning: absurdly long) attempting to show that the Breath comes in by fueling cogitation rather than enabling it. Perhaps a poorly given Command is needlessly complex and vague, requiring more "power" to make it work, but I would argue that there is some higher baseline for more complex Commands, with not even the most skilled Awakener being even theoretically capable of using less than X Breaths for "Hold when thrown".

Note that it might not necessarily be the actual act of passing through the bubble: it could instead be what happens just before/after. Such as the surface of the bubble distending or some such. Maybe not, but worth keeping in mind.