Kurkistan

Okay, Weepings. They last for four weeks (20 days), apparently, with one highstorm thrown in the middle for fun. That's a tad irritating. Given the highstorm in the middle, the Kaladin quote might not be 100% reliable, though. You can reinfuse gemstones in the middle of a Weeping, so you should only have two weeks total of non-glowy gems, at worst--one in the week before the highstorm and one in the last week of the Weeping. EDIT 2: Though it could be a weird no-stormlight storm, which would allow for even broams to go dun, under my model. I'm very strongly inclined to find a way to do away with this evidence, in fact. I hope not to have to resort to discontinuity, but I will if I have to. Five days is such a very short time . So the options I currently see are as follows: a) The broams last for weeks at a time, but Kaladin's family last reinfused them at some awkward time such that they ran out after the weeping stopped. The text heavily implies that this is not the case--implying instead that the Weeping is a necessary cause of the gems being dun (if only through denying them necessary reinfusement), rather than simply an incidental reason dependent upon other factors. b.) This is a woopsie on Brandon's part: he didn't account for broams being broams and applied his "about a week" measure for chips accidentally. Annoying, continuity wise, but forgiveable if we get back on track for the rest of the series. I'm rather dispairing at 'b' being true, if only because I can definitely see plot points where surgebinders can't get any stormlight during a Weeping or some such. You could still have those if stormlight was simply rare and fleeting--only available in large denominations of gemstones--but it wouldn't be quite the same. --- I still really hope that my theory holds because a ~5 day limit is just so very fidly. If we want gemstones to be "magical batteries" with magitech and gem light-bulbs and stuff, we incur a massive cost if they have to be taken out of their delicate and/or hard to reach and/or necessary locations every week to be exposed to a super-hurricane. And also because I like being right. ---- As an aside, I've done some napkin-math on SA:V, though I'm unsure as to how it applies to black-body radiation. Here's some numbers, if we'll accept some assumptions: Okay, so 1 diamond broam is worth 20 diamond chips. If we assume that they're proportional, then 1 diamond broam has 20 times the mass/volume of a chip. Similar proportions hold for the other gem types. We'll also assume equal "stormlight density" for different gemstones and that the different denominations are all the same size for all gem types. So 1 broam has 20 times the volume of a chip. Using some handy dandy wikipedia, we can find proportions of volue to surface area for various shapes. I just did some unnecessarily complicated mathematical thingamabobs to compare the retention rates of different shapes of gemstones when they're volume is multiplied by 20, only to "discover" that the shape doesn't matter if you're only messing with pure volumes, instead of lengths. So long as the shape stays the same when you scale up/down, you're all good. Things do get more complicated if broams are cut with more/less sides than chips, though, and I have not gotten into that as of yet. Therefore, we find that multiplying the volume of a gem by 20 gives us ~2.7144 times more stormlight in proportion to surface area. If we take a chip as lasting for 6 days--just for the sake of roundness--that gives us ~16.3 days for a broam. 5 gives us ~13.6 and 7 gives us ~19.0. I suppose that isn't too bad, actually, and might give us some small amount of leeway on the Weeping passage. Particularly if, for some reason, the highstorm in the middle doesn't provide stormlight. At the very least, it is by far more reasonable to reinfuse a gemstone once every 15 days than once every 5. EDIT: Also, I am by no means knowledgeable as to the actual math behind black body radiation, so it likely isn't a straight comparison of volume and surface area. I do believe these are the right numbers if everything is in simple terms, though.

Careful: Complex Commands cost more than simpler Commands on the same object, regardless of skill.

*Hears mention of time bubbles. Moves in for the kill. Sees Phantom beat him to it. Withdraws silently back to the depths.*

I've never been much one for read-alongs, if only because I plan for my next re-read of WoK to be in the week before I get my copy of WoR. A Cosmere-aware version of the Tor re-read might be interesting to read on its own, though. EDIT: Not that I don't enjoy the. . .interesting theories the Tor readers come up with

Not that gracious, given that I was rather indisputably in the wrong, but thank you. Sorry again for jumping to conclusions. with such surety.

Sorry Pech, but in my infinite wisdom I have deduced that it is unlikely that Nicrobursted bendalloy bubbles last for any length of time from the "insider's perspective", instead just pouring all the extra energy into getting bigger. So you could encompass a building, but not for long enough from your perspective for it to matter. I suppose a burst-Cadmium bubble could be either/or--so long as the user only experiences a brief moment--now that I think of it, but definitely just getting bigger for a split second for Bendalloy. You could still Pulse an enemy position and keep them in stasis for the duration of a critical moment in the battle, with 1 Pulser essentially knocking out a very large number of resources.

@hoser Wow, today is just not my day for coming off right. I apologize for that. To try to clarify a bit. "huge conspiracy of money-fakery": Yes, a tad of an exageration. The main point is that no real conspiracy is needed. Shallan's father was not running so fast his only option was to jump the chasm. If his family can use the soulcaster to recover after several months of mounting debt and interest, then I imagine he could have done the same. I simply don't think any scheme beyond the continued use of the soulcaster was really necessary for him. I do agree with you that Highprinces likely levy taxes in their territories, though, so he would have had a new source of income. He just wouldn't have needed it to be able to pay off the debts he'd already accrued by the time he died. Sorry for misinterpreting you on Rutashi's point. You're post here failed to challenge him directly on it, so I assumed you were supportive. My mistake. "Huh?": That was in reference to your EDIT in this post where you said that you understood how I could have interpreted you as saying Shallan & Co. were planning on yet another debt-scheme. It was a bit of a non sequitur in context, I admit. Sorry about that.

See, I really just don't see a need for any of these shenanigans. Topaz is worth less than marble. Nobody knows the have a soulcaster. They can get free money for the foreseeable future, albeit with a ceiling on how much marble they can reasonably claim to have found. They win. No need to lie about any aspect of their operations besides whether the marble was natural. Sure, there could be a some huge conspiracy of money-fakery, but it's simply unnecessary to explain what happens in the book. Sorry, I amended that to say that you had supported someone who did, without noting your disagreement with that part of their argument. I took this to mean that you supported his assertion of Topaz-Talus equity, but you did not in fact say that yourself. And yes, your "They are in debt and their lives and properties are at risk unless they find something." line also suggested that Shallan and Co. would follow a similar, risky plan.

I honestly wasn't following the conversation too closely, but my impression was that you were asserting that it would be uneconomical to use soulcasting gems (topaz, in this case) to create marble and whatnot to be sold. It's fairly obvious from this quote, theough, that it's a lack of access to/limited supply of soulcasters that makes soulcasting such things more expensive than mining natural deposits--the gemstones themselves are thus less expensive than the value you get from the minerals they create. Therefore, the father would never have needed to risk a bait-and-switch scheme, since he could just get infinite free wealth using the soulcaster. Maybe he borrowed heavily against anticipated minerals that didn't exist just yet, but he was always planning on delivering. There is no need to plan to need to use his power as a HIghprince to get rid of the loans any other way than soulcasting and then mining. I suppose the fact that you supported someone who essentially stated outright that simple topaz->marble wouldn't be enough for the father to make money suggested that Shallan and Nan Balat would have to follow a similar "bait-and-switch" course to the one you posited for their father.

Sorry hoser, you're just wrong on this one: WoK Ch 33 It's quite clear from this quote that they planned to use the output of their new deposits to pay off their existing debts and return to stability; not set up another precarious pile of lies to fall on them later.

Ah, I hadn't known there was a division of powers. Given how easy it is to re-do the links, I can't imagine it would be to much of an imposition for Mr. Sanderson. I suppose it does come down to awesomeness, though. I know that's how you "fix" twg links, I'm just concerned for the rest of the internet, because I'm all benevolent and such.

I know the days of Time Wasters Guide were before my time, and perhaps this has been discussed before, but is there any way to redirect links to the old site into our archive? Right now, there are a whole bunch of dead links floating about the internet, and I know we still have the site name, so it seems that it would be relatively trivial to redirect link to TWG to the appropriate page in the archive. Or, of course, there's a perfectly good reason why this can't be done. Sorry, in that case.

Art thou secure in thy surety that that thou wanteth to go down this torturous trail, oh taunting Phantom?

Don't take this glorious moment away from me, Phantom . I finally out-quoted you. . . Since I don't think this scheme of storing the weight of 3rd persons will work, I imagine you and Bob would be able to have a fun time playing anti-gravity tag. Other than that: No effect.

Ahem. Quote:

Thanks for the quote, though it doesn't settle the issue so far as being able to hear goes. The atium mention with Sazed was kind of a special case, as it was already the end of the world and Sazed has already said the word. It is at least weak evidence, though, since you'd think they'd have cautioned him not to say the name or the like.

I don't think they ever say the magic word, actually, just saying "the Trust". I could be wrong on that, though. Also, dare I ask for a quote on the surrounding metal making it harder?

Just for future reference, the best way to quote Theoryland stuff is to to click on the interview link ("Hero of Ages Q&A - TWG", in this case), then find the question again (38), then add "#<number>" (with <number> being 38 in this case) to the url. That'll link directly to that question for the foreseeable future, whereas alterations to what the "hemalurgy" tag links to could mess up your own reference. Final Result: http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=727#38

I would assume they leave their beard-gems out in the storm just like the Alethi leave out spheres. Though Parshedi apparently do stay out in storms to change their forms.

He could hear Vin in the last cache, and it seems the Ministry would be better off communicating verbally--in "metal room" of course--for their missives than writing it on theftable metal otherwise.

Okay then. To summarize: I believe with near-absolute certainty that you are wrong on this point, both in your conclusion and your interpretation of the evidence you claim supports it. I think I've shown rather amply that you are wrong. Given the fact that you do not agree, despite my having explained myself nearly as clearly as I believe I possibly could, I see no further purpose in contesting the issue. Let the record show that Kurkistan thinks Thought's point resoundingly defeated, and that Thought disagrees. You'll have to forgive me if I file the question of "do circumstances matter for Forging?" very firmly into the "No" drawer and leave it at that.

No, we really can't assume this. It's clear that they use big gemstones as big gemstones. Sure they cut them to be faceted and whatnot, but they don't "cut them down to size" so very drastically as to fit into soulcasters. Therefore even fSoulcasters can draw upon the stormlight of "unequipped" gemstones. WoK Ch 15

*Oops, Mistborn Spoilers* a) For shame, Thought. Kandra are people too. They have failings and virtues and complete personalities. There's no need to be rude (to a fictional species. . .) and call them inhuman automatons without free will. b.) I think 1,000+ years is a pretty good record, myself. The end of the world tends to result in an understandable break in the ability to follow proper protocol. c) You're also ignoring the role the Steel Ministry and its Obligators played in all of this: breaking the geodes in metal rooms, transporting the Atium to and fro amongst money shipments, filling the supply caches, and only ever communicating about this by writing on metal and never speaking a word of it aloud. They did this for 1,000+ years. When their foe is an evil god with infinite patience and the ability to see anything that isn't shrouded in metal and to hear everything if he only but knows where to listen. And there are potential spies for that evil god embedded at all times into the very highest levels of their organization. Ruin didn't even know where the supply caches were, let alone their purpose or contents, until our heroes led him to them. That's Lord Rulering impressive on the part of TLR and his Ministry, if I do say so. EDIT: Honestly, I'm not sure why I'm going to these lengths to prove consistency of operations in Mistborn. They key is, people can and will be highly effective on a long-term, institutional level, given the proper stakes, understanding of acceptable and unacceptable failure states, and incentive structure. This is true in both the real world and Brandon's writing. Considering that you don't get fired/executed when you call 911 by accident, that's a rather poor example, Thought. My mother calls 911 when she doesn't want to look up the number for animal control. She probably wouldn't if that would result in ten emergency vehicles instantly descending upon her house to save her from calamity. I don't know where you're getting "abusing the system" from here. Guards gain nothing and lose everything from failing to be properly rigorous in containing Forgers. What exactly are they "abusing" for what reason? Also, I think you're rather underestimating humanity at this point, to put it perhaps a bit too strongly. No blacksmith will ever deliver a soap-chain to a prison. It will not happen. It does not matter that he is "a fool" or that he can "abuse" the system, it just won't happen. A jailer isn't going to ask a prisoner to hold his truncheon while he leans down to tie his shoes. It just won't happen. A jailer holding a Forger won't put on her chains until he's checked every single link: it just won't happen. Obviously someone in the Rose empire knows enough about Forgery to build a 44-stone cell. Frava even has her own pet Forger. Just because conspiratorial high-level bureaucrats don't immediately know Forgeries exact limits doesn't rule out the entire government having access to that knowledge. On top of that, even if all they knew was "everyone knows a cell with lots of different kinds of stone is hard for a Forger to break out of", that's the same level of "common knowledge" they'd have access to in a world where "everyone knows that you just need consistent quality checking on an institutional level for a Forger's bonds".

Like the secret of the Atium cache never getting out? Ah, I see. I don't think you need magic for consistency, though. Familiarity breeds indifference, true, but only to a degree. You might leave a surgical sponge in, but you're still going to sew the wound shut. You might leave typos, but not leave the book in the wrong language. My reply was a simple reaffirmation because you can and will emphasize the importance of doing something right if the stakes are high enough. It is especially important to judge the severity of these various mistakes, and the degree to which they are allowable. I'm not saying that leaving sponges in is exactly praiseworthy, but "it can happen", while leaving someone's heart to bask in the morning sunshine or sewing the patient up with a Snickers inside does not fall under that category of plausibility. Imprisoning a Forger without taking the precautions I've outlined is just missing the point: to put it more strongly, it is just about pointless. TLR's Obligators kept the caches and Atium a secret because that was the bare minimum that they needed to do in order for their work to have any meaning at all. Just so, there is no point to imprisoning a Forger without these precautions, especially for any length of time. That's the kind of thing that sets "did the job well enough to still say 'we did it'" as the baseline, with the fluctuations of variable indifference all ranging far above and never below. Even if this cannot be impressed on chain-checkers on the lower levels, those in authority can certainly recognize and enforce this expectation. Whereas Gaotona is all sanguine and "oh, you can just break out of anywhere we tried to hold you", he could instead of been "oh, you'll be held, if the men who checked the chains value their lives. . ." or something slightly less evil, but equally effective. Or the conspiritors could have taken an afternoon and checked the chains on their one hope of political (if not also physical) survival themselves. -- Really though, despite the fact that I think you could routinely and reliably imprison Forgers with relative ease under such a policy, "familiarity breeds indifference" and its challenges never actually enter the picture in the circumstances we've been talking about. How often do you really imprison a Forger? Once or twice a year? Even that? Let's say they get half a dozen Forgers every year, just for the sake of making it a bit more challenging. Is that really routine? Recall that everyone knows that rigorous checking of every aspect of the Forgers' confinement (including the floors' integrity. . .) is strictly necessary to imprison them. Otherwise it's practically a waste of time. It's not a case of somewhat justifiable indifference because "only 1 in a 1000 chains that we have are actually flawed", it's "I need to triple check that this chain is not flawed, or else it will be by the time the Forger is done with it." You won't get "overworked and underpaid" scenarios because imprisoning a Forger almost never happens, and is a very special occasion when it does. Sure it takes some effort to keep a Forger in, just as making sure you lock the door on a regular prisoner takes effort, but you take at least the minimum precautions necessary to hold someone. You check that you locked the manacles tight on Drunk Joe and you check that the walls are made of solid stone for Forger Jane. It's simply the done thing. EDIT: To sum it up: Just as Shai can say "who would make a chain out of soap?" and have that be enough that she can never Forge that it be so, under your model we can say "who would imprison a Forger without triple-checking everything?" and know that no Forger caught and known as a Forger in the Imperial Palace could ever Forge her constraints such as to be able to escape them.

Suffice it to say that I believe the intended and reasonable reading of that section is one of discounting "romantic" notions in favor of more empirical approaches; and also I would note that nature of explanations to laymen very rarely tends to most accurately reflect the true workings of complex systems in either form or content. Feruchemy is magic and thus necessarily involves unnatural goings on and interactions. Also, who's to say that the transfer of Investiture is at all entropic? If it is not, as I think likely, then no power need be expended to fuel magical transfers in Feruchemy. This flows to counter your claims that Forgery is thus necessarily a "natural" consequence of changing Cognitive aspects. I am curious as to what exactly the driving force of this "river" is for you. The only orienting force that springs naturally to my mind is the flow of time: the effects of events farther in an object's past necessarily impact what happens "downstream" of them, and cannot impact anything "up stream". The flow, then, at least for me, is one through time from event to event, these events shaping what occurs farther downstream. Plausibility, then, is merely asking if this particular river could have flowed some other way if it's course had been affected in certain ways by a certain set of events. Forgeries, then, do not so much battle the "flow" of what the river looks like before the Forgery, as they contest with conceptions about the plausibility of certain interpretations as to how its flow could have been different given a different past. Forging the Emperor, then, is not a matter of fighting the "flow" (a flow from what towards where, I must ask, if not time?) of what people think he looked like as it is ensuring that the events shaping the course of the riverbed you craft fit into his real and plausible past. Shai could have Forged an Ashraven with a radically different personality, had she invented plausible changes in his past. She did not, however, and her specific concerns with matching his "shape" so specifically came from her trying to mimic a known entity, rather than alter it. The strength of the "narrative flow", then, is not just "how things are now"--as we have seen how very drastically those can be changed--but instead the difficulty of plausibly arguing that the course of a river could have changed in certain ways due to certain alterations in its bed. I am deeply confused by your continued misinterpretation of what I mean by all of this. I do not care about some hypothetical Imperial Forger. This is not about the interaction of stamps. This is about establishing the nature of the world in actuality. It is KNOWN that people do not adulterate lead with gold, that chains are not made of soap. No amount of Forgery can contravene these simple truths of the world that Shai lives in, and so she cannot Forge that it be so. If it is similarly KNOWN that the Rose Empire takes near-perfect and reliable precautions at all times against the possibility of error in the physical circumstances of their holding of Forgers, then it will be as impossible for Shai to Forge her chains into having a weak link as it would have been for her to Forge them into soap. This KNOWING can be done with relatively easy real-world action. It is not done in the Rose Empire. Therefore, there is a reason it is not done, given the desire of the Rose Empire to hold Forgers. That reason is most plausibly that it cannot be done. You dismiss my incredulity that the existence of such a method against Forgery would not be exploited by calling it an "appeal to emotion". Perhaps it is. The same emotion I would feel if someone told me that no one ever uses money to bribe people, or that Breaths are always given up willingly in the true sense of the word. Especially in terms of TES and its magic as an authored work--specifically from an author who takes great care to consider the authentic ramifications of his magics--I will still declare that any model of Forgery which demands that our antagonists be so incomprehensibly dense as this is unacceptable. I have thought of this in a matter of hours, as an aside in a relatively low-key debate focusing on other issues. It would be nearly criminal for Brandon's worldbuilding to include this kind of loophole without our intelligent, resourceful, knowledgeable, and competent antagonists having taken advantage of it. Perhaps it's needless to say, but I find this interpretation unpersuasive. Will you, at the very least, acknowledge that your interpretation is unnatural in a naive reading of the text? If the rest of your theory is perfectly sound, and the only plausible explanation 100 scholars can produce in 100 days is the Thought Model, then perhaps we can accept such a. . .twisty explanation. But it is not one that comes naturally to unbiased reader; under your model, Shai's bed is a challenge to be explained in light of prevailing theories, not an illumination of the nature of Forgery. Because Forging takes time and effort and thought and she had a knife? In fact, what plausible history besides "someone cut it with a knife" could you even invent to explain a mattress being in such a state? Also, the impression one (or at least this one) receives from the reading is that it was cut so that it would fit through the pit in the floor after the bed frame collapsed out from under it: not so that it would itself collapse. If the frame had remained intact, so would the mattress, and so the integrity of the bed as a whole (if you even take the mattress and frame to be one object) was not compromised "beyond the breaking point" by Shai's mattress-cutting. She couldn't have escaped given her tools and knowledge, and particularly given her inability to get through the Ralkalest, but it is abundantly clear throughout the narrative that the walls of her cell--Ralkalest aside--could have been Forged by a Forger with the right stamps and information. I can't say I've held captives before, but I do hope I'd be one such as to check to make sure there wasn't a built-in escape hatch in their cell if I did. It seems the sensible thing. Thought, you are now the Rose Emperor: Unlimited resources and manpower are yours to command. I give you the charge of holding an uncooperative Forger--with full access to soulstone, carving tools, and historical information--for a period of no less than a year. Given your unrivaled knowledge of the true nature of Forgery and its magics, will you not know that if you merely quintuple check the means used to hold your Forger as a matter of course, as a matter of policy, then escape will be impossible? Given that knowledge, would you not do so? The Rose Empire does not do so, and so the evidence tells us that they could not. Thus, any model of Forgery which allows them to have done so is simply not accurate.