Kurkistan

As an aside, I agree that TES is perfect for sucking people into introducing others to Brandon's work, because it's both an excellent work in its own right and it's short enough to be a single-sit-down read, so it's not too big or unreasonable a demand suggestion.

Okay, I agree history is the most important consideration, just wanted to make sure you agreed about the "end result" side of things. You didn't pick up on Brandon's offer of a free eBook? I think it's still on the table, if you want to email your receipt to [email protected]. It's very convenient for theorizing and whatnot on the fly. As for your second paragraph, that all seems to be talking about "plausiblity checks" of whether/how long a stamp will take. Those are the things I generally kick up to Forms. I can explain it more if you want me to, or you could read the other thread's OP and post any thoughts you have in this thread (to keep the discussion in one place).

You're right that something being RAFO'd once doesn't mean it wasn't answered later, I was feeling dramatic Though, in this case, it being RAFO'd is suggestive because no new releases or information pertaining to that question has come out since that question was asked. Therefore, if Brandon is on his toes about what he is and isn't RAFO'ing, a RAFO in the past is a sign that the answer is less likely to be found, if you're deciding between a verdict of "I could have sworn" and "I guess I was mistaken" and/or debating whether to commit to an archive-trawl.

^Yes on the first part, I don't think so on the second. I hesitate to refer even my worst enemy to the pretzel-brained presentation of my original thread, but I actually posit a bit of a dual effect from Forgery: you fundamentally want to say "this is what you are like now" and then, quite distinctly, you also say "and here is what your past was like such that you look like that". The "what you look like now" part is relatively important, since otherwise you both 1) Put a bit too much work on the shoulders of the object/magic system permutating out the consequences of its changed history and 2) Leave far too much up to chance on the final form of your Forgery. We also have textual evidence that two-fold system is how it works. Shai gives the Emperor's stamp anger when his brother is insulted (a bit too much, the first time) and his favorite color, both based on the historical fact of his brother's death. The fact (and similarly facts backed up by Forms) serves to check the "plausibility" of the desired outcome.

Though we do occasionally have phantom-facts floating around. I was recently horrified to find that the "fact" that "shardblades are stored in the Spiritual Realm" is not only completely unconfirmed, but RAFO'd on top of it (though I do find it to be highly likely, myself).

Basically, I think. I have been scolded for being to computer-sciency in the past, so I've tried to stay away from such analogies myself.

^Sadly, I don't think there's any Quantum Leap action going on, what with that whole Dawnchant thing at the end. As for how the "NPC's" in Dalinar's visions are more interactive than Honor, I have a few thoughts. This is just me spitballing, but it may (possibly) be the case that Honor is pulling some relatively necromantic shenanigans in the visions. He could, theoretically, have copied the souls and environments of certain people at certain times and bundled them all into his journal. His speaking out of their mouths, then, is a case of aborting the simulation and spitting out a canned message. As for why he couldn't have been more interactive as himself in the first/last vision, maybe there's some restriction on him accessing/copying his own soul, or some such. Once again, this is all just wild speculation that I came up with while composing this response. @hoser Yes, it's technically possible that Tanavast's avatars interact occasionally, but I find it highly unlikely from a purely "bookly" perspective. "God is dead and I've thought he was talking to me this whole time" is a very big, very important--downright thematic, even--revelation that caps off an entire book's worth of doubts. I don't think we're going to get much equivocation on that, especially because we just got confident!Dalinar back, and we don't want to see him being fundamentally wrong again about what his visions are.

Yeah, Shardblades being stored in the Spiritual Realm is odd. That one's been floating around as a near-fact since forever, but the quote that Phantom pulled was the only one I could find on the topic.

Ah, thanks Windy. I had not recalled that quote.

Thanks, I recall that one as well. I swear that I saw one about Health, though.

No, I don't mean compounding. The example I recall is that burning Allomantic Pewter means that you have more Health to store in Feruchemical Gold. I have no real doubt that Tin can be modulated, at least with skill. Many of the other metals, including Tin's complement, Pewter, can be.

You can store the "extra" attributes you get from burning an Allomantic metal, though I can't find the quote for the life of me. Sorry. "Doubling up" seems to improve both power and discernment for Allomancy. Zane was probably more powerful due to his spike, and also had greater precision in his pushes. Vin was able to read pulses easily as well as pierce copperclouds. For Tin, then, I would guess that it would both increase the degree to which a tineye could boost his senses and the ease with which he controlled that degree; so a normal tineye might have some trouble controlling their burn rate, only really able to go from not burning to burning to flaring, while a more skilled and/or powerful tineye could go stop at more places between. Say boosting your senses by 10% so you can hear what's going on in the next room without being blinded by a bright light.

They both grow over the course of the their stories. Nynaeve in particular chills out quite a bit.

You're missing the point, Kroen. If there were any half-noble skaa in Elend's army, they would be the exception and the mists would be incidental to them being mistborn. Also, I think it likely that the mists might actually intentionally "miss" those with innate Allomantic potential: we know that no nobles were snagged by them, despite the fact that the majority of nobles aren't actually Allomancers. This is either because they had already "snapped" (albeit unsuccessfully) or because their Allomantic potential (while unexpressed) was too high in the first place. Since, if you recall, skaa mistings tend to snap by accident during the course of their lives, what are the odds that more than 1/16 of them had never suffered enough to snap before? The pattern is universal, so even a small group of just 16 in which no one fell prey to the mists snapped would have been noteworthy. Because of that, I'm inclined to think that those with sufficient Allomantic potential aren't even touched by the mists. Alternatively, it could be that the mists will take those with higher Allomantic potential, but give preference to others first. Either way, you won't be getting many mistborn from the mist-snapping.

I haven't read in awhile, so I maybe wrong but, IIRC, the mist-snapping didn't reveal mistings, it created them. The people the mists snapped had essentially no Allomantic potential before the mists imbued them with some extra power. Mistborn are orders of magnitude more powerful than mistings, so I imagine the mists just weren't set up to create them.

I didn't necessarily mean "justified" in the "definitely true" sense, but more so that their similarity is due to one influencing the other or both being descended from the same source, in-world, instead of just Brandon running out of ideas. Looking at my post, I phrased myself very poorly.

I could have sworn that I've seen this theory before, but I can't find it, so congrats for that. There is a similar similarity between religions in Warbreaker and the Mistborn trilogy, prompting Brandon to reply that he both copies over religions when he feels like it and that there are "shadows" of ideas that transcend individual worlds. So Treligism/Purelaker religion might share have such a Realmatically-justified position relationship. http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=590#52

Sorry if I jumped down your throat there, I'm a stickler for vocab. As far as this being a Warbreaker topic, it's an exceptionally old and dead Warbreaker topic that went off course even before it was unnaturally revived, so don't see a problem with a little derailment. You're actually basically right here, so far as I know, but using really really misleading terminology that makes you sound wrong. The energy of the Shards isn't destroyed or created either, so far as I know. The Well refills every 1024 years, Preservation's power returns to him after fueling Allomancy, stuff like that. I can't think of a quote to back this up, but it's my impression that the general belief around here is that the "Power of Creation" Shards hold and distribute can only be dispersed, not destroyed. So there's no need to make that particular distinction between inherent and transitory Investiture. So far as there being a difference between raw Investiture and "spark"-style Investiture, I agree. Brandon calls it "innate Investiture," as I mentioned in an earlier post. The ideas here are interesting, what with attunement and all. All that aside, though, you might want to be careful with your terminology in the future. Investiture has some very specific meanings (though we're still figuring out exactly what they are...), so deciding to start calling the method by which you access Investiture "Investiture" is not very conducive to clear discussion.

That's a fair point, Morsk. I suppose I got caught up in my "no"s. At the very least, though, even if we say magic on Roshar is fundamentally filtered through spren-like effects, it's not purely through "Spren bonds", unless Szeth has a captured spren in his shardblade and you want to make the "bond" relation transitive from spren->blade->Szeth. As far as "what someone has done", I think either interpretation still leaves you with a more nuanced and open explanation of how you get magic on Roshar than just saying "spren".

What exactly is your point, Leuthie? That we only know about spren, so they're the only gateway to power worth mentioning? The "only sources we're sure of" are spren and whatever Szeth has. That kind of immediately invalidates your statement that "[all] Investiture on Roshar is through spren bonds" (the "all" was implicit). If you didn't mean to imply that only spren gave you access to Investiture, then I would suggest that you be somewhat more clear in the future. And now your new statment is also highly doubtful. You've managed to identify two distinct "sources" of Investiture that are not at all akin to stormlight, or even to each other. It's abundantly clear that stormlight is a power source in and of itself, while metals only code for power from other sources and Breaths are clearly doing the heavy lifting with Awakening. Color plays a role, but it's most certainly not a "fuel." Either way, both of those instances are distinct from being "fuel" in the sense of fueling magical happenings through energy wholly contained within themselves. Or do you mean something else by "source of Investiture"? Isomere kind of muddied the water by calling the "spark" of sentience Investiture, but most people (myself included) use it as a catch-all term for "magical power." Specifically, active (or at least potentially active) magical power. Brandon talks about "innate Investiture" sometimes when talking about Allomantic potential and stuff, and I'd probably label something like a spren-bond as "psuedo-innate" if I had the choice, since it's still relatively passive. I think it likely that stormlight is pretty much raw power--raw Investiture--with certain restrictions on how it can be accessed. Spren and fabrials and whatever Szeth is doing seem to enable that access, but that doesn't change the fact that the power itself is within the stormlight. Essentially, I think it's contradictory to say that stormlight is fuel and thus is not a source of Investiture. If you were to say it was a catalyst, like the metals, then I would understand, but not a fuel.

@Isomere No. If Breaths were the same thing as the "spark" of Preservation that makes Scadrians sentient, then Drabs would be stupid, not just "drab." @Leuthie Also no. Szeth doesn't have a spren. Magic on Roshar is a consequence of actions whose consequences are not limited to bonds with spren. Incidentally, I think that's the quote you saw on Theoryland, Senor.

So you're essentially saying a still-super bullet hits a "wall" of slow moving air for some period of time? As far as inward-bound bullets being a threat goes, there are multiple possible explanations for this. 1) As you say, time bubbles don't mess with stuff going into them. This is marginally supported by Wayne being able to dodge bullets and by Wax's fear that Marasi would be shot if any of Miles' henchmen were outside the bubble to notice its effects. 2) As a tweak to the above, bubble's only don't mess with stuff going from slow-time to fast-time, so from outside to inside for Bendalloy and the opposite for Cadmium. This takes away the Marasi evidence supporting 1, though. 3) Refraction can happen both ways, but you're still in a lot more danger within the bubble because the bullet doesn't travel far enough for a small change in angle to have much effect. I'm going with 3 here, though 2 would still be a case that doesn't provide evidence against timey-wimey effects on bullets going from fast- to slow-time. In the case where we saw with Wayne dodging a bullet, recall that his speed bubbles are only a few strides across at most. Even if a bullet is deflected by several degrees, it's still going to hit in approximately the same area as it was before it was deflected. I would hazard that the problem with shooting out of a speed bubble isn't that the bullets go careening off at 50 degree angles, but that accurate shots are impossible at any real range. Wax's bullet is still going generally the right direction, when all's said and done. As far as shooting a Pulser goes, I'm just going to appeal to quantity over quality here. You have an essentially still target and a large number of bullets: have at it, and you'll hit them fairly soon. The key point here is that, in the context of a firefight, Wax is entirely defined in his roll as a combatant within that fight. Whether or not he has a full grasp of the conceptual knowledge necessary to predict a projectile's movement as it leaves a time bubble, he does not have the time to employ that knowledge during the course of any sequence of events in which it would be useful. All I'm trying to say here is that his use of the word "random" is entirely fair given the context in which he says it, independent of whether the changes to trajectory time bubble's cause are truly random.

That's not the case because it regains its "normal" speed when it exits the time bubble. Word of Peter and clear implication from the book on this. Once again, even if projectile-deflection from bubbles is law-like, and even if Scadrians are aware of this, and even if they have worked out exactly what these laws are and how they apply, it could still be the case that, for all intents and purposes, a man with a gun in the middle of a firefight is just going to go ahead and call it "random."

First of all, I don't think "deus ex machina" is really the right term here. Even if Brandon did institute the rule for purely convenient reasons or, beyond that, it somehow violates Realmatics, that doesn't really qualify as a deus ex machina. At worst, it's a contrivance. Second, the "randomness" could come down to a variety of factors. It may well be a case of predictable refraction, but it all amounts to the same thing when you're trying to shoot someone with a gun, so "random" will cover it so far as Wax's thought processes go. The "refraction" might also depend on a number of highly changeable factors: the "compression factor" of the bubble, the speed of the bullet, some cosmic flux going on in the background, etc. In the end, the deflection probably is law-like, but not predictable in any useful sense.

1:04:00 "Another random fact that Windy hates..."