Kurkistan

I would hazard that the Dor is primarily in the Spiritual, with links to the Cognitive. So it can only go as far in the Cognitive as it as connections from the Spiritual, which connections are limited to Sel.

Chrome, Windows 8 64 bit. Have fun with it.

New error! Yeah! Sometimes, when I edit an existing posit (in the thread view after clicking "Edit", not using the full editor), I click "Save Changes", the little "stuff is happening" box pops up, and then it goes away and nothing happens. I'm still looking at the text-editor. If I refresh the page, my post has changed appropriately, but it doesn't show up to me until I refresh. This happens even if I hit "Save Changes" multiple times. This is not a constant bug, but has happened two or three times by now.

^Hence "stunning mental mediocrity." *Pulls out shiny new eBook from the recent deal* Ch 29, Shallan viewpoint:

@Phaontom Nice. I didn't recall that quote, though it's ringing a bell now that I see it.

^I'm of the fairly firm opinion that they are not Splinters, per se, but still manifestations of Honor's power. http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/1999-writing-for-charity-interview/ So they are "attuned" with Honor's power, and can access it easily.

@Chaos Thanks for the blueness, it's a nice relief. I have dutifully de-changed my signature, and it is much less harsh now. I'm on iOS 6.1 (too lazy to re-jailbreak), so that might be the problem. Still not working on Safari as of 2 minutes ago. EDIT: The "Reputation" tab started working again. I'm not sure if I like the change. It gives you less information and takes more space to do it. You can't really tell if a single post has been both up-voted and down-voted, for one, and it no longer tells you when the voting occurred. I found this level of detail useful when checking whether a spike or drop in someone's Rep is due to a Rep-war (like in my Should Quotes be Attributed thread) or a vindictive/beneficent person going on a spree (also like in my thread, actually). This all sounds a bit narcissistic, but I've also used it to check if "counter voting" was called for, in borderline cases. EDIT 2: I just hit "Use Full Editor" in the middle of writing the first edit, and it killed all my next-lines, turning it into a single block. Then it deleted everything when I tried to modify it. I hit CTRL+Z and got everything back (though still not with lines), but still...

I necro'd the Hoid Wrote the Letter thread to update it on this. Because I can Also, Nepene needs to post here so that we can all give him some nice Rep.

NECRO! Brandon's been answering questions on Redditt again, and Nepene fished this gem out of him: So that's settled. Hoid wrote the letter.

Because what Health heals you back towards is determined entirely by your Cognitive aspect. So your conception of your own "normal" state of health, along with those of others, determines what you heal towards. It's not so much "pump up cellular regeneration" as "put this body back the way it should be." This is why Miles can grow half his body back and Wayne can grow back fingers. This idea of your body's normal state of health allows for the necessity of ageing, it seems, since aging is not contrary to these conceptions of health, per se. I have a thread on it here, if you would like to peruse. I also have some deeper thoughts on the mechanics of why exactly Miles must age here.

You've got some freaky html (?) going on there. I'm seeing break-line and emphasis tags. I just tried it on my iPhone 5: Full Version button worked on Chrome, but not on Safari.

^Thanks for the reply. I'll give these "tags" a while before I take them as my enemy, if you insist. I meant to mention it, but I agree with Meg. The warning points counter is a bit disturbing. In the worst case, I can see new members saying "so that's [Ooooh, I only had to hit CTRL+i!] how it's going to be" when they see it after they post the first few times. More realistically, it's just a bit creepy and unnecessary. Also, fun fact on the italics: Firefox, at least, had that functionality back before the changeover.

^I assume he's referring to the clickable sections on his profile (and mine). The one that shows you where you've been up/down repped.

The only problem is that we've lost the functionality to insert tags easily. I hit that light switch, I now have to manually type in the tags for bold, italics, quotes, etc., instead of being able to highlight and click like in the past. If you just want to be sure that copy-pasting isn't messed up, you can go to the far-right option on the top bar (Options, when you mouseover it) and check the "Paste as plain text by default" box.

Yeah, something is profoundly wrong with resizing the text-entry box. It hasn't deleted my stuff after that first time, but every time I try to resize, it highlights the whole box and I magically scroll higher up the screen and ugh. Also, I really like the way that you can split up quotes by just hitting Enter twice. Makes my life a lot easier during my patented quote-splitting when replying to theorizing threads. Kudos. And now another negative, so you don't get big heads . The "Up Rep" and "Down Rep" arrows are a bit obtrusive in this version. They were nice little tucked-away, relatively darkish icons back in the good old days. Now they're a bit too big and vibrant, as well as a bit more spread out on the page than they really need to be. Used to be that you could tell at a glance if anyone had been up- or down-voted, since the color would stand out at the bottom of their post, but now every post has that attention-grabbing splash of color.

@Phantom Try to look at it another way, then. For every 8 hours of sleep you get, you get 16 hours of wakefulness, as you said. When you fill a Bronzemind, then, you are storing some of those 16 hours. So if you spend 8 hours asleep, 8 hours storing Wakefulness, and 8 hours living your life each day, it would be because you "used up" 8 hours by storing them. It really has to work this way because of how Feruchemy works: you can't store "futures", you can only store what you have. So you can't decide on Monday to store a tenth of your health for the rest of the week, and then spend the weak irrevocably unhealthy: you have to actively be storing that health at every moment of the following week. When you store Wakefulness, then, you aren't sleeping and storing the future benefits of that sleep, you're giving up X hours of "awake time" that you already earned through sleep the previous night. You ask why it has to be 1:1: why can't you just wake up, store an entire day's worth of Wakefulness in 1 minute, then sleep for another 8 hours? In that case, we have to look to how the "100% storage rule" applies to Wakefulness. It seems that the lowest you can go is 0% awake, i.e. asleep. You can do anything between 100 and 0%, like being a bit drowsy, but, moment to moment, you only have 1 "unit of wakefulness" available to store.

^Yeah, besides that. The point is that it doesn't strain him to store Weight.

Well, I had a few initial thoughts, but then they got deleted when I resized the "quick reply" box. That might be an issue. Quick re-write, then: Thanks for going through the time to implement all this. Upgrades can be quite...irksome. Though I do want my awards back! I like the blue hyperlinks, though I'll need to finagle my signature a bit, since they're a bit obnoxious down there. Can't say I like the fact that avatars show up everywhere. A bit obtrusive. The title of OP's, at the very least, oughtn't to have them, I don't think. Or maybe I just need time to adjust. I just got a "someone new has posted" alert while I was typing up (version 1.0) of this post, so that's nice. I have to say I miss the light-blue "dead space" between posts (where "Promote to Article" and member names/post numbers were). It may have been a bit wasteful, but it made the page a bit less intimidating and gave some relief, instead of threads just being walls of white. -On that note, the forum as a whole seems a bit desaturated. I liked the green look for quotes (though not the pink one for double-quotes) Wow, this all comes off as a bit negative. Sorry. Criticisms are the things that pop to mind, while all the improvements you implemented kind of sink (very ungratefully) into your brain as "well that was useful, why didn't they do that earlier?" Keep up the good work! EDIT: Oh, forgot. I don't think we really need a "Popular Tags" sidebar in the Forums section. Just seems a bit superfluous, and clutters things up. And the "Recent Blog Entries" section could serve to hold a post or two less at a time.

^Conscious effort isn't a problem, I don't think. It's probably more like something you just do. Like how you brace against the weight when you're carrying something: sure, you need to do it "conscously", but it doesn't exactly require constant mental attention. Wax walked around storing Weight every second of his life, essentially.

Good-o! Just wanted to make sure they didn't think we were poised to throw bags of money at them.

^I theorized either that Honor messed with his spiritweb's connection to the Blade or that Adolin was of the habit of kicking the deathbeam out of the crazy person's hand as it formed. Presumably, he wouldn't have mentioned this disturbing fact to his already disturbed father. Alternatively, it could be that the way Dalinar's consciousness is messed with messes with the Physical/Cognitive cues that normally summon a Shardblade, or some other reason. EDIT (reply to edit): It may be that simple, actually. Or maybe it's that Dalinar's connection to his body is only one-way at that point: he doesn't feel himself hitting up against the ropes, so he can't feel his heartbeats. If it's no that simple, it may have something to do with what "body" he's in the in the visions. Question of the day: would a Feruchemist be able to tap his metalmind, or an Allomancer burn a metal, while experiencing one of these visions?

We discussed it here, if you want to peruse. Dalinar actually never succeeds in summoning a Shardblade in his visions: it simply doesn't come when he tries to summon it.

@Chaos Now that you say it, I get your motivations for keeping TES and Elantris together. The magic systems are related, and that gives some ground for discussion. The reason I said they should be split is because that's the only thing that relates them (besides Easter eggs, essentially). And even that only tangentially. Should Dragonsteel The Liar of Partinel share a board with the Stormlight Archive when it comes out? They'll both have Lightweaving. What about the Silence Divine? Same star system, and the same Shards (I think). I can understand the specific rationale for mashing together those two books in particular, but it isn't a clear-cut road we're treading on. I'm not saying that you would mash those other series together, but your reasons to do so for Elantris/TES and not do so for the others are rather thin. Imagine a more clear scenario: Say that Brandon suddenly became very very lazy, and so decided to make Allomancy and Feruchemy (now called Alloymancy and Ironchemy) the magics in his next YA series, Mythborn. There's no Realmatic-justification for it; Brandon even says outright that it's not a Cosmere book. But he also says that Alloymancy and Ironchemy work in the same way as Allomancy and Feruchemy. So we have grounds for magic discussion, and may even discover some very interesting things about the Cosmere because of Mythborn. Should those two be on the same board? No, I don't think they should. We have two fundamentally different series with different characters, different lore, and different stories set on essentially different worlds that happen to share some Cosmere-relevant magical similarities. The problem is complicated by focuses of discussion. If this weren't a theory-based forum, then TES and Elantris would have exactly nothing in common worth talking about. As with Mythborn, we'd have different characters, different scales, and different challenges and goals (yes, I do like the word "different"). The only thing connecting them would be the author. The boards would have some discussions about characters and story arcs, a frightening amount of romance discussion, and other such stuff, all different between the two books (except the romance stuff, probably, but that really can't be helped ). As my final verdict (because I am totally a judge), I can agree with TES sharing a board with Elantris because of the unique circumstances surrounding these two books (Elantris' loneliness and TES's length) and the specific character of our forum. Elantris needed some love and most of our interesting discussion was inevitably going to come out of comparing the two, specifically their magic systems. But, as a general rule, I don't think we should be afraid of "orphaning" works which are technically connected to existing series. An "Other Cosmere" section would be a good home for them. Looking back, I don't think we necessarily disagree much, and this isn't meant to be a "you are WRONG, Chaos!" post. I just want to get my thoughts on this out there. I agree with your reasons for the current setup of the forums. --- I agree, as a general rule, on the evils of an overabundance of sub-fora. I guess I got a bit carried away there . I hereby grant you my leave to leave the "Other Stuff" section the way it is. I do stand by my suggestion suggest that we add some indication of its non-Cosmereical nature, though. Maybe just throw something into the description. EDIT: Not to toot my own horn here, but I have some small experience with that sort of stuff (better version here, though with ads), if you want advice/help. The most important things, off the top of my head, is to impress the need for people to come to you, as well as encourage people to post guides, no matter how large or small, whenever they feel they can explain something well.

^Yes, it is. My understanding is that that table has the modern feruchemical alphabet, which started with the same original symbols as those in HoA, but diverged from that point on.

@Aaradel No need to stalk me, Aaradel *slowly reaches for phone to call police*, why don't we just sit and talk for a bit... *nervous laugh* I think I might like where you're going with this, but I'll wait for you to flesh out Ideals and wrap up their interaction with Intents--and/or how this impacts the Cosmere as a whole--first. Aggregates are a bit messy mechanically, but I don't think their insupportable. I suppose this is simply another conceptual roadblock so far as our dialogue goes. As for Shai's poetry, that quote is from a section where she's pretty straight-forward; she romanticizes the window "wanting to be beautiful" in her head a bit just before that, but then immediately chides herself for it ("Or maybe she was just being romantic again") and only says more nuts-n-bolts stuff to Gaotona. She could be exaggerating, or I could be misreading, but I think Shai is saying pretty much how she thinks it works, pretty much as was taught by her when she first learned Forgery. Huh. Physics. Thing is, everything might be composed of swirly loops of stuff fundamentally, but the basic unit of magical interaction in the Cosmere seems to be most usually "objects" as whole objects. Awakening, Soulcasting (usually), Basic Lashings, unskilled Iron/Steel Allomancy, etc. When a Seon forms a Spiritual Connection with you, or you form a connection with someone's soul, it's connecting with you, not some aggregate of your parts. So maybe everything is loopy pathways at the bottom of it, but connections seem to require some particularly concrete and whole set loopy pathways at each end. Yeah, I imagine a lot of Spren questions will have been settled by this time next year. The question with Ale and whatnot is how those pathways existed to be able to be raw-powerfied in the first place. A popular conception of drunkenness just doesn't seem to have anywhere to hang around. Okay, I guess I get it now.