Kurkistan

Hear hear.

RAFO.

Except Szeth seemed fully aware that either a full KR or someone with access to Regrowth _would_ be able to heal shard wounds. I believe we also have a WoB or two saying his inability is due to the nature of his Blade. EDIT: This WoB is a bit on the fence if you want to argue perception vs. Blade, but I'd say the evidence of the Taravangian interlude pretty much pushes us over into the "Blade" side of the argument.

Hm. Interesting. No real suggestions from this quarter, but feel free to get in touch with me if you end up focusing on something that I've displayed obsession expertise interest in in the past. Also I've historically offered some small "cosmere google" services to those in dire need, and I'd imagine you don't want to slip up due to a lack of WoBs.

To clarify, I am fairly confident in the "we know (or can reasonably extrapolate) most of it, just not the fringes" stance. No common ground there, then. The premise at its most basic so far as I see it is "I can make it so that any object becomes, in and of itself, as it would be if its past had been different." It then expands into nuances of application and effect, but that's the core. I don't really see any problem with that as a concept, or any contradiction in-text. Beyond that... honestly I don't know what new I can say. I suppose I could make an attempt to compress everything down as you ask, but so far as I can tell I've said all I need to say just about as completely as I can say it, either on this thread or on one of the others I linked to. There's not much point in just rehashing it. And so another argument ends with a confused whimper.

Yes, of course. I am trying (and succeeding, I'd say, but here we disagree) to find ways to justify it. I walk in assuming it makes sense on a fundamental level and then building theories as to how it goes about doing so based on that foundation. If these theories are impossible to construct or back-breakingly convoluted then perhaps I will simply throw up my hands and admit defeat, but otherwise I'll assume there's some consistent set of rules that governs Forgery, just as has been the case with all of Brandon's other magics. The definition of plausible is "seeming reasonable or probable". Our issue here is what exactly is making this judgement and what it is judging based upon, which is the question I've been attempting to address. At this point I must simply direct you towards the rather extensive body of thought I've already written on the topic, rather than attempting to rehash it all here. Like it or not this thread is probably at least somewhat accurate as to what judges plausibility. As to the scale on which it's judged I'll simply redirect you to the discussion Thought and I had awhile back. EDIT: Clarified that what the judging is based upon is at question as well. EDIT 2: Aaand you ninja-edited large sections of your post. That gets awkward.

Eh, I've never much been one for the Prime Directive. By all means don't massively disrupt the market and society by dumping every technology under the sun onto them all at once, but a nice well-planned, deliberate, timely uplift seems the moral option, to me.

Ahem. As the sole keeper of oaths, I recall no such provision wherein you were granted any power whatsoever over the decision-making process, or any power of discipline or reprisal if you as a private citizen (who will shortly be eating a hat, if I have my way) judge that someone is being deceptive. -- On a completely unrelated note, the terms of the bet were quite clear: "If people are disappointed when it gets posted, I will eat my hat!" I then hereby declare myself disappointed, then, for reasons of my own which I feel not obligated to share with you. My friend who I was just talking with had a poor day at work the day the transcript was posted: as you failed to specify the target of the disappointment, then I hereby declare that "people"—that is, more than one persons—have been disappointed when the transcript was posted. You may now eat your hat.

You just keep using the same examples as I did on the other thread, don't you? But where I see them as reason to believe that Forgery works in a very specific way, here it seems you see them as reason to believe that Forgery doesn't work in any particular way at all. So the conclusion I draw from this situation is that everything is decided on a much less teleological level than you talk about. The wall does not consider whether it's fulfilling its purpose (containing Forgers) or the desires of its creators. It's simply there, and knows that it's various component parts came from certain locations through certain processes. So if you can convince it that stone 32 could have come from a mile or two to the East of where it actually came from, then you've got your Forgery. The line, so far as I can see it, is that you can argue that a stone wall was made of different types of stone, but not that it was made out of pudding. That a chain was made poorly or with poor materials, but not with soap. I'll note as well that, lack of historical research aside, this is acknowledged in-book as an incredibly difficult Forgery. Telos aside, I can't imagine it's that easy to Forge a wall made of 42 distinct components into being made of 42 differently-sourced components. And if you want to get into the realm of "it's been sitting there for years with no one noticing", look no farther then stamps used to rot doors or beds. The wall sitting there like that is not the only "implausible" Forgery we see (as you've said yourself, the state of Shai's room when she's done with it is pretty "implausible" itself). So I would conclude from that that Forgeries simply don't factor the "would someone have noticed this at some point?" question into their calculations of "plausibility". Well now you have an alternative reason to work with, or at least a more nuanced version of it. I wouldn't say that the individual blocks only care about themselves, though, so much as perhaps the wall cares about the plausibility of its various blocks being different. I think you may be placing the wrong kind of importance on the water damage. Perhaps some re-reading is in order, but my understanding was that the water damage has all and only been used as an explaining factor in causing something to "happen" in the past. "The water damage in the past made a big-huge hole in the floor". Nothing much more nuanced than that kind of thing. It's not like it's used to say "and then no one noticed the whole because they were driven away by the smell of mildew". In fact, I can't recall a Forgery that needed this "maintenance" (term from the old thread) built into it, that had this need to explain how people didn't notice/correct something over the course of time when an object would have been altered if its past was different. I also don't find that much absurdity in this "the wall is one thing, but each block has an independent context" paradigm. I'm not so sure if it's how it works, but I see no problem just now with the idea of the wall as a singular entity having memory/concern for the source of its component parts. To reiterate, I think you're jumping the gun a bit here; you seem to be approaching this from the angle of "Forgery has fluid and inconsistent rules, and here's the examples..." where I'd prefer to give Brandon the benefit of the doubt and try to interpret how the system as we see it must behave in order for it to be consistent.

Ah, Thanks. So that "or" there tells us that's the only way muggles can worldhop on their own, I suppose.

Hm. Some nice stuff. Thoughts: -Some more info on healing interesting, "align with your spirit, and partially through the filter of how you view yourself" is interesting. We've gotten pretty definitive "it's Cogntive" stuff before, so perhaps here Brandon is emphasizing the Spiritual as a limiting factor? -Miles being influenced is interesting. -Forgery as the most Spiritual was a good question, and I'm pleased with the answer for wholly selfish "now I don't have to change my theories" reasons. -Feruchemical duralumin worldhopping connection _very_ interesting. I sense shenanigans in Hoid's future/past/present. -Is "perpendicularity" a reference to something, or did Brandon just drop a major new cosmere concept/term? -So "Harmonium" is a thing; no other real metals left. --So does this nail down Harmonium as the missing Allomantic ability for FTL? (http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/7503-final-confirmation-on-mistborn-ftl-nowhere-close/#entry124103) -TLR took (but didn't use, we know) a bead of Lerasium. Feruchemy? - P.S. Did anyone else notice Brandon slipping there with that last answer? If only we'd gotten this earlier, then the two AoL books in the pipeline might not be such a surprise.

Hm, looks like I forgot a level of removal for the floor damage. It was water damage that did it, but only indirectly. So in fact she Forged the floor such that it was as if the ceiling above it had collapsed due to water damage, with the falling ceiling happening to punch a hole in that particular area. P.S. Though there might be a typo (not my fault, the book's) lurking in their with the switch between the ceiling and the floor being what falls in. If it is a typo, then the meaning is ambiguous and we're either supposed to think that it was the supports below the now-holed floor that rotted away or we're supposed to think that it was the supports above it that indirectly caused the damage with their collapse. Either way it seems a fairly solidly "Forge the whole floor" situation.

@Calad Maaaaaybe you might be able to get away with saying that what constitutes a whole object in Forging rests on the Forger, but I doubt it. When Shai's talks about why she has to Forge the wall as a whole, she talks about how how at first it was just a collection of stones, but then as people began to perceive it as a wall it got to the point where it couldn't be treated as just a collection of objects. It's at that point where the whole thing needs to be Forged. So maybe if everyone started thinking of the wall as primarily a part of the palace it would need to be Forged as such, but as it is it seems to be perceived primarily as a wall. Myself, I'd wager that objects all have a basic "this is what I'm part of at the most basic level" setting: the stones of the wall think they're part of the wall first and foremost, then secondarily (through the wall) part of the palace... while the wall thinks of itself as a wall first and foremost, then only secondarily as part of the larger building. Like how a person will perceive himself as himself first and foremost, and only secondarily as part of some larger group. P.S. Fear is good. ( ) @Outis Alternate (and true, so far as my reading of the book goes) interpretation: She Forged the entire floor such that one patch of it had rotted through from water damage, just like she'd been hoping to Forge the entire wall such that part of it would be weak enough for her to get through it. -I say "picked up and moved as a whole" in a somewhat misleading fashion, I suppose, as I don't meant that it needs to be practicable (or even possible, if an object is structurally dependent on some containing environment) to actually move it around. Just that it's seen as a whole; perhaps a good metric would be whether you'd expect the whole thing to be affected by a single instinctual soulcasting. And nobody (except maybe Calad when he misread what I said) is claiming that you'd Forge just the one arm. So far as I know, you'd Forge yourself such that you didn't have the arm.

That's a "no" on the limb being treated as separate from the body, so far as I can tell. Regarding the chair's identity in relation to the palace, recall that per WoR the chair's identity is in fact just one small part of the palace's identity. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and "this is a distinct thing that can be picked up and moved as a whole without becoming other than itself" seems a pretty good place to do it. Recall also that much of this is in context of Forging. Perhaps the desk does place some importance on its surroundings--though I myself doubt it's that important--but how Forging treats it seems fairly cut and dry to me.

Regarding the WoB: Yeah, sorry, perhaps I should have expanded on that a bit. As I said: "-Note: The tone of the answer is not ambiguous as to the "yes-ness" of this Forging being easy." This is one of those times where "humans talks stup" rears it's ugly head. If you follow the "sourcing" down the rabbit hole, you'll find a Google Doc with a link to the sound and a transcript. On that transcript by the Forgery-related quote I noted "I'd just like to note that this was in a definite "no, it would be easy for her to do it" tone, not ambiguous as this could be read. Hurrah for speech!" You can either take my word for it or listen yourself at ~9:30 in the first link. -- So far as the "non-PS" points go, I had thought I was making it clear that they were in large part my own argumentation/speculation; an alternative to "Nothing. Makes. Sense!!!", at the very least.

RE: Who decides plausibility Sorry, Caladcholg, but we have fairly good reason to believe that "plausibility" is decided on a much larger scale than the individual. Myself I'd guess at least at the level of local populations, if not entire nations, or wolds, or the cosmere at large. RE: Implausibility of Shai's room being so nice and associated worries Couldn't agree more that something smells off with that if you're using a large enough scope to define "plausibility." In point of fact, Thought and I had one of our old-fashioned slug-fests over the issue of what "scale" plausibility was decided at awhile back; I used that example as an argument for why we ought to conclude that plausibility is evaluated only on the very very narrow level of the object, not in its broader circumstances. So by my understanding/argument the only thing the desk cares about is the plausibility that it could have been taken care of over the years, not the plausibility that it could have been taken care of over the years and then in that state have been stored in/moved to a dank now-cell. P.S. I'll note that the inciting example for our discussion was the idea of whether a Forger who'd nearly lost a limb would be able to Forge it off—temporarily—with relative ease. Context would argue towards it being hard, non-context it being easy (unless I'm misremembering the details of how the discussion went—what, you think I have time to re-read all of that?! ). And it turns out it would be relatively easy.

Maybe. My own theories actually rely on the bubbles getting bigger, though: I'm not sure how just making them an order or two of magnitude faster would help out.

Also, a super-fast Bendalloy bubble doesn't seem that useful anyway: "Huzzah! I have used all my metal such that I passed 0.1 seconds while those outside only experienced 0.0001!!!"

I agree, though we have some hints that increasing the size isn't out of the question.

I'll agree with Outis on this. While I take some small issue with Dent's tone—probably not enough that I'd bother to call it out, but we all have different thresholds—his topic of discussion wasn't offensively tangential.

Bump? Sorry if this is already on the docket, but I just want to be sure this is caught. There's a decent amount of good info from Philly that's largely inaccessible at the moment unless you know exactly where to look, all with the impression from Theoryland that it doesn't exist.

The Final Empire was not on/near the geographical north pole of Scadrial.

Amusingly enough, I misread Zas's (mis-, at it turns out) transcription and thought he said Brandon said WoR. The Iriali Long Trail is mentioned in an interlude of WoR, with the cobbler who Nale goes all Nale on; and we know it's "related to the cosmere", with the various Lands being "in the cosmere".

Nice coming back gift, Zas. Some cool stuff; a fair amount that's more confirmatory than revelatory. The "walking for space travel" theory has been around for awhile, Baxil's mistress is nice to nail down with WoB... The question about Shai seems to nail down that Forging likely can't mimic things that actually require their own Investiture (so no creating Awakened objects of the like) all on its own. @Dent "The Mistress" is also known as "Baxil's Mistress", and is what some call the woman who smashes up/defaces art in the interlude in WoK. So far as the mass exodus goes, that seems to be pointing to the Iriali and their Long Path (not sure if I'm remembering nouns/spellings right).

Well that just earned you an upvote.