Kurkistan

New note: Looks like I haven't actually dropped my running list of questions onto this thread yet. Oops. Here goes (a few may be repeats of existing questions, sorry if that's the case):

@Hoodie/Weiry On top of that the question of sign language isn't an obvious one on the face of the problem, so it really is necessary to ask Brandon something that directly incorporates the deaf/mute/sign-language element.

No such WoB exists that I know of. That's an excellent question. I suspect you could use sign language if it was your native language, but that's just me.

There's no reason as of yet for us to think that the two types of Blades cause different types of wounds. I don't recall any such WoB. We had from Szeth in WoK's prologue that he couldn't use Stormlight to heal from a Shadblade cut, but apparently that's just because Szeth is all fake and whatnot, if we look at Syl's comments and the Taravangian interlude. EDIT: Also, Brandon does not make a point of distinguishing between the two: "honorblades are shardblades"

Another Glimpse of Feather: "I renounce the Shallarin ship."

When you post the website, don't post a browser-parseable url or Google might see us as linking to nasty sites (if there is indeed a problem with the other site). EDIT: I think. Feel free to slap me down if I'm talking nonsense, Eerongal.

Do some reading on the Interwebs so that you know what's what, but what you're going to want to do is access the Boot Menu (/BIOS) and try to select your Recovery Partition (if it exists) to boot from. Failing that, just get a fresh install of any operating system and that'll also do the trick.

@ccstat That's a fair reading.

@Joe No, I don't think. Besides Nin quite explicitly saying that Syl severed all of Szeth's Physical and Spiritual ties, Shardblades damaging the Cognitive would mean that healing wouldn't have its usual template to work off of to heal you back. Besides Brandon's said the reason that Feruchemical gold can heal Shardblade wounds is because it heals the soul—which, most of the time (and particularly in the context of Shardblades) is referring to Spiritual aspects. More so because the question at hand was asking about the definitely-Spirit-webby Hemalurgy as its example. @OP Well if it reassures you at all, knowing that spren like Syl are Splinters means that they're composed of a blend of Cognitive and Spiritual (with some Physical thrown in for flavor). Just because they live in the Cognitive doesn't mean that they don't have any Spiritual oomph.

I'll agree on "we now must wait". Still, it was good to explore the idea a bit and have it down on "paper" so that we (or at least one of us, hopefully) can gloat a few years down the line.

Would you mind citing the WoB on Shards developing into sentience if left alone? This WoB would suggest otherwise. Source: I stole your questions to ask at his Tucson signing. First I have to say thanks, your questions got me two cards. A Szeth card with a code and a RAFO card. First question, his answer was that it is possible for shards to travel between planets without a Holder, but extremely unlikely. Without a holder (he called it an intelligence), the shard would have no impetus to travel between worlds because they're just there. Second question I changed slightly and just asked him "How many shards are there that don't have holders?" That's the one he RAFO'd

A bit of a necro, but one I approve of because it directly answers at least some of the questions at hand and anyone following this thread from the good old days will certainly appreciate the answer.

I shall not allow you to make "Aracanum" a thing, Outis. The beehive idea is interesting, and I could see a magic system that works in that way, but I'm not leaning towards it for this case. The question, really, is where the Breath "is" when it's in Tim. If you give him 50 stolen Breath is it going to boost him to the First Heightening and give him a nice pretty aura? If so, the Breath seems like it's been thoroughly incorporated: like if the wasp turned yellow and started making honey. If not, then the question is where the Breath "is" in Tim. EDIT: Oops, missed some implicit "Kurkistan, save us from our lack of citations!" lines. Hmm. I can't find the root for the whole key-lock theory for Feruchemical access. I'd thought it was a tangent on this thread, but a glance makes it look like we headed elsewhere. To recap what I can recall, a lot of this came out of the discussion about how Feruchemical aluminum likely worked as well as taking into account the ability of Hemalurgists to access their victim's metalminds. The "you just store all your Identity" conclusion came quite naturally from those, IIRC. Also, spanreeds do have some distance limitations.

The "Glimpse of Feather" I wish I could have sent back to past-Feather before she read WoR: "Featherwriter then cried out, rage in her voice, 'Shallan, I'm going to murder you!'"

That last sentence, I think. So once Tim stops being weird with Feruchemical aluminum the Breath really doesn't have a choice but to be incorporated normally. Where else is it supposed to go? Back a hundred miles to where Andy is? A thousand to where the original Awakened object is once Tim stops using his power?

A nice way to think about it. Though I suppose Squires are a Trump power...

I'm of the opinion that Feruchemical aluminum (hope you're reading this, Chaos ) could let you steal Breath from Awakened inanimate objects. As Outis and I were discussing on another forum, though, I'm a bit on the fence about being able to steal from people/lifeless. It essentially comes down to how you read this "clinging" and "sticking" that Brandon talks about in the WoB above. One way to read it is that, when you normally Awaken a Lifeless, the Awakener still has a "hook" on the Breath he put in: he can magically try to get the Breath back, but he just won't succeed because the Lifeless is holding on too hard. So while two different Awakeners (one the one who made the Lifeless and the other a random person) trying to get the Breath back will result in the same thing (failure), something a bit different is happening Realmatically to explain their failure. Joe random can't get the Breath because he doesn't have any claim to it, any way to get "at it". The original Awakener has that claim, but can't enforce it. Another way (that Outis is taking) is that giving a Breath to a Lifeless transfers "ownership" in exactly the same way as giving it to a living person. It just becomes theirs, no strings attached. This reading has an embedded assumption that the process of transferring Breath to a living person immediately wipes out all your "rights" to that Breath, including your ability to take it back. --- This second reading is somewhat cleaner in that it doesn't have to account for a difference in mechanism between giving/taking Breath to/from people and to/from Lifeless. It also doesn't have to posit some mechanism to stop a scenario by which Ace the Awakener borrows Bob's Breath, uses it to Awaken a strawman, and then Bob steals the Breath back. The first reading has to find some way for living people to wipe historical "admin rights" by the time they use that Breath for Awakening (but it seems that it can't be the moment they receive the Breath, quite critically). ------- On second thought, though, I might have to insist that we examine the possibility of living people's acquisition of Breath being slightly different from that of Lifeless. The Breath that goes into a Lifeless isn't really given to them in the same way that "My Breath become yours" gives people Breath: It's not just incorporated into their soul like it is with people, but instead goes to driving around their body and enforcing their orders and the like. This seems a less intimate bond than the one that Breath has to living people, so perhaps under that understanding we can just say that Breath given to living people is full-on wiped (so the Breath-giver can never even try to get it back) while Lifeless Breath still has some strings attached because it's not given in the same free sense. ------ Okay, that's most of my random thoughts spilled out here. I'll give it a break for a moment and let it stew. @Outis' second post: I... don't think so. It seems that your general model requires that the act of acquiring a Breath "wipe" it, so the moment that Breath gets incorporated into Tim it's going to be his. Just like if Andy had given it over directly.

More on Arsteel, though it seems he's a special case. And that other link I showed you. I'll port over my thoughts on the theory shortly.

This WoB might be of interest to you. Source:

Best course I can say is contact the admins. It may even have been intentional on someone's part. If you own a server you can use it pretty easily to proxy through firewalls (at work or schools or the like). A rudimentary implementation would start redirecting everyone else too. Someone on a site I go to managed to redirect everyone to a game store for half a day when he was using the server to get past his work's firewall.

I'm no expert, but that sounds like a definite case of the website (or maybe its server?) having issues. Try getting in touch with the admins.

The "Lifeless statue" question is quite interesting because it tells us that soulcast objects not only "remember" their past (as the goblet in WoK suggested was the case for normal objects), but in fact "remember" on some significant, Realmatic level that attunes them for Awakening so strongly that a piece of stone is going to trip the "this is a human!" circuit.

I really do hate boundary questions... My guess is a "no" there, which makes a certain amount of sense as we don't normally regard hoses as "held items" but more as equipment that we're employing. Another fun and interesting question is what the stream looks like when you spray a stream of water through one side of a time bubble and out the other.

Sorry, didn't mean to scare you off. If I sound all sure and Wizard of the Cosmere here it's probably just force of habit when talking about time bubbles. Anything I say that can't be traced directly back to the OP is something that I'm still exploring.

@Anatrok We'll have to wait and see on god-metal alloys. @Tempus I'm leery of giving the bubble user too much import in the system, actually. For one we know that the anchoring is outside of his control—I don't imagine that a Wayne in Descartes' ship would suddenly have the bubble moving along with him rather than sticking to Scadrial. For another, this "anything touching is included" specification is somewhat odd if we're just saying it's all up to the bubbler. Why ought all bubbles created by any bubblers follow this fairly unintuitive rule for all and only living beings? Beyond this, there are just a lot of weird ways in which the bubble seems quite independent of the bubbler once it's up. As for the train, I don't see any need to say that the train isn't a "real" object. I'm sure it has its own bead in Shadesmar as a whole and singular "train". So, "in reality", the object inside (or outside, in this case) is in fact the train as a whole, not the individual car. If all you need to count the cars as distinctly bubble-able entities is a flexibly minded Allomancer... bad things could happen. Very bad. You'd likely end up with train wrecks at the very least, and that general principle can probably be applied to bring down buildings. ---- I'm unsure as to what you mean with your second sentence there. --- On the brainwave: Sorry, but we're not quite there yet. Talk to Moogle if you want details on all of this, but simply saying "light isn't affected" isn't strictly true. Various and sundry shenanigans have to go on not only to stop red/blue-shift, but also to account for photon density and people not being cooked alive by simple radiant heat and... It gets messy.