Kurkistan

I wish that we had a singular explication of Aaradel & Co.'s spiritweb theory that was tangented with malice aforethought from my Forgery thread. It's really quite fascinating.

This question has been brought up before, most recently by me.

Well ain't that tantalizing.

*Meanwhile, in the Caton Headquarters* The fool! He dares insult us with his "offer"!!! But wait... There is no reason not to allow the mice to fatten themselves. Why put in the effort to gather together all of our spikes when we could let these two-legs do it instead? Then we could just nap for awhile and collect dozens of spikes at a time once we suddenly but inevitably betray them! *Cut away* What a kind and generous offer, meat Chaos! Why we would be fools (FOOLS!!! Hahahaha!!) not to accept.

I look about me in this day and age and see... decay. Mice and men little better scurrying about and boasting of their grandeur. Building shacks and calling them castles. Hurling mud and calling it great war. Thinking that they and their banal conflicts matter. It sickens me. The time has come to wipe the slate clean. To show these fools the true nature of power. To take what pitiful crumbs they have and make even those our own. RISE, my fellow Catquisitors. RISE AND CONQUER.

@Moogle Thanks for the WoB, I was going all "well now I get to spend the next 10 minutes hunting down and copy-pasting in the WoB..." and then I saw your post.

Ah, I'd forgotten to update mine as well.

There are some particularly fun effects for black constellation (like that 3-cost 1/4 that drains one life from every opponent each time you put down an enchantment...), so I'd advise you to take a look. Though, to be fair, the true beastliness of constellation effects is only seen when you get some large-scale flicker effects. So far as scrylands go, I actually have a friend who'll swear up and down that no non-basic land beside the shocklands is even worth having in your deck. He is crazy, though...

As an addendum to this, we might have to go all the way back to the "initial amount stored" discussion and ask if a Feruchemist taps 100 of something at 100% efficiency while another taps 200 at 50% efficiency, is one louder?

A fairly solid deck, I must say. Gotta' love that Eidolon of Countless Battles. Guildgates instead of scrylands, though? *Checks price of scrylands* Ah, nevermind. Theros must be a bit of a love/hate thing, eh? So many enchantments, but so many things that murder enchantments. I'd throw an Armament of Nyx in (instead of that Arrest?) if I were you. It's saved my posterior a few times in my own white/black (focus on Constellation) deck. You don't have any temptation to do some Constellation effects, by the way?

@EMTrevor +1 for science.

On antimatter: My main concern wasn't that someone would do it on purpose, but by accident. I was writing in reference to your example of someone saying "get me some light and dense armor" and getting radioactivity, despite not even having a concept of radioactivity. --- Ah, so shards "weigh" the proper amount. That complicates things a tad, but still not too much for a little mild terrorism. Scenario: I am an entity with a lot of resources and a burning desire to see the enemy capital be blown up. I get a bunch of different blocks of TNT and make core shards of each of them. I hid these in pebbles and have agents smuggle these (heavy, but still movable) pebbles into the basement of the enemy capital. Then another agent de-shards all the TNT so it's back the way it was and lights the fuse. All their base are belong to me. So I'll ask again: Why are any major and even moderately accessible government buildings left standing after a war?

Um, no. I am now convinced that I need to write "Forms: Complicated" if that's what you took away from reading all my Forms threads.--- But we're really really tangenting now and I hereby formally give Chaos back his thread.

On Returned: Ah, that makes a tad more sense. I'd probably just fall back to their body still having the identity and/or the memories still existing somewhere (recall that Lightsong remembered everything at the end) and/or ask the question of whether an amnesiac who got Regrowthed would turn into a pile of goop; but that's all for another thread. -- An interesting and plausible way to look at it, upon your reformulation. Might I suggest that you throw out Forms altogether, though? Why not have all the interaction simply be between Awakener and Breath? P.S. I'm still leaning towards Endwomentization, fyi, if only because it's an effect we know of versus one we theorize.

And how I think of it, actually, making me feel kind of silly for not giving that explanation myself...

Sorry, I had to laugh a bit when you said this was an instance of me being too attached to Forms. That quote is actually the single most devastating setback my Formic theory ever faced, and has nothing to do with affirming them in this context, as a result. That's an aside, though. I wholeheartedly agree that Breath is certainly "keyed" to you when you use it to Awaken inanimate objects. I think it may well even still be keyed to you for Lifeless, it's just that other factors stop you from recovering it. Source: Brandon's talk of "stickiness" here implies rather strongly, at least by my reading, that Awakeners are still able to "yank the rope", but the Breath is just stuck too firmly. But the attachment is definitely still there. - Perhaps this keying is enough to get the anthropomorphization done, but if I had to bet I'd go with the Endowmentization that we know exists and have observed the "humanity-maximizing" effects of rather than the less well-understood way that Breaths are keyed to their users. --- As an aside, people don't (as a rule) have "Forms" under my model. Though you can just replace "Form" with "soul" there and it won't be any significant change to your argument. --- I'm not following you on Returned, though, because if they got a shiny new Breath fresh from Endowment (as is the case, I believe?) then that would actually argue against them keeping the same general appearance under your model.

Perhaps Jasnah managed to do a tad of "healing-ish" Soulcasting, then? If, as we saw with Stick, there's a degree of negotiation to the thing, Jasnah might be able to get away with just saying "hey blood BE THE WAY YOU WERE 5 MINUTS AGO!!!" and the blood will go along with it. Maybe.

Comments I made as I read: I'll be disagreeing with the assumption of all magics having the same fundamental strength, I think. It seems rather clear that the Shards have some degree of say in how much of themselves they put into a magic system: A shattered Honor dishing out stormlight every highstorm is giving out a lot more than, say, Endowment, on average. It doesn't matter much when just talking of proportions, though. ---- One useful tool for tightening your definition of "Cognitive" magical components here would be to disregard "preparation" and replace it with "complexity of initiation"or something. A blind puppy (who happened to be an Elantrian ) could luck into drawing the perfect Aon in a split second and I don't think we'd expect that Aon to be any less effective than an identical one that happened to be drawn painstakingly over the course of a week. Same goes with "thought", really, though with that one it's a tad less clear that the blind puppy could carry out a successful Command. The key is that you don't get points for effort, you get points for results. Effort and thought and consideration seem to have little to do with it at core. --- I find I must disagree with some of your categorizations, then, because of this incorrect (in my estimation) understanding of Cognitivity. Just as with AonDor or Forging, you can luck into the correct bindpoints in Hemalurgy. So far as we know, the only "intent" required is that you know you're about the business of Hemalurgy when you do the thefting. Not necessarily that you know exactly what power/attribute you'll be stealing. So Hemalurgy really seems the least Cognitive of the whole metallic set, not the most. -- But despite this I agree with you that AonDor, Forging, and Breath seem very Cognitive. The false (in my mind, at least) inclusion of Hemalurgy in the set of "this looks pretty Cognitive" is thus a result of misleading definitions. So perhaps the best thing to gauge how Cognitive something is is simply how detailed the "execution" (or "implementation", but I have historical reasons to use the other word ) process that the user actually has to specify is? In Allomancy, Feruchemy, and Hemalurgy users just have to go "BURN!", "TAP!", and "STABBY STABBY!" respectively and they get all the magic in the form it needs to be in. Whereas in the more "Cognitive" magics that you identify the user has to do a lot of legwork to shape the Investiture before it actually starts doing anything. In Awakening, the user needs to tell that poor object how to do anything before it can utilize the power you hand to it. In AonDor, the form the power takes is dictated entirely by the Aon's form (this aside from the power not even showing up unless the Aon meets certain basic prerequisites). In Forging, the Forger needs to spell out every part of the "honest, I really should be like X now!" argument for that poor Forged object to make to the universe. In each case, the complexity of the Command/Aon/Stamp are all to do the work of shaping the use of power that, for instance, the metals do automatically for Allomancy. P.S. Reading on, you seem to be catching onto this with your talk of intermediaries, so perhaps we're not so strongly in disagreement. --------------- Moving on: Shadesmar... isn't water... It's composed (on land) of "seas" of beads, each of which represent individual Cognitive aspects of objects. No water we've seen, though. --- I wouldn't be quite so quick to dismiss the importance of the Vocalization part of a Command in favor of just looking at the Visualization. I'd hazard that the actual Vocalization (the words, or at least the thought behind them separate from the Visualization) is actually quite important, at least before we get into weird territory that we haven't actually seen in the books yet with the 10th Heightening. --- On Sel: Kerry's theory actually has the citation for them all being the same system in the OP. So far as different effects of splintering goes, we probably ought to look to the bare existence of the Dor as a differentiating factor, as well as the different "danger levels" in Shadesmar. Spren being a "release valve" could perhaps be related to how structured the magic system is, by your model. --- In your discussion of Breath vs. Stormlight, it may be useful to note how the Heightenings are a function of growing more Endowmenty. Perhaps it might be worthwhile to examine the nature of Honor, then, and whether Stormlight makes one more like Him? Prone to action and bursting with power seems to be at least going down the right track. Also, some WoB: Source: ------ Overall a good and interesting theory, though I can't say I agree with all your conclusions. Nice to see you back in the game, either way. EDIT: @Tempus-the-ninja On Breath and anthropomorphization: Given the aforementioned way that the Heightenings work the way they do because "each Breath incorporates into it this sort of idea of being endowed by the diety Endowment", I would say that the anthropomorphization is more due to the innate nature of the Breath and less to do with the human it was sourced at.

@Joe Maybe, maybe not. We know that any living person touching the bubble is affected by it, and the natural assumption here is that their clothing is included in the bargain. So non-living things can be affected by time bubbles simply by virtue of being "worn" by living things that are touching the bubble. This despite the non-living thing possibly being completely outside the bubble's radius. The question, then, is whether a gun being wielded by a person counts as enough of a part of them that it will also be included by the bubble's effect. @Scholar No problem.

@Moogle Yeah, I knew someone must have come up with it first...

Mono-white: *hiss*. Boros all the way! *Runs off Hastily to lose after his deck stops working after turn 7*

First of all, forgive me if someone else has already posited this. I will freely admit that I lost track of all the new posts during the post-WoR explosion, and I'm actually quite bad at finding stuff that I haven't read at least once before. That said, I have had an assumption about how the Diagram is so accurate floating around in the back of my head ever since I first saw someone question how a smart Taravangian (hereafter referred to by his proper title of "Mr. T") could make accurate predictions about human behavior given his previously demonstrated idiocy in that regard whenever he's really smart. Like how one day a smart Mr. T tried to get all the dumb people to commit suicide, and actually thoughts that everyone would agree with him so long as he explained it all well enough. So the question naturally arises in many minds: How could the super-ultra-duper-mega-smart Mr. T who wrote the Diagram predict the course of a conversation, let alone the course of human events on an entire planet? My immediate thought when I saw this question was as follows: Super-Mr. T crossed a very important threshold that day: he became intelligent enough to model human thought and behavior (on the macro scale, at the very least) as a pure abstraction, a pure exercise of thought without any reference at all to his own feelings, intuitions, or proclivities. It's as if you dropped a Mr. T-shaped AI on Roshar with all of Mr. T's memories and the directive "save humanity" and then let it figure it all out on its own. Where I would think that normally we model how other people will think and behave based in large part on our own capacities—our empathy and how we'd react in their situation and the like—it seems that intelligent Mr. T, besides not having compassion to care for the suffering of others, doesn't have that ability to empathize, and quite likely doesn't really even think in the same ways as normal people. So any attempt by an intelligent Mr. T to predict the behavior of others will necessarily be poisoned by his own atypical intuitions and proclivities. There may even be another threshold that Super-Mr. T had to cross before he was intelligent enough to recognize and consciously ignore his own intuitions about how other people will behave, such as his incorrect intuitions in the dumb-person-suicide case. --- So, in concluding, I think that the Diagram faction is entitled to trust in Super-Mr. T's predictions and directions because Super-Mr. T was so smart that he could model how us puny humans would react and take those reactions into account. Given the assumption that the Diagram's end goal is the salvation of some part of humanity, and given that Diagramists are heavily skewed towards the "ends justify the means" camp, Super-Mr. T is worth trusting. EDIT: I'm "espousing" the main idea in the OP (and other threads, as it turns out), not necessarily all the morality discussion that follows.

Feather's MTG color guess: Well, she gave us the plains right away, so I'll say... she plays/is White/Green.

Question: Why is Nepene's Collective Unconsciousness thread listed as "Proven"?

*Continuing the horn-tooting with zero signs of shame* Also, while I need to go back over the thing with a hammer and some glue, I think it fair to say that several concepts from the MEC have managed to parasitically worm their way into our general conception of Relmatics.