Kurkistan

Sorry for Debbie-downering there: I wasn't trying to call anyone in particular out, I just wanted to try and head off something I saw as undesirable.

I'd always interpreted Syl's changing appearances to just switching between various "windy things", and that switchery being normal, to some extent, for windspren; a blowing ribbon, tumbling leaves, a mischievous sprite. "Falling stone" is a bit out of that range, but I can see it being wind-related if you stretch your imagination a bit.

I find this new line of conversation to be in poor taste.

Sorry if I overstepped: this is my first time doing a forum-based run of this game. I was just a bit concerned that pure character-building might muddy the water: character's reactions to the doctor's death, for instance, are nearly completely disjoint from our own. There's no need to go overboard and demand new text-colorations, though, I suppose.

I'd like to note that I decided on the character before I got my role.

Yeah, it's about time we started talking murder rather than establishing characters. The characters are more meant to be a bit of fun fluff rather than our main focus (hence why I write all of this in regular color--actually, maybe in character but game-irrelevant text should be purple?) To start off the paranoia-fest: That Porridge guy is a bit suspicious: I vote we kill 'im!

@Porridge Actually, Feruchemical gold doesn't replace Feruchemical bronze. Miles needs to sleep, so it seems that sleep is a psychological requirement and/or Feruchemical gold treats it like aging. It appears that Returned need to sleep for similar reasons.

Could you give the quote? It's been a few years since I read Alcatraz.

Here you go: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/942-the-font-of-kings/ Edit: Oops, you meant on the cover. Sorry, no idea.

Kukri slept with his knives in hand, so wasn't concerned about them being sabotaged. Don't worry, my character is a human.

I'm not sure physics works that way. Is the introduction of a human-sized heatsink at absolute 0 for an indeterminate amount of time really enough to do catastrophe-level damage?

Not necessarily. It's questionable how much heat you can store at a time with Feruchemical brass, but even the max would result in the ferring just being at 0 Kelvin. He stores his own heat, not that of his surroundings.

Kukri heard the commotion and walked into the inn, picking a table near the wall and keeping an eye on the door as he trimmed his nails.

It seems that you know more about memory formation than I do (not surprising, given my ignorance), so I'm fine with going forward with the assumption that Lightsong can't remember a real shade of red unless he saw it as such in the moment. Just to clarify what I meant (though I'm perfectly fine dropping it, I just want the record straight for posterity), let's look at the Scadrial example. Let's say you have a Feruchemist on Scadrial. It's conceivable that he could use Feruchemical zinc to help him see through the mists a little bit just by being being able to piece together glimpses and the like with his increased mental speed. My model of memory would be such that, if he walked through a misty night recording what he saw in a coppermind (but not tapping Feruchemical zinc at all), he'd be able to "see through the mist" if, the next day, he tapped Feruchemical zinc while tapping the memory from his coppermind. Degradation of the memory if he hadn't been storing it in Feruchemical copper would make it harder, obviously, but the principle remains the same. You are claiming that, for color memory in particular, at the very least, we should be talking about Allomantic tin, while I have been thinking of Feruchemical zinc. Regardless, I'm fine dropping this model as likely unrealistic, and am currently inclined to go with the "the brain makes stuff up" model.

I am unclear as to why you're confused, Darnam. The idea (which may be wrong, I'll admit) is that, when you see words you can't read, you remember them as their actual shapes so that, when you learn to read later, you can retroactively interpret the words in your memory. Your brain is already storing the information about the shapes you saw before you learned how to properly interpret them. Alternatively, both you and dyring have suggested that our memories just fill in the blanks: we don't recall reds as "an indeterminate shade of red", then, but as some arbitrary shade that may or may not be the shade it actually was when you saw it. Neither model requires that weird senseless things happen or require the brain to "store information it was never given." Technically the second model has the brain making stuff up, but it's still incorporated into the memory before you reach the Fifth Heightening.

Yeah, I was about to point out that that sounds like Darnam's theory (which I agree is certainly a possibility, btw). Although, to be fair, Darnam, the dyring's first sentence is what I was saying.

I was browsing through Peter's Twitter feed (he answers a lot of questions that are nice to know the answers to ) and saw a conversation between him and our very own Satsuoni. Sats is feeling all bashful today, so authorized me to repost it here. Any upvotes/accolades you feel compelled to give should be allocated to Satsuoni, as I am merely the messenger here. Source:‏ My read of this is that Peter is talking about stuff like how you can store the strength you get from Allomantic pewter in a pewtermind, but it could be hinting at something else. Any thoughts? Mainly I posted this for posterity's sake.

You're welcome: it was just a search for "space ship" on the Events forum.

If you were in Houston then it was probably Sir Read-a-Lot; we tend to record even evasions and non-answers because what Brandon evades or refuses to answer (or just misunderstands, prompting us to phrase things better in the future) is of interest to us as well as direct answers.

Cool way to find the site. Welcome to the forums. Do you remember the questions he asked? Whoever it was probably posted his questions/answers here, if you want to hunt him down and thank him more specifically.

@MathEpic Television lied to me?! @Darnam We may well be "run[ning] afoul of the degree to which perception itself is an activity of the mind" here, and are certainly stepping beyond my realm of expertise. I think our disagreement rests on this different understanding of how active our minds are in perception/memory formation. You are positing (quite possibly correctly) that a memory formed with insufficient background understanding is like a blurry picture. I am proposing that it is more like a picture who's content you don't understand: the picture is still perfectly clear, you just don't know what you're looking at. I may very well be wrong, but in the second case it's perfectly fine for Lightsong to look back and have a better grasp of shades of color than he had when he first "took" a memory. Example: Let's say you show a sign that says "EXIT" to a 3-year-old who can't read. He'll remember it as "that red sign over the door with the letters." Looking back at that memory years later, the kid will have different experiences depending on which memory-model is real. Under your model, he'll probably know as a point of fact (just because of context clues and later experience) that it was an "EXIT" sign he saw, but his memory will still just be of a red shape over a door. Under mine, he'll be able to look back and "read" the word "exit". Once again, I'll reiterate that I know memory formation is not just like snapping a picture, even beyond it's inherent "blurriness." We may need to *shudder* do some research, of all things, to settle this one.

For shame sir! Of course it should make sense, otherwise I've wasted quite a bit of time trying to make sense of it. As to the post in general: You may be drawing false parallels here, Darnam. It's not necessarily that new information is added on to the memory, but I think that it may be that Lightsong's ability to interpret it is better. If you want to do a TV comparison, I think it may be like when Charlie (in Numb3rs) figures out the location a picture was taken by doing crazy math stuff to it and measuring shadows and the like. Nothing new is added to the picture, but a lot of analysis (which can draw on outside knowledge) is applied to it to procure new information that a naive viewer would not have been able to glean from the picture. Another example would be symbols or letters or paintings that you saw before you knew how to interpret them, only to grasp later. So if you see the radiation symbol one day, don't know what it means, then have it explained to you later and say "oh yeah, I saw the radiation symbol back on that door last week." The most direct example, of course, is colors. If I show you a chartreuse color swatch, you'll only be able to identify it as "a greenish yellow" or the like. But if you're then taught about what chartreuse is, you'll be able to retroactively label that swatch in your memory as the specific color "chartreuse". Of course, in this case, not only does Lightsong have new knowledge, but a new ability to apply it. Learning about chartreuse for him, then, is necessary if he is to be able to differentiate it from all the other ranges of "greenish yellow" colors. EDIT: Actually, there's some support for this in that people with broader color vocabularies are better able to differentiate between colors. Show two people a spectrum of greens and the one with access to more green-words will see/identify more distinct colors on the spectrum than the layman; 10 instead of 3, for example. --- Yeah, whether it's Fifth Heightening vs. Returned is unclear. If it was just Returned, that would strongly suggest in some Endowmenty stuff going on to explain everything away.

No problem, might as well put my unhealthy ability to track down quotes to good use. As for the Seeking thing, yes, the Smoked cannot Seek, though I recall that people were oddly obstinate about how to interpret the WoB on it. I have most of the evidence we have on Copper/Bronze on this thread, I believe.

Brandon gives it away for free, if you want to look through a PDF or the like. I think that it's less a question about Returned memory (despite the title) and more one about "Awakeners' memory". Lightsong's flashbacks are all from his perspective—they're his memories—so the question is how his color-perception got retroactively better once he reached the Fifth Heightening.

I can answer some of that. Source: EDIT: Apparently the Breath needs to act like "magical sinew" for the Phantoms to be able to do their thing.