Kasimir

Right, but if that's what you think, why not go pressure Turtle or you, right? I say this without voting for my vote is currently on Stick and I feel it would be disrespecting her birthday to remove it this easily today <3 Why though. Or I guess, what difference do you expect there would be. I recognise this is D1 so a lot of this will wash out but I'm still curious. P.S. Hoo boy Beiranvand took one hell of a hit RIP Iran D:

I'm a bit hazy on this 'interesting' word here. Is this 'I wanna vote for you' interesting, or 'I think that's kinda sus' interesting, or 'gee IDK it just stood out to me' interesting :eyes: 'Cause you prefaced it like the sorta thing you'd follow up with a vote and then went to nudge TUN instead which is...interesting to me. And when I say interesting, I mean my brain briefly entertained Stick/Turtle crack before returning to the mode where I mourn my inability to do RP today because werk werk. @Araris Valerian summoning spell cast.

I wanted to make a RP post. This is not happening today with everyone demanding everything last minute like a bloody load of bricks crashing down on me. Stick Edited to add: @_Stick_ happy birthday xD

Signed you up 1-2 times

I feel like RoW hinted that if that Shard has a name, it would be War. There are multiple reasons to think this is more likely: 1. The Terris prophecy epigraph in HoA states: "He shall defend their ways, yet shall violate them. He will be their savior, yet they shall call him heretic. His name shall be Discord, yet they shall love him for it." 2. We have WoBs that the only reason Harmony is Harmony was because of his ability to balance the two Intents as well as he had. Which is later clarified as: And also: But also to your music theory point, you might find this WoB interesting:

Yep. [Spoilers for Sixth of the Dusk sequel]

It feels more practical than pepper spray for self-defense, or a simple way to deter people—I'm thinking for instance prison riots when you need a safe way to defuse the situation. Probably a better non-lethal means than tasers too, though you would have to establish ethical limits of 'safe' use. At the same time, storing pain could possibly be dangerous. Good for pain management, bad when you push past your limits. Pain is your body's way of telling you that you need to stop doing what you are doing right now.

I'd agree, yeah. I don't know about Hemalurgy and social acceptance - if what @Kitch says comes to pass, i.e. there's a way to do it that minimises the negative externalities or at least pushes it to 'that group of people we don't care about' (Rosharan refugees, anyone? Mentioned because this was being speculated on.) then I am not sure that it wouldn't become more acceptable to your average Scadrian. TLM ends with Autonomy being defeated, but the truth is that whatever happens with Harmony, Autonomy's influence will still have been felt on Scadrial, in the Outer Cities, and especially in projects being pushed and developed by the Bilming government. I'm not sure that so lightly goes away just because Autonomy has been convinced to leave Scadrial alone for the moment. I think my main thought was: yes, but selling your Breath is actually fairly exploitative, for all Warbreaker hints at it but doesn't explicitly condemn it, and I'm not sure that Scadrian spikebanks would really be the sort of social progress pre-Era 2 Harmony would've liked to see.

Would you like me to mark you busy, and then you ping me again when you're clear to run so I return you to the active roster? This wouldn't affect your slot priority for when you are free to run a game - just tells people not to ping you for GMing prior to that.

Probably not, since I think there's a WoB about the effects of doing so: Drabs have a weakened immune system, and higher depression rates among other effects. Perhaps the fact they're farming from multiple people might weaken the effects but given the Set's scientist mentioned trauma, I am not certain it sounds that good either. Mass exploitation would be a double blow to poverty.

Perhaps one day we'll see the reclusive Ammi Dedyet :eyes:

Re-read TLM once more just because. This was playing in my head during Wayne's Big Damn Hero moment, and the Epilogue:

Observation: This HK unit says 'probably.' Rumination: Does it intend to go about traumatising my players? Edited to add: @Haelbarde - our respective ages are probably showing, but. Ah let's do it this way. Ahem. Gentle Admonition: I recognise we are both ancient, fellow HK unit, but it is advisable to recall that blue text is now only used for OOG talk, specifically when you are referring to RL circumstances that prevent you from play. OOC talk is usually just not marked separately anymore, though I have found [OOC: Stuff] and [OOC: Stuff] and [OOC: Stuff] to be acceptable replacements. YMMV.

What Harmony says seems to imply it is just about terminology. But I do wonder: just the red spectra issue and the rusty red appearance. Maybe it's coincidental, but the fact that we're told repeatedly it's the colour of corrupted Investiture makes me wonder what spectra bavadinium—not the trellium available on Scadrial—gives.

The flipside of what @bmcclure7 says is essentially what Bret Devereaux terms the Fremen Mirage: the idea that difficult conditions produce what it takes for civilisations or a people to flourish, while 'ease makes decay.' There's some level on which necessity yeah, is the mother of invention, and that's probably what people are thinking about. My primary training is in the history and philosophy of science and technology, and I'd largely agree with him. Part of it I think boils down to what you think about when you say 'innovation' - do you mean invention? Do you mean science? (These are not necessarily co-occurring: there are inventors who aren't particularly theorists.) There's also a further question here about what you consider strife - dissenting views are great for science (is that strife?), though this claim needs to be qualified further. War time? Sooooort of, sort of not. Because if you're thinking especially about science, my training biases are clear, but I'd argue significant turning points included Renaissance-era shifting of the standards of scientific evidence (a lot of papers have been written about Galileo and Copernicus, but what's key to understanding a lot of the contemporary disputes back then is that it's not just about 'faith' - it's the idea of observational data against Aristotelian conceptions of what gets to count as evidence in science, and what doesn't; what gets to count as a convincing argument, and what doesn't. Adopting the idea of empirical experimentation took quite a while, beyond just the Baconian formulation. And social structures like the Royal Society, places where thinkers get patronage and are able to freely discourse with peers - all of these structures which paved the way to modern science also created environments in which these things got to flourish. And I'd argue you don't have that without a base level of plenty. There's a reason many of the early Royal Society dabblers were, functionally, gentleman scientists, and that's sort of the model we see with Wax and Navani here. (Note that I'm making very broad strokes characterisations here: a lot of the devil is in the details.) The Golden Age of Arab/Islamic Science is a classic example: between the 8th to the 14th centuries, Islamic civilisation flourished, and became a centre where knowledge (and yes, some of it proto-scientific) was collected, transmitted, added to, translated, and just innovated. We have thinkers like al-Haytham, who wrote on optics and physics, and very very famous Ibn Sina who made significant developments to many fields, including medicine and surgery (under the Latinised name Avicenna.) It helps when you're wealthy enough to fund scholarship and large libraries like the House of Wisdom in Baghdad (later sacked by the Mongols), and to invest in your education system and research centres. It's often credited with collecting Greco-Roman knowledge, translating it, and preserving it for transmission back to Europe during the Middle Ages, but really, that's slightly unfair to them as many Islamic thinkers obvious interacted with Greco-Roman thought, and added onto it. (Note that a lot of these references say 'philosophy' - remember that they don't yet have our modern conception of science. This is an anachronism we shouldn't be projecting onto the past. 'Natural philosophy' or just 'philosophy' will go into some of the questions scientists today desire to answer.) In the case of the Golden Age, it falls to war. Peace and plenty were very good for the sciences. And it is the scholarship done by all these scholars working in the Golden Age of Arab Science that eventually transmits back to medieval Europe. Disclaimer I used to be able to cite a lot more texts, but it's been a while since I did the undergrad modules properly. It's in my notes somewhere, but the history of science is highly fascinating, worth reading, and Whig history of science without attention to context or the social dimensions of science, in my view, does it disrespect. Also, I do think the Islamic Golden Age was very fascinating I spent many a month in my undergrad reading Ibn Sina and others. Here's a cool picture of al-Haytham discussing the structure of the human eye.

That's fair, yes. But TLM Chapter 25 also notes that up to four spikes is new anyway: the last BoM limit, as you say, was a three spike cap: Incidentally, I've found the quote that I think was being referenced earlier in the thread: I think this does imply something: the natural inference here is that Harmony had definitely hoped the lerasium dust had made Wax a full, proper, normal Mistborn. Whatever it is, this isn't the case. But I think no theory, even the 'weak Mistborn' one, is unable to explain this: the 'it was a pewter spike' theories all essentially interpret this utterance as saying that it failed to make Wax MIstborn. The 'weak Mistborn' theory explains this utterance by saying that Harmony hoped Wax would've gone full Mistborn, but he doesn't seem to actually have it full strength. And I'm reminded of a WoB that states that Mistborn strength can vary and is dependent on the size of the lerasium bead you swallowed: If Wax breathed in a few fine particles of lerasium dust, I think it's entirely possible that he would be such a weak Mistborn - consistent with the oddities he noticed. But alright, tangent aside: The original quote, and in my view, the true Coinshot segment is establishing that the old rules are gone, and for whatever reason, the Set has successfully broken the three metal cap. I've re-read Chapter 25 and haven't seen a point where it's explicitly noted the new hard limit is four spikes. Certainly, if it requires a trellium spike, then the trellium spike has to be holding one of the Allomantic abilities that wasn't steel or duralumin. I'm not sure they'd feel comfortable using a trellium spike while on their way to stop the bomb. I'm not sure it cries out for explanation: the way I read it is more that Wax is going through sort of the same thought process as Marasi - "He's probably a Coinshot, right? I guess - wow hell he has duralumin, okay, welp, wait, he has bronze? Chromium? Let's hope he doesn't have pewter...oh, of course he does." I don't know it would make a difference because we just don't get a Wax POV from the point he sees Dumad's corpse to the point he and Wayne appear on the ship. I think it's more logical that a rushing Wax doesn't actually go "Oh, so I was wrong, he does have a Coinshot spike after all," because that just breaks up the pacing/flow of the chase, as compared to Wax making a deliberate decision to take the pewter spike, and still not consciously burning pewter, or aware that he can burn pewter. We subsequently learn that Dumad and Wayne's double were both training with their abilities - I feel like that dents the true Coinshot point a little, as well. Wax is basing that assessment off the fact that Dumad is clearly skilled with his Coinshot skills, which seems to weigh against the possibility Dumad recently received the spike and therefore betrays that by using Steel in an amateur way. But we later learn that both of them were working/training hard to be able to beat Wax and Wayne, largely via Wayne's POV, so doesn't that put a pin in the 'true Coinshot' theory anyway? That being said, I was curious enough to dig for some Hemalurgy WoBs and my main finding is that it's inconclusive. Check these out: So, it seems to imply that the Hemalurgist specifically determines what charge and power the spike gets, dependent on where the spike is placed when first extracting the power. And the way they currently know how to do it (this was a WoR signing, this was in 2014) only allows them to extract one sort of power. This is why it's considered 'wasteful' to spike a Mistborn, because you are forgoing their full power set for just one. (Again, if placement of the charged spike allows you to give the recipient one out of four physical metals, I'm not sure this would be quite as wasteful.) I take the second exchange to be fairly unequivocal that reusing a spike to give a person different powers is prima facie difficult. I do think the caveat, "The way they know how to do it" implies it might be possible to do so. Again, I think of the fact the Set has just discovered how to make a spike from non-Allomancers without killing anyone. So that part is in flux right now. But given the second exchange, I'm not sure this should be the natural inference for what is going on with Wayne's spike.

Disagree about fun Of this current active player generation, I've only been Evil with Mat and Devo. Though really from my point of view, it's 'already' as in too many

Firm Instruction: Yes. I have a pacifist module, if you force my hand. Yes I had to flaunt my Disney credentials to reassure people. Welcome back! I recall Fifth and Devo having to write a death write-up for a steel squid statue so the tradition is going very well!

Thank you for avoiding Distro 3. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I just looked and I feel how close death came >>

Yeah basically. Is this tacit confirmation you were really playing Cad Bane and Grogu in a trenchcoat? :eyes:

I am not using the word Steel like you are. When I say Steel spike, I don't mean, "A spike made out of Steel." I mean a spike containing Allomantic Steel. That's it. If Spike placement overrode what was put into the spike, then Ruin never needed to specifically go for Vin. The fact that Vin's sister was a Seeker mattered to his calculus, according to Harmony at end HoA. You are suggesting all Ruin needed to do was to make sure someone pierced Vin's ear with any appropriate Hemalurgic earring. You could argue we now know that you can get Allomantic spikes by spiking non-Allomancers. But I think that's not the same as saying only the final bindpoint matters. Even if you think it is the same thing, given the Set had just discovered it and Wax wasn't there to see, it's unlikely Wax knew to do that. It's equally unlikely such a spike was used for Dumad. I think the point is that there's flimsy basis for this theory. Everything in the text so far suggests that you spike one ability out and then give it to the recipient. I don't really understand the need to hypothesise something odd is going on with Wayne's spike when we know double spiking exists and could plausibly have been done with Dumad.