Colours

Part of the problem with this is that (if I remember correctly) the walls made by Lines of Forbiddance aren't solid, and don't feel solid - they stop things from going over them, but in a yielding and flexible manner. A Forbiddance-staircase should theoretically work, although it would take some skill (and courage, and pants under your skirt ) to climb. What I'm curious about is what happens when you draw a Line of Forbiddance at about the same location on both walls of a corridor - in theory, the Forbiddance-forcefields should support each other and create a more secure footing, but do they actually interact with each other? Actually, what I'm more curious about is Rithmatic billiards. Use Lines of Forbiddance to draw the "table", set up a neat triangle of Lines of Warding, and then bounce them around using some very well-aimed Lines of Vigor! Tension ramps up as the cue ball gradually gets destroyed! Try to command your chalkling precisely enough to manoeuvre the highest-value ball right into the pocket! It's the best possible use of all those different chalk colours, I guarantee it.

The Turing test would work a great deal better if it was proposed after we had some AIs worth testing. I mean, I remember reading about one Turing test event thing where a bot was believed to be human by a fair number of the judges. It would bring up a recent news event and then spent the rest of the conversation directing you attention to various aspects of it and stating its own opinions on those aspects. The twist is, it used literally the exact same script each time. The makers decided on the day before the competition to submit this bot instead of the one they were really working on. It might have been a pretty good idea.

Wild Mass Meta-guessing: The Person Who Cooked Herdazian Tortillas (that's right the chouta vendor is a Herald) The Person With Cute Hair-Ties (now that I think of it, we never hear anything about anyone's hair-ties - those are important) Tiny Penguins Who Covertly Handle Timelines (time machine story when) OK, more seriously: The Person Who Calls Himself Taln? (Edit: Ninja'd, admittedly quite slowly)

I think there was something about some of the Cosmere cultures sharing linguistic roots across worlds, so that part is more-or-less justified. As for the Rending... Reckoner-Rithmatist crossoververse with Lines that make evil Epic chalklings?

Thanks for the welcome. I'd been thinking of jumping in for a while, but I hadn't read enough of the books yet. I almost forgot about that particular subplot, too. In fact, I only remembered Lolan was a thing because Nightblood can drain parts of people seemed like an important thing to know. I shall join Sarcasm in paying more attention!

I know! I know! (I think.) It's Lolan, isn't it? Had to go and re-read to get his name, though.

Ah, but Shardplate can break. It has just occurred to me that Shard-ice-skates would be very, very awkward.

Now I'm wondering what a Shardsmartphone could do. Still, utility-Syl could be really handy. Sun getting in your eyes? Shardshades! Hole in your shoe? Shardboot! Hate the fuzzy rain of the Weeping? Shardbrella! Dear sweet precious Shallan stranded at the top of a tower somehow? Shardcopter! (I mean, you could just walk up there, but why would you?) I'm sure that if you remember to call her intelligent and articulate every hour or so, it'll all work out.

Don't worry, I don't think anyone is likely to seriously ship them - not in this community, at least. Which is kind of strange, but not too strange. I mean, most people ship in a partially tongue-in-cheek manner, in the first place. The strange part is how they don't seem to show up at all, even in (largely nonexistent, admittedly) crack fics. Maybe my expectations have been skewed - Harmony knows there's enough seemingly-random shipping in most anime communities and in the most prominent fandoms elsewhere - but I just can't get over how little shipping there is. I'm not even much of a shipper myself, but it just feels like... a brick that should have been made of porridge, except you ran out of porridge before you could make it, or something. But I've derailed this thread enough already. Whoops, sorry about that.

I get the impression that it falls right into the category of fancy-girls'-school-shipping that you get in MariMite, where the standard relationship model has a younger girl who sees her sempai as utterly flawless and respects her deeply (and perhaps being the only one to see the cracks in her facade and try to fill them), while the sempai in turn draws strength from the innocent spark of the younger and directs her in the ways of the world, and they have tea parties and long walks under the fluttering cherry blossoms and occasional almost-romantic heart-to-hearts? Something like that. It isn't my area of expertise; I've only watched like the first episode of Kannazuki no Miko. I mean, it seems like Shallan would work as the younger girl. Jasnah, on the other hand, is a block of ice. That wouldn't normally stop the shipping, but it does make it that much harder, I guess.

But wouldn't that make him 'armful?

I read the books back to back, so it was an amusing detail. In particular, it seems like it refers to the bit where Dalinar drops him to the ground and puts his Shardplate-enhanced hand right against Elhokar's chest while talking about how easily he could have killed him at any time, in a case of "very odd paternal instincts". I still think it's one of Dalinar's main Crowning Moments of Awesome. In a way, I'm surprised there aren't shipfics, with a scene like that. In any of the other fandoms I'm familiar with, people would be all over it. Same with, say, Jasnah x Shallan, in a MariMite kind of way. High school AU? Maybe I'll have to take care of it myself. You people are so unenthusiastic about these things, while your theorycrafting is about a hundred times more elaborate than I've seen in the usual fandoms. I guess every fandom is different.

I wouldn't have minded Skybreaker because their glyph is the most fun to draw. Second place is the Elsecallers' glyph; they both feel like little dances for brushes. (Meanwhile, I don't even want to touch the Stonewards' glyph. Edgedancer is almost as bad.) I just took the quiz again and it turns out that I'm now even more Truthwatcher. Which is fine by me; they have a neat and elegant glyph (unlike the Stonewards because seriously how do you even begin to determine the stroke order for that thing), and precog powers are the best powers, even without the handy bonuses of resurrection and illusion-making. ...The cost of this, of course, is that I'm now 0% in everything other than Truthwatcher, Elsecaller, and Lightweaver. Guess I'll just sit here with my books and prophecies and imaginary friends.

I was going to make a joke about him being a WindLoper, but I have been as thoroughly defeated as a formerly one-armed Herdazian realising that his one-armed Herdazian jokes are now useless. The Lopen can be the guy waving at you on the left end of the Windrunner glyph who you can see if you squint really, really hard.

Selected works from Brandon Goaterson's bibliography Goatborn series: The Final Goat The Goat of Ascension The Hero of Goat The Goat of Law Shadows of Goat Goat of Mourning The Lost Goat (tentative title) Stormgoat Archives: The Goat of Kings Words of Goat Goatbringer (tentative title) Other Goats: Goatbreaker (sequel, Nightgoat, pending) Steelgoat Perfect Goat Sixth of the Goat Goat for Silence in the Forests of Goat The Emperor's Goat Legion: Goat Deep White Goat Dragongoat

I'm some kind of secular thing. That's... about it. Some years ago, I would have been more precise and detailed about it, but I've come to appreciate simplicity and the value of vagueness in preserving accuracy. As for my current beliefs, well... One time, when I was very little, one of my classmates said something about souls. Now, I had naturally never heard the word before (as English isn't my mother tongue, and "soul" is unlikely to show up on vocab lists for small children), so I asked, "what's a soul?" And then, still confused (likely due to my secular upbringing), I asked, "what does it do?", "what happens if you don't have one?", and all sorts of things that my poor also-very-little classmate couldn't really answer. And at the end of it, I still had absolutely no idea why anyone would need a soul for anything - it didn't seem to be very useful at all. I was, in fact, pretty sure that nothing would be any different if someone didn't have one. ...Something like that. It's grown more complicated than that, of course, since I'm no longer a very young child (or am I? ), but the heart of it is very simple. (As a side note, I wonder whether there are people out there trying to destroy the afterlife. You'd expect there to be some kindhearted - and/or self-righteous - individuals out there who want to rescue the several billion people being tortured in Hell by putting them out of their misery, or something; it seems pretty unlikely that every follower of this sort of belief system would just stand by and allow a literal hellhole to exist. We have a big population, after all. ...I wonder how they would go about trying.)

I'm 72% Truthwatcher and 68% Lightweaver, so it could go either way. What I find more interesting is the stuff I'm absolutely definitely not: Windrunner, Skybreaker, Bondsmith, and Stoneward. I guess that makes me a dishonourable, lawless, divisive traitor.

I remember it being mentioned that Ruin couldn't help but assist the Lord Ruler at times when he was being destructive. The Zane thing probably happened by a similar principle. In fact, maybe Ruin helped out a bit every time anyone tries to kill anyone else; it's quite plausible that in pre-Harmony Scadrial, murder was just that tiny bit easier.

It was probably something along the lines of "let's help Zane make Vin kill more people", I think. Vane is likely the most unsustainable and destructive relationship that could have formed in the entire series, and we all know that Ruin can't keep his hands off of unsustainable and destructive things.

Is it living? Is it unique?

I forgot about this part; thanks for the reminder. It makes sense for him to want to spend some time feeling a little closer to his actual age. I guess the spirit thing might be a reasonable explanation, then, even if it's the least understood and thus feels pretty handwavey. (I considered that it might be due to the cognitive aspect, but in my experience, most people seem to be surprised when they look in the mirror and find the first wrinkle forming at the corner of their eye or something like that, so at the very least gold compounding should make you age much slower. Couple that with how Rashek marketed himself as immortal, and even public perception of him would expect him to stay young.) ...Now I'm really curious about how a hypothetical feruchemical method to store mental health would work out. It sounds scary-fun.

Spoilers for TFE, mild spoilers for AoL. The Lord Ruler routinely spent time being an old man in his little hut, presumably spinning cheerfully on his swivel chair or something. He did this to store youth, and chances are that he didn't continuously compound atium because it burns insanely fast. What I was wondering was, why couldn't this just be replaced with gold compounding, for more-or-less the same effect? Gold burns much more slowly, so he could keep it up pretty much continuously. (The way Miles is discussed in AoL - and the way gold compounding seems to work, in generating more health that you can then continuously store away - it suggests that he doesn't need to spend time being sickly in order to store health.) His need for it also wouldn't increase as he got older, which would be a really big plus. I'm pretty sure that being in permanent good health would be enough to make Rashek look like a young man forever. Healthy skin does not wrinkle. Healthy bones do not bow under the weight of your body. Healthy hair follicles do not produce white hair. In fact, healthy teeth probably don't even yellow. Everything beyond that is down to his mannerisms and style of dress, so he could easily present himself as a twenty-something-year-old. He wouldn't die of any age-related illnesses, either. Shouldn't that make him sufficiently immortal? The best explanations I can think of are: - Gold compounding does not reduce signs of aging, because wrinkles and stuff aren't considered health problems. (Which would be weird, because they're caused by organs functioning less and less well.) - On Scadrial, "old age" is an actual literal thing that you can die of. (Which would make it a type of illness, which would mean that gold compounding should heal it from you?) - Age is some kind of spiritweb thing (not clear on the details) that somehow inherently affects you on a plane where gold compounding can't fix the problems that it causes. (Which would need to be worked out in further detail before it can really be used to explain anything.) - The Lord Ruler actually made a big mistake in starting to compound atium, and he kept it up because stopping compounding is an even worse idea. (Probably the most plausible explanation on this list, IMO.) What do you all think?

I suspect that back in the Final Empire, a lot of this research was privately funded by noble houses and tested on their own mistborn in hopes of giving them an edge in a fight, much like what Vin did in order to discover duralumin. The knowledge about things like aluminium was officially restricted, yes, but I would be surprised if none of the noble families found out about it through experimentation. Most likely, they simply kept it a secret within the family - or even just within their own generation, if they didn't trust their own offspring not to stab them in the back.

I figure we can consider koloss and Inquisitors to be subspecies of humans, so interbreeding would be possible and the child would be born with mostly-human traits. I'm really curious about how an Inquisitor's offspring might turn out. Does anyone have any ideas?

I recommend getting some silver dragees to be your atium. You can actually eat them (no matter what the FDA tells you; we eat them all the time here in not-USA), which is the best part. There are also gold and silver sprinkles. They'll dissolve if you put them in water or ethanol, so you might want to saturate the liquid for your vial with regular sugar before adding the sprinkles. Hooray for drinkable vials!