Djarskublar

In the end, it is magic. Really logical and relatively thermodynamically accurate magic, but still magic. I have some theories about how it doesn't defy conservation, but they are, unfortunately, complete guesses and outside my specialty. The easiest to picture and explain would be motion magic like steelpushes and gravitational lashings. My guess would be that when an object experiences friction, rather than warm up, it loses both speed and Investiture. The Investiture bleeds off it, so it slows and then the Investiture returns to its Shard. So, while there is work being done on something, there is no net gain in energy on the physical plane. This isn't really relevant to the conversation though. I think the general consensus with your theory, @Confused, is that you are reading too much into old WoBs. Still a cool theory. Now that I actually understand it, I can see where you are coming from much better, but I still agree with the general consensus. Occam's Razor and all that.

Now here is the real question: what happens when you have multiple types of Investiture stored in the metalmind you are burning. I.e. you take this ironmind with unkeyed charge stored in it, then turn the iron into steel, and store speed in it, then burn it. It now has two things filtering the magic, so do you get some of both, or something altogether new?

My understanding is that your brain only uses 400 calories a day, or about a fifth of your total energy expenditures (in a 2000 calorie diet). The idea that my heart pumping blood and generating a vacuum with my lungs takes that much energy every day... wow. This. This exactly.

I'm 99% certain that is entirely normal. It's not like they have the best frictional properties. Plus, you probably aren't world class, so he is trying to get you to do it right by shaking the thing around harder. The slightest loosening of grip = someone loses an eye.

No, I just don't bother eating for long enough that I cross said wall... regularly... I frequently eat maybe 300-500 calories in a day, and only realize it at the end of the day. Then I just eat a cookie and go to bed anyway... I used to fence, which was fun, but that was before the surgery, so my body couldn't... circulate well, so I was ridiculously slow. No matter how much training I put in, I literally hit a wall in how much I could progress, and I only found out later that it wasn't a matter of talent, just that my circulatory system was restricted by my ribs growing concavely. The surgery was basically breaking all my ribs and putting a small steel bar behind them to hold them in a normal spot. It's normally a couple days in the hospital on serious pain meds (my understanding is that it is one of, if not the most painful surgery there is) and then you go home with a bunch of serious pain meds. We are talking not one, but two epidurals for five days, plus oxy, tylenol, and another narcotic that I can't remember the name of, among other assorted things to help balance the system. I got fevers for the next three months and barely ate, so I was in the hospital for a week and out of commission for an entire summer break. Needless to say, I suck at convalescing. I got to play a lot of video games and read a TON of books, though, so it wasn't all bad. But yeah, the whole experience was 'fun.' Getting the IV in was hilarious. I am a very odd hemophobe, a combination of needles and blood, but for some reason real blood doesn't bother me, but medical descriptions of it do... to a fairly extreme degree. I can read the Berserk manga just fine, but WebMD is my worst nightmare. When they inserted the IV, my BP dropped to 60/40. When I got the IV put in this last year to get the bar out, the machine couldn't even read my BP for a bit, and then finally read 60/38 once it had gone up a touch. The room got very crowded very quickly both times, but we just told them it was fine and would go away. My father was just laughing the whole time the second time around because we had done it before.

When teachers throw lemons, make lem-- ah screw it, throw them back, man!

Yeah I laugh at marathon runners whining about crossing the wall... I'm like, just a day in the life, man.

I'm hyperbolantating. I got no love for my pun, I guess it was too obtuse. I generally like wordplay, but Protagonist always insists on the lead roll, and is terrible at projecting, while Scenery just sits there. I always feel bad for Scenery, his makeup is frequently terribly done, and he keeps having to change it through the whole ordeal.

Well, I would bet that I have you all beat. Even you, @Elenion. I'm millimeters shy of 6' but I weigh ~110 lbs. I'm 19. I had a surgery a few years ago, and while I was admittedly a few inches shorter then, I lost all appetite and went down to 85 lbs... 85 lbs on a 5'9" frame does not look good, let me tell you. If you have ever seen pictures of holocaust victims, that's basically what I looked like for a few months. I still don't look much better. It doesn't help that my bones are already kinda funky and pointy. But yeah, skin tight across bones is not the sexy pool body anybody healthy wants... Before anyone freaks out, it's not that I have a bad body image, eating is just a pain. I like food, but the preparation and consumption of it is too time consuming. This means that I don't eat well. I literally look for things that are high calorie simply because I know that I will last longer if I eat them. I can, and will, certainly use any fat stores I might (read: probably not) get out of it... When I was a kid, I wondered why we didn't have to eat more. Now I understand the basic chemistry/physics of food, and I am blown away by how much we eat. 2000 nutritional calories/day is, if I remember the conversions correctly, a bit over 8 million joules every day. Let me just say, what the hell man?! That is a ridiculously large amount of energy for a lump that weighs in (in the USA, anyway) at around 80 kg. I mean, I realize the torque our tendons can exert on our bones is terrible, considering the location of connection, but still... Even sedentary people that are skinnier still need ~75% of that 8 mil. 6 million joules a day to sit there seems ludicrous to me. Try tossing that much energy into an impulse on me... Yeah, not pretty.

You get a cylindrical friend. *inserts elephant*

I just want to advertise my favorite band really bad right now. I must say, of all the band I have listened to (many, and varied), hands down my favorite is Nightwish. If any of you Sharders are Finnish, thank you for this wonderful band. They have everything I look for in a band: layered, complex composition; excellent performers; more than 3 or 4 types of instrument; something unique to them (they have an uilleann piper as a core member these days); and last, but not least, they have variety. Everything from Celtic rock (Last of the Wilds is a good example) to noir jazz (Slow, Love, Slow) to more balladic stuff (Eva) to my favorite stuff: the bombastic, heavily layered stuff (7 Days to the Wolves, Weak Fantasy, Sahara). They reside mostly in the symphonic metal subgenre, and their various female singers makes it a dream to listen to. As a note, their most famous album, Dark Passion Play, cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a half million euros to produce because of their use of an orchestra, as well as a couple different choirs. The addition of actual orchestration, rather than synthesizing the background tracks, adds so much to the quality. Some of the songs send chills down my spine any time I listen to them due to the sheer technical precision. I guess I'm done now. Any other symphonic metal fans out there? I know there are metal fans, since we've discussed it before, but this is something else entirely.

And I chose the road less traveled by. And then the murders began. When in Rome, do as the Romans. And then the murders began. Quoth the Raven "and then the murders began." Elementary, my dear Watson. And then the murders began.

I know all these puns have been at your expense, so I will just put them on your tab.

There is also that WoB that Nightblood is much more Invested than we would assume from it having 1k breaths. Where is that extra stuff coming from? I kinda just assumed it was a bonus from Endowment, but the more I think about that, the less sure I am of that assumption. @CaptainRyan, I actually hadn't even considered that the Investitures might separate. That makes a lot of sense too. Ugh, I'm just going to have to ask Brandon about this. Guess I may as well make a Twitter account, even if only to ask for WoB

... This is my main problem. I can accept that you like a wildly different interpretation than the standard understanding. It just looks so inconsistent. If what you say is true, then a fair portion falls into place, yes, but you seem to be contradicting yourself here. I guess this conflicts with my previous statement that it is self-consistent, but I don't see the two as entirely incompatible, since I may just be misunderstanding here. How can the Powers "become Investiture" when they are already 'vast quantities of Investiture that Shards have access to?' One moment, it seems that the 'Powers' are something separate from the 3 Realms, but the next it is just the Investiture the Shards hold within the 3 Realms. I still don't see why these Powers need to be differentiated from the Shards... And you say that the Investiture that the Shards hold is undifferentiated and unInvested. I would wholly disagree with that, independent of any of your other points. You even said so yourself-- "the Powers Invested the Vessels." Besides that, they are differentiated since they are colored by an Intent. Unless you require them to be differentiated by being made physical, which is ludicrous (note that manifestations like the mists or shardpools count as physical). The Spiritual Realm is made of Connections. Everybody has some Connection to their local Shard and to everything and everyone that they have ever seen/known. Some of those Connections are incredibly weak, to the point of being moot, but they technically exist. Your soul is the sum of nature/nurture. By extension, this means the Shards are Connected to everyone in their care, and at least have some Connection to things on Yolen at the very least. Basically, either you have made a mistake, or you need to clarify this. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume I'm not getting it, since I haven't truly understood yet.

Why be efficient when the source is supposed to be limitless... Besides that, it may be useful to the Heralds in some way to have a ton of Investiture coursing through them when they are Surgebinding. Extra Investiture interference and healing, especially considering that as far as I know, they don't get Plate. Plus, they are cognitive shadows, so maybe the extra Investiture is good for them, rather than dangerous. The Returned consume a lot of Investiture as well.

Hmmm, so I'm not being original, then? Oh well. To answer your points: 1) At the end of WoR, we see NB, and it leaks a black smoke when partially unsheathed, just like always, That is by no means conclusive, but a good start. 2) This is true, and I touched on it somewhat in the OP, though I didn't state it this explicitly. In the end, it doesn't matter, the Intent is corrupted. If you just have to eat all of Endowment, so be it. Taking from multiple Shards would be interesting, though, since then there could actually be a 17th Shard. 3) I also listed this as a potential issue in the OP, and again, you may just have to have Nightblood eat all of Endowment instead of sampling from all of the Shards. One thing though, what Intent is being mixed in? I highly doubt it is the same Intent as one of the other Shards. NB isn't evil, it destroys evil. I don't think it is likely that there is a Shard of "Destroy Evil." I suppose there could be something similar, but I think a new Intent is being created by NB and mixed into the Investiture. This is why the Investiture in the Cosmere is reduced. If it just converted it to, say, Ruinous Intent, then Ruin could probably claim it, and Sazed would be unhappy at having a worse power imbalance to mitigate. Regardless, if we just assume that NB eats Endowment, almost all issues with this go away. So, would a new Shard form from the body of the old?

Well, I guess I can start this shindig off! I would rather marry Clubs. I would much prefer Ham over Clubs, but Clubs isn't bad, by any means. More to the point, Elhokar needs a few books before I would even be able to tolerate him, let alone marry him. Quit whining and RULE already! Nobody expects you to be as great as Gavilar, but don't be this bad. It has been a while since I read Mistborn, though, so my memory of Clubs is a little fuzzy, but I do remember liking him well enough. I just want to smack Elhokar, though.

Something I wondered about offhand while mentioning how NB is the only thing we know of that changes the Intent of Investiture in a different thread has me curious. 1. Shards are, at the most fundamental level, a large chunk of Investiture with the same Intent. 2. Nightblood steals Investiture and corrupts its Intent into something it (he?) can use. That is my understanding of the mechanic anyway, regardless, it ends up with a different intent. 3. Presumably, NB corrupts any Investiture, and corrupts it into the same type of Investiture. Does this mean that eventually if Nightblood consumes a Shards worth of Investiture, will that Investiture coalesce into a new Shard with some unknown intent? Maybe Avarice or some such. I only see two things as necessary for this to eventually happen, assuming NB isn't destroyed or put in a museum for all eternity. One: the Investiture it corrupts needs to have the same new intent. I don't think that is an unreasonable assumption. It always bleeds off black, after all. The only caveat to this I can see at the moment would be that the Investiture may have traces of its old Intent that would make it incompatible with other corrupted Investiture. Basically, the requirement is that #3 above needs to hold true, and it doesn't necessarily do that. On the other hand, you could just have it corrupt all of one Shard. Two: the Investiture would have to actually coalesce. I would bet on it doing so once it reaches some critical mass. It should end up in the Spiritual Realm anyway, and space isn't a thing there, so the Investiture would already be together anyway... I think. I don't really see any reason for it to not get it together and form a Shard. You can yell at me now, Spool. I can see some alternative where the Investiture pools into some sort of splinter and slowly grows until it becomes Shard-level powerful. The next question I have is, if it does become a Shard, will it just develop sentience on its own, or will it find a Vessel?

No problem, though I will point out that you can edit your posts after submitting them, even years later, by clicking the edit button at the bottom left of posts, so there usually isn't a need to double post. On topic though, I think this is a General Discussion topic for sure, so all the polls should go there. You can just keep track of where the bracket stands on your own and just put up the polls as needed, maybe a batch of them every so often, say 8. Then after a day or so, record the result and post the next 8. Then it can be completed in a timely manner.

This sounds almost large enough to need its own subforum. I like it. Cosmere Theories isn't really the best place for 64 poll threads about who would win in 'x' consest, though.

Teachers can be chulls. Back in 10th grade, one of my teachers regularly spent the first 15 minutes or so of class staring into space or flirting with the girls in the class. On occasion he would actually be doing something constructive by going over materials with one of the other teachers, but that sort of thing belongs in prep periods, not my time. Then one time I had just come back from a trip and had gotten almost no sleep, so in that class, without thinking about it, I just asked "can we start class now," and he started yelling at me and called me out to the hall. I was sitting there like what the hell, and the only thought I had was how to get out of a 'citizenship' reduction that could cost me money/time and go on record. If I had a knife at the time, I would have stabbed him, even though that is a legitimate crime, unlike calling him out. I got out of it by pleading crankiness from the late flight, even though I was really just a little drowsy, so things like this can work out if you find the right excuse On the other hand, two of my top three people in life are teachers. They gave me more motivation to do stuff with my life and expanded my horizons on what I can even do with my life so much that I don't think I'll ever be able to repay them, though I did promise the best one that I'd get him his dream car if I ever end up rich, and intend to keep that promise To actually respond to your situation, could you maybe see the teacher after class and ask that in the future the teacher just let you know if you did it right or not. Emphasize that you don't want him to do the work, since you want to learn the content well. Just say that you want to work it out yourself, but you want to make sure you get the points. In my experience, teachers eat stuff like that up (especially if it's true). Play off their sense of pride in their work, or sheer laziness, depending on the teacher. They are actually really easy to manipulate, most of the time. (sorry if there are any teachers on this thread, but it's kinda true) It's how I managed to pass my classes with minimal effort since I was so deep in depression I literally couldn't start doing homework. My mind just deflected from it every time I considered it-- the ultimate in procrastination. I just got the teachers to all love me and give me special treatment. People tell me it doesn't work in college, but so far it's working great, though the year I took off of school and anti-depressants are helping me actually get work done, so it isn't as necessary. Though not really the meds yet, since those started about a week ago. And now for a rant about my life now... I lost my job last month, and can't work up the motivation to get another one. The fact that I don't really buy things because my parents are borderline hoarders means that I have enough savings to last me a long time, at least 8 months with my current expenses, makes it worse. Add this to the fact that I am waaay behind in the coursework for my online CS class, and am in a vicious cycle where I can't start working on it because the amount I have to do is getting to be truly daunting, so I just ignore it and it gets bigger. The unemployment problem is exacerbated by the fact that I don't have much in the way of marketable skills, just a year of exp dialing surveys for a call center, and then six months on their QA team. I really don't want to do some dead end crap like that again, but I don't have the skills to do something else that I know of. I sucked too hard in high school to be able to get enough scholarships to get me through college without some income, though, and doing the whole 'college life' thing holds no interest for me. I can experience it through other people's accounts, thank you. If anyone has suggestions on something I can DO, that would be appreciated. I am just kind of emotionally dead at this point. I have apparently developed a skill to turn off all emotion when I want to. Something makes me uncomfortable? Nope. Not any more. I know it's not healthy, but it is such a useful defense mechanism, I think I'll keep it around, just in case I end up in a life or death situation when a calm mind will benefit me greatly, but I wanna know what you folks think. [/rant] Edit: also, one of my new favorite bands got removed from Spotify, but I don't know why

Line up other potential work, and then complain... My last job was like that too. I got my promotion after a year of hard work and expressing interest. A bit later, they promoted some guy who had been there 3 weeks and had no prior experience with management or any industry experience... He quit less than a month later due to drug use overtaking his life and making him not come to work. Yeah, that bothered me a lot. It was a really lax workplace, drug use wise. They warn you they may do drug tests, but I'm almost certain they never tested a single person. I don't really mind that the place closed, but I was comfortable there

Ah, I see what you are saying now. That's actually a fair point. We don't know what the deal is with the shades. They are definitely cognitive shadows, though. Nazh says so, and cognitive shadows are an in-world explanation for things, so what the in-world scholars say goes. Also, when you say SoS, do you actually mean Shadows of Self? I don't remember cognitive shadows mattering in that book at all. Perhaps you meant SfS- Shadows for Silence?

Also note, @joesleepsalot, that the post before yours was made almost 6 years ago, and is no longer a good source for information. Also, please don't multipost under most circumstances, just edit your previous post. You can find the edit button at the bottom of your posts.