ParaTulip

I think this is possibly a misunderstanding caused by Lift being a child and also Renarin being our Truthwatcher PoV. Yes, lightweaving and progression are really good for carrying out Cultivation, but I think they are closer to carrying out Cultivation and Honor by a smidge, like one place off from being pure Cultivation. Rather, it is the mix of Progression and Abrasion that is the truest expression of a cultivator. I just read up on the domestication of silver foxes, which I will put a quote I pulled from the wiki page on the other page of this message so you can read it too. it is a story of a woman leading a project to take already farmed foxes and increase their tameness. The path to doing this is simple: As the foxes grow, stop them periodically to check their tameness. Imagine trying to conduct this same project on Roshar, which Radiant order would be most likely to give you someone who succeeds? You might say Truthwatcher, but then imagine a version of the project where the goal was not to breed a singular type of tame foxes, to achieve a specific vision, but instead to seek a way to grow the potentials of foxes on the whole? In that case, the vision that Truthwatcher have is merely a distraction. The real foxes are what should be watched, should be made to grow or not grow in various ways. I want to put this another way, since it is a hard thing to feel out. Ask yourself: How does God cultivate people? Does God have a vision for each of us which we must attain, or are we each a miraculous unfolding of possibilities that God is also eager to know? I think, when at least Kor imagines God, she imagines a want for a mysterious unfolding in each new soul. To try to set the path something will grow into is a limitation of that growth. She would see God's plan for people to be that they meet challenges and grow from them, that they encounter resistance and surpass it. Friction and healing, challenges and learning, trauma and recovery; those are the true tools and they are forms of Abrasion and Progression, not Lightweaving and Progression. Another way to see this: All the Spren but Cultivation Spren are already corrupted by Honor. Mistspren are fine with being corrupted more because they were never pure to begin with. The Highspren, Honorspren, and Cultivationspren are probably the least interested in being Enlightened because they might want to be monoshardic for whatever reasons (yes, Highspren and Honorspren are both dishardic, but they have become culturally weird about it.) Now the biggest counter argument is that the most Cultivation coded Spren ever is the Nightwatcher and that sure does sound like a parallel to a Truthwatcher. That I have to just call a coincidence and hope it doesn't sink my argument. "When a cub is one month old, an experimenter offers it food from his hand while trying to stroke and handle the cub. The cubs are tested twice, once in a cage and once while moving freely with other cubs in an enclosure, where they can choose to make contact either with the human experimenter or with another cub. The test is repeated monthly until the cubs are six or seven months old." At the age of seven or eight months, the cubs are given a tameness score and placed in one of three groups. The least domesticated are in Class III; those that allow humans to pet and handle them, but that do not respond to contact with friendliness, are in Class II; the ones that are friendly with humans are in Class I. After only six generations, Belyayev and his team had to add a higher category, Class IE, the "domesticated elite", which "are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old. By the 20th generation 35% were 'elite', and by the 30th generation 70% to 80% of the selected generation was 'elite'." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox#Experiment

I think the issue with Lurchers is that their best performance requires a lot of settup. Imagine doing home defense as a noble born an iron misting, you can have anchor points to zip to, have some of them rigged so that a push or pull done the wrong way will break the figure so as to disadvantage a potential mistborn foe, and neutralize most forms of effective ranged attack against your allies. Sure, you are not as good at offense as a coinshot, but if you are the house head or in line for it then you don't want to be personally going out to assassinate people anyway. Also, you can grab your stuff quicker while going out. I would love to be able to yank my keys and wallet over to me while getting out for the day. Further, I can imagine applications where being a lurcher is actually rather nice for the act of love making, but I will simply permit others to imagine the full richness of this potential.

It will learn by watching, by trying. The goal with the metal and the gemstones is to hopefully to crate Connections to patterns outside the mirror so it can become like those things but also something different. By crafting the mirror thus, I am making sure the command has Intents to pick up on and to know what I mean by "reveal true beauty". The issue is not one of sufficient calculation and precise terms, it is about sculpting the meanings for the words "truth and beauty" by examples and by laying down pathways. If you think you need to put the full command into words, then it would be like this:

I imagine Thousand Breath Commands are all going to be hugely weighty things. You could probably do crazy stuff like "Be fruitful and multiply" or "Seek truth". I doubt anything less intensely abstract and broad takes that much power for the Awakening to work. I would probably go with "Reveal true beauty" for my choice if someone asked me what could possibly be worth doing it. I would give that command to a clear, silver, mirror and hope that the object helps people be authentic and splendid versions of themselves. Maybe have the frame be copper and bronze braiding, for memory and spiritual perception, and some emeralds and zircons, for the association with Truthwatchers and Elsecallers, settings to further clarify the purpose.

Hey all. I wanted to get some ideas I have been having after reading Echopraxia by Peter Watts by a community that loves its psuedoscience-fantasy stuff. If you do not know, Mr Watts came up with an idea for how to explain vampires who were banished by the cross without invoking anything with the feeling of being a miracle. You can read a write up on the science-fiction of it all here https://blindsight.bib.bz/a-brief-primer-on-vampire-biology My concept is to apply this to elves. What follows are some notes I wrote to explain the concept to friends. But in short: What if humans but more genders and better at reproduction? Also, there are some thoughts based on imagining what would happen if, like in Watts' works, human science were to revive this lost genetic cousin. Imagine humans who shift around within a space of multiple sexual characteristic dimensions by huffing flower pollen. Different flower in different sequences help the special reproductive and cultural process. If you kill out 1 species of their flowers, you kill the whole race. So of course now they hove drug routines and stuff. Actually, it is better in some ways. But how to explain such a strange paradigm coming about from mundane causes? The first would produce a progesterone analog such that it effects something like birth control for women, the other valley has a flower that tends to make people experience vasodilation or maybe is just cocoa since that is easier to explain as "the fruit that goes well with sex". This pattern of using plants to regulate the reproductive process can then be adapted to by selection pressure; other flowers become associated with midwifery and breast feeding and thus start to have effects on early infant development. Having subjugated their own sex drives, the proto-elves also just have a lot more mental bandwidth to get weird about rituals and start basically creating distinct flower-valleys so they can perform feats of flower-gathering to impress one another in a sort of extension for demonstrating hunting or crafting prowess they already had. Do this for 10k years with an isolated psuedo-atlantis continent (oh, there was supposed to be one of those off India at some point. Sure, that is real in this fantasy. Elves were also darker skinned than Tolkein probably imagined I guess) and you get a weird new species that is still theoretically able to interbreed with humans but the viability rate is not great. Thanks to anyone who is thinking about all of this. My mind is currently trying to turn over what the other types of flowers they could be biologically symbiotic with and what they might do. Maybe the onset of puberty is able to be triggered and moderated/intensified by a set of 3 or more plants that govern the general "get bigger, get deeper voice/hairy/engorge the phallus/clitorous, get wider hips and mammaries", but I worry I am making them too much about sexual characteristics then. I would love to hear more ideas for how such a fantastical people could use the cultivation of their environment and their bodies in anyone else's imagination.

What else would you include on a syllabus for studying modern dystopia and gender? Feminism is having a bad moment in the English speaking world, so I feel like it's a relevant concept.

Constant music and audio book listerer here: This moring I gave A Night At The Opera a spin. I have heard that Mr. Sanderson listens to music as he writes, especially that he wrote the battle of Kaladin and Szeth to Daft Punk. I feel as if "The Prophet's Song" aff that is almost about an alternate version of the Stormlight series leads of the first half, but I do get that this is just the essential motiffs of "religious epic" in English.

I cannot express how much "only" the wrong qualifier there. That is a horrifying amount of death that, if it happened to us, would feel like the end of the world. It might not be dramatic enough for someone who lived through the Desolations, where exterminating 90% of a nation could happen, but it would be a major event.

Hmm, I would think that the trick there would be to try to make a, as Mr Sanderson says "magical disease", as the Signers. Of course, since they lack access to the surge of Adhesion, it is probably hard for the Fused to just stick the god juice particles to a bacterium and let it nature take its course. I would imagine needing to use Fabrials to create an environment that enhances Progression among non-mammal life while infecting hogs first and then later humans with the candidate disease, assuming such filtering is possible. Perhaps if Sja Anat can Enlighten Rotspren, they might become part of such a project. I hope no one minds me giving some thoughts on this general notion of Investiture being anti-plague-ish? That is a really curious choice for Mr Sanderson to make about how his world works. The specific mention of Small Pox is especially keen to me. I have long read The Stormlight Archive with an understanding that the author meant to create a a sort of spiritual analog to the history of conflicts between indigenous peoples and their colonizers, with a perspective from a man who lives in the USA obviously shaping the whole affair. Obviously things like the length of history and the nature of the crimes against the indigenous people are vastly different from those in actual history, and some aspects of these thoughts also are being explored in [checks which forum this is] the Mistborn books along with episodes like The Isles of the Emberdark also having these notions. In actual history, the introduction of small pox among the peoples of the Americas and syphilis among the Europeans had both dramatic impacts in terms of death and subtle impacts on culture which still reverberate to this very day. I do not feel the need to explain the former as it is infamous beyond measure, but the latter is partly responsible for killing the culture of public bathing that had survived from classical Rome to the early modern era. I would personally find these kinds of complexities to be the most interesting things to work out about the world. But then I think about how I and our author differ. While not knowing the man personally, I believe I have read remarks by him attesting to an earnest faith in Church and Christ. Further, though I know the canon of scriptures that I would have learned as a youth and those he would have learned might not contain the same books, I do know some mythic-historic concepts that would probably be relevant, IE the plagues of Egypt in the time of Mosses as recalled in the book of Exodus. In that text, God is awesomely wrathful towards those who serve Pharoh. And yet these plagues, in all their horror, have a singular aspect which is hard to find in most later plagues: They have a clear intention. The plagues were done to ensure those who followed Mosses would become the chosen people of God, from among whom would be born the savior of all humanity (assuming you read the version with that ending) from all the bad stuff. Thus, whatever horror the plagues were, they were not manifestation of pure evil as one who believes in a dualism where there is an equal and opposite force to God might infer from the deaths of first born children and rivers running red with blood. To synthesize: Part of the horror of the plagues of the Colombian cultural exchange was how it was understood at the time. Some among the people living then read their bible, saw that God was one to send plagues upon those wicked people who opposed his chosen ones, and decided that must mean it is peachy keen to do a lot of things we now understand to be really really morally bad. Furthermore, that people did this form of misreading and we know understand them to have been commissioners of evil acts, it makes the whole practice of reading the hand of divine providence in the events of disease suspect and even casts a shadow on seeing such things in the natural world, which is wholly contrary to the kind of writing where the power of the local god is literally delivered in great big storms. Anyway, thanks to everyone who read all of this. I am kinda shocked at how much I wrote. Sorry if I offended your religious sensibilities, but please accept I was not trying to.

@Frustrationokay, so my raids have to be fast, over within two hours of starting and retreating into a zone where it would delay a repositioning. I know one of the Unmade enables rapid force deployment too, but I also imagine Singers are just better at nomadic life than humans in the Rosharan environment? Unless Honor being the High Storm means that the weather is somehow more of a threat to Singers than Humans during this war, I think the Singer side should engage in constant small scale warfare and village cullings. Keeping humans mostly in cities means they will suffer worse from the introduction of disease or poison into food or water supplies, though the ability to soulcast food means this will be hard to achieve. I do think that Koravellium rigged the balancing mechanics such that this sort of a stalemate outcome is going to be what happens most of the time. Probably why Taln hates her so much; Even if he and humanity had lost, at least that would be an end to the endless torment. But she set the table such that this endless buffet of misery could never end.

That would be how I would do it. If the desolation is going to be a long thing, then it is a wonderful thing when the Radiants are gathered in one place and forming an unbreakable fortress: It means they can't be stopping my raids elsewhere. I wonder if Radiant oaths stop them from doing raids and making war in between desolations somehow? Regrowth fabrials would also make certain tactics have to get weirder/more cruel. For example, it might make sense to sterilize rather than kill segments of the enemy population so as to force the opponent to either allow that person to continue to consume resources despite not being able to contribute to population growth. But the healing of a regrowth fabrial means that inflicting lasting maimings like that requires torturing the person such that they accept the wound as part of themself, or at least keeping them from healing for some time.

You put this fortress in the midst of a large lake. I again need to ask what the strategic picture is such that holding the fortress, instead of just having it under surveillance, matters. I know about the German plan to invade the low countries and why the German military command felt it was so critical to do atrocities to the Belgians about any delay to that plan. Purelake is not Belgium. Do you want to make this fortress be in Marabethia on the coast of Purelake and controlling a pass across that narrow strip of land, thus making this about controlling a pass while still having this huge body of water be in play somehow?

The problem for the Singers is the cycle of the desolation. The Fused are the peer force to the Radiants, not the Regals. Anyone with shard plate and blade is a threat to entire companies of Regals. Once the Fused are re-sealed on Braize, then the humans will reclaim their old lands and maybe do their own genocides. I guess it is a bit of a modern thing to view the extermination of one's enemies as anything other than a natural escalation of a conflict for resources. I wonder if Koravellium thought Tanavast would get over his attachment to humans at some point or if the Intent influence made her see this as evolution picking between two upright sapients of comparable bodymass fighting over a niche that she was hoping to keep either way.

I would also ask why the fortress matters strategically? To win the process of the Desolations, there needs to be a final winner. Seemingly the only path to this is the extermination of the opponent as a species or their Shard giving up. Since a Fused probably can't expect to do much to make Tannavast give up, then the only option is to murder as many humans a possible. There are not even 10k humans in this fortress. It is not worth attacking. Have Masked One agents impersonate local fishermen or traders to keep an eye on the place while focusing on a project to poison water supplies for villages and cities, slaughter herds of animals, and destroying stores of grain or other foodstuffs. You know, do a genocide.

What's 40% of you forces in terms of size? What kind of formation and tactics are you using to maximize Light depletion and minimize losses? The hardest part to me would be composing the raiding force in such a way that does not give away its nature as a probing attack. A fortress in a lake does not seem extremely useful? Why wouldn't you simply bypass it? Is it over a pool which can be used to access Shadesmar? Attacking an enemy with a huge moat is a big problem for Fused and Regals. Stormform hates large bodies of water and Deepest Ones also seem less useful in it. Can the water around the Radiant position be made noxious or at least undrinkable by the workings of a Altered One?

Never heard of this before. I just think a near indestructible rope that can appear and disappear at will would be an insanely huge get for human problem solving options. The two most basic tools of humanity are ropes and sticks, clothing as we know it can be understood as a form of rope, homes as forms of sticks. Fire and social systems (including roping animals into those systems) are what I see as the other big instruments of humans, but I don't think I could describe either of those as being a single object in the way shardblades are. Swords, spears, guns, all of them can be understood as being in the stick family.

I think this is a difference in concept. I could imagine something like a line that splits whatever interaxial or molecular bonds it comes within a certain distance of, a parting of the substances at their basic level. If more momentum is needed, simply cut a rock from the ground (or imagine a wire widening to a sold metal weight at the end) and use it to... Okay so I am inventing an implement for cutting cheese from first principles here, but Shard Cheese Cutter is definitely not something you want to call a companion who can understand the words. Wirehammer sounds more respectful. I guess there's something about the want for a horse in Sigil's predicament, he lacked a lever and/or a source of momentum that wasn't his own ability to fall harder.

Not into the stuff, but there is a lot of neat things it accomplishes theologically. God is imminent and transient by being both the Father who is above the creation and the Holy Spirit which is in all Goods. Likewise, Jesus being fully God instead of something lesser to the Father makes the sacrifice upon the cross as significant as possible. There is also the nature of Jesus as God in himself being both wholly divine and wholly human which is actually important as a kind of willful contradiction of other logics: We might otherwise suspect that being God and being human are incompatible as one might imagine them as two different natures. Further to remove this makes it hard to maintain as clear of a distinction from Islam. As someone outside of this all, I think it could have been the case that the Roman Catholic Church could have come to just about any conclusion about the nature of God if subject to the right historic circumstances. However, the emergence of Islam, which holds God to be profoundly singular, as the immediate and local rival of Christianity for most of the time from when Trinitarianism was adopted until after the printing press and Reformation would radically change the nature of what it meant to be Christian.

Rope. Being able to make rope out of shardblade matter would be an incredible power. Bonus points if the rope can be sharp or dull where the user wants it to be, since that does cover the trip wire case, but even just normal style dull rope is great. A living rope that can be stiff, soft, loose, tight, based on mental commands can be used to carry things, restrain enemies, and even as part of a shelter. That said, there is a weirdness that WaT introduced that it is possible to defend against a shardspear by having however much investment in the tissue as a Focused One has. This kinda makes every notion of Shardblades are the premiere weapon system seem stupid to me and like the actual nature of warfare is just having more god juice. Thuncasts are not highly invested to make them immune to Shardblades because Rayse loved being a loser.

How does he avoid killing the ecology? Why should he care about plants and animals that do not serve him, praise him as the savior he knows himself to be? Kill it all and supply Light to those who offer the correct prayers so they can live in a dead world. His name is not Cultivation. Singers cannot change forms without being on Roshar? Then his soldiers simply remain in one form while on campaign or doing foreign garrison and returns home to change. Mastering a single form as if it were a particular weapon and using it exclusively in war seems really sensible to me.

I always figured the Sun King's Gambit meant something like "My heirs, their allies, and those forces from beyond Roshar will undo your evil" instead of just waiting for allies from the stars. It might be the case that Kaladin and Syl returning means the high storm pattern of weather must return. Perhaps the ecology of Roshar needs that pattern of magic juice flow to be healthy, and the Singer society will be miserable because of Taravangian's closing of the skies. The Night of Sorrows world being sunless feels to me like an allusion to various ideas of what a bad world is like. I once heard that an important figure in the LDS movement compared the heaven of faithful christians as being like the sun itself and the afterlife of people who do spit in the face of God stuff (not the exact terms, forgive my inaccuracy) is like a cold and sunless place, while everyone else gets something in between pending some further act of divine love and mercy. Taravangian has made the world of the Singers a cold sunless place. He has done something worse than Rashek's ashmounts. I actually think he did this on purpose so that the Singer society would be utterly dependent on him for all forms of light, and not just Light, so they would have to give him legions for his cosmic ambitions. Essentially, the Listener, Radiant, and Unoathed alliance would hope to eventually be understood as liberators alongside their foreign allies. This all goes out the window if the world of the Night of Sorrows is like, a fine enough place that just has normal society shaped problems and not hellworld problems. Unless someone wants to write fanfic about it, we are not going to get to find this out until 2030.

Have we seen anyone do steam power using flame-spren? Coal and fuel oil are not things that I recall coming up in the Stormlight books, running a steam engine on charcoal sounds like a bad time logistically, and I almost wonder if using attractor and repeller fabriels would not be a better system? Doing a power conversion from Light to Spren to Water to Steam to Kinetic Energy seems like it would need to introduce more losses than just doing Light to Spren to Kinetic Energy. Not sure what the limits on what attractors and repellers can be set to effect, but it just seems like there should be a convergence on the principles seen in the [checks that I am in the comsere forum] era 2 southern scadrian airships. The motor force comes from magical force being applied to the spiny part, not from running a more general power plant. I do feel like there is an idea for a kind of "What if a Shardworld was awful because it was like real life?" concept in all of this talk of oil and coal and power. Imagine a world where there are huge wells of energy beneath the rocks and soil, but extracting and using them destroys the ecology of the planet. I suppose this would be something like if Harmony was a pre-existing being whose body was always found within the soil and who would be injured by the taking up of that power recklessly?

I do not think the Aon system of accessing the Dor is that useful. How do you discover the Aons for concepts like bindpoint and steel spike? It seems like Forgery would be the better way to do this: Create a stamp that forges a history for a spike, having it been invested and bound according to a fabricated history. Maybe even have the stamp maker enact a false version of the spiking so that they can more completely imagine the real thing and inscribe a concept of it into the stamp. The Dor then can be used to make up the difference in Investiture between the unforged spike and what the forging makes of it. From there, examining the forged spike would require some trick like the way Elsecallers can see into the CR but for regarding the Spiritual elements. I bet Bloodsealing and Hemalurgy play well together somehow.

I would be interested in a role like Medea or Circe. Figures with ambiguous divine links but known for their cleverness and skills with the pharmacon. If this is a modern day setting, I would probably lean to towards Medea since she is further ranging than Circe, who is strongly associated with Aeaea. This also makes @IcedOutPenguin my character's grandfather or maybe great uncle? So, how does magic work? Medea's deeds are kind of all over the place and she does not have a kind of divine portfolio like a god.