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Argent

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  1. Argent
    I doubt even the Diagram can be that specific. It's possible that it instructed Taravangian to send or buy a mole in the camps, but being insanely brilliant doesn't mean you get to automatically known everybody on first name basis. He likely had some specific instructions for Graves and then had to leave it up to him to figure out how to execute them.
  2. Argent
    Good sir is, indeed, correct. I think at this point most some sort of substitution is pretty much taken for granted. The only meaningful in-world thing we could use dates for is highstorm / Everstorm predictions, and we already have an epigraph that pretty clearly shows that Taravangian knows how to write dates. So we'll have to convert all those numbers into letters - or perhaps directly into words - somehow. Palindromes are a popular venue, but it hasn't taken us very far, other than to spot a bunch of them... If the solution was only palindromes, however, we wouldn't need that pesky clue hidden somewhere in the book. My top contenders right now are the information about how the letter h is used in the Alethi language, and the other epigraph from the same... book. Oh, look, the main characters' names are the most frequently occurring words! This compilation is completely useless to me, but fun to look at it. Parshendi, apparently, is the most common made-up word, followed closely by Stormlight.
  3. Argent
    This is the story of a good number of us here, mine included
  4. Argent
    Very simply put, it's an algorithm that allows you to compress information in a more compact form. Here's a simple example: Let's say you need to store numbers computer memory. You have a 64-bit machine, so each line you can write to (by default) looks like a string of 64 zeros. If you want to store the numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, normally they would like this (in binary): 1: 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0001 1: 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0001 2: 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0010 3: 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0011 5: 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0101 7: 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0111 That's a lot of zeros just sitting there, doing nothing. To save space you can compress several (or in our case, all) of those numbers in a single line, as long you figure out a way to decompress them without losing the information you stored (assuming you want lossless compression). So if you see 01010111, you know this is [0101][0111] and not [01][01][01][11], for example. The actual compression/decompression algorithms vary, and there is no need to go into them here and now. This should give you some idea about what the concept entails.
  5. Argent
    An interesting question - I don't remember any of the Heralds (the one in The Way of Kings prelude or Taln in the epilogue) showing up with Plate, be it Shard- or Honor-. This leads me to believe that the Shardplate is a human - or human & spren - invention. A very powerful fabrial, perhaps (though I suspect it has to be more than just that). What do we know about Shardplate? DISCLAIMER: THE FOLLOWING WILL FEATURE SEEMINGLY RANDOM AND DISORGANIZED THOUGHTS It's very durable. My guess is that this is somehow related to the the augmenter fabrials, which are said to work with any one of the ten Polestones. Except it has to be even more than that - it probably taps into at least one of the ten Surges (Cohesion or Tension, maybe, I still don't differentiate those two well enough). Normal fabrials work by harnessing the power of a captured spren - which in turn harnesses the very power of creation, the fundamental surges. In this regard my hypothesis that Shardplate is essentially a fabrial seems well supported. It is possible that there is something fundamentally different in the spren pre-Recreance and post-Recreance (assuming all Plates were created before the Recreance, which feels like a safe assumption to me); they could've been more powerful somehow back then. Alternatively, maybe fabrials before the Recreance were created in a different way - artifacts such as the Oathgates certainly suggest that the ancient artifabrians knew something Navani & co. don't. Maybe they didn't use spren back then - which seems reasonable, since I doubt the Radiants were very happy about scientists and engineers trapping the brothers, sisters, and coisins of their bonded spren. Perhaps one of the Orders was responsible for the creation of those ancient wonders, including the Shardplate, and so we should be looking at Surges, not spren? The (Re)Growth aspect of Progression sounds like something that could be involved in the process of regrowing a Shardplate from even a single piece of it. The improved strength, speed, and agility a Shardbearer gains when wearing Plate sound very similar to the effects produced by simply infusing oneself with Stormlight - though, admittedly, this is not a very strong argument, as everything magical on Roshar relies on Stormlight. So... blame it on the Truthwatchers and Lightweavers? Neither Order strikes me as a good fit. If anything, I'd guess Truthwatchers and Bondsmiths working together - but this a very shaky guess. Still, I feel the Radiants were somehow involved - either directly, or through their spren.
  6. Argent
    This is a good guess, I think, but might be more complicated than I would expect from Brandon.
  7. Argent
    This sounds reasonable.
  8. Argent
    Which would be in line with the widely accepted Principle of Intent.
  9. Argent
    Shalash is described as quite attractive during The Way of Kings, and the masked woman seems to be so disfigured, her flesh is growing around the mask. Since there is no indication that she has her Honorblade, and she didn't notice the poorly woven Veil illusion when Shallan was doing her thing with the note in the tree, I doubt our masked lady is Shalash.
  10. Argent
    Yea, both of them sound like they could be Szeth's book...
  11. Argent
    Yea, I'll have to agree that the screaming Eshonai hears is her... subconsciousness? humanity? soul? The fact that she only hears it when she attunes to the Rhythm of Peace is a decent giveaway, though not a big one. I originally assumed that the comet-like spren was her stormspren, but now I think it might be whatever spren was the one giving her warform; so once she embraced stormform, her warform spren lingered for a while.
  12. Argent
    damnation, that R in Aladar had me stumped for an hour because it crosses the line of symmetry...
  13. Argent
    I'll have to play with those - and the other highprinces, if I can (#3, between Sadeas and Kholin, might end up being Thanadal - he is the only prince other than Aldar with an 'L' in his name, and I think I spot an (inverted?) 'L' in his glyphpair) tomorrow... EDIT: I'll take a look about Aladar. If he ends up being #3, then maybe I can still find a candidate for Thanadal because of the 'L'. Good call on Vamah though.
  14. Argent
    Re: the battle map I have them in the following order: ----------------------------------- Aladar (not inverted!) Kholin (inverted) ??? Sadeas (inverted) Roion (inverted) --- [ROSE COMPASS] --- ??? ??? ??? Sebarial (not inverted) ??? - originally I thought his might be Kholin, but #2 fits much much better ----------------------------------- Parsing this Kholin, however, is damnation near impossible. I played with different zoom levels, and the bottom half of the glyph (which is where I suspect "L" is!) is a smudge. The one on the Narak map is pretty much the same in the top half, but the bottom is obviously a little less intricate - unfortunately isolating the differences is not going to happen with such a low-res Warcamps map...
  15. Argent
    Okay, I grow more confident that any component of the Alethi glyphs that doesn't readily translate into a Thaylen letter is just for decoration. So the glyphpair can be written with a vertical line in the middle, with extra lines on each side of the line of symmetry (as long as they are symmetric), with horizontal lines on top and bottom, or any combination of those and more. All those glyphs we see don't make sense to me otherwise. Rotating the individual components along the x- and y-axis, that's fair game. I don't know about rotating them by only 90° yet (so _ can turn into |), we'll have to see. Harakeke, could you tell me where you got the Alethi glyphs (on the sheet with the standard, calligraphic, and radial style)? I see S and SH in the sas and shash glyphs, and K, L, N, and T probably come from kholin and tanat, but what about the rest?
  16. Argent
    I wonder if I am not just flatout wrong in trying to translate the highprinces' names using their parent glyphs... Sebarial makes much more sense as [R][L] (rotated to indicate the presence of different vowels) than my attempts at sebes + laial. I think I'll switch to this for now.
  17. Argent
    This would've been far too easy, Ryshadium
  18. Argent
    Syl tells Kaladin that she has seen "spren like red lightning... stormspren" after the 62-days countdown begins. So those must be hanging out somewhere, in much lower numbers than in the Everstorm, but still present. A highstorm seemed liked a good candidate to me.
  19. Argent
    Very good, have a +1. I am occupied with other things (namely, translating the fracking Alethi glyphpairs), so I can't dedicate too much processing power to this, but it sounds sound. I too noticed the how both Shardblades and Awakening drain the color from their target / source, but didn't think about it hard enough to see the implications. Perhaps the answer is something about life, and its components - physical, cognitive, and spiritual? The object you Awaken is the physical aspect, the Command you give it is the cognitive one (how it "sees" itself), and the drained color is reflection the spiritual... energy... you've transferred to it - its life force, so to speak.
  20. Argent
    If anyone is curious about my notes - which are completely useless to anyone but me - here they are! I think I might try to approach this from the alphabet's perspective again. How confident are you in your Thaylen-to-English key?
  21. Argent
    Ungh, this is frustrating. I am starting to think we don't have enough information to take a meaningful stab at this... But on a more cheerful note, half of Sebarial's glyphpair makes sense (refer to the Battle for Narak map; Sebarial's banner is to the left of the Command Tents text in the middle). The central mostly-vertical line most likely represents 'S' (rotated along the x-axis and smoothed), while the the one that looks like a wave and climbs at about 45° kind of looks like 'L' (again, rotated along the x-axis and smoothed). I suspect that out of the remaining two lines, one is just decoration (my guess: the top one) and one stands for 'B' (my guess: the bottom one). So I guess this is progress. Maybe. But I was hoping for more... EDIT: Harakeke, that's what I thought at first too - and in a way is what I've done. My khokh is really just a 'K' and my linil is just 'L'+'N' (though it's actually 'N'+'L'...), because I assume that symmetry is kind of magical and instead of taking the entire glyph "khokh," I can take just one of it's symmetric halves ("kho" or "okh") and apply the Thaylen-to-Alethi translation logic (remove vowels, squish 'k' and 'h' together, because they technically make a single sound). So we end up with the same result, I just go through the Alethi parent words of Kholin, while you take the target word (Kholin) and translate it immediately through Thaylen. Which might more sense, but will break once we start trying to translate words that are not proper nouns.
  22. Argent
    Hey, folks. As a part of my obsession with the translation of the Alethi glyphpairs, I am going to need some help. There are several names throughout both The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance that are politely written as both a name and a glyphpair. The easy-to-remember example is Kholin, composed of the glyphs khokh and linil. [kho|kh], [lin|il]. [kho] + [lin] = [kholin] And while this one mostly (~80%) makes sense to me - you can read my explanation here, but be advised that the name and content of one of the maps I use reveals the players involved in one of the Words of Radiance battles; no major spoilers, but spoilers nonetheless. Anyway, the Kholin name and the way its usually written makes sense to me. Sebarial's, who is another one of the highprinces, also mostly makes sense. But if I am to ever figure out a way to translate glyphs that doesn't require me to make shady deals with the Nightwatcher, I'll need more glyphs. The more, the better. Off the top of my head (and with the help of a few replies in the translation thread), I can think of only a few glyphs: sas, nahn, shash, shesh, laial, lerel, linil, merem, khakh, khokh, sebes. Some of the Alethi names that come from those words are: Amaram (merem + khakh, though I skeptical of this one), Sebarial (sebes + laial), and Kholin (khokh + linil). So. If you find me some glyphs (even if they are isolated, not in pairs), feed them to it. If they have translation (e.g. "shash" means "dangerous" and "merem" means "honor"), even better!
  23. Argent
    For the highprinces, I am going off the glyphs from the Alethi Warcamps, The Battle of the Tower, and The Battle of Narak. Those seem to be the standard glyphs for the highprinces' names and I've managed to identify with high confidence the glyphs for Kholin, Sadeas, Aldar, Roion, and Sebarial (even though the Alethi Warcamps map has Dalinar, Sadeas, and Roion upside-down; either that, or the two battle maps have everyone but Sadeas upside-down - either way, there is some discrepancy). The Kholin glyphpair (khokh + linil) seems to mostly make sense at this point. I am having some issues with half of linil, but I am almost content with it. Here, let me show you. Oh, and a disclaimer - you may want to zoom in (Ctrl+ScrollUp, usually) on those images by about 500%: This is the Kholin glyphpair, as taken from the Narak battle map. This is the same glyphpair, but with what I think is the khokh half of it colored in red. With everything being so symmetric, it's a little difficult to decide whether the entire colored part is a single khokh, or whether only one side is the glyph, and the other is just a mirror image. I'd say that, for example, only the left (red) side says "khokh", and everything to the right of the vertical bar (which is added for decoration) is just a mirror image. The reason I am so confident about this is because the Thaylen translation seems fairly straightforward, and their letter for 'K' is very distinctive ('Г'); which is exactly what we see here. Finally, this has to be linil. Unlike khokh, this glyph has two consonants, so I figured it consist of two lines - one for each consonant. According to Harakeke's translation of the Thaylen alphabet, the red part closer to the central vertical line (the part I have colored blue here) is most likely the character for 'M' or 'N' - obviously 'N' in our case. So what's left, has to be the 'L' part... but it doesn't look like the Thaylen 'L' at all. Granted, the components of the Alethi glyphs are not going to be the same as the Thaylen letters, but we've seen enough similarities to expect them to be at least in the same neighborhood... And this 'L' is not. Still, I am willing to call this a success and move on to other glyphs - until my hypothesis here proves to be so wrong, I can't do anything with it.
  24. Argent
    Yea, not only did "tension" not work, none of the glyphs work in English. Makes sense, really. But there are so many glyphs, we should be able to do something with them... Also, I am now obsessed.
  25. Argent
    Stormfather, those are going to be a breech to figure out. I love it! In the meantime, I took a quick look at The Way of Kings Endsheet (because the Surges have pretty clearly drawn glyphs there), and more specifically at the "tension" glyph one. From what I can tell, the outermost letter is definitely 'K' (rotated along the y-axis), but the other two lines stump me. If I try to translate "tension" to Thaylen, it would probably end up looking like "[t][n][sh][n]", but this one has 4 consonants, which suggests to me that the equivalent glyph combination will have four distinct lines... and "tension" has only three. The smallest one might be divisible, but I couldn't figure it out in a few minutes I could steal to work on this.
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