CryoZenith

Granted. The chill pill makes him less reckless, not less evil, so it actually increases the amount of harm he inflicts on the world.

I wish to play chess as well as stockfish itself.

32 minutes ago, cometaryorbit said:

And I don't see how Cultivation plus Honor makes "Science" anyway. Honor is about bonds and oaths, Cultivation is about controlled/directed growth. "Civilization" I can see (Cultivation of bonds/oaths/rules, growing a society), but Science specifically sounds more like Cultivation of Knowledge, not Cultivation of Honor.

I actually find Honor + Cultivation = Science to fit better than Honor + Odium = War. Not a perfect fit but still.

So, the way I think about it. There are roughly speaking two aspects of Honor: the bondish/promise-ish aspect, and the more pure impersonal "this is the shard of rules and laws" aspect (granted the second aspect is explored less in SA, but Raboniel does explicitly mention it, so make of that what you will). Likewise, there are roughly speaking two aspects of Cultivation: the aspect of the representation of the natural world (whether or not it has constant growth), and the aspect of pure growth (whether or not it is growth OF nature).

Depending on which aspects you mix, you get a different final Intent. If you combine Honor's second aspect with Cultivation's first aspect, you get Laws of Nature (or, in other words, Science). If you combine Cultivation's second aspect with Honor's first aspect, you get Growth of Bonds (or, in other words, Civilization).

Ok, maybe towerlight/sciencelight is not the best example. Think about it in terms of stormlight, voidlight, lifelight. Stormlight comes from Honor, not Storm. Voidlight comes from Odium, not Void. Lifelight comes from Cultivation, not Life. We've literally never had even ONE precedent of a gaseous investiture named after its shard. So I have no idea why it's almost accepted fact on the 17th shard that the union of Honor and Odium would be called War.

Anyway, here's a fun combo: Invention + Dominion = Peer Review

27 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

Which makes me think, acute radiation poisoning should also work on kandras, at higher doses than would be needed for humans.

Yeah, that one they definitely didn't have the opportunity to test yet.

My guess would be that, if anything, the restriction would stop him from shoving, but if the shove happened, the other guy would just die. From what we've seen, the restriction works like a mental compulsion/geas, not like a reality warping magic, and only affects Hoid himself.

1 hour ago, king of nowhere said:

In that perspective it makes sense that they'd be resistant to poisons, because they can compensate for the damage. cyanide is blocking your red blood cells from carrying oxygen, and the kandra can make more of those cells. Or, a nerve agent is paralyzing their nerves, the kandra can turn their brain tissue into something else to protect it from damage while the liver neutralizes the poison; in the meanwhile, they are stunned, and perhaps that was what was in those syringes.

Hm, this makes me wonder if poisons that rather than disrupting a specific metabolic process, attack the DNA directly, like arsenic, would be effective against kandra. Probably not, since they must've tried that one already, but I wonder why. Having extra livers doesn't help at all with those after all. Maybe they're just really good at excreting specific substances from their body if they can't process them, I'd guess.

13 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

You could always argue that other factors, for example the Vorin rule of keeping half your population illiterate, are the crucial difference.

I feel like you're sneaking in an unfair implication here. I know that the whole "keep the population stupid so it's easier to rule" thing has happened in real life, but the parallel doesn't work for Alethkar at all:

1. Being literate, in Alethkar, does not in itself open up any avenues towards political power.

2. Most political leaders, in Alethkar, are illiterate themselves.

3. There's an entire group of technically slaves, the ardents, which are ALL literate.

6 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

Maybe lerasium, which steals "all abilities", or (refined) atium ("any power"), combined with an unusual bind point?

But I am not sure how broad that really is. Could you steal an owl's night vision or a bat's ability to echolocate? I think kandra shapeshifting is more like that than the gemheart thing, which is a kind of 'leakage' from the Spiritual?

I would guess that night vision and echolocation would just be stolen with a tin spike, and you wouldn't have to go through the complicated process of whatever shapeshifting or gemheart-growing require, since the former are specifically senses.

You know, there's a lot of ambiguity about how Identity and Connection work because a lot of the time, they seem to be intertwined and correlated.

What would be really helpful (and cool) is if Brandon wrote a short story starring two characters, one with extremely low levels of Identity but normal levels of Connection, one with normal levels of Connection but extremely low levels of Identity. So that we could empirically witness exactly what it looks like when only one of them is isolated and drained out.

It would even be useful to get evidence to the contrary: that maybe it's unworkable for something which lacks any meaningful sense of self to be, in a meaningful way, Connected to other things in a precise and calculable manner.

The household power I would choose is having Intellectus over my apartment. (For people who haven't read Dresden Files, don't worry this is not a spoiler, it's general purpose worldbuilding. Intellectus is a form of limited omniscience where you, within a given domain or area, know everything you wonder about. So your mind doesn't literally hold all the information, you don't get flashes of inspiration, you can't make connections between things if you haven't considered them individually yet, you simply turn all known unknowns you deliberately ask about into known knowns. Sort of like a mental Google that you can always trust to be accurate.) It would be particularly helpful when I have to get out on a rainy day but misplaced my umbrella, or I have to exterminate a moth infestation but don't know the main nest.

Well considering that radiants can literally heal from being stabbed in the heart, healing from DNA damage from cosmic rays sounds pretty easy, and even cheap in terms of stormlight drainage. So it doesn't necessarily matter whether shardplate is radiation resistant or not.

I guess it matters in the sense of whether a non-Radiant shardbearer would be protected. Actually, come to think of it, that's a really good and practical question. Hmm.

1 hour ago, Nameless said:

Kaladin couldn't have been sent visions by Odium except through Moash. And I don't think Shallan's D.I.D. needs a magical explanation.

Yeah, didn't Brandon specifically address this and say that Shallan's DID was actual clinical DID, and nonmagical in nature? I'll have to go search for the WoB again to make sure.

On 17.02.2022 at 6:51 PM, Nameless said:

 like cutting off their connection to their metalminds

I've been skeptical all this time, but I'm willing to admit when I am wrong, and this specific argument convinced me. Yes, a radiant would win against a fullborn (at least if the radiant is a bondsmith). I kept thinking about radiant powers in terms of normal surges and superhealing but completely forgot about spiritual adhesion. 

The opposite of Honor is Whimsy :3. (if my hunch that Whimsy represents RNG rather than playfulness/taking things lightly turns out to be correct)

I would guess that what it means for mateform to have "pronounced secondary sexual characteristics" is pronounced characteristics relative to other singer forms. Humans already have pronounced secondary sexual characteristics. I don't remember exactly which character said it, but there was a comment in SA from a singer that basically amounted to "humans are in mateform at all times".

On 17.02.2022 at 5:26 AM, Trusk'our said:

One other way Hoid might be able to push himself to cause physical harm would be to gather a very large number of Bio-Chromatic Breaths that came from violent-minded people, as enough Breaths will cause a change in the mindset of the one who holds them.

I talked about this before, but Hoid is not a pacifist. He actively *wants* to hurt people if necessary, he just can't. So what he needs is not a mindset shift to make himself more violent (he already is violent enough intent-wise), what he needs is a mindset shift that significantly narrows down what he perceives qualifies as harm.

In other words, in a hypothetical situation where two other people had the same dawnshardic restriction as Hoid, the first being a misanthropic mass murderer, the second being an extreme "every experience is positive" type hedonist, I would expect the restriction to inhibit the last of those three people the least.

IIRC there was a WoB where Brando said that if a knight radiant bonds two spren of the same order, that would not increase his power.

Naturally, the Nahel bond is not quite the same as the bond between a singer and their form-granting spren, but that's the only precedent we have, so I would predict (but not very confidently) that a singer with two bonded painspren would have normal warform.

Granted, you live on Scadrial pre-catacendre and you don't have the biological adaptation for breathing in ashmouth smog.

I wish to become the Vessel of Cultivation.

The way poison damage works in roleplaying games is necessarily unrealistic, which is why this entire topic is really interesting. Think about it in terms of LD50. If the average human needs 1 milligram of a particular poison to die, on average, and a kandra is 100 times more resistant to poison, you'll need 100 milligrams. Scaling up from 1 milligram of poison to 100 milligrams of poison is really easy. On the other hand, if the average human needs to be shot with 3 bullets to die, on average, and a kandra is 100 times more resistant to physical damage, you'll need 300 bullets. Scaling up from 3 bullets to 300 bullets is really hard. For actual combat situations, it would mean that poison is roughly speaking as good against humans as it is against kandra (when you poison-coat a weapon you're going for hard overkill dose anyway) but physical damage is roughly speaking useless against kandra.

Of course, lots of this can be waved away with the Rule of Fun, but it's still fun to think about.

45 minutes ago, HavingTheHasHoidAPurpose? said:

For me, an interesting one is A-Tin, F-zinc(mental speed)

While tin savantism is damaging, I think good use of F-zinc could make it a bit more bearable(mentally speed past pain) and also to enhance the unique combat benefits with being able to process the mental stimuli faster.

 

It could honestly go either way in-canon, but the way I imagine that working is like a form of Tsukuyomi. So, not mentally speeding past the pain, but stretching the pain for longer (in subjective mental time), making it worse.

Granted, you gain an aura that psychologically compels everyone to see you as sus.

I wish for Nightwatcher to bond me.

Awww. Reminds me of "woobie the destroyer of worlds". So qt yet ominous. 9/10

1 minute ago, Elf said:

Ah ok. I understand. That makes sense. Thank you for explaining it so nicely. This makes me wonder- have you studied psychology? You seem very proficient in it. 

I have only studied psychology in the sense that there's a criminal psychology and criminology module in law school, and I took that. So, when it comes to things like, say, criminal profiling, determining motive, determining legal agency (in my country there's this thing where if a person is between the ages of 14 and 18, it is not automatically assumed that they're capable of intentionally committing crimes, the court has the burden to prove that on TOP of proving mens rea), you could say I have formal education. On the other hand, when it comes to things like compartmentalization, that's independent reading, me going through books and studies as a hobby.

Quote

And don't apologize for the way you said it the first time around. Nobody should have to apologize for having knowledge. 

Knowing something and knowing how to teach it to others are very different things. I'm not proficient in pedagogy to any real extent so I expect to screw up and look forward to getting feedback when I do :D. So thankies.

Sure. In simpler terms, your mind is not always sure what it wants to do or believe. It might feel like two things are true that cannot both be true at the same time (ex. I feel like I'm dumb so I'm concerned about failing the exam vs. I aced all the practice tests for this exam, it should be very unlikely to fail), or it might want to do two things that get in the way of each other (ex. I want to put in work vs I want to chill and relax). There are several ways you can handle this. One is to learn to accept that the contradictions exist and to learn to live in peace with them (this is the mindfulness method). One is to choose one of them and precommit (aka. promise to yourself that you won't change your mind, even if you start doubting your first decision midway) (this is the discipline method). One is to alternate between them, journal your experience, and look back and see which was better (this is the empirical method). And one is to intentionally take the two things, put them in (imaginary) boxes, and "think inside the box", whichever box is better for the context you are currently in (and this last one is roughly speaking compartmentalization).

Btw. I apologize for the complicated way I said it the first time around. I have a problem where I *usually* get criticized more for being condescending and dumbing down what I say, than for being too jargon-ish, so I might sometimes overcorrect.

The feeling I had from how he talked about needing a "sword" in the form of Wax is that it was, to a certain degree, a need, and not just him choosing to delegate jobs that he could do himself. I don't think Sazed is, for example, in a position like Edgli, where she can directly smite people if she needs to. And there really are circumstances of "need" plausibly on the horizon for Scadrial.

Like, sure, for example, Sazed can make an argument that it's better to let Scadrians learn how to handle pollution by themselves and grow from that instead of autoclearing it, but that line of logic is much more tenuous when you consider, say, the Set's recent change of plans about wiping out Scadrial. That's enough of an existential risk that it's hard to argue against direct intervention, and if we're assuming that Sazed is a nice guy (which we are), the fact that he isn't leads me to believe that he can't.