CryoZenith

On 06.01.2022 at 1:38 AM, LewsTherinTelescope said:

Which is sorta weird, because the restrictions seem to have gone away for all the Bondsmiths even before he died (Melishi was bonded to the Sibling and did things previously forbidden, so it's not just Stormfather weirdness). I'm curious whether the restrictions truly are still there on Cohesion, or if Khriss just found a record that mentioned it and didn't realize that this had changed.

There's that WoB about how the death of a shard or its vessel is a gradual and protracted process so. 

7 hours ago, DiePie said:

Assuming Renarin could sing to one of Odium’s rhythms, Odium would probably go, “why would I give you Voidlight lmao.”

My impression has always been that the way the Song of Prayer works is that you're tapping into Odium and the voidlight acquisition is semi-automatic. He can see you tapping, and he can stop you from getting the voidlight, but he has to know to look in the first place in order to do that. I doubt that even a Vessel has an expansive enough mind to literally consciously take in every single person who uses the Song of Prayer. At least not all the time.

This thread is... deeply confusing to me. And it's not confusing *just* because I'm a utilitarian, it's confusing either way.

First off, I'm not sure you guys (the people saying what she did was wrong) understand how provocation works. Provocation works on the reasonable individual standard: if an average reasonable person would lose their cool from your actions, then your actions constitute provocation. If they wouldn't, then they don't. *even if you expected to provoke*. And walking on a public alley can't be argued to provoke the average reasonable person.

Now, think about what would happen in a world in which it didn't work that way. It would basically amount to criminal gangs having privileged ownership over public property, at least until challenged by the authorities. Any thug could pick a random street or intersection, shout out loud that they are willing to kill anyone who enters that public street or intersection, and you would *actively lose your right to self defense if you enter it*. Is that really the world we'd like to live in? No.

And secondly, I genuinely don't understand this "she could've handled it nonlethally" take. Here's what would happen if she captured them instead of killed them: They would've been executed. Because in Kharbranth their crimes are punishable by death. Plus, pretty sure execution by regular Kharbranthian means is slower and more painful than being soulcast into smoke.

11 hours ago, Frustration said:

Do men not do that where you're from?

Convey complex info with head nods? Nope

We don't even generally speaking have secret salutes/fraternities as such.

On 23.01.2022 at 7:03 AM, Frustration said:

*Does complex nod to communicate information to guys so that girls don't understand*

*blinks confused, like unto a deer in the headlights*

Hm. All godmetals have a feruchemical property, and any combination of two godmetals has at least 1 alloy which has a feruchemical property. It is *possible* none of the ten Tanavastium-Korraveliumium alloys present in shardblades is the proper alloy, but who knows.

14 hours ago, 2EmLee2 said:

Neither- just all boys that I've met who don't like to read are usually crazy not the kind of people who I'd hang out with.

This may in large part be attributable to you being young, and interacting mostly with young people. As you get older, the correlation between "this person doesn't read much" and "this person is bland" weakens. At least that's been my experience. 

Push-pull is more of an in-world explanation the scholars arrived at rather than a capital L Law of Physics (similar to how, for example, Brandon said that end-neutral magics are *basically* end-positive, the separation there is a model approximation in the map, not a thing in the territory). Think of the allomantic chart as Newtonian mechanics, but the actual world runs on General Relativity.

1 hour ago, The Ward's Guard said:

"She can do literally anything with a blink of an eye," Silver added.

"Indeed she can, and we love her for it." nodded Cryo.

For most people, nigh-Omnipotence sounded like the making of quite a scary foe, but Mandrellians were different. Since their civilization was protected from outside agents only and entirely based on how well they understood those agents, a crisp and clean description like "Can do basically anything." was a huge time saver if it actually fit. Such is the nature of Divine Simplicity. They were much less afraid of Narrators and Gods than they were of foes with limitations on their powers, as long as those limitations were intricate and complex enough to defy classification.

"I repeat. Does anyone have a map of the place we're planning to raid, so I may memorize it?"

3 hours ago, Humble_Knight said:

Does anyone know what a hypothetical nal glyph means? If I take it as some synonym of "order", based on Nale's cultural context, Adonalsium could be roughly translated as Metal of Light's Order, which would be a cool way to think of God. 

Or maybe Adonalsium's name doesn't have any mechanically relevant meaning for the Cosmere, but is rather just inspired from the name Adonai (which is one of the names by which God goes in the Old Testament).

Hm... my guess is that some of those things you could do, but not all of them, and not that dramatic.

Here you have to keep in mind that A-Chromium is not the exact opposite of A-Aluminum. A-Aluminum is like an on-off switch: the aluminum gnat burns some aluminum, and the alomantically relevant metals inside of them (as well as other kinds of unwanted Investiture, if the gnat is very skilled or is a savant) go away. All of them. A-Chromium, instead, is less like an on/off switch and more like a base neutralizing an acid: the amount of chromium they are burning DOES matter, and if they don't have enough chromium burning, then they can't do a complete leech. For example, there's a WoB where Brando was asked if a Leecher can destroy a shardblade, and the answer was that there's too much Investiture in a shardblade. (there was also a WoB about Leechers leeching Nightblood, but that one ended up exactly how you'd expect it to)

So a Leecher could do massive damage to a compounder mid-compounding, more than other types of allomancers, but if the compounder's reserves are large enough they won't be completely depleted.

Welcome.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. There are physical safeguards preventing you from hurting yourself, like the Golgi tendon reflex, and psychological safeguards, like innate aversion to pain, but I don't think storing/filling has magical safeguards per se. Get a Ferring adrenalin-pumped or drunk enough, or give them enough morphine, and they can easily kill themselves through storing/filling, depending on which attribute they're storing/filling.

20 hours ago, Wandering Shade said:

I'm decently sure that if nothing else, Vasher can hear the screams of Deadeyes and that combined with his experiences with Nightblood and the basic sword training philosophy of Roshar has resulted in Adolin being kinder and more respectful of Maya than any other Shardbearer in history.

This leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Think about what the Recreance was.

1. You are a bunch of people who genuinely believe what you're doing is right.

2. You are a bunch of people virtuous enough to have been able to speak multiple Oaths and stick to them for decades.

3. You are a bunch of people who didn't predict ahead of time what your actions would do to your spren, because pre-Recreance breaking oaths didn't deadeye spren.

4.  You are a bunch of people who personally knew, on an intimate level, their spren before they became deadeyes.

5. There's hundreds of you at minimum.

6. By pure and unfathomable coincidence, Adolin is kinder and more respectful of Maya than any of you of your deadeye spren, in spite of all the factors listed above.

Like, I AGREE with you that the fact that Maya being the most "responsive" deadeye is because of Adolin's behavior. I'm just saying the implications of his treatment of Maya never having been replicated or surpassed in the past are huge. I'm even tempted to use the word "plot hole" right now, and have a feeling that Sando might've done an oopsie.

There's a WoB in which Brando talks about different numbers for Feruchemy, using a Brute as his specific example.

Quote

Sporkify

This is more towards the whole physics stuff, but is Feruchemy really balanced? If it gives diminishing returns, wouldn't this end up as a net loss of power?

Brandon Sanderson

It doesn't diminish. Or, well, it does—but only if you compound it. You get 1 for 1 back, but compounding the power requires an expenditure of the power itself. For instance, if you are weak for one hour, you can gain the lost strength for one hour. But that's not really that much strength. After all, you probably weren't as weak as zero people during that time. So if you want to be as strong as two men, you couldn't do it for a full hour. You'd have to spend some energy to compound, then spend the compounded energy itself.

In more mathematical terms, let's say you spend one hour at 50% strength. You could then spend one hour at 150% strength, or perhaps 25 min at 200% strength, or maybe 10min at 250% strength. Each increment is harder, and therefore 'strains' you more and burns your energy more quickly. And since most Feruchemists don't store at 50% strength, but instead at something like 80% strength (it feels like much more when they do it, but you can't really push the body to that much forced weakness without risking death) you can burn through a few day's strength in a very short time if you aren't careful.

Footnote: This question was asked when fueling Feruchemy with Allomancy had only been seen in Rashek. As such, the term compounding is used purely to reference tapping at a higher rate than can be stored.
Hero of Ages Q&A - Time Waster's Guide (Oct. 15, 2008)

The part I highlighted seems to imply that it IS possible for a feruchemist to kill themselves by filling, and they have to deliberately be cautious. Now, there could still *exist* a lower bound, it's just that the lower bound is lower than the lethality bound for some of the Ferring types. (No, I say that this lower bound could exist, not that I necessarily have high confidence that it exists. My guess is that, for example, when you store eyesight, you actually CAN make yourself 100% blind by filling. Not 20/600 vision, but ACTUAL zero visual neuron activity. So Ferring types that fill with a nonvital attribute can probably fill all of it, I suspect.)

As for your specific thought experiment, my guess would be that a person with 6 units of strength could fill more without risk of death than a person with 4 units of strength, but not a whole 33% more. Maybe 10% more or something. Because you have to keep in mind what it means to fill strength. Feruchemical Pewter is not like Allomantic Pewter, it's MUCH more underpowered. When a Brute is tapping pewterminds, he is actually gaining muscle mass, real physical muscle mass, and when a Brute is filling pewterminds, he is actually losing muscle. And he cannot control which muscles he prefers to lose, it's an overall deal. And you can't exactly train your diaphragm to be stronger.

You are correct that Firesouls are more resistant to burning when tapping. A similar example is how Skimmers can't collapse under their own weight, no matter how much weight they tap. But this is because of a property of tapping, which filling *does not have*.

15 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

Tanavast may just mean "Head of House Avast" and he is from a culture that drops given names for somebody in that position.

That sounds very intuitively... correct. I might adopt it as my most likely guess too.

8 hours ago, LewsTherinTelescope said:

I am curious if those estimates might hold for normal Desolations, the False Desolation seems to have been a desperate "all hands on deck" event but I'd think most would be that too... but then, in the past the spren might've been more hesitant to lend their aid, so perhaps during most times it was a smaller number. Hard to say.

Considering that spren didn't get deadeye'd before the Recreance, I would assume that hesitancy was much, much lower, rather than higher.

Hm, I see. So it wouldn't be just that Svrakiss were heavily Invested when they died, but heavily Invested PLUS heavily Connected to the Physical realm at the same time. And the Cognitive Realm around there would contribute by essentially being a pressurized barrier holding you in. Yeah, I could buy that.

This is a very interesting theory. I think most of it has merit, there are only two pinpoint things that I moderately to strongly disagree with. First:

1 hour ago, Benkinsky said:

1. Anti-Investiture

(source: https://coppermind.net/wiki/Dakhor)

The Anti-Tones, from my understanding, sound the same as the Tones, but technically they are inverted, and it's the Intent that matters. I doubt that Dakhor chanters know "what we're doing is channeling the Anti-Tone of Devotion", but I assume an Intent like "we want this to block AonDor" could be enough to create Anti-Dor properties. Is Anti-Investiture how Dakhor monks can be resistant to or negate AonDor magic?

There are two main reasons why I think Dakhor has nothing to do with anti-investiture (as in, maybe you can use Dakhor to make anti-investiture, but this hasn't actually happened yet):

1. There are a bunch of cosmere-aware and realmatically-aware Elantrian worldhoppers out there like Galadon. If the monks had developed a way to make anti-investiture, even if the monks didn't notice that's what they were doing, *someone* would've noticed. And if *someone* noticed, that information would've had time to spread amongst the other Realmatic Scholars by now (keep in mind that chronologically speaking Elantris predates the other Cosmere books by quite a bit). As in the current present, anti-investiture is not a well known fact about Arcana, this is evidence against.

2. The one time we've witnessed anti-Investiture being produced so far, the Intent required was very crisp and precise: it was the Intent to make an anti-tone. It wasn't something fuzzy like a generalistic Intent to block a certain magic system. This is admittedly weaker evidence against but it does count for something.

I think the more plausible explanation as to how Hrathen's enchantment works is that it's analogous to a normal-Dor type computer virus that scrambles other normal-Dor type programs. So it's more like how A-Copper counters A-Bronze than like how anti-voidlight counters voidlight.

Quote

However, a Dakhor user or sacrifice would be so aligned to and filled with Dominions investiture due to the chanting that when they died or were sacrificed, they don't pass on into the Beyond directly ("barred from entrance into heaven") but rather become Svrakiss, still connected to the physical realm, half-ghosts and half-demons.

What I'm saying is if Svrakiss are real, the very rare nature of sole-Dominion-aligned people dying might explain why they're so rare that no on-screen-character so far has seen one (aside from maybe Suit...)

The most Invested person that we've ever seen die on-screen so far has been Rashek. And Rashek had a very easy time passing onto the Beyond. Considering how insanely Invested Rashek was, the idea that an average Svrakiss is more Invested than Rashek was is highly implausible. As far as we know, being highly Invested when you die allows you to resist the Beyond, but it doesn't "bar you from" the Beyond in any mechanically meaningful sense.

Yep, pretty much what Trusk'our said. In principle this works, but in practice you need a full feruchemist to make it work, which... is a problem, because we ran out of those.

Harmony would be imbalanced regardless if the Shards he held were asymmetric or not. Symmetry is not the only factor in balance. Balancing a dumbbell on a narrow surface is harder than balancing a rectangular plank on a narrow surface, you have less room for error,  even though both the dumbbell and the plank are equally radially symmetric.

The main cause as to why Harmony is imbalanced is because the powers he is holding are opposed. He would be imbalanced even if those powers weren't asymmetrical. Them being asymmetrical makes it worse, I agree, and I can buy that Nightblood is contributing to the asymmetry a bit, sure, but none of this is necessary.

@StrikerEZ I don't think Venli is unrealistically written. I dislike Venli as a person, not as a character. In terms of *realism*, yes, it is realistic for someone to be in denial about an atrocity they committed, and to be very slow on the uptake of dealing with internalizing that and changing one's perspective. It is also realistic that no *external* karmic event will come and screw over Venli for what she's done, because reality doesn't work on karma (hell, even a world such as the Cosmere, where perception seeps reality, doesn't work on karma per se). But just because I agree to those things being realistic, doesn't mean I stop *disliking* Venli. Just because I agree that Brandon masterfully and coherently described Venli's actions as she should've taken them given her personality and epistemic limits, doesn't mean I have to *like* reading a book that has a lot of Venli in it. Or, in other words: I don't think any less of Brandon for having made Venli. But that's a fact about Brandon, not a fact about Venli. Hope that explains my perspective.

Yeah, I saw that the forum is hosting mafia games. Unfortunately those require the kind of commitment that I don't feel like making before my exams are over. So... see you there March, probs?

Amanda is close but not quite as awesome. Because its etymologic reference to love is latinate, not English, and it only really became a common name in medieval times. Back in the classical era, when people spoke Latin as their mother tongue, it was a very rare name.

When the meaning of a name is not in the same language as the one of the present-day country, you can get away with a lot. But when the meaning of a name is a direct noun or adjective from the language, what determines its "normalcy" is basically historical coincidence. You see more Grace's than Clarity's today because there happened to be more Grace's than Clarity's in the past, making one of the words "feel" more "namelike" than the other. But, it is conceivable, counterfactually speaking, that it could've been the other way around just fine.

5 hours ago, Duxredux said:

I think The_Nimanator is referring to the flashback when Dalinar goes to meet the Nightwatcher and Felt makes a note that she didn't appear to him because he might be too foreign. Is it because he was a Scadrian or for a different reason? He's a single point of data, but one that seems deliberately placed.

Sure, but it's also explicitly stated that Hoid had a conversation with the Nightwatcher. Felt's guess says more about what Felt believes than about what is the case. Wouldn't be the first time Brandon had a character deliberately say something incorrect to indicate something about their epistemic limits.

(in fact arguably fiction writers don't do this enough)

Honestly, rather than using Mara as a subtle reference, you could probably get away with literally naming a baby Marasi. It's a normal sounding enough name, phonemically speaking, that I don't think it would weird people out.

My favorite name to give to a baby is Victor/Victoria. Like, it's mindblowing to me that we consider it perfectly culturally normal and mundane to call someone a victor (a winner) and have that unironically be their name. And I absolutely love it.

We have this direct quote from the Stormfather: "EACH REBIRTH FURTHER INJURES THEIR MINDS."

There's probably multiple factors at play but I think it's plausible that number of rebirths is the biggest one. And if that's the case, then it'd be natural for the Fused type which dies the least to have the sanest Fused.