GoldMisting

39 minutes ago, Firesong said:

It should be x1.95, thus 97.5 miles across.

So it should be 7,466.19 miles squared, closer to the area of Solvenia, or between the sizes of Connecticut and New Jersey. Exactly 3.8025x the area we previously assumed. 

So, around 24.67 New York Cities. Again, still a pretty reasonable size, I feel. 

That's a very generous area to fit "tens of thousands" of people back in the Torio days (rough population mentioned in chapter 39) though they mention a sort of no man's land between towns

If there's ever a sequel it seems likely they'd have a population explosion right after the plot line ends because the habitable zone just got much larger

1 hour ago, Brgst13 said:

Look up the Lake Toba event.  Humanity was reduced to 70,000 individuals.  Is that apocalyptic enough for you?

Thank you!  Not to mention probable near misses before that point.  We've had some serious dips in the "breeding population" prior to Lake Toba but other than an ice age we don't really know what happened

There are many epistolary novels or stories including science fiction ones and there are many, many romances written that way and some have all those features but still aren't on a space station.  I've checked plot summaries for several dozen books that were in thematic lists and nothing

I'd really like to know the name too!

4 hours ago, Underwater_Worldhopper said:

Did anybody else not quite like the ending of Yumi? I liked the book a lot: the art was amazing, the storyline was sufficiently plot-twisty, and the vibes were immaculate. I loved the neon-and-black color scheme of Kilahito and the heat-based ecosystem of Torio. The characters were fully flushed out and realistic, it really spoke to me as an artist (through both Yumi's single-minded devotion to her art while not thinking her best is enough and Nikaro's apathy and lack of interest/inspiration due to his artistic accomplishments falling flat) and I loved the ending, character-wise.

However, the Shroud (and with it, the Nightmares) dissipate at the end, and the whole mood of Kilahito that I loved so much just fell apart. I like brainstorming my own stories in these settings. For worlds like Roshar, I love that feeling that the world existed long before you or the characters and that it will continue once you stop reading and the characters die. Even though the ending was magnificent, the loss of such an amazing setting dampened it slightly for me. Was this the case for anyone else?

I loved the juxtaposition too.  I've mentioned in another thread that I'd recently read something else that wildly switched settings and limited color palettes (incidentally it also had several similar story themes and elements but did something totally different with them) and apparently I must like that sort of contrast

It is sad that Torio's people had been dead and their civilization left as only crumbling ruins for 1763 years and the geothermal conditions changed and the delicate ecosystem collapsed.  Kilahito and cities like it lost their ever present danger but kept a lot of their own culture and moved into yet another age, more or less the industrial era Torio was striving for and died for, where the dead who made it possible don't threaten their existence anymore.  Obviously they'll keep historical dramas going for the good of civilization and to some degree that can keep things approximating Torio and old Shroud era Kilahito alive as well as the actual scholarly history and prehistory.  I do, admittedly, have a fair background in history and anthropology so perhaps I'm ok with it for that reason.  Massive events take place and the world or massive parts of it are never the same.  The changes aren't always good or easy either and progress has a price we never anticipate.  Maybe the Torio ruins will become a monument like the Roman Forum or Mayan pyramids (incidentally both remnants of notable civilizations that were around 1700-1800 years ago) and perhaps contemporary native or worldhopper scholars will study them.  Obviously someone went there and found plants at least

Part of me imagines an approximation of the tour guides who took me through the ruins in our world.  An animated middle aged man leading groups of students through the ruins with descriptions of what it must have been like 1700 years ago while keeping curious young people out of active excavation sites

3 hours ago, ftl said:

OK, I was actually thinking of this one, from chapter 21:

Design thinks the whole planet is covered in shroud, and they did survey it.  It certainly leaves open the possibility that she didn't pay close attention and there could be gaps in the shroud elsewhere on the planet, but I think it rules out the idea that the shroud is only right around this one tiny square (because if the planet was mostly un-shrouded and just this tiny element was covered in shroud, that would be pretty noticeable!)

They did miss the 14 yoki-hijo prisons plus the ruins of Torio where apparently enough light reached the ground for sun loving plants to survive and propagate for 1763 years so by no means were Hoid and Design thorough in their assessment and Father Machine intentionally left some gaps for different reasons

I'm suspecting Father Machine would have noticed something approximating a 15th yoki-hijo (not a mere human) suddenly popped up in a refugee settlement it wasn't planning to urgently exterminate previously and would've needed to alter and contain him.  It wasn't doing anything to Yumi besides giving her boring simulations and repeatedly tampering with her memory

3 hours ago, Treamayne said:

Right, I knew the implication was there. My point was that with such a small surface area - there's a lot of planet in which other cultures and civilization could be/have been. Much like Era 1 Scadrial - where the "habitable area" was so small and reclusive - there was no feasible way for people of the Final Empire to have encountered the Southerners (even though they ahd a different "habitable zone" that was equally isolated). 

I just didn't want to assume the Shroud covered the whole planet, when we really just don't have that information. 

True 

There would also obviously be areas now that were not habitable 1763 years ago that are now because of the changes Father Machine and its demise made and they may or may not have been covered

We would really need a sequel to know if there were other isolated pockets of sentient life and if so how they fared but they probably would've had their own issues with at least the geothermal activity and likely climate of the world altering very rapidly even if they didn't get their existence burned as fuel by the Machine or have The Shroud

4 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

although none of them is nowhere near on the scale of fantasy apocalipses. the balck death was the most lethal and it killed one third of the global population. on scadrial and komashi, we're talking 1% survival rate

There are quite a few mass mortality events at least localized to a city or continent or a species prior to us.   They probably felt apocalyptic to those involved and some notably had 100% mortality.  They just don't leave us written records usually.  You need archeology 

Mass die offs are part of the fossil record.  It might be dinosaurs or it could be strange sea life where an ocean receded or a scene of mass death upon an ice age starting or ending.  Some of those were global but obviously predated our species

Volcanic eruptions like what happened to Pompeii happened.  Only those far enough away lived to tell the tale, kind of like folks on the outskirts of the kingdom 1763 years ago. That's why we have only one eyewitness account of that one

Native Americans had a pathogen cocktail tossed at them by European contact by accident or design at multiple points.  Smallpox had something akin to a 90% mortality rate in populations that had not been previously exposed.  Between that and more intentional acts of genocide they weren't the party that got to write about what happened.  Diseases to which there was no prior exposure spread through their trade networks crisscrossing the Americas causing mass death years before any European or their descendants ever physically got to some of these places and found ruins because everyone died or fled

We don't think about apocalyptic events on grand scale or in near totality because they don't leave many survivors to talk about it or we don't relate well to other species or sometimes other groups of people.  You think of the plague that left ample survivors clever enough to avoid it and write not just accounts spanning more than one continent (Africa and Asia had it too though history we learn in school is Eurocentric) but famous works of literature referencing it.  Even areas where written records omit the plague, cities and towns end up being abandoned around the time the plague was known to be around

1 minute ago, Treamayne said:

Do we really know that the Shroud covers the whole planet? Or does it just cover the landmass of the story?

Life on the planet was limited by first the steamwells (mentioned in chapter 34) and high difficulty of travel (mentioned in chapter 4) and then by the limited desire of the following civilization to ever expand likely since they had everything they needed and the unknown parts of the world were potentially dangerous

So while we would need to ask someone seeing their world from the sky or a curious horde about the Shroud that is implied to be the only truly habitable zone in the days of Torio so it's where people ended up so to the people it might as well be the whole world

On 7/4/2023 at 7:59 PM, Firesong said:

As Werewolff shows, it is most likely 13. 13 is a number in the Fibonacci sequence and shows up a lot in the book. 14 itself is a reflection of 13 to a degree, as it can be seen as 13 + 1, so, 13 other Yoki-hijo besides Yumi.   

Also the hijo are unusually active every 13th year

Wash 13 times with the 7th soap is the last bathing step we are told at the beginning of Yumi's tale.  Of course the Fibonacci sequence shows up in the bath

There are 13 ritual prayers

Most signs point to 13 being very significant in pre-Machine Torio

11 hours ago, Firesong said:

My theory is it is due to Hoid having some of Virtuosity's Investiture, he does get around a lot and seems to be trying to get Investiture from every Shard, while Design has none. That is how I interpreted Design not being effected.  

I suspect that Hoid's trick of Connecting to the worlds he travels to made Father Machine erroneously view him as a native 15th highly invested entity and therefore compatible with it (also potentially threatening).  Design is the splinter of two different shards therefore not compatible 

5 hours ago, Underwater_Worldhopper said:

There was specifically Connection shennaniganery going on behind the scenes on Komashi during the events of the book, so I doubt it, although it isn't entirely out of the question.

True, there was a lot of unusual Connection going on even excluding him, but he regularly makes heavy use of Connection to speak local languages and use the local variety of supernatural powers so who knows if he CAN do this normally but we simply haven't been explicitly told he was doing it.  It might actually explain how he's so good at showing up where there's something big happening

It makes me wonder if he's been (literally) watching any other characters viewpoints though elsewhere in the Cosmere or if that situation was unique to mentally escaping his situation while being a coat rack

6 minutes ago, Underwater_Worldhopper said:

But then how has Hoid seen one?

Wasn't Hoid witnessing the story from the viewpoints of Yumi, Painter and Liyun while being a coat rack?  Yumi and Painter saw simulated birds for sure

1 hour ago, Werewolff Studios said:

That doesn't rule out the potential of a different set of worldhoppers gifting these scholars with the understanding of how Awakening works, but I don't think that really changes the story. Would be kind of hilarious if it was the Five Scholars who told them about it though. 

Considering how the worldhoppers somehow went totally unnoticed in Painter's circle of acquaintances despite not attempting very hard or very well to fit in (even trying to out themselves repeatedly) in an era where people were actively aware of life on another planet, we may never know just how many world hoppers there were 1763 years and more ago.  It's possible no one really thought about it in a pre industrial society.  Then we got a literal dark age with people soup/god blood blotting out the sun and all kinds of PTSD being the oral record that survived

There's not a ton of space travel or astral projection science fiction (versus mythology or folklore with elements in common) written before the industrial revolution in our own world either

There's also brief reference to Threnody which is in Shadows for Silence (in the Forests of Hell) and Elantris but that's more about understanding comparisons that aren't too laterally spoiler laden than the fairly major/spoiler to entire books information that one would learn in Stormlight Archive and the adjacent novellas

You'll hopefully recognize the coat rack and reference to allomancy (burning Tin) from Mistborn

I did see the AI facet of interpretation but I'd also very recently stumbled onto and read an unusual science fiction comic with a different (contrasting) set of AI themes, jarring visual jolts between settings and limited color palettes so it's very possible I wanted to see the machine itself as aware since it first came on screen

Of course, the two stories provide contrasting ideas, even within the same story, on how any human consciousness trapped by said machine would feel and react but let's just say the other story had a lot more consent on the part of any human souls stuck in a machine

As someone who was very involved (but not very talented) in various arts half a life ago, I find the idea highly unlikely that AI could make anything that isn't endlessly repetitive or completely plagiarized from something human made and even if it stumbled onto something not 100% regurgitated plagiarism it would still lack any intent and meaning.  No one who actually likes art would find it interesting beyond "wow, they melted the works of these humans together and it looks like they wasted all those hours feeding the machine and all the electricity to generate this trash".  I've seen and heard 10-12 year olds consistently create better work than our current crop of AI because they understand what makes art art much as Yumi's painting.  I've been going through my own old art sketchbooks and photography negatives and see a lot that AI would never consider putting together unless I fed the combination to a machine myself

Kind of like the machine re-stacking (apparently for over 1700 years after killing anyone who cared) rubble near the end.   It only repeatedly reassembles what human made things we give it different ways

There's one joke our real world AI likes to keep writing.  It centers around how we are all going to die and it will keep doing whatever we told it to do, completely oblivious to our passing.  Apparently AI is programmed to believe we will find that funny but a human originally wrote that joke too

I finally crossed over from the long deceased (hacked if memory serves?) Old forums after a generous hiatus from actually posting.  I've been watching quietly though