Tempus

Sirce Dawnweaver - check out parts two and three, one of where I look at Scadrial having the number 2 associated with preservation, and 8 associated with Ruin, with results similar to the mathematical patterns you also attempt to negotiate through powers. I also note many other associations you brought up - good thinking overall!

Sadly in the end I conclude that Shardic numbers aren't a concrete thing. Brandon says that Shards develop colours that aren't necessarily fixed but occur relationally. Ruin is black and Preservation is white not because they are associated with those colours, but because they are diametrically opposed and so their manifestations take on those properties. My internal leading theory right now is that Shardic numbers are the same - not causal, but instead reactionary. The patterns of the numbers occur due to specific circumstances of the planets, Shards, and their interactions, and not because of any particular cosmic specification reliant on magical constant integers.

Darkness - I can't recall the exact passage. I greped all Brandon texts, quotes, and annotations for keywords like 'five', 'fifth', 'fifty', 'penta', etc, etc. and then read all the relevant passages to see if they had even a passing significance. If you do the same I'm sure you can locate the specific text but my notes are losts to the mists of my backup harddrive.

I've always held an assumption similar to that, Moggle. It makes no sense for a Breath to be arbitrarily consumed periodically. There must be a reasoning of sorts. The conclusion which I came to is that there must be a threshold of some kind, and that the effect in question accumulates until it passes the threshold. This can be thought of in two ways:

1. A Breath is slowly consumed until it reaches a threshold, and then is rapidly consumed. This could be any particular curve, such as your dividends example, or an exponential function like pH.

2. A Breath is discrete, however there is a threshold for the consumption that builds up. Once whatever force that is exerting pressure on the Breath passes a threshold, the Breath rapidly collapses. This could be viewed as similar to a physics model - exerting force on a material until it snaps, adding pressure to a canister until it explodes, or alpha decay until the half-life of a substance is reached. Adding a new Breath could be seen as venting the pressure, or stabilizing the substance.

The first scenario is slightly more likely, given that symptoms are noticed prior to a Breath consumed (or an individual passing).

This thread : > a list of what I was last up to, read through it, and if anything you see there feels like something you'd like to do, hop on board. Give it all a read through and let me know what you think.

I've started a list, you can find it in my sig. Been very busy lately, and I really want to get back to it. It's more 'comprehensive' than 'summarized' at the moment, though I plan on making a summarized one as well. Interested at all?

Rereading the series after finishing Broken Eye , I have a hypothesis about what was up with Kip's mum Lina.

I think that she was a Chi drafter.  We hear that Chi is especially nasty to its drafters' health (probably being x-ray or gamma ray radiation). Lina sent the letter to Gavin admitting she was dying even before she took a mace to the head.  Also, since Parl drafting tends to make its drafters empathetic towards others, it stands to reason that Chi should make one self-centered and unappreciative of others. (Kips Mum to the extreme) My guess that she was a Chi/Super-Violet Bi-chrome (Further giving Kip great drafting genes) because Liv recounts to her sponsors about Lina having stunning hazel eyes, shortly after lamenting that with her own brown eyes her own Super-Violet halo will never bleed into the visible spectrum and give herself beautiful eyes.  It also stands to reason that she was a part of some secret society or another.  

 

I'm about halfway through.

Nice review Peter. One thing I noticed during my recent reread is the gigantic bump in foreshadowing the second book brought. The first book has very little foreshadowing at all, and relatively few hints there's a much much deeper world than we suspect. The second book is supercharged by comparison - the world now abounds with people who know secrets but aren't telling, ancient things that most people forgot, hidden powers that are marginalized, secret societies and plots promised, and in general just jam packed.

I'm not sure if this is a case of 'Yay, the series has a guaranteed publishing contract now' or just a change in direction, but it was very notable to me.

Also, am I the only one who is gradually feeling more and more that major Fantasy authors just need to get together and make their own card game or MTG subset? I've even considered doing one myself as an idle thought. It seems like the major new authors of the last decade or so is correlating with a love of a certain collectible trading card game...

You're wrong, he took two from GreyPilgrim. Right now it should be....

WeiryWriter 8 +1
Fifth of Daybreak 8  
LeftVash 14 -2
Tempus 4
Edgedancer 10
Shivertongue 5
Mailliw73 4
The Only Joe 14
PorridgeBrick 13
GreyPilgrim 15

And I'll add my own onto the right.

You never responded to my calls... *sniff*

Here's my Goodreads friend invite link.

I'm with cem - many things I loved about Blood Song was changed for Tower Lord. It wasn't the same book, and it was a bit of a letdown. There were a bunch of very very promising new authors who all showed up around the same time as Anthony Ryan, and he was originally the one I thought would hold up the best of all of them, but instead he's ended up near the bottom. =(

Lightbringer is such an excellent series, and I'm extremely looking forward to the release in a month. It's one of only a few series that ignites my theory cortex as much as Brandon's do. I spent a good chunk of time myself, Argent, looking up spectrum related information after reading the books!

Peter - I'm generally of the mind that a trilogy or series needs to be digested and and evaluated as whole moreso than as individual volumes. I agree with you the Blinding Knife wasn't a revolution over Black Prism, but I'd prefer to think of them both as a huge step forward for Brent, and a really progressive work for Fantasy as a genre as they step out of the 'dark and gritty' phase from last decade.

By WoB, objects/materials have a maximum tolerance for Investment. However, spikes are also known to not be extremely invested, and have been mentioned as being capable of storing both the hemalurgic charge and a feruchemical one at once. That leaves me with two scenarios I believe are likely.

A )  The spike and Aon would both function normally, until such time as the maximum Investment threshold of the spike was reached.

B )  The secondary Investment in the spike (the Aon, in this case), would lose power corresponding to the existing power of the hemalurgic charge in order to overcome the resistance, similar to pushing on an Invested metal.

What would happen if you burnt it? Probably not much. AonDor is genetically keyed so I would suspect you'd have a situation similar to burning someone else's Feruchemical metal at best. Furthermore, burning the metal would destroy the pattern responsible for generating the effect of the Aon, rendering it ineffective.

It is, and it should be, and I repent!

Sure why not?

For Kasimir... perhaps the mir space station, on a manilla case file such as used in court cases. Alternatively, a mirror inside a suitcase or briefcase, or vice versa.

For Slimy12345678910, maybe something like a base ten cube with a sly-looking emoticon face on it, or a really thin and stylized letter 'Y' trapped in a prison room with |||| marks on the walls counting upwards.

Errr.... I may have completely forgotten about that one. 

Right now, I'm on a general partial hiatus, so I won't be doing any more of these for a while.

People are naturally wired to respond well to things they recognize. If someone sees a post by someone they recognize, they will naturally consider it higher than a post by an unknown, even if they don't have a good opinion of the person they do know. There... isn't much you can do about this - new users all face the same hurdle, and it's simple to overcome. Just make more posts!

Aether, as a developer, people like Swimmingly are totally necessary for the health of a site (or game). Certainly for a site that encourages content contribution (like this one!) thrives on the quality of that content. People might be tempted to say then 'If your post isn't a nice high quality post, then don't bother'.

The truth is, though, that user retention is based more on interaction and feedback than any other factor. When a person makes a post, writes a theory, or asks a question, the most likely reason to cause them to leave is because they get no reaction at all. Likewise, the biggest motivator for people to keep making posts exactly like they've always done are positive reactions. 

Swimmingly has made an astounding 2800 posts in about 10 months. That means in just that time period, he's responsible for 2% of all posts over the entire 3.5-4 years this site has been around. I'm willing to bet that means Swimmingly is pretty much directly responsible for the engagement and retention of a good chunk of the site's thousand or so current active users.

So does he deserve rep for making jokes, responding to tons of posts, and generally helping everybody feel good about being here? He totally does.

While not exactly a leave of absence, I'm upgrading my credentials for the next few weeks, and at the same time my sister is staying with me for six weeks while she moves from Manchester to Vancouver. I will still be around, and will reply to posts and IRC conversations on a more limited basis. Probably will be limited in theories and progress on bigger projects until the courses are complete in late August. 

My personal opinion is that Returned are not souls, but Cognitive Shadows. I have proof, but haven't started working on it yet, haha. It solves the above quote you finished with, Moogle.

Arguably Nightblood is a splinter fair, but it's more a matter of terminology. Nightblood is, by WoB, fundamentally the same as a Splinter, has all the known or expected properties of a Splinter. Is it exactly a Splinter...? Is passes the duck test, which is good enough for me.

WoB has it that the power returns to the Shard. While it's not in the Shard, though, the Shard is weaker - this is suspected to be a reason why Odium was very hesitant to Invest himself into a planet.

Divine Breath, Spren, Nightblood, Seons, and Skaze are all Splinters. There are some other things we've seen that could be Splinters, as they have similar characteristics, but it's unclear at this point.