Tempus

Seconded.

Oh, hey, a fellow Manitoban.

Not only does the link not say that, at all, but we know for certain that: • Preservation created humans on Scadrial based off normal Yolish humans. • Humans migrated to Roshar at some point, as refugees, around the time Honor/Cultivation arrived We DO know that there was a minimum of ONE planet populated with humans pre-shattering (Yolen), and other planets that were populated with sentient non-humans.

PorridgeBrick - Brandon says exactly nothing at all there. That is pretty much one of his infamous 'wiggle room' statements. He confirms nothing, he denies nothing, but he's right - talking about it is interesting. Also, a big difference between soul stamps and Aons is that soul stamps do not require the Shaod - they seem to be useable by anyone with MaiPon ancestry (unconfirmed). The Shaod is still kind of a mystery, so it's unclear exactly what is happening there. Ren - if you had a different form of investiture as power (like using Stormlight, or Breath, instead of the Dor), then there should be some way to make Aons work, and I have no idea what the exact result would be. The big hint in Elantris for Worldhopping is suspected to be the mural in the hidden library of the Elantrian jmping/falling into the pool, and using it like a gate to get to some unspecified place (denoted by a yellow sphere, iirc). It seems quite plausible that you could worldhop with Aons. They seem to have Aons for everything - it's the most versatile magic system we've seen in the cosmere. I don't see any reason why there wouldn't be a combination of Aons and modifiers to get yourself to the cognitive realm. Given enough augmentation, Aon Tia might even be able to let you world hop through the PHYSICAL realm, though it might only travel at the speed of light. My personal stance is that it's more likely an Elantrian worldhopper would have success by finding a way to use native investiture to power Aons, than to trying to give himself some kind of land bond and write an entirely new Aonic system for an entirely new landscape from scratch, really really quickly.

Preservation's investiture is not stored within metals. For allomancy, the metal acts as a focus to which which an individual with an innate investiture (a misting) can access the general investiture permeating the world, consuming the metal in the process. In other words, metal on Scadrial is like Aons on Sel. As far as Devotion's investiture being limited to a world - it's very likely that Devotion's investiture is location tied, as we've seen a variety of location magics on Sel. It's unclear whether a Shard's investiture permeates the whole galaxy, whether the base type of investiture available is the same on every planet, and only it's manifestation differs in the intent, or some other system. In other words, it's unclear if an Allomancer on Roshar who burns a metal is using Preservation's investiture, or the investiture of Honor/Cultivation through the method Preservation gave to Allomancers. It is known that it is possible to jury-rig a system to use another manifested form of investiture - one of the easier ones being apparently that an Awakener who learnt how to hold Stormlight could use it easily for awakening. How an awakener would be able to hold stormlight without a Nahel bond is unanswered. Edit: For PorridgeBrick The Aon requires a bloodline. It is not enough to just just the picture to one of a different place. It apparently took several decades before the Aonic people (the immigrants to the Elantris area) began to transform and draw functioning Aons. It's mentioned in Elantris, it's mentioned in Emperor's Soul, it's in the Elantris Annotations, we've got several Word of Brandon's on it. The most clear and obvious one is in this interview, in question two. In direct word, it is mentioned that Aons are not invented by humans, that Aons are discovered, and that it takes several decades for a newly arrived people to begin to be able to use them. I've also mentioned it a couple times this thread, so I hope everyone can put the 'Just draw a different symbol' behind them for now - you need the symbol of the land, and you also need a bloodline tied to the land. It's also not clear at ALL if any given place works or if there needs to be specific things about it (like a surfeit of investiture, perhaps - Brandon once mentioned that mountains are important).

Again, the biggest problem with the Selian system is that a bloodline is required. It takes approximately several decades, according to the Elantris annotations, for a group of people to have enough of a tie to a location to be able to utilize it. It's not clear at all whether any location is useable or not either. Also, I believe the WoB isn't that people from Sel have a hard time worldhopping, but that the cognitive realm around Sel is particularly inhospitable and that you wouldn't want to visit it.

The fact that it makes a cognitive splash and not a real splash should be more than enough proof it is not a physical entity.

We know the Aimians existed prior to the Silver Kingdoms. In fact, we have earlier confirmation of Aimians that we do of Parshendi. We also know that they are similar to spren, in that one subrace of them can change forms, and their shadows face the opposite direction (both things normal to the cognitive realm). Incidentally, we know that spren on Roshar preceded the shattering, or at least the arrival of Honor and Cultivation.

A bit of clarification for you on how Elantris was restored. The entire city of Elantris is a giant Aon - a really gigantic Aon. Specifically, Elantris is Aon Rao, and it's use is to amplify the power of the Dor in Arelon. And it's big. How big? Well, it's the size of five cities, with the central city large enough to take a minimum of several hours to walk across. That means just the central square of the Aon should be at least 35km long on one side. It is a huge, gigantic, power focusing Aon, built upon what is apparently the concentration point for the Dor in that given area. Long story short, before Raoden fixed the Aon by dragging a big stick near the end of the book, the power of his Aons (weak and pitiful) is the normal expected power of an Aon without Elantris to amplify it. We don't know if Aons can be used exactly with another landscape as their centre (though other systems can and do manage this for other locations), but we know that to access Aonic power you would need to have the bloodline of that region (sDNA), be close to that region (for power from the Dor), and have the right Aon symbols (as the focus). So no, Hoid isn't likely using Aons specifically to worldhop everywhere.

Might be of interest to you, there's also a WoB that Worldsingers and Worldbringers are not of a similar name by mere coincidence. What has Hoid been up to, eh? Elantris has a lot of realmatic goodies - The bit about Seons pulsing, the bit about the Dor having pressure, the bit about the Dor being describable as a wave form with frequencies, the bit about how the Aons are like funnels that transform, the picture on the wall regarding the shardpool as a kind of gate are ones I can recall offhand.

Hi, technical things regarding iPhone voice memo. If you've made a voice memo with your iPhone, simply sync your phone with iTunes. There should now be a playlist in your iTunes containing the voice memo in mp3 format. If not, then with your phone connected, and iTunes running, under the Music tab of your iPhone, check "Include Voice Memos" and then hit "Apply". Your synced voice memos will appear in a Voice Memos playlist, which iTunes creates if it doesn't already exist. If you're having trouble figuring out how to get the mp3, right click the file in iTunes and there should be an option to show the file. Once you've got the mp3, upload it. Dropbox is great, if you've got a dropbox. If not, I recommend http://dropcanvas.com/, which is a nice temporary easy to use service and it doesn't require an account. Those are the easiest ways I know to upload a music file without much fuss. Drag the file onto the page, and paste the link in your address bar here when it's uploaded.

Do you need any help on the technical side, by the way? I'm not an experienced web developer, but I do know C, C++, Python, Ruby, Lua, PPC ASM, and a smattering of other bits and pieces, and I'm familiar with debugging all sorts of things. I wouldn't want any sort of permanent technical maintenance position, but if I can be of assistance from time to time let me know.

Hello! Sorry to be a downer with a bug, but I recently set up the notification and auto-follow system to keep track of my posts, and it seems to have a bug. Nearly always, when I have at least one new notification, the box will fail to populate. The widget appears, and the loading icon appears, but the box will not populate no longer how long I wait. Refreshing the page while the widget is open will allow the notification box to populate correctly the next time I open it (though all notifications will have been marked as read). I have reproduced this error in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari - latest builds.

Hi, and welcome. You guys sound awesomely cute.

These puns are getting odius. I hope your posts get unmade before their rattling causes my death.

You don't have to know the nature of a thing, you need to know the history of a thing. And the history of a thing in this case is about parentage. Could you change your own history by writing a love story for your mom to marry an Arelon instead? You probably could. It's likely you wouldn't be quite the same person, though.

...P-zombies?

You're a bit mixed up there, Porridge Brick. That is roughly correct. The sharing part is the issue. It's not cognition that allows bonding, it's investiture. Bonding involves an invested being bonding into a tear in a spiritweb in the spiritual realm. This is still possible - give Kelsier a splinter, or about 3-5k breaths, or any other equivalent amount of persistent investiture, and BAM. Kelsadin, with the surges of Allomancy and Arrogance.

Well, I should be posting more of these in the next couple weeks. I started out by reading as many theories as I could, and then I wanted to collate them on the wiki because I think this sort of stuff is genius. But there has been some foot dragging in this regard, and everything is hard to find, so I decided I'd go about reviewing all possible information I could get about some basic subjects and try to write some coherent theories based on what I found. Knowing that Brandon is a logical guy and gets Peter to work out whatever he can't, my basic premise is to reduce cosmere knowledge to concepts down to about something just dipping it's toes into quantum mechanics, which is about as much as we've seen hints for. So things like Wave/Particle Duality, electromagnetism, and entanglement are on the table, things like strong and weak interaction are a maybe, and things like quantum chromodynamics are a no. In complex, to explain cosmere magic with the least amount of physics concepts necessary at the lowest level of understanding necessary to describe a thing. In simple, to describe his magic system using science without having to read past the first couple paragraphs on wikipedia. That's about where I've placed his 'handwavium threshold'. Pure guess. But in general I just want to describe things like Investiture, Realmatics, and other big concepts, and link all those descriptions together to turn all this theorizing into a model.

The theory is not so much about particle decay (colloquial radiation), but electromagnetic radiation with a thermodynamic system. Don't think 'Uranium at a power plant' think 'The Sun, giving off heat'. As for shardic power and sentience, we know that investiture is in a closed system (it's in my unorganized quotes there somewhere), we know that sentience is spontaneously generated upon a sufficient amount of investiture (splinters), and we know that enough investiture gathered in one place will stack (Breath). Remember, this is not a molecule shedding ionized particles and slowly breaking apart, but wave/particle dualities within a closed system. Concrete Example: The Investiture of Ruin, as energy, concentrates in the pits of Hathsin until it gains enough mass to transform into a particle (Atium). When the energy is dispersed, the system will eventually return to equalizing and Atium will once again gather. These are some plausible conjectures. I haven't yet really looked into Aluminum, it's about #8 on my Theory ToDo list (but let's be honest, I'm gonna get really distracted). I'll keep some of these concepts in mind when I do get to tackling it.

They do seem to get a lot of wear and tear.

Hmm, the only thing I could recall when talking about spren interacting with the physical world was how Cusciethticth (Sometimes, these names!) makes a big splash in the ocean but the splash isn't real. Do you have more examples of concrete knowledge of spren affecting physical things other than Syl and the Leaf?

I'm big on the idea of balance, Odium's Shard, and we know from the two quotes on realmatic theory that presence in the cognitive world is affected by how you see yourself and how others see you, so I think your points are valid. So, Spren (we have seen one, that stupid stick eclipsed the moment! Thanks Argent) are cognitive entities, we all agree on that. The funny thing is, when spren enter the 'Physical Realm', they don't get a material presence. Instead, they remain cognitive entities. Only certain people can see them, and who sees them can be shared (like an idea). They are not solid, they can change the perception or their form at will, to an extent, but tend to prefer a single perception. In fact, they act more similar to mass hallucinations than to any other real world effect we know of. So I'm getting some better ideas here of what's going on, and how it fits into different things, but there are a few questions I'd like to ask. Thar be minor spoilers: Edit: Odium's Shard - it has been established that a bond could potentially be formed with any splinter, and Warbreaker suggests that any sufficient amount of investiture is equivalent to a splinter. The bond would not necessarily function the same as a bond with Spren (like for example, a Seon would not be able to automatically form a shardblade), but it is confirmed by both logic and WoB that any splinter could form a bond that would act similar to the Nahel Bond. So anything with sufficient investiture could be bonded.

Funny how I can search on theoryland, through the signing threads, and in the general forum here, and still not manage to find that quote. I bow to your expertise!

Alright, so, in looking up info for something else, I noticed that Hoid calls himself spiritually blind in the Epilogue for Words of Radiance. He also goes on a little rant about expectations, which probably says a lot about his character and intentions. But for the moment, knowing that the spiritual realm controls things like connections, some types of investiture, and ghosts, and that Hoid is both pre-shattering and incredibly realmatically aware, what could he have meant by that offhand comment?