Tempus

Dunno if there is a greater purpose, but there is a connection. The original Terris religion, the Worldbringers, was found or inspired or affected significantly by Hoid. The Lord Ruler was a Terrisman who belonged to that Religion. Likewise, Hoid also seems to have founded or influenced the Worldsingers as well. Hoid's short backstory we were briefly exposed to in the Liar of Partinel sample chapters has him as a storyteller - it's possibly related to that.

Nothing in particular, I'll just need to go through any theories were it recorded your name as 'Ate-her' and change em' manually back to Aether.

Feathermancers should have what sort of weapon?

It's pretty much this, except I only get two backup dancers:

Awesomeness - If it makes you feel better, every time someone posts in this thread I do a little chair dance. Upvotes to all of you!

Ah, I went and made three banner variations, because the tall thing was crazy, so here they are then: The first one is larger than 500x100, though :| . They are all png8 and very small filesize though. B&W for the win.

It's written in python. Beautiful Soup provides the scraping tools, and the rest is built-in libraries. In a nutshell, the script searches the title, body, and tags (if there are any) for a variety of characteristics. The easy ones are things like word count, sentence count, paragraph count and a variety of formatting tags, quotes, spelling, and basic grammar. More complex functions look through a 16000 character cross-indexed term dictionary, analyze by frequency, proximity, and category to produce a variety of indicative metrics. When it's got all those metrics, it attempts to assemble them into indicators, usually modified with a fractional exponent to prevent bloating scores from overusing any single element. I then tested against my own evaluated threads, weighted the categories to match, added in a few simple heuristic rules to ensure certain things, and then presto. Example: Class 1 is basically 'Not crem and has the word 'theory' in the title or tag. Class 2 does four or five checks against some weighted metrics, but it can mostly be boiled down to 'More assertions than anything else, and used a lot of keywords together.' Keywords being pretty much unique words from the books. It's not as complicated as it sounds when I summarize it as 'heuristic processing'.

Tempus bows before the bubble master

Alright, as requested I made a logo for you guys, as well as some banner length variations. In addition, I've linked my Photoshop file at the full size (800x1600) so you can make your own stuff similar to how Awesomeness does the profile pics (apply neat filters and textures to the vectors, etc). The feather wings are based on the 'freedom' glyph used in Kaladin's brand. Enjoy! I'm not joining, though. Feathertips Featherblades, spears, and ... farmers?

Excellent profile pic

Gerontarch: An extremely elderly member of a ruling class that bases authority on age. Also see: Gerontocracy (it's a real thing!). ninja'd by an in-world thing.

This may produce an external FTL - as in, time inside the bubble passes so slowly that they are moving faster than light just because even walking would be faster than light outside the bubble. But, it wouldn't be terribly useful - the ship would still take FOR EVER to reach its destination, and anyone aboard would either be long dead or an extremely bored Atium compounder by the time they reached their destination.

Short update so that no one thinks I'm dead. I've been dreading getting cracking on the Stormlight Archive and Words of Radiance boards, as some might be able to tell. I was planning on finishing the Cosmere boards before my trip next Monday, and then starting the WoR boards after. Slogging through those 2500 posts to find all the tiny nuggets of joy, endless, countless hours preparing, watching, finding, reading, typing... so I said: NO MORE and wrote myself a script! I'm very proud of my script - it looks at all the threads in the boards, takes down all the relevant information, and heuristically analyzes the language in the post, the structure, the grammar, the spelling, the punctuation, the quotes, the references, and over 500 key Cosmere terms (Thanks R'Shara!) to produce a massive list. The script sorts the items by class -> Class 1 is 90% confident it's a theory. Class 2 is 80%, Class 3 is 65%, Class 4 is everything else. It then grabs all the pertinent information and records it so I don't have to - author, date, title, link, etc. It then uses the first post analysis to generate the most likely Location, Category, and Topic of the post. It also produces a list of other probable topics, and rates them. It then assigns the theory a score based on the content, and chooses a tag according to this score. The metric system is the same I've been using in my manual evaluations, as best the computer can manage. In my tests against the existing theory list, theories were tagged with 87% consistency with my own ratings, locations were 97% consistent, categories were 76% consistent (the 'Plot' and 'Joke' categories are 0% consistent, sadly), and the topic was 45% consistent for the core topic, but 96% consistent that the topic I assigned was on the probable topic list. It also attempts to notice things where it feels it has got them badly wrong, and mark them for me to consider with attention. So overall, it's pretty darned good at what it does. It is of course quite possible that the inconsistent one in determining the original entries has been me on many occasions, and that the script judged it better. Noneless, before adding any of the entries to the Index I'll be reviewing them all. This will still take time, mind you, but significantly less time as not only will there be a lot less typing and copy-pasta, but there should be about 4 in 5 entries that I don't need to modify (out of the theories - non theories will have to be winnowed out and deleted). Anyway, I started running the script, and you can find the results of Cosmere board pages 1-14 and the entire Stormlight Board here. Words of Radiance board will pop up later tonight, so it might be on there when you read it. Some things you may note if you take a glance: There are lots of bandaids. This is because it evaluates all threads. The ones that are not theories are highly likely to come up with a bandaid when they get evaluated, because they are of course not theories. Class 4 is very big. This is also due to most of those threads being non-theories (but not all by any means) The scoring system has some huge outliers at the upper end. The scores are based partly on exponential functions evaluating the criteria. As a result, the scoring system tends to break down around 35 points, and starts ramping up drastically after that, leading to some threads (especially unusual threads with inordinate amounts of quotes or formatting) being exceptionally high. This is intended, the score is merely an indicator of the presence of elements of well crafted theories, and identifying outliers is part of its job. Some people have changed their display names since I scraped earlier, mostly my fault due to the Joke Proile Pic thread >.> This has messed with my table, haha. Reap what you sow!

Sorry this took so long, been busy working on the Theory Index and on planning out my trip in a few days. Without further ado, your Crying Door.

There is a WoB that all the Shards were about the same strength initially. How they invest themselves in planets diminishes their strength.

Magic has limits besides cognitive input. If magic only did things when you believe they will happen, no one would have discovered magic because no one would have expected it to happen If magic worked only on how you thought it would work, the least skilled people would be the strongest, and would not struggle or overreach themselves as does Vivenna with Awakening. Crazy people would be even stronger than kids. So would extremely arrogant people. What would stop an Allomancer from looking at the Lord Ruler and saying "If he can do it, so can I", and then doing it? Genetics. If magic happened just because you believed it would, anyone could use magic, and they would all be as strong as they believe themselves to be. There would be no genetic component. Basically, magic has all sorts of hard limits, and while training your thoughts is important, especially for some forms, it is merely a tool. It is just as important to train your brain to understand how to throw a punch for a boxer, yet a boxer can not throw a megaton punch extending fifteen feet just because he believes he can. You need the knowledge, the muscle, the training, the knowhow just to punch correctly, never mind absurdly. In the same way, the thoughts you use to enact a magic affect the effects of the magic, within the parameters already allowed by the magic.

Well, first off, there is the piecing the whole world together thing. Slightly important, maybe a little more credit to making the planet not covered in ash and cruelly oppressed by a god-like dictator? Secondly, Ruin is stronger than Preservation at the moment - two new holders would engender a similar circumstance as before, except possibly this time the new Preservation wouldn't think up a good trick before the world was destroyed repeatedly. Also slightly important, not being a hairsbreadth away from divine destruction. I'd much prefer a god who does not do too much like Sazed than say, a Ruinous god hellbent on slowly destroying everything on the planet only to build it up and destroy it all again.

We know for certain splinters do not always have consciousness, or sentience if you'd prefer. Splinters, when left on their own, seem to develop sentience spontaneously - that's a fancy way of saying they do it whenever the conditions are right. We know for example that the Divine Breaths never seem to develop sentience when attached to Returned, and that spren sentience is crude until bonded with a human, and that there were or possibly still are some mindless splinters in the Sel area. It's difficult to say what exactly the conditions to make a conscious splinter are, but at a guess they include: not being attached to another cognitive entity (esp. Humans), not having an explicit Intent, the Investiture strength of the splinter, and the original way the splinter was fashioned.

Harmony has made Snapping easier post first trilogy, so no more beatings. As for heavy metal poisoning, Iron, Steel, Tin, Pewter, Zinc, Brass, Aluminium, Duralumin, Gold, and Electrum are all reasonably safe. Allomantic metal quantities are quite small, and only a tiny amount is necessary to make a reservoir. Assuming an allomantic dose of 10g, those would all be perfectly safe. Most of those metals have safe intakes above what you would feel comfortable eating at any one time (1kg+). Copper, and Bronze are a bit stickier, according to my research, you shouldn't take more than 62.5g at a time without risking being ill. A little lower from Bronze. Not too bad still. Nicrosil is mostly nickel and chromium. The limit is about the same for both elements, so it would be about 9g maximum single dose to avoid illness. Cadmium is the worst, at 2.25g maximum single intake, and Bendalloy (being mostly Bismuth) would be not much of a problem, at about 140g max.

Hey and welcome.

Hi Mozy. Excellent dress. What is MBI, though? I'm not familiar with the acronym. P.S. Confusing theories are awesome.

I think we've got WoB that Bloody Tam is not an atium misting, but that it is a very good question to be asking. Personally, I have the feeling that the Set have got ahold of some God Metal, maybe Atium or even Harmonium, and have 'discovered' a new alloy for it. We know out of world that the God metals can alloy with all the other metals to produce a variety of effects... We could be seeing one of those.

It should indeed, good call.

Alrighty. I wasn't able to think of one for Khyrindor yet (I didn't want to steal the Griffindor pun from Baine either), but I got the rest up: Leftinch: Bay-en: Aet-her:

No, no need to give it another go. Some people like action and depressed people (See: Game of Thrones), and other like world consistency and writing depth. And some like all of it. Fun fact - The SAO light novels as they approach the Alicization series becomes more and more like early Log Horizon style books. As for the translation quality, it's very true many light novels have low quality translations, even in print. It's also true that most light novels are not of the best quality writing at all. Light novels as a genre are mostly self indulgent or mainstream culture cliché tripe, aimed at youth from 10 to 18. Quality-wise, the original writing is more similar to western comic book writing than to western print novellas (and indeed the light novel industry is heavily influenced by the manga industry, and vice versa). That's not to say they are all bad quality - like comics, there are some that provoke good thought, some with unusually high quality dialogue, exposition, or whatever; every section has it's outstanding series. And even the bad series are designed to please, rather like a McDonald's 1$ hamburger. I'm just saying that the translators don't always have as much to work with as you'd hope, and they're not about to start rewriting books to have better prose.