Mistdork

This is like "Junction, Junction, what's your function? - The reprise". I had to make the joke. Sorry, guys...

 

I think I said something similar in the thread we used to discuss the released Jasnah chapter a while back, but Perpendicularity made me think of an object, or location, or entity perpendicular (in the metaphysical, cognitive, or spiritual sense of the word) to the realm it sits in. So if the Three Realms are (using a massive oversimplification) layered on top of each other - I've always imagined the spiritual one on the "bottom", with the cognitive "above" it, and the physical "above" that - then a Perpendicularity would be something perpendicular and (potentially) intersecting to all three, much like a traffic sign is perpendicular to the ground underneath it. Or, better yet, like an elevator shaft is perpendicular to the floors it passes through. I am confident there is a way to extend this metaphor to apply to interplanetary travel, with Shardworlds (and their aspects in all the realms) stacked "on top" of each other in the fourth dimension, and the Perpendicularity intersecting them all, it being a 5D object. 

 

Just think in five dimensions, guys (well, six if you add time), it's easy

 

Oh no, you went into some crazy calculus explanation, this is actually a bit more simple than last time. It's interesting that I would say it's more like the other way around but that's because I imagine the Shardworlds as Platonic Magic (and that's how I understand Plato's ideas of physical, cognitive, and spiritual). Though, I doubt they can...errr...hop quite that directly. ;P

 

Anyways, a Perpendicularity is a permanent Junction (which is even more of a simplification), or a Shardpool, probably because of all that Investiture in said pool creating a link, "weak spot", or certain degree of closeness between the realms... Maybe. I'm a bit curious as to why permanent junctions exist at particular spots, yes, I know that a Shardpool is a manifestation of a Shard's power in the Physical Realm (the reflection of that power in the Cognitive Realm/Spiritual Realm might creates a close connection because you have the idea in the first and the ideal of that power in the second), but why is it that particular spot in the Physical Realm? Why not some place else? What's so special about that location that it manifests there?

Well we do have this regarding colorblindnes on Nalthis:

 

So far as what happens when you get Breath... that's an interesting question. If it were any other "you get better" magic I might be inclined to say you get to stay colorblind, but we already know that the effects of Breath kind of act independently of the Cognitive restrictions we usually have to be wary of.

 

Then again, there's the question of what "level" the Heightening work at. Would you expect getting Breath to let a completely blind man see? If you had a magic that granted people great dexterity with their hands, would you expect it to grow hands for someone born without them?

 

This is probably a good question just to ask at some point, perhaps a red-green colorblind Awakener would only be able to more easily notice a difference in shade and contrast or something like that than color rather than being completely healed... I think that they would have to 1) have a lot of Breath (possibly); 2) have a person who knows the right command heal them (if healing Commands of this sort exist, but those would change a part of a person's identity); or 3) be healed by a Divine Breath. I'm a little hesitant to say that having enough Breath would (completely) "cure" this ailment, since colorblindness would be a part of that person's identity, and even though Breath does act independently of the Cognitive Aspect, I want to say that it's effects would still be limited due to this problem...maybe.

@Kobold: I've decided that when I get my own dog, I will name him TenSoon. And talk to him like a person. You're not the only one crazy enough to name their pets after Cosmere characters. Oh, a cat would be Vin...heh.

Oh, I'll just throw my lot in with Kuristan...though my disappointment isn't related, it still fulfills the contract, I believe.

 

...we'll waiting for that hat eating video, Wiery, you could, of course, buy a chocolate hat or something more edible...(if a more edible hat exists).

So, the Brandon-bots are real...this definitely proves it!

Obviously, all Jedi/Seth are Awakeners, Windrunners, or Allomancers. It's so obvious I'm utterly shocked I didn't realize it before.

Cosmere Gossip, scandals, and the Latest from the Shardworlds. Your place for every piece of juicy gossip and breaking news! From Hoid to the latest in the real breaking news from around the Cosmere. Topics in this issue include:

 

• Where's Marsh?
• Breaking the Silence: Knight Radiant admits his true love is Spren, not wife 
• And how to attract Kelsier's Shadow to you!
• "He Spiked Me!" - Tales of Famous People Reportedly Losing Their Powers
• Queen Sarene, Baby Bump
• 10 Best Spots to Vocation in the Cosmere
• Breaking News: Famous Scientist Explores Hemalurgy
• Aluminium Cloaks; Protect yourself from Unwanted Investiture - Real or Fake?
• Exclusive Interview: Star Playing Kalad Swears he Saw Vasher at the Coffee Shop

AD: "Worldhopping 101: Learn Everything you want to know about Worldhopping from the best teachers in the Cosmere! Limited Time Offer, and strictly not limited to those with Innate Investiture!"

 

Other ideas for articles? List them here! The more, the juicer!

 

(And thank you Blaze1616 for helping me come up with this not so fabulous idea!)

Of course, and I can't forget Hoid Spottings ("Where's Hoid-o"), Best Locations to Vocation in the Cosmere, The Kandra is a Magical Fish, and "He Spiked Me! - Tales of Famous People Reportedly Losing Their Powers".

 

I think it's time for a new topic...xD

That's the reason he left. Clearly.

 

And nothing at all to do with a limited supply of Investiture or new laws regulating the selling and purchasing of Breath. Someone found some ancient documents about his life (way back in the day) and made a movie about him that won the equivalent of 11 Oscars and 4 Golden Globes. It was so successful it made him skedaddle for the price of one Nightblood and 200 Breath (the first delivered to a certain Herald, the later to Hoid). Indeed, the truth revealed at last!

 

​Brought to you by the Cosmere Enquirer: Get your Cosmere Gossip Here. In our next issue, "Where is Marsh? And how to attract Kelsier's Shadow to you!"

Yes, we have seen her in non-Mistborn books.

I asked Brandon a few more questions about WalDo, and got some answers. Just kidding! I got RAFOs.

Q. Is the kandra worldhopper MeLaan?

A. Good question. RAFO. In upcoming Mistborn books, you are going to get to know a lot more of the kandra, so you will have a lot more options.

Q. When the kandra worldhopper is off-world, er off-Scadrial, does she take the form of a human female?

A. Not all of the time.

Q. Has she spoken a word of dialogue in a non-Mistborn book?

A. I can't remember.

Sooooo we're not that much closer to finding out who she is. But we do know that she hasn't spoken very much dialogue, or anything very important. Otherwise, Brandon would have remembered.

Edit: I took his answer to the second question to mean that she doesn't always take the form of a human. She is in animal form some times. But the fact that he couldn't remember whether she had spoken dialogue suggests that she appeared as a human at least one of the times we saw her.

 

Hmmm, at least the answer wasn't 'no'. I guess the best way to figure this out would be to come up with a convoluted question that will trick him into a little more...something in this regard. Perhaps ask if she has had any important dialogue in a Mistborn book or if she has actually appeared in that series as of yet...

 

So...this means for all we know, she could be Kaladin's horse. "She ate my horse." The kandra-as-animal-gag continues! She could even be a chull...or better yet, an axehound! If Adolin gives Shallan a axehound pup (or if any character receives one), my bet is that it won't be a real one. The tradition continues...

This is the key. I think Nalthis will become Hollywood/Bollywood, and be the Cosmere focus for all visual formats.

 

Exactly. It will be like Hollywood (well, Central and South American style probably, though I might be the only one who pictures it this way, with a touch of Ancient Greece on the side) and probably LA.  Vasher will hate it...if he's still around. *snickers*

I had an idea for a fan fiction a while ago that sounds kind of relevant; Nalthian Vampires.

After all, one of the rules of Breaths is that someone has to will them away; My Breath to You, and all that. So I think the idea of someone being able to just take your Breath away would be extremely terrifying.

Breaking the "rules", of course, but then, horror films in our world don't always pay attention to how physics and stuff works.

 

If they brought Spikes to Nalthis and Spiked you in the right place, this could kind of occur... Though, not quite the same, as you're either dead or will have permanent spiritual damage, mixing magics could have freaky results...

 

Basically, the villain is a serial killer who uses Hemalurgy to steal Breath, it could even be based on a "true story", if you want to go that far...  

A topic that's a little off the wall. I'm so not sorry, I Awakened an idea and couldn't let it go.

 

So, given that Nalthis is the perfect place for horror movies (in fact, when they start exporting to other worlds, they could make a fortune off horror films, brightly colored things, tourism, and creepy tea). In some ways, special effects could be cheaper (for a bit, until Awakener demand outraces the supply...) and they could invent the Zombie Lifeless Genre, other than the obvious awesomeness there, what other horror effects (and effects in general) could Awakening produce? How do you guys think the future of cinema might look compared to our world (or other worlds in the Cosmere)?

 

Since, you know, I want to invest in it in a thousand years of Cosmeric time!

Alright, time to creep out of the grave like a Lifeless army in a horror film...The future of Nalthian Cinema, you know they would be able to make some excellent movies in the distant future just with the freaky things Awakeners and Lifeless can do...;D

 

What I want to address though, is the "draining" of color (and sounding like Captain Obvious to boot). It always seemed odd to me, anyways, that when the color of an object is "drained" this draining is graying. This is only from a cosmetic prospective. In color theory, a white object (or a duller, gray object) is, in fact, reflecting more colors than before (instead of reflecting bright red, it reflects all the colors of the spectrum). Black is the absence of color (that is, no colors are being reflected back, instead a truly black object absorbs all colors), if color was really being "drained" so to speak, the effects of Awakening would look quite different. After Susebron regains his tongue and performs Awakening at the end of the book, when the color is "drained" from those objects, they turn white due. If he were "draining" color when he Awakened everything in the palace, this shouldn't have been the result, but it was because Awakening causes a physical (and probably) chemical change in the physical realm to fuel it's power (to change the colors an object physical reflects is not the same as painting over it or even dying it, though, it is like bleaching it, but still somewhat different). It could be the energy produced by this change that provides the power for Awakening (or moving Breath from one object to another). Thus, color isn't fueling it directly, the physical change (and probably the cognitive change) fuels it.

 

Personally, I love this system because it's related to how colors work, but that probably puts me in the minority of readers. It just isn't as cool as burning metal. Invested metal, but there's still a reaction taking place in the Allomancer's stomach (one that we don't completely understand... Do they have special enzymes or invested-cellular structures that burn this metal? What exactly is going on there?), and while its end-positive nature, this chemical/investiture reaction has to take place. It's not exactly the same in nature because they have to continuously burn said metal, but it's somewhat similar...(and now I want to take a part an Allomancer stomach to better understand how burning metals works...it's for SCIENCE!) This kind of change might not be needed for all Investiture (as no more examples come to mind, or if they exist, it's like spiking someone in the back and stealing her power...only a good idea if you belong in the back alley and/or want to figure out the economics of Hemalurgy)...

 

To kind of address everything else: I find Kuristan's dividend/investment model really interesting, though, I personally see it as closer to a slow or minute decay of Investiture over time. I think it's a possibility that Returned are...kind of like corpses Awakened by Endowment with Cognitive Shadows tacked on (so I agree with Moogle, I think it was Moogle anyways). If the 'unsticking' or decay is relatively low (so minute it's not even noticeable until day-seven except if you have Susubron-level power...) and since we never get to see a Returned getting refused in-book from a non-Returned's perspective, we can't say what their aura look like to someone else. Lightsong (the one example we get) probably wouldn't have been aware of this subtle change, and if it's subtle enough throughout the week that only the most powerful Awakener could notice it, than the regular person wouldn't and couldn't tell anyways. Considering that it's only one Breath that's require to get a Divine Breath re-stuck, the decay should be difficult to notice in the first place since one Breath really isn't much and that's all a Returned needs to "eat" to recover their strength...

 

However, I think it's possible that whatever is happening, it might be that Breath becomes part of the Divine Breath (instead of being an individual unit) when the Return "devours" it. Thus, the Divine Breath gets slightly larger and that single Breath doesn't just disappear (but a Breath is so minuscule that an increase in size of the Divine Breath wouldn't be noticeable except if you have thousands of Breaths). By the end of the week, it's gone (or rather, the Divine Breath gets smaller again and can't quite hold on to its human form/corpse or stick as well), and the Returned needs to eat again to refuse again. Though, I don't think this addresses the energy issue...

Sounds like a win-win situation. Either the info is even juicier than expected, or Weiry eats a hat.

 

Or we LIE about it even if it's just as good as expected. Let the hat eating commence.

What's going on is that I've been rather sick for the last few weeks and just haven't been able to finish things up. Hopefully now that I'm feeling better I'll be able to get back to it (after I catch up on schoolwork though).

 

If it's not against copywrite law or some shenanigans like that, why not request help? Perhaps someone here has some transcription experience, if they do, perhaps they can help you...It just seems, to me anyways, that this is a lot of transcription for one person to handle...just a suggestion, though, thanks for keeping us up to date.

So...I was thinking...does the name of the Returned effect the Intent of the Divine Breath, or is it, perhaps, the other way around? What comes first: the chicken or the egg? the Return's name or the Intent?

 

The above are really just rhetoric questions. Splinters can have their own Intent independent of the Shard, but in the case of a Return, this Intent is governed by a human rather than being the result of chosen Intent (Nightblood) or a more "random" Intent like spren (or Intent based on truths/ideals...some of these being harder to grasp than others and thus resulting in bigger splinters, like Honor, cryptics, godspren, or Destroy Evil). But, one of the things I've wondered about for awhile is, when a Returned is given a name, is it due to who they already are/were, or who they will become (based on the needs of the people or the possible future Endowment showed them)? How much do the names actually matter?

 

If the names are influence the Intent, is it because the Returned decided to follow what their name met (aka Warbreaker and Blushweaver) or because they were given it by others? When we consider Blushweaver or Vasher, two Returned who have changed their names or, in Vasher's case, had different names given to him at different times, one might conclude that whatever influence their names have is somewhat flexible. Blushweaver seems to be a goddess of beauty (and sexuality), but she is at times honest as well, reflecting in the long run, her original name as nature. While Vasher has been known as Strifelover, Kalad the Usurper and finally, Peacegiver; in the long run (or by the time of novels and by the end of the Manywar) he fits the ideal hinted at in his given name...

 

It seems little uncanny (and is mentioned by Vasher at the end of Warbreaker) but perhaps reflects the nature of larger Splinters. The ideals/truths that they represent are bigger, and thus, can't be pinned down as easily. On Roshar, a conscious spren forms due to the large amount of Investiture with its large Intent trying to "fit in" and intepret that truth/ideal; like Nightblood, but not forced. When a person Returns, however, the name is an unspecific descriptor that foreshadows the base Intent/reason that person Returned. A Returned's name operates in a similar fashion to the name of a spren or, probably more correctly, Nightblood's command...at least in the long run. However, it shows that a "person" bonded to a Splinter (of this size) has more flexibility, but perhaps not as much as a regular person.

My final questions for you guys:

 

1. Do you think that the Splinter and the name that the Cult of the Returned give the them have some restraining effects on the individual's will due to the level of Investiture (because that Investiture is trying to act according to its "named" Intent)?

2. Does this result in a type of "civil war" between the named Intent and the human conscious bonded to the Splinter?

3. Are names of Returned a Command given by Endowment (in a matter of speaking) that the Returned try to 'live up to'?

(etc. I'm going to sleep now)...

Weiry beat me too it, darn...and just when I found the WoB, too. xD

This has kind of been my head cannon for awhile, though, my understanding of tidal forces is limited for the most part beyond the realization that three moons would create some crazy storms (the sun's tidal force would be more limited in this regard, though). So, this is a very good point, Maximus!

 

As you've mentioned, OP, I agree that it does seem like Something decided to perhaps make Roshar this way. However, it seems it might be Adonalsium who made it that way or at least influenced it to form that way in some fashion. Perhaps that explains the shape of the continent too. Hints of Adonalsium in the underlying math and physics, how fun!

Well, since we should and you can make it happen... 

 

I think that Peter should just change his icon to a troll face...It'd be fitting. >.>

Couldn't the Kandra female be MeLaan? She's still alive, considering that Alloy of Law occurs after the Stormlight Archive, she could be somewhere on Roshar observing and doing whatever (and she's an agent of Sazed, too). Also, since AoL had to be moved back in the Timeline because of a background conflict of some sort (MeLaan on Roshar, maybe?) this would explain that...

 

Now to find the relevant WoB...meh. 

Hallandren 9

Idris 8

Thaylenah 13

Alethkar 10

Herdaz 13

Jah Keved 11

Azir 10

Shinovar 6

The Final Empire 11

Terris 11

AOL Empire/ Elendel Basin 10

Duladel 10

Teod 4

Arelon 8

The Rose Empire 10

Hushlands 5

Nalhalla 8

Fractured States 12

United Isles 10

@TheOnlyJoe (HorseDude): I would argue though, that despite that they call it the Roughs, that the Roughs are probably part of the Basin... Though, I guess, for all we know, Elendel is just a city state that rules over the Basin proper, but isn't technically country. Kind of like how the Italian city states were before the unification of Italy...

Hallandren 9

Idris 8

Thaylenah 11

Alethkar 10

Herdaz 10

Jah Keved 11

Azir 10

Shinovar 8

The Final Empire 17

Terris 11

The New Empire 10

Fjorden 1

Duladel 10

Teod 10

Arelon 8

The Rose Empire 10

Hushlands 7

Nalhalla 10

Fractured States 10

United Isles 9

It's the AOL Empire. I couldn't find a Name.

I swear that the name is the Elendel Basin. Since, that's what the world/place map seems to hint at...

http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/1711-alloy-of-law-map/

 

Hallandren 9

Idris 10

Thaylenah 12

Alethkar 10

Herdaz 8

Jah Keved 11

Azir 10

Shinovar 8

The Final Empire 16

Terris 11

The New Empire 10

Fjorden 8

Duladel 10

Teod 10

Arelon 8

The Rose Empire 9

Hushlands 7

Nalhalla 10

Newcago 2

Fractured States 10

United Isles 8

Hallandren 9

Idris 10

Thaylenah 11

Alethkar 10

Herdaz 8

Jah Keved 11

Azir 10

Shinovar 8

The Final Empire 14

Terris 11

The New Empire 10 (If it is, I don't think it's the right name for it...)

Fjorden 8

Duladel 10

Teod 10

Arelon 10

The Rose Empire 9

Hushlands 7

Nalhalla 10

Newcago 6

Fractured States 10

United Isles 8

So, today's crazy topic is based on creating a Spike Farm that would work economically based on Feruchemical gold/Allomantic gold mining of Allomantic and Feruchemic (or any power you want, if you breed people correctly, want unlimited Breath? JUST FARM IT!) powers using Hemalurgic spikes! The classic "power farm" scenario, but one that considers the economic effects of such farming could have on [future] Scadrial and how one could do it without "upsetting the balance". The discussion is based on the discussion in this topic here: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/14995-goodreads-qa/page-5#entry169867

 

And is particularly based on Moogle's last post (quoted for your convenience!)

 

 

As you can see, Moogle threatened to Spike me if I didn't make topic convinced me to start this topic to continue this discussion here. So, here you go guys! Have fun Spiking!