Potions: A Curious Tale - Adventure Through An Enchanted World Where Your Wits Are Your Greatest Weapon

We know kandra can imitate animals - TenSoon is particularly great at using his dog bones to his advantage. But you know what I want? Kandra birds and in particular Kandra vultures 

(BoM spoilers under the cut)

In Bands we find that we are entering the age of flight. This clearly means that we need a kandra who realizes they should learn to imitate a bird so they can keep up. VenDell tells us that small animals (like bunnies - thanks Wayne - also I really want to know more about “that book”) are extremely difficult because they “need a certain mass to hold [their] cognitive functions.” This probably rules out small song birds, but there are large birds of prey that might be big enough. One of the largest birds (discounting ostriches and emu that can’t fly) is the Eurasian black vulture that can get up to 30 lbs. I really like the idea of a kandra vulture. Can this please happen?

Then we can get the kandra vulture who has an intimate understanding of flight because they have eaten birds and absorbed their anatomy and learned to fly to hang out with Ranette and Sophi Tarcsel and create all kinds of wonderful things?

I sat down to work on the “Sh is for Shalebark” page and got the basic layout and text done. Then I started contemplating which kind of shalebark I wanted to draw.  I’m bad at decisions, so you get this instead... If you want to know more about Shalebark, the Coppermind page is good :-) 

I finally got around to reading Sanderson's Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell (I've had the anthology checked out from the library for a couple of weeks). It has a lullaby. My brain provided a tune for the lullaby (I do not know where the tune came from, I don't recognize it and if it sounds like anything it was unintentional).  Getting this file into a form tumblr would take was a stupidly convoluted process and I'm not entirely happy with the recording quality (I really don't know what I'm doing with recording), but, here, have a cosmere lullaby.

Hey guys, let's think about bendalloy ferrings, aka Subsumers, for a minute.

We know they can store nutrition and calories in a metalmind which means they can eat as much as they want when there is lots of food and then tap it later.  

Think about a Subsumer at a Scadrial eating competition.  "Sure, I can scarf away as many hot-dogs as you want. No problem."

Think about a Subsumer at an all-you-can-eat buffet.  They get to try everything and then go back for as much more as they want of everything they like. Such restaurants would have to have special rules for subsumers...maybe a pay by the hour thing?

Imagine if Lift gets a hemalurgic spike that lets her become a bendalloy ferring. She would have the best stormlight storage system.   She could eat loads, store most of it in her metalmind(s), and then tap into it whenever she needs stormlight.  Unlike spheres, it wouldn't leak away and if she is tapping it from the metalmind she isn't sucking the energy out of her body.

On the darker side of things, you probably also get the occasional Subsumer who is desperately afraid of gaining weight and always stores everything they eat in their metal minds and never taps them.  Most people don't know that they are a ferring and everyone sees them eating, so people don't realize there is a problem until it has gotten really bad.

xkcd’s data recovery program gave me the prompt “Somewhere, this exists.”  hehehe

Alloy of Law:  make Sherlock and Watson vigilantes from the wild west and then send them to a steampunk city where they acquire a brilliant but somewhat naive badass girl apprentice.  Oh, and they all have magic.

Rithmatics: Part 4, obtuse triangles

In the previous posts we have addressed all acute and right triangles.  In this post, we look at what happens if the triangle is obtuse.

Obtuse triangles and the 9-Point Circle Construction

In an obtuse triangle, two of the altitudes fall outside of the triangle. This appears to be a problem, but we can work around it.  The 9 point circle construction we have been using so far is the special case of a more general 9 point conic construction that starts with 4 points.  This more general construction produces a circle whenever the 4 points are the three vertices of a triangle and its orthocenter (the point where the three altitudes intersect).  To find the orthocenter of an obtuse triangle we have to extend the altitudes to find where they intersect outside of the triangle.  We then use the three midpoints of the sides of the triangle, the three points where the altitudes intersect the opposite side (or side extension) and the midpoints of the segments connecting the orthocenter to the three vertices of the triangle.  As you can see in the diagram below, this ends up being the same triangle you would get from considering the acute triangle formed by the orthocenter and acute vertices of the original triangle.  This means that obtuse triangles can give us a different perspective on our circles, but will not produce any new patterns we couldn't get using acute triangles.  The advanced rithmatic theorist should be aware of this but for basic rithmatics it is fine to ignore obtuse triangles.

Shallan's Journey: Chapter 3, In Which Pattern Declares English Full of Lies

Shallan heard her name and glanced up warily. The group was clearly asking Albus about her, but she had no idea what they were saying and was already trying to process too many things to want to add anything else. The stove woman noticed her looking up and came over with a plate of...something, a fork and a glass filled with a drink that appeared to be some sort of orange juice or wine. Shallan realized that she was hungry and took a deep breath to calm herself before offering the woman a small smile and accepting the plate with a “Thank you” even though she knew it wouldn't be understood. She inspected the food and realized quickly that she had no idea what it was, though at least the utensil was mostly familiar. She took a bite and contemplated it. It was very different, but at least it was edible. The woman gave her an encouraging smile and said something Shallan couldn't understand before bustling back over to the discussion at the table.

As she ate, Shallan worked on talking herself down. You had already figured out you weren't on Roshar. The plant and animal life here is very different – the plants don't retreat into the ground and there are chickens that travel in fire. Of course the food is going to be different. The whole world is different. That also means they are going to have different sensibilities and different ideas about who should do what jobs. Shallan groaned quietly. On an intellectual level that seemed straightforward enough, though it wasn't going to make it any easier to navigate this world. Maybe it would be easier to handle if she viewed the situation as a scholar. She reached this conclusion as she finished her meal, so she carefully set the plate on the ground next to her, opened her sketchbook and began to document what she had seen so far. In addition to helping Shallan organize her thoughts, the acts of writing and drawing always helped to calm her.

Hermione rolled her eyes at the argument raging around her. She supposed it could be possible for the Death Eaters to try something similar to whatever was going on as a way to get a spy into the order, but she really didn't think they were that clever. Dumbledore's story also had too many details that made it clear that this new girl was not from anywhere they had ever heard of for the spy theory to be plausible. She watched the new girl as she pulled out a notebook and appeared to begin writing in it. Hermione smiled. That was something she would do. If you don't know what is going on, read, and if there is nothing to read, write down anything and everything.

Hermione noticed that Dumbledore was now standing quietly off to the side and shaking his head as he watched the argument unfold. She knew he would get his way eventually, he always did, but she supposed that if they didn't get the argument out of their system now it would just start again later. It probably would anyway - from what she could tell the Order seemed to spend an awful lot of time arguing. She pushed her chair back from the table and quietly approached Dumbledore. “May I take the new girl, Shallan, I think you said, up to the library?” He nodded his agreement to her, but kept his attention on the argument.

She smiled as she walked over to Shallan and collected her plate to take it to the sink. Shallan was sufficiently absorbed in her writing that she barely seemed to notice. When Hermione returned she greeted the girl, “Hi Shallan,” and when Shallan looked up pointed to herself “Hermione... Her-my-oh-nee.”

Shallan smiled tentatively back and repeated carefully “Her-my-oh-nee...Her-my-oh-nee...Hermione.” Storms! she thought, at least their language seems to use the same sounds, but they go together in such strange ways.” She watched curiously as the other girl, Hermione, mimed sitting at a table and writing and then gestured towards the stairs. Shallan nodded, tucked her sketchbook, which she was now treating as a notebook, and pen into her bag and stood. She didn't mind sitting on the floor, but she also wouldn't say no to having a proper table or desk to work at.

Shallan followed Hermione up two flights of stairs and a little ways down a hall to a room she decided must be Hermione's bedroom. Here Hermione dug a new notebook (it was always a good idea to have notebooks on hand, and they were so much more practical than doing everything on scrolls) and a few pens and pencils from her trunk before gesturing further down the hall. At the end of the hall Hermione opened a door and gestured for Shallan to enter. Her jaw dropped open as she looked in the room. “Pattern! Look at all of the books!” She stepped into the room and looked around in amazement as Pattern detached himself from her dress to explore the library as well.

Hermione's eyebrows shot up as she heard Shallan exclaim excitedly and saw something seem to float away from her. As Shallan looked around the library, Hermione walked cautiously but curiously toward the... thing? creature? that was now floating around the room. As she approached it she asked, mostly rhetorically, “Hello, and what might you be?”. She was somewhat surprised when the... whatever it was... buzzed back at her with something that almost sounded like it could be words. “I don't know why you are talking to me. Surely you know I won't know your language, you storming girl.”

Shallan turned at Hermione's voice and Pattern's buzzing and saw her examining Pattern with a bewildered look on her face. She laughed slightlyand walked over to join them. “Pattern,”she said pointing at her spren. Then she looked at Pattern pointedly, “This is Hermione. She seems to appreciate writing and books. We should be nice to her. She might be able to help us learn their patterns.”

Pattern swirled around more quickly and responded, “She can't understand what we say anyway.” Shallan raised her eyebrows at him and Pattern began to swirl more slowly again before drifting slightly closer to Hermione and buzzing, “Hermione.”

By this point Hermione was staring wide eyed at the two of them. Her mind was racing as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing and hearing. Dumbledore had said something about Shallan's companion, but seeing it was something else entirely. Apparently Shallan had a constantly changing sentient, talking fractal as a friend, or at least companion. Hermione knew that figuring out how to communicate well with Shallan was going to be a challenge when she decided to rescue her from the chaos downstairs, but now she began to think that she was in even farther over her head than she had realized. She wasn't sure if this Pattern was going to make things easier or harder and bit her lip in concentration wondering where to start before finally nodding and gesturing to the room around her, “library.”

Shallan nodded and made a similar gesture around the room and repeated “library.” They repeated this process with a table, chair, book, pen and pencil before Shallan realized there was no way she was going to remember everything and pulled out her sketchbook. She sat down at the table and began making a list. Hermione sat next to her and watched as Shallan drew small pictures representing each of the words they had covered and then drew out an elongated symbol next to each. After finishing with the library words, Shallan added a small portrait of Albus with his name and Hermione with hers. She then sketched the woman who brought her food and looked questioningly over at Hermione as she pointed to the picture. Hermione broke out into a grin as she realized the elongated symbols must be Shallan's form of writing.

“Oh that's brilliant!” She then pointed to the picture and said “Molly.” Shallan repeated, “Molly,” back and wrote it in next to the picture. Hermione grabbed her own notebook, flipped it open to the first page drew a quick sketch of a book and wrote “book” next to it. She then gestured between the two notebooks. Shallan grinned and nodded as she pushed her notebook over so that Hermione could write each of the words using her script. Pattern hovered over them buzzing with excitement. When she had finished, he commented, “Mmmmm...patterns..not perfect, but close...”

Shallan looked up at him curiously. “What patterns do you see?”

“Mm, her small symbols mostly pair with yours. But not all... chair has too many...”

Shallan thought about this for a second before nodding to herself and flipping to the next page of her notebook where she wrote out each letter of the Alethi alphabet while Hermione watched curiously. Shallan then pointed to the first symbol and spoke its sound while looking at Hermione expectantly. Hermione repeated the sound and drew the appropriate letter or blend of letters next to it. When they finished, Hermione pursed her lips. The chart they had just made was mostly accurate, but not completely. She pointed to the letter “g”, which she had written next to the symbol Shallan had indicated was for the hard g sound and gave both the hard and soft g sounds. Shallan raised her eyebrows. Hermione thought for a moment and then pulled over her notebook and said “gem” as she wrote the word, underlined the “g” and repeated the soft g sound. She then repeated the process with the word “gap.”

Shallan sighed. Of course. Hermione's script wasn't completely phonetic. That would have been too easy. Well, at least it did actually use letters and she wasn't going to have to learn a huge collection of glyphs. They made another pass through the chart with Hermione giving some of the most common alternate ways to form the sounds. Pattern watched this process somewhere between amused and annoyed. “Mmmm, this is a terrible pattern. Full of all kinds of lies.” Shallan glared at him.“That may be, but it is going to let us understand the people here.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon naming objects to slowly increase Shallan's vocabulary. Shallan found the process to be a strange combination of tedious and exhilarating. There were so many words to try to remember, but learning something new was always exciting.

Dinner that night thankfully involved many fewer people than lunch had. Hermione introduced Shallan and Pattern to Molly, Ginny, Ron, Fred and George and made the twins promise to at least give Shallan time to adjust before including her in any pranking. She told them about how they had spent the afternoon and asked Mrs. Weasley if they happened to have any pictures books that might be useful for helping Shallan learn English. It turned out that the Weasley's had a large selection of picture books that could read themselves to children, so there was an expedition to the burrow to collect them and bring them back to headquarters.

Ron had no patience for spending the day helping Shallan and Pattern with English, and Hermione angrily kicked out the twins after Pattern caught them teaching Shallan lies, but Hermione, Ginny, Shallan, and Pattern spent the next several days focused on getting to a point where they could communicate things that required more than gestures and pointing. Whenever Shallan felt like her capacity for new words and grammar was saturated, they took breaks during which she would teach the other girls a little Alethi.

Pattern naturally caught on more quickly and so occasionally wandered off to discover what kinds of lies the twins were creating. The fact that he was able to warn Ginny and Hermione of the pranks the twins were setting up helped the girls to accept him and quickly become fond of him despite the fact that Shallan was unable to satisfactorily explain the idea of spren. Ginny giggled that having Pattern as a friend was way better for spying than those extendable ears her brothers had created. Shallan laughed along and thanked the Almighty that there weren't other Cryptics here to bond with the boys. She could only imagine where that would lead.

So I saw @ultimateinferno theorizing about this, and I want spoilers hidden under a cut on my blog, so I’m making a new post rather than reblogging to add to his excellent theory/meta. There are *major Rhythm of War spoilers* mixed with theorizing under the cut.

Ultimateinferno makes a good argument that Lift is the one who is eventually going to deal with Taravangian!Odium. This is *perfect*.

Lift’s “I don’t want to ever change.” You know what? If she kills Taravangian she’s going to get the opportunity to absorb Odium and ascend. Either her boon is going to give her the strength to resist taking the power so that she can deal with it some other way (maybe she could team up with Rysn??? I wonder what kind of affect shattering Odium would have...) OR she *will* take the power, but because of Cultivation’s boon it won’t affect her ability to think clearly.    

Heh, although, Lift, as she is right now, but with the power of a shard might be a whole different kind of problem. As Yanagawn points out, “She often does what she isn’t supposed to.”

1/24 Newnan signing report

*dances around* Not only did I get to meet Brandon Sanderson and have him sign my books, I ALSO got to meet Ben McSweeney (see previous post)!

While hanging out in the bookstore waiting for the signing to start, I met a couple of other fans.  One of them had gotten there early enough to get one of the special "get a seat at the front of the Q+A" wristbands but didn't have a question.  I got him to ask what Horneater stew would be like on earth.  It is apparently based on a spicy Korean seafood soup that traditionally is made by just throwing anything acquired from the sea (shrimp, clams, mussels, etc) into the pot whole, shells and all. He gave the name of the soup. It's Korean. I would probably butcher the spelling completely, so I'm not going to try.

When I got through the line, I asked if he could draw the Blad defense in The Rithmatist.  His response was a look that very clearly said "You expect me to remember which one that is by name?" I clarified and he just kind of laughed and drew me one of the 4 point circles and suggested that maybe I could get one of the more complex ones from Ben.

I asked for something about Kaladin when he was signing WoR.  Before I tell you what he wrote, I should mention that he was halfway through writing it when I opened my rithimatics notebook and kind of distracted him. "Kaladin has known multiple lightweilders." 

So. Rithmatics.  I pretty much just started flipping through my notebook asking questions about each page.  Most of the questions got a simple affirmative. For the other things, I'm paraphrasing: 

Yes, 5 and 8 point defenses could exist.  They haven't really been explored in world though.

You can always bind more than one thing to a bind point, but binding multiple things weakens the point. It is a much better idea to add a small circle that gets 3 additional bind points. It doesn't change anything if the point comes from multiple points in the 9-point construction.

When I showed him the 9-point ellipses constructed from different triangle centers he stared at them for a moment before answering.  He hesitantly said that, yes, those constructions should be valid in theory, but that they shouldn't be used in practice.  The sides of ellipses are weak enough that if you expect to need to defend your sides you really should be using a circle.

At this point he started to say that we shouldn't hold up the line too long as I flipped to a page titled Lines of Vigor.  I was going to let it go, but he glanced at the page and told me to go ahead and ask :D

Yes, Lines of Vigor behave like light waves. (I'm so glad I was right on this)

To clarify I double checked that this means that higher frequency waves are better for doing damage, lower frequency waves are better for transferring energy (and thus moving things)

Yes, Lines of Vigor follow the rule that the angle of incidence =angle of reflection.

GUYS.  LINES OF VIGOR ALSO REFRACT.  I asked it in terms of whether they slightly change speed and direction when they move between materials like, say, concrete and asphalt.  He said yes and that you also get the wavelength adjusting.  Ben then commented that he hadn't known that. *flails*

I got "Oh, wow"'s from both of them while I was flipping through the notebook :-).  At that point, Brandon passed me off to Ben and we chatted about inconsequential things while he took one of my spare sheets of paper from my notebook and drew me a picture *flails more*

I'm still on such a high guys, it's crazy. *dances around*

(very minor edit to fix a typo that was bugging me)