Rithmatics: Part 7, The Incenter And 9 Point Ellipses

Yahoo Groups Will Be Shutting Down - What Each of You Can Do

This post will be frequently updated - check the Google Doc linked here for the latest version. Follow this Tumblr for more information in the days ahead.

Yahoo Groups will be shutting down key features and restricting access to Groups, with user-uploaded content being deleted on December 14, 2019. With this shutdown, decades of fandom history will vanish. But there is something that every member of the fandom community can do now - whether they’ve ever used Yahoo Groups before or not.

I am a member of a Yahoo group - what can I do?

Immediately contact the admins to find out what their plans are.

Download PGOffline, a Windows tool to save the files and messages. Any member of the Yahoo Group can use this tool - you do not have to be an admin to save the mailing list. 

Since many admins are busy or inactive, install the free Windows software program yourself and start downloading - focus on Files, Photos, Links, and Messages. A step-by-step walk through is available here and a video tutorial here.

Submit your plan to download here.

 Export the messages and backup up the files and photos by copying them to another folder on your computer. Then contact Open Doors, the OTW preservation program. The OTW is open to providing storage of Yahoo Groups backups that are assembled by moderators and non-moderators alike. Details are here.

If you are a member of a Yahoo Group and have downloaded the files and messages, and the admins do not respond, please contact your fellow mailing list members. Remember, anyone can save a mailing list messages, files and photos and submit them to Open Doors.

Click here for instructions on how to use the Chrome plugin

If you need help from fellow fans, try asking on the “Save Yahoo Groups” Discord Channel

Mac Users: try this Chrome based plugin

Instructions on how to use the Chrome plugin

Alternatively, if you are familiar with Python, please experiment with the tools found at https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups

I am Admin - what can I do?

Communicate with your Group members - let them know your plans

Download your Group messages, files, photos, and links using the tools above. Don’t forget to download your members list.

Decide if you want to simply archive the old posts and disband the mailing list or start up somewhere else.

Please take a look at setting up a Dreamwidth community - it allows explicit material, threaded conversations, privacy locks and is free. Image uploading is limited to 500MB for free accounts and 1.5GB paid accounts. Also, if you are considering Groups.io as an option, please note that it does not allow any material that depicts sexual activity, even implied sexual activity or anything that could be considered a fetish.

I am not certain I have time to help download? Is there something else I can do?

If you are a member of a mailing list, submit the mailing list for consideration. It will help volunteers focus their efforts. Don’t forget check here to see if your group is already being downloaded.

Even if you are not a mailing list member, consider creating a page for the mailing list on Fanlore, so that there will be a place for people to talk about the mailing list, its history. Details here.

Login Problems?

Has your “inactive” email been purged? Is your email email address not linked to a Yahoo Group ID?

An “inactive” account is one where you haven’t sent an email or logged in for the past year. Receiving emails does not count as activity. The email address is then released, and can be used by someone else.

If you used your Yahoo email to subscribe to a mailing list, your access to the Yahoo Group is gone (along with all your emails). If your account was deactivated within the past 90 days, you may be able to reactivate it. (more here). Alternatively, you can try contacting Yahoo Mail support.

Outside the 90 day window: you can try creating a new Yahoo email account using the same screen name as long as no one else has snapped it up. Simply sign up as you would for a ‘new’ email account. Reclaim an inactive mailbox. Then log into your Yahoo Group.

Ok.  I sat down planning to draw a Sarpenthyn.  You know, the critter in the menagerie that everyone but Shallan though was disgusting.  And then this adorable creature came out and I’m so confused. What do y’all think? Could this be a  sarpenthyn?

(Probably Crazy) Nightblood Theory

So, I just had a probably crazy idea.  

What if Nightblood isn't actually completely native to Nalthis? What if Nale is bringing it back home when he gives it to Szeth? Nightblood could have been a Rosharian Shardblade (Szeth doesn't seem to question it being a shardblade) that ended up on Nalthis. Then when Vashar and Shashara awakened it, the process roused the dead/trapped spren in the shardblade.  From what we have seen,  spren require an active bond with a human to remain sentient in the physical realm.  Awakening would interact strangely with this resulting in the spren needing a steady supply of breath to remain active.  This could provide an explanation for why it sucks the breath out of people (something that is never really explained in Warbreaker). 

Nightblood's inability to fully understand what evil is and place it in a human context runs reasonably parallel to Pattern and Syl's attempts to understand the more abstract concepts of the human world.  In Nightblood's case, the spren is still trapped in the sword and since it doesn't have a proper bond with a person, it is even harder for it to learn, so it can't progress as well or as quickly as Pattern and Syl.

The more I think about this the better it is working...

Recess: That's right. They'd break recess and turn it into a session of advanced algebra instead. (Note: The same thing happens when you go to middle school or junior high. Sorry.)

Alcatraz Smedry (in The Shattered Lens)

From Alcatraz’s handy list of things Librarians would break if they could.

I live near Atlanta and Labor day weekend is approaching, aka that time of year that Atlanta turns into nerd central - we get both Dragon Con and the Decatur Book Festival on the same weekend.

I love the idea of Dragon Con. I love seeing all of the amazing costumes people make for it. But as a person who is easily overwhelmed by large crowds and who has a distinct preference for books over tv and movies, the Decatur Book Festival is much, much more my speed.  Sadly, there is a distinct lack of anything fantasty/scifi on the book festival talk schedule this year. And Sanderson is going to be at Dragon Con... It makes it tempting to consider...

Realistically though, I’m going to be happier at the book festival. 

If anyone else is going to be hanging out in Decatur that weekend looking at books and wants to meet up for ice cream (there are a couple of great ice cream shops in Decatur) or tea or something and chat about the Cosmere, or Imperial Radch, or Wayfarers or... let me know :-)

AHHHH I just discovered that somewhere in the convoluted process of getting the file from SoundRecorder to tumblr the first line got lost... Why didn't anyone say anything?!  Corrected version coming shortly!

Corrected version can be found at http://kalynaanne.tumblr.com/post/111933243197/ok-completely-new-post-because-the-other-one because tumblr apparently won't let me fix this one *rolls eyes*

Ok.  I figured that if I did the lullaby from Shadows, that meant I should also do Shallan's lullaby from Words of Radiance. I sat down and messed around with it until I came up with a tune I like, so, here, have another cosmere lullaby.

Oathbringer Speculation: Soulcasters

We know that people who consistently use soulcasters over a long period of time are...changed. My theory is that they are being slowly turned into spren and sucked into Shadesmar and further that this is the source of Syl’s comment about how the power coalesces slowly  and parts become sentient and a spren is born.

First off, let’s visit our friend Kaza in Interlude 4. We learn that she is slowly turning to smoke, but it seems to hold together well enough that she can wear a glove over her smoke fingers and still use her hand. She is forgetting the “ordinary passions of human life” and increasingly not needing to eat or drink. The she says that “I have begun to see the dark sky and the second sun, the creatures that lurk, hidden, around the cities of men.” It is clear that she is starting to see into Shadesmar and it isn’t too much of a stretch that in Shadesmar there might start also being evidence of her. The Aimian cook notes that she is “barely human anymore.” At the end of the interlude she chooses to “go with the smoke,” but the other times that she almost goes it sounds like she almost goes all the way into shadesmar and doesn’t come back, not that she almost turns into smoke in the physical realm and drifts off. Later in Celebrant (chapter 102) Kaladin finds himself in a tent with a “single bewildered spren made of smoke,” confirming that smoke spren are a thing.

In chapter 81 Kaladin meets a grain soulcaster and notes that “The woman had an inhuman look to her; she seemed to be growing vines under her skin, and they peeked out around her eyes, growing from the corners and spreading down her face like runners of ivy.” Then in Celebrant we meet spren that “were made entirely of vines, though they had crystal hands and wore human clothing.”

In chapter 105, we meet a soulcaster that makes stone and learn that his “skin beneath [his cloak] was colored like granite, cracked and chipped, and seemed to glow from within.”   In Celebrant there “were other spren with skin like cracked stone, molten light shining from within.”

We don’t have a description of the Azish soulcaster that makes bronze, but it seems like a good bet that their description would match that of the Reachers, who “looked like humans with strange bronze skin—metallic, as if they were living statues.”

In Chapter 35 of Words of Radiance we meet a soulcaster that doesn’t quite fit any of the descriptions of spren that we meet in Celebrant, though she could potentially be in an earlier stage of the granite type: “Prolonged use of the Soulcaster had transformed the eyes so that they sparkled like gemstones themselves. The woman’s skin had hardened to something like stone, smooth, with fine cracks. It was as if the person were a living statue.”

We also hear about Honor and then the Stormfather making Honorspren, so soulcasters wouldn’t be the only way that sentient spren are formed, but I’m fairly convinced that it is at least one way that spren are born. 

For reference and as a side note, in Celebrant they meet Cryptics, Honorspren, Reachers (bronze), Cultivationspren (vines), Inkspren, the ones whose skin turns to ash, the glowing granite ones, the ones made of smoke and possibly also ones made of fog/mist, though I’m not completely convinced those aren’t the same as smoke. If the fog/mist ones are different from the smoke ones, then this gives us 9 different types of sentient spren to correspond to the 9 non-bondsmith orders of the Knights Radiant. 

My sister @neranishin and I have projects. She got me a piece of faux fur so we can figure out to make a Soonie pup and I found her fleece that I figure would make good skyeel wings. So there are going to be Cosmere plushies :D

Happy Halloween!

I am a Rithmatist for Halloween this year. I haven’t figured out how to get a good picture of my coat by myself and I don’t have any one around to conscript into playing photographer, so you get pictures from the Shadows of Self release that I’ve been meaning to post and not getting around to for a while. I made Rithmatist coats for @fbstj and I:

Since I’m a Rithmatist (possibly an older version of Melody?), my jack-o-lantern clearly needed to be one of Melody’s unicorns:

More pictures of me in my Coat under the cut.

I really need to do Melody’s circle tracing practice XD

Pattern Skirt

I randomly got this image in my head of Shallan in a poodle skirt except with Pattern instead of a poodle...  So, here, have Shallan in a Vorinified 50's style poodle (Pattern) skirt outfit.  With boots. Because this is Shallan after all. I don't usually like the result of me trying to draw people, but I'm reasonably happy with how this came out.