amnesia fic followup??? TOR & DORA??? 👀 👀 👀 i must know everything
amnesia is a followup to fennel's INCREDIBLY HEARTBREAKING amnesia fic. not exactly a fix-it but gently nudging the story in that direction. mostly just sad!
When he turned from the window again, he half-expected Fitzroy to have fled, but he still sat in his chair as if transfixed, the slim book held forgotten in both hands. As Cliopher turned and met his eyes, Fitzroy abruptly dropped his as if ashamed.
"I am sorry," he said lowly. "I did not mean to hurt you, who gave Artorin Damara so much."
"It's not— it isn't you that is to blame," Cliopher said, and realized even as he said it that it was true, that the feverish heat in his chest was not only grief but a deep, deep anger. He understood why his lord had done it, he did, but— oh, that didn't mean he didn't blame him.
Tor & Dora was written pre-ATFOTS but I dredged it up a few weeks ago and wrote a little more of it, so maybe in another two or three years I'll have enough to be worth posting! it was just meant to be vignettes of them over time but I only ever had two scene ideas.
We disembarked. Dora was already waiting there, out of breath from her run down from the observation platform. The other Mdangs were only just arriving, having walked at a more sedate pace.
Dora dashed across the room and skidded to a stop before us, her face alight. She looked down at our clasped hands and said, "Oh, may we touch you now, then, Lord Artorin?"
I had always liked the way she said Lord Artorin, in just the same way she said Cousin Kip or Grandma Oura, like the title was something plain and ordinary. I smiled at her and said, "You may."
Here’s something similar from Russia: when my mom was 16 in 1980 in Moscow, she was sent to the principal’s office for coming to school with pierced ears, and my grandmother got called to the school as well. I was pretty surprised when I heard this story because I knew she had always been a rule-following Good Student, so I asked why she was the only girl in her whole school to do such a shocking (lol) thing.
Turns out, she was really really upset one day about some teenage drama, so my grandmother took her out for ice cream and talked her into getting her ears pierced, saying it would make her feel pretty. It was entirely my grandma’s idea! (My grandmother was born in 1934, and she used to tell me to wear short skirts to show off my legs while I could—possibly that wasn’t a generational thing and she was just Like That)
I don’t know how people viewed adult women having earrings at the time, but it was definitely considered very improper for a teenager by school authorities—and at the same time completely normal by at least some parents like my grandma.
That's really interesting! Especially considering that pierced ears were already re-normalized in the US by then.
I don't know as much about European attitudes to ear piercing over time, country by country, or how they changed. I've heard that the UK had similar ideas to those common over here, I think? But beyond that...no idea.
mage-pie replied to your photo “The Christmas in July promotion sees [Burger King] decorating one of...”
What’s the historical/sociological term for this kind of ritual magic? Propitiation or something? I know it was a Thing in ancient societies and even during plagues in more recent times, but the name escapes me
I was thinking of it as a form of sympathetic magic, though I don’t know if that’s quite correct. Falls into the same kind of category as renaming a child who’s sick so Death can’t find them.
I can’t think of an instance in history where, for instance, the date of a festival was moved in order to hurry the end or start of something, but I imagine it has happened at some point.
anyastradivarius replied to your post “Ah, yes. Morning. Time to begin the multi stage process known as...”
Wait, what??? I've been picturing you as a 20 year old for like 5 years ��
LOL I will take that as a compliment! I’m going to be 41 in September.
coppersunshine replied to your post “Ah, yes. Morning. Time to begin the multi stage process known as...”
i'm 23 and there's already multiple stages, you're telling there's even MORE
Speaking as a morning person, I still wake up alert and ready to go really early, but physically the struggle is real. None of my joints are going to work right without notifying me they are displeased.
librarian-amy replied to your photo “Yo dawg, we heard you like whisks so we put a whisk in your whisk…....”
Spotify 1-5 (because I’m curious) and also, hmm, 64?
Top 5!~
1. Chen Qing Ling 陈情令 by Lin Hai 林海
2. We Won’t Be Falling (主題曲) by 陳雪燃 Chen Xueran
These two are both in my “Fave Opening Songs” playlist (which only has 4 songs in it for the moment 😂
3. Tu i el teu melic by JazzWoman feat. Auxili
4. Moriré de Sed by JazzWoman feat. Hien, AGS, Del Olmo, Periferia Norte
No. 4 is def one of my favorite songs of all time. I’m not entirely sure how “Tu i el teu melic” beats it b/c while I like it a lot, I don’t seek it out directly like I do “Moriré de Sed”
5. “Sam’s Song in the Orc-Tower” by The Tolkien Ensemble
This song is not just a gorgeous song in its own right, but it’s also a really good WWX in the Burial Mounds song. Give it a listen with that in mind!
64. La Noche De Los Dos by Daddy Yankee feat Natalia Jiménez
This is not even my favorite song on the album Prestige (that’s “Perros Salvajes”, yes I first heard it at Zumba don’t @ me), but it’s a fun one.
hey I don’t have access to a dryer right now. I can boil the cloth mask on the stove or wait a week to sent it out with my laundry but i don’t feel safe going to the laundromat myself. do you think just washing with soap, rinsing, then boiling it for fifteen minutes would be enough?
I’m going to answer this with the GIANT caveat that I am not an epidemiologist or anyone else with any sort of training or credentials when it comes to this sort of thing (dammit, Jim, I’m an ecologist, not a doctor). I’m just a gal who’s anxiety-read a lot. Listen to the professionals over me!
You probably don’t need to take the boiling step - The MN Department of Health advocates using the dryer, but the new guidance from the CDC just says to use a washing machine. Dr. Shan Soe-Lin, a public health expert who’s been pushing for use of face masks by the general population, said you can just hand wash the mask and let it dry overnight.
I suspect the most important element here is to wash it thoroughly with soap and water, because, just like when you wash your hands, the soap will break down the lipid envelope that encases the virus (there’s an awesome video about how this works here). As long as you’re getting the whole mask all soaped up and give it a good scrub to let the mechanical action help break down that lipid envelope (i.e. don’t just half-heartedly swish it in a sink of soapy water), I think you’ll be good.
And you’ll want to let it dry completely, because the masks do lose effectiveness if they’re damp (this is why a lot of advice you’ll see says to only wear them for limited amounts of time — which is all you should be spending outside anyhow).
And I’m sure you’re doing this, but just a reminder for anyone else who’s reading this, a cloth face mask is something you should be using in addition to the social distancing, hand washing, and all those other things that you’re already doing (you are doing them, right? RIGHT?). They are not magic shields of invincibility. Even the N95 face masks health care workers are so desperate for are not 100% effective. And quite frankly, the reason you’re wearing a mask isn’t so you don’t get sick from others. It’s so they don’t get sick from you. Remember, one of the reasons COVID-19 has been such an issue is because there’s a sizable number of people who can have it, can spread it, but won’t be showing any symptoms. And face masks have been shown to be effective at keeping the wearer from spreading those respiratory droplets that carry COVID-19.
Don’t forget, also, wash your hands before you put on the mask and right after you take it off! And don’t fiddle with it while you’re wearing it — remember, you’re wearing this so you don’t spread any virus that you might be exhaling, and if you touch your mask, you’re just getting any of that on your hands to smear everywhere.
mage-pie replied to your post “More system of magic noodlings”
How do people cast spells if they can’t speak? And if someone who is (for example) deaf and mute does it via signing, why don’t others do it as well? Does whispering work? Subvocalizing? If emphasis and pitch are important, is magic easier for people who speak tonal languages? Can someone learn magic words in a language they don’t know, or do they have to understand what they’re saying? (This started out as a disability-inclusion question but now I’m just interested in the details lol)
This sent me on an interesting rabbit hole on the intersection of disability studies and speech-act theory-- so, I will attempt to summarize what I read, or at least how it applies to the magic system I’m trying to work out:
1) A speech act is a vocalized utterance about an action that has a specific meaning to the speaker.
2) In a performative speech act (the kind I’m most interested in because I find it the most easily understood haha), the action that the sentence describes (for example, telling a vampire, “I welcome you in”) is performed by the utterance of the sentence itself.
3) Speech act theory is concerned primarily with the physical act of locution, rather than the multitude of other ways that humans convey meaning-- through gesture, body language, facial expressions, art of all kids, visual media, or written language.
4) There are different levels of a speech act behind every utterance:
a) Locution, i.e. the actual words uttered like "I welcome you," to the vampire.
b) Illocution, i.e. the intention behind the words uttered. So here it would be, allowing the vampire to enter a specific building.
c) Perlocution, i.e. the influence of the words on the listener. The vampire can now enter the home at will.
So generally speaking, a speech act is not applicable to all forms of language and articulation of meaning-- it is one specific, embodied way that humans cause an action to occur through the physical act of speaking out loud.
Given that I need magic to work on objects as well as people, the perlocution of a spell would have to be the action described by the spellcaster happening. I.e. a witch says, “I enchant this car to do x,” or whatever, and the car does it.
So spellcasting is a physical act of locution (i.e. making sounds that contain meaning with the vocal chords) that requires the speaker to have a specific intention in mind, and if the magic is carried by soundwaves-- then you also have to be close to the object or person that you are enchanting with your speech. The effectiveness of a spell would therefore rely upon how good you are at understanding, enacting, and manipulating the sonarities of language, how loud or how carrying your voice is (if the object or person is far from you)... and I suppose how focused your intention behind the utterance is-- not just in terms of how committed you are to this thing that is happening, but how specific you are about what you want to happen.
I think the latter means that spells often go slightly wrong, a la the fantasy trope of “be careful what you wish for.” The spell will come true, according to the letter but now the spirit.
I think that a person raised in a tonal language would probably have a better ear for spellcasting. Subvocalizing would not work, because you would not be producing sound. Whispering might but probably wouldn’t be as effective, unless you’re enchanting something close to you, since the soundwaves need to reach the object that’s getting magic performed on it. A deaf person probably could perform magic by speaking with the same intonations and pitches by learning not from the sound of the spell by from the feeling of the vocal chords vibrating. I don’t think a mute person could. :/ Which is not my attempt to be purposefully ableist or anything-- I just need to base a magic system on a specific metaphor and physical phenomenon in order for it to make sense in my head. And here it’s speech act theory and soundwaves, which necessarily has some limitations because the first doesn’t encompass all forms of rhetoric or human articulation of meaning, and the second is a physics thing that does exist for any sound source that causes vibrations in a surrounding medium.
So like... if you are physically casting a spell, you say, “I wish the ground would swallow you whole,” in a very specific way. Colored gas then rolls from you to the person you wish the ground to swallow whole, and then when it reaches them, they get swallowed by the ground. How much of them gets swallowed, or how long this lasts depends on your skill in speaking.
I’m not sure about different languages, if the requirements for spellcasting are a) specific vibrations in the human body that have meaning to the spellcaster, and b) specific intent on the part of the spellcaster. I would think that if you’re able to assign meaning one line of text in a foreign language, or able to translate that one line from your language to your own... you’d be able to cast that spell. But if you’re... say reading out loud from a spellbook in a language you don’t speak and your intention is, “I want whatever I’m saying to happen,” nothing will happen, because the words don’t have a very specific meaning to the spellcaster.
Hey can I offer a correction for the Queen’s Thief timeline? Costis does NOT take an arrow in the butt. In KoA one of the assassination attempts is that he nearly gets hit by an arrow at the butts— ie the archery butts, the targets on the archery practice range. So you don’t have to factor in healing time for that. Sorry if this throws off your whole timeline! I’m really glad you made it, it’s immensely helpful for writing fic
Huh, all those rereads and I totally missed the preposition “at”! Thanks for the correction. But that actually doesn’t affect my timeline at all, because I assumed from Eugenides’s comment that Costis either wasn’t hit at all or that it was a very minor injury, and I didn’t factor any healing time for Costis in my estimation. (The healing time I mention in the timeline is Relius’s.)
The reason I assumed more than one week passed there is mostly because of the tone of the narrative (lots of short events are told in rapid succession), and because Costis goes into the city often enough to get in four wineshop fights, and based on what we’ve seen of the guards, it seems very unlikely that he would have four off-duty nights to go drinking in the city in one week. By the time Eugenides learns that Nahuseresh paid for the assassins, he had also been in his own chambers for a week, too, which would imply it’s been at least a week + one day.
I ended up counting King of Attolia as taking place over minimum 113 days--if that last bit is 2 weeks or more, which I’m inclined to believe, that bumps it up to 120+, hence my end estimate of “roughly four months.”
Thanks for the note, though. For years I’ve been picturing Costis with an arrow in his butt, and that’s really not fair to his dignity, lmao. And I’m glad you find the timeline useful! I basically can’t write fic without referring back to detailed timelines--I’m actually in the process of compiling one for a different fandom now, lol.
Did anyone actually treat you badly in the Inconvenience Test? If so, how common was it?
It wasn’t common. Most people understand that yelling at the front desk won’t get them anywhere, and most people can regulate their anger well enough not to just use the messenger as an excuse to blow off steam. It was really a sort of very rough litmus test to immediately weed out people who we knew wouldn’t work well in an office environment. Before she (and I) came into the organization there had been an issue with the hiring of several people who had inappropriate workplace behavior, so it was kind of a baseline thing we were working on.
I had a couple of people who got unpleasantly aggressive, and a couple who didn’t but tried to like...argue with me? Like “I didn’t know this was a group interview, it’s unacceptable not to tell people that”. For the former, I’d let the HR officer know; for the latter, it was a judgement call on my part. Usually as long as they weren’t outright attacking me -- as long as it seemed like they were just stressed and needed to complain -- I gave them a pass. She gave me a lot of leeway, because she knew I was a reasonable judge of character. She was also the person who eventually got me my promotion to project manager, and steered me into development support and out of operations; I think a part of her helping me was that she knew I was underutilized at the front desk, from the conversations we’d had about prospective employees.
I think there’s a fine line to walk between “unnecessarily stressing out interviewees” and “giving a few tests that they don’t know are tests”. But you can tell a lot about someone by how they behave when they think nobody’s looking, and it’s tough to convey “nobody’s looking” during an interview.
