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Post by jda on Jan 1, 2020 8:05:12 GMT
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Jan 1, 2020 8:13:55 GMT
Assuming they follow through, props to Khepi for not foot-dragging or obfuscating here. Keeping focused on getting through the shield is also good wherever they wind up. Between the Court and the Wood is not where the forest dudes want to be if they want to stay out of any future fighting.
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Post by machiavelli33 on Jan 1, 2020 11:55:01 GMT
Khepi, Sareed, Kamlen, Irial, Idra...
And Mark.
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Jan 1, 2020 12:13:32 GMT
Khepi, Sareed, Kamlen, Irial, Idra... And Mark. Indeed. I wonder if it's short for Marcus, or if maybe it has no connection to the given name Mark in the wider world. ...or if it's a corruption of "Mork." |
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Post by pyradonis on Jan 1, 2020 12:45:11 GMT
Khepi, Sareed, Kamlen, Irial, Idra... And Mark. Indeed. I wonder if it's short for Marcus, or if maybe it has no connection to the given name Mark in the wider world. ...or if it's a corruption of "Mork." Or if he or his parents used to be ordinary humans. |
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Post by shadow3 on Jan 1, 2020 12:52:08 GMT
IT'S a TRAP.
~ Admiral Akbar, on the eve of the Battle of Yavin IV
Loup has Coyote's powers for the most part, so he could use the same method that the Greek forces used to enter the city of Troy...
A lot can happen in a few days...
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Jan 1, 2020 13:27:36 GMT
Indeed. I wonder if it's short for Marcus, or if maybe it has no connection to the given name Mark in the wider world. ...or if it's a corruption of "Mork." Or if he or his parents used to be ordinary humans. Would you believe his great-grandparents? Unless he's a lot older than he looks neither he nor his parents should have become forest dudes from the Court separation unless they were abnormally long-lived or some other funny business. I suppose he (or his parents) could have wandered into the forest side recently but I suspect the Court MIB would keep random people away so that the secret magic spot wouldn't be (re)discovered. If his name is Marcus (or from Marcus) then his ancestors might have sought shelter in the Wood after Roman rule ended, in which case he'd either be a continental import by extraction or from a tribe that allied with the Romans at one point. IT'S a TRAP. ~ Admiral Akbar, on the eve of the Battle of Yavin IV Loup has Coyote's powers for the most part, so he could use the same method that the Greek forces used to enter the city of Troy... A lot can happen in a few days... Not sure what you mean. "Loup" might be planning a trick of some sort but I don't think he'd need to trojan horse himself inside. The root network (being magical wood) should allow him in or by virtue of being semi-magical wood, demostrates that he could burrow in if he wanted to. ...but if he did attack the Court it would grieve Antimonies. If he destroyed it and killed everyone then he couldn't use the threat of attacking it as a lever against Antimonies. |
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Post by rasputingold on Jan 1, 2020 17:05:07 GMT
so he could use the same method that the Greek forces used to enter the city of Troy While he might be doing that for funsies hasn't he made it pretty clear that he wouldn't need to? He might be lying, but he said and I believe that he only couldn't get through the barrier at first because it surprised him. |
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Post by Gemini Jim on Jan 1, 2020 18:27:14 GMT
Khepi, Sareed, Kamlen, Irial, Idra... And Mark. Indeed. I wonder if it's short for Marcus, or if maybe it has no connection to the given name Mark in the wider world. ...or if it's a corruption of "Mork." Well, Ken and Naomi are Japanese names, which are coincidentally also Western names. Although I like the Marcus idea. Or Mork. Nanu nanu. |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 1, 2020 18:37:31 GMT
To keep with the apparent theme of the Forest "elves" taking vaguely Celtic names (but Anwyn looks Welsh and O'Kerrigan is Irish), which I reckon could have been fashionable with 18th/19th-century English Romantics who would choose the Forest side (the elves being humans transformed some time after the Seed covenant, however it really played out, seems like an open secret), the king of Cornwall in the story of Tristan and Iseult is called Mark as well. Whether this is a Christian name i.e. in honor of St. Mark is disputed; it may also come from a Celtic word for "horse": Rosemary Sutcliff, for instance, believes so.
edit: not that "Khepi" or "Sareed" look Celtic, but on the former, I'd assume the Rosetta Stone would have been discovered at the time of the Forest-Court split as well. The point is that they are named like "fantasy characters", with a vague influence from languages spoken at the "periphery" of the Indo-European sphere (inside or outside). I wonder if they have a Delina Delaney.
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Post by Gemini Jim on Jan 1, 2020 18:40:06 GMT
So, no nanite cookies for those of us who guessed that they would be able to use the Court food and supplies to simply walk through the "magic wall," I guess? Unless "We just need a few days" means "we need you to digest more of this stuff." I suppose it would make Kat's robot subplot a useless and pointless red herring if they could "El Chapo" their way in, or just nanite their way in. |
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Post by fia on Jan 1, 2020 19:58:35 GMT
To keep with the apparent theme of the Forest "elves" taking vaguely Celtic names (but Anwyn looks Welsh and O'Kerrigan is Irish), which I reckon could have been fashionable with 18th/19th-century English Romantics who would choose the Forest side (the elves being humans transformed some time after the Seed covenant, however it really played out, seems like an open secret), the king of Cornwall in the story of Tristan and Iseult is called Mark as well. Whether this is a Christian name i.e. in honor of St. Mark is disputed; it may also come from a Celtic word for "horse": Rosemary Sutcliff, for instance, believes so. edit: not that "Khepi" or "Sareed" look Celtic, but on the former, I'd assume the Rosetta Stone would have been discovered at the time of the Forest-Court split as well. The point is that they are named like "fantasy characters", with a vague influence from languages spoken at the "periphery" of the Indo-European sphere (inside or outside). I wonder if they have a Delina Delaney. Korba, I just wanted to say that I really and truly appreciate your geekery about name etymology. I too love name etymology. Khepi seems like a made-up name to me. There's a Hindi word that means a kind of hat that sounds like Khepi, and apparently comes from German originally, but I have doubts that it's where Tom got the name. I could be wrong. Sareed is a type of dish popular in parts of the Middle East. |
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Post by warrl on Jan 1, 2020 20:27:38 GMT
so he could use the same method that the Greek forces used to enter the city of Troy While he might be doing that for funsies hasn't he made it pretty clear that he wouldn't need to? He might be lying, but he said and I believe that he only couldn't get through the barrier at first because it surprised him. We know he can easily crush something he created, for the purpose of demonstrating that he could crush it, that looks sort of like the robots' barrier. This is not exactly surprising. On the other hand, it's not exactly proof of anything meaningful. |
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Post by todd on Jan 1, 2020 23:57:02 GMT
...but if he did attack the Court it would grieve Antimonies. If he destroyed it and killed everyone then he couldn't use the threat of attacking it as a lever against Antimonies. Good points. On the other hand, the Court's somehow endangering the Forest (so is Loup, but in a different way - and partly due to the Court's activities), and he might decide that that takes precedence over wanting Annnie(s) to live with him. Or he might let his anger get the better of his judgment (and given the condition he's in, that's alarmingly possible) and only realize after he'd leveled the Court that he'd alienated Annie(s). |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 2, 2020 3:29:18 GMT
Khepi seems like a made-up name to me. That is what I wanted to express  More concisely, I could have said that I suspect the Forest denizens of "Tolkienist tendencies", though not drawing on quite the same languages (nothing Finnish or Gothic yet). Their choices of names share an apparent mixture of public "real" and private constructed languages (which might merely be a few words deep, and almost inevitably informed by patterns in "real" ones, but not "randomly" so -- "Ayilu", too, was born to English parents, but cradled in glossolalia): e.g. you might have heard already that the so-called Dwarves' (sic) Catalogue in the Völuspá includes a few names familiar to anyone who has read The Hobbit, and Frodo essentially shares his name with a legendary king of the Danes. The name Khepi looks like souvenir-shop Ancient Egyptian to me ("or is it Frisian", joke meant for at most one reader); imitating, say, "Khufu" and "Khepera". I mean that endearingly. There's indeed a "Käppi" (cappy) in German, but I agree it's an implausible source, even though there's a theme of blunt names in this comic (often undercut by asymmetry; by this, anyone should have expected "Loup"). On the other hand, while I'm not sure about the dish being the source, I do believe that having an Arabic-sounding name (triconsonantal root, short/long vowel distinction but only A/I/U) among all these Fionnghuallas (or Finduilas) was deliberate on the author's part, and for the reasons I've mentioned. I prefer my cookies paleolithic. |
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Post by ctso74 on Jan 2, 2020 6:09:16 GMT
Let's hope the work, that the members of Mark's team does, is permanent. A wrong move could set them back by days, if they're dry-erase...
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Post by GK Sierra on Jan 2, 2020 6:34:00 GMT
Smitty has such a nice smile 😊
The picture of a gentleman
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Post by pyradonis on Jan 2, 2020 9:08:11 GMT
So, no nanite cookies for those of us who guessed that they would be able to use the Court food and supplies to simply walk through the "magic wall," I guess? Unless "We just need a few days" means "we need you to digest more of this stuff." I suppose it would make Kat's robot subplot a useless and pointless red herring if they could "El Chapo" their way in, or just nanite their way in. As I said some threads before, who knows whether even the Court officials themselves are aware of what makes the barrier decide to let someone through. At least they claimed Idra would be let back in.
Or if he or his parents used to be ordinary humans. Would you believe his great-grandparents? Unless he's a lot older than he looks neither he nor his parents should have become forest dudes from the Court separation unless they were abnormally long-lived or some other funny business. No, I meant it as in someone who recently chose to live in the Forest and was transformed, like Aly and his parents. Or was it said somewhere that it is only possible to get an animal body this way? I do not remember. |
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Jan 2, 2020 15:27:44 GMT
Would you believe his great-grandparents? Unless he's a lot older than he looks neither he nor his parents should have become forest dudes from the Court separation unless they were abnormally long-lived or some other funny business. No, I meant it as in someone who recently chose to live in the Forest and was transformed, like Aly and his parents. Or was it said somewhere that it is only possible to get an animal body this way? I do not remember. It's not clear exactly when the policy went into effect but at some point after Coyote divided the forest and the Court Ysengrin came up with the idea to not allow humans into the Wood unless they gave up their bodies. We only know that it wasn't in place at the time Jeanne's beau died. It's been formsprung that there are some limitations on what sort of animal body that a human can get (nothing that would upset the power balance) and that they'd have an appropriate lifespan depending on what animal they chose, or they can become a (lesser) etheric creature like a fairy. The main point of confusion I have is if the green dudes are elves and if so, if elves are humans or etheric creatures, or a (possibly etheric) subspecies of humans. It has been written in response to "is it accurate or correct to refer to Jeanne's lover as an elf?" that "in the absence of other terms, yes" but also that "none of the Anwyn family have ever wanted to become human. It's also extremely rare among their species to do that" and that the Anwyn are the same species as "the green dudes" which I think means that whatever else they are the green dudes are indeed humans (why would humans wish to become humans?). What the hell an elf exactly is in the Gunnerverse remains a mystery. Proboards doesn't like all these links to Chrysoprax's engine I'm trying to put in so here's a generic link to a useful search result for this conversation. It's also been suggested that exceptions to the usual rules might be made on a case-by-case basis for exceptional individuals but it isn't clear if that's only Forest-to-Court. One would think that Coyote might make an exception for someone who was particularly interesting or useful, but then again the hospitality might disappear when he got bored. That said, as a general rule it appears that humans have to become non-humans to live in the wood and that green dudes count as humans. That ritual for putting totems in has been around at least one generation Court-to-forest, possibly much longer because it may not have always been possible for ritual-performers to teach students so Coyote may have had to do it more than once, and the prohibition on humans must have been around longer than all that. |
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Post by Gemini Jim on Jan 2, 2020 18:12:40 GMT
So, no nanite cookies for those of us who guessed that they would be able to use the Court food and supplies to simply walk through the "magic wall," I guess? Unless "We just need a few days" means "we need you to digest more of this stuff." I suppose it would make Kat's robot subplot a useless and pointless red herring if they could "El Chapo" their way in, or just nanite their way in. As I said some threads before, who knows whether even the Court officials themselves are aware of what makes the barrier decide to let someone through. At least they claimed Idra would be let back in. The Court people may be focused solely on the one solution which they think will succeed (expendable robots, angry Kat) - while ignoring or not even considering other solutions. It's also possible that stuff is going on behind-the-scenes while Annie is talking in Elfzanar - Kat negotiating with the Court over the robots, experimentation with the barrier, etc. Given enough time and enough elves (tunneling, walking straight into the barrier, etc.), a "brute force" solution might be possible, but that wouldn't be very dramatic.  Hopefully somebody in the Court has a "Eureka" moment soon, because I suspect Kat won't warm to the "zombie robots" solution. |
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Post by csj on Jan 2, 2020 19:48:35 GMT
oh hi mark
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Post by pyradonis on Jan 3, 2020 17:09:53 GMT
Hopefully somebody in the Court has a "Eureka" moment soon, because I suspect Kat won't warm to the "zombie robots" solution. So what's she gonna do, protest with a sign in her hands before the Court's admin building? Send her army of robot followers against the Court leadership? Oh, wait... |
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Post by Gemini Jim on Jan 3, 2020 17:20:58 GMT
Hopefully somebody in the Court has a "Eureka" moment soon, because I suspect Kat won't warm to the "zombie robots" solution. So what's she gonna do, protest with a sign in her hands before the Court's admin building? Send her army of robot followers against the Court leadership? Oh, wait... I suspect the last panel of today's comic is "what's she gonna do." That could be Juliette's hand on the box - taking the CPUs to a safe place so they don't get lost in the Court bureaucracy. Or maybe the CPUs can be returned later. |
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Post by pyradonis on Jan 3, 2020 17:32:42 GMT
So what's she gonna do, protest with a sign in her hands before the Court's admin building? Send her army of robot followers against the Court leadership? Oh, wait... I suspect the last panel of today's comic is "what's she gonna do." That could be Juliette's hand on the box - taking the CPUs to a safe place so they don't get lost in the Court bureaucracy. Or maybe the CPUs can be returned later. Of course they can be returned later. Remember both Robot (special CPU) and Arthur (normal CPU) had lots of different bodies during their artificial life.
Also, I can imagine many robots would actually be okay with their bodies being temporarily overridden. For example, on learning that his former body had been turned into paperclips, Robot commented "Well, it is good to be useful!". Why should the robots object to their bodies being used in another way, if the only alternative is standing paralyzed in one spot?
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Post by Runningflame on Jan 4, 2020 1:37:23 GMT
No, I meant it as in someone who recently chose to live in the Forest and was transformed, like Aly and his parents. Or was it said somewhere that it is only possible to get an animal body this way? I do not remember. The main point of confusion I have is if the green dudes are elves and if so, if elves are humans or etheric creatures, or a (possibly etheric) subspecies of humans. It has been written in response to "is it accurate or correct to refer to Jeanne's lover as an elf?" that "in the absence of other terms, yes" but also that "none of the Anwyn family have ever wanted to become human. It's also extremely rare among their species to do that" and that the Anwyn are the same species as "the green dudes" which I think means that whatever else they are the green dudes are indeed humans (why would humans wish to become humans?). What the hell an elf exactly is in the Gunnerverse remains a mystery. I read "none of the Anwyn ever wanted to become human" as saying that they aren't human--rather, they could become human (but they're not interested). The reference to "their species" also indicates that their species is something other than Homo sapiens sapiens. ("Magical subspecies" is still on the table, since romance is possible, though we have no proof of successful interbreeding.) About the term "elf," it sounds like Tom's saying that it's not exactly the right word, but it's as close as we can get without inventing a term. In other words, there are no elves in the Gunnerverse; there are green people with pointy ears, and since English likes to call pointy-eared people "elves," you can call these pointy-eared people "elves" if you want to. On the other hand, if this sounds like too much hair-splitting, we could also just call it a case of Our Elves Are Different (warning: TVTropes). |
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Post by pyradonis on Jan 4, 2020 9:07:29 GMT
The main point of confusion I have is if the green dudes are elves and if so, if elves are humans or etheric creatures, or a (possibly etheric) subspecies of humans. It has been written in response to "is it accurate or correct to refer to Jeanne's lover as an elf?" that "in the absence of other terms, yes" but also that "none of the Anwyn family have ever wanted to become human. It's also extremely rare among their species to do that" and that the Anwyn are the same species as "the green dudes" which I think means that whatever else they are the green dudes are indeed humans (why would humans wish to become humans?). What the hell an elf exactly is in the Gunnerverse remains a mystery. I read "none of the Anwyn ever wanted to become human" as saying that they aren't human--rather, they could become human (but they're not interested). The reference to "their species" also indicates that their species is something other than Homo sapiens sapiens. ("Magical subspecies" is still on the table, since romance is possible, though we have no proof of successful interbreeding.) About the term "elf," it sounds like Tom's saying that it's not exactly the right word, but it's as close as we can get without inventing a term. In other words, there are no elves in the Gunnerverse; there are green people with pointy ears, and since English likes to call pointy-eared people "elves," you can call these pointy-eared people "elves" if you want to. On the other hand, if this sounds like too much hair-splitting, we could also just call it a case of Our Elves Are Different (warning: TVTropes). I always read it a bit as Annie calling them elves since she knows of no better name ( "I suppose they could be described as tree elves, but they don't call themselves that".) and it stuck because she is the story's narrator. |
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Post by Gemini Jim on Jan 4, 2020 20:13:58 GMT
I read "none of the Anwyn ever wanted to become human" as saying that they aren't human--rather, they could become human (but they're not interested). The reference to "their species" also indicates that their species is something other than Homo sapiens sapiens. ("Magical subspecies" is still on the table, since romance is possible, though we have no proof of successful interbreeding.) About the term "elf," it sounds like Tom's saying that it's not exactly the right word, but it's as close as we can get without inventing a term. In other words, there are no elves in the Gunnerverse; there are green people with pointy ears, and since English likes to call pointy-eared people "elves," you can call these pointy-eared people "elves" if you want to. On the other hand, if this sounds like too much hair-splitting, we could also just call it a case of Our Elves Are Different (warning: TVTropes). I always read it a bit as Annie calling them elves since she knows of no better name ( "I suppose they could be described as tree elves, but they don't call themselves that".) and it stuck because she is the story's narrator. There is something to be said for not sounding like Spock or Data when describing "green, pointy-eared humanoids who bear a striking resemblance to mythological forest-dwelling sentient beings." |
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Jan 5, 2020 17:18:45 GMT
I read "none of the Anwyn ever wanted to become human" as saying that they aren't human--rather, they could become human (but they're not interested). That sounds similar to what I interpreted it as back when it was originally formsprung. The main fact in favor of that interpretation now is that the Anwyn are a family group, possibly small enough that as long as they've existed simply no single one of them has ever wanted to be human. The reference to "their species" also indicates that their species is something other than Homo sapiens sapiens. ("Magical subspecies" is still on the table, since romance is possible, though we have no proof of successful interbreeding.) About the term "elf," it sounds like Tom's saying that it's not exactly the right word, but it's as close as we can get without inventing a term. In other words, there are no elves in the Gunnerverse; there are green people with pointy ears, and since English likes to call pointy-eared people "elves," you can call these pointy-eared people "elves" if you want to. On the other hand, if this sounds like too much hair-splitting, we could also just call it a case of Our Elves Are Different (warning: TVTropes). People in the Gunnerverse appear to know what elves are. As there are myths about elves then all else held equal there should be elves in the Gunnerverse. So far the only example of an elf we've seen is Coyote when he was getting his jollies by teasing Eglamore. That elf looked a bit like a green dude but also different enough that it could be a bit of a troll. Also Coyote can willfully forget (and therefore be wrong) and he can opt to use a version of elf that might fool an ignorant human who's never seen a real one, or it could even be Coyote's elf parody. Or perhaps the descendants of humans who became mythologized as elves turned green over time because elves are green? If so, did they slowly turn green, were they always green or retroactively green? It is possible to gain supernatural abilities by convincing everyone that you have them. Just out of curiosity: Is that just an observation on the Gunnerverse or both that and a paraphrased quote of Aleister Crowley? It reads like something he wrote but I am too busy atm to look it up. I may be mistaken since he came up in irl conversation a month or so back. |
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Post by rasputingold on Jan 8, 2020 15:30:33 GMT
It is possible to gain supernatural abilities by convincing everyone that you have them. Just out of curiosity: Is that just an observation on the Gunnerverse or both that and a paraphrased quote of Aleister Crowley? It reads like something he wrote but I am too busy atm to look it up. I may be mistaken since he came up in irl conversation a month or so back. I'm not sure if this is the thread you meant to quote me in but I just meant it as an observation. |
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More concisely, I could have said that I suspect the Forest denizens of "Tolkienist tendencies", though not drawing on quite the same languages (nothing Finnish or Gothic yet). Their choices of names share an apparent mixture of public "real" and private constructed languages (which might merely be a few words deep, and almost inevitably informed by patterns in "real" ones, but not "randomly" so -- "Ayilu", too, was born to English parents, but cradled in glossolalia): e.g. you might have heard already that the so-called Dwarves' (sic) Catalogue in the Völuspá includes a few names familiar to anyone who has read The Hobbit, and Frodo essentially shares his name with a legendary king of the Danes.
