palamedesnutz

[palamedesnutz]

okay, question for you all, i desire your thoughts.

if a), who do you think was the architect? who built it? was it purpose-built for the lyctor labs or did they come later? if b), do you picture an existing building or structure when you're reading?

if c), tell me your secrets.

[palamedesnutz]

[palamedesnutz]

to everybody that told me i was gonna "have so much fun reading htn"- why the fuck did i just read about god having an orgy? why did the light bounce off the book into my cornea and allow my occipital lobe to convert what i just read into a mental image? god almighty just got bent the fuck over by his two saints undying. i'm sick of you all. you will feel my wrath

[palamedesnutz]

The Locked Tomb series audiobooks will be re-released in Graphic Audio!

Early this morning, somebody on Twitter liked an old post of mine with a press release from Tamsyn’s literary agent’s website. And it made me realize I had not checked it in a really long time. So I looked, and found out not only that some new translations of Princess Floralinda (Italian and Hungarian!) and Gideon (Greek!) were coming, but that the rights for the TLT audiobooks were sold to Graphic Audio!!!

What does this mean? In short, we will be getting all new versions of each of the Locked Tomb audiobooks, with a full cast recording. That means different voice actors playing different roles as if we were listening to a real audio drama or dramatic reading of a stage play. No idea if Moira Quirk will be involved or not (god I hope so!!!) but this is cool! It usually only happens with really successful novels.

Also I looked up why it says “abridged” and I guess that usually just means they replace something such as descriptions of noises with the actual sounds. So ringing bells instead of the “blah blam” of the Ninth bells, etc. But otherwise it will be the full recordings of the full books!

I CAN’T WAIT!

[palamedesnutz]

[palamedesnutz]

vague au from last week

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Pyrrha must have fucked Pash up so bad, tho. Like. Imagine. Your aunt's murderer— the aunt you've lived your whole life in veneration of, who died when you were barely old enough to remember her—looks you in the eye and says: "She loved you. She carried your picture and told me who you were, and she was so fucking proud of you."

Like. What do you even do with that???

[palamedesnutz]

Happy fourth night! My first time using oil in the menorah :)

[palamedesnutz]

The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex

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[palamedesnutz]

Where do you all see yourselves in ten years? (You can’t say dead)

[palamedesnutz]

asking "wait so what do you think I'm saying" mid-disagreement will replenish years of your life actually

[palamedesnutz]

[palamedesnutz]

My friend read Torah this morning, and it was the portion with Cain and Abel, and we were talking about it just now. And of course since I've got TLT brainrot, I'm thinking about Cain and Abel in the context of Cainabeth and Abella/Ianthe and Coronabeth. Some thoughts:

Cain was the one who had the idea to make a sacrifice; but the implication of the text (per my friend) is that the sacrifice he made wasn't "good enough," because he wasn't sacrificing the best of the land.

Abel, by contrast, does sacrifice the best of his portion (the animals) and this is why his sacrifice is accepted.

Cain is essentially told "better luck next time," at which point he kills his brother and hides this. G-d asks him "where is your brother, his blood cries out to me" and Cain says "am I my brother's keeper?" and he is forever cursed because of the blood he sheds.

Since I'm hearing this story again with Ianthe and Corona in mind, my read on the Cain and Abel story has now become: when G-d tells Cain to do better next time, to make sacrifices that are worthy, and specifically to sacrifice the best of what he has, Cain asks himself, "what's the best of what I have?" and the answer is "my brother, Abel." this is of course a deeply misguided Lyctor-ish kind of thought, and like the Lyctors in TLT, this act fucks up his sense of self -- so he hides, but cannot escape the curse that this murder puts on him.

Interestingly, in the text it isn't clear that it's G-d who curses Cain. G-d tells Cain that he shall be more cursed than the ground, and Cain blames G-d for putting this curse on him. The curse is that he won't be able to use his gift anymore -- he was a tiller of the soil and the curse is that he won't be good at that anymore. So he has to wander the earth. And in the text, when G-d puts a mark on Cain it's so people will know not to kill Cain. I hadn't paid this much attention to the text before but it's actually pretty easy to see a read in which the mark of Cain is not a curse, but an amulet protecting him from the consequences of his actions.

So... who is who, in TLT? On the one hand, seems clear to say Cainabeth -> Coronabeth and Abella -> Ianthe. Ianthe makes a sacrifice (Babs) which is accepted, so she can ascend. Corona makes a kind of sacrifice (pretending to be a necromancer all her life even though what she wants is to be a cavalier; asking her sister to "take [her]" instead of Babs) and it is not accepted; she doesn't become the furnace of her sister's Lyctorhood. And if that's the read, then if this parallel is actually going to play out in its entirety, Corona will kill Ianthe. But is she her sister's keeper? Ianthe is definitely Corona's keeper; we see that over and over again. We see it in Harrow's letters; we see it in the way she has been covering for Corona for her whole life; we see it in the fact that Ianthe says in Nona that she has a plan for "us to be us" again. Corona is not exactly Ianthe's keeper; she's definitely submissive where Ianthe is dominant; she does betray Ianthe to Blood of Eden, but she's so grateful to Palamedes for not hurting Ianthe, and just over and over we see that she doesn't want harm to come to her sister. Her values and actions are in conflict with the empire that Ianthe has come to symbolize, but it isn't at all clear that Ianthe isn't trying to subvert the empire from within, so they may not be working at cross purposes at all. Corona is not not Ianthe's keeper, and she does feel responsibility towards her.

On the other hand, the order of the names in the GTN end matter suggests Cainabeth -> Ianthe and Abella -> Corona. After all, of the two, it feels clear to me that Ianthe has to be the "worse twin." I just don't know if there's scope for Ianthe to kill Corona. As spectacularly awful as she is, Corona is the one person who's consistently important to her. G-d is not (she didn't say the prayer, her motivation to ascend is ultimate power and pictures of her face). But at the same time -- her sacrifice of Babs is certainly not her sacrificing the cavalier that's most important to her. Really, Ianthe's sacrifice is a lot more like Cain's sacrifice than it is Abel's. She refused to give up the best of what she had, instead giving up Babs -- nobody cares about Babs -- whereas Corona absolutely does give up the best of what she has. She literally gave Ianthe her whole life, and Ianthe didn't even want it. (ooh bonus Corona/Gideon parallel, I've got chills.) Corona's sacrifice is worthy in the way Abel's sacrifice was worthy; it hasn't been accepted yet, but who's to say that it won't be? What throne will she mount? Will someone bind her down?

A lot of this question -- who is Cain and who is Abel -- comes down to asking, who is G-d in the Locked Tomb? John claims the title, but he has all of his power because Alecto chose him; so isn't Alecto actually G-d here? Isn't Alecto the figure who could accept or reject a sacrifice in this tale? Or put a mark on someone to protect them from being killed? (Is the Lyctoral eye-switch a form of the mark of Cain? I think so.)

Also a lot of this question could be answered if you just assume that what we're looking at is a subversion of the Cain and Abel story and not a straight retelling. And I think we're more likely to be dealing with a subversion; in which case probably neither twin will kill the other.

I do think everything that follows after the murder feels extremely Locked Tomb. Being cursed to wander the earth, or the universe (Blood of Eden); having to give up the skill that made you you (HTN I'm looking directly at you); G-d putting a mark on you that makes you unkillable (Kiriona Gaia hello). The elements are extremely there.

so... not clear I've come any closer to unraveling the mysteries. but it's been fun anyway. good Shabbos, hope you enjoyed this little drash.

[palamedesnutz]

Okay so we know that at some point during Harrow the Ninth, 500 people directly from the resurrection are sent to rejuvenate the Ninth.

Based on Jod’s pop culture references and apparent age, we can assume he is a millennial and the apocalypse happened sometime between appx. 2019 - 2029, CE. So the people waking up on the Ninth would be our peers. They could be us.

Obviously there is the whole concept of losing all your memories because of resurrection, but consider: your personality, your habits, your muscle memory and similarly brain-muscle memory would hypothetically all be intact, even if you don’t understand why you hate going to church, or find certain things funny, or flinch at loud noises.

I am now going to take this fascinating idea and use it in the cringiest way possible. All references from our society would be lost, but the urge to create shitty memes would still be intact. Imagine this: you wake up o  a lifeless, cold planet with no sky and it’s full of skeletons, incredibly goth elderly people, and catholicism. I can only imagine the memes that would arise.

[palamedesnutz]

This is a pretty common misconception! But Modern Hebrew actually wasn't created based on Biblical Hebrew.

Hebrew developed past biblical times into what we now call Mishnaic Hebrew, aka the Hebrew used to write the Mishna around the year 200.

After that, even with Hebrew no longer being a vernacular language, it continued to be used for writing liturgy, writing Jewish scholarly and legal texts, and for correspondence between members of different Jewish communities who didn't share a common vernacular language (eg, if a rabbi in Ukraine wants to ask a Jewish legal question of a rabbi in Izmir, he'll write his letter in Hebrew). If I'm not mistaken, this version of Hebrew is what Eliezer ben-Yehuda used to construct Hebrew. Yes, he went to Biblical Hebrew sometimes as a source to construct new words, but the grammar is very different.

You can definitely argue though that the rate of change slowed down considerably; for example, there are a lot of similarities with Mishnaic Hebrew. A language used as a vernacular would have changed significantly more! So honestly my original point may be wrong just based on that. But the language has been in continuous usage the whole time!

As Yet Unsent, Part 2

So it was actually the note that Gideon found with her name on it that she gave to Palamedes that made him suspect that she was special in some way, and this caused Camilla to convince BOE to take her corpse with them? It didn't actually have anything to do with Commander Wake?

No Locked Tomb story is complete without someone lusting over a corpse

Corona seems similar to Gideon in her desperate need to be someone's cavalier. Sort of interesting to contrast this to her saying "one half plus one half is only ever one half" earlier

LOOK AT THIS. LOOK AT THIS. ALL OF YOU WHO HAVE BEEN INSISTING THAT THE LANGUAGE THEY SPEAK IN THE NINE HOUSES IS UNMODIFIED MODERN ENGLISH, LOOK AT THIS. THERE IS SO FAR NO POSITIVE EVIDENCE THAT THAT IS THE CASE, BUT HERE IS IN FACT POSITIVE EVIDENCE THAT IT IS NOT THE CASE. SHE TALKS ABOUT LANGUAGE CHANGING OVER TIME AND BECOMING UNDECIPHERABLE AFTER A LONG PERIOD OF TIME, JUST LIKE WHAT HAPPENS NOW ON EARTH, SHE DOESN'T SEEM TO THINK THAT THE LANGUAGE OF THE NINE HOUSES WILL STAY THE SAME FOR ANOTHER 10,000 YEARS, SHE IS FAMILIAR WITH THE CONCEPT OF LANGUAGE CHANGE AND BELIEVES THAT IT IS STILL IN EFFECT AND PRESUMABLY THAT IT HAS BEEN IN EFFECT FOR THE LAST 10,000 YEARS

I'm sorry for capslock but I have strong feelings about this. There is some weird linguistic stuff in this story that basically stems from unfamiliarity with linguistics but I really do not think we are meant to believe that the language of the Nine Houses has just not changed at all over the course of 10,000 years, that would be even worse

Honestly, I ship it now. I dunno about them in an actual cavalier/necromancer relationship, because I think the whole paradigm is bad, but I'd love it if they got together in just a regular romantic relationship at some point