On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Philip Hart wrote: > > >Top of page 259 - Sethra is talking about what the Jenoine will do > >when the Orb returns. She says however "when the Orb is gone" - > >further stating that certain illusions will go with it. > > Is she perhaps implying that the Gods are in fact *using* the Orb to > maintain those illusions? Perhaps the transfer-of-control from Gods > to Zerika will disrupt that usage? I like this idea, though on the other hand do the Gods really need the Orb themselves? I.e., could they have not made an extra one? Perhaps because of a lack of trellanstone, though one wonders why tDG didn't grab the Jenoine's hunk in _Issola_ if so. > Hmm. Pehaps I should be using the singular rather than the plural; > and it's only that Serioli-God who is using the Orb. Which might also > explain why sorcery improves so greatly; he's the Divine equivalent of > a sorcerous kernel hacker, and Verra doesn't know about all the little > tweaks and improvements he made to the code. The upgrade is discussed openly. I prefer to imagine that gods inspired Zerika I to put in MSian performance barriers to keep humans from acquiring too much sorcerous power before they learned to use it wisely. > I'm pretty sure it's stated somewhere that Kieron entered that Paths > alive. Hmm, I'll take that under advisement. I thought somewhere it's said (I'd guess _Jhereg_, when Aliera's letting Vlad pump her) that the strain of trying to get the other Houses to accept the Jhereg was what got Kieron killed. > >Bottom of page 349 - StY expresses a wish to learn a great deal from > >The Necromancer, whom she has just named. I wonder if she does so... > > > > My notion is that the Necromancer performs that first revivification, > or Sethra-t-Y does so with the aid of the Necromancer, and thus > introduces that process into the current sorcerous toolkit. Do we know there were no pre-Interregnum resurrection? Ah yes, _Phoenix_, Lesson 8, tDG talking to Vlad about the upgraded skills of sorcerers. Does tN use the Orb? Does StY actually do any magic that we've seen? > >Bottom of page 392 - "Zerika the Fourth". Maybe we knew her title > >already, but I was surprised. It takes some chutzpah to name one's > >child after the cofounder of the empire... > > > ... > Many Hispanic Christians are named "Jesus", but I suppose that's the > example that you were thinking of - most non-Hispanic christians would > consider naming a child "Jesus" to be arrogant, or so I assume from > the dearth of occurences of that name among non-Hispanics. But > neglecting that one, consider the commoness of "Peter", "Paul", > "Mary", "Joseph", etc. Wasn't thinking this at all - I'm a knee-jerk atheist for one thing, and multicultural for an American for another. I was more thinking that we haven't heard about Kieron XI, and that Phoenix emporers have had a bad track record... > And finally: You're named after an ancient Macedonean king, and I'm > named after an ancient Hebrew king. You think our parents were being > arrogant? Sometimes a name is just a name... I was named after an uncle and some friend of my parents and a Nobel laureate my dad worked for. Also note that "Christian" names are less significant in certain ways than family names. As far as I know "Zerika" is Zerika's entire name. If I met an Al I wouldn't blink, but if I met an Al Einstein I would...