Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

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avwolf
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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#61 Post by avwolf »

MuonNeutrino wrote: About the only previous indication we've gotten along those lines is that we know that keidran have their own versions of alcoholic beverages (given that they generally need weaker drinks than humans can consume), which is suggestive but not necessarily conclusive. It's *conceivable* that they get all of those in trade, but IMO it's far more likely that they brew them themselves, which would also require agriculture, albeit on a significantly smaller scale than would be needed to support herds of food animals.
I hadn't considered alcoholic beverages, that's a good point; though I should note that meads, wines, and ciders don't necessarily rely on "real" agriculture the way a traditional malt beverage like beer would (and there are more exotic fermented potables yet, like the old Mongol recipe for fermented horse's milk, which might hold an appeal for a carnivore). Considering how much amusement I take from thinking about Natani as an alcoholic, I wish I'd thought of beer as circumstantial evidence for agriculture. :P I'm a little jealous of your logical inference there.
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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#62 Post by Chris »

That actually makes quite a bit of sense. So Natani doesn't even blame Trace either technically, he was just going after him for what organization (he thought) he represented. Thus after learning Trace is no longer affiliated with the Templar, and they're actually on the run from them, he'd have no personal reason to hold a vendetta against him. That leads me to wonder how much Natani knows of Trace's amnesia, and what he'd think if he knew Trace's "old self" was trying to reassert itself.

As for Mary being "justified" in the attack on Natani's tribe, I guess that makes enough sense, too. Though it seems a bit odd that a tribe with young kids would be not only pushing into human territories, but also wreaking havoc on the human population. Considering the amount of danger that would have, as seen by provoking a retaliatory attack by the Templar, why would they have their cubs there? It's not out of the realm of possibility, by any means... it just seems like a very dangerous place to raise kids in.
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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#63 Post by Kitch »

:sythe: acting dignified is adorable. :squirrel:
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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#64 Post by avwolf »

Chris wrote:As for Mary being "justified" in the attack on Natani's tribe, I guess that makes enough sense, too. Though it seems a bit odd that a tribe with young kids would be not only pushing into human territories, but also wreaking havoc on the human population. Considering the amount of danger that would have, as seen by provoking a retaliatory attack by the Templar, why would they have their cubs there? It's not out of the realm of possibility, by any means... it just seems like a very dangerous place to raise kids in.
Keidran tribes raise their children creche-style, as a community. They also tend to form extremely insular communities. They all owe fealty to the same leaders (for each major group anyway), but they don't necessarily consider themselves close friends to their neighboring communities. A child born to another tribe will not necessarily find welcome within a tribe, especially if they don't have relatives in this tribe; that's why Natani and Zen were stuck on the streets, begging, foraging, and stealing. They simply weren't particularly welcome in any other community -- they were outsiders. Really, they're fortunate that they weren't enslaved. Sorry, that's beside the point. The point is that a Keidran community doesn't have a place to send their children outside of their own community. And a tribe without children is a tribe without a future. Keidran don't have long enough lives to have the luxury of separating themselves into warbands, long term.

So the warriors go out, raid a bunch of Human settlements, and return home triumphant. They keep doing this, killing more Humans, causing lots of damage. Eventually, this can no longer be ignored by the Humans and a punitive strike is deemed necessary. Perhaps the Keidran warriors did form a separate warband for most of this, but come autumn or spring, they must return home; and that's when the Humans happened to retaliate. We don't know a lot about the timing of everything, but there's plenty of ways that their children could be caught in the proverbial crossfire. (And it's not like we don't have communities in our world that behave similarly and then even virtually hide their soldiers behind their children...or recruit their children to be the soldiers.)
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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#65 Post by sylerner »

Actually, he has been spelling it right all along.

The original spelling was indeed sythe. It erroneously started being changed to scythe in the 15th century.

Sythe was listed as a main entry in the 1828 edition of Noah Webster's Dictionary of the English Language.

This same dictionary lists scythe as an incorrect spelling of sythe!

As time went on, scythe became the accepted spelling and sythe is now listed as an obsolete form. But obsolete is not the same an incorrect. Especially where the form currently considered correct is actually the misspelled form!

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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#66 Post by Schrodinger »

sylerner wrote:Actually, he has been spelling it right all along.

The original spelling was indeed sythe. It erroneously started being changed to scythe in the 15th century.

Sythe was listed as a main entry in the 1828 edition of Noah Webster's Dictionary of the English Language.

This same dictionary lists scythe as an incorrect spelling of sythe!

As time went on, scythe became the accepted spelling and sythe is now listed as an obsolete form. But obsolete is not the same an incorrect. Especially where the form currently considered correct is actually the misspelled form!
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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#67 Post by AndreRhineDavis »

sylerner wrote:Actually, he has been spelling it right all along.

The original spelling was indeed sythe. It erroneously started being changed to scythe in the 15th century.

Sythe was listed as a main entry in the 1828 edition of Noah Webster's Dictionary of the English Language.

This same dictionary lists scythe as an incorrect spelling of sythe!

As time went on, scythe became the accepted spelling and sythe is now listed as an obsolete form. But obsolete is not the same an incorrect. Especially where the form currently considered correct is actually the misspelled form!
scythe (n.)
Old English siðe, sigði, from Proto-Germanic *segithoz (cognates: Middle Low German segede, Middle Dutch sichte, Old High German segensa, German Sense), from PIE root *sek- "to cut" (see section (n.)). The sc- spelling crept in early 15c., from influence of Latin scissor "carver, cutter" and scindere "to cut." Compare French scier "saw," a false spelling from sier.

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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#68 Post by primalcaller ergos »

Yeah that interested me as well.

Now that keidran agriculture is pretty much confirmed, the question I want to ask is:
What type of agriculture would they use the most often?
Do they cut and burn trees to use the ashes as fertilizer?
What other tools do they use?
How often do they use water irrigation?
Due to their love of meat, what livestock do they have?
What plants do they grow the most often?
Do different tribes use different techniques?
If so, does each tribe fiercely guard their secrets, or do they trade techniques?

-Ergos, wondering if this is tom's way of telling us he accidently spelt sythe's name wrong to begin with and decided to write in now as a plot point.
Unless he used the historical spelling intentionally to add some interesting implications-

P.s. Now that I think about it, Scissors and Scythe probably come from the same root word.
Maybe It used to be spelled Seesours?
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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#69 Post by JC the Supreme Tiger »

[quote="primalcaller ergos"]Yeah that interested me as well.

Now that keidran agriculture is pretty much confirmed, the question I want to ask is:
What type of agriculture would they use the most often?
Do they cut and burn trees to use the ashes as fertilizer?
How often do they use water irrigation?
If so, does each tribe fiercely guard their secrets, or do they trade techniques?/quote]

I'd figure, given their generally carnivorous nature (potentially omnivorous for canine keidran), that much of the agriculture goes towards raising livestock, i.e. ranching and the sort, similar to how the majority of corn production in the US goes to livestock feed.

Additionally, given how according to the map, the majority of keidran territory lies in forested lands, I'd figure that cutting and burning trees would probably be necessary to obtain usable farmland for agriculture and livestock, although the ashes might not go towards fertilizer.
Another consequence of the forested nature of the keidran territory is that irrigation might not be necessary unless agriculture is on a sufficiently large scale. The only examples of arid lands lie in the north of human territory.

Given (from what we've seen) how the wolf (and perhaps to an extent all canine keidran), seems to have a structured political system, I think agricultural practices might be much more shared throughout the territory.

With that though, we know very little about the tiger and feline political and cultural structure. It might even be that feline keidran have less agricultural development, and a looser political structure.

More speculation:
Does anyone think that the world map Tom made, might only represent the northern hemisphere,or maybe even a quarter of the entire planet?
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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#70 Post by MuonNeutrino »

JC the Supreme Tiger wrote:More speculation:
Does anyone think that the world map Tom made, might only represent the northern hemisphere,or maybe even a quarter of the entire planet?
I think it almost has to be only a portion of the planet, simply because despite sailing to the basitin islands the main cast did not encounter any reversal of the seasons. Therefore, the basitin islands have to still be in the northern hemisphere, and probably no farther south than the latitude of florida or mexico. And if that's the case, then the map can't possibly be the whole planet.

In my own personal headcanon I had the main continent being about 50% larger in land area than north america. If you do that and then measure the area of the continent in a graphics program like gimp, you can then figure out a scale for the map in km/pixel, and at that scaling Trace & company's wandering path on the map works out to about 4 months worth of travel at an average overland pace. Given that we know it took 4 weeks to sail to the basitin islands and that Trace recently mentioned to Flora that he has about 6 months of memories now, that matches the comic's timeline fairly well. At that scale, the entire map is only about 11,000 km in width (even counting the water at the edges), while the circumference of the Earth is just over 40,000 km. If we assume Mekkan isn't *that* dissimilar to earth, that map then can't be the whole thing. Even if my numbers are off by a full factor of *2*, the map would still only be half of the planet.

Now, it's of course completely unknown what, if anything, may exist on the rest of the planet. It's even conceivable that there aren't any other continents, especially if you skew the size of the map towards the high side. We know that at times in the past all of the continents on Earth have been gathered into one supercontinent, so if Mekkan just has less land area relative to its size compared to Earth (which is certainly possible) then the main continent may well be all there is. Only Tom knows for sure, though.
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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#71 Post by SpottedKitty »

MuonNeutrino wrote:Now, it's of course completely unknown what, if anything, may exist on the rest of the planet. It's even conceivable that there aren't any other continents, especially if you skew the size of the map towards the high side.
Doesn't the back-story about the Festival of the Beasts (in Chapter 8 ) imply that the humans came by ship from another continent so far away the keidran had never heard about it? That would have to be way off the known map, no matter what scale it is.
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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#72 Post by MuonNeutrino »

SpottedKitty wrote:
MuonNeutrino wrote:Now, it's of course completely unknown what, if anything, may exist on the rest of the planet. It's even conceivable that there aren't any other continents, especially if you skew the size of the map towards the high side.
Doesn't the back-story about the Festival of the Beasts (in Chapter 8 ) imply that the humans came by ship from another continent so far away the keidran had never heard about it? That would have to be way off the known map, no matter what scale it is.
Natani did say that, but word of Tom is that she was an unreliable narrator in that particular scene. As Tom pointed out, it's not like she's had a formal education; all she knows about events like that is hearsay. In the book Tom expanded that with two pages afterward with two other versions of the story - the human version of the story (narrated by Keith) where the keidran were the ones starving, and the version that Tom said was true in that post about both sides starving (narrated by a random keidran passerby). Point being, the ship didn't come from another continent, but rather from already-settled human territories elsewhere on the continent.
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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#73 Post by SpottedKitty »

OK, gotcha.

Is there an index to all these little snippets of useful info? I have read back a bit in the forum archives, but I don't think I went that far back.
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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#74 Post by MuonNeutrino »

I just did a forum search for Tom's posts to find that particular one. I already knew it was there, though; I had been linked to it in the past in some discussion here, so I just needed to dig up the link.
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Re: Comic for Saturday, October 11, 2014

#75 Post by BadFoMo »

MuonNeutrino wrote:In the book Tom expanded that with two pages afterward with two other versions of the story - the human version of the story (narrated by Keith) where the keidran were the ones starving, and the version that Tom said was true in that post about both sides starving (narrated by a random keidran passerby).
My apologies for going off topic here, but what book are you talking about? Don't tell me there actually was bonus content in the KickStarter books outside of slightly better graphics.
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