Long Game 96: KKC in the Modern Age

[Archer he/him]

If it's an inactive elim team that forgot to submit the sab, I'll be mad

Is TKN is evil, I'll be mad at Kas specifically for talking me out of my e!TKN read on C2. But I don't think it was e-e because one reason for it was he got a PM from TKN arguing for V!me. Weird thing to make up instead of just refuting my points. 

Kinda haven't engaged with the game too much last couple days, and I apologize. Have some pained votes

TKN TKN 

[Kasimir he/him]

[TAG: RP, 843 words]

53 minutes ago, Archer said:

Is TKN is evil, I'll be mad at Kas specifically for talking me out of my e!TKN read on C2. But I don't think it was e-e because one reason for it was he got a PM from TKN arguing for V!me. Weird thing to make up instead of just refuting my points. 

[OOC: I'd say you deserve it for sending me that long PM sussing TKN when I was like "Bruh I'm chilling why are you doing this in my chill RPful game >>"  Why are you trusting the reads of a guy who was giving this game 30% of attention on the analysis front until probably when the missing sabotage made my mech-analysis brain kick into high gear  Also worth noting I'm cool with the claimed Archivist scanning my vote manip for my alignment, as that's a public Event.

I'd honestly still stand by it - I haven't really profiled him as the super gambity shenanigans guy but more a backscreen planner when he's Evil. Trying to PM me about you is very firmly in the first category less than doc mastermind. I'll just have to update my mental profile.]

lix. obligation

“There is so much obligation in Shaeyre,” Aksel was saying, “In her Annalects, she writes about duty. ‘Wolves howling / I cannot find rest / because I am powerless / to amend a broken world.’” Where poetry met philosophy, Kevan found himself thinking. “Duty, assuming all tasks, can betray arrogance. The idea that we can know what must be done and do it properly.”

“But that is the heart of the Lethani,” said Kevan. “That there is a knowing there. Because we are as part of a world as the flight of cranes, as the diving seals. This is what conditions recognition of the underlying relational structures that governs reality, and makes it possible in the first place.”

He didn’t want to be thinking about the skindancers, or the threat they posed. Shaeyre and Kehant Duhen, two sides of the same coin. Shaeyre cared about obligation: as above, so below. She agonised about the necessity of amending the broken world because you were always a part of the world, and no matter how you tried to run from it, any brokenness in the world, any sickness or illness in it, as the skindancers were, would eventually have some form of impact on you.

Kehant Duhen had written about self-obligation, but also to others. “Act,” Kehant wrote, “only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” And elsewhere, “Thus, act that you use humanity, in your own person as well as in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” Two formulations, according to Vahani, of the same categorical imperative, though Master Anders was less convinced this was true, and the last Kevan’d heard, Re’lar Bergon was writing a research paper seeking to ground duties to future selves and future generations in both of Kehant’s formulations.

He wasn’t a Namer, or anything more than an indifferent sympathist. He didn’t particularly care for alchemy, and suspected Master Volatile more or less felt the same way towards him.

There was little enough that he could do. And there were whispers that Cavothee had been caught—and stopped—trying to sabotage another student, which would’ve made him one of the skindancers.

Odd, Kevan thought, how you could go for most of the term without thinking about the skindancers, and then news like this reminded you that the University was under siege, that the students were being threatened by more than just the ever-present midterms. 

As an El’the, his schedule was in some ways more relaxed: he attended fewer classes, and the ones he did didn’t always have midterms. As a tutor, he found his task was to grade and administer the midterms, which was a whole different kettle of fish from being subject to them. Sure, there were Admissions, but Master Bob and Master Anders had indicated those were different as an El’the: less stressful. The other Masters might ask you questions, but they by and large deferred to the judgement of your sponsor.

A far cry from the combative process that Kvothe’s Admissions had often been. Kevan sometimes wondered how much was simple dramatic licence—narratively, it served to place severe financial pressure on Kvothe’s University years and raised the stakes for that part of the Chronicles rather than give Kvothe a smooth passage through the University—and how much was the reality.

He didn’t trust that so much any more; not after history classes with Master Alys. Realised that the actual records of Kvothe’s tenure were probably somewhere in the Archives, if he so cared to dig for them. Realised, as well, that he really didn’t.

At some point, the whispers, and the inevitable comparisons to Kvothe—all of it had faded to a background murmur, particularly as the student body found other sources of gossip that interested them. And it seemed so unbearably trivial in light of teaching, in light of the Medica, in light of the state of his research.

There was little enough that he could do. The principle of explosion was a neat party trick, but it wasn’t going to be able to let him logic the skindancers out of existence. (And did he want to? This felt like it should be someone else’s problem, like he should be allowed to enjoy his time at the University, and he had so much he needed to focus on, and he didn’t have the energy to deal with them, and yet—and yet obligation didn’t particularly care about what you wanted. It held regardless of your desires or your priorities.)

Obligation, in the work of both Shaeyre and Kehant, was a powerful force: they never seemed to consider that you could just say no, that it was possible you just ‘didn’t feel like it.’ If you were obligated, then you had to do it: no ifs or buts about it.

For a few long moments, Kevan contemplated the thought of just…ignoring his conscience.

Then, he sighed, and headed off to the apothecary to see many scruples of nahlrout he could buy.

Edited August 6, 2023 by Kasimir

[The Unknown Order he/him]

1 hour ago, Kasimir said:

Roleblocker, IDK if you can do this, but if you can, would recommend you put another roleblock on TKN this Turn.

Could I please ask that this not happen? I would rather not get stuck on TKN must be e assumption going forward. I just want to get this one message in so I can get scanned, then we can continue from there. If I were actually e, the chance that I would put in the kill here again is pretty small. If you let me do this, the worst that can happen is a villager goes insane. The best that can happen is the kill somehow not going through again and a villager getting scanned. Sounds like a decent trade off, right? 

TKN

TKN

[Kasimir he/him]

[TAG: RP, 1015 words]

[OOC: @Araris Valerian, @Matrim's Dice: In the world either of you are Village and in Imre (do not know expulsion mechanics):

A. What's the last contract available in the Black Market?
B. Did either of you happen to buy nahlrout?

Can't say more, but am mildly concerned in an E!TKN world.]

[OOC: Can neither confirm nor deny that it is actually true that the mindblowing conversation I had with a prof I was tutoring for was that grades didn't matter since you're required to curve students and as long as you don't give a grade that's egregiously wrong, no one cares if you agonise for several days about how to restructure the B+/B/B-/C+ tier to be Most Fair to the students because it's always relative to the batch of papers, even if it's pretty easy to articulate a set of criteria for a paper with Teh Suck and one with Teh Goodz,]

lx. grading

Kevan stared at the stack of term papers he had yet to grade and felt the beginnings of a migraine throbbing; between his eyes and coiling about his temples. It was a strange feeling, being on the other end of the midterms and grading what the students had submitted. 

The logic component was easy enough; they were doing the fundamentals of logic (the memory of working on the disparate parts of the midterm logic assessment: the problem set assigned, the entire group of E’lir disputing how the problem set was best resolved, and the problems of translating statements and arguments into predicate logic, even if it was classical logic, because one never mentioned Gram Priest, not without memories of Master Anders’s admonition, “Of course you can ignore noncontradiction. If you are Gram Priest and working in paraconsistent logics…”) which meant problem sets, which meant grading translations (Tehlu, were some of the students awful at translation into predicate logic, and if your translation was faulty, your tree was often faulty, which meant your tree couldn’t close when it should, which meant that your proof that an argument was valid was wont to fail even when it shouldn’t have), which meant…

Headaches.

Those, at least, had an easy resolution.

He stared balefully at the pile of rhetoric papers. He’d allowed them a choice of topic from the issues discussed in class: the problem of evil was popular, but too many students seemed to be unable to distinguish between the logical problem of evil and the evidential problem of evil, which meant he ended up seeing papers drifting between the two and those were fundamentally different challenges to the existence of God, much less Tehlu. A stunt that would’ve probably gotten them hauled in for questioning in any environment that was not a Rhetoric and Logic classroom at the University. And that was just scratching the surface: there were papers discussing Alasdair’s similarity argument, and Nikolaos’s simulation argument, and in most cases, he saw errors of reasoning and improperly applied rhetorical techniques.

The most recent paper was meant to be agitating for skindancer rights (privately, Kevan wondered if that particular student was just being edgy or if he was supposed to report that student to Master Anders and then set the problem aside as being one for much later) and the student in question had only the vaguest idea of how to go about doing ethics and wound up mis-citing several Cealdish authors in the bargain.

On top of that, there was the issue of assigning grades. He’d figured he’d seen so far maybe one or two students who very clearly deserved an ‘A’ grade, but so many of them languished in the ‘B’ to ‘C’ zone and the gradations thereof, and he couldn’t seem to decide how to grade them. He’d give a mediocre paper on the ontological argument a ‘C’ grade but then return and revise the grade upwards because he’d discovered the next tranche of papers were so awful that they deserved a C instead, but then to be consistent, he’d have to reread the other batch of ‘B’ papers and…

And the turnaround time was supposed to be a week.

When he’d mentioned his struggles to Aksel, the El’the had just laughed at him. “The first thing you’ve got to do is to get it out of your head that there’s an objectively correct grade you have to give to them,” Aksel said.

Kevan gaped at him.

“But…” he spluttered. But he couldn’t. But it wasn’t fair, he thought, and it was so very important to him to be fair to the students, and this was a yardstick for how well they were doing in the class and informed Master Anders’s view of who he wanted to sponsor, and how to pitch their Admissions questions subsequently. “But they deserve better than that,” he said, at last. Inadequate for what he was thinking.

Aksel folded his arms and leaned forward. “You’re thinking that the fact there’s no objectively correct grade to be giving them means you can give them any grade,” he said, seriously. “Or at least, you’re making that argumentative move. And that’s incorrect. There are papers that are clear ‘A’ papers and papers that are clear ‘D’s or ‘F’s.”

“But then….”

“What do I mean by no objectively correct grade?” Aksel spread his hands out in a shrug. “It’s that simple, Kevan. There’s no correct grade you can give in majority of cases. It’s all relational. What does an ‘A’ really, truly mean? Is there some Plotinic Ideal of the ‘A’ paper floating out there somewhere? If there is, I’ve never heard of it. And that’s the point. All it means for the student to have gotten an ‘A’ is for the student to have put in an outstanding paper. It could be Re’lar level, it could be just clearly better than the others, but nowhere near what you might think of as ‘A’ standard. It’s really about the system, and what it means. It’s a marker for Master Anders to know how the students are doing relative to each other, and so it often doesn’t really matter if one student gets a ‘B’ and another student gets a ‘C-.’ He’s still aware of the relative range they inhabit.”

Kevan was silent for a while, trying to wrap his mind around the idea. It seemed so terribly wrong or slapdash, and he said so.

“You took your grades seriously, didn’t you?” Aksel asked, his pale eyes knowing.

“Yeah,” Kevan said. “Didn’t you?”

“I did,” Aksel confirmed. “I got over it in time. I think that’s part of the tutoring experience. Especially for those serious, hardworking students—E’lir—like we both were. You start to understand the point of the systems. You stop defining your own worth in terms of the letter your tutor or Master Anders gives you. And then, you stand on your own.”

And then, you stand on your own, Aksel had said.

He had sounded so free, so unbothered. So unburdened.

Kevan wondered what it would be like, to be that way.

[Sart he/him]

Ashbringer Ashbringer. TKN TKN. Given that TKN is a Noble who has only been elevated once, I am concerned that the elims have spent a large time in Imre buying supplies.

[|TJ| he/him]

kas bro i'm a commoner, what's this about me living in ankers? smh i'm in the windy tower for this term. 

TKN TKN

---

Salva had messed up. In the midst of his brilliant idea to get people to like him, he'd screwed up royally. He had been quickly gaining reputation of a quiet lonely kid in the corner. the need to show everyone that he was fun was at an all-time high. Stables were not the right location for him to showcase his pyrotechnics. Sadly, he'd realised too late as his spell went wrong and he'd lit bales of hay on fire. If that wasn't enough, some horses were lounging very next to the said fiery bales and they'd galloped away from their house with their tails on fire. 

Salva looked at the disaster through the gaps on his fingers covering his face. All he wanted was to impress some of his friends. It shouldn't have been so hard. Though, looking at their faces, he recognised admiration on their faces. They were laughing but it seemed like their laughter wasn't directed at him. A smile escaped his lips and he let his arms down, basking in the moment for once. He was definitely in trouble with the Masters, he had no doubt. But it was a small price to pay for this tiny sliver of rebellion. And if you had asked him, he'd say he would do it all over again. 

And that is how Salva found himself in front of the entire assembly of students and masters, brought to dais, being asked to speak his truth. 

He keeps it simple and short. He really doesn't need to say anything more that "I'm sorry I set the stables on fire accidentally", even if he couldn't stop grinning when he said it. 

---

@little wilson, please note the public apology. 

[Kasimir he/him]

[TAG: RP, 515 words, DISCUSSION, 210 words]

Just now, Sart said:

Ashbringer Ashbringer. TKN TKN. Given that TKN is a Noble who has only been elevated once, I am concerned that the elims have spent a large time in Imre buying supplies.

[OOC: Hard to say. The pharmacy in Imre has nothing out of stock, which at least says something about any quantity of purchase they've been doing, but Assassins are currently 30 talents apiece, and these prices fluctuate with the market, so I am curious if the Elims have been saving for them. I don't think they've bought any as we'd otherwise see more costly prices due to Assassins going up and down with supply and demand. If Araris and Mat are immediately punted to Imre, they can confirm my statements, if even one of them is Village as well. 

Sorry guys, can't really buy an Assassin. I only exist on a grad student stipend but I can absolutely become a nahlrout druglord and become the god of roleblocks  ]

3 minutes ago, |TJ| said:

kas bro i'm a commoner, what's this about me living in ankers? smh i'm in the windy tower for this term. 

[OOC: Wasn't sure about which end you fell on and how tight your finances were. I could do a spreadsheet to track minimum and maximum funding estimates for each player but I'm kind of intending to have *grits teeth* a nice, chill, RPful game, and adapting my personal KKC finances spreadsheet to track this doesn't sound like my idea of fun and sounds like hardKas territory, so I'm pretty much gonna just back-of-the-envelope (shhhh Drakebro don't @ me >:( ) here.]

lxi. burnout

There was a point, Kevan had discovered, when you just didn’t want to do anything, when your mind screamed rebellion at the idea of going through ever-more papers on materia medica in other parts of the Four Corners, all painstakingly collected in some segment of Archives history.

He felt tired. He couldn’t force himself to focus. He’d been shut up in his room all day: when he wasn’t at the Gyre and Wade, he was in the Archives, tutoring, at the Medica, or in class, and he was going stir-crazy.

He wanted those lazy sunlit afternoons, studying with Soren and Valerra. Even those days from his first tenure as an E’lir, arguing about the basic principles of Artificing with Jarvik and Soren, or playing corners, all four of them from the same bunks in the Mews.

Maybe you had to lose something to grow, sometimes, Kevan thought. You had to let go of some of what had shaped you, and in the process, confront the person you’d become. He wondered if this was something the E’lir he’d been would’ve ever imagined, when he’d first set foot in the University and passed his Admissions interview.

He didn’t think he could’ve reached that point, but he was just sick of research, just wanted to do something mindless and fun. Some of the El’the in the Medica and even Aksel had warned about burnout, about the need to pace yourself and take breaks or you’d work yourself to the bone and lose the will to continue. The second-highest attrition rate in the University was to the Crockery: the highest attrition rate was attributed to students who’d just…burned too brightly, and too fast, and burned themselves out and dropped out, left without their guilders.

Sometimes, Kevan thought they were too quick to think of those El’the or Re’lar or even E’lir who’d left the University (“gotten ploughed,” they’d called it) as failures.

Sometimes, you couldn’t make yourself carry on. And there was no shame in that.

He’d nearly gotten ploughed after all, if not for the kindness of Master Anders; unexpected grace from Master Artificer.

He wondered if all he’d bought himself was a stay of execution. Wondered about leaving; wondered what they would say about him, if he did just that. Went back to Yll, to his mother and his grandmother, and he felt the ache all over again, the home-longing, and beneath that, the scar that had formed over the raw, open wound of his father’s leaving.

In this world, you loved, and were loved; left, and were left behind. It was the deal, pain bound up into love from the very beginning. Grief was the price you paid for love.

(There are faerie stories, even on Yll, especially in villages along the rugged slices of green coast where he grew up. These stories are always from the perspective of the survivors: the ones who have been abandoned, left behind.

The sea gives, and the sea takes. Every village has a mariner.)

He felt so very tired, and so very ready for there to be an ending.

[Archer he/him]

14 minutes ago, |TJ| said:

 smh i'm in the windy tower for this term. 

Why? 

7 minutes ago, Kasimir said:

 

Sorry guys, can't really buy an Assassin. 

I gotchu

no seriously, that's surprisingly affordable when you're fabulously wealthy. Wanna go halvsies on a contract killer, @Szeth_Pancakes?

 

So the sad thing about an e!TKN world is the V!Mat implications. Which I guess makes sense. What's the chance Mat rands elim AGAIN and shoot JNV AGAIN? It's unlikely!

It also puts last EOD in an entirely new light. 1. I'll note you don't need to gambit to expel TKN because enough of the thread was down to do that anyway. 

2. Mat and Ashbringer cast late votes for TKN. Good look. 

 

I swear Sart was expelled already... Kinda want to put a token vote on them just in case that expels them too. TKN Sart

[Araris Valerian he/him]

@Kasimir, I'm neither in Imre nor have I bought any nahlrout. I can't visit Imre again until next term. The last contract when I went there (which I accepted) involved posts with .

[Kasimir he/him]

[TAG: RP, 553 words, DISCUSSION, 215 words]

33 minutes ago, Archer said:

So the sad thing about an e!TKN world is the V!Mat implications. Which I guess makes sense. What's the chance Mat rands elim AGAIN and shoot JNV AGAIN? It's unlikely!

[OOC: Literally Mat rn: "Smdh guys I've been frickin' telling y'all this non-stop."]

33 minutes ago, Archer said:

no seriously, that's surprisingly affordable when you're fabulously wealthy. Wanna go halvsies on a contract killer, @Szeth_Pancakes?

[OOC: Rub it in why don't you I've been living in the Mews and eating ramen, just to prepare for my damn nahlrout spree >> Well, I admit I also wanted to try my luck, see if I could get a Bodyguard for the Archivist. Am sad to inform y'all Bodyguards are also 30 talents. This is sheer class discrimination right here. Drake had the right idea about throwing off our rich oppressors smhhhh.]

33 minutes ago, Archer said:

It also puts last EOD in an entirely new light. 1. I'll note you don't need to gambit to expel TKN because enough of the thread was down to do that anyway. 

[OOC: Fair - my read would be less of gambit to do so and more of an opportunistic gambit taking advantage of the unexpected action failure. I'll note that in light of the lack of alternate RB claimants, in a V!TKN world, it really does have to be action failure happening, which means the demographic who could conceivably be at Ankers, and it rules STINK out, as STINK was lashed. But I stress I don't think this is the intuitive read of the situation - it's basically LG94 all over again. No competing claims, most likely explanation is the RB, and the circumstances mean it's important to operate in the most likely world.]

24 minutes ago, Araris Valerian said:

@Kasimir, I'm neither in Imre nor have I bought any nahlrout. I can't visit Imre again until next term. The last contract when I went there (which I accepted) involved posts with .

[OOC: Despite expulsion? Huh. I was wondering if you were responsible for that contract  ]

lxii. being

Kevan would admit this: he had a fondness for wordplay; for the lines in poems that caught the breath in your throat (where it had always been caught), for elegant turns of phrase in papers and books, the ones that made you stop right there, and run your finger beneath the line, along the page, taking it in again and again in hushed appreciation.

“The starry skies above me, and the moral law within me,” Kehant had written, and Kevan could not imagine he would ever miss that pause of rapt admiration when he read that line, had almost wanted it scrawled in a calligraphed manuscript page for his wall. (Jarvik, surprisingly, had a good scriv’s hand, and had volunteered; Valerra had a clear and unmistakable print, and Soren’s handwriting was, to put it mildly, a barely-legible disaster.)

He remembered a class with Master Anders, back when he’d been an E’lir and Master Anders had been teaching them the painstakingly precise skill of translating statements into predicate logic, using the existential and universal quantifiers. 

“All men are mortal,” became the statement ‘∀x (Px ⊃ Qx)’, which was a sobering if depressing example for the class, but also a classic that seemed to be in most of their textbooks, including the logic textbook that Master Anders had assigned them. It took time, but Kevan’d learned to read it, spelling it out slowly but then with increasing facility as he worked his way through the exercises in the textbook and the supplementary tutorial handouts. You read this as the statement that for all entities x, if they had the property of being a man, then they had the property of being mortal. (And then, of course, the arguments about why you couldn’t just do it with ‘∀x (Mx)’ except that that postulated that everything was mortal and didn’t seem to capture the full statement. And then you started quibbling about meaning and logical equivalence.)

“Kehant is a man,” became the statement ‘∃x Px’, which was an easier thing to translate: that there existed some entity x of which the predicate P was true—or that x had the property P, of being a man. Annoyingly, you had to get the translation right, Master Anders warned them, and scholars could dispute translations. Did in fact, dispute them all the time. There were arguments over how you translated Kripke’s arguments in Naming and Necessity, and depending on the translation you used, and the modal logic system you used, it was possible for Kripke’s arguments to be valid or invalid, and then you had to get into a fight about whether that was a problem for Kripke or for the modal logics in question, but of course, all of this was out of scope for a class meant for students and E’lir.

(Kevan’d heard those words as a promise: take more classes, learn more, understand more, and then we’ll discuss Kripke and modal logics and paraconsistency, and felt the excitement and the thirst to learn more grow within him.)

“Well,” Master Anders said, “Let’s take a moment and deal with this statement instead. ‘All jelly beans exist.’ Anyone want to have a go at translating this?” He glanced about the class, and then shook his head. “I am joking about the word ‘being’ here. You should all be laughing.”

Edited August 6, 2023 by Kasimir

[Araris Valerian he/him]

2 minutes ago, Kasimir said:

[OOC: Despite expulsion? Huh. I was wondering if you were responsible for that contract  ]

I think? My understanding is that unless you are staying at the Grey Man or the Pearl then you can only go to Imre once per term. It would make me very  if that was not the case though.

[The Unknown Order he/him]

6 minutes ago, Kasimir said:

most likely explanation is the RB, and the circumstances mean it's important to operate in the most likely world.]

Hence why I voted myself. Unless there's a counterclaim (which, if anyone else roleblocked anyone, please claim to save an innocent man's career) there's no point in not expelling me because until my slot os resolved, I'm going to take up attention. And it's better for the village if I get expelled then if I get lashed for three turns.

[Kasimir he/him]

[TAG: RP, 388 words]

Just now, Araris Valerian said:

I think? My understanding is that unless you are staying at the Grey Man or the Pearl then you can only go to Imre once per term. It would make me very  if that was not the case though.

[OOC: I'd thought it was different for expelled students. Might have misunderstood this. Assumed they get immediate Imre access. Ah okay yeah Wilson says that it's not immediate, my bad. There's currently a five jot contract for sabotaging me in Imre. I'm very sad that my Art / RPing is so unappreciated  

What's your view on the current RB situation? Elim trap? Not Elim trap?]

Just now, The Known Novel said:

Hence why I voted myself. Unless there's a counterclaim (which, if anyone else roleblocked anyone, please claim to save an innocent man's career) there's no point in not expelling me because until my slot os resolved, I'm going to take up attention. And it's better for the village if I get expelled then if I get lashed for three turns.

[OOC: You say this, and also threaten to go on a broad PM spying spree in PMs. I don't really feel that's a way of building trust, and it encourages RBing you. I'd agree however and echo that any other RBer should claim, please go to JNV and Wonko. Wonko's at GenCon but we pray to Tehlu he'll be back by the 7th August and with us.]

lxiii. northern skies

Sometimes, the home-longing welled up in him, raw and vicious, and Kevan couldn’t decide what he really missed: his mother, his grandmother, or those halcyon days with his father, before his father had been lost at sea (always the sadness in his eyes, though you could never glimpse it directly, it always had to be out of the corner of your eye, in brief flashes, it was so fleeting you could imagine you dreamed it.)

Sometimes, it was the sombre grey skies, and the rolling green hills, and the lighter, dazzling blue of the ocean beneath the rich green cliffs jutting out from the land.

He missed the deep greens and blues; Eithne’d made him an impressionistic painting of Yll from the Centhe Sea, done in strikingly intense watercolours and mixes of hue and small, precise brushstrokes blended together to create a seamless interplay of light and colour. The jagged cliffs, the ocean below.

He wasn’t—alright, he was Yllish, accepted that, accepted he was, as Eithne was, a product of their time, (relational always, the empire had claimed Yll, and Yll had left its own mark on the empire and you never got out unscathed, never could quite uncover those prelapsarian times, or be anything more than you were)—he wasn’t ardent about reclaiming old Yll, and yet the painting somehow seemed to intensify the pangs of homesickness in him when he first saw it, and yet it also soothed a raw hunger in his soul, one he hadn’t known he’d felt until this point.

“Thank you,” he’d told her, then, the words all but catching in his throat. “It’s…so beautiful. Striking, even,” and she beamed, rightfully proud of it, he hadn’t known she could do such art.

Even now, as an El’the promoted too soon (perhaps because he was promoted too soon, too little removed, only two years and a half years away from the young E’lir who’d first come to the University, fresh off the boat at Tarbean and gaped at the Aturan roads and Imre itself), he—

You never really got over it, he thought. It could sneak up on you at the strangest of times, overwhelm you. Even when you’d thought you’d settled in, that you were past it. The sense of dislocation, the feeling of exile. The raw, powerful longing for northern skies.

[The Unknown Order he/him]

8 minutes ago, Kasimir said:

threaten to go on a broad PM spying spree in PMs

?

I was floating the idea to potentially learn who [Potential Gambitting Elim] is by checking JNV’s PMs. It was by no means a threat, and wasn't really an actual idea, just a thought I had. 

I'm still planning on following through with my original Alignment Scanning plan.

[Araris Valerian he/him]

10 minutes ago, Kasimir said:

What's your view on the current RB situation? Elim trap? Not Elim trap?]

Well, I feel like this scenario has been a potential option to the elim before and they passed it up. The problem for the elims is they potentially out a member; we expel TKN and JNV’s roleblocker and we likely hit an elim between them. The only way this goes wrong is if the elims just didn’t send in a sabotage on the hopes that someone would be doing a RB, which doesn’t seem like a solid play.

So I agree with complains on TKN, and JNV should reveal their contact near EOC (in case they are good, in order to stop a sabotage there).

[Mat he/him]

2 hours ago, Kasimir said:

A. What's the last contract available in the Black Market?
B. Did either of you happen to buy nahlrout?

A. Um. Sabotage you for five jots :P.

B. Hahahahahahahahaha I’m too poor to try for talent pipes bro ;-;

[STINK he/him]

TKN TKN

Well well well

 

[The Unknown Order he/him]

19 minutes ago, STINK said:

TKN TKN

Well well well

 

Don't look so smug, you're still wrong. 

[Szeth_Pancakes he/him]

I think I’m going to ask for a pinch hitter — I’m really having trouble getting invested :/

Sorry to everyone who’s been @ ing me.

[STINK he/him]

44 minutes ago, The Known Novel said:

Don't look so smug, you're still wrong. 

Well alrighty then

[Kasimir he/him]

[TAG: RP, 945 words]

1 hour ago, The Known Novel said:

?

I was floating the idea to potentially learn who [Potential Gambitting Elim] is by checking JNV’s PMs. It was by no means a threat, and wasn't really an actual idea, just a thought I had. 

I'm still planning on following through with my original Alignment Scanning plan.

[OOC: Genuinely curious how you think repeatedly dropping PMs about PM scanning, especially strategies to allow scanning past cycle messages in the game, doesn't come off as an Elim looking to take down the Villager who found them before that player can be softcleared. I don't really want to TWTBAW this but I want to point out that that's not really inspiring confidence in your being Village when people already didn't trust you in the first place. At the very least, you should be aware of how this comes across, and not be shocked Pikachu when people distrust you even more for this.]

1 hour ago, Araris Valerian said:

Well, I feel like this scenario has been a potential option to the elim before and they passed it up. The problem for the elims is they potentially out a member; we expel TKN and JNV’s roleblocker and we likely hit an elim between them. The only way this goes wrong is if the elims just didn’t send in a sabotage on the hopes that someone would be doing a RB, which doesn’t seem like a solid play.

So I agree with complains on TKN, and JNV should reveal their contact near EOC (in case they are good, in order to stop a sabotage there).

[OOC: How does JNV revealing their contact stop a sabotage? And you're referring to previous games, correct?]

1 hour ago, Matrim's Dice said:

A. Um. Sabotage you for five jots :P.

B. Hahahahahahahahaha I’m too poor to try for talent pipes bro ;-;

[OOC: Sigh >> Any chance you have an elevation in Arithmetics?]

lxiv. knowledge

“Knowledge,” said Re’lar Jakob, “Has to be factive. Can anyone tell me why?”

Still an E’lir sponsored by the Master Artificer then, even if he’d found himself curious about what Rhetoric and Logic had to offer, Kevan looked around at his classmates. He was one of the odd ones out; not too many of Master Rhys’s E’lir, much less Re’lar or El’the were particularly interested in Rhetoric and Logic classes.

(There was a disparity here, Kevan was beginning to discern, to understand. The common view at the University was that the Arcanum was where you went, after you’d proved yourself knowledgeable in the fundamentals, including Rhetoric and Logic, chemistry, and Arithmetic, among others. But above all, you had to be proficient in basic sympathy. 

Then you went to the Arcanum and you stopped touching the boring, mundane subjects and your life began.

But Kevan didn’t feel that way. There was something heady, even exciting about the way Re’lar Jakob was teaching them to unpack and dissect ideas, the sort of thought that you could take apart concepts, even the way people came to know things, just as you dissected any device in the Artificery, distilled it down to first principles (okay, you didn’t do this in Rhetoric and Logic, not always, at any rate, Re’lar Jakob was pointing out that sometimes, you didn’t particularly want to have to reinvent the wheel, you just wanted to accept certain principles and see where they led you; a kind of exploratory work, or faith, or ‘we can’t completely work from the ground up so let us take certain precepts and build on these foundations and presume they are true, and then.’) and then sought to understand how it worked, and perhaps, if you were good enough, to build it a little better than it had been before.)

Jakob waited.

The class was silent, punctuated by the soft whisper as pages rustled and students leafed through their readings.

“Aaren,” Jakob called out, and a Cealdish student looked up. “Do you want to help us out here?”

“Because knowledge has to be true,” Aaren said, in a clear and resonant voice. He wore his hair in braids threaded with all sorts of colours and glass beads at the tip. “A popular analysis of knowledge in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions casts knowledge as a justified, true belief. Factivity just is the requirement that knowledge, as a mental state, bears the appropriate relation to the truth.”

“Very good, Aaren,” Jakob nodded. “Geschen’s analysis is considered to be crucial, but also fatally flawed. Can anyone suggest why?”

“Because there are counterexamples referred to as Geschen cases,” Kevan offered, tentatively. The readings had stated as much. 

“Good. Can you say a bit more about Geschen cases, Kevan?”

Kevan frowned down at his readings, wishing he’d marked out the relevant passages a little more clearly. “They’re cases where the subject, ex hypothesi, has a justified true belief, but we don’t seem to think the subject knows. One example is of the traveller in the Yllish countryside. He isn’t used to seeing livestock, as he’s come from the city. So he sees a rock, and the light isn’t very good, and it looks very much like a sheep to him, and so he thinks to himself, ‘I know there is a sheep right there.’ But of course, it’s just a rock.”

“Well, he’s just wrong,” one of the other students muttered.

Kevan rolled his eyes and wondered if he’d done the readings. “Yeah, but that’s not the whole case. The traveller can’t see it from where he is, but there’s a sheep behind the rock. So he’s sort of right as well.”

“That’s right,” Jakob said, drawing all eyes back to him. “On the face of it, our traveller has a justified true belief. We all gain knowledge by seeing things: if I asked you how you knew that oak tree was there—” he pointed out the window, at the oak tree in the courtyard beyond, “—well, you’d tell me you saw it with your own eyes. That’s perfectly reasonable, right? It’s justified. And in this case, it’s certainly true.”

The students were nodding, slowly.

“So in the case of our traveller, he sees the rock, and he mistakes it for a sheep. But that belief certainly seems justified—seeing is a pretty good way of learning about the world. Our colleagues in Artificing and Chemistry, for instance, learn about the world through empirical evidence, which includes observation. And it’s certainly true—because there’s a sheep behind the rock. And he forms the belief about the presence of a sheep. So he has, all things considered, a justified true belief—thank you Kevan. But here’s the two jot question: is this knowledge?”

This time, it was Aaren who responded. “I don’t think so,” he said, slowly. “There’s something weird about it. It’s true, yes, but by sheer luck, isn’t it? Even if there wasn’t a sheep behind the boulder, he’d think there was one anyway.”

“Very good,” Jakob nodded, and added, ‘SENSITIVITY’ to the chalkboard. “Geschen cases have created an entire cottage industry in attempts to fix Geschen’s analysis of knowledge, usually by diagnosing why they are so screwy. We call this one ‘sensitivity,’ and it was first proposed by Robert Nazar—it’s the idea that in all nearby possible worlds where p isn’t true—p being any kind of proposition, the subject S won’t believe that p.” He looked at the varying expressions on the face of Kevan’s classmates and laughed. “Well, we’ll talk through each of the responses to Geschen cases, and then discuss why they might be inadequate. They’re quite straightforward, I promise you.”

Edited August 6, 2023 by Kasimir

[Araris Valerian he/him]

6 minutes ago, Kasimir said:

[OOC: How does JNV revealing their contact stop a sabotage? And you're referring to previous games, correct?]

I think we can assume that TKN was roleblocked, so either the elims did or a villager did. If the elims did, it follows that JNV's contact is most likely the elim that sent in that order. If the elims didn't roleblock, then the gambit world is where the elims just didn't send in a kill and hoped that someone roleblocked someone else. This seems quite far-fetched to me.

I had protection during the night, but I'm assuming an attack that is protected against would show as "Araris was attacked but survived." I'm also fairly sure that I'm a low priority target since I don't count toward win-cons.

And yeah, I'm referring to previous games. I can't recall a game where elims deliberately failed to send in a kill to get the target of a roleblock killed, despite that option being mentioned in the thread whenever the possibility arises. The risk versus reward just doesn't seem worth it generally.

[Kasimir he/him]

[TAG: RP, 797 words, DISCUSSION, 293 words]

2 minutes ago, Araris Valerian said:

I think we can assume that TKN was roleblocked, so either the elims did or a villager did. If the elims did, it follows that JNV's contact is most likely the elim that sent in that order. If the elims didn't roleblock, then the gambit world is where the elims just didn't send in a kill and hoped that someone roleblocked someone else. This seems quite far-fetched to me.

[OOC: Ok, but formally-speaking, aren't you missing the world where the Elim who sent in the kill had their kill fail, for reasons of being at Ankers/on the streets, or because they were a noble who got recalled? In both this world and an Elim roleblocker world, it's possible that the Elim kill failed - for reasons of being at Ankers/on the streets/noble recall - and the Elims sought to use that opportunity to frame TKN, who was already suspected. I don't think it's as plausible as E!TKN but nevertheless.

It's not really a very risky thing to suggest TKN of all players because: A. already suspected, B. lack of elevation up to this cycle suggests/entails that he has no real actions to be carrying out, therefore you don't risk fakeclaiming a roleblock when the target took a provable action, e.g. in my case.

It's not clear to me how JNV sharing this with the thread prevents a sabotage: are you considering the world in which there's a kill on JNV?

I'll note the info has been shared with Wonko already, who is expected to return, and the Elims can't plausibly kill them both at once. If they do, they'd have to kill me too because then I know what this entails in terms of who has to be Evil for them to have a double kill capacity (hint: they'd need a Namer.)]

3 minutes ago, Araris Valerian said:

I had protection during the night, but I'm assuming an attack that is protected against would show as "Araris was attacked but survived." I'm also fairly sure that I'm a low priority target since I don't count toward win-cons.

[OOC: Depends on the type but yes.]

8 minutes ago, Araris Valerian said:

And yeah, I'm referring to previous games. I can't recall a game where elims deliberately failed to send in a kill to get the target of a roleblock killed, despite that option being mentioned in the thread whenever the possibility arises. The risk versus reward just doesn't seem worth it generally.

[OOC: I've never actually considered failure to send in a kill even with inactivity - I feel like that's pretty farfetched. I think mech failure is pretty reasonable, however, as the recall and Ankers are both elements of the game, and the Elims might have decided a 15% failure rate was reasonably small.]

lxv. desire

Re’lar Jakob turned the piece of chalk about in a dusty hand, fiddling with it idly. “Can someone give me an example of a mental state that isn’t factive?”

“Belief,” one of the students said, after some hesitation.

“No, that can’t be right…” someone else said, frowning.

“Well, it has to be, right? If it’s factive, then it has to bear the appropriate relation to truth. But you can believe pretty ridiculous things that aren’t true. My gran gets that way about shamble-men,” said a student. She wore a bright red scarf about her cornsilk hair, and her accent was pure Commonwealth. “Gets real careful around autumn, but…” she shrugged. “Shamble-men. You know how they are.”

Some of the class nodded, some of them looked utterly disturbed, and the rest just looked confused or bored.

Kevan hadn’t heard of shamble-men. But in Yll, you were afraid of the water-horses, the ones that’d drag you deep into the lakes to drown. You were wary of the death-singers, whose keening cry foretold the death of someone you loved (he’d never heard a death-singer, never wanted to, his father was lost at sea and perhaps that was why the death-singers had never keened for him, never cried for him), and you heard the tales about the muruach, the seal-folk, who were a different sort of peril altogether, the ones who walked among you.

(The ones who wore the face of your own father, your mother.)

Every culture, every people, he supposed, had their own tales, their own private fears.

“Well,” Jakob said, drawing their attention back to the topic at hand. “It’s certainly possible for us to believe things that aren’t true. How many of you have believed that Admissions was going to be manageable, only for Master Wyles to suddenly ask you to calculate a Cealdim arbitrage problem?”

Laughter rippled through the classroom. “Sir,” one of the students called out. “It’s not as awful as Master Herkimer asking you how many fingers he’s holding up behind his back. It was just one and it was his middle finger!”

Jakob waited until the class had settled down again. “Well, Master Herkimer’s certainly a legend as far as Admissions is concerned,” he admitted. “I don’t know if that belief is factive though, and I don’t want to find out!”

“It is, sir!”

“Alright,” Jakob said, firmly. “Back to our topic. Someone else give me an example of a mental state that’s not factive.” Silence fell in the classroom. “Phoibe?”

“Desire, sir,” the student said, her voice soft. She was sitting in the corner of the classroom closest to the window. “We can desire things that aren’t ours. Or aren’t true.”

“Good,” Jakob nodded. “As I’m sure anyone who’s experienced unrequited love will know—my commiserations—desiring that someone love you back doesn’t mean that’s the case. But there’s an interesting historical example that demonstrates why desire isn’t factive. Has anyone in this class taken Master Alys’s history of mathematics class, can I have a show of hands? Just one? Alright, what’s your name?”

“Henric,” the student said. His accent was pure Modegan, and musical. “I took it two terms ago, though.”

“Well, what do you know about the Samosians?”

Henric said, “They believed that numbers were sacred and everywhere. In music, in nature, in art…that you could express any number at all as a ratio of two whole numbers.”

“Thank you, Henric,” Jakob said. “The Samosians were famous for many things. One of their defining beliefs—as Henric has pointed out, which we now know to be untrue—is the belief that all numbers are rational. They absolutely refused to believe there was such a thing as an irrational number.”

Kevan blinked. That seemed…strange, but he supposed that was history for you.

“Famously, a few historians like Deor record that one of the Samosians, Parsus, was shoved off a boat and drowned by his fellows for demonstrating that the square root of two was an irrational number. I’m not sure about you, but while I feel passionately about mathematics, it’s usually an aversion, rather than something I’d kill over!”

More chuckles.

“What I’m saying here,” Jakob finished, more deliberately, “Is that when I heard this in Master Alys’s class, this story really grabbed me as a case demonstrating how desire isn’t factive. This needs a disclaimer that Master Alys says some historians argue this story is apocryphal and we have conflicting accounts of what happened to Parsus and why he was cast out—I’m giving you the most dramatic one because I’m a tutor and I want you to pay attention in my class and remember things.” He set the chalk back down. “But the way I put it is like this: if people can desire the mathematically impossible, then by God, they can desire anything!”

[The Unknown Order he/him]

1 hour ago, Kasimir said:

OOC: Genuinely curious how you think repeatedly dropping PMs about PM scanning, especially strategies to allow scanning past cycle messages in the game, doesn't come off as an Elim looking to take down the Villager who found them before that player can be softcleared. I don't really want to TWTBAW this but I want to point out that that's not really inspiring confidence in your being Village when people already didn't trust you in the first place. At the very least, you should be aware of how this comes across, and not be shocked Pikachu when people distrust you even more for this.]

Two PMs? Where it wasn't even the main focus. The only reason to want to be able to scan past cycles is so I can do the Alignment Scanning Plan, then learn the identity of a likely elim. Why would an elim want to learn the identity of a random roleblocker, while volunteering to be scanned? Explain that. It's not like they can actually be soft cleared, because I'm not going to flip, and the chances of them releasing their identity after I'm dead are just as low as they are now. The only difference between revealing then and revealing now is the lack of accountability. 

You trusted me before this came out, why is your first inclinations to believe my PM planning is e!me, what, gloating? Why would e!me discuss my plans to PM scan in a PM with two villagers?

I fully reserve the right to be surprised Pikachu faced when there is legitimately no reason e!me acts this way.

-

All I want is to post this message, all I want is to not be roleblocked. Then we can get the first real flip in this game that hasn't been decided by the elims.

There is no reason for a villager to roleblock me now. There is no way e!me risks putting on the kill with the chance of a roleblock and getting practically confirmed e. The worst that can happen if it's e!me is that the kill still goes through. The best is that the kill doesn't go through. But if I'm v, then the worst that can happen is the same, the kill still goes through, but the best, the best that can happen is the kill is still somehow blocked (maybe by that same roleblocker who would have roleblocked me), and I get to post my Message, letting us confirm me.

Which sounds better?

Edited August 6, 2023 by The Known Novel

[little wilson she/her]

2 hours ago, Szeth_Pancakes said:

I think I’m going to ask for a pinch hitter — I’m really having trouble getting invested :/

Sorry to everyone who’s been @ ing me.

There are no pinch hitters that I've been able to find for Steel, so I'm afraid there's no one to step in for you either.