A Fractal of Loops

Brocade is a very interesting fabric.

Brocade is woven, and the way woven fabric works, generally, is that the vertical threads are fed through the mechanism of the loom, then raised and lowered in groups. As you raise a group of threads, you pass one line (called a pick) of horizontal thread through it. Then you lower the first group of warp threads and raise the second. When you''re making very basic plain weave, there's just 2 groups, the odd and the even threads. This determines the picture, because raised threads are visible on the surface of the fabric, while lowered threads are on the underside. I work with a 4 shaft loom, so I have 4 different groups that can be raised or lowered (either shaft by shaft or in pairs and trios. That gives me enough flexibility to make diamonds, squares, and some undulating and zig-zag lines. More complicated looms sold for hobby weavers will give you 8 or 16 groups and those patterns can be more complex.

But to make images as complicated as wrestling cats, you would need dozens or even hundreds of different orders of threads raised and lowered. So, historically, what was instead used was a draw loom which rather than having a huge number of shafts you just raised and lowered each thread independently, for each line of thread in the fabric. This required two weavers. One to raise and lower the threads, one to weave. A really good draw loom team could weave brocade at a rate of about an inch a day (Essinger, James (2004) Jacquard's Web. Oxford University Press, Oxford UK pg 16 - 17).

This all changed with the invention of the Jacquard Loom. The Jacquard loom stores the pattern in punch cards, one card per row, and once the cards are loaded onto the loom the pattern of raised and lowered threads is determined by the cards (the mechanism for raising the threads literally rises through the holes in the binary punch cards). This totally changes the cost and availability of luxury fabrics, because on a Jacquard Loom, that same complicated brocade can be made by one weaver, at about 24 inches per day (Essigner, James (2004) Jacquard's Web. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK pg 38).

The punch card mechanism from the Jacquard Loom, is the directly ancestor of punch card computing, which is where we get all modern binary computing from.

So what do we think guys?

Sadly, I think this is a second example of Maia inadvertently terrifying his staff.

There's an old but still-extant stereotype of senior domestic staff like butlers and housekeepers being more attached to rigid etiquette rules around service than their employers. Its often played for laughs (if you've watched Downton Abbey they do that with the butler Carson a lot).

But Lucy Lethbridge's book Servants which is a really interesting overview of the history of domestic service in the United Kingdom discusses the origins of this and, its not especially funny. Because yeah! Maia could dismiss Esaran, probably with little to no warning, and that would probably seriously damage her ability to get another job. The rigid rules make things predictable. Which is the closest thing to labour protection these people get (Lethrbridge also details how domestic staff were systematically excluded from labour laws as they develop). And that leads service staff to prefer working for rich, old-money families who know all the predictable etiquette. And Maia has started his relationship with his household staff by ambushing them, and disregarding a lot of normal protocol.

Peeling Maia's "everyone hates me" goggles off the situation I think Beshalar is probably terrified.

Beshalar got assigned this job on literally no notice, so he was starting late, he's had this job of protecting the emperor for literally hours, with a partner he's only just met.

Its only been a couple of days since the rest of the line of succession were suddenly died. No one knows exactly what happened yet, or if people are still actively seeking to kill the rest of the royal family. If Maia dies there will be at best a regency and at worst a huge succession crisis and Beshelar will be expected to commit ritual suicide.

Here is Maia's description of the end of his mother's life:

She had been ill for as long as he could remember, his gray, stick-thin, beloved mother. Even to a child, it had become clear that winter that she was dying, as her eyes seemed to take up more and more of her face and she became so thin that even a badly judged touch could bruise her.

This is not a lot of detail and I am fully aware I am currently speculating like mad on the basis of very little information. But I am consumed by the question of what killed Chenelo Drazharan?

Acute wasting is a feature of the end stages of a lot of terminal illnesses. The technical term for this is cachexia. But in terms of popular lay-person descriptions this sort of wasting-away is very strongly associated with two illnesses: tuberculosis and leukemia (and less relevantly, with AIDS).

And in one sense it doesn't actually matter what Chenelo died of, because the most important fact is that she died, and also, there's nothing in the text to confirm or deny any of my wild speculation. But in another it alters the whole reading of the story.

TB (relevantly called consumption for this reason) is, to a certain extent, a disease of neglect. Many people can either shake off a TB exposure, or maintain the disease in a latent (non-dangerous, non-contagious) form. Poverty, malnutrition, other illness or immune dysfunction all drastically increase a person's likelihood of converting to active tuberculosis. This is described at length in John Green's Everything is Tuberculosis so I'm not going to pull page-specific references.

So if that's what killed Chenelo then it is likely that being shipped to a hostile foreign country, a teenage pregnancy then being banished to an isolated manor and ignored by her family was almost certainly a contributing factor and Maia is absolutely correct when he blames his father for this.

First time through Goblin Emperor this is just setting detail but coming back to this detail about the Cetho Ulimeire after finishing Cemeteries of Amalo it reads totally different doesn't it?

Did he though? Did he really?

What do we think about Csevet's level of honesty here:

This is the second major time that Setheris saves Maia from Chavar. And Setheris really does do this, he goes and he sets it all up, and he's efficient, and he does a good job.

I don't for a second think he really does this because he sincerely cares or wants to help Maia. I think he wants to screw Chavar over and maybe hopes that Maia will be grateful and more likely to give him a decent position at court.