may we live forever

“Hey, the water is leaking at the meter and I need you to contact the plumber who fixed our stuff last time.” (Doesn’t call a plumber.) (Has some random friend come over.) (Spends over an hour assessing the problem.) (Determines that we need a plumber.) {I am now seeing red. Did this man really think I don’t know what work requires a plumber and what work we can do ourselves? IT’S LIKE HE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW WHO I AM. We’ve been married nearly 20 years, for the record, and I’ve been doing most of the household repairs this entire time. How? How does he not believe my assessment of the situation?}

(Enter the Friend)

“What if the meter is the part that’s leaking?” “The city already came and said it’s on my side.” “But what if the meter is the part that’s leaking?” SO. MANY. TIMES. IN. A. ROW.

“Do you have a home warranty?” “No, I don’t waste my money on stupid insurances thanks.” “But most people get some kind of guarantee for the first year they own their home.” “That wouldn’t make any difference because we’re in our third year, and also I never had anything like that.” WE. REPEATED. THIS. ENTIRE. EXCHANGE. TEN. FUCKING. TIMES.

(Exit the Friend)

*He* was delightful. It’s so easy to not treat a woman like she has no knowledge or skill. Like. Gah.

Anyways, he said they’ll start digging 8 am tomorrow and be done by 1 pm and the price is not exorbitant.

The problem is that Mat would have opened the letter within two days, tops.

OH. I KNOW. She would have made it unopenable until the correct time. “Here, Mat. I wrote you a letter. You won’t be able to read it for a week. Well, I’m off. Have a nice life!” Very nonchalant, as she always is. Not negotiating weird timelines with Mat. Telling him what he can’t do, so the moment he can, he does.

So what the solution she ended up with is a weird one, where it's something that, in her gut, she knows will fail. But is the type of legalistic and manipulative thing that at the top Verin has convinced herself might just work. She chose the highest-variance agent she could find (basically anybody else would either read the letter or not read the letter, upon instructions), and set it up in a high-variance way, with enough stuff to trip Mat's curiosity. But then had to add enough chaff to make it less likely he'd open it.

What it reminds me of, in some ways, is the scene from Guards! Guards! where Fred, Nobby, and Carrot are trying to bring the odds of shooting the dragon in its "voonerable" spot to exactly "a million-to-one" (which is the probability at which completely impossible events happen nine-times-out-of-ten).

In other words, I don't read Verin as "fumbling" the encounter, so much as "constructing an encounter such that P('Mat doesn't open the letter') is only barely higher than P('Mat opens the letter')" according to the Oath Rod Cop In Verin's Brain. I don't think this is one she could have "rules lawyered" since she was also judge in that.

That said, now I desperately want to see, as a fanfic, the brainstorming scene with Verin and Tomas as they figure out what strategy to pursue.

The problem is that Mat would have opened the letter within two days, tops.

OH. I KNOW. She would have made it unopenable until the correct time. “Here, Mat. I wrote you a letter. You won’t be able to read it for a week. Well, I’m off. Have a nice life!” Very nonchalant, as she always is. Not negotiating weird timelines with Mat. Telling him what he can’t do, so the moment he can, he does.

Makes it really believable that he didn't 'get' Mat. He just wrote Mat like that, rather than anything like the character really was.

Back to the original question: Verin making the letter seem like an obligation is absolutely out of character. That's not how Verin rolls, at all. She plays things off like she really does not care, that she is just curious and a spectator, she has no agenda for you and no plan, and Rand & Perrin, even when they are really skeptical of her posture, still can never quite catch her out on it. They doubt her, because she is Aes Sedai, and because she sometimes seems to know way too much, but even when they think she is manipulating them, they have no clue what it is or why, the stakes always seem so small. Which is probably why she manipulates Rand so easily in Fal Dara, because Verin is never aiming at political goals or big metaphysical stuff, Rand probably does not even register her as a threat - how could her curiosity hurt The Dragon Reborn?

Verin would never bargain with Mat to pin him down, she'd use reverse psychology, and would clearly not even be thinking of Mat as someone who needs her information. After all, he's so busy, and as she recalls, he didn't want anything to do with this Aes Sedai nonsense, she'd find someone else to pass along her message about the threat to Caemlyn. I mean, it's not like Mat has any allegiance to the Lion Throne, she spent time in the Two Rivers, she understands how they are. Besides, after that business at Barthanes' manor, Rand probably knows to secure all the Waygates, of course.

Anyone with the slightest knowledge of Mat would know that his sense of duty and protective inclinations are a far better goad than any authority or contract.

Mat would tell himself a million times that he was never going to open the letter, that he did not want to know what was in it, that it was none of his affair, and that it was stupid to get involved in Aes Sedai stuff. And then he'd open it. We see how he responds to a source of preternatural knowledge. He'd react to the letter the way he did the news of the Aelfinn gateway in Tear and the sight of the Eelfin gateway in Rhuidean.

Mat ignoring the letter is about as likely as riding on and assuming that Melanril has everything in hand, or that a single swordsman, even sent by the Queen's advisor, has no chance of actually harming three Accepted, even if he can find them in Tear. Or that Shadar Logoth has been there two thousand years, no need to explore it, tonight. Or, no, Elayne really did just hear a mouse upstairs, watching Nynaeve fight the Black Ajah is much more interesting. That note in his pocket? Who cares why a Red sister wrote it. Burn me, but a Red would do just as bad to Rand, she probably deserves to be on a leash. No need to go to the kennels to ask her anything. It was probably Adeleas who slipped him the note, since she was grabbling him as much as Teslyn.

“Hey, the water is leaking at the meter and I need you to contact the plumber who fixed our stuff last time.” (Doesn’t call a plumber.) (Has some random friend come over.) (Spends over an hour assessing the problem.) (Determines that we need a plumber.) {I am now seeing red. Did this man really think I don’t know what work requires a plumber and what work we can do ourselves? IT’S LIKE HE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW WHO I AM. We’ve been married nearly 20 years, for the record, and I’ve been doing most of the household repairs this entire time. How? How does he not believe my assessment of the situation?}

(Enter the Friend)

“What if the meter is the part that’s leaking?” “The city already came and said it’s on my side.” “But what if the meter is the part that’s leaking?” SO. MANY. TIMES. IN. A. ROW.

“Do you have a home warranty?” “No, I don’t waste my money on stupid insurances thanks.” “But most people get some kind of guarantee for the first year they own their home.” “That wouldn’t make any difference because we’re in our third year, and also I never had anything like that.” WE. REPEATED. THIS. ENTIRE. EXCHANGE. TEN. FUCKING. TIMES.

(Exit the Friend)

You know I never read Ender's Game? I only watched the movie that nobody liked. I do know there's a big deal in the book where Ender comes up with this insanely good new strategy paradigm where he rethinks the orientation of the zero-g playfield, imagining the enemy as below him rather than to the side (hm, there's probably some symbolism there). But that makes me wonder, does that actually make sense as a thing that nobody else would have figured out? I feel like that sort of thing would be clocked early on in the metagame. I guess it's a bunch of children's teams competing against each other, and maybe none of them were checking the competitive zero-g laser tag subreddit for all the latest strats, like reddit was banned on the school computers in their space academy or whatever.

That really does tie in with the difficulty of writing intelligent tacticians though. You can write smarter characters than yourself, contrary to popular belief; you can have them come up with ideas in seconds that took you a week, or you can have them notice details and come to conclusions that, while logical, would be easy to miss if you the author didn't know the answer already.

But with battle tactics there's a sense that the character has time to plan and is up against other people who should also be pretty smart. You're not putting the characters in a locked room mystery, you're putting them into the full scope of all military history (real or imagined) and trying to have them distinguish themselves within that context. Oten the coolest flashiest tactics are something that should have been figured out decades ago given how effective they are, or just like straight up perfidy or something where there's a good reason why everyone's not doing it.

It would be an interesting challenge to write a genuinely skilled tactician, where I guess you try and get around this issue by focusing on microdecisions they make under pressure. Organisational decisions before a battle, or adapting to specific terrain, or ensuring they have contingencies for if their plans fall through. Avoid the big flashy stuff like "Commander Bigballs had a trick up his sleeve: he was the only dude in this sci-fi setting to remember that newton's third law exists". Not to say I'm asserting this has never been done before, I'm sure there's reams of books with good tactical writing, but it's neat to ponder nonetheless.

I did read the book and the fundamental conceit is that in a space academy full of a bunch of the smartest kids on Earth, after decades the zero-g laser tag meta still consists of, like, lining up in formations and shooting at each other like it's the 18th century.

The basic conceit of Ender's meta-redefining strategy is maybe it's supposed to be some kind of symbolism but in universe, what it is is that Ender figured out the concept of "present less target area to the opponent by facing lengthwise toward the other team" and also the way the game works is the suits you wear lock non-vital body parts in place if they get hit but there's no penalty for getting hit twice so facing your feet towards the enemy and tucking your knees in turns your legs into indestructible armor.

In an academy full of hundreds of allegedly extremely smart kids, it took the Chosen One Super Genius carefully bred by eugenics to figure this out.