Jack did not make it past the candlestick

This is awesome on so many levels.

when we’ve seen primus and ethrand, obviously they don’t give a single shit about occtis beyond maybe sense of denied ownership and it shows, but you still at least feel like there could be some kind of relationship there — that something like ethrand’s “you should have welcomed the name alone as a gift” speech comes from a place of hate borne from time spent together. but no. that wasn’t an older brother reacting to the personally felt betrayal of his younger brother, that was a powerful noble talking down to someone who’s as good as a commoner to him.

i don’t know, maybe occtis has somewhat more of a relationship with the siblings who are closer to his age and didn’t already have important jobs when he was a kid. but the way he talked about it sure didn’t sound like he ever really knew any of them well, even if he saw them more. it sounds a lot more like they just stuffed him away in some corner of their estate with his tutor and only pulled him out on special occasions to make sure no one looked sideways at them for not having their youngest son around.

i’ve always liked but not fully understood the way that occtis reacts — or, more accurately, kind of doesn’t react — to other people in the party being kind to him. but i think, wrapping my head around the way he was isolated from his family, it makes sense. i think that really, what it comes down to is that he’s still learning how to make meaning from expressions like that; reacting to them just isn’t in his repertoire. in a past episode julien pointed out the similarities in how they both left home, but occtis didn’t leave with memories to look back on of the old times when his father was proud of him. why would he know what to do with kind words? he can learn it all now, from people like thjazi and thimble and thaisha, but it takes more than a few kind friends to teach something that most people are given as children. whatever he feels on the inside when people show him some kindness or affection, it comes out stilted and awkward if it comes out at all, like trying to get water out of a faucet after a particularly cold winter night when the pipes still haven’t quite thawed.

it only occurred to him now, after being attacked by his family and ripped apart on some cosmic level and brought back to life as something so deeply unfamiliar to him and forced to run so far from that family, that he can’t cry. after the things that have been done to him and the things he’s seen, anyone else would break down at some point. hell, even julien’s had to let it out at this point. but occtis doesn’t cry, hasn’t felt enough of a need to know whether or not he can, because why would he? crying is fundamentally a type of communication. babies cry because they need something; if it stops getting them what they need, the instinct to cry can start to slip away from them. and what would it ever have gotten occtis? something tells me that if it got any reaction it all, it would be to instill fear in him, to make sure he kept quieter next time. so instead, when such horrible things happen, he gets curious, explores this new perspective on undeath the way he’s always stuck his hands into his family’s specialty — something that’s now genuine a interest but could have started as one last desperate attempt at gaining their approval, saying “see? you pushed me away because i didn’t have your gifts but i have them now. are you looking yet?”

and in a weird way, the thing this drives home for me is how easily occtis could’ve been just like the rest of his family. he’s worked his whole life to imitate the things that separated them from him. he’s not different because he’s a better person on some fundamental level, he’s different because they didn’t bother trying to make him one of them. no amount of conditioning him with fear or feeding him the family propaganda could make him a sorcerer if he wasn’t born as one, so why bother? he just wasn’t worth turning into the kind of person that the rest of his siblings are, so he isn’t one. it has absolutely nothing to do with him at all.

i’m sure we’re going to meet the rest of the tachonis siblings eventually and at some point they’re all going to give us a reason to hate them, and none of it will change the fact that there is absolutely nothing fundamentally different about them. they just had the misfortune of being born with the gift that made their father decide it would be worthwhile to shape them. and before that, there was undoubtedly some older patriarch who thought it’d be a worthy investment to make primus into the person he is.

occtis’ siblings act out The Family’s will and sneer at anyone who would stand in its way and cower in the presence of their father who declares it, while occtis met a kind man and a pixie who was also a kid and they got him out and now he travels with people who make themselves heretics or perform unthinkable feats of magic to save his life and tell him they’ve got him and that he doesn’t have to apologize for who or what he is around them. all because he was born “wrong”, because for so long he wasn’t cared about at all. and it’s awful and it never should’ve happened and yet, in some way it makes him the luckiest one, to even be given a chance at something better than what their family has become.

maybe that’s what fuels ethrand’s contempt toward him, if there is anything real behind it at all; not that there’s some meaningfully thorny past standing between them, but that whoever little powerless baby occtis became while his family wasn’t looking, he found a way out. he rejected the family, the name, and made his own path. and why wasn’t the name enough for him? he has to be a foolish and ungrateful and contrary brat because if he’s not, that means there’s something else out there that’s more worth having than the family name. and when you become a cruel person for your family, when you do awful things in their name, when your power is their symbol and you’ll wield it in any way they choose, you have to believe that nothing is more important than that name.

how many times do you have to be punished harshly for your own childish ungratefulness before you can look down at the boy you’re about to carve open and say he could have prevented this, if only he had been more grateful for what he was given? does it matter how much cruelty it took to shape you, if at the end of the day you’re still a man who could do something like that? for how many years did primus tachonis act out his own father’s cruel commands, made small by the fear of what would become of him if he failed, before that man died and the fear was gone but the momentum and muscle memory of cruelty remained?

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

The best ones have advice on decor, how to select high-quality furniture, childrearing, fashion, etc--from a contemporary perspective, and the things the authors feel the need to clarify vs the wild shit that will just casually mention like it's something everyone knows and agrees on is REALLY revealing of the culture and how it's shifted.

And while a lot of the advice is WILDLY bigoted or just outright funny, you'd be surprised how much of it is...just genuinely timeless, and shockingly compassionate.

They ALSO, as a writer, have INVALUABLE resources--because, again, they're talking about things that are so MUNDANE that a lot of the time nobody really sat down to formally document what normal, everyday people thought or cared about--because that's boring! But a book written to provide advice and information to, say, a young woman who's never run her own home before? You can fully expect an entire chapter dedicated to The Types Of Oven, and which features are useful and worth spending money on, and which features are a huge hassle to clean and a waste of space, and what to spend that money on instead.

And like. As a writer who frequently works in the 1800s? Fuck inflation calculators, this is the kind of thing I need. This is absolutely priceless.

Now that being said.

My current favorite 'etiquette guide' in the world is actually like....70% purely practical advice, written by a gentleman the groupchat has affectionately dubbed History's Most Autistic Man In The World, and thank god they didn't have Aderall back then

Because the AuDHD is strong in this one and as a result, in addition to the deeply practical and useful everyday reference points, we also have:

Charles Turner was born in the United States just a few years after the end of the civil war. His brilliance was evident from the start, and after graduating valedictorian of his high school class he quickly went on to earn his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in short order. While in school, Turner’s relentless curiosity became his greatest advantage. He was drawn to and fascinated by topics that were largely ignored by modern science at the time, namely the cognitive behaviors of insects and other invertebrates. While many of his colleagues believed insects to be mindless automata acting on instinct alone, Turner felt deeply that the brains of these oft overlooked animals were far more complex than the scientific community suspected. He performed extensive experiments to test his theories and found overwhelming evidence of problem solving and individualism among organisms as small as ants and spiders.

By the time Turner earned his zoology pHD in 1907 he had published dozens of papers in highly esteemed journals and had even co-authored a book. It is likely that Turner was the first African American to earn a pHD from the University of Chicago. With such a sparkling academic reputation and enormous body of research, one would expect this candidate to have no issues obtaining a professorship at a prestigious school. Though by every right Turner should have been head of science department at a top university, the systemic racism that permeated academia meant that doors a white man would have walked through were locked and bolted shut for Charles Henry Turner.

Turner did not allow this prejudice to dim in any way his blindingly bright passion for knowledge. He took a job as a high school teacher, and continued to perform and publish research on his own all while he instilled his students with a love for zoology. He published more than 70 papers in extremely respected journals and he remained passionately curious for the entirety of his life. If I tried to list here all of the incredible discoveries Turner made in his lifetime it would take me days to sufficiently express the impact he had on the field of invertebrate behavior. His experiments were so ahead of their time that entomologists today marvel at his research and wonder how much more we would know if Turner’s work had been given the attention and respect of other scientists working at the time. Turner’s mind was about a century ahead of those entomological contemporaries who had no interest in giving him a seat at the table. His tombstone simply reads “scientist”

However the drunk guys are also drinking, and eventually she can't afford to buy another pitcher for the table so she can't keep up the ever-full beer glass trick. At this point she has to resort to setting up the pool trick shot that she's never seen anyone but her boyfriend pull off, and says she'll leave with whoever manages the shot first.