Well, That Could Have Gone Better 023

[screwyoubob]

[Locked to Crew // Unhackable]

Radiation's all cleaned up! It's safe to go near Liquid Metal Reactors 008 through 015 again!

Also? I found the gravity gun that everyone was talking about over dinner a week ago! It's so much fun!

[End LockDid you know that if you leave your lunch in an area with a lot of radiation and forget about it and come

Comments

[not_a_rock]

Alanine... Cysteine...

Are those your gods?

[screwyoubob]

No, no, they're amino acids!

[not_a_rock]

Acids?

So... it's like alchemy?

[screwyoubob]

... kinda!

[not_a_rock]

Ah!

I've not heard songs about alchemy before. But if you work with so many elements, it must help to remember, right?

[Oh B, if you think 20th century Earth is primitive, you'd loooove where Ki comes from.]

[screwyoubob]

[He would consider her world one shaky step above sex-selective infanticide and cannibalism, it's true.]

Yes! Mnemonic songs help you to remember all the things there are to know... plus, they're fun.

[not_a_rock]

Meh-monic?

[Considering these things still happened a couple thousand years after her time, that's not far off.]

Most of our songs are stories to remember. I think. I'm not a bard, after all.

[screwyoubob]

Neh-mohn-ik.

Right! I'm not Artistic-type either, but everyone likes singing songs that help us remember facts!

[not_a_rock]

Mnemonic! I see.

[That's some VERY strange vocab you have there, B.]

Well - they start in fact, I'm sure. But usually they're - exaggerated, to make a better story.

It would be interesting to see if they sing of Gil and the Tower, generations from now! What is kept, and what is added...

[screwyoubob]

[Is it? It seems perfectly normal to him.]

Of course it'll be changed! There's always drift and modification with story telling and language. The only way to preserve it is to write it down! Even then, it'll be interpreted later differently.

[He falls silent. B doesn't like how mutable the arts are. He likes science.]

[not_a_rock]

Ah - but not everyone can read. And scrolls are often destroyed. There are stone tablets, of course, but they're so laborious to create.

The best way to make sure something's remembered at all is to put it to song.

[screwyoubob]

Melodies change and people change the words, or words change their meaning, though.

Basically, artistic stuff always changes.

... Blah.

[not_a_rock]

Isn't remembering things differently better than forgetting them completely?

[screwyoubob]

No way! Take this for example? Way back when, there used to be this rule about not doing things that were 'unclean', like mounting a horse from the right-hand side or having eyes that are two different colours, or having red hair. But the thing was, when the rules were made, 'unclean' just meant 'unusual' and then 'unusual' started to mean weird, which started to mean bad, which then changed to 'forbidden'.

So basically there was a time when my people were kinda stupid when people with two coloured eyes were stoned to death.

It's better that dumb rule should have been forgotten rather than anyone dying because it got changed over the centuries!

[not_a_rock]

People have eyes with two different colors??