Yeah, Nessie’s part in this story was more of a cameo…as was to be expected, of course, since the timing an manner of its appearance made it obvious that its only purpose was to serve as a vehicle to enable K’ip to demonstrate his considerable growth in abilities and lethality.
Our sea-faring friend helps the effect along by panicking – unnecessarily, as it turns out, but then, how was he supposed to know? Si’ri has more reason to apologize for her panicking, since she should actually have been aware of K’ip’s current level of abilities – and she does promplty apologize, to her credit. Even if the only panel where she actually does panic got cut…^_^; *cough*scriptwritingartefact*cough*
K’ip’s abilities continue to be arts-and-crafts-based, but by and by some of his skilltrees started to grow fruit of actual practical value as a weapon. Calligraphy being an obvious example, of course. Crisp handwriting always looks sharp, and if you combine it with a sharp letter, it’s natural you can cut through just about anything.
So, yeah…if cases of people being attacked by giant sea monsters start to skyrocket soon, don’t act surprised. It’s a natural consequence of the fact that children no longer learn cursive writing in school. >_>
And, yeah, Si’ri was originally critical of K’ip’s decision to follow the calligraphy branch. She said she saw no connection between calligraphy and a sea voyage, but K’ip insisted it was called penmanship for reason. *cough* OK, I’ll see myself out now…
More on Thurs…uh, Monday.
Heh, “scharfes S”. I remember how that used to be standard when I learned German in school in the 90s. Alas, nowadays they replaced by “ss” in a lot of words…
Yeah, a classic case of a half-hearted reform that does more ill than good, in my opinion. Getting rid of the ß completely would have removed a number of inconveniences with things like keyboard layouts, font compatibility and OCR software (which tends to read ß as B), at the price of everyone having to get used to it. Leaving things as they were would have been the other option. But getting rid of ß in most, but not all, cases gives you the worst of both worlds: everyone has to learn new rules, but the technical inconveniences persist. What’s the point?
Exactly! It is, in a way an orthographic throwback to the middle ages. And let’s not forget that the Swiss got rid of it waaay back in the ’30s.
Still, it could be much, much worse. I’ve been reading a lot of period Romanian documents, and, back in the 1830s, we had a big orthographic shift from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet.
You’d expect for it to have gone in overnight, right? Say, from January 1st, everything gets written using the new system? Wrong! For about 30 years,until they finally completed the shift in 1862, they used a so-called “transitional alphabet”, which mixed letters from the Cyriillic and Latin alphabets in an ungodly mess.
And the worst part? While there was an established transitional alphabet, a lot of the newspapers and publications liked to improvise, so you often find articles written wholly in Cyrillic next to articles written in the Latin alphabet and articles written in three different types of transitional alphabets all on the same page, depending on who wrote the article…
That does indeed sound quite messy. Kazakhstan is trying to do the same thing right now, although they hope to get it done in 7 years instead of 30 (and at a cost of more than half a billion dollars) – although I’m pretty sure it won’t be as quick and easy at that. And that’s already their third switch in a century. Since 1900 the went from Arabic to Latin, then to Cyrillic and now back to Latin. Perhaps the simpler solution would be going the Japanese way – and just use several alphabets in parallel. XD
German documents of that timeframe are relatively easy to read, by comparison – it takes some practice to get used to the Frakturschrift style, and slightly different spellings of many words, but by and large it’s not too much changed. (Referring only to printed materials, here, handwritten material in the old style takes a lot of practice to read.)