He didn’t. Selkie is playing translator. He’s not even reacting to the inbreeding comment in the last panel, he’s still on the whole “eels for leather?”
Depending on which browser you use, you could also “Black List” / “Red List” certain websites, like the one which claims to be offering you winnings. Over the years I’ve made quite a collection of blocked URLs in my browser, but it’s made browsing the ‘net a helluva lot more smooth and uneventful.
Oh, well, crap. Yeah, sorry. Most modern phone manufacturing companies intentionally don’t give their users the tools necessary to be safe or have good experiences, despite the technology existing. Look in to “planned obsolescence.” It’s moved beyond the “shady as %&$#” and gone in to full-blown “completely immoral” territory these days.
I have Safari on my iPhone. I was getting; “Take this survey for a gift card” pop ups. I was told go to settings then safari and see the link that reads “remove cookies and clear browser data.” That took care of it without having to back everything up, although my passwords all had to be reentered.
If you do a reset on your phone, that should get rid of it. You MUST back up all you wish to keep first. If you don’t know how, a vice to your nice phone store/provider (Like Verizon or Sprint) should have techs that can help you. Guy who sold us our phones did it for free.
<>
I do all of my browsing on my cracked Samsung S4, so I understand. I get “hijacked” too. There’s 2 apps I have, “DU Cleaner” and “DFNDR”, that MAJORLY help!! I use the DU basic sweep, and about 5 or 6 options (including virus cleaning) on DFNDR. Sometimes I have to do it a LOT, and I don’t really understand how what works and why, but I DO know they seems to help – A LOT! They are both free, so there ARE ads of theirs to deal with. Overall, though, I’m thrilled with them!
One word of caution – I have tried one or two other apps for same purposes, and found them to junk up my phone more than help it. I was able to remove them without (apparent) problems, though. (Used prior form of DFNDR for that, too!)
I keep getting reports of this. I think when I get home I’ll temporarily disable the ads so I can look over them again to try and prune out sketchball ones.
Huh. I don’t get any such problems. Maybe a significant portion of the people who view the comic either have interests which take them to pages which install malware on their computer, or a site which links to the comic is infected?
It might have more to do with the type of browser used. As mentioned earlier in this thread, some browsers (particularly phone browsers) are notoriously vulnerable. All online advertising providers are high value targets for malicious worm deployment since they appear on so many websites. It’s not something advertising networks admit to readily, but they’re hacked and infected by piggy-backers with startling frequency. Independent advertising ventures are much safer for that reason, but naturally a lot more work.
Eelskin is simply the hide of an eel, like cowhide is the hide of a cow. But the hide of a YOUNG cow is calkskin (if it’s an unborn calf, it’s slunk – no, not skunk, slunk). The hide of a YOUNG goat is kidskin.
He says these are YOUNG eels. I wondered if there is a term for the skin of a young one.
i don´t know about their leather, but breeders refer to young fishes as ‘fingerlings’, because they´re as small and thin as a finger – but finger-lether would sound beyond weird.
I assume a purely chemical method, maybe simple seals on tanning boxes to keep it from diluting too quick, or maybe they use oils with a higher or lower density than water to keep it in one place.
Interesting. I’m not aware of a cold fresh water Dwelling Eel large enough at puberty to even make enough leather for an arm band let alone a chest piece. In fact there are no TRUE freshwater eels just eel like creatures known as the spinney eels of genus Mastacembelidae (freshwater dwellers) None of which get more than about 2 feet long and all are tropical/ semi tropical species.
I have a Mastacembelus vanderwaali in a nice little 16 gallon tank at home, His name is Bob (all my fish are actually named Bob) and he eats blood worms and other invertebrates
there are a few Eyurihaline species of eels like the electric eel but those are not usually found in lakes. Lamprey are eel like but are again Eurihaline
Actually, electric “eels” are knifefish and purely freshwater. The frequency in which they are wrongly portrayed as saltwater in infuriating. The typical American and European eels breed in saltwater but the young migrate to freshwater to mature. So, they could certainly have subadult eels in Sarnoth, as the great lakes do connect to the ocean via river, but I don’t see how they could really be “farm-raised”.
The perils of too much knowledge! It sounds like fish-experts are just going to have to remind themselves that Selkie does not live in our world. In hers, the ecology of North American freshwater lakes may have superficial resemblances to ours, but in many respects it has to be quite different, and we’re bound to bump up against the differences a lot in these coming pages.
Or perhaps the Giant Eels of legend are real animals in the Selkieverse?
I used to think that Tanuki were completely fictional animals because I had only heard about the Japanese folklore version. Turns out they’re real animals: they just aren’t elf-like magical tricksters.
ohh, eelskin is so delicate and soft though honestly I wouldn’t consider it a good material for making clothes, gloves and handbags maybe, If I wanted good clothes, I’d say stingray would be the better option, which I think feels so much better and more durable for making garments, either way they must be luxurious swimwear and clothing option underwater.
Sting ray leather is Tough stuff but is thin enough that for clothing it has to be backed by cow hide (similar to Reptile and bird leathers) My dad and great grandfather were both Cobblers, We also did a lot of leather jacket repair and things like that…
They do have sturgeon though, and I sort of wonder if that might make a decent leather option. Sturgeon do have a great deal in common with sharks despite being classified with the bony fish.
lady O, Eel leather is delicately soft. like suede leather but so so much more fragile. love the feel of it as a trim but I do not find it practical for an entire garment or even a bag.
This is a bit off-topic but I’m wondering if we’ll learn the background/origins of the sarnothi in this chapter.
My theory is they’re aliens. The reason I think this is because when I took an African Art class in college, my professor told us about the Dogon people and their beliefs in the Nommo. She messed up the details a little but what she told us made me instantly think of Selkie.
The Dogon believed in the Nommo, alien fish-like beings who came to Earth and immediately went into the water since that is their natural environment. Overtime they gradually evolved to become more human looking.
When I heard this, I thought this might have partially been an influence on Dave’s creation of the Sarnothi. If they’re aliens it would explain why they have mammalian and fish characteristics. It would better explain why they aren’t tolerant of the cold despite living in a cold environment since it wouldn’t be their natural warm water environment. It would also explain any advanced technology and “magical” abilities they have.
Dave could also, if he wants to, put a distant group of Sarnothi in Africa and have them be the truth behind the Nommo in the Selkie Universe. Even without going the alien route, it could be cool to have another Sarnothi civilization.
In seriousness, I’m curious how the Sarnothi fit into the evolutionary tree. It would make sense for them to be relatively close to the primates, given their similarities, but they’d have had to be a fairly recent split (or one heck of a case of convergent evolution)…
I remember Dave explaining that in his original draft the earth was pretty much like something out of Avatar (the kung fu one, not the cat people one), so sarnothi were the waterbenders, and you also had hawk people air benders, something fire benders and lastly earth benders – the last group evolved into present day humans.
Dunno how much of that if any still applies to the current story line though.
Oh God, that’s an old piece of trivia I’d mostly forgotten about. Good memory.
None of that is applicable to the current iteration of the story. But yeah in that discarded first draft of the story, the Sarnothi had the power to manipulate water at-will, a hidden sky city of bird-people could do the same with air, dragon-people living underground in tunnels that connected the world’s volcanos manipulated fire and lava, and Todd would have become the first human to re-discover the ability to manipulate rock and soil.
Stressing again, none of that is canon or applicable to things as they are now. It was just the first draft of the storyline. Unless I run out of ideas down the line. ;P
In Girl Scouts, we learned to make small disks out of clamshells, and bore holes through the center, thus making what we were told was “Indian money.” There’s actually a lot of cool currency that the world has used that would be fine underwater.
Of course, Todd would have to find a moneychanger….
Extra History did a great rundown of the different types of currency the world has used (including giant stone disks too heavy to be moved, which just change ownership and everybody remembers who owns what), and I fully recommend giving it a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nZkP2b-4vo
Douglas Adams mentions the Triganic Pu: “The Triganic Pu is a unit of galactic currency, with an exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu. This is simple enough, but, since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.” — Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Those aren’t the only two options; there’s also back-and-forth like a cow plowing. And, of course, the Japanese use up-to-down, but read the lines from right to left, except if you write the letters across, in which case they read left to right ^_^
Chinese is essentially written in whatever. If the lines go up and down you go up and down. If the lines go horizontally it’s left to right or right to left depending on where the front cover of the book is. Same rule applies when you read vertically as to which line goes after which line.
Many times my wife will start reading something, get a couple lines in, and say “oh, wait”, flip the book over, and start again.
The only direction I haven’t seen is up, but I wouldn’t put it past them.
It’s like the Chinese like messing with people. I was told on my last trip there the Chinese can read Japanese just fine, but have no idea what they’re saying. It wouldn’t shock me if it turned out Japanese is the original Chinese and some Chinese language teacher just decided to change the sounds for the fun of it.
The Japanese language and Chinese languages are unrelated linguistically.
The Japanese did adopt Chinese writing about 1500 years ago, they had no writing system or concept of literacy before that. Modern Japanese writing makes use of three writing systems (well four if you include Romanized versions, aka transliterations using the western alphabet). Two of the writing scripts (Hiragana and Katakana) are phonetic and developed from very simplified versions of Chinese characters. The third writing script (Kanji) uses Chinese characters directly.
In practice Japanese writing often contains a mixture of these three writing systems, as they are often used for different purposes. For example the following sentence:
私の出身はアメリカです。
My home country is America.
As a result many Chinese can comprehend a lot of things in Japanese because the characters have the same or similar meaning. The reverse is also true, if you know Japanese, you can sometimes understand the meaning of Chinese writing. The characters for “exit” for example are the same in both: 出口 (literally “opening to leave from”). However pronunciation is not the same in most cases. Japan took the characters but used them to write their own words.
Japanese and Chinese grammar and pronounciation are very very different however. Aside from an exchange of the odd word here or there (like sushi from Japan, or ramen from China) they are not at all related.
Being a 鬼佬 (caucasian) married to a Chinese with a big family and little hapa children, I can pretty much confirm absolutely that they are messing with us.
A couple things bother me
1) The city is laid out WAY too two-dimensionally. When you’re aquatic that whole gravity thing is a lot less of a problem, and your travel isn’t limited to it.
2) Thermodynamics. We keep hearing about how cold-sensitive Selkie’s people are. It makes no sense. Their blood is in constant thermal equilibrium with cold water because of their gills. Either they have hell’s own metabolic rate to keep warm or they can survive a body temperature that would kill any mammal stone dead. Or the author didn’t think it through.
Why lay out all the huts and small buildings on the sea floor? They could mount many of them on stilts and have a community that is much more compact, with shorter distances to swim. Also, if there are any dangers to the community, a sphere is easier to defend than a plane.
They also said the light poles are also heaters – so the whole area could be pretty warm depending on how hot they get, or it could be they make certain parts of the water in the lake warm and that circulates through the village. Gravity may not be a problem, but if this isn’t a super-deep lake, they wouldn’t want to build so close to the surface an everyday plane/drone camera/etc could see the buildings, so smaller and more spread out makes sense
Gravity may be less of an issue, but a surface upon which to build is still a thing. Saranothi can more easily move in 3 dimensions, but the ground is still the ground. Free floating buildings wouldn’t be much use when they start floating away. You could anchor them and let them float vertically but then you have to deal with currents, etc. if you want stable, consistently locatable buildings, constructing them on the lakebed is your best bet.
Just because something CAN be done doesn’t mean it HAS to be done or even SHOULD be done.
Travel might not be, but the surface you’re building on is essentially 2d. Now, if you were to build on the side of a canyon or something like that you could essentially build into the wall and have egress out the sides– but the lake floor is essentially flat.
In the Sarnoth capital city you have higher towers (as seen in Carrie’s and Benny’s memories) which wouldn’t necessarily need an internal structure or transport mechanism– you could simply pile the houses upwards and have doors on the outsides. That level of building hasn’t happened in Havei Jin’Suir.
With regard to the thermodynamics, what you effectively have is a creature that can survive/thrive under a much wider range of temperatures. This is true of most cold-blooded creatures.
Warm-blooded mammals must keep their temperature regulated within a few degrees of optimal or the body shuts down– Sarnothi aren’t trying to regulate a core temperature, they assume the temperature of the environment, which means as things get colder stuff slows down until you fall asleep in torpor.
why do i foresee Todd getting a full blown “Three-Piece-Suit” sunday best set of clothes from this guy… only to be told after he’s worn it around the office for a few times, that it was from forced-bred, caged up, mass-produced (if you can call it that) killed just after puberty eels? i seem to recall his stance on the chicken and cattle markets for fast food chains being somewhat non-favorable… i wonder what that would change in his mind for this purpose?
He still knows its sourced from eel, so if he is against wearing clothes made which require killing the animal (as opposed to say wool) it won’t matter to him the exact nature of the eel raising and skinning process, its all going to be outside his comfort zone.
I think I missed something at some point. When did Todd acquire an ear for Sarnothi?
He didn’t. Selkie is playing translator. He’s not even reacting to the inbreeding comment in the last panel, he’s still on the whole “eels for leather?”
He hasn’t, the dialogue in brackets is translated from Tensei. Dialogue out of the brackets is standard english.
I forgot to put a Note from the Editor about that in here. Should probably do that when I get home. :\
Everytime I get on this site it takes to an ad saying I won something.
Delete all your browser cookies. Then restart browser. Fixed.
A malware scan wouldn’t hurt either, just to be sure.
Grats on winning, though. Just don’t click any of them XD
mine just has my photo and address and a guy with a knife >.>
Depending on which browser you use, you could also “Black List” / “Red List” certain websites, like the one which claims to be offering you winnings. Over the years I’ve made quite a collection of blocked URLs in my browser, but it’s made browsing the ‘net a helluva lot more smooth and uneventful.
I don’t know how to do any of those things, I read this on my phone.
Oh, well, crap. Yeah, sorry. Most modern phone manufacturing companies intentionally don’t give their users the tools necessary to be safe or have good experiences, despite the technology existing. Look in to “planned obsolescence.” It’s moved beyond the “shady as %&$#” and gone in to full-blown “completely immoral” territory these days.
I already know about planned obsolescence, but thanks anyway.
I have Safari on my iPhone. I was getting; “Take this survey for a gift card” pop ups. I was told go to settings then safari and see the link that reads “remove cookies and clear browser data.” That took care of it without having to back everything up, although my passwords all had to be reentered.
If you do a reset on your phone, that should get rid of it. You MUST back up all you wish to keep first. If you don’t know how, a vice to your nice phone store/provider (Like Verizon or Sprint) should have techs that can help you. Guy who sold us our phones did it for free.
<>
I do all of my browsing on my cracked Samsung S4, so I understand. I get “hijacked” too. There’s 2 apps I have, “DU Cleaner” and “DFNDR”, that MAJORLY help!! I use the DU basic sweep, and about 5 or 6 options (including virus cleaning) on DFNDR. Sometimes I have to do it a LOT, and I don’t really understand how what works and why, but I DO know they seems to help – A LOT! They are both free, so there ARE ads of theirs to deal with. Overall, though, I’m thrilled with them!
One word of caution – I have tried one or two other apps for same purposes, and found them to junk up my phone more than help it. I was able to remove them without (apparent) problems, though. (Used prior form of DFNDR for that, too!)
😉
Hope I’ve helped!
I keep getting reports of this. I think when I get home I’ll temporarily disable the ads so I can look over them again to try and prune out sketchball ones.
Huh. I don’t get any such problems. Maybe a significant portion of the people who view the comic either have interests which take them to pages which install malware on their computer, or a site which links to the comic is infected?
It might have more to do with the type of browser used. As mentioned earlier in this thread, some browsers (particularly phone browsers) are notoriously vulnerable. All online advertising providers are high value targets for malicious worm deployment since they appear on so many websites. It’s not something advertising networks admit to readily, but they’re hacked and infected by piggy-backers with startling frequency. Independent advertising ventures are much safer for that reason, but naturally a lot more work.
Considering Todd’s vegetarian status and the controversial status of veal, poor man must be biting his tongue hard!
The leathersmith is speaking tensei, not english. Todd is happily oblivious to the butchering of inbred child els.
Do they have a name for that? Like calfskin or kidskin?
Elverskin would be my guess.
In my opinion, that makes it sound like it comes from elves.
Eels elves what’s the dif
“Eelskin” works in google.
Eelskin is simply the hide of an eel, like cowhide is the hide of a cow. But the hide of a YOUNG cow is calkskin (if it’s an unborn calf, it’s slunk – no, not skunk, slunk). The hide of a YOUNG goat is kidskin.
He says these are YOUNG eels. I wondered if there is a term for the skin of a young one.
i don´t know about their leather, but breeders refer to young fishes as ‘fingerlings’, because they´re as small and thin as a finger – but finger-lether would sound beyond weird.
not surprised, Eel leather is very good…
now the Curing and tanning process… that’s something I would be extremely curious about
Same! How do you cure/tan/dye underwater? Magic I’ll guess
Maybe that technological breakthrough is the basis of the rest of their “magical” technology.
It would also explain why humans never developed the technology themselves.
or maybe they bring air down in buckets and fill big upside down pots.
I wish we could upvote comments.
I assume a purely chemical method, maybe simple seals on tanning boxes to keep it from diluting too quick, or maybe they use oils with a higher or lower density than water to keep it in one place.
Interesting. I’m not aware of a cold fresh water Dwelling Eel large enough at puberty to even make enough leather for an arm band let alone a chest piece. In fact there are no TRUE freshwater eels just eel like creatures known as the spinney eels of genus Mastacembelidae (freshwater dwellers) None of which get more than about 2 feet long and all are tropical/ semi tropical species.
I have a Mastacembelus vanderwaali in a nice little 16 gallon tank at home, His name is Bob (all my fish are actually named Bob) and he eats blood worms and other invertebrates
there are a few Eyurihaline species of eels like the electric eel but those are not usually found in lakes. Lamprey are eel like but are again Eurihaline
Actually, electric “eels” are knifefish and purely freshwater. The frequency in which they are wrongly portrayed as saltwater in infuriating. The typical American and European eels breed in saltwater but the young migrate to freshwater to mature. So, they could certainly have subadult eels in Sarnoth, as the great lakes do connect to the ocean via river, but I don’t see how they could really be “farm-raised”.
The perils of too much knowledge! It sounds like fish-experts are just going to have to remind themselves that Selkie does not live in our world. In hers, the ecology of North American freshwater lakes may have superficial resemblances to ours, but in many respects it has to be quite different, and we’re bound to bump up against the differences a lot in these coming pages.
Your backing up to the fourth wall Sessine.
Maybe they just use multiple eels?
Or perhaps the Giant Eels of legend are real animals in the Selkieverse?
I used to think that Tanuki were completely fictional animals because I had only heard about the Japanese folklore version. Turns out they’re real animals: they just aren’t elf-like magical tricksters.
Sai Fen knows enough of them to sculpt them…
EOUSs? I don’t think they exist.
Well, that was bizarre…
<>
OK, I give up. sheeesh.
—Ed is immediately attacked by an EOUS coming out of the hot tub.—
It’s so cute how she’s translating for her dad :3
When I go to China I get the whole family translating for me. Sometimes the different stories match up, sometimes they don’t.
My family in China is completely awesome. It’s a lot of fun when a 12 year old is leading the old white guy around explaining what everything is…
ohh, eelskin is so delicate and soft though honestly I wouldn’t consider it a good material for making clothes, gloves and handbags maybe, If I wanted good clothes, I’d say stingray would be the better option, which I think feels so much better and more durable for making garments, either way they must be luxurious swimwear and clothing option underwater.
Sting ray leather is Tough stuff but is thin enough that for clothing it has to be backed by cow hide (similar to Reptile and bird leathers) My dad and great grandfather were both Cobblers, We also did a lot of leather jacket repair and things like that…
Alas for our Sarnothi friends, no stingrays (or sharks) in the Great Lakes. Eel is likely their only option for a leather source.
They do have sturgeon though, and I sort of wonder if that might make a decent leather option. Sturgeon do have a great deal in common with sharks despite being classified with the bony fish.
Eel leather. I wonder how soft that is?
lady O, Eel leather is delicately soft. like suede leather but so so much more fragile. love the feel of it as a trim but I do not find it practical for an entire garment or even a bag.
Cool. Thanks for the info. :3
I believe those eels grow a bit larger, than the ones, what Selkie catched in the river…
Wasn’t there a one-off of Selkie trying to ride an eel?
Nah, that was a sturgeon.
This is a bit off-topic but I’m wondering if we’ll learn the background/origins of the sarnothi in this chapter.
My theory is they’re aliens. The reason I think this is because when I took an African Art class in college, my professor told us about the Dogon people and their beliefs in the Nommo. She messed up the details a little but what she told us made me instantly think of Selkie.
The Dogon believed in the Nommo, alien fish-like beings who came to Earth and immediately went into the water since that is their natural environment. Overtime they gradually evolved to become more human looking.
When I heard this, I thought this might have partially been an influence on Dave’s creation of the Sarnothi. If they’re aliens it would explain why they have mammalian and fish characteristics. It would better explain why they aren’t tolerant of the cold despite living in a cold environment since it wouldn’t be their natural warm water environment. It would also explain any advanced technology and “magical” abilities they have.
Dave could also, if he wants to, put a distant group of Sarnothi in Africa and have them be the truth behind the Nommo in the Selkie Universe. Even without going the alien route, it could be cool to have another Sarnothi civilization.
In seriousness, I’m curious how the Sarnothi fit into the evolutionary tree. It would make sense for them to be relatively close to the primates, given their similarities, but they’d have had to be a fairly recent split (or one heck of a case of convergent evolution)…
Based on both similarities and differences, I’m leaning toward “artificial species”.
I remember Dave explaining that in his original draft the earth was pretty much like something out of Avatar (the kung fu one, not the cat people one), so sarnothi were the waterbenders, and you also had hawk people air benders, something fire benders and lastly earth benders – the last group evolved into present day humans.
Dunno how much of that if any still applies to the current story line though.
Oh God, that’s an old piece of trivia I’d mostly forgotten about. Good memory.
None of that is applicable to the current iteration of the story. But yeah in that discarded first draft of the story, the Sarnothi had the power to manipulate water at-will, a hidden sky city of bird-people could do the same with air, dragon-people living underground in tunnels that connected the world’s volcanos manipulated fire and lava, and Todd would have become the first human to re-discover the ability to manipulate rock and soil.
Stressing again, none of that is canon or applicable to things as they are now. It was just the first draft of the storyline. Unless I run out of ideas down the line. ;P
Damn, Todd manipulating rocks and soil would really be a plot that……rocks. 😉
I think you have another spectacular comic to draw sometime. I’d read it.
I almost feel like the leather guy is supposed to be a copy of the shoe guy.
Now if Selkie finds something she wants, *how* would Todd pay for it? I doubt they accept US credit cards, and cash would be very silly under water…
In Girl Scouts, we learned to make small disks out of clamshells, and bore holes through the center, thus making what we were told was “Indian money.” There’s actually a lot of cool currency that the world has used that would be fine underwater.
Of course, Todd would have to find a moneychanger….
Extra History did a great rundown of the different types of currency the world has used (including giant stone disks too heavy to be moved, which just change ownership and everybody remembers who owns what), and I fully recommend giving it a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nZkP2b-4vo
Douglas Adams mentions the Triganic Pu:
“The Triganic Pu is a unit of galactic currency, with an exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu. This is simple enough, but, since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.” — Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Question: Is Tensei written Left to right, or right to left? Just curious. 🙂
Those aren’t the only two options; there’s also back-and-forth like a cow plowing. And, of course, the Japanese use up-to-down, but read the lines from right to left, except if you write the letters across, in which case they read left to right ^_^
Chinese is essentially written in whatever. If the lines go up and down you go up and down. If the lines go horizontally it’s left to right or right to left depending on where the front cover of the book is. Same rule applies when you read vertically as to which line goes after which line.
Many times my wife will start reading something, get a couple lines in, and say “oh, wait”, flip the book over, and start again.
The only direction I haven’t seen is up, but I wouldn’t put it past them.
It’s like the Chinese like messing with people. I was told on my last trip there the Chinese can read Japanese just fine, but have no idea what they’re saying. It wouldn’t shock me if it turned out Japanese is the original Chinese and some Chinese language teacher just decided to change the sounds for the fun of it.
The Japanese language and Chinese languages are unrelated linguistically.
The Japanese did adopt Chinese writing about 1500 years ago, they had no writing system or concept of literacy before that. Modern Japanese writing makes use of three writing systems (well four if you include Romanized versions, aka transliterations using the western alphabet). Two of the writing scripts (Hiragana and Katakana) are phonetic and developed from very simplified versions of Chinese characters. The third writing script (Kanji) uses Chinese characters directly.
EXAMPLES:
Hiragana: ありがとうございます
Katakana: アメリカンドグ
Kanji:郵便局
In practice Japanese writing often contains a mixture of these three writing systems, as they are often used for different purposes. For example the following sentence:
私の出身はアメリカです。
My home country is America.
As a result many Chinese can comprehend a lot of things in Japanese because the characters have the same or similar meaning. The reverse is also true, if you know Japanese, you can sometimes understand the meaning of Chinese writing. The characters for “exit” for example are the same in both: 出口 (literally “opening to leave from”). However pronunciation is not the same in most cases. Japan took the characters but used them to write their own words.
Japanese and Chinese grammar and pronounciation are very very different however. Aside from an exchange of the odd word here or there (like sushi from Japan, or ramen from China) they are not at all related.
Being a 鬼佬 (caucasian) married to a Chinese with a big family and little hapa children, I can pretty much confirm absolutely that they are messing with us.
I’m imagining Fehn using a snooty British-accented Tensei.
A couple things bother me
1) The city is laid out WAY too two-dimensionally. When you’re aquatic that whole gravity thing is a lot less of a problem, and your travel isn’t limited to it.
2) Thermodynamics. We keep hearing about how cold-sensitive Selkie’s people are. It makes no sense. Their blood is in constant thermal equilibrium with cold water because of their gills. Either they have hell’s own metabolic rate to keep warm or they can survive a body temperature that would kill any mammal stone dead. Or the author didn’t think it through.
Not sure how you mean about the two-dimensional thing. Because it’s horizontally-constructed huts and small buildings?
The “cold sensitivity” is a bit misunderstood. They just try to avoid triggering hibernation dormancy.
Why lay out all the huts and small buildings on the sea floor? They could mount many of them on stilts and have a community that is much more compact, with shorter distances to swim. Also, if there are any dangers to the community, a sphere is easier to defend than a plane.
They also said the light poles are also heaters – so the whole area could be pretty warm depending on how hot they get, or it could be they make certain parts of the water in the lake warm and that circulates through the village. Gravity may not be a problem, but if this isn’t a super-deep lake, they wouldn’t want to build so close to the surface an everyday plane/drone camera/etc could see the buildings, so smaller and more spread out makes sense
Gravity may be less of an issue, but a surface upon which to build is still a thing. Saranothi can more easily move in 3 dimensions, but the ground is still the ground. Free floating buildings wouldn’t be much use when they start floating away. You could anchor them and let them float vertically but then you have to deal with currents, etc. if you want stable, consistently locatable buildings, constructing them on the lakebed is your best bet.
Just because something CAN be done doesn’t mean it HAS to be done or even SHOULD be done.
Travel might not be, but the surface you’re building on is essentially 2d. Now, if you were to build on the side of a canyon or something like that you could essentially build into the wall and have egress out the sides– but the lake floor is essentially flat.
In the Sarnoth capital city you have higher towers (as seen in Carrie’s and Benny’s memories) which wouldn’t necessarily need an internal structure or transport mechanism– you could simply pile the houses upwards and have doors on the outsides. That level of building hasn’t happened in Havei Jin’Suir.
With regard to the thermodynamics, what you effectively have is a creature that can survive/thrive under a much wider range of temperatures. This is true of most cold-blooded creatures.
Warm-blooded mammals must keep their temperature regulated within a few degrees of optimal or the body shuts down– Sarnothi aren’t trying to regulate a core temperature, they assume the temperature of the environment, which means as things get colder stuff slows down until you fall asleep in torpor.
why do i foresee Todd getting a full blown “Three-Piece-Suit” sunday best set of clothes from this guy… only to be told after he’s worn it around the office for a few times, that it was from forced-bred, caged up, mass-produced (if you can call it that) killed just after puberty eels? i seem to recall his stance on the chicken and cattle markets for fast food chains being somewhat non-favorable… i wonder what that would change in his mind for this purpose?
He still knows its sourced from eel, so if he is against wearing clothes made which require killing the animal (as opposed to say wool) it won’t matter to him the exact nature of the eel raising and skinning process, its all going to be outside his comfort zone.
Todd would probably be better off if the details of the leather acquisition were left un-translated. XD
Dave, would Todd be bothered by, say, leather shoes or a coat made of fur?
I don’t remember Todd’s reasons for his vegetarianism, just that he was pretty outspoken about it in the past.
Somebody never watched Waterworld