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Good to see you! I'm always pleased to be wrong about people being gone. ^_^

I hope you've been doing well in these tumultuous times. Have some fresh Canon Cookies! 🍪

~Neshomeh

Because, y'know, this thread was me plugging the new chapter of the story. A random recommendation like this feels like a bit of a weird non-sequitur.

Well... I never really left; I'm just a really chronic lurker.

As for Cyba, it basically boils down to a mix between the disguise generator accident, the Ironic Overpower and the fact that wearing red tends to attract trouble in the Trekverse (plus her being transformed into a member of a villain species). Sigma and Phi are drawn to different colours due to the imperfect mode of their creation - the canon was so bent they didn't even end up as proper clones.

Glad you're enjoying it by the way!

… which unfortunately [is in Japanese], but I don't think I've ever read a lovelier fluff oneshot in a while. It has everything I look for in a fluff: the pairing makes sense, the characters involved are relatively IC, overall tone is sweet but not saccharine, and it's shining proof that level-headed, dignified characters can believably engage in super cute fluffytimes. I often hold this fic up as an example when reviewing bad, cringy fluff fics.

Since her author isn't active anymore, that question that would be best answered by reading her previous stories, but the short answer is it's unclear. I know this because I looked up Cyba Zero on the wiki. You can, too! {= )

~Neshomeh

I just don't have the brain for it right now. Last week I gave up on reading David Eddings fantasy in favour of old X-wing novels, so that's about where I am.

I will read it, we promises, preciousss.

hS

I propose 90088.

Because Luxury would totally do this.

So, I've recently read that mission with Jack Russel, and it's hilarious! One question though-- why is the Cyba character obsessed with red? I'm a huge Trekkie, and I've never seen anything that indicates Borg having obsessions with colours. True, they use green lighting, but they don't seem entranced by green. So, why is Cyba like that?

There might be more than 26 of those. >.> The only Plants with known office numbers currently on the list of RCs are:

• The Antigravity Apple - -9.88
• The Kudzu Vine - Room C-1, Section 31
• The Aloe Vera - 73
• The Snowthorn (deceased) - 2500
• The Strangler Fig - 2817
• The Bonsai Monkey Puzzle Tree - 4444
• The Bonsai Mallorn - 7200

There may be others, though; the Marquis de Sod, for instance, has Office 221B, but it's not on the list for some reason. I think perhaps I'd better click through the Flowers category and see if I can catch any others that are missing before we think about trying to fill in any theoretical blanks. I was going to suggest that the Firstborn and/or heads of the earliest departments would be most likely to have alphabetical RC designations, but maybe not. {= /

(Two seconds later)

Oh, Hornbeam has an office number, too: 2659. Couple of holes in that theory, then. I'm going to be very grumpy if I find these numbers are doubled up because they somehow never got on the list.

~Neshomeh

Huh. That actually doesn't seem to be taken. 4.20 isn't, either. I'm shocked.

(For future reference, here's where to check.)

~Neshomeh

Shifuo? Yofuo? Yobuo?… _{(Well, not all strings of numbers make sense in goroawase)}

If that’s not already taken.

My Agents' home continuums are the Sharpe TV series and RWBY, though in-depth knowledge of either fandom is not required. If you're interested in beta-ing this request, please email me at dayerfe@gmail.com.

The three places I can think of that people are likely to come across this information say the following:

• Note: No agent since [Jay and Acacia] has a RC beginning with a letter, unless that letter stands for a number. (original list of RCs, LJ)

Specifies beginning with a letter, which does also imply that single letters are out without explicitly stating as much.

• You may not claim a letter—that's reserved for Jay and Acacia. (List of RCs page)

A fair reading does suggest a single letter alone, but could also be open to interpretation.

• Jay and Acacia's RC did not have a number, but rather the letter F. It is unique in this regard. (Response Center page, citing the LJ List of RCs)

A really pedantic reading of that might suggest that only the letter F is off-limits, with others being fair game. I might edit that, since I suspect I may have written it in the first place. >.>

Anyway, the most important source here is the first one, which tells us that no agent since Jay and Acacia has had an RC beginning with (or consisting of) a letter. But, how do we read "since"? In universe? Out of universe? Both?

Either way, I think Sean and Lux came along after J & A, so they're out.

But if we want to allow agents who joined the PPC before J & A in-universe, there are a few who would qualify: Makes-Things, Anya, Elisabeth, and Montgomery Osbert III. The last three were partners, so they'd probably share an RC; but that's two letters we could potentially assign if we want to.

Personally, I believe Makes-Things is the type to sleep on a cot in his lab, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have an RC to go to if he chose to...

What say others?

~Neshomeh

Honestly, I'm not a fan of that rule due to the fact that it only applies to one case; that's why I was trying to get Luxury in on it, too, just to make it feel like it was a rule worth having. But I'm happy to let Neshomeh work it out, since she's actually planning to use it soon.

—doctorlit

I read as many of the Legendary badfics as I could to initiate myself in (and ruined my childhood series). Not to mention, as a reader of fanfiction, I’ve stumbled on some really bad ones in Harry Potter and Redwall.

...I can tell you that with the Talmud, at least, people were taught to recite it and it was arranged in such a way that there were...context clues, essentially. Pieces that would connect one set of thoughts to another to make it easier to remember. Or at least, that's what I was told in school; I couldn't give you an example off the top of my head.

Also: it is extremely likely that many, many groups of scholars have sat down to discuss and argue the symbolism of not only 3761 but many other numbers. On an amusing tangent, the Talmud has a tendency to record different rabbis' opinions on a topic as though they might have been in conversation with each other; this despite the fact that said conversation was frequently happening over several hundred years! There's also (related) amusing phrasing in the original Aramaic that turns what's probably intended as "Rabbi X responded vehemently" into "Rabbi X came and attacked him, saying _____!" I think that's mostly used with contemporaries, but if I'm wrong, then that is delightful. Just imagine: Rabbi W gives his opinion in the year 400 CE. In 550 CE, along comes Rabbi X and attacks his opinion, and it's recorded as though they were sitting at the same table!

Apart from that: the rest is fascinating, and your snark has and continues to amuse me. (Also: writing 26 takes two pen strokes, what are you talking about :P)

~Z

I promise I was aware of this, I was just snarking. ^_~

On checking, Wikipedia claims Christian numerology actually had its start in Pythagorean philosophy! But it also barely makes passing mention of Jewish numerology at all, so I'll take it with a pinch of salt (NaCl, so 11-17, which spells out KQ - 'King Queen', refering to salt's position as the monarch of all minerals).

I would like to imagine that nobody actually uses words of the King James Bible to do their numerology, but you know they do...

I know it's a translation artefact, but I do love the image of a bunch of scholars sitting down and earnestly discussing the esoteric symbolism of the number -3761.

On the Oral Torah: obviously 'oral tradition gets written down' is a tale as old as, er, writing (see: Gilgamesh, Homer), but is Judaism the only case where long-term oral tradition was both written down, and still used as teachings, rather than stories? I know Islam has recorded oral tradition, but I think the hadiths were recorded fairly quickly. Similarly, the Christian Gospels weren't written 'live', but all come within 2-300 years of the events. The Jewish timespan is much longer than that.

... turns out a very brief check shows I'm wrong. Early Buddhism followed exactly this approach, and it looks like the Sikh Guru Granth Sahib may have elements of the same thing, though tweaked by being written by the human gurus personally, and by being not just a teaching but the official teacher and Guru of Sikhism (which remains one of my favourite facts). And, um, the Qu'ran was carried orally for centuries before it became economically viable to write it out much. It's still a fascinating trait, and not the least lessened by occuring more than once.

... I've just discovered that Catholicism claims it has an unwritten oral tradition which has been passed down continuously from Christ to present-day Bishops. That, um... seems unlikely.

I wonder if there's any actual data on the accuracy or otherwise of oral transmission of traditions? I know most cultures claim to do it perfectly, but it seems very hard to prove - and the ones who are most dedicated to the idea of getting it right are also the ones most likely to destroy evidence of getting it wrong. It would be nice to know if, for example, the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm go back centuries or are just 50 years older than the written form.

hS

(Surely Christianity doesn't have a monopoly on numeral-based systems of divination, though?)

It doesn't! Judaism most assuredly has its own version, and I'm quite sure other cultures do too. The Jewish version is, of course, based more on the Hebrew alphabet, and has different ideas about lucky numbers and so on. The simplest one to mention and explain is 18: the Hebrew letters representing it (there's a whole system for how to write numbers in Hebrew letters) are י"ח, yud and khet. Flip the letters, and you get the word חי, khai, which means life! So it's a very popular number, especially for things like charitable donations - you see things like High Holidays synagogue donation options being in multiples of 18, and I think I've seen the same for a Jewish high school. The minimum donation is often 18 (in whichever currency - I was about to add a dollar sign, but I expect just about any currency sign would be applicable).

Another is 3. A lot of basic Jewish concepts/tenets seem to come in threes, one of the most famous of which being...one I think we actually discussed once, since you knew a version of it as a choir song and it turned out to have changed the words! In rough translation: "the world relies [literally: "stands"] on three things: on Torah [either the study of it or the moral and ethical rules encompassed in both the Bible and all the writings and teachings that are based on it], on worship [literally "work", in this context meaning roughly "doing things that serve G-d"], and on gmilut khassadim, גמילות חסדים [generally translated, iirc, as...acts of loving-kindness? Dictionary says "charity, benevolence", which sounds about right]."

There are other things that come in threes, too - the main one coming to mind right now is a famous quote from the Mishna, in Pirkei Avot (uh... Chapters of the Fathers? Let me just. Look up the common translation. ...oh my gosh, it actually is translated as that. Alright, then! An alternate is Ethics of the Fathers, which I think is more familiar to me. The first is the literal translation, while the second more accurately describes both the contents and the fact that it's a part of the Mishna, which is a whole bunch of rabbinic Jewish ethics written down about as concisely as possible. Why concisely? Well, this was the Oral Torah, which wasn't supposed to be written down. However, there was a fear that it would be lost, and so Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi (Rabbi Judah the Prince) wrote it down rather sparingly. This is why we have the Talmud, actually: it's basically centuries' worth of interpretations of the Mishna, plus applications of it (theoretical and practical) and stories about the people debating about it all for good measure. Very, very interesting.

And I've been sidetracked. This is...I think the first teaching in Pirkei Avot, actually.

...it is not: it's the sixth. However, there are a couple of teachings before it which also come in threes!

1. Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in [the administration of] justice, raise many disciples and make a fence round the Torah.

2. Shimon the Righteous was one of the last of the men of the great assembly. He used to say: the world stands upon three things: the Torah, the Temple service, and the practice of acts of piety. (An alternate translation of the one I talked about before! I translated the second bit as "worship" rather than "Temple service" because that's what it's come to mean in the absence of the Temple; but the Mishna was codified much, much closer to the destruction of the Second Temple, so this translation makes sense in the original context, even though the concept had likely already expanded to service of G-d through prayer, ritual actions, and good deeds, given that's what rabbinic Judaism did - in the wake of the destruction, it took Judaism and reworked it into something that could be practiced anywhere in the world, by means of, primarily, finding ways to substitute prayer for Temple services [which made it more accessible both location-wise and across things like social class] and I think more or less setting up rabbis as perhaps a little more authoritative/leaders than they were when the priests were active, though they were already scholars and community leaders at the time of the destruction, as far as I know.)

3. Joshua ben Perahiah and Nittai the Arbelite received [the oral tradition] from them. Joshua ben Perahiah used to say: appoint for thyself a teacher, and acquire for thyself a companion and judge all men with the scale weighted in his favor. (Finally, the one I was looking for! Pretty self-explanatory: find a mentor, find a peer you can rely on, and don't let yourself be biased against others in judgement, but rather try to see the good in them. Or at least, that's one interpretation ;) I'm very, very sure there are others.)

There are a whole bunch more after this one that use the three things structure; I spotted two or three in the following five or so alone! I'll stop quoting here, though. All three quoted translations come from here: https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.1?lang=bi I'm not sure which English translation they're using, but it's a reputable site. They also give a little introduction:

Composed in Talmudic Israel (c.190 - c.230 CE). Avot (Fathers) belongs to the fourth order [section of the Mishna, and therefore also the Talmud, later on - I believe the Talmud dates to about 500-800 CE in terms of much of the writing and the final codification; it encompasses the ideas and dramatis personae of...I think it's five or so generations of scholars], Nezikin (The Order of Damages) and presents the laws of interactions between Jews and Gentiles and/or idolaters (from a Jewish perspective) [as well as some general ethics and laws/ideas about interactions between Jews and other Jews, or Jews and the world, as you've seen]. It has five chapters. -same page, drop down piece at the top.

Another quick thing to say about Hebrew numerology is, in perhaps a simpler form...the date! Today turns out to be, in the Hebrew/Jewish calendar (lunar-solar, has its own set of twelve months which are...mostly 29 days long, I think? Can't remember right now), ב׳ בשבט תשפ״א - in translation, the 2nd day of Shvat [/Shevat], 5781. Bet, ב, is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet and thus corresponds to the number 2 (11 is where the system starts pairing letters together instead of just continuing on down the alphabet. 15 suddenly switches from what's been, essentially, 10+x to 9+6, so as to avoid spelling out one version of G-d's name, which would mean the paper it's written on has to be buried instead of thrown away or destroyed in a normal way. 16 does the same, with the letters for 9 and 7, presumably because yud and vav, the letters for ten and six, are also used in the YHVH (yud hey vav hey) name in the Tanakh, though that's an educated guess - if anyone ever told me, I've long since forgotten. I don't even remember getting an explanation for 15, just that I memorized the change).

Anyway. Continuing on: Shvat, commonly anglicized as Shevat although the E is very much...swallowed, basically, in the Hebrew pronunciation, is the fifth month under the modern system (which takes Tishrei as the first month of the year, since it has Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, in it). In the ancient system, Nissan was the first month; that's when Passover is celebrated. It was the first month for a long time because it held the date of the Exodus from Egypt, and thus the (renewed) beginning of the Jewish people, though that's an anachronistic term in context (at that point, we're technically talking about Israelites). I don't remember why it was changed, or exactly when, though I expect Rosh Hashanah was a factor in the logic (there are actually...four, I think, new years as laid out in the Talmud! IIRC, there's the new year of the year itself, the new tax/financial year, the new agricultural year, and...hrm. Blanking on the fourth for now). Under the ancient system, Shvat would have been the...eleventh month? Yes, the eleventh month.

And then we get to 5781, תשפ"א. Uh. Basically, at this point we're getting into letters that stand for specific large numbers. I no longer really know this off the top of my head. I do remember that the last few letters of the alphabet correspond to numbers in the hundreds, though. פ, pey must be 80; א, aleph is the first letter of the alphabet and corresponds to 1. ש, shin, and ת, tav, are the final two letters of the alphabet (in that order). My memory claims they correspond to 300 and 400 respectively. If the currently surfacing vague memory that the 5,000 is added to the date through inside knowledge rather than written out is accurate, then this makes perfect sense - the letters here actually show 781, written as 400+300+80+1 (plus signs implied only). Add them together, and you've got 781! And then add in 5,000 years since...it must be the date of...Creation? Hrm. Yeah, seems it's 5,000 years since the date of Creation as calculated by Rabbi Yossi ben Halafta in the second century, CE: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/counting-the-years/ According to the article, [t]o this day, those Jews who believe the biblical accounting of time to be literal still accept Rabbi Yossi’s calculation, dating Creation to the year 3761 B.C.E. Others claim that the date is figurative, symbolic, or holds esoteric meaning. This makes a good deal of sense, considering both the varied interactions of Jews with science and modernity, and the fact that "two Jews, three opinions" is an idiom I keep ready to hand because it's extremely applicable. Either way, that's when we're counting from to get 5781 (which will last roughly from September 2020 to September 2021 - Tishrei falls in September/October, with an occasional few days landing in August).

And with that, I think I'm done for now. Sources: my education and degree, plus the couple that I linked. Hopefully that was both informative and interesting! :)

~Z

PS: As ever, I'm happy to discuss further when it comes to this or other religious/cultural topics, time and energy permitting :) ...er, very much not in a proselytizing sense: that's actively forbidden in Jewish religious law (halacha), and I stick to it. I just enjoy cultural exchange and delving back into different aspects of my field now and then. Presenting these concepts understandably to people who don't have the same background knowledge/context is an interesting challenge, too, and generally a useful thing to practice! Especially since my current job partially relies on being able to present information (mostly historical) to people who might well know nothing about it, or very, very little.

... is the best joke simply that Lux never gives out her real (RC) number, but always throws out a joke? 69, 'yours', '26' with a seductive eyelash-flutter and then an explanation in tones of "what do you mean you don't get it?".

Which would actually be kind of character-building: it would demonstrate that she does keep her work and play separate, she just... doesn't draw that line anywhere near where other people would.

Is she confirmed not to have a partner? If she might have one, my new theory is that she's aware they'd be uncomfortable if her... Luxishness impinged on their RC, so she keeps it firmly elsewhere.

hS

It is funny just like this, as a once-off joke. I laughed! I can 100% see Lux answering the question that way, too, and that would also be funny.

My point is it wouldn't be funny if we actually declared that the word "Yours" is Lux's RC number, because that wouldn't make sense even within the PPC's very forgiving bounds of logic (who exactly made that decision in-universe, and why?) and would therefore soon wear out its welcome.

"Not funny," pshhh.

~Neshomeh is totally not thinking about whether or not she can get away with stealing the joke for the aforementioned partly written story.

Which, surprisingly, is still online. I wonder whether "body of work" is an apt description, because there are only two (technically three) fics to her name: Hemione's Talent (which I believe is already reported to the wiki) and Karaoke night, two truly bizarre fics full of bad SPaG, OOC out the wazoo, HP characters' singing anachronistic American pop songs, and narmy drama. Here's a gem from the latter:

"Okay Harry shall be singing the following songs by the following artists, Bruno Mars The Lazy Song , Linkin Park New Divide, and finally Maroon 5 Harder To Breath. Harry when your ready."

Harry walked out on stage in his pj's and a t-shirt with slippers on.

Cockroaches?