@yoshua171: Sure, feel free to consult me when you're not certain whether something or another would work, be it magic or something else - I suppose I'm perhaps around a bit more consistently*, and also during your daytime. My word obviously doesn't have the same weight as Jack's when it comes to the specifics or the world of the Prophecy more narrowly, but I've been around for a long time and if he's ever actually written the information down where I could see it, I can most probably recall it. If it was literally over five years ago, it may be a bit outdated, and if I don't know enough to as much as infer anything, we'd be waiting for him anyway, but that's that... In a sense, I'm pretty much like a sapient browser cache.
*Somewhat ironically, I am even more omnipresent when I'm working, as this effectively prevents me from leaving all computers alone for extended periods of time or immersing myself in something enough to neglect to patrol the places I frequent as I otherwise am wont to do. Granted, I tend to at least check up on most places on my cellphone when I am away from laptop-friendly places, but unless it's something that requires my immediate attention or can be answered in a sentence or two (which, knowing my general verbosity in text, isn't all that common occurrence), I am not too likely to respond in text from a touch-input device. Pocket-screens are good for reading things without getting out of bed and quickly checking something on the go, but not literary works.
Speaking of which, I'll probably never fully understand the phenomenon that is the popularity of tablet computers (their general cheapness left aside). Can't fit one in your pocket, which negates half the portability of cellphones, and they're still touch-input devices with all the flaws that has. (As a sidenote, I kind of wish they hadn't gone from pressure-sensitive screens to touch-sensitive screens ... especially in cold weather, where you might want to wear gloves, or in cases when you hands aren't all that conductive in general.) Could attach a more reasonable input device peripherally, but then you're left with a screen without a stand and/or not enough hands to hold everything and control things at the same time (whereas I'm reasonally capable of holding a laptop on my right arm and typing with my left while standing, never mind using a laptop as the name designates).
On a more random note, I don't think we're going to have thought to text any time soon. And *not* because the technology won't be here (hey, we kind of can get vague images out of people who envision things hard enough already). More simply because
human brains don't tend to work as such technology requires - conscious thoughts very rarely are one continuous, coherent stream of words. Brains get distracted, context-switch, get even more distracted, context-switch again, backtrack, think better of something that was already put down, context switch again... We'd probably have to raise a generation of people who exist in constant state of deep meditation
while also handling all daily tasks of life before thought-to-text will be easier to the average person than just typing. That, or we'd minimally need a competent enough AI for it to be capable of figuring out what would or wouldn't make sense ... and one or the other of previous conditions filled, there is still the issue of literally reading minds being now possible. Just imagine the possible social ramifications of that...
Hmm... Reading through the OoC posts, it seems rather strange that the effect of such kind of mind-control spell would be hard to determine on oneself. If you already know there has been *some* kind of mind-affecting magic at play, then it should, conversely, be exceedingly easy as long - or about as easy as answering questions like "How do I feel/what do I perceive?" and "Do those things make sense?" I'd say the spell would minimally either have to be sophisticated enough to
also cancel out the person's awareness and knowledge of self or, alternatively, it would have to be not a generic mind-affecting effect, but more specifically
thought-control.
Speaking of mind-control effects in general, I perhaps should send a PM later to discuss why the ailment/blessing from the Illusionist-confrontation occasion...
Re: Words and folklore things
Yeah... Danish and English are probably much more similar than Estonian and English - immediate self-correction: there is nothing "probably" about it, as English and Danish are factually far more closely related than Estonian is to either, my own observations left aside -, and as such it may be a bit harder to tell what has been recently "borrowed" and what has been there for a long time (as I noted being rather obvious with "devil" having a proper Estonian word for it and "demon" being a very glaringly un-Estonian borrowed word). - I personally do not like lending words into Estonain from English in general, and actively avoid lendwords whenever possible... The words simply do not fit, and more often than not are fairly unpleasant to listen to ... kind of as if the person is actually using random English words in their speech, and doing so with an absolutely
atrocious accent. It .. just doesn't sound good.
At all. I also assume at least part of why there aren't proper words for creatures like leprechauns is them not being an inherent part of the your culture, some variations on what a creature or another is was originally up to regional differences (also why I occasionally distinguish between Middle-, Southern-, Northern-
et cetera Estonian folklore), or - perhaps as a derivative of the latter - the Danish "troll" was not so much English "troll" as it was more simply some variation of - or at least closer in meaning to - "monster". If you try to assign the English word monster to any specific kind of being then you run into approximately the same "issue". (For some reason, I tend to associate "trolls" with Norway first and foremost, though as far as I'm aware they're prevalent throughout Scandinavian folklore - minus Finnish, but they're not really Scandinavian in other ways but by placement ... they do have evil witches, though, much more so than Estonians did, and northern Finland is more the Samic culture.)
"Little devil" sounds almost adorable, somehow ... also somehow feels like you have the definitions of "devil" and "demon" in reverse, as much as I've always seen imps defined as "minor demonic creatures" or just "minor demons" and often used interchangeably in stories. It's also interesting that you'd mention the LoTR series, as some creature labels and even people's names (such as Bilbo being "Baggins" in one book and "Paunaste" in another) have gone back and forth quite a bit. I personally prefer the "properly" Estonian variant ... mostly because otherwise either the words look weird and randomly untranslated or worse, they just happen to be Estonian words, but not
those Estonian words. Nothing detracts from the epicness of a tale like the main bad guys being a particularly angry set of toothpicks**...
**"Ork" is pretty much a sharpened stick. "Hambaork" is a toothpick. And "carnivorous squirrel" is "lihasööja orav". I
knew there was something important I was forgetting...