Correction: I had seen those spells, but not read them (as much as it did not feel relevant at the time and I was preoccupied).
Should I push it up to the Compendium site, too when I get to it? (Think I've not updated the IC archive a while, too, though I do have the HTML copies sitting around.)

And heh... I generally used to draw during boring lessons. (I did not own a laptop before university, so it's not like I could've brought one with me ... in university I pretty much switched to doing homework or proper work at lectures.) That was pretty much the only way I could obtain that info, since otherwise, I admit, I generally just fell asleep... (And the human brain has a tendency to not store things experienced during sleep properly into long-term memory, which is why people often have hard time recalling sleep-type dreams fully, as well as any times they woke briefly during the night. Technically, your hearing and other senses will work as usual during dreams. As I've said before, being asleep is nothing like being unconscious.)
The brain also tends to have some kind of ... optimal level of being occupied, I suppose.
(Also, muscle-memory can be dangerous. I've seen a person utterly forget their bank pin because they accidentally consciously thought over it after having relied on their muscle-memory for years...)

It's for that same reason that I've always tended to look somewhat skeptically at people claiming (very confidently, too) that one can only think of one thing at the time.

I'd reckon they specifically mean the conscious focus (or having your attention consciously be on something) when they speak of thinking, rather than, well, the general processing of info and analysis. In that they might not be too far off (depending a bit on the individual). If they mean general processing? Then they're objectively wrong.
Like noted before, subconscious processing will happily not only take over the more mechanical tasks, but often also complex analysis. Ever had it occur that a solution to something or a new approach to try or idea to insert in relation to something you've been working on just suddenly pops into your head even when you haven't been actively thinking on it? Yeah.
In conclusion, it really depends on what your definition of "think" is - is it having the focus of your conscious attention on something, or is it all (higher complex) analysis taking place within your mind? (Question is not fully rhetorical; for the sake of context, I'm actually curious. In turn, you should perhaps ask what they mean when they say "think" the next time a similar statement pops up...)

As for me, then I can listen to music in my head all I want, but much like visualization or hearing speech, it does require at least a measure of (semi-)conscious attention to uphold, so it won't exactly occur randomly. (I think the only times some piece of music has succeeded to annoy me would be when I couldn't immediately recall where those were from.) Similarly, I'd have to intentionally unravel a musical piece in my mind to hear only some persistent part of it, like only a few instruments or the vocals (since I often don't pay too much attention to vocals while casually listening, it might actually take me listening to the entire song in my head to figure out what the vocals are in the first place ... I've discovered that a couple of the few non-instrumentals in my main playlist actually have pretty weird messages after having listened them for a while and for whatever reason, suddenly deciding to pay attention or think over them).
I most commonly listen to music while working, actually, though I suppose for me it's mostly to start myself off (I actually tend to phase the music out once I'm focused on what I'm doing). I tend to be fairly good at phasing distractions around me out when I'm intently focusing on something in general, save for when someone, say, calls out my name or opts to stand by my table and look at me, which will cause whatever part of my subconsciousness deals with monitoring surroundings poke at me so I can go "Ah, what?" and consciously catch up on what happened. Of course, if I happen to be together with people who have taken it upon themselves to bother me in a way that actually demands I focus on them a bit, it can be rather disruptive and annoying...
I do occasionally take breaks on my own volition, though (well ... I am now, among other things), but I generally place those after some logical chunk or piece of work.

I occasionally also listen music for the sake of listening to it... I also tend to differentiate between music depending on context. A lot of it may fit a scene, but isn't really what I would listen on its own. Likewise, very little on my main playlist (which is a combination of what I'd term "listening-music" and what is the, eh, "working-music" - the first is generally a bit more varied and less uniform, I suppose? "Working-music" might be better off not particularly distracting, you see...) is what I'd term relaxing, since given my main uses for it, becoming more relaxed is actually heavily counterproductive. Worse would be music which induces feelings akin to melancholy... Curiously enough, a fair amount of those things people on Youtube like to label "inspirational" are crushingly melancholic. (Not all of them, obviously.)
Granted, a couple of titles tend to induce slightly melancholic feelings purely by association (such as the end titles of a couple of old games).
Incidentally, if I do listen to music while writing (I only sometimes do), then it's typically just my usual working/listening-music, and not anything that would set the mood (with rare exceptions - I actually idly tried to assign titles to the FDRR factions at one point), so chances are it's probably situationally inappropriate...

As a sidenote, I also recalled an article about how certain environmental elements tend to affect people's ability to remember what they were going to do. Entering a new room and even simply just going through a doorframe were a big one...

EDIT: I reckon you somehow messed up a couple of tags somewhere in there. Or it doesn't like the brackets you have around the words at some place. The front-end style-coding of this site is anything but robust.

See:
Test
[b][i]Test[/b][/i]
(Just swapping the closing tags breaks it...)

HAH! Well, who would've thought it... swapping the closing tags on that particular header actually fixed the entire formatting issue. That's interesting... and slightly dismaying, to be honest, that such a relatively minor detail could cause a runaway error like that, though I guess that's just how coding is wont to work.

You might as well put the spells on the Compendium if you've got the time, sure; at least that way they won't be lost if something stupid happens. (I tend to only really backup important things, and actually saved quite a bit, including my entire Documents-folder, before the reformat. The problem was that I'd forgotten that I had had to reinstall Windows when I got my new motherboard, and so all of my older documents were, in fact, stored in the "windows.old" version of the documents-folder... which I did not remember to save. Needless to say, a LOT of old documents were lost to that bit of thoughtlessness, including the rough original document for the Compendium itself and the original Prophecy of the Withering-document (though the latter is important enough that I've made backups of it three or four different places, including a certain Dropbox-folder). I also lost several roleplay OPs and character sheets and -posts for other RPs (moved the Prophecy posts to the real documents-folder), a bunch of unfinished stories... crap. Oh well, spilled milk and all that.)

EDIT: On the subject of music, I've given it some thought, and I figure that the reason that I tend to replay incomplete versions of songs in my head is that I don't remember the songs as much as I try to reconstruct it from what memory I have.

@Rhaevnn Xeno?

Derp. Thought Merc was going before me, for whatever reason. Have post up asap (tomorrow at the latest).

@Mercinus3 next on the Drunken Dove?

@Mercinus3 next on the Drunken Dove?

Yup, I'll get a post up ASAP.

M3

That's interesting... and slightly dismaying, to be honest, that such a relatively minor detail could cause a runaway error like that, though I guess that's just how coding is wont to work.

The robustness of code depends mostly on what type of code it is... HTML, which BBCode is based on (BBCode is basically like extremely simplified and restricted HTML), is actually incredibly robust, which makes it especially odd that the BBCode parser here is as finicky. HTML ... if you're fine with the formatting applying till the page ends or when anything overrides it, nothing happens if you outright neglect the closing tags ... it won't care about nonsense in tags, multiple closing tags, tags which span multiple included files, closing tags before opening tags, indefinite amount of nesting, replicate object IDs ... it will work. It won't necessarily always do what you wanted, but it'll work, and not even grumble at you.
XHTML will yell at you, but few actually like XHTML. Also, please don't actually abuse HTML, for the sake of your own and everyone else's sanity... Because you can doesn't mean you should, but you should be permitted to regardless, especially with things like markup languages. It's not like you even can, say, write onto a memory segment that belongs to something else and break everything with those...)
- These types of things aren't generally called 'runaway' errors, by the way... Runaway errors are something pretty much endemic to TeX.

(DropBox is fairly reliable when it comes to backuping things like text documents in general ... the chance of both the cloud and whatever local devices sync with it failing at the same time is low.
For future instances - deleting files only unlists them - if nothing has been written on the same segment since, they're still there (the table which says where things are just no longer has an entry for them; if you go and tell the computer to read the "empty" areas, you'll still pick whatever's there up). Reformatting likewise only unlists the files. There's a fair amount of free software for recovering from those kinds of errors.)

I figure that the reason that I tend to replay incomplete versions of songs in my head is that I don't remember the songs as much as I try to reconstruct it from what memory I have.

It was not so much the incompleteness as such which caught my attention, but rather how the songs are incomplete. As far as I know, if people only remember a part of a title, it's more commonly a vertical segment of it (and generally a more distinctive segment) - say, the chorus, or the opening, or some particularly powerful bit -, rather than a horizontal layer of it as what you wrote seemed to imply (like only the guitar, or only the vocals). To me, this implies that your brain interprets the music as consisting of separate components that just happen to be simultaneous as opposed to it being a whole ... or, well, rather does it more than the brain of the average person, as much as some distinguishing happens with everyone.
(In some cases, such filtering can be useful... Such as I know speech in particular is frequently separated from other background, presumably because it has a much higher chance of being important information than, for example, the exact pattern of the moderate gusts of wind disturbing nearby trees. ...Now when I think of it, it might also have to do with why I seem to have a strong preference for pure instrumentals and titles in which voice is used as an instrument, as opposed to ones with strongly distinct spoken vocals ... I think I've mentioned I somehow seem to find vocals distracting in a different way than any instrumental can manage ... eh.)

- And just in case you forgot: what is it you generally mean when you refer to thinking?

Heh, somehow I didn't notice the question at the end of your post until now. Eh... well, it would depend on the context, really, but in regards to the "thinking" referred to in regards to "can only think of one thing at the time", I guess my definition would be along the lines of... "can only run one process at the time" or "can only follow one train of thought at the time without consciously switching between them", though I'm not even entirely sure how I feel about the latter. I guess when I say "think about *blank*", I mean "process *blank*".
So I guess by my definition, thinking can be a is all complex analysis.

And I got what you meant in regards to the way I recall/hear music, and that is what I meant. I, uh, apparently work in horizontal layers? I also very rarely have any trouble separating one sound from another (unless one is significantly louder than the other to the point where I actually have trouble hearing the one I want to separate) and am practically never distracted by sound per se. The only time multiple sounds can really start to confuse me is if there are multiple layers of sound that I feel like I should pay conscious attention to (most notably, if multiple people speak to me at once; I actually find it particularly confusing and downright disorienting when that happens). When I listen to music in real-time I have no problems shifting my focus from one layer - the vocals, for instance - to another - like a particular instrument - and sort of "fade out" the rest.
When I still played Battlefield I remember usually doing pretty well, because even with a cacophony explosions and gunfire everywhere, I still never had trouble registering footfalls beneath it, which in turn meant that no one could manage to sneak up on me (unless they were actually sneaking, but everyone sprints in Battlefield). So I guess I just naturally separate sounds into layers? Heh.

A note to those people working with Iridiel and Domhnall; I will be focusing my posting energies on a post that is set before Aemoten and his party arrive and find Iridiel and her little group. It breaks the flow slightly, but it will explain why Iridiel is so recalcitrant currently.

@cthulu Hey Nessa, doesn't Thaler have anything to add on what's going on IC?

@cthuluNessa?

Bah sorry guys exam season snuck up and for some reason this end I stopped getting e-mails when this updated!!! ;-;

It's quite all right, though I was getting worried for you; it's been a while since I've heard from you, after all. I'm glad that you're still around.

@cthulu: ...Did the new forum ever send e-mail notifications? I thought it was a feature that died with the old vBulletin site, and hasn't been reimplemented yet (might remind the site owner about it, since I tend to feature in the dev thread anyway).
Good to know life hasn't completely eaten you yet, in any case!

(What are you studying, by the way, if you don't mind me asking?)

Uh...?

*Lifts head* Oro?

I'm still here! Just waiting for Merc to post. :P

Thank you for reacting, yoshua and Rhaevnn, but eh, yeah, as you realize yourselves you can't really do anything. I'm just quite worried with how long it's been with activity in the RP being so low... Nessa just posted, and I know that Shien is waiting for @Legion X51 to post before she can, which stalls things in that scene. And I know that @Mercinus3 is busy with his stuff, but eh... yeah, he said he was going to post "ASAP" more than two months ago, which stalls that scene... And naturally @Ashgan has his turn up in his scene, as well.

Eh, all in all I'm just worried for the RP, and (no offense to you for writing it, of course) only become more so when I notice status-messages of the players denoting that they have gone too long without being excited for an RP. Hell, The Prophecy has been practically standing still for two months, aside from a few posts from myself, Nessa and Shien; I wouldn't even blame people for losing their passion for the RP at such an unforgivably slow pace. I just don't know what to do about it...
So yeah, in summary I'm worried.

It has also been recommended to me that, once the main group reaches Zerul City (at current pace, sometime in the early 2020'ies), an effort is made to try to recruit some additional players for the RP... a recruitment thread and possibly (was suggested, still debating with myself whether it would be an advisable course of action) the reposting of the RP itself to make its age and length less apparent and imposing to new players (not that the age reflected on this thread is an accurate portrayal of the true age of the RP. How old is it by now? Must be about seven or eight years...

Thank you for reacting, yoshua and Rhaevnn, but eh, yeah, as you realize yourselves you can't really do anything. I'm just quite worried with how long it's been with activity in the RP being so low... Nessa just posted, and I know that Shien is waiting for @Legion X51 to post before she can, which stalls things in that scene. And I know that @Mercinus3 is busy with his stuff, but eh... yeah, he said he was going to post "ASAP" more than two months ago, which stalls that scene... And naturally @Ashgan has his turn up in his scene, as well.

Eh, all in all I'm just worried for the RP, and (no offense to you for writing it, of course) only become more so when I notice status-messages of the players denoting that they have gone too long without being excited for an RP. Hell, The Prophecy has been practically standing still for two months, aside from a few posts from myself, Nessa and Shien; I wouldn't even blame people for losing their passion for the RP at such an unforgivably slow pace. I just don't know what to do about it...
So yeah, in summary I'm worried.

It has also been recommended to me that, once the main group reaches Zerul City (at current pace, sometime in the early 2020'ies), an effort is made to try to recruit some additional players for the RP... a recruitment thread and possibly (was suggested, still debating with myself whether it would be an advisable course of action) the reposting of the RP itself to make its age and length less apparent and imposing to new players (not that the age reflected on this thread is an accurate portrayal of the true age of the RP. How old is it by now? Must be about seven or eight years...

Ah, so you saw that status and got worried. Hmmm, see that's not so much relate to The Prophecy. The world of The Prophecy and the interactions between the characters interest me greatly. While the pace can be a bane to "excitement," it's not at all the reason for that post. I enjoy this RP and I have no intention of dropping it. If things tappered off as you are worried that they may be, I'd be on board if you even had to reboot it. I like the world and the possibilities it presents far too much to abandon this.

Plus, I still have my character Ilitas on my mind from time to time.

Just, I'd like to explain that that status and my excitement aren't entirely related to my enjoyment and my ability to write and my desire to stay in something--in this case this RP.

My "excitement," is something that occurs pretty much only when there's a large-ish group of players/characters in a certain level of proximity, or at least able to affect one another (if only through expanding ripples through the world caused by their actions) despite the distance between them. Additionally, excitement for me tends to be made by the player to player OOC interactions when discussing the RP and the world and what they want to do in the future. Schemes, lore ideas, plotlines, hypotheticals, stuff like that. In my experience these conversations most engage (and excite) me when they're in an IRC environment.

There are probably a few other things that contribute to my excitement, such as being able to contribute to the world at large (be it through lore, or exploration, or some other method I can't immediately bring to mind). Anywho, my experience with the Prophecy, especially since I'on came into contact with other characters, be they your NPCs, or people's player characters such as Ixion and Morgan, I've found that I am gradually enjoying the experience more and more. It's also amazing to be surrounded by so many fantastic writer's and brilliant inventive/creative minds :)

So yeah. Don't you worry about my excitement for it is a fickle beast. The greater the amount of time that I RP the less I see that powerful inspiration/excitement. It's exceptionally difficult for me to get excited at this point. Instead I amuse myself and wrap myself in a world and the characters therein, which supplants that "excitement," and still allows a great deal of enjoyment even if it doesn't rouse the deepest parts of my creative being--if I may be a tad over-dramatic and poetic haha.

So yeah...that.

Man I am really bad at ending OOC posts....

The ending is always so awkward. Perhaps I rant/freewrite too much when I do this? I don't know.

I'm going to stop now.

Uh...?

*Lifts head* Oro?

Thank you for reacting, yoshua and Rhaevnn, but eh, yeah, as you realize yourselves you can't really do anything. I'm just quite worried with how long it's been with activity in the RP being so low... Nessa just posted, and I know that Shien is waiting for @Legion X51 to post before she can, which stalls things in that scene. And I know that @Mercinus3 is busy with his stuff, but eh... yeah, he said he was going to post "ASAP" more than two months ago, which stalls that scene... And naturally @Ashgan has his turn up in his scene, as well.

I full heartedly apologize for such a delay. I should have said something in the meantime to let you guys know that I had been busy, but even then the two months since the ASAP is not excusable on my part.

However, on a good note, I should be finishing the academic year within the next couple of weeks, so situations like this should not happen again. If it does, Shien has my permission to seek and slap me with whatever fish is suitable.

M3

Just to be clear so that we don't end up in the by-now cliché situation where everyone is waiting for someone else, who's next in the Drunken Dove?

Curiously, I've also caught myself pondering just what kind of fish would be suitable for slapping a person with... and quite frankly where the expression comes from; I've used it in several different variations myself over the years, but never realized it was something other people actually used as well.
A flounder, probably... seems suitable for slapping with. Like a flyswatter in fish-form, minus the handle.