Watch, by next year this will be National Charlie Kirk Martyrdom Day. Maybe we can stuff some Nazis into the LHC.

Went to the office, ate a sandwich, did some work, read some news. Poor Coworker D was stuck on a customer call until well past his quitting time. I only had a couple hours of customer call.

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 4 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): More monsters, so many more monsters. Some can be defeated with Hime’s encyclopedic knowledge of the supernatural, but a chainsaw is still always handy.

Read (manga): Throw Away the Suit Together vol 3 (Keyyang): I guess I see the appeal of billionaire romances, since any story that involves job-hunting in the 21st century is guaranteed to be a downer, but at least they still have each other, so it probably counts as HEA?

Written (game design): 317:

Actually, lots of terms, if we’re going to have multiple kinds of
magic (whether distinguished by what it’s like to cast them, what
kind of effects they get, or both), and each needs at least what
its own practitioners call it and what everybody else calls it.
Which brings us back to the unresolved question from weeks ago,
“how does magic even?”.

There’s at least invoking the powers that be, and channeling your chi.
Turning your blood into flaming spears to fling at your enemies? Begging
the god of snails and sunsets and palindromes to give you a protective
shell? Letting the conjured phoenix out of the little cage you keep it
in? Breathing fire like the dragon you’re descended from? Growing spikes
like the mutant porcupine you ate the heart of? Monstering out by
drinking a mysterious potion? Calling up the spirits of the dead to drag
their shameful descendants to the grave?

How does necromancy (either D&D-style armies of undead, or OG divination
by spirits of the dead) work if souls get reprocessed? Are the parts
that know stuff or animate bodies reprocessed, or discarded back into
the environment, or what? What even is a soul? Egyptians had multi-part
souls, it’s not that much of a stretch.

For that matter, what is a spirit of the dead? Is that the same as
an individual ghost, or a more generalized vat of soul (which, not
being a physical substance, can be accessible everywhere)? There’s more
exciting friction (ie, the PCs are more boned) if you have to go where
somebody died to ask their spirit questions, but the Greeks did okay
with random locations and vats of blood, right?

And what’s an undead? I prefer the dead rising from their graves
to cause trouble as an omen of worse things to come over necromancers
calling up stupid shambling comic-relief zombies, but neither has
to be very common before cremation or sky burial or woodchipper has
always been everyone’s mandatory funeral custom. I guess if it’s rare
and there’s a very strong preference for burying intact bodies, maybe it
could still happen? Nothing horrible a PC can do is going to stay rare,
though. Some number of bodies get lost, though, so those could still
come back. Of course the bodies of wandering weirdos are most likely to
not get recovered, so maybe that’s another reason normal people don’t
like the touched. That gets us both headless horsemen and ghost ships,
which are vitally (hah) necessary part of undead stories.

I suppose bodies don’t need to get woodchipped to be safe from returning
from the dead if they have proper funeral rites. They could still be
animated as objects, though.