Annotated 8-2
Those kids have no idea how much they’re tempting fate just by going after Gravedust, after what happened to Sting.
I think the legibility of Syr’Nj’s writing may vary with your age: I’m old enough that hasty cursive was part of my formal education, but my younger brother started on keyboards when he was in first grade.
It’s unclear whether this letter ever reached Naror’Nj. After all (spoiler?), Syr’Nj and most of the Peacemakers will indeed be missing in action for a while after this, long enough for Bandit to recruit some replacements, but Naror’Nj doesn’t seem surprised when she turns up alive on his doorstep some chapters later. I think Ardaic would deal honestly with Syr’Nj about forwarding her mail, at least, even if he’s not overly fond of her yet. But he’s not the only link in the chain.
Maybe the Gastonian mail carriers decided to “lose” her letter rather than risk contact with a hostile nation, or maybe Naror’Nj did get the letter but simply decided his daughter was alive and on her way back home, resigning himself to wait until events proved him right or not. If it was the latter case, then he would not be the only family of an MIA case to cling to hope and denial in that way.
(Looked for “I know what I’m doing with my life” memes to go with this image. Didn’t find any.)
Alt-text didn’t make it to the annotated version.
Fixing that now!
Yeah, about cursive…
LOL!
How to summon a cumsprite.
You forgot another factor of age when considering the legibility of this.
I, too, am old enough to have been taught cursive, but… I had to extrapolate a lot after squinting mightily at this.
I feel you. My eyes are heading in that direction as well. I had to squint a bit myself.
I had very little problems with it, but that may be because it’s more legible than my own handwriting. :-)
I am just barely old enough that cursive was part of my informal education from my parents when I was a child. I rarely if ever use it, in part because I have too much experience in graphic design to have any love for sloppy handwriting – and that’s how I learned to write cursive, sloppily. I’ve never seen a need to develop it, even though I have developed several fonts.
Regardless, I also have some years of experience in data entry, and let me tell you, I’ve seen some pretty bad handwriting, but trying to make out “seen” in panel two, as well as several other words (“consumed”, as well as any that contain an “s” or “n”) was a struggle and a half – partly because I had to squint and lean in to read it.
So, in the spirit of perhaps helping others, here is a rule to remember if you’re going to write in it: the legibility of cursive can be seriously hampered by text scaling – especially if some characters seem too similar to others.
I learned cursive in school at around ten years old. Copied the textbook style exactly, because that’s how I did things. Some time later, a classmate said she couldn’t read my handwriting, and I was flabbergasted. I didn’t say anything, because that’s how I did things, but I thought to myself “how can you not read it we learned cursive from the exact same textbook and my style is completely impersonal it’s as plain as it could possibly be unlike everyone else I’m not deviating from the standard style at all!”
Years passed, I began to gradually personalize my cursive style, developing ways to write both faster and neater. I felt that I had it figured out.
I don’t remember exactly when, but probably when I was between 18 and 20. I kept making small improvements on my cursive, and I began to realize that the improvements were slowly turning my cursive into… not cursive.
I realized that my handwriting was faster, neater and more legible when I didn’t write in cursive. I remembered that I had never liked the original style I copied from that textbook years earlier. The Vs and Ws and Ys were weird, the ligatures were ugly, and writing them had always been an added effort, not a natural consequence of writing efficiently. I hadn’t been writing in cursive for nearly a decade because it made things easier or because it looked better, but because I had been told to do it. Because that’s how I did things.
Ridding myself of cursive was one of the most liberating things I’ve done. The only time I use it nowadays is when I write my signature, and it’s faster that way only because I’ve slowly come to accept that signatures don’t have to be legible. ^_^
The reason to use cursive is that quills or fountain pens tend to drip when you lift them from the page. So you really, really want to minimize that lest you end up with black speckles all over what you’re writing.
Modern pens don’t drip, so there’s no reason not to remove all the extraneous lines.
Oh, and the cursive taught in writing classes is modeled after someone with really bad handwriting. (Probably because lots of old documents were written by people with bad handwriting and so everyone assumes it’s supposed to look that way…) That definitely does not help.
That’s because no meme-er knows what they’re doing with their life
Do wood-elves have ent-like patience?
Seems like watching the plants grow would sort of require having the long-term firmly in mind.
If they’re any longer lived, probably better patience than humans.