It's nitpicking time! List your favorite safehold nits

Aivah shows up in Merlin's room unannounced having gotten past all the guards. Merlin can make the next step of logic, which is that if she can sneak into his room, others can, and if they can sneak into his room, they can get to the Royal Family as well. He's the Royal Family's bodyguard and they are not expendable.

Even with complete trust in Aivah, she's demonstrated a security hole.

Diagnosing and fixing that should have been a top priority and a plot point. Maybe it's in text we haven't seen yet.

Expert snuggler wrote:Aivah shows up in Merlin's room unannounced having gotten past all the guards. Merlin can make the next step of logic, which is that if she can sneak into his room, others can, and if they can sneak into his room, they can get to the Royal Family as well. He's the Royal Family's bodyguard and they are not expendable.

Even with complete trust in Aivah, she's demonstrated a security hole.

Diagnosing and fixing that should have been a top priority and a plot point. Maybe it's in text we haven't seen yet.

I think you are probably right on this one. However there could be more than meets the eye here. We still don't know how Nynian acquired her covert skills.

Don

Why isn't there a SNARC sensor watching Merlin's quarters?

BSRA - p. 199 (HB edition). Merlin is accompanying Staynair to the Monastery of Saint Zherneau and is musing on trying to be incognito. Merlin grumbles to himself that his eye color may give him away "He couldn't simply reprogram their color, but he could have used the fabrication unit in Nimue's Cave to make himself a nice brown pair of contacts to cover their "natural" color."

So.. a PICA can totally change hair color, facial features, add skin spots, change gender, but cannot change their eye color? That seems a bit... strange.

Why has nobody wondered why the Safehold day is 26 hours and an odd number of minutes long? Surely the "archangels" could have divided it into a whole number with simple prime factors like, say, 24?

Yeah, we know why - all their scientific knowledge is based on those Terra-derived units of time, distance and mass - but most people on Safehold don't know that. And have never wondered about it.

The planet is full of "near-this" and "false-that" and "pseudo-whatevers". Has nobody wondered what were the originals?

Using two words that sound almost identical for opposite sides of the ship is profoundly stupid. In the confusion of battle or dreadful weather, when it's most important to get it right, is when they are most likely to be misheard. There is a very good reason we abandoned the term "larboard" centuries ago.

Most navies' gunners are ordered to SHOOT at the enemy. FIRE means "Oh shit the ship is burning!"

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It's easy to quit drinking. I've done it lots of times!

The planet is full of "near-this" and "false-that" and "pseudo-whatevers". Has nobody wondered what were the originals?

This one bothered me for a while until I decided RFC was simply using a translation convention, and that all these have proper safeholdian names - but RFC didn't want to burden us with yet another strange set of names for what was functionally the same as something we already know.

JimHacker wrote:

This one bothered me for a while until I decided RFC was simply using a translation convention, and that all these have proper safeholdian names - but RFC didn't want to burden us with yet another strange set of names for what was functionally the same as something we already know.

Round these here parts we got this bird called a Fieldlark. Folks a fair distance away call it a Meadowlark, and if you click on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meadowlark you'll learn more'n you ever wanted to know 'bout 'em. As it happens, my dad didn't know it was a field lark. He just always thought of it as a Fielark. I figure as how them there folks on Safehold was always the same, and just thought about them Near-oaks as Nierokes.

~Tonto

Ealdgyth wrote:BSRA - p. 199 (HB edition). Merlin is accompanying Staynair to the Monastery of Saint Zherneau and is musing on trying to be incognito. Merlin grumbles to himself that his eye color may give him away "He couldn't simply reprogram their color, but he could have used the fabrication unit in Nimue's Cave to make himself a nice brown pair of contacts to cover their "natural" color."

So.. a PICA can totally change hair color, facial features, add skin spots, change gender, but cannot change their eye color? That seems a bit... strange.

Also it is wrong, he changes his eye color to brown with his AZ persona.

Why has nobody wondered why the Safehold day is 26 hours and an odd number of minutes long? Surely the "archangels" could have divided it into a whole number with simple prime factors like, say, 24?

On further reflection, I doubt they even thought about it. They just did what they always do - apply T-hours to the local day and live with whatever off-the-wall numbers you get. They never considered how inconsistent it might seem to people with no reference to the original T-day.
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At my house, the "things that go bump in the night" are cats.

Isilith wrote:

Ealdgyth wrote:BSRA - p. 199 (HB edition). Merlin is accompanying Staynair to the Monastery of Saint Zherneau and is musing on trying to be incognito. Merlin grumbles to himself that his eye color may give him away "He couldn't simply reprogram their color, but he could have used the fabrication unit in Nimue's Cave to make himself a nice brown pair of contacts to cover their "natural" color."

So.. a PICA can totally change hair color, facial features, add skin spots, change gender, but cannot change their eye color? That seems a bit... strange.

Also it is wrong, he changes his eye color to brown with his AZ persona.

Textev suggests without directly asserting that the eye color change is accomplished with a set of contact lenses.

Don