April 12th, 2019
12 Apr 2019 · page 890 of 1306
That's sad and all Will but Eliza has facts to share, which is her favourite thing
Cast: Dr Esther Flack, Eliza Swift, Vincent Knott, Will Sharpe
Comments (41)
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What was Mayor Hackett 's first name?
"Mayor"
So in this comic we've had a wizard that was a great natural talent but was bad with studying and schoolwork, we've had one that lacked natural talent but was a sturdy studyer. Now we have the perfect wizard, one who seems to suck at both.
Makes you wonder, are there actually any competent wizards in this world? Or are the rubbish ones just the only ones interesting enough to follow?!
[https://widdershinscomic.co...](https://widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/character-qa-march-2017 "https://widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/character-qa-march-2017")
Ben's brothers sound competent, at least from Ben's POV.
one brother, one sister! both devastatingly competent.
Oops my bad; I had never heard the name Bryony before and I think my mind mapped it to "Bryan"
Also, Dr. Flack seems plenty competent in the wizardry department; her morals and schemes, well, that's another matter...
Victor Cunningham?
Izzy's very competent; she's also self-taught, which may say something about the state of wizardly education.
I tend to think that the Widdershins University is too much about prestige and money, and second-rate wizard colleges might be actually better at real educating, with the staff more caring about students.
He has something they both lacked, self confidence.
-- RH
Rules out Yasmin Rana, as we'd initially suspected when we only saw the R. Perhaps Hackett is trying to use the method to rig the vote, but needs people to remain ignorant to it?
In other words, he's only guilty of plagiarism of a doctorate thesis paper.
Could the sentence be any worse than crime against magic?
Plagiarism generally gets you kicked out and disrespected, and maybe banned from practice - which, given his lack of ability, would probably be a good thing. His combination of confidence and inability is a recipe for disaster.
He could be killed, or worse, expelled.
So Flack didn't use the method (can we still call it Sharpening if he didn't invent it?) on him when she visited him in jail; she sneaked into his dormitory and did it while he was sleeping. Yikes.
Does Flacking sound good? :)
Yes. Yes, it does, and we do need a word. So if Sharpe was first Flacked at night while he was sleeping, what was the jail visit for, then? And how does he know she imbued him with Trust?
i just assumed hes clever enough to realize what roughly must have happened
That certainly explains why everyone they've encountered had the spell placed on them. It's seemed strange that literally *everybody* had been hit with this spell. Clearly Flack has been busy at night.
I've been meaning to ask, how do wizards manage to draw such perfect circles all the time? Not just the circle shapes themselves, but the shapes within them at the correct angles and everything. Is it just practice? I remember Mal didn't draw a great circle at first.
Thursday afternoon practicals for the entire first year. Magic circle drawing.
Well, the first year is just regular-circle drawing. The second year you actually do something with them.
So I was sort of right: Flack was the one who created the method, but Will was willingly involved to some extent. And he was deceived about what happened, just like Ben.
There are minor discrepancies between the previous glimpse of The Note and this one. The earlier view was signed with a single R, not two initials, RH... and the arrangement of words on the page is not the same... but I am not going to read too much into those differences. It's the same note.
The key question in my mind about the note is, what time is it NOW?
They left Will's cell shortly after midnight; talking to Eliza, making their way to the university, and climbing around in vents has probably used up several hours at least.
Another question is, does The Depths just refer to the underground part of the university, where they are now, or to a specific section of it? And if the latter, does Will know how to get there?
> The key question in my mind about the note is, what time is it NOW?
5 AM (and 5 minutes?) if you trust the wall clocks in the fourth panel there: [https://widdershinscomic.co...](https://widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/april-9th-2019 "https://widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/april-9th-2019")
Oh, well spotted! So there's a bit of time for more incidents before that 6 am meeting, if necessary, but not a whole lot.
I'd compliment Dr Flack on her many elegant dresses, but in this modern age it's probably a sacking offence.
Ouch. Does Dr Flack enjoy puns, I wonder. With that name she should be a publicity agent, not a secret plotter.
Oh, she saw something in you alright.
Took me a while to notice, but given the setting's time frame, that note ought to've been written in cursive. Possibly on the chalkboard too.
yeeeah i'm not re-learning cursive.
I would buy that it's become common practice for wizards to use print as it's more clear, and you really don't want to leave any hard to decipher words in magic instructions.
Print now is a quick fix for the general lack of penmanship. But it was a thing back then. So I'd not buy that at all, no
Speaking as someone old enough to remember... not this era, to be sure, but a period when cursive writing was still highly prized and taught in school... the set of people who had clear, legible handwriting did not overlap much with the set of people who went on to careers in, say... well, medicine? engineering?
The solution to notoriously-bad doctors' handwriting was to train pharmacists to decipher bad handwriting. But engineers were required to learn drafting. They were not allowed to use cursive writing on a blueprint. I can quite see that in a world that has included wizardry for many centuries, the extra safety provided by print could have made it mandatory for wizards.
And... bear with me here. Two more steps in the hypothesis... First: as a computer programmer who spent a lot of time writing letters and numbers into squares on a coding sheet, I can attest that a professional habit can transfer over into private life. Though I was taught good cursive writing, I don't use it. I print, even for casual notes.
But RH (probably) isn't a wizard. Even if a lot of wizards like to print all the time, why is this note printed? Well, now we get into the effects on society of having a group of powerful individuals not using cursive script in private life. For centuries!
What this could result in, is having cursive script fall out of fashion in the Widdershins universe, a long time before it did in ours. Ta-da! We now have a reason, not just for this note, but for ALL handwritten communications by now in this universe to be printed rather than cursive.
If you accept this chain of reasoning, then you can be undisturbed by the fact that Kate will not be re-learning cursive!
I'm pretty sure that by the time you learned to write typewriters and even ballpoint pens had been a thing for a while and many more people learned to read and write, so penmanship starts to fade out as a status symbol.
Engineers are supposed to produce standardised drawings legible by not-so-very-literate craftsmen so it makes sense to not only use print, but to make them use lettering guides to do it. You don't use lettering guides for casual writing. They might well use print for casual writing if that comes easier to them, depending on training. I don't know when lettering guides became a thing, but the USPTO has a "10 million patents" site with some early examples of patents typeset in a cursive script typeface(!).
But we're talking academics here, typically upper class people (who else can afford to get in?) in a time when penmanship, thereby legible cursive writing, is still very much a status symbol, besides academics spending much of their time writing to communicate their ideas rather than get an apothecary to put the right stuff in the mortar. All the apothecary needs is ingredients, amounts, and possibly method, so recipes have a rather limited vocabulary.
Besides, [apparently](https://www.bmj.com/content/313/7072/1657 "https://www.bmj.com/content/313/7072/1657") docters don't have that much worse handwriting than others, when reasonably well-rested as opposed after spending too many hours writing jargon indecipherable to outsiders. (Unrelated aside: On top of their other crimes, disqus fucked up their platform seriously bad on the topic of copy/pasting links, perhaps copy/pasting in general.)
Academics, though, don't just scribble: They put their thoughts on paper and actually want at least their peers to be able to read that. Cursive, with the right training, is exactly intended to do that at higher speed and so higher volume than print, certainly given the quills and dip pens of the time. So their professional habits would hardly have been to use print.
Besides, I'd learned cursive too, but only recently I found out I've been taught all wrong. This appears to've been a feature of schooling since at least the sixties, possibly earlier. You're not supposed to write from the wrist, but from the arm. That takes a bit of training but once you can do it, you can get nicer, more legible results, faster. Using cursive, not print.
It's not my comic so not my call, but I think your argument falls a bit flat, given the customs and available technology of the time. "Magic" won't do it. A better pen and somehow different social relationships might.
My mother was taught 'arm movement' cursive in the 1920s. I wasn't taught arm movement in the 1950s but was taught cursive because printing was babyish. I suspect arm movement was lost when almost everyone began using typewriters and authors began making fun of characters by saying they had clear "childish" handwriting. Nurses, on the other hand, are still taught clear handwriting because they don't have the status of doctors to get away with illegibility. Maybe "RH" is lower-status - hence his conniving at something with Flack, to get ahead - so he has the habit of printing.
Not my comic either, but I have noticed that the Widdershins universe differs from our own at that period in a number of ways, including different social relationships. It is an observable fact that the writer of the note and Eliza writing on the chalkboard both chose to print. It is also an observable fact that women have much more power in society there than they did here, and the Widdershins attitude towards the LGBTQ spectrum is entirely different. If you want to sum up Widdershins in a phrase, it would be, "Victorian* England, but better," where better is entirely defined by one Kate Ashton. In Kate Ashton's view, it seems, "better" includes the tiny detail that nobody writes cursive. Maybe they never did! I like your idea of a better pen. Maybe nobody ever invented cursive in the first place... maybe magic was there first, providing swift-pens that (for the wealthy) printed lettering smoothly and legibly across the page, never once snagging, scratching, or splattering.
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* Technically she isn't Queen yet, but mumble mumble handwave thingie anyway, y'know?Still feels Victorian. And spinning retcons is fun!