I like “Glass-Walker” a lot, but I feel I should stick up for pretty, pink, pony-like things in general, for they are also fine and excellent!
I like Glass-walker a lot. Some of us, the older ones in the crowd, might find a bit of interest in the reference to White Wolf’s werewolves as well.
I love how you’re totally in favor of gender neutral language provided the words, or the things they remind you of, are all sufficiently masculine :P
Anyway, Glass-Walker is also cool. We have some good choices.
edited by Anne Auclair on 6/24/2016
Could references to “walking” and “dancing” be considered insensitive to serpents?
I hope so.
[color=#e53e00]looms meaningfully
Discussion is good. Discuss nice.
Edit: In case unclear - the tone’s starting to get a bit snippy, I can see this descending. [/color]
edited by babelfishwars on 6/24/2016
If you hadn’t posted, I was about to. Better to drop it than to encounter an impassable and ugly difference of opinion.
Kay, sorry about the snark.
Glassmeister sounds nice and Neathy (Unterzee anyone?). Glasswalker is literally what you do to achieve that profession, walk through and behind the mirrors to uncover the wreathing river. Glassdancer is a more poetic version of walker - I like it for the connotations of moving lightly or skipping between worlds. But otherwise there really isn’t that much difference between these three, I think. They all announce you’re working with the mirrors/Parabola and do so without the gender problem that Glassman has and without the class problems that glazier has.
edited by Anne Auclair on 6/24/2016
Glazier or Glass-Walker would be my choices if it can’t be Glassman anymore. Preferably Glazier. Why Glazier? Because it wouldn’t be the first career to take on a warped meaning in the Neath. In this case not only dealing with Glass but with the things behind it.
It’s not exactly clear what Glassmen do beyond "something involving Parabola." Maybe they’re involved in the mirror or glass trade as well. It also grants a rather mundane cover for a position I think certain elements would frown upon.
edited by TeslaWalker on 6/25/2016
The problem with glassdancer and glasswalker, in my opinion (and I prefer the former to the latter, so go figure), is that they evoke Lord Dunsany rather than Jules Verne. They’re too fantastic. Something a bit more scientific might be more in the spirit of the age (the age that gave us the Crystal Palace and all the wonders of the modern age).
Maybe something combining vitreous (of or relating to glass) or crystallic with the suffix -naut, or -mancer. Vitreonaut? Crystallmancer?
edited by Frederick Metzengerstein on 6/25/2016
Another root we could use is speculum, literally mirror, whixh often appeared in the titles of medieval books. Since the word is Romantic, perhaps the French -eur ending – say speculeur?
Regrettably that wouldn’t really help the situation, since -eur is a masculine ending (you change adjectives ending -eur to -euse or -trice in most cases, so chanteur is a male singer, chanteuse a female one). You’d still be saying ‘glassman’.
Also, not to make fun, but calling anything a speculum tends to lead to some fairly predictable jokes.
Thank you Mairead, I was having trouble pointing out that last bit but it’s kind of hard to get over.
-naut conflicts with the next tier, the as yet unavailable Oneironaut, and -mancer feels too D&D.
The understatedness of Glazier is pretty good, and Glasswalker and Glassdancer both have this slightly whimsical feel to them that seems appropriate for dealing with Parabola.
[quote=aegisaglow]Has anyone tried to use a Page from the Liber Visionis since the cameo change went live, by the way? Want to know if it works and lets you choose any cameo now or not.
edit: If anyone else was curious, it appears to work–I used it, and when I go to my "Change my Cameo" page it said "You have an opportunity to change your face. Choose your new face below" with all the cameos beneath it. I haven’t actually done it yet because I’m super indecisive, but it’s nice to have the opportunity.
edited by aegisaglow on 6/22/2016[/quote]
Also, quoting myself from a few pages ago, can confirm I was able to switch from a formerly gender-unspecified-exclusive cameo option to a formerly female-exclusive option. (Specifically, from the tomb-colonist to the one with the goggles that look sort of like a furnace grill to me, because I realized I’m always wearing goggles or a mask or my Cosmogone specs and that seemed appropriate). It’s pretty cool, I imagine it like my character’s severe injuries miraculously healed somehow.
I was very tempted to go with the person holding up opera glasses, since that felt like an appealing interpretation of the Cosmogone specs, but it didn’t quite fit those situations where I’m wearing a sneak-thief mask or luminous goggles.
Sure, in French. But in good old no-grammatical-gender English we have female voyeurs, provocacteurs, amateurs, connoisseurs, entrepreneurs, restraunteurs and saboteurs!
Just can’t win, I guess.
That’s true, those words exist in English and without an obvious grammatical gender, but they are still cases of using a male term as if it is gender neutral (we could have adopted ‘saboteuse’, but the male version is always used when speaking in general or the group is mixed - so all actresses are female, but when you have both, it’s actors, and we say ‘inside the actors studio’). So, it’s still pretty much using ‘man’ as if it meant ‘person’, it’s just better hidden than in ‘fireman’, is all I’m saying. Personally I like glass-walker, but no solution is perfect.
And genuinely, I apologise if I seemed flippant. It is just that as someone who has trod this particular road before as a student I can speak from experience when I say the jokes get really wearing, really fast.