Computer death and Immortal healing

[sophia_sol]

SOOOOO my poor old laptop Bunbury finally gave up the ghost. It's been on its last legs in a variety of ways for a while, but last night it decided that it no longer wanted to recognize the existence of its power cord. (I tried a different power cord, to see if it was the cord that was the problem, and NOPE.) No matter what I did, it simply refused to admit that it was PLUGGED IN, DAMNIT.

So now Bunbury's pretty useless.

Thankfully I have an old castoff laptop available to me (my sister's old laptop, which before that was previously my dad's old laptop). It has its own idiosyncrasies, but it WORKS.

BUT.

It doesn't have any of my FILES on it! Or my programs! I already had to download VLC, and I just realized I don't have Audacity, and oh, I don't even REMEMBER some of the useful programs I downloaded for things like ripping audio out of videos and other shiny stuff! Drat!

And I do have all my files stored on an online backup service, but it will be a pain to have to download them all.

And, I mean, I'm only going to be using this laptop for a month or so (my parents are giving me a new computer as a graduation gift) so it feels like kind of a waste of time to do all the necessary things to this computer to make it MINE (with all the files and programs and everything) because I'm just going to have to do it AGAIN in a month's time!

*sigh*


IN OTHER NEWS, I just started writing a fic about what happens when Immortals lose teeth, say, in an accident. Does the mouth just heal with spaces left? Or do they get new teeth growing back? How thorough is the Immortal healing ability? For the purposes of my story I was going to say that yes, teeth do grow back, they just take a little while.

And then I started speculating back to the first time Methos would have been in a fight or something that caused him to lose a tooth, and how it would have worried him, not knowing if he'd be missing that tooth for the whole rest of his (hopefully extremely long) life.

But THEN I started thinking, hang on, back in those days they did NOT have particularly good dental hygiene! If we assume Methos at the time of his first death was about the same age that Peter Wingfield was when he started playing Methos (since that's the age of the body Methos is portrayed with) that means he was over 30. He would most likely have had tooth problems by then, and dentistry at the time was a matter of pulling out any teeth that ailed ya. And yet Methos has a perfect mouthful of teeth. So WHAT HAPPENED?

It already seems to be established that scars that are acquired pre-death remain on an Immortal, so presumably other injuries, including tooth-loss, would be included in that category. So those teeth can't have just grown back, although any he lost after becoming Immortal would have. (I cannot imagine that a person can live for 5000 years of violence and NOT lose a few teeth. I mean, really.)

And he COULD have maybe had the miracles of modern dentistry fix any problems, except we've seen him in flashbacks, and his teeth were just the same.

So now I'm left here trying to fanwank a plausible Watsonian explanation for this, instead of the Doylist "protagonists on tv are not allowed to have missing teeth. This is also not permitted in actors." And I can't come up with one. Any suggestions?

Comments

[melannen]

People only started getting really bad teeth with the advent of agriculture and lots of low-quality food! In pre-agricultural societies, it wouldn't be unusual to still have all your teeth when you hit 30. So clearly the answer is just that Methos pre-dates agriculture! (Also, I suspect the Immortal immune system is better than normal even before First Death - we've never met Immortals with pox scars any more than bad teeth, after all.)


...and I include a folder in my backups that has the install files for all the programs I need. I started it after my first deliberate wipe, but it has come in very handy!

[sophia_sol]

Oh, fascinating! Well, that certainly explains Methos! (but not all the YOUNGER immortals, who DON'T predate agriculture....like say Duncan) So yeah, the exceptional Immortal immune system will have to be the explanation, then.

That is such an excellent plan. An excellent plan that I wish I had thought of. Welp, now I know for next time...

[tei]

In my mind the Immortals probably have some sort of long-term healing mechanism as well as the short-term one. It would be necessary just to protect an Immortal from the kinds of diseases that they would contract, just looking at the statistics of disease at various times; I mean, even ignoring plagues and such, it would be pretty much impossible to live for five thousand years or even a few hundred years cancer-free, unless one had some kind of defense and/or way to beat it kind of...automatically, I guess? So assuming the latter option, perhaps...uhm... dental damage would heal itself as well, once he had his first death?

[sophia_sol]

Oh, I'm sure they do have long-term healing as well as short-term healing!

But the thing is, that some immortals DO have extremely long-lasting things that don't get healed. Like that scar on Kronos' face. I mean, it was given to him because the actor was thought to be too pretty for a villain, but there still needs to be an in-universe explanation for it, and the best one is that injuries received before first death don't go away.

(of course, there are also other things, like that one singer dude who got the scar on his neck that ruined his voice, and that never went away. That one was received after he was already immortal, so the explanation seems to be that neck wounds just don't heal as well for immortals as other wounds, because necks ARE after all their weakness.)

[tei]

Oh, shoot. True. I do like melannen's explanation, except that I'm not sure how to calculate whether or not he's pre-agricultural. IDK, how much agricultural advancement would be necessary to ruin teeth? Because him completely predating agriculture relies a lot on the "and that was when I took my first head" line.

Aha why, show, why?

In a similar vein, I wrote out a plot yesterday for a fic in which Suetonius was Methos' Watcher.

[sophia_sol]

Yeah, I just got back from Wikipedia, and apparently agriculture is at least 10000 years old. So more than TWICE Methos' alleged age. Although I DO tend to have this assumption that Methos is RATHER older than when he took his first head. Or when he SAID he took his first head. Or when he took the first head he REMEMBERS taking. I'm quite sure I've discussed this in comments with Aria and/or Sentientcitizen multiple times, but am too lazy to go dig up what all we said about this....

Suetonius as Methos' Watcher OH YES PLEASE. I mean, I don't actually know much about the dude, not being enough up on my classical history, but I am ASSUMING that the fic will be epic!

[tei]

Aha, that's fine! No, I'm sure he is probably older than that... but aaaaa 10000 is just SUCH A BIG NUMBER. I couldn't deal with him actually being that old! Mostly because I have a moderate idea of what he might have been getting up to five thousand years ago, but before that... yeah, IDK. THE PROBLEMS THAT NICE TEETH PRESENT.

Then again, all the evidence of the Immortals before the nineties is from flashbacks! They remember themselves as they want to, so there's no reason to take their memories of their former physical appearances at face value.

[sophia_sol]

Hah, I just kinda start figuring, once you're THAT OLD the specifics in terms of age stop really mattering because you're already so many times older than practically everyone else. Mostly I figure, too, that HE doesn't really remember much of what he got up to back then either, because memory is SO fallible and changeable. He has stories he tells himself about his earlier life, but he has no idea anymore if these stories have any bearing to reality.

And there's even that one episode that deals with the fallibility of the memory of events! ...even if I found that ep REALLY BORING and ended up skipping most of it, it's still interesting and relevant as an IDEA. So yeah, the flashbacks are TOTALLY subjective, which allows you to do all sorts of fun questioning of what really happened in everyone's history! And what you'd see if you got, say, Kronos' flashback on what the Horsemen years were like, instead of Methos'. Or whatever!

[tei]

And what you'd see if you got, say, Kronos' flashback on what the Horsemen years were like, instead of Methos'.

*__________*

[sophia_sol]

:DDD YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT!

[tei]

I can't decide how it would be different! I mean, it seems like they must have had different experiences somehow because Methos was able to give it up in a way that Kronos wasn't. But who knows if that's because of their experiences with the Horsemen, or because of things that happened to them after. I, erm, don't really buy into the "Duncan saves everyone from themselves!" thing that the last episode was pushing, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't Duncan that ~brought Methos back~ or something. Duncan is awesome and obviously important to Methos! But not that kind of important.

So I don't think the Horsemen meant more to one than the other. Kronos just didn't realize it was going to end one day, and Methos did. Or something.

[sophia_sol]

I know! There are so many possibilities! And they should all exist.

I also don't buy into the thing from the last episode, that Duncan ~brought Methos back~. But hang on, Aria and I have totally talked about this, let me go remind myself what we said.

Right, yes, so I'd said But...to a 5000 year old person, a couple years isn't enough to change who you really are. Methos doesn't become a different person over the course of knowing MacLeod; he's the same person, he just has more motivation to do what's "right" because he respects MacLeod's opinion so much.

And she said,

I think you've basically nailed it. I thought the Watcher girl he was in love with was a nice touch; considering the lengths he went to in an attempt to save Alexa, I can buy him cracking a little if a woman he loved was shot in front of him -- and then of course Kronos turns up immediately and offers him an outlet for that pain. I think it is valid to assume that Methos-circa-meeting-Duncan is quite a bit tired; Duncan gave him a positive kind of reboot, and in the AU Kronos has basically the same function in a negative way. I have no idea how well I'm articulating that, though.

So yeah, I think that makes sense?

(if you are interested in reading all the excited flailing and metaing I was doing about Highlander over the course of watching it, go read this comment thread. There's a fair amount of conversation about issues and theories and characterization and all that good stuff.)

[calvinahobbes]

I always get really sad when people tell of their computers dying. I don't know why. It's just SAD, y'know? Trusty companions, porn stashes, blablabla.

I used to have a folder with program installs for easy migration, but I haven't actually been keeping one since I got this computer. I should really get on that. I never remember the names of the useful ripping programs either, not even when I have them installed -- I always go through a bunch, trying to figure out which one does what I need.

[sophia_sol]

Computers dying IS a tragedy. "Trusty companions" indeed! I am totally with you on feeling sad when people's computers die.

Next time I totally need to keep a list or SOMETHING of what the useful programs I have are, and what they all do, and everything...

[calvinahobbes]

But see, even in the midst of tragedy we learn valuable life lessons! Or something...

[sophia_sol]

Valuable Life Lessons are valuable indeed. I shall hold the shining light of this knowledge aloft, to keep the tragedy at bay!

[calvinahobbes]

:D :D :D

[aria]

I really like the pre-agricultural and Immortal healing explanations! But I also assume that Methos was actually quite young when he had his first death. I assume Methos has cultivated the ability to stay in one place for up to fifteen or twenty years without causing too much of a fuss, and can pull off anywhere from twenty to forty with the right mannerisms for the time and possibly a few subtle cosmetic modifications. So he's playing Adam in his late twenties or early thirties, but he could conceivably have died younger than that! He's not quite sure how old he was, in fact, but it was before he started having any significant tooth loss. :D

[sophia_sol]

I have trouble thinking Methos could have been that young when he died, because, well, I don't think he looks it. He is definitely capable of youthful mannerisms that pull his apparent age down, but looking at the lines on his face etc, I really don't think he COULD have been younger than Peter Wingfield even if he can play younger.

Though I absolutely agree that he's not quite sure how old he was!