The first day of the rest of your life

I was thinking, if people born on Felarya stop aging at their peak, around their late twenties. would they celebrate this at all? A second 'coming of age' celebration?

Doesn't have to be a huge ritual or anything, just something familes would come together and have a few drinks or something, mabye cake. Depends on the speices though I guess.

I would think it is a personal choice, but very few families would. Just because you've stopped developing doesn't mean you'll stop changing. The soil only prevents the decay of aging from occurring, besides, there would still be yearly birthdays, which means celebrating your hundredth year would become far more common. Just my two cents.

Yeah as I said I didn't imagine it being an greatly significant thing that everyone would celebrate. I doubt the poor would, as they would see it as an superficial reason to celebrate and no reason to waste well earned money. But those in luxury who like any reason to get drink and food out and just show off to family and freinds might do it.

Well celebrating the fact you wont be aging is different from celebrating a birthday. As soon as people find out as long as they wont be physically aging when they get to Felarya, I'm sure they'll be thrilled at first. I'd celebrate, that's for sure.

Is there a way to tell that you've physically reached your prime? I would've imagined it would be very difficult to immediately notice that you've stopped aging, and that it'd only be something you'd notice after quite a while (eg. that your hairline has stopped receding, that there're no new lines round your mouth.) If there was a specific age that everyone stopped aging at like in the movie In Time I could imagine it being plausible, but I thought the exact peak age was different for different people?

Well I would of thought they would use an estimate where people generally stop aging and base the celebration on that.

no different from the age we consider people adults, I mean we don't observe the exact maturity of a person and annouce them as adults it on that do we? the age of adulthood is just something we roughly estimated and isn't even constant between cultures

Could be like, on your 25th-30th bday what ever the average, perk age is, its a massive party type thing, like when you first become an adult(of age), or such, then just proceed on normal birthdays afterwards, the day you where born never actually changes.

Or maybe they have a way to tell what point you actually stopped aging and then when you find out you throw a big party for all your friends and family and so forth

Suddenly, there is a year you cannot remember, cause all your friends and yourself stopped ageing all in the same year...dear god, the hangover

People pick lots of silly reasons to celebrate. I'm sure they'd celebrate this, come to think of it. It could be something someone writes up? Maybe a little cultural tidbit we can put in the wiki.

okay I thought I'll return to this and have a stab at fleshing this idea out. Even the smallest of ideas can help keep the forum alive.

Permanence Celebration:

The Permanence Celebration is a Native Felarya custom that celebrates when someone reaches their physical peak and stops aging due to the effects of Felarya soil. This is often thought to happen on the person's 28th birthday. How a person's Permanence is celebrated depends on the race or class of the individual, some races, such as those with no concept of time measurement, do not celebrate it at all. It's mostly celebrated by the smaller races, such as Humans and Nekos, for them to reach their peak is the first stepping stone to living a long successful life, and so it's customary for friends and relatives to congratulate them and wish them luck on their future.

Some Negav stores, always seeing a chance to make a profit, supply Permanence cards and good luck charms for people to buy and send to someone who is expected to have their Permanence day. The cards range from simple good luck cards, to amusing cards that come with jokes.

The Cult of Minalca often tries to use these celebrations to spread their faith, often promoting 'Permanence services' to tell of their life stories and advice in the hopes on converting the unbelievers.

Certain Negavian Nekos celebrate their permanence by capturing and consuming as many Tomthumbs as possible, as tomthumbs are associated with good luck, Nekos will therefore eat them on this celebration in the hopes that their good luck will rub off on them, This is one of the more darker consequences of human and Neko customs overlapping.

Don't forget that we still don't have a calendar. Even the length of day varies from one to the next; we don't have any real way to tell time yet, let alone figure out how old a person is in "years", whatever those are in Felarya. I'm not sure how we can have an idea like this work when we have no way of knowing how old a person is. D:

While we haven't got a exact calander (come on guys, you started that dicussion years ago) Felarya however does have eras with years in them

http://felarya.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chronology

If there's years, then there are birthdays

I think it's a good start, even if we don't have an official calendar. Last time we ended up arguing about it because two people couldn't decide on a more creative calendar or a practical one. >>

Well if I had my say (since I wasn't here to give an opinon when the topic of the calender was brought up) I would go for an practicle calender.

While I understand that Felarya is an alien world, however I think there is a point in world building when you make something too alien that it becomes unrealteable to the audiance and they have to stop enjoying the plot in order to look up something that isn't easily understandble. Even in something like the Elder Scrolls games, while the calander has different names for the days and months, the structure is still roughtly based on our own so we can relate to it. We just have to learn the names, not memorize a complety alien method of time meaurement.

And in Felarya, alot of earth like concepts make it in anyway, even though our earth doesn't exist in the Felarya universe. Like how many Felaryians have our sense of humour, inculding irony. Even though technically their sense of humour should be completly different from ours. But then if it was an alien sense of humour, then we the audiance woulden't find the jokes funny. And I think that applies to time measurement as well.

Practicality can also be directed toward basing it off of lunar cycles and solar cycles. Every so often though Felarya switches suns it borrows light from, and that's where the issues come in. That's how calendars start out. Not just straight up numbering days with no relevance. The reason why we have a "year" is because its a full revolution, and the seasons come full circle - in Felarya those are BOTH irrelevant.

This is why practicality does not work for Felarya, is because what we'd use to make it "practical" wouldn't make any sense with Felarya's chaotic timeline. If I think of anything though, I'll post it.

Is the change of the sun noticeable to the people in Felarya? If so we could do something amoung the lines of the time period it takes for Felarya to change one sun to the next

That's the problem DarkOne, its always different. Its not like "oh the sun is like this for this long this many times and then its like that for that many times, and then it goes back to the way it was that other time, and cycles around."

It's always different, very unreliable, and the seasons in felarya are different by region. In Miragia forest it could be winter, while in Chidokai it could be fall, and in Bulvon Wood it could be spring. Since Felarya is so dimensionally unstable like this, it makes nigh impossible for a "practical" calendar.

So you'd probably have to do something ridiculous, like King Kerume's baby took 284 days to start crawling/walking. Or something like that.

Well if a Felarya Year hasn't got anything to do with sun rotation, then mabye a year to them is simply a collective term for a choosen amount of days. It doesn't actually measure anything else like seasons and such, it's just there to categorize a large number of days into simple counting units to make it eaiser for them to record their past.

Just like money really, rather than work with hundreds with coins, we have larger counting units to manage large numbers. A Felarya Year could just serve the same purpose with days

Yes, but since you cant base a year off rotations and seasons, you'd have to get inspiration for the number of days elsewhere. You *could* just say "its 400 days" and be done with it, without doing any work but then you're being uncreative for the sake of Felarya, which is counter intuitive. I'm also willing to bet it wont rub off too well on Karbo, since he tends to favor creativity more.

The pattern being taking an idea that works, twisting it to work with Felarya, and after that adding in an element for creative flair. That's how all ideas that are canonized work. Even in steampunk universes, which favor simplicity for the sake of a crude yet effective tool, imagination is important. Being lazy and churning out days purely for the sake of a simple calendar wont benefit Felarya in any regard.

Mabye it can be linked to the Silvery Night thing, as there seems that there is bound to be an 'Silvery Night' at some point, even if the time between them vary, it can't be too inconceivable that overtime Someone in Negav found a pattern in how it varied. A Silvery Night founds a bit like a Felarya version of christmas anyway