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16

Ren: The Girl With The Mark / Season 2 Episodes coming out!

« on: March 17, 2024, 11:36:39 PM »

Ren S2 episodes have started appearing for public viewing

S2E1 "The Helgoth Protocol" is now available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uihptY8m1A

Video in spoiler:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

17

Exilian Articles / How to think about history in your games

« on: March 17, 2024, 11:30:50 PM »

How to think about history in your games

By Jubal

Even very "historical" games can produce wild ahistorical outcomes. Does that matter?

As someone in the unusual position of being an academic medieval historian professionally and an indie game developer over a number of years, I’ve written and am currently writing a number of academic papers on the relationship between history and game development. However, most of that work tends to be pointed at historians – so for a change (and because it’s currently NotGDC, the online game dev conference) I’m going to attempt a version of this with more of a game developer’s hat on and address this to game developers as a basic piece on how to think about games and history. If people like this, there’s much more I could say or actually do as talks in future pieces or NotGDC iterations, so please do let me know if you found this interesting.

The thing that people always expect of me as a historian is that I will talk about accuracy, and will mostly be here to complain about games getting things wrong. “Oh, you must be so annoyed at all the things Total War gets wrong” is something I’ve heard rather more times than I care to remember, or the sometimes even more awkward “oh, I bet you love Kingdom Come Deliverance!”

This hits a pretty rapid problem though: making a totally accurate simulation of the past is impossible. I think most people and certainly most game developers understand this on some level: the demand for medieval RPGs where the player character has to take a dump regularly is pretty low, despite the fact we can be pretty sure that’s a period-accurate thing for them to do.

Even if you did make a terrible game where you were doing everything ‘accurately’, there’s a further problem: your player is not, themselves, a medieval person. Growing up in medieval cultures, people had different thought processes and mental structures – different assumptions about how the world worked, what was important, and what was valued. They had a whole lifetime to grow up into that world, and learn huge amounts of expected knowledge about things the average player today can’t be expected to know. A medieval person’s knowledge of how one gathers moorhen eggs or the right conditions for digging peat turves or of stories and folk tales many of which are now lost aren’t to be judged better or worse to a modern person’s knowledge of how to use a spreadsheet or which stores one buys cheap clothing at or what the order of Marvel movies to watch is, but fundamentally you cannot, in a ten or even hundred hour game, replace one lifetime of knowledge and assumptions with the other.

You may be wondering, then, what the point of my research into history and games even is, if we can’t produce accurate computer games. They’re often seen as just an entertainment medium in the end, after all, and most gamers don’t actually understand games as a good way to learn about history. Should we not just decide that computer games are so much fantasy, and not bother thinking about how they relate to history?

My answer to that is “absolutely not”. The relationship between games and history is far more complex than a question of accuracy, but the relationship between games and history is there and it matters immensely. Games are just there as entertainment in the same way that paintings are just there to be pretty: which is to say, they’re not. They are art, and do project ideas and influences, whether we choose to acknowledge that fact or not. Games are a space where imagination, selections of ideas from history, and a selection of modern ideas and concepts all frequently collide. That makes them an amazingly fertile space for imagining and reimagining the past, and taking past concepts and imaginations seriously in that matters a great deal.

Hades' "Ancient Greek" underworld has medieval stained glass windows: history inspires in places we don't expect.

This is, incidentally, something not enough people realise about academic history. Historians are often assumed to be the “one damn thing after another” guys, and working out as well as we can what really happened in the past is a core part of what we do. Also important, though, is working out how that past got recorded, remembered, and reinterpreted ever since it happened. We need to unravel that not just to get to what we can know about original events, but because all human societies use the past as a reference for the stories we tell about who we are, our countries, identities, ideologies, and ideals. Games can embed those sorts of stories and bring in history to support them, and that role in carrying ideas makes them matter. As well as bringing in history, games choose (as we saw when discussing accuracy) when to leave it out: and keeping an eye to what from history you're picking and why is the best way to understand the role history is playing in your development processes.

In other words, rather than thinking of your games in terms of whether they’re accurate, as a historian I’d encourage you to think about them as a selection process. Even if you’re not setting a game historically there’s a good chance you’re including a number of historical elements and ideas, and that collection helps signal various things to your players about the sort of world your characters inhabit and your contribution to their wider imagined past.

There’s a dark side to all this which I want to discuss head-on: extreme ideologues, especially on the nationalist and racist far right, love using games and their iconography to sell their ideas. People at far-right rallies hold up Deus Vult flags as much because of its popularisation into internet culture via games like Crusader Kings as because they’re actually reading any serious literature on the crusades. People may not think of the games they play as accurate, but they’re still taking parts of that curated collection away and re-using them, and we’re still building expectations about what the past can and can’t look like. In a world where people often hold pre-modern history up as a grim age of human misery, or as a golden age of “pure” nations that we should hark back to, or indeed as a grim age of human misery that we should hark back to, the sorts of imagined pasts we tell stories about do matter.

Understanding games as a selection process helps us understand this and helps us ask the right questions about how it works. Accuracy here can be a double-edged sword: some games that sell themselves hard on “historical accuracy” very much use accuracy in specific areas to cover for the things that they left out of their curation of the past in other areas. A really nicely 3D modelled historical sword is a lovely and very exciting thing, but it doesn’t ‘counterbalance’ having a world which takes over-simplistic and ahistorical pictures of faith, rulership, gender, and identity. For that we particularly need our curation approach, to ask what’s missing from the historical picture. Note that I’m not saying that games should be moralising in this regard, or always contain modern assumptions about what’s good or bad regarding those things, or always contain as many medieval elements in the curation process as possible on the other hand. I’m a firm believer in the idea that there are many routes to a good game. I am saying, however, that devs could do more to recognise which ahistorical tropes are likely to be beloved of those who would use history for bad purposes, and consider that when it comes to design, community engagement, and talking to writers and historians alike about our work.

I don’t want to give the impression, though, that thinking about games as curation of the past is solely about the modern political impacts and tropes. I want to give the positive case as well: thinking better about what we include and exclude can be a way of unlocking new ideas for our games, new parts of the past to explore and new ways to see them. There are immense amounts of untapped potential in building imagined pasts and historical or historical-fantastical settings that aren’t worked into modern games effectively, and I’d be very excited to see more of that rich diversity of human experience tapped more effectively by game developers.

A medieval 'grotesque', British Library Arundel 83 f55v. The medieval imagination is a wonderful place to explore!

To look at the area of history I know best briefly, we have far more art and stories and ideas from the medieval period than ever appear in modern games. Looking at the past and discovering what else can be used from it can unlock a huge amount more that you might never have considered. That might mean looking at how you build your maps and moving away from north-facing, or point-accurate, map styles, or it might include thinking about characters with disabilities and how they navigated those issues and lived in the medieval world rather than solely leaving them as figures of pity. It might involve moving away from having taverns as an assumption in your setting, creating new spaces of gameplay as a character navigates the rights and responsibilities of being a guest in their society, or looking at specifically medieval relationships between people and their rulers which were often more fluid and surprising than the absolutist autocracies that “medieval” states are often depicted as having. It might mean looking further beyond Europe for inspiration into the vast swathes of the premodern world that have never been seriously touched in many game genres. It can mean exploring the medieval imaginary, too, from looking at how we make less sceptical and cynical protagonists in more religious worlds to finding spaces in modern fantasy for the headless blemmyes or for the bonnacon, a mythic cow that farts fireballs.

For me, that’s all a more positive approach to history in games, thinking about what we’ve got – and whether we really want it in our collection – and thinking about what we haven’t got and what’s still there to be discovered and used. Using history in games better should be a win for everyone, unlocking new stories and spaces: more different things for players to relate to, history-interested folks to discover, and developers like us to build great narratives and gameplay around.

It’s also something that’s not as hard to do as you might think: if you’re sitting there thinking “that sounds great but there’s no way I can find anyone to talk to about history” or “I’m too small to pay a historical consultant” – well, here I switch to my historian’s hat and say talk to us anyway. Whilst I’d love to see more devs hiring historians as part of their narrative and design teams, if that’s out of reach there are plenty of historians out there who’d love to share ideas with small and independent developers, and spaces like Exilian’s Coding Medieval Worlds workshops or the online Middle Ages in Modern Games conferences where there are resources and networks available.


To sum up, if there are three things I’d like you to take away from reading this, they are these:

> History in games matters. It helps us unlock new stories and material, and affects how our game takes part in wider discussions and imaginations of the past and present, whether we want it to or not.

> Rather than thinking about overall “accuracy”, think about the history in your games as a curation process. Considering what’s there, what isn’t, and why you’re using it are key to working out how to use history better.

> Remember that you can talk to historians! Academics are often keen to engage with the public and there are many more fruitful connections that can be made.

I’m an optimist about what we can do with games and history – and I think there’s a huge amount still to be done and a great many fascinating stories to be told, fresh historical and fantastical worlds to discover, and more besides. I hope this piece has helped give you some new tools to look afresh at your games and game settings, and that it’ll help you to explore building games in a wider array of medieval worlds.

18

Exilian Articles / Beyond the Wall – Part One

« on: March 12, 2024, 10:38:56 PM »

Beyond the Wall – Part One

By rbuxton

Which wall? Trump’s wall.

In 2017 I visited my brother in Chile. After travelling together for a bit I set off alone and soon made friends with some European university students. They were involved in the university’s International Society, which put on cultural events. I was invited to “France Night”, a pleasant evening in which two French students talked for half an hour about their country’s history and culture. “Mexico Night”, on the following evening, was completely different. There must have been at least thirty Mexican students pulling out all the stops with food, music, games and a Zapateado dance show. I was struck by how good-natured, proud and interesting the people were. In that moment I realised how insulting the then-US president’s rhetoric was – insulting to both Mexicans and those crossing it from other Central and South American countries.

A young organillero plies his trade.

My new-found interest in Mexico was strengthened by conversations with other backpackers over the next few years. “We spent a month just sitting on a beach eating tacos,” said one, “It was amazing!” I realised that I was extremely ignorant about Mexico: like most countries in the world, it only gets mentioned in the UK news when something “bad” happens. From its portrayal on TV I had assumed it was a vast desert where drug- and people-smugglers roared around in dark trucks. So perhaps the “wall” I was now determined to overcome was more mental than physical; a product of my own biases and misconceptions. I finally touched down at the airport in Mexico City (henceforth referred to by its modern sobriquet, CDMX) in March 2023, with no plan and no onward flight. This time, my brother was not there to meet me.

I’d like to make one thing clear: Mexico is not a “developing” country. It has great infrastructure, huge cities and a booming tech scene. The streets of CDMX follow a grid layout – perfectly intuitive for most of the world’s population but strangely confusing to the British. Music is all around, often coming from the Organilleros – an army of smartly-dressed musicians pumping away at organs and doffing their caps for change. They sometimes rub shoulders with busking saxophonists, while efficient recycling trucks whizz by and traffic wardens whistle to keep everything under control.

During one outing in CDMX I jumped on a double decker bus with another (male) backpacker. After a few minutes people started nudging us and pointing at the floor, but our Spanish was too basic to grasp what was going on. It turned out we were standing in the “women and children only” part of the bus, an area taking up most of the ground floor and demarcated by pink handrails (which were yellow elsewhere). In weighing up the pros and cons of this system, I felt, one could cover many of the gender and equality issues which have been thrown up in the UK in the past decade or so.

My favourite public transport story, however, comes from CDMX’s metro. I was standing by the doors of the carriage with a young man to my right. He was seated and had very stylish hair, moulded into some complicated shape and looking wet as a result. Suddenly a few bubbles whizzed past us accompanied by a cry of “Cinco pesos!”. What on Earth was going on? Looking up, I saw one of the many one-item salespeople who ply their trade on the metro; his product was children’s bubbles. He had a neat trick: by holding the bubble wand towards the stream of air from a fan he could literally bombard his potential customers with his wares. Unfortunately for my neighbour the wax holding his hair in place was quite attractive to bubbles, so several stuck without him noticing. I didn’t have the confidence – social or linguistic – to point this out to him, so I’m pretty sure he was still wearing them when we emerged onto street level a few minutes later.

In venturing beyond the Wall I got a little more than I bargained for. In reading this, you will too. You have been warned...

Around the Capital

I had decided to ease the culture shock by making my first stop in Mexico the small town of Tepoztlán. Getting there was not too much trouble but in order to find my hostel I booted up Google Maps. I was charged £72 for the privilege, having missed the text message from my network which said something like “Welcome to Mexico, we’ve turned off the data roaming cap you sensibly set yourself, wasn’t that helpful of us?”. On top of this I was struggling with the heat, the jet lag, a sore throat (probably my fault) and a bad back (definitely my fault). When I arrived in Tepoztlán a light dust was swirling through the cobbled streets and saloon-style doorways; some sort of festival was going on and a man in a skeleton costume waved at the local tourists. Mexico, it seemed, was not holding back.

Tepoztlán, it turned out, is turned out to be a “Pueblo Mágico” (magic town), one of several hundred in Mexico which have done much to preserve their heritage. Its old buildings, murals and mountaintop Aztec temple no doubt contributed to this accolade. I spent a day acclimatising and shopping around for a big sombrero to replace the weedy cap I had brought from the UK, eventually choosing one made of straw (the material of the peasantry; posher sombreros are of felt). The next morning I rose early to climb the mountain before the heat set in. The path was beautiful and led to some brilliant views; the temple wasn’t overly interesting but the wheeling clouds of Mexican Eagles certainly were.

From Tepoztlán I backtracked to Cuernavaca, capital of Morelos state and an important cultural centre. It had some interesting churches and a nice cathedral but otherwise didn’t hold much for a backpacker. The city’s most interesting site is a squat castle built by the conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1528 (making it perhaps the oldest Spanish building in Central America) but it was closed during my visit. Like Cortés (well, kind of) I now turned my attention to the Aztecs’ Tenochtitlan; Frida Kahlo’s Ciudad de Mexico; Instagram’s CDMX.

The Aztecs (technically the Mexica) chose the location for their city based on the omen of an eagle killing a snake while standing on a cactus; this image still adorns the national flag. The location was a lake, so they developed a land-reclamation system involving plants grown at the water’s edge. This gave them a handy system of canals which helped the city become very efficient. When the Spanish conquered it, they built their city directly on top. I’m not really sure what this means, but the result is that the centre sinks by about a foot every year. This, combined with the tectonic activity of the area, has led to some buildings sitting at a jaunty angle. Over the next few centuries the city expanded into the surrounding mountains at a frightening rate; by 2005 it was (by one measure) the second most populous in the world. Recently there have been many efforts to address the social issues associated with such growth, including an extensive cable-car network.

I stayed in a hostel a few blocks from Zócalo, the city’s main square and venue for both political demonstrations and free concerts. It’s surrounded by beautiful examples of Spanish colonial architecture, including universities and a cathedral. Latin America in general is home to some amazing architecture which might look vaguely familiar to those of us who’ve visited Europe. These buildings tend to be on a significantly smaller scale, and this could be due to practicalities like sourcing materials, the aforementioned tectonic activity, and the desire to erect colonial status-symbols speedily. They helped form a national identity as independence movements swept the region, and I imagine the conversations going something like this: “You can’t be your own country when you don’t even have fine, neo-classical buildings”, “Oh yes we do!”

Easter celebrations in the Zócalo.

I spent much of my fortnight in CDMX exploring the old buildings, which now house museums and the like. I took the metro to the neighbourhood of Xochimilco, or “Little Venice”, where colourful boats ply the green-fringed canals which are all that remain of the Aztecs’ waterways. Another trip took me to quiet Coyoacán, where I was hoping to visit the house of the famous artist Frida Kahlo. Unfortunately it is so small that it gets booked up for weeks at a time, so I had to content myself with the house of her friend and neighbour, Leon Trotsky. It was here that the Soviet politician and his surviving family members sought refuge in 1936, and here that he was assassinated in 1940. You can stand on the spot where his final struggle took place (CDMX was home to many contemporary Russian exiles during my visit, mostly men my own age fleeing Putin’s draft.) I also visited the museums of Modern Art and Anthropology; the latter would really require two full days to understand both its Aztec artefacts and its dioramas about the indigenous groups who co-existed with the Spanish. I made several visits to the vast Chapultepec park, a forest in the city centre on the site of a famous battle between Mexico and the USA. I once got lost there in a graveyard and had to be led out by a local teenager who carried his bicycle between the tombs.

I spent three Sundays at an Anglican church near Chapultepec, which served some of CDMX’s expats and digital nomads (the city almost irresistible to the latter due to its climate and amenities). On arrival I was confronted by a pie chart showing the ethnicities of its members, and was surprised to see Nigerian in third place (after American and Mexican). It was nice to be able to relax there and chat to people who had called the city home for most of their lives. Semana Santa (Holy Week) was approaching and on Palm Sunday we paraded around the church equipped with crosses and, for some, bagpipes. Easter Saturday found me back in the Zócalo watching a huge display of music and dancing, accompanied by a sermon from a very charismatic woman, who spoke so fast I could only really pick out repetitions of the phrase “pueblo de Dios”. I had been advised to stay in CDMX over Semana Santa because, as in many countries, holiday destinations get very booked up. The city, Zócalo concert notwithstanding, was comparatively empty and I had some nice relaxed walks around the centre.

My first excursion was to the mountain Pueblo Mágico of Mineral del Chico. It was very nice up there among the pine trees but it was so hard to reach by public transport that I only had an hour there and had to spend much of that time on the toilet. My trip to the ruins of Teotihuacan was rather more successful. This vast site of stone temples, walkways and marketplaces was one of the largest, and most cosmopolitan, cities in the world in the 1st Century AD (so cosmopolitan, in fact, that it’s not clear if it was the Olmecs or Toltecs who built it). What is known is that the Mexica, arriving in the region about a millennium after Teotihuacan’s decline, believed it had been built by gods and modelled Tenochtitlan on it. The so-called pyramids of the Sun and Moon dominate Teotihuacan’s skyline and are connected by the wide, temple-flanked Avenue of the Dead (we’re not sure about any of these names, by the way). The pyramids would have had structures at the top, perhaps of wood, but were not used for human sacrifice, a practice which was mostly confined to the Mexica in the 14th and 15th centuries. More subtle are the stone animals, pillars painted with deities, and houses which show a cross-section of the building techniques used throughout the city’s history. It was very hot and I was fortunate to have a sombrero to protect me from the sun, though it was dwarfed by those of the souvenir-sellers.

I had a blast in CDMX, but it didn’t feel that way the whole time. I was preoccupied with my money, which was supposed to last nearly a year, and Mexico was significantly more expensive than I had expected (I had unwisely used my India trip of 2011 as a budgeting reference). I was also overwhelmed by the sheer size of Mexico and the fact that I was right in the middle. It turns out that having the world as your oyster is more than a little daunting. One day, sitting around in the hostel nursing an upset stomach, I was on the verge of booking a flight to Colombia when I received a WhatsApp message on a group which had been defunct for more than two years. It was an old travel friend asking where everyone had got to and the answers came back as follows: Mexico, Belgium, Tenerife, Canada and Mexico. It turned out that my American friend Henk was just a few hours away by bus! I mention this extraordinary coincidence because I had first met Henk under very similar circumstances; sometimes lightning really does strike twice.

The American and the Mexican

So it was decided: I would set off Northwest for my rendezvous with Henk, stopping off in the cities of Querétaro and San Miguel de Allende. The former is Mexico’s fastest-growing city and its tech capital. On my first day I stumbled upon a crowd of people in traditional costumes, including rattling anklets, dancing to the beat of drums. I visited a number of churches and the Santa Cruz convent. The convent forms the terminus of the city’s impressive colonial-era aqueduct, indicating how important these institutions were in the operation of early Spanish settlements. The bus journey to San Miguel de Allende was dramatic and afforded great views of the city and the famous pink church tower of La Parroquia de San Migeul Arcángel. Another famous site in the city is the house of Ignacio Allende, one of the leaders in Mexico’s war of independence (1810 to 1821). The city is no stranger to war: it was a front line during the 16th century Chichimeca War and had to be abandoned several times before the Chichimeca leaders were bought off by the Spaniards.

Finally I reached Guanajuato, surely one of Mexico’s strangest cities. This arid mountain town experienced a “silver rush” in the 16th century and was soon producing 30% of the world’s silver. There was no planning so buildings popped up wherever they could; thanks to the region’s wealth many of them were very grand. The result is a maze of staircases and alleyways giving out to cramped squares and neo-classical façades. With space at a premium the roads are all in tunnels below street level; I felt like Indiana Jones as I approached by bus. The city is popular with backpackers and international students, who are drawn here from Guadalajara by the promise of techno music and cocaine.

I met Henk on the steps of the market building and we caught up over pork sandwiches with plenty of offal. We donned hard hats to explore one of the mines and visited the church where some of its silver ended up. We joined a walking tour organised by one of the volunteers at the hostel and wound up at the museum of the artist Diego Rivera (husband to Frida Kahlo). We hiked up to a viewpoint where my sombrero was nearly lost to a gust of wind; Henk helped me to attach a chin strap. We spent several evenings at the statue of local independence-era hero El Pípila, from which we could watch the sunset picking out the many colours of the city. In the hostel we ate sopes, a kind of thick tortilla, and drank mezcal, a smoky cousin of tequila which is also derived from the agave plant. I did not visit the city’s most famous attraction: a museum of naturally preserved corpses, exhumed and displayed in glass cases. My reluctance to visit surprised many Mexicans; their relationship with Death is certainly different to my own.

The finest busker in León, if not Mexico.

Henk’s interest in Mexico went far beyond the charms of Guanajuato: he was living in León to further his footwear business. León is Mexico’s capital of leatherwork and not on any tourist itineraries (it’s worth mentioning it was the only place in the country I encountered anything resembling unfriendliness.) Henk and I arrived by bus and went straight to a small factory to inspect their latest boot prototype (more accurately it was just a part of the boot; the city relies on thousands of cottage industries specialising in the different parts of shoe production.) There I met Arturo, Henk’s friend, landlord, and business partner, who acted as interpreter. We spent that afternoon, and many others, roaring from factory to factory in Arturo’s small red “bocha”, or Volkswagen Beatle. It was fascinating to get an insight into the leather industry and to begin to understand its importance, culturally as well as commercially, to the people of León. That evening I was also introduced to pulque, a thick alcoholic drink which has been distilled from the agave plant for at least two thousand years, and cumbia music, which is almost ubiquitous in Latin America.

Henk took me to a leather market where skins of cows, snakes, crocodiles and more could be bought. I was interested to find out that Iran is the world’s biggest exporter of snakeskin. I asked one man where he had bought his elephant hide and he did not answer – I suspect this was not due to my poor Spanish skills. We also visited the city’s triumphal arch and the church of El Templo Expiatorio, which was built in the 1920s. I’m no architecture buff but I could see this church was very different to others I had visited: built in a neo-gothic style it had the colouration of a Battenberg cake and eschewed fancy decorations in favour of simple stained-glass windows. Every evening, sunset would bring out brides-to-be and their entourages to have photos taken in advance of their weddings. I ventured into the extensive catacombs, which had a number of rooms dedicated to different saints. I was surprised to find them very brightly lit – how could anyone sleep? I also took a couple of buses to a big lake for some birdwatching.

It is impossible to overstate the generosity of my hosts. Despite often using his house as an Airbnb Arturo invited Henk and myself to stay for free for two weeks. Henk is a brilliant cook and would sometimes wake me up with pancakes before taking me to the local market to buy fruit and vegetables. Arturo invited me to Sunday lunch with his extended family, most of whom lived locally. There I met his sister Mariana, who had worked as a nanny in the USA. Her host family had given her a Scrabble set as a parting gift but she had not found enough English speakers to play it – until now (unfortunately we never got around to playing in Spanish). Henk and some of his friends, also one-time landlords of his, took me to a karaoke bar, where we – what’s the word – surprised the local people with our renditions of Johnny Cash and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The bar “ran out of beer” that night, so we drank a lot of mezcal. At one point Henk asked me if I thought we were in a richer or poorer area than that of the cumbia bar. I guessed it was richer and more middle-class. How could I tell? Let’s just say there’s a correlation between physical appearance and affluence in Mexico which is depressingly familiar to those of us from the UK.

Henk left to attend to business in the USA and Germany, and I lingered. Over the next few days I encountered a number of people with very inspiring ambitions, some of which I’ll reproduce here:

“I work in the leather market but I’m hoping to train as a teacher.”

“I’ve been invited to Spain to do an interview on TV about my beauty products.”

“I’d like to turn this place into a seafood restaurant, like the one outside of town. They have shrimp tacos there. Come on, let me show you!”

I have not covered half of my adventures in León here. They culminated with my desperate attempts to clean the bathroom on my final morning before my host returned from a friend’s house. I had rocked up at 2 am the previous evening and blocked the sink with my vomit. Too much information? Let’s get back to the backpacking.

From León I did two day trips, the first to Aguascalientes. I looked around some nice churches and the Museum of Death, which contained historical and artistic pieces relating to Mexico’s fascination with all things morbid. I considered spending the evening at the city’s famous festival, but since it was, in Arturo’s words, “not very cultural: more about the drinking” I decided to give it a miss. A longer trip – and a night in a hostel – took me to Zacatecas, the northernmost city on my trip and situated where the Central Plateau gives out to semi-desert. It’s another old mining town but, unlike Guanajuato, it has enough space for the grand buildings to really stand out. The most interesting site was the ”Mina el Edén”, or Eden Mine, which has some beautiful caverns running for several kilometres, and a train. The name is both deceptive and cruel: hundreds of thousands of indigenous people were killed while working as slaves in the mines, and in the associated wars with the Spanish (many African slaves would later share the same fate). While walking the streets of Zacatecas I stumbled upon an open-air display of traditional music and dancing. As far as I could tell it was actually a cultural exchange of sorts: the dancers were from a university in the distant state of Oaxaca (woh-ha-kah). With the exception of a terrifying dance on stilts most dances were calm affairs of ten or so couples in traditional costume. One seemed to tell the story of the Spaniards’ arrival in Mexico: the dancers acted out some domestic scenes, gradually giving way to joyful twirling. Towards the end the “lead” woman took up position in the centre of the stage, squatted down and flapped her skirts around. Eventually she laid an egg, which her partner promptly ate, to much applause.


This is part one of a two-article coverage of rbuxton's adventures. You can read part two by clicking here.

You can also read about rbuxton's previous Accidents in Andalucía, or discover more travel writing from other Exilian members via our travel writing index.

19

General Chatter - The Boozer / March virtual meetup - Good Friday, 29th?

« on: March 06, 2024, 11:38:51 PM »

Looks like this might be the ideal pub day - we're due a Friday pub, it might make sense to do it on the 29th? The 15th is a bit close already and the 22nd might be awkward for me.

Thoughts welcome as ever!

20

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / SF and its impact

« on: March 04, 2024, 10:18:30 PM »

So I recently saw this piece linked and read it:
https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2023/12/31/an-anti-defense-of-science-fiction/

And I found it interesting, in an "I'm not sure this tallies at all with my worldview but maybe I'm just looking at the wrong bits of the genre". The writer seems to largely be arguing against some positions that I've not come across people who hold, like people thinking that reading diverse SF is in and of itself a moral act (who argues this)? And also seems to be arguing that a) SF doesn't really have a political impact but also b) is aligned with bad political and technological change as much as good. Perhaps the argument is that it's really a positive reflection of society rather than providing the reimagining or critique of society that it promises - as he puts it, he thinks SF is "by turns the muse and the mouthpiece of an economic-technologic system committing atrocities that implicate us all".

This... seems an odd critique to me, but maybe I'm just reading the wrong SF? I don't really even think of SF and SF-leaning works as being essentially mapping and imagining technology, so much as envisaging societies in which our current technological limitations aren't in play in one way or another. So the mapping closely of "defending" SF being a pro-tech-at-all-costs position and "not defending" it being a techno-cautious position doesn't feel like a natural set of things that click together in my head. I get that there are real connections where as the author shows e.g. there's connections from the military to SF fandom spaces, but I don't know how much one can conflate fandom spaces with SF as a genre. I dunno, I dont necessarily disagree with the author, I was mostly interested in how different our assumptions about "what is SF and what does it look like and what do people think about it" seemed to be.

Any thoughts?

21

Ren: The Girl With The Mark / Season 2 full trailer

« on: February 26, 2024, 09:34:28 PM »

It's happening

Patreon subscribers get the new series on March 8, everyone else gets a release schedule throughout March and April.

22

Pangolin Games / Exile Princes Steam & Itch page & trailer release!

« on: February 14, 2024, 05:45:42 PM »

A largish move towards getting the game out into the world today :O

Got a trailer done after PrioryGames poked me to do so:

And also an itch page:
https://jubalbarca.itch.io/the-exile-princes

And perhaps most crucially, a Steam store page - the game can now be wishlisted! I doubt many people actually will wishlist it, but we'll see.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2824620/The_Exile_Princes

23

Announcements! The Town Crier! / Happy Cyril and Methodius Day 2024!

« on: February 14, 2024, 10:07:40 AM »

Happy Feast of Cyril & Methodius!


The Baška tablet, written in Glagolitic, circa 1100.

It's mid February and as usual it's time to celebrate (among other things) languages and learning as Feb 14 is Cyril and Methodius day, dedicated to the brothers who created the Glagolitic alphabet, the first! They're patron saints of Europe, and of several eastern European countries, and so are excellent figureheads for a festival of learning, alphabets, languages and international cooperation. Take some time today to hug a linguist in your life, read a good book, learn a language, and reach out across borders. The world needs these things, now as much as - perhaps more than - ever. Have a lovely and learningful day!

Find out more

24

General Chatter - The Boozer / Cyril & Methodius Day 2024

« on: February 14, 2024, 10:01:28 AM »

It's Cyril & Methodius Day 2024! Here's the usual thread to wish other people a happy Cyril & Methodius day and let us know what you've been up to regarding writing, alphabets, and languages on this particular year's celebration.

If you want to donate to charity today, Room to Read's direct donation link here. Please donate to them, they're a very good cost efficient charity for supporting literacy in developing countries.

FAQs

What is Cyril and Methodius Day?
As celebrated by Exilians and many others, Cyril and Methodius Day is a festival of literature, learning, languages, and linguistics. It's an alternative or additional celebration to the feast day of Saint Valentine - not as an "anti-Valentine's" project, but providing people another choice of celebration for the day.

How do I celebrate it?

• Read a book.
• Hug a friendly linguist, and tell them how much you appreciate alphabets.
• Tell other people it's Cyril and Methodius day. Spread the word!
• Recommend good books to a friend. Make ALL the reading happen!
• Celebrate and discover more about European, and particularly eastern European, culture, writing, food, arts, and more.
• Do some work on learning a language.
• Talk to your international friends from Europe (and beyond).
• Do conlanging/make a new alphabet!
• Donate to a reading-related charity

So, uh, why do this?

• It's fun! It's that extra bit of excuse and motivation to get on and do the language learning you wanted, or finish that book chapter.
• The world needs people learning about, and reaching out to, each other more than ever. Now is absolutely the time to do that.
• For people who are alienated by the commercialisation of Feb 14, or otherwise don't want to or can't celebrate it, finding something else positive to do and celebrate is SO much better than just sitting around being glum.
• It's inclusive: not everyone has or wants romantic partners for Feb 14, but just about everyone can communicate and learn.
• It helps people. Raising money for charity has been a part of how we celebrate Cyril & Methodius day for some years now, and that's raised worthwhile sums to help spread education to those who need it most.
• It shines a light on two really interesting historical characters who, whilst little known in many countries, had an impact that especially in the form of the Cyrillic alphabet, named after Cyril, is noticeable to this day.
• Books really are just plain excellent.

Is religion important here?
We've claimed Cyril and Methodius' Day in an entirely non-denominational fashion, as has happened to many other Saints' Days, so there is no religious prerequisite for celebrating it. Cyril and Methodius were of course Christians, as were almost all people in their cultural place and context, but their work included many fields combined with or outside purely religious functions including diplomacy, law, and languages. We of course respect that these saints do have a particular religious context and function for people in some traditions, but we think it's possible to celebrate some of the ethos of the things for which they are patrons without being disrespectful to those contexts.

You've got the date wrong!
Cyril and Methodius' Day is celebrated on Feb 14 in the Catholic and Anglican traditions - the Orthodox church and others celebrate their feast at other times of year.

Why can't you just celebrate Valentine's Day?
Not everyone wants to, for all sorts of reasons. Valentine's Day tends to involve heavy commercial promotion of a certain type of romantic relationship that just doesn't suit everyone - some people are happy being single, or indeed are aromantic, or asexual, have other reasons for not wanting to celebrate, or just don't want to define their relationships and celebrate them in the way that Valentine's Day now has a tradition of promoting. Other people may just decide that Europe, reading, and languages are something they value and want to celebrate more than - or alongside - the alternatives. There's no problem mixing the festivals either - languages and love can always be intertwined! Cyril and Methodius day offers a choice of festival that embraces this and can give people a fun and interesting rationale for something different to do on Feb 14.

Who were Cyril and Methodius?
Cyril and Methodius, apostles to the Slavs, were Greek saints in the ninth century AD. They're primarily known for the creation of the Glagolitic alphabet, the first alphabet designed specifically for slavic-family languages, and the ancestor of the modern Cyrillic (which is named after Cyril). They accomplished numerous missions on behalf of the Byzantines, including to the north of the Black Sea, though most famously to Moravia (modern Slovakia). There they worked to create and spread a uniquely Slavic Christian tradition, drawing on both the Latin and Greek traditions of learning but with many unique elements. Despite Moravia moving into the Latin sphere after their deaths, their followers moved to other Slavic nations, especially Bulgaria, from which their work influenced many eastern Europeans to this day. They are patron saints of Europe in the Catholic church.

Can I get a lest text based explanation of all this?
If you want a video explanation of what's going on here, I made one in 2015.

25

The World of Kavis / West of the Mattahars

« on: February 13, 2024, 11:51:15 PM »

The lands west of the curve of the Mattahar mountains are largely more arid than those to its east: most of the watersheds run down to the Dragonfly sea, not westward to the ocean, leaving large desertified and arid areas in the regions south of the Starlit Sea, Tabnire, and Kesrata.

Geography

There are two main sections of the desert, with the Ocean's Tusk or Gulf of Skies, a large and shallow salllamaer gulf, sitting between them. North of the gulf lies the desert known as the Hernaal, south is the Lisk. Both areas lack much sedentary population except at certain oases, with nomads moving along the shores or across the arid sands. A little water flows into the Tusk at the mountain end, leading to the small and modestly fertile valleys of Keretha, ruled by a Hanau prince, little more than a city-state and somewhat far from most major trading routes (Any trade from Verasine will prefer the route through Dulshan where supplies are easier, or will skip the Tusk entirely and travel with a Chelonian flotilla up towards Tabnire, Kesrata, and the Starlit Sea.)

In the Mattahar foothils there are more semi-sedentary tribes with small villages and clan leaders but little formal authority above that. Keretha is a little southwest of the Valleys of the Sunrise, and its natural routes through the mountains would pass through that area (which further reduces its exposure to the outside world, for the Hanau of the Valleys are deeply secretive). Hasdramut meanwhile is more directly due north, but a bit deeper into the mountains: the waters of the lakes around Hasdramut largely flow north into the Starlit Sea.

Peoples

The Mattahar foothill peoples are a mix of humans, dwarfs, and goblins, farming succulents that can survive the arid conditions or trapping hyraxes, golden-moles and large jerboas for small amounts of meat. Some occasionally cross the mountains to seek a better life in Dulshan or the Heirophancy, but the perils of the journey, barriers of language, and the distaste of neighbours for such desertion mean few attempt the journey. The largest settlements in this region might have one or two hundred souls, perhaps three hundred in some of the villages of smaller goblins, and there are few of those.

Out in the desert, dwarfs become more commonplace, perhaps better adapted for hard climates. Nomadic groups travel with the seasons along the shores of the sea or trekking inland to oases. The desert peoples have a strongly place-centred system of belief, memory, and oral record.

Meanwhile, the Kerethans are more Hanau (about a third to a half) and likewise have more gnomes than usual, with humans and dwarfs also mixed into the population. Kerethans speak a localised language which mixes the vocabulary of certain Mattahar foothill and desert languages with structures more related to Heirophantic or trading-talk. The region grows kamut wheat, millet, and mebev, a tough little fruit rather like a hard and bitter apricot, sometimes cooked and sometimes mixed into a salted drink with the acidic sap of certain succulent plants. Some places in the foothills also cultivate mebev trees.

26

The World of Kavis / The Land of a Hundred and Fifty Lakes and Assehr

« on: February 13, 2024, 11:36:59 PM »

The Land of a Hundred and Fifty Lakes, sometimes also known as Jettestal, is the name for the wide marshland that separates the Heirophancy from Dulshan on the seaward side. It begins somewhat south of the passes up to the Valleys of the Sunrise, and covers a broad. Inland of it, the marsh is fed by several fast-flowing rivers that pass through the steep foothills of Assehr. This latter region is perhaps more important than the Lakes: it is unremarkable for much beyond keeping sheep and goats, but it includes Meshtom's Road, a Heirophantic construction that for a hundred years or so at the Heirophancy's peak was the key artery through which it controlled the coasts and cities of the northern and coastal regions of Dulshan.

This region has been under Heirophantic control in the past, particularly Assehr, and even today local leaders will vary between giving nods to Heirophantic and Dulshani rule, perhaps in some cases claiming Heirophantic ancestry or paying tribute to the Heirophancy's role as keepers of balance whilst also sending tributes to Dulshan where useful. The loose nature of Dulshan's rulership and the impossibility of the Butterfly Court coming into so ill-prepared a region means that except in times of open war honour can usually be satisfied on all sides. Occasional skirmishes and local rulers drafting in larger powers to their aid are nonetheless common, and small Francolin companies often see their first fights somewhere in this region.

27

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Open Web Search

« on: February 12, 2024, 07:59:23 PM »

https://openwebsearch.eu/news/

I hadn't come across this project recently but it looks interesting: an attempt in the coming years to compile an open nonprofit web search index, the thing that is needed to run under Google etc etc. There's very few players in this field - most search engines don't AFAIK actually have their own index, there's about 3-4 big ones and the rest just license someone else's (so Ecosia search uses Bing's search index for example). So having a proper open index seems a pretty good idea: of course, the continual web crawling needed to get it good will need to be funded from somewhere, but the idea of an open, public competitor to the tech giants in this area feels pretty welcome and starts addressing one key problem of the modern web, which is that a ton of key necessary online infrastructure is just run by whichever company made it first.

28

General Chatter - The Boozer / TOSDR - a web Terms of Service Guide

« on: February 12, 2024, 07:50:39 PM »

https://tosdr.org/en/frontpage#ratings

Stumbled across this today: a service for rating and disambiguating different web services' Terms of Service, which is a pretty neat idea that I'd not come across before. I'm not sure how much use I'll get out of it, given that often frankly whether I need to use a service is more dependent on who else is using it than its ToS, but it does remind me that there's a fair bunch of services I shouldn't be posting e.g. my image content on because they absolutely will nab it.

29

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / NotGDC, a Game Dev "Not-Conference"

« on: February 07, 2024, 10:44:28 PM »

I stumbled across this today and thought I'd share: NotGDC is a "not-conference" for game dev etc. It's a sort of open collection/online festival for talks but also bits of writing and tutorials and stuff. I'm mulling over whether it'd be interesting to submit something.

Details are at:
https://notgdc.io/

And archive of previous years' stuff:
https://notgdc.io/archive/

30

General Chatter - The Boozer / February pub - 29th?

« on: February 06, 2024, 09:25:03 PM »

We're due a Thursday pub, I'm away (as is Glaurung) the week previous, so Thursday the 29th would seem sensible. Any objections?