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Topics - Jubal

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106
Tabletop Design - The Senet House / Dwarf Gothic
« on: April 22, 2023, 11:38:33 PM »
This is really a TTRPG (or possibly boardgame, or computer game, who knows, though I think my first envisioning of it was TTRPG so it's going here) setting idea without anything attached to it yet, and I don't know if I'll use it for anything, but here's the pitch for my own notes as much as anything, thoughts welcome!


Humans have dominated Hovaz for many years. Their empires held sway upon the surface, and even into the high mountains and deep woods their fires burned. In among them, dwarfs were little communities of tinkers, who were spat upon, moved with their masters, and perhaps sometimes told stories of half-remembered times when they held their own halls deep beneath the high hills: but these they told only to themselves.

But now the world is fracturing: the exhaustions of war have caused the world to creak at the seams, caused corruption and banditry to spread across the fields and the lowlands. Muskets are being used as clubs because of the scarcity of gunpowder, and the depradations of war are causing spirits to stir that should not have been awoken. And little by little, the dwarfs built spaces for themselves: little places and times where they found that they could take time and space for themselves. And so they met, and so they told their stories of half-remembered times, and so they took their tinkerings and tales and they made of them... something new.

The world is fracturing, and it may be up to the once-humbled dwarfs to decide what sort of age the future will be. Inventions built as a way of opting out of a breaking society might now be needed to save it, or complete its destruction. How will mankind react to the heavy tread of golems and the rattle of carts along the dwarfs' new iron roads? Will the dwarfs manage to bring torches back to long-empty halls, and will what they build there be a rebirth of tradition or something entirely new to shape a different sort of existence altogether?

Will the dwarfs be able to deal with the monsters that lurk in the shadows? What about the ones that lurk within themselves?


There's various ideas I'm batting around with for this. One core premise is sort of exploring what happens when people who've formerly been oppressed find they can turn the tables: it's not really an industrial revolution story in my mind, and I think I want to keep the dwarfs' technology quite artisanal. But I think focusing on problems like "Well all our stories from 400 years ago say X, now we actually get to decide on that, are we going back to that? Do we trust these stories, and who are we if we don't?" is quite an interesting one re playing with shaping belief. And I think putting it from the Dwarfs' perspective makes it a potentially hopeful setting: the world is being reshaped anyway, it can't be "defended" or "protected", it's just about deciding what sort of world it will become.

I think it also works aesthetically in my head. Like, I sort of imagine the movie trailer for this involving a caravan of bicorne-hatted or floppy-hatted dwarfs edging nervously through a forest, perhaps with a golem-pulled cart or early steam engine, with human bandits with rusty swords watching from the shadows - and then as night falls, both the humans and dwarfs find themselves losing members of their party to an unseen assailant. Or possibly a scenario with dwarfs returning to a mine mentioned in their songs and finding humans living in the upper caves who've actually now been there for several generations: how do you deal with that? Who has what rights? Are you coming to put a king back on a mountain throne, or do you find new compromises and ideas?

Anyway, just something I've been mulling over. We'll see if I add any more thoughts to it!

107
The World of Kavis / Some Philosophers from Kavis
« on: April 19, 2023, 11:22:10 PM »
Some musings on schools of thought for how Kavians think about their world.

Philosophy is at its most active in Camahay, where arguments between wandering scholars and thinkers are practically a typical form of entertainment. The problems considered tend to be those that lend themselves best to open formats, with arguments by analogy being common and a general explanation.

Dulshani philosophy mostly derives from the Camahayan philosopher Veyrgu, whose philosophy strongly focused on self-negation and the idea that sensory inputs are a barrier to understanding higher truths. Veyrite philosophy is also taught in schools in parts of the Heirophancy and Palictara.

Heirophantic philosophy is frequently devoted to the fundamental religious concepts of Suyr and Beyi, the force of movement and of stillness, and how one balances them and observes them. This latter question - how we know whether actions or things contribute to the cosmic balance - leads to the question of how one knows anything at all, which Heirophantic philosophers tend to approach from two main angles, the sensory knowledge and the cosmic knowledge, with the aim to bring the more immediate sensory knowledge into accordance with the cosmic knowledge in order to be able to create orderly thought and the ability to percieve truth. Most Heirophantic scholars claim, in line with Alash and his exegetist Kirpintar, that the ability to bring the two forms of knowledge together is something brought about by the cosmos' inherent need for it: that the existence of consciousness proves the cosmos' need to know and thus regulate itself. This need is most particularly expressed in the existence of the Syarami. Other schools exist however, including the work of Souish, who argued that there is no inherent force beyond the dual: that is, that Beyi and Suyr do not seek to be combined or reconciled, but rather that the understanding that this is necessary is the mark of true consciousness and the first step to true sight. Veyrites meanwhile apply Veyrgu's teachings to the problem and suggest that sensory knowledge is actually a hindrance to seeking cosmic knowledge, and that through self-denial people can be taught to see the balance.

Palictaran philosophy is devoted much more to formal logic systems.

The Oak Islander monk Phiatori was crucial to the development of post-Heirophancy philosophy in the Starlit Sea and Alasia. Phiatorine ideas take earlier Heirophantic ones about sensory and cosmic knowledge, but suggest that the ability to truly know either is ultimately illusory. Instead, Phiatorines suggest, one should seek an acceptance of not having cosmic knowledge in particular, focusing instead on building a relationship with what can be determined and reasoned from sensory knowledge, which may be illusory but can at least be tested and found to accord to consistent principles. Their focus is not, however, on empiricism and testing of physical principles, but in arguing how one can sensorily derive the reactions and beliefs of others and therefore sets of moral principles which can be held.

In Alasia, the scholar and scribe Mecteber was the founder of the School of Perfected Song. This takes the Phiatorine principle of seeking moral rectitude in the absence of cosmic knowledge, but with a much more physical and social rather than internally moral understanding of what this should entail, using Alasian harmonic and bell musical systems as the root of a structured society and arguing that because perfection of structure can be logically constructed internally, it represents the most reliable form of knowledge to be realised externally.

108
History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Medievalisms on the Screen III: Digital Medievalisms and the Teaching of History
« on: April 11, 2023, 10:11:55 AM »
This week is CEU's Medievalisms on the Screen conference! I'll be speaking at it, as will  Rob Houghton who's spoken at CMW before, and Juan Manuel (CMW regular and very occasional Exilian pub-goer) is one of the organisers. Would be lovely to see some of you there if you feel like dropping by :) Registration is free and you can pretty much drop in and out per which talks you want to see. My talk is on Saturday: the conference covers Thurs-Sat as a three day event.

For more information, check their website:
https://medievalstudies.ceu.edu/medievalisms-screen-iii-digital-medievalisms-and-teaching-history

And you can register for free at:
https://forms.gle/EDfpchLt6BFnXvvC8

109
General Chatter - The Boozer / April Pub! Fri 28?
« on: April 08, 2023, 12:41:12 PM »
After a couple of unusual months, maybe back to an end-of-the-month Friday this time? Would that work for people?

110
Announcements! The Town Crier! / Updates from the Forge 49: Spring 2023
« on: April 02, 2023, 02:05:25 PM »
Issue 49: Spring 2023

EDITORIAL

Welcome back to Updates from the Forge! It's time for another issue of your favourite Exilian community newsletter (a fact we can rely on by the fact that nobody else is producing such a newsletter). Your regular correspondent and your regular imaginary editorial llama welcome you back for another issue packed with exciting projects - but first, we've had a wave of news from the site:

The last few months have been exciting ones for Exilian - among other things, this site has now turned fifteen years old, something that was rather unexpected for a forum originally meant to be up for a couple of weeks until its precursor Mixed Mods came back online. We had a lovely fifteenth anniversary virtual meetup on March 18 that ranged from music to reminiscences to the range of plush toys sold by popular Scandinavian furniture outlets to debating the historic definition of statehood. Back a little further, in February, also had the results of our Winter Competition, Snowstorm, won by Vicorva with an interactive-fiction game called Avalanchia and resulting in an absolutely wonderful showcase of writing and art that you should definitely go and check out. Our Coding Medieval Worlds 3 workshop was also a success, with more on that below.

In other site news, we've launched a bursaries scheme for Exilian Articles, where we can pay small 'thank yous' especially for writers who are in under-represented categories. If that's you and you have thoughts on worldbuilding or some quirky information you're desperate to dump on someone, then please check the bursary scheme documents out and get in touch! We've had some exciting new pieces in that section recently too, with a travelogue from rbuxton and pieces on goblins for your fantasy settings and building chimeras by Jubal that may be worth your while - just head to the Articles section to have a read.

We also saw two volunteers leave staff at our elections, with GMD and Lizard not re-standing for the positions of Spatharios (moderator) and Technikos (tech staff) respectively. Thanks to both of them for their services to this community over the years. If you'd like to help keep Exilian going or you think you know someone who'd be a good fit among our volunteers, please remember we have a thread open here detailing various volunteer posts that we'd like some support with: we're always very happy to provide the best training and support we can for our volunteer positions.

And whilst all this has been going on, have the good people and citizens of Exilian been idle or distracted? They have not, dear reader, or at the very least they have certainly been producing marvellous creations at a rate of knots while distracted. With several new projects, some very welcome returning faces, and everything from medievalisms to mushroom problems and claymores to canapes, please be regaled with Spring's Updates From the Forge!

CONTENTS:

  • Editorial
  • Game Development
    • Discover the Legends of Castile!
    • Whispers from Windy Meadow...
    • Highland lore from Norbayne
  • Arts & Writing
    • Veo Corva's The Beautiful Decay on Kickstarter!
    • Storydragon's Poetry
  • Miscellany
    • Coding Medieval Worlds 3: Videos Now Available
    • Crusts, Cheesebreads, and Canapes in Exilian's Kitchens
    • Free images for your projects from Eric Matyas
GAME DEV
Discover the Legends of Castile!


New Exilian member Torrezno Entertainment has posted about their upcoming game Legends of Castile, a point and click about a girl called María who leaves her small Castilian village for a convent in Burgos, hoping to become a nun after believing she sees a vision of the Virgin Mary. However, her path gets intertwined with those of many of the region's folkloric creatures, for her prospective Mother Superior assigns her the task of finding proof of their existence to persuade the local Abbot to take action against them. María will then find herself entangled and interacting with a wide range of some of Castile's strangest inhabitants, and working on solving various puzzles to continue her quest...

The resulting madcap adventure, with a sense of humour inspired by Monkey Island and the Discworld books, will take players through many of the legends of Castile with over thirty mythical creatures to meet and as many lovingly hand-drawn environments to explore. Focused on core item and point-and-click gameplay (the developer promises that annoying mechanical minigames will be absent), this game looks pitched to appeal to fans of the classic genre, though also anyone interested in a good quirky tale and in the folklore and legends of this fascinating part of the world.



 
The heart of Windy Meadow: will the rain dampen villagers' spirits?
Whispers from Windy Meadow...

Aure, creator of the highly acclaimed Roadwarden, has returned to his previous story, Tales of Windy Meadow, giving the story-game a major overhaul with an upcoming release that promises to realise new potential from the game and its story. With the vast majority of dialogues changed, deepened character interactions, and the lore updated to better reflect the version of the Viaticum setting presented in Roadwarden, this promises to be the sort of re-release that gives whole new life to a game at every level. Whilst the core story beats will be familiar to those who played Windy Meadow before, the main characters have more and different conflicts to deal with, and some of the themes and outlooks of characters throughout the game have been changed to give them a deeper and less dogmatic outlook on the difficulties of life in Viaticum.

From Stabulus' Tasty Claw Inn to Salvia and Iudicia's cabin in the woods, the setting of Windy Meadow offers an everyday, slice-of-life vision of a fantasy world where nature is stronger than mankind. Its protagonists may live in a world where the Wrath of the Herds looms as a real threat, and the palisades of a village are a vital line between it and the surrounding wilds - but, even so, the everyday and human problems of growing up and working out their relationships with those around them are still very present. They must work out how to make their way through the world, and we're very excited to see their intertwined tales being revisited and deepened.
 
 
 


Highland lore from Norbayne

Some of the heroes of the Highlands from Phoenixguard's Norbayne campaigns.


In the Norbayne section, Phoenixguard has been posting more lore for his standalone RPG Norbayne. In particular, we've recently had an update on the ancestry of the Midlanders - the people we might most recognise as humans - and especially the Highlander lineage of this ape-descendant species. The celtic-themed Highlanders have played a particularly key role in Phoenixguard's playtests of the game, with the McFyfe clan in particular contributing multiple player characters to the tales of Norbayne already. Their serried ranks of kite shielded foot spearmen may be the core of highland armies, but as individual warriors brutally spiked targe shields, claymores, dirks and of course magic spells may all be part of a Highlander character's arsenal for taking on the world. Their insistence upon traditional thick furs and leathers even in tropical environments may not be what those of other cultures might consider sensible, but some things are a matter of pride.

Keep your eyes peeled for more Norbayne content in the near future - the team are hard at work, and a little birdie spotted them chatting to the Exilian Articles section as well: stay tuned!


ARTS AND WRITING



The Tombtown books. How to try and improve through a series: ensure book 2 has an additional cat on the cover.
 
Veo Corva's The Beautiful Decay on Kickstarter!

Author (and Exilian winter competition winner 2023) Veo Corva has their latest book, The Beautiful Decay , on Kickstarter! The sequel to 2019's Books and Bone, this second Tombtown book The Beautiful Decay is a tale of pet zombies, secret libraries, queer romance, fungal horror, and a Very Good Cat. In a book that sees things more from the perspective of the outcasts and mixes dark aesthetics with personal warmth, characters often casually killed in other fantasies get to take the forefront. The community of necromancers Veo has penned into existence in the rambling secret crypt settlement of Tombtown must face up to one of the things most dangerous to the undead themselves - fungi, the embodiment of life as decay.

The kickstarter is already fully funded so you can back it in the guaranteed knowledge that you'll get your rewards - ebooks at the cost-efficiency end, but you can also preorder paperbacks and get bundled sets including Books and Bone. There's also a chance to get V's other works and stories, including the TTRPG Kin and the novel Non-Player Character. If you want to find out more about Veo's stories, they are also currently doing a regular read-through of Books and Bone on Twitch every Sunday, so you can check out their channel if you want to listen in on that!



Storydragon's Poetry

StoryDragon is another new member who arrived with the snowstorm of our winter competition, bringing two lovely pieces of writing to add to the snowfall. Now he has his own poetry thread, where he's posted a first poem, The Eyes of the Universe, with an intriguing interweaving of the cosmic, the referential, and the down-to-earth in how it views the night sky...

Quote
The eyes of the universe
Look down towards earth.
And while you fiercely curse
Your network, (that's fast as snails,)
I search the western sky;
Where I spot, up high...

Do go check out the rest of the poem in StoryDragon's thread, linked below: more details about the poem's background are also available to subscribers of the StoryDragon Ko-fi. Several members have said they're looking forward to seeing more work from our newest poet, so hopefully that will be forthcoming in future weeks and months!


MISCELLANY

Coding Medieval Worlds 3: Videos Now Available


February's Coding Medieval Worlds was a great event for many of those who attended - but if you missed out, then you can catch up on the panel and talk highlights of CMW via Exilian's YouTube channel. Four keynote sessions from the weekend were recorded. From the Saturday, we had a panel on Medievalisms and Soundscapes with Clio Em and Prof. Mariana Lopez with some fascinating insights on sound and worldbuilding, and a fireside chat where Kitfox Games captain Tanya X. Short (of Moon Hunters, Boyfriend Dungeon, and Dwarf Fortress fame) had a great conversation with Tess Watterson covering setting design, historical inspiration, and hints about their next planned release. On Sunday, meanwhile, we had a panel where art historian Madeleine Sterns, environmental historian Acer Lewis, and archaeologist Maria Vargha talked medieval space and how it's represented - and could be represented differently - in games. And to finish off, our final keynote was by Zoe Franznick, one of the narrative designers on medieval murder mystery Pentiment which has had a lot of success since its release last year. Coupled with the breakout discussions this all made for an exciting event and we're delighted to be able to share the videos with you!

Coding Medieval Worlds is a joint event run by Exilian and the University of Vienna's Digital Humanities unit, who kindly provided the funds for the online venue this year, so thanks are due to them. It's also a major volunteer effort, so thanks in particular to Jafeth for his camera-work allowing us to get high quality recordings of all these panels, and to him, Tess Watterson, and Sarah-Nelle Jackson for their work as panel chairs. You can access all the videos in the linked playlist below - including those from previous years. We hope you enjoy them, and do share them to friends and colleagues!


Crusts, Cheesebreads, and Canapes in Exilian's Kitchens


It's homemade bread! Like bread, but made at home!

We've seen a flurry of recent posts in the Jolly Boar kitchen, where Exilian members post their food ideas, inspirations, and achievements. All comers are welcome to share interesting recipes and ideas, making the best use of our wide array of members and their global food interests. Why not head over yourself sometime?

To whet your appetite, recent foodstuffs include Spritelady's bread-making, after inheriting a wide arrayof baking paraphernalia and deciding to experiment with it. We have it on good authority from our European correspondents who've ventured to the island that British bread-making does not have a good reputation, so perhaps Spritelady's valiant efforts as one of our UK-based members can improve matters! We've also had Jubal's advice on salads, with a thread on Georgian salad-making (and the importance of walnuts therein) which has also spread out into discussing Persian use of oranges, olives, and red onion, the possibilities of portulaca, and more besides. Canapes, fried khachapuri, turnip tarts, and savoury strudel are all also part of the recent kaleidoscope of foods being posted about: plenty of food for thought! And, also, food for eating.


Free images for your projects from Eric Matyas


Just some of the textures SoundImage can offer for your upcoming creative projects...

Whilst Eric Matyas is perhaps best known for his vast array of free-to-use music, his SoundImage website includes the latter as well as the former, and recently there have been new additions to his tile-able textures selection! The SoundImage texture library contains many hundreds of high quality images that you can use in tiled format for a wide range of projects and applications. Like Eric's music, they're available as-is for use in both hobby and commercial projects with attribution, and commission variations and non-attribution licenses can be purchased from Eric if you need something a little more fine tuned for your particular work.

The Skills and Resources Offered section on Exilian is always worth a look more widely: there are tons of links there to free art and music to use in your creative projects, so if you're tired of re-using the same stock assets but aren't able to pay for commissions, there are plenty of great options out there - head over and take a look!



That's felt like an even more packed issue than usual of Updates from the Forge - and I hope you, dear reader, will check out the threads of some of these great project creators and let them know what you think of their work. Getting support and constructive feedback as an independent creator is hugely valuable, and it's an important part of Exilian that we try to provide a healthy space for those discussions. The more we engage with one another's work, the stronger the community becomes and the more worth it is other creators starting to spend time here, so do head on, explore, and get inspired for your own creativity as well. Perhaps some of that will be in our next and fiftieth issue? Until then, take care and keep creating!

111
Coding Medieval Worlds & MAMG / CMW3: What Lies Beneath - How Pentiment Writes (and Rewrites) History
« on: April 02, 2023, 12:15:25 AM »
I'll be honest, after how successful Pentiment has been I simply assumed that we'd be very very unlikely to be able to get anyone from Obsidian coming: generally bigger companies in the RPG sector have given Coding Medieval Worlds a miss in recent years, I think partly just not really assuming that a free workshop hanging out with historians might have much utility to it. Tess, via our friend Adam/LudoHistory, did a wonderful job getting us in contact with Zoe, who has proven wonderful to work with and I think gave a really fantastic keynote to round out the CMW3 weekend, which you can see below.

I'm really excited by the possibilities for games that move role-playing out of the hack-and-XP storylines we most commonly see, and I think the success of Pentiment is also a really good sign in that department. There's a lot in this talk that gives really excellent detail on how they built that and made it immersive:


Links:
Pentiment
Meandering Medievalist (Zoe's Website)
Maniculum Podcast

112
Coding Medieval Worlds & MAMG / CMW3: Soundscapes Panel
« on: April 02, 2023, 12:08:14 AM »
I really need to listen to this again to get the most out of it, but I thought this was a really classy panel: Mariana & Clio are both very much best-in-the-business for talking on their respective areas and I'd love to do more with both of them in the future. I wish sound engineering in the game dev systems I work with was a little easier, I feel like I don't manage to make very good use of it in my own work. Huge amounts of food for thought in this one anyhow.


113
Coding Medieval Worlds & MAMG / CMW3: Representing Medieval Space Panel
« on: April 02, 2023, 12:05:39 AM »
I really enjoyed this panel! It was a pure-historians discussion rather than mixed, but I think we still got a really good range of perspectives by having an environmental historian, art/architecture historian and archaeologist on the panel. All the talks have some really good highlights, Acer's discussion of mapping realism was interesting, Madeleine's visual work is super striking (especially her thing on columns breaking the way particular Greek columns break even when it makes no sense, because Aesthetics), and I think Maria's point on moving life outside the immediate village environs is fantastic and one I want to explore more in my games (I did a bit with this in Fenlander, but that's a very small project).

Anyway, hope you enjoy it, comments and thoughts below welcome...


114
Coding Medieval Worlds & MAMG / CMW3: Fireside Chat with Tanya Short
« on: April 02, 2023, 12:02:38 AM »
This was a really great discussion, I thought - I was initially nervous about doing this as a fireside chat rather than a conventional keynote, but it worked out really well and I'm sort of considering leaning into this format more in future. I came across Tanya a year or so earlier when helping put her in touch with a consultant, and I'm super excited for their Byzantine-fantasy game when it comes out, I am very much going to be the target audience (and I've liked all of Kitfox's other work I've come across, though I'm yet to play several of their titles - I actually have most hours on Shattered Planet of any of their games, I have whiled away much time thereupon). Anyway, the below is worth a listen and has some very good thoughts on game development, running teams, developing themes & ideas, and more besides. Awesome interviewing job by Tess too.


115
Exilian Articles / Three Accidents in Andalucía
« on: March 26, 2023, 01:44:52 PM »
Three Accidents in Andalucía
By rbuxton


My brother arrived in Spain in January 2020 and, with one thing and another, it was three years before I managed to visit him. By then he was living in Madrid and I used that as a start point for a three week tour of Andalucía, the southernmost of mainland Spain’s “autonomous communities” (they are very autonomous, by the way). I was partly drawn to this region by its mild winter weather, but mainly by its promise of history, culture and mountains. The title of this article is not entirely honest: my first two stops, and my first “accident”, were actually in the central province of Castilla-La Mancha.

Humans were living permanently in caves in Andalucía from at least 25 000 years ago. The area was then colonised by Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors (Arabs and Berbers) and the Christian Kingdoms which would become modern Spain. In the 1st century AD a Jewish community – the Sephardim – settled in the area and experienced varying degrees of persecution until they were violently expelled in about the 14th century. Although they contain art and architecture from many of these different eras, the cities of the region do not feel like monuments to racial and religious harmony. The dominance of one group would come abruptly to an end and the conquerors would make their own mark on top of the old – quite literally, in places like Granada. Geographically Andalucía is fairly mountainous with several national parks and its dramatic coastline includes the Costa del Sol. There are some fertile river valleys to the west but to the east it borders a desert – the only one in Europe.

Many of Andalucía’s cities have an “old city” area which is clearly defined: on a hill in Toledo, an island in Cádiz. In Cordoba, however, it goes on forever, and the buildings there were noticeably lower and the narrow streets less gloomy as a result. Getting lost in these areas is part of the sightseeing experience, and the main buildings of interest sometimes spring out at you without warning. I saw a number of open-topped tour buses and wondered about their efficacy: a big bus in these places is about as useful as in, say, Venice. “There’s the roof of the cathedral… about a mile away, and the palace next to it… you’ll have to walk that bit.”

Madrid

On my first day in Spain’s capital I saw the cathedral and palace then took the metro to the Buen Retiro Park. I walked through it, past the lake and monument to King Alfonso XII, to the Reina Sofia art gallery. This is home to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, a vast black and white painting depicting the 1937 Nazi bombing of the eponymous town. Next I went to the Temple of Debod, an ancient Egyptian temple gifted to Spain in 1968. It was moved piece by piece to a hilltop in the city centre, where it has a commanding view over parks and the distant mountains. My brother took me into those mountains the following day, to Navacerrada, where a ski resort looks down over a reservoir. We followed a river valley up to the remnants of the snowline, where the path got slippery underfoot. Huge vultures wheeled around us, riding the air currents with hardly a beat of their wings.

In between the days out, tapas and live music I tried to plan my next stop. I was dismayed to see that a train journey to Seville would be expensive and take up most of a day. Much better to take a bus for €5 to a city just south of Madrid.

Toledo

Perched on a rock and surrounded on three sides by the Tagus river gorge, Toledo is spectacular. The city is famous – as anyone who’s seen the film Highlander will know – for its steel making, and the souvenir shops are packed with swords. I dragged myself up the slope alongside its 16th century walls towards a hostel with a sunny roof terrace. I visited the complex of the Santa Fe convent, a series of buildings which was variously used as a Moorish palace, Castillian castle, base for a knightly order, nunnery, girls’ school and now eclectic modern art gallery. The following day I took a bus to a viewpoint on the far side of the gorge, walked back across a Roman bridge and took in the synagogue, alcázar (castle) and cathedral. The latter was one of the most incredible buildings I’ve ever been in; a highlight was its three metre high gold and silver monstrance.

Now to my first “accident”: sitting down to a meal of pasta and tomato soup (I’d misread the tin) at the hostel I heard drumming. I was aware that February was carnival month in much of Andalucía and thought my arrival might have coincided with a rehearsal. I was wrong: the main parade was that evening and it wound through the city streets and down, down, down to the river. I felt like the happiest tourist alive as I followed the dancers, musicians, fishermen and weeping clowns/kings/queens. The noise was sometimes deafening and the sense of community contagious. Only the pigeons, startled off distant balconies, seemed perturbed.

Accident the First- being swept up in Toledo's carnival. Great for your correspondent, less so for the local columbidae.

Granada

A dramatic bus ride through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada took me to Granada, medieval seat of the Nasrid dynasty. I had come to see the Alhambra: essentially a city on a hill of its own consisting of palaces, castles and gardens with some of the best preserved buildings of their kind in the world. I spent a lot of time gazing at views of and from it, and had booked a four hour guided tour well in advance. Wandering the labyrinth of beautifully plastered rooms and courtyards was very special. My guide pointed to some interesting features of Islamic architecture: fountains, for example, are always small to provide a peaceful murmur of water, unlike the thundering status symbols of European aristocracy. Islamic buildings are usually plain and unadorned on the exterior so, when the Christians conquered the Alhambra, they slapped their own richly decorated palace in the middle of it. When Sultan Boabdil, weakened by infighting in his own court, surrendered Granada the centuries of Moorish rule in the Iberian Peninsula were over. This was in 1492, the same year Columbus set sail on his fateful voyage across the Atlantic.

Málaga

The warm weather of coastal Málaga was a relief after the time spent in the mountains, and helped me get over a cold. The city’s reputation as a mere party destination for British sunseekers is undeserved – though there’s certainly a large amount of Sangria available. I explored its waterfront and Roman and medieval buildings, many of which are clustered around a steep, pine-covered hill which affords brilliant panoramas of the city. The cathedral (affectionately known as the “One-armed Lady” since the second of its two towers was never finished) was lit up beautifully every evening by the setting sun. From Málaga I did a day trip to the Nerja caves, a huge network of chambers with artwork dating back 42 000 years. Tourists cannot visit these light-sensitive paintings but it’s still worth seeing the extraordinary speleothems (the general term for cave mineral formations) which include a 32-metre high column. There was plenty of information about the area on a “nature walk” above the caves, which I extended towards a beach for a freezing cold 30-second swim.

Andalucía Day was fast approaching and I asked Pedro, the receptionist, if this would affect long distance public transport. “I don’t know,” he said, like everybody else, “But you know you should go to my home town. You will see something very folk, it’s not for the tourists. Do the pilgrimage to Santa Fe, it’s maybe one hour. There will be music. I have to work”. Unsure of what I was letting myself in for I took a train into the Sierra del Gibralmora. Santa Fe turned out to be a sharp rocky outcrop above the town of Pizarra and the four-hour round trip had great views back to the coast. I returned to find the streets of the town had been closed to vehicles and there were horses everywhere. People drinking beer on horseback, chatting on horseback, watching the musicians and Flamenco dancers on horseback. I, meanwhile, was making an ass of myself trying to order street food in my faltering Spanish – it was clear there weren’t many tourists around. I returned to the hostel, grinning at my accidental good fortune, and showed Pedro my videos. “Hey,” he cried, “That’s my house!”

Accident the Second - an unexpected trip to Santa Fe where your correspondent found himself lacking the apparently obligatory horse.

Sevilla

I only had a day in the fourth largest city in Spain so I spent most of it exploring on foot. It was nice to stand by the river and imagine Columbus setting sail all those years ago. The city is home to the third-largest cathedral in Christendom which, unfortunately, seemed to have the third-largest queue as well, and it was the same with the alcázar. I don’t feel I did Sevilla justice, but I did have some very nice empanadas. It was time to chill for a few days in a laid-back coastal town.

Cádiz

Cádiz is situated on an island connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus just on the Atlantic side of the Strait of Gibraltar. The Phoenicians were the first people to spot its potential as a trade post in the 7th Century BC and they walled off the isthmus to create a fortress. The 16th Century Puertas de Tierra still divide the old city from the new; another notable feature is the large number of sea-facing merchant watchtowers dotted around. I climbed a tower, went to the cathedral and had a great time in the extensive fish market, where I bought a big bag of prawns for €4 (they were no longer wriggling, unlike the crabs). Cádiz’s place in history was further cemented when it became the de facto capital of Spain during the Peninsula War. It was here that the liberal constitution of 1812 was proclaimed, and this left-wing attitude has been proudly maintained ever since. It is most evident today, I’m told, in its riotous annual carnival, which I had just missed.

Or so I thought.

I began to suspect something was up when I saw a group of middle-aged men in silly costumes waving inflatable guitars at each other on the Saturday night. By Sunday afternoon, crowds had started to gather at the steps of various buildings around town, which served as stages. These were filled up apparently at random by groups of performers in even sillier costumes – the group of large rubber ducks was a personal favourite. The acts divided roughly into two types. The first I would describe as “street pantomime”: two people – friends or a husband-and-wife team – would regale passers by with stories, jokes and songs with the help of kazoos and wooden sticks. Afterwards they would give out badges in exchange for coins and spend the coins on beer and sherry (“Please fund our alcoholism,” read one sign, in English). The second type would be a group of ten or more singers with guitars, drums, cymbals and seriously good four-part harmonies. The words were entirely lost on me which was a shame as the crowd were laughing and joining in with everything, especially the drinking. I’m pretty sure, however, that the nun was inviting the fireman in through her window for some distinctly un-nunnish activities.

Accident the Third - because why have one accidental carnival stop when you could have three?

Córdoba

My last stop was another former Moorish stronghold with remains of walls dotted around. My first view of the cathedral and alcázar was from the far side of the Guadalquivir river, where there are historical bridges and watermills. The alcázar here was actually built by Christian kings after they conquered the city in 1236. More recently some exquisite Roman mosaics were moved here, but the gardens with their rows of fountains were the highlight for me. I went to the Museum of the Sephardic Jews in an old town house, which was very moving. Many converts to Christianity continued to practise Judaism in secret – an activity the 15th century Inquisition sought to stamp out. Just across the road was a synagogue, forgotten after its conversion to a church but now restored. The city’s famous Mezquita is another example of a religious building changing over time: it’s a cathedral built to completely cover and encapsulate an earlier mosque. The first thing you see on entering is some of the 800 or so columns supporting arches stretching away into the gloom. I finished up with a tour of the churches to the east of the old city, then it was time for a bus back to Madrid and a flight home.


I’m not sure how to wrap this up. It was a brilliant three weeks and I’d recommend it to anyone. The bigger cities could easily be done as a weekend getaway or, for a longer tour, Andalucía could be combined with Portugal, Valencia and Barcelona or even Morocco (an hour away by boat). There may be a few errors in the dates and facts in my account so please let me know if you spot any. Regarding my three accidents, I suppose I was simply in the right place at the right time. If that doesn’t encourage you to put a bag on your back and go somewhere new I don’t know what will. Thanks for reading.


Editor's Note: If you enjoyed this article and want to read more travel writing by Exilian members, please check out the forum's Travel Writing Index, which includes a range of members' travels and thoughts on places from Tunis to Tbilisi and more besides!

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Arts, Crafts, Music & Drama - The Artisans' Guilds / Glaze: Protection for images from being incorporated into training sets
« on: March 25, 2023, 01:03:25 PM »
So today I came across Glaze, the first attempt I've seen at a widely publicly accessible anti-generative model trap-tool:

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

The principle being that it makes very subtle, not easy for humans to detect, tweaks to an image to get AIs to read it as being stylistically very different to how we see it: using the difference between model input perception and human perception as a way to keep the base image but really confuse the model. Glaze mainly messes with the stylistics, to make it harder to do "X in the style of Y" type requests from systems like StableDiffusion and MidJourney.

I think we're going to see a ton more of this stuff for style protection, but also similar techniques for "gaming" LLM and image model outputs (once people can work out how to maximise product placement from these models, someone will make an advertising fortune). And there'll be outright "malware" inputs that try to break the set or get the AI to replicate damaging code or whatever. There are some big vulnerabilities and possibilities in this area that people haven't really been considering yet because the tech is so new that people are only just reacting to it.

A quote from Prof. Ben Zhao who worked on Glaze, via TechCrunch:
Quote
What we do is we try to understand how the AI model perceives its own version of what artistic style is. And then we basically work in that dimension — to distort what the model sees as a particular style. So it’s not so much that there’s a hidden message or blocking of anything… It is, basically, learning how to speak the language of the machine learning model, and using its own language — distorting what it sees of the art images in such a way that it actually has a minimal impact on how humans see. And it turns out because these two worlds are so different, we can actually achieve both significant distortion in the machine learning perspective, with minimal distortion in the visual perspective that we have as humans.

This comes from a fundamental gap between how AI perceives the world and how we perceive the world. This fundamental gap has been known for ages. It is not something that is new. It is not something that can be easily removed or avoided. It’s the reason that we have a task called ‘adversarial examples’ against machine learning. And people have been trying to fix that — defend against these things — for close to 10 years now, with very limited success,” he adds. “This gap between how we see the world and how AI model sees the world, using mathematical representation, seems to be fundamental and unavoidable… What we’re actually doing — in pure technical terms — is an attack, not a defence. But we’re using it as a defence.

117
Food Discussion - The Jolly Boar Kitchen / Georgian salads
« on: March 24, 2023, 06:22:55 PM »
Georgian salads

I made one recently, as shown. Kind of, anyway. arguable if I did a good job, but I thought it was nice. I put it together for my department's Now Ruz (that is, Persian new year) celebration, figuring I'd add something from my kinda-neighbouring-to-Persian area of study.

A Georgian salad is interesting - comparable in some ways to a Greek salad in that the base is chopped cucumber (usually quite chunky rather than fine-cut), with no leaf vegetables as a norm. Tomatoes and onion are also very common elements - I used red onion in this one - but perhaps the most quintessential 'Georgian' element is walnut. Here I added this by scattering a slightly massively too generous portion of chopped walnut on as a topping, which I've seen done before: equally, though, walnut oil is a traditional element and is the core way Georgian salads are dressed.

I'm not sure what the Georgian obsession with walnut is but it goes well beyond salads, they're also used to make the paste for badrijani (aubergine rolls), in desserts as the base for churchkela grape-and-walnut sticks and as a garnish for pelamushi grape-cakes, and probably in a load more stuff I'm forgetting right now. The pric

Anyway, there's one final element in the right-hand dish, which is the brown caper-like things around the outside. These aren't capers at all - they're pickled flowerbuds. the tree and dish are both called jonjoli in Georgian - the tree in English is the Caucasian Bladdernut, Staphylea colchica. Its a smallish tree (6-10 feet according to Wiki), and the buds are preserved with what from the limited information I can find seems to be a process of pickling in brine with oil and onion added during the process for flavouring. The result is quite a distinctive, strong pickle taste and one I actually really rather like.

Jonjoli are usually served separately not in a salad - though this would be in a Georgian meal where all the dishes are served together for everyone to pick bits from, so it's not like they're meant to be eaten alone. I had a large jar that I'd purchased a while back and I figured this was the occasion to open it, so here we are.

Queries, variants, thoughts and confusions all welcome below!

118
Exilian Articles / Thinking Chimerically
« on: March 18, 2023, 01:07:36 PM »
Thinking Chimerically
By Jubal



The Chimera of Arezzo, an ancient art piece. By Saiko, via Wikimedia Commons.
What makes a chimera a chimera? Whilst of course there’s the ‘original model’ with its goat, dragon, and lion heads and snake tail, the term has a more general usage for animals made of bits of other animals. These include the gryphon, the hippocampus, the hippogriff, the owlbear (in its post-Gygaxian/modern incarnations), the wolpertinger, the jackalope, a lot of grotesques in medieval margin images, and so on. We’ve even had the spectacle of a real creature being declared chimerical: the first Europeans to see platypuses assumed they were sewn together fakes, and indeed some aboriginal tales posit them as the offspring of a duck and a rakali, giving them a chimerical ancestry.

We keep coming up with and using chimeras. The gryphon may be ancient, after all, but the owlbear is only about half a century old. The inherent way that animal parts can be recombined is something we will doubtless keep playing with – but what works, and how we can put together a chimera, isn’t something entirely without logic or rules. Those rules depend on what we’re trying to achieve with our chimerical being, and how we feel and think about the particular animals and animal parts being used. For the time being, we’ll start with a basic definition of a chimera as having the characteristics that it has parts that are recognisably from multiple animals, and that it also bears some attribute or connection to those animals.

Within that, I think there are two main purposes of a chimera: a chimera as confusion and a chimera as magnification of the animal’s attributes. The chimera as confusion is exemplified by the original chimera. The purpose of the chimera is that it is wrong: it is unnatural and strange that these familiar images have been reassembled into something unfamiliar. Medieval grotesques also fall into this category, with human faces and dragon’s tails and legs poking out of all sorts of places that, well, they just shouldn’t be.

However, here’s where things can fast get out of control, because creating something that just looks wrong is actually kind of easy: if we create a creature with sixteen limbs alternating octopus tentacles and spider legs, give it an array of eight eyes, the beak of a rooster and a big ol’ fish fin, we definitely have something that is weird as hell but not really something that fulfils a chimera’s function. It’s just too weird, and whilst it might be horrifying, that’s because of the inherent horrors of what we’ve created more than because the bits don’t belong together. Another way of putting this is that a messy chimera can easily just become an alien, where the whole thing is weird rather than having the specific wrongness of relatively familiar elements mismatched together. Insectoid and invertebrate elements transposed into vertebrates, too, are such a staple of horror as a genre that it’s (in my view probably unfortunately) relatively difficult to use them in a chimera-like situation.

So we get the twist in the chimera’s tale: it relies on a weirdness that needs a certain level of familiarity to make it work. The specific horror or discomfort of the chimera is that it takes elements we know and understand, and put them in a combination or situation that breaks that image. In this sense, the especially incongruous goat head might be the most important part of a classical chimera. It’s the familiarity of that image – or that of the human parts in medieval human-dragon grotesques – that combined with the multi-part nature of the creature creates the effect. Especially aspects like its multiplicity of heads manage to provide a clear mix-and-match nature and a clear wrongness while maintaining the clarity of which parts come from where rather than making a simply alien being.



They greymarne - very much not the gryphon you know and love. Author's own work.
There’s another way to use chimerical creatures, though. Rather than focusing on the mismatched elements of them, we can equally use animal parts about which we have similar feelings and emotions to create symbols that exemplify both things. The gryphon is a great classical example of this – we have similar feelings about eagles and lions, both proud. I think that’s how the owlbear – originally an explanation for a weird plastic toy with a long beak and a tail someone found in a shop in the 70s – developed so neatly into the owl plus bear combination that we more commonly see today. Both owls and bears have associations of night, danger, sleeping, predation, but we also have rather warm feelings towards both creatures.

To give a good example of just how much this works on feelings, I want to share with you a creature I’ve used in the past, the greymarne, a corruption of Griffinus Marinus (in much the same way that a vormorant is a shortening of Corvus marinus, the sea-crow, this is a sea-gryphon). There is very little mechanical difference between a greymarne and a gryphon – both have bird head, animal body, fly, and so on. But the greymarne has the head of a gull, and that changes everything. The gryphon is a noble steed and soars the peaks: the greymarne squawks in your face and tries to dive-bomb you. The gryphon chases wild ibex in the hills or attacks mighty elephants, while the Greymarne is out to get your lunch and will probably snack on a dead fox if one washes up in its vicinity. Because our feelings about the input animals are so different, two mechanically similar creatures come with wildly different expectation games.

Again, we have an interesting problem that parallels the one we had with our confusions, which is that some combinations that work well don’t function properly as this sort of chimera, either because the respective parts don’t resonate or because, to take a cooking analogy, the combination overpowers the original flavours. Enter Quetzalcoatl, stage left. The winged serpent is a fantastic image and, nominally, chimerical, including bird and serpent parts. But because most people around the world nowadays do not have terribly strong feelings about quetzals, they become a sort of adornment to the core serpent image rather than something we might think of more properly as a chimera. Generally a lot of bird + lizard combinations end up with some issues like this, giving a more dinosaur or lizardman feel than something we perceive as chimerical, perhaps due to our lower familiarity and empathy with a lot of non-mammalian creatures.



So we can move from these thoughts to a couple of core guidelines about using chimeras and, perhaps, creating new ones. There are two major ways to create a chimerical creature, either by trying to create something where the combination of parts turns the familiar into the unfamiliar, or by creating a creature where shared ideas and familiar attributes give a reinforcement to both sets of characteristics. In both of these cases, it tends to make sense to have at least one part of the animal be something that is comparatively familiar and about which the audience already has some fairly heavily embedded ideas. Mammals tend to work especially well for these purposes, because we’re more familiar with them and tend to feel less like they’re alien to us.

To give a couple of examples to end with: let’s first make a wrong chimera. We’ll start with something cute and familiar: a small cat, for example. We then need to focus on giving it some things that are incongruous, but also familiar themselves. A good idea for a secondary head might be that of a rat – we get the incongruity of “hey that has a second head” but we also play with the idea that this creature both represents predator and prey, perhaps even with the ‘prey’ side being the more malevolent one. Add some webbed back feet, like you might find on a duck, and we have a creature of damp ditches or sewers from a fantasy city, gnawing on foul meat and frightening the regular stray cats and dogs with its terrifying multi-headed shadow – and yet at the same time, it’s all almost something you could imagine taking in, giving a bath, and letting settle down for a nap by the fire.

To make a type two chimera, we need two animals that we have similar feelings about, unlike our cat, duck, and rat. Let’s once again start with a mammal, this time a badger. We think of badgers – probably not wholly correctly – as grumpy but loveable, stoic and somehow defensive, tenacious creatures. What else do we give those attributes to? Well, a tortoise or a turtle. We’ll go with a more aquatic style of turtle to emphasise the difference: shell and back legs of a turtle, front legs and snout of a badger. The resulting Bortle (or Machvaku, or Tadger, or Bouldersbane, to come up with some names) is a creature of wild waterways, defending burrows it digs into the riverbanks. Slower moving than a badger on land, it moves more quickly by water, and its powerful bite and sharp claws give it a reasonable means of defence. It could easily be given some magical attributes to set it apart too, perhaps its shell having particular properties or it having some ability to sniff out particular other creatures or items that a story character might need.




So there you have it, some chimerical thinking and a couple of examples of how to apply it in your fantasy setting design and games. What did you think? Let us know below!


119
Announcements! The Town Crier! / Fifteen years of Exilian!
« on: March 18, 2023, 10:05:09 AM »


Exilian is fifteen years old today. It's almost a strange thing to write - that the first post I made back on March 18, 2008, would have sparked somethign that would still be such an important part of my life - and bringing community, inspiration to a fascinating gaggle of other people from across the world - a decade and a half later. In that time we've done so much - game mods, poems, conventions, workshops, games, articles, atheniads, chain writing, travelogues, TTRPGs, elections, seven WBU threads, 33128 words in a single word association game, and myriad other things recorded in the depths of this forum.

The world today looks pretty different to back then as well: I don't know how much is because it's changed and how much is because I'm older, but certainly the past decade and a half has seen some big shifts in the internet and in creativity, and in the world we have to live in while doing those things. One thing I am sure of, though, is that the spirit of wanting to be curious, kind, and creative in our approach to the world was needed then and is needed now. I hope Exilian will keep fostering that spirit of enquiry, open-mindedness, and welcome for many years to come.

Thank you for being part of this journey, whether you've been here since 2008 or whether you've just arrived today. Exilian is your space for creative geekery - and there's more to come.


We'll be having our special anniversary virtual meetup this evening! Keep an eye out for the email or, if you're not on the emailing list, shout in the comments below this post to be messaged the link on here.

120
Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Healthcare, Pensions & Ageing Populations
« on: March 17, 2023, 11:50:53 AM »
(Split from World Politics and Elections)

France meanwhile is somewhat a little bit on fire due to Emmanuel Macron's attempts to reform the pension system to cut its costs. My sympathies tend to lie with people who want good pensions, though I'm not sure a lot of people on the left have really gone out and outlined reasonably just how much taxes are going to need to go up in the coming years, especially on businesses and the middle classes, to support the vastly larger pension population Europe now has. I suspect more and more countries will end up relying on a UBI-style state backed pension, because private pension systems just have too many holes in them now, but that may lead to worse outcomes for a lot of middle class pensioners (who will pay more tax and get less pension, in order to support working class pensioners - which is a necessary and morally decent thing, but may nonetheless go down like a cup of cold sick among sections of the electorate with high propensities to vote). The other thing I think is terribly urgent is some pretty radical rethinks of how we do healthcare: we really need to shift to a place where we refocus on trying to give people fifteen healthy years after retiring rather than thirty increasingly frail ones, but some of the things needed for that, like more early-intervention care on what people see as "minor" issues that affect quality of life at the probable expense of spending as much on e.g. continually improving cancer or heart care to keep people's bodies physically technically functioning for longer, are again quite possibly likely to be unpopular. It's a hugely difficult area & set of issues.

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