Topics

181

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Historical methods, politics, analogy and empiricism

« on: August 28, 2022, 02:03:04 PM »

So, opinion writer/economicsy person Noah Smith recently wrote a piece (https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/on-the-wisdom-of-the-historians) in which he charges essentially that everyone is listening too much to historians who are using "personal judgement" rather than "empirical testing" to make claims and links to the present.

As such, I wrote a short response piece (which you can find at https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2022/08/28/on-history-and-analogy/) detailing what I think some of the issues are with this, why arguing from historical context points isn't the same as arguing from random anecdotes, and some of the problems with trying to make history look more like social sciences which we've actually seen as it's something people keep failing to do.

Thoughts welcome

182

General Chatter - The Boozer / Old Vines and Swallows’ Tails: A Trip to Maribor

« on: August 24, 2022, 10:21:55 PM »

Old Vines and Swallows’ Tails: A Trip to Maribor



The train, my fourth of the day, pulled into the sunlight of the train station. I had, rail by rail, watched the hills of Austria wind by, the crags of the Semmering pass and the orchards of Steiermark. I could in some ways have been forgiven, in the last part of the journey, for wondering if I had left: for the rolling hills and orchards were still familiar, the woods and valleys just as green. In a certain historic sense, I had not left Styria at all. But the signs at the station were in a Slavic, not a Germanic language, and the feel of the city just that little bit more relaxed, less neatly put together, than I might have found an hour or two northwards. I was in South Styria now, in Slovenia, and I had just arrived in Maribor.

Whilst Andrej Sapowski used the name in the Witcher setting as the second city of Temeria and home of the sorceress Triss Merrigold, the very much real Maribor is the second city of Slovenia. Its links to the marks and marches of the south-eastern Frankish empire, and later the Habsburgs, are betrayed by its original name of Marchburg. Maribor is a nineteenth century romantic Slovenisation, one that only really took off after being given a reverse etymology of mar i bor (to care and to fight for) in a song by prominent Slovene nationalist Lovro Toman.

Baby swallows in a willow-tree by the Drava river

The way into central Maribor from the station passes the charmingly retro-futuristic bus station and a few more modern blocks before one emerges into the almost-familiar streets in the style of many a former Habsburg provincial centre. Upon finding my accommodation, one of the first things I noticed was that the building’s outer hallway had numerous piece of paper taped to the floor. Then I noticed that said pieces of paper were covered in bird droppings. Looking upwards, the unmistakeable neat round shapes of swallows’ nests were huddled in the corners.

I did not have to wait long to see the nests’ inhabitants either: walking down to the river Drava, the branch of a weeping willow was laden with the shiny blue coats of fledglings awaiting food, calling loudly for their parents to return from looping flights across the water. I have never been in a place quite so full of swallows and their cousins: the centre of Maribor has house-martin nests under many a building overhang, whilst over the river and up in the vineyards the barn swallows themselves dance and loop. It is perhaps strange that watching swallows should be so restful – they are, after all, in constant motion – but perhaps the illusion of calm in ever-whirling movement is part of the trick.

The river-side area of town, known as Lent, offers a pretty tiled-roof sweep of views up into town, and the wide Drava beside. A road and some parking cuts between the front of shops and cafes and the river itself, so besides the old water tower (on which more later) and one restaurant actually located on a boat (which I didn’t try this time) there is mostly a gap between the ‘waterfront’ locations and any actual water, which is arguably a pity. Some waterfront buildings used to exist but were damaged after the 1967 damming of the river – perhaps most notably the Maribor Venice, one of the main landmark pubs on the shoreline that awaited timber rafters in years past. The area is still beautiful despite the waterfront having taken a long step back from the water, and the cafés and bars here seem to have no shortage of business. Here, too, is one of the main tourist attractions of Maribor, the world record holding oldest grapevine which grows up the front of the Old Vine House, now a small museum and wine shop.

Maribor Cathedral, dedicated to St. John the Baptist

Looping round through the middle of town, I headed by the main square and up to briefly poke my head through the door of the cathedral, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, patron of the city. Slovenia, along with Croatia, is at the Catholic end of the Balkans, with the influence of its former Habsburg masters returning it to that fold despite a brief outburst of Protestantism at the end of the sixteenth century. Dvorec Betnava, a manor house now on Maribor’s southern outskirts which I didn’t get to during this trip, was the centre of Maribor’s Protestantism, with its then-owner Wolf Herberstein supporting the construction of a chapel and school for the Protestants starting in 1587. The counter-reformation ultimately caught up, and the Catholic cathedral outlasted its challengers sufficiently well that Betnava itself is now owned by the local archbishopric.

The cathedral building itself was started in the 12th century, and is a somewhat plain building for a Catholic cathedral of its size, far more appealing to my sensibilities than the over-complex decoration and finery of many larger Austrian churches. It stands across a small shaded park from the central building of Maribor’s university, the old cemetery around the cathedral being remembered only by a pillar with a sixteenth century lamp atop it. In the park stands a statue of Anton Slomšek, a now-beatified bishop who is buried in the cathedral: he took up the cultural cause of the Slovenian language in the 19th century and pushed for the bishopric to be reassigned to Maribor rather than Lavant in eastern Carinthia, which it was in 1859. He was also a passionate supporter of ecumenism and dialogue with the Orthodox Church, founding the Brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius as an organisation for improving dialogue between the two faiths. In Vienna, one can often imagine the non-Catholic world is a distant thing: but Maribor, connected further into the Balkans by river, has the ties and uncertainties of a city more used to being on the edge of worlds.

Passing the pretty white-painted walls of Maribor castle for the first time, I headed up to Mestni park, rounding various trees and ponds and meeting the inevitable population of painted tortoises who had, like their cousins in almost every major city in Europe, probably spread there in the 1990s. The park stretches close into the city and from there up into a valley between the hills: it is created in homage to an English country park style, moving from pavilions and open walkways to large open ponds flanked by wooded hillsides and the beat of dragonflies' wings.

I cut up through the forest from the park towards Pyramid Hill: besides the main marked route there are numerous small trails through the trees, eventually emerging to a dry meadow that, according to the signage, boasts an impressive three hundred butterfly species. This was too dry and late in summer for most of them – their most notable species, the exceptionally pretty Southern Festoon, is a springtime butterfly – but some whites and small fritillaries still lazily moved between the dry grass-stems, and views out beyond the city showed rolling hills and small houses and vineyards nestled between them. There were still enough insects left for spotted flycatchers to be sitting in the trees, which I passed under again to emerge soon thereafter at the peak.

The vineyards on Pyramid Hill

Pyramid hill itself is named for a pyramid-like obelisk that was placed there in the 1790s, a rather brief feature in the landscape but one that has stuck in the nomeclature. This hilltop was, perhaps more notably, the location of Maribor’s first castle, the burg for which the city is named and in the shadow of which the town first grew. Built in the eleventh century as part of defence systems to stall Hungarian raids and passing through a kaleidoscope of families, fires, and redevelopments, the castle’s thick wall foundations can still be seen crowning the hilltop alongside a Marian shrine from the 1820s. Unlike the more modern castle, a squat building in the centre of town designed to withstand early modern cannon-fire, the old castle would have offered stunning views of the valley for better visibility and control. To this day, the viewing point still provides some of the best views available out across the city. The sweep of the river cuts across the middle of the landscape, with hazy hillsides and peaks stretching out beyond the eye’s grasp. Maribor itself is not the most dramatic city from above, for most of its buildings are not overly tall and have tiled rooves, meaning there are few real overhead landmarks. The sight is pretty, all the same, and the undramatic appearance might almost be calculated for a vista of peace and simplicity.

Coming down from Pyramid Hill, steep and overgrown vineyards cling to the sunlit slopes, looking too overgrown to be easily harvestable but providing the walk with a particular charm. The fact that Maribor has not attempted to cash in on the association with Sapowski’s fictional world struck me again as surprising – the scene would not have felt too out of place in his Beauclair, and another of his characters besides Triss sprang to mind, through Ciri’s deep association with the swallows that did deep fighter-pilot runs between the vines. If anyone feels like opening the Rosemary and Thyme Inn in Maribor, one can’t help feeling there may be a market.

Food in the evening proved a little less fairytale: I had hoped to go to Romani Kafenava, a well-reviewed restaurant a little way out of the centre run by the local Romani community, but found it closed, presumably for a summer break – it will definitely be on my list if I return to the city, but was not to be this time. I eventually went to a grill place by the river and got a large bap with some characteristic Balkan cevapcici, a grilled mixed meat dish. The place was friendly enough and the food plentiful, though I was too tired to correct them when they double-charged me for four drinks rather than the two that I’d actually imbibed. It felt a successful day nonetheless.


The second day started with a trip to the old Maribor synagogue. It is a squat late medieval building, used today as an exhibition space for displays on the history of the Jews of central Europe. The current exhibition was an excursion into the life of Hedy Lamarr, most famous as an actress but also notable as an inventor and Viennese in origin. It is interesting, perhaps, that she is still thus seen as part of a sphere that includes Maribor: the Slovenian national project has not undermined a certain Habsburg heritage and alignment for a town whose very buildings on a certain level cannot help but turn their faces north to their old provincial and imperial metropolises in Graz and Vienna. One should not think, for a second, that this makes the area any less Slovene. Hitler’s fascists explicitly attempted to Germanise Maribor during the 1940s, and conducted several massacres in the face of bitter opposition by Slovenian partisans. Rather, I think, Maribor is a city that holds many roots tangled in its heart, and has chosen, in a slow and careful way, to work out if they can still grow a vine worth having.

Maribor's town square, including the old town hall and plague monument

As for the Jews of Maribor, the thriving community that built the synagogue was already torn asunder at the close of the medieval period, with Maximilian I decreeing the Jews’ expulsion in 1496. The building spent many years from 1501 onwards as the church of All Saints, before becoming an exhibition centre and then a museum in the later 20th century. The old Synagogue includes a replica (the original is in the Castle Museum) of the 1379 gravestone of a rabbi called Abraham. Whilst the main Jewish cemetery in the city is no longer extant, the square between the Synagogue and the nearby tower that was once part of the old walls used to be a garden which may have had burials of prominent members of the community. Today the square is quiet, and paved, and looks out over the river: a place still, perhaps, to remember.

Breakfast was next – a slow affair in which the tea I ordered was cold by the time the milk for it arrived, and drunk by the time the food appeared. The café had a friendly atmosphere, nonetheless, and there are certainly worse fates than cold tea in the sunlit central square of Maribor. After that it seemed time to head for the castle, whose museum covers the history of the region from prehistory to the twentieth century, from mammoth tusks to marquetry and glaives to gramophones. It is a pretty building, as much of Maribor is, looking out over squares to the front and side. In front of its entranceway stands a monument to Saint Florian, patron saint of preventing fires and floods: it was erected after the seventeenth century saw five major fires in the city, including three in five years between 1645 and 1650, after which no doubt some divine intervention was felt necessary. 

Not just the museum but also the late fifteenth century castle walls themselves stand testament to the fact Maribor has long perched on the edge of worlds. These rolling mountains were Roman, once, gaining a Slavic character in the early medieval period as villas gave way to hilltop fortresses. Slavic raiding gave way to Hungarian raiding as the region perched on the edge of the Frankish world, and then in the late medieval and early modern periods Ottoman expansionism put Maribor on the defensive lines protecting the Habsburgs’ domains. Between the fires and the front lines, one almost wonders if the carefully relaxed feel of the city today is actually that of a place that has rarely had a moment to exhale.

Some of the green hills visible on a walk up the Drava valley

Having gone around the castle, I’d awkwardly managed to do it at about the same rate as a pair of other travellers, who I felt seemed to be giving me a couple of odd looks – concerned that they may have been worried about being followed, not an unreasonable caution especially for younger women when travelling, I decided it might be time to be elsewhere. I absented myself from the centre of town, stopped by a bakery, and had lunch under a willow tree by the river. Bakeries are quite a good bet for lunches in Maribor: far quicker than a café, and the town has little shortage of pleasant places to sit. After the rolling expanse of history – perhaps because of the rolling expanse of history – the quiet of sitting with the ducks under a willow-tree by the river was more than welcome.

After lunch, I briefly stopped by Slovenia’s smallest museum, dedicated to the local fire service and located in an old kiosk by the far end of the main bridge, just large enough for a single sign, one friendly guide behind a desk, and a few shelves of old pumps and other such artefacts. It’s a quirky little building, and probably easy to miss if one doesn’t know it’s there, but worth going into if one is passing. The bridge is worth crossing regardless, for the views along the river are well worth seeing, both looking down to Lent below and along the riverbanks to the wide green hills of the skyline.

The day’s afternoon was dominated by that walk upriver along the Drava, a flat route which quickly develops into pretty views of rolling forests and hills. I had hoped to ultimately walk around a large island in the river, but it appeared to be dominated by a paid-entry swimming area pumping out painfully loud music so I satisfied myself with the riverbanks. Here, even in the heat of the afternoon, were. Wall lizards, surprisingly absent from the stone walls of the dry vineyards the day before, were very much in evidence, as were several snakes (I sadly cannot report on which species, the views never being good enough, and indeed put a hole in my trousers trying to get a photograph to work it out from). Besides the continual blue glint of branches laden with decorative fledgling swallows, there were small birds such as nuthatches and spotted flycatchers, and numerous butterflies, too. A lesser purple emperor lazily floated between tree-branches just above my head and, as I tried to get a better picture, managed to land in one of the most photographically inconvenient places possible, not that I was complaining – sitting first on my hand, then briefly on my head, before flying up into higher branches again.

A local Slovenian recipe: some štruklji at Fudo

Along the route were a range of signs and artefacts of lumber rafting, historically one of the area’s core industries until the Drava was dammed upstream from the city. Rafts came down from Villach, stopping at Maribor on their way downriver laden with logs: the upper part of the river, with its fast rapids, was the hardest part of the journey, and Maribor must have been a welcome sight to those undertaking the journey in centuries past. A few large rafts in the old style still sit in inlets, and one even passed me by, with its cargo some of wine-sipping Polish and Italian tourists, with a band and a Slovenian tour guide sufficiently excitable that she was fully audible from the shore. She addressed her guests in English, of course – the lingua franca of this part of the world is tending to slip away from being German, as is happening across much of Europe.

I was surprised not to see any herons or kingfishers around Maribor. The Drava is certainly not short of fish, and nor are the lakes in Mestni park. I did, however, see some fish-eating birds that I had expected far less, on my way back to the city centre: a pair of female goosander, most of whose fellows migrate northwards to the Baltic in the summer months but who seemed to be quite happily making use of the Drava’s ample fish stocks.

This was the evening when I finally cracked the puzzle of how to get good food in Maribor, by going to Fudo, a restaurant on the main square, which ran straight to my must-visit list for anyone else passing through the city. The late day slipped towards dusk, and the ground-level fountains in the main square were lit in bright colours as small children played in them; whilst I tend to prefer water-side places, the town square is very pretty in its own right. The dish I went for was štruklji, a Slovenian variety of dumpling in which filling is spread on a flat dough before being rolled up and then rolls then boiled to cook them. The oldest known recipe for them is for a tarragon-filled version written down in Graz in 1589, and these similarly included that herb in the recipe. The wine was a white, a Sylvaner from northern Slovenia, and like the food excellent, a very large cut above the previous night’s rather over-scented Muscat. Fudo is definitely the strong recommendation for a place to eat in the city, and well worth the visit.

The heavy white walls of Maribor castle

I began the last morning by briefly meeting up with one of Maribor’s newer residents over a late breakfast and another appallingly bad cup of tea (this one at least came promptly and with a very good bagel). I should note that I remain open to claims that there is somewhere in Maribor that one can get a drinkable cup of tea, but am yet to see any primary evidence. In any case, having left Ukraine earlier this year with the war encroaching, she had first gone to Slovakia before deciding that Slovenia, its taxes low and its economy in no bad shape, seemed like a better bet. Maribor, the eternal borderland in centuries past, is in an increasingly connected world still no stranger to change. It was protests in Maribor against an exceptionally corrupt former mayor that ultimately ballooned into the fall of Slovenia’s right-wing prime minister Janesz Jansa in 2013: he briefly made a return more recently, taking advantage of divisions in the whirling array of personnel among the Slovenian centre and left of politics, before once again being defeated by the new green-liberal Prime Minister Robert Golob, who seems to have at least for the time being united Slovenia's Europhile liberals behind his new Freedom Movement.

We walked through the streets, passing the castle and, beside it, the war memorial. Maribor’s war memorial, to the hundreds of partisans who died fighting the Nazis, is a strange object, black and forbidding, a central globe wrapped in something between a helmet and the embrace of a colossal cephalopod. In the middle of such a delicately Habsburg city, it is jarring – and indeed in a way it should be jarring. There is something to be said for not having the horrors of times past fade into the background, and a realisation that this was something stark, and strange, and different, something those of us who have never lived through war will never quite be able to empathise with. To say I like it as an object would be the wrong term, but I think it matters, and that is perhaps more important.

Alone again once my brief companion had headed off to deal with some bureaucracy at the city offices, I spent the middle of the day back in Mestni Park. The heat of the day caused birds and insects to flock to the remaining ditches and trickles of water: birds on offer included a marsh tit, tree sparrows, a serin, and a buzzard wheeling high overhead. Stopping for a drink at the water was a particularly beautiful sight – a scarce swallowtail butterfly, its long white-tipped tail streamers held out as it sipped from the half-dry stream.

A scarce swallowtail butterfly in Mestni park

The far end of the park offered a young song-thrush hopping along by the path, some spectacular smaller butterflies and fritillaries, and an interesting modern stone monument with a variety of different stone-carved roundels representing connections between humanity and the earth, especially places across the heart of Europe. “Maribor and its fairy beings”, one of the roundel explanations notes, “hold in their hands the key to the elemental heart of Europe and thus its creative forces”. I am not so sure any place can make such a claim, but if I had the key to the elemental heart of Europe in my possession, I think I could do worse than give it to the fairy folk of this little city that has drawn tranquillity from centuries of borderland conflict and kept vines growing from its oft-burned earth. I think they would look after it as well as anyone.

My last stops in Maribor – I got lunch at a bakery again – were the museum at the Old Vine House, a small exhibition but with some very pretty art of different grape varieties and some charmingly fashioned old wine jars. I have accumulated some knowledge of wine over the years, but it always bemuses me a little to find that, apparently, there is an entire order of knighthood dedicated to it (whose Slovenian chapter have a section at the Old Vine House displays). The vine outside is only exceptional if one knows its past: but its charm, like that of Maribor as a whole, does not rely on its exceptionality, but rather the extent to which it has a sense of timelessness, cultivated as carefully as the Old Vine itself. Leaving both museum and vine behind, I wound up at last at the old water tower.

The water tower is undoubtedly one of my recommendations for travellers to the city: it is a very pretty sixteenth century building, pentagonal in shape, squatting on the riverside outside the walls below the old synagogue. It contains a small wine bar, has good shade and outdoor seating, and is one of the only places on the river side of the road. It is a calm place from which to watch the birds over the water, drink dry white wine, and think on things: and if all I have seen of this planet has taught me anything, it may be that there are too few such places in the world.


All pauses in life are, in a way, illusions. Time never ceases, vines never stop growing, and the swallows never stop whirling across the Drava in summertime. That the little breaks in time are imagined makes them no less important, and in some ways no less real: and the labour and art behind a seeming stillness is never-ending. Maribor’s very name is a reinvention, from the blunt naming of a borderland fortress to a nineteenth century Slovene’s ideas about what the city should be, a name half the age of the city’s most famous plant and yet now rooted and blood-watered into what this place represents. Maribor treats its past, I think, less as a museum and more as a garden, a vineyard in which, knowingly, the illusion of a moment can meet the illusion of forever. And overhead, gone in a moment and yet present through eternities – the swallows learn, once again, to dance.

183

General Chatter - The Boozer / August pub: Friday 26?

« on: August 13, 2022, 11:56:21 AM »

Would Fri 26 work for people for this month's meetup?

184

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Innovators & innovation

« on: July 28, 2022, 12:34:37 PM »

I thought this was a really interesting article. To sum it up, the core argument is that we think of innovation far too much as being the produce of single genius minds "disrupting" progress, which often actually leads to chaos and sets back the process of collectively building up knowledge and making incremental improvements. The author* also traces this through a general pattern of reduced institutional trust, which he thinks tends to lead to higher willingness to trust 'disruptor' figures across the board, many of whom are terrible at the day to day business of running things.

https://www.noemamag.com/the-resurgence-of-tesla-syndrome/

I guess I'm not quite as negative about individual ability to innovate as this suggests: I guess I'd reframe it a bit and suggest that individual innovation is perhaps a bit more important than is framed here, but that the innovator and the person who works out how to integrate and build that innovation into society successfully are maybe not usually ideally the same person?

The other thing I think it's important not to conflate is the innovator-as-myth and actually innovating. I don't think one can really claim that individual minds don't come up with new and brilliant ideas sometimes, which are of course a product of their world and circumstances but still, some people manage to produce really interesting new stuff from processing their environment (pretty hard to e.g. argue that da Vinci, Turing, or Marie Curie weren't innovative). And yes, a lot of innovation is incremental hard work, but sometimes innovation can and should be sudden and disrupt things, too: the explosion of information tech into people's lives since the 1990s has, in my view, on balance been a big positive, and inevitably has also radically disrupted whole segments of the workforce (reducing the proportional number of clerking/secretarial jobs in many fields for example). The singling out of GM crops as a "well this seems good to tech innovators but actually" example feels weird to me: there are big problems with corporate control of GM technology which stops e.g. farmers holding seed over and thus raises their prices horribly, but GM per se should be a really important tool for increasing food yields, something we desperately need in a food-insecure world.

I guess where I realign with the piece a bit is that I don't think all that is true though of a lot of popularly known individual "disruptor innovators" - tech and business "geniuses" are often the wealthy people running the show rather than the people who come up with the actual innovations, and there's nothing actually innovative about the platforms of a Trump or a Johnson, or even a Corbyn, in politics. We could probably actually have done online marketplaces better without Bezos and Musk, and I definitely believe that broadening access to who can be an innovator is a key public good.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting piece and wondered what people's thoughts on it/the surrounding topic were.


* The author also was a long-distant predecessor of mine running the same student society I used to run as an undergrad. Small world.

185

General Gaming - The Arcade / Adventures on the Planes (Planescape!)

« on: July 28, 2022, 12:07:05 PM »

So, I finally played through Planescape: Torment this week. Lots of thoughts! It's a good game, it does a lot of things I really appreciate with the storytelling: the extent to which you can dialogue through rather than fight through key moments in the game, and the game tries to make that an equally valid outcome, is really interesting. I think it was nice for me to have a game that used the planar cosmology on its own terms, and whilst I really could take or leave the planar stuff in D&D proper, actually Planescape as a setting in its own right offers a lot more interesting high-concept possibilities that I don't think you get just from its relationship to the Prime Material Plane being the core focus. I think I can now actually remember that devils are baatezu and demons are tanar'ri, a distinction that two whole Baldur's Gate games completely failed to din into me, and I might be able to remember which of the Githyanki and Githzerai are which too on a good day.

Narratively, bits of the setup oddly reminded me of the first witcher game - "amnesiac back-from-the-dead scarred protagonist with gruff voice and mystery cosmic-level enemy goes adventuring and is unexpectedly and inexplicably attractive to women" is apparently a whole genre. The companion characters are generally well written and have good plot arcs: Dak'kon's was probably my favourite for the writing, I enjoyed Nordrom a lot, and I thought Falls-from-Grace was conceptually a SUPER interesting character who I'd have liked them to do more with. Annah was a bit stereotypey but rescued by the delightful voice acting. In general, the game kind of struggled with its women characters in a very "this world feels written by white heterosexual men" kind of way, to the point where it felt in-your-face and weird to me, a white heterosexual man. It's not that the writing was overall bad or that there weren't some good concepts, but some quite creepy bits are played mostly for laughs, about 40% of the random women NPCs are "harlots" standing around on street corners, almost all of the well developed women characters are in love with the player and the one who isn't is a literal personification of lust, etc. Artefact of its time, of course, but I did find that noticeable.

There were some super nice touches though. The early quest where you have to get your companions to believe that trees ought to grow in a certain area I absolutely loved: clever way of getting more character interaction, making a really important point about the setting being shaped by belief, and providing some tonal stuff that provided a level of hope. It would have been very easy to try and make Planescape far too grimdark, especially given the backdrop of the Blood War and the player's ultimate fate and so on: I think they avoided that quite well. I also loved the Modron Maze, the silly drops of "A Clue!" and things like that which emphasised that they hadn't got the concept of a dungeon quite right were very enjoyable. The pacing of the storytelling is very good as well, there's one thing which feels a very unexplained plot hole by the end of the game but given the complex weirdness of the plot that's not bad going.

I did my playthrough as Neutral Good, which I liked (though it was annoying that there were e.g. LG restricted items but no NG restricted ones, NG shouldn't just be treated as a halfway house alignment). I'm not sure I felt there was so much other content there that I was keen to do another run: the small number of companion options and relatively linear story don't give immense scope for different runs, and I don't enjoy going back to do evil or mercilessly lawful runs which a Vhailor/Ignus in party run could end up like. I'm aware there are a few additional cutscenes etc for other options I could have taken, and one or two faction moments and quests I didn't do, but I was fairly completionist (and used walkthroughs quite a bit). The fact the game only took me about 35hrs despite that felt good going, I'd actually quite like more RPGs that don't ask for 100+hrs of my life.

So all in all I thought it was pretty good and it's a pity they didn't make more Planescape games. I think you'd have to switch protagonist to do a sequel but it felt like there were a lot of interesting things in the setting still to explore.

186

Tabletop Games - The Game Room / Links - RPG resources

« on: July 26, 2022, 01:56:17 PM »

As we have one thread for the models & companies side, I thought it'd be good to have a repository just for particularly useful articles and blogposts and stuff on RPG running, setting design, etc. If you want to recommend a whole blog or series, or just particular posts, feel free to do either and I'll reorganise the list if it gets long.

Nb: there's a lot of stuff out there on the web. Recommend things for this list on the basis that they're good & should be read more, not just on the basis that they exist.

As a start, I thought this was an especially interesting little piece, a quick reference guide to standard D&D monsters but listed by function instead of alphabetically - function here rather oddly mixes biomes and narrative functions, but I think it's a neat list all the same:
https://dmdavid.com/tag/the-right-monster-for-the-job-dd-monsters-listed-by-function/

Video/YT DMing channels

Matt Colville (https://www.youtube.com/user/mcolville)
Tons of thoughtful and fairly long general advice DMing videos from someone with a ton of industry experience.

Dael Kingsmill (https://www.youtube.com/c/MonarchsFactory)
Useful thoughts on how to use particular monsters or do certain things differently, plus interesting mythology/storytelling content.

Setting design & monsters

A Book Of Creatures (https://abookofcreatures.com/)
Very good detailed bestiary, no gaming rules but great for finding bits of world folklore you didn't know about.

Monster Man (https://directory.libsyn.com/shows/view/id/monsterman)
James Holloway's podcast of old-school D&D monsters.

DM David's Monsters By Function List (https://dmdavid.com/tag/the-right-monster-for-the-job-dd-monsters-listed-by-function/)
An alternative arrangement fo D&D monsters according to how you might want to use them in game.

187

Announcements! The Town Crier! / Updates from the Forge 46: Summer 2022

« on: July 13, 2022, 08:40:57 PM »

Issue 46: Summer 2022

EDITORIAL

Welcome to another issue of Updates from the Forge! First, an apology that even by our usual sluggish standards this is a late issue, almost two weeks after we'd usually have it out: unfortunately with a very busy run of conferences and wading through the later stages of his PhD writing your regular editor (and chair, and executive officer) is having a somewhat hectic time of it at the moment, and has not had time to sit down and write about himself in the third person like this until now. Also, the imaginary llama we employ as an editorial assistant remains useless, so we're giving it a 20 percent paycut. As we don't pay it, this won't make much difference, but it's the thought that counts.

It's been a quiet but not an un-busy few months here on Exilian, as the below run of articles and projects shows. We've got new poetry, whole new game projects, mod releases, travel writing, and more besides. Our regular monthly meetups have continued too, and keep going from strength to strength - if you'd like to join in on those and haven't been getting the emails about them, please get in touch. We've also been busy at the back end of the website, and may have some announcement to make about possible changes to our hosting situation in the coming months.

But for now, we'll keep this editorian short and let you get onto what you presumably came here for - summer's Updates from the Forge!

CONTENTS:

• Editorial
  
• Game Development
  
  • An RPG... In A Box?
  • Rus TW - Fortis Bellator
  • Fall of Telmar: A Narnia Total War Cinematic Mod
  • Innkeep Steam Page Launched!
  • Bigosaur's Block Buster Billy
• Arts & Writing
  
  • Infinitas: The Griffin Imperium
  • Poetry by Jubal
• Miscellany
  
  • Jubal's Venice Travelogue
  • Exilian: A Choose Your Own Adventure

GAME DEV

An RPG... In A Box?

Created by new member ol_smaug, RPG In A Box is a new voxel-art game engine for making RPGs. It includes a wide range of features including a built in voxel editor and asset library, a map editor, tree dialogue and quest editors, a flexible scripting system, and more besides. Combat options include both a real-time and a more detailed turn-based combat system, and a flexible inventory manager allows you to equip and unequip weapons and equipment on characters as well, with experience and character advancement features built in. There is, in short, everything you need for building a basic RPG easily accessible, and the RPG In A Box community already seems to be working out how to take the engine and script systems in a range of exciting new directions

Jubal's Valethad, in RPG In A Box's map editor.

RPG In A Box is still in development, and new features are being added and announced via social media and on the engine's discord server all the time. Recent updates have included adding percentage chances for loot drops and the beginnings of a more flexible character stats and status effects system which will no doubt see a range of improvements and additions in the coming months. Here on Exilian we've even already got our first little project using the engine, Jubal's Valethad (pictured above) - perhaps you'll have your own sometime soon as well?

Discuss RPG In A Box on Exilian

RPG In A Box Website

Rus TW - Fortis Bellator

We've also got some Rome: Total War modding news - BagaturKhan has produced a new edition of Rus Total War, originally created by VIR and the Imperial Community modder group. Rus Total War takes you back to the eleventh century and the initial flowering of the Kievan Rus, a complex network of principalities that stretched across much of modern Ukraine, western Russia, and Belarus. You can play as the princes of Kiev, Halych, Novgorod, Smolensk, or a number of other ambitious Rus leaders attempting to expand and maintain their power across the landscape. Or, equally, you could play as one of the powers with which the Rus clashed at times in this period, a time when Rus were raiding and fighting as mercenaries across the Byzantine world and the Mediterranean beyond. Byzantium, Hungary, Poland, and the Volga-Bulgar Ilkhanate all stand at the edges of the Rus polities and may have their own political goals in the region.

Will you rally the Rus to your banner, or change the course of history entirely? Find out by taking a look at the mod...

Fortis Bellator Thread

Fall of Telmar: A Narnia Total War Cinematic Mod

Also in Rome: Total War modding news, BagaturKhan has released a new submod, Fall of Telmar, for Jubal's epic Narnia: Total War. The new mod significantly overhauls the graphics of the Telmarine Narnian and Old Telmarine factions, moving them away from the mix of Pauline Bates inspired reskins of vanilla Rome: TW units used in the original mod and towards the conquistador-like morion helmeted Telmarines of the 2008 film.

For those who want their Narnia: TW experience to better mimic the battles of the big screen, this is a must-have mod that will let you witness a much more cinematic view of Narnia. Images from the film series have also been used for the loading screens, further moving the experience of the game towards the modern cinema experience. Do check it out!

Fall of Telmar Thread

Innkeep Steam Page Launched!

BeerDrinkingBurke's game Innkeep now has its steam page launched, a big new milestone in the journey towards the best [citation needed] fantasy inn ever with the most experienced, honest, legitimate [citation seriously needed] master of the house at its helm! In this tavern simulator game, you start as the eponymous Innkeep, and must learn to serve drinks and food to paying/threatening customers... but there's a lot more to the inn business than just keeping your customers happy. Picking up on news, rumours, and secrets around the inn, and ensuring your revenue stream is supplemented by trading in information and in items mysteriously going missing from tavern patrons' bags in the night, may all be a part of making your tavern a success!

Innkeep Exilian Dev Thread

Find it on Steam

Bigosaur's Block Buster Billy

Sometimes, in life, you just have to push through your blocks.
Billy may have taken this too literally.

The latest new game project from Bigosaur (creator of Son of a Witch, The Game Is On, and Windmill Kings among other titles) is another puzzler, Block Buster Billy! This game focuses on mathematical-style block pushing problem-solving puzzles, where you as the eponymous protagonist must create connected blocks by rearranging individual numbers and symbols into valid equations, or disrupting an equation block to be able to move the blocks inside it into different orders. As you progress through a series of islands the puzzles get more complex, requiring you to build right-angle hooks in the block pushing or use comparison statements to reach the chest of shiny shiny gold that awaits Billy at the end of the level.

Can you beat the puzzles? How many islands must you progress through for your final victory? Why does Billy want all this gold anyway? At least two of these questions may be answered in Block Buster Billy!

Find out more on Exilian

ARTS AND WRITING

Infinitas: The Griffin Imperium

In a recent thread, BagaturKhan has introduced  the Griffin Imperium, a key part of the setting for his upcoming story Revenge of Tyrants: Soul's Storm. Here you can find out about the lore of this newly detailed part of the Infinitas setting - the Imperium is based on a mysterious planet, on which Griffin-like aliens once ruled. Now under its often short-lived Emperors it hosts a mixture of supersitious locals and contract soldiers, operating from the capital city of Dane, a refuge fled to after Griffin City itself was torn apart in the Acheronian war. Find out in the thread what happened to the Ho-Nari Emperor Silotl, or the recently deceased Emperors Antonio, Maurizio and Dimitri - or discover more about the risk of cults and the pressures on the contract soldier system in the Acheronian war. There's another whole society from Infinitas to explore!

Visit the Griffin Imperium (Exilian Thread)

Poetry by Jubal

So it's when the world feels heavy
And the sky seems like to fall,
That I wonder if the wonder's that
The sky stays up at all...

Recent posts in the writing section have included further additions to Jubal's poetry thread, a blockbuster thread containing most of his poetry and song lyric writing from 2008 to the present. Poems in recent months include 'Ouranos' Pockets', quoted above, which reimagines the sky through different outfits and their imagined weight, and 'Herons', which gives some reflections on visiting the Alte Donau heronry in Vienna during the opening days of the Russia-Ukraine war back in March. If you like poetry, why not go over and comment, or even post some of your own work for people to read?

Read the Tale

Spoken Storytelling on Exilian

MISCELLANY

Jubal's Venice Travelogue

The Lion of Saint Mark, a traditional symbol of Venice

Exilian has had a long history of people posting travel writings, and whilst the difficulties of the last few years have led to something of a dry spell, some of us have been able to get out and about a bit more this year - including Jubal taking a trip to Venice! In his travelogue, take a deep dive into the past and present of one of Europe's most tourist-heavy and yet enigmatic cities, one that dominated the Mediterranean but, in turn, is threatened today by encroaching waves. Dipping between medieval history, the fauna and flora of the Venetian lagoon, the food and drink of the area, and the experience of visiting Venice today, this is a narrative well worth reading if you're interested in travel.

Read Jubal's Travelogue

Exilian Travel Writing Index

Exilian: A Choose Your Own Adventure

In the far depths of Exilian nestle the pages of Exilian: A Choose Your Own Adventure, a sprawling forum-based choose your own adventure game written by our members over a number of years. The forum is set up such that any Exilian member can edit their own links and pages in and contribute to the four madcap stories on offer: that of Adonibal Barca, a pangolin captaining a trireme, the tale of Tibula Khan, ruler of Tasmongolia, the story of Comrade General Angus, a minotaur with many firearms, and finally the story of Beesnot Lumpwagon. Why you would want to play a story where you get to be Beesnot Lumpwagon is anyone's guess, but the option is there for you all the same.

So why not go and have a play and let us know what you think - or even add more nodes to the game yourself and give players some more endings to choose from! The choice, as in any good adventure game, is yours.

>YOU: Play the Game

Check out the Choose Your Own Adventure forums

2022 continues to be a packed year, and we're now more than halfway through it - this summer, we hope you get a chance to rest somewhere that gives you even a little space to breathe against the hot gales of the world. We hope, too, that you get a chance to create and find out new things, even as life throws challenges in our way. Exilian will be here to give you any help we can in those endeavours - and to bring you, in three months' time, autumn's Updates from the Forge. We'll see you then.

188

Tibula Khan Threads / > TIBULA: Tell the ghosts that they're a myth

« on: July 13, 2022, 06:35:25 PM »

You tell the ghosts that you think they're a myth and don't exist. The ghosts do not appreciate this and use their ghostly powers to eviscerate your soul, which is a somewhat dramatic way to try and win an argument about existence after death but you're forced to conclude its validity. Or at least you would be if you were alive. Which you're not, to be entirely clear.

Whether or not you think it exists, it thinks it does and has the power to devour your incorporeal self.

Would you like to play again?

~THE END~

189

Tibula Khan Threads / > TIBULA: Reclaim Sargoth for Tasmongolia

« on: July 13, 2022, 06:31:26 PM »

You decide to reclaim SARGOTH for your mighty Khanate. There is, however, nobody here except you, which makes the victory feel a little underwhelming. The town stands empty and almost ghost-like around you, pale stone walls sitting cold amid the mountain air. What do you do?

> TIBULA: Go south, then East, into the Scarlet Mountains

INVENTORY

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

• Bow
• Arrows
• Spare Furry Hat
• Eagle!
• None

190

Pangolin Games / Valethad

« on: July 13, 2022, 06:09:35 PM »

Valethad is a project I started on to test out the RPG In A Box engine. I'm not sure how far I'll get with it, but here's a little thread on it anyway.



The game is set in the World of Kavis (technically my third game in this setting after the Big Random Game and Adventures of Soros): it's in the lands of the Heirophancy, the vaguely Persian/Roman/Greek inspired empire that sits roughly in the middle of the setting. Narratively, I wanted to do something outside Chardil (the pseudo-Europe continent) as my interest in developing the setting has shifted to the southeast, which much like in actual early medieval Eurasia is more the centre of gravity.

I haven't got very far with Valethad so far - I'm still struggling with some pretty basic features like how to get the AI to do patrols and suchlike - but I've written some fun dialogues and the combat system is basically working, and I've got healing items and varied weapons and suchlike implemented, so that's good.

Will post more as and if more unfolds!

191

General Chatter - The Boozer / Pub: Thurs 28th July?

« on: July 13, 2022, 04:29:46 PM »

How would this work for people for our monthly virtual meetup? I should get the announcement out soon.

192

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / D&D with an AI

« on: June 27, 2022, 10:26:58 PM »

Report on someone trying to run a game with an AI bot playing:
https://www.wargamer.com/dnd/ai-player

And the original reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/vfsyc5/i_played_my_first_game_of_dd_with_an_ai_openai/icydveb/

Quite interesting stuff, though not sure how far one would get beyond the short session given.

193

General Chatter - The Boozer / Jokes and Puns Thread

« on: June 06, 2022, 03:09:17 PM »

I realised we actually didn't have one of these, despite our long running Funny Picture and Funny Video threads.

Some starting terrible entries:

Q: Why's it hard to get published in the Journal of French Male Nomenclature?
A: Their Pierre review process is very strict.

And

Q: Why did the Skyrim player from Calais think the "Clear Skies" ability would let him learn to control the undead?
A: Because he'd heard that on a clear day he could see the Wight Glyphs of Dovah.

194

General Chatter - The Boozer / The Lion, the Lagoon, and the Lovers: A Trip To Venice

« on: May 22, 2022, 10:26:23 PM »

The Lion, the Lagoon, and the Lovers: A Trip To Venice



Venice is unique: a city that squats low in the marshes of the northern Adriatic, but whose shadows through space and time are long indeed. Married to the sea – in literal ceremonies over the years – its Republic through a mix of commerce, hard-nosed bargaining and naval power broke and reshaped the Mediterranean world, though as with so many littoral powers it ultimately found itself broken on the land. Reborn as the fashionable city of art and romance that has embedded itself in the world’s imaginations today, it is irreplaceable; in its uttermost depths it, like the lagoon that is slowly but certainly embracing it with the passing of the years, is probably unknowable. But if you must know, consider love. In all matters of the Serenissima, look to love.

I arrived in the city deep into the evening, from the long and winding alpine train route that runs seven and a half hour direct services from Vienna. I had spent the first half of the journey talking to a seventy-eight year old man named Herman Perlot, whose reminiscences included noting where the “Ruskies with their kalashnikovs” had stood when his family had moved from Lower Austria (the Russian Zone) to Carinthia (the British) where his older sister still lived – his civil engineering career having taken him abroad and ultimately to settle in Australia some time before. People will go a long way around, for those they love. We discussed castles and the movement of peoples and the making of Europe, what it meant to live in the past and where the tides of politics and war were taking the continent today. It was his first return to Austria, and my second trip abroad, since the Covid-19 pandemic had begun in March 2020: a strange two years that still, in masks and vaccination checks and the strange awkwardness of reinventing conversational rituals, still cast its net through every part of life.

Leaving Austrian and Austria likewise behind at Villach, the train pulled south, through tunnels, beside shallow rivers, and at last toward the Italian lowlands and the lagoon of Venice. Nowadays, a bridge takes the trains all the way to Venice itself: but the route is an old one. It is hard today to imagine the first of those who would become Venetians, pushed to seek refuge in the marshes by the insecurity of the late Roman world, arriving in little boats to the islands. The first doge we know of was elected in the seventh century, though the city had existed for some time before that point: it spent some time under Byzantine dominion before emerging as the Serenissima, the Republic of Venice, whose commercial colonies drew it into the eastern Mediterranean and ultimately, in 1204, to mastermind the decapitation of its former Imperial masters. The Republic lasted until the late eighteenth century: by then, led by British aristocrats on the Grand Tour, the world was already falling head-over-heels for Venice as a tourist destination, and the tourist trade is now the city’s major raison d’etre, hosting tens of thousands of tourists every day.

When I got to Venezia St. Lucia, the city’s central station, I stepped out and was confronted for the first time by the canals and sixteenth to eighteenth century architecture that dominate much of the city: whilst Venice’s greatest age of power was medieval, the city and its landmarks today are mostly from the early modern period. The sky was darkening and I shelled out sixty euros for a week’s ticket for the vaporetto, the boat-buses that loop around the islands and canals of the Venetian lagoon. The vaporettos can provide some nice views, although they are often far too packed to be assured of good positions looking out over the water. My stop, and my stay, was based on Giudecca, just south of the main island of Venice: it is one of Venice’s more residential islands, and offers easy vaporetto access to San Marco, the heart of the old city, and to the Accademia area, making it a very well located choice. The apartment I stayed in looked out over an old canal, with a side view over to the tower of San Marco in the distance from its balcony.

View from the Accademia bridge.

One sleep later, the morning streets were warm as I crossed the Accademia bridge and the Grand Canal for the first time. The cloud of the previous day had rolled back to show the almost over-perfect postcard views which the city knows are expected of it. Venice is a city of open plazas – strangely open, usually devoid of benches, and mostly with far less tree and plant cover than would be ideal – surrounded by cafes where clusters of tourists huddle under what shade is provided and strain to hear one another through the crossfire of chatter. These bare spaces are set amid a labyrinth of slender alleyways and bridges, all only navigable on foot (much of it would be a difficult place for those who rely on level access). The lack of navigability may be a feature as much as a bug when viewed from certain angles, for it helps disperse the unwary tourists and, more importantly, increases the potential value of tours, which are often to be seen, some bright umbrella or little coloured flag bobbing up and down to signal the guide’s location amid the crowd. In the tourist-focused areas tourists are the overwhelming majority of people, with ageing gondoliers and younger sellers of glasswork and gelatos casually observing from the wayside. Venice does not beg for your money: it knows you will spend it anyway.

The largest of the open plazas, which I eventually reached and had lunch next to after a while weaving through the streets, is San Marco itself, an immense open plaza that sweeps towards the finery of the medieval basilica. Venice has no high-rise modern buildings, so the free-standing tower of San Marco still dominates its skyline, its steps trod by hundreds of tourists a day eager to get a good view over the city. The basilica itself was under renovation, but even past the scaffolding the exterior is a work of art in and of itself, an intricate dance of mosaics, domes, and Byzantine spolia. It is not heavily built for the central cathedral of such a powerful state and the seat of a patriarch (Venice’s archbishop has been acknowledged as a minor patriarch since 1451) – indeed, it is far less imposing than the seventeenth century dome of Santa Maria della Salute that sits along the shoreline past the grand canal, built after a plague outbreak in the seventeenth century. That, however, is why it reflects its city so well. San Marco, like Venice itself, has no great need to impose: it reclines, knowing its beauty will attract adoration even if it finds the attention tiresome. Limitations on tourists mean that entry requires a tour, a long queue, or more likely both: I avoided either, and headed beneath a clock-tower back into the streets.

And then, a few maze-steps further, there was the world’s most famous bridge. Being from England, one of my first associations with Venice would have been Shakespeare’s play, and the words “what news on the Rialto” echoed in my head. The question is crucial in the play, less for its words and the emotional trials of Shylock, and more for whom it is addressed to: for only by giving the titular Merchant of Venice this line does the playwright allow him to talk to another Jewish man, Tubal. In a play about lovers, this exception proves the rule of how little we are able to truly see things from the other angle: for when Shakespeare’s Shylock speaks it is to, and for, Christians, and even before he opens his mouth his community and context are taken from him. The old mercantile bridge on which that shipping news was passed around still stands proud over the Grand Canal, but today’s Rialto would never hold such a meeting. It heaves with people, tourist shops squat in its archways, and whilst the haze of noise might not be so different to times long past, these travellers come, they photograph, they move on. There is no news on the Rialto, now.

Statues at the Palazzo Grimani.

I wove my way back into the winding streets, and turned on a whim at a sign to the sixteenth century Palazzo Grimani, once the residence of one of Venice’s elite houses and now one of its myriad art galleries. The building itself is much of the art, and the immense frescoes with classical motifs are worth visiting for, entire ceilings covered with huge central depictions of ancient myth or wildly complex scenes of nature. The Grimanis’ classical sculpture collection has currently been largely reassembled and returned to its original sixteenth century setting in the house, and is also very worth seeing in its own right: one packed chamber includes walls covered in busts and classical sculptures, with among other things Ganymede being stolen by an eagle suspended from the skylit ceiling and the most eye-openingly graphic rendition of Zeus seducing Leda in the form of a swan that I’ve ever seen.

The top floor of the Palazzo Grimani contained a number of artistic reactions to a classical painting, done as paint-spattered canvases with neon tubes slashing across them at sharp angles. This was the first part of the Biennale that I found, though far from the last – the Biennale, a vast international art festival happening once every two years, wraps itself around Vienna in an embrace as inescapable as it is flamboyant. One or two sites, like the Biennale gardens and the Arsenale, have a vast array of art, but other displays and national ‘pavilions’ are strewn across the city. I headed down past the Arsenale and to the waterfront again, eating lunch in the shade of a huge blue resin panda and then wandering past a sculpture of some curious, jumbly-like figures piled into a sinking ship. Living in Vienna, I am far from unused to being in a city where art is almost casually integrated into life – but in Venice during the Biennale, one wonders if one’s life is ultimately becoming an integrated backdrop to the art.

I spent a while sitting at the edge of the Biennale gardens to see a little more of the city’s green space. Whilst the Venetian lagoon as a whole is internationally important for its wetlands, the city itself is a surprisingly dead environment in most places, with the exception of pigeons, occasional Italian sparrows, and the ever-present yellow-legged gulls that hang heavy as bomber aircraft over the heads of tourists, diving in to tear food away from unwary café guests and even killing and eating the pigeons on occasion. The Biennale gardens, whilst not, did at least expand the range of what was present: starlings and jackdaws picked their way through the grass, greenfinches squabbled in the trees, and a jay lurked from tree-branch to tree-branch. A classical-style sculpture was home to a common wall lizard, one of many in the city, its dragonish eye peering warily at me as it basked on the thigh of some ancient god, guarding it as only little dragons can.

A sharp-eyed wall lizard at the Biennale gardens.

Back at the nearby Arsenale, the Naval museum was my last stop for the first day. Spanning five floors, the impressive collection includes model boats innumerable, showing lagoon craft and old model warships as well as more recent spoils and wreckage from twentieth century conflicts in the northern Adriatic. The top floor is labelled as “Swedish navy room and collection of shells” – I headed up there, expecting a rather standard line-up of naval torpedoes and artillery pieces, but found that in fact the collection of shells is a room full of cases of everything from giant cowries to starfish to some impressively curiously shaped bivalves. These I can fully recommend – they are a magnificently attractive collection. One curiosity, however, was that like with so many things around Venice, the focus felt heavily on the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries, with very little focus on the medieval period. Whilst much of the present visible city dates from that period, it still feels odd that the Venice of Titian or Sebastiano Veniero is given so much prominence over that of Enrico Dandolo or Marco Polo in the stories that the city tells of itself.

The museum also included parts of the last Bucintoro, the state barge that the Doges rode out to the Adriatic from around 1000AD until the fall of the Republic, every Ascension Day, for the purpose of marriage: casting a ring into the waves, they married the city to the sea. Pope Alexander III endorsed the marriage formally in 1176, and the ceremony has been revived by the Mayors of Venice since the 1960s. “Desponsamus te, mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii”, are the words of the ceremony – “we espouse thee, O sea, as a sign of true and perpetual dominion”. It is undoubtedly true, but it is a monument of time-honoured hubris that the Venetians ever assumed the dominion was theirs. The love between Venice and the sea has made and broken people and Empires, brought new horizons and despoiled them just as quickly, and eventually rising sea levels will reclaim the city – perhaps it is no accident that it was the English who most fell in love with Venice to start its modern tourist industry, for we can see in Venice a mirror of our own sea-lust, our maritime era that left moral scars still snaking across England’s skin today. We use the word love to refer to many things, and far from all of them are kind.

A further loop took me round one more small park, with a couple of swallows whipping past over a canal, a small child bawling in entirely justified fear at the unwanted attention of a gull, and a fountain containing one enormous fish and a delightful colony of some sort of (probably non-native American) pond tortoises. I finished these various windings through the streets by finding the Cà d’Oro alla Vedova restaurant, which whilst steep in price had excellent seafood and famously specialises in local style meatballs. Food in Venice is a tricky question: it is far from a cheap place to eat, at least in restaurants, but for the most part the food is well worth the high prices, especially the seafood which with one exception (which we will turn to later) was worthwhile. Whilst in general Venice has a bad reputation for pizza and after one experience of doing so I wouldn’t necessarily order it in restaurants there, I think there is more to be said for it more widely as an option than it is sometimes given credit for – pizzerias will often sell, inexpensively, three euro slices of pizza big enough to be a meal that one can take and sit by the lagoon to eat, which in terms of feeding oneself affordably is no bad plan.

A Lion of St. Mark looks down from the Basilica of San Marco.

Another thing to be cautious of when it comes to food in Venice is how to get food in the mornings: if the Republic of France had no need for scientists, the Serenissima has much the same approach to the concept of breakfast. Most days I ended up not eating until an early lunch, often some sort of pizza wrap or sandwich for which there are a good number of shops around town. Lunch and dinner conversely have no shortage of options, not only including full meals but also cicchetti, tapas-like small sandwiches and other dishes traditionally eaten standing at a bar with a drink. This was something I did not really manage to explore, but would be high on my list were I to do another visit. Venice does not come across as a place overly proud of its wine, though what is there is perfectly good – an assessment I cannot extend to one of the commonest café drinks around the city, the aperol spritzer, a disconcerting bright-orange drink that I saw little appeal in before drinking one and less afterwards (though perhaps you, dear reader, will think differently: certainly, the city seems to sell enough of the things that perhaps there is an appeal I have missed).

I headed for San Marco in the morning, the blazing figure of the Lion of Saint Mark watching me as I travelled. I stopped at San Zaccaria first, a late fifteenth and sixteenth century church behind San Marco, though it originated in the ninth century after the Byzantine Emperor Leo the Armenian sent the eponymous saint’s body to the city. The ninth century was an acquisitive time for Venice, for that period was also when it acquired the relics of St. Mark from Alexandria – in his honour, Venice increasingly adopted his aforementioned winged lion as its symbol. It is near-omnipresent across the city, staring down with an alarming array of expressions from official buildings, artworks, and sculptures. The city may have seen itself as leonine, but it is the wings more than the mane that characterise it best: wave-skimming Venezia could never have been part of a pride, and the Serenissima’s attempts at land warfare are little mentioned in the annals of history for good reason. Curled in the lagoon, the sun-basking lions of Saint Mark have little need of their claws and teeth. Perhaps that, in any case, is why they have the time to read.

For the day’s main event, then, I braved the queues of San Marco again: I did not have the stomach for a lonely and interminable wait in the hot sun to see the Basilica, but I did head into the Palazzo Ducale. The route around the palace is long, with few to no places where one can sit along the way and a lot of steps, so this is worth being mindful of: it is, however, utterly worth it if one can do so. The state rooms of the doge’s palace are exceptional not only in their beauty but in the type of social order they represent: the pinnacle of a system designed to maintain its oligarchic nature at all costs. Books recorded newborn entries into the narrow ranks of Venice’s elite, who in turn staffed a bewildering array of courts, councils, and assemblies that interlocked and jealously guarded their privileges and spheres of power.

One of many gilded council rooms in the Palazzo Ducale.

The palace is as lavishly decorated as any I have seen at the heart of an Empire – but what sets its decoration most apart is the intense, continuous use of art, with any available surface bedecked in sixteenth and seventeeth century art, the modern decorations being the result of fires in the sixteenth century. The art frequently reflects nominal virtues in keeping with the functions that a particular room’s committee or court was meant to possess. Room by room, the continuous lagoon-swamp of detail continues, the art drawing one in until lost amidst the sea of sails and faces and classical analogies that wrap artistic ermine robes around the place: far from the starkness of form favoured by autocrats, the Palazzo Ducale is power as painted tapestry. Of course, then, no one person is meant to be able to take it all in at once – any more than any one person was meant to be able to manage the system that it represented.

More than show maintained the heart of the Serenissima, though: Venice’s power was never without a sharp edge, and racks of crossbows and swords still bedeck the walls of some of the Palazzo’s rooms, accompanied by Turkish ship’s lanterns that were the prize-proof of battles fought in the distant past. Beyond them and across the dark and cramped Bridge of Sighs, famous as the route of those condemned by the Republic’s courts, lie the cramped rooms of the old prison. This was one of the first custom-built buildings for that purpose, rather than having dungeons attached below a castle or palace. Ironically, the prison was key to the only time the Ducal Palace was ever robbed, when a man named Vincenzo Pipino (alias Encio), Venice’s “gentleman thief” notorious for both his exceptional string of art heists and his curious code of honour, shut himself in a cell whilst trailing a tour group in 1991. He stayed there until the building closed, timed the guards after hours, then strolled back across the Bridge of Sighs during a gap in the patrols, wrapped up a priceless artwork, and walked out of a side door. It was later returned as part of a deal, a feature of most of Pipino’s heists – indeed he once apparently called the police upon realising he had been hired for a particular job by the Balkan crime lord Željko Ražnatović, as he feared based on Ražnatović’s reputation that the priceless Bellini paintings he had been hired to steal would simply be sold off rather than ransomed.

Upon leaving the palace, I did a double-take. Here was something I recognised perfectly, embedded on the corner of the wall between the palace and the basilica, though I had not seen it in person or known it was here: the Four Tetrarchs. These porphyry statues, a set of four, show the co-emperors from the late Roman tetrarchy (Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius and Constantius), dating from around 300AD. The men are barely distinguishable, shown in similar style to emphasise their shared bonds and collective rule. Constantius’ son Constantine, despite having torn up the remnants of the Tetrarchic system, had the statue brought to his new Rome – Constantinople – a few decades later. The Venetians looted the statue in 1204, recasting themselves as the Imperial centre and adding it to the corner of their basilica. At least, they looted most of it, for remarkably the missing heel of one Emperor’s foot was recovered in an archaeological excavation in the 1960s in Istanbul and remains in a museum there. As much as old Dandolo reportedly could never forgive the Byzantines for the anti-Venetian riots that erupted numerous times in the twelfth century, and as much as Venice's reputation and public face has been one of calculating mercantilism, his countrymen in the end still adorned their city with the treasures of their former lieges. Venice’s grasp was always turned eastward, rather than looking west, and it is hard not to feel that in its own selfish way this city loved Byzantium even as it undermined the remains of the Eastern Empire.

I passed by the Palazzo Contarini, whose fifteenth century construction and spiral staircase I opted to admire from outside rather than paying the fee to climb: from there, I headed to the Da Vinci Museum at San Barnaba. This is, one should note, not the same place as the Da Vinci Museum of Venice: the city in fact has two museums located to the genius – and whilst neither has much by way of original works, seeing and thinking about Da Vinci in the setting of a city he spent a good deal of time working in and around is a worthwhile insight into the context and constraints for so much of his work. Indeed perhaps the biggest surprise was that the little museum had no exhibit on Da Vinci’s cork aqualung, which was explicitly designed to allow a man to walk on the floor of the Venetian lagoon.

Libreria Acqua Alta and its unusual choice of shelving.

What it did have was a very nice array of examples and constructs of bits of Da Vinci’s engineering work, from cam-shafts to catapults and aerial screws to anti-ladder wall defences. Drawings of swords in the shape of animal jaws and a replica of a hexagonal hall of mirrors built by the great man are likewise on display, and explanations note the extent to which Da Vinci’s work was focused towards the demands of his employers – especially in war. The exhibition’s backdrop and home is the now deconsecrated church of San Barnaba, dating to the eighteenth century, though as its nearby freestanding eleventh century tower attests the site is far older. I personally quite like the repurposing of churches for spaces like museums, libraries and bookshops: being able to maintain them as useful public spaces in an era when religious attendance alone is not enough for them feels like the best use of the roomy and well-built architecture.

My last stop in the day’s wanderings was the bookshop of Libreria Acqua Alta, which sadly lacked one of its online-guide promises in that its famous group of pet cats were nowhere to be seen, but was nonetheless delightful. I have always loved a good second-hand bookshop, and in this case the shop’s quirk is its use of old boat and gondola parts as shelving and storage, which gives it a very particular Venetian character. It can be a little awkward to get around, for there are plenty of customers and the space between shelves is tight, but it is worth going to see. There are few English books, and I found none I wanted, but there were some there – a copy of an illustrated volume on English Country Houses was a curious thing to pass so far from home.

I wound my way back through the streets to the vaporetto and Giudecca, evening swifts screeching overhead. Venice is resolutely a city of small shops, though many are doubtless owned by chains with tourist interests elsewhere, and there are movements to support locally owned options among tourists to the city. Surprisingly for a city so under its particular set of pressures, one even sees some boarded-up rooms at the higher levels of buildings in the middle of the city: buildings where locals are priced out and which may not be easily convertible for tourist residency might perhaps be falling into traps of disuse in places.

The bright-painted houses of Burano.

My third full day, I decided, was time to head out to the outlying islands around Burano – the furthest I would go from the city itself, out into the less densely populated parts of the lagoon. Burano was Venice’s lace-making island, its name sitting alongside the glass-making centre of Murano. Murano and the strictly-no-cameras cemetery island of San Michele were both more or less en route to Burano, but I did not end up visiting either: instead, I stayed aboard the (far more packed than was comfortable) vaporetto as it ploughed its furrow through the open lagoon, and ultimately stepped off it on the isle of Mazzorbo.

Mazzorbo is connected to neighbouring Burano by a bridge: there is little to be done there, but it is one of the most pleasant places that I saw around the lagoon, with blue-sheened swallows whipping along its little waterways and a beautiful medieval church looking out over the lagoon. Seeing high medieval church architecture was somehow a relief after the heavy sixteenth and seventeenth century finery that dominates Venice proper: the slightly simpler styles and warmer colours of the building  Some heavily-built, satisfied looking cats greeted me as I walked through the long lagoon-shore grass, and I realised how few. Jan Morris’ book on Venice had noted the cats as a core part of the city’s culture, but I saw almost none during my trip – a far cry from smaller Greek or Croatian ports I had visited in the past that tend to be still full of rakish, scarred, mewling thieves of one’s heart and meal alike. Even those in Mazzorbo had more the look of a house-cat than a true port squabble, but I was glad to meet them all the same: to know that a few of the Veneto’s lesser lions still wander the lagoon-shores was something of a comfort.

Burano was traditionally an isle of fishermen and lace-makers, and its key and striking visual feature are its single-colour brightly painted houses, which had Instagram-fame hopefuls clinging to them like flies to a white sheet on a summer evening. Like Venice proper, the island is a place of open squares, the centre of which feels a bit dulled by the solely-tourist focus of its activities. There are plenty of restaurants and tourist shops, and the island is undoubtedly strikingly pretty, but the endless footfall of tourists is a strange experience. Off the tourist routes on Mazzorbo and Burano, some houses are boarded up, which does make one wonder about the health of the islands as a whole. I did not, unfortunately, get to the lace-making museum, which is probably Burano’s most interesting feature: instead, I took yet another vaporetto, a short route that relays between two stops – that of Burano, and that of the small nearby island of Torcello, where I headed next.

I have two pieces of advice concerning the island of Torcello: the first of these is that under no circumstances should one fail to go to Torcello, and the second is that under no circumstances should one contemplate eating the food on Torcello.

The churches of Torcello should, unlike the island's restaurants, not be missed.

The island is not short of places at which one can eat: there are about five restaurants beside the brick-paved path through the middle of the island, which also boasts one of the only railing-free “devil’s bridges” left around the lagoon. This, indeed, comprises most of the buildings on Torcello as a whole. However, most of them are heftily priced restaurants even by Venice’s far from cheap standards: the one more affordable one, which is closest to the vaporetto stop, is a chaotic affair and whilst the squabbling mass of sparrows around it are delightful it did involve a long wait in the hot sun for food that was rather mediocre by Venice’s usually high standards. More problematically, the fish risotto I had there was, I can be reasonably certain based on timing, the input that my stomach’s algorithms output as a case of food poisoning that left me feeling far less than fully effective for the last two days of my stay in the city.

What Torcello does have to offer, however, are two of the oldest churches in the lagoon. They, and the museum, strictly ban photography: but suffice to say that the Veneto-Byzantine mosaics they contain are some of the most stunning pieces of medieval art I have seen in my life to date. They are wall-spanning, golden, and have lost none of their spectacle with the years. Where the churches of Venice proper are heavy with baroque decoration, the stylisation and boldness of medieval mosaics have a singular power that is dissipated in the art-shrouded halls and Corinthian column-tops the city itself is filled with. The basilica, founded in 639, took its modern form through renovations in 864 and 1008 respectively: its mosaics date from the eleventh century: they would already have been well over a century old when the blind old Doge Dandolo took the cross on the Fourth Crusade, the church itself as old to him as the Borgias or the Wars of the Roses are to us today.

Beside its stunning churches, Torcello offers some nice paths to walk by reed and lagoon-side ways, with pheasants lurking in the bushes, shelduck and egrets out on the mudflats, and Italian Wall Lizards with bright green backs skittering out of one’s way. A female whinchat stopped by in the bushes briefly before flying onwards, and magpies whisked along overhead. I was a little regretful to have to leave well before the latest part of the afternoon when the mudflats and wetlands no doubt come most to life. I had to do so, however, and after another loop around Burano I found myself compacted once again into the vaporetto, south-bound for Venice proper.

Cuttlefish pasta "in black": a Venetian specialty.

By the time I had returned to Giudecca, I was feeling decidedly unwell, and the next day I confined myself to the island and spent some time resting. I did get out to see a part of the Biennale locally – the Kyrgyz pavilion, which had an exhibit of heavy wool hangings in a traditional style, albeit with modern patterns, and a stylised. It was one of my favourite Biennale exhibits, giving a sense of place and space rather than the flatly abstract concepts that sometimes characterise modern art. Continuing my walk, occasional cats and the chirp of canaries were a reminder that Giudecca otherwise is quite residential when one gets off the waterfront, though it could badly do with more green space like much of the rest of Venice and at one point I headed for some visible trees only to find they were behind a two metre wall topped with barbed wire and glass shards, which was a somewhat alarming dedication to sealing off one of the island’s few green oases.

Giudecca’s waterfront is worthwhile spending time around in and of itself. The Redentore church, which is sadly not free to get into, is a spectacular example of the heavy domes and classical styles of the early modern city. Like Santa Maria della Salute across the lagoon, it was built after an outbreak of plague – in this case, that of the 1570s, which more than decimated Venice’s population. Attached to a small capuchin monastery – and I saw one or two brown-robed friars pass by during my time on Giudecca – Il Redentore has since its foundation been visited annually by the city’s great and good who cross a pontoon bridge from Zattere to go to mass there. The first Doge to do so, Sebastiano Venier, had been the Venetian admiral when the Turks were defeated at Lepanto, and his successors continued the tradition. Today the Festa del Redentore, celebrated on the third Sunday in July, is also known for its firework displays.

Besides this, the restaurants are an attractive feature of Giudecca as a place to stay, especially around the Zitelle vaporetto stop. A string of restaurants along this part of the offer both exceptionally good seafood and brilliant views directly across the lagoon to San Marco. The owners and waiters – an ethnic kaleidoscope by background – were very amiable, more mercantile than the somewhat glass-eyed salespeople I met on the main island, as efficient as anyone ever is in Italy, and had no clue whatsoever how to recommend a wine. I even startled one of them, for whom Venice was apparently lower than his ideal levels of warmth, by choosing to dine poncho-clad and outside on a clouded and breezy evening. I came back more than once, anyway: the grilled squid I had on my last night in the city will be lodged in the memory of my tastebuds for a long while to come, and with very good reason. Another must-try cuttlefish or squid dish which can be had here is to have it served with pasta or polenta “in the black” – that is to say, using the ink as part of the sauce. The deep black sauce is extremely good and is definitely a very worthwhile local specialty to try.

The unmistakeable shape of an ibis overhead.

On my last full day of the trip, I added another island to my list – Certosa, which is easily accessible after the Gardens and Arsenale stops on the 4 vaporetto route. The island, a former monastic centre, has the ruins of the old monastery blocked and a mess of half-done redevelopment sprawled across it, with a marina bolted onto the side, but despite this apparent chaos I was very glad of the place, lacking as it did the photographic perfection that is over-pervasive in the city proper. As I disembarked I saw a pair of water-birds whose shape gave me pause – I only later worked out from my photographs of their silhouettes that these must have been pygmy cormorants, birds of the Adriatic, Aegean and Black seas, their beaks much shorter than their familiar common cousins.

Wheeling down onto the mud flats just beyond the marina, I also saw four Sacred Ibises, an invasive species common across Africa south of the Sahara but now spreading significantly in parts of Europe. Their unmistakeable strange gait and long-curved beaks were a strange sight: the mud flats vary with the tides as to how open they are, but they provide ideal homes for these strangers. The lagoon’s bird numbers as a whole have boomed since the 1990s, due both to better environmental protections and to climate change making some previously seasonal birds permanent residents. I missed some of its most striking species – not least flamingos which can sometimes be found in large flocks – but spending some time looking at the natural history of the area was rewarding. The dance between man, nature, and the sea in Venice has never stopped or regularised its steps, and with newcomers like the ibises and changes in flood defences and climate in the coming years, the mud-flats and reed-beds of the future might look quite different to those of the past.

I caught a glimpse of a heavy-set bird of prey, likely a buzzard, as I wandered into the woods in the north of Certosa. These played host, meanwhile, to the Namibian exhibit for the Biennale. This consisted of a number of rock-and-metal made men positioned hidden around the woods and water, hidden or climbing or simply seeming to commune with the world around them: the exhibit was highly controversial in Namibia itself, however, having been made by a white artist more connected to the country’s tourism scene than its native and artistic communities. The interpretation given along with the artwork, which represents certain indigenous Namibian peoples as uniquely in touch with nature, is doubtless an idea with an ugly history of othering and racism behind it. Devoid of their interpretation, I did find the rock men delightful to discover, with the sounds of orioles above and reptiles skittering off the low sea walls and path around the trees – and if there was a silver lining to their presence, they did at least interest me enough to find out the controversy around their creation. I hope, however, that in future the native and traditional artists of Namibia are able to get the support and recognition they deserve on this stage.

The Piraeus Lion: some faded runes can be seen at the top of the leg.

I met a friend, working on archival research in the city, for lunch: we had hoped to do so more during my stay, but her recovery from Covid had left her needing recovery time for much of the trip. Afterwards, the final island that I visited (and where she was staying) was San Giorgio Maggiore, home to an eponymous monastery and a key landmark of the lagoon. The Biennale was again interwoven with the place, and we trod our way around an exhibit of art made with fire, burned chairs and flame-scarred canvases adorning the walls. We passed through the island’s great church, too, another sixteenth century edifice that boasts two huge Tintoretto paintings and, whilst we were there, yet more bits of Biennale artwork. God and art, in Venice, remain so intertwined that it is a case of chicken and egg to tell which is providing the space for which.

On my own once more, all that remained was a last loop through the streets in the afternoon. I saw the Armenian pavilion of the Biennale, a haze of sound and a cloth-like cascade of gold tucked around an old Venetian courtyard. Around the corner from it, I visited the Arsenale gate and the Piraeus lion – this remarkable sculpture, purloined by the Venetians from the harbour that gives it its name sometime in the high Middle Ages, has upon it some long but faded inscriptions, carved in runic letters by Norse warriors fighting in the medieval Mediterranean. Various attempts have been made to translate the inscription, but all agree that it is some form of dedication to a departed comrade, carved by fellows who were likewise far from home and made well before the Venetians looted the statue for themselves. Venice's jackdaw-like clawing at the Mediterranean drew to itself a thousand such stories, no doubt: and for all that the city exists now only to the drumbeat of tourist shoes, one still hears the echoes of emotions long, long departed thrown back off old and weathered stone.

I reflected as I headed back through the streets that the truth, often acknowledged but not much acted upon, is that the world’s love for Venice, as surely as the changing tides, has suppressed something of the city. Much of the centre has a certain numbness to it: where Jan Morris once found cats and canaries, where in another world there might be a sense of bustle and human warmth, there is little left beyond the endless tread of slightly stressed tourists and the beating down of the searching sun. It does not, in places, feel like a city that is run for humans to live in, and places like San Marco and the Rialto are as a result cloaked in an almost eerie inhumanity, where old stories are read off scripts and closed in glass boxes for a public whose cloying attentions have closed off much of the artisanal flair and relaxed charm that a Mediterranean city of culture should be humming with. Not all love is kind: and the world's for Venice may be just so.

The centre of the old ghetto today.

Before I caught the train the next day, one last stop beckoned: the old Ghetto district. Shakespeare lurked, uneasily, at the back of my mind. I only walked the streets – the Jewish Museum was closed for renovation – but it was nonetheless a strangely different place to much of the rest of the city. Immigration of Jews from elsewhere has rebuilt the Jewish community of Venice, reduced to a fraction of its former size after the horrors of the mid twentieth century: and where San Marco feels numb, the old Ghetto feels alive. The arches in front of the old Banco Rosso look out onto a plaza with trees and benches, the open stall has market stalls selling fruit, and kosher bakeries and little shops line busy streets. Whether or not it was a twist of historical irony that the area so famously segregated to dehumanise its residents was the most human part of the city I had seen, it helped to see it.

Lumbered with a bag, I rested for a while at the Savorgnan Park close to the station, and saw two additional birds – a spotted flycatcher and, bizarrely, a great-tit, which despite being one of the commonest birds in Europe had hitherto been absent (the treelessness of most of the city cannot have helped). I poked my head into the dark, weighty atmosphere of the late seventeenth century church of Santa Maria di Nazareth as I headed round one last corner, and then found myself at last witnessing the same sight as when I had first entered the city. Did I understand it better than I had done beforehand? I knew more, and had seen more: but Venice felt if anything less susceptible to reason than when I had disembarked.

An egret stalked a ditch by the railway as the train snaked inland from Santa Lucia again. One imagines oneself in Austria well before the border, for South Tyrol looks more like its Austrian counterpart than like the Italian lowland one has just left. The peaks and tunnels of the Alps beckoned, and after them, Vienna, where only the wide river gives whispers of the sea. I opened my laptop, and began to write.


Venice is indeed a curious place: its beauty irreplaceable and unique, its soul assailed by love for better and, very often, for worse. The sea to which the city is married claws at its foundations, the throngs of admirers whose cameras flash at its art leave it numbly staring out, trapped in the old self they want to see at the expense of what it might otherwise become. Much of what it has lost is, too, still to be found for a quarter of the price around the Aegean and Adriatic. For seafood, I would go to Porto Kufo, for the old charm of Adriatic trade, to Dubrovnik, or for cats and wheeling gulls, to Korčula. But for the long years, for the lions, and for love? These, in a heartbeat and on a swallow’s wings, only Venice understands in all their tried and twisted forms – and for these, yes – for these, without a doubt, I would return.

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Arts, Crafts, Music & Drama - The Artisans' Guilds / One of the first horror films?

« on: May 18, 2022, 08:58:34 PM »

Stumbled across a link to this earlier, apparently a silent made in the 1890s thought to be one of the first horror films. Quite an interesting little three minute watch