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1
Announcements! The Town Crier! / Under The Yoke Released!
« on: March 28, 2024, 09:24:04 AM »

Under the Yoke, the medieval peasant life simulator, is now available on Steam! The game covers over 250 years of rural English history, following a family through generations of forestry, crop rotation, crafting, love, personal and legal interactions, and more besides. Coming from Exilian member and Coding Medieval Worlds 4 guest speaker Priory Games, this is bound to be a great play for historic gaming fans who want to get down and dirty with medieval survival and village life.

The game has mechanics showing not just the farming side of peasant life but the importance of community and specialisations in shaping people's place in the medieval world. This includes elections to certain village roles, a representation of the legal status of your particular peasants, and the core struggle for subsistence food and enough surplus to pay your feudal rents. Dynamic events can provide major system shocks, with famines draining food storage rapidly but also potentially providing an opportunity for profit when food prices rocket. You can plant crops, learn recipes, work out the advantageous way to manage a medieval family, and discover much more about your world through pop-up events as the years roll by.

Why not check it out, and let us know how your peasant avatars fare through the cold winters of twelfth and thirteenth century England? The village awaits!



2
Of Tesserae Discarded: A Trip to Ravenna and San Marino



The streets at night were quiet, and somewhat pale even in the shadows, but immediately different in many ways to the streets of central Europe with which I was more familiar. The air was warmer than it had been back in Vienna, and this small city where I had just arrived on the train from Bologna felt like a little exhalation after the rush of the journey.

Floodlit, on my left, orange stone and pillared archways were thrown into sharp focus against the darkness of night. A cluster of palms between the building and the street added to the definite sense of a change of place, but the building alone told me enough. A tall, round brick tower that had probably stood for a thousand years before anyone I ever knew was even born, its triple arched windows a much more southern European style. Inside, though, would be sights older still, memories of an empire and its successors who struggled over this land to contest yet older Imperial memories in turn. Here their power and faith would be picked out in fragments of glass and stone, destroyed and repaired and remembered with the changing years: for this low-lying wetland city was the hope and home of kings and emperors, once - and its name was and is Ravenna.





The archepiscopal palace complex.
This trip was rather different to most of the travels in my doctoral years, in that I was not alone, accompanied by three friends from my university days. Without having to rely on my often very haphazard organisational capacity my plans were less chaotic than usual (helpful given that a lot of things in Ravenna required bookings and thus forward planning). Equally helpfully, I did not have nearly so many problems ambling about vaguely staring at eateries failing to decide where to go, a problem that has left me ambling around very hungrily on some previous parts of my travels.

On the other hand, I couldn’t in good conscience drag my travelling companions far out of the city on the off-chance of seeing the odd slightly unusual lizard or interesting woodpecker: as such, readers eager to hear about the wildlife of Ravenna may be disappointed. In any case the centre of the city is, much like the other cities of that peninsula that I have visited to date (Bologna, Ravenna, San Marino and Venice) surprisingly devoid of green space, and I was surprised to not see even sparrows in the city proper, occasional pigeons being the majority of the avian life. There are wetlands outside the city – indeed part of the reason for its historical significance was likely the defensibility that the more extensive ancient counterparts of these offered – but I shall have to visit them another time.

The promise of this place for us was, regardless, not in the surrounding wetlands but in the shining remnants of its distant past: Ravenna is a city whose name is soaked deep in the mires of history. It was occupied as an Umbrian settlement even before classical Roman period, but rose to its primary fame in the latest days of western Rome and during the period of Ostrogothic rule: needing a defensible frontier city to rule from but with his capital in Milan under too much pressure from the Goths, Honorius moved the capital of the Western Empire there in 402 AD and it remained a key capital for the last Western Emperors, the Ostrogothic kings, and the Eastern Roman Exarchs over the following centuries. Ravenna’s great treasures are the Byzantine mosaics from this period which still adorn a number of spectacular religious buildings around the city.



The roof of the Neonian baptistry.
One would not always know this from the exterior views, for the buildings of the modern city are somewhat muted in their colouration: the local stone and brick is not vivid or deep in colour, and the Italian flags hanging from buildings likewise tend to have sympathetically faded with the years. Much of the city centre is pedestrianised: the urban heart of the old city is somewhat inland, with a newer seaward part of the city holding more recent industrial and marina development (and fewer tourists, including us: we remained in the older parts of the city). The port in the Roman era was south of the city proper, at Classe (from Latin classis, meaning fleet) but silted up over time and is now seven kilometres inland. The modern city has grown in the direction of the retreating waves, with the newer areas stretching along an eighteenth century canal that stretches from the edge of the old city to the Adriatic.

Our first stop was the ‘Neonian’ baptistry, so named for Bishop Neon who ordered its construction. A lot of spots in Ravenna have timed entries, and this was one of the shortest, with only around five minutes to look inside (though nobody was taking the timings in a terribly exact way). The baptistry is not overly large, and like many buildings in the soft wetland ground of Ravenna has sunk somewhat over the years, but the mosaics inside are breathtaking. The intensity of surrounding deep colour that mosaic permits is something that neither words nor indeed a camera can capture well, especially when produced as a total surrounding effect in a tall but narrow-floored room. I was very conscious from the start that, whilst I could and did take many a picture, no angle could capture more than quite a small percentage of the experience, which relies both on peripheral vision and on drawing one’s eye up from the wall art to the roof detail without the viewer being able to take in both at once.

Ravenna is not short of later religious architecture too: next door to the baptistry is the large baroque-interior cathedral, which would have been more impressive had it not been for seeing the baptistry. The pale colours and larger scale of the baroque interior create a space that sharply contrasts with the incredible intensity of the baptistry. Some elements, including parts of the pulpit, are spolia from earlier churches, but these too are pale stone, feeling almost like ghost monuments when compared to the heavy colour of the baptistry.



Mosaic birds outside the Archepiscopal chapel.
The third part of the same building complex that one can look round is the Archepiscopal museum. This contains some immensely interesting treasures, from a headless porphyry statue to many lapidary inscriptions to a sixth century bishop’s throne with incredibly fine ivory decorations. Its crowning glory, however, is the late sixth century chapel, a private space for the archbishops of Ravenna. Here, like in the baptistry, one goes from the pale stone of the inscriptions and the delicate pale imagery of the throne to being bombarded with an intensity of colour, nature and sacred imagery. The outer ceiling covered in birds was a particular favourite of mine. Unlike in some Catholic churches of more modern periods, the intensely busy mosaic work in Ravenna manages to draw me in rather than put me off: it may partly be its use in smaller spaces, but I think also the use of colour and bolder imagery helps: mosaic necessitates a certain simplicity in its styles which at times feels easier on the eye.

Later in the day we had yet more churches to look at: San Apollinare, a church built and initially decorated in the Ostrogothic era, was the first of these. This was the church that had loomed out of the night as I first walked the streets of Ravenna the previous evening: it was originally the church of Christ the Redeemer, built by Theodoric the Great, and was heavily redecorated and re-consecrated by the Emperor Justinian to remove the Arian and pro-Theodoric elements of the decorative scheme (on which more later). What we see of the mosaics of Ravenna today is often not just a case  of unintentional survivability or the ravages of time, but also an intentional sorting between time periods, decorative preferences, and power politics.

The next stop was the complex around San Vitale – though before the church itself  we looked at the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, a tiny cross-shaped building behind the main church which was not in fact the mausoleum of the fifth century queen and Imperial advisor Galla Placidia (one of a number of later attributions of buildings in Ravenna). Of all the Ravenna mosaic spaces, this was in some ways the most intense experience. The unusually small size made for a sharply contrasting experience: whilst the enclosed space was quite small, paradoxically the nature and sky symbolism and patterns of the mosaics conveyed vast and open concepts, with deer and birds and stars all taking their place among the inevitable saints. The brightness of the in-fill patterns also amazed me. It is easy, and indeed intentional, that one’s eye is drawn to the centrepiece images of the mosaics, but the little side-sections easily forgotten beneath the archways are themselves stunning pieces of design, even if some of them curiously resemble early Microsoft windows screensavers.



The mosaics at San Vitale.
And then, at last, San Vitale itself. It is probably the most impressive of the surviving mosaic assemblages, built around soaringly high curving walls and with a wealth of bright greens and blues. The church as a whole is much larger than the surviving mosaic sections, which cover one main section leading away from the central dome (whose later baroque decorations might be impressive anywhere else, but the mosaic outshines them by far). The larger space also means that the San Vitale mosaics are more airily lit than many of the smaller buildings, and the scheme feels more surrounding and all-encompassing than the more frieze-like mosaics high on the wall of San Apollinare. A key point of note in San Vitale’s decorations are the portraits of Justinian and Theodora, two of the most famous images of these key figures of the sixth century world. What one often does not realise without being in the physical space itself, however, is that these famous pictures of the ruling couple are surprisingly hard to see in a direct way. They form the sides of the main apse from the perspective of an approaching viewer, thus only being particularly dominant pieces of imagery to those standing inside the apse itself. To the viewer from any further away it is the religious imagery that dominates, with Christ, the apostles, the angels and the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem taking particular prominence. Faith was, of course, far from apolitical itself, but it is important to remember that nor was it solely a matter of display, and nor were politics and faith separable for the creators of these works. Mosaic was the manifestation of belief, which in turn was power, power which mobilised wealth and human energy, which in turn commanded yet more tesserae into place.

Food in the evening was at Osteria Passatelli, a restaurant on the other side of the centre which we also used on our last night, going to a smaller and more traditional place, Trattoria Al Cerchio, on the intervening evening. The main comment I have about the food in Ravenna is that, as a foreigner outside Italy, “Italian” food often seems like an omnipresent part of life, encompassing core daily staples, unquestioned and consistent. When one actually goes to Italy, however, it becomes very quickly apparent how little one knows about Italian food. Besides eating some good pizza I came across quite a variety of new foodstuffs in just a few short days in Ravenna, including cappelletti, a local filled pasta, and squacquerone, a sort of crumble or biscuit cake made with almonds. The food we had was also consistently very good, with no real misses in the entirety of the trip (of course, had we had any Italians present they may have been more discerning than we mere Angles).

The next day, in any case, experiences rather different – and not strictly speaking Italian – beckoned. On that second morning we took the train to Rimini, and thereafter a bus inland, crossing the border into another country altogether.





San Marino, as seen from the second tower.
The tiny state of San Marino lies to the south of Ravenna, its old city being on the crest of Monte Titano, an imposing mountain whose ridge hosts the three towers that are visible on the city’s flag. The primary things I learned about San Marino were its love of liberty, and the fact that in Sammarinese eyes this is defined in particular by a) its constitutional republican independence, b) having a lot of towers, and c) its right to slightly undercut the government of Italy via differential tax rates. The lowland parts of San Marino have a disproportionate number of car dealerships, and the core city a disproportionate number of luxury goods and weaponry shops, largely for the latter reason.

Sammarinese independence and liberty is in a sense the whole notable thing about San Marino, and is very much a historical anomaly. States like it were far more common in the medieval period, sometimes nominally acknowledging some overlordship from a pope or Holy Roman Emperor but being largely self-governing. San Marino managed, however, to retain its republican system through the Renaissance as larger city-states began to impose control on smaller neighbours to form larger dukedoms and republics. It perhaps benefited from being roughly in the papal-dominated parts of Italy, but at the far edge where perhaps negotiation was more possible. Certainly the Republic was under papal protection by treaty for the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries without becoming part of the Papal States proper.

Medieval San Marino invested in its own defence, as its towers show. All three are medieval, some later than others: The first and second are small castle style arrangements with an outer wall and central bastion: the first contains some museum exhibits and a heavily graffitied prison room with nineteenth century scribblings that I wish I knew enough history to interpret, while the second hosts a weaponry museum which makes some slightly dubious sweeping statements but does include some rather pretty equipment. This includes a number of crossbows: it used to be the case that a newly elected captain-general (one of San Marino’s dual heads of state) had to provide two crossbows to the city’s armouries, which given the city elected two such leaders annually must have made a fairly significant contribution to a small medieval city’s armouries. The third and last of the towers is just a watchtower and indeed curiously has no ground level entrance, so it may never have been used for more than lookout duty from the top: I am unsure if it has any internal space.



The second tower, and the sheer cliffs on the city's northeastern side.
One of the main things that can really be said about the towers is that they are immensely pretty. They are in a sense on the wrong side of Monte Titano to be true defensive fortifications, hanging on the edge of the extremely sheer northeastern slopes which would be hard to scale regardless instead of protecting the shallower slope on the southwestern side of the ridge. Their true function and great advantage is in visibility, both seeing and being seen: on the crest of the hill they must have been visible for many miles: lighting a beacon on one of them could certainly be seen from as far away as the coast if one had a direct view inland. The views that they, and the mountain in general, offer are likewise magnificent, stretching from the sea to the dramatic high hills and mountains inland with almost nothing out of the line of sight. Being on the steep side of the mountain also gives the towers some very dramatic visual angles, their walls transferring straight into cliff-edge plunges down towards the ground far below.

By the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in any case, the towers were still prisons and arsenals but no longer a fundamental part of Sammarinese strategy. As the modern era loomed, the cause of San Marino’s independence was increasingly down not to the imposing nature of its defences but to the brilliance of its diplomats. Whilst Monte Titano is an imposing defensive position, San Marino has never had the manpower to seriously face down armies in the later parts of its history. Instead its destiny was guided by figures like Antonio Onofri, who managed to persuade Napoleon not to invade, perhaps on the grounds that this tiny republic could stand as a bastion of the less monarchic virtues of Bonaparte’s post-revolutionary France. Onofri turned down Napoleon’s offer of expanded lands for the city-state with the apocryphal quip that “wars end, but neighbours remain”: small, in the world of Sammarinese liberty, is beautiful.

Returning to the old town centre, we stopped for lunch, getting piadine, a sort of folded flatbread sandwich common in the surrounding regions of Italy as well, before heading to the state museum of San Marino. This occupies a full building and includes some international antiquities as well as artefacts from San Marino itself and a wide collection of pottery proudly bearing the three towered emblem.

Giuseppe Garibaldi’s statue stands at the heart of San Marino, near the state museum: a curious public monument for the state defined more than anything else by having chosen not to be part of the Italian unifier’s lifetime achievement. But like Napoleon before him, Garibaldi ended up with a soft spot for San Marino, not least because the republic sheltered him during a disastrous retreat from his attempt to create a republic in Rome in 1849: consequently, one of the greatest architects of modern Italy  was more than prepared to go to bat for San Marino staying out. The Sammarinese stayed out of World War Two, though under their own fascist government, again somehow treading a line that avoided either Mussolini trying to crush the Republic or the Allies wanting to liquidate it after the war. In its ability to appeal through sheer charm to those in power, it is arguably possible that San Marino represents the puppy sized elephant theory – that is to say, the idea that puppy sized elephants will, in a world of humans, eventually evolve because humans like cute things and being adorable and high in people’s affections is a survival strategy. It is a novel strategy to utilise for statecraft, but it seems to have served San Marino really rather well.

San Marino’s apocryphal history starts that way, in a sense: Marinus, the patron saint, moved inland from the coast after being (so the story goes) falsely accused of being someone’s estranged husband, and the monastic community he founded was eventually donated the mountain slopes by a landowner, with the city later growing up around it. At its roots, Sammarinese liberty was always a gift of others: an artefact not of strength or power – or even towers - but of the belief that San Marino should be free.



The parliament of San Marino.
It was to two shrines of this history that we went as our last stops: first the basilica of the saint himself, which is a nice but fairly standardly laid out baroque church lined with imposing statues of club-armed saints. We then went to have a look at the outside of the Palazzo Publico – the heart of Sammarinese government – which we then realised that we could go inside as well, and for visitors to San Marino it is absolutely something I’d recommend. The general ticket for most sites in San Marino gets you not just into both of the major towers and the public museum, but also into the Palazzo to have a look round the Sammarinese parliament chamber, which is decorated in extremely pretty nineteenth century painted woodwork. The saint stands at the centre of a pseudo-medieval themed wall painting, looming over the little parliament.

Outside the parliament is another curiosity that might be less expected for travellers: a bust of Abraham Lincoln. Whilst the famous president of the United States never visited San Marino, in a curious letter exchange he was made an honorary citizen. In the spring of 1861 the Sammarinese sent a letter written in “perfect Italian on one side, and imperfect but clear English on the other”, and proposed an alliance based upon their shared republican values, defended by Lincoln against the Confederacy at a time when the Sammarinese were trying to ensure their independence against the imminent unification of Italy. Lincoln replied and accepted the offer. “Although your dominion is small”, he wrote back “your State is nevertheless one of the most honored, in all history. It has by its experience demonstrated the truth, so full of encouragement to the friends of Humanity, that Government founded on Republican principles is capable of being so administered as to be secure and enduring.” Such sentiments ensured that it did, indeed, endure.

The fog rolled in as we left, falling fast around the mountain slopes: the wide landscape visibility of the earlier part of today was rapidly lost, curtains rolling across the sky in front of our eyes. The shrouded mountain, wrapped in protective cloud away from the world, was no longer visible as the bus rolled back to Rimini – but, somewhere behind us, invisible, knowing that the towers still stood upon the crest of Monte Titano meant something that it might not have done before. Just as in Ravenna, representations and symbols in San Marino held a real power.





The palace mosaic in San Apollinare - note the hands of erased Ostrogothic courtiers on the columns.
Our last day back in Ravenna included some brushes with the alternative ways the city might have been put together, the paths less trodden in its history, and this began with the other of the old baptistry buildings in the city. Unlike its Neonian counterpart this one only really had the roof remaining of the original decorative scheme, with rather plain walls. There was a definite historical reason for this, however, for this was the Arian baptistry. The followers of Arius, notably and prominently including the Ostrogothic king Theodoric who ruled in Ravenna, believed that the Son was subordinate to the Father, clashing with the view of equality in the holy trinity that was favoured in Constantinople. Religious difference was tolerated by Theodoric for much of his reign, through the time of the emperors Zeno and Anastasius, and indeed he reportedly even ordered citizens who attack Ravenna’s synagogue in a riot to pay for its repair. Late in his reign, however the new emperor Justin and his nephew, Justinian, began persecutions of Arians in the Byzantine east. This caused a tit-for-tat escalation of religious suppression, and after Theodoric’s death when Justinian as Emperor attempted to re-establish Imperial control over Italy a purge of Arian imagery was certainly on his agenda. The roof of the Arian baptistry was apparently deemed uncontroversial enough to survive. The wall decoration, like much of the decorative scheme in San Apollinare where the hands of members of Theodoric’s court can still be seen on the pillars of an edited palace mosaic, did not survive Justinianic ire.

That, however, was not Justinian’s greatest insult to the memory of the Ostrogothic king. Theodoric’s mausoleum is a little way from the core of the city, sitting lower than its original two-storey height would imply in a park that has been somewhat lowered to account for the sinkage over the years. It is deeply unlike the round brick towers and arches of the typical Italianate churches, with a shallow round dome that has an almost science-fiction look to it (add a couple of sigils here and there and the T’au of Warhammer: 40,000 would consider it well within their aesthetic range).

There is little to see inside the mausoleum, which somehow adds to the strangeness of the place. The ground floor is empty except for two scallop shell carvings and some vaguely funereal emotional music for some reason, while the top floor has a porphyry bathtub and a cross and likewise nothing else. Theodoric himself was removed not long after he was interred: Justinian had no wish for the building to remain a bastion of one of Arianism’s greatest champions, and the deceased was rather less than ceremoniously removed from his intended eternal resting place. Theodoric would doubtless have been rather displeased had he been alive to know, but he might also have been a little upset at the thought that, regardless, his tomb would eventually become a traipsing ground for camera wielding foreigners of all kinds. On the other hand, we’re still talking about him now, so perhaps in a sense the building served its purpose.



The mausoleum of Theodoric.
We did a loop around the park outside Theodoric’s palace, which is a fairly open grassy square that had a few more birds than the inner city but still very little – the potential for significantly better urban wildlife spaces once again being there but very much untapped. We also stopped briefly at the city’s old fortress on the way back, into town, much of which was being renovated and which contained a small park.

Lunch was, once again, piadine, which continued to both be very good indeed if not the most efficient variant on sandwiches and wraps as far as the desideratum of retaining its contents is concerned. Thereafter we set out for Ravenna’s secondary claim to fame, right at Ravenna’s heart and dating to a much later part of the Middle Ages. There in the centre of the city lie the multiple tombs (he has been moved more than once) of Dante Alighieri, the Italian writer whose name hangs over the language much as Shakespeare does for English or Rustaveli for Georgian. With only a passing familiarity – whilst one can’t avoid picking up bits as a medievalist, as of the time of writing I am yet to read any of Dante’s major works even in translation – I for one was nonetheless  keen to find out more about how his life and work were intertwined, and to learn more about the texts that had produced such a great literary impact.

Unfortunately, I would have been better off browsing Wikipedia rather than paying for the hour spent going around the Dante museums. There are three parts to the ticket, two of which are Dante related: the first is the Dante House, which is mostly a museum of later artistic representations and reception of Dante, small and possibly interesting if one was already a Dante specialist, but probably not for the average viewer. The supposed main event, the Dante Museum, is a psychotropic mess of over-interactivity: no manuscripts or particularly effective summaries of Dante’s work, displays only in weird moving technological blob-scapes that change according to where the viewer is standing making them frankly impossible to read, and artefacts really only related to Dante as a cultic figure rather than a historical one.

The third part of the ticket, a rooftop garden and small underground mosaic in one of the civic buildings, is unrelated to Dante. The garden does however have nice views and is probably nice in summer, and is therefore decidedly more worth the time than the Dante museum. The mosaics beneath it are small, and also contained some curious modern artworks including a tiny pig with giant bull horns which was rather endearing whilst also feeling rather out of place. Also on the list of nearby curiosities more worth visiting than the Dante museum is the next door church, which has some very nice and really rather impressive mosaics positioned underneath the altar beneath a filled pool which also contains fish.



Mosaics for the home: part of the "stone carpets".
Our return to the real tiled treasures of Ravenna was made with a visit to the Domus dei Tappeti di Pietra, or House of the Stone Carpets. This is somewhat out of the centre, but not very far: one has to walk through a rather unprepossessing little 18th century church to St. Euphemia and down some steps. There, the stone carpets in question are laid out in all their glory, a huge room of mosaic floors forming an intricate dance of pattern and colour. Unlike in the Byzantine churches for which Ravenna is famous, these are slightly earlier secular mosaics, with a soft, warm orange rather than the heavily rich blues and greens that dominate San Vitale or the smaller baptistries. There are a couple of pictorial mosaics, most notably a “dance of the four seasons” which shows an array of dancers with banners and a piper, but the majority of the room is intricate patterning. As a result of the extreme skill and visual centrepiece nature of mosaic pictures, it is often easy to overlook the brilliance of simple pattern, but it is something that I think deserves more attention: except perhaps for some rugs, people in modern western cultures like myself are often a bit unused to artistic intricacy in what we have underfoot, and imagining the effect of a specifically eye-catching and visually interesting floor on a room is quite an interesting thing to consider.

Another thing that is worthwhile doing in a city is to avoid mentally trapping it in time: for many smaller cities and even some larger ones, a single time period tends to dominate the public consciousness and be the view presented to the world. But Ravenna had long been an important city before the era of Theodoric and Justinian, and the statistically average inhabitant of Ravenna over the course of human history lived well after the city’s days as an Imperial capital. Even in those Imperial days, beyond the soaring domes of the churches lay homes and market stalls, fishing boats and a synagogue, children discovering for the first time the colour of a butterfly’s wing and old men seeing the latest soldiers arriving and remembering the faces of a hundred others flickering past over the decades. As these ephemera and old stories are forgotten, there is often a tendency to fit a city’s history more and more into its expected boxes, much to the detriment of our imagination and understanding alike.

The very last stop, the so-called Palace of Theodoric, exemplified this process. It fits the category of somewhat erroneously named sites in that it is probably not a palace and certainly does not date back to the Ostrogothic period: the name pushes it back into the expected frame of Ravenna’s past. It may be, at best, on part of the approximate site of Theodoric’s residence, and a number of – in the least surprising news ever to hit Ravenna – mosaics have been found underneath the site. The present partial building may be a guardhouse or gateway for a previous church on the site, and houses some impressive mosaic sections including lizards, patterns, and fragments of riding scenes. Some more understated black and white sections were quite interesting to me, differing rather in style from the rest: perhaps minimalist aesthetics were not entirely beyond imagination even in the days of great floor-tiled battle scenes and dancing gods.

The next day it was time to journey home, though I had a brief stop in Bologna city centre before heading to the airport for my flight. Bologna would need another travelogue to itself: it is outwardly vivid in a way that Ravenna is not, a city of vibrant red stones and bricks that is adorned with pseudo-classical statues and immensely tall towers, some of which were clearly undergoing significant building work to try and shore them up against the ravages of time. One thing that Ravenna could have done with more of, and which this reminded me of, was more explanation of the various renovations and repairs in intervening and more recent centuries. Even an earnest attempt at restoration is a subtle change to what once was, and often such attempts come with new tweaks and reimaginations that slowly change the pasts we once knew.




History is, after all, as much about what is not present as what is. Faced with the incomplete past, we fill things in around it and create totality out of the holes in our tiled patchworks. The pictures we see today are selected parts of lost artworks and the imaginaries that came with them, reimagined into singular new images whose incompleteness we must take our time to realise, and whose antecedents we can often never fully recover. Beyond them lie a mass of discarded tesserae, the little pieces of human pasts that fill in colours we have forgotten the names of and fragile realities long since lost. Understanding the tiles piece by piece, allowing us to reimagine them in different frames, is the best we can do: the corner decorations beyond the pomp of the centrepiece, the fragments of the church art of a purged belief system, the changes in name of an unfamiliar building, or even an entire little city left out of the march of national unification.

Caught half within the mire-mist and mountain fogs of historical memory, Ravenna and San Marino faded into the night behind me. Their histories cannot and should not be ignored or rejected: their intensity of their impact on viewers and on modern realities is too great for that. With a consciousness of how such pasts are put together, however, and with an understanding of how art, belief, and power build upon one another, we can rediscover them from new angles and in new ways. There, somewhere in a cold church amid the verdant tiles, we might find mosaic pasts that are more wonderfully alive than we ever dared to imagine.


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In fantasy worlds, notions of humanity and monstrosity are often fraught. This keynote examines the operation of monstrosity in medievalist fantasy texts as inherently shaped by its medievalist context, and by the ways in which games and play can disrupt our usual understanding of monstrosity and abjection. The monstrous is produced by a subversion or refusal of normative categories – something becomes perceived as monstrous when it cannot be understood or incorporated into a worldview. This works in harmony with the enabling flexibility of medievalism – the medieval is able to be so diversely utilised because it is never fully knowable (though some users also disregard very knowable aspects out of convenience), just like the monstrous. However, in a game with rules, and especially one with win conditions, this potential to unsettle boundaries is often dispelled by game mechanics that render the world into knowable components. This keynote talk will draw on my research on monstrous hags in fantasy games, as well as the ideas discussed at the workshop, to consider the relationship between game systems and the disruptive potential of medievalism and monstrosity when it comes to dnormative boundaries and Othered outsiders.

Tess Watterson (tesswatty) is an early career researcher who specialises in medievalism and experiential learning. She received her PhD from the University of Adelaide for a thesis on witchcraft, gender, and persecution in medievalist fantasy video games. Her earlier work focused on medievalism and militainment in Robin Hood video games, including her Masters of Research thesis completed at Macquarie University. Tess aims to contribute to expanding pedagogical approaches for engaging with the past through experience and play, including in her current role as Special Collections & Experiential Learning Coordinator at the Library of the University of New South Wales.
 
The session chair was Madeline Sterns (TheLichQueen). Madeline is a mediaeval and early modern art historian and game studies academic with interests in materiality and reception. She is currently a part-time instructor at Front Range Community College in Colorado (USA) teaching Humanities courses including Film Art and World Mythology with contemporary media applications.

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Coding Medieval Worlds / CMW IV: How Monsters Work Panel Video
« on: March 21, 2024, 01:35:03 PM »

In this panel, we invited three specialists from game development and academia to introduce us to some particular specific monsters and discuss why they work in their particular formats, settings, and narratives. What effects different sorts of monster are there to produce, how both medieval and modern creators worked them into those settings, and how we can use those techniques to present or re-imagine monsters when representing medieval worlds were all part of the discussion.


This panel featured the following people:

Hannah Bayat is a QA analyst at Microbird Games in Vienna, where she has worked on the upcoming title Dungeons of Hinterberg, a modern-fantasy alpine adventure mixing dungeon crawling and puzzle gameplay. Her work more widely has included a range of areas around software development, especially visual computing in which she holds a master’s degree - this has included development of health and food security applications, and publishing academic work on medical imaging technologies.

Sven Gins is a doctoral researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, working on the core project Homo Imperfectus: Animals, Machines, and the Quest for Humanity in Late Mediaeval France. He is also the lead for design and development on the public engagement project Monstrum: The Medieval Cooperative Board Game, and works on how medieval heritage finds its way into modern fantasy and sci-fi games as one of his sidequests.

Tamara de Bruin (intotheferns) is a research Master’s student in Medieval Literature at the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on treason and literary propaganda around the Wars of Scottish Independence, and the way that popular medieval narratives use animalistic natures or characteristics as strategies to create effective dehumanisation of their subjects. She is also currently involved in the design and development of Monstrum.

The panel was chaired by James Baillie (Jubal). The convenor of Coding Medieval Worlds and current chair of Exilian, James is a historian focusing on digital approaches to the history of the medieval Caucasus and has written and taught on the topic of games in history as well as being an active writer and game developer.



Links
Monstrum: https://svengins.weebly.com/monstrum.html
Dungeons of Hinterberg: https://www.dungeonsofhinterberg.com/

5

In this panel, we moved the focus from monsters to those people on the edges of medieval societies and their lives on the margins. Our different panelists considered how social class, law, and identity were among elements that could leave people outside society’s boundaries, and will share different perspectives from practical game development to academic research on how we express those marginalisations in modern games.


This panel featured the following people:

Michelle M Sauer is the Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Dakota. She is a medievalist who specializes in early Christian devotional literature, gender and queer theory, and critical race studies. She is also one of the founding members of an organization called Medievalists of Color, and part of our mission is to counteract the “inherent” whiteness of representations of the Middle Ages. Currently she is working on a number of collections on materiality, critical race theory and religion, as well as the history of sexuality. She is also working on a monograph about solitary sexuality involving religiously enclosed peoples, including issues like monastic masturbation. She enjoys playing video games, particularly fantasy-setting games such as RPGs set in medieval-esque worlds and is interested in the relationship between medieval stereotypes and Victorian conceptions of the era.

Owen Goddard (Priory Games) is a solo hobbyist developer from the UK. His current project, Under The Yoke, is a multi-generational medieval life-sim told from the perspective of a family of peasants from 1085-1335 as they strike out a living in medieval England. The game intentionally centres the lives of everyday people as they navigate the oppressive feudal system of the period. Throughout Under The Yoke are player-choice moments designed to reveal the conditions of those who are cast to the margins of society, whether it be by their occupation, religious affiliation, or health, among other factors.

Thom Gobbitt is an early medievalist whose research focus stands at the intersection of the history of law and the history of the book, and who is steadily expanding into ludology. On the gaming front, he is currently editing a collected volume of chapters on the representation of the medieval past in analogue/tabletop games, and is preparing a TTRPG based on the seventh-century Lombard laws in the Edictus Rothari of 643 CE.  Thom is also a part-time postdoctoral researcher on the ERC PresentDead project, in the Austrian Academy of the Sciences, Vienna, which explores grave reopenings and human interactions with materials relating to the dead, from the fifth to eighth centuries.

The panel was chaired by Blair Apgar.



Links
Under the Yoke: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2592060/Under_The_Yoke/

6

In this panel, we had three specialists giving views on monsters from different parts of the world and how they fit in with the different cultural and historical specificities of those areas. What made a creature or idea monstrous or outside society’s norms in different cultures? How many of those ideas were shared, and what differences do?

This panel featured the following people:

Tineke D’Haeseleer was trained as a sinologist at Leuven University (Belgium), and got her PhD in mediaeval Chinese history at Cambridge University in 2012. For two decades she taught classical Chinese and East Asian history in the UK, the Netherlands and the US. She is the editor of China's Magical Creatures (and Where to Find Them), a free, open online textbook written by her students, and she is a co-translator of the eighth-century Essentials of Governance (Cambridge Univ.Press, 2020).

Rakesh Khanna grew up in Berkeley, California, of mixed Punjabi and Anglo-American heritage. He co-founded Blaft Publications in Chennai with his wife, Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, in 2008. The company publishes translations of bestselling Indian-language pulp fiction, folklore, and graphic novels. He is the co-author, with J. Furcifer Bhairav, of Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India.

Rebecca Merkelbach is assistant professor of Old Norse-Icelandic studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She has published on the paranormal and the monstrous in medieval Icelandic literature, including the book Monsters in Society (De Gruyter, 2020), on storyworlds and worldbuilding, and on the late medieval Sagas of Icelanders.

The panel was chaired by Liam Downs-Tepper.


Links
China's Magical Creatures (and Where to Find Them): https://open.muhlenberg.pub/chinasmagicalcreatures/
Blaft Publications: https://www.blaft.com/

7
Once again, we're looking for a number of additional volunteers to join the Exilian team! Our small core team, currently comprising four members (Chair/Exec, Treasurer, Voting Members Officer, and Site Adjudicator) is urgently in need of additional support to keep Exilian running.

We're advertising for four committee-level posts as of now: Tech, Membership Development, Social Media, and Content Editing. The holders of these roles aren't necessarily expected to cover every part of the brief, but they will be taking overall responsibility for these areas of Exilian's activity as part of our admin committee. We have formal titles for each role: except for the Tech officer who is designated as the Technikos, a choice of "despot" or "heteriarch" may be made by the successful applicant for this set of roles. Exilian is a democratically run organisation and in-post committee members will need to be ratified by the voting members and annually thereafter.

All of the available roles will come with the best support we can give: we're happy to train people in their roles and do not expect people to come in with prior experience. We have a strong ethos of supporting our volunteer officers and ensuring help is at hand: for all roles, there will be volunteers around with experience in the role who can help with any problems or queries. If you have any questions about any of the posts and what they entail, please leave a comment below.

The roles are as follows, with the information on how to apply in the post below.




Technical Officer

Key roles
The Technikos has responsibility for the front-end site and the technical aspects of keeping Exilian running - server issues, hosting, the site's programming and software, and so on are all within their remit.

Important powers/functions
- Control over the technical aspects of the forum and website
- Responsibility for look & layout
- Responsibility for the integrated functionality of site applications and content
- Along with the Basileus, responsibility for contact with site hosts

Regular tasks
- Website tech updates and edits
- Helping other staff and mod teams use the site
- Adding updates and mods to the forum to increase user utility
- Ensuring backups are up to date and available

Social Media Officer

Key roles
The Social Media officer will help promote Exilian and our members' creative projects across our social media accounts (Currently Facebook, Twitter, and Mastodon, but this may change and the Officer will have a lot of leeway to help our strategy evolve).

Important powers/functions
- Managing & building up Exilian's social media accounts
- Recruiting new members for the site
- Promoting Exilian's content
- Feeding back to the rest of staff on public perception of our activities

Regular tasks
- Schedule regular social media posts
- Engage & chat with interested parties on social media
- Find optimal audiences for specific pieces of content
- Directly message and invite creators to the website

Content Editor

Key roles
The Content Editor will be responsible for two significant areas: the Exilian Articles section, and the monthly newsletter Updates from the Forge. This is a wide role that involves commissioning and editing/formatting articles, as well as keeping an eye on news from across Exilian's activities.

Important powers/functions
- Editorial control of Exilian's main front-end "voice" via our newsletters
- Commissioning & engaging with article writers
- Representing the needs of the content section in staff meetings

Regular tasks
- Editing & helping write "Updates from the Forge", our monthly newsletter, and getting it released on schedule
- Finding news items from across Exilian's activities that can go into the newsletter
- Finding volunteers to write regular articles for the articles section, and deciding on bursary applications
- Editing and formatting the articles and posting them on time

Membership Development Officer/Forum Admin

Key roles
The Membership Development officer is a more classical "forum admin" role. The holder of this post will be there to engage with and support creative project managers across the site.

Important powers/functions
- Works with Exilian's creators and users to support their use of our website and other systems
- Wide-ranging remit to improve forum structures & functionality to help users
- Feeds back to other staff on how regular members & creative team leads are finding the website
- Responsible for keeping & updating our email list and getting monthly emails out to members

Regular tasks
- Greet new members, discuss projects with game developers and writers and be willing to engage with their work
- Get project developers settled into the site, creating new subforums for them where necessary
- Let developers and new members know about Exilian's democratic features/system and help enable them to take part
- Running creative competitions and/or game jams for the site
- Putting a brief email out once a month with links to our recent newsletter and announcements of other important upcoming events or similar

8
Announcements! The Town Crier! / Exilian is 16!
« on: March 18, 2024, 07:16:54 PM »

We have been a community of creative geekery for sixteen years as of today! Yes, that's right, Exilian is now legally old enough to drink in some jurisdictions! We're not planning to test this by pouring gin into the servers, though we are hoping to do some upgrades soon...

As with every year, the most important thing to say on Exilian Day is thank you. Whether you're just reading along, lurking on the forum, occasionally posting, or a core member of the community, it's your interest, excitement, creativity and geekery that makes Exilian what it is and makes it worth doing. We hope that you find everything we continue to do - articles, events, meetups and more - worthwhile, and that you'll be along for the ride as we bring you another packed schedule of thought-provoking, interesting and fun things for the next year and bring fascinatingly quirky and creative people from around the world together to take part.

Here's to us and to another year of Exilian!

9
Ren: The Girl With The Mark / Season 2 Episodes coming out!
« on: March 17, 2024, 11:36:39 PM »
Ren S2 episodes have started appearing for public viewing :)

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

Video in spoiler:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

10
Exilian Articles / How to think about history in your games
« on: March 17, 2024, 11:30:50 PM »
How to think about history in your games
By Jubal




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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



A medieval 'grotesque', British Library Arundel 83 f55v. The medieval imagination is a wonderful place to explore!
To look at the area of history I know best briefly, we have far more art and stories and ideas from the medieval period than ever appear in modern games. Looking at the past and discovering what else can be used from it can unlock a huge amount more that you might never have considered. That might mean looking at how you build your maps and moving away from north-facing, or point-accurate, map styles, or it might include thinking about characters with disabilities and how they navigated those issues and lived in the medieval world rather than solely leaving them as figures of pity. It might involve moving away from having taverns as an assumption in your setting, creating new spaces of gameplay as a character navigates the rights and responsibilities of being a guest in their society, or looking at specifically medieval relationships between people and their rulers which were often more fluid and surprising than the absolutist autocracies that “medieval” states are often depicted as having. It might mean looking further beyond Europe for inspiration into the vast swathes of the premodern world that have never been seriously touched in many game genres. It can mean exploring the medieval imaginary, too, from looking at how we make less sceptical and cynical protagonists in more religious worlds to finding spaces in modern fantasy for the headless blemmyes or for the bonnacon, a mythic cow that farts fireballs.

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

11
Exilian Articles / Beyond the Wall – Part One
« on: March 12, 2024, 10:38:56 PM »
Beyond the Wall – Part One
By rbuxton



Which wall? Trump’s wall.

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



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

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

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

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

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


Around the Capital

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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


The American and the Mexican

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




This is part one of a two-article coverage of rbuxton's adventures. Stay tuned for part two! You can also read about rbuxton's previous Accidents in Andalucía, or discover more travel writing from other Exilian members via our travel writing index.

12
Looks like this might be the ideal pub day - we're due a Friday pub, it might make sense to do it on the 29th? The 15th is a bit close already and the 22nd might be awkward for me.

Thoughts welcome as ever!

13
Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / SF and its impact
« on: March 04, 2024, 10:18:30 PM »
So I recently saw this piece linked and read it:
https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2023/12/31/an-anti-defense-of-science-fiction/

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

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

Any thoughts?

14
Ren: The Girl With The Mark / Season 2 full trailer
« on: February 26, 2024, 09:34:28 PM »
It's happening :)


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

15
Pangolin Games / Exile Princes Steam & Itch page & trailer release!
« on: February 14, 2024, 05:45:42 PM »
A largish move towards getting the game out into the world today :O

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

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

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

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