#also its very hard to steward land that is half a country away from you its a gesture and i know my dad meant it well but i would like

[panopti-cunt]

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[kuramirocket]

In some ways, what happened to Mexican Americans in the Southwest happened time and again throughout American history. Promises were made to the community, but many were never kept.

“I just don't think people get the passion that's attached to this,” said Rita Padilla-Gutierrez, whose community has lost tens of thousands of acres of ancestral land over generations. “It's the history, for God's sake. Plain and simple. Your language, your customs, your food, your traditions. But for us, it's being a land-based people.”

What we now consider the Southwest wasn’t part of the United States at all 172 years ago -- it was the northernmost part of Mexico. In 1845, the U.S. annexed Texas, which Mexico considered part of its territory. This spurred a long and bloody war with Mexico and, ultimately, Mexico ceded half its country to the U.S.

The agreement between the two countries was immortalized in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave around 100,000 Mexican nationals living in those territories citizenship if they decided to stay. More importantly, the agreement protected the rights of any Mexican whose land was now a part of the U.S.

“When Mexico negotiates the treaty in good faith, assuming that all of its citizens' rights will be respected, what it doesn't understand is that for the United States, only whites have the rights to full citizenship,” said María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, author of “Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States.” “[Shortly after the treaty,] territorial governments systematically go about disenfranchising all Mexican citizens who they deem to not be white.”

Indeed, when the treaty was sent to Congress, the Senate removed the article that laid out the process by which the land would be protected.

In 1848, there were 154 communities in New Mexico to whom the U.S. government guaranteed land. But most of those agreements, or land grants, were never honored. Today, only 35 communities remain.

While the country prospered, the treaty would forever change the fate of generations of Mexican Americans to come.

Heirs to land that’s been owed for generations

“There's a huge disparity here in terms of poverty and [in] terms of education,” Arturo Archuleta, a land grant heir in New Mexico, told “Nightline.” “These communities have been left behind.”

Heirs like Archuleta are working to get reparations for the land that was taken from their communities, which existed long before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was even created, according to Jacobo Baca, a historian with the University of New Mexico’s Land Grant Studies Program.

“It's beyond [a] sense of place,” Baca said. “Our identity is tied to place, but we don't see that place having an identity without us, either. So it defines us just as much as we define it.”

At the University of New Mexico, a collection of documents shows how a variety of land grants were vastly diminished over the years. One of the documents showed how an agreement for over 40,000 acres was reduced to less than 1,400 acres.

“I think for land grant heirs, there's this recognition that this treaty was a promise that was made that wasn't kept, and that the federal government owes the recognition of these communities,” Baca said.

Archuleta is an heir to the Manzano and the Tierra Amarilla land grants.

“We come from Spanish communities that came over, [and from] Native American communities as well,” Archuleta said. “So we really are sort of mestizo. We're mixed… We're a land-based people. Half of our soul was here before Columbus ever hit the sand.”

Archuleta says that these communities should be able to thrive where they are.

“It's not just surviving, but thriving. Our cultural connections are still in place,” he said. “The land grant and the treaty issues is probably what you consider the first Latino issue in this country, and it's still unresolved.”

Padilla-Gutierrez’s family in New Mexico has also seen its land vanish over time. For centuries, she said the family has been living in the area near Tomé Hill in Valencia County. Now a hiking trail and site for religious pilgrims, its hillsides are filled with petroglyphs and its summit contains several large crosses.

“We have very deep, deep native roots here,” Andrea Padilla, Padilla-Gutierrez’s sister, told “Nightline.”

Padilla-Gutierrez said their land used to encompass 123,000 acres but that it has since been reduced to only 400 acres.

“America owes us the opportunity to take care of our own communities,” Padilla-Gutierrez said.

“I think regaining some of our land back would be justice,” her sister added.

The family still has the patent it was given to honor the land grant.

“It's signed by Ulysses Grant, who was president at the time -- seal and everything -- granting us that our land grant will continue to be ours again,” Padilla said. “But then later, they stole our mountains.”

The Tomé land grant lost 50,000 acres to the federal government in 1906. Like many others who held land grants, the family later had to sell their land.

“It hurt my father deeply, because he fought to the very end, telling people, ‘You can't do this. … Once you sell your land, that's it, you're nothing. You lose your culture. You lose everything,’” Padilla said.

Her sister says their family’s land should’ve never been sold. The community lost more than acreage, she said. They “lost their way of life.”

The betrayal of these land grants sowed racism that still exists today

Mexican American culture has been maligned for generations, and the racism born out of that continues to be espoused at the highest levels of government today.

The president himself famously kicked off his bid for office by saying Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And as recently as June, The White House suggested that travel from Mexico was contributing to COVID-19 infections rather than states’ efforts to reopen their economies.

“It does hit me in the heart,” Padilla said. “We always worked hard... And we did the right thing. So when they talk about lazy Mexicans or, ‘These Mexicans are all drug dealers and murderers,’ I'm, like, ‘Where? I haven't seen that. I'm not [one].’ You know?”

Saldaña-Portillo says this bigotry results from Mexican natives’ land being given to white settlers.

“[It helped create] the representation of Mexicans as these barbarous Indians,” she said. “That's annunciated every day when we hear Mexicans described as rapists, murderers and thieves.”

Archuleta said he's not surprised that there's racism in the U.S. because in communities like his, racism had "never gone away."

“We've always felt it,” he said. “We've always known it. We've seen it. We've been on the receiving end of it, either through the institutions, through the bureaucracies or at the individual level.”

Juan Sanchez, a sixth-generation native of the Chililí Land Grant in New Mexico, remembers activist Reies Lopez Tijerina of the 1960s.

“We are called the forgotten people,” Sanchez said. “He came to New Mexico preaching the treaty and preaching and telling the people that they were gonna lose their land.” Tijerina was a major figure in the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to reclaim Mexican Americans’ indigenous heritage and original territories.

“They were articulating it concretely, saying, ‘We have these land grants and we want these land grants honored as per the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,’” Saldaña-Portillo said.

Tijerina’s story culminates in June 1967, when he led an armed raid on a courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, to free imprisoned activists and place a citizen’s arrest on the district attorney who ordered a police crackdown on them.

“They were gonna go make a citizen’s arrest and so it just got outta hand from there. The frustration of not being heard just exploded,” Sanchez said. “They [had] put all the heirs of different land grants that were the followers of Tijerina in a corral like sheep.”

In the ensuing shootout, two police officers were wounded and two hostages were taken as the activists fled Tierra Amarilla. After a week-long manhunt, Tijerina surrendered. He was found guilty of assault on a federal officer and sentenced to two years in prison.

“He opened our eyes. He taught us,” Sanchez said. “He always said, ‘Change the law,’ and we've always tried that.”

For fellow land grant heir and activist Steve Polanco, this fight is personal. His family has lived on Tierra Amarilla since the late 1800s, and now in his 60s, he is the president of the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant.

“We took a stand that … the only way we were gonna be taken from here … was dead,” Polaco said.

Polaco said the original stewards of the land shared 550,000 acres and that they would help each other.

“These mountains were full of herds of sheep, herds of pigs that were being taken care of,” Polaco said. “They’d head off for the day and they’d take care of their flocks, pigs, herds of horses all over these mountains.”

His land has been under siege for decades, he said, with outside investors hoping to develop the lands into everything from a ski resort to a landing strip, the latter of which is visible from his property.

“The building of the airstrip makes me feel really bad because, number one, they destroyed the property. It looks very ugly. It's gonna cause erosion. It’s so dry that the dust kicks up, and there's elderlies that live in the area; that dust affects them,” said Polaco.

“It's very emotional, especially when you see these outsiders coming in and doing destruction and taking advantage of us,” he said.

Today, he continues to harvest hay and attempts to keep the land as undisturbed as possible. He says he wants the Treaty of Hidalgo to be honored and the lands respected, particularly in the face of a changing climate. To that end, he said it’s important to elect public officials who “know the culture and our struggle” so that their Constitutional right to the land can be upheld.

What comes next?

Archuleta says it took generations for these communities to fall into poverty and other socioeconomic issues, and that it’ll take a long time to solve their problems as well.

“We're in a marathon. We're not in a race,” he said.

Archuleta’s grandfather is buried in Manzano, New Mexico. His dad grew up there, too.

“He left in the ‘70s. He didn't have opportunities. That's the stuff that's hard to swallow when you're like, ‘Man, this is something that was in our family and it belonged to us,’” he said. "And because of circumstances beyond our control, the loss of the commons, the poverty that that created… This drives the work that I do. Working with land grant communities and trying to get justice for our communities.”

In June, Archuleta spoke before Congress as it considered a bill to give land grant heirs access to their former lands.

“What the current legislation does is it would create a federal definition of traditional uses on federal lands for land grant communities,” he said. “Access to fuelwood, for example, to heat your home. Access to pasture to graze livestock. And it would also require that the federal agencies work with land grant communities and consult with them.”

For Sanchez, “the dream of reparation would be that we'd get our land back. But we know that's impossible; times have changed.”

“Short of that, I also think our communities are due some type of reparations in terms of monetary compensation for all the hardships that they've endured,” Archuleta said. “What that figure looks like to us, if we did a calculation, probably about $2.7 billion. Not to pay out individuals but to pay our communities for community development and to buy back land.”

Meanwhile, Padilla-Gutierrez hopes to transform a historic jail in her village into a museum.

“The idea is to keep the legacy alive. Do not destroy and forget the history,” she said. “We wish that our parents could be here to see this that we've done. We're slowly inching back to being a legitimate and prideful land grant.”

Her sister emphasized that the family doesn’t “want handouts.”

“We wanna provide for ourselves. So justice would be giving us that opportunity to do that,” Padilla said. “We've always been here and we're not going anywhere… This is where we come from. This is our land and we're gonna protect it and we're gonna continue to be here as long as we possibly can.”

“The hard work of my dad and my grandfather and my great grandfather -- their blood, sweat, and tears... I have to make sure that none of that was [in] vain,” Archuleta added. . “That their hopes and dreams survive on, and [that] they survive on in my kids and their kids.”

[rasenkaikyo]

At the Threshold

previously

with @onwesterlywinds​

Ashelia Riot comes up from the basement.

Hinako Daigo inhaled gently and looked around, seeing Ashelia approach.

Hinako Daigo smiles at Ashelia Riot.

Ashelia Riot: "Ah, hello!" She remembers having seen this woman before... but she's having trouble placing a name until she recalls something Edge mentioned to her earlier in the day about Yue...

Ashelia Riot: "It's Hinako, yes?"

Hinako Daigo: "Yes! I know there have been some few odd visits here, but a pleasure as always, Grand Steward."

Hinako Daigo performs an Eastern bow before Ashelia Riot.

Ashelia Riot nods to Hinako Daigo.

Ashelia Riot tries to replicate the Eastern bow and manages - albeit a little clumsily.

Ashelia Riot performs an Eastern bow before Hinako Daigo.

Ashelia Riot: "Welcome back. I'd heard you might be stopping by, but I'm afraid the details were neglected."

Hinako Daigo smiles, appreciative of the gesture.

Ashelia Riot: "Come in! I'd be happy to offer you something to drink."

Hinako Daigo: "Very well."

Hinako follows Ashe to the bar of the Sandsea, where heads for its stools while the steward peruses behind the counter.

Ashelia Riot: "Have you traveled far?" She readies the kettle for tea.

Hinako Daigo takes a seat like times before. "Not as far as you might think. Your friend Sylvan had a trick or two to cut travel time, as it were."

Hinako Daigo: "I did just come out of Doma, though."

Ashelia Riot’s eyes grow wide with awe upon seeing Hinako Daigo.

Ashelia Riot: "So you've seen Sylvan! I hope she's been well."

Hinako Daigo beams at Ashelia Riot.

Hinako Daigo: "Quite so! I am sure she has a story to tell."

Ashelia Riot: "As do you, I'm sure, if you've come here directly from Doma. Not a trip most are able to take, even with teleportation magicks."

Ashelia Riot: "Green tea, or black? Or something stronger?"

Hinako Daigo nods. "I would accept black, thank you."

Ashelia Riot pours out two cups of black tea and passes one over.

Hinako Daigo smiles to Ashelia as she takes up her cup. "Glad I did, though. That I might cross paths with both her and Yue under separately pretenses might be naught less than a sign of the kami."

Ashelia Riot nods to Hinako Daigo.

Ashelia Riot: "I should think so."

Ashelia Riot goes to sip at her tea, then thinks better of it due to the heat. "Might you remind me - you're a priestess in Doma, yes?”

Hinako Daigo inhales gently to take in the fragrant vapor of her tea. "Yes, miss, that's correct."

Ashelia Riot: "And how did you happen to meet Sylvan and Yue?"

Hinako Daigo: "In the wake of reclamation, Doma has been steadily restoring itself from its enclave outward, and I have been providing aid where I can - I understand that both Sylvan and Yue were there with similar goals. Of course, the land has seen no shortage of trauma at the expense of the Empire. Where malevolent energy is allowed to prosper unchecked, danger is sure to follow."

Ashelia Riot nods.

Ashelia Riot: "Ala Mhigo has seen much of the same. Especially in certain areas once marked as gravesites."

Hinako Daigo: "That is fair. And as tends to be the case it falls upon priests like myself to address one of said dangers. Auspicious as it was, the ensuing chaos in engaging what you would know as a Voidsent just so happened to draw the attention of Yue and Sylvan... consecutively."

Ashelia Riot’s eyes grow wide with awe upon seeing Hinako Daigo.

Ashelia Riot: "I assume they were both unharmed, or else we wouldn't be having this discussion so calmly."

Hinako Daigo: "Just so, in fact I would say the fiend stood little chance in laying even a scratch."

Ashelia Riot nods to Hinako Daigo.

Ashelia Riot: "Well! I'm glad they were both able to lend you their aid."

Hinako Daigo nods. "As am I, and you can see why I would see it as a sign. Of course, there has been word on the tongue of the odd Doman about the efforts of you and yours at Doma Castle, to which as ever I could not express my gratitude enough. I have had much to think about in the past suns, so when Yue offered her hand on her company's behalf, I was hoping it might lead me here."

Ashelia Riot: "Of course. And you are always welcome among us - be it in Eorzea or in the East."

Hinako Daigo smiles at Ashelia Riot.

Hinako Daigo: "I appreciate your grace, Lady Ashelia. That said, I have come first and foremost to make an inquiry, and in so doing I would also offer you my service."

Hinako Daigo sipped her tea as her gentle expression tensed a little bit.

Ashelia Riot: "Of course - ask away."

Hinako Daigo: "Well, I understand a little bit about your company's background. I know that you took your name from a high level group in Ala Mhigo, to assess notorious cases and enemies of the state. Does that still ring true any with Risk?"

Ashelia Riot hesitates, then nods.

Ashelia Riot: "Yes, and no."

Hinako Daigo: "Oh?"

Ashelia Riot: "We... that is to say, our first priority is ridding the world of imperial threats. Garlemald in particular."

Ashelia Riot: "But while we are affiliated with the Ala Mhigan government, and while I personally hold a seat in its new representative body-" She tenses noticeably at that mention. "-we are not strictly Ala Mhigan."

Hinako Daigo smiles weakly at Ashelia Riot.

Hinako Daigo: "That I understand, and I mean not to deter you from that path, nor infer you consider your hands tied. All the same I too would like to see the Empire's shadow continue to wane, but I'll get to that."

Hinako Daigo softly sets down her tea for the moment and starts to reach into her haori.

Hinako Daigo pulls out a partly folded, slightly frayed sheet of paper, Doman make. Upon closer look, it shows a carefully rendered sketch of a stern-looking man at its center, surrounded by dramatic swathes of ink in the Far Eastern script. A wanted poster.

Hinako Daigo hands over something to Ashelia Riot.

Ashelia Riot surveys the sheet with great care, as if memorizing every detail of the face. She's done this before with plenty of Garlean targets, but never with an Au Ra; she hopes she can commit herself to the same level of concentration.

Ashelia Riot: "Are you looking for him? Or is he looking for you?"

Hinako Daigo: "I'm looking for him. Fusatane Torioi, Hingan-born, last seen in Doma. Wanted for murder, treason and conspiracy. He's suspected of working with Imperial forces to nearly decimate his own clan, including his lord and father, and remains unaccounted for."

Ashelia Riot thinks she understands Hinako Daigo's connection to this murderer. Her eyes narrow, and she nods.

Ashelia Riot: "I see. In that case, we'll be certain to keep our eyes open."

Hinako Daigo nods firmly. "Word in the rumor mill is that he has been working on his own agency, picking up other stray traitors to the country. ...I have reason to suspect that he's plotting to take back the very clan he betrayed, and I would hope worse doesn't come for worse."

Hinako Daigo: "This is why after I crossed paths with your friends, I could imagine no one better to at least be of some aid on the matter."

Ashelia Riot heaves a deep sigh. "You've done much for us," she says. "And a man of his nature seeking to gather any sort of power in the new Doma cannot be abided." She wonders what a next step might possibly be, though - sending Edge, perhaps, though she is loath to part from him again.

Ashelia Riot: "Thank you for trusting me with this."

Hinako Daigo smiles at Ashelia.

Hinako Daigo: "Absolutely... And from the bottom of my heart and soul, I thank you." She bows her head gently.

Hinako Daigo she looks back to her tea. "And that brings me back to the rest of the reason I'm here."

Hinako Daigo tries hard to concentrate.

Hinako Daigo: "I knew I came to the right place... Personally, I do not feel I have done half as much as you have, and there is still much to do. With Doma and Ala Mhigo free, if there is anything I can offer to help you see the Empire pushed back even further, I would gladly give it."

Ashe nods deeply in a sort of half-bow, grateful for the acknowledgement but still humble.

Ashelia Riot: "I may take you up on that offer in the near future." She does not elaborate; she cannot, while the details of a potential campaign in Dalmasca are still being ironed out. "And I swear to you that we will devote whatever we can to finding more of this Fusatane's whereabouts, though it may take time."

Hinako Daigo: "That is fine... I would take anything I could get, in due time. I sense a hint of pressure, and I wouldn't expect you to take priority."

Ashelia Riot nods to Hinako Daigo.

Ashelia Riot: "But please know that you are welcome among us - gladly."

Ashelia Riot beam with delight at Hinako Daigo.

Hinako Daigo beams at Ashelia Riot.

Hinako Daigo: "Full glad I am to hear it, Lady Ashelia, and I thank you for hearing me out. Maybe I can present the extent of my appreciation soon."

Ashelia Riot finishes the rest of her tea in a single swig.

Hinako Daigo sees this, pauses and follows suit.

Ashelia Riot: "There's no need for that. In the meantime, I would be happy to show you to a place where you can rest. Short journey or no, you must be tired."

Hinako Daigo: "Ah, certainly... it has been quite busy."

Ashelia Riot: "I would give you a full tour of the manse, but you've seen most of it by now!"

Ashelia Riot is so grateful she doesn't have to give a tour.

Hinako Daigo scoffs at Ashelia Riot.

Hinako Daigo: "Of course!"

Ashelia leads Hinako to the door to the rest of the manse’s quarters.

Ashelia Riot: "Through here - there are showers downstairs as well."

Ashelia Riot: "Should you need me, my office is the first door on the left."

Hinako Daigo nods and smiles warmly. "Thank you kindly", then bows once more.

Ashelia Riot bows again, a bit more fluidly this time.

Ashelia Riot performs an Eastern bow before Hinako Daigo.

Hinako Daigo nods to Ashelia Riot.

Ashelia Riot: "Rest well. And welcome to the Riskbreakers."

[joechappel]

VICTORY

“O death, where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” - I Corinthians The written word is painfully ill-suited to convey the textured nuance and layered complexity of human communication, in its glorious fullness. Irony, sarcasm, and the way we display one emotion to guard another...these are all part of the beautiful way we Homo sapiens communicate. Much of this nuance is achieved through non-verbal means, whether it be visual cues, or the aural cues found in the rise and fall, timbre, or breathiness of a voice, or in countless other ways. I often reflect on this when I hear about the tweets of the man who currently lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, especially when weighed against that same man’s outrageous speech and behavior at his political rallies. I am intentionally NOT a follower, but it would be nearly impossible to not know about them - that in itself says so much. It becomes glaringly obvious when staffers write Tweets meant to make him “relatable” (like his tweet about A$AP Rocky) and when he becomes that most dangerous of combinations: unhinged and unmanaged; and writes something more dark, more genuine, and more revealing, like his reprehensible language inviting Americans to leave their own native land and “go back” to some other country, all because they do not look like his small-minded idea of what an American should look, think, and behave like. Sadly, many Americans find connection in his words, written or otherwise, and there has been much hypothesizing about how influential his hate speech would be to his followers. How far would they go? Unfortunately, the question has some very dark answers, and the freakishly tragic answers to that question keep coming with greater frequency. Even the most willfully ignorant observer finds it difficult to ignore the evidence. When the suspects of more than one mass shooting subscribe to the verbatim philosophy, language, tenets, and policies elevated by the POTUS himself, there can be no denying the connection. At this point, we can no longer delude ourselves into believing we are still in some earlier time of hypothetical what-ifs and the ‘gaming-out’ of different ghoulish scenarios in regards to the behavior of Trump followers in the wake of his dog whistling and race-baiting speech. We are no longer in a time of predictions. We are in a time of analysis. The truth is we’ve been at this point for a very long time, but even the most aloof onlooker really has to work hard to not notice on days like this. Back to my point on language, I often run into friends who jokingly comment on my seemingly shameless anger they glean from my posts, but as I already said, the written word often misses the precise mark. What the reader sees as anger can often be anxiety and fear. And I know that these days when I wake up and type what guides my spirit in the moment, it is my fear that consumes me. Fear as an American witnessing the shameless unraveling of the pillars of our democracy, fear as a gay Black man who cannot escape the ‘othering’ of his very person and will always be amongst the most obvious and identifiable of targets to the xenophobic, racist, and/or homophobic bully. And They will always come for me and my kind first, so my fear is of an existential nature. So you may read unlimited anger, but I’m telling you it’s more often panic and fear - especially because so many of you don’t seem to notice or (this is the most frightening of all) you don’t seem to care (enough). Fear as a human sharing my vulnerability in the presence of others (like being willing to stand naked in public or willing to risk ridicule and rejection - these are my Kryptonite) because the older I get, I’m learning that the only way to live the life that enrages my demons and gladdens my angels is to walk in my truth. It is the only way I can sleep at night and hold my head a little higher in the day. The fear and the anger and the anxiety are determined to do their toll, one way or another. That is an energy none of us can wish, pray, or ignore away. The power we possess is in our choice to hold it all in and let the damage be on us or to be vulnerable and open and honest about it and hope that the energy dissipates in some healthy useful way. The other risk we take is that the dissipation can be ugly and unhealthy when we put it back out into the world. That is what is happening with these misguided men. They are releasing a horrendous pain out into the world, because they can no longer bear their loneliness, their deprivation, and their feeling of being wronged in this life, and along comes a voice and a movement that gives them permission to wallow in righteous anger and preys on their brokenness - it is a harmonic convergence of vulnerability, toxicity, and ignorance that comprises the recipe for the tragic events of Gilroy and El Paso and Charlottesville and countless other places. To say that I feel sympathy for these men would be an awful exaggeration...I don’t even want to use the word ‘empathy’, but in a some ways I do understand the genesis of their mental and emotional depravity. This year in particular has been one monumental cosmic mindfuck. I have experienced unexpected loss, the stripping away, paring down, and letting go of so many things I thought were prerequisites to the defining of me...all of it as the universe keeps whittling me down to my most bare essentials. And somehow I know I’m still not done - there is a transformation afoot and I am being shown who I am and am not, what I can live with and without, who is and isn’t essential in my life. The gift of such a time is that I’m also being offered a newfound clarity in my life’s priorities. I am not my progeny - I am childless. And I am not the lesser half of a spouse - I am single. I am not my next cool gig. I am not my last cool gig. I am not Big Joe or Skinny Joe - I am at all times wonderfully and simply Joe. I am not my casual acquaintances. And I am still me, even when my most cherished friends and loved ones leave my life one way or another. I am still me, when my physical ‘stuff’ gets lost or stolen or broken or misplaced. I am not my wealth or lack thereof. I am vulnerable, sensitive, still somewhat broken, talented, opinionated, imperfect, sassy, intelligent, on-a-journey Joe. All day and everyday. Occasionally I go through my photos on my phone as I did the other day. Each time I notice something cool or interesting about the collection in its entirety. This time I was struck by how many pictures I am embracing or being embraced by someone. I thought I had a bunch of selfies on my phone, but my pics tell a different story. I am a man who defines himself through the relationships in his life. I am my friends. I am my loved ones. It is in the company of others that I truly flourish. As much as I regard myself as a loner, I need that human interaction to thrive - just like all humans, I need to relate. It is that same need that I believe drives so many to become hypnotized by the sinister words of POTUS. Young White males who feel alone, abandoned, forgotten, left behind, denied entry into a life of unearned entitlement that is their perceived birthright ....these vulnerable individuals find connection and kinship in his racist and nationalistic hate-speech. The point is that I can relate to loss and loneliness and feeling robbed of one’s things and even one’s very station in life. That kind of pain has a universality to it, but the myriad ways we choose to let it manifest in our lives can have consequences that go far beyond our personal spheres of influence. Sometimes the unhealthiness of our coping skills has irreversibly tragic outcomes. A friend used to always end his emails with the famous Horace Mann quote “be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” I was so moved by it that I stole the idea (like 100% of the truly wise and impressive things I share) and started ending my own letters and email with the same quote. I’ve since stopped using the quote that way but it popped into my head today. The funny thing is that when I first heard it, I thought “some victory” equated with a grand feat. Anything less than Nobel-laureate-worthy work, or some act that would garner the attention and praise of a thankful public was not qualified to fulfill the task. I needed to write a symphony, run for office, cure something, write the next great American novel or do some other noteworthy deed. Today when I read the same exact words and measure them against the ugliness and tragedy of the world around me, my concept of “some victory” alters. When my portion is fully rendered and I am weighed in the balance for the last time who is the man others will describe? Did his arms stiffen and perpetually keep others at length or did those arms endlessly seek to embrace, comfort, and help others? Did that man walk in the fullness of his truth or did he wither in fear? Was he a model of good citizenship, to the best of his ability, for the next generation to witness or did he leave them to figure it out all on their own? Did he steward his world and his wisdom and then selflessly pass it on or did he selfishly hoard it, taking it all to the grave? Today I am convinced Mann’s ‘victory’ is in our successfully living better today than we did yesterday. I believe that when we are willing to be vulnerable and walk in our truth we can access a compassion for others such as the immigrant, the less advantaged, or whomever we deem the ‘other’, and simultaneously we can show the Patrick Crusiuses of the world a better way forward than the cruel narrow path our failed current leaders have set before these at-risk individuals. The deed is done, so there is no saving this particular man and the lives he has taken, but perhaps we can channel our righteous anger for some other future good and save the next scared, lonely, and angry individual from making the same sick choice. There are untold lives at stake. Yes, we should be ashamed to die, not having “won some victory for humanity.” But the victory is nearer and more immediate than we think. The victory is in our personal living and the battle rages on at the core of our collective soul. More than our thoughts and prayers, this world could use our better living and a greater expression of our humanity. “Be ashamed to die, until you have won some victory for humanity.” - Horace Mann

[ciathyzareposts]

The Last Works Before the Renaissance

By 1993, textual interactive fiction was reaching the fag end of the unsettled, uncertain half-decade-and-change between the shuttering of Infocom and the rise of a new Internet-centered community of amateur enthusiasts. Efforts by such collectives as Adventions and High Energy Software to sell text adventures via the shareware model had largely proved unfruitful, while, with the World Wide Web still in its infancy, advertisement and distribution were major problems even for someone willing to release her games for free. The ethos of text and parsers seemed about as divorced as anything could possibly be from the predominant ethos in game development more generally, with its focus on multimedia, full-motion video, and ultra-accessible mouse-driven interfaces. Would text adventures soon be no more than obscure relics of a more primitive past? To an increasing number even of the form’s most stalwart fans, an answer in the affirmative was starting to feel like a foregone conclusion. Few text-adventure authors had serious ambitions of matching the technical or literary quality of Infocom during this period, much less of exceeding it; the issue for the medium right now was one of simple survival. In this atmosphere, the arrival of any new text adventure felt like a victory against the implacable forces of technological change, which had conspired to all but strangle this new literary form before it had even had time to get going properly.

Thankfully, history would later mark 1993 as the year when the seeds of an interactive-fiction rebirth were planted, thanks to an Englishman who repurposed not only the Infocom aesthetic but also Infocom’s own technology in unexpected ways. Those seeds would flower richly in 1995, Year Zero of the Interactive Fiction Renaissance. I’ll begin that story soon.

Today, though, I’d like to tell you about some of the more interesting games to emerge from the final days of the interstitial period — games which actually overlap, although no one could realize it at the time, with the dawning of the modern interactive-fiction community. Indeed, the games I describe below manage to presage some of the themes of that community despite being the products of a text-adventuring culture that still spent more time looking backward than looking forward. I’m fond of all of them in one way or another, and I’m willing to describe at least one of them as a sadly overlooked classic.

The Horror of Rylvania

The hiking trip across Europe has been a wonderful experience for two recent college graduates like yourself and your friend Carolyn. From the mansions of England to the beaches of Greece, you’ve walked in the footsteps of the Crusaders and seen sights that few Americans have ever seen.

Carolyn had wanted to skip the Central European nation of Rylvania. “Why bother?” she���d said. “There’s nothing but farmers there, and creepy old castles - nothing we haven’t seen already. The Rylvanians are still living in the last century.”

That, you’d insisted, was exactly why Rylvania was a must-see. The country was an intact piece of living history, a real treasure in this modern age. If only you hadn’t insisted! As night fell, as you approached a small farming village in search of a quaint inn to spend the night, the howling began. A scant hundred yards from the village, and it happened...the wolves appeared from the black forest around you and attacked. Big, black wolves that leaped for Carolyn’s throat before you could shout a warning, led by a great gray-black animal that easily stood four feet at the shoulder. Carolyn fell to the rocky path, blood gushing from her neck as the wolves faded back into the trees, unwilling, for some unknown reason, to press their attack.

If she dies, it will be your fault. You curse the darkening sky as you cradle Carolyn’s head, knowing that you have little time to find help. Perhaps in the village up the road to the north.

The Horror of Rylvania marks the last shareware release from Adventions, a partnership between the MIT graduate students Dave Baggett and D.A. Leary which was the most sustained of all efforts to make a real business out of selling interactive fiction during the interstitial period. Doubtless for this reason, the Adventions games are among the most polished of all the text adventures made during this time. They were programmed using the sophisticated TADS development system rather than the more ramshackle AGT, with all the benefits that accrued to such a choice. And, just as importantly, they were thoroughly gone over for bugs as well as spelling and grammar problems, and are free of the gawky authorial asides and fourth-wall-breakings that were once par for the course in amateur interactive fiction.

For all that, though, the Adventions games haven’t aged all that well in my eyes. The bulk of them take place in a fantasy land known as Unnkulia, which is trying so hard to ape Zork‘s Great Underground Empire that it’s almost painful to watch. In addition to being derivative, the Unnkulia games think they’re far more clever and hilarious than they actually are — the very name of the series/world is a fine case in point — while the overly fiddly gameplay can sometimes grate almost as much as the writing.

It thus made for a welcome change when Adventions, after making three and a half Unnkulia games, finally decided to try something else. Written by D.A. Leary, The Horror of Rylvania is more plot-driven than Adventions’s earlier games, a Gothic vampire tale in which you actually become a vampire not many turns in. It’s gone down in certain circles as a minor classic, for reasons that aren’t totally unfounded. Although the game has a few more potential walking-dead scenarios than is perhaps ideal, the puzzles are otherwise well-constructed, the implementation is fairly robust, and, best of all, most of the sophomoric attempts at humor that so marked Adventions’s previous games are blessedly absent.

That said, the end result still strikes me more as a work of craftsmanship than genius. The writing has been gone over for spelling and grammar without addressing some of its more deep-rooted problems, as shown even by the brief introduction above; really, now, have “few Americans ever seen” sights advertised in every bog-standard package tour of Europe? (Something tells me Leary hadn’t traveled much at the time he wrote this game.) The writing here has some of the same problems with tone as another Gothic horror game from 1993 set in an ersatz Romania: Quest for Glory IV. It wants to play the horror straight most of the time, and is sometimes quite effective at it — the scene of your transformation from man to vampire is particularly well-done — but just as often fails to resist the centrifugal pull which comedy has on the adventure-game genre.

Still, Horror of Rylvania is the Adventions game which plays best today, and it isn’t a bad choice for anyone looking for a medium-sized old-school romp with reasonably fair puzzles. Its theme adds to its interest; horror in interactive fiction tends to hew more to either H.P. Lovecraft or zombie movies than the Gothic archetypes which Horror of Rylvania intermittently manages to nail. Another extra dimension of interest is added by the ending, which comes down to a binary choice between curing your friend Carolyn from the curse of vampirism, which entails sacrificing yourself in the process, or curing yourself and letting Carolyn sod off. As we’ll shortly see, the next and last Adventions game perhaps clarifies some of the reasons for such a moral choice’s inclusion at the end of a game whose literary ambitions otherwise don’t seem to extend much beyond being a bit of creepy fun.

The Jeweled Arena

You let out a sigh of relief as you finish the last paper. “That’s the lot.”

“Good work, ma’am,” says Regalo, your squire. “I was almost afraid we’d be here until midnight.”

“Don’t worry, Regalo, I wouldn’t do a thing like that, especially on my first healthy day after the flu. In any case, Dora wants me home by eight. The papers look dry, so you can take them to Clara’s office.”

As Regalo carries the papers to the adjoining office, you stand up and stretch your aching muscles. You then look through the window and see a flash of lightning outside. It looks like quite a storm is brewing. “I’m beginning to think my calendar is set wrong,” you say as Regalo returns. “Dibre’s supposed to be cool, dry, and full of good cheer; so far, we’ve had summer heat, constant rain, and far too many death certificates. Perhaps this storm will blow out the heat.” “I hope it blows out the plague with it, ma’am. I’ve lost three friends already, and my wife just picked it up yesterday. No one likes it when the coroner’s staff is overworked.”

“It doesn’t help that Clara and Resa are both still sick. If we’re lucky, we’ll have Resa back tomorrow, which I’m sure your feet would appreciate. I presume Ernando and Miranda have already left for the day?” “Yes ma’am.”

“Now I’m really worried. The only thing worse than being the victim of one of Miranda’s pranks is going a day without one of her pranks -– it usually means you missed something. Perhaps she decided to be discrete [sic] for a change.”

“I didn’t get the impression her sense of humor was taking the day off, but I don’t know what she did. It can wait until tomorrow. Is there anything else you need me to do before I leave?”

Written by David S. Raley, The Jeweled Arena was the co-winner of what would turn out to be the last of the annual competitions organized by AGT’s steward, David M. Malmberg, before he released the programming language as freeware and stepped away from further involvement with the interactive-fiction community. Set in a fantasy world, but a thankfully non-Zorkian and non-Tolkienesque one, it’s both an impressive piece of world-building and a game of unusual narrative ambition for its time.

In fact, the world of Valdalan seems like it must have existed in the author’s head for a long time before this game was written. The environment around you has the feeling of being rooted in far more lore and history than is explicitly foregrounded in the text, always the mark of first-class world-building. As far as I can tell from the text, Valdalan is roughly 17th-century in terms of its science and technology, but is considerably more enlightened philosophically. Interestingly, magic seems to have no place here, making it almost more of an alternative reality than a conventional fantasy milieu.

The story takes place in the city of Kumeran as it’s in the throes of a plague — a threat which is, like so much else in this game, handled with more subtlety than you might expect. The plot plays out in four chapters, during each of which you play the role of a different character. The first chapter is worthy of becoming a footnote in interactive-fiction history at the very least, in that it casts you as one half of a lesbian couple. In later years, certain strands of interactive fiction — albeit more of the hypertext than the parser-driven type — would become a hotbed of advocacy for non- hetero-normative lifestyles. The Jeweled Arena has perhaps aged better in this respect than many of those works have (or will); it presents its lesbian protagonist in a refreshingly matter-of-fact way, neither turning her into an easy villain or victim, as an earlier game might have done, nor celebrating her as a rainbow-flag-waving heroine, as a later game might have done. She’s just a person; the game takes it as a given that she’s worthy of exactly the same level of respect as any of the rest of us. In 1993, this matter-of-fact attitude toward homosexuality was still fairly unusual. Raley deserves praise for it.

Unfortunately, The Jeweled Arena succeeds better as a place and a story than it does as a game, enough so that one is tempted to ask why Raley elected to present it in the form of a text adventure at all. He struggles to come up with things for you to really do as you wander the city. This tends to be a problem with a lot of interactive fiction where the puzzles aren’t the author’s primary focus; A Mind Forever Voyaging struggles to some extent with the same issue when it sends you wandering through its own virtual city. But The Jeweled Arena, which doesn’t have a mechanic like A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s commandment to observe and record to ease its way, comes off by far the worse of the two. Most of the tasks it sets before you are made difficult not out of  authorial intention but due to poor authorial prompting and the inherent limitations of AGT. In other words, first you have to figure out what non-obvious trigger the game is looking for to advance the plot a beat, and then you have to figure out the exact way the parser wants you to say it. This constant necessity to read the author’s mind winds up spoiling what could have been an enjoyable experience, and makes The Jeweled Arena a game that can truly be recommended only to those with an abiding interest in text-adventure history or the portrayal of homosexuality in interactive media. A pity — with more testing and better technology, it could have been a remarkable achievement.

Klaustrophobia

You are standing at the top of an ocean bluff. Wind is whipping through your hair and blowing your voluminous black cape out behind you. You can hear the hiss of the surf crashing far below you. Out towards the horizon, a distant storm sends flickers of lightning across the darkening sky. The last rays of the setting sun reflect red off the windows of the grey stone mansion to the East. As you turn towards the house, you catch a glimpse of a haunting face in one of the windows. That face, you will never forget that face......

> wait The surf and cliffs fade from sight............ You awake to find yourself in your living room,lying on the couch. Your cat, Klaus, is chewing and pulling on your hair. Static is hissing from the TV, as the screen flickers on a station long off the air. You look at your watch and realize that it is 3 AM. You must have fallen asleep on the couch right after you got home from work, and settled down to read the newspaper.

I noted earlier that the Adventions games are “free of the gawky authorial asides and fourth-wall-breakings” that mark most early amateur interactive fiction. That statement applies equally to The Jeweled Arena, but not at all to Carol Hovick’s Klaustrophobia. The other winner of the final AGT competition, its personality could hardly be more different from its partner on the podium. This is a big, rambling, jokey game that’s anything but polished. And yet it’s got an unpretentious charm about it, along with puzzles that turn out to be better than they first seem like they’re going to be.

What Klaustrophobia lacks in polish or literary sophistication, it attempts to make up for in sheer sprawl. It’s actually three games in one — so big that, even using the most advanced and least size-constrained version of AGT, Hovick was forced to split it into three parts, gluing them together with some ingenious hacks that are doubtless horrifying in that indelible AGT way to any experienced programmer. The three parts together boast a staggering 560 rooms and 571 objects, making Klaustrophobia easily one of the largest text adventures ever created.

Like the Unnkulia series and so much else from the interstitial period, Klaustrophobia is hugely derivative of the games of the 1980s. The story and puzzles here draw heavily from Infocom’s Bureaucracy, which is at least a more interesting choice than yet another Zork homage. You’ve just won an all-expenses-paid trip to appear on a quiz show, but first you have to get there; this exercise comes to absorb the first third of the game. Then, after you’ve made the rounds of not one but several quiz shows in the second part, part three sends you off to “enjoy” the Mexican vacation you’ve won. As a member of that category of text adventure which the Interactive Fiction Database dubs the “slice of life,” the game has that time-capsule quality I’ve mentioned before as being such a fascinating aspect of amateur interactive fiction. Klaustrophobia is a grab bag of pop-culture ephemera from the United States of 1993: Willard Scott, Dolly Parton, The Price is Right. If you lived through this time and place, you might just find it all unbearably nostalgic. (Why do earlier eras of history almost invariably seem so much happier and simpler?) And if you didn’t… well, there are worse ways to learn about everyday American life in 1993, should you have the desire to do so, than playing through this unforced, agenda-less primary source.

The puzzles are difficult in all the typical old-school ways: full of time limits, requiring ample learning by death. Almost inevitably given the game’s premise, they sometimes fail to fall on the right side of the line between being comically aggravating and just being aggravating. And the game is rough around the edges in all the typical AGT ways: under-tested (a game this large almost has to be) and haphazardly written, and subject to all the usual frustrations of the AGT parser and world model. Yet, despite it all, the author’s design instincts are pretty good; most of the puzzles are clued if you’re paying attention. Many of them involve coming to understand and manipulate some surprisingly complex dynamic sequences taking place around you. The whole experience is helped immensely by the episodic structure which exists even within each of the three parts: you go from your home to the bank to the airport, etc., with each vignette effectively serving as its own little self-contained adventure game. This structure lets Klaustrophobia avoid the combinatorial explosion that can make such earlier text-adventure epics as Acheton and Zork Zero all but insoluble. Here, you can work out a single episode, then move on to the next at your leisure with a nice sense of achievement in your back pocket — as long, of course, as you haven’t left anything vital behind.

Klaustrophobia is a game that I regard with perhaps more affection that I ought to, given its many and manifest flaws. While much of my affection may be down to the fact that it was one of the first games I played when I rediscovered interactive fiction around the turn of the millennium, I like to believe this game has more going for it than nostalgia. It undoubtedly requires a certain kind of player, but, whether taken simply as a text adventure or as an odd sort of sociological study — a frozen-in-amber relic of its time and place — it’s not without its intrinsic appeal. Further, it strikes me as perfect for its historical role as the final major statement made with AGT; something more atypically polished and literary, such as Shades of Gray or even Cosmoserve, just wouldn’t work as well in that context. Klaustrophobia‘s more messy sort of charm, on the other hand, feels like the perfect capstone to this forgotten culture of text adventuring, whose games were more casual but perhaps in some ways more honest because of it.

The Legend Lives! A pattern of bits shifts inside your computer. New information scrolls up the screen. It is not good.

As the impact of the discovery settles on your psyche, you recall the preceding events: your recent enrollment at Akmi Yooniversity; your serendipitous discovery of the joys of Classical Literature – a nice change of pace from computer hacking; your compuarchaeological discovery of the long-forgotten treasures that will make your thesis one of the most important this decade. But now that’s all a bit moot, isn’t it?

How ironic: You were stunned at how *real* the primitive Unnkulian stories seemed. Now you know why.

David Baggett’s The Legend Lives! is the only game on this curated list that dates from 1994, the particularly fallow year just before the great flowering of 1995. The very last production of the Adventions partnership, it was originally planned as another shareware title, but was ultimately released for free, a response to the relatively tepid registration rate of Advention’s previous games. Having conceived it as nothing less than a Major Statement meant to prod the artistic growth of a nascent literary medium, Baggett stated that he wished absolutely everyone to have a chance to play his latest game.

Ironically, the slightly uncomfortable amalgamation that is The Legend Lives! feels every bit as of-its-time today as any of the less artistically ambitious text adventures I’ve already discussed in this article. Set in the far future of Adventions’s Unnkulia universe, it reads like a checklist of what “literary” interactive fiction circa 1994 might be imagined to require.

There must, first and foremost, be lots and lots of words for something to be literary, right? Baggett has this covered… oh, boy, does he ever. The first room description, for the humble dorm room of the university student you play, consists of six substantial paragraphs — two or three screenfuls of text on the typical 80-column monitor displays of the day. As you continue to play, every object mentioned anywhere, no matter how trivial, continues to be described to within an inch of its life. While Baggett’s dedication is admirable, these endless heaps of verbiage do more to confuse than edify, especially in light of the fact that this game is, despite its literary aspirations, far from puzzleless. There’s a deft art to directing the player’s attention to the things that really matter in a text adventure — an art which this game comprehensively fails to exhibit. And then there are the massive non-interactive text dumps, sometimes numbering in the thousands of words, which are constantly interrupting proceedings. Sean Molley, reviewing the game in the first gush of enthusiasm which accompanied its release, wrote that “I certainly don’t mind reading 10 screens of text if it helps to advance the story and give me something to think about.” I suspect that most modern players wouldn’t entirely agree. The Legend Lives! is exhausting enough in its sheer verbosity to make you long for the odd minimalist poetry of Scott Adams. “Ok, too dry. Fish die” starts looking pretty good after spending some time with this game.

And yet, clumsy and overwrought though the execution often is, there is a real message here — one I would even go so far as to describe as thought-provoking. The Legend Lives! proves to be an old-school cyberpunk tale — another thing dating it indelibly to 1994 — about a computer virus that has infected Unnkulia’s version of the Internet and threatens to take over the entirety of civilization. The hero that emerges and finally sacrifices himself to eliminate the scourge is known mostly by his initials: “JC.” He’s allegedly an artificial intelligence, but he’s really, it would seem, an immaculate creation, a divinity living in the net. An ordinary artificial intelligence, says one character, “is smart with no motivation, no goals; no creativity, ya see. JC, he’s like us.” What we have here, folks, is an allegory. I trust that I need not belabor the specific parallels with another famous figure who shares the same initials.

But I don’t wish to trivialize the message here too much. It’s notable that this argument for a non-reductionist view of human intelligence — for a divine spark to the human mind that can’t be simulated in silicon — was made by a graduate student in MIT’s artificial-intelligence lab, working in the very house built by Marvin Minsky and his society of mind. Whatever one’s feelings about the Christian overtones to Baggett’s message, his impassioned plea that we continue to allow a place for the ineffable has only become more relevant in our current age of algorithmization and quantization.

Like all of the Adventions games, this one has been virtually forgotten today, despite being widely heralded upon its release as the most significant work of literary interactive fiction to come along since A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity. That’s a shame. Yes, writers of later text adventures would learn to combine interactivity with literary texture in more subtle and effective ways, but The Legend Lives! is nevertheless a significant way station in the slow evolution of post-Infocom interactive fiction, away from merely reflecting the glory of a storied commercial past and toward becoming a living, evolving artistic movement in its own right.

Perdition’s Flames *** You have died. ***

All is dark and quiet. There is no sensation, no time. Your mind floats peacefully in a void. You perceive nothing, you feel nothing, you think nothing. Sleep without dreams.

All is hazy and gray. Sensation is vague and indistinct. Your mind is sluggish, sleepy. You see gray shapes in a gray fog; you hear distant, muffled sounds. You think, but your thoughts are fleeting, disconnected, momentary flashes of light in a dark night. Time is still frames separated by eons of nothing, brief awakenings in a long sleep.

All is clear and sharp. Sensation crystalizes from a fog. You see, you hear, you feel. Your mind awakens; you become aware of a place, and a time.

You are on a boat.

Last but far from least, we come to the real jewel of this collection, a game which I can heartily recommend to everyone who enjoys text adventures. Perdition’s Flames was the third game written by Mike Roberts, the creator of the TADS programming language. While not enormous in the way of Klaustrophobia, it’s more than substantial enough in its own right, offering quite a few hours of puzzling satisfaction.

The novel premise casts you as a soul newly arrived in Hell. (Yes, just as you might expect, there are exactly 666 points to score.) Luckily for you, however, this is a corporate, postmodern version of the Bad Place. “Ever since the deregulation of the afterlife industry,” says your greeter when you climb off the boat, “we’ve had to compete with Heaven for eternal souls — because you’re free to switch to Heaven at any time. So, we’ve been modernizing! There really isn’t much eternal torment these days, for example. And, thanks to the Environmental Clean-up Superfund, we have the brimstone problem mostly under control at this point.”

As the game continues, there’s a lot more light satire along those lines, consistently amusing if not side-splittingly funny. Your goal is to make the ascent to Heaven, which isn’t quite as easy as your greeter implies. Achieving it will require solving lots and lots of puzzles, which are varied, fair, and uniformly enjoyable. In fact, I number at least one of them among the best puzzles I’ve ever seen. (For those who have already played the game: that would be the one where you’re a ghost being pursued by a group of paranormal researchers.)

Although Perdition’s Flames is an old-school puzzlefest in terms of categorization, it’s well-nigh breathtakingly progressive in terms of its design sensibility. For this happens to be a text adventure — the first text adventure ever, to my knowledge — which makes it literally impossible for you to kill yourself (after all, you are already dead) or lock yourself out of victory. It is, in other words, the Secret of Monkey Island of interactive fiction, an extended proof that adventure games without deaths or dead ends can nevertheless be intriguing, challenging, and immensely enjoyable. Roberts says it right there in black and white:

Note that in Perdition’s Flames, in contrast to many other adventure games, your character never gets killed, and equally importantly, you’ll never find yourself in a position where it’s impossible to finish the game. You have already seen the only “*** You have died ***” message in Perdition’s Flames. As a result, you don’t have to worry as much about saving game positions as you may be accustomed to.

I can’t emphasize enough what an astonishing statement that is to find in a text adventure from 1993. Perdition’s Flames and its author deserve to be celebrated for making it every bit as much as we celebrate Monkey Island and Ron Gilbert.

Yet even in its day Perdition’s Flames was oddly overlooked in proportion to its size, polish, and puzzly invention alone, much less the major leap it represents toward an era of fairer, saner text adventures. And this even as the merciful spirit behind the humble statement above, found buried near the end of the in-game instructions, was destined to have much more impact on the quality of the average player’s life than all of the literary pretensions which The Legend Lives! so gleefully trumpets.

Roberts’s game was overshadowed most of all by what would go down in history as the text adventure of 1993: Graham Nelson’s Curses!. Said game is erudite, intricate, witty, and sometimes beautifully written — and runs on Infocom’s old Z-Machine, which constituted no small part of its appeal in 1993. But it’s also positively riddled with the types of sudden deaths and dead ends which Perdition’s Flames explicitly eschews. You can probably guess which of the pair holds up better for most players today.

So, as we prepare to dive into the story of how Curses! came to be, and of how it turned into the seismic event which revitalized the near-moribund medium of interactive fiction and set it on the path it still travels today, do spare a thought for Perdition’s Flames as well. While Curses! was the the first mover that kicked the modern interactive-fiction community into gear, Perdition’s Flames, one might argue, is simply the first work of modern interactive fiction, full stop. All of its contemporaries, Curses! included, seem regressive next to its great stroke of genius. Go forth and play it, and rejoice. An Interactive Fiction Renaissance is in the offing.

(All of the games reviewed in this article are freely available via the individual links provided above and playable on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux using the Gargoyle interpreter among other options.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-last-works-before-the-renaissance/

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 12/14/2017

Three images side-by-side, showing the street space necessary for 60 people in individual cars versus one bus vs individual bicycles. The rows of cars fill up the street, extending to the edge of the photo, whereas the bus and rows of cyclists easily fit. Source.

History

Will Feminism’s Past Mistakes Haunt #MeToo?: "Over the last half-century in the United States, the solutions conceived for social problems, from poor school performance to the global refugee crisis—to sexual disrespect—have diminished to one: punishment. Because millennial feminists grew up in this environment, it has narrowed their vision too. […] the more we entrust the state to mete out justice for sexual infractions, including harassment, the more we collude in the manner in which it administers 'justice.' You may be titillated by the idea of Charlie Rose in a jail cell. But it will not be the Charlie Roses who end up behind bars."

The Brutal Origins of Gun Rights: A new history argues that the Second Amendment was intended to perpetuate white settlers' violence toward Native Americans. "As the writer and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues in her brilliant new book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, America’s obsession with guns has roots in a long, bloody legacy of racist vigilantism, militarism, and white nationalism. This past, Dunbar-Ortiz persuasively argues, undergirds both the landscape of gun violence to this day and our partisan debates about guns. Her analysis, erudite and unrelenting, exposes blind spots not just among conservatives, but, crucially, among liberals as well."

A portrait of a Mony Neth smiling, with words from Thi Bui, author of The Best We Could Do: "This is Money Neth. He's the same age as me — forty two. I came from Viet Nam; he came from Cambodia. His family fled the Khmer Rouge when he was just a few months old. He spent years in a refugee camp in Thailand. By the time Mony arrived in the U.S. as a refugee, he was ten years old." Mony was arrested by ICE on October 20, 2017, part of a wave of deportations sweeping up Southeast Asians. Over 150 Cambodian refugees were arrested for deportation in October. 95 deportation cases involving Vietnamese people have been submitted by the U.S. to the Vietnamese government. Many of these people came to the U.S. as refugees, and they are now sitting in detention centers, about to be deported to a country they fled years ago. Source.

Class

A Pain in the Back: Capitalism breaks the body of the worker to the benefit of the state and factory owner that might intervene and facilitate its repair. "[…] it is significant that when facing the prospect of a working class liberated from drudgery, the popular reaction is one of panic and not celebration. This reaction belies a deep-seated protective instinct toward the most puritanical facets of capitalism: the moral necessity of work and the inherent value of industry. Most urgently, this comes at a time when these very aspects are becoming baked into a definition of human nature increasingly invoked against a dystopic robot future."

The Dream Hoarders: How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality: "The upper middle class has been having it pretty good. It is about time those of us in the favored fifth recognized our privileged position. Some humility and generosity is required. But there is clearly some work to do in terms of raising awareness. Right now, there is something of a culture of entitlement among America’s upper middle class. Partly this is because of a natural tendency to compare ourselves to those even better off than us. This is the 'we are the 99 percent' problem. But it is also because we feel entitled to our position since it results from our own merit: our education, brains, and hard work."

Our Top Ten Reads on Inequality in 2017: "From the GOP tax bill to the resurgence of neoliberal economics, there are plenty of reminders that we are living in one of the most unequal times in modern history. Here are [the Boston Review's] top reads on class and the economy from 2017."

A camera pans around a person standing in a small kitchen. The person’s face is subtly augmented with nearly transparent colored swirls, meant to hinder face recognition algorithms. A blue box indicating a successful face detection appears only a few times during the whole scene. Source.

Issues

Beyond Machine Sight: "Labeling facial recognition a type of 'computer vision' dangerously implies a level of nonhuman neutrality and insight that the software does not possess. In fact, it is a mechanized augmentation of human visual biases and mistakes. […] If we mainly focus on computer vision, we may be numbed into viewing our tactile relationship with machines as simple and self-evident rather than fraught and entangled. Most of what our devices see is what we type into them, what we click. At stake in digital privacy rights is not our ability to hide from view, but a broader sense of how we use technology to facilitate care, how we let it touch us. Big Brother isn’t watching from a panopticon. He is cupping our face in his hands."

[CW: sexual assault] When We Body-Shame Sexual Abusers, We Shame All Those Who Look Like Them And Did Nothing Wrong: "As long as we keep acting like sexual abuse is wrong because the abuser is physically unattractive or sexually deviant, abusers deemed attractive and 'normal' will get away with it. People are criticizing sexual abusers’ body types and sexual preferences rather than the abuse itself, as if it’s these things that made what they did abusive. And they’re not. What made these acts abusive is the lack of consent."

A Native Activist on a Simple Way to Combat Land Grabs Like Bears Ears: "[…] land acknowledgment is becoming the norm in many parts of the world. Australia’s Parliament begins every day with 'Welcome to Country,' a gesture of respect toward Aboriginal peoples. In Canada, acknowledgment statements are being read each day in classrooms, at city council meetings, and even before professional hockey games. Usually crafted in consultation with local indigenous groups, acknowledgments are a way to honor the traditional stewards of the land. They also call attention to the losses incurred through colonization."

A person is wearing gloves made entirely out of thin strands of glass. Source.

Activism

Abolitionist Tech Is Helping People Get Home For The Holidays: "Bail fund apps are just one part of the strategy by community organizers to end money bail and transform our entire legal system. Actions like Southerners on New Ground’s Black Mama’s Day Bailout and the work of the more than 30 community bail funds throughout the country seek to counteract the devastating impacts of mass incarceration."

Can Tiny Houses Halt the Expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline?: "'We hope to bring back our culture that was so forcibly taken from us by the residential schools, the Canadian government and overall impacts of colonization and corporations’ destruction on our territories,' [Kanahus Manuel] says. 'So with these tiny houses, there’s hope. There’s hope that we are going to lift ourselves out of oppression and economic poverty. It’s when we get onto our territory that our people, especially our young people, are going to wake up and connect to that land and defend that land.'"

Direct Action Item

Have you ever encountered a problem in the built environment that you wish would be fixed, whether it's a door that never seems to open the way you think it should, a bike lane so small that it's not a bike lane, or a perfect spot for a bench but no bench? Take some inspiration from guerrilla public service this week and help yourself (and your neighbors!) out. Put up some guerrilla subway signage, install a guerrilla bike lane, build some public benches, host a guerrilla movie theatre, seed bomb an empty lot, splice some trees along your commute route to bear fruit, …anything you can think of!

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[uncontrollablyme]

So last weekend I was off-roading with a friend of mine, on an expedition with Mountain State Overland. (Check them out in links at the end, not only are they skilled overlanders, but an amazing group of folks, bringing together other rad peeps and likeminded individuals.) Driving from Virginia Beach across much of Southern Virginia with the most picturesque scenery, we traversed the mountains from VA into West Virginia.  The trip was unreal.  Such a memorable, fantastic experience.  I will circle back around to it in just a minute, or like 5, mmmm after proof reading maybe more, measurement has never been a strong suit.

The week before the trip, I got out my old hiking pack, and sorted through its contents.  I hiked a lot in my old life.  It was one of the things during the chaos of an abusive relationship, that I remember fondly, mostly.  I remember the first time I saw a natural waterfall.  I can still hear the growing rush of the water crashing on the Earth below, snow melting by the second moving the ground and dirt and rocks, in to this majestic flow of beauty.  So powerful it could down trees and cut right through rock, the water has a way of unearthing the life below the surface, shifting everything around and finding all the more water along the way, harnessing its power.  Symbolic really, and I was intensely drawn to it.

I remember hiking in boots too small that created blisters so bad, I was donned with the trail name “Blisters”.  They were my size, these boots, but I learned quickly, hikers need a half a size bigger on their journey usually.  Walking through tears streaming from the pain, because he would never have allowed me to slow his hike down, I almost stepped right on a snake.  Boy did that wake me up and shift my focus!  He came running for that, to get credit for saving me of course, (since I was such a mess I wouldn’t ever be able to help myself, I was conditioned that way, by him, fucker).  But I also remember being behind, so far in fact, that I felt I was the only one out there.  Symbolic, again.  What I was amazed at, though, was that there in the woods where I could have disappeared and no one would have known, was that I was not scared.  Now sure, the concern of being eaten by a bear, is forever present in the woods, but more like I felt I was not alone.  I was no longer as lost as I felt, daily.

I discovered I actually was not alone out there.  Long before, having abandoned my religious roots, I had had the feeling of being disconnected from my Faith. But out there, It found me.  Every step, each inhale, all of the deafening quiet, I was NOT alone. I was in fact, surrounded by all the beauty, the life of the woods, the clarity in my mind, the full connectivity in a “disconnected” way.  It was glorious.  For a few hours I walked to the beat of my heart.  I processed life, and was away from the terror that existed in my day-to-day.  Just for those moments, I was free.  I was instantly smitten with Nature (yes I used a capital F on purpose).

While looking through my pack, I came across a few words I’d written years ago, I managed to stick in a pocket and forget about until now.  As I came off the trail, at least 11 to 13 years ago, and most likely headed straight for a pizza joint, (because who doesn’t crave carbs after a 13 mile day?!) I scrawled out the following on the most perfect card I purchased in the town.  On the front of the card is a sketched picture of the Town Inn in the small city.  On the back:

“And above all things have fervent love for one another; for love covers a multitude of sins.  Be hospitable to one another without grumbling.  As each one has received a gift, minister it to one another; as good stewards of the manifold GRACE of God.”             ~Peter 4:8-10  (how serendipitous to me, my life and how I choose to live #BELOVE)

Inside I wrote: “There are so many life thoughts and quotes driven by the trail, path and woods.  This weekend was a reminder as the ideas of ‘life’s path’ floated through my brain.  I am never closer to my Faith than when I am in nature, and this weekend was exactly where I needed to be.  Grateful, hearts.

Even when the path is hard to see there are always guides, signs and reminders to help open your eyes to the right way.

You can branch off the path, but you will be guided back without fail.  Wandering is not lost, as the saying goes.

Even if you do not reach the end, your journey is what matters.  It is where the living is.

Sometimes your path takes you off track a bit, you must see it through to find all of the beauty in life, it is there just beyond the comfort zone.

Take time to enjoy all that surrounds you.

Obstacles may be just the test you need, to make you stronger, better.

Not everyone has been through exactly what you have, but we have all faced struggles and challenges on this path of life.”

Now in the thick of that time in my life, to find this now, and know that back then I was still okay on fundamental core level, gives me a belief in my own strength that just sets my heart on fire.  To know that I was in immeasurable pain, mentally and physically and socially, financially, as a parent, woman, lover, my life raped daily down to nothing of myself, and I still managed to be this human… WOW! Something to be proud of for sure, but more so, to propel me to advance this human condition of acceptance and adventure and love and growth as far and deep and wide as I can, because I can!

Needless to say Nature is where I can most easily connect, recharge, heal etc.  And last weekend, current time this time, was still very much needed.  Jumping day one off with the rolling mountains, unfolding each peak with more breathtaking views, we arrived in Bedford, VA to make a stop at Blue Ridge Overland Gear.  A quaint town, with a delicious little coffee shop (there is much more, but it was a quick stop).  B.R.O.G. is located inside a building that as I walked past the basement doors, made me imagine bootleggers delivering their moonshine there.  It is old, but what a beauty of a building.  It has those good bones.  Woodwork that makes you want to take a picture, which I did, and lighting that makes the beautifully worn floors look bright, columns that make you want to touch them and remember the generations of people that existed there before. I got to meet the owner and some friends and instantly knew they were my kinda people.  (y’all know who you are if reading this far… high five to hammock man, keep on keepin on with the hot pants.  Chris, I understand why others say they feel like they’ve known you forever.  Your soul is a special one, now keep clear of the creepy’s).

We continued on to Covington, to a piece of Virginia land, with the oldest standing home in VA.  Merry Go Round Farm is absolutely breathtaking, and the owner/farmer Jacob fast became a group favorite.  He is funny and easy to adore, but he also let me hold a 3 hour old piglet, so basically I love him.  We set up camp, checked in with family, got to know the rest of the group, had dinner, listened to music, got a rockin bonfire going, and stared up at the vast twinkling sky above.  We shared stories and laughed lots, and of course, I broke out my moonshine!  Certainly it didn’t make it on the rest of the trip, but don’t panic, I had plenty of brown water, (bourbon for those who don’t know me) and the group brought even more.  Sausage, you are an awesome guy, filled with all kinds of history, knowledge and compassion.  Tell my babies I miss them, and take mama for a walk, her 700 pound booty!

I left Covington beginning to relax and sink in to the adventure.  Often, my anxiety makes the transition from routine to vacay tough, I need a timeline so I know what to expect.  I am not in need of planning all the details, but a guideline so that honestly, I don’t lose my shit.  I can prepare my surroundings and people so that if I do lose said shit, that I am safe and I can get myself through it eventually.  Yep, that’s me, #crazygirl over here… eye rolls… but this time, I had an easier go of it, I was excited, I was happy, and I was in that place, like back in the woods, not alone.

The next two days were spent crawling over rocks, and up steep hills, and wading through door high streams and “puddles”.  The vehicles were impressive, but the drivers – you guys deserve a cheers! When the locals stand back and say “y’all ain’t gonna make it through there with no damn vehicle” and then watch as you do, maneuvering with skill and confidence, and the rush of adrenaline at times… bad asses… all of yas!  We camped remotely, and had the privilege of some pretty amazing weather, sites and sounds, and challenging and beautiful terrain.  I got to watch the majesty of massive windmills swooping (if you’ve never seen one, or been to a wind farm, you must), see how some true to WVA country folk live, and sit in awe over the history and awesome country we are blessed to live in!

To say the trip was fantastic, just doesn’t quite cover it.  I have attached some pics, and you can also check them out on my IG: @uncontrollably_me but my suggestion to all, because the pictures really only serve as personal memories of the actual greatness and do not really do it justice, is to get out there, see the world, or just your back yard.  Get to the beach, the mountains, the trails, the gardens.  Take them in, hold them close to your heart.  I mean what is the point of a memory if we don’t keep some amazing stuff in there?

We are not lost, we are on an adventure.  Go on lots of them!

Find your clarity, your peace, your passion, amplify it with things you love.  Surround your self with beauty in the purest form and people that make you wanna love harder!

Peace!

T

  Mountain State Overland http://www.mountainstateoverland.com/ follow their IG: @msoverlandand and watch their youtube videos for more *** Merry Go Round Farm IG: @merrygoroundfarm *** Thanks to my friend Adam for taking me along, follow him on IG: @overland_history  Huge shout out to Gaby and Rachel for cooking the most delicious meals, Jason for navigating like a BOSS, and saving my life with the better bag, Papa lemonade for being the fire-man and comedian, and all of the other overland crew with unreal rigs, Y’all ROCK! Cheers!

                        The path So last weekend I was off-roading with a friend of mine, on an expedition with Mountain State Overland.