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Thursday, August 30, 2018

West Marches - Azais' Song

West Marches - Azais' Song

The night before our shiocro showdown we are all in the tavern cloaked in thick silence with the impending battle approaching. Sedricks begins to strum his lute in an attempt to ease the tension. As you’re listening you begin to hear ever so faintly what sounds like humming coming from somewhere in the tavern. As Sedricks continues to play the sound gets louder and you realise it’s someone singing, a female, but in a language you don’t all quite recognize.

As the music continues the singing becomes increasingly louder and simultaneously more determined, invoking a strange but welcome feeling of calm and confidence within all who hear it. As people become more entranced in the song they forget to search for its  origin. Minutes pass, like time is slowed, and eventually the lute and singing come to a fading end.

As people are too absorbed in the calm yet hopeful sensation the melody left them feeling for tomorrow’s battle, no one noticed it was a silver haired, purple eyed elf facing the fire who had been singing. It was an ancient elf battle song and Azais had just sung, casting her guild with a ritual for luck in battle.

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Definition - Depaysement

Definition - Depaysement


People do some out-of-character things in foreign countries. They strike up conversations with strangers in bars, even if they would never do the same back home. They wear unflattering hats. There’s something about being a stranger in a strange land that’s equal parts exhilarating and disorienting, and this messy mix of feelings is what the French word depaysement — literally, decountrification, or being without a country — means to capture. It’s “the feeling of being an outsider,” and though getting lost because you can’t quite read the street signs as well as you maybe thought you could can be unsettling, the feeling of being somewhere else just as often “swirls us up into a kind of giddiness, only ever felt when far away from home.”

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Indigenous - What do you see?

Indigenous - What Do You See?

"A white man and an elderly Native man became pretty good friends, so the white guy decided to ask him: “What do you think about Indian mascots?” The Native elder responded, “Here’s what you’ve got to understand. When you look at black people, you see ghosts of all the slavery and the rapes and the hangings and the chains.

When you look at Jews, you see ghosts of all those bodies piled up in death camps. And those ghosts keep you trying to do the right thing. “But when you look at us you don’t see the ghosts of the little babies with their heads smashed in by rifle butts at the Big Hole, or the old folks dying by the side of the trail on the way to Oklahoma while their families cried and tried to make them comfortable, or the dead mothers at Wounded Knee or the little kids at Sand Creek who were shot for target practice. You don’t see any ghosts at all.

“Instead you see casinos and drunks and junk cars and shacks. “Well, we see those ghosts. And they make our hearts sad and they hurt our little children. And when we try to say something, you tell us, ‘Get over it. This is America. Look at the American dream.’ But as long as you’re calling us Redskins and doing tomahawk chops, we can’t look at the American dream, because those things remind us that we are not real human beings to you. And when people aren’t humans, you can turn them into slaves or kill six million of them or shoot them down with Hotchkiss guns and throw them into mass graves at Wounded Knee. “No, we’re not looking at the American dream. And why should we? We still haven’t woken up from the American nightmare." -Chief Guanikeyu. Jatibonicu Taino

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Quotes - Arthur Ashe

Quotes - Arthur Ashe

"Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can." Arthur Ashe