#human ecology fund

[whatisonthemoon]

How the CIA backed research on mind control

David Dickson March 15 1979 Nature Vol. 278 David Dickson reports on recent revelations about the Central Intelligence Agency's support for university research

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the US Central Intelligence Agency mounted a comprehensive and well-planned effort to encourage university scientists to carry out research that would, the agency hoped, lead directly to techniques for controlling the human mind. 

According to previously classified documents, the agency was responsible for initiating or supporting research that led subsequently to important contributions in various fields of behavioral science, including sociolinguistics, psychotherapy, and personality assessment. 

And in an effort to legitimize its interest and obtain access to leading investigators, the agency financed a funding organization that provided grants to a number of prominent members of the scientific community including Carl Rogers, B. F. Skinner, and Professor Hans Eysenck even though the researchers were frequently unaware of the true source of their support. 

The details of the CIA's involvement in these fields, described as helping to "liberate the behavioral sciences from the world of rats and cheese," are provided in a book which has just been published in the US by Mr. John Marks, a former Senate aide and State Department official. (The book will appear in the UK later this year.) 

Using documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Mr. Marks has put together a detailed picture of how the agency used the academic community in its search for the holy grail: a technique that would provide sufficient manipulation of the human mind to eliminate uncertainty from the intelligence business.

Many of the more bizarre, farcical, or outrageous aspects of this pursuit have since received wide publicity. These range from experiments that switched the East Coast academic community on to LSD, to the construction of a bugged San Francisco brothel (and included a scheme to make Fidel Castro's beard fall out). 

But behind these there was, as Mr. Marks shows, a closely considered plan for deriving, through the extension of conventional research techniques and the often unknowing cooperation of university scientists, the type of information that the CIA could use for controlling the behavior of its agents and others.

Much of this research was financed through an organization known as the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, set up at Cornell University in 1955 under the guidance of Dr. Harry Wolff, professor of neurology and psychiatry, who was later to become president of the American Neurological Association. 

Dr. Wolff's aim, which received considerable sympathy in various academic circles of the time, was to provide a framework for the multidisciplinary study of man in relation to his environment. The CIA's interest was sufficient for it to provide 90% of the society's funding until, having separated from Cornell in 1957 to obtain "more established stature in the research community," the organization was folded in the mid-1960s.

Some of the research funded through the society had a direct and obvious relation to the agency's interests. It provided Wolff himself with a research grant of $74,000 to study the factors that cause men to defect from their countries and cooperate with a foreign government. In other cases, the concerns were more basic. Professor Charles Osgood, for example, who had asked the CIA to support his research into the way people in different societies express similar feelings, received $192,975 over five years through the society. He later completed his influential work on cross-cultural meaning on a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

In some cases, the CIA used research grants explicitly to build up the prestige of the Human Ecology Society. Thus, the society provided $26,000 to Professor Eysenck of London University to support his work on motivation; the agency accepted that the research would have "no immediate relevance to agency needs", but the society took funding credit for nine of his publications in its 1963 report. "It's news to me," said Professor Eysenck. Often the research workers were unaware of the source of the majority of the society's funds; some were told that the money came from rich New York doctors or Texas millionaires. "I don't like secret involvement of any kind. I can't see why it could not have been open and above board," says Professor B. F. Skinner, who received $5,000 towards the research leading to his book Freedom and Dignity.

But as well as providing academic respectability, funding of research through the society allowed the CIA legitimately to approach "anyone in the academic community", as one source put it. Thus, in a move that Mr Marks describes as "turning scholars into spies", the society provided $15,000 towards a tour of the Soviet Union by ten prominent psychologists (only one of whom knew of the agency's involvement), and CIA officials debriefed the group on its return.

Support for university behavioural research was curtailed in the mid-1960s. However, in contradiction of testimony later given to Senate committees, the research itself was continued, although with a greater emphasis on more direct ways of influencing behaviour, such as inserting electrodes in the brain. (At one point, agency scientists considered the potential of genetic manipulation: "The rest of the world didn't ask until 1976 the type of questions we were facing in 1965", one agency source is quoted as saying.)

Mr. Marks admits that much of the research which the CIA sponsored led to important contributions to accepted academic knowledge- possibly because the agency was free to take imaginative leaps denied to more conservative (or more democratic) agencies. But he is uncompromising in criticising the ethical basis under which many of the experiments were carried out. (This was not always the agency's fault; some scientists had to be restrained from taking their experiments on, for example, sensory deprivation to their "terminal" conclusion.)

"We as a country can defend ourselves without sending our own scientists--mad or otherwise-into a hidden war that violates our basic ethical and constitutional principles. The time has come for the United States to lead by example by voluntarily renouncing secret government behavioural research," Mr Marks writes in his conclusion.

[msclaritea]

Charles Manson, Jolly West and Scientology with Eric Hunley & Jon Atack

Eric Hunley speaks with guest, Jon Atack.

"We have ways of making Slaves here...We can brainwash faster than the Russians..." L Ron Hubbard, 1952

[anarchistmemecollective]

sorry but this is important. in a globalized world with more than enough food for all crop failures do not need to lead to starvation.

the world food program estimates it would cost about $40 billion to end global hunger for a year. less than a quarter of elon musk’s current net worth, or less than half of what joe biden has spent funding the genocide of palestinians.

even if there was not enough food to feed everyone, as may happen with climate change and ecological collapse, the choice of who does and does not eat will always be political. the distribution of power is the definition of politics, and that includes the power to eat.

remember that during the irish ‘famine’ ireland was a net exporter of food. it was the bread basket of england. it was only the potatoes that the irish relied on for subsistence that failed. and i’m pretty sure even the blight itself was political, a result of human monocultural farming practices. potatoes aren’t even native to ireland, or europe.

[ocean-sunfish-hater]

Straight Out of the Colonial Playbook:

The Myth of Untouched Lands

The Jewish National Fund (JNF) is an organisation with charity status all across the world. Many people know them as the people who use their little blue boxes to collect money to plant trees. They seem to be doing well to reach their goals, having planted over 250 million trees since 1901. All this seems pretty innocuous, perhaps even noble. After all, the idea of planting trees seems quite divorced from violent settler colonialism.

ID: A large slice of watermelon. You can see the Red of the flesh, the black of the seeds, and the white and green of the rind. It is set against a light teal background, a colour that may invoke peace and calm, much like a free Palestine would.

But the two have long, intertwined histories. Just look to the National Parks of the US, used to grab land from Native Americans with the justification that they were "uninhabited". Colonisation of the Arabian peninsula was partially justified with the argument that native Arabs had degraded the environment to the point of desertification,  and colonial rule was the only way they could be saved from themselves [1]. Unsurprisingly, most of the ecological damage in that region had been done by the colonialists themselves in the pursuit of resources.

The JNF isn't just some minor organisation that has unfortunate ties to questionable powers. Though they shroud themselves in the soft words of environmentalism,  they currently stand as one of the primary tools of violence for Zionism.

Established in 1901 by the 5th Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, they have always been an organisation with settler colonial intentions. In 1940, their leader Yosef Weitz, said “There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from [Palestine] to the neighbouring countries, to transfer all of them… not one village must be left… for this goal funds will be found." [2]. You know what happened to him after the first Nakba? He became the head of the JNF's forestry department [3].

According to their own website, they currently stand as the "single largest provider of Zionist programs in the U.S." [4]. They also own about 13% of all state lands in Israel [5]. They have been both a major driver, and unsurprisingly, benefactor from the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people.

So how exactly does planting trees feed into settler colonialism? The model works like this:

The Israeli government violently displaces people from their lands in the name of "self-defence".

The land becomes "uninhabited".

The JNF uses funds they have accrued from overseas donations to buy up the land.

They establish a national park in the area and begin to plant trees.

Settlers move into the surrounding regions. The JNF have a policy of not leasing land or accommodation to non-Jewish people [5].

Any remigration of indigenous people back into those lands is framed as "environmental destruction" and those people are forced out once more.

You know what's sneaky? They are using trees as bodies. They don’t have enough people to colonise all the land they've stolen, so they plant trees to occupy the spaces that human bodies cannot. They deliberately use fast growing trees like pines to aid in this pursuit [3]. Each forest acts as an occupying force, just one that uses seeds instead of bullets and trees instead of soldiers.

Most of their efforts are concentrated on Naqab (Negev in Hebrew), a region in the south of Israel mostly consisting of desert. On their website, the JNF boast of their Blueprint Negev initiative, and how it's "transformed Israel’s Negev Desert, making the Southern Israel an attractive place to live and work" [4]. Their mission statement in the Naqab includes the justification that they are providing homes, jobs and opportunities in the "empty" region [6]. One of the slogans have on their website is "Building the Negev, town by town"[6]. This is explicitly a settler colonial project, and all of it can be found on JNF website, in their own words.

And to top it all off, you guessed it, the Naqab is far from uninhabited. It was never empty land. In August 2018, 350 villagers from Umm al-Hiran were displaced to the state-regulated Bedouin township, Hura to accommodate the expansion of the Beit Yatir settlement in the Yatir forest, which was planted by the JNF [5]. In 2010, Nuri-al-Uqbi presented evidence that his ancestors had owned and lived in the lands of al-Araqib since before the Israeli occupation to the courts. In 2010, a Beersheva judge rejected the case, siding with the government's claims that his tribe had no ownership claims on the land [7]. The indigenous peoples of Palestine are constantly disenfranchised, displaced, and have very little means of winning their land back within an Apartheid legal system.

The JNF are using strategies employed by colonial powers in the past to violently seize land from native peoples. Acting under the guise of environmentalism "launders" the colonisation, adding extra steps in between the expulsion of people from their homes and the eventual settlement of that land by colonists, with the added bonus of making the JNF look very good. And you know what? Their reforestation schemes suck. Fast growing, new growth forests in the DESERT are not a substitute for old growth forests, not to mention the enormous amount of water they must be using to keep these forests as, well, forests.

What boils my blood the most is that you can see them honouring their colonial inspirations and sponsors in how they name their parks. Britannia park in the Hebron district obviously takes its name from Britain, a country instrumental in the establishment of the Israeli state and the Nakba that has ensued. Fittingly, it sits upon the ruins of seven Palestinian villages, destroyed by Israel during the first Nakba [8].

And this isn't just stuff that has happened in the past, but is happening right now. JNF UK is currently receiving donations to plant a memorial forest "to commemorate those who were brutally murdered on October 7." For £100, you can plant one tree. For £250, you can contribute to an outdoor seating area for group events. For £36, you can pay for an irrigation system that will provide enough water for one tree for four years [9]. Doesn't it make you angry? 36,000+ Palestinians have been murdered, and the JNF are collecting money to water trees on their graves.

I hate it when scientists stay neutral. We and our work are not divorced from the world around us. Conservation means nothing if it comes at the cost of human lives; it means nothing if it is used to veil the atrocities of colonialism and apartheid. It is our duty as conservationists, and as human beings to hear those whose voices carry cries for help, and answer the call. Do not be won over by the siren song of green colonialism.

Free Palestine. May all empires fall.

Bibliography

[1] Skandrani, Z., Decolonizing ecological research. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2018. 8(3): p. 368-370.

[2] Stop the JNF, The JNF, Apartheid and Settler Colonialism. (Spring 2024). https://www.stopthejnf.org/the-jnf-apartheid-and-settler-colonialism-spring-2024/

 [3] Stop the JNF, Tower and Stockades, Forests and Jim Crow Vetting Commitees. https://www.stopthejnf.org/jnfs-sordid-history-tower-and-stockades-forests-and-jim-crow-vetting-committees-by-jonathan-cook/

[4] Jewish National Fund, We are JNF. https://www.jnf.org/menu-3/about-jnf

[5] Amnesty International, ISRAEL: APARTHEID IN ACTION. Amnesty international: submission to the 43rd session of the UPR working group, 9 May 2023.

[6] Jewish National Fund UK, Homepage, https://www.jnf.co.uk/

[7] Jonathan Cook, Bedouins defiant despite Israel eviction plan. https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2014-06-14/bedouins-defiant-despite-israel-eviction-plan/

[8] Palestine Land Society, Britannia Park - Burial and Treachery. https://www.plands.org/en/articles-speeches/articles/2022/britannia-park-burial-and-treachery

[9] Jewish National Fund UK, Green Sunday 2024 – Memorial Forest. https://israelunderattack.jnf.co.uk/projects/green-sunday-2024-memorial-forest/

[fatehbaz]

When you tag things “#abolition”, what are you referring to? Abolishing what?

Prisons, generally. Though not just physical walls of formal prisons, but also captivity, carcerality, and carceral thinking. Including migrant detention; national border fences; indentured servitude; inability to move due to, and labor coerced through, debt; de facto imprisonment or isolation of the disabled or medically pathologized; privatization and enclosure of land; categories of “criminality"; etc.

In favor of other, better lives and futures.

Specifically, I am grateful to have learned from the work of these people:

Ruth Wilson Gilmore on “abolition geography”.

Katherine McKittrick on "imaginative geographies"; emotional engagement with place/landscape; legacy of imperialism/slavery in conceptions of physical space and in devaluation of other-than-human lifeforms; escaping enclosure; plantation “afterlives” and how plantation logics continue to thrive in contemporary structures/institutions like cities, prisons, etc.; a “range of rebellions” through collaborative acts, refusal of the dominant order, and subversion through joy and autonomy.

Macarena Gomez-Barris on landscapes as “sacrifice zones”; people condemned to live in resource extraction colonies deemed as acceptable losses; place-making and ecological consciousness; and how “the enclosure, the plantation, the ship, and the prison” are analogous spaces of captivity.

Liat Ben-Moshe on disability; informal institutionalization and incarceration of disabled people through physical limitation, social ostracization, denial of aid, and institutional disavowal; and "letting go of hegemonic knowledge of crime”.

Achille Mbembe on co-existence and care; respect for other-than-human lifeforms; "necropolitics" and bare life/death; African cosmologies; historical evolution of chattel slavery into contemporary institutions through control over food, space, and definitions of life/land; the “explicit kinship between plantation slavery, colonial predation, and contemporary resource extraction” and modern institutions.

Robin Maynard on "generative refusal"; solidarity; shared experiences among homeless, incarcerated, disabled, Indigenous, Black communities; to "build community with" those who you are told to disregard in order "to re-imagine" worlds; envisioning, imagining, and then manifesting those alternative futures which are "already" here and alive.

Leniqueca Welcome on Caribbean world-making; "the apocalyptic temporality" of environmental disasters and the colonial denial of possible "revolutionary futures"; limits of reformism; "infrastructures of liberation at the end of the world."; "abolition is a practice oriented toward the full realization of decolonization, postnationalism, decarceration, and environmental sustainability."

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten on “the undercommons”; fugitivity; dis-order in academia and institutions; and sharing of knowledge.

AM Kanngieser on "deep listening"; “refusal as pedagogy”; and “attunement and attentiveness” in the face of “incomprehensible” and immense “loss of people and ecologies to capitalist brutalities”.

Lisa Lowe on "the intimacies of four continents" and how British politicians and planters feared that official legal abolition of chattel slavery would endanger Caribbean plantation profits, so they devised ways to import South Asian and East Asian laborers.

Ariella Aisha Azoulay on “rehearsals with others’.

Phil Neel on p0lice departments purposely targeting the poor as a way to raise municipal funds; the "suburbanization of poverty" especially in the Great Lakes region; the rise of lucrative "logistics empires" (warehousing, online order delivery, tech industries) at the edges of major urban agglomerations in "progressive" cities like Seattle dependent on "archipelagos" of poverty; and the relationship between job loss, homelessness, gentrification, and these logistics cities.

Alison Mountz on migrant detention; "carceral archipelagoes"; and the “death of asylum”.

Pedro Neves Marques on “one planet with many worlds inside it”; “parallel futures” of Indigenous, Black, disenfranchised communities/cosmologies; and how imperial/nationalist institutions try to foreclose or prevent other possible futures by purposely obscuring or destroying histories, cosmologies, etc.

Peter Redfield on the early twentieth-century French penal colony in tropical Guiana/Guyana; the prison's invocation of racist civilization/savagery mythologies; and its effects on locals.

Iain Chambers on racism of borders; obscured and/or forgotten lives of migrants; and disrupting modernity.

Paulo Tavares on colonial architecture; nationalist myth-making; and erasure of histories of Indigenous dispossession.

Elizabeth Povinelli on "geontopower"; imperial control over "life and death"; how imperial/nationalist formalization of private landownership and commodities relies on rigid definitions of dynamic ecosystems.

Kodwo Eshun on African cosmologies and futures; “the colonial present”; and imperialist/nationalist use of “preemptive” and “predictive” power to control the official storytelling/narrative of history and to destroy alternatives.

Tim Edensor on urban "ghosts" and “industrial ruins”; searching for the “gaps” and “silences” in the official narratives of nations/institutions, to pay attention to the histories, voices, lives obscured in formal accounts.

Megan Ybarra on place-making; "site fights"; solidarity and defiance of migrant detention; and geography of abolition/incarceration.

Sophie Sapp Moore on resistance, marronage, and "forms of counterplantation life"; "plantation worlds" which continue to live in contemporary industrial resource extraction and dispossession.

Deborah Cowen on “infrastructures of empire and resistance”; imperial/nationalist control of place/space; spaces of criminality and "making a life at the edge" of the law; “fugitive infrastructures”.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey on indentured labor; the role of plants, food, and botany in enslaved and fugitive communities; the nineteenth-century British Empire's labor in the South Pacific and Caribbean; the twentieth-century United States mistreatment of the South Pacific; and the role of tropical islands as "laboratories" and isolated open-air prisons for Britain and the US.

Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo on “remaining open to the gifts of the nonhuman” ecosystems; hinterlands and peripheries of empires; attentiveness to hidden landscapes/histories; defying surveillance; and building a world of mutually-flourishing companions.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on reciprocity; Indigenous pedagogy; abolitionism in Canada; camaraderie; solidarity; and “life-affirming” environmental relationships.

Anand Yang on "forgotten histories of Indian convicts in colonial Southeast Asia" and how the British Empire deported South Asian political prisoners to the region to simultaneously separate activists from their communities while forcing them into labor.

Sylvia Wynter on the “plot”; resisting the plantation; "plantation archipelagos"; and the “revolutionary demand for happiness”.

Pelin Tan on “exiled foods”; food sovereignty; building affirmative care networks in the face of detention, forced migration, and exile; connections between military rule, surveillance, industrial monocrop agriculture, and resource extraction; the “entanglement of solidarity” and ethics of feeding each other.

Avery Gordon on haunting; spectrality; the “death sentence” of being deemed “social waste” and being considered someone “without future”; "refusing" to participate; "escaping hell" and “living apart” by striking, squatting, resisting; cultivating "the many-headed hydra of the revolutionary Black Atlantic"; alternative, utopian, subjugated worldviews; despite attempts to destroy these futures, manifesting these better worlds, imagining them as "already here, alive, present."

Jasbir Puar on disability; debilitation; how the control of fences, borders, movement, and time management constitute conditions of de facto imprisonment; institutional control of illness/health as a weapon to "debilitate" people; how debt and chronic illness doom us to a “slow death”.

Kanwal Hameed and Katie Natanel on "liberation pedagogy"; sharing of knowledge, education, subversion of colonial legacy in universities; "anticolonial feminisms"; and “spaces of solidarity, revolt, retreat, and release”.

[yikes-kachowski]

A piggy back off your last ask! Your AU has me all excited. I'm curious about Zuko and Katara's tenure as monarchs? How did the people receive her as their fire lady?

Also your art is amazing!! Can't wait to see more 🥰❤️

This au is very detailed lol, so if you have questions feel free to ask. Just understand that @shalheretical and I have named lots of places in the atla world.

We’re going to break this into three parts: one on notable events in Zuko’s tenure as Fire Lord; one on Katara’s accomplishments that relate specifically to duties she performed in relation to being the Fire Lady (she did other things outside of it); and a final note on the reception of an outside minority woman as the Fire Lady.

PART I

Immediately after the complete and unconditional surrender of the Fire Nation, all military personnel who are not directly involved in civil administration are recalled back to the Fire Nation—though they must find suitable local replacements and return as soon as possible. The Gaoling Agreement of 101 AG saw the repatriation of 1.3m Fire Nation occupiers from everywhere in the Earth Kingdom but the northwestern Gansai region. Because of this, and a late Azulon policy of Development First, Industry Now, which had 75% of all Fire Nation agriculture halted in favor of industrial development and had most food being imported by way of colonial extraction, the sudden population growth and the fact that they had to move factories and warehouses to start farming again, saw that 53 percent of the Fire Nation was experiencing starvation, and that 16 percent was experiencing acute starvation—5 percent experienced famine. This would be at its worst for the first four years of Zuko’s reign—known as the Rice-Rations Years—but it would only truly stabilize in 110 AG.

A near-complete shutdown of the archipelago’s ports until 103 AG exacerbated this problem. However, this was to prevent, as much as possible, the 3.5m individuals identified as war criminals/accomplices to war crimes from escaping to “safe havens” such as Jinyala, the Si Wong, or Whale Tale Island. No one was allowed to leave the ports without a written order by the Fire Lord. The nascent Earth Kingdom Navy helped patrol Fire Nation waters; these sailors, along with some Kyoshi Warriors, also helped inspect ships leaving Fire Nation docks for potential stowaways. The Earth Navy would stay until 104 AG.

The Boiling Rock was used to hold Tier 1 and 2 war criminals until the Omashu Trials began. After this, the Boiling Rock would be shut down. Non-political Fire Nation prisoners would be moved to more humane prisons; non Fire Nationals would be extradited back to their home nations. Captives—such as Hama, Tyro or the Boulder—were repatriated from the work camps they were imprisoned in.

Shrine consolidation was a Sozin policy of putting all shrines under direct monarchical control and turned over for use of the state religion—Agniyo, the religion of the ethnic majority (Shiboshi) Fire Nationals. Zuko begins a policy of Great Reversal, where these shrines are returned to their traditional stewards. The Intranational Sovereign Rights policies is the parent policy of the Great Reversal. The Fire Nation is home to 98 ethnic minority/indigenous groups (including the Sun Warriors and the Bhanti), with 106 recognized languages and dialects apart from Hokugo (the state language). These are all put under Special Status, where extra government protections and provisions are made to protect traditional Fire Nation diversity. Specifically, local councils are approved to use state funds to protect Status minority religions, languages, ecology/land, food, dance, and arts. The Sun Warriors in particular are given greater autonomy and sovereignty over their ancestral lands.

In 107 AG Zuko made an official declaration to renounce the millenia-old belief that the Liufeng dynasty is in any way divine, or descended from Agni. In apology for these centuries of disrespect towards Mother Agni, a new shrine in the capital of Kazanshi is announced; it is officially completed in 125 AG, and dedicated in 126.

Zaibatsu, vertically integrated business conglomerates, are dissolved; the businesses are put under monarchical control, and their assets are partially used for reparations paid towards the Water Tribes and Earth Kingdom. (Aang turned down reparations outside of help rebuilding Air Temples/shrines, and protections on sacred Air Nomad land, such as areas in Gansai and Whale Tale Island.) Land was seized from landlords and nobles, and sold to their serfs and tenets for extremely cheap prices. This is open to anyway once all serfs and tenant farmers have their share, which leads to some immigration from especially the southern Earth Kingdom.

Starting in 103, all war criminals are prosecuted under Earth Kingdom and Water Tribe officials at Omashu, which only ends in 119 AG, due to the thoroughness of the prosecution. Some critics from the Fire Nation claim that no Fire Nation representatives presented an unfair bias, and Why can’t it be held in the Royal High Courts? Zuko maintains that the Earth Kingdom and the Water Tribe are a lot more merciful than he would be. Note: Iroh volunteered to be tried for the Siege of Ba Sing Se and his March on the Si Wong, even though King Kuei offered him immunity. He was given a postponed sentence of ten years; during this time, he would stay in his tea shop, and most of the money he made would go to helping Go Shi Wai, one of the worst-affected places of the war.

Gansai, later the United Republic, holds the largest number of Fire Nation settlers. This is due to an early Azulon resettlement policy, wherein ethnic minorities in the Fire Nation were resettled in Gansai and away from the imperial core, for Azulon’s All-Shiboshi Empire dream (the officials that ruled them were still Shiboshi, though). There are nearly 4m settlers living there; and since they’ve been outside of the Fire Nation for at least a generation, they are the least willing to move. Gansai was made independent in 115 AG through a referendum that went through every village, town, city, settlement in the region. Many Earth Kingdom citizens still consider this a humiliating capitulation to the Fire Nation, and resent King Kuei for allowing this.

Serfdom and slavery were abolished in the Fire Nation by 105 AG. Looted wealth is confiscated from the noble class, and repatriated to their home countries. The royal coffers do the same. Since the power of the noble class was severely weakened by these moves—and the removal of the zaibatsu system—many enraged nobles would attempt government takeovers—whether through the legals means of an Agni Kai, or through nine different assassination attempts from 105 AG to 127 AG. These, by the way, would only lead to legislation that weakened the noble class even more.

The Fire Nation educational system was technically reformed, though specifically. Zuko was looking to return the institution to its prewar systems, with some amendments. He took a lot of care for educational reforms, because he considered it ground zero for deradicalization policies. Teachers were screened and replaced when necessary; there was a national recall on textbooks, and Zuko commissioned a completely new curriculum. The military education of children from 11 to 16 stayed in place. The national examinations that gave people opportunities to work in government positions were opened up to the merchant and former self classes.

Protections and rights for same-sex couples are restored. Abortion is made legal. Funding goes back to the arts. Overall, Zuko’s policies mark a return to the cultural pursuits from before the war—especially in the arts, education and religion.

PART II

Once again: these are her activities that relate to her acting (somewhat) in capacity to traditional Fire Lady duties. However, a lot of her actions—even when acting as Fire Lady—are outside of traditional royal involvement, which is noteworthy. It should also be noted that she is not a part of the legislative body of the Fire Nation in any capacity, nor is she in any way given any sort of powers of making policies at an official capacity. To me, this doesn’t really matter, because I personally don’t think she’d be incredibly interested in dealing with Fire Nation legislative proceedings anyway, and it’s way more straight forward for her to just tell Zuko what she thinks would be a good idea since he can just enact it immediately. Not that she never influences policies through cooperation with Parliament, just that she normally chooses not to.

She specifically is known for her deep involvement with charity and patronages. She tends to focus on issues involving the homeless, youth, drug addictions, the elderly, environmental protections, illness and minority rights advocacy. It’s due to her nearly weekly visits to hospitals and health clinics across the Fire Nation (and sometimes abroad) that Katara gets very specifically interested in serious and terminal illnesses—the care of their patients, prevention and destigmatization. She’s especially famous for initiating physical contact towards patients with leprosy, to prove that leprosy could not be easily transmitted through casual touch—such as hugs and handholding.

She is president of the Taiyang-jie Childrens’ Clinic in the capital. She is a patroness of the Natural & Geologic Historical Society in Lopyang. She is president of the Royal Academies of Healthcare, Sociology & Philosophy, and Music & Theatre. She is president of the Gojiki Child Association, a charity to care for vulnerable tribal youth. She also works with the National Leprosy Trust, the Fire Nation Centre of Minority Dance and Theatre, and the Imperial Phoenix Hospital.

She was integral to the founding of Taqqittiavak, an international medical association, inspired by witnessing the calamity of war, and how there’s often not enough medics for the wounded, who are often left to suffer and die. She is a patron of the Three Nations’ Doctors League, a similar organization, though Taqqitiavak works in conflict zones, and 3ND in humanitarian crisis zones. She specifically works with them in an anti personnel landmine campaign. Her work directly leads to the signing of the Qiue Treaty to create an international ban on the use of landmines.

She makes regular lengthy visits to the Ruzuro-yeiji Hospital in Kemkami, where she specifically helps in the care and comfort for patients who are seriously or terminally ill—something royalty had never done before. She is a patronesses to the Imrani Cancer Fund, an international charity dedicated to cancer research.

She is the founder of Tunnganiq, an association dedicated to research and care for mental disabilities, especially those acquired in war or in accidents. She regularly supports efforts in the advancement of mental healthcare, institutional reform, and the stigmatization of all psychotic and neurotic disorders. She (and Toph) opened the Centre for Disability and the Arts in Republic City.

She is the patron of the Fire Nation branch of the Nutaraq Appeal, an international organization dedicated to helping pregnant women and new mothers in need around the world.

Katara (and Sokka) launch the International Child Bereavement charity, which seeks to support the children of: military families, children orphaned by war and conflict, children of suicide victims and children of the terminally ill. She and Sokka are also patrons of the Southern Water Tribe Cultural Center in Republic City.

She supports the Laiyi Fund, which is a parent fund to several smaller charity organizations that give accommodations and social assistance to the homeless, and campaigns to destigmatize homelessness worldwide. In general, Katara is very vocal and active in her support of homeless populations, and to end the conception of homelessness being a moral failing in the Fire Nation, especially by regularly working with the homeless directly, without any official means of protection. She supports the Just Homes Initiative in the United Republic, which seeks to “just house them” with no strings attached.

She was awarded the Freedom of Omashu Award, the highest honor in the Southern Earth Kingdom for her humanitarian efforts—as well as the Ba Sing Se Citizens’ Award and being awarded a gold medal in a healthcare conference in Piriyakheri.

PART III

To be honest, her marriage to Zuko really wasn’t a huge deal to most peasants in the Fire Nation—they were so far removed from royal life, that who the current Fire Lord is hardly mattered, let alone who the Fire Lady is. The middle class, especially in major cities like Kazanshi, Kenkami, Lopyang and Kimosaki, and the noble class (especially, much to her embarrassment, Mai’s family, the Keohsos—where the brides for the Fire Lord are traditionally found) were the most vocal in their disapproval of the idea of there being a foreign bride. What if the Fire Lord abandons them (a population that’s starving and struggling) for the South Pole? What if she roadblocks courtly promotions only to Water Tribe immigrants that will surely be used to replace the ethnic Fire Nation population? What if their heir is a waterbender, of all things? Most ire was reserved for Zuko, either way. The Fire Lady is hardly a consideration, at this point in time—the role is prestigious solely because she is the wife of the Fire Lord, who actually matters. Katara is who gives the position prestige and reverence beyond that, through her compassion, altruism and humanitarian efforts, which kind of gave the role of Fire Lady an entirely new role in greater Fire Nation society, outside of just running the household and being the head of the royal family, which doesn’t really affect regular citizens.

Besides, nobles who didn’t know better than to keep it to themselves were pretty readily dismissed from the court and removed from the Caldera—a hugely humiliating experience.

Their wedding is a big deal. Some agitators try to say that they’re wedding, in 106, is a flagrant extravagance when the whole nation is suffering—this is still more of an attack on Zuko, than Katara. The wedding, though a big royal wedding, is mostly used to help lighten the air for the population—it’s an excuse to be off of work for a week, to have fun celebrations, to be with family, to keep up with royal fashion, etc. It’s a reprivement.

Katara becomes somewhat of a fashion icon—not the biggest, by far, but especially her jewelry, accessories and hairstyles take the country by storm. It’s big enough that she’s able to auction off her old clothing and her own beadwork projects for thousands, which she would then donate to places she felt needed the most help. She alone is responsible for making smiling—especially smiling with your teeth—popular in the Fire Nation.

A lot of people really idealized her as a mother, with the way she was regularly seen walking her kids to and from school, and around the capital. She would participate in parent-student events in school, and was known to very rarely use nannies. Unlike other Fire Nation noblewomen, she never once used a nursemaid. She very regularly took her kids on holidays to the Southern Water Tribe. Non-racists in the Fire Nation really admire her dedication and loyalty to her origins and native land/practices. Racists thought she would teach her kids to look down on the Fire Nation and only care for the preservation of her homeland and culture.

A lot of people—especially older, more traditional folks—also thought she acted unbecomingly for a Fire Lady. She dresses casually in deels when not working in an official capacity, regularly goes off to do things without following royal protocol, smiles and waves to crowds and in photos. A lot of people criticize her speeches as being emotional and, occasionally, even hysterical. Her willingness to act outside of capacity and to do things that should be beneath her—in public—was especially condemned.

But overall, she’s been pretty popular from the beginning, and definitely went down as at least one of the most beloved Fire Ladies in history. If not the most.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Just as the Arab is always involved in Jewish Israeli discourse, the tree is always uninvolved. What could be ‘involved’ about planting a tree? A tree is a tree is a tree. And trees are not only uninvolved, they are good. ‘Ecologists usually portray nature as a domain of intrinsic value’, writes geography and law scholar Irus Braverman in her book, Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine. Trees are assumed to be natural, innocent ecological entities with no say in politics. But in this conflict, which is largely a conflict over land – with two national movements contesting the same territory – digging below the surface shows that trees have been used strategically to seize, hold and control territory. They are used as tools ‘almost as if they were weapons’, writes Shaul Ephraim Cohen in his book, The Politics of Planting.  It is in Israel’s interest for trees to appear uninvolved, resulting in a process that Braverman calls ‘naturalisation’, meaning the portrayal of ecological changes as ‘natural’ or otherwise inevitable, and the use of the innocence of nature to cloak an ethno-national agenda. Indeed, Braverman’s book was originally titled Tree Wars before her publisher asked for a more marketable title. The message is clear: trees are part of a ‘covert war’ that mobilises ecology to fix and create geopolitical facts in the region, largely through the actions of the KKL-JNF – Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, or the Jewish National Fund. The Jerusalem Forest, where I myself planted a pine sapling at the age of six, is a creation of the KKL-JNF, which planted a greenbelt of parks in the Judaean Hills west of the city in the 1950s and 1960s. Later, after Israel captured East Jerusalem – and the entire West Bank – from Jordanian control and ‘reunified’ it in 1967, this forest was expanded eastwards, across the Green Line. Like two-thirds of the 400,000 acres of forests managed by the KKL-JNF, the Jerusalem Forest is not scientifically classified as a ‘natural forest’ like the native stands of Mediterranean oak, terebinth and carob in the wetter parts of northern Israel. It is a distinctly human creation, with large monocultural stands of Aleppo pine trees of the same age. Ecologically, these pines are considered a ‘pioneer species’: growing quickly, requiring little maintenance and colonising what is considered, in the Zionist imaginary, to be ‘barren’ land.  Colonisation is precisely the point of afforestation. The KKL-JNF is a Zionist and quasi-governmental agency that was founded in 1901 as the paramount institution for buying and holding land for Jewish settlement in what was then Ottoman Palestine. The organisation bought land from local Palestinian residents and then began foresting or farming the land to demonstrate their presence and provide protection from land alienation. Today the KKL-JNF is still the largest private landholder in the region, owning 13 per cent of Israeli territory. Braverman describes the KKL-JNF as Israel’s ‘land-laundering body’, as the state employs the agency’s non-governmental status to hold vast swathes of land for exclusively Jewish use without fear of being labelled discriminatory. While the KKL-JNF performs many quasi-governmental tasks such as building roads, dams and farms, it is best known today for its campaigns to rehabilitate ‘degraded’ forests and plant new ones. The KKL-JNF claims to have planted 250 million trees over the past 120 years. 

[...]

After 1948, when the State of Israel was founded and more than 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their land, the KKL-JNF began planting forests over Palestinian villages to prevent their residents from returning. The KKL-JNF felt that trees were, in their words, ‘the best guards of the land … Walls and fences can be cut down. A tree says “we are here”’. After planting, tree law protected new forests from demolition. This legal aspect was critical for afforestation’s success in capturing, occupying and controlling the land. It is part of what Braverman terms the ‘lawfare’ of the state, meaning an imperialist’s use of their own rules to impose a regime, which is then legitimised by its own legal structure. Israeli courts have determined that when a forest is grown on expropriated land, Palestinians who return to that land are trespassing. In 2010, the Supreme Court rejected a petition by Palestinian refugees from the village of al-Lajjun to reclaim land in the Megiddo forest, ruling that afforestation justified Israeli control under the 1953 Land Acquisition Law. As both Cohen and Braverman note then, short of human inhabitation, trees were considered the most effective tool to hold and control land for the Jewish state. What this meant, in practice, was that if there weren’t enough Jews to settle the land, the state used trees instead – as stand-ins for Jewish bodies.  The flip side of Israel controlling land through Jewish tree presence is expropriating Palestinian land through absence. Nowhere is this clearer than in the paradoxical legal status of the so-called ‘present absentees’, Palestinians who were internally displaced after the 1948 war. Under Israeli law, they lost their land deeds because they failed to prove ownership with a physical presence, even though many were driven from that land by violence. Israeli laws governing ‘Absentees’ Property’ have expropriated a startling 70 per cent of Israeli territory within the Green Line. Palestinian ‘absence’ was sloganised long before 1948 in the Zionist saying, ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’, which epitomises a deep failure and unwillingness to recognise native Palestinian inhabitation.

19 October 2021

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Hi, wanted to ask about this since EN had the Cloudcalling event very recently. There’s a lot of talk about how the people of the Sunset Savannah respect nature and want to live in harmony with it. What do you think Twisted Wonderland at large feels about environmental efforts like that?

I think Twisted Wonderland in general probably leans toward being environmentally conscious.

I recall back in the first Halloween event that Scarabia’s theme for its area was to promote environmental preservation, recycling and reusing goods, etc. Ortho also has various lines which refer to energy efficiency, and Leona mentions interning at a mining and energy lab. That means that organizations and technology dedicated to ecological efforts exist and get funding. Clearly this is something that is valued or at least trying to be spread or made more common.

Many of the areas we visited outside of NRC try to make the best of what’s in the environment rather than force the environment to change to conform to the lifestyles of the people who have settled there. For example, Silk City is built around its waterways for trade and potable water in an otherwise arid area. The fruits they grow here are also very sweet because the hot, dry climate forces the sugar content in them to be higher. In Harveston, people forage and resell items from Mt. Moln amongst each other and to tourists. Briar Valley is mountainous, so they built Castle Blackscale behind that deadly region to safeguard the royal family. There’s many more examples of this if you care to dive into the lore ^^ I’ll just cut it here for the sake of brevity.

Another thing!! Twisted Wonderland has fantasy races to account for. Note that many, if not all of them, have close ties to nature. We know the beastmen of the Sunset Savanna value living in harmony with nature due to their animal ancestry. Merfolk live in the waters, so things like pollution and overfishing would deeply affect them and their way of life. And fae, of course, are said to be deeply connected with nature and are theorized to even draw their power from those elements. I’d imagine that there would be some pretty strict regulations among them and human societies to help maintain their environments, especially with multiracial unions (like that of the mermaid princess and her human prince).

Recall too that there have been wars over territory hundreds of years in Twisted Wonderland’s past. Humans invaded Briar country seeking its resources and land, and that resulted in much tragedy, bloodshed, and loss of life. The world thankfully seems to be much more peaceful in modern day… so I think modern leaders probably looked back on history and sought to build up from it and maintain good relationships, not regress back into that dark era of war and hatred.

[bogleech]

Just read your plastic bug review ( absolutely delightful!) and Id love to hear your mosquito hot takes if you have the time.

Well there's a viral lie that they're ecologically valueless and of course, no, there's really no such thing, and their importance goes far beyond just another food for insect-eaters, but that's more "scientific facts" than "hot takes" so as far as "hot takes" go:

They're both beautiful and cute animals, more charming than butterflies.

The fact that they're bothersome vampires is part of the charm, it's just plain cool that our planet has swarms of night-flying blood-sucking swamp creatures.

I completely reject their status as "deadliest animal" on the basis that a mosquito by itself is irritating but inherently harmless. The diseases they can carry are distinct organisms that evolved to exploit the mosquito as a vehicle. It is worth noting that only a few mosquito species can even transmit illnesses to humans at all!

Speaking of which I notice people are quick to defend bats, raccoons, rats and other more popular animals that can spread disease, but use mosquito borne illness as justification to want mosquitoes totally eradicated, and I think that's pretty transparently a matter of petty spite. Take away the diseases and the mosquito is still an "inconvenience," however harmless, and humans just have a very difficult time with the reality that nature does not exist for our comfort and fun.

Can't help noticing that research into just killing them all off gets more attention and funding than the equally viable and environmentally safer research into simply making them inhospitable to pathogens, and I'm sure that's driven partially by the above biases, but partially because there's probably money and clout in being the one to reduce Pesky Bugs from popular tourist destinations like Florida.

Even having said all of the above, an animal never needs to be harmless, pleasant, or ecologically "essential" to be worthy of admiration. Each is a unique and special sculpture of evolution and a "character" in the vast varied cast of living organisms. Some of them are allowed to be bad guys. Some of them are allowed to just be background filler. The total sum of the different forms taken by life on our planet is what's precious about life on our planet, including every part of it anyone has ever feared or hated.

wiggleys:

[thehomelybrewster]

1d8 "Free" Fantasy RPGs To Replace 5e At Your Table

D&D 5e sure is a roleplaying game, and it's one that I have enjoyed a lot. However, that doesn't mean that I'd recommend it automatically for other people. This has many reasons, which I won't elaborate here. It has also shaped the perception of TTRPGs significantly thanks to its market dominance, and not in a good way.

5e has a reputation for being an expensive, complex game, and 5e players fear that other RPGs might just be the same. That it's too much of a hassle and too much of a financial burden to switch systems.

So, to help 5e players pick out a different system, I've made this handy 1d8 rolling table to help them pick a fantasy TTRPG with a combat component that they can try instead!

Let's now go through these eight nine RPGs and see what's up with them, right below the "Keep reading" section!

I'll be listing some metrics like the page count for the rulebook(s), the core resolution mechanic, how complex the game is in terms of character creation & combat, and how well-supported the game is by their publisher and the community-at-large.

1. Cairn

Author: Yochai Gal

Release Year: 2020

Cost: Free PDF, printed copies cost between $3 to $10 depending on the print quality.

Page Count: 24

Website: https://cairnrpg.com/

Resolution Mechanic: 1d20 Roll Under system for ability checks/saving throws, attacks hit automatically, "fiction-first".

Action Economy: Movement + one action per round.

Characters: Random character creation, class-less and level-less, advancement based on "Scars" (suffering damage that reduces your HP exactly to 0)

Setting: Implied. Low-magic European-style fantasy; mysterious woodlands.

Other Noteworthy Mechanics: Hit Protection and Ability damage instead of HP, Slot-Based Inventory.

Degree of Support: Very high. Available in fifteen languages (e.g. Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and German); full rules text is under CC-BY-SA 4.0; multiple published third-party adventures & supplements available; some official bonus material (e.g. bestiary, magic items/relics, and spells) is available for free on the website.

Addendum: An expanded 2nd Edition is currently on Kickstarter (ends April 26th 2024); Cairn is legitimately easy to learn, however the Hit Protection system and the connected Scars system is a very different abstraction to health and advancement compared to 5e.

2. Cloud Empress

Author: worlds by watt

Release Year: 2023

Cost: Free PDF of the rulebook and the creator-written sample adventure "Last Voyage of the Bean Barge", $20 for the print edition of the rulebook, $12 for PDF supplements, $25 for print + PDF supplements; free solo rules also available as PDF only.

Page Count: 60

Website: https://cloudempress.com/

Resolution Mechanic: d100 Roll Under system for stat checks/saving throws, critical successes or failures on doubles (11, 22, 33, etc.), 5e-style advantage/disadvantage, attacks generally hit automatically.

Action Economy: Two actions per round with no free movement.

Characters: Semi-random character creation, four classes ("jobs"), no rules for character advancement in the ruleset.

Setting: Specific. "Ecological science fantasy" heavily inspired by Hayao Miyazaki's "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind"; costly magic, giant insects, dangerous mushrooms; only human player characters.

Other Noteworthy Mechanics: Damage points culminate in Wounds; Wounds and Stress as ways to track your character's physical and mental state; slot-based inventory system.

Degree of Support: Low-ish. Several official supplements exist, however third-party material is very sparse. May improve due to the recent establishment of a Cloud Empress Creators Fund, has a simple 3rd party license system.

Addendum: A supplement, "Cloud Empress: Life & Death" is currently on Kickstarter (ends April 26th 2024, yes, the same day as Cairn 2e) and as a disclaimer I even backed that current Kickstarter; Cloud Empress is built on the engine of the sci-fi horror RPG "Mothership"; clearly built for one-shots and short campaigns; has a wonderful resting system that encourages roleplay between players.

3. Iron Halberd

Author: level2janitor

Release Year: 2023

Cost: Free PDF of the rules; no print option available.

Page Count: 60

Website: https://level2janitor.itch.io/iron-halberd

Resolution Mechanic: 1d20 + Bonus Roll Over system against difficulty or armor rating, however most non-combat-related actions follow a fiction first approach without dice rolls.

Action Economy: Movement + one action per round.

Characters: Semi-random character creation, class-less but there are four different "gear kits" that nudge your character towards certain archetypes, levelling up with XP.

Setting: Essentially non-existant. General European fantasy with magic, gods may or may not exist/shape the world, various fantastic ancestries included.

Other Noteworthy Mechanics: Includes rules for building strongholds and maintaining warbands; slot-based inventory with a durability mechanic.

Degree of Support: None. The game is intended to be relatively compatible with other OSR content and the creator suggests using adventures made for the D&D retroclone Old-School Essentials if you wanna use pre-published ones. An official introductory adventure, "Sea-Spray Bay", is apparently in the works. No 3rd party license available, as far as I know.

Addendum: One thing about Iron Halberd I like especially is how it uses random tables for generating equipment. Most of the equipment is listed in a numerical order by category, and the various gear kits include references on different rolling formulas for those equipment categories. For example someone taking the "soldier's kit" rolls twice on the d20 Weapons table and takes their preferred pick, while someone taking the "sage's kit" only rolls a d4 on that table.

4. Mausritter

Author: Isaac Williams

Release Year: 2020

Cost: Free PDF of the ruleset available; box set with the rules and several goodies including an adventure costs $55; additional box set + PDFs containing eleven official adventures costs $55 (or $20 digital-only).

Page Count: 48

Website: https://mausritter.com/

Resolution Mechanic: 1d20 Roll Under system, 5e-style advantage/disadvantage, attacks always hit.

Action Economy: Movement + one action per round.

Characters: Random character creation, class-less, levelling up with XP.

Setting: Vaguely specific. You play as mice and everything is related to mouse-size; cats are the equivalents of devils or dragons; humans exist as a setting background but may or may not be present in a campaign.

Other Noteworthy Mechanics: Includes rules for recruiting warbands; slot-based inventory with a durability mechanic.

Degree of Support: Very high. Several official supplements exist, as well as loads of content, be it adventures or supplements, made by other creators. Available in seven languages (all of them however are European). Has a simple 3rd party license system.

Addendum: Mausritter uses the phrase "adventure site" instead of dungeons. On the website a free adventure site generator is available, as is a digital tool that can be used to generate your own item cards for the slot-based inventory system.

5. Maze Rats

Author: Ben Milton

Release Year: 2017

Cost: $4.99 for the PDF, no print option regularly available.

Page Count: 32

Website: https://questingbeast.substack.com/

Resolution Mechanic: 2d6 + Bonus Roll Over system; advantage system that uses 3d6 drop the lowest + Bonus.

Action Economy: Movement + one action per round.

Characters: Semi-random character creation, class-less but instead there are character features (e.g. spell slots or attack bonuses), levelling up with XP.

Setting: Essentially non-existant. Magic is very irregular (s. the section below), but otherwise it implies a vaguely European fantasy setting.

Other Noteworthy Mechanics: Spells are randomly generated each adventuring day and spell effects are negotiated between the GM and the spellcasting player; includes several fantastic d66 tables that can be used to randomly generate worlds.

Degree of Support: Decent. The rule text is licensed under CC BY 4.0 and unofficial translations are available. Some third-party content has been made specifically for the game.

Addendum: The only purchase-only game on this list. However "unofficial" distribution of the PDF is very common. Also this is the oldest game on the list. Ben "Questing Beast" Milton is a prolific OSR blogger and runs a YouTube channel on the OSR. Great dude.

6. Sherwood - A Game of Outlaws & Arcana

Author: Richard Ruane

Release Year: 2022

Cost: Free quickstart PDF titled "Sherwood - A Quickstart of Outlaws" available; digital rulebook costs $7.50 and the print edition (including PDF) costs $15.

Page Count: 25 (Quickstart), 32 (Rulebook)

Website: https://www.r-rook.studio/

Resolution Mechanic: 2d6 + Bonus Roll Over system for skill checks (including attacks), 2d6 Roll Under system for saving throws; advantage & disadvantage system that involves rolling 3d6 and using the higher/lower of the two results; almost all rolls are player-facing

Action Economy: "Conversational", assumption of movement + action.

Characters: Largely choice-based character creation. Combine two (of six) background abilities with the benefits of seven different careers. Big focus on interpersonal relationships during character creation. Limited character advancement takes place during downtime.

Setting: Specific. Takes place in a fantastical version of 13th century England, with fey and magic coexisting with outlaws and crusaders.

Other Noteworthy Mechanics: The group of outlaws possesses two shared resources (Resources and Legend) that can be spent to gain certain benefits; spellcasting is divided into two categories: arcane talents and sorcerous rites, with the former being immediate and the later taking significant time; slot-based inventory.

Degree of Support: None. No further publications exist for the game and while it is published under the CC-BY 4.0 license, no third-party content exists as far as I know. It does include a guide on how to convert D&D and Troika (N)PCs into Sherwood characters, as well as three adventure seeds (one in the Quickstart, two in the rules), which is at least something.

Addendum: Might just be the game on this list that encourages the most roleplaying; the character sheet is sadly very provisional-feeling and the Quickstart feels outdated compared to the finalized rulebook.

7. The Electrum Archive

Author: Emiel Boven

Release Year: 2022

Cost: Free Rules PDF available, zines cost $12 as digital PDFs or $24 as print + PDF combos; the first zine contains the entire contents of the Free Rules PDF

Page Count: 26 (Free Rules), 72 (Issue 01)

Website: https://www.electrumarchive.com/

Resolution Mechanic: 1d10 Roll Under system, attacks always hit.

Action Economy: Movement + one action per round.

Characters: Largely choice-based; three archetypes roughly corresponding to fighters/rangers (Vagabonds), rogues (Fixers), and spellcasters (Warlocks); player characters are presumed to be human; levelling up with XP.

Setting: Specific. Mechanics heavily tie into the lore; humanity has abundant access to minerals but requires a rare substance known as Ink to operate certain pieces of tech (like guns) and cast spells but cannot produce Ink themselves; spirits of various sorts can be foes, targets of worship, or sources of power.

Other Noteworthy Mechanics: Uses a spellcasting system for the Warlock archetype that's heavily based on the one used in Maze Rats, as in it uses randomly-generated spells whose effects are negotiated between the player and the GM; slot-based inventory with a durability mechanic.

Degree of Support: Minimal. The game consists out of the free rules and (soon) two zines; a third party license exists but content produced under it is very rare.

Addendum: I need to disclaim that I recently backed the Kickstarter campaign for the second zine for this game; the free rules feature wrong page numbers in its table of contents which is unfortunate; The Electrum Archive uses incredibly simple stats for NPCs which makes creating new ones based on other games rather simple.

8. Shadowdark RPG

Author: Kelsey Dionne

Release Year: 2023

Cost: Free player and game master quickstarts exist as PDFs and are available in print for $19, the core rules cost $28 in PDF form and $57 in a print + PDF bundle

Page Count: 68 (Player Quickstart Guide), 68 (Game Master Quickstart Guide), 332 (Core Rules)

Website: https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/

Resolution Mechanic: 1d20 + Bonus Roll Over system, 5e-style advantage/disadvantage, natural 1s are critical failures and natural 20s are critical successes.

Action Economy: Movement + one action per round.

Characters: Largely choice-based; players have a fantasy ancestry and a class; levelling up with XP; class progression largely random.

Setting: Vague. General (dark) western fantasy conventions apply; alignment is a force in this universe and a sample pantheon is provided; the most potent enemies in the rules are named individuals that fit classic TTRPG monster types; illustrations and lore snippets have recurring motifs.

Other Noteworthy Mechanics: The key mechanic of Shadowdark is how the game handles light, namely that light sources are tracked in real time (i.e. a normal torch lasts 1 hour), which increases tension; slot-based inventory; has a 0th-level character creation option using an eliminationist "Gauntlet".

Degree of Support: Fantastic. Several official supplements and offically sanctioned digital tools exist; lots of third-party content available under a generous third-party license.

Addendum: Definitely the most similar game to 5e on this list besides the next entry; very robust mechanically and the Core Rules features extensive lists of magic items, monsters, and spells; also for early play giving your players only access to the quickstart is a totally valid choice; and finally, before Dionne made Shadowdark, she made 5e adventures for years and it shows (affectionate).

9. Pathfinder

Authors: Logan Bonner, Jason Bulmahn, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, Mark Seifter

Release Year: 2019 (initial release), 2023 (remaster)

Cost: Free and comprehensive SRD available via the platform Archives of Nethys, free "Pathfinder Primer" abridged rulebook available via the Pathfinder Nexus (powered by Demiplane), Core books are priced $20 for PDFs and $30/$60 for print as a softcover/hardcover; a Beginner Box set with shortened soft-cover rules costs $45

Page Count: 464 (Player Core), 336 (GM Core), 376 (Monster Core), 160 (Combined Beginner Box Softcovers)

Website: https://paizo.com/pathfinder

Resolution Mechanic: 1d20 + Bonus Roll Over system, 5e-style advantage/disadvantage, four degrees of success based on result compared to target number.

Action Economy: Three action points per round; various actions may require more than one point; every character can use one reaction per round of combat.

Characters: Choice-based; players first pick an ancestry and a background and a class (the ABCs) and then tend to have meaningful choices after each level-up; levelling up with XP.

Setting: Important. Golarion, the game's setting, is a world that has been long in development and it shows; powerful magic and influential gods; very clear notions of what the societies of the various peoples of the world are like and how they should behave.

Other Noteworthy Mechanics: Balance between character classes and reliable combat challenge calculations are an important design goal; weight-based inventory system; archetype system for "multiclassing".

Degree of Support: Fantastic. Loads of content gets regularly produced by the game's publisher Paizo; the Pathfinder Infinite program (similar to D&D's Dungeon Master's Guild) provides lots of lore-compliant third-party content; uses the ORC third-party license for content produced outside of the Pathfinder Infinite program. Translations into other languages available but Paizo does not provide a comprehensive list of available languages (only German and French confirmed after brief personal research).

Addendum: The most popular and commercially successful of the listed games; but also by far the most complicated, though it is easier to GM for specificallty than 5e; also I dislike how certain feats create situations where fairly mundane actions get mechanics through these feats instead of being things you can generally do; anyway the reason why it's a 9 on a 1d8 table is because if you wanted to try out Pathfinder 2e you already would have and because while Paizo is better than WotC it's still a flawed big company.

...

So this was an exhausting little project. I hope you found this helpful and I hope you give at least one of these games a shot! A follow-up to this post is not out of the cards, but I don't plan on one.

Before we go, have this poll about which of these systems you're most looking forward to try! Shame it can only be open for one week...

[mysticstronomy]

WILL HUMANS EVER GO TO MARS??

Blog#417

Wednesday, July 10th, 2024.

Welcome back,

Mars has called to us since ancient times. To humans across the eons, the red-tinted speck glinting in the night sky has garnered special attention, with myths and legends wound around its possible ties to Earth. As we observed Mars with telescopes, this fondness graduated into a scientific fascination.

Within only about the last half century, as science has continued to advance, we gained the ability to land scientific instruments on the Red Planet. Beginning with the Viking probes in 1976 and continuing through the Perseverance rover and its flying companion, the Ingenuity helicopter drone, this robotic exploration has allowed humans to discover complex secrets of Mars.

But this is far from the end of our ambitions. Indeed, humans have planned crewed missions to Mars since at least as far back as the 1950s. Scientists and CEOs alike have crafted intricate ideas to establish a presence on the Red Planet, ranging from small-scale research outposts to major settlements. Elon Musk’s plans to put a million people on Mars stand as a particularly bold example.

Yet even with all the money and influence being poured into the goal of putting boot prints in the Martian regolith, there remain considerable doubts that we will ever actually get there. Between economic and ecological problems mounting here on Earth and the major challenges facing even the most basic mission to send humans to Mars, the impetus to spend the money necessary to fund such an initiative has ebbed with the political tides perhaps more so than any other space mission.

But the fascination remains, and the call of Mars is still as loud as it was to the futurists of the past. There seems to be something of a destiny in this call that makes it all but inevitable that humans will one day step down onto the surface of Mars, much as we once first stepped onto the surface of the Moon.

This history itself is instructive. In the earliest days of the Space Race, many people thought it inevitable that humans would one day set foot on the lunar surface, even if it took decades as opposed to the scant few years promised by visionaries like John F. Kennedy. But the illusion of inevitability is not proof of its existence in fact, as many failed predictions through history have shown.

Even the Moon landings were subject to faulty predictions. The New York Times’ 1920 declaration that rockets could not fly through space due to the lack of air comes readily to mind. Yet on July 21, 1969, two men from Earth stepped onto the surface of the Moon, proving all but the most determined doubters wrong. Will their spiritual successors at NASA and other space agencies one day follow suit on Mars? The first person to step on Mars likely walks among us now, and their moment in history may be coming soon.

Originally published on https://www.astronomy.com

COMING UP!!

(Saturday, July 13th, 2024)

"WHAT IS THE COLDEST PLANET IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM??"

[lsdoiphin]

Hares, as you may already know if you've been following my better half @broncoburro or @forevergoldgame (if you're following neither, you're missing huge amounts of context for the setting!), are nothing like the hares of the real world. They are massive leporids from Northern Vestur and one of the few meurian animals remaining after a historic event known as the Great Hunt where humans wiped out most of the planet's remaining meurian species in order to harvest their meur for relics about 350~ish years ago. They are obligate carnivores and known to hunt humans when the opportunity arises.

The baku is a large, lumbering omnivore with a similar ecological niche somewhere between a panda and a regular bear. They're a rare species, endemic to a single far-flung region of the world, having only just barely escaped extinction. See, while the Great Hunt was headed and funded by the Tri-Kingdom, its reach spanned the entire known world - but the further from Vestur it travelled, the less discriminatory the hunts became. The local peoples who were paid to hunt on the Tri-Kingdom's behalf had little idea of what meur was and what meurian animals were actually useful, leading to mass to mass culling of "useless" meur-touched animals like the baku, whose unusual sleep-inducing abilities cannot be wielded by humans. Regardless of their uselessness, the damage had been done to the species, and only the mundane offshoot survives - though rumors persist about meurian baku.

Sphinxes are scavengers that can be found across the deserts and savannas of the mainland. Unlike their meurian cousin, the manticore, they never evolved meurian flame breath, and their 'stinger' is no more than a vestigial sickle buried beneath the fur of their flowing tails. Instead, they specialized further into human mimicry, using their ability to copy human speech to hunt domesticated animals, naive children, and drunkards.

Now you might be thinking: "why would a teenage girl want to own any of these as pets? None of these sound like animals that should be pets." Well, first off: you'd be hard pressed to find a young girl that doesn't want a wolf or a tiger as a pet, that's just how they are, c'mon.

Second, there are three primary reasons Rhea thinks this is a more realistic idea than it is:

Exotic "pet" owners among the upper class: While exotic pet ownership isn't big in Vestur as a whole, it has a notable presence among the Southern upper class, both noble and common. Rhea is the duchess of the Southern Kingdom so she is well aware of every instance of somebody paying excessive amounts of guilder to import something they shouldn't and stick it in their courtyard. As I've mentioned before, this is a sin Ancha is guilty of, having gotten swept up in a past "teacup baku" craze/scam some 4 decades ago. Unlike her peers, however, she kept her baku, Fig, even after he outgrew his alleged "adult size" of 1'9" at the withers. Others culled theirs once they became large enough to cause mass property damage. Ancha knows Fig is a massive, terrifying wild animal and does not recommend anyone repeat her mistake, but being raised in captivity he cannot be returned to the wild and so she's committed to caring for him for as long of his estimated 70~ish year lifespan that she's here for.

Haretouched Northerners: The "haretouched" is a strange phenomenon that exists in the North. Now, we haven't posted a formal explanation of what exactly being haretouched means yet - I'll save that explanation for Dan to write at a later date. In the meantime, to very briefly summarize what it means: occasionally, a hare will bond with a specific human. Those who have bonded to a hare are said to be "haretouched" - or more bluntly, cursed. The haretouched are treated as pariahs by broader society, though they are begrudgingly tolerated in the North itself and destigmatized by Northern nomad clans. While Northern nobility has done its best to keep the haretouched out of their bloodlines (save for the Lord of the Nomads, who is seldom acknolwedged, much less counted), occasionally a fluke will occur regardless and you end up with someone like Quincy or Lamonte. Rhea, of course, is just a Southern bystander who thinks the idea of having a murder-bunny for a friend would kick ass.

Captive beasts performing in circuses: Self-explanatory. Sphinxes especially are a popular choice for exploitative entertainment because of their mimicry abilities, and are often trained to have "conversations" or "sing."

[eretzyisrael]

Good News From Israel

In the 4th Feb 24 edition of Israel’s good news, the highlights include:

Kibbutz Be’eri re-opened its printing press 3 days after the Hamas attack.

Thanks to Israeli tech, a totally paralyzed woman is “virtually” cured.

The first Arab Israeli delegation to visit Auschwitz.

Lab-cultivated coffee cuts water used in production by 98%.

An Israeli startup delivers the world’s first fully electronic truck.

Israelis win international gold medals in ice hockey and fencing.

An embassy for indigenous people is to open in Jerusalem.

Read More: Good News From Israel

Israel’s resilience in the wake of the Oct 7 onslaught has astounded many of its overseas supporters and opponents alike. Israel is making an astonishing comeback, as this week’s positive newsletter highlights.   On the Jewish New Year for trees, JNF-USA volunteers planted thousands of trees at the site of the devastated NOVA music festival. Israel’s largest printing press resumed operation 3 days after Hamas overran the kibbutz. The IDF brought back a tractor stolen by Hamas on Oct 7 from Gaza to its kibbutz owners. Wounded IDF soldiers are being brought back to health thanks to heroic rescues, surgeons using hi-tech medical technology, and empathic volunteers providing rehabilitation, respite, and emotional support.   Aside from the war, Israeli medical technology brought back the ability to communicate to a paralyzed Israeli woman. And an Israeli startup won an international award for regrowing human bone tissue. Meanwhile, two initiatives are restoring trust between Israeli Jews and Arabs.   Israelis are helping the USA bring its aging power grid back to life; and an Israeli startup is recycling waste into fashion products. Israel’s economy is certainly coming back, and a new Resilience fund is helping war-impacted startups make a comeback. Meanwhile El Al is increasing its flights to bring back tourists and to encourage international business.   The warm winter and welcome rains have brought back color into Jerusalem’s streets; Israel’s ice hockey team came back from being banned from a tournament, to winning all its 5 games; and Israel just celebrated the 20th anniversary of its greatest ecological comeback – the rehabilitation of the Hula Valley.   Finally, "they will all come to Jerusalem" – as the world gradually recognizes that the Jewish People have come back to their ancestral homeland, the Indigenous peoples of the world have opened an embassy in Jerusalem. The photo is of the Netanya offices of Elbit Systems, which has helped Israel make a fighting comeback.

[houseofpurplestars]

[Image id: two images of a large set of outdoor stairs between buildings. The second picture shows a few people walking on the steps, which have been painted as the flag of Palestine. /end id]

Last night, a group of activists repainted the famous Bueren steps in Liège, Belgium, as the Palestinian flag. This gesture follows similar actions in France and Belgium, aiming to show the solidarity of Liège with the Palestinian people.

The city of Liège cut all ties with the zionist entity in April 2023 due to the occupation. It is a city within the Wallonia region, which cancelled arms exports to the zionist entity early last month. In addition, Belgium has refused to suspend UNRWA funding and its major trade unions have refused arms exports to the zionist entity since the end of October.

The group that painted the steps stated that they aim to support the demands of the Palestinian people: a permanent ceasefire and a complete withdrawal of the IOF from Gaza, followed by processes of decolonization, reparation, and rehabilitation for human, material, and ecological damages caused by colonization.

t.me/PalestineResist

[fatehbaz]

Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity, a way in which subjects get (what Wynter names) “selected” or “dysselected” from geography and coded into colonial possession through dispossession. The color line of the colonized was not merely a consequence of these structures of colonial power or a marginal effect of those structures; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). Richard Eden, in the popular 1555 publication Decades of the New World, compares the people of the “New World” to a blank piece of “white paper” on which you can “paynte and wryte” whatever you wish. “The Preface to the Reader” describes the people of these lands as inanimate objects, blank slates [...]. [Basically, "Man" is white, while nonwhite people are reduced an aspect of the landscape, a resource.] Wynter suggests that we [...] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar–slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people [...]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. This refiguring of slaves trafficked to gold mines is borne into the language of the inhuman [...].

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The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, [...] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in [...] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. [...] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here [...]. While [this industrialization] [...] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with [...] coal [in the nineteenth century], the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) [...]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery [...].

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Catherine Hall’s project Legacies of British Slave-Ownership makes visible the complicity in terms of structures of slavery and industrialization that organized in advance the categories of dispossession that are already in play and historically constitute the terms of racialized encounter of the Anthropocene. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. As the project empirically demonstrates, these legacies of colonial slavery continue to shape contemporary Britain. A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and [...] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished and investments were made in the Great Western Cotton Company, for example, and in cotton brokers, as well as in big colonial land companies in Canada (Canada Land Company) and Australia (Van Diemen’s Land Company) and a number of colonial brokers. Investments were made in the development of metal and mineralogical technologies [...].

The slave–sugar–coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power [...]. The slave trade [...] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization. Slavery and industrialization were tied by the various afterlives of slavery in the form of indentured and carceral labor that continued to enrich new emergent industrial powers from both the Caribbean plantations and the antebellum South. Enslaved “free” African Americans predominately mined coal in the corporate use of black power or the new “industrial slavery,” [...].

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The labor of the coffee - the carceral penance of the rock pile, “breaking rocks out here and keeping on the chain gang” (Nina Simone, Work Song, 1966), laying iron on the railroads - is the carceral future mobilized at plantation’s end (or the “nonevent” of emancipation). [...]

[T]he racial circumscription of slavery predates and prepares the material ground for Europe and the Americas in terms of both nation and empire building - and continues to sustain it.

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All text above by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[canisvesperus]

DRoP is such a fantastic example of how a massive fandom can fade into obscurity due to censorship and creator hostility towards the fandom. A lot of the young people on this website do not know how big Pern was. It was huge, about as old as Star Trek, and yet everyone knows Star Trek and its influence but few even recognize the name Pern anymore. I’m not going to write a whole essay here, there are tons of great articles on Fanlore about it, plus all of this was a little before my time too. But I am mutuals with one of the most prolific figures in the Pern fandom during the 90s and early 2000s who was threatened with a six figure lawsuit for using some of her OC art to advertise commissions. Any fan who created fanworks that so much as depicted a character/setting/time period from canon, NSFW content, broke the in-universe rules of canon including rules regarding gender and sexuality, depicted lesbian or bisexual OCs, displayed your work outside of author-approved communities, or sold art that so much as resembled Pern dragons (note: they’re just dragons, any dragon artist associating with the fandom could be a target). Literal children roleplaying online with their friends were being bullied by the author. This is the tip of the iceberg as it pertains to the issues of old fandom and I think a lot of you take for granted the freedom we have today. The Powers That Be is hardly even a relevant concept anymore. However, some people seem to have taken it upon themselves to fill this ecological niche. This is also why I’ve honestly been anxious about pushes for stronger copyright protections in light of the AI situation. I fear that TPTB would increasingly take advantage of what any new law entails and what it neglects to specify— with easy and vulnerable targets, human fanartists (and I’m looking at y’all who sell commissions, merch, organize funded projects outside of IP holder permissions), being affected the most. If anything it might be a new opportunity to crack down on infringement as a whole, especially if financial losses associated with derivative works created using AI becomes a wider issue than it currently is. I also hate to see modern fandom reverse engineering the same attitudes and atmosphere of the 20th century, eg. bullying on the basis of canon sanctity, except this time it’s a mob instead of lawyers. Learn your history people.