A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

Supporters of the  Malagasy Uprising are forced to annul their pledges to the rebel cause in a cattle sacrifice staged by the French military, 1948 "Any fool can get into an ocean/But - - it takes a Goddess/To get out of one."   Hello, I hope everyone's doing ok. Mostly alright myself, though these past few days have been pretty rough at times. Kinda feel like it might help to write about my feelings here before I get to the post proper. Skip down to the next bold heading to avoid hearing about some intense stuff.  One of my cousins is missing - the serious kind of missing, not just the habitual itinerancy and spotty communication you come to expect from migrant family abroad. This isn't the first time it's happened to us, losing people to dangers of the road or the Med itself, but it is the first time that I've been old enough to be brought in on the news  (the modern clan network - mark of adulthood to be entered into your subsubtribe's Whatsapp groupch...

The next generation of Vezo sailors involved in serious play. Andavadoaka, Western Madagascar "In brief, if Western historicity (at least in the twentieth century) can be summed up by the much invoked figure of Benjamin’s allegorical angel of history, that is hardly the Sakalava vision. Instead of turning back toward the mounting ruins of the past onto which the angel mournfully gazes, Sakalava face the future, bearing the past on their backs, carrying it with them." - Michael Lambek, The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar I've been setting up a SWN game for some of my high schoolers (all of whom have 0 experience with TTRPGs with the exception of one girl who watches a lot of actual plays but hasn't joined a table herself) and I'm noticing stuff that I wouldn't have expected: Procedural Generation Trying to push myself out of my comfort zone and use more proc-gen tools for my games (SWN is a good system for it.) Initially intend...