Etreageometrievariable - Être à Géométrie Variable

Warforged bard is named Gender

It’s a social construct

Getting salt from gamer boys in my inbox.

Listen up turd turrets, I WANTED to just play video games, I WANTED to just have fun, I NEVER wanted my gaming to be political or a struggle, I just wanted to play.

But you wouldn’t fucking let me, you brought up my gender, you judged me based on it, YOU made it political.

So now I WILL wreck everything with my fucking feminism, I am the feminist nightmare you fucking created.

Witness me.

All of Final Fantasy VIII in a Nutshell:

Everyone Else: SEIFER NO

Seifer: SEIFER YES

*frantically takes notes*

I always find it kind of weird that matriarchal cultures in fiction are always “women fight and hunt, men stay home and care for the babies” because world-building-wise, it makes no sense

think about it. like, assuming that gender even works the same in this fantasy culture as it does in ours, with gender conflated with sex (because let’s be real, all of these stories assume that), men wouldn’t be the ones to make the babies, so why would they be the ones to care for the babies? why is fighting and hunting necessary for leadership?

writing a matriarchy this way is just lazy, because you’re just taking the patriarchy and just swapping the people in it, rather than actually swapping the culture. especially when there are so many other cool things you could explore. like, what if it’s not a swap of roles but of what society deems important?

maybe a matriarchy would have hunting and fighting be part of the man’s job, but undervalued. like taking the trash out or cleaning toilets: necessary, but gross, and not noble or interesting. maybe farming is now the most important thing, and is given a lot of spiritual and cultural weight.

how would law work? what crimes would exist, and what things would be considered too trivial to make illegal? who gets what property? why?

how would religion work? how would you mark time or the passage into adulthood? what would marriage look like? if bloodlines are through the mother, bastardy wouldn’t even be a concept - how does that work?

what qualities would be most important in a person? how would you define strength or leadership? what knowledge would be the most coveted and protected? what acts or roles are considered useless or degrading?

like, you can’t just take our current society and say you’re turning it on its head when you’re just regurgitating it wholesale. you have to really think about why things are the way they are and change that. 

apparently, evangelical cartoonist Jack Chick passed away last night

let us remember him by taking a moment to laugh once again at this classic

Idée de JdR (pitch)

2015: les USA n'ont pas pris part à la seconde guerre mondiale, le débarquement n'a pas eu lieu. Épuisée, l'Angleterre a rendue les armes, à la suite de quoi l'étreinte Nazi a étouffé toutes les poches de résistance en Europe. Contraints de fuir, des centaines de français trouvent refuge dans les colonies.

Pendant plus de 60 ans, le IIIème Reich s'est assoupi sur ses victoires passées. Mais l'appétit dévorant de ce géant autoritaire et militariste n'est jamais rassasié. Alors que ses yeux gourmands se tournent vers les restes de ses ennemis d'antan, les descendants des réfugiés de la guerre, craignent de revivre l'Horreur une fois de plus... Lorsque rafles, censures et raids anti-libertaires s'abattent à nouveau sur le Monde, le feu d'une révolte sans précédent s'allume... Le laisserez vous s'éteindre, ou brûlez vous de ce feu intense qui abat les dictatures?

Il y a sans doute pas mal d'objections historiques à apporter à ce pitch de base, mais l'idée m'a bien plus. Apparemment, je suis pas le seul, vu que j'ai déjà un joueur et deux joueuses qui se sont manifestés!

I apologize if this comes off as disrespectful to Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin. Or their families. Or YOU, the reader. I’m not about that. That’s not why I drew this.

I am just really freaked out that 40% of Americans (and 47% of White Americans) do not think that the killings and violence in Ferguson ‘raise any racial issues.’ Fellow White Persons, this is our chance to learn. This is our chance to change.

When Trayvon Martin was murdered because Full Grown Men in America are frightened to violence by the presence black children, the dialogue turned very quickly into a conversation about gun control.

And gun control is an issue that deserves our attention.

But it won’t change the massive poverty in Black America. The arrest rate. The education statistics. The institutional, systemic, casual, and passive racism that plagues our country.

And it wouldn’t have saved Michael Brown.

Anyway. I’m sorry if this comes off as disrespectful or insincere or preachy. I’m sorry if my execution (or personality) gets in the way of what I’m trying to say. I am an imperfect artist, an imperfect person, and I am, undoubtedly, blinded to a million things by my own glaring whiteness. So this might be… Lord, this might be awful. I’m so sorry if it’s awful. Really.

But. I just keep thinking… Look, my wife is pregnant with our first child. A boy. We’re nervous, we’re excited, we’re SO ANXIOUS because what the hell do you do with babies? WE don’t know. But if we were a black family… in this country… we would be so terrified. Because we live in a nation that murders the children of black parents, puts it on the news WITH RIOTS AND TEAR GAS as decoration, and still half of us don’t even see it as a problem. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine bringing a child into that reality, to face the odds we lay out for black kids?

That would break me. I’ve never known anything like that. No one should ever know anything like that.

So let’s talk to our friends about race. Lets talk to our families. And when actual victims of racism try to tell us what’s going on in, say, a peaceful community protest as they are being gassed and shot at by cops WE SHOULD LISTEN TO AND BELIEVE THEM. Let’s talk to each other about this until we are all on the same page.

And then let’s turn the damn page.

Rappel cordial que les artworks de L5R = <3 (Et ceux de Mario Wibisono en particulier)

Bayushi Misaki by MarioWibisono

(source unknown)

Rogue Studies Resources

1. Masterposts

Thieves’ Cant Masterpost

Lock Picking Masterpost

Dagger/Knife Fighting Masterpost

Rogues in Fantasy Literature Masterpost

D&D 5e: Homebrew Roguish Archetypes Compendium

Building a Rogue in D&D 3.5: Collected Resources

Traps Masterpost

2. Tools

AdBlock Plus

Sci-Hub (active as of May 2018; if broken, check here for new link)

Internet Archive Digital Library

Project Gutenberg

Wikipedia

3. Bibliography 

Bandits and Outlaws

Eric Hobsbawm, Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels (1960); Bandits (1969)

Anton Blok, “The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered”, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 14, No 4 (1972)

Eric Hobsbawm, “Social Bandits: Reply”, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 14, No 4 (1972)

Shi Nai'an, Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh (14th c.)

Stephen Basdeo, Geste of Robin Hood blog, especially the tags Robin Hood, Outlaws and Bandits

University of Rochester, The Robin Hood Project

Robin Hood Bold Outlaw of Barnsdale and Sherwood

Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1819)

Valérie Toureille, Vol et brigandage au Moyen Âge (2012)

Clair Hayden Bell (transl.), Peasant life in Old German epics; Meier Helmbrecht and Der arme Heinrich (1931)

This Rogue, The Bandit / Irregular / Soldier loop (2017)

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)

Walter Scott, Rob Roy (1818)

Charles Macfarlane, The lives and exploits of banditti and robbers in all parts of the world (1858)

John Gill, El Tempranillo (1805-1833), the Andalusian Robin Hood

Bogdan-Vlad Vătavu, “The world of the hajduks”. Bandit subcultures in 19th century Romania and their balladry (2013)

Alexander Pushkin, The Brigand Brothers (1822); Dubrovsky (1832);  Kirdjali (1834)

James J. Farsolas, Historical reality and legend in Alexander Pushkin’s short story Kirdjali (1991)

Gergana Georgieva, The Kircali Time as Metonymy

Prosper Merimée, Carmen (1845)

Edmond About, The King of the Mountains  / Le Roi des montagnes (1856)

Nathan Brown, Brigands and State Building: The Invention of Banditry in Modern Egypt (1990)

Paul Sant Cassia, Better Occasional Murders than Frequent Adulteries: Banditry, Violence and Sacrifice in the Mediterranean (2000)

Spyros Tsoutsoumpis, Land of the Kapedani: Brigandage, Paramilitarism and Nation-building in 20th Century Greece; ‘A history of violence’: Paramilitarism, politics and organized crime during the Greek civil war (1945-1949)

Billy Jaynes Chandler, King of the Mountain: The Life and Death of Giuliano the Bandit (1988)

Rogues and Vagabonds

J.J. Jusserand, English wayfaring life in the middle ages (1920)

Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)

Sonia T. Banerji, Sturdy rogues and wanton wenches: response to vagrancy and development of the Tudor poor laws, 1530-1597 (1995)

This Rogue, No rest for the wicked: Anti-vagrancy laws in Tudor England, 1495-1604 (2017)

William Harrison, A Description of Elizabethan England (1577)

Frank Aydelotte, Elizabethan rogues and vagabonds (1913)

John Awdely, The Fraternitye of Vacabondes (1565)

Thomas Harman, A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors (1566)

Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache (1599)

A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in Britain, 1560-1640 (1985)

Carol Moore, Poor Relief in Elizabethan England

E. B. Gent, A new dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew (1698)

Phil James, Moll Cutpurse: The ruler of the London underworld in the 17th century was an actor, a thief, a fraudster, a folk hero—and a woman. (2015)

Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker & Jennifer Panek, The Roaring Girl: Authrotative Text, Contexts, Criticism (2011)

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722)

John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728)

Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751)

Rictor Norton, The Georgian Underworld: A Study of Criminal Subcultures in Eighteenth-Century England (2012)

James Caulfield, Blackguardiana: or, A dictionary of rogues (1793)

William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance (1840)

Benedict Seymour, Notes on “The Last Days of Jack Sheppard”: Capital Crimes and Paper Claims (2009)

Stephen Basdeo, Rogue Fiction tag in Geste of Robin Hood 

Urban Underworld and the City

Shawn Norris, Subura: Rome’s Original Suburb (2015)

Norman Pounds, The Medieval City (2005)

David Nicholas, The growth of the medieval city: from late antiquity to the early 14th century (1997); The later medieval city: 1300-1500 (1997)

William Benham and Charles Welch, Mediaeval London (1901)

Thomas Frederick Tout, A Mediaeval Burglary (1916)

Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (1987)

Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame / Notre Dame de Paris (1831)

La cour des miracles: Un repaire de truands, mendiants et prostituées / Les mendiants se font bandits / Ni roi, ni Dieu

unknown author, François Villon (1431–1463)

François Villon, Œuvres complètes; Poems (transl.‎ David Georgi, 2012)

Mike Dash, Islam’s Medieval Underworld (2013)

C. E. Bosworth, The Mediaeval Islamic Underworld: The Banū Sāsān in Arabic Society and Literature (1976) 

John Freely, Istanbul: The Imperial City (1998)

Fariba Zarinebaf, Crime and punishment in Istanbul 1700-1800 (2010)

Peter Linebaugh, Tyburn: a study of crime and the labouring poor in London during the first half of the eighteenth century (1975)

PBS.org, 18th Century London: its daily life and hazards

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Black London: Life before Emancipation (1995)

Anonymous, The London Guide and Stranger’s Safeguard against the Cheats, Swindlers, and Pickpockets (1819)

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1886)

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, Volume IV: Those that will not work, comprising; Prostitutes. Thieves. Swindlers. Beggars. (1861)

Heather Shore, Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London (1999); London’s Criminal Underworlds, c.1720-c.1930: A Social and Cultural History (2015)

Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (2000); London Under (2011)

Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (1928)

Craig Gemeiner, The Dirty Tricks of the French Apache

Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (1928); Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (1964)

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume III: Century, Chapter 1. What Keeps Mankind Alive? (2009)

This Rogue, Epitaph (Ballad in Which Macheath Begs All Men For Forgiveness), and The Threepenny Opera censored (2016)

Jarrod Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers: The Myth of Old Odessa (2011)

Isaac Babel, Odessa Tales (1926)

Roberto Arlt, The Mad Toy (1926); The Seven Madmen (1929); The Flame-Throwers (1931)

Jorge Luis Borges, A Universal History of Infamy (1935)

Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers / Notre Dame des Fleurs (1943); The Thief’s Journal (1949)

Darrell J. Steffensmeier, The Fence (1986)

Deborah Lamm Weisel, Contemporary Gangs: An Organizational Analysis (2002)

Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City (2016)

Various, The Story of Cities series / The Guardian (2016)

David Harvey, The right to the city (2008)

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

H.G. Wells, “The probable diffusion of great cities”, in Anticipations (1901)

Allan Jacobs, Great Streets (1993)

K. Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory since 1968 (1998)

City-Building, City Structure Models (2014)

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)

Prisons and Gallows

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975); On the Role of Prisons (1975)

Andrew Dilts, To Kill a Thief: Punishment, Proportionality, and Criminal Subjectivity in  Locke’s Second Treatise (2012)

Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, Vols. I & II (1898)

Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (2005)

Guy Geltner, A Cell of Their Own: The Incarceration of Women in Late Medieval Italy (2013)

Guy Geltner, Isola non isolata. Le Stinche in the Middle Ages (2008)

William Andrews, Bygone Punishments (1899)

Stefanos Daskalakis, The Imaginary Prisons of Piranesi (2017)

Uwe Böker, Title-pages and Frontispieces of Popular Accounts and Newgate Calendars (1600-1870) (2007)

The Newgate Calendar (1740-1842)

David Whitehouse, Origins of the police (2014)

Jacky Tronel, Le ferrement des forçats au départ de la prison de Bicêtre (2014)

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897); The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1897)

Jean Genet, The Miracle of the Rose / Miracle de la Rose (1946)

Hanns von Hofer, Punishment and Crime in Scandinavia, 1750–2008 (2011)

Tom Murton & Joe Hyams, Accomplices to the crime: the Arkansas prison scandal (1969)

Erwin James, The Norwegian prison where inmates are treated like people (2013)

Elisabeth de Kleer, Dragons in the Department of Corrections (2017)

ExecutedToday.com

Corsairs and Pirates

Philip Gosse, The History Of Piracy (1932)

Colin Woodard, The Republic of Pirates (2007) 

Joris Leverink, Pirates, Peasants and Proletarians (2016)

David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates (1995)

Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates (1724)

Daniel Defoe, The king of pirates: being an account of the famous enterprises of Captain Avery (1719)

John Rattenbury, Memoirs of a Smuggler (1837)

Charles Ellms, The Pirates Own Book: Authentic Narratives of the Most Celebrated Sea Robbers (1837)

Anonymous, Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy (18??)

Joshua Michael White, Catch and Release: Piracy, Slavery, and Law in the Early Modern Ottoman Mediterranean (2012)

Adrian Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean (2010)

Stanley Lane-Poole, The Story of the Barbary Corsairs (1890)

Lord Byron, The Corsair (1814)

Molly Greene, Catholic pirates and Greek merchants: A maritime history of the Mediterranean (2010)

C. R. Pennell, The geography of piracy: northern Morocco in the mid-nineteenth century

Ernle Bradford, The Sultan’s Admiral: The life of Barbarossa (1968)

Peter Earle, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (1970)

Highwaymen

Gillian Spraggs, Outlaws and Highwaymen: Robbery in English Society and Culture (2001)

Bret McCabe, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (2015)

Alexander Smith, A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, Shoplifts, & Cheats of Both Sexes (1714)

Patrick Parrinder, Highway Robbery and Property Circulation in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives

Robert Hopps, Narratives of Crime and Disorder. Representations of Robbery and Burglary in the London Press, 1780-1830 (2017)

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

Stephen Basdeo, Highwaymen tag in Geste of Robin Hood

OutlawsAndHighwaymen.com

Mafia and Organised Crime

Kelly Barksby, Constructing criminals: the creation of identity within criminal mafias (2013)

Filippo Spadafora, Origins of the Sicilian Mafia (2010)

This Rogue, Mafia Lore: Honour and Blood (2016)

Mario Puzo, The Godfather (1969)

Pino Arlacchi, Mafia Business: The Mafia Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1988)

Letizia Paoli, Italian Organised Crime: Mafia Associations and Criminal Enterprises (2004)

Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (1993)

John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (2004)

Henner Hess, Mafia and Mafiosi (1998)

Marco Gasparini, The Mafia: History and Legend

Alexander Stille, Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (1995)

Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (2001)

Rebels and Illegalists

Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt / L'homme révolté (1951)

The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt (2016)

Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (1973)

Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978)

Juliet Barker, 1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt (2014)

Vincent Challet, La révolte des Tuchins: banditisme social ou sociabilité villageoise? (1998)

Steven Attewell, Revolt From Below – The Impact of the Smallfolk on the Game of Thrones (2016)

This Rogue, Stealing back the commons (2017)

Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, aka Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels (1959); Bandits (1969); Cities and Insurrections (1975)

Bernard Thomas, The Lives of Sailor, Thief, Anarchist, Convict Alexandre Marius Jacob (1879-1954) (2013)

Jean-Marc Delpech, Parcours et Réseaux d'un Anarchiste: Alexandre Marius Jacob, 1879-1954 (2006)

Richard Parry, The Bonnot Gang: The story of the French illegalists (1987)

Doug Emrie, The illegalists (1995)

Chris Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898-1937 (2005)

Antonio Tellez, Sabaté, Guerilla Extraordinary / La Guerriglia Urbana in Spagna: Sabaté (1974)

Klaus Schönberger, VaBanque: Bankraub - Theorie, Praxis, Geschichte (2000)

Evan Johnston, The wonderful world of bossnapping

Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (1971)

lse Biel, Zapatista Materiality Disseminated: A Co-Construction Reconsidered (2012)

Mike Duncan, Revolutions Podcast

Other

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965)

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)

Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932)

Paul Lafargue, The Right To Be Lazy (1883)

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

Joseph L Goldstein, The card players of Caravaggio, Cézanne and Mark Twain (2011)

Martin C. Langeveld, Confidence: A natural history of the con man (2007)

Luke Owen Pike, A history of crime in England, Vols.I & II (1873)

Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900 (1987)

Karl Marx, “Apologist Conception of the Productivity of All Professions”, in Theories of Surplus Value (1863)

Rachel Shteir, The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting (2011)

Linda Stratmann, The Secret Poisoner: A Century of Murder (2016)

Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)

Jason Porath, Rejected Princesses: Tales of History’s Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics (2016)

This blog’s theory tag

And Greek bibliography here.