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Absinthe

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Absinthe
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  • Bring Back The Gypsy Talent Title

    My character is just a tribal princess. Her people spent their days hunting and riding and their nights singing and dancing. So gypsy + hunter/ranger captured it well. Wandering bard does not. In fact, she would find it offensive. Praise-blame poetry was vulgar and bards debased themselves by doing it for unworthy motives. It is wrong for her to call herself a gypsy but it is OK for Nexon to call her a whor* ?

    I think Nexon completely fails to grasp why the right of self-designation is important in a pluralist society.



    Unlike “gypsy”, “bard” was actually a derogatory term. Bards were seen as itinerant trouble makers. And “wandering bard” reinforces the negative stereotype of bards as vagrants, vagabonds, rogues, tramps, drifters. Itinerant communities are constantly having to battle this tendency of settled communities to lump them in with derelicts.

    Of course language is constantly evolving. Sir Walter Scott gave us this romanticized bard as like the lyric poets of Ancient Greece. And “wandering bard” in this romanticized sense can be seen as idyllic (the lyric poet wandering the hills, seeking inspiration).

    Bard in each of these cases has the same referent. They are just different senses of the same word. Gypsy and gypsy on the other hand are capitonyms. The meaning of the word changes based on whether or not it is capitalized. Examples: Turkey (the country)/turkey (the bird), China (the country)/china (porcelain), March (month)/march (walk) or march (frontier). Sometimes these words evolve independently (March/march) and sometimes not (Turkey/turkey; China/china). Nevertheless, most rational people don’t run around claiming turkey is a pejorative for Turks, or that Turkey is a pejorative given by people who see Turks as like turkeys, or that turkey’s “appropriated” their name from the Turks. And most sane people don’t run around calling for bans on Thanksgiving claiming it as a national holiday celebrating anti-Turkish sentiments.


    Gypsy (proper noun)

    In American English, the proper noun “Gypsy” is commonly used in reference to Romani ethnicity. There is no historical evidence of the term ever being offensive or contemptuous. And prior to the 1980s every Romani-American sub-culture translated its self-designation to English as Gypsy. But some newer immigrants like the Sinti and Roma have never called themselves Gypsy. To call them Gypsy is to deny them the right of self-designation. Some might take offense. So it is generally recommended to use the term cautiously if at all.

    Where I live Romani-Americans traditionally designate themselves as either Rom or Gypsy. Rom expresses belonging to a Gypsy community. Gypsy expresses belonging to the Gypsy ethnic group. One can be Rom and not be Gypsy. One can be Gypsy and not be Rom. So the terms are not synonyms despite efforts by some to treat them as such. And they don’t typically get offended if people don’t know the difference.


    Gypsy (common noun)

    In American English, the common noun “gypsy” is just a generic term that refers to any itinerant person. When it was coined it was obviously in the sense of “like a Gypsy”, who were at the time itinerant people. But the term hasn’t been connected to any racial or ethnic group for well over 500 years. And there is no reliable source that even urges caution when using this term, much less urging us not to use it.

    In 2018, a woman in Portland, Oregon claimed that it should be taken as offensive. And naturally every wannabe social justice warrior had to jump on the bandwagon.
    It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

    The Gypsy Robe incident is a perfect example. One of the claims surrounding the Gypsy Robe tradition was that it “appropriated” the name of an ethnic group. This was blatantly false. The name actually derived from the fact that the robe passed from one show to another. The other claim, that Gypsy is a pejorative, was also blatantly false. In the end they gave into fear that the issue would divide the community and changed the name. But even they didn’t go so far as to change the name for those already carrying the title. Nexon just took the bullshit to an all new level.
    Darkpixie99KensamaofmariSherri
  • Cannot see the White Dragon Messenger in Dunbarton

    G3 is part of the storyline. It doesn't make you a dark knight. There is a side quest for that.
    MizukiHayama
  • "Aossi"?

    LOL Wikipedia.

    Sluagh sidhe is just how Scottish-Gaelic refers to Scottish fairies collectively. It translates to Irish as “aos si”.

    It translates to English as “fairie folk” or “sidhe”. I prefer sidhe. Lowland fairies are very similar to highland fairies. This suggests a common origin. But English fairies are very different from Scottish fairies. This is not because they are different types of fairies. It is because they are two words from two different languages (or dialects) that look or sound the same but mean very different things. (Scottish-Gaelic faire; Middle English fairy)

    There is nothing even remotely irrational or supernatural about the sidhe. They were just roving bands of hunters. Each was associated with a particular habitation. Each habitation represented a hunting ground or sidh.


    Things like imps, goblins, and trolls are blatantly English. And the banshee is not a sidhe despite the name. Orginal Irish folklore does have a bean-shidh (female sidhe) who sang laments for the recently departed in certain Irish families. But the banshee was an invention of English speakers.

    Elves ... it depends on what you mean by elves. Mabinogi elves are town folk, not fairie folk. Scottish elves were sidhe. In the south-central highlands of Scotland are the ruins of crannogs and ring forts. This was once the most peaceful and prosperous community in all of northern Britain. The Gaels referred to them as "daoine sith" (men of peace). It was said they preferred to hunt and ride rather than defend the kingdom. Their story co-evolved with the Arthurian legend leading to the romanticized sidhe that inspired romantics and neoromantics like Tolkien. In the 13th century some folk fancied the ruins as ruins of castles of elf knights. Elf in this sense most likely referred to their location in the upper part of Alba (lol ... Alban knights). Anglian albi evolved into Northumbrian aelf.


    Scottish folklore isn’t really all that elaborate or complex.

    The most prominent trooping fairies are the fairie folk and the selkie folk. Both are quite human and roved in bands.

    The most prominent solitary fairies are water spirits: kelpies and brownies. Water spirits were ubiquitous to Scotland. Every stream and waterfall seemed to have one. Their natures were as varied as the waters they inhabited. Kelpie was originally just a generic term for these water spirits. And Scottish brownies (uruisg) were essentially just kelpies that became more social towards the end of the harvest and hung around the farms. During this period libations were made to them similar to those made to household spirits elsewhere. Later the term kelpie became equated with large bodies of water and they consequentially became more dangerous. But then they also helped millers. With nature, things are seldom as simple as black and white.



    Anyhow, the game borrows words from British and Irish literary traditions. But that’s about it. The Sluagh in the game is just a possessing spirit. That's not a very "Celtic" explanation at all. Spirit intrusion = soul loss or what we would call loss of mind. Good job. But for a Celtic feel you'd want to be able to explain with a breach of taboo theory instead like the Scottish-Gaelic geas or Welsh tynged.

    Since my main is a Scottish elf she would probably say someone put a tynged on her.

    The Sluagh thing was nonsensical, which kind of threw her off at first. Her understanding was that Eiren was a bean-shidh (woman of the fairies) under a geas. In the end the geas was removed.. Whether this is true or not i don't know. But it worked really well. That was the first story I've played through so far that actually felt "Celtic'.
    pawcalypse
  • Do people have no manners during training?

    I get the point. I just don’t agree.

    The only one who seems to feel a sense of entitlement is the original poster. We are talking about public spaces, not personal spaces. Her belief that it is her personal space is false.

    Her belief that she is entitled to control public spaces by virtue of first come first served is false. Nowhere does any agreement we’ve entered into grant her such entitlements. She is the very definition of self-entitled.

    The first come first served argument is self-serving nonsense. Even if we accept the ridiculous proposal that queuing is the only polite and moral way to resolve such conflicts, there are other perfectly valid ways to schedule queues. Sharing is the most obvious since most of us learned basic sandbox etiquette as children. But like the last player could just as easily argue that precedence should go to them based on last come first served (stack). Someone who arrives last shouldn’t have to wait simply because whoever showed up first feels too entitled to care that someone else wants to train there too. It is just a matter of the OP being polite and realizing that they are players too and not NPCs and blah blah blah. These sorts of arguments just have no substance.

    If self-entitlement and emotional pandering is all you have to stand on, then you have nothing,
    GretaShaelimintielDaktaro