[In the universe's scope, we know nothing]

I took a look at the kickstarter page, and I can tell that representation really isn’t a priority there. For example, their £600,000 goal of adding miniquests in which a female player character is even possible came after “Live Medieval In-Game Music” and “Symphonic Orchestra Soundtrack”, and remains unfulfilled as of yet:

However, being able to “seduce local women” is already a part of the base game.

It’s interesting how the game creators are actually pushing the whole “as historically accurate as possible” line of reasoning:

We want to make the experience as authentic as possible – real-world locations, real castles that don’t look like something from Disneyland, period-accurate armors and costumes, combat and fencing systems designed in collaboration with the most knowledgeable, skillful swordsmen around, and a story based on actual, historic events.

But apparently, women and people of color just aren’t realistic enough I suppose.

Ironically, my blog’s main picture (The Queen of Sheba, a Black woman) is actually a Bohemian Illustration from the 15th century (c. 1405), exactly when and where their story is set:

Bohemia was located in Central Europe, around where the Czech Republic is currently. I have a fair amount of works tagged or containing Bohemia/Czech Republic, including this illumination of the Martyrdom of Saint Maurice:

And Master Theodoric was a Bohemian artist, painter of many religious images including this one of Saint Jerome:

He also did a pretty great Saint Maurice:

And then of course there’s John of Oppava’s work, a master of the Prague School of Illumination in the late 14th century:

Prague was the center of quite a few Medieval European seminal works, including the first frescoes depicting the specifically Black King in Adoration of the Magi.

As for events and history involving Mongolian folks, well. The Battle of Legnica is obviously a thing that happened, Central Europe including Bohemia and what is now the Czech Republic were affected by the invasion. The descendents on the Mongols in this area became known as the Crimean Tatars and more or less stayed put (this would be c. the 15th Century), and had mostly converted to Islam by that point.

For a more detailed explanation of the ethnic makeup of Bohemia during/immediately preceding this era and the influx of settlers (called “proto-colonization by some historians, but it’s really kind of not), check out Central Europe in the High Middle Ages: Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, c. 900-c. 1300 by Nora Berend, Przemysław Urbańczyk, Przemysław Wiszewski, Chapter 5: Society and Economy (p. 250), and Chapter 7: New developments of the 13th Century (The Mongol Invasion; p. 244).

There’s also East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000-1500 by Jean W Sedlar, Chapter 13: Ethnicity and Nationalism (p. 401) to read more about the integration of the Turkic-speaking Cumans into the overall identity of the region. Keep in mind, however, that many of these distinctions do not reflect “race” as we think of it or have it now, but denote religious and/or ethnic affiliations. Which is not the same as race. It does however, show just how diverse and well-traveled the general population was at that time, and how much immigration to the area there was: from Italy, Greece, Germany, Turkey, and Central/South Asia.

Joke’s on them when you finally run into an available monster and get not only a lover, but an adventure partner only capable of being found in romance novels. ;;3

Really, though, just shrug and play it off. You can only be hurt by light teasing from friends and family if you actually take it as offensive or meaning to be hurtful.

In life, there will be dozens of people you meet whose entire natures are joking or ball-busting, or ribbing, or whatever-you-call-it. This is a genuine personality type, and they never actually mean harm–more often than not, they’re testing you to see your own nature and how well you can get along with anybody.

Researchers demonstrate ‘mind-reading’ brain-decoding tech

Researchers have demonstrated how to decode what the human brain is seeing by using artificial intelligence to interpret fMRI scans from people watching videos, representing a sort of mind-reading technology.

The advance could aid efforts to improve artificial intelligence and lead to new insights into brain function. Critical to the research is a type of algorithm called a convolutional neural network, which has been instrumental in enabling computers and smartphones to recognize faces and objects.

“That type of network has made an enormous impact in the field of computer vision in recent years,” said Zhongming Liu, an assistant professor in Purdue University’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Our technique uses the neural network to understand what you are seeing.”

Convolutional neural networks, a form of “deep-learning” algorithm, have been used to study how the brain processes static images and other visual stimuli. However, the new findings represent the first time such an approach has been used to see how the brain processes movies of natural scenes, a step toward decoding the brain while people are trying to make sense of complex and dynamic visual surroundings, said doctoral student Haiguang Wen.

He is lead author of a new research paper appearing online Oct. 20 in the journal Cerebral Cortex. A YouTube video is available at https://youtu.be/Qh5_uMGXl1g.

The researchers acquired 11.5 hours of fMRI data from each of three women subjects watching 972 video clips, including those showing people or animals in action and nature scenes. First, the data were used to train the convolutional neural network model to predict the activity in the brain’s visual cortex while the subjects were watching the videos. Then they used the model to decode fMRI data from the subjects to reconstruct the videos, even ones the model had never watched before.

The model was able to accurately decode the fMRI data into specific image categories. Actual video images were then presented side-by-side with the computer’s interpretation of what the person’s brain saw based on fMRI data.

“For example, a water animal, the moon, a turtle, a person, a bird in flight,” Wen said. “I think what is a unique aspect of this work is that we are doing the decoding nearly in real time, as the subjects are watching the video. We scan the brain every two seconds, and the model rebuilds the visual experience as it occurs.”

The researchers were able to figure out how certain locations in the brain were associated with specific information a person was seeing.

“Neuroscience is trying to map which parts of the brain are responsible for specific functionality,” Wen said. “This is a landmark goal of neuroscience. I think what we report in this paper moves us closer to achieving that goal. A scene with a car moving in front of a building is dissected into pieces of information by the brain: one location in the brain may represent the car; another location may represent the building. Using our technique, you may visualize the specific information represented by any brain location, and screen through all the locations in the brain’s visual cortex. By doing that, you can see how the brain divides a visual scene into pieces, and re-assembles the pieces into a full understanding of the visual scene.”

The researchers also were able to use models trained with data from one human subject to predict and decode the brain activity of a different human subject, a process called cross-subject encoding and decoding. This finding is important because it demonstrates the potential for broad applications of such models to study brain function, even for people with visual deficits.

Scientists have discovered a previously unknown ‘supercolony’ of Adélie penguins, hidden in plain sight on Antarctica’s remote Danger Islands.

There are more than 750,000 pairs of penguins living on the islands - 1.5 million animals in total - which is more than the rest of the Antarctic Peninsula combined.

Not only is this an incredible reminder that we still have so much yet to uncover about the planet we live in, it also provides scientists with hope. Up until now, there were fears the penguin species was declining rapidly due to climate change.