Lexi

After years of creating Neo-Khuzdul lessons, grammar documents, dictionaries, exercises and other study materials, I am delighted to announce that Scholarium has officially opened its doors.

Scholarium is a completely free interactive learning platform where you can follow the Neo-Khuzdul course, complete exercises and examinations, practise with flashcards and crosswords, play language games, follow Story Letters, earn badges and track your progress through a guided lesson path.

It brings the course and all its supporting materials together in one place, while introducing many new ways to practise and experience the language.

The included introductory video offers a first look inside Scholarium and some of the features waiting for you.

I have also written a longer article about how the idea for Scholarium began, how the platform developed and what this launch means for the older course systems, you can read it on the article wordpress blog.

A New Home for the Course

Scholarium now replaces the separate systems previously used to access different parts of the course.

Brainscape is no longer required. Scholarium has its own lesson-based flashcard system, including Practice, Memory and Challenge modes. Support for the Neo-Khuzdul content on Brainscape will end soon as well.

The downloadable Patreon lesson packages will also be removed within one week and replaced with a link to Scholarium. All their content, together with much more, is already available through the guided Scholarium lesson path.

The Google Forms exercises and examinations will also be taken offline within one week. Scholarium now includes its own exercise and examination system, created specifically for the course and offering far more possibilities than Google Forms.

The YouTube video lessons will remain available, but they are also included directly within Scholarium, where they can be watched without the advertisements you may otherwise encounter on YouTube.

Those who have already started the course through Patreon, Brainscape, YouTube or Google Forms can request to begin Scholarium at a particular lesson. However, I strongly recommend starting with Lesson 1, as Scholarium contains many new stories, games, exercises and activities that were not part of the earlier learning path.

The doors are open. Enter Scholarium and begin your studies today:

ENTER SCHOLARIUM

Welcome, Scholars.

Ride with me, Sir Knight

Full Timeline (e1-e31)

I'll confess the Bolaire discourse is bothering me. I'll own up front that generally i like Tal, enjoy his gameplay, and appreciate his commitment to interesting and unique characters. So yeah, I'm probably a bit biased.

But I want to break this down from the (objectively true) perspective that Bolaire is an abuse victim. I see a ton of discourse about whether or not Bolaire is right/being fully honest/acting reasonable with regards to Thjazi and this, to me, feels like willful blindness and victim blaming with regards to Bolaire's history.

Let's take the facts as we know them:

Bolaire was created by the halflings for the direct purpose of killing Rauwyn

Bolaire and his siblings succeed and are scattered

Bolaire is picked up and used throughout various conflicts without his consent because he doesn't have free will.

Bolaire gains free will

Bolaire murders his captors to escape being used against his will

Thjazi at some point figures out who/ what Bolaire is and blackmails him into his service

Amid all the conversations about the ethics of Bolaire's body snatching, about his outbursts and bad behavior and cattiness is how Bolaire is a victim of both his creators (who built him in an age of magic with knowledge our current PCs don't have access to, but presumably with the exact understanding of what they were doing) and Thjazi, who forced him into service against his will. I've seen plenty of discourse about how Bolaire is a monster for how he treats the bodies he rides and i see a lot of talk about consent for everyone BUT Bolaire so I'm gonna refrain the way he was treated in new terms in hopes it offers some insight into Tal's (imo) really nuanced gameplay.

*Imagine bolaire was built to seduce a god instead*

-your form was built for a singular purpose or service

- you're given no choice what you do with your form. You do as you were made. You seduce as your told. Because you have no mobility in your form you must share a body with one of your captors without your consent as they carry out the task you're designed to do- whether you like it or not

- you gain sentience and must use your seduction skillset to escape your captors, who have been forcing you to use your skillset against your will.

- you win your freedom, are forced to find a form so you can continue to exist. You choose the least kind person you can because you know you will destroy the body eventually.

-you build a life of sorts and begin to try to understand the world you're in and who you are, you've only ever known what you're told you do.

- some guy finds out "what you used to do" and decides he'd like some of that action, that someone with your skillset would be useful to his machinations and so he begins to threaten you and blackmails you back into the life of service you've just barely escaped.

Do those lists look pretty much the same? They look pretty the same to me. If you felt differently about the second list, thinking of this is terms of forced SA, than you do the murders, I posit you're probably wrong about Bolaire- or at least how Tal is playing him.

Tal's behavior isn't out of line or out of pocket. He's playing an abuse victim with no support who's being blamed for their abuse because their friend group loved their very charismatic abuser.

I've seen mile long essays justifying folx who've killed their abusers but we think Bolaire is being a little bitch because he rightfully called Thjazi an asshole? We want to bend ourselves into knots and cry buckets over Occtis (rightfully so, let me be clear) because he grew up in the Tachonis household but we don't feel bad for Bolaire's entire sentient existence being one forced murder after another? We're weeping over Azune's sister (another murderer btw) and his (justifiable) identity crisis and crash out because of it but we don't allow Bolaire the same over his *5 other siblings*? And that's to speak nothing of the fact that it's Thjazi's fault neither of them have been able to search for them in the post-rebellion years?

Y'all. Y'all.

Come. *ON*

And just- just worth pointing out that according to the NIH has conducted studies on the mindsets and behaviors of abuse victims and here's a list of the most common:

increased aggression

depression

distrust

alienation

tendency to withdrawal and isolation

impaired self-protection

poor social integration

Read that list twice and tell me Talesin isn't playing Bolaire as a medically accurate abuse victim. A full 100% of Bolaire's bad behavior (according to popular fandom sentiment i obviously think he's totally reasonable) *including the mistreatment of his body* is in line with the behavior of a person who has sustained long term abuse and frankly- and disgustingly heartbreaking- since Bolaire is emotionally only about 13 years old he's playing an abused teenager with terrifying accuracy.

Do i find Bolaire's behavior grating and distasteful sometimes? Sure. But I also find my teenager grating when they're acting out too, and they're a relatively well adjusted, average human. I don't think emotional behavior makes a bad person or character. I don't even think that Bolaire has let his emotions interfere with the Schemers ability to accomplish their goals and have no way interfered or put the rest of their group in danger; something we can't say is true for Julien, Wick, Tyranny, Hal, Thaisia, Murray, Azune or Thimble.

What i do know is Bolaire is now standing in a room full of people who are justifying his abusers actions because of his intentions, telling him he's being unreasonable about the abuse he suffered and he should just "let Thjazi go" so everyone can get on with the task of saving the world now that they're in clean-up mode after piecing together Thjazi's breadcrumbs.

I dunno fam, if my friends told me to just get over my abuser and hang with them while they sang his praises and would i mind too much helping with my abusers plan and oh maybe loan one of my siblings or myself out for a ritual that very possibly could destroy me, or the world maybe, it'd just be great so please suck it up and deal? I'd put Bolaire on myself and deal how I see fit.