Chalk

"I can retort with history is a snapshot of the present, and history is made by storytellers. Facts come and go; stories are what lasts. [...] It only takes one good diary to change our perspective on a whole situation that happened a hundred years ago. [...] I was literally thinking of a diary that was found during the San Francisco earthquake that actually, like—we find these things and suddenly we realize that a whole bunch of people were full of shit."

Yeah, I don't need a doctorate in history to know this sucks. One single primary source may be all it takes to convince a subset of people that actually a historical figure was incompetent or terrible, but that does not mean that perception is accurate. One lone diary isn't a study of history in any meaningful sense; it's a record of one person's experience, and that alone is not historiography. Caring more about story than about facts is not a good thing—one of those things is pretend and the other has an actual impact on real people's lives. This is incredibly self-congratulatory; it has nothing substantive to do with this entirely separate discipline; it's frankly pretty bad storytelling anyway; and it would furthermore make most actual academics grind their teeth at the kindest.

But it also sheds some light on why Taliesin, out of game, insists that Thjazi can't possibly be working for a happy ending that is inclusive of the PCs and that he actually planned for half the PCs to die and that everyone who likes him is a "schmuck". He truly believes that if only everyone could just read Bolaire's diary, they'd all agree Thjazi was full of shit. He truly believes that he alone has the game-changing knowledge, and everyone else is too willfully blind to try to look for it.

Have you ever seen a violinist going APESHIT?!

Obviously there are black string players. We just don’t see them because they “don’t look like” string players.

"wow that must be so terrible" "deserts are so ugly" "I would never want to live in a wasteland like that" "it's just empty nothingness"

wishing 10,000 exploding hammers upon you

behold New Mexico

[ID 1: tall, snowcapped rocky mountains rising above a plain filled with desert scrub

ID 2: brightly colored banded cliff walls of several mesas climbing their way into mountains

ID 3: a desert prairie

ID 4: colorful hoodoos against a twilight sky

ID 5: white sand dunes as far as the eye can see

ID 6: a collection of hoodoos against a stormy sky at sunset

ID 7: a juniper tree standing with a cliff wall in the background

right now the trump administration is attacking the public lands in the Southwestern US. most recently (July 2026), in Utah the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments have been cut by over 90% to allow for mining. these lands are sacred to multiple Native nations in the area and contain irreplaceable archeological sites. additionally, the commission of Native representatives who aided in management of these lands has been dissolved leaving Native people without a voice in caring for the remaining land. (read more here)

here in New Mexico, the 10 mile buffer zone surrounding Chaco Canyon preventing oil and gas drilling is under attack. Chaco Canyon contains incredibly old and incredibly fragile archeological sites sacred to Pueblo people. these sites are threatened by mining and drilling. (read more here)