what_the_blog

After a very close battle Shotaro Hidari has taken 1st Place!

Our 2nd Place: Kim Soleum put up a beautiful fight against him and our 3rd Place: Baek Saheon put up a great fight as well!

I'm noticing a pattern among the winners

Now that the beta tournament is over, nominations for the Alpha Poll close at the end of the month, so don't forget to submit people if you haven't already!

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

“The simple joy of her hand in mine”

@numberoneomegaversepoll

Yeah, you could definitely play a scenario where violence is the morally correct answer for laughs, but you don't have to.

If you wanted to play it straight, one might imagine a game about fighting a fascist state where all of the bosses are The One Good Nazi types with very sympathetic, human reasons for collaborating with the regime – there's the Sad Dad who's only committing mass murder because they're holding his kid hostage, the idealist who genuinely believes they can reform the system from the inside, the moral coward who rationalises their atrocities as harm reduction because if they quit, whoever replaced them would be even worse, etc. – and all of the talky nonviolent options for dealing with them involve compromising the player character's principles.

The final boss is naturally a totally unsympathetic Hitler 2.0 type, but before you can fight him he hits you with the old Mustapha Mond monologue, and if you've let even one of his buddies off the hook, he turns the tables on the conversation-fu trope and persuades the player character to stand down.

OP: How to Make Qingshui Zongzi. (cr佳佳妹)

Qingshui zongzi清水粽, literally Plain Water Zongzi, is the simplest traditional zongzi. It only uses glutinous rice and bamboo leaves as raw materials, without any sweet or savory fillings like red beans pastes, smoke pork or red jujube. After boiling, people usually dip the soft sticky rice zongzi in white sugar or honey before eating. It highlights the natural fresh fragrance of bamboo leaves and the mild sweet taste of glutinous rice. This plain version is especially popular in southern China like Hubei, Hunan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Sichuan and Chongqing. Guangdong doesn’t have plain water zongzi; they only make jianshui/lye water zongzi碱水粽. Neither has extra fillings, but they are two distinct varieties with totally different flavors.

Authentic plain water zongzi are made narrower and smaller at the tip than regular zongzi. They have a perfectly mild, easy-to-enjoy taste and are steamed until extra tender, making them gentler on the stomach.

I wanted to remind you today about Sara and Ahmed's story today (vetted #454). Sara and Ahmed are a young couple in Ghazzah who have lost everything dear to them. They lost the apartment they were going to live in together once they were married. Ahmed lost his brother-in-law and his uncle, and his sisrer was injured in the attack that killed her husband.

"In times of crisis, the power of community and compassion shines brightest. Your donation, no matter the size, will be a beacon of hope for Sara and Ahmed. It will show them that even in the darkest times, there are people who care, people who are willing to extend a hand and help them rise from the rubble. Let us come together to show that love and compassion know no borders. Let us be the reason Sara and Ahmed can dream again, the reason they can rebuild their lives and find solace in a world that has shown them so much pain."

Please consider donating to help Sara and Ahmed recover from their losses.

sprite edits of my Mew Mew design from this post! and also the small versions