The Western Post - July 2023

June '23 West Pacific Crossword

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By Sekiya

Greetings, readers of the Western Post! We are including last month's puzzle once more in our newspaper in order to encourage participation from as many TWPers as possible!

The crossword represents different parts of the region, from general knowledge to specific areas such as roleplay and history, so a few hints can be found in dispatches like the Index of TWP Delegates, Library of Regional Commendations, and the Guide to the Map and Roleplay. Perhaps it even inspires you to get more involved in those areas!

Complete the crossword online

Down
1. First nation in TWP to be condemned
4. Wrote the first Manners of Governance
5. Allegedly looks like the founder of The Sasquatch Republic
6. Has hosted versions of TWP forums since 2006
7. Center of the map and largest economy in the RP world
8. The historical center of the Roleplay world
11. Founder of Punday Monday
12. Organiser of several TWP sports events
13. Editor of the Western Post
14. Served the longest single delegacy in TWP
17. Their citizens could think less
18. Newest staff of the Western Post
19. The eyes of the West
21. (19) wants but cannot have a certain region of this continent
24. Led a coup in the region in 2005
25. Condemned for multiple coups in feeders
26. All your ___ belong to Darkesia
29. Creator of the Snark Quest comic

Across
2. The newest continent on the map
3. Created the position of Guardian
9. Started the regional radio The West on the Waves
10. This continent has the largest freshwater lake
15. Commander of TWPAF
16. Continent originally reserved for TWPAF
20. Has the most terms of delegate in the region
22. #1 Exporter of Violet Tea probably
23. Master of the trebuchet and King of Snark
27. Currently holds the position they were the inaugural holder of
28. Also known as Aukera
30. The name of the TWP Roleplay world

Send your answers to The West Pacific Master Dispatch to be featured in next month's paper!

Hello! I'm Nox (Occidius), as you may know. I'm a research veterinarian with degrees in classical languages and Greek and Roman History. Yeah. I have in recent years employed my education in positively zero ways, and so exists this new series of articles to, somewhat, remedy that. Every other month, I'll endeavour to answer common questions about life in the classical era. If you have something specific you'd like to learn, please feel free to reach out! In the meantime...

The ruined city of Termessos is engulfed by its tombs. They carpet the hills on every side — sarcophagi in heaps, sarcophagi in rows, grass-grown, broken, and bare. Most are massive and hulking. But a few, half-hidden by their ponderous cousins, are more modest. One of these, a gray stone chest with a peaked lid, bears a short epitaph. The final line is still clear: "I am the dog Stephanos; Rhodope set up a tomb for me."¹

Dogs were the classical world’s favourite pets. The largest, conventionally called Molossians, were deep-chested mastiffs. Originally bred to hunt boars, they were used to guard homes and sometimes to pull carts.* Another large variety was the "Indian" hound, said to result from a cross between a male tiger and a female dog (the breed was rare, it was thought, because the tigers often ate the dogs after mating with them). The slim and swift Laconian hound, which ran down deer and hares, was long the premier midsize breed. Over the course of the Roman era, however, it was overtaken by the equally slim and still swifter Vertragus, an ancestor of the modern greyhound. The best-known small breed was the Maltese dog, a stub-legged, long-haired little creature whose most useful quality was being able to fit in a handbag.† The names given to dogs tended to reflect their appearance. Molossian and Laconian hounds had macho monikers like Courage, Lancer, and Whirlwind. Lapdogs, on the other hand, tended to be called things like Fly, Pearl, or Smidgen.²

A Maltese dog on a Roman tombstone. Grave Stele for Helena, AD 150–200. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Many wealthy Greeks and Romans kept a Maltese dog or three. They appear on Greek vases, leashed to their masters’ banqueting couches. In the Roman world, they became fashionable accessories for elite ladies, who carried them in the folds of their tunics. Often, they were outrageously spoiled: a Roman poet describes how one doting owner commissioned a painting of his lapdog Missy. Favoured hunting dogs were equally pampered. In one of his works, a Greek historian enthuses at length about his greyhound, which lay beside him as he wrote and accompanied him to the gymnasium every day. Alexander the Great named a city after his faithful hound Peritas.*³

However attached they were to their dogs, wealthy families delegated feeding, walking, and other chores to slaves and dependants. One ancient author describes how a sombre stoic philosopher was put in charge of his patron’s yippy lapdog, with comedic results (the dog kept getting tangled in the philosopher’s beard). Dogs were normally fed some combination of table scraps and stale bread, though favoured hounds might receive baked doggy treats. Despite an understanding of basic medical procedures — male dogs were sometimes neutered — veterinary care was rudimentary. It was thought, for example, that a dog could be cured of mange by having it sleep next to a person every night.† Ancient dogs seem, however, to have had about the same lifespans as their modern descendants: some breeds, according to Aristotle, could live up to twenty years.⁴

Cats were much less popular than dogs. They entered the classical world from Egypt, where they had long been sacred animals and treasured pets.‡ The Greeks and Romans, however, tended to regard them as hunters of vermin, not companions. Even as mousers, cats seem to have been less common than ferrets and tame snakes until the Roman imperial era. In upper-class houses, at least, their unpopularity might be explained by the abundance of tame birds.⁵ One Greek philosopher had a goose that followed him wherever he went. Another was in the habit of conversing with his pet partridge. Wealthy Romans kept peacocks for their beauty, nightingales and blackbirds for their song, and ravens and parrots for their ability to speak. Indian parrots were especially prized and often trained to greet guests and perform other tricks. A Greek historian lived for twenty years with a parrot that could sing, dance, and address his visitors by name. Other parrots were taught to hail Caesar and, inevitably, to curse. It seems to have been a party trick to get the house parrot drunk and make it repeat dirty words. This, however, was a risky business; once a parrot starts swearing—one author laments—it never stops.⁶

Some Greeks and Romans, to the dismay of most other Greeks and Romans, insisted on keeping large snakes as pets. The cold-blooded emperor Tiberius was a famous snake enthusiast. Alexander the Great’s mother was another. Snakes seem to have been popular among the Roman aristocracy, who draped them over their shoulders and allowed them to glide among the dishes at banquets.* Equally unwelcome guests were the monkeys (probably Barbary macaques) kept as pets by many Roman notables, which had a habit of wreaking havoc at the dinner table.⁷

The most exotic and impressive pets belonged to Roman emperors. Lions were particular favourites. Domitian once forced a senator he disliked to fight the fiercest of his pet lions (unfortunately for the emperor, the senator was a skilled hunter and defeated the beast). Caracalla was accompanied at all times by a lion named Scimitar, which he caressed like a Bond villain while sitting on his throne. One of his successors liked to unleash his pack of tame and defanged lions on unsuspecting party guests as a joke.† Bears were another favourite imperial pet. Valentinian I owned man-eating bears named Goldflake and Innocence, who lived in a cage by his bedroom and subsisted on a hearty diet of political prisoners. A like-minded predecessor reportedly enlivened banquets by having men thrown to his pet bears.‡ Some emperors kept whole zoos in their palaces. Nero allowed herds of tame and wild animals to wander the grounds of his Golden House, and a later emperor was said to have owned elephants, elk, lions, leopards, tigers, giraffes, hyenas, hippopotami, and a solitary rhinoceros.⁸

Although most of the animals in imperial menageries can hardly be called pets, some were much more than symbols of power. Caracalla’s lion, for example, slept in his bedroom, and supposedly tried to save his life the day he was assassinated. Valentinian was so fond of one of his bears that he couldn’t stand to see her in a cage and finally released her in a remote forest.

Sometimes, man’s best friend eats his enemies.

Notes

* One eccentric Roman emperor reportedly harnessed four huge dogs to a chariot when he wanted to drive around the grounds of his estates.

† They did have a single practical attribute: letting a Maltese nestle on one’s stomach was said to relieve indigestion. The ancient Maltese dog, incidentally, seems to have looked more like a Pomeranian than a modern Maltese (to which it is not directly related).

* In return for all this pampering, pet dogs often displayed remarkable loyalty to their masters. In the early first century, for example, after a Roman aristocrat was executed for treason, the man’s dog refused to leave his body, even bringing it scraps of bread. When the corpse was flung into the Tiber, the dog leapt in after it and tried to nose it out of the water.

† This would have succeeded only in giving that person scabies.

‡ When a Roman soldier in Alexandria accidentally killed a cat, he was lynched by an Egyptian mob.

* Since these pet snakes are never described in detail, their species is uncertain. The nonvenomous and relatively docile four-lined snake is a plausible candidate. If one author’s story about a giant child-eating snake in Rome is more than an urban legend, it is conceivable that some reckless Roman purchased (and then lost) a reticulated python from India.

† A few aristocratic Romans also owned lions, but most were discouraged (or so a poet suggests) by the expense involved in feeding and training them.

‡ Not all Romans were so bloodthirsty. One young emperor cherished a pet chicken named "Roma." Another liked to watch puppies playing with piglets.

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Pride Month is a celebration of the LGBTQ+ community that happens during the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Riot, a very important happening for the history of LGBTQ+ rights! Here in the West Pacific, we stand with the people fighting for equality, a fight that doesn't just happen during this month but rather goes on throughout the entire year, and that each day gains strength. Each year, our region creates several events in June in order to honor this celebration, which are collectively called TWPride. A mix of new and old events was planned by organizers for the 2023 edition, and you can read a retrospective about them in this article!

Art Event: The Pride Parade of Flags

This year, the years-old practice of designing national flags and other artwork to honor Pride Month was made into an official event! Written by our delegate Overthinkers, the RMB post announcing the TWPride Art Event called for nations of the West to make a version of their flag incorporating a pride flag or other symbology, providing a venue in the Discord server's #the_western_artists channel for those that wished for help in artwork design, and reminding that TWP stands with everyone. Notably, the event was not a competition but rather a celebration, and entries could be submitted to OT either in the aforementioned Discord channel, or uploaded as one's flag followed by a telegram to her or message in the RMB.

OT also made a dispatch called the TWPride Art Wall and regularly updated it throughout June to include many excellent TWP nations' pride flags! A lot of good quality artwork can be seen there, as well as in the national pages of these nations themselves and in the Discord server, where some people such as me (Giovanniland) added to the artwork display by making multiple versions of one's flag based on different Pride flags. Furthermore, the regional flag seen above and the World Factbook Entry also shifted to the TWPride theme!

Card Contest: Record Turnout

The Card Club, as mentioned in its update, also joined in the TWPride celebrations by hosting the third version of the TWPride Card Contest! In this contest, participants had to collect cards referencing the LGBTQ+ community in their motto, flag or name, with bonus points if the card features a LGBTQ+ flag or symbol. An unprecendented eight entries were submitted for the contest throughout the month, beating the Avian Celebration Card Contest's seven entries record as well as doubling the turnout from the 2022 TWPride Card Contest. These entries were evaluated by me and Laudesia, and are listed below:

• 🌈 LGBT by Apexiala

• Pride 2023 by Con Nihawitan

• Pride collection for the contest by Foressul

• TWPride Card Contest by Fotisdia

• Crikey by PR Lightspeed Rescue (Dr Hooves)

• 🌈 Pʀɪᴅᴇ 🌈 by Omnicontrol

• #TWPrideCardContest by Podium

• TWPride by Rengum in Lingo

Due to the new record set by the participants, the rewards pool was vastly increased! Not only was the podium increased to four people, but these four top collections also earned each two cards instead of one, with a total of several hundred deck value gifted away. Apexiala was the winner, with their collection totalling over a thousand cards, followed by Rengum in second place with four hundred and Fotisdia in third place with two hundred. Furthermore, Dr Hooves earned fourth place due to their creative display of cards and RMB post explaining the context behind it.

In regards to gifts, Apex received two very valuable and Pride-themed cards, namely Season 2 Mikeswill and Galway-Dublin! Second place Rengum and third place Fotisdia then received a pair of Season 3 legendaries each, namely Galway-Dublin & Giovenith and Look at me & Vancouvia respectively. And the prize for Dr Hooves included the legendary card Cogitation and Pride-themed TWP card Dalimbar.

Last but not least, the other four participants Con Nihawitan, Foressul, Omnicontrol and Podium each earned a participation prize in the form of a high value Pride-related card, in celebration of the high number of entries achieved in the contest. Overall, the contest was excellent, and I’m very proud of TWP’s card collectors to have celebrated Pride Month in a great way!

The Great TWPride Bake-Off: Make your Mama Proud!

Another returning event in the 2023 TWPride was the Bake-Off! It started last year as a competition hosted by Wymondham, and this year has been overseen in a different model by Blue bubble, in a more laid back way intending to serve as a compilation of recipes from TWPers and friends. Several nations were eager to participate, with Arstotskiano inaugurating the cookbook by submitting a Homemade Coconut Ice Cream recipe, originally from The Food of the World: A Journey for Food Lovers but with a few alterations, and Ostrovskiy sharing their Cranberry Cinnamon Pancake. Both recipes are available in the Discord server's #the-great-twpride-bake-off channel.

Later in the month, Blue herself joined in the fun, and I also shared a recipe of my own! Blue made Cherry Hand Pies using this recipe, and then I shared a photo of homemade sushi from some time before to celebrate International Sushi Day, which is June 18th. Although I unfortunately don't have a recipe in hand, I do recommend the following website for some tips on making homemade sushi, which I definitely recommend because tasting food from different cultures and then trying one's own hand at baking them can be a nice experience! Below you can see pictures of Blue's hand pies and me and my family's sushi respectively.

Pride Post Wednesday: Interregional Participation

The other major event part of TWPride was the Pride Post Wednesday, brought back from the 2021 edition in a very similar way to how it was back then. Varanius reached out to several people known in some of TWP's allied and friendly regions and invited a few people to talk about Pride Month in our regional message board, for a total of four different players each talking in one of the Wednesdays during June.

The four people invited were Madjack, Emiline, Kuramia, and Kazaman, listed by the order of the posts during the month, and each of them had awesome, well-written posts to contribute! I will be linking to each of them here in this article, so all readers of the Western Post can appreciate their participation in Pride Post Wednesday—Madjack's post (June 7th), Emiline's post (June 14th), Kuramia's post (June 21st) and Kazaman's post (June 28th).

Furthermore, the Pride Post Wednesday events were also complemented by other RMB activities! These include our daily Today in the West prompts with several Pride-related questions for anyone to answer, and the weekly observances following the Pride theme, for example songs about Pride on Karaoke Friday and themed haiku on each Haikuesday. Questions of the Now included topics such as LGBTQ+ people and families TWPers know personally, what people do to celebrate and help LGBTQ+ people beyond Pride Month, and which LGBTQ+ people from history should be talked about more and why.

All in all, TWPride was a month full of celebrations and acknowledgments that LGBTQ+ equality is a cause worth defending and one that TWP will always stand for. Thank you for reading, and let's hope that each day the movement for recognition of LGBTQ+ rights and equality gains strength around the world!

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Chess tournaments have been a mainstay of The West Pacific Cultural Trust's Gaming Community for the past year, with several editions held since a revival of the community took place. However, an innovation happened last month, when the region combined efforts with a fellow feeder, The North Pacific, and the two organized the TWP & TNP Interregional Chess Arena together! Here in this article you'll read a summary of this regional event.

Planning for this event started late during May and spearheaded by me, Giovanniland, on the TWP side and Madjack, Kaschovia, and Bobberino on the TNP side. It was decided that the event would take place June 25th and adopt some configurations from TWP chess arenas such as the 6:00 to 9:00 PM UTC time and the 5+3 timer, which means 5 minutes for each side plus 3 incremented seconds per move.

Comparing this tournament to the 4th TWP Chess Arena that happened last April, there was a slight boost in turnout, from 13 to 14 people. Other statistics also increased, for example 122 games up from 91 last time and 7,831 moves across them compared to 5,965 last time, as well as average participant rating seeing a huge increase to 1448, in comparison to 1344 last time. Furthermore, another interesting fact is how the Berserk feature continues to gain popularity, doubling from being used in 10% of games in April to 20% of games in June—it awards an extra point in case of victory in return for having to play with half the established time and no increment.

In regards to the players, the player FrontierJustice (who opted to stay anonymous) dominated the arena, as seen by their 87 points being almost the double of second-placed Unshleepd (MedrzecDobregoDopa), who achieved 44 points. Although the two were neck and neck during the start of the tournament, losses for the latter while the former amassed a large win streak meant that the points difference widened. However, competition was lively beyond the first place, for example between Unshleepd and the 3rd place Lemsrow (Martledola), who ended the tournament tied with 44 points! For much of the tournament, the third place was The Perfection Isles (ItzOrangeSteve) though, who fought until the end and finished 4th with 36 points, closely followed by Deims Kir in fifth and myself (Giovanniland) in sixth, the first time I didn't finish in the podium.

The full ranking of players alongside some statistics is written here:

1. FrontierJustice – 87 points (22 wins, 2 draws, 3 losses) – 27 played, 81% win rate, 59% berserk, 1910 performance

2. Unshleepd – 44 points (14 wins, 1 draw, 6 losses) – 21 played, 67% win rate, 33% berserk, 1772 performance

3. Lemsrow – 44 points (13 wins, 6 losses) – 19 played, 68% win rate, 53% berserk, 1677 performance

4. The Perfection Isles – 36 points (12 wins, 10 losses) – 22 played, 55% win rate, 36% berserk, 1613 performance

5. Deims Kir – 32 points (12 wins, 6 losses) – 18 played, 67% win rate, 1704 performance

6. Giovanniland – 28 points (10 wins, 2 draws, 7 losses) – 19 played, 53% win rate, 11% berserk, 1569 performance

7. El Fiji Grande – 20 points (8 wins, 6 losses) – 14 played, 64% win rate, 1482 performance

8. Kaschovia – 20 points (9 wins, 1 draw, 10 losses) – 20 played, 45% win rate, 1416 performance

9. Francois Isidore – 10 points (5 wins, 10 losses) – 15 played, 33% win rate, 1252 performance

10. Ihoards – 8 points (3 wins, 4 losses) – 7 played, 43% win rate, 29% berserk, 1363 performance

11. Bobberino – 7 points (2 wins, 5 draws) – 26 played, 8% win rate, 11% berserk, 1145 performance

12. Inner Ryxtylopia – 7 points (2 wins, 3 draws) – 30 played, 7% win rate, 1069 performance

13. Vulxo – 2 points (1 win, 2 losses) – 3 played, 33% win rate, 1343 performance

14. Provostika – 2 points (1 win, 2 losses) – 3 played, 33% win rate, 1057 performance

The first place award given to FrontierJustice.

Last but not least, the tournament awards were revealed in a dispatch published a few hours after the event, which recognizes everyone for their participation and displays the top 3 challenge coins, designed by me and shown in this article. The award was inspired by other challenge coins I've designed for past TWP Chess Arenas, but this design is fairly different, combining the North Pacifican flag's blue color and north star with the West Pacifican flag's red color and rays. Above all, however, the most important part of any chess tournament is not whether one has achieved a high position, but instead the fun participating! It is my opinion that the TWP & TNP Interregional Chess Arena was a great inaugural edition of a chess event involving two regions, and I hope that future interregional arenas like this one continue to happen.

Photography has been one of my hobbies for a long time, already back when I was a small child with a camera and decided to take photos of everything when going out with my parents (much to the dismay of today's Gio when browsing photos from that time and trying to find good ones). Nowadays, I like registering interesting sights, making beautiful shots of nature and notable places I visit! Sometimes, I have shared one or two photos here in this game, often of nature or pets, and even picked some to illustrate my roleplay factbook. However, there's much more that I can talk about—even when excluding those where I or friends/relatives appear for privacy reasons—so I thought it'd be an interesting idea to start a series of articles for the Western Post where I showcase a few photos each time and write about why I chose them.

You may be thinking where the title comes in, and the answer to that is, I plan on featuring snapshots of different places I've been to! I'll begin with local photos this edition, and then pick different places for further editions, as I search my digital album. Furthermore, if there are any suggestions of what I could feature next, feel free to let me know—but without further ado, here are the four photos I've chosen for the inaugural edition!

Full quality photos here

For the first two photos in this article I decided to choose a coastal landscape! Naturally, as I live near the coast, there are plenty of those to choose from, but in my opinion those two capture the seaside feeling the best. The first one describes very well how a beach setting looks here in Brazil, with many beach umbrellas lined one after another where people can enjoy food and drinks facing the sea, mobile vendors traveling across the sand hoping to sell products as diverse as snacks, sweets and souvenirs, and of course many people enjoying the sea! This specific beach offers a calmer part of the sea fit for relaxing, with the waves from the open sea blocked by a line of sand, rocks and corals.

The second photo, on the other hand, focuses on the natural features of a coastal place. I particularly like this one because of the contrast between the various tones of blue and aqua green in the image! The clear sky without many clouds allows one to appreciate a beautiful sky blue, followed by various lighter tones of the water, and then a darker blue at the bottom due to the shadow from the restaurant building there. Furthermore, a beautiful view of the coastline is also present at the left! Sand dunes and many trees (particularly palm trees) line the coast, which is a beautiful sight even when there's a fair amount of manmade interference.

Full quality photos here

For the other pair of photos in this article, we move from the coastline to an inland park in the city! In this case, both have been shared by me in TWP's discord server before⁠—the first is one of my favorite photos from this year so far, a beautiful sunset after I finished a walk of more than two kilometers throughout the entire park. I often go there both to exercise and take some photos too, and that time I arrived at the right time to able to walk the entire route, appreciate the stunning view and the return to the starting point! The picture was liked by others when I initially shared so that is further reason for me to choose it.

The other photo is from another time I went there, and it pictures the beautiful nature within the park! It's part of the Atlantic Forest biome, sadly nearly extinct due to many major Brazilian cities being built on the coast, but protected areas such as this one are great both for people to appreciate and for the remaining fauna and flora to have a safe place to live in. In the picture you can see several typical species of trees and bushes that even adapt themselves to growing on sandy areas such as dunes, overall shaping a lovely landscape. Furthermore, as it was the right time for an afternoon moon (it happens in the week before a full moon), that's the small white dot you see in the middle of the image!

That is all for this edition, and I hope everyone likes this new article that seeks to share interesting photos of various places in the world to other people that may not know them. Furthermore, if there's enough interest from other people to showcase their own pictures as well, I can accept submissions starting with next month's edition—just let me know through a Discord message (username: @.giovanni_) or telegram to Giovanniland!

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All your chocolate belongs to Darkesia
The Western Post Staff - Delegate: Overthinkers - Editors: Fujai and Giovanniland - Staff: Blue bubble, Bran Astor, Fauthur, Gryphonian Alliance, Hertfordshire and Jammbo, Occidius, Podium, Sekiya, The Holy Principality of Saint Mark, Varanius, and YOU
All your chocolate belongs to Darkesia

spooky!