The world around us is never as it seems. We are always reliant upon our own senses, and the testimony of others to help us navigate the world. Rarely are either reliable. People mishear, or in the worst cases intentionally deceive about what they’ve seen. Not to mention everyone wants to keep up appearances. Can you blame them? Can you blame you? It’s hard enough just existing, but going against the grain is a whole other animal.
Some peopleMost people are even lying to themselves.But what of ourselves, surely we know what we’ve seen with our own eyes? Our senses are often deceived, both physically, and sometimes psychosomatically. What we see, hear, smell, and especially feel are only a small indicator of the reality. Not only that, but we love to fill in any blanks we have, often without even realizing it. The warm feeling on your arms as the sun cascades through the blinds feels equally as real as a heat lamp, or an experience inside a memoizer.
I recognize that this opening is quite cynical, but I want to propose the opposite. Most people are trying their best, but effort does not make reality. You need to be aware of how, and why people lie to themselves and others if you have a hope of understanding the world around you. Trust, but verify (even what you’ve seen with your own eyes). As a potential coordinator you will be responsible for the consequences of your actions, and the actions of others. Reality is sometimes a harsh check on the world we thought we were living in, so make sure to pick your head up every so often, and challenge what you’ve seen.
Warmly,
Yahrn Listrea,
Coordinator of the Fazyeid Node
Documents
Should you find yourself running into issues locating and/or parsing the documents please contact your assigned coordinator. The documents that make up this collection series are:
Consort assignments
Below you will find the various consort assignments associated with this collection. For each you will be given a prompt of a decision to be made. Once you have selected what you think is the best course of action based on the circumstances you can click on the prompt to display the outcome.
Warning
Each outcome is selected by the curator who authored the collection, and is also subject to any bias associated with them.
Note
The situations are based on real-world events with modifications. Any private information has also been anonymized or removed. If an assignment has any likeness to a real world person/place/event it is incidental.
Regionalizing (TODO)
Several nations are currently pursuing action to require The Archive to have “regionalized nodes”, meaning that their nodes would be “contextualized” to the region. The argument being made primarily is that presenting “information” is not good enough, and that the information presented at the archive is biased towards large nations. These nations argue that for them to be able to present “relevant” information, people in their nation should be able to see a version they help curate. There are several arguments for this, for example Shekland and Arzentia both frequently have idioms and phrases in documents produced from these regions that are hard for people to understand. The argument goes that having a specialized version of the archive that recontextualizes these idioms to ones that are region specific could help with understanding what’s being said better.
That being said, since most of the nations that are looking to make these changes are also monarchies, there is an argument that this is being done cynically to allow them to censor information. “Recontextualization” is often a euphemism for using propaganda techniques to smooth over legitimate critiques. This critique however cuts both ways. The Archive itself is largely a black box, there’s no definitive work that demonstrates how it functions. Therefore, it’s reasonable to point the conspiracy finger backwards at The Archive. The primary system resides in Shekland, so who’s to say the data being propagated to other nodes isn’t already being “recontextualized” to whatever is convenient to them?
Should The Archive be required to allow for regionalization?