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Blood and Roses was a trading game, along the lines of Monopoly. The Blood side played with human atrocities for the counters, atrocities on a large scale: individual rapes and murders didn't count, there had to have been a large number of people wiped out. Massacres, genocides, that sort of thing. The Roses side played with human achievements. Artworks, scientific breakthroughs, stellar works of architecture, helpful inventions. Monuments to the soul's magnificence, they were called in the game. There were sidebar buttons, so that if you didn't know what Crime and Punishment was, or the Theory of Relativity, or the Trail of Tears, or Madame Bovary, or the Hundred Years' War, or The Flight into Egypt, you could double-click and get an illustrated rundown, in two choices: R for children, PON for Profanity, Obscenity, and Nudity. That was the thing about history, said Crake: it had lots of all three.

The exchange rates — one Mona Lisa equalled Bergen-Belsen, one Armenian genocide equalled the Ninth Symphony plus three Great Pyramids — were suggested, but there was room for haggling. To do this you needed to know the numbers — the total number of corpses for the atrocities, the latest open-market price for the artworks; or, if the artworks had been stolen, the amount paid out by the insurance policy. It was a wicked game.

The sack of Troy, says a voice in his ear. The destruction of Carthage. The Vikings. The Crusades. Ghenghis Kahn. Attila the Hun. The massacre of the Cathars. The witch burnings. The destruction of the Aztec. Ditto the Maya. Ditto the Inca. The Inquisition. Vlad the Impaler. The massacre of the Huguenots. Cromwell in Ireland. The French Revolution. The Napoleonic Wars. The Irish Famine. Slavery in the American South. King Léopold in the Congo. The Russian Revolution. Stalin. Hitler. Hiroshima. Mao. Pol Pot. Idi Amin. Sri Lanka. East Timor. Saddam Hussein.

"Stop it," says Snowman.

Sorry, honey. Only trying to help.

That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland. This was the point of the game, said Crake, when Jimmy complained. Jimmy said that if that was the point, it was pretty pointless. He didn't want to tell Crake that he was having some severe nightmares: the one where the Parthenon was decorated with cut-off heads was, for some reason, the worst.

— From Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

The above-linked ban review has been closed and a motion passed. You have been unblocked, conditional to the restrictions and mentorship arrangement set out in the motion, available in full at this link. The three mentors assigned are Casliber (talk · contribs), Jayvdb (talk · contribs) and Moreschi (talk · contribs).

For the Arbitration Committee,
Daniel (talk) 10:03, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Terima kasih (id:thank you), Daniel. Others, too, of course. Cheers, Jack Merridew 10:08, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Hello

Welcome back Jack. --Pixelface (talk) 15:33, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. Jack Merridew 15:37, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Welcome back. In the spirit of the upcoming season, I'm hoping for peace on Earth; hopefully we'll at least have peace with you this time? Hope springs eternal, you know. :) BOZ (talk) 16:47, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Thirded (if that's a word?). Also, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, "Learn from the mistakes of others, life's too short to make them all yourself," i.e. I have found that editing in new areas that I did not previously edit in seems to get positive feedback, whereas old whatever you want to call them have a tendency to be well you know in the areas I used to focus on. Best, --A Nobody 16:54, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Uh, the upcoming season here is the wet season… but I get it. BOZ, I am going to offer a view on Gavin's RfC, however I'm not going to focus on D&D nearly as much (unencyclopaedic, and all). I will vigorously oppose D&D's Notable Dick, if necessary; that's always been a key reason for my involvement there.

Pumpkin, I am focused on editing in a wider range of areas; see? I have not been 'gone', I have better than 10,000 edits while on holiday from en:wp; see?

Cheers, Jack Merridew 04:59, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Hey Jack. :) It's good that you would step in to help against "He Who Must Not Be Named Because He Loves To Hear His Name And That Makes Him Show Up"; however, I always assumed he was doing what he was doing to D&D articles more to annoy you (and to a lesser extent, Jeske and Gavin) than because he wanted the templates gone (although I'm sure he wanted that also). Regardless, I haven't seen any clear evidence (not the same as him not being there) of him getting involved in D&D articles in that same way while you were gone from here, whether or not that backs up my theory. I have seen evidence that he has been around, moving pages to nonsense titles before someone moves it back (this comes to mind, for example) so we all need to keep an eye out. The best way to handle that is, as always, revert the change if you can, then let an admin know so they can block and semi-protect. Carry on! :)

I see you've been doing a lot of good work. Carry on with that as well! :) (But yeah, I'm sure it's not as wet here as it is on an island, but we've got plenty of slush and snow, so wet it is.) BOZ (talk) 15:30, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

New Assignments

Given your unique perspective of being (a) intelligent (b) bahasa-speaking, you may have some opinion on the balance of articles such as this one. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 14:02, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Also, maybe constructively reviewing articles at Misplaced Pages:Good_article_nominations or WP:PR maybe good. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 14:03, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

My talk page is too fat

Weird - it looked fine yesterday but has now gone too wide for some reason - can you see what is amiss? Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:07, 11 December 2008 (UTC)