ME: Yeah so I'm being pursued by the Relentless Eviscerator now
BARELY AUDIBLE IN THE DISTANCE: I'm gonna eviscerate ya!

Mutant, librarian, poet, union rabble rouser, dog, Ashkenazi Jewish. Neuroweird, bodyweird, mostly sleepy.
I write about transformative justice, community, love, Judaism, Neurodivergence, mental health, Disability, geography, rivers, labor, and libraries; through poetry, opinionated essays, and short fiction.
I review Schoolhouse Rock! songs at @PropagandaRock
As previously mentioned, I've been working on a conlang for Project Lexa. It's really exciting work! Obviously I can't share many details on how the language itself works -- it is a game about learning that language, after all -- but I got permission to talk about an element I'm extremely excited about. That's right: this conlang has its own form of poetry!
In this language, similar-looking glyphs have similar meanings, and glyphs can be combined in specific orders to create complex terms. Because of these facts, it's possible to create several extremely similar-looking sentences whose meanings are intertwined! This is the basis of the poetry in Project Lexa: choose a certain set of symbols in a certain order, then create several sentences without changing the order.
This leads us to the example above. Translated into English (and massaged to sound a bit more poetic), we get:
There were soldiers
There were dead workers
There is a human history of weapons
Something I really love about Project Lexa is that we're not just making a language; we're making a world that uses it. Some uses of that language are utilitarian, while others are poetic, metaphorical. It's an incredibly cool project and I'm extremely grateful to be a part of it.
That's all for this time! Check out the Ward Games newsletter to get notified on future news about the game!
"they're using civilians as human shields" seems to be a favorite of fascist sympathizers and genocide-enablers. Of course they've been deploying it very often this week. "Hamas uses civilians as human shields". The monsters.
It always rings familiar to me because it's also a favorite of Argentine dictatorship apologists. I grew up hearing this shit. "Well, sure the dictatorship went too far sometimes, but they were fighting monsters! Don't you know the guerilla fighters (every single person targeted by the military was a guerilla fighter btw) would use civilians as a shield? They would hide behind children and babies and pregnant women! Hell, women would get pregnant on purpose to use their bellies as a shield1"
Of course they never say the next part out loud, but it's always implied: "that's why they had to shoot them. That's why the soldiers and the police had to murder all those civilians and children and babies and pregnant women, to get at the monsters. Otherwise, who knows how many other civilians they would hide behind, how many more innocents the soldiers would be forced to kill." The monsters.
Incidentally, one of the dictatorship's many atrocities was stealing babies from the people they arrested, tortured, murdered and made to disappear. They would give the babies away (sometimes sell them) to "proper" and "good" families. No records of anything of course. There's still hundreds of Argentines that don't actually know where they come from. The organization "Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo" is still working to find them. It started as a group of women whose children were kidnapped and made to disappear by the dictatorship, trying to find their children's children. It's been 46 years and they recently found grandchild number 133. And I think back to that "women would get pregnant just to use their bellies as a shield" defense. How convenient for them, to see these women not as mothers, but as monsters. How justified in their actions they must have felt, separating a mother from her newborn child, sometimes letting her live exactly until she gave birth, and then discard her, dispose of her body because she's just that, a body now. She was a monster, became a body and soon, she'll just be a collection of bodyparts, mingling with others, never to be found, never to be identified, never to be given a name again because names are for people. It's lamentable, that work, but hey, they can now give this baby to a family that would "actually" love it. How necessary their work must have felt.