Shores of Night

Skyrim, how I love thee. The only game I've never grown entirely tired of playing (apart from Fire Emblem), Skyrim is still on my PS3, and this time Eve and I have undertaken a slightly different tack. At the moment our character (a female Imperial called Helena Justina*) is level 63, she is relearning the One-Handed skill, and has maxed out Smithing, Two-Handed, Heavy Armour and only has Pickpocket below level 30. She's completed the Companions and Mages College quests and could become Thegn of Falkreath, Dawnstar, Winterhold, and Solitude if she chose to (she is the Thegn of Riften, but only because we wanted a house, Eve is passionate about loot and enjoys Alchemy much more than I). There's a large bounty on her head because I got a bit sword happy in Marketh, and went to town on the guards there in the stupid big quest - you may have gathered we don't like that particular plotline). We have raided tombs and barrows, defeated Dragon Priests, Draugr Deathlor...

By K. Steitz When I was an awkward, bookish teenager, my favorite novels were The Blue Sword and The Hero and the  Crown by Robin McKinley. Those books are still in my collection; their pages are dog-eared, yellowed, the spines are broken. I loved them deeply and visited them regularly. The main characters in both books were these incredible young women who never quite fit in, but cared desperately for their chosen family and fought tooth-and-nail to protect them. At the time, I didn’t think very hard about why I loved them, or how I had found some of the few books in the genre that had female protagonists- I just loved them. As I grew, as we all must, I learned that fantasy is a genre for boys. It is about strapping young men who come from modest backgrounds and save their homes/countries/etc, or save their lovers whose names never quite matter. I learned that these are stories of wish fulfillment. These stories, and women, and the world, were almost always told thro...

Patriotism. It's an issue of growing concern, as it waxes in strength across the West, threatening the hard-won cooperation of the EU and America, threatening in the latter to tip into full-blown Nationalism. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as:  The quality of being patriotic; vigorous support for one's country, I have to say I am not a patriot. Or at least I don't consider myself to be one. In the UK it is a word that is too often associated with the far right of politics, with skinheads and racists. The chant of 'two world wars and one world cup' sums up the attitude of many people and a lot of them are the sort who ask non-white citizens 'when are you going home' rather than accepting multicultural values. I feel it's an unthinking, unreasoning thing, that we're expected to adopt without considering what we're actually supporting. It speaks of exceptionalism, often held in the most myopic terms, wilfully ignoring the work done elsew...