This is what we've been working on for the last... many weeks. Covering the religious and ethical side of slavery, for the BBC's season about Abolition.

BBC Religion and Ethics pages on slavery

2007 is the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, not of slavery in general.

Though I proofed and coded up all the articles here and they're mostly really good stuff, I think our biggest coup¹ is the article on Rastafari, reggae and slavery. Audio clips FTW!

¹ i.e. where we really outclass the massively better-funded History site. :)

I caved and changed my Pro username to my true name (well, true nickname) instead of Baskerville, my primary character's name.

(Don't worry, this wasn't really engendered by just two fellow members saying they thought I should. I wouldn't have mentioned the idea to begin with if I hadn't mostly decided to do it already; in actual fact, it's been a decision months in the making.)

It's... kind of a thing. A big thing. Medium size, at least. Baskerville's been my username since the Vine.

It's cutting off another connection to my past, my very origins as a 'writer'/play-by-turns messageboard roleplayer.

Or, to look at it in an alternative way, it's clarifying (because posting under a character name could be confusing) and streamlining (because my posting account's now the superuser account; R.I.P. Admin). And 'Mutt' is four letters long.

Mainly, though, it reminds me of all the people who knew me first and primarily as Baskerville Phoenix, and of how when I look around today, none of them is around very much any more. And of how I parted with some of them, including one in particular who --- well, de was love-of-my-life territory in a purely platonic sense (I'm asexual and so was de back then).

Unfortunately I don't have Swiff's organised approach to loves of one's life. He got all that out of the way as a young teenager and is now cut loose to have the odd casual fling whenever he gets lonely (or a girl sneaks into his room and he's too polite to kick her out) and only very occasionally looks back and feels wistful.

(I must remember not to write him as a brooding romantic anti-hero, because he really isn't one. He just happens to have been hit in a major way by very unplatonic courtly love¹. He's otherwise very sane and secretly rather cheerful.)

¹ Not in the classic sense of the phrase, obviously, because the whole idea was bollocks. I merely call it that to tease him, which he takes in good humour. Ah well.