Issuu

ROUX

EST 2022 Issue 27, 26th February 2026

Luxembourg

Print run: 560 copies

Chief Editor: Host and DJ of Radio New Vegas, Mr. New Vegas

Fernweh (Traduction)

Song interpretation

Starring:

Anastasiia SHKAMERDA – self-proclaimed non-artist

Angelica RINGS – #1 monster energy consumer

Bill SYLA – currently on fraud watch

Chloé LEMONNIER – find me at the uni library, knitting

Dorian SOUSA CALVO – when she leaves, i steal her yarn

Hugo NAZAC – average Jean-Luc Godard enjoyer

Julien CRUCITTI – December already?! What’s next… January?!

Kristina SHATOKHINA – woman of vision; high priestess

Lara SEYLER SCHMIT – tealover, bookdragon and poet

Lina HARRATI-SCARPA – I like cats

Lu CULLEN MORENO – no, I’m not a vampire

Margaryta ALEKSANDROVA – the witch

Maria MAZEINA – a.k.a Masha

Pegah & Pariya PALIZBAN – not twins :)

Rafael CORONADO – Laureate Indie Gamer

Stefan DIAC – sober philosopher

Umut UCAK – rank III level 1 yapper

Valère GAUBE – a.k.a. the Knight of the Noodle Necklace

Valeriia STELMASHENKO – retrained as a designer, apparently

Zoltan TAJTI – founding father; Maecenas of the online edition

We are thankful to: Ramona Ventimiglia, Veerle Waterplas, Margaly Monelus, and Abigail Slate of the Office of Student Life, Sonja Di Renzo and Antonio Tavan of the Repro Team, Espace Cultures, Karin Langumier, Alannah Meyrath, Bianca Pirrelli, SAUL, Jolt Coffee Roasters, Dalmat CoffeeHouse, Café Saga, LLC, BNL, Casino and CNL.

Find us at: campus buildings (reception areas, magazine stands), student lounges, chill-out-zones, Jolt Coffee Roasters, Dalmat CoffeeHouse, LLC, BNL, Casino and CNL.

Join us! We are always looking for graphic designers, writers, artists, photographers, reporters, administrators and all sorts of sailors willing to (wo)man the good ship ROUX!

Find the magazine online: https://issuu.com/rouxmagazine

Our website: https://roux.lu Instagram: @roux.magazine

Cover hand-drawn by Valeriia STELMASHENKO

Poster p. 14 - 15 hand-drawn by Chloé LEMONNIER

Unless otherwise noted, all images in the magazine have been dedicated to the public domain under the Creative Commons CC0-1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

Direct all copyright claims to: paper.roux@gmail.com

Goth Girl Winter

What It Is, And How We Survived It by your local coven repre senta tives

We live in a Hot Girl Summer dominated age, a cultural mood in which life has to be lived to the fullest, music is meant to be blasted and much of the year must be spent perfecting your summer body. But as the sunlight and warmth dwindle and another year comes to an end – particularly here in Luxembourg, where summer lasts roughly a month and winter seems to occupy the rest – one has to ask: Can you really summer your way through the winter?

Perhaps rather than denying the season, we ought to meet it where it is and embrace the cold in all its gloomy wonder. This past year has offered a strangely fitting way for this endeavor with the rise of the viral Goth Girl Winter. Prompted by releases of Nosferatu (2025), Frankenstein (2025), Wuthering Heights (2026), a flood of memes, reels, and YouTube video essays got filled with declarations: forget Hot Girl Summer – it is time for the haunted, the spectral, the Victorian ghost winter.

Here at ROUX, your editors have, for some time now, quietly maintained a small local coven. Naturally, we could not let this pass us by. What follows are three accounts of our own attempts to embrace the season.

Kristina:

I’ve always been of the gothic soul, a firm believer that falling in and out of love with the darkness is often necessary to discern a true light. Looking back, I confess that I’d also been too snobbish: only ever reading the classics, distrusting and rarely enjoying anything painted or written beyond the early twentieth century. But what does one do when all one’s favourite gothic novels have been read and reread time and time again, and the new movie adaptations feel like a calculated sequence of ragebaits targeted at me personally?

That’s right: abandon the snobbish prejudice and dig hungrily into the unknown terrain of twentieth-century gothic art. Do it. I did just that on the Christmas break, joining the goth girl winter in my own way, plunging down the rabbit hole of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles (1976-2018) – and so far this year, it has been my best decision.

Anne Rice once wrote that, for her, vampires are metaphors for “the outcast, the outsider, the predator in all of us.” When she writes gothic fiction, she writes of the real. And most importantly, she writes with the most deliciously epic and decadent style – one that fully satisfies my literary fancy. And the characters! – Rice’s vampires transcend gender upon their transition to immortality; they are wicked, amorous, passionate, philosophical, bloodlustful, androgynous fiends.

They are lovers of art, aristocratic scholars of existential dread, endlessly wondering about the meaning – and meaninglessness – of their wretched existence.

Is the Dark Gift of immortality a gift or a curse? What can the damned really say to the damned? Is the vampire’s nature that of the Devil? If you hunger for sophisticated bloodsuckers with decadent, sexually charged flair, hop on.

Such has been my goth girl winter. I became consumed by reading in a way I hadn’t been since high school, sometimes retreating to read in a local gothic church for extra immersion. I listened to copious amounts of classical music, experimented shamelessly with nineteenth-centuryinspired androgynous fashion, and haunted the local cemetery. Contrary to the northern gothic logics of embracing the cold, I rebelled against it: I preached not austerity but excess; not purity but indulgence in a continuous effort to stay hot, passionate, and a little grotesque in a season that asks us to disappear. And in all this delightful time, I almost didn’t notice winter coming to an end. One thing holds true: winter must be dark, then let it be decadent… Alas – farewell, my beloved goth girl winter! I shall see you again in ten months.

I preached not austerity but excess; not purity but indulgence in a continuous effort to stay hot, passionate...

I felt furious, and resentful, helpless, and terrified, I was in love and oh so devastated...

Lu:

The mind realizes that the days begin to shorten before a word is uttered about it. And by the time someone verbalizes it, it’s already too late. This is a realization I have every winter. This past November, after weeks of not feeling quite right, the winter blues hit me like a freight train – unable to fight against the inertia, I gave in. But if I was to surrender to the cold and dark months, I was to do so properly.

I didn’t feel sad, but I didn’t really feel content either. I was trapped in a sort of numbness that frustrated me to no end, eventually making me angry, then regretful, and then the cycle would start all over again. So what I really needed was to feel, to get my soul moving.

I started to develop a craving for this. I rewatched Emma (2020) and Pride and Prejudice (2005), in the pursuit of romance and drama, but I was not satisfied. Emma’s surrender into passion and Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth’s slow-burn romance have long been a source of comfort when life feels dull, but Regency era longing wasn’t cutting it this time. I considered buying the books, but something else caught my eye…

I happened to have a copy of Wuthering Heights that I had abandoned last summer for a sci-fi novel barely thirty pages in. It called to me.

I didn’t really know what it was about, only that it might be spooky and that there would be ghosts and romance involved. And I’ve always been a fiend for horror, my favorite book of all time is Dracula, but I always dug deeper into the horror, not the gothic. And this winter I learned what a mistake that was.

The first few chapters were a bit confusing, but I eventually managed to immerse myself in it all. And there I was, in the rainy, cold Yorkshire moors feeling all the feelings the frigid weather had numbed. I felt furious, and resentful, helpless, and terrified, I was in love and oh so devastated. And it was so incredibly freeing. I found myself gasping when a character was wronged, and dreading what might happen next as I fell asleep at night. I accompanied my misadventures with the gloomiest music I could find and I basked in it all.

I finished Wuthering Heights upon coming home from a trip to Geneva. I spent the afternoons strolling around the historical city surrounded by fog and mountainous landscapes, hearing all about one young Mary Shelley’s summer on the lake. So, more than a little inspired by the tale of a real-life summerturned-winter (the legendary summer of 1816), I decided what my next gothic novel would be: Frankenstein

Margaryta:

I like that we have started to go deeper into the theme of goth. Honestly, we should have opened this Pandora’s box a long time ago. I love being goth, I enjoy it, and in Luxembourg it comes very easily, especially in winter, when it gets dark early.

Gothic temples that watch you. Ruins that carry echoes of the past. In gothic novels, buildings often play a main role, or at least an important one.

This winter, Luxembourg wrapped me in its buildings and temples. And while wandering through Luxembourgish streets,with the gothic music in my headphones. Cathédrale Notre-Dame, Gräinskapell, ghosts of the past began to speak to me. In fact, it was not so much the university in Kyiv or my studies in the history of art that taught me to hear the whispers, but my dearest goth friend Kristina (you can see her thoughts above Lu ) and I am grateful to her for that.

I am not telling you to be goth. But walk through the streets of Luxembourg. I will not tell you about my favourite places. Find them yourself. Let them affect you.

I like that we have started to go deeper into the theme of goth...

ANNE HAVIK

I learnt how to play cards when I was around 6. A simple deck of cards, 52cards, 4 suits and 2 colors, is fascinating and I was drawn to it

At some point in highschool I realised just how many different card games exist, some with similar rules, some very different And as I went to an international school, there were a lot of people who could show me their version of what to do with a card deck. And I started collecting card games. So here are some that i think are particularly cool:

Strategy & luck based 2+ players

Setup:

Only cards from 6 up are used and jokers are removed. Each player gets 6 cards and then one more card is drawn to determine a trump suit That card stays under the deck face up until the deck is finished.

The

Lying based 3+ players

It goes in a circle (if more than two people) W hen it’s a player's

game: turn, let’s call him B, he “attacks” the player next to him, let’s call her A, with one of his cards and places it on the table. Player A needs to “defend” by placing a card of the same suit but a higher value (value hierarchy lowest to highest is 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K, A) or any trump card. All other players can keep adding cards to the attack on A, by placing the cards of values that are already on the table. Player A either defeats all cards (up to six can be placed) or takes all cards. After each turn everyone needs to draw up to 6 cards. W hen a pile is done, the first with no cards wins.

Setup:

All cards are distributed. Jokers are wild cards, they are whatever you say they are.

Playing in a circle, the first player places a card face down and says its value. If it’s one card, they say <value> and <suit>, if it's

The game: multiple they say <number> of <value>. The players after have to place cards of the same value only. So if the first player says “4 of hearts”, all other players have to place 4s as well, saying what exactly they placed. Since there are only 4 cards of the same value, most of the players will have to play a different card and lie. If a player thinks the person placing before them lied, they say “bullshit” and the cards placed by the previous player get exposed. And a “duel” of sorts happens. If the player placing did not lie, the caller takes the whole pile If they did lie, they take the whole pile. The person that won starts the new round. The first person to get rid of all their cards wins.

Written by Maria Mazeina

Designed by Valeriia Stelmashenko

The number on the card

Designated suit that ranks higher than all others

Deduction based 3+ players

The game:

Setup:

Jo moved. The game is played somewhat like uno. Each

player gets five cards and a starting card is placed in the centre face up. Players take turns placing cards on top of each other that match either by number or by suit. You can only place one card at a time and if you can't play, you take a card from the deck

There are ten preset rules, related to the suits, numbers, amount and order of cards. Usually one or two people at the

table know those rules and no one else does So whenever one of the players does not follow a rule, he gets a card from a deck with a statement of what he didn't do “ one card for not saying blah”. But he doesn't get an explanation for why he should do it

Any player can pick up on a missed rule

Players also get cards for asking or explaining rules. Thus players have to understand the rules throughout the game.

The first one to get rid of all their cards wins and gets to invent an 11th rule for the next round (has to be about cards and not contradict the other rules).

The ten rules:

1. On a card of spades, player placing needs to say “<card value> of spades”

2 On any card of hearts, the player placing needs to say “ canar ”

3. On a 7 of anything, the player placing needs to say “have a good day”. The next player needs to say “thank you ” when it's their turn

4. On a queen, the player placing needs to say “God save the queen ”

5. On any black (spades and clovers) picture card ( jack, queen, king), the player placing needs to say “ woop woop ”

6. W hen there are three cards of the same value in a row, the the player placing the third one needs to say “kookoo”

7. W hen an ace is placed, everyone needs to clap, the last person to clap gets a card

8. W hen a player has only two cards on hand, they need to shuffle them

9. W hen a player has only one card on hand, they need to flick it

10 W hen a player places their very last card, they need to say “ mao ”