Triogenix

Thank you for your responses so far! Last of my questions coming up; 1, Positronics are currently improved iterations of processing units found on ancient mining droids of unknown providence; do you think this is a good thing? Should it be changed? Why or why not? 2. Currently phoron is being rewritten to be a Room Temperature Superconductor, and a required material for the continuation of the spur's technological and economic status-quo, now threatened by the scarcity. With this very general summary in mind, list three to four general ways you'd like to see IPCs be affected by the scarcity, and why. 3. What is one way you think that the lore team can improve in terms of OOC organization or similar? Best of luck on your application, and remember, there's no wrong answers!

Thank you for your responses so far! Last of my questions coming up; 1. IPC lore in general has a few old scattered factions (scrappers, purpose, SLF, ceres lance, etc) that don't do much besides exist, or in some cases are narratively dead. Given that you covered the scrappers in your application, what do you think should be done with Ceres Lance and the SLF? How would you modernize them? How would you connect them to the wider setting? Don't feel the need to write out exactly what you'd do, but give a general synopsis of how you'd approach the topic, what generalized solutions you'd use, and your reasoning why. 2. One of the biggest areas of improvement for the lore team as a whole is bridging the disconnect between the Horizon/the game and the wider setting on the wiki. If you were assigned to write a small article arc relating to synthetics, what would you do to try and bridge that gap? Would you try and make it directly affect the characters on the Horizon? Where do you draw the line for how much a lore development should affect a character? Don't feel the need to write out exactly what you'd do, but give a general synopsis of how you'd approach the topic, what generalized solutions you'd use, and your reasoning why. 3. The IPC team also has some domain over the lore of other synthetics, such as AIs and Cyborgs. Given the latter is a domain shared with CCIA, if you were assigned a project to improve the lore of the former, how would you go about it? Do you think it can be improved? Why or why not? 4. What is one way you think that the lore team can improve in terms of OOC organization or similar? Best of luck on your application, and remember, there's no wrong answers!

Hello! Following Rusting’s resignation from the Lore Team, the Unathi Lore Writer position is now open. When making your application, please include the Lore Developer Template: Ckey/BYOND Username: Position Being Applied For (Wiki Maintainer, Lore Developer, Deputy Lore developer): Have you read the Lore Team Rules and Regulations wiki page?: Past Experiences/Knowledge: Examples of Past Work: Include answers to the following questions in your app as well. 1. A particular section of Unathi Lore that you think should be expanded upon, alongside your reasons for it. Or what you think should be removed, and expand your reasons for that too; 2. Do you have a long-term vision for what direction you want to take Unathi? 3. Is there anything regarding Unathi lore that you'd really like to remove or heavily rework, but it's so ingrained in the lore to the point where it'd be challenging to do in a way that's satisfactory? 4. What direction do you want to take Unathi lore in an IC manner? 5. What do you think are your strongest and weakest attributes in terms of working on a team, and why? 6. The Unathi writer is a position that comes with two deputy writers under them on the team. It is the writer's job to manage their team, in addition to their duties of moderating the WL. Given that, what skills do you have that you think will assist you in this? On the opposite end, what do you believe is your weakest link regarding management and moderation?

Glad to see you applied! Wanted to throw a few questions your way. Remember there are no wrong answers. 1, Positronics are currently improved iterations of processing units found on ancient mining droids of unknown providence; do you think this is a good thing? Should it be changed? Why or why not? 2. Currently phoron is being rewritten to be a Room Temperature Superconductor, and a required material for the continuation of the spur's technological and economic status-quo, now threatened by the scarcity. With this very general summary in mind, list three to four general ways you'd like to see IPCs be affected by the scarcity, and why. 3. You mention how synthetic lore has the widest range of potential characters due to its variety. That said, at what point do you think that range is too much? Is it even possible? Where do you draw the lines of what makes IPCs IPCs? That is all I have for now. If you have any questions or need clarification on what I'm asking with a certain question, feel free to reach out, my DMs are always open. I look forward to reading your responses, and good luck with your application!

Glad to see you applied! Wanted to throw a few questions your way. Remember there are no wrong answers. 1. IPC lore in general has a few old scattered factions (scrappers, purpose, SLF, ceres lance, etc) that don't do much besides exist, or in some cases are narratively dead. Given that you covered Purpose in your application, what do you think should be done with Ceres Lance and the Scrappers? How would you modernize them? How would you connect them to the wider setting? Don't feel the need to write out exactly what you'd do, but give a general synopsis of how you'd approach the topic, what generalized solutions you'd use, and your reasoning why. 2. The Synthetic Team recently got a faction of their own, Pactolous via the Golden Deep. If you had free rein, where would you take that faction? 3. One of the biggest areas of improvement for the lore team as a whole is bridging the disconnect between the Horizon/the game and the wider setting on the wiki. If you were assigned to write a small article arc relating to synthetics, what would you do to try and bridge that gap? Would you try and make it directly affect the characters on the Horizon? Where do you draw the line for how much a lore development should affect a character? Don't feel the need to write out exactly what you'd do, but give a general synopsis of how you'd approach the topic, what generalized solutions you'd use, and your reasoning why. That is all I have for now. If you have any questions or need clarification on what I'm asking with a certain question, feel free to reach out. I look forward to reading your responses, and good luck with your application!

Okay. I'm incredibly tired. I will be brief. It is the best option to stick to because we need something fulfilling the scarcity's intended role in the narrative. There are tons of other ideas, suggestions, or similar that could fill that niche, but functionally, they're all solutions to the same issue. I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you mean the scarcity as it currently is in lore - yes. It's a nothingburger, anyone with eyes can see that, what's more important is why is it a nothingburger. It is also why it is getting reworked. If you read the linked google doc of the new phoron page and still think that will remain the case, I don't know what else to tell you. We just randomly picked that the listed applications of phoron are all present aboard the ship, and that there's enough spread across departments that it could potentially require decisions to be made as to where to allocate phoron if say - there wasn't enough to supply everyone. I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the point of the scarcity in the wider setting; it is not and should never be a plot hook. Plot hooks can stand alone from a dynamic narrative (though they are greatly more effective with a dynamic narrative), and certainly not something that creates a dynamic narrative. Dynamic narratives are created by allowing conflict to happen more easily within the setting, and it's that latter part being the point of the scarcity; just to make conflict to happen more easily and more justifiably. I disagree. The original scarcity was basically just stating, "Hey, things are unstable and conflict is easier to justify now" without backing up why, how, or what exactly it really meant across the wiki; combined with the fact that many teams were in maintainer hell updating old stuff, that's all it stayed as for it was just a statement on a handful of pages. All attempted fixes since then have been much of the same, statements about the scarcity that mean little, never translating into the wider setting. If you want to count it as a rework, that's up to you, but I wouldn't consider it trying. Trying means putting your money where your mouth is, for lack of a better term, and backing up statements like that across the wiki. I.E, if things are unstable and conflict is easier to justify, what does that practically mean for someone on New Gibson? Black Markets? What about NHP? How do we show that? How do we write it out? ETC, then repeat that for functionally every lore wikipage; that is what trying means. I also disagree that this has been tried for another reason, and that is the scale of the rework. Every previous rework, including the original scarcity tbh, bent the scarcity and only the scarcity to try and get it to fit in better with the setting. That is not the case here - I'm not trying to once again try to bend the scarcity to fit the setting cause yea, that's been tried before and hasn't worked - instead, the setting is being bent to fit the scarcity. I was considering axing entire factions as part of this, to give an idea of exactly what I mean when I say "bend the setting." I should have gone to sleep already but I wanted to close this out before doing so. I think calling it a rework can be deceiving, as it implies some continuity with the current scarcity. The current scarcity has phoron being used as the funny fuel for BS drives and similar; with the rework, it has turned into the funny purple rock that the entire current technological and economic level of the spur requires to continue. Without it - it'd be like going from what we have in 2024 back to the 1920s. It's not the same thing at all.

This is a question I have asked myself many times over the past ten months - and I will explain why every time I chose to continue. 1. First and foremost, if I had scrapped the scarcity that wouldn't have solved shit - I'd need to come up with something new to replace it. Our setting is one where for the vast majority of the time, justifying conflict is extremely difficult, and justifying the setting not trending towards stagnation is equally difficult. Think about how many times you've heard the question "why?" or "but why would x?" in regards to anything lore-related that shook things up. Therefore, we will always need something that OOC'ly creates narrative potential by making conflict easier to justify in some way, for narratives are fundamentally structured by conflicts. Which leads to my second point...... 2. Coming up with something else would have been just as difficult, if not slightly more so, than reworking the scarcity. Firstly, I'd have to retcon a ton of stuff regarding the past five years of IC articles, developments, and similar, or if assuming I ended it IC'ly as well, again, still set up and start whatever would be replacing it (and also, plan it out and put that in the staff forums as documentation so future LMs won't have to do what I did, and crawl through old discord logs trying to figure out what somebody was cooking). Therefore, I'd have still spent the past ten months on that project, but instead of reworking the scarcity, I'd be replacing it; functionally there's no difference between the two. The reason I'd still have spent ten months on that is......... 3. There is already a ton of stuff done, however, I will not push anything onto the wiki until everything is done; as big reason the scarcity turned out the way it did, IMO, is that it was done piecemeal, as when you have a writing team of 21 writers and two loremasters, you'll get a lot of different conclusions from the same sentence. This is a fact of human communication; it happens, but by not doing a rework piecemeal, there's a significantly lower chance of these errors in communication occurring. No matter if I retconned the scarcity, I'd still have done it this way. Furthermore, I've had to add, rework, replace, or outright delete a ton of stuff to make the scarcity (or any other thing that creates narrative potential) - even before factoring in the changes to phoron - in order to make it work. For example - I'd still probably need to make a page about the economics of the spur, trade, and tourism, and fill that with lore no matter what I chose to replace the scarcity. A ton of this comes down to Issues vs Problems, something I explain in more detail here; Put simply, any spurwide event such as this is much more likely to introduce problems that remain problems forever (especially if it's done piecemeal), which don't introduce any narrative dynamics because the lore they would need to do so either didn't exist, or because the problems were all but hand-waved by lore team members at the time; as an example, you can't have interstellar travel be difficult when we're an interstellar setting - everything would start to break, so therefore much of the effects of bluespace becoming less viable were left vague at best, if mentioned at all (or in a few rare cases, mentioned on a single page for a faction, but then ignored on all the other pages for that faction). Stuff like this only contributes more to the increasing stagnation of the setting, as things become less likely to happen. There are ways to sidestep this, but they aren't easy, (one such way is reworking every wikipage before releasing the update) which is why they weren't done before. 4. Lastly, and potentially most importantly, this is taking so long because I'm determined not to make the same mistakes that were made in the past. You mention that people have been trying to "resuscitate this forsaken Phoron Scarcity topic for literal years now" - which I just fundamentally disagree with. I've been on the team since the spring of 2022, so going on three years at this point; if you asked me what people have been trying to do regarding the scarcity for my entire time on the team, I'd come away with the exact opposite conclusion. Whenever possible writers have tried to write around, mitigate, or otherwise hand wave the scarcity because it fundamentally doesn't work; the reasons why are legion, I could point out the interstellar travel issue again, or how it was done piecemeal, or how the exact effects were very badly put into writing, or how much of the lore that would be where the biggest impacts of the scarcity would be written simply didn't exist, and many, many more. I don't want to repeat those mistakes - so I'm going to take my time with it, make sure I organize everything properly, talk with my team about it, think it through thoroughly, so on so forth. As far as I'm concerned, this is what is necessary to do anything like this in a way that will be successful, and trying to do it any other way is a waste of time. Conclusion: I will be brief since I have already essay posted. At the end of the day, I do not want to do this rework; it's a slog mentally, plus a ton of work, in addition to my regular duties as LM. However, I'm okay with doing it, like legitimately, and I don't resent those who came before me for not doing what I am doing. When I started this project, we were about four years on from KOTW with little done to address the issue of the scarcity, and ignoring a problem - whether outright ignoring or ignoring by writing around - doesn't make it go away. Someone was going to have to deal with this eventually, so I had a choice to make: continue ignoring it (I put a band-aid solution in this category) and let the problem fester, or do something about it. I chose the latter, and that's a choice you're free to disagree with; however, it's a choice I'm going to see through properly. If that means it takes a year and a half (my original estimate) that means it takes a year and a half, that's fine by me; it's better to put in a lot of effort and make sure something is done properly than to not put in that effort and make a half-ass'd attempt that'll probably end up doing more harm in the long term, while leaving the mess for the next guy. Tldr; I'm reworking the scarcity because it plays a critical role in allowing us to have narratives within our setting, and it's the best bad option I had, having the most gain for work ratio. It's taking so long because I'm a) dropping the entire rework all at once and b) needed to add, rework, replace, or delete a ton of stuff that wasn't previously introduced to make anything like this do what it's supposed to do and introduce a narrative dynamic into what is otherwise a setting that continues to exponentially stagnate.

Hi. So I wanted to give a little update on this - I bring up the scarcity pretty frequently in discord, but I wanted to throw this up on the forums for those who aren't around on discord when I am. Basically - a lot has changed. Don't look at the original post and then expect the end result scarcity to match it. Here's a teaser I posted on discord that is somewhat out of date; https://docs.google.com/document/d/15rjI111OpFeofF5X6s1QRRGEGVgxAv7x8cmCmddZQjY/edit?usp=sharing NOTE; THIS IS NOT AN INVITATION FOR FEEDBACK. This is a rework that will take place across the entire wiki. Any feedback I receive from people outside of the lore team who don't have the full context of everything else that is being changed will therefore most likely not be helpful; as they are attempting to give feedback with - at best - partial understanding of the situation. Feedback can wait until the rework is completed. P.S - if anyone has or is currently getting an economics (specifically like macro-economics) degree and would be comfortable helping me out, please reach out. I'm not asking for ghostwriters, or other outside contributors of any form; I already have an very solid "end-point" idea of what I want to do. What I would like is someone who is more knowledgeable than I to help me get to that predetermined "end-point" in a way that makes sense and doesn't make me look like an idiot, nothing more, nothing less. Basically, an expert consultation more than anything.

Thank you for your application! At this time, Kermit and I have decided to go with another applicant. That said, we hope you continue to apply for positions on the lore team in the future!

Kermit and I have decided to accept this application. Congratulations!

Hi. I'm only responding to this because I feel the need to. The topic of images on the wiki - and how we get them - is something that has the potential to get the owner(s) of the server in legitimate and serious legal trouble; this is not a hyperbole or overstatement to my knowledge. It might sound silly, and I may be incorrect, but in cases like this, I've learned it's better to stay on the safe side. Therefore, while I understand people in the community have strong thoughts and opinions on this topic, now that the suggestion has been made, this is something that will be discussed and decided on internally. I don't mean to sound rude or dismissive, but the community isn't the ones at risk of getting into legal trouble or having to deal with similar issues over stuff on the wiki (and how we got it), and I give all the weight to the thoughts of those who are at risk. If I want outside opinions, suggestions, or otherwise, I'll ask for them. Until then, this is the last post I'll make on this thread.

From my perspective, the issue is more the conclusion of four separate things; 1) It's up to the relevant team if they want art/graphics (of some form) for their wiki lore pages - they determine the necessity. 2) Being able to draw/create graphics isn't and should never be a requirement to be on the lore team. 3) It is unfair to expect staff members to spend their own money - in addition to the time they already contribute to Aurora - to commission artists to do stuff for the wiki. 4) EU copyright law (and copyright law in general) is weird, and I don't fully understand it. I don't know what non-AI images/graphics can be taken from the internet outside of ones created for the purpose of the AuroraStation wiki. Therefore, the conclusion I come to is that we can't ban AI art because its one of the only ways for us to get free art/graphics we can use for the wiki, other than creating something ourselves (again, not something that should be a requirement), even if it doesn't look good. If we had an "artist" staff position similar to spriters who just made art, for free, for the wiki, I'd approve a ban like this in a heartbeat. However - this is not a dismissal of the suggestion, merely an explanation as to why this is something that can't be implemented with a snap of my fingers - Kermit and I will discuss this with input and help from the Head-Devs to figure out the best path forward.

Hey so I found more time to come back around to this; fixed up some things based on feedback previously. Will likely merge it soon.

Hi! Thanks for applying a few rapid-fire questions, I wanted to shoot your way. Remember, there are no wrong answers. 1. One of the biggest issues in the past with the lore team as a whole is that when allowed, off-the-beaten-path character backgrounds/archetypes often become the standard character background/archetype for that relevant species and/or faction (the largest example being how almost every Elyran and Eridanian was white, despite the populations of both factions being primarily from the Arab World and Africa respectively, before the ethnic restrictions). Do you think this would be/is a problem with IPCs? Why or why not? 2. In regards to your future plans, should the worst come to pass - to be clear, I think this is very unlikely, but I need to ask the question regardless - and the team doesn't end up in a sound place, with good systems established, and you have a willing/ready candidate to take over consistently; do you think you'd stay in the position until it does, or is there a timeframe at which you'd resign? I can't think of anymore off the top of my head - I'm sure I'll throw a few more questions up at a later date, but for now, that's it. I look forward to seeing your replies.

Hi! And thanks for applying - I have a few questions to ask, as well as some general stuff to say. Remember, there are no wrong answers. General thoughts: As it isn't currently a rule that in order to apply for writer, an applicant must also have the WL for the team they are applying to, that's not something that will be taken into consideration for this application. It is likely I will add this rule after the current round of applications are concluded, because I believe it should be a rule no matter what. Still, I think doing so in the middle of the process is unfair - it'd be like changing the rules in the middle of a sports game. Beyond that, I can't really give more of my general thoughts without getting into the weeds of questions and comments on specific parts of this application, so that's what I'll do. 1. I'd like you to expand more on what you think could be done in regards to the below quote - when synthetic lore is already standing on aspects of lore like shell infiltrators, the entire first invasion of Biesel being the result of the creation of autonomous military drones, the SLF, the exclusionists, and many more that give reason for synthetic distrust; I'm uncertain if the fire needs to be stoked even higher than it already is or what other reasons can be added that are different from all of the previously mentioned ones. 2. Jumping off that first question, IPC lore as a whole has been stuck in the narrative corner of "oppressed species" for years, which significantly limits what lore they can have. Much of this application seems to be based around keeping IPCs in that corner, for better or worse. I'd like a general expansion on your reasons for that from an OOC narrative perspective, ontop of ways you think that IPCs can get out of that corner. 3. Lastly, I really like how you don't just base your thoughts on what's on the wiki, but how that wiki lore translates into the game. So I'd like to ask a broad question - Do you think there's a disconnect between the lore as it's written on the wiki and the game? Why or why not? How would you fix it? That's all for now - again, there are no wrong answers, and I look forward to seeing your responses.