Triogenix

== For General Horizon Crew Dissemination == The Conglomerate is happy to welcome the Horizon back into Tau Ceti space. As some of you may have already heard, there will be a small celebratory party onboard the Horizon once it safely reaches Tau Ceti’s gravity well; hosted by NanoTrasen. It is our hope that we can both sufficiently congratulate the Horizon crew for their work on Konyang, and also share the good work conglomerate employees did with the wider spur. Therefore, we expect all employees to be on their best behavior, as you will all be representing the conglomerate. Furthermore, the Horizon will be receiving a VIP during this party, who will be accompanied by a heavily armed protection squad, whose only goal is the safety of the VIP. While the VIP is excited to meet all crew of the Horizon, their safety and job aboard the Horizon assisting with boosting the public perception of the event are considered our top priorities, and we expect all employees to act professionally. That is all, and we look forward to seeing you back in Tau Ceti! == Command Eyes Only == OOC Note: Yes, this is not in the command WL section of the forums. However, this information is still something only command characters would have access to. Obv, if you’re interested and don’t play command, you can still read the following. Greetings Horizon Command team. I apologize if this section seems informal, but I want to be as clear as possible about this whole situation, and stiff language leaves too much room for interpretation. Put simply, the brass want some good PR out of this event. No stories about crewmembers getting outrageously drunk, no workplace incidents, etc. We need to present the Horizon as a professional, well disciplined crew who are capable of lending a hand in times of need on behalf of the SCC, similar to what you all did in Konyang. Your actions gave us an avalanche of goodwill not only among the population, but among the government - however that won’t happen again if the wider spurs thinks the crew of the SCC's flagship can’t even look after themselves. Furthermore, in regards to the VIP, you’ll all need to make sure the crew stay on their absolute best behavior around her. She’s going to be guarded by a Heavy Asset Protection Team, and those guys/gals are serious about her safety. Glossing over the fear that they might end up shooting an employee, they aren’t perfect and there’s a chance the VIP can get hurt. With that said, and being 100% honest, if a hair on the VIPs head gets hurt, or there’s any incident involving her, we’re all, myself included, going to need to have a damn good reason why it happened, or we’ll be out of a job before the end of the day. That might be a bit of a hyperbole, but it gives you a good idea just how important this VIP is to the brass. It’s a lot of weight on your shoulders, but this is your responsibility as command. I expect you to live up to these expectations. - Madyson Boyer NTCC Odin, CCSA.

Konyang Bluespace Gate to be Repaired; Linked to Tau Ceti It has been almost a month since the rampancy crisis on Konyang ended, and the planet's people have been slowly rebuilding. The road back to prosperity will be long, but the government and Stellar Corporate Conglomerate jointly announced that a project which may help to expedite the process has almost neared completion. Ongoing for the past month, SCC technicians have been working around the clock to repair Konyang’s bluespace gate, which was damaged when the Solarian Alliance abandoned the system to rogue fleets. Most of the structural damage was repaired shortly after the system joined the greater Coalition, but the local government did not have the expertise nor credits to repair* the damaged bluespace lane between the Konyang and Tau Ceti gates, and it has sat inactive ever since. The interference of Einstein Engines, a notably pro-solarian company, also hampered efforts through suspected sabotage, though no formal charges could ever be pressed. No longer. Following the SCC’s assistance in resolving the Rampancy Crisis, the Conglomerate graciously offered its assistance in repairing the bluespace gate for a reasonable fee from the government; and secured lucrative contracts for Zavodskoi Interstellar to aid in reconstruction efforts. Einstein Engines of course protested the agreement, calling the Conglomerates prices extortionate, but little attention was paid to them as the prosperity the gate could bring if the lane to Tau Ceti is repaired were immense, and were folded into ongoing reconstruction efforts by the Konyanger government. The lane would create a direct connection to the most profitable system in the spur, and allow for increased trade between the coalition and the republic, with the Xanu-Tau Ceti lane still being shuttered for undisclosed reasons. Political figures in Tau Ceti have also praised the move, with President Joseph Dorn saying; “With this lane, we further increase our ties with our friends and allies in the Coalition of Colonies.” It is further rumored that the SCCV Horizon, a ship instrumental in assisting Konyang in resolving the crisis, will be the first to travel through the gate, back to the Tau Ceti system, before having a celebratory event onboard. We wish the best for the people of Konyang in their rebuilding efforts. * Note, repair is a reductive word, and oversimplifies the gigantic complexities of bluespace lanes, and their maintenance.

After much deliberation, you have been selected as the new synthetic lore writer, congratulations!

Thank you for your application. It was a difficult choice, however, we have decided to go with another applicant. That said, I hope you continue to apply for positions on the lore team in the future!

This is a fair concern and one that I tried to address here. Again, nothing is final yet, but as part of this, my thoughts were to limit the number of times any character, or multiple characters all played by the same player, can be mentioned in "official" lore to like, once or twice, at most, to ensure that we recognize a wide variety of characters, and it's not just one person, or a group of people, to stop characters from ending up looking like; as for the wiki specifically - just due to how we do event arc pages(copy-pasting articles) if a name is in an article it'll go on the wiki. but I agree that we shouldn't have something on the Konyang page like "The rampancy was stopped by the Horizon crew, led by Captain Helena Artigas" or anything similar.

After discussion with the rest of headstaff, we ended up thinking about the following ideas for the future; 1) An In-game memorial, on a computer(or something similar) that will showcase the names of all characters who died during IC arcs, and separate them by arc.(Matt mentioned this in his reply.) 2) Allow for characters to earn accolades, and be mentioned in articles, or other official lore, should it be wanted by the relevant team and the admin assigned to an event, and further approved by the loremasters and head administrators, similarly to the death-retcon rules. The rules will be edited to reflect this once we have a better idea of how we want to handle it going forward. 3) Due to the above - actions during events that are notable will be placed under heavier scrutiny by moderators and administrators. 4) Should the relevant team wish to pursue it, they may hold and publish interviews with members of the crew/characters present regarding events and arcs, which must be approved by the LTA before publishing. 5) The LTA, Head Staff, and relevant teams should ensure that the opportunity for and obtaining of the recognition by all of the above applies to a wide variety of players and characters, not just regulars. Furthermore, the aforementioned members of staff should strive to have it so that different characters/players get any of these types of recognition, either within the same arc, or across arcs. 6) As for events - we have been, and will continue to be attempting to have an increased amount of consistent, low stakes, style of events, in addition to high intensity ones, though this will take significant time, and will not be an immediate, noticed change, due to the way the lore team proposes and decides on events. Beyond that, there are some parts where specifics will be hammered out; like do we have a system similar to what @Fyni suggested? Or something else. This isn’t final either, there may be some changes before being implemented as actual policy just due to how these things work, but this shows the general direction we’re thinking.

In regards to the argument that this should also apply to other parts of lore written by problematic people, there are a couple of things I want to quickly mention. Firstly, in regards to things like ATLAS or other lore, other steps have already been taken to ensure that they are never repeated - the largest of which being these two lines from the lore team rules and regulations. Essentially what this means is, the Loremaster and their deputy have the final say in any official lore that gets added. If anything like ATLAS is attempted to be added again, the LTA can just say "no." and shut it down. Any additions, substantial or not to lore, are done at the discretion of the LTA(most of the time this just means not outright denying something). Secondly, the point of this policy is not to change the past, but to learn from it going forward. You can point out many different areas where it's easy to say "That shouldn't have happened, that person was problematic and we need to remove x, y, z" but that doesn't stop the same thing from happening again in the future. You both mention just scrubbing the name of anyone problematic, but that isn't an actual solution; an actual solution needs to be able to reasonably prevent something problematic from re-occurring, not just fix it once it's happened. If that was a solution, malf would still be in the secret rotation as any bad malf's could just be ahelped, or in other words "fixed/banned if it occurs."

I do not have the time to fully read, and give a coherent response to all of the above points made by people currently, though I will do so at a later date. However, I want to just point this out, because it's something in my skimming that I do not see addressed(I might have missed it however). You can go through the history of the wiki, and find that a specific character, AIMMO, who was incredibly problematic and whose player was banned, was mentioned in official lore. I'm not going to discuss exactly what they did, put simply this is something I'm not okay with repeating, and will likely never be okay with repeating. I don't see a way to ensure that this does not repeat, without something like the current policy we have in place, unless we create an artificial divide between characters/players that are "trusted" and those that aren't, which is something I really do not want to do. Were it not for the fact that this has already happened in the past, I would not care, or have any policy about namedropping people in canon articles or official lore. This is a policy in place due to something that has already happened which I believe should not be repeated, not due to something that might happen.

The current LTA has the position that no specific character names should ever be mentioned in official lore; we allow things like non-CCIA given medals and awards, but characters can't be mentioned in articles/on the wiki, and those medals/awards cannot be in-game items(CCIA follows different rules for their awards). As this is related to lore events, I believe that the LTA's authority, and therefore this position, extends over it. It can be brought up that it was done before, however, to be honest, I don't care. That was the decision/position of that LTA, the current one is different, and future ones can be different as well. However, while I am loremaster this is not something I will likely compromise on - ever. Something awarded to the Horizon crew as a whole, or to the Horizon as a ship is fine, and with the event arc now over, this is something the synthetic team considered. Time will tell what their decision was after consideration. Therefore I'm also voting for the dismissal of this suggestion.

Hello, and thanks for applying! I have a couple of questions about/things I'd like to see regarding your answers. You mention the trinary as an example, which is fine, but I'd additionally like to see an example more in line with a majority of synthetic lore. I.E, how you'd accomplish tweaking this theme regarding synthetics in another nation. or do you view it as something that will include the entire species? I.E, if IPCs are demonized here, they're seen as equals here and that's fine. This also ties into my next question; Both of these statements seem to be about the same thing and yet contradict each other. On one hand, you say you like to argue, but will always be open to compromise on the other, you talk about taking it on the chin, which I see as just accepting a "no" so I'm confused. I'm also going to ask a few questions that aren't specific; 1) Both you and NM mentioned the flexibility/versatility of synthlore in terms of character creation, and both in regards to depth; however, do you think this versatility can also be used to create characters with a lack of depth? Why or why not? Is it a problem if so? Do you have any plans to "deal" with it? 2) Concerning themes, how embedded should themes be? An example of a super-embedded theme is with Tajara; all of tajara characters are affected by the fact the species is in a cold war. Whereas the theme you identified for synthlore I'd argue is one that characters don't have to engage with. 3) Lastly, how would you deal with differentiating IPCs from humans?

Hello! Thank you for applying. I have a couple of questions I'd like to ask regarding some of your answers in addition to the discussion we had. While this is fine in theory, it seems rather general, which is understandable given it can be difficult to determine how we work at times from the outside looking in, but additionally not arguably different from what every writer has tried to do since I joined the server, regardless of species. Given that, and the fact that this is still a debatable issue, one that is brought up consistently, I'd like more detail on specifically what you see yourself doing in the writer role that might be different from other people. Furthermore, you mention trying to avoid rigid parameters, and I'm curious whether it's something you're totally against for the species or more along a scale, if so, what is your "too-far" point in terms of adding parameters to synthetic, gameplay, lore, or expectations. Lastly for this section, 2 of the three things you mention in bullet points above the quoted section, the exception being composition, seem super minor, internal, or otherwise sometimes difficult to tell from an outside perspective that they're different from how a human would react. If the issue is players being unable to differentiate between a positronic and a human in RP/mannerisms currently, what do further minor changes cause? How would they be enforced if it's difficult for people to recognize them? and as answering the previous question necessitates answering this one; how different do you think IPCs should be from humanity? Should a clear line be drawn for players, or left fuzzy? I really like this clear roadmap. That said, my main question is; how do you see synthetic-centric factions interacting with the wider spur, and the wider spur with them, while keeping the major theme that their lives are heavily tied to mankinds perception of them? Are they all going to be like the trinary where it's a grudging okay? How do you plan to differentiate between them? Additionally; regarding religion, I'd like a couple examples as to differences these religions would have compared to the trinary, as the line "seeking to answer outside of mankind" implies, atleast to me, similar veneration of synthetics as holy and/or different. And lastly, something not specific, but in general. As one of the questions outright stated, synth lore currently does not currently exist in a way that is freed from other species' lore. What I mean by that is, that pretty much every piece of synthetic lore exists as something between two species, and therefore two teams. Do you think this is something that needs to change? Why or why not? Feel free to reach out if you have any questions for me, and good luck!

Now that Silicon Nightmares is over, we are looking for applicants to fill the position of synthetic writer. 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. What do you think are the primary themes of synthetic lore? If you got this position, how would you develop them? 2. What do you think is the strongest part of synthlore currently and why? 3. What do you think is the weakest part of synthlore currently and why? 4. The Synthetic Team’s arc, Silicon Nightmares, recently finished. Given what happened, what would your next steps be? 5. What do you think are your strongest and weakest attributes in terms of working on a team, and why? 6. As the writer of synthlore, you will often find yourself required to work with other teams, primarily the human team, consistently to further your lore, and reach compromises as their lore is highly intertwined with other species. Therefore, how do you think you'll deal with not being able to do what you wanted, either in part or in full? 7. The synthetic 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? Good luck to all applicants!

This was recently PR'd and discussed by the head developers, who said the following on the PR: "I've spoken to this with Arrow at length (seriously, we've had a lot of discussions about this PR) and the resolution we both came to is that this is ultimately just another band-aid on a system held together by duct tape. We can't keep adding duct tape to our languages system - it fundamentally does not work and does not make sense because it relies on chains of contorted OOC reasoning and Bay holdovers that make no sense in our universe (tradeband, freespeak) along with unmaintained languages (Sol Common) that should be less monolithic. In short, this PR is at this time not wanted. Anything that touches languages needs a comprehensive rework by the lore team. I'm willing to put forward my full availability to make sure it happens if there's a concrete effort, and to discuss the head developers' thoughts/visions about it." So therefore, I'm voting for the dismissal of this suggestion, as before this can happen, headstaff and the lore team will first need to complete an extensive/total rework of our languages.

The lore team already has plans in place to address the current lack sol consulars, but due to the nature of these plans I can't discuss specifics without massive spoilers. Therefore, while I understand the reasoning behind this suggestion, and recognize that there is no way people could have known what was being planned in private, I see nothing more to be gained by keeping it up; for all intents and purposes, it has been accepted for some time.