Mofo1995

I'm a big fan of Kyres. They're a good friend, and a talented writer. They were unbelievably helpful as my deputy, and I think they would be a good fit for Cael and that they would be able to gel well together. 10/10 Mofo seal of approval +1

All at once?

The praises I had on their last application still stand true, so in summary I think Faye's a good bean! +1

Maybe it isn't fair, in the sense that most of the issues the current batch of candidates are looking to fix are issues that resulted from my lackluster performance as loremaster... HOWEVER, of all the applicants so far, I think Alberyk is the strongest and most likely to succeed at helping Cael, uh... fixing my mistakes. Tajara lore writing is ascendant and far beyond any of the quality I had ever produced as taj writer. Alb is also far more active than I was and would probably be a great fit for Cael and likely to keep up with their pace and needs. I get people's concerns about conflicts of interests and consolidation of too much power under one individual. After all, I gave up head CCIA when I took on loremaster for similar reasons. My memories kinda spotty on it, but I think I volunteered to do that instead of being required to? Either way, for about 6 months I was deputy loremaster and head CCIA concurrently. I think they're legitimate concerns, and I get why people would have them. Though from my time as taj dev with Alb as my deputy and later as loremaster with Alb as one of the writers, I can confidently say they never leveraged their position as head admin to influence lore team politics. Or at the very least, never leveraged their position against me to make me do things. As far as I'm aware there wasn't any abuse of power like that going on. The past isn't always an indication of the future, but I have faith and confidence in Alb to appropriately separate the roles given their good track record of doing so over the past two and a half years. I am worried about the workload of so many positions at once! But maybe that should be taken with a grain of salt, since that's coming from someone with no free time who can't really imagine, well, having free time. It would obviously be far too much for me to imagine handling, but Alb's a lot more committed than I am, so maybe its within the realm of their possibilities. I talked to Cael about potential good deputy loremasters before taking my leave, Alb was certainly one that came up. They were also on my personal wishlist for good deputy loremaster picks back when I last had deputy applications, so I'd say they have a very consistent and strong performance on the lore team. S'posing they can work it into their time schedule, I feel Alb would be perfect for the job, and has my full endorsement!

I beLEAF strongly in Nursies capabilities as a role-player. They have deep ROOTS in this community which they have been a part of so long. I'm happy to see them BRANCHING out into other species to give playing them a try. I think nothing but good role-playing could STEM from giving them a diona whitelist. It Chlorophylls me with joy! +1

I think it's a fair cop to say my friendship and nostalgia have blinded me, but I in no way was intentionally misrepresentative. 1.) Why I did nothing There was no mechanism for anonymous complaints at the time for handling bad behavior in invite only spaces. The power of loremaster didn't expand to that jurisdiction until last winter, by popular demand. Marlon did approach Garn about it, but at the time there wasn't the whole "confidential complaints" thing, so Garn wanted him to out with. Not throwing Garn under the bus, dudes a great lad, but I also told Marlon the same things. 2.) Why didn't I defend Marlon at the time? I was a coward and a bad person. I've come to a lot of controversial friends defences many times, even to their defences against each other, but you're right, I let Marlon down and regret it. Making a random public post or announcement in their defence would be weird and awkward, but I've spoken highly well of them many times in the intervening time, despite not making any big grandiose announcements. 3.) I legit do not remember the scrap you're referencing between you and Marlon about the bad faith thing. But thats totally fair criticism anyways. 4.) No really, the skrell deputy thing actually is what did him in. Yeah there was brewing discontent, but thats what kicked off the whole riot and really force multiplied everything else from like a 5/10 to an 11/10. It's also what really cast them down from the favor of the head devs, since they explicitly told us 2 deps only. At least from my perspective and whatever access I was privy to in head discussions. Not defending that whole ordeal either, or even my complicity in it since at the time I had forgotten there was already two deputies when Marlon asked me about the applicant and I told him the applicant was gr8 and to bring em on. But anyhow, things really probably weren't going to boil over even closely to how they did without it. Anyhow, I've always deeply valued your abilities as a critic. If I had to say what my agenda really was, it was a heated and passionate and emotional defence of someone I cherish after a long night at work, hastily typed out in a flash of passion and gesture of friendship. But you're right, I've fairly clearly shown my bias, actively worked to try and cover my own ass, and glossed over or downplayed their faults as a loremaster, albeit largely through the blindness of my feelings of friendship and nostalgia. I still stand by the idea of the Marlonian Paradigm and that were still fundamentally working with the core concepts and ideas which they established, and that there isn't enough hespetch for it. And they still have my support for unathi deputy. Thanks for taking the time to point the flaws in my narrative to me, and I hope I can take it to heart constructively.

For those who aren't into reading long-winded praises and shameless endorsements, Let me start this off by saying +1 . Full send, no regrets, I literally cannot endorse nor give Marlon a higher endorsement than I'm about to. There's a big and extremely unfortunate tendency on the lore team to wholesale reject, hate on, and big time badmouth any lore dev who was on the team previously and leaves. In my 5 years on the team so far, I can say that at this point I'm just convinced it is an eternal and immutable aspect of the team. It's just something that will always happen unless a dev was completely inactive, and even then they will get mad backbiting about that too. It is far, far, far easier to highlight old lore and then project it and compare it to contemporary lore to paint a picture that "wow, this lore all sucked." With little to no appreciation that the lore landscape of the past where it might've fit in perfectly fine and well, was different today. I think there's also not much appreciation that the next generation of lore team folks are going to feel exactly the same way about our current lore writing endeavors. I am going to state several things before writing an emotionally charged post about the superlative and arbitrarily high opinion I hold of Marlon. 1.) Marlon either directly personally established the foundation of nearly every single major lore faction and species over the course of their tenure, or oversaw, debated on, compromised, and approved every single etc. Nearly every single piece of our entire lore setting either originated from or was worked on to some extent by Marlon. The entirety of lore development since their departure as loremaster is still entirely within and working under what I'm going to call the "Marlonian Paradigm." Their efforts and work are so monumental and titanic, that to leave the Marlonian Paradigm would mean having to completely retcon nearly the entire setting and start from scratch with a completely different one. 2.) While older lore was tonally far more light hearted, modern lore is still within the Marlonian Paradigm as it has shifted to the more grounded and serious tones also established by Marlon while shifting away from the more light hearted aspects. In other words, balance between two aspects of the same foundation has shifted, however the whole work is still just the redecorated interior of the same thing. 3.) Marlon was a super-human coordinator of people with absurdly indefatigable energy, able to pour in a massive amount of interest at any time divided among large amounts of different projects, and they did it for five whole years. 4.) Marlon has almost always been completely reasonable and wide open for discussion and compromise, and a master negotiator. Traits which I admire greatly. These have fundamentally established the expectations for the role of loremaster. Marlon was also extremely friendly and welcoming, and helped encourage and fan my interest in our server's lore when I was still a brand newbie whose only proper friends were MetaphysicalPersona and my college roommate. 5.) Almost the entirety of the current lore team rules and regulations were created under Marlon. All I did was write them down. In an ironic way to how they replaced his official "Lore Bible," they are the gospel of his era's rules and regulations according to me. 6.) Marlon was the single greatest lore writer to have ever been on our lore team, and in my opinion, is the undisputed Greatest of All Time. Let me begin by painting a picture of when I was new to the server. It was fall of 2015, I was new to roleplay as more than a game-y experience, and I hated all Tajara because I thought they were all furries. I was entering a new community in a new game that I never seriously played before other than an abortive attempt in January 2014. The only friend I had with me was my college roommate who told me to try it out with him, and soon after a very interesting roleplayer who would later get banned for their crazy characters. I was nervous and anxious about making new friends, and from what I could tell, the community was very elitist and insular against outsiders and newcomers. This was back when the server used to go hidden on weekends to avoid large influxes of new players, after all! Taking some uneasy steps, I started not just playing on the server but also interacting with other people on the forums (This was all before discord!) and trying to make new friends. I started reading news articles and getting interested first with skrell lore, before becoming more interested in all of the lore. It all seemed so rich and vast, despite being tiny compared to today. Nervously, I posted open ended questions about aspects of Skrell life and the federation, and I was greeted by a friendly and welcoming person who eagerly answered my questions and even wrote new lore just to get answers when there weren't any. That's actually how Grand Councilor Weashbi Jrugl was added. Marlon added him just to answer a question I posted about who was in charge of the Jargon Fed. In a time when I was a shy, wide-eyed, nervous newbie, there was a kind and encouraging person who eagerly made my acquaintance and helped show me the ropes in a community that felt very insular and unwelcoming to outsiders. With that positive energy, I eagerly started delving deeper into the lore, reading more articles and voraciously consuming all of the information on the wiki pages. Marlon wasn't the only one at the time to fan my interest in lore, as I made fast friends with HiveFleetChicken and Loow who were both on the lore team in the Spring of 2016. They were both likewise very supportive and full of encouragement, always happy to talk about Tajara and Skrell lore with me and discuss different ideas for all of it. On the skrell side of things, we even formed a skrell metaclique where we would randomly flood the station with our skrell characters and get up to wacky deadpan humor skrell antics to mess with the silly humans. And it was awesome! Lore back then was so freeform and experimental, and Marlon strongly encouraged players to really get out there and make their own stories with it. When HiveFleet was removed from the team following a big scandal, tajara applications opened up. By that point I had fallen in love with Tajara lore, and fortunately was picked for the position by Marlon in October of 2016. Despite being a mostly new player, still largely wet behind the ears and figuring things out, Marlon was nothing but helpful and supportive and very naturally assumed the role of a mentor and friend who helped me figure everything out and always gave insightful and constructive input to help me make the best writing that I could. He personally extensively helped me with the Tajaran Military Structures page, which was the first page I wrote, and even took the time to lecture me on color theory and work with me to make the graphs less of an eyesore. They even went out of their way to make a full map for Adhomai after they already made maps for Moghes and Biesel! Old lore team was far more... "catty" and "aggressive" I'd say than current lore team. Current lore team has its dramas, sure, but old lore team (and by old, I mean like pre-2017) used to have large and bombastic arguments on the regular. While they didn't do a perfect job and I've still failed to render a perfect job, Marlon did great at bringing down the tension and cooling things off. Marlon often knew when to admit they were wrong and work on and compromise out mutually agreeable works on the lore team. Coming into spring of 2017 at the weeklong super event culmination of the second antag contest, Marlon worked extensively with Loow and I, as well as the admins and the rest of the lore team, to pull together an event that was wildly popular and much beloved at the time. There was praise from all sides, everyone seemed to love the hell out of it, and if it wasn't for Marlon's intervention, it was going to be a super boring player referendum to decide the end! Most modern event arcs ever since essentially follow the template established by that weeklong event, which we owe largely to Marlon. Circling back to the much detested light hearted lore that used to be all over the server lore landscape. I'm gonna drop a truth bomb here and tell everyone the entire lore team setting is full of little inside jokes between old lore devs. It was extremely common up until like, 2018/2019 for there to be straight up joke articles, internal lore memes, and all other kinds of inside jokes. Back during the golden age of Skrell, there was an absolutely absurd amount of skrell metaclique inside jokes just being churned out all the time. Chad "Danger" Supreme, Tegucigulpa being a city on Qerrbelak, "Jargon" being a joke on humans not being able to pronounce it, Swamp Rap, too many for me to even remember let alone count. At the time, it was official lore that the first song shared between humans and skrell was "Come Sail Away" by Styx. Something which I think has some great symbolism for that bright and early future, but I'm getting off topic. It was an environment where lore writers were aware that we're all just amateur sci-fi writing volunteers, and we had a fun time with that self awareness and turning the mirror on ourselves to self-deprecate and poke some fun at the disproportional gravity we sometimes assign to it all. A self awareness which I often lacked greatly in my quest to make everything "gritty" and "grounded" and "believable," and ultimately, edgy. Pointing to those old articles as examples of Marlon being a bad writer isn't fair in the slightest, because everyone was having a bit of fun with their own lore in their own ways too. It was a different time where the expectations about the writing weren't so formal and regimented like I've made them. This is also not to mention that while it's easy to point out the articles that are dumb in hindsight, I'm often astounded at how people ignore the massive body of work comprising all the rest of their contributions which we still active use and build upon today. In a few years if our server shifts back to being more on the goofy, silly side of writing with occasional serious item, people then are going to look back at us now like we've got sticks up our bums and were edgelords. I know I've been guilty of it [being a 2serious 2edgy boi] plenty of times. Marlon left the team in winter of 2019 after months of pretty much everyone and their mother who had an axe to grind with them came at them following their demotion from loremaster, and would not stop coming at them. It was a full on dogpile where they could not say nor do anything without everyone coming out of the woodwork to put them down. In that time, we had also discovered there was even a metaclique explicitly coordinating what I can only call a group effort of bullying, after a good Samaritan began leaking and feeding us logs of it. I encouraged Marlon to bring it to light and file a complaint, since at the time there really wasn't a methodology for handling complaints like that confidentially. However, disenfranchised, disheartened, and constantly under public shame, ridicule, and attacks from all sides which were explicitly coordinated and malicious in nature with the intent of forcing Marlon out, they left and felt it better to not kick up any dust on the way out, honorably bearing the brunt of all the malice and shame. In the time since Marlon has gone, there's been this growing "legend" of them that they were this spectral boogyman of old lore. People who weren't even around when they were who came in during the hiatus even spout the same lines about how their writing was bad and they were a mean and unreasonable person, based entirely on the gossip they've gathered up. I've even had some clueless folks among the playerbase try to josh around with me about "That Marlon guy was crazy and his lore sucked right? lol" without realizing how monumental they were, without realizing how much of a dear and close friend to me they are, and without realizing just how much our entire lore owes to them. In time, the titan who lifted up and built our lore became ridiculed and hated as its destroyer, despite all current lore still being entirely within their direction. And what did Marlon do to get demoted from loremaster such that I took the position? Chiefly and primarily, above every other consideration, Marlon was removed from loremaster because they told skrell team to take on a third deputy despite our bosses imposing the two deputy limit. Not for the quality of their writing, nor necessarily their personality. If Marlon hadn't made that grim mistake that essentially spawned a lore team riot, they'd might've still been loremaster today. I can't point that out enough, that in the eyes of lore team management, the only strike on their entire record was being demoted from lore master for breaking that rule. In other words, a mistake that only someone in an administrative position could even make, yet they're applying for the low responsibility position of deputy, and honestly, are far less argumentative and quarrelsome than some of our current deputies, deputies who themselves are still within the bounds of acceptable behavior according to the lore team rules and regulations code of conduct. Can't praise them enough. Marlon's a dear and close friend, mentor, and role model. And despite some of my other close friends hating his guts, I cannot help but love them entirely.

@Marlon P. I harumph at you good sir! Harumph!

LORE DIARY ENTRY #9 This is a lore diary entry for OCTOBER 2021. See below for changes to lore in this month! Major changes in the spoiler below! There's 1 Tajara, 1 Vaurca, and 1 Skrell entry. Medium-sized, niche changes in the spoiler below! There's 4 Tajaran, 2 Diona, 1 Vaurca, 1 Diona-Skrell, and 3 Skrell entries. Small additional fluff in the spoiler below! There's 2 Tajaran, 1 Diona, and 4 Skrell entries.