Human Lore Deputy appleicaticon

[Scheveningen]

Ckey/BYOND Username: Scheveningen
Position Being Applied For: Human Lore Deputy
Past Experiences/Knowledge: I was chiefly the first human lore developer, an unorthodox and disproportionately late concept at the given time, but something that ended up through successors to be much more than it initially was.
Examples of Past Work: https://wiki.aurorastation.org/index.php?title=Timeline_of_Humanity#Pre-Second_Space_Age Pretty much the start of the 1969 arc all the way down to 2037 was mostly my ideas in combination with Jackboot/Marlon at the given time. That was some years ago. Speaking of which, the 21st era was never truly finished and I never really got started on the 22nd century, as real life at the time ended up poaching me from being able to write what I felt was right for the Auroraverse without the stress and depression that inevitably is involved with having real life responsibilities.
Additional Comments: mine writeup https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UOZYHD20oQqCGRu9gs8I-HdcNp1B3rUnYJlge8AnMT4/edit?usp=sharing

[BoryaTheSlayer]

Hey, Schev! I'm glad to see your application and I really like a lot of ideas in your app. Extremely sorry about a very late response on this, but I was really hoping that other people on the team would keep you busy by asking you questions. I guess I'll just do that myself.

• Do you have any specific ideas on how you would write the history? While I actually don't see the "information dark age" as that egregious of an excuse, I do find it a very good idea to explain how corporations rose to power and a more descriptive history for all factions, so that everyone has plenty to go off.
• I also really don't want to leave Scarabs in the dark! But I also don't really know what to do for them, since adding new things to them could potentially shake them from the balance they currently enjoy. What would you do for them? New content? Events? Articles?

Really looking forward to your answers on these questions.

[Scheveningen]

Thanks Borya.

In regards to the former question, the premise I already had going was that companies were able to get on their legs and grow particularly through funding their own puppet proxy PMCs to participate in the earlier skirmishes in the Proxy Cold War. The juxtaposition that was used was essentially how the United States manages to have a permanent war economy and a very profitable/persistent military-industrial complex that fuels a large majority of the supply and demand for various commodities - and in this case, it was heavily privatized, instead of simply half-half as it is today. In this case, as we go off of history, corporations are able to grow, buy out other competitors and consolidate their growing power into major megacorporate entities, as well as brokering agreements with supposedly different megacorporations to essentially have an official cease-fire and to stay out of each other's way. This manifests into a situation where megacorporations become utterly impossible to break up, as even the corporate side of things understands that for accelerationist capitalism to survive, they have to distance themselves away from true monopolization of the entire economic megasphere. Otherwise, in a disaster scenario, there's nothing left to salvage once it all breaks down.

To actually answer that question, I want to make it clear through each corporate faction's relative progression where they came from, how they met specific demand in their associated areas, and how their sphere of influence grew and managed to root itself down within the galaxy today. Likewise, I noticed a rather strange lacking of a specific superpower from the lore, something I want to fix... it could be fun, at any rate.

The fate of the Scarabs is a fairly tricky question. They're a nomadic entity for the most part, which makes them rather difficult to solidify as relevant power projectors go, even if they have the most significant flotilla and not even the Solarian Alliance would risk trying to police their numbers. But for the most part, I want them to have a lot more gameplay presence, particularly through implemented mechanics. I would also like them to be relevant antagonistically (but not enough to warrant killing a Scarab on-sight, certainly not), as it's pretty clear that nomadic space jihadists would very likely have some cultural differences with corporate employees working on a cozy space station.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

You've been dismissed or resigned from staff quite a few times and it resulted in you being banned from becoming a moderator. Every time you seem to turn increasingly combative and you crash and burn out of staff.

What guarantee can the lore team have that your behavior wouldn't continue as it has the past few years whenever you get onto staff?

[Scheveningen]

10 hours ago, Marlon Phoenix said:

You've been dismissed or resigned from staff quite a few times and it resulted in you being banned from becoming a moderator.

Was I "banned" from becoming a moderator? As I recall, this was gone over before, and I was never given the impression either officially or unofficially this was the case. I can understand the desire to re-interpret how the past went if it suits you, but don't do that, if you don't mind. I've resigned numerous times from various staff positions, certainly, I've been around the ballpark in that regard. A majority of those resignations were largely tendered with not having enough time to commit to the staff position, and knowing there'd be better persons for the job than I'd be if I were to stick around and do nothing with the position. We've seen numerous times after all, that inactive staff can be a problem, so for a majority of the cases where I did decide to step down from the associated staff positions, that was the case.

As for the moderator tenure and how that went, I stepped down when I was doing my work as a staff member very poorly, and I needed to distance myself from the staff position so as to focus on bettering myself and rethinking how I deal with people and other community issues. Was I asked by admin staff to consider resignation at the time, before action was forced if I fucked up again? Yeah, for sure. Garn especially thought it was a good idea, had I not taken action, the entire situation would've been worse off for everybody involved. I was in a pretty bad mental state, and the fact I didn't rein myself in sooner is a major regret of mine. 

10 hours ago, Marlon Phoenix said:

Every time you seem to turn increasingly combative and you crash and burn out of staff.

The same could be said of anybody, it's incredibly easy to paint anyone as "combative" especially if they don't agree with the accuser on any given issue. Just the nature of things.

10 hours ago, Marlon Phoenix said:

Every time you seem to turn increasingly combative and you crash and burn out of staff.

What guarantee can the lore team have that your behavior wouldn't continue as it has the past few years whenever you get onto staff?

I'm a player in good standing. I had prior history many years ago about being an unreliable command whitelistee (and god were people right about how bad I was), and since 2015-16(ish) I haven't had it stripped; one notable figure that I've become less bad, if not better. I've played command roles responsibly for that given time - I apologize in advance to anyone who had a rather mediocre experience, I have hit or miss days. I make it a priority of mine to contribute to the overall enjoyment of the round, whether it is for a backdrop character like an engieborg or for an integral command character. I don't commonly say it - and I also understand that being sappy too often tends to wear thin on people so I generally avoid doing it - but I do care about the community, especially the individuals I've come to call friends here. I care about trying to make the game and the roleplay setting enjoyable for most if not everyone there is.

Community, friends, a hobby, all that stuff is pretty important to me. Why would I throw all that away for something petty? I'm definitely committed to writing, it is something that is fun and engaging to think up all kinds of odd ideas and make them part of the server's story. I really didn't have to write this out, but I am pretty motivated to do the job well this time, tie up the loose ends laid around from the last time I was lore for humans, etc.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Excuse me, you're partially right. You werent banned from mod you were banned from all staff. I forget what you applied to in 2019 that had me ask but the ban was from staff not mod.

I dont KNOW if your turn for the better is genuine. It would be very easy to go back and find every testimony from you about how youre better that time around and wont burn out or do something bad, but then you do. The worst being the times when you deleted antag contracts from me then when i made a complaint you deleted the rest during the complaint as retaliation then that other incident where you banned me from discord then tried to lie about it until you were busted - so my big worry is about this behavior happening as a lore deputy- i am extremely concerned about the integrity of any project you'd take on and concerned about how you could treat players and other staff if given authority again. 

You say you changed this time around and I hope so but is there anything you've done recently that you think can help show and not so much tell that your behavior has improved? I think asking for feedback about it would be good because it's only me so far.

[Scheveningen]

7 hours ago, Marlon Phoenix said:

The worst being the times when you deleted antag contracts from me then when i made a complaint you deleted the rest during the complaint as retaliation then that other incident where you banned me from discord then tried to lie about it until you were busted

Most of this was 3-4 years ago, roughly, I do not remember the exact range of time. It's a pretty long time to be hung up on two incidents within similar time frames in particular. But as I recall, we've both been rather awful to each other. I don't care to dig up examples from 3-4 years ago as I really do not care that much as to what's already interned into its respective drama grave. It's water under the bridge, there's nothing to say about it, if you haven't forgiven it you have a right to not to.

Likewise, look at the position I'm applying for. It is definitely not equivalent to the moderator rank, that which was expected to have a degree of its own autonomy so as to be able to deal with various situations. Lore deputies fall under two approval chains, that of the team head and that of the loremaster(s). My only aims are to contribute and help drive the overarching story of the server to help make it more fun. It's your opinion if you think my motivations with applying is some attempt to seize any semblance of power. It's a little bad faith to assume that, but sure.

Frankly, there is nothing I can tell you that'll convince you. You'll believe what you want and you're well within your grounds of free will to do so.

Edited April 17, 2020 by Scheveningen

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I brought them up because theyre directly related to things loredevs do - working with players with these events and stuff. Theres some red flags i have that are a lot more recent but i dont want to dig them all up im only trying to point out where you can face big issues as a lore deputy and what you think you can show from the past year that can help assuade the fears. Saying that any bad behavior would be limited by you being a deputy isnt helpful there - do you think you'll NEED those constraints and if not how have you changed since your last incidents as staff?

I'm not stuck in my ways here - a pattern is a pattern is a pattern. What would help put my foot in my mouth are ppl with staff vision that can vouch for your behavior since they see our notes and stuff. Im posting my own concerns based on past incidents. You already challenged me on an easily provable fact (the staff ban) and said it was me altering things to suit my own ends so please understand that's not the best way to show me youre trustworthy in staff again.  :s

Edited April 17, 2020 by Marlon Phoenix

[Scheveningen]

I believe I will be fine. Thank you for your concerns, I will keep them in mind.

[NewOriginalSchwann]

Hello, and thank you for applying! My apologies for not getting back to you sooner, I found myself unexpectedly busy last night. I just have a few questions!

1. I'm a bit curious about your desire to make the Scarabs "relatively antagonistic." Could you expand upon that?
2. What do you plan to do with the Coalition? You have a distaste for the sandbox aspect of it, but don't seem to offer anything to fix that. How much freedom would players have in your take on the Coalition?
3. How would you make Elyra less of a punching bag?

[Scheveningen]

2 minutes ago, NewOriginalSchwann said:

I'm a bit curious about your desire to make the Scarabs "relatively antagonistic." Could you expand upon that?

The biggest thing as I view it, is that groups additional late-join roles would really help manifest Scarabs into the game's local story a bit more. Given the differing morals of a Scarab who isn't adjusted to a corporate environment, I'd love to see how a party of Scarabs' morals and culture clashes with the rest of the station. They would act antagonistic perhaps from a roleplay point of view in that they're unexpected guests that board but don't necessarily have as dire intentions as the Syndicate, pirates, etc.

From the overarching lore point of view, I'd like to highlight how morally grey they tend to behave out in the unaccounted for areas of space, most characters treat them with ambivalence which is honestly a bit boring. In my vision, what they would be is that sometimes they're helpful, sometimes they mess up and create issues, and it would create a scapegoat effect of them being - on occasion - "nothing but trouble" to the most law-abiding characters. And that itself would likely create some interesting situations. Likewise, those who view the law as relativistic would likely sympathize with Scarabs and be more likely to help them out.

8 minutes ago, NewOriginalSchwann said:

What do you plan to do with the Coalition? You have a distaste for the sandbox aspect of it, but don't seem to offer anything to fix that. How much freedom would players have in your take on the Coalition?

The fact that the culture of the Coalition isn't really anything but "We're not the Solarian Alliance" is rather what bothers me. I don't want the Coalition to be particularly homogenized culturally or ethnically - god no - it's rather that there's very little history or common points that Coalition members really can speak of apart from disliking the SA. Sandboxes are normally more useful in environments where individual characters act as the leading protagonists of their worlds, in which they can literally shape the "sandbox" with their decision-making and such. Characters can only do that on a local scale for a round-by-round basis, where a character's competence only affects the station. Instead, the reality is that the "sandbox" people talk about is the relative freedom in character creation, depending on the character, their species, their background, etc. While sure, the original intention of the Coalition/Frontier was that anyone could make their own backstory planet within reason and say that is where their character lived, it was ultimately just a means to the actual character's creation and is meant to exemplify how hardened or soft that character particularly is. "Sandbox" means something completely different, as a result.

I view the Coalition as very important, as it is a juxtaposition of a freer nation with less strict boundaries as opposed to the authoritarian, imperialistic dominion of the Solarian Alliance. It's a very useful foil and it's an proven concept that the Alliance actually lacks the ability to hold itself together if it were any bigger than it is right now. Sadly, the Coalition and the Alliance both suffer from the same issue: their history is a bit barren compared to the other, more well developed factions. "Who are you, who do not know your history" being an important quote that inspires me in this regard. Likewise some at-present events need to be written to justify some future conflict I have planned should I get this position. It'll play a pretty significant role in what I want to come about, but I don't want to spoil specifics very early.

18 minutes ago, NewOriginalSchwann said:

How would you make Elyra less of a punching bag?

Good question. I imagine even Elyran characters are tired of constantly being on the defensive. They're very tired of getting punked by the Vaurca, the Unathi, and space piracy in general. I'd like to see much more retribution against whom they view are the original perpetrators of terrible crimes against them, and they and Eridani and the Coalition will all play their own major roles in a narrative event I have planned.

[BoryaTheSlayer]

Thank you for applying, but I chose another applicant.