Quote from: Iason Taiwos on May 16, 2026, 05:56:16 PMFirstly, Istefan Pertgonest. Once my rival (during a Senate campaign), never really a friend (just never got to know him very well), but a Benitian/Belacostan worthy of every honor possible for his contributions to our province. He isn't very active on Witt anymore, but he is still around, and anytime he shows up, it feels like a big piece of our province has returned.

"Active" is one of those matters of definition, you know. I certainly don't post a lot, but I do visit Witt pretty much daily, with the Belacosta forum being one of a handful I always check for the new message indicator.

Quote from: Marcüs Causch on February 25, 2026, 01:58:43 PMWhy does the official title of the King contain the parts "by the Grace of God" and "Defender of the Faith"?

So, the historical reason is that they're part of the titles of the British Monarchy*, aped by Talossa's founding king, and were not subsequently explicitly deleted the way some other parts have been.

(I previously suggested in the other thread they were added to the title when Ben was an atheist; on review of the Big History, I think they actually were added after his conversion to the Latter Day Saints.)

*For example, David White, Garter Principal King of Arms, read out the British form of Elizabeth II's titles at her funeral as follows: "Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, and Sovereign of the Most Noble Order of the Garter".

So, I don't know how many people have been following this, but Florencia needs a Governor.

To that end, under the province's current Constitution, they need someone who meets the following requirements:

1) NOT the current King, the current Constable of Florencia, a current judicial officer of Talossa, or a current member of the Talossan Senate.

2) Has experience as at least one of the following:
__a) Member of Florencia's House of Shepherds for the whole duration of a previous term.
__b) Member of the Cosa of Talossa for four months.
__c) Member of the Senate of Talossa for one month.

3) Has the confidence of the House of Shepherds -- which, given its current composition, is to say, can get the approval of Mximo Carbonèl, who personally holds a large majority in that body.

Note in particular that as the vacancy has lasted more than eight days, you do NOT need to be a Florencian to qualify.

If you meet #1 & #2, think you can meet #3, and are interested, I suggest you put your name forward to Antaglha Xhenerös Somelieir, Cunstaval of Florencia.

Job description is here.

IIRC:

The royal title got "Head of the Church, Defender of the Faith" appended in blatant imitation/parody of Henry VIII back when KR1 was self-identified as an atheist. This was simply carried forward until the drafting of the 1997 Organic Law, when Matthias Muth got the word "Unorthodox" added to the title in Article III Section 3 to eliminate any claim to any real church. The "Head of the Unorthodox Church" bit was then deleted by amendment post-KR1 because King John was a member of the Orthodox Church.

Subsequently, we had a massive revision of the Organic Law that completely eliminated the title section. Now the title is codified in El Lexhatx, L6, as:

"__________ (name), by the Grace of God, King of Talossa and of all its Realms and Regions, King of Cézembre, Sovereign Lord and Protector of Pengöpäts and the New Falklands, Defender of the Faith, Leader of the Armed Forces, Viceroy of Hoxha and Vicar of Atatürk."

Quote from: King Txec on December 21, 2025, 10:17:50 PM

Quote from: Mximo Malt on December 21, 2025, 05:40:25 PMIsn't the "crown" just a general's hat, Your Majesty?

Actually, it is a train conductors hat.

-Txec R

Well. While it is traditionally called "the Romanian train conductor's hat", it (both King Ben's original, and the duplicate King John acquired) is a Milwaukee Fire Department captain's hat from a retired dress uniform design.

Damn, this means I'm gonna have to finally sit down and decide what I want on a coat of arms, aren't I?

Ahem.

I mean, thank you, your majesty. (I almost added the cliché "it's an honor", but, of course, it literally is an honor.)

And congratulations on your anniversary.

I have an admittedly-odd hobby of reading old (1970s, 1980s) computer magazines. As I go along, I'll often see something that piques my curiosity, and so I'll do an Internet search for more tidbits about the item. Well, about a third of the time, the LLM box will confidently assert that the thing I just read about did not ever exist. Even when there's a directly-relevant search result a handful of items down.

Similarly, I tried, a few months ago, to have several LLMs perform a quite simple task -- take a list of the countries that are parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, take a list of countries by population, and give me the combined population of the countries that are members of the ICC. Every single time, the LLM crapped out. Even given explicit instructions on how to complete the task, a model would at most get a dozen countries in, and then quit in favor of some method of estimation. With results that were all over the map (as it were).

(Incidentally, Wolfram Alpha, which is not an LLM, will give you accurate-for-2023 stats for the member countries in the case of any number of  organizations, including the ICC. Manually adding Ukraine and subtracting the Philippines is easy enough, and indicates that every LLM estimate was off by at least 10%, and usually more.)

I accordingly am of the opinion that the thing LLMs are most suited for is enabling students to cheat on their homework. Facile regurgitation of shallow knowledge, an inability or unwillingness to work, and an obligation to answer instead of saying "I don't know" -- LLMs do a great job of emulating a sixteen-year-old just trying to skate through a required class.

Linguistically, I note the "Free Province" construction evokes the historical Irish Free State (1922-1937), a constitutional monarchy established as a compromise for a people who would have, in the main, have preferred to be a republic.

Quote from: Carteir Montagnhă on September 09, 2025, 09:30:55 AMhello! i just got my Talossan citizenship today! and i would like to get to know everyone here since i am now a Fiovan myself :)

Hello, from your provincial representative of the monarch!

Quote from: Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP on August 09, 2025, 05:18:06 PMConsidering that one point on the agenda is the promotion of the Talossan language, I'd like to suggest Raßemblamaintsch dels Citaxhiéns Talossaes as a better translation for the name.

Well, if you are starting with the English translation of the party name (which most Talossans would be), sure, that's likely more how you'd go into Talossan. But since Mximo is a native speaker of French, I expect the "per el" instead of "dels" more correctly reflects his intent (historical French parties of the "Rally" name pattern include both a "Rassemblement du" and a "Rassemblement pour la").

Për.

The whole symbolism of the sash as part of the Royal Regalia is to honor modern Talossa's substantial inheritance from the Republic. It should be left as-is.

Talossa's provinces are . . . well. The provinces, by and large, have been nominal. There have been brief periods of actual local activity in some of them (Fiova for a while after Reunison comes to mind), but as a group, most of the time, they're just a potential hook that isn't being used. And while they don't get created/destroyed/re-symbol-ized at a blistering pace, they do change often enough that I expect that if incorporated into a bit of national regalia, said item of regalia would spend most of its time out-of-date.

Thanks, yes, visibility restored.

I think the Courthouse board got nuked. At least I can't see it or my past posts to it. That was kinda important.

Um, did someone delete the Courthouse sub-board on Witt? I can't find it, and looking at my past messages my posts to it are missing.

Contra.

Nothing huge -- but it bothers me that it is specified that sentence in the case of falsely claiming membership in the Order of Belacostă can only be pronounced by the Cort pü Inalt, not any lawful court hearing the case. Especially since the same unified statutes then specify how the provincial-level courts work.

So, the "Contra" is as much my fault as anybody's, because I didn't actually look at this back when a revision in accordance with my objection would have been easy. Sorry.

Anyway, assuming this passes, I'd appreciate if the Consuls would soon propose an amendment to eliminate that specificity.

One might, of course, debate if coloring hair or expressing a liking for Nickelback qualifies as "in the Judge's official and individual capacity".

I didn't have to parse exactly what the boundaries of that clause meant, or evaluate who has the power (the Ziu or a court) to decide if that clause applies, because the underlying complaint was so obviously about one individual's (in)actions in an official capacity as a judge.

On a purely speculative note, I wonder if relatively-disengaged voters pick among available parties at near-random, thus implicitly favoring small parties over broad coalitions.

In which case, the optimum tactic for a political alliance might be to register as several parties, but with the same electoral list. There is, at a first glance, no rule I see against people appearing on the electoral lists of more than one party. (Or, actually, even against for multiple parties having the same party leader.)

The natural checks on artificial use of this tactic are 1) having to pay a registration fee for each party; and 2) parties that look obviously "spammed" (particularly in having the same party leader) will probably turn off voters.

I'm waiting for the follow-up, where the badge of the new position has four fingers raised.

For the obvious reason, the holder of the new position would have to post in four-line rhymed stanzas.

As a Talossan cabinet position, of course the obligatory rhyme scheme for the stanzas would be ABBA, for a slightly more obscure reason.

Yeah, so, regarding the most recent case I saw?

It would be nice if, instead of relying on my interpretation (which isn't binding precedent since it's a General Cort-level decision, and couldn't become biding precedent under the Organic Law even if appealed to the Uppermost Cort because it couldn't get a three-judge panel after recusals), you guys could either revise the statute law to explicitly say the inactivity-retirement system is a Notice of Reprimand procedure requiring concurrence of 2/3rds the Cosa, or, alternatively, revise the OrgLaw to make the existing procedure unquestionably Organic.

What exactly you should do is, I think, too much a policy (and thus political) matter for it to be proper for me to make a specific recommendation.

But I do think the absolute worst place for there to be any obvious room for differing interpretations in Talossan law is over the question of who has the power and responsibility to definitively interpret Talossan law.