Thank you both!

With thanks to @GV and @Xheralt Del'Encradeir it is wonderful to see this thread turning into a flourishing historical exploration. We should consider some kind of video reminiscing if you all are interested.

I personally think that Senats candidates should be selected as follows, if there is more than one candidate:

50% of the vote is by members of the party within the province, and 50% of the vote is from members outside of the province.

Senators represent a province, sure, but they are also important safeguards for the Cosa.

Let's say that there are 3 members of the party in the province, and two of them are in a sort of fringe sub-branch. They propose one of them, while the party backs another.

They would get 2/3 in the province, which is 67%, but the rest of the party all vote for the other member (who has 1/3).

2/3 + 0   = 33.5% of the total vote
1/3 + 100 = 66.5% of the total vote.

The province still has a say, they are 50% of the vote, but that way, the party can make sure that the backed senate candidates trully represent the party.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on July 08, 2025, 10:46:04 PMI called it the Johannine Era.  I need to figure out the Talossan for that, of course.  @Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP ... I'm hoping the answer isn't just making it possessive with sè, but since I don't know of a way to adjectivize a noun, I suspect that might be the answer.

Atx Ianesc, I'd say.

EDIT: I should add here that all the era names are incorrect as they follow English compounding syntax.

I still insist on my (mis)use of the Greek term National Schism to describe the era of the separate existence of the Republic.

@Xheralt Del'Encradeir's categorization of Sir Tamorán dal Nava as a "jock" strikes me as weird. He's just as nerdy as the rest of us. But he's also very combative (or was so), and during the period when he was Seneschál and I was a leading figure in Penguinea we absolutely despised each other. Then, during the Republican era, we became very close political allies, and I keep trying to persuade him to become active again. I've found that that happens to me again and again in Talossa - my closest political allies seem to be my firm political opponents of 5 years ago. I like to think of that as the Hegelian dialectic.

Also of historical interest to Xheralt might be this - entent2.pdf - a newssheet which was my attempt (in my usual overheated style of the time) to intervene in the post-Ben Kingdom. I beg Xheralt's forgiveness for the personalised tone. What we were aiming for above all was to try to counter Ben's lies and propaganda, to reach out to whichever Kingdom citizens might be prepared to treat us fairly, to repair the National Schism. Sadly, that door closed when John Woolley became King and didn't open up again for 5 years or so.

Wow, a very fascinating read! I look forward to reading more!

-Txec R

I have a smattering of old Talossan documents in my Google Drive.  Three issues of TNN, Ben's post about pagans, the '97 OrgLaw, a few stray chapters of Ar Pats, etc.  I'm a little reluctant to post the lattermost, because in the "Old Growthers are often too Talossan to have Talossan names" vein, real names are used.

Anything not quoted is agreed with or not contested at this time.

I first met Ben in the pre-Talossan era.  He and the others were all a year ahead of me in high school, and at this great remove I'm not sure if it was one or two years before.  I was a frequent houseguest; as a budding science fiction fan (even then), his Micronauts toy collection was huge, amazing to me.

Quote from: GV on July 08, 2025, 09:33:53 PM26 December 1979 to 25 November 1980: Era 1, ending with the Battle of the Garage

26 November 1980 to the day of Frederic Coriu's first visit in 1981(?) and ending at the end of 1982: The Expansionist Era.

It was not until 1983 Ian M. came on the Talossan scene...

I would consolidate all of this into a single "pre-Cheap Glory" era.  The Garage War ended my involvement with Talossa for a long while (for obvious reasons), but it did not change Talossa itself.

IM may not have been a Talossan, but being in the same school and same year, also participating in the same activities (Debate, Forensics, minitures wargaming -- especially WWII simulations, surprise surprise) he was certainly known to Ben, Wes E., Geoff T., and the aforementioned Dan & Bob.  Ián Anglatzara and I were in the Drama Club and Stage Crew; it's quite likely that was how he first got involved with Talossa.

Quote from: GV on July 08, 2025, 09:33:53 PMcertainly the most colorful (as Ben put it, "mostly red, white, and black").

Yep.

Quote from: GV on July 08, 2025, 09:33:53 PM1983 to Ben's re-coronation in 1988: The IM Era (for lack of a far-better name). 

[...] Davron was there.  Dan L. was there.  IM was there.  I'm pretty sure Cona was there, too. 

I was not.  My involvement with Talossa had ended with the Garage War, a year or more prior, and we were not friends at the moment.  Ben & company graduated from RHS in 1982, and I didn't see them again for years. Over a decade, in fact.

I happened to run into IM walking about a half mile from UWM.  We exchanged pleasantries, and he told me about the expansion of Talossa, the "Cheap Glory", which included my childhood home. 

I jokingly said, "How would you like it if somebody walked up and claimed your childhood home?!  I may have to go to war again!"

This apparently caused a bit of panic within Talossa.  But with communications reopened, I was able to reassure them than, no, I wasn't really angry, Ben & I buried the hatchet, and I (re)joined Talossa. 

The Talossa I returned to was very different from the Talossa of high school.  First and foremost, I must mention LOSS, the League of Separatist States, which Talossa founded.  Ben's (wild) idea was that of World Singular Secession, that everyone should have their own "their home is their castle" country.  IM had the Kaiserlich J_ Konigreich (sp?), Ián Anglatzara had the Kingdom of Thord, I had a measly bathtubbia, the Glib Room Empire that had evaporated even before the Garage War was settled (but I'd signed the peace treaty with Ben in its name), and a second attempt, the Confederacy of One (C/One) that went equally nowhere.  Other micronations joined in, and LOSS still exists out in the www somewhere AFAIK.

Somewhere in the decade-plus I was away, Ben decided that he didn't want to spend his energies playing diplomacy in a "Micronational United Nations", he wanted to devote his time to his Kingdom, and worked to persuade people to become Talossans.

Quote from: GV on July 08, 2025, 09:33:53 PM1997-1998: The next wave of Cybercits come to Talossa.  Not all of them buy into Ben's creative direction for Talossa and wish to do Talossa in somewhat their own way, while keeping well within the Talossan representative-democratic-monarchist structure and system.  The Uppermost Cort's vetoing the citizenship process for Miestra Schiva is infamous.

There have not been many Living Cosas.  I was present at two very significant ones.  One was where the so-called "Greek God Guy" had his application essentially rejected.  I'd tried to find a middle course, taking the standpoint of "You all have questions that weren't answered, let's put this on hold, ask your questions, and see what the answers are."  But, rejection on religious grounds is just that, and he [insulted and not wrong for feeling so] joined the penguin colony. To my shame, I didn't ask the more important question -- "Why is this guy's religion even being questioned?" I encountered him, years later, in another forum, and we made peace then.

Ben (newly Christian after being rabidly atheist in H.S.) had a very jaundiced view of paganism.  The handful he'd met (in and around UWMilw) were weirdos (even by the lights of other pagans!) and had really soured him on including any such in His Kingdom.  If he'd simply allowed himself to see the better examples, Talossa's history would be very different.

Quote from: GV on July 08, 2025, 09:33:53 PM1997 sees what I believe to be the first mass-exodus in Talossan history: Miestrâ and certain others, I think.  I don't have my notes in front of me, and this is before my time.

Penguineia.  I tend to think of it as The First Schism.  Of course, following this loss was a recruitment drive.  And like the folks who had just left, some of the newcomers didn't like everything about the Kingdom they'd just joined.

Quote from: GV on July 08, 2025, 09:33:53 PM1998 sees the second mass-exodus from Talossa: Dan Wardlow and others in dramatic fashion.  Dan burns his Talossan materials, and with them go much documentation of Talossa's earliest Cybercit past.

June 2001: the next mass-exodus - this time the third Liberal Party of Talossa.  Ián Anglatzara is among those who flee.

What led up to this?  The second significant Living Cosa I was involved in.  It was combined with 2000's Talossan Independence Day celebrations, wherein I provided the site (the elegant and professional rooming house I lived in) and hosted, the first one NOT held at the Ancestral Founding Site.  There are photos of me in my night security guard uniform.

I did not personally hear the insult that Ben said was given to Queen Amy, so I cannot comment on it.  Call it confirmation bias if you will, but from what I saw of the other party, in person, I found it all at least very plausible.  I didn't like the man's personality; accurate or not, my impression was "arrogant jock", and he was the antithesis of the introverted tabletop wargamers that the Talossa I knew had grown out of.  There's been a lot of water under the bridge since then, but that was my frank assessment back then.

"Truth is a three-edged sword", there's Ben's version, the other guy's version, and the truth -- which sits somewhere between the two.  But it absolutely consumed Ben.

Talossa's orientation towards expansion and encouraging activity now worked against it.  The only "crime" that could readily & instantly end a citizenship was that of not participating, of not voting in the Clarks.  There was no mechanism for removing bad citizens -- irrespective of whether the man genuinely qualified as that or not.

By the way, this was the origin of "pocket votes".  To prevent historical figures like Tony R., Florence, Jean W_ (another teacher of Ben's from high school), and so forth from being "administratively beheaded" (denaturalized), Ben would get their opinions and submit their votes for them.  Eventually, they said, "stop asking, whatever you want is fine."  Being his friends, and also knowing the people he was representing, this was eminently plausible, and we had no specific reason to distrust him.  That's fine for a tight-knit IRL community, not so much across the www.  Even though the Constituzion and the '97 OrgLaw that followed it essentially prohibited proxy voting, that's basically what this became.  Now enshrined as an honored tradition across all parties.  Of course, because he needed the bloc, he held these votes even after denaturalization for inactivity was relaxed and later ended. 

The only other way to boot a citizen out would be for something really heinous -- the insult, whatever it was, didn't rise to a legally actionable level -- that would be adjudicated in long and drawn-out Uppermost Cort proceedings.  With Ben's personal ire in full flower, and no Talossan crime committed (although, for example, if a Brit did something like call Queen Victoria a "fat ugly cow" to her face, I'm sure it would have been considered a crime somehow in that kingdom) the Talossan system could offer him no relief. 

Yes, Ben went real-world, and because what he found using publicly accessible (for a fee) records had some bearing on the fractious interaction with the Queen, he tried to use it as leverage.  Nowadays it would be called doxxing; the word hadn't been coined yet, back then.  Again, I found the discoveries plausible, and didn't hold Ben's usage of such against him. Others did.

There were those who simply cleaved to the martyred "jock".  There were those, like Ián Anglatzara, who recognized that Ben's actions amounted to an end run around his authority as Chief Justice of the Uppermost Cort, and repudiated Ben as well.  These were the founders of the Republic, from the perspective of those who didn't join the exodus, like me. 

With control of all web assets in Republic hands, royalist supporters like myself were unceremoniously deleted from the Wittenberg of the time, and the websites.  It angered me greatly at the time, but that is also water under the bridge, and I have had some wonderful conversations with M-P over the phone since.

The wake of this was how I became the first nominally Opposition (I was voting ZPT) PM...because I'd stood by my friend, Ben.  I made a pretty inauguration speech, but didn't get much accomplished after that; I was promptly replaced in the next election.

This post is getting long enough.  I'll offer my perspective on what led up to Ben's Final Abdication in another missive.

Quote from: Mic'haglh Autófil, O.Be on July 08, 2025, 09:57:03 PMDo we have them archived somewhere?

I think GV might have the only copies?  I remember I did see some, although there was too much Nazi stuff for me to want to seek out a lot more.  I think that was a phase of Ian von M's?

Quote from: Sir Lüc on June 22, 2025, 01:54:13 PMThe ones on the History page are more accurate, although the 2007 "modern" era arguably ended with Reunision and we could be considered to be in yet another era with the accession of King Txec.

I went ahead and followed this suggestion.  Making it an era from 2007 to 2024 under the reign of King John neatly encapsulates that period.  I called it the Johannine Era.  I need to figure out the Talossan for that, of course.  @Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP ... I'm hoping the answer isn't just making it possessive with sè, but since I don't know of a way to adjectivize a noun, I suspect that might be the answer.