Curiosity on Eras

[Breneir Tzaracomprada]

This is a question that has been gurgling at the back of my mind for a while so I thought I'd throw it out there. In reviewing the list of seneschals it is broken down by eras. It is a really interesting way to review Talossan history.

So far, the following eras are listed:
King Ben Era (1985-2005)
Abdication Era (2005-2011)
Reunision Era (2012-Present)

Are we in a new era? I'd like to think so. It seems like a good breakpoint for a new era was the ascension of Txec to the throne. As the Reunision era is tied to the honorable work of King John and there is precedent for breaks in the eras based on royal changes.

This is all informal, of course, but are we in a new era of Talossan History? The King Txec Era?

[anglatzara]

The eras leading up to the declaration of the Republic in 2004 are more significant than the ones after that. The pre-Internet era, for example, was completely different from what followed.

[Breneir Tzaracomprada]

The eras leading up to the declaration of the Republic in 2004 are more significant than the ones after that. The pre-Internet era, for example, was completely different from what followed.

Do you think the 20-year King Ben Era can be split into more specific sub-eras?

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

There are existing divisions, but I do agree we're probably in a new era with a new king.

https://wiki.talossa.com/History

[Sir Lüc]

I largely wrote and laid out the List of Seneschals page in its present form and the eras on there are more about separating different political systems/power structures than actual history.

The 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.

[GV]

...As the Reunision era is tied to the honorable work of King John...

Oh dear, oh dear...  King John's "honorable work" only began because of Miestra Schiva making the first move in December 2011 to get the ball rolling. 

Never forget that from 2005 through 2011, John *refused* - either through channels public or private - to try to get us "down south" to come back to the Kingdom.  He rightly saw us as a legitimate threat to the way he wanted to do Talossa, and by societally blocking our return, he succeeded until the Kingdom grew so stagnant (along with far-more moribound Republic, I might add) that in order to keep it from going into a permanent coma, he consented to the influx of people from the Republic and the energy he rightly knew we would bring, even at the cost of the way he wanted to do Talossa.

Logic and common sense dictates a swift return of the "republicans" to the Kingdom immediately or very soon after Ben's abdication and exit.  John had at that time tremendous political and societal sway over the country, and he used that power effectively, fostering and continuing the Ben-started culture of the 'republicans' being the next thing to demonic evil in the world.

John absolutely *refused* to give us "down south" any grace whatsoever about the domains and Wittenberg, succeeding in planting in the minds of many newbies the idea we were the bad guys right along with Ben.

(You can tell I get worked up over this - lol.)

As to "eras", I'll put my thoughts into a reply to this post.

[GV]

Prehistory to 25 December 1979: Pre-Talossan Period

26 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

Frederic Coriu's first visit to Ben's house occurred in 1981(?) and it was his reaction to Ben's Talossan flag that validated Ben's creative life altogether.  I look at this event as being the third-most-important occurrence in Talossan history after the tragic death of Ben's mom in February 1979 and the founding of the Kingdom.

A reading of "the Big History" imho clearly shows the workings of Ben's mind: the death of his mother directly or indirectly led to the founding of Talossa.  Also, everything I've said regarding Ben's mother here is public knowledge Ben put into his public writings.  May she continue to rest in peace.

1979 to 1982 saw as foils to Ben the names Daniel Laurier and Bob M. (the latter competed in the Olympics in swimming for Barbados).  It was not until 1983 Ian M. came on the Talossan scene, becoming not the most important foil Ben ever had (that was Dan), but certainly the most colorful (as Ben put it, "mostly red, white, and black").

1983 to Ben's re-coronation in 1988: The IM Era (for lack of a far-better name). 

I have seen every extant issue of IM's "Talossan National News".  If you have yet to do so yourself, you are officially required to do so.  This is the era of IM's greatest creative output in Talossa, the era of early Davron, King Dobberpuhl, and the legendary King Florence.  Talossa got a whole bunch of stuff out of its system during this time, and it came to a peak and an end at Ben's re-coronation in September 1988 (month?).

That event was the last great gathering of Talossa from its earliest years - sorta like the 1974 Academy Awards from what I can tell.  Davron was there.  Dan L. was there.  IM was there.  I'm pretty sure Cona was there, too. 

We internet-Talossans can never truly know what it was like to have been in-person and in Ben's wider-than-just-Talossa friendship network in Milwaukee.  For better or worse, going online in the 1990s changed Talossa forever.

Very late 1988-November 1990: This is the time when Talossa came the 2nd-closest to going under.  The National Destiny Referendum (name?) in November 1990 saved the country.  In the end, no-one wanted Talossa to go the way of the Dodo, and with that, the stagnation of the past two years came to an end.

1990 is also the year that saw IM come out of the closet.  His time as an independent political force in Talossa in opposition to Ben ends here and even in 2004-2005 never truly returns.  This was the Talossan political equivalent of an earthquake.

December 1990 - to ca. 1995: Resurgence in Talossa.  IM is PM during part of this time and revitalizes the country in a way no-one has before or since.

1995-1996: Beginning of the Cybercit Era.  The first internet-citizens are brought on-board, and they all buy into Ben's creative direction for Talossa.

1997-1998: 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.

1997 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.

1998 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.

Not sure about "eras", but Ben in the end is the one who incites all the mass-exoduses that have ever been from Talossa right up to the day I write this screed.

More soon,

[Mic’haglh Autófil, O.Be]

I have seen every extant issue of IM's "Talossan National News".  If you have yet to do so yourself, you are officially required to do so.  This is the era of IM's greatest creative output in Talossa, the era of early Davron, King Dobberpuhl, and the legendary King Florence.

Do we have them archived somewhere?

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

The 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.

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

Do 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?

[Xheralt Del’Encradeir]

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.

26 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.

certainly the most colorful (as Ben put it, "mostly red, white, and black").

Yep.

1983 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.

1997-1998: 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.

1997 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.

1998 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.

[Xheralt Del’Encradeir]

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.

[King Txec]

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

-Txec R

[Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC]

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.

[Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP]

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.

Atx Ianesc, I'd say.

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