Where the Wild Things AreBoard

Back from a break, and re-finding my feet, WILD LIFE is my latest attempt at being literate in NS. In this edition I poke a little fun at Gameplayers since defender Blue jay 1 (also known as Qvait) accidentally couped inactive region Stargate. Enjoy!

But if you're just thinking, "I don't care about any of this. Why did I get a notification?", then this section is for you.

United Nations military approach Stargate

Stargate is the legacy of an ancient civilisation. Really - the region was founded before founders were even a thing in NS! On 27 December, life imitated art when invading aliens used Stargate to attack Earth. Well, not quite. What really happened was that raiders from Lone Wolves United and The Black Hawks jumped their puppets into Stargate to try and distract defenders from their real raid target - Japan. (OK, so their real target was Warzone Sandbox, and Japan was the back-up target... but the TV show vs NS narrative works a little better if I drop Warzone Sandbox from the story and go with the Earth / Japan angle. Forgive me). Responding rapidly to this invading alien force, a coalition of united nations jumped through to Stargate on an interplanetary mission to defend the region.

Unfortunately for the raiders, their jump landed them in some hot water in The North Pacific. And unfortunately for the defenders, they accidentally couped the Casl.

With only a few brief interruptions, Casl had been delegate of Stargate for over 4 years. For most of the time, Casl held on to this position with only two or three endorsements. But for most of 2021, this was held with only one endorsement, making the founderless region rather vulnerable.

When the raiders jumped in seconds before the region updated, they hadn't endorsed each other. So they weren't about to take the delegacy. The defenders couldn't be sure of that though. Having already endorsed each other before jumping, their split-second decision to defend the region led to them unintentionally usurping the delegate. Oops.

Was it a big deal? Not really. Other than resetting Casl's number of days as delegate back to zero, no harm was done. But this is NS, and it would be boring if we didn't try and make a song and dance out of this stuff ;) And by all accounts, defenders smashed raiders all through 2021, so it was kind of refreshing to see them make a mis-step before the year was through.

The North Pacific signed a security treaty with Stargate way back in 2012 under delegate Blue Wolf II. Current TNP Delegate Madjack understandably felt compelled to publicly condemn the incident. They went further, and terminated TNPs' relationships with raider groups LWU and TBH. The statement was calm and measured, and disappointingly lacked the drama I was craving. I felt that the "Mad" was missing from Madjack's reaction. Ridersyl was disappointed too: "I was hoping for some actual drama."

If you're interested in nuanced argument and counter-argument on the ethics of the situation, go read the thread - the link is there for you. From here on, this article is just going to focus on the snark.

RiderSyl thoughtfully tried poking at both raiders and defenders, hoping to make the gameplay thread more interesting. But the thread didn't really take off until LWU member Evil Wolf (who is also Blue Wolf II, ye olde TNP delegate*) joined in. Responding to Madjack's post: "Perhaps raiders shouldn't use our treatied allies for their thorns.", Evil Wolf said:

"Perhaps you should stop using this non-issue to push your own self-serving agenda.
The thorn didn't even break the actual terms of the treaty, you personally, Madjack, are just making this into a nontraversy. If you want to be mad at someone for breaking the Stargate delegate's streak, maybe be mad at the actual people who did it, neither of which were LWU nor TBH.
Your claims, Madjack, of a treaty violation are, at best, a misinterpretation and, at worst, a flat out lie. However, I'll give you the benifit of the doubt. Maybe you think we violated the spirit of the treaty, eh? Perhaps we could talk to the TNP representitive who signed that treaty and get their insight? I can only wonder who that might be.
Either way, I don't see how you, Madjack, breaking off relations and refusing to speak with diplomatic representives of either TBH or LWU, in private or in public, benifits The North Pacific. It's almost like you don't want to come up with a solution, Madjack. I can only wonder why that might be."

In nine sentences, Evil Wolf manages to mention Madjack's name four times. I don't know about you, but people over-using my name in conversation pisses me off. I thought this was a nice touch on Evil Wolf's part.

The post comes across as a pretty angry response. When you're typing angrily, it's easy to let mis-spellings in, and there are mis-spellings here. However, "benifit" is mis-spelled the same way twice, so maybe it is just bad spelling.

Madjack picks up on this:

"And get a f*cking spellchecker."

I like this part of Madjack's post. Whereas the rest of the post could be interpreted as being actual dialogue, this part just says "I think you're stupid". It's exactly what is needed to escalate an otherwise non-event.

Is Evil Wolf deliberately escalating the spelling war by posting "Very mich not the information I'm getting through the grapevine"?
It's possible. The post was edited two minutes later, but kept that misspelling of "much". I like to think that this was an intentional provocation.

Madjack retorts: "I expect any grapes you're currently involved with are quite sour."

Not bad. I'd have been proud of myself for keeping that grape theme going if I'd have thought of it. But looking from the outside, it doesn't really score many snark points.

This part of the retort scores highly though:
"I spoke with both Miravana and Jo prior to the decision. I informed Miravana of our decision prior to making the announcement, as a courtesy for our long working relationship with The Black Hawks. I did not inform Jo prior to our announcement."
Miravana (TBH) was worth the courtesy. Jo (LWU, Evil Wolf's crew) was not. Ouch. That's a burn. TNP had an embassy with LWU since 23 October 2011. Ten years of relations, but no courtesy was given?

It gets rubbed in:
"I spoke with Jo for as long as I deemed was worthwhile."
Oooh! That's got to hurt. No time at all is as long as was considered worthwhile?

Evil Wolf comes back with some condescension, starting their next post "My dear," which is a nice touch, but has nowhere near the same burning power. Madack is winning this war of snark.

Davelands (founder of The Sportsbook) makes a couple of comments to Madjack, then notes:
""I see that you just left The Sportsbook's Discord.
It's a shame since you have been there from the beginning.
If this is how you react to some rather gentle comments then you really are letting your emotions get the better of you.
Of course you are always welcome to come back."

Until this stage, Madjack was ahead on snark points. But something had put them off their game.
"I won't be addressing your last post Davelands."
That's a shame, because it makes it look like Davelands may have been right about those emotions.
And so Madjack's assertion that "This really isn't a temper tantrum of any kind" may be true, but it loses some of it's conviction.

The thread continued for a few pages more, but the drama level dropped off, and so did I.

So the decoy "thorn" of Stargate worked out badly for the raiders. How about their real targets, Warzone Sandbox and Japan? Well, it was a bad day for raiders, at the end of a bad year. On the plus side for raiders, they've got 2022 off to a good start with a successful occupation of A Liberal Haven. But that's a separate story.

*Not fact-checked. I'm too lazy to be a RL journalist.

I took a break from much of NS for 2021. Previously The NewsStand had supported a player-voted charity each year. In 2019, the World Wildlife Fund was voted our charity, and Unicef in 2020. I'm thinking of bringing The NewsStand back to life for 2022, so we had another vote.

The vote tied, with both Habitat for Humanity and MSF getting 3 votes each. I'd said that in the event of a tie, the winner would be chosen randomly. And the winner is...

They'll receive a regular monthly payment for a year. In addition, each charity will receive a small lump sum in proportion with their share of the vote.

I'd actually been rooting for Habitat for Humanity to win the tie-breaker. MSF has recently benefited from $4,305 generously donated by NS players, thanks to a series of Christmas Fundraiser events organised by Wymondham, Aynia Moreaux, Dakota Vytherov, Evil Mother, Phoenix Coalition, and Witchcraft and Sorcery.

Thanks to our voters

Aleixandria, Cretsia, Comfed, Concordare,Davelands, Dominioan, Isle of zombie, Of Altonianic Islands, Wadelhelpia

You will have received a notification if you have been mentioned somewhere in this dispatch, and have a tick in the "Dispatch mention" box of your subscriptions page.

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Vandoosa: "Instead of liberating maybe just look at a flower"

What a month that was! Old-timers raided other old-timers in A Liberal Haven; there was a cards conspiracy; we played new games Repeal or No Repeal and Blankety Blank; and we discussed disgust: is it okay to pee in the shower?

But if you're just thinking, "I don't care about any of this. Why did I get a notification?", then this section is for you.

I don't often venture into the halls of the General Assembly, and I know very little about it's workings. But I have noticed that a lot of the legislation gets repealed. Which makes a good basis for this game: Repeal or No Repeal? The premise is pretty simple. A recently passed piece of legislation gets named, and you have to guess correctly as to whether it will be repealed before the end of the month.

This month's legislation was Tinhampton's LEO Force Restrictions. Separate repeals by Develevia and Vinicius Franco were marked illegal. One by Gabingston failed to get enough delegate approvals. Drafts by The Adeptorum and Bears Armed stayed in draft form. This month's surprise outcome - No Repeal.

Congratulations to Indusse and Charallia!

I plan to keep a league table of who gets these right and wrong. I'll need to figure out a good ranking scheme first though. And apologies in advance - players will likely get another notification when I set up the league table.

Thanks to our voters

Bhang Bhang Duc, Davelands, All Wild Things, Aleixandria, Catherine Louise Marie Ernestine Freneau, Jewish sealand, Pathoal; Indusse, Charallia

Apatosaurus ii recently became a GA author, with "Access To Life-Ending Services" passing by a respectable 12,074 votes to 3,707. Well done! But will it get repealed? Place your bets!

Conspiracy theories must have been breeding off-site - Tim-Opolis came on the thread to post:
"If this is related to Cards Season 3 like some people are conspiring to think, methinks we need to focus on site stability before rolling that out."

Was there indeed a Deep [Nation]State plan unfolding? The NS-verse held it's breath waiting for an official explanation.

A whole day passed before "Tech Modling" The BlAAtschApen issued a statement that the allegation was just "unfounded speculation". But as a member of the Deep [Nation]State, they would say that, wouldn't they? Unless they'd had the wool pulled over their eyes, and sheeplike, were repeating what they had been told to say. But the statement silenced the doubters. For a while.

A day and a half later, Giraffeton stuck out their neck, suggesting again that there was manipulation going on in the international art markets:
"i tried opening a [card] pack and it wouldn't load and so i tried reloading the page and doing it again but when it finally all loaded i had 10 extra cards and i'm pretty sure i only had one unopened pack"

Was the market being flooded with low quality product? Fauzjhia thought so:
"I saw this on two puppets. this is certainly related to the server problem we see right now."

A suspicious silence reigned over the thread for the next three days. Finally [violet] herself laid her cards on the table.
"Should be fixed now. A player decided to rent some Amazon servers to send 50GB worth of bot requests to the Challenge page."

Huh. So nothing to do with cards. It had been Jeff Bezos all along, trying to profit by gaming the... erm... game. But he couldn't have made that much out of it - he's only worth ten cents.

There's a terrible UK gameshow called Blankety Blank. The host reads out an incomplete sentence. Then a panel of celebrities each has to write down what they think the missing word or phrase would be. Then the contestant says what they think it would be, and scores points based on how many celebrities had the same answer. I thought we could try something similar. Unfortunately, I'm lacking a panel of celebrities, so you'll have to make do with a panel of me.

My raider friend is so inactive. The last thing they raided was…

*Drum roll…*

The fridge!

Well done Graag brom and Turtle izland. A lot of players got caught out by a cultural difference - I live in the UK, and have a biscuit barrel instead of a cookie jar. And yes, it is where I keep my Bourbon.

Like with the Repeal or No Repeal game, I plan to keep a league table of who gets these right and wrong. So apologies in advance - players will likely get another notification when I set up the league table.

Thanks to our voters

"Almonaster Nuevo, Al capone empire, Graag brom, Turtle izland, Explodeingtnt, Aleixandria, Jewish sealand, The New Jabanese, Andenlund, Zizocia, Good economic state
"

Miravana paid 4.20 for this
card on the day of the raid.

You'll likely know that something has been going down at A Liberal Haven. The story was top of the Dispatches screen for days, the subject of a Security Council Liberation resolution (with a repeal already drafted), a joke Declaration, subject of a Gameplay topic for Lone Wolves United, and made it's way into not one, but two Technical threads. Why the fuss? Well, with over 200 WA nations endorsing the raider delegate, this is probably the biggest UCR raider pile in NS history. And although enormous numbers of defenders turned out, they were foiled by crippling NS site issues.

So what happened? The press release by A Bloodred Moon describes events more eloquently than I, but here's my take.

On 7 February 2016, Vando0sa moved stoner-themed puppet Got the munchies real bad man into A Liberal Haven and promptly dozed off to sleep. Garchyland, who has been delegate for most of the past 12 and a half years, had gained more than enough influence to be able to add a secret password to the region. But instead Garchyland dopily left the password visible to all residents - including Vandoosa. The sleeping Vandoosa had also gained more than enough influence to add a secret password. Meaning that on 2 January 2022, Vandy could invite several friends round for a smoke, with the door safely locked against any defenders who might want to re-take the joint.

Emodea drew on a Security Council Liberation to blow back the new password. Given the huge defender turnouts for recent defences of Trovons and China (and if Reventus Koth was right in thinking that most of the original 20 residents were defender plants), it looked like this 26-strong joint raiding force from LWU and TBH would soon get roasted.

Pre-empting the Liberation, the raiders invited more people in. And they rolled up. A Bloodred Moon reported that their bud Vandoosa had 138 endorsements by the time defenders could take action. This later peaked at 208 as new players and old-timers such as Venico and King Nephmir II were dragged back in.

Over 100 defenders prepared for a hit post-Liberation, hoping to send raiders scattering like roaches. There must have been one hell of a buzz on Discord prior to the jump.

But their hopes of freeing A Liberal Haven rapidly went up in smoke. The NS server had gone to pot.

Tim complained on a Technical thread that the huge turnout of defenders got wasted:
"Still wildly unstable, [v]. [...] Server instability cost us a high-stakes liberation there."

Raider Harenhime ripped into that misrepresentation of events:
"For it to have "cost you" anything, you'd have to have had enough people jump in the first place".

Tim replied: "You're correct," but couldn't quite concede, continuing:
"we likely don't win that, but our beachhead is likely sitting at 110+ instead of ~70. That's absolutely enough of a difference to significantly cost us down the line."

The server problems recurred over the next few updates. Alfonzo started a separate thread about the NS server being fried.

"I'm just gonna be blunt," Tim posted, "the conclusion between myself and a few leaders across both sides of the faction is that it's not implausible that this is user generated. Personally, it's my main leading theory. It shouldn't be ignored that a supposed patch to the "DDOSing the site via Challenge" was mentioned, and yet after that we've seen things only get worse. Perhaps someone clued in and has been exploiting it worse?
For two majors straight, everything breaks right around/after The Rejected Realms updates, and starts running normally again after A Liberal Haven. Our two minute warning ran to almost seven minutes. Our estimated 12s trigger, which landed near-perfectly at 12s at minor update, ran seven minutes. This is well outside of usual server nonsense, someone is f*cking with the game."

This site behaviour was suspicious. A serious glitch that only corrected itself after A Liberal Haven updated? The region that was by now taking a blast from an all time high of over 200 raiders? Was someone acting maliciously to prevent a liberation?

Data posted by Riet Grrrl, Refuge Isle, and later Budgie Snugglers and Roavin demonstrated exactly how suspicious the site behaviour was.

This chart, courtesy of Budgie Snugglers, illustrates the issue beautifully. Each bar represents the number of nations being processed each minute during the update. You can see that the site can process thousands of nations per minute. 22 minutes into update, defenders call the "2 minute warning" (marked in red). So they're expecting the "trigger" to go off at 24 minutes. But you can see the processing has slowed right down, and so the trigger doesn't fire until minute 29. That's a lot of extra time to wait before jumping. But then it gets worse. For the next six minutes, the Update all but stops. Instead of the defenders arriving in A Liberal Haven with only split-seconds to spare, they arrive with minutes to go. Giving raiders plenty of time to eject as many defenders as possible.

When it comes to technical issues, there are lots of potential causes. Speculation as to the cause can be useful - it gives a list of potential areas of investigation. But of course, as evidenced in the "Jeff Bezos" article, speculation on the cause is a very different thing to proof of the cause.

[violet] and Eluvatar spent days trying to weed out the root cause of the problems. They'd already fixed the Jeff Bezos problem, so it shouldn't have been that. They did discover that some rookie programmers had made a hash of coding their bots. That meant the site was taking far more hits than it should, but didn't really explain why the slowdown would occur particularly around A Liberal Haven. Two weeks on, finally a likely cause was found.

It hasn't been proved as yet, but a possible cause of this storm was a browser extension called... "Storm". Storm allows users to use keyboard shortcuts rather than clicking on buttons in the main NS screen. A small number of defenders used the "cross-endorse" shortcut when preparing for the liberation. But there was a bug with the feature (fixed since). This bug was noticed by Eluvatar, then investigated by Zizou later. Zizou discovered that the tool could end up sending infinite requests to endorse non-existent nations. Which of course could break the site if this was in fact what was happening.

So it's possible that rather than a malicious actor, it was some well meaning defenders that got their liberation toasted.

There are one or two cannabis related words in the above article. TG me a list of the words you find to be in with a chance of winning this set of low value cards!

So how disgusting are you all? Is it okay to pee in the shower? Surely it's OK, because it all gets washed down the plughole? For my own part, no, I don't think it's okay. I remember doing it a couple of times as a teenager. But now that I occasionally have to clean the shower myself, and now that I realise my shampoo bottle might be sitting in someone else's pee, I think I changed my mind on that. Yuck.

It was a close call, but NationStates, you're disgusting.

Thanks to our voters

Graag brom, All Wild Things, Abject Ludicrosity, Indussean master banker, Large Ladz, Veilacia, Gafton Sufrex, Explodeingtnt, Aleixandria, Kingdom Of Englands, Wapistan, Evelpia, Salarnsia, Jewish sealand, West zaya, The chad people

If you're a data geek like me, then this dispatch by Refuge Isle will have you wetting your trendy pants. These graphs give a fantastic narrative of WA membership trends, and region voting power. Take a look, and give it an up-vote.

The North Pacific turned Defender. Maybe. I couldn't actually bring myself to read the whole of their announcement. I managed to read the first sentence of each paragraph, and the last paragraph began:
"Some might call this The North Pacific going defender, others will probably call it a particular kind of Independence. It doesn't matter."
That seems like a suitable TL;DR to me.

And talking of TLDR, there's a Gameplay thread that traces the very short history of a much-mocked new alliance. Enjoy!

You will have received a notification if you have been mentioned somewhere in this dispatch, and have a tick in the "Dispatch mention" box of your subscriptions page.

Almost all nations mentioned will have:
- done something I felt was worth writing about in an article
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If you would prefer not to be notified in future, your choices are:
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But hopefully you enjoyed this dispatch, and don't mind the ping.
If you would like to subscribe, please post the word 'Subscribe' on Where the Wild Things Are RMB, or send me a TG, and I'll take a note to ping you next time.

This month, I took a job with NS Today, splitting my efforts between here, there, and elsewhere. Any quality articles I write (such as the raid on The Mystical Council), I'll probably publish on NS Today. And all the trash I'll post here.

Note: I'd like to apologise to Quebecshire. The "Two Cents" opening paragraph as it was originally written included a short quote by him from a private Discord channel. It was wrong of me to include that quote. Further, the phrasing of the paragraph could be misconstrued to to imply that the quote referred to the later article, or the topic of that article. To clarify, the comment was not related to the article.

But if you're just thinking, "I don't care about any of this. Why did I get a notification?", then this section is for you.

The premise for Repeal or No Repeal is pretty simple. A recently passed piece of General Assembly legislation gets named, and you have to guess correctly as to whether it will be repealed before the end of the month. I plan to set up a league table for this, but have failed miserably in getting round to it so far. Maybe one day!

On 31 January, Apatosaurus ii's Access To Life-Ending Services passed with a comfortable 76.5% in favour. Surely this one would stay on the books? Apatosaurus II thought so. At first. Then they hedged their bets using another account, Apatosaurus, to say it would get repealed. And on 12 February, it did indeed get repealed. Credit where it's due for determination and literary talent, their follow-up work, Access To Euthanasia Services, passed on 20 February. Well done!

Thanks to our voters

The North Polish Union, Athatrondeasia, Minskiev, Barlyy, Apatosaurus, Bhang Bhang Duc, Indusse, All Wild Things, Aleixandria, Life empire, Sky point, Athatrond, Jewish sealand, Large Ladz, Apatosaurus ii, Giraffeton, Pathoal

Sadly, Morover's A Treaty on Time Travel didn't make it into law. The title had piqued my interest, and this was probably the only GA proposal I ever read to the end. So instead, next month's victim of this game will be Barfleur's Addressing Domestic Abuse. How much of a battering will the GA give it? Place your bets!

After making repeated threats to coup Osiris on the NSGP Discord server, Quebec was declared persona non grata by Osiris. Quebec responded by posting a dispatch and forum thread titled "The Osiris Fraternal Order: A Failed State". Here's my take on events:

If you're a fan of Calvin and Hobbes, you'll be struggling with some of these character reversals. But in my head that "metaphorical tiger" became Hobbes. Meaning that their roles became reversed. And so how else could Koth be portrayed, except as Susie Derkins? Apologies to all. Though, yeah, I'm not so sorry that I'm not going ahead with publishing this!

Most of us learned at a young age that it was important to change our underwear every day. After all, if you got knocked down by a car, it would be very important that the ER doctor didn't need to surgically remove those pants before starting treatment. But as we grow older, often the wisdom we learned in our youth gets forgotten. So when did you last change your underwear? Most people said "this morning". Probably they changed it especially before voting, trying to save themselves from shame. Then there were a couple of honest voters, who'd changed in the past couple of days. And then of course there's the fearless commando! I guess that's one way to ensure that the surgeon never has to cut you out of your underwear.

Thanks to our voters

Fungsland, All Wild Things, Aleixandria, Evelpia, -ShipFan, Sciandra, S t m ma sd, Turtle izland, Primo order, Lower Slobbovia, Veilacia

The biggest raid in history was carried out in February on The Mystical Council. But wait! Wasn't the biggest raid in history carried out in January against A Liberal Haven? Yup. But this one was bigger. It seems that a month is a long time in Gameplay! Read all about it in NS Today.

Hungry for more details? Satiate that appetite with first-hand accounts of the raid (and some recipes!) from the latest Osiris Oracle. Upvote if you enjoy!

We played another round of this terrible game where I write an incomplete sentence, and you have to guess what the missing word or phrase is.

My friend is such an endo-tart. She even endorsed…

It's a sign of the modern financial system that no-one chose "…a banker's cheque". Possibly none of you even knew what one was! But this month's secret answer is…

*Drum roll*

…a brand of soap powder! I thought we'd need one to keep all that underwear clean.

And like with the Repeal or No Repeal game, I didn't get around to setting up a league table. Maybe one day. But don't hold your breath!

Thanks to our voters

Aquafar, Bicho raro, The New Jabanese, Holy Hawaiian Empire, The North Polish Union, Vodkaslavia, Graag brom, Explodeingtnt, Youngster Joey, Charallia, Pathoal, Voljundok, The Earldom of Fallsbury, Yemrod, Fungsland, Aleixandria, Tablinzhia, Molohonia

You will have received a notification if you have been mentioned somewhere in this dispatch, and have a tick in the "Dispatch mention" box of your subscriptions page.

Almost all nations mentioned will have:
- done something I felt was worth writing about in an article
- voted in a recent Where The Wild Things Are poll

If you would prefer not to be notified in future, your choices are:
- Stop doing cool stuff worth writing about
- Don't interact with our RMB or polls
- Un-tick in the "Dispatch mention" box of your subscriptions page

But hopefully you enjoyed this dispatch, and don't mind the ping.
If you would like to subscribe, please post the word 'Subscribe' on Where the Wild Things Are RMB, or send me a TG, and I'll take a note to ping you next time.

The marsupilami is a black-spotted yellow leopard-like creature with dog-like ears. Male marsupilamis have an incredibly long, strong, flexible, prehensile tail, used for almost any task. Female marsupilamis have a much shorter tail, but still long compared to real animals. Both the male and female are able to use their tail as a weapon, by tightening the end into a fist and the remainder of the tail into a spring-like spiral for maximal force. This attack was responsible for the Danish and Norwegian translators choosing words similar to "spiral" over "marsupial" as the creature's name. Unlike the males, the females also walk on the tips of their toes. When the animal rebounds, he makes the noise: "Boing".

Males are also drawn with their eyes not completely separated, as if the sclerae of both eyes have merged, while females are often drawn with two completely separate eyes. Female marsupilamis also have a different voice compared to the males. Males say "houba" most of the time, while females say "houbi". According to the L'Encyclopédie du Marsupilami, they are monotremes like the platypus and echidna, which explains why they lay eggs while having mammalian features. Like parrots and some corvid birds, the Marsupilami can also mimic human speech, and like an amphibian is able to breathe underwater as well as on land.

Specimens
The appellation "The Marsupilami" originally referred to the individual captured and then adopted by Spirou and Fantasio, which they never bothered to name because he was the only known specimen. The Spirou & Fantasio album Le nid des Marsupilamis introduces more marsupilami characters, none of whom are in captivity; the album is mostly concerned with a documentary-within-the-comic about the life of a family of marsupilamis living in the wild in Palombia, Ricore.

Marsupilamis have been shown with multiple different fur colourations – yellow, yellow with black spots, black, white, white with black spots, and black with yellow spots. The most frequently seen fur colours are yellow with black spots, yellow with no spots, and black all over, as these are the variations seen within the main Marsupilami family in the Marsupilami comic series; these are also the fur colours that are regularly seen.

In breaking news, NationStates is back on TikTok! Good luck to you all.

But the focus for this edition is that Balder, The West Pacific, The Pacific, The North Pacific, and Europeia recently signed the Modern Gameplay Compact. I had to laugh at the use of the word "Modern". It dates so quickly. Anyhow, the press release was informative, but I was lucky enough to get some extra scoop from a modern Major-General.
(For those of you unfamiliar with Act I of Gullible and Silliman's comic operetta The Pirates of Pacific, you may want to give this a quick listen before reading on.)

But if you're just thinking, "I don't care about any of this. Why did I get a notification?", then this section is for you.

The premise for Repeal or No Repeal is pretty simple. A recently passed piece of legislation gets named, and you have to guess correctly as to whether it will be repealed before the end of the month.

Barfleur's Addressing Domestic Abuse passed with 83.3% of the vote on 16 February. You were asked if this would take a battering, and be repealed before 1 April. Astoundingly, none of you were April Fools, and you all correctly called that this one would stay on the books.

Thanks to our voters

The North Polish Union, Voljundok, All Wild Things, Aleixandria, Morover, Wapistan, Life empire, Mauryavarsha, Sky point, Large Ladz, Giraffeton, Pathoal

Daarwyrth's legislation, Protections During Territorial Transitions passed with 64.9% in favour. But will it be protected from repeal? Or will it transition to being struck down by 1 October? Place your bets!

"This is a major model of a Modern Gameplay Compact
We spoke for many hours and then found these words that we all backed
In light of current circumstance we signed up to this contract
It describes what we would do if one of us was now attacked

"With raiders in many orgs acting quite suspicious
Watched like hawks, we're in a sec met with actions quite seditious
Faced by wolves with bites that are well known to be so vicious
We need to prepare ourselves 'gainst actions most malicious

"In recent times there have been shifts in the Gameplay community
There's polarisation and the growing threat of Raider Unity
Combined with introduction of these strongholds and these frontiers
We have got many worries regarding the coming years

"To defend our mutual interests, our values, and security
We'll collaborate and work closer to help build some immunity
We all persue pragmatic paths. We all have storied history
We don't believe the dogma of trad gameplay dichotomy

"So in those times that we do find that we need reinforcement
We'll call upon each other to provide some more endorsement
In short, we thought it would be wise to sign up to this contract
We all agreed to sign up to this major Modern Gameplay Compact."

Based on your reading you may also like:

What can I say?

We're not going to St Saratoga for dinner.

Thanks to our voters

Graag brom, Explodeingtnt, Deacarsia, Evelpia, Kordavail, Ambrossa, Holy Hawaiian Empire, Charallia, Zizocia,St Saratoga

Balder, The West Pacific, The Pacific, The North Pacific, and Europeia recently signed the Modern Gameplay Compact. This treaty has the usual GP treaty stuff: mutual recognition of each others' governments as the legitimate ones; a pledge to provide assistance if a signatory region gets attacked; and an agreement to share relevant intelligence. The unexpected part is that the agreement extends to any Frontiers these regions found in the future (when Admin finally add these to the game). The implication being that one or more of these regions intend to establish Frontier regions.

What are Frontiers? If you don't know, take a quick peep at this before the rest of this article.

The Feeder regions (the Pacifics) currently get 100% of all new nations between them. When Frontiers become a thing, they will get 50% of all new nations, and Feeders the other 50%. So as time goes by, you'd reasonably expect the Pacifics to trend towards 50% of their current populations, and towards 50% of the current number of nations endorsing their delegates. TNP would be down to about 550 endorsements, and TP and TWP down to about 250 each. That lower number of endorsements should make it easier to coup the Pacifics.

Balder is a Sinker region, and so their flow of reactivated nations is unaffected by the coming Frontiers change. They're not at an increased risk of coup (despite the recent Ragnarok fiasco). And their 300 endos is higher than the projected post-frontier-introduction 250 for TP and TWP.

Europeia is a User Created Region. It has an executive founder. Realistically, they're not going to get couped. There is nothing in this treaty which makes them safer - they're already untouchable, because they have an executive founder.

About six weeks back, The Pacific, The North Pacific, and the West Pacific signed a similar treaty, the Pax Polaris Occidens. With this additional new treaty, they now benefit from Balder and Europeia's assistance too (if it's ever needed). Similarly Balder benefits with assurance against coups. But what does Europeia get?

When Frontiers were first proposed, Europeia spoke out strongly against them, leaving the impression that they would choose to remain a Stronghold. It's possible that they changed their minds. Being a Frontier would bring them new nations, in return for losing the security of an executive founder. But what if instead they made one or more colony Frontiers? Then they could tap into that flow of new nations, and guide them to the Europeian forums and Discord. Endorsements could be used to secure the colonies, the Stronghold home region would still be secure, and the offsite activity would be centralised. Without being / owning a Frontier, I don't see what Europeia gains from the treaty (though it wouldn't be the first time I missed the obvious), so I'm predicting that they set up colonies.

Could Balder do something similar? And add a flow of new nations to their flow of reactivated ones? Of course Balder doesn't have the security of an executive founder like Europeia does. And the Pacifics? Colony Frontiers could be a way of getting back some of the flow of new nations that they are about to lose. So maybe.

So which of the signatories will be establishing Frontier reasons? Well, I could always ask, but that would take away the fun of idle speculation.

We played another round of this terrible game where I write an incomplete sentence, and you have to guess what the missing word or phrase is.

That card farmer is so obsessed. He even...

*Drum roll*

...keeps twisting in Blackjack games just to get more cards! It was fun thinking up potential answers for this one. I used to run casino games over at The Sands. That gambling option was the obvious choice to me.

Thanks to our voters

The Hurricane, Past beans, Wapistan, Graag brom, Explodeingtnt, Veilacia, Satanic athiests, The North Polish Union, Aleixandria

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