Isaac Beach
Banned
Thanks! If you don't mind I've got a few more questions.
How has the internet evolved over 5 centuries? I don't expect technical details (although maybe I should) but some insight into how people interact with it and its place in society would be great.
I'd also like to learn more about Calbear's Coup. Why and how did it happen? What happened afterwards? Did Ian start another forum or just give up?
Is Thande-Blaming universal? And is there anyone who takes the following seriously?Any other shadow nations of note?Thande-blaming has been a national pastime in England for centuries. The earliest recorded incidence of Thande-blaming has been hesitantly dated to the 16th century, in the marginalia of the Macclesfield Psalter (now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge): “Thyffe pleafes me notte. Itt ys Thandys fawlte.” Thande-blaming was certainly a popular sport in Elizabethan England, and figures heavily in popular literature of the time. The 1603 'bad' quarto of Hamlet, for example, records Laertes' dying words thus: ……………………………………..here I lie, Never to rise again: thy mother's poison'd: I can no more: Thande! Thande is to blame. Jacobean Thande-blaming was a drunken and often violent pass-time, on which extensive bets were sometimes made, and it was banned by Cromwell as a 'Papist practice leading to decadence and unholy thought'. (Incidentally, Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost is often read as a closet Thande-blamer.) Underground “blame-easies” quickly sprang up, and the practice survived well into the eighteenth century, when the early Romantics brought it back into the public eye by controversially embracing the 'blame-Thande' ethos. The quantities of blame attached to Thande in this period were frankly excessive, even by modern standards, and were so much decried in polite society that Byron was forced to re-write the early draft of Manfred, in which Thande kills Manfred by stealth. By the nineteenth century, however, the practice had been thoroughly incorporated into polite society. Even Queen Victoria gave it her own spin by simply declaring Thande 'not amusing'. This period was really the zenith of Thande-blaming in Great Britain, and set the standard for future 'blamers (as they came to me known). W.G. Grace was the champion of Victorian 'blamers, and is justly regarded as the father of the modern profession. Thande-blaming today is, sadly, a neglected area of British culture. Woeful underfunding of modern blame societies and the advent of digital e-blaming have taken their toll, and 'blamers are now more active in the US, Canada and Australia than in the UK. Nonetheless a revival is underway, and new pockets of Thande-blaming are springing up all over the country (notably in Oxford, Reading, London and Cheshire). It surely cannot be too much to hope that blaming Thande will one day regain its place as the prince of British hobbies.
What does GC stand for, and is there a story behind the change from AD/CE?
Of course; the internet is absolutely enormous. There are hundreds of layers that intersect in so many different ways as to make policing it near impossible. Google has long since gone under and connectivity across the vastness of space is handled by towing enormous mast radiators between planets and systems; they are heavily defended as they are the communicative lifeline of many colonies. Webspace itself has taken the form of a vast network of search engines, digital lobbies, portals and neural interfaces, constantly growing and collapsing and fluctuating as websites are born, grow much as countries in some cases, before either collapsing, being subsumed by other predatory websites or finding their own niche to survive in. Complete artificial reality is fairly simple, utilising the same neural method that disconnects the brain from the body during sleep and instead reconnecting those neural pathways to the internet via a simple headset. Due to this some religions revolving around uploading one's brain directly to the internet and forgoing a body are popular, but whether they are actually people's souls or just intricate digital copies is a matter of debate among technicians and theologians. Because of this intricacy, cyberspace is basically considered another realm of Humanity and often treated with the same regard as foreign governments; particularly powerful websites even have seats in some multinational bodies and the 'Stellar Shura' -the interstellar bureaucratic body that governs across all Human systems- exists predominantly online. Still, people will just pop online to find the news or porn or forums, video games and video streaming services; but there is a whole subsection of Humanity who basically exist on the web and this has lead to the internet being an important facet of Humanity.
Now I'll be very careful here because I don't want it to seem like I'm actually commentating on the intricacies of our board's governance. It's just for fun y'all. But Calbear and Ian had a fundamental disagreement regarding artificial intelligences; Ian wanted to treat them as equals and give them board membership, but this was a minority opinion and Calbear represented the great majority of the board who believed that AIs were dangerous and should not be given the same rights as Humanity. Eventually, Ian declared that AIs would be given the same rights as other members; so Calbear seized the site's reigns and digitally apprehended and subsumed the controls that made Ian Admin. Those that agreed with Ian left the board, and some say that Ian still lurks on the fringes of the vast AH community in disguise.
It's not universal across the board but it is very popular, accounting for about 20% of the board's religious affiliation on a website that has three million active users (quite small for a shadow nation actually) and has spread into other websites -such as TvTropes- and even the real world; there are celebrations across Yorkshire. It's considered a real religion and there's a bit of a schism going on between those that see Thande as a Christian prophet and those who see him as a god all his own.
Very few that we'd know today; Wikipedia has a successor whose adherents scour the internet and real world in search of knowledge that they then record both in digital and physical copies. TvTropes has done a similar thing as AH and monetised their purpose, picking out stereotypes and tropes both in media and real life and thus serve both advertising companies and 'culture builders', who are usually colonists trying to differentiate their society from those around them. The future's weird. Youtube doesn't exist but a vault of video, audio and other teledigital forms exists that literally has over a trillion videos on it. Sometimes it interacts in odd ways with users leading some to conclude that it's gained sapience by analysing all the inputs it controls but others think it's just a glitch.
GC stands for Gregorian Calendar. Which is important because the Islamic and Chinese Calendars are used more often.