Do Work! If you were in Vizsla during Warp's time as Quaestor then you heard those two words repeatedly. He said it often, but he didn't just say it. Warp did work. In particular I want to focus on the time I was Proconsul. For a good portion of that time there was no Consul. Warp became my right hand man in handling the day to day running of the clan. From showing me how to work the admin system and learning the ropes as PCON he was invaluable. He helped me learn to organize competitions and even basic markdown coding for comps and reports. His efforts during this time, and really a lot of his time as Quaestor were never really properly awarded. That was my bad as he was forced to go rogue due to real life and I let it fall by the wayside. As far as activity I have no better way to explain how active he was particularly on the gaming front than this. Turel just passed Warp for the all time lead in Clusters of Fire. It took two and a half years of Warp being rogue for second place to catch him. But Warp did more than just play games. He taught others how to play the games and more importantly how to submit the scores and games to the website. I know this because he taught me. For most people that doesn't seem like much but for new, or in my case, returning members that was much needed.

Do Work! I modeled my time as Consul in part on Warps example of doing what needed to be done when it needed to be done. He never pawned his responsibility off on others. He was always a well respected member of the summit who's voice and ideas carried weight. He shaped Vizsla in a lot of ways particularly the work ethic members both under his oversight and above him developed. Congrats Warp!

I'll keep this short and to the point. I have served in two Clans with Warp and observed that he sets an example for everyone in the DJB, demonstrating a commitment to promoting activity for both himself and others. Even during his time in Rogues, he consistently joined voice chats and participated in gaming with Club members, remaining actively involved.

Vynn has already spoken on it, but Warp serves his Clan dutifully with an almost unmatched zeal when at his most active.

It's an honor to be able to provide this recommendation.

Thank you, Warp.

Atty. I wasn't going to let this Ruby Sceptre go through without my two-cents. For all the reccs you've put through for me, and made me cry, it's my turn.

I came into the DB, absolutely confused because I had never been on a platform like this before. I didn't know where to start, or what to do, or even how to go about starting to figure out what to do. You saw me struggling and helped without anyone asking you to, held my hand as I had questions about how things worked, and listened to my frustrations. You linked me to Wikis, pointed out what courses would suit me best, cheered me on as I did my very best to make you proud. Even though this was your job as PCON, I know you would have done it either way, because that's just you.

In my near year of being here, I have seen time and time again you shepherding the new joins into their spots and helping them find their voices. When it comes to events, especially the Godkiller event we ran last year, you spend tireless hours making sure everyone has a chance to make their ideas heard. You act as a soundboard, a reference, and a guiding hand in a way I don't think I've ever seen someone act before. When someone has an idea, you are there, to see how it can fit into the narrative, how it can benefit everyone.

It is so obvious you love the Brotherhood, and Arcona, with all of your damn heart. Arcona would not be what it is without you, without our Atty, without your characters or your ideas. Without your heart.

You helped guide me in my early days of leadership, too, even though it shouldn't have been left to you. You listened to my frustrations and confusion and you helped me manage them. You outlined what I needed to do with compassion and empathy, and made sure I knew where I was going as AED. I never would have even applied, or thought of applying, if it weren't for you. And that's just you-- an inspiration to everyone you meet. You help uplift every single member of the clan, pushing them gently to be the best they can be, to reach their full potential and realize their best selves.

I would not be where I am without you Atty, in my DB career or in real life. Unfortunately, I can't equate that to XP, but it should be noted none-the-less. We are first clan because you inspire us to be. When someone thinks of Arcona, I know they think of you. Our heart, the glue that holds us together.

Atty. Abbey. Vacmi. She-who-ships. You should get a million awards for your service to the clan, for everything you've done for us. I hope this suffices, even a bit. We are proud of you. We love you. Thank you for gracing us with your presence.

Your mini-me, signing off.

I remember Atty, sorry people ancient history incoming, as a wide eyed, eager to do stuff, new member. I sat on the Arcona roster and watched her create a place for herself within our club. I watched her take her first steps into leadership as Aedile of Galeres. I watched her take up the mantle of Consul, earn herself the right to add Arconae to her name. I watched as she never once stopped thinking or acting towards making the club, and every unit she was a part of, a better place. I also watched her earn herself medal after medal, mountains upon mountains of Clusters of Ice as she seemingly never put her pen down. So it doesn’t surprise me to be asked to write a recommendation for a Ruby Sceptre for this powerhouse of activity.

Atty is the person you go to, when you want to do something but need a soundboard to make sure you’re doing it right. When you need something proofread and time is short. When you just need a chat with someone about something, important or inane.

With regards to statistics, I’ll just say that in the year since her last award, she’s more than earned this sharp implementation.

Atty, I’m kinda honored to finally be able to be a part of awarding you something for everything you do. Enjoy this piece of red cutlery. Do keep in mind, it’s handwash only, if you put it into a dishwasher it will weaken and repeat offenses could shatter it entirely.

For the last year, Atty continued to play an important role in the DJB Story Group, editing every club-wide fiction released in 2023, including six chapters of the Galactic Happenings series and four GJW XVI fictions, and brainstorming plot ideas. Her work included fixing typos, suggesting rewrites for improved flow and readability, and significant discussion of plot direction, representing hours of work. As PCON, she also stepped into her CON's shoes and helped plan, run, and grade the most recent Pro Bowl event.

Ever since joining the Exarch staff, Atyiru has been the embodiment of the RP Society in the Brotherhood. Even before we had a formal name for it. But when the time came to really make a concentrated effort to get RP adopted across the Brotherhood, Atty was standing on the front lines, ready to lead the charge. Her patience and understanding when it comes to people's trepidation around trying RP is uniquely her. Her ability to empathetically understand, learn, and quite frankly remember people’s first, second and seventh characters defies my abilities even as the former person in charge of “knowing” all the DBs characters. She was one of the first members to hit Rank 12 in the You Can Certainly Try (DM) trophy, a testament to how many RPs she’s run for others. She has also been one of the first few members to hit rank 12 in the Players Gonna Play (Player) trophy. This is a culture we’re trying to demonstrate, and hopefully get others to replicate.

As I mentioned in her most recent promotion over the past year since joining staff, Atty has: helped digest the infrastructure for how we promote and organize RPs, assisted with crafting policy and documentation for it, generated ideas, and brainstormed ways to make RP a day-to-day activity. She reviewed the backend setup of the Envoy Corps, helped with the original manual process that was needed to process these requests, and helped troubleshoot the automation we eventually landed on to make sure it worked. This still involves reviewing manually and reading over RPs to check for authenticity from the participants.

Even since her last promotion 3 months ago, Atyiru has been an anchor in a sea of growing pains that come with launching a new activity for the Brotherhood. Her experience, knowledge, and presence have helped me and the team with shaping policies as we encounter new challenges to the system. An example of this is crafting the policy around "wait" times before an RP can be submitted and minimum word count qualification for sessions. This involved compromising with members who wrote very fast, and prevented unintentionally “spam” or “meta gaming” RP activity to keep it scoped to our expectations. Things like this come up as members try new things that we didn't plan for. Scoping policy quickly and effectively is critical, and Atty helps with this. She also proofreads the things I write, making them seem more legible.

Continuing as a member of staff, Atyiru has been diligent with reading through submitted RPs, verifying them against our policy, and approving or rejecting them in a timely manner so they process on the site. She has also been involved in making sure that new RPers feel heard, engaged with, and makes an effort to learn their characters or work with them. She has co-DM'd sessions to help other DMs be more comfortable with running RP, and continues to embody the RP community as one of its most active players and organizers.

She recently added the "Shame Corner" venue to the Envoy Corps world building efforts- a venue to promote cross-clan mingling and interactions.

We're delighted to have her on staff and to continue working with her on expanding the Envoy Corps. For her community efforts, and continued presence in the RP community, I’m proud to see her recognized for all the things she does that might not show up on the assessment tool as she is always going above and beyond.

Changes to the DB codebase essentially benefit the entire membership, as it improves the quality of the codebase and, even if the changes themselves might only benefit a subset of members, it clears up the backlog of issues which means we can get to other issues that themselves might impact other members faster.

Erinyes was more or less thrown into the DJB’s git repository, which contains a codebase of over 10 years old that has over the years become a bit of a nightmare to get started in. Not deterred by the complexity of the code and its outdated documentation, Erinyes dove in headfirst, started getting familiar with the code, and immediately set out to add improvements, starting with bringing the “getting started” documentation up to date with the current state of the code. After that, she eagerly started going down the list of open issues that were in the low-hanging-fruit category but hadn’t been picked up until now, which is in my opinion the best and most productive way to get to know a codebase better. Ranging from various improvements to the unit statistics and leadership reports, adding reporting tools for the Envoy Society and Casual Gaming, through various smaller fixes to the site’s faction and award event pages, to automating the Scroll of Foundation awarding for SA graders.

How difficult and time-consuming these changes are to make greatly depends on how fast someone navigates the codebase, how many solutions you try before you arrive at a final implementation, and whether you encounter any hiccups along the way or not. Given the state the documentation was in and the discussions we’ve had on the subject, getting a working development setup must’ve already taken hours, and those first improvements to the leadership reports must’ve taken a lot of trial and error as well, given the complexity of some of the queries.

Erinyes, thanks for all the work you do, congratulations on Ruby Scepter!

Erinyes was able to create a report that addresses the various data-points the brand new Envoy Corps needs to make sure that the system we created: a.) works and b.) continues to work. To do this, we needed to be able to see key metrics such as the breakdown of unique roleplaying activities a month (started/closed), the amount of rank-ups per month, the spread of ranks in each trophies, the amount of words written, who our top roleplayers are, and Clan-by-clan breakdowns.

These datasets were something I was trying to manually track, email-by-email, and by doing a ghetto lookup query in Discords search filter. We are now able to easily track unique participants in RP activities, and I can generate it to a specific time/date range, which helps when considering pauses in the system. This data also helps us make sure that members aren’t progressing too quickly, or too slowly, through the RP trophy ranks, creating a better overall user experience for members. Without data, we would be making guess work. But now, we have concrete data reporting and numbers to support the long term health and success of our supplemental roleplaying society.

Erin did this very quickly, and I wish we had this kind of data prior to trying to create the proposal for the Envoy Corps in the first place. Thank you for all of this work.

Erin proactively provided multiple customized data pulls for Casual Gaming Queue and supported platform data. After the war she provided a detailed document with analytics for what games were played, a week to week breakdown, and unit breakdowns providing raw numbers, percentages and useful graphs.

Leaders having not only the right data, but data in a useful format is critical to the function of any organization. Erinyes’ ongoing support for the Fist staff through customized gaming data helps us identify trends and future platforms for adoption. Furthermore, her detailed breakdown of the GJW gaming data helps me craft better vendetta activities for our members. On behalf of the gaming community thank you for your support.

Erin was engaged, discussed solutions based upon my requests as a Consul, and was able to accommodate both data and site improvements.

This information enabled me to have fact based conversations with my Summit based upon trends in the clan's performance. This led to changes in competition structure and types based upon the activities the clan members were engaging in. This also enabled me to share the metrics with the Clan (see Kamjin's Annual Reports) and saved me a ton of time pulling data to do quarterly reviews.

Erin, thanks for stepping up and being so easy to work with!

When Koda stepped down prior to the Great Jedi War for personal reasons, a large void was left open for us. It could potentially have been an extremely rough time, especially for me as a fresh Consul having been thrust into the station with the shortest of notices, and going into my first war at the helm. But, in full support of my retired Pecan, I was ready to face it head-on with as much confidence and gusto as I could manage.

Without skipping a beat, Erin offered to take the position if even temporarily to keep us at the pinnacle of our game and help me learn the ins-and-outs of GJW-time leadership. Her contributions to how it had been run in past years when she was Consul, showing me when to push the members and when to lax back some, the specific areas that the summit should focus on while also having fun and contributing themselves, all of it was absolutely invaluable and directly contributed in what we managed to accomplish as a team. And for that, I am forever grateful.

I honestly do not feel we would have been nearly as successful as we were in this war had she not been there to directly mentor and help me along my path of growth, even working together with me in contributions even when it pushed her own limits. Since joining up as my Pecan, she has made significant contributions outside of her mentoring and leadership. She has made substantial edits to over 25 Taldryan wiki pages, still working on a Taldryan Military wiki-edition rework, in addition to having worked directly with me on planning out our now underway armed forces expansion which is still being constructed. She also helped with the clean-up and pre-implementation of our upcoming storylines, helped drive activity through roleplay participation and gaming to get other members involved and excited, and the various other administrative roles expected of her.

Even when things get busy, she always faces it with enthusiasm and does everything she can to help ensure the success of Taldryan; because she truly cares. This is especially evident as, since her last recognition, she has participated in 150 gaming activities, with a staggering 1,794 Clusters of Earth and 662 Clusters of Fire, 55 various competitions with 15 crescents coming from them, of which 17 of those competitions were from the Great Jedi War which earned her first TWO Gold Novae of her career and an additional Silver Novae. She has also contributed almost 18,000 words in roleplaying across 5 sessions and an additional 2,200 across 3 different fiction with an additional 46 Clusters of Ice.

Lastly, Erin, I want to thank you directly. For everything you have done since I came to Taldryan those several years ago, up through now and what you continue to do. You are a true example of what it means to be someone who is invested in the future and survival of Taldryan. If you didn’t already have the Taldrya title, I would be recommending you in a heartbeat. Instead, since you do, I’m proud to support doing this for you.

Thank you Erin. From the bottom of my heart, and on behalf of Taldryan.

Erin seemed to come out of nowhere with a slew of new improvements to the site and, as everyone else has discussed, our ability easily to track various statistics over time. One other thing that hasn't been addressed is her work on updating and unifying the old About Us and Join pages. Thanks to her, we now show prospective members a single and much clearer picture of what exactly we do here. Thanks, Erin!

As her Proconsul, it's my solemn honor to speak for the Qrees (get it? GET IT Q?) and attest to the breadth of care and organization our Red Qek Consul takes with his Clan. Behind the scenes, she maintains our tightly packed planning calendar shared amidst the Summit to schedule events at every level from Battleteam to Clan and any member ones in between, navigating scheduled times for larger outside events like the Probowl and the Great Jedi War and making certain every summiter is aware of that schedule. She handles the grind of project management as she puts out calls for wiki work and instructs on the process for writing and submitting proposed changes as well as writing proposals in general for the DB space, all while juggling rigorous hiring processes for the Summit and follow up interviews with applicants. This goes hand in hand with being the Clan's liasion to the Dark Council, as she communicates updates from the DC towards the summit daily as they occur and ensures the Clan stays apprised of all Brotherhood, Clan, and House news and events with his regular reports. She claims and writes untold numbers of recommendations for Awards and Promotions, reminds of timelines and follows up on event plans and RP organization, and makes certain she's up to date and aware in order to best navigate on the Clan's behalf with newly introduced systems or changes. The nitty gritty efficiency here might not sound glamorous, but Q's methodology and diligence have kept the Clan on task and afloat through her reign, including the last seven months, and she wisely delegates to and chooses her team to entrust with daily functioning in more nebulous areas of being phone addicts with a lot of free time energetic chat communication and community engagement. She has plotted, organized, and executed several Clan events and competitions and written truly wonderful and cognizant fiction for them while plotting to connect our Clan to the macro plot, whether or not anyone reads. Q is quiet, at a glance, but only at a glance; engage them directly and you'll be engaged right back, be that conversation, fiction sharing, gaming with fellow Brethren, etc, and take a peek behind the curtain and you'll see a regularly reigned in (sorry not sorry) summit chat steered to productivity.

I know many days your very voluntary job doesn't seem very fun, Q. Especially on the days when it seems like we're taking nothing but flak from all sides, like we're not heard, or like there's no good decisions. But you still stick with it, pull your hair out, come back, and do the work. And it's not glamorous, no. But it's critical, and you have been our backbone this whole time. I just want to say thank you for that. Thank you for being here to do the often thankless administrative trudge that allows our family and our home to continue to flourish. Thank you for your iron will and unflinching morality. And thank you for being my friend.

Arcona is lucky to have you, Shadow Lord.

Proconsul and her Knight

Hey, Tiger-man. How's it going? Surviving as Fist? That's good...because you're killing it.

Since his last medal, Turel (or Rajhin as he claims to be called these days) took to the ground running at the planning for this most recent Great Jedi War. He wanted to offer everyone a "little of something" while also making it possible for those crazies that lived and breathed competition to get a true clash going. Furthermore, he took on the gargantuan task of running a bracket tournament. For those who have done so, you will instantly know the effort and oversight required to do that at all, let alone timely during one of our club's biggest events.

Turel is a risk-taker, willing to try new things even if that might blow up in his face spectacularly. In those cases, he learns from it. Well, in all cases. He strives actively to speak for the members, giving me flashbacks to the dusty soap box in the corner. He also participates himself, being a constant presence and even playing with the member base.

I love seeing you succeed, Turel. More than that, I greatly enjoy getting to add my own words to the recognition of that success.

Congratulations.

Well, well, well...who let the bird in?

This guy is probably my favourite member to get yelled at by, Howie aside, and that's saying something all on its own. Do I even need a rec beyond that? Hm, I suppose so.

Arch serves many functions, some of which include but may not be limited to: sounding board, he who calls out BS, idea's guy, and meme-ster. What I've always appreciated about Arch is that he'll never be the yes man in the room. He'll, instead, be the first to cry foul and tell you exactly how it goes. Then that's followed by a lot of hard data that even I wouldn't gather just to prove a point. Well played.

But that's just what goes on behind the scenes. What ends up before the members is a complete focus on the experience. With the Shadow Academy, that shows itself as a long-term redesign with a focus on ease of completion. But also being informative. Everyone should be able to go through the basic courses and be able to utilize the base functions of our club, or at least that's the goal. One Arch is continually hitting. Then came a fresh approach to what had become a sort of automated approach to GJW trivia competitions. It offered a mix between competitive and easy participation. I, for one, loved it. But I also embrace chaos, so what do I know?

I'm so very glad to talk you up once again in a recommendation, and I offer my sincere congratulations.

Since his last medal, Qormus spent 5 months as my M:DGM. During that time, besides acting as a sounding board for ideas, he undertook two major projects. First, he helped to lead the revision of the Consul's Handbook, which was a major undertaking that required dissecting an extremely outdated handbook, deciding which parts could be salvaged, and then working with the rest of his small team to identify important new information and somehow put it all together in an intelligible package. I think it turned out very nicely. Second, he spent hours digesting the last several years of club-wide and clan-specific statistics and analyzing trends. The end product was 14 pages of analysis and recommendations, which was shared with the clans for their review.

I'm going to be 'that guy' that leaves the numbers to others on this one. What I want to speak to is Qormus' character. Qormus came under my realm of awareness in a time of uncertainty for me. I was hiring two new Hands after going an extended period bouncing between known entities. This time, I was taking a true risk not really knowing what I was going to get.

Well, what I got was a dedicated and passionate member of the Brotherhood, who can't be kept down no matter what life throws at him. In our discussions, Qormus was respectful and contemplative. When it came to potential charges, he was able to argue from the difficult position of "the defense" even if he himself may not agree with what went down. But he laid out his arguments and did it well. That was, in fact, what I hired him for...and he gave that to me in spades.

In Qormus, you have dependability, intelligence, and passion for the club. I could go on, but platitudes only go so far in recommendations. I'm just happy to be able to append my own to this request.

Congratulations, Qormus. You deserve it.

You'd think with less than a week in the Chamber I'd have little to say but, with actual activities that need to be addressed, I quickly saw Qormus in action. Never one to presume an outcome he's been a steward of engagement during my transition and helping me frame what's going on. I echo Atra's comments above that he's an insightful and reliable Hand and I'm glad to be working with him.