Greetings Tarenti,

As many of you know by now, my new job in RL has sucked up basically all of my time this month. My apologies for not being my usual fixture on the IRC channel and being a bit late on this report. Actually this works out better since I can now be certain that nothing else will happen in October. I am expecting that my time is going to continue to be limited through Christmas. I am still available via email and AIM, and I will do my best to pop into #tarentum when I can. Keeping the activity records up to date is still my top priority, and the records are up to date. As always, if you think something is missing from them, please let me know so I can fix it.

http://scion.divineright.org/atr/

Last month we lost a net four members, and I predicted that the trend would not continue. I was correct in a sense: we lost only a single member this month. As Ronovi pointed out in her report we have not actually gained any "new" new members since becoming House Tarentum, most likely due to a bug in the website's code. Hopefully we can stop the bleeding and start to attract new members both from the usual allotted members, but also through recruiting efforts (that's you guys, bringing in your friends and families to Tarentum) and by doing interesting things to attract members from other Houses.

Please bear in mind that you must NOT actively recruit from other Houses - but if others hear about us doing cool stuff and being active, they might be interested enough to check us out. Don't be afraid to make friends with people outside of Tarentum. You don't have to be in the same House to be friends and have fun.

We had 13 active participants this month, as opposed to 16 last month (if you're doing your homework you'll notice that one person participated after I wrote my report last month). There are 47 of us now, so that's 28% activity, down from last month but the same as August.

Congratulations to Ronovi, Beef and Ryllo Shaden on being the top three participants. Ryllo snuck up and beat me out for the third place spot on the last day of the month while I was drunk on Halloween. Nice work!

Because of the Vendetta, our participation in competitions rose sharply this month. In September, I recorded only 5 people participating in competitions while this month there were 19. However, I believe even this relatively high number may be the victim of under-reporting because Zero Raven mentioned that he took part in the gaming portion of the Vendetta and that fact is nowhere reported on the ATRs... please remember to shoot me a quick email and let you know when you participate. Just about everything counts toward your next promotion, but we can't reward you for activity we don't know about!

Merit awards were up this month, due to the Vendetta. Congratulations again to those who earned them. Novae and Seals haven't gone out yet, so we'll probably see those in November's numbers instead.

Promotions were also up, which is very good news. I am proud to have been able to promote FILIPPUS to the rank of Novice and Ryllo Shaden to the rank of Acolyte. Great work guys! I look forward to writing many more of those as you continue to advance. If you have any questions about what you should work on next, just let me know and I'll get you pointed the right direction.

I suppose the take-away from all these numbers is that Tarentum really isn't dead. 28% of us are active and participating in some way. 6 of us participated in 19 events in the Vendetta, meaning an average of over 2 events per participant. You can look at this in a few different ways. On one hand, 28% isn't a lot. Just over 1/4. We'd love to see 70% or 80% activity if we could get it, even if each person only did one thing per month. However, of the people who are active, they are doing more than two things per month, and the top three did 5, 6, and 9 things this month. For something that's a hobby outside of school and work, I'd say that's not that bad.

Any one person can have a dramatic effect. Your participating once raises the percentage by 2%. Participating once can get you raised from APP to NOV. Playing one match of JO in a competition and losing still counts as one of the 10 competitions you need to get from GRD to JH. Asking Oberst or Bloodfyre to edit your story will make you a better writer, if you pay attention to their advice and learn from it. The DB isn't about medals or promotions. Not really. Those are things we have, but they're not where the real value is. The real value is that this is a place that can teach you to be an excellent writer. It can teach you to be a leader. It can teach you skills that will help you in real life, like graphic design, programming and writing.

But before you can teach you need to learn, and you need to do.

http://www.darkjedibrotherhood.com/dbjedi/competitions.php?me=1 http://www.darkjedibrotherhood.com/wiki/index.php?title=Promotion_Requirements

In Darkness,

-- SBM Scion "Firebird" Altera (Sith)/AED/Tarentum [ACC: OPR] GC-PoDP / SC / AC-ToSH / Cr-3S-8E / CI-GC / SoF / LS / SoL-TC / S:-6U-4B

{SA: DML - DSLC} Captain, ISD II Magnus Kaerner