Summer Camp '23 Pledge

If there’s something I missed a lot during my long hiatus from World Anvil, it was Summer Camp and World Ember. I’ve been away since the last one I did, which was 2019.
I always enjoyed them as challenging opportunities to expand on aspects of my worldbuilding that I might otherwise put off or not even have considered. And it also gives me opportunity to binge read and comment on other people’s creativity and see what fantastic works they managed to create from the same prompts. And not at all be jealous.
What I do have to consider is time and energy, and these kinds of events require a lot of both from me. I touched a bit on this in my new year’s resolutions. I do have some health issues, things are better today, but I still have a long road ahead of me. And energy management is among the major things I’m still struggling with.

Sometimes the inner completionist and perfectionist screams so loudly. You gotta catch ‘em all. Or something like that. It’s been a long process – still ongoing process – to reprogram my brain to pace myself better and to not judge myself so harshly. I don’t have to do everything, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. Good enough is many times… Good enough. Great, even. Perfect, maybe, to someone out there.

Taste is like a pair of buttcheeks – usually split.

— My Dad.

The Pledge

I stand by my new years resolution to not overwork myself by spreading my energy and time across too many project and ending up disappointed none of them get any significant progress. The Rosepetal remains my single world to do worldbuilding for, and this summer camp I am aiming to expand on its lore by completing at least 16 prompts.

by Fallon Michael

Seeing I have my vacation planned at the beginning of July, and not anything scheduled aside staying home and taking it easy, reaching silver level feels doable.
I’ve never been the slightest competitive, just my own worst critic, so I will keep on being perfectly happy from just reaching my intended goal. But I won’t be sad either if I don’t as long as I can examine myself and say I did my best. There’s always next year. And if I go beyond my goal, then I’ll pat myself on the shoulder and reward myself with among the best things summer can offer: a soft ice cream cone.

---

1st Theme - Power

I will very likely look through the material I have for the various major factions and organizations of the Rosepetal and see if any of the prompts give opportunity to expand upon those.
Admittedly, I’ve always found it excruciatingly difficult to write about and portray power dynamics and relations both between organizations and between individuals in a way that feels somewhat realistic and dynamic. I guess my various difficulties in real life with understanding certain aspects of society and people shows its colors here.
I also have some more materials related to power in a more literal sense, but that might be a bit of a cheap-out as I am far more comfortable writing more science-oriented, formal-phrased articles.

2nd Theme - Frontiers

This feels like it could be a much easier theme for me to write around, and a few ideas popped up in my mind right during the reveal stream.
The first thing that came to mind is a still-in-concept Faster-Than-Light Travel Solution^TM, consisting of a coterminus dimension named "Darkverse". I'm likely going to play around with some well-known tropes of an alien, poorly explored and understood place filled with hazards. Most spacefaring civilizations only having come as far as to set up secure enough lanes to get from point A to point B.
Another physical frontier could be the invasion of the extragalactic Marrowblight virus and the various symbiotic mold-base species it creates from infecting carbon-base lifeforms. Having entirely taken over several planets and replaced their ecosystems with its own, its still ongoing spread is a rising concern for many of Rosepetal's inhabitants.
If expanding to non-physical frontiers, I'd probably tie it together with the Power theme and expand on the socioeconomics of one of Rosepetal's oldest civilizations, the Ascendancy. In it families hold power, but are not focused on bloodline purity but rather on occupational fit and merit. Arbitrary judgement of an individuals merits/accomplishments can move them between families through adoption or marriage based on evaluated worth.

3rd Theme - Relics

Most of the ideas swirling around my head keep being the more obvious such as ancient landmarks, historical items. There's the generation ships used by the ancient humans to reach Rosepetal, millions of years ago. There's the galaxy's only known true dyson sphere, the Axiom, whose creators are long gone. Each civilization and culture too would have their share of historical documents, crafts, arts, buildings, landsmarks and more.
"But can relics be more than just those obvious things?", I keep asking myself.
Can relics be non-physical? Can they be digital or virtual? Say, a place or item within a virtual world? Maybe there's forgotten corners out there in the Meshverse, or just virtual/digital objects that managed to attain a similar sense of history or worth as a realverse one would.
Or... maybe a combination of both, like data archive? The Hövnísian Royal Atheneum's data archive, from whose PoV most of this world will be written from, is several centuries old by now. The archive is still actively used but there's volumes of data saved for historical value even if no longer current or useful. How much time needs to pass before something can be considered a relic? Are there other qualifications than just age that needs to be fulfilled before it can be considered a relic? Can it be a relic if it's still in use but just very, very old?
How about a creature? Like the close to mythical naiavon that according to lusoyan history led them to discovering FTL travel. People know they're out there in the void, but the likelihood to ever see one during a lifetime is low. They're targets of ancient history, of myths and fantastic tales in multiple civilizations, while true scientific knowledge about them remains very limited.

4th Theme - Communication

The last theme has been revealed and we got one week left until Summer Camp officially begins. I really like this theme as well and am really stoked to see the possible prompts for these.
I've had a lot of interest in the sociological and psychological aspects of language and communication study. How it works, and why it works they way it does, how it came to be that way. I think a lot of it stems from my struggle communicating with most people while growing up. I ended up withdrawn and quiet and shy and anxious. A lot of things escaped me that came natural to others; expressions, connotations, unspoken meanings and rules, reading cues, and so forth. I had to study and learn these things the same way someone else studies history or math. Maybe it's not so surprising that I found written communication so much easier. I had a lot of pen pals, back when that was a thing. Written text peeled away my anxiety about getting intonations, facial expressions, or body language wrong.
As for Rosepetal, I'm hoping to develop a lot of the ideas I've had that touches upon a wide variety of communication-related topics.
Language is of course the first thing most think of when it comes to this theme. Including me. One of my goals was to showcase a feeling of diversity in world, and avoiding what I'd not necessarily call lazy but convenient worldbuilding. An example being the existence of one or two universal lingua francas that are the same everywhere and understood by everyone. I have the lusoyans who can produce a much wider spectrum of sounds compared to humans and their complex language became a source of cultural pride. I have the Ktlac Ktlac who can't speak most human-descendent languages due to physiological differences, yet many are successful business-owners and traders. I have the nullvox whose creators didn't think they needed a speech organ, so they had to develop alternate means of communicating. These are just a few examples.
Technology wise, there's the question of communication grids: I have the subverse that's stable and reliable but not all that quick for messaging across space, and I have the meshverse which would be more closely analogous to real-life internet including virtual spaces. I have ideas for different devices to access these two - what would be their positives and negatives? What limitations would I like to put in, if any? Most are vague concepts so far that still needs to be fleshed out properly.
A lot of people on the discord have also covered a lot of cool concepts and ideas for things that could be touched upon, so I feel I have quite a lot of food for thought for this one. Conditions that could enhance/impair communicative ability, events and stories that involved communication or miscommunication, materials/items/creatures used for communicative purposes, people that were pivotal for some form of diplomatic mediating and so on.

Challenges & Events

SC 2023 Event Hub

Summer Clubs

Camp Chill (ID 4574878) by Rin Garnett

I'm joining Annie Stein's Camp Chill for this year's summer camp. I'm normally a very laid-back, calm, and absolutely not competitive person, and identify a lot with it's description and guidelines.
While I aspire to reach the silver badge, I'm going to take it easy.

Camp Chill Guidelines

• Remember the prompts are suggestions, not requirements.
• Write what you're passionate about, leave what you aren't.
• Relax when you feel tired.
• Fight off any pesky brain-squitos trying to make you doubt your work.
• Don't abandon your non-summercamp goals! Write that article you're itching to write, even if it doesn't fit any prompts.

I'm also joining Sailing Ocelot's Anvil Sailors as I think one of the most appealing parts of Summer Camp is the community interaction. I love getting feedback and critique, or just a nice compliment, and equally love giving it to others in turn.
Whether I'll include some pirate-y reference or not... we'll see.

Anvil Sailor Guidelines

• Comment on folks' articles now and again.
• Facilitate encouragement and Summer Camp cheer.

Extracurriculars

I've done a lot of preparation in Rosepetal in the hopes of making it more welcoming to new readers.

Main Navigation update

Space Cat got home safely!
I've reworked and restyled the structure of my main navigation, and although not everything is perfectly in place I think it will make it much easier to find things once I start actually filling out more of Rosepetal. It's unfortunately still a little barren articles-wise which I hope Summer Camp will help rectifying.
In addition, I finally got around fixing the flyout navigation panel which can be accessed through a button at the top left (beside the search bar and back to homepage button). By using the global world fields in settings, I'll now both keep the in-article navigation and the world navigation accessible here. This will free up some sidebar space in the articles as well as ensure readers always have the navigations at hand.

Front Page Facelift

Along with fixing the main navigation, I've also added a proper world vignette that I hope conveys its purpose and point of view: I've decided to go as much as I can on the idea of this world being an in-universe representation of a public knowledge repository. All articles (aside meta ones like this pledge) have already been written from the point of view of a scientific wiki so I thought I'd just keep going with that.

CSS Clean-Up

I've gone through my CSS and cleaned up a lot of code, managing to shrink it by nearly 30% in the process which feels great.
I have also edited a part of my theme primarily by adjusting some colors to have better contrast and increased some font sizes to improve readability. At the same time, I took a look at my major containers and think I've managed to make color coding more cohesive.

Poking at Tags

I've taken a look at the magic of tags, and planned for a system of tagging articles that'll hopefully make organization much easier going forward. My Article Index is the first one I made that utilizes tags to create auto-filled lists - here for an A-Z of all articles.
Going ahead, I'm also planning on doing auto-fill lists in hub articles, so one also can browse by topic.
An example of this is my Bio-Taxonomic Classes articles that will list species based on their morphologic silhouette. And the major government hubs, such as the The Ascendancy, will also have tag-lists for articles that are relevant to them.

Rough Historical Outline

I am currently working on filling out a rough outline of the history of the Rosepetal, that at minimum will bring up some important historical milestones and events. This also meant that I had to finally decide upon the actual time period - something that I've so far left very vague.
As mentioned in my introduction articles, Rosepetal plays out in a long distance future of our real universe, after humans for an unknown reason emigrated from the Milky Way.
It's been settled that this long distance future is circa 3 million years.