What question do you want to ask AU?

[Hlansteurna]

What's the inspiration behind Diffusion in your nation?

[Liagolas]

where did the inspiration come for the idea of people in the dominion using masks to prevent individualism from growing?

I don't know if the masks came from anywhere in particular to be honest. I started from the idea of Liagolas being hyper-collectivist to the point of denying individuality and attempting to cultivate the appearance of a hivemind. Using masks to prevent anyone from actually "having a face" just seemed like a good next step.

What's the inspiration behind Diffusion in your nation?

Who is that on your flag? Hlansteurna's leader?

[Hamatu]

1. What're your main plans for Liagolas?
2. What would you say're the biggest influences on how you came up with Liagolas?
3. Favorite/most memorable work of fiction you've read/watched/played?

So, the mermaid-desert combo actually sorta just happened over time. Initially, Hamatu was just a sideshow to my main, and was just an underwater society of water mages, who worshipped a powerful water-goddess (at this point, Hamatu was still human). But, then at some point- I think it might've actually been when I was making the flag, actually- I decided they were mermaids. Then, when I made the 'Salt and Sorrow' factbook, it basically just worked out that the form of divine punishment Ilitu would use would be... well, make a desert. And, her mercy would be providing an underground sanctuary for her followers. Obviously, there's other stuff going on besides the mermaid-desert combo, but as I made it, it really just seemed the natural thing to do, and I didn't actually expect people to see it as anything particularly unique.

[Anatoliyanskiy]

What gave you inspiration for Hamatu? I know this is a pretty general question but it's a really unique nation that I haven't seen replicated anywhere else. Like mermaids, a big desert? Quite a strange combination.

[Feyrisshire]

Why does Anatoliyanskiy has a hammer and sickle on its flag when it's more of a social democracy than anything else?

[Kiu Ghesik]

1) Your favorite thread on F7?
2) Before F7, and maybe apart from NSG, has there been any other places that you have visited or tried to get into?

1. Rate the AN's chosen factbook, as evidenced by my dumping essays there on the regular.
2. Nowhere I actually ever posted in, though I found out about this site from lurking on another worldbuilding-focused forum.

Why does Anatoliyanskiy has a hammer and sickle on its flag when it's more of a social democracy than anything else?

Why'd you decide to make your hotlinks blue? Was there a reason besides emulating Wikipedia's style?

[Anatoliyanskiy]

Why does Anatoliyanskiy has a hammer and sickle on its flag when it's more of a social democracy than anything else?

It's, a long story. If you read the overview, then you'd know that it represents the workers of the nation and not communism, and how important they are to the nations success. There have been talks of removing it and replacing it with a star though, and those talks are ongoing.

/skipmeanddokiughesik

[Hlansteurna]

Where did you get the idea for all of your nations? They all seem very unique.

[Liagolas]

1. What're your main plans for Liagolas?
2. What would you say're the biggest influences on how you came up with Liagolas?
3. Favorite/most memorable work of fiction you've read/watched/played?

1. I want to revamp the Factbooks. Replace the "Official Factbook" with something that reads less like Dominion propaganda and more like excerpts from The Place Without a People. Also the lore in the old "Official Factbook" needs to be redone, since I don't think it quite represents what I want for Liagolas. My vision is that the Factbook comes across like a website that offers previews of The Place Without a People and extra content, like excerpts from interviews and research material.

2. It's a weird combination. The Evil Overlord List on TVTropes, General Assembly, Ender's Game, and Star Trek. When I started Liagolas, I had recently read the Evil Overlord List, so I decided I wanted to make an "evil" NationState. But I wanted to participate in General Assembly, and I realized that just being "evil" wasn't unique or practical. In Ender's Game and Star Trek, there were hive mind factions, the Formics and the Borg. So I had the idea, what if Liagolas was a nation of humans who were obsessively trying to imitate a hive mind? And finally, fitting Liagolas into General Assembly is the origin of the idea of the new Liagolas wanting to open the Dominion to more normalized trade and diplomacy. And tht leads to Liagolas being this strange, suppressive, pseudo-hivemind-state where the "leader" is trying to comprehend the world outside of Liagolas for the first time and isn't sure how to reconcile the rest of reality with its own role and its own life. I quit General Assembly a long time ago, so now I have more time to think about and flesh out Liagolas itself in ways I want to.

Rand's Anthem had some influence as well, though I'm loathe to credit her for that. I don't read Rand anymore.

3. Hilda.
__________

AN: How did Kalosian fashion get popular in the 23rd-century?

[Kiu Ghesik]

Where did you get the idea for all of your nations? They all seem very unique.

OA was largely inspired by just the general theme of the issues I'd gotten and the tone of the website, which is why it's so satire-styled. That, and I was listening to Athens Queen by Stan Rogers when I wrote a good deal of it, hence the shitposty-drunk-Canadians aspect.
KG, I've already answered for. Just dig back like a page and I'm sure you'll find the answer.
M22 was inspired by shanty-style filk songs, because I'm a nerd who listens to that sort of thing, and Space Station 13 for the memes. Hence why its primary banner is the clown.
CBG is, uh... I don't even know at this point what inspired it, mate. It's just so big I can hardly comprehend it now. I just kind of thought "an AI nation might be cool", and then "hey, what if I tied it into M22's background?" and then "what if I put it after the Authority inevitably falls apart?" and then I got off on an Afghan War kick and I don't even know what it is now.

AN: How did Kalosian fashion get popular in the 23rd-century?

1) Why'd you choose that vaporwave-style flag? I mean, it fits the aesthetic, but it's a bit odd, I feel.
2) An aspect of the Dominion's philosophy I've been intrigued by is how they see other nations- do they perceive foreign nationals as digits of another nation's body?

[Liagolas]

1) Why'd you choose that vaporwave-style flag? I mean, it fits the aesthetic, but it's a bit odd, I feel.
2) An aspect of the Dominion's philosophy I've been intrigued by is how they see other nations- do they perceive foreign nationals as digits of another nation's body?

1. I'm not familiar with vaporwave, so if the flag looks like vaporwave, that's by coincidence. I just cobbled this together using free software and figured it looked ominous and foreboding. Maybe I should replace it with some other design, but I haven't gotten far enough with Liagolas to have a sense of how the state would represent itself in imagery.

2. The current Liagolas and Domain Council think foreign nationals ought to be digits of other nations' personhoods, but they recognize that that's not how other countries operate. The first time lowlier Hands needed to interact with foreign nationals (incidental stuff like driving their car or acting as security), I imagine the instruction would have been something like, "The bodies that are visiting the Dominion of Liagolas today are not like appendage-bodies in Liagolas. Where these bodies come from, each body is a dominion to itself, and these body-dominions attempt to collaborate with each other as dominions severally instead of as appendages cooperatively. But it is the wisdom of the Dominion to respect these body-dominions' inferior lifestyle in order to facilitate communication between itself and the body-dominions."

/skipme; still Kiu Ghesik

[Celestial Provinces]

Where did you get the idea for all of your nations? They all seem very unique.

OA was largely inspired by just the general theme of the issues I'd gotten and the tone of the website, which is why it's so satire-styled. That, and I was listening to Athens Queen by Stan Rogers when I wrote a good deal of it, hence the shitposty-drunk-Canadians aspect.
KG, I've already answered for. Just dig back like a page and I'm sure you'll find the answer.
M22 was inspired by shanty-style filk songs, because I'm a nerd who listens to that sort of thing, and Space Station 13 for the memes. Hence why its primary banner is the clown.
CBG is, uh... I don't even know at this point what inspired it, mate. It's just so big I can hardly comprehend it now. I just kind of thought "an AI nation might be cool", and then "hey, what if I tied it into M22's background?" and then "what if I put it after the Authority inevitably falls apart?" and then I got off on an Afghan War kick and I don't even know what it is now.

AN: How did Kalosian fashion get popular in the 23rd-century?

1) Why'd you choose that vaporwave-style flag? I mean, it fits the aesthetic, but it's a bit odd, I feel.
2) An aspect of the Dominion's philosophy I've been intrigued by is how they see other nations- do they perceive foreign nationals as digits of another nation's body?

Why the scythian/mongol style nation? When?

[Las Palmeras]

What would you imagine warfare between two FT space nations to look like?

[Kiu Ghesik]

Why the scythian/mongol style nation? When?

I hate to be an ass but I've gotten this question or some variant of "what inspired you" at least six times now. Just throwing that out there.

What would you imagine warfare between two FT space nations to look like?

What's your favorite religious tradition you've learned about from the cultures you study?

[Las Palmeras]

What's your favorite religious tradition you've learned about from the cultures you study?

The Mexica migration story and associated mythical history has a special place in my heart, despite being a pain in the ass to interpret (what parts to read as historical memory or not). I like it because it opened the gateway to a bunch of funny outdated theories and speculations in the hands of Western writers, and I work on those. Most of the time, they're little geographic and booknotes over Aztlán being in New Mexico or Jalisco or even Arizona. Other times, they lead to a bunch of historiographically underlooked curiosities, like 19th Century anthropologists arguing whether the Aztecs and Toltecs were Asians or not, hell, or even Atlanteans....because said experts tried to "recreate" the migration route.
/SKIP

[Celestial Provinces]

What would you imagine warfare between two FT space nations to look like?

You would probably have something similar to the Battle of the Denmark Strait, two sides with plans that come across eachother, plans go awry, so on and so forth. Except that both sides would hide behind shields until some on runs out of ammunition or a shield fails. Also with VERY dangerous weapons to operate.

Something like that at least.

/skip

[The Auraverse]

-snip-

wHy ThE mOnGoLs

What actually got you into NS in the first place? How did you stumble upon the site, and by extension, the forums? Did you mess around with one before the other (i.e. were you an issue player before finding the forums and beginning to participate in them)?

[Kiu Ghesik]

wHy ThE mOnGoLs

What actually got you into NS in the first place? How did you stumble upon the site, and by extension, the forums? Did you mess around with one before the other (i.e. were you an issue player before finding the forums and beginning to participate in them)?

because Mongol empire best empire; Temujin 2024, bring back the golden horde

I'd been lurking on r/worldbuilding for a month or so, actually, and while I was never active there I saw a post about this website, thought "hey, that might be cool", and decided to see what it was. A day or so later and I made an account, which was of course drunk Canadian bois. I was never an issues player entirely solely because I had looked at the forum before I had even realized RMBs were a thing. Seeing that there was a community for factbooks, and enjoying writing far more than clicking buttons and watching funi numbers go up, I just naturally gravitated towards the forums instead.

/skip

[Sanghyeok]

Do you plan how each dispatch and page is organised before you start creating, or do you change as you go (for example, the home page and each dispatch's overall layout and style?).
BN: I am not from Cuba, Vietnam, or North Korea so yes.

[Nevertopia]

do you live in a predominately capitalist nation?

[The Auraverse]

Do you plan how each dispatch and page is organised before you start creating, or do you change as you go (for example, the home page and each dispatch's overall layout and style?).

Ahah. Ahahah. "Planning". Well, I try to have a general idea of what I'm doing before starting work on a factbook cluster, and I'll typically try to stick to a unified aesthetic throughout. The trouble with this nation in particular is that I tend to work on things in staggered intervals, between which I change my outlook on what does and doesn't actually look good. The hub page, for instance, is going to be redesigned soonish, because it's old and no longer fits my aesthetic view for the nation. As illustrated by the latest thing I've churned out, I'll probably be gradually shifting everything to a more graphically-oriented and "clean" look.

Within the factbooks themselves, I'll generally have some idea of the layout and structure of everything before I actually create any of the graphics and do any of the formatting, since it'd be kind of intractable otherwise.

/skip

[Valentine Z]

Do you plan how each dispatch and page is organised before you start creating, or do you change as you go (for example, the home page and each dispatch's overall layout and style?).
BN: I am not from Cuba, Vietnam, or North Korea so yes.

Maybe I was just ignorant, so I have not seen you around despite being a relatively older nation compared to most of the folks here. Did you participate in anything else back in 2016, or just answering issues? ^^

How long does it take for you to make that GIF flag? I know the NS limitations on GIFs are heavy handed, so it must have taken a while, I assume.

-----

BN: Oh man, a lot of things to talk about, and I don't mind! :3

So yeah, first thing. The he/him is because he started off as a man, so I wanted to leave that inside. The original Factbook and entry still addresses Valentijn as a man, then surprising you guys with the fact that yes, he is now a she!

As for the motivation, it started with the counter, then I joked around that if he gets misgendered many times, I'll turn him into a her. I had no intent of doing that at first, BUT I fiddled around in Sims 4 and I have to say, I was like "Oh wow, she looks super!"

And that's the story of how Valentijn became a woman, a bit more OOCly.

[Baizou]

How long does it take for you to make that GIF flag? I know the NS limitations on GIFs are heavy handed, so it must have taken a while, I assume.

Since Valentijn is now a she, why does "Important Personnel of Valentine Z" use he/him pronouns and call Valentijn "the man in woman's armor?" Is that simply old content that hasn't been updated yet, or is it intended to reflect an earlier time from before Valentijn started using she/her pronouns?

Also, was there any particular out-of-character reason that inspired or motivated, etc. you writing this transition into Valentijn's story?

[Las Palmeras]

1) Do you plan on using other Umineko characters on your leader roster?
2) Why did you decide to use secondary characters? Usually when people pick pre-existing characters, they pick the main protagonists. Ngl, it surprised me.

[Kiu Ghesik]

What's your favorite part about Montse Tepka's new character design?