Another possibility to make it feel more magazine-ish would be to have regular columnists.
Nah... That would not be a good plan.
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Another possibility to make it feel more magazine-ish would be to have regular columnists.
Exactly what Derahan and I thought
Ssshhhh, Don't give it away
I have to say...Tanzhang really nailed it with his thoughtful critique. I won't belabor things by adding much more other than to say: Derahan? Your job is a REALLY difficult one. Coaxing articles out of a crowd of forum members is tedious, unrewarding and unrecognized work. I got an insider's view of all that during the canonized era and saw how much background effort was taking place that is completely transparent to the casual reader. canonized worked his ass off and i bet you are too. So be proud of yourself for what you're doing...and know that your effort is appreciated. Naturally there's room for improvement but there always will be.
Gahhh you're completely right, I wanted to write a longer entry (focused on the kinds of mistakes that are easy to make in historybook AARs), but the subject felt presumptuous and I didn't have enough time, so I felt that writing a 'statement of purpose' would be a good first step, to set a standard (historicity combined with recontextualization rather than trying to build a fantasy world) by which I can then say that X Y and Z things are mistakes, because without that standard then you can't really call things mistakes or not (for instance if you wanted to write about a world where Leonardo da Vinci was completely successful and his machines became common throughout Europe you would be writing about a significantly different world and I don't think I could really criticize someone doing that of not being historical enough because history has been thrown out the window at that point).
Fyregecko - is that AAR advertising I smell?
Merrick's little opinion piece was short and sweet, while Fyregecko's was much longer but both essentially asked and answered the same question: Why do I (replace I with Merrick and Fyregecko where applicable) Write AARs? Although the answers were different and both were worth reading (though I feel Merrick's could have been a bit longer and Fyregecko's a lot shorter)
Re-reading the post, though, I'm sure you didn't mean to be insensitive, and think that I see what you mean (bear in mind that criticism of all kinds feel different to the 'victim' ).
The article could certainly have been shorter but, not knowing how long the others would be, was worried about writing something too short. Derahan asked me to write the article and gave me some rough guidelines on length, but without a word count. No criticism to Derahan, I'm honoured that he thought that an article by me could be of interest - just that, in the future, a suggested word count might be useful for potential authors
Re-reading the post, though, I'm sure you didn't mean to be insensitive, and think that I see what you mean (bear in mind that criticism of all kinds feel different to the 'victim' ). The article could certainly have been shorter but, not knowing how long the others would be, was worried about writing something too short. Derahan asked me to write the article and gave me some rough guidelines on length, but without a word count. No criticism to Derahan, I'm honoured that he thought that an article by me could be of interest - just that, in the future, a suggested word count might be useful for potential authors
That is a good point, doing the pdfs it is quite noticeable sometimes that you have page-and-a-quarter articles next to 5-page long ones, so maybe a minimum and maximum word counts as reference would help bring more balance.
Yeah, one of the problems with the AARlander at present is that there is zero coordination between contributors. When you write an article, you have absolutely no idea what your fellow contributors are writing about, how long their articles are, whether you should adjust your accordingly, etc. The only person who does know is Derahan, and he doesn't have much choice but to ask people to write articles, hope to God they actually write them and then publish the finished product. Otherwise no articles - and by extension no AARlander. Theoretically, we could end up with an issue where every article is on the exact same subject - and that issue would be pretty boring to read IMO.
I'm sure Derahan is aware of the faults with the current system and is taking steps to remedy the situation, but I'm not entirely sure that a hard and fast word count is a step in the right direction. I'm not a big fan of limiting people to x number of words per article, and I can certainly say that if I had to limit my article last issue to say, 500 words, I believe it would have made the article much less effective - in fact, less effective to the point which it probably would have been better off remaining unwritten. If Fyregecko can look at his article and say with conviction that "if it were any shorter, it wouldn't be worth writing" then it's long enough, and I don't feel that I, Derahan or anyone else should force him to shorten it. I just felt that as a reader, his article could have been shorter - not that it should have been shorter. (for the record, my own article was about 5-600 words longer than his.) Sure, we could use word counts as liberal guidelines rather than hard and fast rules: but if you're going to make rules that are easily broken, why bother with such rules in the first place?
Thanks for doing that BTW.
So what happened to this rumored monthly AARlanders?