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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.
thanks alot, I doubt that I currently work my ass of as hard as Canonized, but then agian, during his time the AARlander was more developed and hopefully we will get to that stage in due time where I will have to work my ass off, which I want to for the forums. And improvements is always needed, nothing is ever perfected as far as I am concerned. That is why critque such as Tanzhang's is really usefull
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).
I actually think that would have made a great article. (next issue perhaps?) I don't think its presumptuous either, at least no more so than some of the great articles Mr. C and Loki have written in the recent past, or Rens' "bored room" comment (I've heard him mention that somewhere before, was it from a previous article?) from misterbean's interview.
Fyregecko - is that AAR advertising I smell?
I hope not - I was trying to avoid that at all costs and was careful to mention another drawn AAR
But only having one AAR meant that I had little choice when I wanted to give examples of what I was talking about.Well, that fills me with confidence...
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'
Also, criticism of this kind is highly subjective – relative length will be perceived differently by different readers, to a consummate historical writAAR like Tanzhang your article was probably preaching to the converted a bit, whereas to someone thinking of starting a new AAR the article probably contains enough examples and enthusiasm to encourage them to try.
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.
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'
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.
Well...I couldn't agree more with you. The zero coordination between contributors is a problem, how big I can't say as I don't want to estimate it. I am aware of it, hence what I just said. Though I've just got down one step to do it and that is to create a more permanent writer staff on the AARlander (so far so good it seems). Though I wish I could figure out a good way to get out some coordination between writers as well, the only thing I can think of would be a skype chatroom once a month.... Though that doesn't sound all to well for me as people might not like that. And as for the word ammount, the limit is a forum post, this I've put in place so that I won't limit any writers contribution to the AARlander since we need all of what the writers want to provide, so putting a maximum and minimum limit isn't something I believe I will do, though, I am open for all suggestions.
If anyone has any suggestions with solutions to the problems write them here or PM them to me, that'd be great!
Skype chatroom might be difficult, since we're from all over the world, and each have time issues.
Some other social media solution?
Renss
Some other social media solution?
Renss
Back in the Gazette days, we used instant messaging or the good old fashioned phone (at least the editAARs did.) More than anything, however, we had a deadline as to what was being submitted and often read it (and perhaps slightly edited) prior to them posting. It was always hectic on the days we published trying to make sure everyone got their submissions in during the already agreed upon posting time but it was also exciting to see the new work being done. For article research, I'd suggest for anyone to read back through some of the Gazette's offerings. I was always impressed. Keep it coming Derahan! I am still very interested when I see a new issue.
Ah, great! Thanks alot! Well, we will just have to ponder about what to do with the inter-communication!
And on the other hand, as for new features for the next issue is just that, as I might just say it here, the introduction of a more permanent staff of the AARlander (Had to ask people! hehehe!)
And on the other hand, as for new features for the next issue is just that, as I might just say it here, the introduction of a more permanent staff of the AARlander (Had to ask people! hehehe!)
Well, it was to late to implement that to this edition but the next one should be released after a month of the upcoming edition, i will not make any promises on how exactly long that month is as anything can happen to me, Gen. Marshall or the writers.