Believe it or not, the spring season is quickly coming to an end. Thane and alder nominations open tomorrow, and before you know it those elections will be over and we'll be into summer. It might seem like spring was a quiet time for Wintreath. Activity was low but consistent as the world continues to reopen and life gets back to normal for most people. Some of our members left to focus on their offline lives and others don't have the time to be around that they did while the pandemic was raging. However, it's also been a time of peaceful construction. Earlier in the season I pinned down eight public areas that we have some kind of focus on: foreign affairs, forum and Discord gaming, video gaming, Minecraft, NationStates, roleplay, Werewolf, and Wintreath governance. I'm glad to say that in the spring we made progress in almost every area.
On the foreign affairs side, we had not one but two events with other NationStates regions: a continuation of the joint Werewolf games with 10000 Islands and an Among Us event with the Kingdom of Great Britain. Both events were great successes, boosted other areas of the community, and showed the good that foreign affairs can still do in a world where many of us have become jaded and cynical about interacting with other NationStates regions.
In the gaming area, we revived Cards Against Humanity night, which had been dormant since the autumn. Some weeks have been modest, but others have brought people together who wouldn't normally be around at the same time. Those are the weeks that have been especially awesome to me, and I hope we'll have more weeks like that as CAH nights become more established. We also had a Spyfall game in March that ended up with over 100 posts, the second in a row. That's amazing when you consider that before these two games only one other game had reached that milestone. Video gaming has always been more of an aspirational focus for us, but the Among Us event with KoGB was awesome and I believe we will be starting Among Us nights very soon!
Likewise, we've established weekly Minecraft nights, which have been a modest success. They usually draw 3-5 people, and one night we even had a nice voice chat while we were playing which I think will probably be more prominent going into the future. At the very least, I know I've played more Minecraft since we started these nights than I'd played in a long time.
Werewolf continues to become one of the most prominent areas of Wintreath. We've hosted 2 games this season (compared with 2 in all of 2020), took part in a game in XKI's forum, and selected
@Melehan to represent us in the Mafia Championships this year. We also had some discussions about the future of Werewolf in Wintreath, which I think will bear fruit as we go into the summer.
Last but not least...Wintreath governance! The Landsraad is established! This was a huge project for me that involved setting up the new legislature, building a whole new law codex, and making sure our laws fit the new structure of government. For someone that has never been all that involved in legislative stuff, it was an interesting project and I'm especially proud of the law codex. However, I'm glad that it's finished and in the hands of our Citizens, who I hope will drive it to new places that have nothing to do with constant updates to the procedural rules (and definitely no seating acts). The experiment with having Citizen representatives to the Cabinet also continues, and I established two new publications to inform the community of what's going on in Wintreath: this one and
Wintreath in Statistics. This is by far the area that received the most TLC from me in the spring.
That's not to say that everything is perfect or there's nothing we could be doing better. We still have plenty of work cut out for us in the summer, especially now that we're competing with the real world once again. However, I wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate the things we accomplished in the outgoing season and make the case that spring wasn't some kind of lost era for us. It was slow, yes, but we accomplished great things that I believe will help make us bigger and better going forward.
To everyone who contributed to anything that we did in the spring: thank you. I know how hard it is for most people to volunteer much time into anything online these days, but it's your work that helps build and maintain our great community. It's just not something I can do on my own. And thank you to everyone that participated and enjoyed anything that we did this season. I know for me personally, seeing people liking and having a good time with something we're doing is a huge motivation boost, and I'm sure it's the same for everyone else that's put in work to build the things we're doing. Let's build on our quiet progress and make summer an incredible time in our community! It's going to be a hot one, so don't forget to
stay frosty, too.
May 25th - Citizen Checks (If you're on Discord, you will receive a warning if you don't meet Citizenship requirements)
Earlier this week, NationStates rolled out a new feature where regions could choose a banner to show on their page, and I found a banner that I hope shows what we are to people seeing Wintreath for the first time: a person trudging through the snow, having found a village of people hanging out outside and having fun. Check it out if you have a chance and let me know if like it!
