STATE OF THE TAXON FOR THE MERRY MERRY MONTH OF MAY
DRIP, DRIP, DROP WHEN THE SKY IS CLOUDY
It's another month of San Francisco treats as the weather is remaining synced with the city by the bay, and you can keep tabs on it using the widgets in comm profiles!
The aliens have adopted the theory "April showers bring May flowers" with enthusiasm, so every available bit of ground is going to be covered in flowering plants. Trellises and window boxes will pop up all over town to add yet more color and fragrance. In order to maintain the floral explosion there will be daily gentle rain showers, just enough to dampen the daisies and mist the mums. Also, there will maypoles in many of the gardens.
REMINDERS
→ PLEASE fill out your permissions meme if you haven't already! We need one from everyone.
→ Head on over here and leave us links to your plurks and twitters to be added for additional contact information, if you're so inclined! You can make a phone post, too, if you so desire!
→ Don't forget, you can glitch your character individually at any time by going through our glitch requests, get your character more stuff from home with item petitions, and have them earn money by getting them a job.
→ Remember to use the hiatus post in the mod journal when you go on hiatus. A post in the OOC comm is much more likely to escape our notice than a comment to the official post.
→ Check out the calendar for events and the activity records for your current activity check status.
→ TAG ALL OF YOUR POSTS! When you make posts and when you tag into someone else's. Commenting on a post, but failing to tag your character will not count towards the activity check. Please remember to do this so proper credit is given and active characters remain free of being swept.
→ Taxon isn’t the only one that has a birthday! Don’t forget to let us know when your characters birthdays (and yours!) are so we can add them to the calendar, and you can give them a ridiculous cake to celebrate their successful aging courtesy of the hamsters!
Additionally, we'd like to remind everyone of the mini pause glitch at the end of fourth wall for characters who learned things that needed to be forgotten (whether it be having been canon punctured or information you would rather them not retain). If you think you might need it but don't know for sure, or just want to preemptively participate in later in the tie-in metaplot, we need you to comment here letting us know.
If all else fails, or is just hard to find, hit up our link directory featured right at the top of the mod journal. Also, you don't have to wait for one of the HMDs to give us your thoughts. If you have ideas for Taxon that you'd like to share with us (including more cultural events, which we’d love to do more of), you can comment at any time to the suggestions or complaints posts.
FREEBIES
April showers bring May flowers! ...except, it didn't rain much in April, did it? Well, it's been established the aliens aren't the best when it comes to research, but at least they got the flowers part right! This month, the hatches will be gifting all of Taxon with free gardening supplies to help tend to the flowers popping up everywhere and vases to put them in. Also available will be umbrellas, galoshes and panchos, as well as fans to help keep the captives cool.
NOT GONNA REACH MY TELEPHONE
The signal from outside is getting stronger, citizens, but it comes with a price. As the aliens upstairs work to block them, whatever it is that’s out there just tries that much harder to get through.
What were frequent, short transmissions of static last month become occasional bursts of words: pieces of a message that manages to poke through before being pushed back off the air. There will be four transmissions in the month of May, all of them containing words in a possibly understandable language (depending on the characters), and all will be posted to the main community by a mod with the events journal, so be on the lookout.
SILENCE IS A TEXT EASY TO MISREAD
Communication troubles aren't only coming from the outside this month, and starting on the 22nd it'll be a lot more direct.
The radio signals are a problem, a big problem, and the aliens are scrambling to find a way around the issue without compromising the project entirely. What they compromise instead is the citizen's ability to speak.
When the code goes live at noon that Sunday, everything is gibberish. Mid-conversation or in the quiet just before you turn on the tablet, all the citizens of Taxon will speak nothing but gibberish. No real words, just nonsense sounds strung together.
Five minutes later, it all stops. To keep the gibberish from becoming an annoying, noisy problem, the aliens will decide to simply shut off verbal communication entirely. No voices, no sounds, no singing or talking or screaming or grunting. Everyone will be incapable of making their voices heard, even Extras (though they won't seem to notice the difference), and tablets will only allow the text function to be used.
Now this is where it gets tricky: any character that knows a language or languages other than English will find it terribly difficult to write without slipping into a different language. Any time they try to write something down, it will take a very concentrated effort to keep their communication limited to English, and even then some words and phrases will slip through. You can always use Google Translate to muck your tags up, or simply denote words in another language by bolding them.
By the 26th, everything will be sorted just enough to get people their voices back. However, they’ll still have the same troubles as they did with writing: if they know more than one language, it’ll be hard to make themselves stick to English.
Finally, just as Saturday the 28th becomes Sunday the 29th, everything will be back to the same kind of normal it always is in Taxon.
STOP! MEME TIME.
Spring has finally arrived in Taxon and things are surely to get interesting CR-wise with all these flowers in bloom, so don't pass this meme up! Toss around ideas and potential plots, jump on those you'd like to get CR with, go, go, go!
What's been going on: A quick summary of what's up with your character and how they're doing.
Things to do this month: Anything you'd like to do with them this month. CR requests, plot requests, "I'd really like them to have x kind of development but idk how to go about it, any ideas," whatever you want to get to this month or a plot you want to start rolling for the months to come.
It's another month of San Francisco treats as the weather is remaining synced with the city by the bay, and you can keep tabs on it using the widgets in comm profiles!
The aliens have adopted the theory "April showers bring May flowers" with enthusiasm, so every available bit of ground is going to be covered in flowering plants. Trellises and window boxes will pop up all over town to add yet more color and fragrance. In order to maintain the floral explosion there will be daily gentle rain showers, just enough to dampen the daisies and mist the mums. Also, there will maypoles in many of the gardens.
REMINDERS
→ PLEASE fill out your permissions meme if you haven't already! We need one from everyone.
→ Head on over here and leave us links to your plurks and twitters to be added for additional contact information, if you're so inclined! You can make a phone post, too, if you so desire!
→ Don't forget, you can glitch your character individually at any time by going through our glitch requests, get your character more stuff from home with item petitions, and have them earn money by getting them a job.
→ Remember to use the hiatus post in the mod journal when you go on hiatus. A post in the OOC comm is much more likely to escape our notice than a comment to the official post.
→ Check out the calendar for events and the activity records for your current activity check status.
→ TAG ALL OF YOUR POSTS! When you make posts and when you tag into someone else's. Commenting on a post, but failing to tag your character will not count towards the activity check. Please remember to do this so proper credit is given and active characters remain free of being swept.
→ Taxon isn’t the only one that has a birthday! Don’t forget to let us know when your characters birthdays (and yours!) are so we can add them to the calendar, and you can give them a ridiculous cake to celebrate their successful aging courtesy of the hamsters!
Additionally, we'd like to remind everyone of the mini pause glitch at the end of fourth wall for characters who learned things that needed to be forgotten (whether it be having been canon punctured or information you would rather them not retain). If you think you might need it but don't know for sure, or just want to preemptively participate in later in the tie-in metaplot, we need you to comment here letting us know.
If all else fails, or is just hard to find, hit up our link directory featured right at the top of the mod journal. Also, you don't have to wait for one of the HMDs to give us your thoughts. If you have ideas for Taxon that you'd like to share with us (including more cultural events, which we’d love to do more of), you can comment at any time to the suggestions or complaints posts.
FREEBIES
April showers bring May flowers! ...except, it didn't rain much in April, did it? Well, it's been established the aliens aren't the best when it comes to research, but at least they got the flowers part right! This month, the hatches will be gifting all of Taxon with free gardening supplies to help tend to the flowers popping up everywhere and vases to put them in. Also available will be umbrellas, galoshes and panchos, as well as fans to help keep the captives cool.
NOT GONNA REACH MY TELEPHONE
The signal from outside is getting stronger, citizens, but it comes with a price. As the aliens upstairs work to block them, whatever it is that’s out there just tries that much harder to get through.
What were frequent, short transmissions of static last month become occasional bursts of words: pieces of a message that manages to poke through before being pushed back off the air. There will be four transmissions in the month of May, all of them containing words in a possibly understandable language (depending on the characters), and all will be posted to the main community by a mod with the events journal, so be on the lookout.
SILENCE IS A TEXT EASY TO MISREAD
Communication troubles aren't only coming from the outside this month, and starting on the 22nd it'll be a lot more direct.
The radio signals are a problem, a big problem, and the aliens are scrambling to find a way around the issue without compromising the project entirely. What they compromise instead is the citizen's ability to speak.
When the code goes live at noon that Sunday, everything is gibberish. Mid-conversation or in the quiet just before you turn on the tablet, all the citizens of Taxon will speak nothing but gibberish. No real words, just nonsense sounds strung together.
Five minutes later, it all stops. To keep the gibberish from becoming an annoying, noisy problem, the aliens will decide to simply shut off verbal communication entirely. No voices, no sounds, no singing or talking or screaming or grunting. Everyone will be incapable of making their voices heard, even Extras (though they won't seem to notice the difference), and tablets will only allow the text function to be used.
Now this is where it gets tricky: any character that knows a language or languages other than English will find it terribly difficult to write without slipping into a different language. Any time they try to write something down, it will take a very concentrated effort to keep their communication limited to English, and even then some words and phrases will slip through. You can always use Google Translate to muck your tags up, or simply denote words in another language by bolding them.
By the 26th, everything will be sorted just enough to get people their voices back. However, they’ll still have the same troubles as they did with writing: if they know more than one language, it’ll be hard to make themselves stick to English.
Finally, just as Saturday the 28th becomes Sunday the 29th, everything will be back to the same kind of normal it always is in Taxon.
STOP! MEME TIME.
Spring has finally arrived in Taxon and things are surely to get interesting CR-wise with all these flowers in bloom, so don't pass this meme up! Toss around ideas and potential plots, jump on those you'd like to get CR with, go, go, go!
What's been going on: A quick summary of what's up with your character and how they're doing.
Things to do this month: Anything you'd like to do with them this month. CR requests, plot requests, "I'd really like them to have x kind of development but idk how to go about it, any ideas," whatever you want to get to this month or a plot you want to start rolling for the months to come.