It's always nice to see another NFU rising in the ranks, and Zuza is perpetually a great example of an active member ready to take the next jump from EQ3 to EQ4. Since her last promotion in January (yes, less than a year) Zuza has slammed out 169 competitions participated (193 if you include containers and brackets) and organized an additional 7. Of those, she's placed in 100 as evidenced by her collection of many many Crescents, giving her a fantastic 59% placement rating overall, especially when you consider 6 of those are Novae from the recent GJW XVI. Also no surprise since she's the premiere puzzle-piecer in Arcona. She comes in hot on the gaming field with 1601 Clusters of Fire and 681 of Earth. Add to that her prolific fiction writing: 170,976 words of fiction across 52 fiction activities, going especially hard on the roleplays with all of our members. She rounds that off with a respectable 29 Clusters of Graphite for her graphical pursuits. Given her position in Clan leadership (more on that below), it's unsurprising she's pulled in 2 Scrolls of Indoctrination, and 1 Scroll of Foundation and of the Master each. And through all this, she's passed 13 courses, graded 13 courses, and gained two degrees in the Shadow Academy.

Now I mentioned her leadership. Arch already mentions her fantastic work as Magistrate and Praetor to the Headmaster, so I will leave that alone. For the last ten months, while her Rollmaster duty position might have phased out, she has stuck to her role in the Clan's intake Battleteam, the Selen Training Corps, or STC. Here she takes new members and guides them through activities in the Brotherhood in ways similar to the old Promotheus checklist, albeit at a much faster rate as she tries to keep up with the XP system and a concentrated population of folks that just #dothething. In handling the new faces to the club, she also is the active manager of our Master-Apprentice program, retaining lists of people that are seeking apprentices to guide into the club, their prime interests in activity, and tracking and doing the same for all members JM3 and below (currently 14 Master volunteers and 4 Apprentices). Much of her work is accordingly in Discord, messaging goings-on and dropping links to competitions for the new folks to absorb. Recently, she also started management of the Arcona Announcements channel in cooperation with Zujenia, acting as a supplement to the Brotherhood channel by focusing attention solely onto news reports that affect the Arconan population, ranging from BT and House reports, to the latest drops from the Fist and DGM. All in all, she's siphoned approximately twenty reports into this space for our members to digest and readily reference.

Zuza is by far one of our best leaders in Arcona. She has a concern for the members that is the lifeblood of what makes Arcona awesome for so many. We don't always agree on management matters, but she always has my ear at the very least. We owe it to her for all the great work that she's put in as our Rollmaster Battleteam Leader and more. It would not surprise me to see her jump up the leadership ladder by leaps and bounds rather than by the steady position-by-position progression and excel each time along the way. So XP or by the old system, that's what these ranks really stand for: what she's done for herself, for others, and what she's capable of doing next. You've more than earned this, Zuzer. Congratulations.

Qyreia Arronen
Consul, Clan Arcona

Qyreia Arronen, 2023-10-22 13:57:55 UTC

I’m very happy to see Zuza hit another XP threshold for promotion, not only because she deserves it, but because it briefly puts off the nightmare of trying to quantify the hodgepodge of abstract work she does in non-site XP for an award. In addition to her previously documented M:HM work and the generic SA staff task of catching late-ish exams, Zuza’s role as my Praetor is effectively two separate jobs.

In the first, she is Deputy Arch. She is my continuity plan. As HM, I have something like nine different administrative menus and a Google Drive that has, well, it won’t tell me how many subfolders and files but there are an awful lot of them. We run a standing, unique competition series. There are two staff channels and six subordinates, down from eight just recently, not counting either of us, and there’s a special menu on the site just to keep me from breaking my menagerie of staff positions (unsuccessfully, it turns out). If I get hit by a bus, or maybe just retire from HM, then someone has to know how all that stuff works, in isolation and together. Zuza drew the short straw and now she gets to learn all the things. The obvious examples here are that she’s running the SA Decathlon this quarter, which involves some quality time with the SA Exam Metrics screen, and that’s she one of only two staffers who’ve made direct edits to SA systems since I took over. But the list of SOPs is long and thankless and ever-changing.

Who got to sit in voice chat the other week, watching my screen as I droned on for a full hour, to learn about course assets and how the interface for SA exam questions works and why the version in the gdoc draft would make the system choke and die? Who got to go through all the dozens of menus and submenus and help map out which site permissions HM, P:HM, M:HM, PROF, and DOC should get to realign things with how I want those positions to work? Who got a surprise lesson in how brand YouTube accounts work with Google user accounts? Yes, obviously Zuza is involved in discussions on course overhaul and staffing and such. She proofreads. Whatever. Less obviously, the SA troubleshooting system, which members have used 53 times so far this year, involves a Google Form linked to a Google Sheet, leading to edits in one of two separate menus, before one returns not only to the familiar Recommend an Award menu, but also to that first spreadsheet and then for good measure a text file on my computer. That process is documented in exactly one place, which is Zuza’s PM history with me, or I suppose now her PMs and her EQ4 promotion event. For the last decade, James has been a terrible enabler while Solari, Bubba, Farrin, Seraphol, Ciara, and I have been slamming our grand ideas and partially completed projects into each other like we’re making Nerd Voltron, and now poor Zuza has been voluntold to become its mechanic. If that description was bizarre, frantic, and just barely coherent, then it is an accurate depiction of life in the depths of the SA. Learning and training on and helping to document all these tools and processes is the definition of unglamorous, tedious, grunt work that Zuza cannot possibly view as more than just tolerable, but she not only does it, she does it with a smile and prods me for more of it whenever I let up on her.

Now I was going to inflict all of that on whomever I hired for Praetor, Zuza is just the lucky victim. Her real job is that she’s the Brotherhood’s midwife, greeting our new baby dossiers and server members and shepherding them through their early weeks in the club. It’s critical work. Our attrition rate through the NV ranks makes one wonder if these kids are eating their siblings in the nest to reduce the competition. Early, direct engagement from a dedicated leader—not an off putting, creepy weirdo like me, but a nice, friendly weirdo like Zuza—is one of the few tools we have to address that. She was already doing this for Arcona in her role as BTL, and seems to be doing it pretty well since Arcona is roughly twice the size of the other clans and swarming with enthusiastic noobs. I just poached her to do it for everyone else while she was at it.

She monitors #welcome and she monitors the various new member emails (and yes, there’s also a special admin menu just for that, and another for rogues we catch sniffing around) and then Zuza does the unthinkable and talks to strangers. She does direct outreach, but even if she didn’t, any new join who makes it to the Discord server would bump into her anyway. A quick spot check tells me that in the past 24 hours she’s been chatting away in not only #welcome and #general-chat, but three more of our general/society channels, five out of seven clan chats, #cantina, and however many channels I'm just in. And that was a slow day, a day when she’d warned me she would “be fairly busy” traveling out of town. She unsurprisingly popped onto voice chat, too, she’s in damn near every RP session, and she’s one of the most prolific multiplayer gamers in the club. Whatever you joined the club to do, she will find you, and she will do it with you. If you’re a shy, awkward nerd walking into the cafeteria on your first day after transferring schools mid-year, which is not far off from what popping into the DB as a new member is like, then Zuza is the popular student who appears out of nowhere and inexplicably asks you to sit at her table. You can be an extrovert and make your own friends, or you can just follow Zuza around and she will give you friends, and I think you can guess which option is more comfortable for the kind of person who joins an online Star Wars club. I wish we had a dozen of her.

Alethia Archenksova
Headmistress

Moff Alethia Archenksova, 2023-10-20 00:09:10 UTC