Greetings Folks,

Going to try to hammer out this report real quick before the lightning storm in my area kills power and/or I fall asleep at my keyboard. Yay for tired Aedile!

Crusade Results are In

Congratulations to every member of Taldryan who helped us conquer the silly lightsider folks, and conquer Jaguada. Odan-Urr acquitted themselves quite proudly, and they managed to kick some ass in the Special Forces events, but Taldryan in the end, carried the day.

We have had a quite frankly, audacious amount of Nova awarded within Taldryan due to our recent victory on Jaguada, and everyone who won an award did spectacularly well. I do just want to highlight one person's performance though, as he above all showed how much ass he could kick. That man is Alaris Jinn. Congrats Alaris, you just signed your ticket onto the Special Forces team by winning EVERY EVENT. Well done man.

You can find the full list of placements, and even a link to everyone who competed in the events here

SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!

The Grand Master recently saw fit to give us a glimpse into his depraved and insanity addled mind, by revealing plans to, for some reason, pay us. His announcement can be found here, and will almost undoubtedly be integral to the oft referenced possessions system that the Dark Brotherhood has been working on for a donkey's age. Possessions are exactly what they sound, we get to buy shit. What kinda shit? I dunno. Blasters. Dancing girls (and boys), maybe Death Stars. Who knows? But it's a pretty cool think, and I want to thank Muz for giving us this glimpse into the future, and the coders who are undoubtedly being driven mad by questions about this thing.

In correlation to this, Muz has announced that we will be given back pay, for our past positions and jobs within the DB. Now, for most people who joined since the advent of the automated website, most of your tenures and such will be recorded, but there are gaps. If you go through the DB History Tab on your Dossier, you can see the positions you may have held in the past. Compare them with your notes, and make sure they match.

If they do not match, we have finally found out why Howlader has been bothering us about making dossier fixes. If the records do not match reality, **you are to email Howlader ([Log in to view e-mail addresses]) with proof of your previous positions. Use Dark Voices and other material such as wikis, Taldryan.net or whatever you or Howie can think of to track down the past, and get you credit for your work in the DB. You can see Howie's report on the proceedings here

Upcoming Competition

Just a quick spoiler for this one… the summit of Taldryan and Naga Sadow have been working together a joint competition that will be taking place in the very near future. It's not nearly as labour intensive as the Crusades have been, but is designed to keep your minds and quills sharp in these off months, and give us an increasingly rare chance at developing ourselves outside the context of a war. More to come on this later.

Shadow Academy Spree

The Headmaster is trying to reach an important milestone in his administration, and Taldryan is going to help him. Head on over to the Shadow Academy website and start taking courses. That's all. Just go take some courses, and help reward our Headmaster for all his work… oh, and if you do, you might get a Scroll of Foundation for your troubles. Details here

Get to Know a Tally: September Edition

Nominations have concluded, and it is now time for voting. Head on over to the forums here and cast your ballot for who you'd like to get interviewed next. Wee!

RTFR Results

First and foremost, I am extremely disappointed in almost everyone who submitted. The clear obvious answer in the cake vs. pie debate is simple: Cake is so much better, and you're insane to think otherwise. Purely insane.

Anyways, the following entries took home prizes for their originality, humour, or however much they sucked up to me.

A note on RTFRs… they're meant to be fun, everyone competes, just throw your name in the hat competitions. I'd really like to see more entries, especially by our Journeymen in coming months. For the near future though… RTFRs are once again going on hiatus, due to our competition time being shared with our CNS frenemies. (Yea, I said it).

First Place: Halcyon Taldrya, because of dropping the mic.

Cake is good...,but cake is no pie. Nope. Not a bit

Why?

You can't fuck a cake

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6ifkomwmt1qzno5fo1_500.gif

Second Place: Aeson Rhys, because mincemeat pies are in fact delicious.

Pies are much better. There are an enormous variety of pies, fruit pies, custard pies, cream pies, and two of my favorites vinegar pie and mincemeat pie. Heck you can even have egg pie (Quiche) or meat pies (pasties).

Cakes basically fall into six types- Sponge cake, Yellow Cake, White Cake, Angel cake, pound cake and the all time favorite, fruit cake. The flavor can be varied by adding something extra like chocolate but the type remains the same. And of course you must add cream or frosting to complete a cake.

Pies however are complete in and of themselves.

Joint Third Place: Benevolent Taldrya Whiner, because Ben using Wiki Stats to prove an argument warmed by heart.

Pie. So much pie. Observe:

Cake. It can be a dessert. I will concede the previous cake-gument and allow pancake to count as a cake (therefore, cake can also be a meal). A single type of cake is appropriate for all occasions. Where-as, all pies are good for all meals and occasions. Apple pie for breakfast? Awesome. Beef pies for lunch? Cool. Chicken pot pie for dinner? Great. Sour Cherry for dessert. Perfect. One could eat a different type of pie all day and have an appropriately balanced day. If you did that with Cake, you'd be frothing at the mouth from all the icing sugar by lunch time.

Which brings me to the next point. Icing. I'm sorry, but icing largely tastes the same. I mean, you can flavour it...but it still tastes like icing. And with a cake, you get that stuff everywhere. Say you get a corner piece? You've got icing on the top of the cake piece. You've got icing on 2/4 of the vertically oriented faces (don't act confused Yacks, you're a man. You can visualize geometry in your head. Just do it.). You even have 1 or more layers of icing in the middle. As for the actual cake? It's basically pastry-sponge. From Angel Food Cake (aka foam cake) to like a bundt or pound cake...it's a sponge. It starts to taste like whatever it touches. Icing. So now you've got sugar that's optionally given some other flavour covering a type of sweet bread that naturally absorbs the icing flavour. Icing. Gorram icing everywhere. Even pancakes (which, while I'll admit they are real cake...they are an odd variety), usually get syrup (aka sugar) poured on them. And then they taste like syrup. This is why cake cannot be greater than pie. As much as I like sweet things, that's really all a cake can do. Sugar.

Now, consider pie crust (the more-or-less constant defining feature of pie). For arguments sake, it's flour paste with fat. Lard, butter, whatever. It's the thing that makes human food taste good. Carrots? Good. Roasted carrots with a bit of melted butter? Awesome. Now, you have this mixture that is flour and delicious (sidenote: delicious is like culinary infinity. Multiply any real number by infinity and you get infinity - loosely speaking. Flour times delicious = Delicious)...and you fill it with something else that's good. It can be sweet if you want. It can be savoury. Both are improved by the lardy goodness.

Lastly, if you won't be convinced by reason, I give you a simpler argument. Your "debate" is ill-defined. You just say to compare Cakes and Pies. I choose to define the value of variable "Cake" and variable "Pie" as the number of known variants of each type. For simplicity's sake, I use the mighty Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pies andhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cakes. Now...I'm too lazy to count them, but the view history tab shows the page size of each of these pages. As of this evening, list_of_pies sits at 25,965 bytes and list_of_cakes sits at 15,262 bytes. 25,965 > 15,262, therefore sizeof(list_of_pies) > sizeof(list_of_cakes). Removing common factors reveals Pie > Cake.

Joint Third Place: Chaosrain Taldrya, because he was willing to sacrifice his own beliefs in pie being better, in order to try to win a competition :P

http://www.bobgarontraining.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/veggie_pumpkin-pie.jpg

Cake doesn't pull this kind of horse shit. Cake wins.

Welcome to our New Members!

Well, one massive welcome to our newest member, Rath Ghyron. We're very happy to have you in Taldryan.

Also, Shadow's back. That is all.

Reports from the Dark Council

• Already mentioned it, but the DGM Report is the thing that contains the results from the last round of the Crusades. Found here

TL:DR

• We won the Jaguada. Props to Alaris.
• Credit System Announced, Email Howie with Dossier Updates
• We're gunna be doing a Joint Competition with CNS soon.
• Go do some Shadow Academy Courses!
• Vote on the next Tally to be interviewed!
• New (and old) Members!
• RTFR Results
• Dark Council Reports
• Also congrats to Arcona and Scholae Palatinae on their victories.
• Make sure you check out the competitions page: https://www.darkjedibrotherhood.com/competitions