The Archling was born ahead of schedule, which is probably not the one thing I would have picked to get done early this year, but such is life. Preemie life has really put a cramp on HM projects, but she’s healthy and happy and I can’t really complain. We are slowly, slowly working our way back to normalcy and I finally have a few things I can properly launch.

I have been a very narrow bottleneck for things like new course deployment, but fortunately I got lucky with staff applications and my new M:HMs have brought more energy to #sa-staff than I’ve seen since taking over. They bring a good variety of backgrounds to the table, ranging from shiny new Thrissa to ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe’ Atty, with Titius in the middle as someone who’s past the learning curve but still fresh. They’ve been hobbled a bit by my availability, but nonetheless you can thank them for some quality of life improvements and you’ll be seeing much more of their work as we get through the summer.

Before I get into new releases, there are a few reminders I would like to gently scream into your lovely ears.

Search Bar

It exists! I think people tend to forget about this. Towards the top of the main SA page you’ll find the helpful search bar. You can also get to it from any SA page by going to Departments & Courses in the SA menu and selecting Search Courses. I know we’re not at the point where the Academy is the first place people go to look up how to do something, but as we continue to transition from trivia courses to ‘how to do all the things you might want to do’ courses, this will steadily grow more helpful. In the meantime, it’s really helpful for when you can’t remember which department you read something in. The search looks through all the course notes.

Don’t Cheat

We occasionally see exam submissions, mostly but not exclusively for the Test of Wisdom, that are very likely generated by ChatGPT or other AI. This happened again since my last report. I spoke a bit back in March about why you shouldn’t expect to see a lot of CoJ cases about this issue, because the bar to prosecute for this is very high. That said, we do refer all instances to the Chamber and that paper trail will come back to bite you if you make a habit of cheating on your fiction entries.

Ethical and judicial considerations aside, ChatGPT is just not very good at getting a high initial score on the ToW. You’re going to get a short piece with one scene, simplistic plot, and flat characters. It’s not really going to make sense in the DB context. So you’re going to get a crap score and then have to do edits to bring it up on the retake, which is exactly as much work as just submitting a fic entry you already wrote. So just do that instead.

Credit Where It’s Due

As I’ve mentioned here and there in chat, one of the main things I do when I patrol wiki changes is deal with images. There’s two parts to this. The first is applying categories, which is easy enough for Bentre or me to do, but currently kind of a pain for people who aren’t familiar with them. So don’t worry your pretty little head too much about those.

The other thing is licenses and sourcing, and yes, do worry your pretty little head about this. It looks complex but I’ll walk you through it. The main thing to remember is that the club, as the content host here, has an obligation to make sure we’re not supporting copyright infringement, because if we do, Bad Things can happen. We also have an ethical obligation to support artists and respect the work they do.

So every time you upload an image to the wiki, you must do one of the following:

1. If you made the image yourself, just pick whichever license you want from the dropdown menu. If you’re not sure which one to pick, just use Copyrighted. If you made the image with some sort of AI tool, just pick the AI Art license from the dropdown menu and move on with your life.

2. (Rare) If you got the image from another artist and it was released under/they asked you to use a specific license like Creative Commons, select that from the drop down. If it’s not there, email [Log in to view e-mail addresses] and we’ll add it.

3. If you paid an artist for it, selected Copyrighted Commission from the drop down and credit the artist in the file description. Just say who made it and drop a link to their socials.

4. If you didn’t make it and the artist didn’t make it for you specifically, and your use of the image qualifies as fair use, just slap Fair Use on it. But you still have to credit the source. Just slap that link in the upload description.

That’s four options, but really they boil down to the principle of saying who made the file directly on the file.

Poke Arch

If there’s a problem with the SA or the Wiki or the trivia bot, I will address it if I’m made aware of it. I’m not going to refuse to answer questions or fix things because you didn’t say Simon says. Here’s a nice list of things that will make me aware of something, in rough order of preference:

• The SA Feedback Form, handily linked to from every page in the SA and every HM report.
• Emailing [Log in to view e-mail addresses]
• Emailing me directly at [Log in to view e-mail addresses]
• PMing me at @archenksov
• Tagging me on the Discord server via @archenksov or @Headmaster.
• Bringing something up in a small, ‘let’s talk about problems and how to fix them’ channel, like #yammer.

For Wiki articles, you can also stick {{NeedHelp}} at the top of the page, or use my Talk page, or just make an edit and wait for me to see it when patrolling the edit log, if none of the above do it for you.

What’s not on that list? Bringing up a problem in a busy channel like #general or your clan chat without tagging me or, worse, bringing it up in a channel I can’t even access. If you do that, either I will not see your issue and cannot address it, or you’re just offloading the work of contacting me to other people, which is lazy and rude. That’s fine if new members do it, because they don’t know all our fake internet jobs with their stupid, grandiose names. But if you’ve been here for years, you can manage this.

ACC

It’s old news at the point, but the ACC Judge Orientation is online. This course, prepared by Erin and Iddy as part of the recent ACC code update, walks through how the open judgment queue will work for ACC matches going forward. If this is something you’re interested in, take a look at the course notes and see how you can opt-in to the system.

As the name says, this is specific to judging. Now that the ACC reforms are more or less complete, it’s back on my to-do list to build an introductory course for participation along the lines of what we have for fiction, gaming, etc. This won’t be a hard requirement, like the old qualification exam was, but hopefully it’ll make it that much easier for new members to go from hearing about the ACC to participating in it.

Droids

The goal with all of our new “stuff” courses is to move away from discussing the relative merits of CEC and KDY engines and towards how to take that thing you like from Star Wars and bring it to life for your characters. The latest release, Droids covers a lot of Possessions mechanics that are similar to other item types, but we also tried to cover everything you might need to know from the CS System.

Props to Aiden Lee Deshra for serving as the lead author for this course.

Envoy Corps and Societies

The Societies are an example of another reorientation I hope to make, shifting to focus on in-universe organizations that your characters interact with while keeping site and dossier mechanics in their own courses. There are already courses for the Big Four, although at least two are going to need complete rewrites in the near future. In the meantime, now that we have five societies courses active, I’m going to go ahead and launch the Maven: Societies degree. New degree requirements involve a code change, so it may be a day or two before this is attainable in Promotheus. Right now, it’s a solo maven but the plan is to link it up to some other degrees covering the Brotherhood setting down the line.

I didn’t stutter: the degree requires all five society courses. You’ll need to take Societies: Envoy Corps for it. This course was the product of many hands, with Zuza helping with initial planning before Alaris took over to build the backbone, and then Atty wrote the exam, with me meddling at every stage.

The GMRG course needs overhauling to bring it up to date with the Guard’s current lore, and the ACS course is basically just an exam. Envoy Corps is more or less what I want to do with the other societies, so I think it’s worth talking about that because the reaction to this course will affect how we do things in future releases.

The goal here was to treat the Envoy Corps as a major organization operating in the Brotherhood’s world, just like the factions or clans. It covers who Envoys are and what they do, how you might encounter or join them, and all of the things that set them apart from other groups. It doesn’t cover how to rack up Envoy Marks by doing RP, because that’s what Activities 104: Roleplaying is for. It doesn’t have a big chart with all the point thresholds, either. That’s intentional. My vision is that the Shadow Academy is for guides and high level overviews. If you only read one doc on the Envoys, this should give you a pretty complete picture, and it shouldn’t need much updating until some future Exarch redoes the basic premise of the society. But if you want big charts of point values and leaderboards and all that stuff? That goes on the Wiki with all the other reference charts.

As I said, you can expect to see more stuff like this (and Droids), so if you have any strong feelings about that approach, now is the time to bring them up.

Assorted Status Updates

Q2 has come and gone, so everyone congratulate our top three decathletes: Katrila, reecioes-jasmyn, and Alex Draconis.

On the wiki front, we’ve got our honorees for May, June, July, and now August.

Our Featured Articles were Sivall Zoria, Vornskr Battalion, Dajorran Marshals, and now Okami (Mandalorian Clan ).

For Wikipedian of the Month, we had Sofila "Sagitta" Douve Armis, Meleu Karthdo, Wulfram Armis, and Bril Teg Arga.

As a reminder, anyone can nominate a Featured Article, so please put any good ones you’ve made or seen into the pile for a future Dark Side Scroll.

On the SA side of the house, Thrissa has been hard at work adding wrong answer hints to most of the auto-graded exams that didn’t already have them.

Closing Remarks

As always, if anyone sees any errors in the course notes or exam questions, please submit them through the form. Scrolls of Foundation are a nutritious part of a healthy XP diet.

And, of course, I am always available at [Log in to view e-mail addresses] or archenksov on Discord.

Academy Changelog

DB FUNDAMENTALS
Comms 101: Website Navigation
- Corrected a question on the exam (Alex Draconis)
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)
Comms 102: Discord
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)
Comms 103: DJBWiki (An Introduction)
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)
Activities 101: Fiction
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)
- Revised discussion of appropriate content and etiquette.
Activities 102: Gaming
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)
- Removed references to Clusters of Earth.
- Added discussion of Discord LFG roles.
- Migrated externally hosted images to site assets.
- Updated GMRG join procedure.
Activities 103: Graphics
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)
- Revised discussion of appropriate content and etiquette.
- Updated to reflect new difficulty classes.
Activities 105: Vendettas
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)

CHARACTER CREATION & DEVELOPMENT
Character Sheets 101: Introduction
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)
Character Sheets 102: Possessions & Loadouts
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)
Creatures & You
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)
Societies: Envoy Corps
- New course! (Alaris and Arch)
Societies: Shroud Syndicate
- Replaced outdated advancement images with links to the wiki as a stopgap.
Maven: Societies
- New degree

COMBAT & WARFARE
Personal Speeders
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)
Personal Starships
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)
Lightsabers
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)
- Corrected a Markdown error.
-Tweaked wording to reflect that the GLS isn’t technically our highest award anymore.
Droids
- New course! (Aiden)
Martial Arts: Form Studies
- Added wrong answer hints for the course. (Thrissa)

LEADERSHIP, LAW, AND COMMUNICATION
Chamber of Justice 101: Basic Covenant Studies
- Basic spring cleaning and modernization updates. (Bentre)
- Added wrong answer hints. (Bentre)
Recognizing Members
- Updated to reflect new promotion thresholds and XP-based promotions to EL ranks.
- Added wrong answer hints.

LEGENDS
Legends Galactic History 101: Formation of the Galaxy
- Fixed a malfunctioning exam question (Nesken)

LORE
Alchemy Studies
- Marked deprecated.
Galactic History 103 - Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire
- Corrected the use of Lasat to refer to Lasan. (Jorm)
Mandalorian History 101
- Fixed a spelling mistake on Question 1. (Thrissa)

WRITING
ACC Judge Orientation
- New course! (Erin)
Character Development
- Submitted answers are now emailed with exam results.
Combat Writing
- Submitted answers are now emailed with exam results.
Descriptive Writing
- Submitted answers are now emailed with exam results.
Introduction to Fiction Writing
- Submitted answers are now emailed with exam results.
Story Structure
- Added wrong answer hints. (Zen)
Test of Wisdom
- Clarified grading process and added explicit warning against use of AI. (Zen)
- Submitted answers are now emailed with exam results.