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Post by Sevastáin Pinátsch on Jun 1, 2014 12:50:47 GMT -6
[MUSIC] [APPLAUSE]
Welcome to Late Night with Sevastáin Pinátsch, Talossa's most popular and longest-running television broadcast -- allegedly due to its high quality, but arguably also due to a combined lack of precedent and competition. I'm Sevastáin Pinátsch, a host with similar high accolades and corresponding extenuating circumstances.
Recently we've witnessed some brand new immigrants and some established citizens renounce their citizenship. There's been varied reaction, from renewed calls to lengthen or complicate the immigration procedure, to laissez-faire shoulder shrugging. Whatever the right approach is, I think we need to stay light-hearted about the eventualities.
To that end, I had the Late Night interns scoür Wittenberg for tonight's Top Ten list. Lady and gentlemen, I give to yoü… Wait.
Really? Did we really not wipe out the ümlaüt infestation from episode two? I had your word!
[Intern appears from stage left with a bottle of Diaeresis Remover, squirting the studio and dialogue with generous amounts of spray.]
Thank... you. Yes, that seems to have gotten it.
Lady and gentlemen, I give to you, the Top 10 Excuses for Giving Up The Best Thing That Money Can't Buy.
10. I didn't realize so much reading would be involved.
9. This mandatory voting every two years or so is really cutting into my free time.
8. I wish I'd done better research on the gender ratio. There's a serious lack of hot chicks.
7. I love you, but I'm just not ready for long-term commitment right now.
6. It's business, not personal. My financial advisor tells me that due to high inflation the relative value of this account has diminished to the point where it has become an unwanted liability in my overall portfolio.
5. This was supposed to be my escape from the real world but the bureaucracy, posturing and pandering here is far too realistic.
4. I'm going on disability. The constant butt kissing has left my lips permanently damaged.
3. My sociology thesis is done. Thanks for telling me everything I needed to know.
2. I rolled d20 and failed my Saving Throw against Boredom.
And the number one Excuse for Giving Up The Best Thing That Money Can't Buy...
This place needs a dress code and the hygiene sucks. Would it kill you people to shower and wear pants more often?
We'll be right back… after I write the rest of the show.
[APPLAUSE]
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Post by Magniloqueu Épiqeu da Lhiun on Jun 1, 2014 16:22:44 GMT -6
8. I wish I'd done better research on the gender ratio. There's a serious lack of hot chicks. Yeah, is it too much to ask that a few hot guys from my home town also join the cause of the causes!? Seriously, I mean... MARRIAGE!?  |
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Post by Sevastáin Pinátsch on Jun 1, 2014 16:51:16 GMT -6
8. I wish I'd done better research on the gender ratio. There's a serious lack of hot chicks. Yeah, is it too much to ask that a few hot guys from my home town also join the cause of the causes!? Seriously, I mean... MARRIAGE!? True, that. I guess having your pick of a bunch of ugly guys from all over the globe is no pick at all. |
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Post by Magniloqueu Épiqeu da Lhiun on Jun 1, 2014 19:13:03 GMT -6
Having my pick of a bunch of any guys from farther than 100km (that's roughly 60 miles, y'all) is no pick at all, thank you. |
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Post by Lupulüc "Lupüc" da Fhöglha on Jun 2, 2014 7:26:37 GMT -6
[MUSIC] [APPLAUSE] Welcome to Late Night with Sevastáin Pinátsch, Talossa's most popular and longest-running television broadcast -- allegedly due to its high quality, but arguably also due to a combined lack of precedent and competition. I'm Sevastáin Pinátsch, a host with similar high accolades and corresponding extenuating circumstances. Recently we've witnessed some brand new immigrants and some established citizens renounce their citizenship. There's been varied reaction, from renewed calls to lengthen or complicate the immigration procedure, to laissez-faire shoulder shrugging. Whatever the right approach is, I think we need to stay light-hearted about the eventualities. To that end, I had the Late Night interns scoür Wittenberg for tonight's Top Ten list. Lady and gentlemen, I give to yoü… Wait. Really? Did we really not wipe out the ümlaüt infestation from episode two? I had your word! [Intern appears from stage left with a bottle of Diaeresis Remover, squirting the studio and dialogue with generous amounts of spray.] Thank... you. Yes, that seems to have gotten it. Lady and gentlemen, I give to you, the Top 10 Excuses for Giving Up The Best Thing That Money Can't Buy. 10. I didn't realize so much reading would be involved. 9. This mandatory voting every two years or so is really cutting into my free time. 8. I wish I'd done better research on the gender ratio. There's a serious lack of hot chicks. 7. I love you, but I'm just not ready for long-term commitment right now. 6. It's business, not personal. My financial advisor tells me that due to high inflation the relative value of this account has diminished to the point where it has become an unwanted liability in my overall portfolio. 5. This was supposed to be my escape from the real world but the bureaucracy, posturing and pandering here is far too realistic. 4. I'm going on disability. The constant butt kissing has left my lips permanently damaged. 3. My sociology thesis is done. Thanks for telling me everything I needed to know. 2. I rolled d20 and failed my Saving Throw against Boredom. And the number one Excuse for Giving Up The Best Thing That Money Can't Buy... This place needs a dress code and the hygiene sucks. Would it kill you people to shower and wear pants more often? We'll be right back… after I write the rest of the show. [APPLAUSE] This is great! I laughed so hard! |
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Post by Sevastáin Pinátsch on Jun 2, 2014 9:29:23 GMT -6
Thanks. I've got another great guest interview coming soon. Stay tuned.
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Post by Sevastáin Pinátsch on Jun 2, 2014 10:11:36 GMT -6
[MUSIC] [APPLAUSE]
And . . . welcome back to the portion of the show I lovingly call "filler". Not that this is worthless: quite the contrary. Even if you don't like it, it buys me valuable time to wait for the arrival of my special guest, or surreptitiously replace him or her with a not-so-special but "better than dead air" guest.
However, individual tastes do vary; for you, perhaps, this chunk may be the meat to my meat by-product.
In our continuing quest to appeal to the widest possible audience, we've found it useful to include a bit of gratiutous sex, meaningless violence, or wanton destruction in between the hopefully-humourous opening segment and the mostly-intellectual interview segment.
With that in mind, I once again dispatched Intern Dave to a derelict building in Vuode, far away from the pesky oversight of law enforcement and the risk of excessive bypassers/casualities, to throw a variety of objects from a five-story building.
I hope you enjoy it. If not, stick around. It gets better, I promise.
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Post by Sevastáin Pinátsch on Jun 3, 2014 15:43:54 GMT -6
[MUSIC] [APPLAUSE] Ladies and gentlemen, my guest tonight is someone you probably look up to, as I do. As a Talossan for 16 years, only a handful of citizens can say they have contributed more years to molding our alternate reality here in the Kingdom. Won't you please welcome Ián Anglatzarâ? [APPLAUSE] Ministreu, welcome to the program. > Thank you! It's an honour, honestly.That's kind of you to say. I'm gratified. I want you to know how thankful I am, not simply for you agreeing to appear on the show today, but for making it possible that I am even here in Talossa to have you as my guest. As people may or not be aware, I applied for citizenship in August 2013, but it was not until February 2014 that I received an invitation to post to Wittenberg. This was not your error, but it has never failed to impress me that you followed up on my lost application when after 6 months it might have seemed logical to assume that I'd lost interest. Had you not, I'd have assumed I'd been rejected by Immigration, and never returned to the Kingdom again. I will always be grateful for your diligence. > When I started on this job, I noticed your application lying around. You seemed like a perfect fit for Talossa, so I wanted to make sure that the previous government hadn't simply failed to process the application. I'm glad too that I sent that invitation.It is remarkable that you yourself are in the Kingdom today. While I understand it doesn't make for a pleasant talk to unearth troubled history, your TalossaWiki biography is painfully short and gives no hint of what you endured prior to leaving the Kingdom and becoming part of the Republic of Talossa. Can you please tell us the story of how you went from being a friend of Robert Ben Madison to being someone who he later demonized as a "monster" and a "traitor"? What I've managed to absorb from A Nation Sundered and Ár Päts doesn't provide a clear picture of the devolution of your relationship. How was it that your citizenship was lost and later restored in 2003, but that you left again? > I wasn't more Ben's friend than any other new citizen, but he really felt like a decent guy, so I certainly held him in high regard. And he was the Immigration Minister in those days, so he was the first Talossan everyone got to know.
> I think our falling out was inevitable given our differences in outlook when it came to micronationalism. Ben was, as a Talossan, virulently patriotic and chauvinist. Talossa was the only micronation worth even thinking about, everyone else was a copycat and an enemy to be held up for ridicule and to be attacked. When I looked around at the plethora of other micronations in those days, Penguinea, Porto Claro, Septempontia, Corvinia, it seemed to me that some of these guys were doing something comparable. Perhaps not as splendidly as Talossa, but I didn't understand why they had to be treated as enemies. That was really the cause of our falling out. I talked to these other guys, and my patriotism and trustworthiness was questioned as a result. And I refused to back down.
> Eventually I became a member of a political party called the Talossan Liberal Party, which was rather mainstream in outlook. Our goals were to reform the voting process -- the fact that Ben was deputy SoS and every election reported that he had collected the votes of lots of old friends who nobody had heard of for years in Talossa, mostly voting for Ben himself of course, was farcical. We also wanted to transfer power from the Seneschál and the King to the Ziu.
> Our mainstream outlook frightened Ben, I think, and infuriated him. To him, we put on a friendly face that threatened to "trick" people into voting for us, when our goals were clearly to reduce his power (we were 'anti-Ben'). So he infamously hit back by promising never to appoint a TLP Seneschál. By this time, early in 2001, every time I or someone else from the TLP wrote anything political on Wittenberg, Ben were at our throats at once. It was negative and tiresome, just fights and more fights, filled with vitriol and invectives. Eddie Abel then suggested that we leave altogether. To everyone else Talossa was a pastime, something you devoted a couple of hours a day to, but Ben was doing Talossa 24/7. There was no getting away from Ben, and because he had invested twenty years of his life to Talossa, nothing (we thought) could make him ever give up the fight, by fair or foul means, so there was no way we could win. If Ben dropped the pretensions at democracy and promised to use his Royal veto to stop us and to make sure we would never be able to enjoy Talossa again, it was game over. So we left.
> This was probably the intended effect. When Ben saw that someone threatened his version of what Talossa should be (and as King and founder, he considered himself to have a veto), he tried to make you renounce.
> Anyhow, we ex-TLP tried to start a community of our own. Not a micronation, but something similar. But we were too few so it petered out. I still checked out what happened on Wittenberg now and then. Two years later I realised that I missed the fun part of Talossa so much that I wanted to be part of it again. I had fallen so much in love with Talossa when I immigrated that the bug never left me. By now I had become convinced by something that Dan Wardlow said in 1999, namely that Talossa was best regarded as Ben's sandbox. Ben was in many respects like a child, and Talossa was his only success in life. Even though he claimed Talossa to be a democracy open for all to participate in and help setting a course for, in reality this was just pretense. You could play along, following Ben's rules, but you couldn't and perhaps shouldn't try to grab his toys. Fair enough, I thought, I'll become a citizen again and stay away from politics, just do cultural stuff and have fun on Wittenberg.
> I contacted the Cort Pü Înalt and submitted my "Why Talossa hasn't meant all that much to me" essay and was re-naturalised. What I didn't expect was that Ben threw a fit and used his royal right to commute sentences, citing the dictionary definition of commute: "change to something else", and declared that he commuted the Cort's decision to annul it. Art Verbotten wrote to me and apologised for this ridiculous and illegal veto, but if Ben hated me this much he wasn't going to fight it.
> So I forgot about Talossa until I was contacted by Ián von Metáiria late in May 2004 who told me to keep an eye on Witt on June 1st...And we all know what happened then, with the 10th year anniversary recently upon us. Thanks so much for that story. I've deliberately stacked the questions this week so the further we go, the lighter they get, so I hope to end on a high note. There is ongoing debate about whether the Immigration process is too easy, as well as concern that the meaning of citizenship isn't well-understood, respected or properly valued. What are your thoughts? Is our Immigration process functioning as it should be? > Yes, I'd say that the immigration process works quite well. The Republic tried to be stricter, and the Kingdom too before the Revolution of 2004 bled Talossa of active citizens and Ben had to lower the bar to create a huge influx of new citizens (which is of course what undid him in the end), and that didn't work out too well. Yes, we do end up with a few citizens whose devotion to Talossa isn't what I'd wish, but where's the harm in that? All nations have citizens who are less than active. Raising the bar again is something we cannot afford. A steady influx of new citizens is needed for vitality.I quite agree. Professionally, you're a technical writer, but you've been involved with science fiction fandom for about 35 years, running conventions, editing fanzines, hosting websites, managing mailing lists and chairing groups and boards. Have you written any science fiction? > I haven't. Why not? > I don't have a writer's urge to produce stuff and I don't have the stamina. I love translating and I love being active and organising things, but I'm not a writer.Oh, you're a writer, but I do understand the stamina aspect. It's grueling, unlike this interview, I hope. What are your Top 5 favourite currencies? Beers, if you will. > This varies with time, and where am I. I want a different beer at home in the dark of winter than I want at a restaurant table in Paris in the summer. But here are some general favourites:- Närke Stormaktsporter
- Goose Island Bourbon County Stout
- 3 Fonteinen Oude Geuze
- Stone India Pale Ale
- Tripel Karmeliet
- Westmalle Tripel
> Sorry, I cannot for the life of me reduce it to five.Quite alright. That took discipline. The last one can be 'interest' on the previous five. Last question. You're 50, but you still love comics, stickers, coloring books, fridge magnets, fantasy board games and other wonderfully geeky things. I'm slightly younger, but also love comics, retro video games, 1st edition AD&D, and other things that 13-year-old me also adored. Conversely, my father was a certified codger by the age of 30. What is happening with adulthood? Are we an improvement or something to be concerned about? > In this respect, we're an improvement. It used to be that you outgrew things by being told that you were too old for them, not by actually getting tired of them. We still outgrow things, but now it's no longer by having other people telling us to stop doing them, but by outgrowing them for real.
> Adulthood is proven by how well you take care of yourself, how you behave towards others in your life, and by how you create a healthy family. By how you engage with the world. Which hobbies you have have nothing to do with maturity or adulthood.
> Playing board games or reading science fiction is neither more nor less mature than playing golf or watching football. This should be obvious to anyone. They are just different hobbies or pastimes. However, as an adult you get other things out of these pastimes than you did growing up.
> 1st edition AD&D I have outgrown, though. I still love it for nostalgic reasons, that's why I hold on to the core rule books, but the game sucks. Really. But some of the best moments in life I had with that game, moments I will remember till my dying day.
I sincerely wish that weren't today. [Pinátsch throws dice and rolls for surprise and initiative. Anglatzarâ is surprised. Pinátsch waves a hand and the armrests of Anglatzarâ's chair morph to grab him firmly by the wrists. The legs then immobilize his ankles.] [Pinátsch now brandishes a Vorpal sword that was concealed behind his desk.] Must I kill him, Phil? [The sword answers...] * I am afraid so. It is the only way he will learn. He must atone for his terrible words against The Game. *But how will he learn if he's dead? * Oh, he's learned now. There just will not be time to reflect on the lesson. *I am truly sorry for this Minister. You were a good man. [Pinátsch swings. Anglatzarâ is cleaved in twain. The audience gasps.] Next time on the show. Well . . . we'll see who agrees to show up. Goodnight! [Audience remains in stunned silence.] Oh come now, it was only a joke. [No laughter.] Oh, fine! [Pinátsch waves his hand again, revealing that it was all an elaborate illusion.] [APPLAUSE] I'd like to thank Ián Anglatzarâ for being a good sport. Please don't deport me. Goodnight Talossa! Let's do this again soon! [MUSIC] [APPLAUSE] |
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Post by Ián B. Anglatzarâ on Jun 4, 2014 3:22:39 GMT -6
[Pinátsch swings. Anglatzarâ is cleaved in twain. The audience gasps.] And this folks, is why you should always have a high-level cleric handy, and why a high Constitution is a good thing. |
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Post by Sevastáin Pinátsch on Jun 4, 2014 6:23:35 GMT -6
And beware of cheeky Illusionists bearing invitations to late night talk shows.  |
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Post by Ián B. Anglatzarâ on Jun 4, 2014 6:58:58 GMT -6
And beware of cheeky Illusionists bearing invitations to late night talk shows. I didn't realise you were multi-class, I thought you were a Bard. |
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Owen Edwards
Puisne Justice
Posts: 1,400
Talossan Since: 12-8-2007
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Post by Owen Edwards on Jun 4, 2014 17:04:42 GMT -6
And this folks, is why you should always have a high-level cleric handy, and why a high Constitution is a good thing. I'm a low level cleric and I could always carry a copy of the OrgLaw above my head if that would help? |
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DEPUTY Minister of Culture 
MC for the 47th Cosa
La C'ho'aliziun per la Mhamtenençù dal Müdada dels gConsonants
