Secret Small Laurel Group Exposed For Attempting To Control A&S Narrative – The SCAllion

COLLEGE OF ST. FELIX, ATENVELDT – And news brought to you here about the sub-etha waveband by Shallot Reporters confirm that a small group of Absolute Power Facebook laurels really do have it in for everyone.

We asked a member of the closed group (reportedly a few Elder Laurels from each kingdom and a guy who simply calls himself “The Doge” and doesn’t understand the crypto reference at all) about this as secretly as possible, since we had to use Facebook chat as a means of communication.

Shallot: Out of curiosity, how much control do you actually have over the knowledge sharing with the SCA arts and science community?

The Doge: Well, honestly, we’re not doing so well. We’re going to have to deplatform the A&S community. Because there’s so much research material on the internet now, it’s getting in the way of us controlling the narrative, let alone the flow of information.

Shallot: Uh, what do you mean by deplatform? I mean, Facebook is pretty clumsy, but it does get information out there, assuming Zuck is having a good day and no devs are spilling coffee on their keyboards.

Someone who is absolutely not a Doge (SDNTD): Damn, it’s still too much! People who really look can find things without consulting their great-grand Laurels. What do we do when they join some weird old world group or 14^and century so-called “mafia” and suddenly have access to all this material?

Shallot: Uh, celebrate their success?

SDNTD: No, no, no. We need to go back to 1986. We need them to beg us for copies of our newspapers, and to give us every back issue of Tournaments Illuminatedespecially the piece I wrote in 1980 about making Elizabethan dress using Laura Ashley dress patterns. I tell you, TELNET destroyed everything we had worked on in 1991. We have to go back, so we are setting our Project AS XXV.

The Doge: We don’t want to be unreliable or anything, but we really did have a system. Students used that they had to find their way in unfamiliar libraries with the aid of a card catalogue and a flashlight, was a novel by Anya Seton.

She used to learn everything on our knees and take our word for it, because they usually couldn’t find the books. We spent time and money building personal libraries and sweatshops, and they came to us in droves, eager to work, and that’s how I got my Laurel in Capitalism! Bwah ha ha ha!

By the way, did you know that they didn’t have pink in the Middle Ages?

SDNTD: Ignore him, he’s so old he once spent a quarter of an hour apprenticed to that one know-it-all Pennsic guy.

Shallot: Okay, but can you elaborate? I mean, I think it would be a boon to the A&S community to be able to find resources and look at museum galleries and things like that online, and it would help them make a lot of cool stuff.

SDNTD: Well, but then they get the credit, not their colleagues who don’t really make anything anymore. They can bow down after they’ve been elevated, just like everyone else. Gee. And they might discover something new, and who needs that? So we’re working to prevent that.

Shallot: I’m going to take a chance here and say that boat sank. I mean, how do you hoard information these days? It’s too late.

The Doge: We simply need a repository that is hard to access and even harder to maintain. We are seriously considering SharePoint, but I have no idea what “the Cloud” is.

Shallot: You do understand that Facebook is an outdated tool these days, right?

The Doge: We don’t care, we are keeping a real tradition going – if we had to go through it, they should go through it too. I suffered and I want every student in SCA to suffer the same as I did, otherwise everything is ruined!

The Shallot had no further questions.