Thanks Craitman - glad to see you are still around and evidently serving as benevolent dictator of this august institution.
I had a look at MicrasWiki yesterday - great to read back over some of the events from back in the day. Just a shame that so much of it is lost to the mists of time. Somewhere, buried away, I've got an old hard drive with a backup of the Riponia forums on it. There's so much intermicronational history on there.
A few personal highlights from the ~2005-2008 period - in no particular order:
> The Non-Aligned Movement - one of the great power blocs of its day which upended the geopolitical order (usually at the point of a bayonet). Antica, Natopia, Riponia, and later Matbaa and Alexandria -
what a combination! The Declaration of Non-Alignment still reads brilliantly - Steven and Nathan deserve most of the credit for that, if I remember correctly.
> The Atkins Reduction, the GSO and Geiss -
SO much drama. And yet it laid the foundations for an MCS which has survived and thrived to this day. And there's still plenty of green space on Micras.
> The Treaty of BBC - What an incredibly exciting time that was, to have our small hobby suddenly at the front-and-centre of a primetime BBC programme, and to be the first group of micronations to engage with it. Obviously we then spent the next few years decrying all those frivoulus interlopers (and meant we had to put up with the hulking grey blob of the CIS
), but it rejuvenated the hobby and brought in some great, committed people.
> Taesong and Nova England - two micronations that will always hold a very special place for me. And on the other hand, Ocia and Woodstania - man, we used to love riling those guys up
. Speaking of which...
> The vast, all-encompassing RecWars (not to mention the warring RecWar systems). Has there been anything since to match them? The ferocity of Taylor Bay, the machinations of the War of Broken Pottery, the global carnage of Circum-Raynor, and of course the ultimate conflagration of the Lovely War, which
expunged that tottering nation from Micras and left Riponia at the
pinnacle of its power and territorial reach (albeit I think our heart was always really in Corum).
> So much spycraft
> Some of the insane creativity of this sector - reading Scott Alexander in the Apollo Fireball, listening to Nick Leghorn on KZFO, basically everything Iain de Vembria did, the fact that we somehow ended up with a more well-regulated football league than most real countries (thanks Craitman). And so much more I can't begin to list.
> And of course Riponia itself. What a crazy, mad, buzzing, creative place that was. It took over my life (and those of most of my schoolmates) for four years, and I was so proud to count so many top micronationalists as fellow citizens, and so many great micronations as friends, allies, or rivals.
And yet so few of those great empires remain, beyond bits and bytes, hiding in the celestial aether of the internet, gently gathering dust...
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
