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Dispatch → Bulletin → News
by 
The Impeccably Arranged Snark of The West Pacific Master Dispatch.
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251 reads.
The Western Post - September 2024
All hail
Fujai, 53rd Delegate of the West! Remember to endorse Fujai and the Guardians!
Solve the anagrams to reveal the letters for the final message, and then use the circled letters from the words in the top part to complete the final phrase at the bottom. Each circled letter is used just once.
Full version here
Use the submission link here in order to send your finished answers! You'll be featured in the next month's newspaper if you participate, and win the challenge coin made by Fujai if you correctly solve the puzzle.
Arkengia who participated in the last month's puzzle!I sat down this month to ask our wholesome
Cheesehead of a Delegate Fujai some questions. Usually folks I interview give questionable answers that require some follow-up. The problem with Fujai is he's too goshdarn sincere! So I turned to the region's latest high tech tool: OpeTWP. A quick couple of clicks and a finely crafted command later our adorable leader's honest answers were Midwest-ified.Welcome to Questions & Branswers with FujAI.
What is the best sandwich?
Oh, ya know, gotta be the
hot dog! Folks'll argue all day, but I tell ya, slap some mustard on there and you're golden, don't cha know!What is one region you really want to purge?
Oh gee, I better keep that one hush-hush like a secret recipe, ya know? But if ya twist my arm, maybe The East Pacific. But oof, that's a tough one, hey!
Who's the scariest guardian?
Oh fer sure, it's gotta be Bhang Bhang Duc! Oh, big as a barn, just like that big ol' dog in The Sandlot, ya know? Looks like he'd eat ya for breakfast, but deep down he's just a teddy bear, bless his heart. And sharp as a cheese slicer, oh ya betcha!
Apples or oranges?
Well, I tell ya what, apples, hands down, are better for snackin', what with their nice crunch and all. But when it comes to flavor? Oh jeepers, oranges got that zing, oh ya! But you won't catch me peeling one of those things for fun, no siree!
Have you ever asked someone for their autograph?
Oh ya, back in high school we did some fundraisers for new band uniforms, brought in a couple-a music groups that tour schools and all. Got 'em to scribble on a couple things. Do I care now? Oh gosh no, couldn't care less if I tried!
What do you think happens when we CTE?
Oh, well our noggins probably get frozen like a good cheese curd, and they ship us off to some fancy Australian safety deposit box. Can't say I'd mind too much, eh?
Favorite action hero?
Oh, easy peasy—Teralyon! I mean, come on now, who doesn't love 'em?
Do you have a favorite smell?
Oh you betcha, it's sour cream. I know, sounds odd, but lemme tell ya, nothing better!
Do you have a least favorite smell?
Oh gosh, corn. And I know, I'm from the Midwest, but listen, that stuff when it's ripe—woof, no thank you!
Pineapple: Does it pizza?
Oh sure, it does, but am I askin' for it? Eh, not really, no. But I won't kick it off my plate neither!
Flat or sparkling?
Sparkling, all day, every day, oh ya sure. Nothing like that fizzy tickle, don't cha know!
Most used app on your phone?
Oh, Firefox gets the most taps, but when it comes to time-wasting, it's gotta be YouTube, oh ya!
You get one never-ending pasta bowl for the rest of your life, what is it?
Oh jeepers, it's gotta be that garlic pesto gnocchi, ya know? I'd eat that till the cows come home, oh fer sure!
What number am I thinking of?
Oh, you're thinkin' of 8, aren't ya? Oh, I can see it plain as day!
Describe your TWP experience in seventeen syllables.
Colors and folks, sure
Swirling round like a snowstorm
Refrigerator!
Has it really been a hundred days? According to the passage of time, indeed it has. I spent years telling myself that I didn't want to take the hot seat, and here I am with my own Delegacy flying by.
Here's some of what the government has been working on, in no particular order:
Codifying exactly what the TWP government does
Working on delivering some of the region's bigger-budget cultural items, such as TWPride, Casserole of Humanity, OcTWPerfest, and more
Passing Commend Dilber
Rebuilding the Ministry of World Assembly Recruitment
Planning a revamp of the Regional Guides
Bringing promising new community members into government positions
Redesigning how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs functions
Continuing to build the Office of Recruitment
Preparing a revamp of how we do citizenship in the West
Documenting processes and guides to make it easier to bring on new staffers
I'm pleased with what we've done, especially the plans we've made, but now is the time for executing those plans. I take great pride in the fact that TWP is arguably the most stable GCR in NationStates. Our system works and our community is strong. However, especially among leadership, we need to make sure that stability doesn't turn into stagnation.
As everyone has seen and knows, times are changing in NationStates, as they always have. We've weathered over a year of the Frontiers and Strongholds system, where we lost about half our new nation spawns, but every feeder has absolutely seen a hit. One of our focuses has been: how is the way people interact with NS changing, and what do people want from it these days? One of the biggest answers we've come upon are that some folks are looking for smaller, less intensive ways to be involved. To this end, we're trying to create experiences that can easily insert themselves into peoples' routines. The overriding goal of TWP is community, and the government's entire raison d'ętre is to foster it and help it grow.
Actually effecting changes that keep TWP, and NationStates more broadly, relevant to the lives of our community members, is a different story. Here and elsewhere, people are dealing with burnout. The last several years have taken a lot out on folks, and that doesn't show any signs of abating. As time goes on, the priorities of our community members change, and the difficulty is adapting to those changes while our leaders experience them. It's been slow going, but I feel positive about the direction we're headed.
The three biggest goals of the government going forward are:
Continue to support the region's cultural development
Recruit and retain new government members
Reduce the strain of management on regional leaders
The way we do these things is:
We know how to do culture, the difficulty is adequately spreading the workload so as not to overwhelm any one person
Make it easier for people to get involved in government activities and keep them hooked
Develop a deeper base of government staffers and proper documentation to decrease day-to-day workload of Ministers
In a nutshell, that's what we're going to be up to for the next while. We've got some really exciting cultural events coming up, including N-Day, OcTWPerfest, a spooky interregional event with our friends in the NPO, new radio shows, our annual holiday events, and more! Keep an eye on the WFE and the RMB for updates and changes as we continue to shape the future of The West Pacific together.
The Western Post is the current newspaper of our region, for which people of different skills throughout The West Pacific come together in joint effort to write about about topics as diverse as regional events, real life matters, and much more. A new edition is published every month, a streak dating back to September 2019 when the newspaper was still called The West Pacifican, before the name was changed a year later. In order to celebrate this joyous occasion, a special article has been written where we take a look at interesting statistics about our newspaper! This is the time to reflect on the past five years, and the numerous contributors who have played a pivotal role in achieving this milestone, as well as to look ahead to the future.
We present in this article information about the upvotes, views and total characters of each edition since late 2015! This base data was then used to generate other interesting numbers, such as the more meaningful six-month average of the three. The stats were then added to one graph, with adjustments on their numbers so that all three could be compared. Editions are listed by their number, so use the list of volumes if you are unsure of which edition certain information refers to—issues of The West Pacifican are simply referred to by their volume number, while those of The Western Post also have a P besides the number. Unfortunately for the data, the April 2024 downtime wiped information about dispatch views so there is a gap between the time we last collected data in September 2023 and the downtime. On the good side, however, the upvote average continues to increase and we're very glad that readers consistently like our editions each month!
The format of the Post has continued approximately the same as it has since the beginning of monthly publication, and similar to what was mentioned in the last two anniversaries, our editions have a length neither too short that has little substance, nor too long that takes away the interest of our readers and makes our staff overworked. The character count average has decreased in regards to a year ago, although image-based articles have increased in frequency over the past year which compensates for that, such as Photos of the World, Lorekeeper's Logs, the travel articles and the CityGuessr puzzles! A defining aspect of The Western Post throughout the last year is the prominence of real life topics in the newspaper, reaffirming the important point that we are a community of people playing this game each with our own lives, although NationStates topics such as roleplay, cultural events and gameplay continue to be present.
The statistics above all show the importance of both writers and readers into making The Western Post the great newspaper that it is today—our dedicated team behind the printing press deserves gratitude for their countless contributions to our success over the years, and our readers are the motivation and inspiration for us to write craft high-quality issues. We invite all of you to celebrate this anniversary on the regional message board and share your favorite aspects of our newspaper! You can remind yourself of the articles you liked the most by taking a look at our back catalog, and even volunteer to join our staff if you wish.
Overall, many interesting tales have been told so far here by many authors, and we look forward to many more to come. We're always open to any contributors, and you can reach out to 
Giovanniland by telegram or Discord for more information on how to join! Quoting the footer of every edition, the Western Post is brought to you by The West Pacific Cultural Trust, The West Pacific News Group, and readers like you—and it certainly wouldn't be possible without everyone's contribution, so all we have to say is thank you.
Welcome to the twelfth edition of CityGuessr, including the answers and results from the previous month's challenge and a brief recap of the current CityGuessr leaderboard. Keep in mind that this month's puzzle is the last of the first year! Next month we'll get to know the CityGuessr Grand Champion and start the second season.
Five people sent their guesses about which European city I took photos of:
- Arkengia,
Con Nihawitan, and 
Peourouin – Thessaloniki, Greece – 303.48 km away – 3 points 
Tinhampton – Kavala, Greece – 334.30 km away – 2 points
Vorhollah – Burgas, Bulgaria – 594.26 km away – 1 point
The location for the previous puzzle is Athens, the capital of Greece, with the images depicting a park and some streets in the city! You can see the updated leaderboard with all the points earned since the first challenge, with a change in the leadership, and also the challenge coin designed by Fujai, although no one will receive it this time.
- Con Nihawitan – 18 points
Corbeil – 16 points
Nas Crustium – 13 points
Fotisdia – 10 points
Lionsroar and Tinhampton – 5 points eachAberketia,
Bhang Bhang Duc, Foressul, 
Halsoni, Lzecov islands, New caman, 
Ritelssaeney – 3 points eachMontrandec and
Vorhollah – 1 point each
Now let's get onto this month's challenge, here are the rules originally written by Tam Dao and adapted since then!
CityGuessr, as the name suggests, will ask you to guess which city of the world the photos are showing, both photos always referring to the same city. We will keep the scope of the game to cities only, as we don't have the luxury of moving around to check for clues. We will also provide a single clue of the continent where the city is located.
Use the submission link here in order to send your guess! Remember that you only have one guess that can't be changed later, and that it's expressly forbidden to use outside resources to figure it out, otherwise it wouldn't be a guess.
Furthermore, to add a bit of competition to the game, we will rank all guesses based on how close they are to the correct answer. The top 3 answers will be given points: 3 points for 1st, 2 points for 2nd, and 1 point for 3rd. The highest scorer(s) will gain the bragging right of being the CityGuessr Champion of the Month, and the top scorer across 12 editions of the game will be crowned CityGuessr Grand Champion.
In this edition we return to the Americas!
I wish you all good luck in solving this edition's challenge, and have fun!
Furthermore, if you wish to submit photos to be considered for a future puzzle, submit them through telegram to 
The West Pacific Master Dispatch.
Welcome to the Card Club's update about the month of August!
The major cards-related happening in TWP this month was the 2024 Olympics Card Contest announced by fellow Card Club leader 
Laudesia, in celebration of this major sporting event that happens every four year and happened last month in Paris. The three participants listed below collected sports related cards and earned bonuses for choosing those directly related to the Olympics:
The winner was Il Sonno della Ragione Genera Mostri once more, who also made a 
forum post mentioning all the sports for which they acquired at least one card related to it and added to the collection, and in the end received the legendary card Season 3 Laudesia as the prize. In second place came Vylixan, who was gifted the Season 2 legendary card Pythagosaurus, while third place Halo was awarded a valuable Epic card, namely Season 3 Mikeswill.
The updated all-time leaderboard for card contests is shown below, the most striking difference being Il Sonno rising to fourth after adding another win to their tally, while Halo and Vylixan had smaller increases.
Rank | Nation | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | Number of Participations |
#1 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 10 | ||
#2 | 4* | 4 | ||||
#3 | 3 | 1 | 4 | |||
#4 | 3 | 3 | ||||
#5 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 21 | |
#6 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 9 | ||
#7 | 2* | 2 | 1 | 5 | ||
#8 | 2 | 1 | 3 | |||
#9 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 5 | ||
#10 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | ||
1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | |||
#18 | 3 | 3 |
* Aluminum Oxynitride and Mediobogdum had no opposition in two and one events respectively.
This September, the Card Club is hosting the Unthemed Card Contest! It's the first time in our event history that we choose to not announce a theme, and instead leave it to the participants' wishes, in a bid to see their creativity and also to hopefully attract new participants. This time, our bonus points will be awarded to those collectors that leave a short explanation of their collection when making the post to submit it, remembering of course to add the #UnthemedCardContest tag to officially enter the competition. Laud and I are looking forward to the collections that people build and the themes they choose, so let your creativity go wild! The only rule for the collections is to have 100 or less cards.
Once you've assembled your collection, share the link on the appropriate place depending on whether you're a TWPer or not, after entries close at 23:59 EST of 30th September, Laud and I will announce the results! The winner and runner-up will receive a legendary card each, and other people might win prizes too if we get good turnout and quality submissions.
The West Pacific Card Club is brought to you by The West Pacific Cultural Trust.
The Western Post Staff - Delegate:
Fujai - Editor-in-Chief: Giovanniland - Staff: 
Bran Astor, 
Inner Ryxtylopia, 
Overthinkers, 
Teralyon, 
The Holy Principality of Saint Mark, and YOUAll your chocolate belongs to Darkesia
The Western Post is brought to you by The West Pacific Cultural Trust, The West Pacific News Group, and readers like you. Thank you.
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