NiceMarmot

Yes, I'm never sure what to do about a background on the photos. I bounce back and forth between simple photos, and doing fancier backgrounds and borders. Can't seem to decide which to do. Absolutely, have fun! I'm thinking of using him in a more expansive build myself. Perhaps showing some hapless Avalonian merchant getting snarfed... Congrats on your 2000th post, by the way!

Yes, I sort of incorporated military into the History curriculum, but perhaps it needs its own discipline. What would the subjects be? Fortification, Siege engineering, battles, ...? Five and three sounds good to me. How many active Kaliphlins do we have right now? Good idea on the trees. Maybe any three techniques? I'm going to wait until we know how many subjects total, and then divide by 10 or 12 to get the max number of subjects per build. No problem. Didn't know that about the wiki. Thanks for all the feedback! I'll update the wiki this weekend sometime.

Sorry, I've been busy at work for the past two days, so I haven't had too much time to work on it. At this point, I think the general idea has been fleshed out fairly well. I just need some feedback on the details. I've got a draft of the initial post on the wiki -- has anyone looked at it? I'd love to get feedback on it. I think next step is really nail down the list of disciplines and subjects.

This is Mardufeth, a mere youngster at 350 years old. Additionally, he's a bit thin because he lives deep in the southern Rakath Mtns, where the soil is poor and there are few plump Avalonian merchants to feast on. At least I think he's a he. Differentiating gender in Blents is quite difficult...

My round 2 tribe -- Blents

The Nocturnus Black Ent, aka Blent, is a rare derivative of the common Ent. Once widespread, they are currently found mostly in Nocturnian forests, although a small tribe lives deep in the coastal forests of northeast Kaliphlin. The Blent is rarely seen, although it is extremely difficult to tell a sleeping Blent from a common Nocturnian evil tree, and Blents can sleep for years. Nocturnus Black Ent (Blent), by nice.marmot, on Flickr Blents have sparse foliage, and supplement photosynthesis with animals that they catch as they wander through the forest. They spend their lives (which can be thousands of years) tending to their patches of evil Nocturnian forest, which are shepherded to provide a supply of food in the form of forest animals. Thus woe to the ignorant Nocturnian who unknowingly cuts down trees in a forest with a Blent. Very few have survived an encounter with a hungry Blent bent on revenge. With amazingly strong limbs, extremely thick, tough bark, and an ironwood like interior, very little can harm a Blent, except a serious, large forest fire. For this reason, fire dragons are the Blents' worst enemy, and they have been known to gang up and hunt down dragons that move into their area. In general though, they tend to stay out of the affairs of other species, caring only about the health of their forest. Blents have an ancient culture, mostly made up of long, florid, epic poetry, which can take decades to recite. Although capable of modern speech, they usually communicate in their own tongue, which mostly consists of slow, deep subsonic rumblings that can propagate through the earth for miles.

Great build. Yes, I remembered the old riddle and guessed the question, although it took me a minute to remember which one. Don't remember that Bangles song, although I am old enough... I think the desert build looks OK. A more varied and scenic desert would have looked nice too, but this works for me. Maybe because it's LDD or something. But the plainness of the desert nicely highlights the rockwork and the nice roadway.

Good idea, unless we want to have a separate Interior Design discipline. Do you have any suggested subjects for it? Have you reviewed the list of subjects on the wiki, by the way? I'd love to get some feedback on that, as it's the most recent version.

You're probably right. Although I think Doctor of Historica sounds a bit odd -- too medical for my ears. Maybe there's a different way to phrase it; change the "Historica" part, or perhaps latin-ize it so it sounds different. Historicae Doctor? How about "Historicae Aedificandi Doctor"? Then do we switch the name of the program also?

Cara, could you PM me if you ever see masonry bricks, headlight bricks, or travis bricks at the Santa Clara store? Thanks.

That's not a bad idea -- then each person can update their own post in that thread. Let's do it that way, so people don't have to use the wiki. Actually this Master of Historica program is separate from the University of Petraea part II project. The UoP community build will be focused on building out the university campus and university life scenes. The Master's program is run by the University, but is focused on advancing building techniques and styles. BTW, I like your level names. I've updated the wiki page on the Master's program with this and a bunch of other ideas that have been raised here. Check it out everyone and let me know what you think. I especially need feedback on the subject ideas. Wow, way cool! I've got to get back into LDD someday. It can be a lot of fun to build in, especially to try out wild ideas for which you don't have the parts.

It's not that hard, and you can even post anonymously over on the wiki I think, as long as you don't mind putting up with the annoying Captchas and so on. I think it will be too much for any one person to keep track of all that, so it's better to just make every student responsible for tracking their own progress, whether it's on the wiki, on your EB profile page, or on PostIt notes stuck all over your dog. When someone finishes the entire program and wants their badge, they just have to submit documentation somehow to Ska.

As far as keeping track goes, I'd say that every student is responsible for keeping track of themselves, by creating a section in their sigifig's page on the wiki. They just list their MOCs (with a link to the EB topic), and for each MOC, list the subjects certified.

Exactly. We need to decide how many subjects you can address with a single MOC. We don't want people creating MOCs that are just jammed with twenty different subjects. I think three or four is probably about right. Once we know that, we can calculate how many subjects we need to allow for 12-15 MOCs to complete the entire program. At a maximum of three credits per MOC, plus three AP credits to start with, twelve builds would cover at most 39 subjects. At four credits per MOC, plus four AP credits, twelve builds would cover 52 subjects. I'm thinking four and four, since I'm having a hard time keeping the subject list under 50, and I think we will be adding more subjects rather than taking them away. Perhaps we should flesh out the list of subjects, and then work backwards from that quantity to how many credits per MOC? Is four per MOC doable? That would likely be two technique-related ones and two content-related ones (although not strictly so). For example, you could have a build showing a city marketplace with some advanced SNOT building and a variety of trees. I've changed some of the stuff on the wiki so that some disciplines state: "Pick three of:" Then we can add subjects to those disciplines without adding to the number of builds that someone must do to complete the program. And perhaps we should allow for several 'own subjects', and we can then reduce them as we add new Disciplines. I think we have a bunch of Technique-related disciplines (Architecture, Landscape Design, Hydrology) where we really want you to advance specific building techniques, and then we have a bunch of Content-related disciplines (everything else), where we're just making sure that you have built in a wide variety of styles and themes. Any MOC is likely to touch one or more techniques, and at least one content subject. Did I answer your question? On the wiki, I've currently got Agriculture set up as a pick-3-of-these-5-subjects discipline. I'm not sure we care that people really have done an MOC illustrating each type of agriculture, but we want them to have done at least a few. In Geography however, I'm thinking one ought to have at least demonstrated that you have done the major geographical types: mountains/cliffs, forests, swamps, desert, etc. I could be convinced either way... Perhaps there's only one title available, Master of Historica, and it's only available after you complete the full program. Then there won't be title overload like there is in Avalonia. I'm willing to create the artwork for it. I'm sure EB doesn't want to hand out badges willy-nilly, but completing a dozen diverse peer-reviewed MOCs is a fairly high bar to achieve, so I don't think we'll be handing out many of these, at least in the short-term. Good idea. Maybe we can lump Art and Music into a Culture discipline. I'll probably let someone else come up with possible subjects, as Gex is not a very cultured guy. I'd suggest we make this a sort of complete-3-of-the-6-subjects type of discipline.

After sleeping on it, I'm leaning this way too. I think 56 is way too many. I'm not sure 21 is enough either. But let's flesh out the disciplines and subjects and see how it goes. I think that for some disciplines, like Geography, Agriculture, Business, Law, etc, the program could be more like: "complete any three of the following subjects". For something like Architecture, it's probably good to have a group of core subjects that everyone has to complete, but that's probably not necessary for some of the other disciplines. Each MOC is going to cover at a minimum two subjects hopefully -- one building technique subject and one 'content-related' subject. That's an interesting idea -- perhaps we could combine them. Yes, we probably need some sort of military discipline, to ensure that people get a few battle MOCs done! Agreed. Depends on how many active guild members we have I suppose. I could go either way on this one.

I put the tentative disciplines and subjects up on a wiki page, so that others can edit it. That way we can have a standard list that everyone can refer to when we're discussing these things. But we should probably have the discussion here. So don't edit the wiki page without mentioning it here also, otherwise we won't know why something was changed.

Thanks for the feedback on my UoP Master program idea. Here's what we need to flesh out / determine: How many disciplines and subjects? What are the disciplines? What are the subjects? How many subjects can you get credit for in any one build? How many of your peers do you have to get a +1 from before you're certified in a subject? How many certifications can you get for "advanced placement", and what's the cutoff for how far back an MOC you can use? Can we get a really cool badge for anyone who finishes the whole program? (Ska: hint, hint) Taking a crack at throwing out some ideas: I'm thinking it should take someone about 12 decent-sized builds (not tiny little vignettes) to get through the whole program. Maybe 10, maybe 15. Let's say 12 for now. Assuming you can get four certifications per build, that's 48 certifications. Plus let's say you could get four advanced placement certs for builds you just did. That's 52 total certifications. So I'm thinking we need somewhere in the neighborhood of eight disciplines x seven subjects each. Disciplines: Architecture, Landscape Design, History, Geography, Hydrology, Agriculture, Zoology, Anthropology, Business, Law Subjects: the ones outlined in my first post, plus more! For Business, we'd have stuff like marketplace, manufacturing, caravan/shipping, and for Law we'd have some government and law related subjects I think we're going to have a lot of possible subjects, so I think at least four certifications per build should be the max. (You could do a build with fewer of course.) Otherwise people would never get through the program -- you'd have to build 30 or 40 MOCs... How many Kaliphlin guildmembers need to certify your build? I'd guess about 1/3 of active members. More than that, and it will be hard to get certified since some people don't see every build. However, we do need to guard against people buddying up in sort of a you-certify-me-and-i'll-certify-you way. Perhaps you don't get certified if two or three guildmembers veto it? Advanced Placement: I'd say about four to six certifications? Up to three or four months back? Subject to the same peer review. Not sure about these numbers at all. Badge: I sure hope so, after 12-15 peer-reviewed MOCs! Well, that's my strawman proposal. I'm kinda just throwing out some ideas and numbers here, and certainly am not strongly attached to the numbers. So feedback and suggestions greatly appreciated.

Gideon, wow, lots to like about that build! The castle is great, and I'm really liking the drawbridge, the path, the reeds, the bridge, ... well, just about everything actually! Gabe, good luck! Have fun, and looking forward to pictures!

I call him 1x1 grey-round plate-guy. But after seeing his latest MOCs, I might have to change that...

Sign me up for the Moon card

I'm really kind of liking Ecclesiastes' new challenge build for Mitgardia. I like the preponderance of categories and phases -- it encourages people to build a lot of different things. I'm wondering if we can do something similar here in Kaliphlin. I'd suggest that the University of Petraea offer a new multi-disciplinary degree program, "Master of Historica" perhaps. The degree consists of multiple disciplines, including architecture, landscape design, history, geography, hydrology, agriculture, zoology, anthropology, archaeology, etc. Multiple "subjects" are set for each discipline, and we must build MOCs that cover all the subjects in a discipline (and eventually every discipline). You can only get credit for three subjects per build (or whatever limit we set). Example subjects: Architecture: round walls, round towers, different roof techniques, advanced SNOT, 1x1 round plate walls (a la Derfel Cadarn), microscale, forced perspective, building in wood, half-timbered Tudor style, etc... Landscape Design: ordinary rocks and cliffs, sideways rocks, SNOTted rocks, palm trees, various other tree techniques, desert scene, flowers, etc. Geography: mountains, cliffs, oceanside, river scene, forests, swamp, sand dunes, etc. Hydrology: still water, waves, flowing water, waterfalls Anthropology: city, village, countryside, tribal, Kaliphlin life, Avalonia, Mitgardia, Nocturnus, Valyrio, etc. Zoology: brick-built animals, dragons, birds, etc. Agriculture: crop farming, raising livestock, fishing, harvest time etc... So you could build a city scene in Avalonia with a round tower using advanced SNOT and a forced perspective in the background with great palm trees and still water and a brick-built dragon, thus hitting eight subjects, but you'd only get credit for three. To get credit for a subject, you'd have to get a certain number (5?) of Kaliphlin guildmembers to give you a thumbs up in the comments for that subjects. Then you're certified for that subject. So theoretically your peers could tell you (in a nice way) that you need to fix something or build more of them or whatever, until they feel you've really nailed it. To get a Master of Hydrology degree for instance, you'd have to build MOCs that got you certified in all subjects for that discipline. And if you achieved masters degrees in all the disciplines, only then would you get the Master of Historica degree. I think that we'd probably allow each student up to perhaps three "advanced placement" subject certifications at the start, based on MOCs previously completed within the past four months. So if you'd just built an awesome round tower right before the challenge started, you wouldn't have to build another one; you could get credit for that subject right away. And the challenge would be open-ended; no ending point. What do you all think?

Oh wow. Big, big like! Really nice techniques for the rocks and walls.

Yes, a thicket of these dense trees can be a huge pain to fight your way through! When I travel to Mitgardia, I tend to stay on the roads when going through spine tree forests. Just too much work to hack your way through, especially for a Kaliphlin used to widely-spaced palm trees!

Ecc, very good idea for a challenge! Well thought out framework. I like it. That's the thing about you Mitgardians -- you're well organized.

Oh, that makes sense. I think I've got like one of those! Checking on BrickLink, they're expensive. Doing the whole dome in those would add up to some serious money!