Administrative Announcements

 For the last couple of weeks, I've been experimenting with blogging more frequently, taking advantage of the ability to schedule posts for future publication. Going forward, I'm going to try to post three times a week on Blogger, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Ideally I'll have the posts queued up beforehand so they will auto-post at 7am on the days in question. And, if I've done it right (using "If This Then That" or IFTTT), then such postings should trigger a corresponding post over on my Facebook profile. If I can figure out how to do it, I'll also link my Bluesky account to update when the blog does.

And hopefully I can keep coming up with enough content for that schedule... Regardless, I will NEVER use generative artificial intelligence systems to write my posts for me. I have used it for generating pictures, including the centre-piece of the KOALA patch as previously discussed, because I'm a crappy artist, but the writing here is all mine.

Oh, I also have a Linktree now - you can find it here. (https://linktr.ee/KingGeorge2.0) As I evolve my social media presence I'll make sure to keep the Linktree updated.

I'm of two minds about Twitter (or X or whatever): on the one hand, it's still got over 600 million users, and at least a third of those are active, but on the other hand I left it for some good reasons, and it seems to have gotten worse since I left, not better (based on news reporting about the antics of Grok, the Twitter AI, anyway). I'll have to consider this some more.

New unit, new uniform (same king)

 I wore a new uniform for the diplomatic reception on the Friday night at MicroCon, as can be seen in the picture below. It represents the public debut of our new military unit, the King's Own Airborne Llama Artillery, or KOALA for short.

Dress uniform for KOALA, the King's Own Airborne Llama Artillery.
(My chancellor, Rankin, is visible on the right side of the photo.
And someone fuzzy is in the background?)

KOALA is actually based on two different historical facts - or, at least, one fact and a rumour. First, the rumour:  according to my father, our family might have been descended from a famous US military officer, who revolutionized the use of artillery in the Mexican-American war by realizing you didn't actually need to unhitch the horses to fire. (As I always say, as a bonus, it made the horses run a lot faster, too!) Second, a few years ago I learned about "zamburak", which were camel-mounted artillery pieces. 

The name of the unit is also based on historical precedents, between "horse artillery" units such as the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery and units like the "Queen's Own Rifles". So KOALA is sort of a mashup of the two, with "airborne" thrown in for good measure.

So, since llamas are the national animals of Slabovia, I thought, could we do the same thing but with llamas? And then, to make them our "rapid response" unit, we could make them airborne!

The only thing keeping the unit from "going live" is a lack of airborne-qualified llamas. 

Oh, and yes, that's the head of a stuffed llama poking out of the holster - when anyone asked if it was loaded, I replied, "Yes, he's been drinking all day, he's QUITE loaded at this point." The llama was given to me by Zar Antonov of Obscuria in a parcel he sent me earlier this year. I put it in the holster because I wanted to make it quite clear that there was nothing more, um, pistol-like in said holster, just in case anyone got "twitchy". 

Another shot of the KOALA uniform, with Molossian President Kevin Baugh for scale.

Oh, and KOALA has a "Unit Crest" as well! I came up with idea for the overall design, and Chancellor Rankin was kind enough to help me realize my vision, because curved text can be a royal pain if you don't have the right image editing software! I did use Generative AI to come up with the "Koala bear with a gun" in the center of the piece, because I am spectacularly bad at drawing.

The crest for KOALA.

Panel Discussion from MicroCon 2025

 In addition to my own talk at MicroCon 2025, I also took part in a panel discussion called "The Show Must Go Wrong", together with the hosts of MicroCon 2015 (His Excellency Kevin Baugh and his wife Adrienne), MicroCon 2017 (HRH Princess Julianna representing Ruritania), and MicroCon 2022 (Grand Duke Travis McHenry of Westarctica).

The panel discussion is a bit long (the video's about 42 minutes long) but it was good fun.

You can watch it here.

My talk from MicroCon 2025

 If you didn't make it to MicroCon 2025, and you're not in the MicroCon 2025 group on Facebook, you should still be able to watch my talk here - it's about 15 minutes long.

Oh, and here is my traditional photo of the MicroCon audience, taken from the speaker's podium...

A sneak peek...

 Just a heads-up for anyone in the Great Lakes region who's interested in micronations - we're currently planning a local event for next spring (late May or early June) in the area around Brantford, Ontario...

More details to come once the time and place are "set in stone"!

Royal Warrants

 Recently, I had the opportunity to buy some customized product from Million-prints.com, and as a result of that, I started thinking about royal warrants again.

For the uninitiated, a royal warrant is a document that proclaims a merchant to be the preferred supplier of a particular product (or set of products) to the royal household. There's a great write-up on them over at Wikipedia.

Anyway, I decided to issue my first royal warrant, because I was so happy with how the bricks turned out.

The presentation of the royal warrant to Marc of Million-prints.com

This picture was provided by Marc, showing the royal warrant on the wall of his shop.

I'm so happy with how the royal warrant turned out (and Marc's response to it) that I'm thinking I may give others to local businesses I frequent, like maybe the veterinarian that takes care of our royal mouser. (I know that Buckingham Palace doesn't give out royal warrants for services, but they do their thing and I'll do mine.)

A short video clip from MicroCon 2025

 RTAM (Radio télévision Aigues-Mortes), a micronational news agency, was at MicroCon 2025, and managed to get me on video briefly...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-kfSB81pwg