Young Writers Society

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1. FEATURED MEMBER INTERVIEW: KATJADAWN
2. BIRTHDAY WEEK REVIEW
3. SQUILLS NEWSHOUR: WEEK 4: RESURRECTION
4. NOVEMBER CLASSIFIED UPDATE
5. NOVEMBER CLASSIFIED UPDATE: TRUTH REVEALED
6. SHAMELESS PLUGS
7. SUBSCRIBERS

FEATURED MEMBER INTERVIEW: KATJADAWN
written by Liberty < PM: >

On the 14th of November, @KatjaDawn became featured member! She joined the site on November 24, 2017, she’s done 150 reviews, and earned four shiny review stars. Also, I had the chance to talk to KatjaDawn about her experiences.



KatjaDawn: Thank you, and I'd be happy to!



K: I found out when I logged in and checked my notifications. I was pretty shocked, to say the least! It was and is very exciting and an honor to be chosen for FM!



K: I believe my reviews this month are a big part of why. I've been more active recently and I try to help people by reviewing as often as I can- particularly works in the green room. I do my best to provide helpful feedback and encouragement and I'd like to think that's the main reason.



K: Mainly, just participate and be yourself. We're all just writers trying to improve and share our work. Be friendly and helpful. Review, not with the points you're getting in mind, but with helping provide encouragement and constructive feedback in mind. Don't be afraid to participate in the forums and say hi to people. It's a very friendly community on YWS!



K: I'd like to say how grateful I am for YWS and the community on here. It has helped me to grow as a writer and to become so much more confident in myself and my writing. I've never felt more welcomed and appreciated than I do, being apart of YWS. Everyone I've met on here is amazing and just overall, I'm very grateful.



It was a pleasure talking to KatjaDawn! If you haven’t already, make sure to congratulate her on her wall, or do so in the thread.

Adios!

BIRTHDAY WEEK REVIEW

written by alliyah < PM: >

Birthday week was a blast wasn't it! Here's some of what happened for the record-books!

On Monday, the 15 Word Story Contest ran by @Panikos was opened as well as the Give a Haiku Contest . Interestingly both contests had over 40 entries each! There were more than 40 mini-stories submitted, and all totalled, over 40 haikus written for each contest. That's some pretty great participation. The winners for the 15 Word Story, are still to be announced, but watch the thread for those updates. And the winners for the Haiku contest were @fraey in third place, @LittleLee in second, and @niteowl being the grand champion.

On Tuesday, YWS classic opened up with the annual birthday tagbook. This one was started up by @Jaybird and had a little twist! The #Classified vs #LongLiveBigBrother tagbook's premise was that all members of the site had been invited to a Mars space station under the guise of a classified vs unclassified throwdown, just to find out it was a suprise birthday party. Members of both sides were a bit suspicious, but cake was offered to all regardless. The tagbook is pretty entertaining to read-through, and @ShadowVyper's naruto-style-running is not to be missed! You can still probably jump in and make an entry if you'd like, or just peak in and take a look at what the party had to offer.

On Wednesday, the Resource Crew Collaboration Article was opened up, and this one's still looking for entries. So if you've ever had a birthday, or know about birthdays, please click on the link and write an entry! Also on Wednesday, the Unclassified Crew spread their message throughout the site, while also encouraging people to vote for TheEgg over at the Ultimate Mascot Polls.

On Thursday, we celebrated our site's 15th birthday! And it was a wild day from start to finish. Jaybird hosted a party over in the chatroom, which was well-attended though sadly lacking in cake. We even sang "Happy Birthday" to YWS in near-unison. The Classified Crew of course added a bit of mayhem to the day, exchanging their blue squares for Big Brother's classic dog avatar. There were a lot of nice posts over in the people tab throughout the day of people saying what the site meant to them, or just well wishes for YWS.

Then on Friday, I hosted the Birthday Poetry Jam, where participants were encouraged to try writing some different forms of poetry, and it was nice time to jam and get some poetry written.

Saturday, we wrapped up the birthday activities with @Rydia hosting Monkeys vs Dragons in Round I the monkeys (unfortunately) won, but results are still pending for Round II which is hosted by @Elinor and were unreleased at the time of this article being written.

That wraps up the Birthday Week's activity review, and I have to say there was a lot going on, and quite a bit of variety! Next year YWS will celebrate their sweet-sixteen so I'm sure there'll be even more fun in store, but we'll have to wait for next year to find out.

SQUILLS NEWSHOUR: WEEK 4: RESURRECTION

Written by CaptainJack < PM: >

The Squills Newshour has returned and now we want to hear from you, the Squills Fan Club.
Click here to watch Week 4!

For those who cannot watch the video or hear the recording, here is the transcript for what I said:
Howdy Folks and welcome back to Squills Newshour.
This is now Week 4 of the broadcast.
The first broadcast was almost two years ago, let me just be honest about that. Almost two years ago.
And now we are trying to bring this back. We proposed it in different ways. I proposed it as having a pod cast. We want to have multiple editors and writers speak at the same time. But for now I think it just needs to go back to what it once was - it was me talking about memes.
And that only lasted for about a month before taking a little bit of a decline.
Now we're back in action and and we want to know what the Squills community wants to read about, and what they want to hear about.
We've done drives like this before - we tried to get new writers and we have a good stack of writers now - we just need to know what our community wants to know. We want to be able to approach politics but we don't know how to approach politics without causing issues. Squills is supposed to be a neutral news network and it's supposed to be focused on the YWS but I know that many members (like myself) are very engaged in communities outside of it.
So I'm putting that question out there.
- What would you like to hear?
- What would you like to do [with Squills]?
- How would you like Squills to put itself back into the Young Writers Society community?
[during the video, I'm holding up a couple of sheets like a newscaster and then flip them around while saying:]
This is not my script. This is a paper on Macbeth. I didn't write a script this week.
Squills Newshour runs 5 to 10 minutes, but this week it's going to be about 3. So I have about a minute left to tell you all about why you should check out the last edition we did and as of 11/17, that's when it ran to.
There's two different featured member interviews in there. If you have never experienced Squills before, we usually do a featured member interview.
@alliyah (one of our wonderful global moderators on site) is very devoted to the classified movement. Really she's devoted to breaking down the classified movement that you might see from people like @BluesClues. (Who is the lovely BlueAfrica and my lovely Bethesda.)
Then there's also [for] this week, I brought back Pop Culture Corner.
There is a NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month - an interview with Carlito.
Then there is a couple of new members.
As usual, we have shameless plugs and our subscribers. If you want to be on the subscribers list, just give Squills Bot a shout. The same goes for Shameless Plugs, check out our template and send something our way.
If you want something featured in Squills...
As always it's Lady Lizz, well it's not Lady Lizz anymore. This is Captain Jack with Squills Newshour. We are radio out and clear.

NOVEMBER CLASSIFIED UPDATE

written by alliyah < PM: >

After the smoke of birthday week has settled, some people have been asking across the site, "what is classified" and "what happened?" To be perfectly honest, we still don't know all the answers to those questions, but I'll get you as much information as I can in the article about what went down in the classified vs unclassified throw down over Birthday Week.

For those who don't know, "classified" is the movement that started with a simple hashtag (#classified) in February and has become a way of spreading mayhem across the site. Their members are part of a secret club on YWS and have released clue hunts, censored and redacted different information on the site, and are generally fairly cryptic. The resistance movement against classified is called "Unclassified" which have their own club open to the public. Some have called me the leader of that movement, though I wouldn't be so bold as to claim that, but would only assert that we are loyal to Big Brother and the site, and against the mayhem that classified promotes. Fast forward to this month, the hashtag was in full force again, and over YWS Birthday Week things really picked up.

Before Birthday Week, we knew something was going to happen because classified crew members started changing their usernames to these cryptic blue squares, very reminiscent of what's known in the digital world as the "Blue Screen of Death" then all of a sudden they started releasing a date, "11/14/19" ... the day of YWS's birthday! The Unclassified Club was quick to release a counter-date "11/13/19" when they promised to take over the site and put a stop to classified's plots.

During Birthday Week, the fighting intensified, after @Jaybird released a tagbook entitled Classified vs LongLiveBigBrother the premise of the tagbook was that all of YWS had been invited to a secret surprise party on planet Mars. While some assumed the party was... just a party. Others wondered if this was a subtle release of key clues - namely that classified was involved in Martian activity and that the number "15" corresponded to some vital piece of information.

With these two pieces of intel, members were urged to vote for @TheEgg who is the previous mascot of Unclassified over in the Ultimate Mascot Polls .

The next day, November 13th, Unclassified took over the site as promised, though not with schemes or cryptic codes, instead they overran the site with truth and positivity. People were continually urged to vote for TheEgg, people shared different petitions to stop classified's conspiracies, and shared why they love YWS with the hashtag "UnclassifiedLove4YWS". By the end of the day, I also released three graphics highlighting my assessment of classified. You can check out those graphics in my other Squills article in this week's issue.

In conjunction to the release of three graphics, I made my official Unclassified Site Briefing which released all of Unclassified's Counter Movement plans for the site to view, as well as my final conclusions,

CLASSIFIED is PROJECT BLUE BOOK'S presence on YWS, which was specifically created to hide the fact that YWS bots are actually extra-terrestrial life-forms.

It is PROBABLE that several key members of CLASSIFIED are actually alien or artificial intelligence life-forms

The evidence for these conclusions is staggering, and was posted in-full in the Unclassified Site Briefing document which you should all read. It included the fact that there has been proven redaction measures taken by classified, and that their members have basically admitted to the above-allegations.

After this truth was posted on the site, the classified crew was, I believe reasonably spooked from their plotting. On November 14th, they all changed their avatars to Big Brother's own beloved doggy avatar, which I take to mean was a show of solidarity and concession of control. Strangely, Big Brother's own avatar also changed to a blue paw print, the meaning of which has not been discovered yet.



Since then the hashtag's use has gone down a considerable amount. I think it is reasonable to believe that classified is lying low for the moment, and hoping people forget the truth of just what they are and what they stand for. If you'd like to be part of the resistance movement and help us uncover any of the clues in the future, we would welcome your presence over at the Unclassified Club .

tl;dr: Reject the Conspiracy of Classified. Unclassified know's the Truth. Long Live Big Brother!

NOVEMBER CLASSIFIED UPDATE: TRUTH REVEALED

written by alliyah < PM: >

On November 13th during YWS Birthday Week as part of Unclassified's site take over, I released three graphics which were the culmination of all that the Unclassified club had learned about the Classified movement. I'm collecting all of them in this article to share with you know in one place.

* The Blue Square Graphic - which shows classified's danger to the site, because of their connections to both "Project Blue Book" as @EverLight first identified and the "Blue Screen of Death". The Blue Square was first released by @BlueFeltrix and was followed by many classified members including @Querencia, @BluesClues, @AvantCoffee, @Tuckster, @ShadowVyper and @Panikos, changing their avatars to feature this odd blue square.



* The Unclassified Graphic - which shows the only way to resist classified is through an organized effort to support Big Brother and unclassify the conspiracies. Members of Unclassified members boldly led the charge in petitioning for classified to stop their mayhem, the pressure seems to have worked! Diligent code-breakers, @fishsashimi, @jster02, @Oxara, and @Riellehn have led the charge in attempting to decipher the mysterious messages left by classified. Many more have joined in spreading Unclassified's counter-message of positivity including @Mea, @Wolfical, @Liberty, and @Miraculor77.



*And finally, The Classified Truth Graphic - which shows the truth of what classified has been hiding this whole time, that all of their conspiracies are in fact to hide their actions of redaction and the fact that they are entangled in Project Blue Book. All the information that Unclassified has gathered has finally been brought together.



The graphics, analysis, and code-breaking culminated in the release of the very much anticipated Unclassified Site Briefing which documents the truth of just what the Classified movement is. For more information on how defeat Classified, join the Unclassified Club .

SHAMELESS PLUGS

written by SquillsBot < PM: >

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Unclassified wrote:

11/13/19
#unclassified

We need your help to protect YWS from "Classified" and their Blue Screen of Death. Join the Unclassified Club to get the latest information and fight against the #Classified Conspiracy.




That's all folks~ Now send us yours.

SUBSCRIBERS

written by SquillsBot < PM: >

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