Well, this ended up not being about Archipelago in the least. If anything this is about something that's just about as Anti-Archipelago as things can get. But I promised you a lengthy PM about what I want, so I guess I'll send it anyway.
There's a lot of reasons why working on Straylight is a bit difficult and not particularly pleasant. And, of course, it's the sort of thing I can't really use much of my time on. Most of those reasons are the kind of things that other micronationalists can't really do anything about. It's possible that even if the rest of everyone in micronationalism suddenly rearranged everything so that the conditions for working on Straylight would be optimal, I wouldn't put all that much more time into it. Thus, I shouldn't, and won't, demand other people to change what they are doing for Straylight.
At the same time, one of the reasons Straylight [i]is[/i] difficult to work with is that I want it to... make sense, as part of the environment it's embedded in. Straylight should exist in a very specific kind of world, in fact one a lot like the Earth maybe a few decades from now in terms of technological development. It should exist in a world where something like an Aztec theocratic matriarchy couldn't just suddenly pop up out of nowhere. Not in a world perfectly like our own of course, no. Straylight could definitely exist in a world that made sense to me that could accommodate Hyperborea. Nelaga... not that well. Maybe as Cloud Nine tensegrity spheres, but even then the idea is so unlikely that I'd appreciate it at least having some kind of an economic reason to exist (not that Straylight has one, though). But then again, I don't know. It's not like I ever put a lot of work into making sancts make economic sense either. Perhaps there's a way to make Nelaga make sense as well.
As a further constraint, the history of Straylight should be short. This is one way in which Straylight *really* never fit into Shireroth - even if the organisation named Straylight stayed around for thousands of years in some reasonable universe, the way of life in it at the late end would be completely unrecognisable to the people living in the ealry end. Medieval stasis is already stupid, future stasis goes against my sensibilities even worse. Even without an intelligence explosion, the era between the inception of technology and social conditions under which sancts make economic sense, and the time when technological development has made the future so weird that I don't want to make an honest attempt to write stories about it anymore, is going to be measured in something [i]less than centuries[/i].
In a very good reality compared to this one, there would be a knight in shining armor who would ride into Bastion on a white horse, and he would say "I have a vision of a beautiful and interesting world, and in this world there is a Straylight-shaped hole - will you help me by filling it?" I would take the whole nation and I'd rewrite everything to make sense in terms of the history and the political situation of the world, I would reimagine the parts that could almost fit in, and change or remove the parts that didn't fit in at all. It would be best for me if it were a world that were frozen in one future moment, where I could take my time going back and refilling history, but I could deal with a universe running in real-time as well. [i]Maybe[/i] one in slightly speeded-up time, but nothing at the ASC time scale where every event that ever happened to Straylight would have to be compressed into a couple of months' span of real time.
I'm sure you can understand the impulse to just go it alone like Bill did. Straylight needs a fairly specific environment to thrive in, and nobody's going to offer me a shared universe that just happens to have precisely that kind of environment. I think you've done well with the Shirithian constraints in Hyperborea, especially the timespan, but then again, you do have the advantage that there's not a lot of technological development going on in Hyperborea. When someone invents a better mousetrap in Straylight it should be out on the world's markets the next month, and someone else should already be putting an even better one together a week before that happens.
I don't want to be so selfish about his. And I don't want to give the impression that the reason I do anything related to Straylight about once in a blue moon is what other people are doing, it really is just me and my laziness and unwillingness to just hammer text out. Most of the time when writing anything specific it's possible to just cleverly ignore everything about the world that doesn't fit in. But for me to have anything to write about, there has to be a Straylight in my head, and for there to be a Straylight in my head that I can feel I understand based on my intuition and understanding of economics and sociology and etc., there need to be other nations and business and a certain political situation and certain technology, etc.. Hell, Antica's actually pretty good in those respects. I mean, it's a pretty boring environment, but at least it doesn't have official time compression, and isn't in a medieval stasis. It's at least a better springboard for future development than Shireroth was, if I should ever put my mind to Straylight properly again.
But, yeah. I'm honest about the "knight in shining armor" thing. If someone gave me an interesting world that Nelaga and Hyperborea and Straylight and maybe others could participate in, I would join. It wouldn't have to be a world built instantly from whole cloth. But I'm pretty sure it'd have to at least make a clean break with the conhistory of any Micrasian nation, except perhaps those parts of Hyperborean history that can be reinterpreted and reimagined to match. The world political situation could be based on an MCS map, I suppose, though it'd have to be filled out with new nations (or, at the very least, we should be explicit that we're assuming it's filled with nations) - Straylight can't coherently exist on a planet where there's gobs of unincorporated land right there for the taking, unless post-apocalyptic, and I hate post-apocalyptic settings.
Right now, though, I honestly don't think anyone around in Bastion has the talent and persistence and time to actually create that world and make it interesting. And I of course understand the primary argument a micronationalist could make regarding it: That someone's Aztec theocratic matriarchy or enormous medieval mash-up or etc. wouldn't fit into it. A deliberately weird nation of people trying to do the will of a Machine God and convert the world into a dreamscape where mechanism and organism are the same certainly wouldn't! But there *could* be a world in which Straylight and Hyperborea and Nelaga all make sense, with minimal changes, and, you know, it'd still be a world. There'd still be space for further creativity. You know, there's space for both Norway and North Korea in this world, there's space for Dubai and Detroit, there's space for a Soviet Union and a Spanish technocracy, and for an entire mankind's history of strife and invention and experiment and different societies. Is it too much to ask that Straylight should have a world to live in in which it makes sense?