User:Sloublues/Vigoria

Vigoria was a proto-country in Europe in the third century AD. Due to mismanagement and mishaps, it sank in the Mediterranean with the loss of all hands in about 270 AD.

• maybe a still from Utopia showing Laurel and Hardy as two of the initial investors. (Do I want to go investors route, though?)

Origin

• list the people involved, plus some noteworthy backers
• what were their motives?
  • better government
  • make money
• where did they get the island? made or already there?
• a few quotes would be good here

Initial difficulties

• five cents / year operating budget
• not enough money or technology for as big an island as originally envisioned
  • fire code meant they had to limit the population to only X, considerably less than the Y they wanted
• too much money spent on a graphic designer for the national flag
• too little money spent on a musician for the national anthem
  • saved on weapons -- test audiences tended to commit suicide, so they just bought earmuffs to start with
• would have programmed in Lisp, but tax on parentheses was too high at the time
• personality conflicts and "creative differences" -- set up for later trouble
  • People doing the project mostly want a solid, sensible, enjoyable, blah blah nation -- aside from X who wants to put green in everything
  • Investors want (conflicting) razzle-dazzle and politics
    • The rockets
    • "Will you be using that new Norton Anti-Vandal program? I won't put my money into anything that isn't properly defended from Vandals."

Notable investors

• Aurelius Theodotus
• Kartir
• Quintus Fabius Clodius Agrippianus Celsinus
• Saint Benignus
• Saint Martial
• Saint Nectarius
• Valerian the Elder
• Virius Lupus

(^ a few actual 200-299 AD people)

• Mark Twain (include a scrap from a letter in which he hopes that this one will make up for his losses on stupid inventions)

Non-notable investors

• Alexander the Sub-par contributed in the hopes that he would actually be able to conquer the result.
• Eric the Awful pitched in a few horned bullet-shape helmets, on the grounds that another nation meant more places to pillage.
• Herodotus the Senile
• Pliny the Middle-aged

Early years

• beta launch date
• list a few problems
• started population with a contest to win citizenship and be in on the beta
• big advertising blitz -- list a few mags/papers/places ads appeared in
  • Kosmospolitan
• up to population so-and-so by year so-and-so

Problems

• committee approach
• a few quotes would be good here

Final Disaster

• the Kewl Rockets embedded in the island malfunction or are misused, slamming it into another project, Atlantis, and sinking both
• bankruptcy and the terrible things done to bankruptees back then for want of a few cents

Legacy

• discouraged similar projects, in several veins. Historian (author of Aristotle's Gun) has said, "If this had been a success, democracy would have become the norm many centuries sooner, and maybe now we would be that much closer to an ideal society. Or maybe I'd be sitting in a teepee in an uncivilized 20th-century North America, explaining to a chieftain why he doesn't have to worry about 'hanging chads' jokes in his lifetime. History is funny like that."
• maybe a proverb about putting rockets in an island

Disputes

• some historians claim this is all nonsense