Nicole Rennolds becomes XO of Atlantis

Following the departure of Mike Kennedy from the role, Nicole has been selected to take over the position as second-in-command of the most popular Phoenix sim.

Whether she'll be using existing character Morgan O'Doyle, the ship's expert gunner, or creating a new XO character remains to be seen.

Update 1/3: Nicole informs me that Morgan O'Doyle is likely to be promoted.

Firefly on Science TV

Mike Palmer has passed on the news that the first season (hopefully there will be a second one day) of Joss Whedon's Firefly will be running, in original order and in High Definition, on the Science Channel in the USA from Sunday 6 March, starting with the two-hour pilot "Serenity" at 8pm, then "The Train Job" at 10pm.

The rest of the season will then run every Sunday.

Not only do you get to see all the episodes in shiny high-def at a non-silly time, Dr. Michio Kaku will be explaining some of the science behind the show.

Press Release here.

So if you want to see what "Richard Castle", "Anna" and "Joan Holloway" (Nathan Fillion, Morena Baccarin and Christina Hendricks in RL) got up to before their current hit shows; tune in! You will have one jing cai time!

Edit: I got Morena Baccarin's character name wrong. Thanks to Jason Andersen for pointing this out.

Kvant reminder

Just to remind you that we have a new-ish Firefly sim, Kvant. If you're interested in it, we're about to head off into the black, so please check it out!

RSS Feeds

If you want to make sure that you never miss a post in your sims, you could do a lot worse than use Phoenix's handy RSS feeds in whatever reader you use, be it Outlook, Google Reader or whatever. Situated at the top of each forum and thread, you can choose between being notified of new topics or of every single post that appears.

There may be a few hours delay in the posts arriving, but I find this a valuable service for broadly monitoring the plots in the sims I take part in.

Hopefully this will stay in Phoenix 2.0.

Banner design competition

Phoenix is holding a competition to design an official banner, which will be used for alliances and general promotion.

The entries will be voted on by our sites members.

Please submit all entries by email to General Coordinator Ash Leighton Plom; the link is in his profile.

January Referendum Results

Phoenix's members have voted on a number of government and legislative issues.

Key decisions taken are:

• That terms for Elected Officials should be 12 months
• That canon characters should be NPCs only and used sparingly by Sim Leaders and GMs
• The Rules & Responsibilities document, with amendment, has been ratified.

This last vote is the most important; it now means that Phoenix Roleplaying has a codified, yet amendable constitution and the club has taken another step on its journey.

Full results are here.