JALGC (Gray)
Author: Kariada Kunai
Compiled by: Ariadne Davion & Jenarra Tikvah
What is JALGC?
In (or around) November of 2003, Kariada Kunai was working on her Accepted Project. Projects. Massive Contributions which have not stopped to this day. Anyway... The Gray Ajah consisted of only about a dozen Aes Sedai and Accepted at the time.
This was before there was an Online Events Team, or we had any real, scheduled online events at all. We had the IRC chat rooms (the three basics, anyway), and we all hung out in there, but there had been no real scheduled gatherings to that time.
Kariada got the idea to change all that. She came up with an internet forums game called, simply, “JALGC”. There was no advertising what it meant. As I recall, it started with a game to chase down all the posts that the Grays were making in which there was a particular image (I don’t remember what of). The person with the highest number of tags at the end got some little prize, though I don’t remember what it was, plus bragging rights (which we all know are super important). I became so obsessed with this game, that I ended up coming in first or second, because I stalked all the Grays as they posted for days on end... this was before I realized I could use the image file name as a search term and post-stalk that way. ~look~
The “game” was so successful that it turned into weekly games online in the Olde Warder and Hen chat room. I volunteered to help Kariada with the weekly games, and quickly became her second in command. We had a rotation of three or four game formats, and week by week, had more and more people show up to play. Eventually, I took over the irc games, with Mariasha, Atane and Moriendar working as my crew. Months later, I left the games to those three who took it over entirely and ran it for quite a while longer. This also encouraged other members to run online events, and led to TarValon radio which ran briefly in 2005, as well as other Ajahs and the Companies hosting game weeks and online events.
In March 2004, JALGC made another appearance from the Grays, encouraging Tower Members to chase down fools’ gold dropped by various leprechauns (each an Avatar and character run by one of the Gray Ajah members).
The Gray Ajah grew amazingly, with several new Accepted joining over the Spring and Summer that year. And they *kept* growing!! The popularity of the games both on the forums and in the irc channel were putting the Grays out and about in the Tower in ways they hadn’t been before.
In March of 2007, I started another one, this time with images of various pies. I hoped by using more than a dozen different images, that we’d cut down on post-stalkers, and give other people a fighting chance at racking up pie points. We called that one “PIE - Partners in Excellence” which I had gotten off a random google image search. :-p By this time, we had 18 Aes Sedai, and about 7 Accepted.
The Gray Ajah continued to grow over the years, and then by leaps and bounds. It went from being one of the smallest Ajahs on the site in 2003 to being the force it is today.
And if you were to ask Kariada if she had ever thought it would grow that large, she would say of course - it was Just A Little Gray Conspiracy.
