Alpe-Adria, Welcome To The Fold

First of all, the fourth Carnival of the Balkans is up and running, with a multi-lingual round-up of recent Balkan-related stuff in blogland. (If only London had a resource like Slavs of New York...)

Among other things the Gazette learned from Carnival #4 was that Yakima Gulag Literary Gazett now runs the fifth largest nation in the NationStates.net virtual Balkans. The NationStates political simulator is the creation of Max Barry, who might be better known as the author of anti-neoliberal satire Jennifer Government. (It's coming to the screen, supposedly. One or other of the Knightley-Portman conglomerate will presumably be in the frame to play Jennifer at some point.)

What you do is answer one of those political-opinions questionnaires that one can waste quite enough time on anyway, pick a flag/currency/name et cetera (unfortunately for the Gazette, Illyria was taken), and wait for NationStates to feed you a policy or two. The Grand Duchy of Alpe-Adria blinked into existence a couple of hours ago, and will be extremely happy to remain an unassuming statelet with a flag it must have picked up at a Liechtensteinian car boot sale.

Edit: and no, The Worshipping Empire of Ruslana Lyzhicko is, oddly enough, not me...