Dispatches from the colonies The House of Stattenfield continues its methodical expansion across the known network. Annexation proceeds by hostname Slowly, thoroughly, by hostname. Dispatches from the colonies The House of Stattenfield continues its methodical expansion across the known network. Annexation proceeds by hostname Slowly, thoroughly, by hostname.
House of Stattenfield The Stattenfield Empire Lente vincimus. Slowly, thoroughly, by hostname.

A brief history of the expansion

Info

How a family name acquired a colonial office, a motto, and an accumulating stack of hostnames.

The house

The Stattenfield Empire is a personal gazetteer dressed as a late-nineteenth-century expansion. It is not a company, a political program, or a claim on anyone else’s homepage. It is a way of keeping the family’s public works in one place, with the manners of an age that loved maps, mottoes, and the idea that a name could stretch farther than a street.

The doctrine is modest. Annex a hostname. Raise a site. Describe it as a possession. Repeat until the internet notices, or until it does not, which is historically more common.

Crown colonies and protectorates

Some holdings do ordinary work in the world: a laundromat on a Missouri square, with hours and machines and people who are not in on a joke. That is the civic charter.

Other holdings are entertainments written with a straight face — catalogs, clinics, observatories, and archives that would have been at home as pamphlets on a railway bookstall. They are marked as protectorates, patent medicines, or personal archives on the gazetteer. If a province is satirical, it usually says so in its own footer. This office does not recant on its behalf.

Method of annexation

  1. A domain is acquired, preferably one that already sounds like a place.
  2. A website site is raised, usually with a custom theme rather than a rented flag.
  3. The public face is deployed to an Apache host that already garrisons the other colonies.
  4. The possession is entered on this plate, with a specimen of the homepage and a short notice in the gazetteer.

The empire expands at the speed of weekends. This is considered a feature. Rapid conquest looks like a startup. Slow conquest looks like an atlas.

This office

Stattenfieldempire.com is the capital: not the largest city, only the one that keeps the maps. Questions of policy belong on the FAQ. Letters belong on Contact. The Viceregal Archives are a locked room off the courtyard, for people who already have a key.