Join the new world

I've pretty much already quit the game, I just want to make it official. I will leave below a short history of my time in this game. It is as accurate as I can remember, but I have not done any research to confirm my memory, so the timelines could be a bit off.

Edit: Turns out it's a lot longer than I intended. Oh well. I suppose there's a lot to remember over two years. Read it, or don't. Be advised there are no pictures though.

Later Edit: I have shared eRep in the past with my beautiful girlfriend of nearly five months. She was hurt that she was not mentioned in the article, so now she is. She also comments (as she has before) that Adam Reese is "mean," a "butthead," and "needs to find something better to do" than troll the NZ media all day. Her words, not mine.

I was born just over 2 years ago in Virginia (eUSA) shortly after the election of Uncle Sam.

I participated in Operation: Portugal Thunder as a civilian. This was a 1-battle fight against Portugal which the US lost. I joined the US National Guard (now called US Training Division) shortly afterwards.

I started a newspaper and named it The eUSA Today. It was quite good. Uncle Sam didn't like it because it "made him look pretty dumb" but I really only used direct quotes. Go figure.

I had joined the eUSA Forums and IRC recently, and met up with some guys playing another game on the side called Tribal Wars. Google it if you want to. It turned out that these guys were basically the Michael Lewis fan club, and included such notable figures as Kyle321n, Geno Garon, and perhaps Emerick IIRC.

I participated in Operation: Taco Bell. This was America's almost successful invasion of Mexico. We won the first 3 regions easily, but then noticed that (due to a flaw in game design) the top half of Mexico did not connect in any way to the bottom half, so we could not continue. Admin took several days to correct the bug, but fortunately the US got initiative back. We had the last 2 regions under attack and it was going well, when Mexico retreated one of them to give us a border with Portugal. MPP rules worked differently back then, so because we had attacked their homeland they had MPPs against us, but they attacked us in Mexico, so we had none. Obviously, we lost our spring break destination pretty quickly. Uncle Sam was impeached.

Scrabman took over when Sam got the boot. He worked out a rental agreement with Mexico for one of their regions and started the USA's first regular training wars.

It was around this point that I had started to make some good friends via IRC. Notably were Jewitt (then the Senator from TN and Economic Council member), SamWystan (my USNG Commanding Officer), and ChrisDF0 (who isn't really that well known).

Chris and I decided the USA was getting a bit boring and decided to move to Thailand where we pooled our Gold to open a Q1 food company called Michael Lewis Burgers. Lewis was rumored to be moving to Thailand to accept his role as God-King/President of that nation. He never showed up. Somehow the company was set to be on sale for 25 Gold, even though I didn't sell it and Chris has always said he didn't either. Anyway, it was sold and we weren't too mad because we made a small profit on the sale and the Thai food market is pretty slow anyhow.

We moved back to the states and used the money to set up a new company, a Q1 Wood resource company in Tennessee called Tennessee Hard Wood (THW for short). Chris did more managing of the company that I did, but we eventually grew it into a Q3 business before selling it for a handsome profit.

My newspaper (which had been re-named Thailand Today while I was there) was re-named again to The Grapevine. The goal was to make fun articles instead of news. That lasted for a bit.

I had resigned from the USNG when I moved abroad because I didn't really intend to return so soon. Upon my return, I joined the US Army. My CO was Scott Coyle, who was a much better graphic artist than a platoon commander. He resigned after about a week and I was named to take his place. A few days later I was approached by Joshua Hoss to join a new branch of the military called the Airborne. I agreed.

The first deployment of the Airborne was to Turkey. The Turks had occupied most of Greece and Israel for as long as anybody could remember, and the Americans (along with a few Atlantis friends) wanted to change that. We dropped in silently, with covert avatars taking jobs from the local market. We had random noobs start the Resistance Wars with gold moved on the money market. I was honored to be able to start one of the first RWs, and once my name was clearly related to the effort, I started writing "Freedom Fighter" articles in my paper. Eugene Harlot noticed, and asked all the branches to vote the articles up. That became the only time my newspaper reached the International Top 5, and IIRC it was #2 for a bit. Operation: Turkish Delight was really the first time American mobile forces made a major impact around the world.

We returned from deployment and I joined up with the United Independent Party mainly because Jewitt was a member and I thought he was a pretty cool guy. I would end up running for Congress an impressive 7 times and win 0.

Scrabman finally gave up being president after about 3.5 months, allowing his protégé and Secretary of State Harrison Richardson to run. Emerick, who had been deemed a troll and banned from the USA forums under Scrabman, returned to the community and decided to run for president at the last minute. Richardson won, but it was closer than anybody expected.

Meanwhile in Europe, longtime Atlantis member Sweden launched an invasion against recent Atlantis addition Germany. It caused a rift that quickly led to the alliance falling apart. Richardson tried to form FORTIS between the US, Canada, UK, Spain, and Ireland. The UK voted it down because of the proposal for weighted voting in the alliance. They then allowed Hungary to landswap through their northern regions to attack Canada. It was at this point that the USA and UK were no longer friends.

At the same time, or very shortly after, Russia attacked Alaska. It marked the first time ever that someone attacked the USA's homeland regions. They lost. Russia attacked again the next day, and this time won. Thus began World War III, or, the PEACE invasion of USA and Friends.

I changed my newspaper again at this point to "A Long Strange Trip" and wrote articles themed around music. I also moved to the Netherlands for about a week before returning home. My paper was again The eUSA Today before becoming Weekend Update.

During the war, I thought it would be fun to host an eRep podcast. I had heard of one in the UK and another from some eUSA Oldfags, but wanted to focus more on current events than history. I teamed up with Jewitt to created "Airborne on Air," and recorded the first episode in late July. We would go on to write 3 episodes, record 2, and have very little interest.

Long story short, we were getting our asses kicked. Emerick easily defeated Richardson in the next election. Canada was entirely wiped from the map, as was Spain (at different times). The USA was reduced to 2 regions by Russia and Indonesia. Many accounts will say it was only Florida, but a resistance war in Maine freed that region shortly before the battle for Alabama was lost. Indonesia never attacked Florida. Some say they couldn't afford it. Others contend they were biding their time and did not expect the US to take the offensive. Whatever the case, we did. Emerick re-took the south and re-named the country to the Confederate States of America in a nod to the American Civil War.

The day after the next election, Emerick went missing. The US government simply had no communication with him, and he never logged on. The rumor is that someone facebook stalked him to find his street address, then hacked a Verizon database to find out which cell phone had a billing address at that house. In any case, Vice President Jewitt sent a text to that number saying "Fgt this is your VP. Whats your PW?" About 5 mins before Indonesia would have the chance to gain initiative back, he got a reply.

This is just the legend, and I have no way of knowing if it is true or not, so I can’t say for sure if someone committed "account sharing" and I sure hope nobody gets banned. Except Plato. He needs to be banned.

Anyhow, back to the story. It turns out Emerick had spent the night in jail. He claimed it was for parking tickets, but honestly he had been arrested for drug charges. He got Jewitt's text literally 30 seconds after he got his phone back when he was released from prison on bail. Emerick chose to resign, and asked the Congress to Impeach him.

Jewitt and I got back in the Podcast game sometime soon after this, using a platform called Blogtalkradio where we could do the show live and have guests call in. I got the idea listening to a blogtalk show by Ajay Bruno. The Report on Air would go on to have a great run before Jewitt became president and no longer had time for the show. Season Two returned later on, with Kyle321n as the frequent but unofficial co-host. The show became The Report Down Under when I moved to New Zealand, with Brad Reala co-hosting.

Gaius Julius took over when Emerick left. He named me as his Secretary of State the following month after wining re-election, despite the fact that I had zero experience in the post. Honestly I think the most important thing I did in the job was make friends with Bradley Reala who was in charge of a small branch of the DOS that tracked immigration. I promoted Reala and he was named Secretary of State under Jewitt 2 months later, where he did a helluva job until becoming President.

I held my job for one month, and was booted when former Airborne buddy Josh Frost won the election. I spent the time chatting up Aussies and other folks from around the globe. At some point we joined EDEN.

Jewitt was elected in December and named me to be Chief of Staff. His run was not serious, and I actually helped him draft an article that said he was announcing his run for second place (as a safety candidate in case Frost was banned or impeached). That article was never published, but in its place a promise to invade the UK for their deception leading to WWIII. Jewitt won in a landslide.

He didn’t attack the UK, but in fact Japan on Dec 7th (the same date where RL Japan attacked RL USA in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii during WWII). The attack failed, but we reached out to Japan diplomatically and eventually got their permission to march through. Jewitt embarked on the "Three Pillars" campaign to remove PEACE forces from Asian Iron regions. It would be the USA's first successful campaign against another country outside of our homeland regions.

Jewitt was re-elected and I was re-assigned to Secretary of Unconventional Media, basically a made-up job to keep me in the cabinet. I thought it was sweet of him. He continued the Asian campaign and began attacks on the UK in the final week of his term.

Josh Frost ran against Jewitt's VP PiginZen in February and won, becoming the first American to win presidential elections in non-consecutive terms with the same account. It would be later revealed that Harrison Richardson was ThisGenMedia (a president in the Beta era that eventually stole money from the treasury). Frost continued the campaign against the UK down to London but never finished them off.

PiginZen won in March and named me as a personal advisor, and Brad Reala as his VP. To be really honest, I don't remember what PIZ did as president but I have a feeling it wasn't much.

I kind of 2-clicked for a while and honestly I don't really remember what happened in April-May. I think maybe Frost may have been president again, and Emerick was banned. I moved to India at some point and ran for Party President of the "Tiger Breaks the Diamond" party, or something like that as an ATO candidate. I re-named it "Dell Tech Support" before handing it to an Indian and moving home. I moved to Australia for about a week and ran for Congress, but again I lost. Kyle321n and I were going to set up an American branch of The Crimson Order, but it never really got off the ground. I quit the game in June shortly before V2 came out.

Kyle and Brad convinced me to return in October when New Zealand was about to be released. I joined up with the forums and moved out here a few days after the country went live. We were psyched to have our own country, as we were building a coalition of English-speaking people from about a dozen different countries on both sides of the "mega-alliance" lines.

A large group of Serbian nationals moved in at the last minute and won a majority of the Congress. It was fairly disappointing, especially when most refused to join our forums or IRC. Adam Reese, the native fail-troll, quickly became a fanboy for the Serbians and their Aotearoa party. As the Serbians continued to win elections, most of my crowd trickled back to the States. I made some pretty cool friends here, but honestly the game began losing interest from me again.

I served as party president for the UNZIP, and finally won congress elections (twice!) while here in New Zealand. That was pretty cool. I also helped found and run Te Pori, a citizens militia. Hopefully the other guys will keep it going in my absence.

It's been a fun ride, but honestly the game just isn't fun now that my university firewall wont let me into IRC. The forums just don’t really do it for me.

I feel obligated to toss in a quick word of blame towards Admin for failing to listen to their customers and his apparent lack of common sense. I already published a rant against admin after the battle for Western Australia, and I think I re-posted it somewhat more recently. Go look it up if you wish. I think my biggest beef with him recently is the growing lack of transparency, with the fall of the Erepublik Insider and the name-change to Plato. I love that they still claim average ticket time is under 24 hours.

O7 New Zealand. Good luck and godspeed. It has been a pleasure and an honor to meet and work with so many people here in this game that I cannot begin to name everyone for fear I would leave someone out. If you ever desperately need me for some incredible reason, talk to Kyle321n (he has my cell number). Otherwise, this is goodbye.