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Day 1,298, 05:45 • Published in USA USA • by Silas Soule
Insert Clever Title Here

This is Amurrikan Idol!

In case you're one of those lazy sods who hasn't been keeping up with things:

Everybody's favorite communist game show host, Civil Anarchy, has thrown down the proletarian gauntlet for Round Two of the American Idol Writing contest. The challenging topic: "Write a satire about an oldfag".


Since I am, myself, older than spit, and because I am also, despite my distinguished age, extraordinarily fabulous, if you know what I mean, what better choice could I possibly make than to share a few brief words about what is after all my favorite subject: me!

Wild applause!




First off, let's put the whole thing into the proper perspective, shall we?

Unassuming bright-eyed noobs often assume that eRepublik is a loverly free on-line strategy game built on a clever social simulation framework engineered by the brightest minds in Bucharest.

Oldfags like me know better.

We know the game is actually a bizarre witch's brew cooked up during an all-night Black Mass held on the desanctified altar in the abandoned ruins of Saxon church tower in a remote part of Transylvania at nine minutes after midnight on the ninth night after the ninth full moon.


For the first time anywhere, Spectacular Times reveals a photo of one of the remote code mills where eRepublik is produced. Notice the mystical slogan on roof: FUD!


In fact, the Socialist Freedom Party's Deep Unit for Revealing Profound Seekrits (DURPS) has determined that: the game is actually made up of three parts fiddle-faddle, two parts hokus-pokus, a delicate smidge of perfidy and a very, very light dusting of imagination. These ingredients are stirred together in a viscous boiling bubble of code that is never permitted to encounter the light of an automated unit test harness. This loathsome concoction is cooked up by sorcerers twelve-year-old programmers who wouldn't know what a regression test suite was if it slapped them in the face with a large trout.

At least that's what my good friend Uhriventis tells me. And he knows stuff.

In short, it should be obvious that I've spent two years playing this game not because I'm a bored old fart with nothing better to do. And not because I'm a vain and egotistical blabbermouth with a nasty case of logorrhea. No. Shame on you for even reading that. The simple, straightforward fact is I've stuck around through thick and thin, withstood the wild ride of ups and downs without barfing, weathered the wind and thunder, persevered through the good, the bad and the ugly, and -- good lord -- even participated on rare occasions in the USA Forum, solely in order to carry out an important mission: to complete a penetrating undercover examination of the level of psychological fortitude that is required to withstand the nefarious onslaughts against sensibility, morality, good order, and all that is good and decent, that is being perpetrated by those depraved reprobates, enslaved by pseudo-Plato, who've been promoting this "free" game to the unsuspecting masses, all in the hopes of one day finding a suitable remedy for their execrable and flagitious spells.

Sadly, all I've come up so far is yet another bit of cheap "ward off the evil eye" jewelry so derivative that it would make Chihuly giggle at its redundancy:



But. But! But I will never stop. I will never surrender and I will never shut up until the last bad design decision is hung from the guts of the last peer code review. Yes! Comrades! Friends! Fellow fabulous ones! Revolutionaries of all shapes and sizes, let them know that we are not sheep and we will not be cowed!

Shout out with me now!..

The snuggle continues!

The people I've cited will never be unseated!

What do we want? Strategy! When do we want it? Meeoww!

Down by the riverside, I shot my old lady.


Err.. wait. Forget that last one. Sometimes I get possessed by the ghost of Wm. Burroughs and there's little I can do about it until the trance passes.


PQ in a blue mood


Deep breaths.

OK, moving on...



The second thing I wanted to share about oldfags like me is...

Redacted for vulgarity.



And finally, I would just like to say that I am not really as bitter and cynical as people make me out to be.

Sure, I will never have the sunny workaday disposition of a rainy sunday, nor the hail-fellow-well-met/whatchoo-lookin-at-willis double-edged panache of a good/bad-fellow like Chutley, nor -- due to my living-on-the-edge, devil-take-the-hindmost, James Dean-esque "Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today." philosophy of e-life -- can I offer to others the tight-fitting, comforting protection of a enveloping presence like Glove's, but...

And this is an important but.

I can say that doing your own thing in eRepublik, following your own star, pursuing what I like to call "the revolutionary road", wherever that may lead you, does have its own rewards. As my delicious friend Thedillpickle likes to say, "What else is there to do?".



xio,

PQ