A Dialogue with Gnilraps

Day 2,974, 10:11 • Published in USA USA • by Blame My Doppelganger



Greetings once more, fellow eUSA citizens!

After venturing further out into this game hoping to learn and accomplish new things, I decided what better way to do that than to have a dialogue with a veteran of the eUSA? Gnilraps, the former President and Defensive Dictator has provided me plenty of his time recently, and I feel privileged to have been able to work with him. So a big thank you to Gnilraps. You're a star.





For the purpose of this dialogue, I will be BMD and Gnilraps will be G. Make of the latter what you wish…


BM😨 First things first, as a fellow Waits fan, what is your favorite Tom Waits song?
G: There is probably one favorite for each album. I suppose my current favorite is Bad as Me. It’s really an impossible question. Usually I answer this question with, “my favorite Tom Waits song is whichever one is playing.”

BM😨 Is there any Tom Waits song you could offer right now that our readers should listen to for the duration of our dialogue?
G: http://tinyurl.com/grteoe9

BM😨 Moving on, what is one thing that the eRepublik world doesn’t know about you that you feel they should know?
G: I’ve actually revealed quite a bit about myself ingame. Some of it’s pretty surprising actually. But because I want to give you something of a scoop, I’ll tell you something new. My first career in Real Life was working for Nikon in the Biomedical Optics division. I designed optical solutions for many exciting imaging problems. One of my clients was a man named Dr. Wise Young, a world-renowned neuroscientist who was Christopher Reeves’ surgeon and who continues to be working on techniques for re-growing neural tissue in the spinal column. Actually, Dr. Young’s laboratory was one of the most innovative things I’ve ever seen - he designed a science lab that had no walls (he used curtains of air instead of walls) because he believed that all knowledge should be shared. His lab was also 100% wheelchair accessible. He is just one of the amazing people I met during my days at Nikon.

BM😨 Wow. That's certainly pretty amazing. To eRepublik them, what is the meaning of your in-game name?
G: I suppose it should be gnilleps but that would just lead to even more questions.

BM😨 After signing up 6 years ago, what has made you stick around this long?
G: In my Real Life, I encounter lots of pressure and could easily struggle with anxiety. Having a virtual life helps me in a most therapeutic way. I’ve definitely spent less money in this game than I would have spent on weekly therapy over 6 years, so in my mind it’s a bargain.

BM😨 I see in your profile you boast being a president/founder of many parties. What is your fondest memory of one of these parties?
G: The founding of WTP was a great moment. I wrested the party out of the clutches of one of eUSA’s former citizen-enemies, and since then he has never again been a considerable threat. I got to work with some interesting new people (it was my first foray out of the Federalist Party where I also had some truly epic moments of fun) that I otherwise wouldn’t have met. And we forged something that has lasted. It’s sad to see how Oblige has ruined it with his megalomaniacal form of individualized oligarchy - it’s definitely the weakest among the T5 parties and falling. But she’s my baby and I love her.

BM😨 Fast-forwarding six years then, what is your current favorite political party in the eUSA?
G: I will have to issue an apology to my current party for this answer. Honestly, I suppse SFP is my current favorite, but answering with that would be… boring. So I will remove SFP from the list of possible answers.

My current favorite is defnitely BSP and I’ll tell you why. BSP has figured out that - as much as it hates the 'system', it must work with the system in order to change it. And so BSP has developed an arsenal of excellent statesmen who daily tread into the cesspool for no other reason than to try to clean it up. Too often I see people rail against the cistern only to turn away from it leaving it unchanged in the process. BSP will not do this. I love me some BSP.

BM😨 Did you enjoy your time as a President and Defensive Dictator?
G: Normally I love being the CP/(and/or)D, but this time around has been terrible. I did not run a campaign that was designed to win, it was merely intended to be SFP's protest campaign against the establishment candidate at the time. So my platform was cobbled together around a principle I don’t fully believe in (anti-Dictatorship), although I managed to form something I thought was interesting in its own right (rather than anti-Dictatorship, a one-month reprieve from it). The plan was decent enough. But nobody, and I mean nobody expected me to win. Then the hypocrites in Congress (for instance Aramec who loves to bitch about how this person or that person has violated the holy law of eUSA when he himself blatantly and intentionally violated congressional law - not to mention compromising the security of the SCI - during his term as CP/D simply as a troll move) pressured me into turning away half my cabinet, so I’ve had to work with people who were basically already pissed at me to begin with. It’s been a shi**y term.

That said, DMJ deserves special attention for being both pissed at me AND doing a fantastic job of taking care of things all month. Thanks, DMJ.

But yeah, being CP/D is tons of fun when you plan ahead and want to be there.

BM😨 Could you expand a little for the ignorant like myself? Were you not elected to become the Defensive Dictator? How exactly did this come into fruition?
G: It depends on who you ask. I was elected based on a campaign promise to serve the month as a non-Dictator. So many of those who voted for me were voting specifically for that. I know this because I got PM’s from people who would not normally vote for me ever… they voted for the non-Dictatorship platform. So ask some people why I was elected and they will tell you that it was because I promised a Dictatorship-free December.

But ask Congress and you will get a different story. Congress voted to disallow my platform. So once I was elected, I had a hard choice to make. The Bear Cavalry took that choice away from me fairly quickly when they launched the Revolution. Then I had 10 days to figure out what to do. In some ways I regret capitulating to Congress. It would have been more honorable for me to refuse the Dictatorship and let them impeach me. So in my opinion, I did that wrong.

All of this is true despite the fact that my personal convictions are that the Defensive Dictatorship is a wise course of action.

BM😨 So with all this in mind. feelings of other individuals and parties aside, how do you feel about the dictator module?
G: I am favorable towards it.

BM😨 Where would you like to see the eUSA in the future? Do you see yourself still being a major part of it?
G: I see eUSA continuing down the path to boredom. eRepublik is supposed to be a tabula rasa for creative social interaction. Now it is quite true that the cadre of expert gamers (I count myself among them) we have has fashioned a highly functioning and successful eUSA operation. You won’t get me to say that what we’ve got doesn’t work. But our problem is that we could have a lot more yet our experts fear losing what they’ve built. We are being led by pixel-huggers.

Actually, since you’ve asked, I’m going to pontificate some more on this. There may not be a single individual in this country who has more to lose if eUSA were to suffer an invasion or takeover. I surely run the largest military commune in the country. And yet I would rather engage this game with a little more risk, with the added values of fun, organic change, and excitement, than to keep pushing this shiney, perfectly round, cold ball call eUSA. Yes. I see eUSA as a perfectly round silver ball that rolls in a straight line and makes almost no noise as it moves along the surface of eRepublik. But such a ball has zero warmth, isn’t half as much fun to play with as something that’s a little off-kilter, and won’t be missed when it’s lost or gone.

And so the eUSA I’d like to be a part of is different than the eUSA of today. I’d like to see us forge some lasting friendships with a couple of the bigger players on the international scene. This would mean that we’d have to surrender a little bit of our self-determination in FA - a sacred cow if there ever was one - but it would enable us to better participate in the game outside of eUSA.

Meh.

BM😨 So then what advice could you give to a newb like myself and possibly others reading?
G: This desperately needs an update, but it’s still worth reading.

BM😨 Not meaning to sound confrontational, but most the information given to me seems half-hearted or out-of-date. Do you think the eUSA is doing enough to attract and retain new players/new citizens?
G: The link I sent you was actually an updated version from the same series I had published a year prior to that. As I said, it needs to be updated again (probably yearly). And sometimes eUSA is doing a good job of attracting and retaining new players, sometimes it is not. Even when we are doing a good job of it, still there is more we could do. I think the problem is that there is a diminishing number of people who genuinely think that the game is WORTH attracting and retaining people into. For this reason we should appoint someone like Franklin Stone as the permanent eUSA Retention Director. Nobody cares about the continuing success of this game and community than he does.

BM😨 Any last words?
G: CURRAHEE

BM😨 And most importantly...tits or ass?
G: If those are my only choices, tits.