Breakdowns

Six months sans seamen.

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Harbor Assault – Year II In Review

And the game we play has survived another year.

We’re in a typically weak part of the calendar, after a long and exhausting holiday event schedule and the natural rush following the release of new content.  This is one of the three times of the year where the grind really is a grind, and motivation must be drawn from a wider array.

Crap Is King

At 12:29:05 Server Time on November 29, 2014, I observed the NavyField login server as down. This was thirty-one minutes prior to a scheduled Harbor Assault between Russian Alliance (attacking) and Flota Gallega (defending). I cannot expect anybody to know anything about login issues earlier than that, but I have great confidence in knowing that many people would have begun noticing in the following minutes. Upon being unable to login, whether they had been in-game in the previous hour or whether they were just showing up for the day, fleet members would quickly become aware that new connections to the NF server would not be possible. The server itself remained up.

Once the HA start time had passed, reports came to me that Russian Alliance had numbers beyond the ability to fill one room, and that in logged accounts, Flota Gallega was severely handicapped. No information about the physical progress of the Harbor Assault was given to me. I was not on the server, and making decreasingly frequent attempts to get back on.

It was 13:51 when I, back on Enterprise, saw the game clock and the London HA tiles. This was within no more than two minutes of the word coming to me that the server login issues had been resolved. What I saw at London was twenty-four tiles taken by Russian Alliance, the harbor itself still belonging to Flota Gallega, and no battle setting nor in progress on FG’s lone tile. I beat you all to it when I said verbally, “RA can do that to FG, but RA didn’t legitimately do that to FG.”

Showtime

No mergers?

No transfers?

No problem.

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

In eleventh grade English class, semester one, individuals in my class were given the assignment to write some type of paper; whether it was to be expository, persuasive, or whatever else I do not recall.  For the topic of my essay, I chose my experiences from eighth grade, and the shortened title of it became “The Jim-Bob Show.”

This writing was the origin of many firsts for me.  It’s the first thing I can remember writing in my new style that I knew would not become long and lost, unlike my hilarious commentary on Buddhism from the year before (it was lost or destroyed by my history teacher and I retained no original).  It was the first paper I knew would cause my teacher some angst because I did not follow every portion of the required format.  And it was the first of my writings that I deliberately composed to a soundtrack, and in this case, it was the first time I had heard the work.

The Jim-Bob Show recounted my life across my last grade-school year and how two characters dominated the scene.  Bob was my teacher, a rookie educator who had replaced the 7th-8th grade teacher from the year before, Mr. A.  Everybody liked Mr. A, but he took a job elsewhere and a replacement was needed.  Bob was fresh out of the US Navy, where he had spent possibly two decades as an airman.  Larger thorns in the balls are hard to find.  My English composition condensed many stories about his methods and demeanor.

Going along with my teacher Bob was the new principal, Jim.  Although not in his presence every day, I was able to recall a great many things where he hovered about.  On top of that, my father, who was the head teacher at this school, leaked a lot of information to me about many shady and illegal things that were happening at this small public school.

Tuesday was taco night at one of the eateries in town and my father often would take me to dinner; we’d go with another teacher from school and his daughter KM, who was two years younger than I.  All the things I thought I knew about the illegalities in the leadership of this school were confirmed at these dinners.  This teacher, his wife, and their daughters are still family friends.

Jim was the replacement for Dr. E, a great lady whose care for children and their education was clear to me even as a pre-teen.  She, as principal, carried the school through a lot of turnover into an era of great expansion and improvement.

Her daughter was KE, who was a grade ahead of me in my brother’s class.  KE was a very athletic girl, but I don’t remember her excelling in any sport in particular.  This contrasts with AB, who, though a couple grades older, was a heck of a basketball player.  I played on the 7-8th grade boys’ basketball team as a 6th grader and was the leading scorer, even topping the lone eighth grader, TC.  The girls’ season followed, and AB told me at the beginning of that season that her goal was to top my 84 points in six games.  She did, even cracking a hundred.

Dr. E lived out at CP on the water, and as principal, threw parties for the teachers and their families at the beginnings and ends of the school years.  They were an absolute blast, for there were plenty of children to enjoy all the outdoors we wanted, and we mostly all got along.  At one of these parties Erin and Dan took their famed long walk off a short pier, and a number of fables were begun.  At another such party, KE’s older brother TE was back from WSU with a college friend and we were playing some basketball.  The friend was Graham, though he became more famous under the name Goro (as from Mortal Kombat) for his shot blocking ability.  This is not the same Graham who I worked with last year who went by the nickname Big Dick.

Our time spent at CP, or even more specifically, at HP as our home base, forces a lot of good memories to the front, even though I was able to go back and, in writing, inform my junior English teacher, VJ, of all the awful things that concluded my time at BS.

VJ rejected my recollections as fantasy, which really pissed me off.  I was there.  I saw a lot and was told of things I did not see.  Jim and Bob wrecked my interest in school for three years (only when visited by my father at a conference did VJ concede).  There, at the start of my junior year, able and willing to talk about all the crap, she denied everything.  I’m not all for socio-psycho-analyzing too much, but this ended up shutting me down again for the next couple years.  Accepted to university, for this and at least three other even better reasons, I bailed after four months.  Came home, got married, had two kids.

I advertised The Jim-Bob Show as the abridged version, and here I look at it right now, from Thursday, September 16, 1999; it tells the entire shortened story, gives name to a dozen witnesses (CM, SH, CW, RB, BR, J and I cannot remember his last name but he won the high jump on field day that year, SS, ND, JW, JR, WH, and myself), and mentions possibility of an addendum in the right time.  It took a lot out of me and it’s not easy to recount all that shit even today.  It closes with a quote from Apocalypse Now:  “The horror.  The horror.”

Consigned to Flames of Woe

There is no way that this is going to be nearly as well-structured a post as I typically make the effort to provide.  It’s just going to be all over the place, and you can thank one guy in particular for effectively forcing me to reply to far too much of his bullshit.  I’m going to write this straight down the 35 replies to Walter E. Kurtz’s Horror and then when I’m done I may or may not shift some paragraphs about to make it more linear.  Just go with it.

Walter E. Kurtz’s Horror

The second half of last week saw me very ill and therefore unable to put the first portion of this together before now. I do not often reply to comments here, but, on occasion, it feels like the right thing to do. And away we go.