I’m a little surprised so far at how few questions are coming our way so far in this election. It’s relatively quiet for what ought to be the most active part of Election Season. There are at least two possibilities that I could see to explain why:

1. I have perfectly captured the zeitgeist. Everything I am saying is completely and totally agreeable; a clear and a perfect representation of the club’s will to proceed forward into the future. Nobody has any questions because there is no need to ask them. It is only a matter of time before our collective consciousness manifests fully, and we use that to eventually conquer the Earth, and then the universe.

2. This is all just boring.

I’m thinking it’s probably closer to the second one. Plus, everyone who has been talking about anything, has been talking about weighty topics. So, why don’t we lighten things up slightly?

My single favorite post (not my favorite thread… I would have to think on that one a bit) is an attempted psych evaluation. As in, the standard boarding psych evaluations people do when they start a new character on a ship.

In the summer of 2012, both Harry Shires and I were on Challenger; he was the CNS, and I was the ship’s new XO, and we kept trying to do the evaluation thread, except we were both busy that summer at different times. So stuff would happen like this, where we’d be posting, but it was going to take a while for the other person to reply, so we just made it an in character joke that they didn’t actually meet that time. Of course, the one thing that’s better than a single gag is a running gag, so when we tried to start the eval again, and a cadet crashed the thread, Harry naturally decided to just ignore my character, and such the gag kept going for a couple more months.

Eventually, Harry decided to leave as the Challenger CNS; I don’t remember why, but I remember he had anticipated it and it was a planned exit. He decided that he wanted his final post to be our little psych eval that we’d both been dodging for months. He also decided that he never wanted to play that character again, so he wanted it killed off and he wanted me to do that, though we didn’t actually plan anything out in advance as to how that would happen. He left it totally up to me on how to end that exchange.

This is how it ended up playing out.

I love this post for several reasons:

1. It’s something I would never write on my own. The unique value of online play by post roleplaying is that it’s a collaborative form of writing, and in collaborating, you end up writing together things you otherwise would never write individually.
2. It builds upon stuff that was previously established. Not just the running gag about how Jurvo kept missing the appointment, but also Tolar’s bonsai tree; Harry would mention it in pretty much every thread that took place in the counselor’s office. Other readers found it particularly hilarious that Tolar’s tree also met its fate in much the same way as Tolar.
3. Lethal melee combat is something we don’t get too many opportunities to do, and it was fun to just try it.
4. It was fun to end some character’s story in the way they wanted it ended. It’s actually a pretty high expectation to do that, to give someone a big sendoff. I’m glad I was able to live up to that expectation.
5. A whole side-sim got spun off from this, from the mystery of why on earth Tolar thought Jurvo murdered his family. We actually ended up getting in some trouble because Harry wanted to come back as an Gallamite Ambassador to figure the whole thing, but the Academy Commandant thought this was a confusing distraction for the cadets and kinda told us to stop. She was completely right, but we still had a blast with it.

The reason I spend so much time focused on all this boring stuff with keeping the club running normally, is so that the magic stuff like this post here can happen. If we can’t expect other people to be here consistently, because there’s no accountability and as a result people don’t do what’s expected of them by other members, then posts like this don’t happen, because the posts that lay all of the groundwork for these sorts of magic posts just don’t get written. If Tyra (the Challenger CO at the time) told Harry and I “Hey, I know you guys are having trouble getting that thread going, just don’t worry about it” then we wouldn’t have had the first joke that started all of this.

So you’ll forgive me if I seem pre-occupied with boring things; those boring things are the foundation for everything that is not boring. I want to make sure I leave that foundation stronger than it is now.

Joe