So there's a Dilbert comic which features the titular character coming back from an exercise run and feeling miserable about it. The punch line for the strip is "The key to finding joy in your work is having a hobby that's even worse." Today I was working on the update at my job because we were very slow, and suddenly I was given a mountain of new paperwork for data entry, and I was happy because it meant that I didn't have to work on the update anymore.
I had a really lousy weekend, which has helped put things into perspective for me. I'm gainfully and fully employed now at a job that isn't going anywhere, and my wife is too. With full employment has apparently come a larger amount of social commitment. I stopped working on updates at home in June, having plenty of free time at work, but this is simply not going to be enough anymore. If I were to do this update, and do it at the quickest pace without ignoring my social and work commitments, the ETA would be sometime in late December. Fact is, I can't moderate a large globe-spanning NES anymore. It requires too much research, writing, and commitment that I just can't offer. At best, we could hobble along for another 2-3 updates, and I'd be making this post next January or February anyways. Fun fact: For every 4 updates I've written for this NES, I could have submitted a novel for Novel Writing November contest or whatever it's called. I average 15,000 words per update, and that's not including the massive amount of notes, outlines, and other supporting documents.
Now here's the nasty part of this post. On top of all of this writing I do (for free and at the expense of doing other stuff I could be doing), I get maybe a half dozen "great update" posts. I am human, so I run on kudos as much as the next man, but mostly all I get are complaints. More often than not these are justified complaints, and I try to respond fairly and even-handedly. Hell, I get complaints from people who aren't even in the NES. Frankly, I've noticed an environment of elitism and narrow-mindedness from a large portion of the NES player base (I mean, come on, IOTs are pretty much the same thing as NESes, we should have combined our player bases). This attitude has seeped into quite a bit of the responses and PMs I get, and I'm just tired of that pettiness. In addition to all of the writing work I have to do, it seems more and more that I have to deal with bloody high school-esque drama that seeps into these forums: "Oh, let's see, _______ wants to join the NES, but he doesn't like ________, what nation could I recommend?" Now before you take offense, I want to point out that some of you have been a genuine pleasure to deal with and I'd like to expressly point out the following: Jehoshua, theDright, TheMeanestGuest, spryllino, J.K. Stockholme, and Justo. I've disagreed with some of them on occasion, but for the most part, they have all been polite, clear, objective, and consistent in their diplomacy and actions as NESers. If I gave awards, they'd get them.
Now by all that, you're probably assuming that I'm quitting NESing, or full of crap, whichever is fine to me. I'm not either though. As I stated above, I just don't have time to do a globe-spanning NES. It takes too much research, background construction, etc. I do plan to start a smaller NES in the nearish future, however, focusing on a much more limited scale. I figure a rehash of one of the old tried-but-true rulesets for a miniNES is the way to go from here on out. For all of its flaws and the dislike I have for some of it, NESing is still going to be part of my life, no matter how busy I get IRL. Even if it means I'm solely limited to running small board game NESes. So I'm still going to be here, ideally both playing in and moderating NESes, but the fact is that despite my hopes and desires, I just can't do Capto Iugulum. It's a temporal and mental impossibility.
As for unfinished business, there is quite a bit. I've already expressed my apologies to TLJ, who only now is seeing fruition of a IRL year of work and planning. I have no intent on writing an epilogue, as things may not be finished in the long term. Nor was that really the intent of the NES. People have accused me of having a preset notion of where things should be headed. This is lies and calamity. I have let every player and nation choose what path they were on. The reason this perception has come to being is because I have always advised players on what their people would think. An NES is a story, and stories frequently come with a point. The point I've been trying to make with this NES is that the world is not a place where you can do whatever you want without careful planning and consequences for every action. Thusly, I have operated my NES on the ideas of geopolitics, best exemplified by the following quote from George Friedman:
Geopolitics and economics both assume that the players are rational, at least in the sense of knowing their own short-term self-interest. As rational actors, reality provides them with limited choices. It is assumed that, on the whole, people and nations will pursue their self-interest, if not flawlessly, then at least not randomly. Think of a chess game. On the surface, it appears that each player has twenty potential opening moves. In fact, there are many fewer because most of these moves are so bad that they can quickly lead to defeat. The better you are at chess, the more clearly you see your options, and the fewer moves there are actually available. The better the player, the more predictable the moves.
TL; DR Summary: Screw you, read the goddamn post.
