Day 6

Day 6 of La in Florida:

• Another long day at work. Helped Mike with a few things, struggled with the KF beta interface, poked around in our DNS and email servers looking for clues to resolve an earlier problem.
• Polished off Chesterland Adventure: Removed the redundant code, fixed some cosmetic issues, altered the tileset, made an icon, tweaked the build settings.
• Came home to some ravioli prepared by a super housemate who was already asleep.
• Gathered together all the materials for an evening of letter-writing at the Saturn, then got distracted organizing things in the living room. Perhaps I'll do them tomorrow.
• Made my own poor imitation of a La Burger. The cat climbed up my sweater and perched on my shoulder the whole time I prepared and ate it.
• Didn't feel tired, so I played four more Warcraft FFA games - won half of them! - and organized my music.

Day 7

Day 7 of La in Florida:

• Made a bunch of phone calls enroute to work - hooray for catching up on business!

• The port of Chesterland Adventure - such as it is - is "finished". Click on the picture to download your OS X version:

  

  Don't forget to reveal the "easter egg" by holding down CTRL and typing E-G-G.

• Went to the falafel place
• Organized more music at home
• Hammered away at the contract work
• Listened to a radio dramatization of Asimov's "Caves of Steel"

• Then closed the day with four games of Warcraft III. The first three I lost narrowly, due to the FFA luck factor: Bad map placement, double-teamed at bad times, etc. The third game I was up against three Human players.

  After attacking each one in rotation and destroying their expansions, all three declared over the chat console that I was Public Enemy #1, and cooperated in an attempt to destroy me. I spent most of an hour fighting them off, and pulled every trick I knew: Teleporting off-center onto my Trees of Life (to land right on top of the enemy), pinging far-flung expansions with single units (distraction), entangling enemy heros (to assassinate them and/or interrupt spells), micromanaging my Giants (to draw enemy fire and create chokepoints) and my Bears (to widely distribute the "Roar" powerup), adapting my army, splitting my army, leveraging anti-magic potions, walking Trees of Life across the map, and even telling distracting lies over the chat console like "Well, you got me. I'm out of gold." and "I'm hiding up here in the corner where it's safe. Leave me alone!"

  When it was all over, and I had wiped all three players off the map with a secretly built Chimaera fleet, my three "level 10" heroes had brought down enemy heroes 23 times, and destroyed over 400 enemy units. That's rather a lot, especially considering that the closest competitor had destroyed a "mere" 63 units.

  Yes, I suppose I'm bragging, and to look at the big picture this is just a silly online game that means very little ... but still, I've made it part of the day, so I'm documenting it. I've been waiting for the point when I stop learning new tricks, because when there's nothing more to learn my addiction will vanish. But even today, while watching the replay (at 8x speed), I discovered a few things that I could have done better.

  The most obvious one was, I should have walked in and destroyed two of the three players when I had the opportunity to, instead of backing out and letting them live so they could unite against me later on. Wading into an enemy base is always a great risk, because if you or he is being spied on, a third player will jump at the opportunity to strike you at home. Even if there's no spy, the player being attacked will often say something over the chat log like "Oops, I'm done for", and the other two players will instantly go looking for the guy that made the hit. And even if the victim makes no announcement whatsoever ... the second he drops out of the game, the remaining two players (who typically have been fighting each other) will realize that you are a greater threat, and descend upon you and your conflict-weakened army. So there's a fine tactical advantage to the practice of smacking an enemy silly, but leaving him with a glimmer of hope: He keeps his mouth shut.

  Anyway, I digress.