More Hardcore Blogging Action

A colleague at work started a blog that he said I'm allowed to link to, and it has a really nice design. I'm seriously considering learning php and getting a webspace that supports it. In the meantime, go look at Paul's blog here, and post comments on anything that interest you. I'm sure he'd appreciate them. Adrian, Jason, CK, none of your tomfoolery here. Well, maybe a little bit.

On a related note, I've activated comments on this blog, so your insults and criticisms can be more specific than ever before! Just click on the comments link at the bottom of an entry. You have to be a blogger member to post as anything other than 'anonymous'. If, however, you believe that Blogger sign-ups are nothing more than a CIA ploy to build a case against you, nothing's stopping you from saying who you are in the post.

War. Uh. Whatever Is It Good For. Saturday Night LAN Parties.

Paul also happens to be leaving for Memphis next week, where his wife Amanda is going to be in school for the next three years. We had sort of a final LAN party at their house last night. Starcraft was the game of choice. We played a quickie map Paul had made for the occasion so we all could be in on the action, vs the computer. It was a little too easy for my liking, but what the hey. After that, we watched Monty Python's Holy Grail with Shakespearean subtitles on, which added a whole new dimension to the movie. Finally Travis, Marvin, and I decided to put in one more melee game.

In order of skill, everyone at the party last night would probably agree that I and Marvin were roughly equal, and Travis was the least proficient Starcraft player. My philosphy, however, has always been that in multiplayer melee, as long as there's more than two players, all bets are off. You skills may be helpful, but ultimately they will amount to the same general significance associated with *squat* if everyone else in the game decides to screw up your plans at every turn. However, that's not exactly what happened last night. What happened was a little more bizarre.

For my part, the mistake I made was to underestimate the tenacity of my opponents. Early in the game, I hit Marvin hard, decimated one base, and then left it just so the game wouldn't be *too* short, and then went to work on Travis. Well, the moment I attack Travis, Marvin comes in with a load of crap from a secondary base I knew nothing about. I fend him off, spend a good while hunting him all over the map, and when I'm satisfied that I've crippled him too much to ever be a threat again, I go back to work on Travis. The problem is, Travis during this time has built up a force of carriers too large to be taken down easily, and so I take some losses, run home to lick my wounds, and along the way realise that Marvin is still in the game, with a nice shiny new base and a couple of expansions. I'm just numb with shock at this point, and from there it all goes downhill. My desire to build anymore units ebbs until I find myself eventually just staring at the screen for long stretches without doing anything. The map we're playing on has near-infinite resources, by the way, and so it was looking to be a long, long, game of attrition.

My will having been utterly broken, I threw in the towel and surrendered. Now initally I thought at this point that it was Marvin's game, but as we watched him run headlong over and over into Travis's wall of 24 carriers (cloaked by two arbiters), I realized that Marvin was suffering from pretty much the same problem I had: his brain was fried. He kept attempting to take on Travis's force with less carriers, which obviously wasn't going to work, especially since Travis's were cloaked to begin with. So about an hour later, Marvin surrenders, and Travis wins.

Travis tried to be nice after that, saying stuff like "Well, if you guys had attacked me earlier, I would've lost". Now could'ves and should'ves are fine and all, except

a)We didn't attack Travis earlier, and
b)We lost

I don't like it when losers bring up a bunch of hypothetical scenarios to explain why they should've won, and while it's a little more tolerable for the winner to say stuff like that, it's not alright for him or anyone else to tell themselves "Oh, he didn't *really* win". It's melee. Travis won. This is why melee is a great mode. You can't say. You just can't say.