2001-09-03 - 11:51 p.m.

Planetarion: The Big Stab

Round 4 of Planetarion is almost over. In fact it really "ended" three weeks ago, but still the game is working. Still people are attacking and defending, etc. We've had three massive "Havoc" donations, but they've mainly used to make huge top 100 planets. Fine, whatever.

I feel like a weary traveler, with the end of the road in sight. In just a couple days the game will freeze, and a few days after that the next round will begin.

I'm still Galactic Commander of my fractured galaxy, something that some people are obviously not too thrilled about. However, my goal was to peacefully lead the galaxy until Planetarion stopped in a couple days.

However, more than once I had to bite my tongue and swallow my pride. Several of my galaxy-mates, mainly the ones in Sharon's camp just couldn't resist insulting me, or the people in my camp: Cocky, Britannia and Lily.

What was so hard about it was the fact that they were just so damn DUMB. It was so hard to stop myself from replying to their jibes because they were such great straight lines. They seemed to have no idea how very stupid they sounded. And this was not a jovial, jocular stupidity either. It was crudely vicious.

The most stupid of the lot was Kru. I remember being astonished to learn that he was, in fact, 21 years old. I really thought he was 13 or 14! He was that dumb!

The stupidity started early. Very early on in the round, Kru joined an alliance that was opposed to the majority of his galaxy mates, including myself. I remember one seemingly endless conversation with him where I vainly tried to explain to this blockhead that it was okay for him to be part of this alliance, but he just had to be QUIET about it. But no, he seemed to feel that he had some sort of God-given right to rub it in our faces.

This boy did not know the meaning of the word discretion. And it was obviously that this wasn't the only word he didn't know the meaning of.

A few days ago, he and I had a little duel on IRC. A couple of the village idiots were kicking each other from the channel, and I told them to cut it out. So Kru the joker, decides to kick ME from the channel.

I have very few ironclad rules, and one of them is: you do not kick the GC from the galaxy channel. I came back in the channel, very angry, and I banned Kru, then I kicked him.

I kept him out for a while, and then he got around me, and got back in the channel and kickbanned me.

Ordinarily what I would do is I'd ask the resident IRC expert (Lily) to come in on my side and decide things in my favor. However I was able to appeal to the galaxymate who actually owned the channel, and he put Kru on the outside permanently and he let me back in. The then gave me a level of power in the channel that would allow me to discipline him if he got out of hand in the future.

I told Kru, in no uncertain terms, that if he wanted to duel with me he would lose. He was constantly trying to excuse his mean-spirited aggression by saying that it was "a joke" and that anyone who got upset by his pranks had no sense of humor. That was crap, because Kru really had no sense of humor himself, and was very thin-skinned about jokes made at his own expense.

In Planetarion everyone has a "homepage" where the vital information on their planet can be found. There's also a space for the Galactic Commander to post a couple lines like "Look out for attacks tonight" or something like that. When nothing vital was going on I usually put up a funny or ironic quote. A couple days before I'd put up a quote by the Duc de La Rochefoucauld: "We all have the strength to endure the misfortunes of others."

I came home from my outing with Tully, and found that Kru had posted on the galaxy bulletin board: "What greater misfortune could their be than having Uberhamster as a Galaxy commander??"

Sigh. Not only was this joke not funny, but it showed that Kru really didn't understand the real meaning of the quote.

So, I said "fuck it!" He wants funny, I can do funny. So I decided to give him a Limerick or two:

There was a young boy named Kru,

Who didn't know how to screw,

Then he joined VeX,

But still got no sex,

Because he smelled like doggie-doo.

VeX, by the way, is Kru's PA alliance. The other Limerick dealt with some more technical PA stuff, and I can't repeat it because I am using some pseudonyms here and I used someone's real name to make a rhyme. So it goes!

I thought this was a lot funnier than Kru's little jibe, and everyone else did too. Kru also said that he thought the Limericks were funny, but I could tell he was seething behind a thin veneer of sociability. So I decided to prod him a little more, and sure enough he started to spew insults at me. He was definitely not amused. Mister Prankster can't take a joke!

So, I spent the next couple hours verbally bitchslapping Kru. I made him look very stupid, and very lame. I didn't even have to break a sweat. He kept giving me these great straight lines, and I kept smashing them back at him like the feeble, wobbling tennis serves that they were.

In retrospect, I probably should have been gentler on the poor sap. The reason why this battle of wits was so easy for me is that I'm 42 and fairly smart and he is 21 and really dumb. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. It was nothing to be terribly proud of.

And like any guilty pleasure, I indulged in it too long. Next thing I knew, it was two in the morning. Kru's responses were coming slower and slower, so I just signed off and went to bed.

Lily was just starting her college classes, so she got up a couple hours later than usual. When she checked her planet in Planetarion she discovered that she was being attacked, and that I had a massive pile of incoming. In fact, most of my supporters were being attacked. And leading the charge, Kru himself. He had stabbed his galaxy-mates in the back.

Worse yet, the attack had been underway for about two hours when Lily discovered it. There was no way to get defense for everyone in time.

She shook me awake, and I started trying to get defense from Fury. The defense I got from Fury was impressive, but it was going to be mainly late. Kru and friends were going to get asteroids from me for two ticks. Damn, damn, damn.

Kru posted a shrill, insane-sounding entry on the galaxy boards, saying how he'd been planning this attack for weeks and that he purposely kept me talking until late in the night so he could get the drop on me. Well, he definitely got the drop on me, but it was pure dumb luck: if Lily had been on her old work schedule, she would have caught the attack when it started. A little later he deleted that post and tried to make noises like his alliance MADE him attack us. What a wanker.

Everyone got covered, but my defense was later. I got hit for two ticks and lost asteroids for the first time this round. However, any ships that were there for the third tick got vaporized.

However, the fact that Kru could give the attackers inside galaxy information is what made the attack hard to defend against. He could tell his allies that most of my defense was late.

However, before the attackers had left my planet, I had arranged a counterattack on Kru. I was trying to get a counterattack on the people that helped Kru out, but they were technically Fury allies, and nobody was really motivated to do any attacking with only a couple days left in the round. However, one of the Fury officers was able to negotiate our galaxy as a demilitarized zone: Kru's allies couldn't attack or defend there, but neither could Fury.

This was exactly what I wanted: I knew that in-galaxy Kru and his allies were vastly outnumbered. As soon as Kru's out of galaxy defenders left, waves of in-galaxy attackers started to hit his planet. He had no way to defend - even another idiotic chaos donation couldn't help him.

He then took the coward's way out: he put his planet on vacation. Vacation mode freezes a planet: it can't grow, but it can't be attacked. This meant that his planet was untouchable until the round ends. Oh well. I hit him a lot harder than he hit me.

All in all, it was a stupid way to end what was already an unpleasant round. It also means that may new galaxy-mates and I are probably going to have to watch out for Kru and his dumbass friends next round, too. That's okay - I'm looking forward to it.

Countdown: 8 days behind