cybernations has eaten my soul
i am exhausted.
i am sick of invisionfree bulletin boards.
i am so over this job.
i am exhilerated by all that i have accomplished.
for the sane ones amoung you who have NO CLUE what i am talking about, my husband, a bunch of our friends, and i all play an online browser-based game called cybernations. the basic premise is that, by choosing from a bunch of options and using a little of that imagination thing you used to use when you were a kid, you create, name, rule, and maintain your own fictious nation. anyone hwo knows us knows how RIGHT UP OUR ALLEY that kind of game is. so, seven months ago, jim, a handful of our friends, my brother, and i all created our own alliance within this game. it's one of probably about 200 alliances, but it's one of only three major ones on the color-team we have chosen: purple, the most populous, powerful, and well-known team in the game. so while we are small and only one of many, we have friends in high places. we also could potentially have a lot of enemies. but that's beside the point.
the point is that within our alliance, i was appointed to be the minister of foreign affairs. that was a real cushy job at the beginning, cuz we only had two embassies of our own, and only hosted about three. keeping track of embassies and ambassadors was easy. now, however, we have made our public debut and are now a publicly known and recognized figure, and people want to make nice with us and trade embassies and sign treaties and such. over course of the last few days, we have gone from hosting eight embassies- to hosting TWENTY-ONE. that meant i had to create 13 new embassies within our forums, register myself on 18 other alliances' forums (since i was still only registered with three of them), had to setup my profile and signature on 18 forums, request and set up our own embassy at 14 of those forums, post our standard threads at 18 forums (cuz several of our ambassadors have gotten lazy), update our standard status report, then go back and update the status reports i had just given to 14 embassies before all the changes were made.
as if all this wasn't enough, as i was going in and making the new embassies on our forums, i found that jim had been sloppy, messy, and lazy with the creating and maintaing the information on the embassies we already had set in place, so i got to go adit and correct every one of them, individually, and manually. then i found myself having to create new usergroups to differentiate between our regular members, our council members, our founding members, visiting ambassadors, and other guests, plus create, from scratch, little icons to attach to each one- and then discovered that none of our 50 members had been properly sorted into the user groups we had in the first place. so i had to go to each member, individually, and place them in the right group. their member titles were ununiformed and hard to understand, so i had to go through all those too, finding out which peope were from which alliances and which of them held official positions in that alliance in addition to being our ambassador.
meanwhile i am having to stop what i'm doing regularly to go to each of those 21 forums to check to see if i've been properly masked as a diplomat yet, if our embassy has been created, if people have asked any questions or replied to any of my postings, etc etc etc- plus go to the alliances who have not yet sent us ambassadors and poke them to do so
and all of this while monitering our public forum on the MAIN cybernations forums, answering questions there, and maintaining a constant presence on nine different cybernations channels on the internet relay chat server, trying to make nice with everyone i come across and generate a good public image for our alliance.
long story cut a bit shorter, i sat in this chair for eighteen straight hours, from 8pm monday night until 2pm yesterday afternoon. and i've been in it since about one this morning. all of it spent doing alliance work.
I HATE THIS GAME!!!!!!
that said, i am amazed aby and quite proud of all that i have done, and the response we are getting as an alliance, and *I* am getting as an individual character is astonishing. i have gotten so many compliments from the members and officials of other alliances, many of whom i am familiar with the reputation of in-game, and it is quite awe-inspiring. it's kinda like- imagine you worked for a huge corporation, and you were just a quiet, hard-working little peon who did your work quickly and well and kept humbly to yourself. and one day, one of the big CEO's of the company walked by you, stopped, turned to you, and said "hey, (your name here), you're doing a great job. i'm impressed by your work. keep it up. and hey, let's do lunch." it's that same kind of "holy crap, that awesome person knows who i am and complimented me on my meager accomplishment!!!"
i am so drained. i am so sick of staring at this screen, of thinkig in CN terms, of talking diplomatese- and i am so pumped by what i've done, and excited for the future of our humble little merry band.