Where Do I Start, Where Do I Begin?

Part One of Three.

The Flag of The Polity of Star City

Since I last wrote about NationStates four years ago, I've noticed that the governments of many regions ceased to function and slid into informal gerontocracy as the numbers of residents declined. Well, as I write this on January 30th, my nation Star City is just over seven years old. When this is published my home region The Proletariat Coalition will also be seven years old - though the exact date in March is long-forgotten, it was contemporary with the invasion of Iraq; as such I tend to set the anniversary on the 20th. To mark this, I'm republishing my memoirs from five years ago. You can read the currently outdated history of TPC at NSwiki.

CHAPTERS 1-3 Originally Written and Published March-April 2005

Without doubt, Sealand sparked my interest in micro-nations. What sparked my interest in NS was the ability to customise and run your own state in a non-roleplaying environment. The regions were originally supposed to function as geographical territories to be fought over. The later user-created regions could be looked upon as multi-player nations (on which Gamia wrote an essay).

I happened to randomly come across NS in a Google search and then spent about 5 days trying to create a nation, when the server traffic finally eased and allowed me to create Star City on January 3rd 2003 - a 2002 date would have given me such an air of seniority. I spent a very brief amount of time in the South Pacific and I don't remember much about the world situation at the time. I then founded a region with a long-winded Spanish name that I forget, and hung around with a friend there. After my friend's deletion and having answered every issue four times over, I received a telegram from Haderan in late March 2003 - an invitation to a new region.

I'd love to be able to continue from where Haderan's original memoirs finish - the foundation of The Proletariat Coalition (TPC) - but, again, I can't remember much. I tried the Wayback Machine, but had no luck. Haderan was attempting to set up a regional government during April - I think he felt that he would, as he did, have to leave NS and required a way for the region to run itself without his guidance. Thus, the ministries were born. I always like to recall that Minister of Economics was originally a post, until I pointed out that it was irrelevant given the game mechanics. Having applied for Economics minister and destroyed it as my first act, I then applied for Foreign Relations Minister. Being unopposed, what with this being a wholly-new government, I immediately took up the position that I would stand-down from 1 year and 5 months later.

Contrary to the nostalgic view people have of the pioneering days of early-TPC, it was really quite boring. In fact, I resigned as FoRM at one point in July 2003 - I don't think anyone really took it seriously. Either that or it was knocked off the regional message board. I retracted that a few hours later, but I still felt government was too easy. Haderan was quite a laid back delegate. In contrast, Blackbird was demanding - and it produced results when the region reached its highest points during his 2004 delegacy.

I may well have been abroad at this point, but the July delegate election was held after Haderan's rapid departure. This was back in the olden-days when we arranged these things by who had the most endorsements. So without even knowing I was a candidate, I managed to rank third with 10 endorsements. Come to think of it, I don't think we even reset the endorsements to zero before the election. Regardless, Cwajga won. I can't remember what happened to Cwajga because my computer's IBM Deskstar drive died in the summer heat (the product IBM denies has a problem). In spite, I decided not to use the computer ever again... which lasted 21 days until I remembered my nation was nearing deletion.

When I came back in mid-September after playing the World Rally Championship 2 demo to death, I received a telegram from the new delegate - Jako. Until January when the dickheads at NTL cut my dial-up access, I still had that telegram some 400+ days after receiving it, whereupon some recruiter spam knocked it out of my inbox. Jako was glad that someone with experience was around and still in government after Haderan's departure and two short-lived delegates in the intervening month (Cwajga and PileAlcalin). Unfortunately I missed out on a great new region called The Lefts Nirvana. Apparently they'd been causing quite a stir by doing blitzkrieg invasions on Nazi and fascist regions. By the time I got there with my main puppet, Caiusdom and another prominent nation I can't recall were creeping toward deletion through inactivity. If I remember correctly, Caius got caught up with university. A while later TLN and The USSR (not the similarly named region founded by RedCommunist) amalgamated as Soviet Lefts Nirvana which worked for a few weeks at best. I tried to revive TLN a few times with the experience I gained from TPC, most notably on April 1st 2004 (poor choice of date) when I managed to get 5 nations to join with an all-night recruitment session. Pay attention to the fact that with Caius' demise, the idea and the region died aswell - at least in "physical" NS form. My incarnation of TLN was abandoned about two weeks later.

This is when things picked-up at the Foreign Ministry. NS was possibly at its population peak by this time and regions were flourishing everywhere or I had just never noticed them. I created lots of puppets to get with the action everywhere. In hindsight, that hasn't really worked since I now only check all my puppets every Friday.

I'm sure I had been to Cuba before, but the first image of the region that comes to mind is 3 nations of total inactivity heading towards deletion. This was also, unsurprisingly, when some invaders decided to grief it. I formed some sort of attachment to the region and to all intents, I was a dual-citizen of TPC and Cuba.
I don't particularly know how Sanbern recruited so many nations, but after a mod refounding there were 20-odd nations there. The GRD came to prominence with Gamia at the helm and thanks to their defence, Sanbern had the stability to try and form a government.

I declared in June, at least to myself, that June-September 2004 would be my last term in Foreign Affairs, I had time on holiday to give serious thought to the idea of becoming delegate. Having been a minister for so long, seeing Blackbird and Jako - who in terms of activity in early TPC, were younger than me - serve as delegates, and Haderan's return in June 2004, prompted me to go for the delegacy in December 2004. After two weeks away from NS, I felt revitalised. The backlog of work probably got rid of that feeling it was all to easy. Then deputy, Soviet Sexy Girls, was handling things nicely, and it was time to let go of my "child" - the ministry, not SSG. The greater challenge of the delegacy finally awaited. As is traditional, I created an election thread six weeks before the actual election (September-December '04 term). I've mentioned before that this was when I changed my mind about when to run for delegate. At first I wanted to build up some policies and a decent manifesto by observing the government from outside in the lead up to December.

What I haven't made clear before now was that this occurred in the wake of Haderan's (and, less so, PileAlcalin's) return. Haderan, as regional founder, commanded a lot of support and reverence. However, 'the clique' was unsure. He was a potential "threat": He had been out the region for a long time and was out of step with the internal and external situations. He had the potential to run a successful campaign and potentially undo some of the past 18 month's progress (either structurally or interregionally). Particularly, the region may have receded into isolationism - which was one of the concerns I felt was understandable. A Granita deal was done: I would run if Haderan ran but Blackbird didn't; if BB ran alone, I would contest. So I declared my candidacy early on 28/07/04 (for election week 07/09/04).

I had chosen December because I expected Blackbird to do the same as Jako and stand down after 2 terms. However, Blackbird went for a record third term and I felt the region need a change of delegate. My results in the September 2004 Delegacy Election far exceeded my expectations and the turnout was better than ever thanks to The Red Factions' efforts to energise the electorate. Though I was not elected (BB 55%, SC 40% and Hypercube 5%), my proposal for the addition of a new ministry was taken to heart. At the time of writing, the Ministry of Justice is nearing implementation and I hope it will be in place very soon.

CHAPTER 4 Originally Written and Published April 2006

The Flag of Isla Pena

My time in Cuba goes back to around early 2004. It was around then that the region was griefed and only had 3 nations - which came first is difficult to remember 2 years later. I was placing my puppet Dotjxraomm in various regions of interest and happened upon Cuba. Not an an awful lot happened until Sanbern got the region back together with 2 dozen nations. By Summer I was using my puppet to conduct foreign relations and tried to encourage them to open up to and join the Red Liberty Alliance. Sanbern was more interested in establishing internal structures - for the same reasons as Haderan. At the time, the GRD was an unknown element, and I infiltrated it at this time. Though there were a few takers for some of the ministerial positions, those who won those positions were unable to put in the hours required.

Sanbern himself couldn't give his time anymore, due to unknown real-life issues, and held a snap election on August 20th. He informed me that the only candidate was La Espagnola* - an invader pestering the region. As no-one else was willing to enter, I joined the race on the second day and won at the end of the week with 2 votes to 1 (my supporters being myself and Sanbern). I went on an immediate endorsement-whoring campaign, tried to keep existing nations, and did some one-man late-night recruitment.

* In my previous draft I mistakenly named the candidate as Muerto En Llegada, another invader.

My election victory had upset the other candidate and his friends, who had been looking forward to an easy invasion. Unable to take the region at the polls, they took it by force at update in early September. El Cockaroacha took the delegacy and proudly proclaimed "DO NOT COMPLAIN, WE WON'T LISTEN!". We got the region back thanks to the various defenders who came to our aid, but the region would endure anther three invasions before being griefed on the morning of Tuesday 5th of October. I neglected to say that whilst I still had my puppet in Cuba, I had won the delegacy under another puppet Isla Pena. Its identity, as the puppet of the Foreign Minister of a major region, was kept secret as I believed it would give the invaders another reason to harass Cuba. I took a number of precautions to prevent suspicion - I logged in at different times as Star City, I tried to write like a foreign language student of English, I adopted different mannerisms - however, the RLA bigwigs probably knew anyway since I had two accounts at the RLA board.

After all the invasions, it was obvious the region needed protection and I filled out the RLA membership application for Cuba. When the bid for membership was accepted on October 13th, Cuba gained the stability it needed to flourish. My first delegacy of TPC meant I had to quickly find a successor for Cuban delegate (as only one nation per user can have UN membership). I had never intended to be the one who developed Cuba (especially since the old constitution stated my term was 2 months), only protect it whilst a real native could build the region. I passed the region on to La Tropicana who got the government up and running and made Isla Pena into something of a folk hero. When I accidentally let Isla Pena get deleted for inactivity in April, I logged back in to find the regional message board equivalent of a state funeral.

EPILOGUE Written 4th of March 2010

I know these memoirs end abruptly, but then so did the appeal of playing NationStates. That's harsh but don't forget the game was just a PR exercise to promote Max Barry's book Jennifer Government, so it was inevitable that another game would come along and blow it out of the water. I can forgive Max though, particularly since he's been paying for NS out of his own pocket.

As for me, re-editing these memoirs made me consider my time in regional government. I'm not satisfied with the performance of my delegacy, perhaps because I put it off so long the game had started to wane, but also because I wasn't cut-out for a leadership role - I've already compared myself to John Major, I might as well say Gordon Brown now. I much preferred being a minister, mostly background work, out of the public eye. That might explain why I've been a grunt in the New Pacific Order for over four years rather than pursue dreams of prominent political or military office. My recount of four years on CyberNations will not be memoirs but simple war stories.

Edited for Republication, 30th January 2010
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