Subject: ackanomic Digest V4 #285
From: [email-masked]
To: ackanomic digest users <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 00:00:01 -0400 (EDT)

ackanomic Digest	Thursday, October 21 1999	Volume: 04  Issue: 285

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From: Bill Palmer <[email-masked]>
Subject: Acka: Soul
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 02:20:16 -0400 (EDT)

train bruthah... where's mine, and is it bearing an embossed label
"Danek"?
I am so far off the map the ground is marked "intentionally left blank".

Danek

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From: [email-masked] (John Bollinger)
Subject: Re: Acka: Martial Law
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 10:20:38 -0400 (EDT)

QtR wrote

>Interesting? For me this is possibly one of the most boring times ever, 

Well, all I can say is that different people find different things
interesting.  It seems that many of the old guard find chaotic times, new
and unusual scams, and other kinds of unusual events to be more interesting
than normal day-to-day operations.  Others, many of them newer players, do
not feel the same way.

>which is actually why I left for a while. First off we had people going off 
>to set up Acka Lite with scant regard to what the rules actually said, which 

I wouldn't quite say that.  Well, okay, maybe I would.  Nevertheless,
although I was originally a doubter, I am now firmly convinced that the
Lite thread is the true original thread of Acka.  I will also observe
that it's a two-way street -- some players of Fat Acka decided to be
sure that that game continued regardless of the actual effect of the
Kernel proposal.  Adamant proponents on both sides of the fence ensured
among them that Ackanomic would split.

>is hardly in the spirit of, well, I was going to say Nomic, but definitely 
>not in the spirit of Acka. And then some sort of nomic war thing seems to be 
>going on. Now, I don't know which side started this, but can someone explain 
>to me why this is supposed to be fun? It seems apparent from the schism that 

Actually, I find the nomic war concept rather boring as well, usually,
because it normally resides primarilly in the joint metagame state.  Fat
Acka's rule 17-2-6 / 17-2-6-1 brings this one into Fat Acka's game state
proper, however.  FWIW, although Fat-Acka declared war on Acka-Lite,
Acka-Lite seems to have largely ignored it.  My own actions, although
couched in martial terms, were really only indirectly about the war -- they
were more about the opportunity presented by Fat-Acka effectively declaring
Acka-Lite a subgame and also giving its rules the authority of Fat-Ackan
rules.  I don't know how the pro- and anti- scam playership broke across
the two Ackanomics, but I am certainly in the camp that enjoys a good scam.
(I reserve the right to define "good" to my own satisfaction. :-) )

I might have ignored the war angle altogether if I hadn't become enamored
of the "Forces of Lite" double entendre.  :-)

As for things in the spirit of nomic or Ackanomic, I have always been of
the opinion that the CRD procedure was the single thing in Ackanomic least
in that spirit.  The question remains: even if you find it boring, why do
you want to push it under the rug?

>the players of fat acka and acka lite aren't interested in playing the same 
>type of game at the moment. It's a pain, but once it's established then such 
>is life. Going out to try to wreck someone else's game is, to me, the 
>epitome of childishness. Now granted, ThinMan didn't actually wreck the fat 
>Acka game state (presuming that what he tried worked), but why bother 
>interfering with it at all? If you want to play, then play, if you don't 
>then surely the best bet is to leave well enough alone. The same goes for 

In fact I tried to be very careful to not do anything that would break
Fat Acka in any way.  I had the idea to try to plant an unmodifiable rule,
but I firmly squashed it, along with various other ideas.  In fact, what I
did may be a distraction, but it interfered only in the sense that it ended
the Fat-Acka end of the nomic war that you don't care for anyway.  And
besides, according to Fat-Acka, by playing in Acka-Lite I _am_ playing in
Fat-Acka -- that was the central issue that made it worth doing (and
possible).

>any attempt by players of fat Acka to sabotage Acka Lite. Interesting? 
>Hardly. Fun? Certainly not.

I firmly agree about sabotaging other nomics, but that is not what I have
done.  In the end, all I can say is "to each her own."  If you don't find
this interesting or fun then I am unlikely to convince you otherwise.  What
I hope I will convince you is that some, hopefully many, of the other
players do find this interesting, and perhaps even fun.  I do.  In fact, I
even find discussion and debate about it interesting and fun -- maybe more
so than the actual actions.  [ Thanks!  :-) ]

I remain,

ThinMan
General of the Forces of Lite
Military Governor of Fat Acka
shrubbery-in-chief

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From: Ape Idiom Reporter <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: Martial Law
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 12:56:45 -0400 (EDT)

>I denounce this crd. Burn the witch! The president is scamming us!
>
>**two-star

A hearing has been called.  Valid responses are:

*This will patch the crisis
*The President is scamming us.

Reply to vote.

I thought long and hard about this message.  I was seriously considering
retracting this CRD, because of the strong sentiment against it.  Then I
looked at the messages again, and realized that the people who found CRDs
boring, the people who wanted this resolved through argument or whatever,
were the players who had abandoned fat-acka.  

As an officer, I do NOT vote and perform actions based on what I want -- I
try instead to represent my constituency, the active players of Acka.
These are:

/dev/joe, AIR, BLMP, CnH, Clamshell Lawyer, Cthulhu, QtR, Reductio, Studge,
and **.  I guess Fortunato too, but I really don't think e's paying attention.

Now, I have been wrong in the past, and may very well be wrong now, but my
honest opinion is that these Ackans don't want to have to deal with this.
To resolve what really happened requires that we go wading through another
nomic's ruleset.   Harfy?  Boring?  I think we tend towards the latter.
There may be dissidents, but I firmly believe that my opinion is held by a
majority of Ackans.  If they express distaste for my actions, then I will
modify them.

And I do not appreciate the imperial nomic comments.  I have been burdened
with many harfing jobs because most of the harfers have abandoned the game.
 I am not president and speaker because I am the most popular, powerful
player of the game -- I am president and speaker because no one else wanted
the offices.  I was perfectly happy, way back when, being Rule-Harfer,
Dungeon Master, and Herald.  So don't come yelling at me about how I'm
turning acka into imperial nomic.  YOU turned acka into imperial nomic.
When there are 9 players, and most of them are inactive, the game is damn
near imperial nomic no matter how you slice it.  When only 3 players vote,
a CRD is just a quicker version of a prop.

On else...if's comment:

I am not performing retroactive effects.  A retroactive effect would be:

"Repeal rule XXXX as of date YYYY in the past."

What I did was:

"Change the gamestate to match what it would have been IF
rule XXXX HAD BEEN repealed as of date YYYY in the past"

The first makes retroactive changes, while the second alters the present
gamestate in a manner which matches the effects of the first.

Yours,

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From: "Gavin M. Doig" <[email-masked]>
Subject: acka: Pages
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 18:37:33 -0400 (EDT)

I'll try and copy Slakko's pages at
http://gmd.home.dhs.org/acka/
just as soon as my ftp server is reanimated.

Please let me know if anything's broken (other than the fact that the pages
aren't yet there ;-)), or if I need to update any pages to point to the
right officers (which is likely).

BLMP,
web-harfer.

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From: Randy Hall <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Acka: Martial Law
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 18:44:09 -0400 (EDT)

> To resolve what really happened requires that we go wading through another
> nomic's ruleset.   Harfy?  Boring?  I think we tend towards the latter.

This seems like an odd position to take in light of the fact that
you have made another nomic's ruleset a subset of this nomic's
ruleset. 

> And I do not appreciate the imperial nomic comments. 

Well, a CRD is an executive tool, and a proposal is a legislative
tool.  I haven't seen anything even remotely approaching a "crisis" 
that a CRD has been used for that a CRD has been necessary for. 
While I can appreciate the fact that you may not wish to put 
"nice try, ThinMan the Traitor" through the proposal queue without 
actually taking the time and thought to honestly figure out whether 
it was only a nice try or something much better than that, I can 
hardly see how adding this to the ruleset is a "crisis".  As my 
grandpa used to say, it smells of winning by kicking the chessboard 
over.  Perhaps we need a CRD to erase the fingerprints of the other 
scams that are in the ruleset, or one to add "George the Annoying 
Argumentative Intellectual" as well :-)  

> As an officer, I do NOT vote and perform actions based on what I want -- I
> try instead to represent my constituency, the active players of Acka.

Perhaps I'm missing how a proposal is not a better tool to accomplish 
this goal?  I also missed the "constituency" calling for the CRD, like
in the olden days.

> I have been burdened with many harfing jobs because most of the harfers
> have abandoned the game.

Well, you created the rules that require all this harfing ex nihilo; 
you're not going to find any sympathy here.  Acka voted to ditch them.  
Regardless of how you feel about the cut and paste error when feeding 
P4371 into the bot, that was the way the vote went.  We have since made 
our choices on whether we want to be in a game that requires alot of
harfing or not (and of course we can all change our minds and switch 
games etc. etc. if we don't like the way either game is unfolding).
My sense is that alot of people don't want to do the harfing, though,
no matter what happened.

> So don't come yelling at me about how I'm turning acka into imperial nomic. 
> YOU turned acka into imperial nomic.

I'm not yelling at anyone and I did no such thing.

Its a shame that such and interesting and clever scam was treated 
this way.  Whether or not it is acka in fact does not matter, its not
acka in spirit.

George
too wordy for words

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From: "Gavin M. Doig" <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: acka: Pages
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 18:44:28 -0400 (EDT)

>I'll try and copy Slakko's pages at
>http://gmd.home.dhs.org/acka/
>just as soon as my ftp server is reanimated.
>
The pages should be live by now.

BLMP.

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End of ackanomic Digest V4 #285
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