Hello! Wow what a ride. Many thanks to everyone who played, and thanks especially to Wonk for setting this all up. Figured I’d write this so you all could see what all went on on my end.
IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:
Wonk did a writeup of the game here, and put up an archive of all the orders that were submitted here. GO CHECK IT OUT
I had prepared articles for several different eventualities, including:
- Aliens destroy humanity
- Humans destroy humanity
- Humans destroy alien threat (NOT DONE YET, WHOOPSIE)
I’d also prepared for the Monitor getting shut down either by legal action or outright bombing! Several times over, actually:
- Backup newspaper based in Iceland
- ‘Deep Web’ site (i actually tried to get a working onion network page going for this, but it was a THUNDERING pain in the ass and didn’t want the readers to have to set up TOR to access it)
I also intentionally left some security holes in the Monitor:
- Several of the reporters had trivially weak, easy-to-guess passwords – and one of those was literally ‘password’! I’m.. I’m a little worried that WordPress didn’t shriek at me about this, honestly. Note: Don’t bother now, I’ve changed all the passwords.
- I intentionally skipped most security patches and plugins for this installation of WordPress, allowing a clever player to have their bloodymindedness rewarded.
- The guy who had the password of ‘password’ – I tried to telegraph that he wasn’t very computer-savvy by having him not write that often, having his articles be rife with the sort of errors someone uncomfortable with computers would have made, and ending them with -30-, which was the ‘end of file’ indicator for some very, very, VERY old implementations of newspaper word processing programs.
There were some articles that never saw the light of day:
- Brazil tried to manipulate me into running a smear campaign against Japan, but spent some RP to quash the story.
Did You Know:
- Every so often, one or more of the players would start freaking out about leaks and try to find out who my sources were, but
- literally every player was leaking me information about everyone, themselves included
- on multiple occasions, there was apparently a race to be the first one to leak me a juicy bit of info
- no seriously you guys, LITERALLY EVERYBODY was leaking things to the media
- that’s fucking hilarious
- you guys are trivially easy to bluff, there were times when y’all had pocket aces and i had ‘RULES OF POKER’ and an expired Wendy’s coupon and still had you sweating bullets