As of July 16, I’ve been working for my current employer for three years, and as of July 19/20 I’ve been living in my current city for 2 years. After working every day from the 15th to the 19th, I had Monday off, which was nice after a busy weekend. Sleeping in and being frustrated about that was less nice, but skipping class Monday has thrown off my perception of time. Yesterday I kept thinking it didn’t seem like Tuesday, and I still think today doesn’t seem like Wednesday. The good news is that, after tonight, I have three days off.

In other news, yesterday I had an excellent start to my day due to developments in an online game I’ve been playing recently. One of the guys involved with the Game of Thrones Diplomacy game I’ve been playing via Facebook message (actually, now that I think about it, it may have been the moderator of said game) invited people to play this science fiction strategy game online, and I joined both the game that was just the Game of Thrones Diplomacy players (one friend of mine and several friends of his – people I may have played RISK against a few times, at most, during my freshman year of college or while visiting my first university) and another game that was supposed to be random Internet people as well as friends of my friend.

I started this game in the north-western part of the galaxy, in a decently dense star cluster, so my carriers didn’t have to travel too far in order to capture unoccupied stars. Over the course of the game, several players were taken over by the AI due to inactivity, and I had begun taking AI-occupied worlds from my northern AI-controlled neighbor. I noticed my eastern neighbor had begun to do the same thing, so I opened diplomatic communications by sending him a message asking if he would be interested in negotiating partition of the AI-controlled planets in order to avoid an unfortunate diplomatic incident.

He didn’t reply, but apparently hadn’t seen the message before launching an invasion fleet at my stars. I had a large fleet at a star next to the one he was heading toward, so I moved those ships into position in order to retain control of the star. His invasion was defeated, but a battle of some 400 ships total is slightly too large to be considered a “skirmish”, in my book. Anyway, I logged on to this game yesterday morning to learn that my eastern neighbor had conceded defeat (despite being only slightly weaker than me, and I think I was in 2nd place overall) and his empire had been taken over by the AI, which leaves 3 human players – the guy who has been in 1st place (if I remember correctly, for essentially the entire game) on the southern end of the galaxy, me, now a solid 2nd place on the northwestern edge of the galaxy, and the new 3rd place player roughly in the center of the galaxy. In order to win, a player has to control 85 (if I remember correctly) of 192 stars. The 1st place player has 37, while I have 31 (or something like that). I’ve thought about messaging both the 1st and 3rd place players and asking if they want to split the other stars between us, but doing both would probably be difficult, particularly since the 1st place player is on the opposite end of the galaxy. I would have to backstab someone eventually.

Long story short, diplomacy is much simpler when you only have 1 human neighbor. The AI may be aggressive if you attack it, but you can’t really negotiate with it (yet, anyway – maybe in a few years online games will have decent AI).

I thought I had more to write about, but I’m suddenly drawing a blank (and should probably get ready for work anyway). 600-odd words seems like a good length for now, and I can always write more later (while procrastinating instead of writing this stupid paper that’s due tomorrow, for example).