1 -- Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 -- I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 -- You'll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 -- You'll include this explanation.
5 -- You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed


1. Relate your favorite gaming war story.

My favorite gaming war story, hmm. Tough call. I think I'll have to go with a day-long game of Space Empires IV I once played with sirroxton. For those of you not familiar, SE4 is a 4X game. We started in different corners of the universe, unable to interact with each other until we developed the technology to open wormholes into each other's space.

I was playing my traditional strategy, which can be summarized with the phrase "I can build 'em faster than you can sink 'em." I was going down the road of outproducing my opponent, and it started working quite well. I expanded across three quarters of the map before sirroxton had left his corner.

---

Skip to the other side of the void curtain. sirroxton, knowing how I play, and knowing that I'd be coming after him, dedicated the resources of his empire to building a massive fleet that could stop me when I reached his space, and simply allow him to backtrack through the wormholes I opened after defeating my armada in straight-up combat. The logic was, he would've been able to commit the considerable resources I had to spend on developing wormhole technology on better weapons and more ships. Of course, having a massive fleet meant outrageous maintenance costs. So sirroxton adopts a clever doctrine: build the ships, then immediately place them into mothballs. When the breakthrough finally comes, deploy the fleet, retake any advances made in the 2-3 turns it would take to mobilize the fleet, and crush the invaders will overwhelming numbers and technology.

---

I develop the wormhole drive, and start jumping from cluster to cluster. Of course, each time I enter a new cluster of stars, I have to burst in like a space-borne SWAT team just in case its sirroxton's worlds. Finally, I jump into a system that contains enemy worlds. Bingo. I order the whole fleet in, bombardment vessels, carriers, transports, mine layers, the works. I blitz in, destroying the major defenses of the system on the turn I arrived, and landing troops on all inhabited worlds on the next. Tiny groups of picket ships either fell before my implacable wall of death, or fled deeper into sirroxton's space, pursued by my fast cruisers.

---

At Roxton High Command, the Mothball Doctrine was entering its reactivation phase. Hundreds of thousands of resources were expending bringing hundreds of warships online, all clustered in an out-of-the way system a full star off my invasion path. Alas, one oversight came into view as his mighty force was restored to glory; although functional, the fleet had no fuel or supplies. There was no depot on the desolate rock they orbited while dormant, and without it, it would take years to join the fight, and even if they could, without ammunition or energy, even the mighty dreadnoughts would be torn to ribbons by the well-supplied encroachers. Something had to be done.

---

The moment I knew I had found my opponent, I ordered my entire intelligence community to gather as much information as they could on my opponent. A turn after my initial attack, a lode of intelligence dropped on my desk. Ship statuses, designs, troop concentrations, mine field locations, population distribution, census data, general fleet strength, all sorts of things. I was able to glean that most, if not all, of sirroxton's battle fleet had been caught in mothballs, and would no doubt be activated soon. I also learned his designs were years ahead of mine, and if the battle came to a standup fight, I would be hard pressed to win the day. I ordered the wormhole back to my space heavily mined.

---

The Roxtonian fleet was impotent until supplies could reach them, and a great deal of supplies were needed. The surviving merchant marine was not equipped to handle the load, so sirroxton designed and build two mammoth transports, the Resupply class, to sail from the shipyards of his homeworld to the exiled battle fleet with the supplies to take them to the nearest depot, and then on to the front. With all the resources of the nation behind them, the shipyards cancelled all other jobs and began emergency work on the two new transports.

---

The initial attack had gone well, but the campaign had cost me more than anticipated, particularly when the main body of my ships jumped into a new system only to find themselves surrounded by mines. Several carriers were destroyed, along with their expensive fighter escorts. I could not press the attack without sufficient fighter cover; I had to withdraw until replacements could be brought up from the Home Guard. I now held the system my wormhole had appeared in, and my warships patrolled the two adjacent stars, not glassing the worlds there, but waiting for enemy to show himself.

---

The first of the mighty transports was launched, ordered to immediately proceed to the fleet, without waiting for its sister. The emergency builds had cost the shipyard dearly in the short-term, and the second transport would not be delivered in time to make a difference. It was the prototype, or bust.

---

There were only two fast cruisers left in the system when the first Roxtonian ship they had seen for some time jumped in. By now, I knew the enemy fleet had no supplies, and I knew that they could not be resupplied easily. The only thing I did not know was the location of the enemy fleet, or how sirroxton planned to resupply them. So when I first saw the tell-tale icon of an enemy taskforce entering at a jump point, I mentally went down my checklist of what resources I could pull through to my space before I needed to close the wormhole. However, I was relieved to see it was just a transport. On closer inspection, the transport had a name: Resupply 0001.

---

The moment the transport was sighted, the game was over. The BIS General Protection Fault and the BIS Blue Screen of Death swept down on it and destroyed the unarmed transport with heavy anti-ship weaponry. With its destruction went any hope of reactivating the Battle Fleet, and more over, gave away its position to my cruisers. A few turns later, sirroxton surrendered.

---

So yeah, that was probably the best gaming war story I have, or at least, the one I remember the best.

2. What and where was the best meal you ever had?

Probably Christmas dinner, 2003 at my grandparents'. Eating turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, asparagus, brocolli bake, and probably more I can't even remember until I was ready to fall asleep in my chair. An outstanding meal for an outstanding day.

3. What are your chief interests in computer science?

Graphics, Databases, and Artificial Intelligence. Graphics because they're flashy and pretty. Databases, because they are the most basic and simple expression of the purpose of computing. Artificial Intelligence, because the more we learn about the way to make machines think, the more we learn about how we think.

4. What's your family like?

I have two parents, now separated, one in Worcester and one in Norfolk, MA. I also have two sisters, one seven years older, one four years younger. My older sister has a dog, which has somehow become "our" dog since she's been globe-trotting.

My mother goes to Clark, and my sister recently got her Masters in Public Health from Columbia. Right now both my sisters and my mother live in my mother's house in Worcester. My younger sister is finishing high school now, and plans to attend school in Ohio studying forensic psychology.

My father lives in Norfolk, and works in purchasing for Allied-Domeq, the company that owns Dunkin' Donuts, Baskin Robins, and Togo's. I don't get to see him as much as I'd like, but he's the person I can always count on to move heaven and earth to get something done. I inherited a lot of my personality traits and mannerisms from my father (much to my mother's chagrin).

My mother and older sister are very liberal women, and my sister is very active in pro-choice organizations. She spent several years living in New York City, where she helped administrate funds for women. My younger sister is rather conservative compared to her housemates. She's the commander of her High School JROTC program, although she really has no interest in pursuing a military career. She's by far the most aggressive of the three children. My father is very conservative by comparison, and often enjoys tormenting my older sister by talking politics with her.

5. Have you ever played in or ever been interested in RPGs or LRPGs?

I've played in several RPG's and LRPG's (I'm assuming LRPG is synonomous with LARP). In the last year or two, I've participated in three runs of Craig Perko's METEOR (once as a player and twice as a GM), attended InterCon where I also playing in Three Nations. I've run a D&D campaign in the last year (creatively dubbed Campaign 2004-1), and played an ancient Jedi Ewok in a Star Wars-based RPG. That's ignoring the Kobolds Ate My Babies runs I'm been associated with.



Wow. That was longer than anticipated.