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Okay so.... what made you go with... uh, eliministrator? >_>
Did you have fun with the tweets?
Did we ever make you guys laugh with the tweets?

I think we just didn't know what to make of them at first XD

But then Tom, being Tom, totally rolled with it. He's a boss.

I thought it was funny. Also, Eliministrator sounds awesome. Best couple name fusion ever.

It was never canon though. I have no idea what you are talking about.

I. HAD. SO. MUCH. FUN.

I am certain you made me laugh at least as often as I did.

Connor and Dana took spins at Mr. A's twitter, as did others, but for typical day-to-day interactions, you guys were usually talking to me on my phone.

Eliministrator was interesting to me cause of the profile pic coincidence. However, once the joke was made, I tried not to go out of my way to bring it up in case it made you uncomfortable. The game was supposed to be a safe place.

The weirdest thing was staying in character as Mr. A for extended periods of time. He doesn't think like a person does, and thinking like him left me feeling exhausted and loopy. Also, I had to figure out what sort of instantiation you were talking to at a given time, which started out inconvenient and later just became a reflex. "Today I am loopy!" "Today I am angry!" "Today I am incompetent!"

I really, really enjoyed writing for Mr. Administrator.

We all had problems were sometimes we would come into the GM chat typing in all caps, as the result of writing as Mr. A so much.

Tom wrote:I. HAD. SO. MUCH. FUN.

I am certain you made me laugh at least as often as I did.

Connor and Dana took spins at Mr. A's twitter, as did others, but for typical day-to-day interactions, you guys were usually talking to me on my phone.

Eliministrator was interesting to me cause of the profile pic coincidence. However, once the joke was made, I tried not to go out of my way to bring it up in case it made you uncomfortable. The game was supposed to be a safe place.

The weirdest thing was staying in character as Mr. A for extended periods of time. He doesn't think like a person does, and thinking like him left me feeling exhausted and loopy. Also, I had to figure out what sort of instantiation you were talking to at a given time, which started out inconvenient and later just became a reflex. "Today I am loopy!" "Today I am angry!" "Today I am incompetent!"

I really, really enjoyed writing for Mr. Administrator.

I particularly enjoyed the ones that made that FRICKING APP, Or I should say, the ones who said those guys got vaporized.

Tom wrote:I. HAD. SO. MUCH. FUN.

I am certain you made me laugh at least as often as I did.

Connor and Dana took spins at Mr. A's twitter, as did others, but for typical day-to-day interactions, you guys were usually talking to me on my phone.

Eliministrator was interesting to me cause of the profile pic coincidence. However, once the joke was made, I tried not to go out of my way to bring it up in case it made you uncomfortable. The game was supposed to be a safe place.

The weirdest thing was staying in character as Mr. A for extended periods of time. He doesn't think like a person does, and thinking like him left me feeling exhausted and loopy. Also, I had to figure out what sort of instantiation you were talking to at a given time, which started out inconvenient and later just became a reflex. "Today I am loopy!" "Today I am angry!" "Today I am incompetent!"

I really, really enjoyed writing for Mr. Administrator.

I figured there were three people tweeting as A.
one was a bit of a jerk
one was all business
and the third was a bit nuts and would actually banter back and forth with me.

The pic was supposed to be similar to A's.... for some reason I thought it'd make me less noticable

but yes, I think one of the highlights of the ARG was those tweets to A.

Also, Eliministrator was confusing for me, because I was new to this....shipping... thing. Now I find it pretty funny. XD

Actually, all of us filled all those roles with our tweets. Because Mr. Administrator just has that many personalities.

Can I also say, from a design perspective, the "multiple instantiations" thing was the best Author's Saving Throw ever, because if one of us fucked up the canon, that instantiation simply was misinformed / lied / terminated.

If we'd overused this it would have been problematic, but there were times we were very glad that he is a plural entity.

Can you give an example? I don't quite remember it as well as you guys do (which is not surprising x3)

I can't actually think of any off the top of my head, but I know it happened....

Oh... I did get mad at that!
Everytime someone would question Mr. A's behavior I'd remember that you could either play along or completely disregard it with "That was a stray instantiation!"

Hindsight shows that you didn't really use that a lot, which is good. But during the game? The possibility of that justification coming up? Oh god it was unnerving!

Yeah, it was a last resort thing. But if we hadn't been able to do it, the alternate explanations would have been worse. HEY GUYS I FORGOT, DERP

I'm not sure if this is related to the ARG (in fact I'm pretty sure it's not but this is a question about the Mr. A twitter) but between EC2 and the start of the ARG there was a conversation I had with the A twitter as "the help line" regarding getting oil in the handscreen.

My question is "the hell was that about?" If nothing else, it made me laugh. Pretty sure it was Tom at the twitter because the first tweet in the sequence came from his normal, OOC account before being restarted by Mr. A.

That was me. That instantiation was confused and trying to fix the keyboard.

Tom wrote:Can I also say, from a design perspective, the "multiple instantiations" thing was the best Author's Saving Throw ever, because if one of us fucked up the canon, that instantiation simply was misinformed / lied / terminated.

Indeed. I was going to post it under the A Wizard Did It entry, which it fits like a glove. It it got put off, because I wanted to add the Foreshadowing Machine, and that would require digging through his twitter for a link. OCD is one hell of a drug.

Dryunya wrote:

Tom wrote:Can I also say, from a design perspective, the "multiple instantiations" thing was the best Author's Saving Throw ever, because if one of us fucked up the canon, that instantiation simply was misinformed / lied / terminated.

Indeed. I was going to post it under the A Wizard Did It entry, which it fits like a glove. It it got put off, because I wanted to add the Foreshadowing Machine, and that would require digging through his twitter for a link. OCD is one hell of a drug.

I also love the fact that it basically gave us license to do whatever we wanted for the character. We could have him be both a self-conscious buffoon and an arrogant asshole, whatever served humor/drama/the story more.

I cannot think of any other time when having a character be so inconsistent was so consistent with the character. There was a baseline "Mr. A," but after a while creating odd variations was part of the fun.

Madam Administrator is still the best one. But of course I think that. Dana had to fight really really hard to keep me from going on a comedic posting rampage when that was a thing.

My favorite was the AMA. That came about because there was worry amongst some of us that Mr. A was coming off as too much of an asshole, and Tom stepped up to make him a bit easier to relate with to everyone.

I enjoyed getting slightly involved as Cheshire during that, because if you guys somehow liked Cheshire trolling you, I knew you'd love Cheshire trolling Mr. A. I didn't want to have Cheshire dominate, though, so I kept it low-key.

Also, you should have seen all of us react when Twitter forced us to stop. Our first reaction was "why did the AMA get cut short?" Once we found out that Twitter stopped it because of posting limits, we actually celebrated - we made an interaction that went over so well, only outside limitations could stop it.

This may be a hindsight thing, but I wonder if things would have been easier if we had set up a Reddit for that kind of thing (my big worry about that would have been troll potential, which is much easier to manage via ignoring on Twitter).

Rick Healey wrote:This may be a hindsight thing, but I wonder if things would have been easier if we had set up a Reddit for that kind of thing (my big worry about that would have been troll potential, which is much easier to manage via ignoring on Twitter).

I've never used Reddit, so I'm glad it was on Twitter, where I could participate freely without struggling to get used to an unfamiliar system.

I had Mr. A pull an Orwellian Edit on me, the timing of which just blew my mind. The conversation, IIRC, went like this:

Mr. A: MAN, THE FOURTH WALL IS AWESOME. GOOD THING WE MADE IT, EH GUYS?
Me: @YouHaveFailedUs Are you trying to boost your PR?
Mr. A: @ParchmentScroll WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? THE FOURTH WALL IS GREAT!
I went to my computer to direct reply to that tweet (as opposed to texting a reply, which breaks the reply chain), and it wasn't there. I checked my phone, and I had reflexively deleted it after reading it. It was like having Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory in real life.

Wait, I don't follow. What tweet was deleted?

Dryunya wrote:Wait, I don't follow. What tweet was deleted?

The last one. When I went to reply to it, it didn't exist.

just remembered.
this was brought up in chat, but I'd like to ask you guys. feel free not to answer if there were spoilers.

I uh, sent quite a few tweets out over the course of the ARG, specifically to A the majority of the time.
Did that affect him at all? did that alter his characterization at any point?

Yup.

Tom wrote:Yup.

YAY. seriously though, that made my day