Wednesday, June 15, 2016

In which Nietzsche was right

God is dead. Or, more to the point, godlike powers in tabroom are dead. Kaz asked me something about missing her deity-fueled existence and I went to check and saw that I no longer walked on water either. Oh, well. It made sense when the program was getting started and CP needed more bodies on the ground. But now that it’s the official program of the NSDA—much like Snickers is the official snack bar and Cialis is the official erectile dysfunction medication—it makes sense that it operate under the auspices of the mother ship. In other words, it's gone pro.

Godlike powers were nice, but not essential. If it’s a tournament I’m working, whoever owns the tabroom account can add me to it. The thing is, we used it once or twice to help other people remotely, and we could just access their tournaments badda bing badda boom, but they too can just grant access, so one way or another, we can get in. Mostly, it was the joy of seeing the words Godlike Powers on my home page that was the best part. Now that I’m back to Schmucklike Powers, it says nothing. Of course, it could say Schmucklike Powers, but I can live without that.

It’s rather amazing how quickly tabroom caught on. First of all, of course, it’s free, but that was almost beside the point. TRPC was free, and we stopped using that at the first opportunity. The idea that tabroom was going to be a living entity rather than a legacy program was part of it. Just the way it handles prefs, speeding things up enormously, was worth the agony of switching to a new program that still had a few bugs in it. Then again, TRPC had a few bugs in it too, so there you are. As for the other competition, I never thought much of Joy, although it still has its holdouts. Speechwire, which I've never used, also has its advocates, but it costs money. Tabroom, free, would have to be a hell of a lot worse than Speechwire, not free, to warrant not defaulting to it.

Anyhow, it doesn’t exaggerate things to say that tabroom is now the de facto tournament-running program across the country. And it only took a couple of years.

Now if we could only get it to make a decent pisco sour…


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