And so my 10,080 minutes of fame comes to a close.
Once again, thank you to
aldriq for the nomination. Your support in commenting in Indies over the last year has been greatly appreciated. I always said you had excellent taste in AAR's.
Hardraade,
Enewald,
Qorten,
Lord E and
asd21593, thank you for the congratulations.
Now in choosing a successor, firstly I must note that as EU3 AAR's have taken out the last 4 nominations and bearing in mind Guideline 2B, I felt compelled to look to a different game for my selection. Having said that, I cannot recall a time over the last 10 years that an AAR forum has been such a hive of activity as the EU3 subforum is at the moment, with new stories popping up all the time and existing stories flourishing. I particularly recommend canonized's Dangerous Liaisons and Prawnstar's Rebels without a pause as reads well worth your time, from authors with proven track records.
I have noted that it is not without precedent that an AAR has been nominated twice for this award, in circumstances where there has been a considerable period of time in between. This would reflect a continued excellence in the quality of the story, the likelihood that there would be many newcomers to the forum who may not be familiar with older works and the fact the plot has moved on considerably in the intervening time, so that it is now a much more mature product.
On that basis, unless there are any objections from CatKnight, I hereby nominate
The Butterfly Effect: A British AAR by El Pip. Since this AAR was last nominated on 1 April 2007, it has progressed from Chapter 26 to Chapter 100, and resolved a major power war, a US election, the start of the Spanish Civil War and general and widespread analysis of contemporary tank/naval/aircarft engineering advances around the world, covering a game time of some 16 months from mid 1936 to early1938, an admirable feat given the 3 years of real time it has taken to write it. At this rate, Germany should invade Poland some time in 2016 and the war will be over by about 2030.
The Butterfly Effect is a model to budding authors as to how to turn the dullest material into gold, how to generate a loyal core of commentators with regular fan service (tractor porn comes readily to mind) and an eye for historical/technical detail which makes the story educational as well as entertaining.
Congratulations, El Pip. Time for an update, I think.