As always, I deeply appreciate all the congratulations from my fellow board members
I do want to single out coz's comment in particular:
All I may ask is this - what does one have to do to earn one of your red special cookies?
Given it's been
years since I've last awarded one, I figure I should tell a little story as background:
Way, way back in the day, there was a user named
@Lord Strange, who would hand out his fabled
Lord Strange Cookies of British Excellence to AARs which he deemed excellent (especially, presumably, for exceptional portrayals of the British). These spawned about half a million imitations as various other users took to inventing their own distinctive flavors of cookies as a way of showing that they had found an AAR they had particularly enjoyed. It proved to be something of a passing fad -- most of them have passed into oblivion long since.
I don't really have too many specific criteria that I use to judge whether I award one or not -- I simply hand them out for works I deem worthy of particular merit, those that stand out from the norm and are worthy of exceptional attention in my mind. There are, however, two criteria I do try to hold to more than others:
1. The work must be complete. Usually it must have been brought to a definitive conclusion by the author (
not necessarily the same as playing the full amount of in-game time). I will
occasionally bend this one for sufficiently exceptional works, though those still tend to be rather solid tales already at the point of the award (by which I usually mean at least a complete "narrative arc" or its equivalent that could stand alone as a tale in itself). Nevertheless, such exceptions are rare, as I want to encourage people to finish what they've started.
2. One cookie per author. Essentially, a
Red Special Cookie ● is meant to be a "lifetime achievement" type of award. (This is as much a measure meant to keep me impartial and the award itself meaningful as much as anything else; many of the authors I've awarded in the past would deserve more than one such award, but I feel I would "cheapen" it in a way if I kept awarding it to the same people over and over again.)