I basically only have one friend, and it’s kind of surprising to me how well that’s working out.

If we were to rewind five or six years, I would be hanging out with quite a few different circles of people– all gamers of varying stripes, but technically still people. I had my D&D group; a handful of Warmachine players I was still close to despite having soured on the game itself; the Infinity group I had just started to poke my nose into; a small group of friends I met with on Tuesdays for cards and board games; and even a group of “my friend’s friends” whom I occasionally joined for random movies and games. In most of these groups, there would be people I enjoyed hanging out with, people who were… let’s go with “inoffensive”… and people for whom I spent considerable mental energy devising plans to avoid having to ever speak with.

Here is an approximate venn diagram of these groups circa 2012:

As you can see, I considered my entire board game group to be good friends, with maybe one or two people from every other group warranting semi-regular communication outside the physical confines of our gaming store. There were certainly positive aspects to having a social circle of this size, however it was also very stressful for me– people usually don’t guess this based on my hilarious, charming, and generally spectacular personality, but I’m actually quite introverted. I can put on a dazzling show for a few hours, but when it’s done, I need to crawl back into my dark cave and shut the world out while I recharge for a few days.

I get a lot of free Infinity models. More than once, people have just handed me dozens of models for factions I was starting, which was certainly appreciated each time as a booster to my developing forces. I have two competing theories about why this keeps happening: either people recognize my self-evident greatness and want to shower me with gifts to express their awe, or the people in my community make bad purchasing decisions and end up with closets full of junk they eventually get tired of looking at.

It’s hard to say which of those two is a likelier explanation, but I know which one I’ll be subscribing to.

I ran a weird event this past weekend. At its core, it was a fairly standard 300pt ITS event (albeit with a focus on TAG-centric missions like Deadly Dance and Show of Force). However, in addition to the standard ITS scores for completing missions, each player was given a checklist of optional TAG-themed achievements that they could try to collect over the course of the event:

I added a thing to the thing! You can watch my painfully long video run-down of the update, or just read the bullets below. Or neither, I guess. GO ON. JUST WALK AWAY AND KEEP LIVING IN IGNORANCE.

>:(

Hacking Helper Update Notes: Classified Objective Generator (v.1)

• New sub-tab: References -> Classified Deck
• Draw random objectives from a simulated 40-card deck
  • Uses card images from Spud’s Classified Deck.
  • Intelcom values match Customeeple’s deck (i.e., Kidnapping 1-4, Telemetry 37-40, etc.)
  • Duplicates automatically discarded
• Hide card images from prying eyes
• Switch between HVT: Retroengineering and HVT: Kidnapping (defaults to Kidnapping)
• Enable “Selections Locked” to enforce tournament integrity– if enabled, your selection will be saved and cannot be reset for 30 minutes, and will persist when reloading the page, restarting the browser, or rebooting your device.

A future update (v.2) is planned within the next few months, which should include a browsing feature, the ability to manually set your objectives, and a text-only mode. Please don’t tell me how great those features would be; I’m already on the same page, I’m just a bit burned out on coding right now. 😛

As always, because of the annoyingly sticky caching employed in the app, you’ll need to clear your browser’s cache to get the update. Visit www.refreshyourcache.com for browser-specific instructions.

-Spud

So without really meaning to, I’ve ended up taking a 5-month break from “real” project blogging. I won’t bore y’all with the details, but suffice to say that a pretty unremarkable combination of “not doing very much” and “not wanting to write about the stuff I did” was to blame. However, in that time I’ve built up a small pile of finished projects, so hopefully I’ll be able to get back into the swing of things over the coming months. 🙂

Without further ado… in May 2017, I posted some designs for a set of Yu Jing urban terrain that I planned to build “at some point”. Quick refresher:

The timeline in my head was that I would do major foamcore construction of the buildings in the Fall, and then take a break for a few months before resuming work on the surface detail in the new year. And for the most part, that timeline has held up– the work you’ll see here was mostly completed in October and November of 2017, and I’m prepping the next stages to start in the next month or two. So, yay for vaguely accurate projections. 😀