1. Despite all appearances, I am, in fact, still alive.
2. I didn’t post for 2+ months because the projects I started kept hitting walls of various sorts that prevented me from writing them up.
3. It’s all good now, though.
4. Today’s thing isn’t about army men, but it is very cute.

My sister is a better adult than I am. She has a more normal job, does normal human things like go outside and eat different food every day, and much to my relief, she volunteered to do the “family” thing. That last one was particularly appreciated for its effect of reducing certain lines of badgering from our shared mother, and the whole topic will be settled for good in a few months when Sandy provides my mom the grandchild she so stereotypically pines for.

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