Sunday, August 25, 2013

Still Alive

News since last update:
  • Foremost - going to DragonCon next weekend.  If anybody still reads this and will be down there, let me know!
  • Space Hulk - was down in Matt's neck of the woods for work the other week and we played two games of Rescue the CAT using the 1st edition rules.  My dice rolled horrifically when I was playing humans; at one point I rolled 5 1's on 6d6 for flamer mortality (which let a bunch of bugs get through the firewall and into my dudes), followed by no 6s on 12d6 of overwatch fire.  Matt did somewhat better as the humans, but I got one bug up behind his CAT-carrying sergeant, took him out in one attack, and the CAT broke on impact.  Scenario probably winnable, but the north entrance near the CAT entry is concerning.  We also debated whether 'twas better to have a sergeant carry the CAT or a flamerman; I believe we concluded sergeant, since you want your flamers firing and your carrier moving, so stacking both duties forces you to split that model's AP between conflicting purposes.
  • Located a FLGS last weekend.  Mostly a Warmahordes / MtG / Pathfinder shop, but supposedly they have two killer GMs already so maybe I'd fit into the RPG lineup nicely.
  • Considering taking up minis wargaming; found a mint-condition copy of Dirtside II (with chits!) on Amazon for $5, so I snatched that up.  Also gave Fast & Dirty 4 a read; there are parts of it which are better than Stargrunt, and parts which I do not much like.  Review possibly forthcoming.  I anticipate difficulty finding opponents for any GZG / generic system, though, and last I checked I have little aptitude for painting, so perhaps I should stick to ACKS.
  • Went to DEFCON, had a good time, didn't get pwnt (that I know of)
  • I have started reading dead trees again, most recently Time Enough for Love.  I suspect book accumulation is some sort of nest-building behavior.
  • .i ui mi cilre fi lo lojbo
  • Have a bunch of non-gaming personal projects queued up
    • Getting back in shape
    • Building an OpenEEG (and learning enough EE to do it right and not toast myself)
    • Couple of machine learning / AI things I want to look into, including a CUDA artificial neural network implementation (there are several of these already out there, but I need the practice)
    • Software defined radio / listening to the parts of the EM spectrum I can't see
    •  wechall.net, overthewire.org, and other 'wargames'