Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Still here.... Yes, it HAS been a while...

 

So, it’s been more than a year now…  Last time I wrote one of these I was getting ready to come down here to North Texas to become the CIO of the University (MSU Texas)…  Well, survived my first year.  Coming from the IT/Tech side of the house far more than the “management” side has helped a lot.  Since I’ve done most of the jobs that the folks reporting to me have done, I’m told my “eyes do not glaze over when they get into the technical details”.  Since we’re a small shop, we don’t have the same level of separation I was accustomed to back at UIUC…  Well, we have just become the 5th University in the Texas Tech University System, so more akin to the relationship between UIUC and UIS I suspect for folks familiar with the Illinois System.  But getting here to be the same sized fish in a much smaller pond has been…  Interesting?  LOTS of legal requirements here in TX that simply do not exist up in IL, and having the multi-million dollar budget is JUST a bit different than working in Atlas where I was scrounging and rebuilding “stuff” to just keep things moving…  Yes, had a budget, but it did not even begin to cover what was needed to maintain and update all the machines there.  Working on a 5 year old Laptop because we didn’t replace our own machines with any regularity was “less fun”.  And having to deal with the random IT equipment that just “appeared” made life way more interesting…  At least not having to deal with the potential HIPAA legal issues stemming from one particular part of Psych deciding to do whatever they want despite being instructed repeatedly that “what you are doing is in fact illegal and putting the University at risk” has been a huge weight off my shoulders J

 

Got the family moved down here finally…  Rented a house owned by the University right across the street from Campus for the first 6-7 Months…  Was super convenient as I could simply walk the block or so to my office, but was rough maintaining the 2 households.  FINALLY got the place up in IL ready and on the market, which sold within the first week or so.  MOVING on the other hand was super un-fun…  And the motivation to never be doing that again I think, at least not any time soon.  We got rid of 3 large dumpsters full of stuff and gave away tons of random things and still have a garage full of moving boxes J

 

Gaming?  Not much, for the first 8 months I worked a lot and it was during the lockdown, so…  Now, the family is here and the School year has begun, so just a bit busy.  There is an X-Wing event in the DFW area “The Battle for North Texas” coming up in November now that I’ll try to get to.  It is ~ 2 hours’ drive, and REALLY looking forward to playing again.  Picked up a number of the BattleTech things in their Kickstarter and have dug out the ancient BT stuff I had from the 80’s-90’s when last I actually played.  More or less the same rules, not a WHOLE lot changed?  I stopped playing not long after the 3050/3060 stuff, so up to the Clan invasion and the immediate fallout.  Played “MechWarrior”, the Clix based “Dark Ages” game and have a bunch of that stuff still, but WizKids has long since killed that game off…  Fun in a “beer and pretzels” sort of way and was close enough to the BT I grew up playing that it was interesting to me for a time.  The competitive events were not very fun once people got deep into the “Mr. Suitcase” mentality and just went to venues to prize snipe and E-Bay it off because the prizes were exclusive to the events and were generally just better than what you could buy…  Made it less fun for folks like me who wanted to play a specific Faction or Factions and just have fun…  Any case, have WAY too much of that stuff around that I dug up in the move.  The dozen or so 40K armies I have, random other dead games like “Planetstorm” and the like…  My Legion stuff I’ve done some painting while I was here renting, but have not really since we bought the new house…  Packed away until I have a “hobby space” again…  Well, that and the realistic chance of actually PLAYING the game.  Not a lot of incentive for me to build and paint up the armies if I’m never actually getting to play the game…

 

FFG used to be the Asmodee owned company that ran X-Wing and Legion, but that moved over to “Atomic Mass Games” (AMG)…  This happened during lockdown and while there have been a few releases for those games, the fact that they (AMG) announced that nothing was in the pipeline for Armada (another I used to play and still have many ships for)…  Not a dead game yet, but with no more releases for at least 2 years?  Seems dead to me.  We get some news tomorrow in fact on X-Wing points updates and rules changes?  Maybe some Organized Play (OP) announcements…  I am slightly hopeful as without OP, I see X-Wing also continuing to die off…  Legion less so, but even that has a VERY strong OP component that drives a lot of traffic at big events like Gen Con…  

 

Guess We’ll see…