ADEPTICON!!!!!

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Andy

Dakka Detachment 3, Adepticon 2012

Gwen and I just got back from spending the weekend at Adepticon 2012, and it was a total blast! I got a chance to play in the Warhammer 40k team championships, where I was a part of a 4-person team that played in a 4-round tournament. This event is a monster one; there were over 100 teams competing for thousands of dollars worth of prizes! We didn’t win a lot of our games, but we were lucky enough to win the “Best Hybrid Team” award. This award is given to the team that had the highest combined scores for appearance and theme. To say I’m psyched is an understatement!

In addition to the Team Championship, I also managed to get in a game of Dystopian Wars with Craig of the D6 Generation, which was a great time. He and I played a game at 500 points, his FSA vs. my Prussians. I managed to pull out a win, but it was a close, fun game! Later that night, Gwen and I sat in on a recording for the 40k Radio podcast, where I got a chance to talk about the cool experiences I had in the Team Championship. After that, it was time for the D6G Boardgame After-party. I got a chance to try two cool games; a Sci-Fi deck building game called Core Worlds, and a boardgame called Survive! Escape from Atlantis.

All in all, it was an awesome weekend and one that I will remember for a long time. I’m looking forward to going again someday, though it will be a while before I can make it back due to my schedule with the Navy.

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More on the New Site

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Andy

Well, Gwen and I successfully managed to avoid dying in a horrible, fiery crash and made it safe to Indiana last night. We are just kind of relaxing today, before heading up to the Adepticon convention site tomorrow morning.

Since I’ve got the time, I thought I would lay out exactly why I am taking my website in the direction I am. Believe me, it wasn’t an easy decision to make, but I did have some very good reasons. Here they are, in no particular order:

  1. Ease of Updating. The old site was, to put it simply, a bit of a dog to update. Everything had to be done manually though MS FrontPage (I never did get around to properly learning HTML). So, when I updated the site each month I had to change and upload 3 or 4 different pages, as well as any photos that I was linking to. Even a minor “Hi! I’m still Alive!” post could take about an hour to do. This hassle and time commitment was a big part of why I didn’t update very often. WordPress’s tagging and auto archiving features make my old methods look prehistoric in comparison.
  2. Change in Internet Habits. When I started my website, it was my primary means of communication to discuss my hobbies. Now, I mostly use the various forums I belong to, which means that there has been very little impetus to update many of the sections of the old site. Also, I’ve gotten away from doing the many Anime and video game reviews that I was doing when the site started. This is mainly because I decided that there were so many reviews of these things already available everywhere else online, my time would be better spent elsewhere. I might start to get back into that a little bit, since I can now post them as tagged blog posts, but those underlying difficulties remain.
  3. Appearance and Usability. Admittedly,
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On The Road (Again)

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Andy

Well, Gwen and I are finally on our way West to Indiana. We got a little bit of a late start, but we should still make it before 11 pm. I am actually writing this post using my iPhone on the WordPress app. So far it’s working pretty well; it should make updating the site on the go a lot easier.

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Introducing the new Andy’s Random Stuff

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Andy

So, I have decided that it is high time I actually did something with this site. After my recent experiences with WordPress in coming up with my new site manbattlestations.com, I decided that I would convert the main page to a WordPress blog. No worries, though, the old site is still there in all its glory, sitting just beneath the surface of this shiny new face. You can access it by the link above that is labeled, appropriately enough, “Old Site.” Suffice to say, most of my future updates will be made here, though.

So, to my great embarrassment it has been almost 6 months since I last updated here! My, how time flies. This delay was a bit of an odd one; I certainly didn’t intend to go this long before updating. Instead, things kept coming up at work, with my masters classes, and with other things and each time I (by default, mostly) decided that it wasn’t worth the time to update here.

So, what has happened since my last update? Quite a bit, actually. I made two trips to Russia, finished my Masters degree, played in a couple of wargaming tournaments, and played a couple of great video games.

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