Dispatches from the Middle Circle

Well technically today. It's past midnight now. The tournament is in nine hours and will run about nine hours itself. I'm excited, nervous, and maybe a tad anxious too. I'm going to be meeting a lot of new people, and perhaps make a lot of first impressions with them.

I've struggled with wargaming in the past. If I don't feel like I've given it my all, then a loss feels bitter, hollow. I feel like I'm an idiot for not understanding the general and specific concepts of the game. I feel like a loser who can't even win a silly, meaningless board game. It can get to me.

Tomorrow is a prime opportunity to put my best foot forward and have some true fun, and hopefully connect with people. Because that's honestly one of the reasons we do this hobby, right?

I also made some quick truck proxies for the game if we end up rolling the escort mission. Not a terribly fun mission. Made in Tinkercad in like five minutes, I find their generic cutout nature oddly pleasing.

Independent bookstores around the country have a particularly clever lifeline, one perfectly suited to the unprecedented moment we find ourselves in. The strange part? It came into being just weeks before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, and before the bookstores started closing up shop wondering if they’d reopen at all.

The lifeline in question is called Bookshop. 

A migratory flight.

"There are few people I dislike more than mercenaries, but corporate security force mechwarriors are one of them. A mercenary in perpetual service to one company, I have yet to meet a corporate badged pilot I would consider pleasant. They are, to a head, the sort of person who was disciplined enough to pass basic mech school but wrong enough in the head that the psyche weedouts kept them out of anything more dangerous than a Stinger with the guns ripped out. They resent this, it drives them out of uniformed service, and they are so individually hollow that the only opportunity left for them to ply their trade is as corporate guards.

They are all little Camerons, bloodthirsty tyrants convinced of their superiority by their technology. At the same time, they are furious that they aren't "real" mechwarriors like the pilots they see on the holovid, that their job is mostly quarterly performance reviews, sitting in air conditioned waiting rooms, and idly pointing guns at civilians wondering what it's like to pull the trigger. This makes them unpleasant drinking company and worse combatants when push comes to shove."