Saturday, November 26, 2016

Greetings Fellow Vacuum Heads!

Hey! Long time, no see! How have you been doing?

WHOA! WHOA! Put down the blunt objects, let me explain...

Yes, I abandoned the UFTWWWP. Yes, I've been out of touch for quite a while. I know that there have been a lot of changes in the world of Full Thrust since 2005; new faces, new products, new websites. However, I have a perfectly rational excuse for my over-a-decade-long silence.

I got distracted. No, I got really distracted.

In the early 00s, my life was really in flux. I had just graduated from UWM with an all-but-useless Journalism degree.and spent for first few years after college trying to find a career with little or no success. I bounced from lousy, unsatisfying, dead-end job to lousy, unsatisfying, dead-end job. At the same time, I was dealing with a troublesome combination of depression, anxiety, and ADD. It was not a fun time.

Meanwhile, my local gaming group had moved on from FT st to other games, meaning that the only games I could get were at conventions. When Gen Con moved away from Milwaukee, I discovered that I couldn't afford to make the trip to Indianapolis, so I turned my attention to local conventions which were more RPG-centric. Soon, FT became one of those things that I had to set aside in hopes that I could find the time and interest again to pick it back up.

The UFTWWWP also suffered from the same decline until it was left fallow. First of all, I lost the password to homegame.org's server and the admin wasn't answering my e-mails, so updating the page became impossible. Also, I had really not kept up with advancements in HTML, so I feared that any new content would not be fitting in an age of HTML 5 and dynamic web design. Work and other interests took my attention away until there were times that I had nearly forgotten that I had a Full Thrust site.

But now, that's changing.

Full Thrust still exists. Jon Tuffley has even wisely made the rules available for free online and a few enterprising gamers have even produced their own versions. New minis are still being produced, some of them made available through old favorites like GZG and Brigade, and new designs are cropping up all the time on Shapeways from fresh imaginations. There is still interest in space combat if you take games like X-Wing and Armada into account. I hear the call of the space sirens. Perhaps it's time I dust off the figures, roll out the game mat, and start designing ships again.

In the years since, I've had some experience running gaming web logs, primarily my OSR blog, No School Like The Old School. Blogs don't require nearly as much setup and TLC as the old websites I played around with in the 90s. Also, they seemed a much better way to put announcements and original material. Perhaps it was time to resurrect the UFTWWWP as a new blog. I intend to transfer as much of the remaining material on the old site to this, publish new material as it comes in, and publish news and reviews of products and events of interest to Full Thrust players.

It will take a little doing, but this will be a new beginning. Pardon our mess as we settle into our new home. Any help or suggestions will be gladly appreciated. Just make sure to digitally smack me across the head if it looks like I'm getting distracted again.

7 comments:

  1. Great news I loved your old site.

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  3. Added to favorites. Nice to see you back.

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  4. Any chance we can get an updated version of Andrew Ayres shipbuilding program?

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  5. Loved your old site, nice to see it in a new home!

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  6. Welcome back, Mark!

    I'm still here. Glad to see you are too.

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