I call not it on the taking cornpop's organizational work.

But seriously I miss cornpop already.

I would occasionally get pain like this - the big change for me was making sure that when I slept I didn't pin that elbow under my body. The biggest influence over it wasn't the constant gaming it was that I was burying my right elbow in my mattress and pinning it under my body and putting tons of pressure on it after having gamed all day lol. Fixed that and the pain went away.

It's not a fix all and may not be pertinent in your case but it's worth a try.

I didn't play tf2 when I was in college - but then again comp tf2 was still a baby then. But I am free that saturday :D

The museum that I work at's building was constructed in 1890, as a sort of department store for railroad shops (basically whatever goods came in by rail) but by 1917, those goods had become so ubiquitous that they no longer needed their own special store and were instead spread throughout all the shops in town. Then, in the 1920s, it became a car dealership (cars were tiny and dealerships were often strictly indoor affairs), but the crash in 29' took them out, and a local family that specialized in furniture making, and undertaking, moved in. This wasn't all that uncommon, as whoever made a chair or table could also make a coffin, and coffins tended to be a fairly reliable business so if your fancy chair didn't sell, you could still stuff somebody in a pine box.

The entire basement was also remodeled to accommodate embalming services, which had become extremely common after 1907 (various laws about just burying grandma in the backyard and its illegality were enacted at the state level here in Indiana). They lasted in that location until 1954 when Sears took over the building and did Sears stuff there until 1983 - whereupon the Museum eventually moved in.

When they were remodeling to facilitate the museum, the contractors had to take pictures of the entire process, being as the building was flagged as an historic landmark. "Orbs" as spooky-ghosty enthusiasts call them are legion in every photograph - I like to think they're just dust particles getting caught by the flash, but there's just no convincing some people.

Furthermore, the entire basement is still set up to embalm corpses. The first thing they did was fill in, with concrete, the pit wherein bodies were drained. In the 1930s the way you prepared a corpse was to essentially lower it down on a gurney and puncture some important arteries, and then let the blood and other fluids naturally drain out by manipulating the gurney.

On top of that, there is the full skeleton of a serial killer in boxes - I've labeled them "Hubbard Bones" on one side, and leave the unlabeled side exposed so I can scare interns with them. Basically, I'll ask them to see what is in those boxes and they'll go open them. I've positioned his skull in such a way that he is cheerily saying "Hi!" to them - or at least what I would imagine would be his cheerily saying "Hi!" with no skin n' such. He killed 7 people in 1854, was publicly executed on the courthouse lawn, and then his body was parted out for illegal dissection, and then used in the old high school's science lab as an anatomy piece until 1924 when his bones were turned over to the museum. We also have his death mask, made by a local doctor, which includes sick sideburns.

A ghost hunter from Indianapolis who has a podcast or internet show of some sort (I didn't look at it) asked to come do a show. The only spooky thing he found was a "cold spot" just before entering the embalming room, at which point I had to ruin his fun and point out that there is a cold air output vent just above where he was standing that runs 24/7 as a means of climate controlling the basement which we use for artifact storage.

So in short, no ghosties, but if there were such a thing, I probably should have encountered one by now.

Part of the reason pug groups develop stringent rules against off-classing relates directly to the type of players that frequent those pugs. The reason for this is that often, when playing with relatively new or inexperienced players, off-classes can be absolutely devastating in their impact on the game. Grab a couple of UGC-iron level 6s players and ask them to go against a team of relatively novice players who are maining a heavy. The heavy will likely be extremely tough to take down.

Off-classing then becomes a problem for the pug group because the primary objective of the pug group is to help new-newer players learn how to play 6s competently, and they can't do that because most of their effort is being utilized in having to figure out how to deal with an off-class they have no experience in taking down. So, they in turn establish strict rules against off-classing so they can focus on trying to figure out how the hell one plays scout, etc.

If you really want to off-class or practice playing against a particular off-class (a good idea!) you just need to set up pugs on your own and make the participants aware of what is going to go on there.

It is generally a good idea to try using the client well in advance of the first match of the season so you don't get screwed. When I played it was fairly normal for people to log on at least 30 minutes prior to a match just to make sure the game actually worked correctly - saved my bacon in my first ever esea playoff match because my cp_granary had corrupted and it took me around 15 minutes to fix my map file because of slow internet speed.

Once you're further up the ladder things change and people are expected to be a lot more accommodating (in part because everybody will know each other pretty well too). But when you're on the open grind, aren't anywhere near the top, and don't know many people, always opt for the FFW when it is presented to you. It's not your job to care about other teams and their problems. I've actually witnessed several open teams that I mentored in the past die due to certain members insisting on being nice guys about ffls. Just don't do it and your life will be a lot easier. Once you're at the top of open and playing another top open team (and higher) you'll know and probably be friends with at least some member of the other team and will likely be able to achieve a resolution more easily.

The client is a fickle master, but it generally works as intended. I think in all the time I played it only messed up for me once - and *typically* uninstalling and reinstalling will fix whatever the problem is. You'll encounter this more at lower levels of play because nobody knows anything about the client and will resort to panicking the moment something goes wrong.

As a former UGC admin, I can also confirm that the VAST majority of the complaints I received as an admin were regarding to disputes about ringers. They're just bad in general for the competitive integrity of a match/league. Sure, it's nice to be able to play a game when you're set to play a game, but there are almost *always* bad feelings about ringers being included in a game, either because the ringers over perform, or because a team refuses to allow a particular ringer in a game. Ringers are for scrims and not for matches. Granted, it's hard to find substitutes to play on a low open team, but there are definitely people floating around who would be willing to hang around, surely one of the 6 starters knows *somebody* who would be willing to be on call. Generally it's considered nice to pay their fees too.

When you're just starting out it is several orders of magnitude more difficult to enter as a relatively unknown quantity and find a good team. You should focus on getting together with people you've played with in the past, and liked, and forge your own team with them. People will come and go, but your policy should be this:

Find one other person you *really* like to play with and hang out with. As time goes on, you will either find more people that fit into that category, or will have to rush and find 4 others randoms. The goal from that point on should be either to adopt one of those four into the category of *really like* or find replacements for them at the nearest possible opportunity (meeting people you really like in pugs/lobbies etc). Then ideally you've at some point got a team with 4-6 people you really like playing with after a few months.

Other things that are generally good to have in teammates:

- Make sure they aren't children who are prone to getting grounded from the computer
- Make sure they aren't children who have an obscenely early bed time
- Make sure they have reasonably stable internet (no 300 ping pocket on the regular for example)
- Never allow players who have "friends" that must play on the team with them too unless they both are also your friends - they will both leave your team at the same time and screw you.
- Never allow romantic partners on your roster if you don't know them - they will break up and they will screw you.
- Make sure they have a relatively stable living environment (oops I lost my apartment can't play is a thing that happened to me twice)
- Always have a replacement in mind for every person on the roster.
- If somebody leaves go to the ESEA page and find dead teams and teams that are lower ranked than you and start adding the players off of those rosters and asking them to try out for your team. Eventually you'll be integrated enough into the community to also know when particular players are unhappy or their team is likely to die - ask them too.
- Everybody is shit at this game, the second somebody starts talking like they're good or that they know something shut that shit down *immediately* especially when you're in lower/mid open, because if they did know something or were in fact good, they wouldn't be playing on your team. If you don't that player will become a festering sore.
- Don't expect immediate success, plan to get repeatedly put in the trash for at least a month.

Fallout 1 hands down.

The original mystery, the characters are compelling, story is fun, discovering all the stuff is great.

Fallout 2 got bogged down in wacky side-plot type areas that, while fun, ended up being too much - the ol' "you're finished when you can't take anything more away" problem.

I've simply never found a Bethesda RPG that held my attention beyond a few real hours of play time. Eventually I'll up and decide to give them more of a chance, but I feel like while yes, most RPGs have a power curve that eventually trivialize portions of the game (due to you being a God at some point) that point comes super early in basically every Bethesda title I've played and I end up quitting as I can do whatever I want with impunity - though they are pretty good at visual story telling in some places and have a lot of nice visual set pieces.

I tried out New Vegas, but it suffers from a real problem in that it presents a whole bunch of stuff to the player very rapidly and you don't really get a lot of time to slow down and smell the roses, which is fine if you're going for an intense story, but I like games that are more of a slow burn that slowly ramps up to a big crescendo, rather than being so hectic right off the bat - I'm old. It's like they were scared people wouldn't play more than 6 hours so they crammed tons of crap into the front end.

I'm a big fan of the 1922-1923 Soviet Flag

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/Flag_of_the_Soviet_Union_%281922%E2%80%931923%29.svg/800px-Flag_of_the_Soviet_Union_%281922%E2%80%931923%29.svg.png

The design was eventually incorporated to official coat of arms because it was pretty complex for a national flag.

Also Mozambique https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d0/Flag_of_Mozambique.svg/2000px-Flag_of_Mozambique.svg.png

It's got an AK and a book on it. What more do you want?

I had 2 - I'm trying to watch my figure what with all the beer.

I made myself baked potatoes and intend to get really drunk in about 4 hours.

No deaths on med on viaduct, that's A+ level shit.

You put brown sugar on top of the pineapple - it's the best there is.

I mostly inserted the phrase "fully dead" because some people do talk about UGC like it's dead or defunct when it's not; it's just smaller than it was 3+ years ago.

In NA at least most of the secondary leagues were populated by players who were looking at getting into the scene, had just recently moved into ESEA and were still playing in the other leagues because they always had, or had friends who did, and/or they were players who were taking a break or had fallen out of ESEA.

TWL, UGC, and CEVO post ESEA move were all part of that system. There were also an assortment of very small community based 6s leagues that were basically an avenue for players who consistently played pubs together to try out sixes with their friends. Most of these really small leagues only ran 1-2 seasons, as most of their player base either gave up or moved to larger leagues in search of more competition.

The issue for us here in NA is that the "new" player base is just much smaller than it used to be, and more people are aging out of the system altogether where they don't have time to even play a match a week in UGC etc.

As far as why specific leagues died:

The small pub community leagues: interested players moved on to larger leagues, and some stayed, but in either case most of the pub communities of that era have died because of quickplay options.

TWL died in part because it was, at one time, the go-to league to play in before going on to CEVO which was then the primary league, but when highlander really got going in the wake of the ETF2l HL tourney, UGC was the place to go for that and TWL, which had lost much of its player base to CEVO and ESEA by then, fully expired. Interesting fun fact Dr. Shadowpuppet, my fellow hoosier, was at one time the head admin for TWL.

UGC isn't fully dead yet but it has decayed fairly markedly in the past several years, in part due to the decline in popularity of highlander, its primary league, among other issues. I was the head 6s admin there for 2 seasons.

CEVO died multiple times and that is kind of a vexed story so I'll go over it in order.

The first death.

CEVO was the go-to league for the first really big run of comp 6s in NA (after early TWL and fragmov or whatever it was called). It had a lot of momentum having been a major league for CS 1.6 play for years. However, their tf2 league ran into several problems having to do with admin favoritism. Essentially certain rules were applied to certain other teams unevenly based on the fact that team x may've had an admin or an admin's friend playing on it, which soured many players on CEVO generally, and ESEA picked up tf2 at around the same time and promised an eventual tf2 LAN which more or less precipitated a mass exodus of players from CEVO to ESEA - furthermore, ESEA's admin system is automated, and several of their admins had no real interest in TF2, so players were less likely to encounter admin abuse.

CEVO continued on as a feeder league to ESEA with most of open playing in CEVO as well as ESEA, bolstered by plenty of teams that didn't want to pay ESEA's fees and "learn the ropes" as it were. However that all came to an end in 2011 IIRC, because they set up a playoff during Christmas vacation, and the "default day" for the first round of playoffs was Christmas Eve, so craploads of teams refused to play and couldn't work out a scheduled date to play due to the chaos that generally surrounds people's schedules around Christmas time in NA. That particular playoff ended with somewhere around only 5-6 matches being played in total out of a huge bracket of teams. The CEVO league was then formally declared dead.

CEVO then returned with a new angle, rather than run a league, they would run a "vanilla tournament" this was in part off of the back of the hype surrounding NA's first foray into European play that would take place at the I series LAN. Tons of teams signed up, a small entrance fee was to be paid, and nobody really had any problem with that. The tournament was also specifically set up so as to fall during ESEA's off-season, so teams wouldn't have to worry about scheduling conflicts. However, CEVO delayed the tournament on the grounds that they wanted more teams. They eventually delayed another week. Several teams began to openly discuss dropping from the tournament due to the likelihood that ESEA's first week would fall within the bounds of the tournament. CEVO then announced that the vanilla tournament as such would be cancelled, and that a "vanilla season" would instead be played. Almost every team dropped from the tournament and likewise requested that their entrance fees be refunded. In the end only 3 matches in total were played, and the "season" was won by yz50 and dummy's srslybro team they pocketed somewhere around like 300$ iirc lol.

Then CEVO was resurrected in the wake of ESEA's bit-coin bandit scandal, as well as, in part, some controversy surrounding some of ESEA's then recent "invite conduct" policy punishment schemes and penalties to winnings which occurred as a result - Pyyyour campaigned under the "no exceptions" catchphrase to voice his and others discontent with those series of decisions. CEVO was bankrolled by Nahani and several other people who had long backed TF2 and the league got off to a pretty hot start, being more or less on par with ESEA for coverage and team numbers. It also featured a LAN. However, the league encountered several problems, but the *most* important seems to have been CEVOs forfeit win policy which held that no team could be granted a forfeit win, and that any forfeited match would be replayed against another team which had also received a forfeit win. This meant that in some cases one could see 3-4 matches being played on multiple maps within the same week, as your team was forced to resolve last week's forfeit matches. Although there was widespread discontent relating to this rule's implications, nothing was really changed, and ultimately CEVO died a 4th time and has since remained defunct.

Yikes! Is that a new thing or will I have to fiddle with it every time there is an update?

Thanks for the help it appears to work now!