acemarke

Ditto, flying PHL-BOS now!

YES I AM!

I actually just dug up my blog/journal post from that day. Here it is, for posterity:

I got over to the Battletech area around 12:45 on Thursday. One of the many Battletech events at GenCon is the "canon event". Catalyst Games sets up a series of scenarios which relate in some way to the current major plot arcs of the BT universe, and the performance of the sides over the course of the event affects how some of the future universe plot points are written. This year's scenarios revolve around Stone's Coalition invading Terra in 3078, towards the end of the Word of Blake Jihad. In particular, the Coalition is assaulting a WOB Castle Brian fortress outside of Cairo.

I had signed up for both the 10:00 and 2:00 canon sessions on Thursday. Of course, by the time I got there, I had missed most of the first session, which I knew. So, I talked to the GMs for a bit, got an idea how things would work for the next session, watched for a bit, and added all my planned events to my phone's calendar.

I joined in the 2:00 session, and signed up for the Coalition. The objective was to gain victory points by controlling the six VP markers around the board. If the map was overlaid on a pool table, there'd be one VP marker on each pocket. Each turn, whichever side had the most non-crippled mechs within three hexes of a marker got the points for it. Each side also got points for kills and kills by the side's commander unit. Finally, the board was left untouched at the end of the 10:00 session, and the 2:00 people just picked up with all the mechs, locations, and damage left over from the first session. We started getting reinforcements as well.

I was handed an 80-ton Zeus assault left from earlier on the left side of the board, and a 30-ton Valkyrie reinforcement that come in center bottom. Unfortunately, the WOBs got a whole bunch of reinforcements in the lower left corner, and promptly started charging after me and another guy holding the upper left VP marker. I lost a bunch of armor in the next couple turns, including one laser to the head that stripped most of its armor. But, nothing internal yet, so we're all fine, right? Uh-huh. Yeah. Next turn, medium laser to the head, and I was minus one mech. Meanwhile, my VLK was jumping around doing some light damage in the lower right corner... until the NEXT round of WOB reinforcements showed up over there. When we finished the last turn around 5:45, I was in some woods right behind an Awesome that had no rear armor.

At this point, the GM told us to wrap up the turn quickly. I figured he just wanted to finish things a few minutes before 6:00 so they could prepare for the evening session. Well, there was one other thing planned. The GM got our attention, pointed us to a large display of painted mechs on the next table, and said, "You all see that UrbanMech on the bridge over there? The one with a missile being fired out of its arm? Well..." He reached under the table, pulled out a very large styrofoam mushroom cloud, and said, "It just fired a tactical nuke at that hex right there." He overlaid the mushroom cloud on the map, and informed us that "anything under the cloud is dead, the center hex of the mushroom cloud is 500 points of damage, and subtract 25 points for each hex away. Go see if anything's left. Welcome to the Jihad!"

I was cackling gleefully by this point. I looked, and my VLK was 15 hexes away, which meant it was about to take 125 points to its rear arc. This didn't take long to roll, though, since the second 10-pt group took off its already damaged head. By the time the rest of the nuke casualties were calculated, 90% of the units on the board had been wiped out. It was beautiful :)

So YES! If you look carefully at that top picture, in the upper section there's a silver Awesome facing that corner of the board... and if you really squint, you can see a dark mech just behind it. That oughta be my Valkyrie :) (at least it's a Valkyrie until I rolled damage clusters :) )

Thanks again for running that and giving us all such a glorious memory!

I WAS THERE! I GOT NUKED BY THAT URBIE!

That GenCon was my first physical tabletop BT experience. I'd been playing Megamek for several years and was a solid player, I'd just never played in person.

Showed up, joined the canon event. I think that day I was driving a Valkyrie.

5:45, afternoon session is almost over. GM says "see that Urbie over on the display? It's got an Arrow IV launcher, and just nuked this table".

He then pulls out the nuke template, places it on the table, and says "anything under here is dead. $UNGODLY points of damage reduced by 10 per hex out, see what's still alive".

My Valkyrie had its back to the blast...

And then had its head taken off so it didn't matter :)

And that was my intro to tabletop BT :)

edit

OH WAIT YOU WERE THE GM!

I feel like I might have said this in some prior historical thread, but thank you for having run that! It was a blast! heh heh

Bad bot. Banned.

It was never really alive in the first place.

In practice, what happened was:

• Random community members would submit an RFC that was usually either badly written or poorly thought out. Either way, the ideas also almost never aligned with the React team's actual development plans

• The React team has their own internal roadmap and development process, and have often worked on features internally and prototyped them in conjunction with app teams at Meta, going through multiple prototypes before they're satisfied with the API design. When they did then publish an RFC, they were already 98% done with the work and essentially saying "this is what we intend to ship". There'd be a few hundred comments complaining about the API naming, the React team might tweak one or two things and ignore the rest of the (mostly useless) feedback, and then ship it.

I covered some of this in my post The State of React and the Community in 2025.

I've heard that the React Foundation has a goal of trying to open up the actual day-to-day React development process - making it more transparent, letting the major sponsors appoint technical guidance committee members, and eventually getting the community more involved. Thus far I haven't seen any public indications of that happening. Not sure where things stand behind the scenes. So, I'm hopeful that there's progress here, but not expecting anything major to happen any time soon.