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Well well well, it's been a while since I wrote any kind of column (sorry - that's a "blog" in modern netspeak) online. In fact it's been over a year since I've been much involved in anything Quakeworld related. From time to time I'll drop by some servers or into IRC and people sometimes ask me how I'm doing or where I've been, so here's a little update for you. There's probably also some players new to the game or from outside Europe who are thinking "who the **** is this guy anyway?" - well, more about that later.

At the moment I'm not playing QW actively for a couple of reasons. Back in August last year I bought a house with my gf and of course this also meant getting a new net connection. First of all I had cable which was great in theory (~7ms ping) but was heavily overloaded in the evening i.e. bad PL and massive ping spikes. So a couple of months ago I switched to ADSL2 which is nice and stable - unfortunately though it is interleaved hence around 37ms ping. This translates to 65ms in QW to Wargamez so obviously any kind of serious play is out of the question. Of course there are other reasons too why I've not been playing - having moved house and also changed jobs means I've got less freetime. Often I won't sit down at my PC until after 22:30 CET.

Over the last year I have had some fun with frogbots from time to time but it's a real shame that XS4all seems to be down indefinitely as I quite fancy jumping in for a no-pressure game of FFA every now and then, now that I have a stable ping. At the moment I don't feel like I could jump straight back in to 4on4. I haven't played a single map in 2007 and in fact it's well over a year since I played more than a couple of pracs in a week. Oh yeah, and I'm using a TFT monitor now too - add that to crappy ping and a bucketload of rust and it's pretty clear that my days of playing Div1 Quake are long gone. I was never any kind of 'top player' but at least I felt comfortable playing at that level for a few years. I do still miss the buzz of 4on4 from time to time however and maybe I will look at joining some North American clan so I could play in UK with 40ms at maybe div3 standard.

Anyhow, despite not playing I do try and keep in touch with the QW scene from time to time. As for what clans and players are hot right now I couldn't tell you, but there seems to be some good progress in terms of the new qw.nu site and especially the ongoing development of ezquake. Maybe even if I'm not playing much that's something I could get involved in, in terms of testing and documentation (which is what I do for a living now, for anyone who cares!). I've noticed quite a few issues in terms of the cvar descriptions! This 'Quake TV' stuff looks very promising too although I haven't seen it in action yet. As for the actual games themselves, I just watched the EQL5 finals with commentary which was good fun as always. One thing I will say however is that the standard of play in QW today doesn't look like it is all that much higher than it was a couple of years ago. There are still some improvements in tactics and such we see develop but overall I think the skill level is starting to plateau.

Anyway in my 'QW break' I've sometimes thought back over my time in QW. And I figured, why not write down a kind of extended history of my 'career' in the game. Now I realise that for some people this may be boring as hell, and some things I talk about won't mean anything to most players, but what the heck.

I can remember pretty much the precise time I first played Quake. Just after 21:00, on the 14th of October 1997. That was the date I got my first PC, and the place we bought it from had been using Quake to test the soundcard was working under DOS - he just conveniently 'forgot' to uninstall it. I remember when he left the house and said "I bet you are going to fire Quake up as soon as I walk out that door!". Well DUH!!

Now at this time we didn't have an internet connection so I used to rely on magazines for all my info, game demos and suchlike. Shortly after getting the PC I got this magazine which had a whole CD packed full of Quake mods, patches, maps etc. One of these mods was the Reaperbot, an AI deathmatch opponent. Incidentally it was coded by Steve Polge, who landed a job at Epic coding the AI for Unreal on the basis of this mod. Anyway, this was my first introduction to deathmatch. At the time I was still playing with keyboard only, and soon found that while this was OK in the confines of singleplayer, in deathmatch it simply doesn't give you the required level of control. I had read in magazines about players using the mouse, doing circle-strafing etc and this sounded like something I needed to learn. So over the following months I learnt to use the mouse, at first with +mlook bound to mouse2 (so you have to hold it down to look up/down with mouse), but I soon found that I was holding it down all the time anyway so I finally changed it to be on permanently like everyone uses today.

Of course, after some time it became apparent that using arrowkeys to move wasn't that great either because in order to change weapons, I needed to reach the numbers 1-8 (the idea of rebinding weapons hadn't occurred to me yet...). So I shifted my keys up to TFGH (middle of weapons 3-8), which is what I still use to this day. I actually think this is better than the more popular WASD because it is more central giving you much easier access to the righthand side of the keyboard for teammsgs etc- but that's a whole nother can of worms

But enough of my settings. In September 1998 I started University and of course that meant fast internet access. I didn't have a port in my dorm but at least I could use it in labs for downloading onto floppies, and started experimenting with more maps and mods like Omicron and Frogbot. Now by this time I reckoned I was a really good player, but of course I'd only had experience playing vs bots and never against real people! I got know a couple other guys who played Quake and we had a few matches on the LAN. I think I started off using something crazy like 800x600 software because the lab PCs were P2-300s, much faster than my own computer, so I was playing with something like 15fps and wondering why my mate using 320x200 had a much lower ping than me on a LAN! Unfortunately, due to the uni firewall we soon discovered that playing online wasn't possible.

Anyway one of these guys knew about this online service in the UK called Barrysworld. They ran good public and private servers for QW and Q2, plus had their own 'free' dialup which made them very popular. I started reading up on news etc on their website and eventually stumbled across an article regarding a proxy called "Qizmo". My friend was a steadfast Cheapo supporter and had never heard of it, but one feature caught my attention - UDP firewall evasion. So around Christmas time that year I finally was able to play online using the TCP connect facility, although packetloss was really bad.

We used to play quite a few custom maps like ztndm3 and aerowalk (which I'd learnt due to frogbot support) and I started posting a bit on a mapping forum called Terrafusion. Back then I was a bit of an internet n00b and had my email address publicly listed - but this worked out OK because it was spotted by another guy at my Uni, a CS postgrad using the online moniker "Aardappel". Many of you on both sides of the Atlantic may know him for his mapping, coding, work in industry or even as a player. So over the next few months I would play quite a lot of late night QW (when our connection was better) with him and his buddies mostly on custom maps but also learning my trade and getting used to some teamplay.

Although when it came to tactics I was a complete novice (not having played against unpredictable humans for very long), aim wise I wasn't too bad because I learnt to play deathmatch against bots meaning you need to be able to master twitch shots, good shafting etc. So I was good enough to get recruited into my first clan, Central Beating. This was mostly made up of younger guys still at school but of course as my first clan it was quite exciting as I'm sure it was for most quakers. There was also one older guy, Stretch, who was to become a good rival on Barrys FFA server over the next couple of years. Of course at this time (early 1999), Quake3 was still a long way from release and the QW scene was still thriving in the UK. It was a long way from the european scene you see now, I mean the idea of playing regularly vs foreign clans never really crossed the minds of most players I knew except for those in the elite clans. So we were playing in a newbie league called the UK Quake Academy, this was below even Div6 of UK (never mind other countries!). Now we had some (relatively) quite good players in our team and were beating quite a few clans from the lower divisions too in praccy, so we reckoned we were hot stuff.

However this didn't go unnoticed by our 'sister clan', StrikeForce who had been around a bit longer. So they poached some of our better players and the rest of us were left to try and pick up the pieces. This meant lower activity of course and by the time summer approached, I was really getting addicted to QW, playing late into the night, long enough to witness the Barrysworld servers rebooting at 6am every day So that summer getting tired of a lack of clan matches, I decided to join a midlevel clan called Deadly Intentions, led by a couple of decent modemers, Sheep and Scruffy. Of course during the summer I was back living with my dad so I had to get a modem, the classic Pace 56 Voice internal ISA modem, which was capable of pinging around 90-110 in quake with a good isp and qizmo compression. Remember of course that this was still the 20th century and hardly anyone in the UK had broadband, with a few moving onto ISDN once it got to a reasonable price level (around $50/month + call charges). Because of this we used to have a league specifically for modem players, the MCW (Modem Clan Wars) league. We had quite a few good modem players and I had been hoping we would be playing in Div2 - however this wasn't to be. At the time it wasn't that uncommon for players to play in different clans in different leagues - e.g. one clan for UKCL and one clan for MCW. Sheep and Scruffy had a place in Happy Campers' modem team who while not an elite clan were one of the bigger names in the UK at the time, which left DI without a team.

Of course as newcomer to QW I was desperate to play in all leagues and so applied to join Strikeforce for the MCW, as I still kept in contact with those guys and hung out in their IRC chan. In the end the leader told me I was wanted, but only if I joined as a full member not just modem team - so another clan change! This worked out quite well at least in the short term as I got on well with the guys then, we had a couple of LAN meets and it was generally a happy time. We had a good season in Div3 of both UKCL and MCW, winning both titles. Around this time I was starting to get noticed a bit more, and the head admin Bigfoot picked me as Div3 player of the season for MCW. This seemed really cool at the time, having my name up in lights on BW website which as a low-div player and relative newbie wasn't something I was used to. Maybe they should bring back such awards for EQL.

I was still playing a lot of FFA and even with modem was holding my own against div1 players. Towards the end of the year we got ISDN in our uni house and I could finally play as a proper LPB without packetloss! Also had some good games on the germany.net ffa server where a few EA guys used to be regulars along with Imperator, who later joined IBH and in more recent times has played for FS. By now I was starting to pay a little more attention to the European scene, following the progress of UK clans in the first season of Villains. There was a really cool guy in the UK scene called Jimbob, very modest and probably the best modemer I've ever seen, with the possible exception of Shiva (aka Memil). He perfected bunnyhopping before it got mainstream (remember at this time, kteams hadn't been fixed so you used to often 'slide' sideways rather than jump) and was prepared to talk to anyone. Anyone once he finally got ISDN a few top clans were sniffing around and I think his mate Caustic (who later came out of retirement to play for Redux) recruited him into Shroet Kommando (SK), who were a pretty big clan then featuring players like Kane, Timber, aKKe etc. I remember him telling me about how 'sick' Zetor were after they beat SK in the quarterfinal or something like that. So I checked out the demos and was astounded by the speed at which they played. Until that point my idea of good TP was that I'd seen from clans like Empire of Azeroth (Paracyde, Venture, Ser, Mirage etc) who had skilled players and some good teammsgs. This was still the fairly 'static' style of play where players tended to have a position they would try and camp the whole game. ZR redefined my idea of what was possible through their speed of movement, and Rock became my fave player to watch. Then of course I got to see Trinidy from Euthanasia who just seemed to be on steroids in terms of how fast and smooth he could move. These two clans kinda led the evolution in QW teamplay, whereby players were much less static and would move quickly to interchange positions and launch swift attacks. This strategic philosophy was then of course perfected by Flaming Fist over the next couple of years.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. The end of the 90s also saw the release of Quake 3 Arena. This had a profound effect on the UK QW scene, with many top clans moving over such as Four Kings (4k), SK, Demonic Core (DC) etc. And of course many more followed like sheep, often coming out with some ridiculous statement like "I really love QW, it's the better game, but everyone else is playing Q3 now - QW scene is dying". This was a self-fulfilling statement - if every player who said that had stuck with QW, then there wouldn't have been a dying community! Of course, the concept of 'pro-gaming' was starting to take off now too, and people will always follow the money.

What this meant in terms of my clan, of course, was that instead of playing div2 the next season following our promotion, we were in div1 due to other teams dropping out. We also decided to enter Villains2 and divisions started to form within the clan. A couple of new players had came in over previous months who I didn't get on so well with. And we also brought in a few 'l33t0rs' like Quake50, who went on to be quite successful in Quake3 with 4K. This meant that we had a mix of ambitious players who wanted to play at the top level, and more casual players for who maybe didn't like the direction the clan was taking. Villains2 turned out to be a bit of a disaster, we were paired with Gods of Hellfire (a Belgian clan, strong on personality and maybe not so strong with a shotgun in their hands!), but also Firingsquad from Holland and The Pooh Clan from Sweden (many members of which went on to form Lithium). Our home map was e1m2, the least popular of TB3 in the UK where we usually did OK. But of course, playing a swedish team on e1m2, featuring Riker pinging 20ms lower than us was a completely different proposition. The stuffing kinda got knocked out of us and quite a few players left to join other clans (some maybe understandably annoyed at not being starters anymore in favour of newer members). The final straw for me was when we were supposed to play vs Denial, probably the top UK clan at that time in the UKCL. We had already beaten 4K in a previous week and had a LAN arranged that week. With some MM3 communication I was quite looking forward to the match (I think DN were also lanned that weekend somewhere else, not sure), but there was a lot of lethargy amongst other guys about playing the match and would rather give a default (known as WalkOver on the continent).

I've never ducked a clan game in my life so pretty soon after that I decided that I needed to move on to another clan, one that was a bit more serious about QW. There were some options I thought about asking to join like JAMS who were nice guys, but I figured at that time I really needed to try for a top clan. As I mentioned above, DN were #1 in the UK by this time so were the obvious choice, although I'd had a few run-ins with some of their members in the past... the likes of Storm and Prom launching a barrage of abuse most times we were on FFA, accusing me of botting and all sorts (see here for a demo I recorded back in 2000 - they actually persuaded some rookie admin to kick me from the server!). Anyway DN had the core of the UK team with guys like Raggy, Oppy, and Aerotus so it seemed like the best move to achieve my ambitions so I joined them around March 2000 or thereabouts. Of course DN were the clan everyone loved to hate (like many big teams such as Slackers, Man Utd, Bayern....) so I got a bit of flack from this move, but to be honest I was far too into my Quake at the time to worry about what people thought of me I was the type of player who would sit on a server playing for 3 hours straight without uttering a word except to teammates (a bit like Vana), which was quite different from some of Denial

Like I said before, by now the UK scene was shrinking rapidly and so in order to find some competition we had to start playing more and more vs foreign clans. A couple of German teams (Imperial Bounty Hunterz and The Dark Icemarines) probably became our closest rivals in Y2K. Also that summer Smackdown was launched, a tourney with a worldwide ruleset(!) with divisions for North EU, South EU, North America, South America and Australia. At the time routing in Europe still left a lot to be desired and while ping to holland/germany was OK, to Scandinavia it was pretty bad, around 70ms. There was also no ASE for finding servers and the number of (known) qizmo proxies was fairly limited. We were a bit unsure about whether to enter S-EU or N-EU division. By then FS had moved on to Q3 so one of their players, Little Horn (aka Eriq), was kinda floating around central EU servers playing mix or standin with his 13ms-on-the-moon 100mbit connection. Oppy asked him to join us and he agreed as long as we played N-EU div. He also was able to bring a few of his dutch mates on board like Infinity (aka Blixem, Delta and 999 other stupid nicks), Lithium (Amen/hedfuk) and Cr34m. Some time later Inf also got his IRL friend, Crit to join cos sometimes they would LAN together. We now had a pretty big team having also recruited a few more decent UK players like my old clanmates Scruffy and Sheep to replace inactive ones like Aero and Skumbag (teehee, I'm sure Skum would love the inference that Sheep 'replaced' him :p) and could practice quite a lot, although I was back home for summer on modem again. Then we were approached by Venture and Paracyde who wanted to join us. After a bit of debate about whether we really needed them they were taken on board due to having decent skill and also european experience from EA. So we figured we had a pretty strong squad for the coming season

Smackdown kicked off with us facing AirWalkers, who were basically a remix of _W_hatever, a notoriously lame/funny clan (thanks largely to ParadokS' roommate, Kelvin). Oppy and I had arranged to play this match from a netcafe in London meaning a decent connection with ~40ms in Denmark. This kinda backfired when evil admin Andy forced us to play the deciding map in Norway where AW had a big advantage, but we won through in the end. Anyway I don't think Vent was too happy with this lineup and wanted to play with his 'topteam' including dutch buddies, Inf and LH (who weren't available on that date anyway, but bleh). So after that time he didn't really play that much with us. Anyways we got through our group without too much trouble aside from TDI who won DM6 (a map very rarely played in UK), and faced up against our familar rival IBH in the playoffs. Because of the way Smackdown1 was scheduled (starting in teh summer), I still wasn't quite back at uni yet so wasn't able to play. DN homemap was of course DM3 where we usually fared very well vs clans outside of scandinavia. IBH on the other hand surprised us with their map selection, E3M7. I later learned from 123 that this was because due to missing some players, they had to field some dutch n00b called Reppie who was a bit of an expert on that map. Deciding map was e1m2 which was fairly close I seem to recall. Although it's nearly 7 [edit: 10!] years ago now I still remember the turning point - Paracyde had RL and was fighting 123 armed with SNG in the doorway between quad and GL. Paracyde wins the fight, but before he can recover health 123 spawns on his pack and cuts him down with nails!

Smackdown 2 was a bit better from my perspective as I had a good enough connection to play - however we never quite realised our potential and had to face some tough clans like Lithium (featuring Riker, Shiva/Mem, Nabbe etc), tVS and Koff. During 2001 the clan also moved back to a more UK-focussed squad with players like Kara, Dynamic, Gibbs, Blitz and Corax being brought in, together with honourary Brit Andy. Various titles were collecting during this time including UKCL, MCW and the German 0wn4g3 league. It was also my graduation year and so from June onwards I was back on the trusty modem, meaning very little european quake for me Yet again I was left to spectate Smackdown in it's 3rd season. Towards the end of the year some of the team (Blitz, Gibbs, and Corax) broke away to form Redux together with Caustic and the swede Silver, who was known to those guys from an older clan, TBM. Raggy/Rags followed soon after and thus the squad was somewhat diminished.

Come 2002 and the activity within the clan had dropped down a fair bit due to players leaving or 'retiring'. With Smackdown4 looming, and having already missed out on most of sd1/sd3 due to my connection, I decided that I needed to move on or risk missing out again. The only UK clan that could offer me the kind of commitment I craved was Redux, but I wasn't very happy about the way the split had been handled previously and on a personal level I knew I probably wouldn't be happy there. I liked Corax a lot (I'd put his name forward to join DN in the first place) but I knew that sooner or later I'd end up in an argument with Blitz about something Any other UK clan would have been a serious step down in Quake terms, so I had a look around the servers to see what other central EU clans were playing a lot of pracs and looking hot.

In the end I settled on the German clan, Trash. They were a long-standing team who I had played against with DN in previous years so I knew it wasn't just some 5min wonder clan that would die off at the first sign of trouble. It's important to note that while multi-national clans are commonplace over the last couple of years, back then most clans had most players from the same country. So this was quite a big step for me, figuring that not speaking german meaning that IRC and teamchat could get tough. As it turned out this wasn't too bad and I slotted in well with most of the guys. I got to know Ayvern pretty well and he became someone I could talk to about all manner of things, not just Quake but also our lives in general. Quakewise we did OK, placing 5th in NQR2 (when it was a ladder) and playing quite a few games.

By the end of the year, however, that old bane of clans everywhere, inactivity had set in. Ayv and I decided it was best to break away and form a new clan. We also took the Hungarian player Zero from Trash, siamese twins Raptor and Darkwarrior (ex-TDI), and up-and-coming german player Spoink of P0RN clan fame. He was a bit of a novice to serious 4on4 at that stage (I remember ayv and I chuckling about how he once used first pent on dm3 to chase an enemy up ra tunnel, leaving rl vacant!) but we felt he had the skill to become a good player with a little guidance. Zero and Spoink are of course a bit more famous these days playing for SR and FS, but we were quite 'low profile' back then.

So, we had 6 keen quakers, but no clan name. The story about where "Hyphen" came from is pretty strange. Normally, people will pick a clan name and then base their tag on that. Not so for "Hyppien" (c) Sassa 2002. Dark said he really wanted to have a simple "-" as our clan tag, and asked what the English name for that character was. The guys liked Hyphen as a name and so the clan was born.

Probably the best thing about Hyphen at that time was that we were all roughly the same skill level and focussed on teamplay a lot. There weren't really any huge egos, no clan leader, and we had a mutual respect for one another. It's pretty much the only clan I've ever played in where there was no concept of a 'topteam', I'd be equally happy playing with any combination of our 6 players. Of course we might change the lineup a bit for certain maps, I'd usually play dm3 and spec dm2 if we had enough players, meanwhile Spoink was really effective on e1m2 while Dark didn't like it so much. But basically it meant that we had 6 good active players and could play several times a week. I'd also built up a really good understanding in Quake with Ayv and we always seemed to know what each other was gonna do in a given situation... e.g. co-ordinating attacks on RA to help the quad runner, knowing when one of us was gonna bore an rl for teammate and that kind of stuff. I'd say along with Manulito he's probably my all-time favourite teammate for a 4on4 game as they seem to have the same kind of tactical mindset as me.

2003 saw us enter NQR4, where after some strong showings in prac games we were placed in div1. This was the cause of some debate as we weren't really used to that standard of quake every week... but on the other hand div2 was maybe too easy for us also. Anyway fairly early in the season we had an infamous game against Slackers which gained us a lot of publicity. As a new clan of relatively unknown div1.5 players I think they underestimated us and played the first map with a weakened lineup (Goljat, Xalibur, Hib and Slebe the walking backpack). We also had around a 10ms ping advantage which I think they weren't too bothered about vs a bunch of n00bs like us. So after they got smacked down on their home map DM3, they got in a panic and replaced Slebe with Gamer who had been spec due to an unstable ping. Dm2 wasn't pretty with Hib locking down the low rl so it went to a third and deciding map. I wasn't confident about our chances on E1M2, but like I said earlier we had really good tp and understanding which helps a lot on that map. Goljat famously said in his match report that it was harder than playing Flaming Fist which I find hard to believe, although if you check slackers website records, their all-time lowest fragcount on e1m2 was that game vs Hyphen. I can't remember many times I've felt such an aftermatch 'buzz' as that, SR were surprisingly gracious in defeat and we had a lot of people coming in to #hyphen.

In a funny sort of way this raising of our profile also led to our downfall. Scandinavian players like Mrlame and CPM superstar Rat joined which changed the clan makeup a bit. Things were getting a bit more serious and personalities sometimes clashed, so after some time Spoink quit the clan. He said he was stopping QW but I saw him hanging out in #fs a lot and had a suspicion he might try and join them, which turned out to be true a short while later I don't have a problem with people wanting to change clans, but I'd rather they just be honest about it. Anyway due to Spoink leaving and us playing more in Scandinavian servers, Zero felt that he wanted to leave too some time later. The clan just didn't feel the same again and although we carried on playing for quite some time with new players like Hagge, Gibbs, Insane and Keyser, I think the spirit of Hyphen had died. It's a shame we couldn't have kept going for longer with our core 6 founding players, that's one of my biggest regrets in QW.

Around the end of 2003 Hyphen was going through a period of inactivity and I'd got kinda rusty. Then I switched back to my original nick, Maverick, and started playing a ton of mix games on the new Wargamez servers in Denmark. I found I was actually starting to really enjoy QW again and looked for an active clan from western europe. FS didn't want me (*sniff*) so I joined another Dutch clan, Boefje who were playing a lot and had my old teammate from DN days, Eriq playing for them. POV expert Gijs was the leader and although he acts like a kid sometimes at least I could see he had good aim and potential to improve in TP. Ironically we used to go around saying "]SR{Dragon" and he ended up joining them eventually, along with our regular standin Murdoc and also Mja! We had some good times, winning prac maps against LA and also playing some fun new maps in CMT which I hadn't been able to really since the UK days. Also a lovely dm3 prac against SD which we won despite them having 17 quads, 4 rings, 2 pents and taking more YAs and RAs than us During this time I also discovered that Oase had improved a lot in terms of TP understanding since the old days when he used to hang around with some of the dutchies in Denial. It was good to find another teammate I felt comfortable playing with again like Ayv.

Of course nothing lasts forever and in late 2004 inactivity meant I switched clans again, to Insanity which was basically a remodelled Dutch Hope. This turned out to be a bit of a disaster and I never really settled there. There was this rising star Optimizer who yes, was a good player but also had an ego the size of Gijs lunchbox. I'd literally been playing computer games since before he was born, but you know what 15 year olds are like. His idea of tp was shooting you if you took an RL, and then idle for 10mins while slagging off teammates in Ventrilo (the word 'noobshow' being used at least 15 times every minute). Now to be fair I wasn't at the top of my game during this time and made mistakes sometimes, but that's not a fun environment to play in so I decided to leave. Ironically had I stayed then maybe I would have become a part of the modern Slackers (who kinda merged with INS), but who knows.

The next stop was an interesting one. After that experience with Insanity, I decided to adopt a different approach and rather than have skill as my main criteria for teammates, I'd be more concerned with personalities. By this time I had less time for QW, skill level had dropped and I knew that Div1 glory was not a realistic ambition. There was this Polish player I knew from #iBh called CIA who I liked because he had great enthusiasm for Quake and could make harmless jokes rather than trying to embarrass other people. He was playing in an active clan called Easy to Kill. Also present were former Imperial Bounty Hunter Flowie and Spanish superstar Pericles. These we players I knew and could be sure that it would be more pleasant to play with. So I hung around spectating and playing standin for a bit to get a feel for the clan. This worked out OK and so I decided to join.


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And there we have it. I'll probably revisit it someday to add some more.