Goddamn it has been awhile since I checked the group. A whole year, in fact! We're all seniors now, and damn does that feel weird. In less than a year, we're probably all going to be going our separate ways and heading off to colleges and pretending to be adults. We can gamble, we can smoke, and we can make complete messes of our lives. That's what being an adult is, dammit.

Me, personally, I'm kinda busy with college applications, various assignments, planning trips, and just doing a whole bunch of work in general. Most of the rest of us are doing the same thing. It's great! Stress is great. But, honestly, I'm not all that stressed out about it. I've sort of hit an acceptance about this kinda thing.

One of the games we play a whole shitload of now is Overwatch, which is like TF2, but it's shinier and it's BULLSHIT WITH BULLSHIT ULTIMATES LOL PRESS Q TO WIN pretty fun. Adds a new layer to the whole "shoot mans" bit. We're all decent at it, but none of us are pro.

Chris has started a CSGO gambling website which a couple of us are doing admin things for. Looks interesting.

Dota 2, wow. Bunch of updates. Wings won the international and Kyle and I attended the Boston Major (bug one of us for pictures if you want). It was absolutely fantastic. Then 7.00 came out and completely changed the game. Shrines, new bounty runes, Tusk is good, oh my. We've steadily improved, although sadly not many of us can fit tournaments (or sometimes even a full match) into our schedules. Growing up. Kinda sad. But, regardless of that, we DID win a battlecup recently under the name of SIEG HEIL, which was funny as hell to see on a victory screen.

I started renting out an actual minecraft server so we don't have to fucking deal with terrible internet or servers that arent always up when we wanna do a custom modpack. This has the connotation that I have money now to do this. It's so fucking odd to not have to ask anyone "hey can I buy this?" Like... seriously. We're also running our own modpack, the NB Pakc, which has been updated to 1.10.2, despite my strenuous objections (Fuck you, Kyle, I want my Thaumcraft ;-;).

We also switched to Discord, which is like Skype, but better. Got our own server and everything, which is ruthlessly moderated by me, Kyle, Jack, Jamie, and Kav.

It's sort of weird looking back and thinking to myself, "Wow, this group's been around for five years or so! We started as a tiny little skype call with three or four people in it, and now look. We've got morons from Sweden, Denmark, Indiana, Texas, Canada, Iraq... and it was all made possible by us. We met all these guys." The degree to which our little band of idiots friends has proliferated around the world is sorta staggering. We're not, like, important or anything, but there's more people than I initially thought. It's been fun. I do hope we all stay in contact.

We started out as a bunch of Lakesiders screaming "NO BRAKES!" in a circle, and now we're a bunch of seniors getting ready to go and graduate and move off into the world. From me to you (if anyone reads this), Happy New Year, and it's been a hell of a ride.


--Chaos