Every post in this convinced me more and more that you are a tactical genius beholden to the worlds funniest series of missteps.

"basically a middle manager at Stratemeyer" - me when I lie, lyingly

I'm looking forwards to "oh my god you played X in #Over/Under" as an intermittent dopamine spike for the next few years of my life

War makes yuri of us all

Anyway I have a million other thoughts, and I'll maybe get round to posting them, but right now I'm just feeling really quietly proud, and happy that I stuck myself out into this game.

Dreamspeed everyone, see you around!

I wouldn't trade the experience that I had for anything else, but also, I think if I had had almost any other experience I would be saying the same thing. The weird coincidences, the little places I caught stuff, or got caught, made this game to me.

I definitely missed out on a lot of the simply fun/joy of the game. I didn't kiss many girls, I didn't spend much time in bars, I definitely did less art than I had hoped because I came back to Tempest sooner than I planned.

But I got some incredible catharsis, worked through anger and sadness.

Just keeping an open XO desk, regularly handing out even quite small bonuses for good behaviour, all of that stuff just led to such a healthy internal company policy that our opsec tightened up in the span of just a couple of days. Turns out that treating staff well is actually busted.

I ran interrogations and deep character searches, and I wasn't perfect, but I caught a lot, and cleared a lot of legitimate officer's names.

And really importantly, the best way to stop your officers selling intel was to sell them on the mission statement, and get them genuinely on board.

Several people now have said the words that "Tempest won because of Tan" and especially now that the game is over I'm getting a chance to take some perspective on what I actually contributed.

I wrote the game's first counterintel op, on day 3, as a denizen looking to be safe.

The back half of this game though felt like doing real XO shit, continuously.

I did spy vs spy interrogations; I managed PR; I got to hit these RP heavy scenes like the Chapel Talks and come away feeling *electric*, and I did a lot of Tempest's wargame grid stuff because I'm a map freak.

That all sort of ended with Op Indigo, the two hour war, and then having to quickly recover ground and respect with several bosses that had been thoroughly convinced by the act.

By the end of the game I managed to regain a lot of that trust, but it was slow and difficult going for sure.

I realised, especially after MAA Forgrave stepped down, that I was briefly the only person running the organisational side of Tempest. If I'd been killed in that window I think we would've lost a lot of time to chaos, so I kept playing up that Tan was this unstable flirt.

I cut myself off from the company in a lot of ways, but I also never toyed with the idea of divergent loyalties.

All of my time in the Bratva was spent building this cover as a sort of playgirl artist, and that was so difficult to come back from, especially because of how fun it was to play.

Ending the game as Tempest XO was huge for me, it was the culmination of a whole lot of hours spend trying to cultivate trust in a faction that had no reason to trust me, and a lot of very very good reasons not to.

To some degree that was self-imposed challenge, by choosing to go out as a spy

The request to have the train stop at 37.08 I think was one of my favourite very small RP beats from the cowboys. I think Ramel was the one that stated it, but it just felt so characteristic of them

Pissfuck Mountain is one of a lot of bits that I initially bounced off of and grew to love.

I have a long way to go before I ever play games fully for fun, but it was so obvious that the cowboys were doing all of this for the love of the bit, and that's definitely a little infectious.