Dashofpepper and Hulksmash Join Forces!

Greetings, hello, and salutations!

Dashofpepper here.

I've never been the kind to write a blog, keep a journal, or report on my current mood or the music I'm listening to - and now isn't going to be the start of it!

For the last couple of years, I've dedicated myself to publishing tactical articles, army advice, and picture intensive battle reports on http://www.dakkadakka.com/. Battle Reports...ahh...near and dear to my heart. The best way to help educate players playing your army, or wanting to play the same army is to SHOW them what you do. Or at least, for those of us who are visual players...that's the best way to learn.

I stopped writing battle reports a year ago. It always turned out the same - I'd spent hours and hours uploading pictures, meticulously trying to recreate the battle, posting my thoughts, what my opponent was thinking, what happened during the game, what strategies I was using...and post an epic-length battle report that anyone could sit down and look at from beginning to end and actually KNOW exactly what happened and why during the game. And after all that effort, the result was usually a couple people going berzerk, trolling my threads, flaming me into oblivion, and making a general nuisance out of themselves - which of course distracted me from the REST of everyone getting enjoyment out of my writings, learning from them, and following up with questions about how to utilize things I did, or clarifications on certain tactics. That isn't to say that I believe everyone who disagrees with me has nothing worthwhile to say, but there is a chasm between intelligent disagreement and personal attacks.

A year later, having forgotten why I stopped writing them in the first place, I took another stab at battle reports! After a 5-0 Performance at the Alamo GT, I spent every minute of my free time after work for the following week preparing battle reports about the event. Approximately 20 hours of work later, all five battle reports were up! Drama ensues.

Dakka's #1 rule involves not being rude. After Sarigar showed up in one of my Battle Reports with a mix of poison, spinning facts, and outright lies, I didn't think that it was particularly rude to point out he was malicious, a truly bad person, and contributed negatively to the greater good of planet Earth. I didn't call him names, I just noted that he was a bad person. Its true, so I didn't think twice about it.

Such things *are* apparently rude, and after my post got deleted and his smear campaign in my thread continued unmolested, with the "Mod Alert" button being repeatedly mashed to no avail, I tried a lighter version of the same information in my own defense. And...banned.

So! That was cathartic. Here I am, glad to have a friend like Hulksmash, and planning on continuing my exploration of the tactical capabilities of underdog armies in the relative peace and quiet of his blog. Battle Reports will go here too, when I figure out how to link them, explore the commands here (not sure if this uses regular HTML or something else).

And best of all - instead of having to either respond to trolls and feed them, or ignore them and let them smear crap on my face unmolested...I can delete them!

That's not to say that I brook no argument - because I certainly believe that an argument here and a debate there adds a flavorful dash of pepper into a conversation - which is the devil's advocacy explanation for how my name came to be in the first place. I like to spice things up! But here...I can write, post pictures, and continue my campaign to improve the tactical capabilities of 40k gamers in peace.

I can't even express how comforting it is to know that what I write won't devolve into drama, flames, and personal attacks when I actually have the power to delete unconstructive or malicious posting. On the other hand, it could be that no one *reads* Hulksmash's blog, and the name Dashofpepper will fade into obscurity until one day I'm just "Justin" at events, and only faint memories of the cat with the lime hat still remain.

Either way, I find myself quite content. So depending on when you're reading this, I'm either still banned, or have been unbanned and you linked to this from a piece of content on Dakka or somewhere else on the internet. While I will still write 40k related content, it will be completely here. I will link my articles and other stuff wherever is appropriate for folks to read, but won't engage in any sort of discussion in that thread aside from bumping an article from time to time. Feel free to post a comment - I get an e-mail when I have them, and I answer questions and comments regularly. If you need to ask a question, drop a comment in one of my articles, or send us an e-mail!