Here I am, online at 3:44am Texas time, where I am. I have suffered from non-24 for decades. I sleep until I wake up and work until I fall asleep. The problem is trying to make that match going to the office at the same time every day or getting to appointments on time. It gets ugly. These long weekends get really bad. I seem to run on a 30-hour day, 25 hours awake and five hours asleep and during that 25 if I lay back in my recliner and read or watch TV I quickly fall asleep but only for a few minutes. Next life I gotta do different. Maybe I'll be reincarnated as an owl. I can remember a time that someone claimed it proved I was an evil person because I got on the BBS when he was asleep. He was not joking. He actually thought it proved something. I guess what it proves is that if you abuse your body with round the clock work you pay the price.

By Eddie E Crutchfield (Librarian101) on Sunday, January 04, 2026 - 05:47 am: Edit

Your not the only one up late tonight

By Stephen G. Parry (Mutant) on Sunday, January 04, 2026 - 08:56 am: Edit

I know your pain. I have struggled since teenage years with sleeping out of sync with the real world. My day job is teaching so I have to be up early most days, but during vacations my body clock drifts anything up to 8 hours, and during heavy marking periods, I end up averaging three hours sleep a night.
I exist on the Autism Spectrum, and those of us who do often have sleep disorders. All of my four children do too. My youngest (28) struggles with an almost completely random sleep pattern.
I use to struggle with sleep quality too - I often wake up feeling as tired as when I went to bed. This was eventually identified as a form of restless leg syndrome. The meds I take can be very effective, but I get resistant to the benefits and have to change every few years. Stress of course makes the symptoms worse.
All this has blighted my working life.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Sunday, January 04, 2026 - 10:39 am: Edit

I'm right there with you on the sleep cycle problems, sadly.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Sunday, January 04, 2026 - 12:55 pm: Edit

I worked rotating shifts most of my military career and then worked straight night shift for fourteen years. My body still want to flip over to going to bed at 2-3 AM and get up between 10 and noon any time I have extended time off. Hate to think what I'm going to do after I retire.


Garth L. Getgen

By Matthew Lawson (Mglawson) on Thursday, January 15, 2026 - 12:35 pm: Edit

Hey SVC,

I tried to email you a higher resolution cover, but I got a mailer-daemon saying "user over quota". Is there another email I should try.
Matt

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, January 15, 2026 - 07:32 pm: Edit

Try sending it to Sales@startfleetgames.com or to graphics@starfleetgames.com

By Matthew Lawson (Mglawson) on Thursday, January 15, 2026 - 08:07 pm: Edit

Sent it again to both!

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, January 27, 2026 - 04:56 pm: Edit

Yesterday I was declared permanently handicapped by a medical review board, which means I trade in my temporary (recover from broken hip) red handicapped parking pass for a lifetime blue pass. I am not sure that this is a thing to celebrate.

By Gregory S Flusche (Vandar) on Tuesday, January 27, 2026 - 06:11 pm: Edit

It means less paperwork getting the new ones latter

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Tuesday, January 27, 2026 - 07:19 pm: Edit

For what it's worth, Steve, I'm right there with you in the permanent tag club (my right kneecap considers the whole "staying in the vertical groove" thing to be laughably optional).

By John L Stiff (Tarkin22180) on Wednesday, January 28, 2026 - 02:37 pm: Edit

It is a practicality. My late mom had one after her hip replacement surgery. She loved to drive but had a hard time walking. Getting her closer to a store/restaurant was a good thing. Not just for her, but for all of us.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, February 12, 2026 - 02:06 pm: Edit

DID YOU EMAIL STEVE COLE?
Due to a computer glitch, I lost the last three months of email. My habit/policy is the reply to everything, even if it is just "I am busy and will get back to you later" but at this point the problem I have is there is no list of who was waiting for "later" to arrive.

So if I owe you a reply, drop me a line again.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, February 16, 2026 - 02:59 pm: Edit

MONDAY 16 FEB
I walked into the office today with plenty of things to keep me busy.

Email query about new products mentioned years ago that haven't been released yet. Yeah, well, Jean keeps telling me that I really do not have to mention every idea I ever had. There are about 50 products we have mentioned but have yet to do. It's good to always have ideas in reserve. Just don't think that if I mention a product idea that it's a finished product that would have been released if we were not lazy.

Email query about the new 3d vendor. We signed the contact last week and I got the preliminary electronic copy today. The hard copies are going back and forth in the US mail. We expect the vendor to have some kind of store working by mid-March with a handful of 7000s series sets. After that, he will add five or ten items a month, but remember we spent five years releasing 2000 items on Shapeways. They won't all be with the new vendor on the first day. Shapeways "released" anything we uploaded, even if it turned out that they could not print it. The new guy actually gets the minis in a printable form before they go on his store. Also Shapeways had "pictures" of the 3d renders immediately; the new guy will have actual photos of actual printed ships which takes longer.

Albert and Jean have given me back over half of CIVIL WARS for me to make fixes that I missed or fixed wrong. They expect to do the rest tomorrow and I expect to have the "rulebook" part of this thing finished Wednesday or Thursday. The other odds and ends needed to release the product will get done by next week and maybe even this week.

Petrick has checked five more SSD books which I have yet to turn into email reports to Nick Samaras for him to finish the SSDs. Albert and I overruled Jean and declared that when an SSD book is updated it goes on the PDF stores and into the physical print plant even if the updated rulebook is months or years from release. Please do not ask when a rulebook will be updated. When it is, we'll tell you.

I have 16 pages of late-arriving line item reports on the ORION MASTER STARSHIP BOOK. This is a mess because the book was finished when this report came in and my doing the report (Petrick is busy on other things) will mean Jean (proofreading) and Albert (page formatting) will have to do their time-consuming jobs over from the start. I hope to get the first page of this report done today. There are about a dozen line items per page. If I can do one page a day this will take a month. Remember that if I'm not working on this, I'm working on SSD books or Civil Wars or new product development or something. It's not like I do one page of this a day and then go take a nap.

A guy wrote a story and I have it on my desk. Telling him what he did wrong could take one entire productive day. He did a lot of things wrong, such as scripting an incident on the Lyran-Federation border.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, February 16, 2026 - 04:21 pm: Edit

I have made the second round Jean Fixes to Civil Wars through page 54 (out of 72).

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, February 16, 2026 - 04:25 pm: Edit

I cannot work on the Orion MSSB because the copy I was given on a thumb drive is corrupted.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, February 16, 2026 - 04:40 pm: Edit

I tried to transcribe Petrick's hand-written SSD reports but because his pens were failing and he writes in tiny little letters I could not read them with enough accuracy to send the notes to Nick in good conscience. So I handed the whole stack of marked-up pages back to SPP and told him to email me a report on each book.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Tuesday, February 17, 2026 - 08:46 am: Edit

Re: 3D vendor: that is some very welcome news!

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, February 17, 2026 - 04:38 pm: Edit

TUESDAY 17 FEB 2026

No really notable emails this morning.

Nice chat with a history professor who wants to write fiction for us.

I finished the second round fixes on Civil Wars.

Nice chat with the 3d vendor on ways to move things along.

Petrick is working on an SSD book report.

Mike is still waiting for the AC-220 current adapter for the new shrink-wrap machine.

I asked Albert to get me a working copy of the Orion book so I could start doing fixes. He did so efficiently. I made the first page of changes although I found that Petrick had already made some of them.

There was some kind of crisis with stamps dot com today but I was mercifully left in blissful ignorance of that.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, February 17, 2026 - 05:19 pm: Edit

If anyone is really interested, when I remember to do my daily report I tend to update it several times during the day, so you might check the next day to be sure you saw all of the previous day's report.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Wednesday, February 18, 2026 - 11:17 am: Edit

SVC could I please get a new topic under "UPDATING SFB (LET’S HELP SPP)" for "SSD CHARTS, TABLES, AND SYMBOLS"

By Matthew Lawson (Mglawson) on Wednesday, February 18, 2026 - 11:31 am: Edit

Do we get to know the 3D vendor since things have been signed?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Wednesday, February 18, 2026 - 02:41 pm: Edit

WEDNESDAY 18 FEB 2026

I added a new topic to the UPDATE area Shawn wanted.

I am not announcing the new vendor YET because he's busy getting the store running and doesn't want to have 50 of you asking him questions or offering helpful suggestions. There will be time for that after the new 3D cart goes live.

Jean has not completed re-checking the 2nd round fixes so no progress on CIVIL WARS today.

I spent all day on the Orion MSSB lost reports, most of which, it turns out, had already been done.

Petrick sent me the report line items he did yesterday on F1SSD and I forwarded them to Nick Samaras. He finished the final report on F1 at 3:52pm and I sent it to Nick.

There was no other email worthy of note.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, February 19, 2026 - 09:32 pm: Edit

THURSDAY 19 FEB 2026

I only had an hour in the office due to morning and afternoon appointments.

The new shrinkwrap machine has been installed and tested and works great. We won an auction and got an almost new unit at 20% of the retail price.

There was no email that needed a mention.

The doctor I saw today gave me a glowing report and a year of peace before I see him again.

I make some progress on the ORION MSSB.

I did some bookkeeping for Petrick as I handle his affairs and have for years now.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, February 23, 2026 - 02:37 pm: Edit

MONDAY 23 FEB 2026

I worked on Orion MSSB all day.

Steve Petrick worked on SSD reports all day.