I made a bet with myself about 5 or so years ago that I'd either be dead, insane, or snorting dangerously old mould off the kitchen ceiling if I kept running this place. It turns out the last two were true because I made the disastrous decision to work in IT and now suffer from highly functional alcoholism. (Yes, highly functional. It's amazing how much you get done at the top of the Ballmer peak.)
Let's just say I don't own a printer anymore. Not since I remembered I owned a working chainsaw.

So there's the usual; sign in today, get a shiny badge. (Batch is timed to UTC, gotta sign in before the 15th or you're shit outta luck.) Your e-schlong grows by one pixel. But I'm gonna take up some character space here to go over a few things that have happened in the last year, because fuck you, this is my blogpost:

Since my last post of this nature, we've had a fresh new site installed. Less PHP vomit to go horribly wrong, along with a migration to a strong dedicated web server. Unfortunately, a being of the french kind was involved. Disgusting, I know. But give him some praise, he has to work with PHP on a professional level. In some countries you can qualify under disability criteria for that, and still make good money.

We also had our first big event in a long time, too. Swashbuckler Skirmish[redsun.tf], our first totally-not-steam sales event, fully equipped with 4 teams full of Celsius room temperature individuals. Instead, we had 3 teams (one of which sponsored by your greatest ally, the Red Sun Central Bank™) and one mega-team trying to see how much their collective e-schlongs could farm meaningless internet points.
During that event, we debuted the first new type of item in a long time: profile themes, another Steam ripoff that let you customise how your profile looks on the Loadout.

We've also been involved in the usual cross-community charity works too. You've probably seen our branding pop up on the Blap Bash 2022[blapature.org] streams alongside deploying some decent servers for the pineapple.tf robots[pineapple.tf] whenever they've had an event on (or hosted on behalf of someone) - chances are if you've played one of the big MvM events of the year, you've inadvertently played on Red Sun hardware. Fun fact, eh?

And for those that know me beyond the schizo drunkard that appears every second quarter-half moon, but only on Thursdays if the tides are low, I've been working on various technical improvements to improve the site's FastDL and content stores.
There's the vastly-unused forum attachments that are supported over cloud storage now, allowing for very fast downloads. Very cool. Very nice. Very underused.
And there's a bunch of other boring shit that no-one cares about because all the peanut brains want to care about is the shiny new vscript rehash being shat all over the Workshop. Ask if you care about technical garbage, it's interesting if it's your thing.

But enough with that, here's some fun but uninteresting numbers for you to do absolutely nothing with:

8 years of Red Sun in some off-the-cuff numbers:

• 29,356 unique user accounts
  
• 2,873,809 Battle Points across all accounts
  
• 227,198 total badges earned
  
• 259,743 items across all accounts
  
• 34,434 forum posts
  
• 3,687 forum threads
  
• 6,238 account bans
  
• 1,545 forum accounts
  
• 1,350 unique donations
  
• 23 various moderators and developers (they do it all FOR FREE)
  
• 2 active administrators
  
• 0 intrusive advertisements
  
• 0 payment subscriptions
  
• 0 unfair pay-to win mechanics

I'm going to be stuck here until someone mercy kills me anyway, so let's keep going. Nothing bad could possibly happen, right?

As of this post, I've also made Crate #8 purchasable until the 17th of March 23:59 UTC at 200 BP per crate as a special one-time offer. Too bad, no URF coins for you.

Now piss off, I'm working on Absolutely Fucking Nothing™. That's right, Absolutely Fucking Nothing™. What is Absolutely Fucking Nothing™? You'll know when the time's right, but right now I'm not working on it, I'm downing enough paint thinner to fuel a lawnmower.

See you next year. Or never.