✪ Rick's Scribbles & Notions 📝

March Madness: Life, Work, and Spaceship Hockey

I’ve been putting off writing a blog post for weeks because life has been hectic. But I knew that if I didn’t sit down and write something tonight, the month would fly by before I even realized it — so here I am!

What’s been going on lately?
Honestly, not much… but also a lot at the same time. Work is still stressful, my next university class is about to start, and I’m trying to juggle a million other hobbies — DnD, coding, writing, and, oh yeah, running a spaceship hockey league. (More on that in a minute.)

Let me explain the spaceship hockey thing…
There’s this game called Subspace that came out way back in 1997. It’s a 2D spaceship arena shooter where you blast each other to hell — think multiplayer Asteroids with a physics engine. It was a big hit with online gamers for a few years, but once bigger titles like Starcraft and Fallout hit the scene, it started to lose momentum. That's not to say the player base shrunk, but the novelty around it was short-lived.

Even after the mainstream moved on, the Subspace community stuck around. By 2004, the servers were thriving, with anywhere from 80 to 140 players on each one. When I joined in 2010, the numbers were steady enough that I was playing on three servers, each with different configurations and themes (one of them was based on capture the flag where you were soldiers with bazookas). Another one was a server called Hockey Zone, which turned the spaceship shooter into a kind of hockey simulation — instead of shooting each other, you passed a fiery puck and tried to score on a net. It was like nothing I’d ever played before, and I was instantly hooked.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Hockey Zone is still alive — barely. The player base has dwindled, but it’s hanging on thanks to the dedication of volunteers who love the game enough to keep the league running after 25+ years.

A few months ago, I volunteered to become the next League Coordinator (LC) of its minor league, think of it as the second division or a lower ranked tournament than the main one. The community voted between me and a few other candidates — and I won! Now I’m in charge of coordinating games, building teams, and keeping the whole little spaceship hockey league alive. So yeah, besides work and school, I’m also spending a lot of time on the Hockey Zone website — setting up team profiles, assigning players, and scheduling games every week. That’s probably why I haven’t had much time to read lately.

As for my day to day job, things have been intense there too. I recently got promoted (which is great — more money is always a plus), but with the promotion came a lot more responsibility.

I’m no longer just managing a Tier 1 support team — now I’m also tracking escalated bugs to Tier 2 and working directly with the dev team in Tier 3 to follow up on fixes and release versions. Basically, I’ve become the Tier 2 liaison between the support team and the developers. It’s a lot, but I actually like it (if I'm being honest). I’m learning how to use tools like JIRA for bug tracking, and I’m building connections with the software engineers — which is awesome since I’m studying software engineering and want to understand how the dev side of things works.

The downside? My inbox is always full. I’m not just answering questions from my team anymore — other departments are now coming to me for updates on bugs and fixes. It’s a lot to keep track of. But honestly, I’m not going to complain. Not everyone gets the opportunity to work at a software company, let alone one where I feel like I’m actually part of the team and helping develop the product.

So yeah, March has been a busy month to the say the least. But even though things are hectic, I’m happy. I’ve got a good-paying job, I’m learning skills that align with my long-term goals, and I still get to spend my free time doing things I love. That’s not a bad place to be.