Low Sec Lifestyle

I've spent a lot of my game time for the last five days working on my entries for the Pod and Pilot Fiction Writing Contest . I currently have two entries. I submitted them for the contest a few hours ago. I have added a link to them on my menu at the right. The category I am writing for is called "A Day in the Life" and described as such: A Day in the Life – True, somewhat true, or made-up tales of player character miners, mission runners, manufacturers, pirates, scammers, spies, and other heroes, rogues, and opportunists of EVE. The first entry I finished last night. I put on some music made sure everything and everyone in my house was fed and leaving me alone and burned through the writing. The story is not long. It ended around 2.5k words. I blinked, pushed back and asked my boys if they were willing to proof read for me. They said yes. I sat down with them and we talked about things. There was a lot of honesty and a bit of soul bearing in i

Clear the Sky sat above the asteroid belt. Under her stern, Asghatil I burned dark umber-red against the blackness of the Oraron Constellation. The pyroxeres asteroids were pale, illuminated to a washed out creamy brown by the yellow sun tucked into the systems center. Lasers ripped through the massive chunks of rock as the retriever sucked the ore deep into its gullet. Encased in her pod, Clear Play was insulated against the relentless throbbing of the ship. The dull, non-ending drum of the ore crushers was lost to her. Instead, she measured the asteroids and redirected the lasers. Each moment was precise and calculated. Numbers flickered across the scanner as it measured the mineral concentrations locked deep inside of the asteroids. Clear Play directed the lasers in rhythm with the numbers, each movement focused on maximum yield from the rocks cores. In the corner of her HUD the position of her Hobgoblins flickered past, their patrol relentless. A red icon flickered

So much ridiculousness and yet so fun. I spent the morning trying to make some ISK. I failed for the most part. Not put out, I logged everyone off but Sugar and my little industry character. She had stuff to do reference her industrial abilities. I was then sending her a few regions over to set up a secondary spot to haul in a particular ore with a particular mineral need in it. CCP has given me the option to mine almost risk free without paying much attention. It is ridiculously easy to mine these days. However that is not my rant or my story. I had her out chomping up the ore that she needed. My little retriever is tanked. In my primary window I've been writing. Its been a productive evening for that. My first little random fictional entry is almost finished. As NPC rats pop up I kill them. I've never been one for sitting there and tanking the damage. Plus, the flickers of red bother me. I noticed that one NPC was 30k off of me. It was not approac

The Easy Gank Alt Nerf Bat has smacked down and I don't think many people expected it. I did not. Yesterday, I received the e-mail news letter Eve Online Volume .82 . It had one thing that captured my attention. New additions are coming to the Buddy Program soon, including Open Invites, allowing you to share a unique public link that anyone can use to obtain a 21-day extended trial of EVE Online. Just like the existing invites, when the new player subscribes, you get an extra 30 days of EVE game time added to your account. That didn't seem to bad. It looked like the permanent links might not generate a PLEX if people used them to gain game time. I could live with that. In fact I decided that I would immediately put up a link on my blog if they came out with the program. Some game time would be nice. I was fine if it was not PLEX . Plus, it was a good way to get even more advertisement out for Eve. Then today I saw this tweet about the change. A D

The Cheetah sat in the darkness. Quiet. Still. Its engines were cold and its systems silenced. Light refracted off of its surface. Visually, it was no more than a ripple in space. One missed by eyes and sensors alike. Tucked deep in the dark pathways of the system it waited. "Obelisk inbound." The words flickered across the pilots vision. Deep in the center of the ship wrapped in the confines of the pod, the pilot watched. Two hundred kilometers away, the massive freighter that the pilot had been watching dropped out of warp a mere fifteen kilometers away from the gate. The Cheetah's engines flared to life, their energies dissipated and cooled before they were exhausted into space. The pilot entered coordinates. The small ship twitched and leapt into warp. It dove towards the Obelisk and slid out of warp only a few kilometers behind, at a spot picked days before by the pilot. The tiny ship moved forward and dropped its cloak as a large fleet dropped out of warp ahead

Ganking happens. Sometimes it is low sec. Sometimes it is high sec. Sometimes it is null sec. Sometimes it is expected. Sometimes it is not. It is the best of sites. It is the worst of jumps. It is having a full hauler. It is watching your pod eject as your ship explodes around you. I don’t gank in high sec. Yet. I add the yet because I realize that those days are numbered. Eventually, my natural curiosity is going to win out. I am sure that it will happen after the new crime watch changes are in. I am not overly capable of doing the smart thing and trying to do it now when things may be a tad bit easier. I’ll have to be more careful about it then. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. For now I am the receiver of ill gotten goods. At first I wrote stolen. Yet, as I tilt my head and debate the word I do not feel that stolen is the proper description for the booty. Someone I know has been ganking haulers for the last few days. He alphas T1 haulers. Overloaded, under ta

I tried to do three things reference Eve and writing today. I failed at two and succeeded at one. My success and setting up, organizing, and chopping through half of my second 'story' for this contest. I can only hope what I write is acceptable. I am looking at building permanent pages for them. Once I am satisfied, I will add another link set to my side bar. Or, perhaps, I will add a side bar to the left side finally. I'm not sure. I am pretty sure that I will finish up the first one tonight or tomorrow and hopefully the second by Monday evening. My first failure was my continuing failures to write about Blog Banter 40. I wrote a lot. Pages and pages of words. Yet nothing I wrote captured the topic of the blog banter. The topic, as I understand it is: "Given the scope of the sandbox, what part should eSports play in EVE Online and what other formats could provide internet spaceship entertainment for spectators and participants alike?" I c

There is a fiction writing contest hosted by Telegram Sam and backed by CCP . I've been tossing around some random short stories in my head. Now seems an ideal time to spend the next month working on them and seeing how I do. The contest has two categories, Lore and Non-lore stories. I know nothing about the Eve lore. I am also not overly interested in it. I find that interesting. The Lore is not bad but it is like reading a book and watching a movie. They have the same information in them but it is different. Eve's Lore compared to playing Eve are like that for me. The Lore sets up the basic structures of the world but the written lore is not the game that I am playing and love so much. I want to write about the game that I play. However, after I got down the series of short stories I have in my head I will look at the Lore if I have energy for more. I love science fiction and writing something 'true to Eve' has a fun appeal to it. I have five

Blink is one of those offline/online Eve Online games. I logged in to see that they had hit their 400 trillion point and were doing their celebration give aways. So far, the green box has been most kind to me so I selected the green box again. A Phantasm . How cool. I only know of it as a ship ren sometimes flies and kills people in. It was a good start to the day. I was puttering around doing Radar sites. I found three Radar's in one system and I wanted them. I wanted them badly. As I finished scanning a Helios came in and dropped combat probes to scan. A sacrilege came in after that and sat in space for a bit. I debated this. The sacrilege is an Amarr heavy assault cruiser. It was possibly standing between me and the potential ISK from the radar sites. Unacceptable. If he jumped on me I would kill him or at least try. I had ISK to make. However, he docked up. That was fine. I kept dscan nice and active as I completed the Radar site. I did a seco

My laser specializations finally finished and I got the T2 medium lasers I had been waiting for to activate my Legion in "bigger, tankier covops " mode. I was excited. Then I stared at the horror on my screen. I paid ISK for this. W.T.F. Thank god I play scrolled out. I know that each configuration is a different look. This one is the configuration I want for the Legion as Big CovOps project. The unexpected side effect is that it is truly, terribly, terribly fugly. Eve is just one of those games where hideous things are not cast aside. In other world shattering exciting events...Kittens asked me to get him some skill books. I was in Rens at the time and the Rens prices were terrible. I hopped over five jumps and picked them up at a decent price. I then flew the 15 jumps back to drop them off. I opened my cargo hold to trade and saw that I had forgotten to load the books into the ship. I took a break to make dinner which just turned into

I am putting together a thing for my boys and extended family boys in two weeks. It is dipping my toes into a more complex event coordination. Earlier this year Diz had a fleet concept idea but it never came through. The ships for it are still somewhere in some station. Anyway, it just never happened. I'd been anticipating this fleet for some time. Of late, my personal confidence level has grown in indirect ways. I'm ready to be Diz's coordination and planning. He just has to FC it. I am trying to put it together. I'm am rather worried that the entire thing will be a flop. I just need people to show up and join fleet. I am providing the ships but I can not provide the people. I just spent a lot of ISK on this project. I'm vest for it to be a success. By a success I just want good participation and people to leave fleet when we are done with a smile. I am hoping that if I set it up, they will come. Dher said I should tell people what ships to

There is a program called ISBoxer that allows you to run multiple accounts as if they were one account. It is a useful tool for mining or running all the same type of ship to do something. CCP allows it because even though the program is giving the commands to all of the accounts the puppet master is still a player and not a bot program. When the fleet commander screams, "THIS IS A GIFT FROM GOD! KILL EVERYTHING!" the situation has reached an interesting level. I logged in and was immediately jumped by Hono and Emes reference a 5/10 they had found a few systems away. Only, they thought someone was doing it already. I sent them to investigate and logged on my own scout to see what there was to see. They are getting a lot better about intel but I still double check. The site was being done by a tengu. There was a Harb from the same corp on one side of the gate and a Myrm on the other with 5 other people from that corp in local. Then, local starts to spike

Now for the purely silly. I love corp chat. I adore the random things that happen there (even if I often cause them). This is the real version of the story: I got back in from doing errands and logged in to see Dher say that we had a bunch of sites to do. I immediately said, "Not it," because I assumed it was wormhole grinding. He assured me that it was not wormholes but some anoms. Okay, I don't mind that. I slipped into the Sleipbear and logged in my logi. We collected up MacG and one of our newer members and puttered to the next system to start making ISK. We burn through the site and the expedition is given to me. Dher asks me where and I stare at my journal and go, Akkio. It was about 12 jumps from where we were. I reshipped into a cane and we headed out of the area. We had to jump through Ennur where a corp has recently moved in. That was not such a big thing. I was duel boxing and just trying to split my attention properly. Dher was doin

Mr. Malachai Thorne Eve-Mailed me back this evening, continuing our conversation from earlier . ******************* Re: Re: Re: Re: Fuck you. From: Malachai Thorne Sent: 2012.10.21 03:31 To: Sugar Kyle, Nah, you're a douchebag. You attacked someone that was clearly afk, had no valuable cargo and in a ship 2 or 3 classes below yours. And then you killed my pod, which is like a turbo douchebag thing to do. You gained nothing by doing that, only the satisfaction of knowing you inconvinienced someone else. Which makes you a douchebag. Oh and btw, I sincerely hope you do get raped. What would be even better is if you or one of your loved ones have been raped, that would bring me endless mirth. ******************* I did not respond. Petition submitted. When I read it I made the decision. When I pasted it to corp chat the boys asked me petition it without delay. So, Eve is a game. It is a game of loss. And loss gets people get mad. As someone that engages in Pv

I don't get hate mail often. I was going to wrap this up into a little blog about the roam but I decided to make it its own thing. The short and sweet of it is: We killed a Vexor that landed 15 off of a gate and sat there. So, we shot it . Then when the pod didn't leave there was a mild race to pop it . Fuck you. From: Malachai Thorne Sent: 2012.10.20 08:23 To: Bisben, renecito, Sugar Kyle, Why the fuck would you do that? I hope you get cancer. At first I was shocked. I read the title of his eve mail and started to read another eve mail by someone I knew that was nice. After the moment of confusion (I shouldn't have been awake) I figured out what was going on. I shared his response with the boys and decided to ignore his tone to answer his question. Re: Fuck you. From: Sugar Kyle Sent: 2012.10.20 08:34 To: Malachai Thorne, Hello, Your Vexor landed 15k off of a low sec gate. A small gang fleet full of negative sec status people were sitting

Industry in Eve pulls at me. It is not an isk thing it is a building thing. I am one of those people that love legos. I can build things. I love the process. Sim City , the Sims , Civilization , Black and White ...any game that gives me the tools to create has anchored me and dragged me in. While Eve's world building is a tad bit more subtle then Sim City, it is still a game in which creation of things is very important. I wrote a thing when I got my Sleipnir about making it vs buying it. I discovered that I could not make it. I found that I was disappointed in that and I've since started working to correct that. My latest decisions have been for my high sec industrial goals of stuff building. I decided that I wanted an Orca and a Charon . I've always wanted an Orca. Well, at least since my 5th or 6th day in game when I first met one. Ever since I've desperately wanted one. My issue has always been price. I am a cheap, cheap person. When

I have been reading reviews about Dishonored . I like how the game looks but I am not into First Person view point games. Yet, I adored Fallout 3/Fallout New Vegas . It seems that in the right enviorment I can enjoy them. When I think First Person I think First Person Shooter. That is not a gaming style I enjoy. Dishonored, however, is billed as a First Person Role Play Game and my intial reaction was "I don't roleplay, how silly." Then, I thought about how hypritical that sounded. " EVE Online is a massive multiplayer online game " according to its own website. I play the hell out of Eve. Yet, I play a game that is called a roleplay game without feeling that I roleplay at all. Was I right or wrong or just suffering from a matter of my opinion? To define role play in games I'll use wikipedia and the dictionary . role–play verb \ˈrōl-ˌplā, -ˈplā\ 1: to act out the role of 2 : to represent in action After reading t

I was looking at my kill board for the month. Halfway through the month and I have seven kills. What does that mean? Nothing. Things have been busy. Long work week, Vegas, another long work week, losing my days off to more work stuff. I've been making isk however. Unlike a fleet I can drop in and out of PvE. Plus, some of my future plans are rapidly coming together and they need ISK. It isn't that I haven't been PvPing. I've had a lot of misses lately. There was a blackbird the other day. One more volley and he'd have gone down. But he landed his jam and warped off. Ahh well. He was smart enough to dock otherwise I'd have had him waiting through the jump timer at the next gate. None of that pays for Chella's skill books. Capital Ships is 360mil ISK and Gallente Carrier is 450mil ISK. She will need Advanced Spaceship Command in a week (46mil ISK) and a month later, Capital Ships will come knocking asking for payment. My goals for this m