Wandering a Winding Road

I think that I will make January the first month since I started PvPing that I will not kill anything. I find it very interesting to do. It is a bit of rebellion that means nothing to anyone but myself. I've spent a lot of time looking over my shoulder trying to be productive by various standards that are not my own.

There are a few reasons for it. One is that I am busy and the time needed to go out on a fleet is not time that I have at the moment. In a way, my time is ticking down. The new CSM comes into office in under two months. I need to finish some things up because there is always the chance that I will not be reelected. Then, there is the fact that I had the winter summit last week. Much of my time was spent prepping, travelling, and then doing. All in all, January has been a very busy Eve month.

I feel a bit guilty and a bit rebellious. Silly emotions but ones that are there. But, I'm tired and distracted and PvP has never relaxed me. It just wears me out and that is not what I am looking for at the moment. It is why I spend a lot of time debating what is contribution in Eve. So often I see it defined as ones participation in PvP. A lot of that is environmental. I do live in low sec which is a PvP environment and it stands to reason that many of those who live in the area would define everything by that.

But I am a great believer in Eve as a game with a lot of pieces. I have this vision of things where different types of people can create something. Silly, I know. But because of this I have lots of little things that I want to do. I've been spending a lot of time collecting my belongings and working on little projects that are not particularly large but are time consumptive. My blueprint collection is an example. I realize that I don't know a lot about where what is in the game. I have a general idea of things but as I've been slowly building my blueprint collection I'm learning where I can find rigs and drones and hull BPOs.

I also got the bright idea to get Chella involved in the research effort. She is heavily trained into industry. Not as much as my two capital ship builders but well enough. I was delighted with myself when I thought to use her. My other two have full research queues. One is copying capital blueprints as fast as she can. The other is researching my rigs and ships. That is slow going with it being a few weeks to a few months to research them to optimal. That means I was delighted when I undocked her and sent her to my research station. I transferred my huge stack of new blueprints and chortled to myself over how clever I was. Grandly, I switched to the material research tab and discovered that she could research exactly one thing. Oh.

Part two of my adventure was to go find a school station. I had a discussion earlier today on twitter about queuinga up skills and the general desire for it. I do agree but I also don't want to get rid of the concept of school stations. They are just one of those little experiences in life.

On my journey, I avoided the closest one. It was through one of the seemingly permanent gatecamps on a high sec to low sec system. I used to go on about how gatecamps were not a big deal. Then I moved to Sujarento. Gatecamps are a regional flavor but where they are camped its more like a campground with running water and electricity for the RV. And that is why Chella is currently training Laboratory skills and can proudly research three blueprints at the moment.

This is the other reason why I will never be able to train an optimal skill plan.