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Showing posts from October, 2017

Memories - Part Four: Tall Poppies

Virtual Realities: Memoirs of an internet spaceship politician by Sugar Kyle CSM9, CSMX Who are you to try? But before I could see where I was going, I had plenty of reality to deal with. With my finished product ready, I started to watch the forums. The second summit for eight council had happened during my preparation. I had expected more excitement about the current council and the upcoming elections. Something to echo the roar of anticipation in my own body. Searches me with silence on the official and player run forums. Fanfest would be in May. During the keynote was when the results had been announced for the last few years. It was mid February. We only had three months. It was both an eternity and far to short. Every day, I waited for someone to announce that they were running. It would let me know who my competition was. Maybe, that perfect person would announce and I could withdraw bashfully before I took it to far. I waited, and waited, and waited, and fina

Memoirs - Part Three: Tall Poppies

Virtual Realities: Memoirs of an internet spaceship politician by Sugar Kyle CSM9, CSMX Did anyone write a manual? Every hurdle is a higher higher than the last. The decision to run for the CSM was an enormous one. It should have been the greatest challenge. Once I decided to do it, I just had to do it. However, as with so much in my near future, I was wrong. It was cowardice that led me to do a soft announcement of my intent to run for the CSM. I was giving myself one last out. The response of my readership would define the possibility of my success. I tell myself that I was all in at that time. That I would have gone forward even if they all said no. It is easy to believe that after the fact but at the time, looking back over chat logs of me spinning in circles over my decision, I cannot say that I was that confident. I spent two weeks writing my letter of intent. Wex pointed out that I had a habit of writing in a passive tense. He then recommended that I re

In which Sugar learns to scan

I horrified someone. It was accidental. Still, a lingering taste of guilt was present at the time. "You don't know how to scan!" was the shocked response when I said that Sugar was learning to scan. "I, the player, know how to scan," I assured them. "Sugar, the character, does not. She always had an alt handle that." The idea behind Sugar learning to scan is a simple one. I have not spun up any other account since I walked back into the door. In my not quite plan to do... something. Explore? Fly around? Live? Die? I have no idea but it is interesting how ill prepared I am to do so with just one character. Alts have been a part of my game play from an early age. I made Sugar three weeks after I made Chella. Sugar was the alt. She was supposed to go learn how to PvP while respectable Chella built things and had a glorious spaceship life. That didn't quite work out. Sugar wound up training in the background until one day, sleepy eyed, she to

Memoirs - Part Two: Virtual Worlds

Virtual Realities: Memoirs of an internet spaceship politician by Sugar Kyle CSM9, CSMX What is Eve Famous? Who am I? Who can you become in a game? Isn’t everyone a no one in a video game on the internet? Our communication is by text. For those that we became closer to and played with we’d join talk servers. But how does anyone get to know anyone else out of hundreds of thousands of players? EVE Online is a video game that has a world that is known as a sandbox. A sandbox, in its most basic form, is a game where the player creates their own paths. The game play is not handed out in a neat, linear progression. Instead the world is built and players get tools to interact with the world. EVE expanded upon this by focusing on player to created their own game play. The game itself became a tool for the player interaction and instead of relying on their features to push the game forward they allowed the players to generate content. It makes EVE both endlessly fascinating a

Memoirs - Part One: Virtual Worlds

Virtual Realities: Memoirs of an internet spaceship politician by Sugar Kyle CSM9, CSMX This is where it really started. The day I lost my mind. I never told anyone how long I had been debating my run for the ninth CSM. The thought started to circle in the back of my thoughts in November. I was back home after a sucessful Eve Vegas. I had met a few people. My notes from the presentations and round tables had gone over very well. I felt useful, comfortable, and excited that I was a member of the community. I belonged and I cared about this thing that I belonged to. That thing was the community of Eve Online. Eve Vegas of 2013 was when I found out that a conversation I had been fortunate enough to have with CCP Masterplan at Fanfest of that same year, had sparked enough interest to gain developer attention. At Eve Vegas I learned that they would be working on ideas based off of the premise that I had presented. Only days later, a developer posted to the Offical Eve Onlin

The Reason for Words

Over the last two days I have been taking classes about selling myself. Not on the market but for promotional and interview processes. I have several that I can take but I am afraid to take them. I want to use words like anxiety and nervousness but it boils down to fear and insecurity. On the second day of the class I spoke with the instructor. I shared with him what I did for the CSM and he found it to be fascinating. It was a big step. I am often brushed aside by people or they look at me as if I am insane. This instructor however is interested in people and I thought he might be interested in it. He was. When I walked away from Eve after CSMX, it was not because I was angry. I was in a lot of emotional pain. Things had not gone how I wanted them to. I was dealing with my self esteem issues. And, I was near the point of everything turning into hate and anger. I wanted to write about the CSM, but I did not think that anyone wanted to listen. I also believed that in the spring of

Eve's Lore

I was not introduced into the world of Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer until I was in college. While it was a normal event for the people I wound up socializing with, in my part of the world such things were only heard of as vague news stories when something weird happened. As an adult, I've found these worlds a bit hard to enter. I'm reading a Warhammer set right now involving dark elves. I've read some Dungeons and Dragons series and I've read some Warhammer 40,000. I enjoy the stories sometimes but other times the weight of the world the story must be carved gets to me. Warhammer is big on this. It is so dark and grim that humor and character personality is so often lost in syncing the characters with the world. It sometimes makes it hard to care about the chracters because their path is predestined and scripted into the world. I am a voracious reader. I read science fiction, fantasy, history, classics, true crime, and smattering of other stuff. This year I&

Let's talk about corps and me

In the pages of this blog is a story. That story is a true one. It is a meandering, rambling path of a random person that logged into Eve Online and stayed there. There is a start but no end and very little definition as to what and who that person is. My journey to find the right corporation for me has been short. I stumbled across my first corporation. I worked to prove myself to my second. I, bashfully and embarrassingly joined my third. I leap, hopefilled, to my fourth, and now like a girl with a string of long term relationships behind her and experience but no idea of the future, I don't know what I want. "Make your own corporation, Sugar." I've heard those words for a while. There is an appeal. it'd be an utter lie to say there is not. There is a seductive tone to it. A place where people came because they didn't mind being around me. There is also fear. Fear of failure. And, under that concerned. Out of the main emotions the one that has alway

What poor posture

Over the years, I have been accused of being male for many reasons. One that amuses me the most is because Sugar, the character's avatar has large breasts. Men make large breasts and women small ones, I was informed. Therefore, I am male. No. Sugar has large breasts, yes. But, Sugar's breasts are not the maximum breast size in the character creator. Men often pick the largest breasts they can. I can pick guys because they have a stick thin avatar with an enormous chest. Sugar's fit her body. I took the time to play with the character creator and move my avatar up from stick with a horrific haircut to balanced looking, attractive woman. But the posture. I noticed a new background on someones icon. Well... new to me. It was rather bright which caught my eye after years of dark backgrounds, with dark lighting, or just people angling their avatar to have the biggest breasts possible. That is if they put any energy into it at all. This made me look at the character creator

Join my corp!

Such was the demand on twitter. I actually leaned back and blinked a bit. Really? Wow. What a nice feeling. Sure, it was from a delusional person that liked me and forgot what a ninny I am. Also, my utter disconnect with my previous skills. It was still a nice feeling. And, without the CSM thing hanging over me again, I rediscovered what it is like to be sure an offer was about myself. I do hate that suspicion that I developed. It made me shy away from any type of title in the final dredges of the CSM. That point where I walked away from Sniff, sent Sugar off to a little edge system and gave up undocking or playing. I curled up in my chain and sighed. How was I to tell who wanted me and who wanted the title? I'd had many, many offers that started with, "Come join corp X, we want a CSM in our corp." It was quite a sucky time and left me isolated when I had the most attention. To channel Elsa again: "The snow glows white on the mountain tonight Not a footpri

Sekrits

"Don’t let them in Don’t let them see Be the good girl you always have to be Conceal Don’t feel Don’t let them know…" The lyrics to 'Let it Go' are rather potent. Beyond the song and dance of Disney, they are remarkably flexible. Add that they are sung by an ice queen and it is quite a marvelous tune. While hanging out for the sake of hanging out in Eve Uni Chat (yes, I'm still there. Wallflower forever!) skill points came up. Someone was pleased about their skill tree. I'm still unfamiliar with the new layouts so I had to ask what tree they meant. They posted their top notice that shows how complete you are in certain skill trees. There have been some bitterness in this blog when it comes to the changes in skill points. I understand that things had to change. In some ways I don't resent the changes. Lack of resentment does not mean I like the changes. Think of it as when they changed the green skittles in a regular pack of original

Someone fire the ship cleaners

My golden pod is not golden. Back when I was neck deep in Eve, I was one of the first to jab myself in the butt with a syringe full of pod-be-gold. I received a lovely permanent ... gold - I guess - plating. I liked it. Sleek and sparkling, it glittered in the starlight. However, today, when I decided to strip from my ship and admire the glittering reflection of my pod, I noticed that its butt was a bit... well... pewter. It must be the angle. Nope. My butt had gone pewter at some point. In a dark, dried part of my brain, a memory shuddered and flaked off. I picked it up and through the crumbled edges saw something about ship washes. I shook the memory but nothing fell out. The faint echo of proposals tickled my memory, but not enough for me to know how to wash my ship. The simplest thing to do was ask. With a question asked and an answer received, I was now the proud finder of ship washing. Eventually. It took me a few minutes. I hit the wash button and my pod