History

I was chatting with Token Prophets the other day, nice girl, a bit hyperactive but I suppose that's what makes here a demon on the markets, twitchy and ready to strike.

She asked me how I became a pod pilot, we talked about it for a while and then after she had left for Dodixie I decided to record some of the details for your reading pleasure.

I was in my teens and always wondered about space, we all knew about the galaxy and the many planets, spaceships, crew and the almost mystical pod pilots.  So one day some people came to my school, I was a few years away from finishing and it was time to decide on a career.

I remember when the guidance counsellors said the word career it sort of thudded into my brain, like each letter was made of stone and dropped from a great height to crash into the ground like a biblical message from those on high.

Career.

So once I had recovered from the shock that here and now my future was being decided I noticed  that they were introducing some visitors, and a couple of them had sockets, they were pod pilots!

They looked almost human, I had always thought of them as very tall and more than a little bit god like, but they looked normal, like adult humans, they looked almost like me.

So I started listening, they were offering a potential career first as a crewman and then, maybe, as a pod pilot, I was fascinated, the male pilot, I never did get his name, had such a deep timbre and even voice.  Later on I surmised it came from being in many deadly situations and talking to some school kids was not one of those.

He should have talked with Mrs Mason then!

So he mentioned a test, the Elite test, I immediately said yes, as did some other people, the test was uploaded to our personal devices.  Essentially it was a simulation of what was actually happening out in the real universe except the planet names had been changed, the starter planet for me was called Lave.

So the Elite test gave me a rating, the powers that be noticed this and I was offered and accepted a place as a trainee, fast forward a bit and I became a pod pilot, that is where it gets interesting.

I'll recount that in the future.

Even more downtime!

So I lived through the infamous downtime incident of June 2010, well actually I slept through some of it and worked through most of the rest so I'm probably overplaying it somewhat, but dramatic stuff sells right?

Then about 12 hours after the servers came back they went down again, well at least that is what it looked like from here.  After a bit of snooping around I found the packets were being lost somewhere in London, then google searched my ISP and Eve Online and found some others were complaining about the same thing.

Ahh ha!  So found the culprit, put in a service request with my ISP and at around 6pm that evening I was able to login to Eve again, since this was a Saturday I'd lost most of the day, oh well.

So PI, you may have read my previous post/s about it, to be honest my interest has plummeted quite a bit in the last week or two, not really sure why.

I suspect one of the reasons is the current juggle of my main account and also an alt which is training and spending time with some newbies to try and bring them into the main characters corporation.  So the conclusion of all that is neither account is receiving enough love and I do not really have the time for the PI click fest.

Today they gave us a new ship for PI, the Primae, which is dedicated to PI work and reminds me of a small Orca in function and some people say it looks like Serenity from the TV series Firefly, though I struggle to see the similarity myself.

Nice looking ship, thanks CCP, bloody useless in anything else and the need had been filled from day one by low level haulers like the Iteron I and others, nice looking ship though, maybe I should cover it in plastic?

Finally we received a 100,000 skill point lump sum to be spent on whatever training you wish, as long as it was given to the correct character, I had a 50% success there.  On the one hand it is wonderful that CCP have decided to pay us for the long downtime we recently suffered but on the other hand it will only open a can of worms with people bitching and complaining about the amount of skill points, being paid to the wrong character etc etc.  Of course in the future if we have another unscheduled downtime, or even a long downtime the forums will alight with a depth of morons never before seen screaming for a skill point payment and howling in indignation when it is not paid.

Personally I would have told them it's my way or the highway, but maybe CCP have seen the demos for the upcoming Warhammer 40k MMO?

Schrodinger

Twenty four hours now with no Eve Online.
A siege mentality has set in.
I have started hoarding food, boarding up the windows and laying fields of fire from at least my window to the side fence.
That dog is looking pretty shifty.
"I've got your number!  I've got all your numbers!!", I yell.
Muttering to myself about all this sunlight, those teenagers, why don't noodles taste the same these days?
Do we really need 57 channels? Is their really nothing on?
Start up Eve again, server status is unknown, again, shut down the game.
Sit here for a minute.
Start up Eve again, server status is still unknown...again, shut down the game.
Check out the web site, it is down.
Have a look at the OMG LABS mirror, it apologises that all posts are older than three hours it seems to say with hunched shoulders, I shut it down.
What to do?
I have other games don't I?
Hmmmmm......
It seems not...that is a bugger.
Could I get another game?  What if while getting said game Eve came back and I didn't notice?  Would it actually be back online if I didn't notice, even though it was?
Which reminds me I must name a ship Schrodinger.

Shitting Bricks

I was sitting on the couch watching The World Cup and wondering how I could somehow insert a Vuvuzela into one of my blog posts.

So Chile is playing Honduras, with the constant drone of that damned African horn in the background.

Reaching for the iPhone, little did I know of the horror that lay in wait, down in the digital depths of the device.

Check the mail and other things, fire up the Capsuleer app, check the mains, the alts, look at the blog roll.

The usual stuff, have a look at the ones I follow, can't read every post on the list.

Notice that CrazyKinux has a new post.  E3 stuff and a list of new blogs that are being added to the blogroll.

[scrolls down]

Holy Crap! That's me!!

Right at the very bottom is Yosagi Yojimbo!

Yes the in character blog has made the list, I think I swore in disbelief for about fifteen minutes!

So this blog links to that one and it also links here, so some traffic should come this way.

But I can't help thinking I should have called it Aaron A Aardvarks Adventures.

Lol.

Exposure

Every once in a while the station attracts some sort of space junk, I suppose the local gravity sucks it in.  Eventually the station staff head outside and collect the garbage for recycling, what is old is new again.  Even rarer is this, I call them floaters, some poor soul has lost their life somewhere in the system and their desiccated shell has made its way to the station somehow.  I'm looking out my apartments window just staring into the eyes of this human that is staring into infinity.  For some reason I'm fascinated by the visage before me, the dried and damaged skin, bulging eyes and one hand gripped in a fist.  Suddenly I realise that it is a she, not much hair, maybe singed off or made too brittle in space and they broke away, individual strands orbiting some object for a while, maybe forever.


[buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!]

The communicator breaks me from my apparent trance.  Hitting the receive and waiting for the signals to sync it would seem the station staff have also noticed the floater.  Some stations believe it is bad luck to bring them into the station, normally they will attach a small engine, or sometimes just give them a shove, into the larger gravity well to burn up, usually the local planet.  She gets smaller as she moves away and is soon blocked by some of the station superstructure.

Finally the communicator syncs and I find it's Roku.

"Hey man what's up" I ask in what I think is an interested voice, still a bit spooked.

"Yosagi!  Oh this and that.  Still looking after that Megathron you loaned me, she's purring like a dream", Roku says perhaps a bit to enthusiastically.

"Yeah?  Did you take it in for those repairs, and what about the insurance, what level did you buy?"

"Ahh the top level yeah, can't remember how much it cost right now but it's all good.  We did have that little war recently though, have to tell you about it sometime".

"So the purpose of this call is?", I ask.

"You're famous man! You know that little thing you write?".

"Little thing, nice one man.  Yes I know about it, as I write it", my response is a bit chilly.

"Well it's hit the airwaves, near and far, you are now on the list!", Roku enthuses.

"List? What list?", I reply quizzically.

"The free press round up!  You know the one with many of the writers who spread the word about what happens in this universe, away from the official channels".

I think about it for a short while, Roku's signal has gone to shit anyway so while I wait for the system to fix that up I try and remember what he's talking about.  I'm not sure if I recall it properly but maybe I saw some guy trying to hand out flyers for some press thing.  Trying not to enter the greater station in recent times has been my mission as the influx of refugees has made the place much less pleasant than normal.

His signal has come back.

"So what do you think about it?", he asks.

"Not really sure to be honest.  In one respect I'm shitting construction blocks about it but I guess I'll just keep on doing the same thing and see what happens.  Might have to give it a proper name though", suddenly realising that some sort of cool name or description may be better.

Some silence on the line for a few moments.

"No you don't need to do that, just keep it as your name because the system lists them alphabetically, so yours will be the letter Y whichever part of your name they use."

It dawns on me, "Ahh so it will be at the bottom of the list so the odds are people will not make it through all the writers above me and I might as well report on purple monkeys for all the good it will do".

"Exactly!  You can write any old crap and nobody will ever see it.  It's perfect!  You get the fame of being on the list without ever having to produce anything worthy of actually being on the list!", Roku appears to find this fairly hilarious, so much so that I think he accidentally disconnects the signal.

I'd had enough of him for now anyway, though I'd better chase up the maintenance guys in Olo station and find out about my Megathron soon.

I try to catch another glimpse of the corpse but she is long gone.

Now we need some Llamas!

The Tyrannis expansion seems like a non-event.  The roll out of the expansion has been slow with more parts released recently, Eve Gate and Planetary Interaction (PI).

Eve Gate I'm not sure about at the moment, perhaps its usefulness will grow over time, at the moment I'd say its use is limited.

PI has been available, at least the training has been, since the expansion.  So when the Command Centers were finally released to the capsule pilots a few weeks afterwards their was a sense of excitement.  On the day of "The Great Land Rush" it seemed that every man and his dog was flying around in haulers servicing their budding PI installations.

Personally I cannot really see the need for PI, the system we had was fine, even though those items were supplied by NPC's.

Hold on a minute while I check my PI installation.

So where was I?  Ahh yes PI being a waste of time.  The ability to create your own POS materials and other things using the local planets is moderately handy I guess.

Wait a sec, if I adjust my extractors closer to the production modules I can cut down on link distance and thus can create more structures. Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle, that got it.

Yes so as I was saying....hmmmm I can create both items on the same planet and then use an advanced production facility to manufacture them into something else which also reduces their m3 and the customs charges.

Talk amongst yourselves for a while I want to optimise my third PI installation.

Customers are waiting!