Posting from inside!

Ma Vaga!

OK, I cheated a bit using Photobucket to upload the pic but yes, I am indeed updating my blog from inside EVE Online! The TRUE return will happen soon.... >:)

Fly dangerous!

o7

It's all a game to me!

No I'm not dead. Extremely fucking busy but alive and kicking :) I just wanted to announce that after the current CFL season (which also happens to be a complete bust for the Montreal Alouettes) I will be going on a much needed hiatus from the Rockline drumline so I'll be able to concentrate on that other passion of mine, gaming. Yes I will be returning to EVE Online after almost a full year off and I will have my hands full relearning the tools of the trade and getting used to A LOT of new stuff. I will also fly (read blow up) some rockets in Kerbal Space Program, shoot dumbass guards in the knee in the Elder Scrolls universe (either Skyrim or ESO... please Zenimax send me my key !!!), blow up some Inner Sphere surats in Mechwarrior Online (hey Piranha, you know it's 3050, right?) and obviously get reacquainted to the fine art of Rocket Jumping in Quake Live.

The whole drumline experience has been a lot of fun but after almost two years straight I think it's time to step back a little, and maybe play my own drumkit without having to follow 15 other drummers! So the Big Comeback isn't exactly tomorrow but it's there. The leaves have to change colors first!

Hope you enjoyed Compressorhead !!!

Fly loud

o7

The slow restart

Well after downloading the bloated EVE client, paying my dues, and bracing myself for all the changes, I am finally back in New Eden, and I'll have to admit I missed it. I still don't know exactly what the fuck were the CCP devs smoking to make the inventory system the way they did but I think I'll survive. Having not played much because of drum duties, parental duties, and three work days until my long-expected vacation (and uber bike trip YAAAAAAAY!) let's go with a plain "The Good, The Bad & The Ugly" post, in reverse order:

The Ugly: The User Interface. Hostie. De Câlice. De Tabarnak. You Odin-loving berserkers were supposed to make things SIMPLER !!! What the fucking bastard shit is this?!?! When I look at that UI I'm thankful I've got 4 years of EVE under my belt; I can't imagine what a complete n00b must feel like when he sees it, revamped tutorial or not.

The Bad: Well, not much actually if only that the EVE population has stagnated. Below 40k players on Tranquility on a primetime Sunday is sub-par. Period. Still hurting I see. Oh one bad thing I can think of: Tech 1 prices... simply put, huh?! 8 million ISK Stabbers? 12 million ISK Thoraxes?! And on the flip side 1.3mil ISK Medium Trimarks?! Somebody page Dr EyjoG so he can perform surgery, this market is beyond sick !!!

The Good: EVE is still EVE. It's like that comfy but shredded pair of jeans or those Phentex slippers your grandma knitted just for you. It's like being a BMXer and hitting your first big jump in 5 years. Yeah, despite some short-comings EVE still feels just right in its "aliveness". There are also a few other good things; the new skins and ship models (OK, except the Vagabond and the Fleet Tempest... may Eyjafjallajökull burn you to Valhala!) are really cool, but on a few ships some artists have outdone themselves. I did a quick Level 4 mission in a Crusader of all things - the "Go fetch the Quafe thru a Blood Raider camp" mission - and noticed that the new Amarr T2 ship skins were very hot. So after docking up my Earwig I did some simple math and activated my Absolution... Zoh My Gawd! It's one of the most beautiful spaceships (all universes mingled) I have ever seen!

There are a couple other things that are extremely fun about my return to New Eden. First, a "welcome back" present from Crowd Control Productions with a "90 days for 24.95$" deal. Right off the bat this was a good way to come back. But even better is this: a few months before I unsubbed for a then-undetermined amount of time I had struck a deal with EVE Online Hold 'Em Poker to have an ad on my blog, and when I made the decision to unsub I decided I would keep the ad on my blog, for free if need be. But apparently someone at EOH Poker decided otherwise so Cozmik woke up to a nicely filled - without going overboard - wallet so my plans of not carebearing ever again (unless for stupid fun of seeing pretty lights and/or flying fast) were getting off to an awesome start!

So there ya go. I'm back but for now only sporadically. Some things are looking up on the horizon so when October 21st comes one thing is certain: people are going to cry, hopefully a lot! Time to go back to the BOZO roots and start something... nefarious !!!

Haven't said that in a long time... FLY DANGEROUS !!!

o7

Tomorrow!

See the thousand ships bashing the crap out of the Byrn Eden monument at Jita 4-4? This can mean only one thing. Yes that's right. Tomorrow it will happen, and I'll have a fitting music video. I return to New Eden with only one thing in mind: pretty lights. I don't care if they're mine or someone else's, stuff in EVE needs to blow up. Repeatedly.

Because I still have a crazy schedule until October 20th I won't be super active off the start but this will give me time to get reacquainted to the "newly" revamped Neocom, all the ship changes and new modules, and all the new ship flavors of ship fits. I hear some of 'em haven't really changed, but I know others have changed drastically. The very first thing I'll do of course is to restart the skill queue. As I've mentioned before, Large AC Spec V will get finished, it was about half-way done when Cozmik went into cryo. After that, being pretty happy about the ships I can fly and being in absolutely no rush to get into capital ships, I will proceed to "level V" a lot of stuff. This should keep the skill queue occupied for quite a while.

So there ya go. Some time tomorrow afternoon I should be undocking from... Balginia I think? Or is it Harerget... or Offugen... whatever I should be undocking from somewhere and heading to the nearest market hub to buy myself a whole bunch of cheap ships to blow up. And LOLs should follow!

See you on my overview !!!

o7

And we're off!

Last week I announced that I had renewed my subscription to EVE Online, but I didn't do much apart from logging in to make sure my training queue was in order, and to gather together various ships I had lying around in places other than my usual hang-outs. Namely, my Orca which was docked up in Berta after my stint in Ushra'Khan, and a Taranis in some other system in Derelik (I probably got it because it was ridiculously cheap... why else buy stuff out there?!). I also got to re-acquire an arty Tempest I had left in a very deep Class 4 wormhole a while back. During my hiatus the AMC alliance has been put in stasis and a few W-space colonies have been vacated, including the deep C4. So while I was away my Tempest was being taken care of by the Black Line corporation, and upon my return a contract was made for me in the dung-hole called Jita. So my first actual log-in was one of hauling. Good that this is out of the way!

You'll probably notice that I've skipped my Incarna experience. Let's say that it was very short. At first I thought I was out of the woods because the computer was behaving itself, there was no lag to speak of, and I even got this nice screenshot of Cozmik standing by his Absolution. This lasted about 15 minutes, when all of a sudden my computer simply shut down. Awesome. So a 2008 3ghz Core2Duo with 2gb of RAM and a 1gb nVidia GF8800 is simply not enough to run Incarna. Sorry but I've got other much more interesting places to dump my money than on computer parts. Well, it's not like I care much about Incarna, so after a slight cool-down period I logged back in but this time turned station environments off, and also turned all graphics way down; as I'd say in Quake3 terms, "r_picmip 5 ftw" :)) Actually, I found that having the now-infamous Door isn't too bad: when you have no ship to actually spin, you lose less time and you can do stuff that actually matters.

Back on the getting-back-in-the-swing-of-things train of thought, I also needed to give my trade alt Cassy Winds a wad of ISK to do the buy low/sell high thing. A few items have been good to me in the past and most of them still were so it wasn't long before all the ISK was locked in buy orders. With nothing else to do with Cassy I went back to Cozmik and checked a few things on the Rens market. I had heard that the EVE market was all over the place but it didn't prepare me to actually witness it. The first weirdness was finding out that there wasn't any Light Ion Blaster IIs in Rens to fit to my Taranis. Okaaay... and on the next day the few that were there were ridiculously over-priced. Good thing that there were some at my missioning hub, so I bought a small stack. And then I checked the ships... 130m for Vagabonds, 140m for Rapiers, 200+ for Broadswords, 250+ for Sleipnirs... GOD DAMN! Did a whole bunch of T2 producers quit and now those things are rare? Then I checked the Cynabal... 190m... I felt like buying three! While I was checking the Angel ships I noticed that the Pirate battleships hadn't changed much, but the Dramiel... 53m... expected nerf much? So yeah, after 4 months, the failest expansion in the game's history, a weekend of riots and a slew of ragequits the EVE market is getting schizophrenic. Speaking of the ragequits, I've heard somewhere (can't remember where) that EVE has about 370 thousand active accounts. But what my numbers said was that at prime time on a Thursday night 28 thousand people were logged in. Summer's almost over, people are getting back online, so we can't say "because of summer" anymore. "EVE is dying™" ? This remains to be seen. I think she's taken a serious hit though.

So now that my parenting weekend is over I'll have more time to get active. I'll be spending a couple nights of ISK grinding but now all the pieces seem to be in place. Fun will be had soon. No, not "tm"! See you out there !!!

Fly with a purpose

o7


Edit: Oh damn! For the first time in this blog's history I've posted more than 100 times in a single year, and there's still over 4 months to go in 2011. Yay me !!! ^_^