The last 30 days

Well this is it. Less than 30 days to go on the old EVE account. And I don't even feel like doing "one last roam" or "one last mission" or anything of the sort. I did chose what will be the last skill on the queue so if I get hit on the head and do come back to buy myself a Machariel well it will be uber with Large AC Specialization V. But the chances of this happening are pretty much zip.

On the blogging front, ever since my crazy two weeks of myself being sick followed by two days spent at the hospital with my boy I've got writer's block. Hell it's taking me all my small change just to write these few lines. I prefer spending my time listening to copious amounts of music, playing my modded Skyrim, and just plain taking it easy.

I may write more at a later date but that's pretty much it for now. Sorry for the lack of updates but truly, I'm all out of words right now.

Fly safe

o7

Friday's Electric (well, not quite) Lunch Hour - 2012/02/10

Axes are dangerous when misused; be careful with them. I dedicate this to my good friend André whose birthday it is today. He is what I could call my music pusher :)

Bonne fête mon chum et à bientôt !!!

o7

Friday video soon™

Because my box is under siege by my two little terrors (day off from school, and school registration for the youngest one \o/), the posting of my friday video will happen some time later.

Till then, rock hard!

o7

Slight case of writer's block

I don't know if it's the winter blues, the fact that these days I'm a one-game gamer and it ain't EVE, or because of spending 2.5 days at the hospital followed by sleeping on the couch because I had the two tornadoes over the weekend, but these days my writing ideas are making themselves scarce. Sometimes I have an inspiration but I'm too busy to write about it when it's fresh, and when I do find time I find myself looking at my WordPad window and don't know which word to put in front of which.

At first I was feeling like writing a debriefing on 4 years of EVE Online, especially since I've dug up some ancient screenshots literally from Day One (OK, six days old!) but the words were getting all jumbled. Screenshots such as this one:



Me in Rifter, Letrange in Firetail. Also check out my awesome fit !!!



Yep, this is Letrange giving me EVE 101 on January 26th 2008, on the old "classic" client. Crazy how time flies. Back then EVE still had that shiny veneer and that new car smell. I had ideas about the game that I realize today were not only extremely noobish but also all wrong. Ah EVE, the Harsh Mistress. And then there was this one:



WTF is that pointy ship? Is this a real player or not? What's my name again?!



Yep, three weeks old and flying in Curse. And yes, my first ever BOZO op wasn't even for PvP, but I remember quite clearly that at the time I didn't know what the fuck was going on! To put it on the "learning cliff" scale, I was getting close to the vertical part and I suddenly caught a glimpse of feet dangling; these feet belonging to players who had hung themselves on the mighty overhang of course!

But even all that good nostalgia is not enough to reconcile me with what I see now as a massive capitalism sim. The veneer isn't only gone; the paint is rusting and the bumpers are falling off. And the smell... God Almighty! Because of its harsh nature and its grief-happy mechanics, the EVE community has a way to attract an obscene amount of trolls. The only reason why I've been on the forums in the past 5 months was to update the Montreal EVE Meet thread; if I read only a tiny part of General Discussions I end up wanting to punch someone after about 2 minutes, and I'll spare you what I think of C&P and CAOD. And as an alternative, FailHeapChallenge is even worse. The only place to find something positive about EVE, to me at least, is through the Blogosphere. Blogs seem to seperate adults from pubescents. I don't think I would have lasted this long in EVE if it wasn't for the intereaction of at least some fine people, and for this I salute you all, bloggers of EVE Online!

But my writer's block isn't only about EVE. As you may have noticed on the right-hand side I've started writing a second blog on The Skyrim Blog. It's my first foray into an in-character story but right after Chapter One I had to rush my boy to the hospital and since coming back the blank page syndrome is even worse. Methinks I need to shut off and reset my brain for a bit.

And that's about it for now. Fly safe or hard, carebear or ganky, whatever floats your boat!

o7

Edit: I forgot to mention, the number one sport in EVE Online, ship spinning, is now free on eveonline.com, removing yet another reason to resub XD

Saturday morning video - 2012/02/04

Sorry I skipped the Friday video postage, but believe me it's not from neglect. Three days at the hospital with my youngest will do that. No worries, all is cool now and he's back home and his asthma is under control. Fuck asthma.

On the EVE front: well quite literally, the end is near. On March 15th at 0500 evetime Cozmik will go into cryosleep, and he will stay there as long as there is no way for me to make ISK while having fun. I've gone over this before so I won't bore you again. On a positive note I did finish the training of Minmatar Battleship V and I'm currently training the same for Gallente. which will finish a week and a half before The End. After that nothing will matter.

On the Skyrim front: yes, this is where I've been having ridiculous amounts of fun. It's the new drug I needed. Having plowed through the game as soon as I got it, I am now doing the quests I skipped on the first play-thru so on Cozmik mkII I played Stormcloak and finished the Dark Brotherhood line. But two mods make sure that it's always fun to run around in Skyrim even if I don't do a single quest. The first is Wars in Skyrim IV, a mod that adds tons of vibrant life all over Skyrim. You can find giants and mammoths being attacked by bandits (with hilarious results), Thalmor mages ambushing you, werewolves hunting in packs, and flocks (!) of dragons to make sure you don't get bored. And those are not the easy laughable vanilla dragons anymore because my second mod is Deadly Dragons, a mod that not only makes dragons A LOT harder to kill, but also adds a variety of them with more powers. Storm dragon that shoots lightning? Check. Black Dragon that spits acid? Check. Dracolich that summons dragon priest ghosts? Holy shit check! But it doesn't stop there because the mod also adds a lot of dropped loot from the dragons and new craftable stuff that uses that new loot. Oh and a sweet-ass retexture of the Daedric armor!

So just look at these two paragraphs and guess what has my interest...? That's right. And it's far from over because on Tuesday Bethesda is releasing the Skyrim Creation Kit, so modders while start pumping out a lot of new material, and good mods will get even better. I cannot wait to see them!

Fly where your heart wants to

o7