The face behind the 'toon

Yesterday was my birthday. I don't ask for stuff, mainly because I feel I owe people for it.

However, I have something for you, whomever you are; you strange people who seem to enjoy reading this blog.


Yarr >=3

'You chose poverty when you chose piracy.'

My sec has been dropping like a rock snce I decided to spend some time chilling out in Decon. The guys are fun to hang out with, so even the slow times are fun. And my Combat Log isn't depressing me anymore. I took a look at it an hour ago and before the latest cluster of kills - including three podmails in a row, somehow - there is a long gap of inactivity spanning 127 days.

A hundred and twenty-seven days.

That's roughly four months. The most recent kill other than the Doom Armada series is from just before I left Atrocitas. Granted, three of the weeks I was in Righteous Indignation with Tygris Alliance, I was out of the country and lacking proper access to Eve (installed on my WoW-addict kid brother's computer so I could pop in to say 'hi' while my bro was at work). That still leaves over three months of relative inactivity.

I can correlate those four months to a few specifics ingame and in Life:
- The steady decrease in my wallet, as Tygris paid no recompense for losses, nor shared loot from kills equally (there being so many people on each kill that it wouldn't have made much of an impression, anyway).
- Loss of self-confidence in Real Life (depression and general head-fuckedness; it happens and it's over now, thank god)
- Not being with a group that made me feel confident about doing things ingame.

Whenever I would complain of not actually being able to afford to lose ships, the CEO of UnSec was fond of telling me that I'd chosen ingame poverty when I'd selected piracy as a profession. But I can look at the chart of my Eve lifetime and see that it's the reverse which is more accurate.

I'd had my share of losses, and I did pay for my first bs with a complex piece of artwork, but my time in Atrocitas was very good to me up until the end when the dynamic began to change and I was already well into my Real Life slump. You'll all get a chuckle out of this: I was in enough of a state, mentally, that I did agonise a bit over the moral implications of pirating - the reactions I started getting to my increasingly low sec status made me wonder why it was such a big deal to everyone else.

When I joined a nullsec alliance, I was under the impression that it would boost me up again, but instead everything slowly ground to a halt; I suffered some losses which were enormously expensive to me, with no compensation from corp or alliance, and eked by on selling rigs in highsec and the charity of some close friends. I was able to support myself a bit on Syndicate rats, but then Tygris policies changed, relegating the entire alliance to three systems for NPC-hunting, and that cut off both the meagre ISK flow and the slow sec-climb I'd been keen on at the time. The impression I got from my few forays into alliance ops was that we were nothing more than DPS sponges, to kill or be killed, and if we died then it was just too bad and we needed to have another combat-worthy ship ready to go immediately. There was no sense of group cohesion or caring for your wingman, no patience with the questions I asked as I attempted to settle in, and the result was that I had no confidence in the CEOs, the FCs, or the alliance and allies as a whole.

UnSec was, at the start, a refreshing change - back to lowsec and freedom to profit from others' losses, with the intention to guerrilla-warfare a bunch of nearby-nullsec blobbers in our spare time... but nobody was ever on in the right places, at the right times. We can blame Summer Slump for this, in part. But it never improved, the CEO went a bit batshit when the Dev Blog regarding speed nerfs went out, and over time everything just slowly dribbled halfheartedly through the rotors in a semi-liquid slurry.

And now? Now, I can think about buying a certain tech-2 cruiser I've been eyeing up, and the skillbooks to go with her. I can fly my battleship without worrying if I can afford to replace her, and the idea of taking on larger ships with a gang of cruisers doesn't leave me asking what our chances are. I haven't lost a single ship since I joined Hellcats and returned to what I know best, where I started.

Perhaps my former CEO wasn't so successful with piracy; perhaps he was just expressing his feelings in that black-or-white way of his, where everything is in extremes and absolutes. If it wasn't so easy to live off of piracy in Eve, it wouldn't be an ingame career choice to begin with, nor so common an occurrence.

The kind of stuff they would arrest people for in the Real World

Earlier today, someone attempted to invite me to a fleet whilst I was afk. I couldn't place the name, but I knew I'd seen the corp around somewhere in the last week or so. I asked around, but nobody knew.

I should have checked our killboards.

He convo'd me again later this evening.

[ 2008.09.25 21:48:54 ] Shae Tiann > Hello?
[ 2008.09.25 21:48:56 ] Scyrusx > hello
[ 2008.09.25 21:49:07 ] Scyrusx > im not sure how i ended up talking to you lol
[ 2008.09.25 21:49:23 ] Shae Tiann > you tried to invite me to a fleet earlier when I was afk ^_^
[ 2008.09.25 21:49:40 ] Scyrusx > oh thats because you podded me u crazy sob
[ 2008.09.25 21:49:43 ] Scyrusx > lol
[ 2008.09.25 21:49:45 ] Shae Tiann > what?
[ 2008.09.25 21:49:47 ] Scyrusx > im gonna kill you
[ 2008.09.25 21:49:50 ] Scyrusx > for podding me
[ 2008.09.25 21:49:51 ] Shae Tiann > lol
[ 2008.09.25 21:49:54 ] Scyrusx > yyeeeeaaa
[ 2008.09.25 21:50:06 ] Shae Tiann > not podded someone in ages...
[ 2008.09.25 21:50:11 ] Scyrusx > lol
[ 2008.09.25 21:50:22 ] Shae Tiann > I'm an innocent lil carebear, me...
[ 2008.09.25 21:50:32 ] Scyrusx >

2008.09.23 23:45:00
Victim: Scyrusx
Corp: Manufact Co.
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Capsule
System: Siseide
Security: 0.3
Damage Taken: 398

Involved parties:

Name: Mynxee (laid the final blow)...

[ 2008.09.25 21:50:39 ] Scyrusx > a crew member of yours
[ 2008.09.25 21:50:43 ] Shae Tiann > oh, was that you? ^__^
[ 2008.09.25 21:50:51 ] Shae Tiann > that's my ceo
[ 2008.09.25 21:51:00 ] Scyrusx > lol
[ 2008.09.25 21:51:07 ] Scyrusx > for some reason i have kill rights on you
[ 2008.09.25 21:51:27 ] Shae Tiann > yeah, I had a warp scram on you
[ 2008.09.25 21:51:45 ] Shae Tiann > :>
[ 2008.09.25 21:51:46 ] Scyrusx > oh, well if you see my abbadon just be worried :)
[ 2008.09.25 21:51:54 ] Scyrusx > ttfn
[ 2008.09.25 21:51:57 ] Shae Tiann > fair enough :)

Yes, that would indeed be the second hate-convo (not hate-mail, mind you; nobody's ever sent me hate-mail) I have ever received. It is also the first ingame death-threat I've ever been issued.

\o/

I feel like I've passed some sort of benchmark test of Eve Online bastardry. He lost an Omen that night for sitting out in a belt in lowsec with known pirates at large in the system. Now he states a desire to avenge his own idiocy, and I sat there and laughed my arse off for ten minutes.

Scyrus, m' dear, in all sincerity, I wish you the best of luck. Come visit Decon when you feel up to it. You have all the time in the world: your killrights are only valid for a limited time, but I'm an outlaw. Just make certain you ask for 1v1 before jumping in, or you'll lose that shiny battleship before you get your chance for revenge.

(Oh, btw, it's spelled 'Abaddon')

Fun with Capital Ships

'IAC and ex-Etheral Dawn in here? Man, we're gonna have to scrub the system down.'

I was semi-afk working on an art commission and doing my standard semi-afk thing of listening to comms and checking out the neutrals in Local. My bio contains the line 'While you're reading my bio, I'm checking out your standings and employment history', and it's true. I'd spotted the aforementioned characters at a glance - I have friends who left IAC, and my earliest encounter with other players was being insulted by Yal XianKun, ceo of AIAA. Not that I would need an excuse to shoot someone, but the ex-ED guy would have been the icing.

It was a slowish night, after the excitement of the previous night's run. I'd logged in just as the guys had decided to surprise a freighter friend with their carriers, then scored a tasty kill as a Fleet Issue Mega jumped through after the hauler (there's some debate about whether it had been intending to try for the freighter, or just happened to be coming through at the same time). The ex-ED guy disappeared from the system, and the IAC pilot docked up in something small and logged as well. The guys were goofing around outside the station shooting each other.

'Hey Shae, undock! Bring your hyperion out!'

'Whyyyyyyyyyy?'

'I wanna test my damage.'

'What are you flying?'

'I'm flying a Phoenix. ...It's an interceptor.'

'You lie like a rug.'

I went back to my artwork, grumbling about nu-metallers who couldn't appreciate Courtney Love references in advertising. The silliness outside continued until I saw the IAC pilot log in, then leave the station.

'Oceandragon's undocked, guys, he's undocked.'

'Ohhh, come on, baby... YES!! Oh my god, he's in a Nidhoggur! Get it!'

'He's still under invuln. Come on, come on, come onnn... Point!'

'Point!'

'Ohhh, baby!'

Vent flooded with laughter and comments about how seriously, seriously bad the guy's timing had been. I dropped my graphics tablet, brought Uninvited Ghost online and skipped outside to join the party. The carrier was still in line from the undock as I locked him up, spun up the blasters and dropped my own point. I glanced at the sentry guns, then thought, Fuck it, and released the drones, too.

'Bump him, Shae!'

Hurr, hurr, hurr, kinkeh. The Hyperion's drive chugged up with agonising deliberation as I aimed for the carrier's broad side; it smacked against the Nidhoggur's hull at just shy of top speed, bouncing the larger ship further out of dock-range. I slapped a web on the target and watched as the carrier's armour and then hull melted in little more than a minute.

We missed the pod - not for lack of trying - and he wasn't actually carrying much, but the whole thing had been Darwinian Law in action. He couldn't have missed that most of the people in the system were undocked; we speculated that he must have been kicking himself for not having an instawarp point, or maybe he'd just frozen in shock when he'd seen what was outside the station. Who knows?

Nothing personal, Oceandragon, but you just happen to look good on our killboards ^_^

Oh, yeah: I didn't lose a single drone to sentry fire, either.

The View from Amamake

... is full of people who would merrily kill you.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Mynxee's already bloggled about this, but I thought I should make a record of my own. This blog needs something other than random babble for once, anyway ^_^

I was feeling rather bummed out from all that time spent playing highsec hauler, so Mynxee suggested we go for a little roam. I say 'little'; the full route turned out to be something like thirty-five jumps. But what the hey, I needed a little action and a change of pace. I had two hours before I needed to log for the night, so I clonejumped back to Ladistier for a cruiser. After a little conference with Mynxee, we realised we had enough ECM birds between us to choke a substantially larger vessel, so I brought Sugar with her classic gank fitting, and away we went.

The first few systems out were quiet, and we took time to grab safespots and I took a few pictures (I'm like this in RL, too). The few people we did see were either docked or not viable targets (meaning bigger and scarier than we were); I spotted a couple of old war-targets from the early Arzi days. We'd been going for maybe an hour or so when Mynxee noticed we were close to Amamake.

'Hey, that's where some of the guys seem to get a lot of action. Wanna see if we get some kills?'

I have heard things about Amamake. I know people who have pirated there and people who have died there; most of them were the same.

I also feel that the old curiosity killed the cat line is a better reference to Schrodinger's theoretical experiment than to a hapless feline poking its nose somewhere it oughtn't.

'Eh, sure. Why not?'

So we jumped into Amamake and popped the lid off the theoretical box. What was the worst that could happen?

The first thing I noticed was a Local population of forty-five. Yikes. The second thing that registered was that we'd materialised in the midst of a moderately-sized gatecamp of primarily positive-sec pilots. Oh, crap. Mynxee had lag, and my jumpcloak timer was ticking down as I scanned for a safer place to warp to.

Then I noticed how small the place was, and how many stations there were. Bloody hell!

Tick... tick... tick...

If I didn't want to get squished on that gate, I'd have to find a safespot fast; Mynxee had a little more time than I did. I spotted a planet I'd fallen roughly in line with; crossing my fingers, I punched Warp and waited tensely to see if it worked. Either they were slow on the uptake or their locktime blew goats - only a Malediction flashed briefly yellow before I was gone.

Mynxee's voice came over the comms.

'You're being followed.'

Hmm, a taste of my own medicine; it wasn't that long ago I was doing the same thing to others in Kor-Azor. I was already picking my next warp-point, this time with my Places tab open and ready to take bookmarks. Did they have enough stations in here? Jeez! Removing them from my overview helped a bit, but as we bounced from point to point, we landed a little too close to some of those stations for comfort. With an eye on the directional scanner, we kept moving. Two ships worried me particularly: a Deimos and a Thorax which kept showing up on shortrange scans, clearly warping from planet to planet in hopes of trapping one of us.

A Magnetometric Quest probe was dropped in the water. I should really have been more concerned than I was at the time, but I've only used Quests to find deadspace complexes and was preoccupied looking for the more obvious Snoops and Spooks. At one point, Mynxee suggested warping from belt to belt to see what would happen. I was ready to go along if only because it would answer the question of whether the cat would die (btw, Mynxee, I was never the smart, sensible one in school - I was the one who spent all her time reading or drawing because everything else was boring and my classmates were shallow).

We made the mistake of lingering too long, too often in one particular spot while we debated our options, and as I started to warp to the next safespot, a Falcon showed up practically on top of us. I was already gone, Mynxee managed to get out, and we agreed Amamake was too small for that sort of tomfoolery. We headed through an apparently clear gate into Siseide and breathed a sigh of relief.

Eight in Local, mostly carebearing types with a habit of sitting in belts chatting. We ricocheted around the system for a bit, making safes and being friendly with the locals, and at one point I called into my headset,

'Hey! Wensley is in here!'

We gave a hail and hello and chattered some more whilst looking for something tasty on the Local buffet.

As I was making another safe, Mynxee asked,

'What's a Tormentor?'

'Um, Amarr frigate.'

'There's one in a belt here. That Omen is here, too. Fight going on.'

'Need a hand?'

'He's going down.'

A cackle echoed over comms as I warped in to keep the cruiser from running as its shields crumpled. The already-popped frigate pilot continued to recruit in Local, to our amusement. Sugar's shields took a beating from a determined frigate rat who didn't know when to quit, before I caved and put it out of my misery.

I was still watching the scanner warily, and at one point I thought, That Deimos looks familiar. And that Thorax, too. Huh... Maybe they were just passing through? No joy: they stayed around, and in space. I started checking for probes but came up with nothing, and nothing, and nothing again. And they were still there.

Mynxee ganged up Wensley in case he needed help with the Cynabal he was tracking, and we continued searching the system for targets. We really were in there too long.

It was deja-vu. I warped off to my next spot and started to run up the directional again when Mynxee said,

'There's an Arazu here.'

The recon had her scrammed and damped in short order, and for a mad instant I considered warping back; if I could lock and sic the Vespas on him before he could kill my sensors, we stood a reasonable chance of taking the Arazu out. I was realigning when Myxnee said the Deimos had arrived, and that decided the issue for me.I like a good fight, but that was a suicide run; the boys from Amamake had tracked us down, and I was next on the hit-list.

It was tempting to stick around and see how long it would take them to catch me, but by then it was edging on one in the morning and I had initially intended to log half an hour earlier. My Global timer had run down without being noticed, and Mynxee was lining up to pod-streak the long run home. In the end, I followed her out of the system, chased by a bit of rude commentary from the Arazu pilot.

[ 2008.09.24 00:15:46 ] Van Steiza > When a man talks dirty to a woman, it's sexual harassment. When a woman talks dirty to a man, it's $3.95 a minute.

Most charming, indeed.

There were a few 'eek!' moments on the way back. One gatecamp I jumped into I was certain would munch my Thorax like a Mars bar, but didn't, in the end, seem interested.

[ 2008.09.24 00:30:35 ] Shae Tiann > ooooh shinies!
[ 2008.09.24 00:30:36 ] Mynxee > gogogogogo girl!
[ 2008.09.24 00:31:01 ] Mynxee > oooh the strong silent types.
[ 2008.09.24 00:31:15 ] Kuger > kiss me
[ 2008.09.24 00:31:18 ] Shae Tiann > prrrr
[ 2008.09.24 00:31:24 ] Triksterism > YOU WHORE KUGER
[ 2008.09.24 00:31:50 ] Triksterism > ITS OVER :(

You meet all different sorts out in the spacelanes late at night. I scooped a clutch of Ogres that had been left on their lonesome near a gate, at which point I discovered what a LOLkillmail I'd have been: somehow, I'd slapped a frigate-sized microwarpdrive on Sugar rather than a more appropriate cruiser-sized module o__O

I'd love to know what sick mind created a system like Amamake. Penirgman is bad enough for stations, and that's in highsec and rather on the large side; a place like that in lowsec is already a deathtrap without being fully within a ship's scan radius.

Will I go back? Probably, with perhaps a little more preparation, now that I know what to expect from the system. Will I die there? I think I used up one of my remaining lives in there already, so there's now a one-in-eight chance of somebody getting lucky. Will I have fun? Of course I will; it's not every day I get my dreadlocks ruffled like that ^_^

The Logistics Grind

It's now been three days of sitting in the same bloody station whilst overseeing my hauler buddy's moving of stuff into Decon. Lordy, it's enough to drive you mad. I reached the point last night where I could no longer bear to run fits through EFT and simply logged off in favour of spending time with my Significant Other (who reads this occasionally even though he no longer plays Eve, bless you, sweetie).

The logistics of moving is probably the most tedious part of Eve. It never gets easier, nor faster. There are methods to simplify the process, but those have their own hangups.

I'm a bit of a pack-rat, in the 'I want to have enough spare modules to outfit a replacement ship quickly' sense. Trouble is, I've had that mentality since I started, and maybe 2/3 of my stuff will never actually be used anymore, as my skills have improved and thus the ship loadouts upgraded. With the last system-move when I was in UnSec, I gave nearly everything into my best friend's keeping, to be stored in a single system in highsec a few jumps from my lowsec base, so that bits can be brought down as needed. It simplifies things quite a bit, but now my mate has a hangar with nearly 400 different types of modules, drones and ammo. That's right: different types. Everything is repackaged and stacked. There's enough stuff rattling around in there to fit out several dozen low-end cheap frigates and cruisers, and maybe a spare battlecruiser.

Why the bloody hell do I have so much stuff?

And the funny part was that, after going through the stacks, my hauler buddy still had to make a trip to Oursulaert to obtain a bunch of parts, because my fitting lists have upgraded again!

So three days spent working out new, upgraded fits, parsing through what I already have, then cramming it into a hyperextended hauler and waiting for Decon to not be scarily busy. And I'm left with aching eyes, a headache, and a cruiser which doesn't have a point because for some reason I forgot to pack it. D'oh.
(Special thankies to Mynxee who just now loaned me a spare point ^_^)

Long, long hours spent in tedium, watching DG3N having fun in Local, wishing I had a ready, useable ship other than the battleship... it's like being under house-arrest under Mum's orders until your room is clean. It's worse than moving in Real Life, because it's not like you can stuff everything in bin-bags and toss it in the back of your mate's Land Rover to be sorted out later; it's all very precise, specific, and everything needs to fit together into combat-worthy ships at the far end.

*headdesks*

The least fun part of Eve, and yet the most necessary if I don't want to be in a similar position to the one I was in with Tygris, where my unfitted ships were in one system and my cans of gear and ammo in another, several jumps away through Lower Syndicate. In the name of fun, do we put ourselves through such torment and tribulation.

But it's worth it in the end, as I breathe a sigh of relief that I won't have to run logistics for the next wee while... at least, not until I lose the ships I just had brought in.

I kan has ISK?

Looks like I'll be hopping on the Sad Pirate Fundraising wagon for a bit here. Alas, my only sources of fundage in-game are through ransom, selling off hawt lootz, and my best friend's running missions for level three agents in Gallente space. I've never willingly fit a mining laser to a ship, and have no head for the market, so the routes most pirates seem to have their closest pals manage are all rather closed for me.

No, I'm not asking for ISK. I'm offering a service in exchange for it.

Get your head out of the gutter, you should be ashamed!

I've been using Photoshop for nearly nine years (omfg now I feel old). I've been making forum avatars and sigs since then, and people from UnSec requested a few not too long ago.

So... if anyone would like a forum sig, drop me an evemail or convo. I've noticed most people charging from 40 mil up to a hundred, so I'll start there and say costs are negotiable. I have a few examples of previous work up here, here and here.

Edit: Ah, yes, as Mynxee just said, I can do banners for blogs and websites, as well - the one on here is obviously my work, I did an announcement banner for Atrocitas to use on the Eve forums, and designed my own website (though that required a bit of elabourate coding I had to pass on to a friend to manage).