Our EvE » reflection

Let Slip The Veil

Kename Fin — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 04:46:45 +0000

The silence was unbearable. Millions of neurons screamed in absence of any sensory input. It was as if the whole universe had been ripped away like a free will of a Sansha or the salary of a Caldari merchant. Dark, echoless space surrounded me and sheer endless black stared back at my soul. Before was a relative concept that was beginning to lose its cohesive shape and after was as distant as a point singularity. There was only the faintest of amorphous sensation surrounding what should have been now. The weight of thousands of days training and tens of thousand experiences demanded that something, anything, happen.

It was time to make a change – to rip open the veil and tear back the sky.

Electrochemical connections surged with pain and relief as long dormant paths of study were pulled to the fore of consciousness. What was once routine seemed muffled and disconnected in light of more recent solitude and stillness. The energy needed and required was straining my systems to their very core – and it was good. Today was going to be a good day. Who knows? If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll even get to die.

The first sensation is one of swaying stillness and the sound of a million silent voices. Suddenly there was a gut wrenching sliding and a visual influence and indication that an e-warp was underway and my ship was soon to be at its former location. I had only the faintest recollection of where that might be and was still busy checking my systems and their responsiveness. Or in my case the lack there of. Fully half of my ships modules were offline and the ones that were on seemed to be unwilling to respond. Why was everything still so slow.

Realisation dawned with the sickening force of a collapsing wormhole. I was finally jacked back into my ship and until I had finished the initial e-warp, the ships systems would be unable to comply. I quickly pulled up the camera feeds to try and get a bearing while simultaneously asking the computer for a quick and dirty 360˚ sweep of the local theater for anything remotely telling. Skills were like old friends that you hadn’t seen in years – you knew what they were then and it was going to take practice. Practice like time, was something that I might be out of.

Ships. Tens, hundreds, thousands of ships were cluttering up my inputs, demanding my attention and stealing my distracted mind to narrow alleys that would be less than profitable if traversed. As I neared the end of my warp bubble, I flipped to overview Gamma and started looking for exits. I threw as many distractions as I could quickly grab into the corner and tried as hard as I could to ignore the rest. My priorities were to get safe, get back online and get back to where I truly belonged. This was madness and I couldn’t be farther from the reality I understood and grasped.

Finally finding something that looked right I punched up the destination, diverted the cap to the drives and hoped the local group would just ignore my half functional ship and its limited cargo. As I landed on the gate, I realised I had miscalculated and was 15 km off the back of the gate and my propulsion was one of the stupid modules that wouldn’t respond. Pounding the interface didn’t seem to help make it active so I put the last remaining cap into the one remaining hardner and turned toward the gate. With blind luck I might make it before someone decided to liberate my conscious from my capsule… I don’t mind so much as I hate not being able to participate in the festivities. If I am going to die, I plan on at least leaving some ammo behind in their hull.

I hit the jump range and mash it, waiting for my systems to catch up with the trans-luminal displacement my ship has just experienced. As the scans loaded and I was able to get some rational data I realised I just jumped into…

Times Fun When You’re Having Flies

Kename Fin — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 10:17:13 +0000

On Being a Frog in Well Stocked Pond

The wormholes have been rolling by us at a rate of 2-3 a day. With our static Class 4 exit lasting at most 16 hours we usually have time more than enough time to harvest anything we roll across in the adjacent wormhole systems. If those systems are empty and their connections not holding any prospective targets to hunt down, we’re more than happy to roll the exit and see what else pops up. We’re easily running as many sites as we can possibly squeeze in between pilot availability, wormhole collapse and outside interference. It’s good on the wallet and fun for the participants – so who could want for anything more?

Time – as I posted above seems to be the limiting factor. Were there more of it in the right places, we’d accomplish even more. As it is, I’ve let the posts slide for the last two weeks. I’m behind on keeping up with not getting farther behind. The reasons are all good and I don’t regret them in any way. The first issue that demands more time is the burgeoning role of maintaining the new alliance. Hats off to Letrange on the way he’s managed to even stay sane let alone manage to get some play time in. And he even manages to post regularly. The second is some impending travel that is coming up for myself, and that means a lot of loose ends have to be tied up first. And finally, there are some issues with EVE and CCP that needed to be dealt with.

So, while having loads of fun, I’m a bit tired and looking for whoever it is stole my last billion isk. I’ll be coming for you…

Not Always Shiny

Kename Fin — Thu, 20 May 2010 06:18:42 +0000

On Making Stupid Mistakes & Learning

As I looked over the last year or two of posts, I realised that I very often only present the upside to the efforts and events that we go through. I don’t often mention some of the accidents, problems and outright stupid mistakes that my colleagues or I make on a seemingly regular basis. To further entertain you, I’ll try to recall some of them and tell you what we’ve learned in the process.

Hmmm…. Nope…. Can’t think of anything.

I’m quite sure I could come up with more examples of our incompetence, but would likely ruin our reputation for flawless execution.

What’s In Your Hangar?

Kename Fin — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 21:25:29 +0000

On Reviewing The Ships That Make It All Possible

I saw Rixx Javix post about what he has in his hangar and naming conventions and thought it was a wonderful idea to review what I had as well. I’m late the party, but likely not the last. I absolutely love naming ships for practical as well as aesthetic reasons. I also have to admit that I’m going to play a little bit loose with the term “hangar” as I live out in unknown space where things are not as well defined and most all of my ships are in a Ship Maintenance Array. Living out of an SMA, reduces the number of spurious hulls we have on hand, but I usually have duplicate hulls already purchased in k-space.

Click on ships to see their descriptions

And that sums up the list of ships I keep. I used to have a lot more, but now I tend to limit them to what I’m using currently and a couple of backup hulls kept in Jita.

Seriously?

Kename Fin — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 10:26:02 +0000

On Waking Up After Being Deprived Of Your Pod

Ouch. Blinding pain. My ship … is, why can’t I feel my ship. And … um … I can’t … seem to focus … on the present. Station … docked? Sleepy … groggy … slow.

Not unlike post-election interviews with the runner-up, waking up after a binge, stepping in it in the park or waking up in a new clone, the process of recovery is sometimes short and sweet and more often filled with emotion, pain and suffering. How you handle losing it all speaks more volumes about you than the epitaphs shouted in comms, kill board statistics or isks spent on your last ride. From an early age people need to learn some important EVE life lessons.

1) It’s a ride. It does not have emotions. It doesn’t care if you are in, on, afk, logged, asleep at the pod, finger in your nose, smiling or frowning. It is quite oblivious to anything you care about. Pets, asteroids, spouses, corp-mates, local taxes, sovereignty fees – they are all irrelevant to the EVE Train.

2) It is independent. It goes where it will. You are able to affect its direction to some extent, but more than likely it is less Butterfly Effect and more akin to Clear Skies or Carebears Attack in the ability to affect the larger picture. You look out for you and yours and things go swimmingly.

3) You will die. You will lose a lot of ships if you are actually playing the game with any level of interaction. It doesn’t matter if you are in high security, low security, null security or wormhole space – you and your ship will soon be parted. Today’s Headlines: Death Coming. Tomorrow’s Forecast: Mostly ganky with an increasing chance of podding. The only unknowns are when, where and everything except how well you handle yourself.

This is not some HTFU rant about people who can’t hack the harsh, kill-or-be-killed world of New Eden. It’s a realistic gut check for pilots who think the worst thing that can happen is getting your current clone senselessly splattered on the nose-cone of a Terror Assault missile or perforated by Repulic EMP. It’s all senseless and it will continue to happen as long as there are people flying other ships. There is always someone bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, wealthier or prettier who is able to relieve you of your capacity to be in a ship.

I’m not saying don’t be upset about losing a ship. I cry over every last one. Most of them I built. I fit them, flew them, trained them, repaired them, crashed them. All of them I loved. My ships are my life and every last one of them is important to me, from the disposable frigates to the disposable battlecruisers. They surround me, they hold me, they give everything they have to me – could I give them less. And as for my pod – that rather frail hunk of metal filled with snot and keeping my clone from feeling the effects of strenuous accelerations and combat – it too serves its purpose and no more. I have bought several clones. I will buy several more. God willing, I will not forget to buy one when I die tomorrow.

So when an overwhelming force of pilots gank you, get up, get back in a ship and keep going. Or not. Either choice is valid. The people who shot you out of the sky won’t really care one way or the other. Ranting – not likely to get you much response. Wild and derogatory remarks – again not likely to help put implants back in your head. Best case scenario – ask if it was them in the reverse situation, what would they have done. They might offer useful suggestions. The worst case scenario is they might just laugh and say, “Die.” Either way, use it to get better at flying your spaceships.

To put this in more of a personal context – the Wormhole Engineers have been attacked, off and on, since they first started living in wormholes. Mining maulings, hauling hijacks, gratuitous ganks and overt overkills have been the norm and not the exception. We learned important lessons all along the way. We first learned how to hide better and then we learned how to run away better. We learned how to be better aware of the situation not just around us, but beyond our little corner of the world. We began to learn how to resist and tank and eventually even how to shoot back. We learned how to take ammunition from out tower and distribute it more effectively on the hulls of other pilots. We haven’t had a lot of kills and we’re still not afraid to back down. However; if we shoot you, it isn’t personal and we’re not out to bully the pilots we see around us.

One of the lessons we learned the hard way was there are no innocent people out here in the wormholes. Letting an unknown covops pilot buzz around in plain site is a sure way to buy a new clone and it is still worth getting an overwhelming force out to catch and pop them. Sending the pilot back to known space is the only way to assure they aren’t scouting for a larger party. The larger force may still be there, but they’ll have to survive with one less set of eyes. They may only be scanning for exits, but that’s what we were doing until we saw someone else’s probes.

Ken Fin Who

Kename Fin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 06:27:55 +0000

On Getting To Know The Author

Somewhat in response to Freebooted’s post about introductions, I came up with the following:

Vestigial Heritage

I’m an old Caldari pilot who has managed to fly a lot of ships, visit a lot of systems and learned some of the most spectacular ways to die. I believe in working very hard to be the best pilot that you can. To that end, I spend a lot of my skill points on getting my skills to level 5. This also means I don’t have a lot of skills. I love my Drake and I don’t mind trying to use it in a lot of different situations.

I am that bane of banes for MMOs, the carebears’ carebear. I like mining. I like manufacturing. I like killing rats and Sleepers, setting up towers, plugging different numbers in spreadsheets and seeing what comes out. I like flying with a group of friends more than I realised when I started and I miss them when they are gone. I used to mine Veldspar in high-sec before I started exploring and mining Kernite in exploration sites. I would run missions for extra ore when the macro-miners would strip out whole systems.

I have a whole lot of blueprints and end up using them on occasion. I have been in one fail cascade, one very successful corporation and have most recently started out again on my own with a new venture. We endeavour to focus on solely on wormholes and utilising them for fun and profit.

100

Kename Fin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:05:30 +0000

On Reaching 100 Posts

It had to come sooner or later. I always thought it would be later. I can remember back when I first started and thinking that I would probably never see 100 posts. I’ve never been that faithful at keeping a digital journal and have multiple different abortive attempts saved on various backups through out the house and online. Journals on paper have always been easier for me. Now that I’m here I find I’m at a bit of a loss on what to say. I have several different things that I have been reticent to post about for fear of touching off dry tender or annoying people overly much. Additionally, I so wanted people to see the hundredth post and think, “This is 100 material.”

So, without further ado, I am celebrating 100 posts with the proclamation that Our Eve has been included in CrazyKinux’s BlogPack.

Now that you’ve glimpsed my vanity, let me celebrate by making announcements.

The pilots of Dark Star Galactic Engineers [DSGE]- Wormhole Engineers Division have formally split off into a separate, wormhole focused corporation, Wormhole Engineers [WHEN.]. Not new information per se but leading up to #2.
As a focused wormhole corporation, we will be foregoing most all high/low/null-sec activities [excepting support logistics].
Many of the mission/pvp-minded pilots in DSGE have moved to our sister corporation, Fearless Bandits.
Industrial pilots will be remaining in DSGE or with an as yet unannounced industrial corporation.
In approximately three weeks, these focused corporations will be joining into an general support alliance built from the ground up to offer mutual support while maintaining individual corporate focus.

All this will allow us to do several things more efficiently. Those who are interested in missions and pvp will be able to do so without the burden of worrying about corp-mates living out in a wormhole. Those who are living out in the wormhole won’t be feeling bad if “so-and-so” isn’t fulfilled living out of a tin can in the wilderness. And the burden of maintaining high-sec research facilities is removed from both of them while still keeping those resources available to them. All this coupled with a fresher set of leadership that is flatter [not so top-down in style] and committed from the ground up to inter-corp co-operation and movement as necessary. At the core of each is a group that get their jollies doing the very thing the corporations are dedicated to. Thus they could also be considered “core”-porations.

And Happy 100 Posts!

Wormhole State of Mind

Kename Fin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:17:42 +0000

On Living And Lasting In Wormholes

In a recent article Star Defender ponders the longevity of wormhole occupants and the preponderance of persons heading back into known space. This is increasingly true, I will agree. One of the other things we have noticed is that even within a corporation, we’ve found that some people who loved the wormhole when they first moved in, decided that it wasn’t really a long term option for them.

After doing this for almost a year, we’ve learned that it is, as much as anything, a lifestyle issue. Some people are looking for isk and have decided that missions or tending their rock gardens in high sec is more to their liking. Others miss the constant flow of traffic and capsuleers that they can shoot at. We look for people who like smaller ops, closer knit groups and slightly neurotic. The people who end up doing the best are the ones who don’t like crowds, love making things work [especially without the right tools], and are used to living on the fringes of society.

In many ways, Letrange’s post on Alliances as they relate to wormhole life is indicative of the issues involved in long term wormhole residency. If you haven’t read it, let me take the liberty of paraphrasing him, “1st, go read Letrange’s Blog Entry. Back. Good.” Basically as it relates to wormhole life, alliances are different. Both alliances and corporations need to start thinking approaching life differently from their counterparts in high-sec, low-sec and null-sec. There are aspects of all of them that apply, but there some things that need to be thought through differently.

The first to be addressed is living out of what amounts to a caravan parked on the Gaza border. You desperately need fuel, supplies and food; however, parties on both sides of you are armed and should be considered dangerous to your well-being. You have to find ways to be self-sufficient while sharing with those also in your RV. One hopes that everyone living in the same place is courteous, thinks exactly alike and doesn’t have any body odour. If you solve this in a manner that keeps everyone happy, let me know.

Other issue that exists after a short amount of time is resource availability. CCP stated that they never intended wormholes to be a long-term residential solution. They’ve set it up so all your fuel and possibly everything else you use up will come from beyond the confines of your home. Couple this with the simple fact that wormholes tend to ‘dry up’ with usage and soon there are a plethora of people and paucity of provender for them. This is the main issue for people that otherwise have the correct state of mind to survive in a hostile environment making ends meet with their own wits. They just need more ‘content’ to be content.

As a corollary to this, the more pilots that you have in a given system, the better equipped the corporation will be to deal with any of the situations that happen to come upon it. Besieged by battleships, bring it. Perplexed by pirates, pulp ‘em. Stymied by Sleepers, sic ‘em. But as above, it takes a lot of resources to provide a lot of resources and all of them chew through it rather quickly.

So we’re left with the phrase, “Lifestyle Choice” that I really think best captures what it means to be a wormhole resident. Things aren’t often grand out here, nor does it all happen with clockwork efficiency. Fleets are often best described as ad hoc and would make most dedicated FC’s cry. Logistics are always a bit of strain and a large percentage of time is dedicated to just making sure everything doesn’t come crashing down. I think it is ok to say that those of us who tend to stay out here in the wormholes are different. There’s a niche out here that we honestly feel blessed to be able to fill and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

Mind the Dust [OOC]

Kename Fin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:10:42 +0000

As you might have noticed [or not if this is your first time tuning in], the site has been undergoing some minor, um, “tweakage”. I’d like to say that this is all part of the on-going effort to provide consistent quality in a relevant format that is changed and modified to meet the needs of the readers. It is not.

I have been however thinking for sometime to give it a bit of refresh. And in that vein, saw that the original theme had gone through several iterations and point updates. I decided to pursue that as a first line means to freshen up the whole site. It has been an interesting couple of days to say the least and I thought I’d share some of the highs and low points along the way.

Backups were made. This is something that I can’t stress enough and regularly fail to mention. Backups save lives people! We buy clones so we don’t lose our Skill Points. We insure our ships and only fly the ones that we have the isk to replace. Quite to the contrary of my feelings, I regularly fail to make backups, don’t copy files to my server, forget to leave a copy of my flight itinerary with my husband, lose the copy of my passport and notice my clone is out of date two weeks after it lost skill points from being podded. Don’t be that way. FTP was fired up and the entire site was packed into an archive and downloaded. Inside of WordPress the whole thing was also backed up from the Tools menu. Finally, a screen grab of the theme settings was made, “Just In Case.”

Now it was time to update the theme, which conveniently could been done within the WordPress engine. Links were clicked, scripts were run and messages were displayed. Eventually all was in readiness and a trip to ‘Visit Site’ was made. The results were beyond description. Words fail to adequately express how bad all of my layout decisions were when everything in the theme was returned to its default setting. Text was unreadable, headings were off, carefully designed alignments were destroyed, pictures were suddenly missing or in one case pointing to the wrong image. Calamity!

Enter the backups. I briefly toyed with the idea of just reloading everything from the back up and giving up on any sprucing up of the site. But something, somewhere, deep down inside of me wouldn’t let the php win. I was in control. I am the mistress of this domain. I will…. scream and start using the aforementioned screen cap of the theme settings to begin to squeeze things into shape. After about 15 minutes or so, I had something that at least resembled the previous theme and was mildly functional. I decided to head off for bed and think about it at a later point. After coming back I managed to make a few more changes, wrangle some of the CSS back into place and even begin some of the ‘tweakage’ that I had desired all along.

Here’s hoping that it doesn’t just offend all those concerned.

The Little Things

Kename Fin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:44:47 +0000

My corporate compadres, denizens of Domnion, wanton wormhole wanna-be’s are relentlessly reminding me that it has been ~~a week~~ ~~two weeks~~ nearly three weeks since I posted any information. I’ve been sorely remiss in spending much time posting information here, as I’ve been busy trying to live life in a pod out in the wilds of Apocrypha. Dominion brought some changes, but nothing overly significant to the capsuleers who fly here the wormhole. So then the question I need to answer to myself is, “What has happened?”

We’re still in the same system and we’ve managed to pick up another regular engineer. He really seems to be settling into the opportunities that exist out here in the unknown and is always eager to learn more. He laughs at our attempts to explain that living out of one or more metal boxes powered by a large metal candy cane is a “Lifestyle Choice,” but is excited about the future. We’ll have to revisit the idealism when he’s been ganked a coupled of times, podded and otherwise thrown under the bus [bus being a euphemism for Tech 2 ships with overwhelming firepower and numbers.]

The ability to run sites has picked up some as well with a fairly balanced effort at participation from all involved. We have tried [and been fairly successful] in making everything a concerted group effort, though the industrial side of things is still a bit of a struggle. The new guy has been very giddy about not only mining Arkonor, Bistot and Crokite, but being able to be compensated for it without having to worry about the market, hauling, refining, et cetra. We’re excited about his excitement too. Along the way we’ve become very adroit at operating together as a unit and understanding each others’ strengths and weaknesses. In many ways our efficiency is finally picking up and coming together.

The flip side of this situation is that we are also beginning to realize just how isolated we are. Our jargon and vocabulary has shifted significantly and we communicate in seeming nonsense to some of our corp-mates. We haul our “bloot” to market, we talk about our gases and our pre-warps, we know that “@#$@” and “aoliv89#*&” mean someone is about to die. We have reached the point where we know within a few million isk how much a particular site is worth. We can judge approximate time frames for running those sites. We have become fairly comfortable with suggesting fittings and I would go as far as to say know what should work. We have established procedures for scanning, scouting, bookmarking, mining, fighting, etc that aren’t really written down in electrons anywhere.

This is all to say that as we add new people to our endeavor out in the uncharted realms of otherwhen, we’ll be struggling not only to bring them up-to-speed, but also even just communicate.

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