15/05/11 08:39 AM
| Arkonor | 285 |
| Bistot | 217 |
| Mercoxit | 192 |
| Crokite | 187 |
| Hedbergite | 171 |
| Hemorphite | 168 |
| Jaspet | 152 |
| Dark Ochre | 147 |
| Pyroxeres | 118 |
| Kernite | 106 |
| Veldspar | 99 |
| Scordite | 93 |
| Gneiss | 90 |
| Plagioclase | 88 |
| Spodumain | 82 |
| Omber | 81 |
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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!
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.
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.
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.
Technorati Tags: old players, new players
In a brief return from being lost in space, our intrepid explorer and CEO of Penny Ibramovic Engineering [PIE] drops by to bring us another of her delicious posts to read after dinner. Enjoy.
The manufacturing division of Penny Ibramovic Industries is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Whilst it is reassuring to check my wallet and see a steady stream of income based on profit from sales, that income is dwarfed by the continued success of the wormhole engineers. Raking in tens of millions of ISK for most wormhole operations makes my market sales look like petty cash. One wormhole operation can plump my wallet up with enough iskies to cover all my sell orders on the market, whatever outrageous profit margin I added at the time, rather than waiting weeks watching the cash trickle in. Production may offer a steady and generally reliable income, but it’s slow.
Admittedly, I am hardly a business entrepreneur at the moment, but nor will I be with my home out in w-space, as I will not be able to commit the necessary time to making a fortune off the market. Indeed, access to any market information is impossible in w-space, hence my need to return to New Eden to monitor prices and make adjustments. If I simply accept that manufacturing and sales is not currently a cost-effective use of my time, maybe I will be better off. It isn’t as if my researched blueprints will disappear or suddenly become useless. All that will happen is I will lose the incremental adjustments to my wallet as my modules sell. But I think I may miss that.
However much I like living out in w-space, my anti-social nature enjoying the solitude, the sell order transactions in my wallet continue to give me a link back to New Eden. It’s not that I want to interact with these capsuleers, I actually quite like that I don’t have to just because I run a business. But w-space can feel very empty. Local channel remains quiet and unpopulated, regardless of who may be in the system. Even if there are others in the system, space remains big enough that you are unlikely to encounter them, except perhaps when passing through wormholes. And you don’t really want to encounter other capsuleers in w-space, unless you’re specifically looking for them.
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Tourism In EVE"]  [/caption]
Not that I pay attention to the local channel when I am in high-sec, though, I actively ignore it. And idly hitting d-scan in high-sec—out of curiosity more than w-space habit—reveals far more activity in the system than makes me feel comfortable. I am sure all that activity was occurring back when I was living in high-sec, I just wasn’t aware of it. But now that I am used to the deceptive tranquility of w-space, appreciating all that is going on around me in high-sec makes me oddly claustrophobic. I need space. But just as much as I need space, I need to feel connected, even a little. Inferring that life continues by the wallet transactions of capsuleers buying my products gives me that connection. I suppose sometimes you just want to look out the window to be reminded of the world you are ignoring.
It seems that one of the great things about keeping a blog is the ability to look back and try to objectively review “how it’s gone” for whatever time period you care to arbitrarily select. Some folks take a monthly snapshot while still others look at a week or a quarter or a year. I’m choosing the end of the calendar year because I can and wanted to.
I’d like to have a full break down of the monthly page views or unique visits or bits transferred, but for some reason, my stats got wiped at the end of August and so really only have the last third of the year to make comparisons from. Having said that, we can make wild, sweeping extrapolations and expositions of what it must have looked like were the numbers still in the database.
You likely see something similar show up again later with better numbers as more time has been captured by the statistical tracking software.
Hot Cha, where are you?
Everybody’s eyes are closed
I can’t see why I miss you so
So Hot Cha, where are you? -(TMBG)
I’ve previously written about the immortality that capsuleers have to face on a day-to-day basis. Our own longevity is both a boon and bane and is a topic I’d like to pursue and review in depth more later. Several others have also mentioned this and how they have dealt with the issue. The good folks over at Galactic Water Cooler have even dealt with the issue on their wonderful podcast [specifically episode number 176]. If you don’t know who GWC is then I recommend you do something drastic. Stop reading this and go visit them right now. I’ll wait.
Right then, welcome back. Although immortal, many times the capsuleer is just not jacked in. The lights aren’t on and no one is home. The neurons just aren’t firing. This is completely different from the previous entry about not being in a coherent state-of-mind when danger come calling. This is when the pilot just isn’t plugged in at all. Recently the little jack at the back of my head where the pod jacks fit has been loose. It just doesn’t work right all the time. Seems intermittent and somewhat random, which makes the whole issue harder to diagnose. I’ve been in and out of the local fix-it shop several times and seem to have it fixed until the next time that I need
I once had a dream of a gleam, of a gleam in my eye
And I’ll have it till the day I die
I had a thought bubble of trouble, of trouble and strife
And I’ll have it for the rest of my life -(TMBG)
- It Sucks
The warm fluid surrounds me. The merest thought engenders actions that serve only to indulge the slightest whim of my fancy. The only thing missing is euphoria of human contact – and that is easily overlooked in lieu of the near omnipotent control available via my synaptic pathways. I am the capsuleer. I am immortal.
And good thing too – when a capsuleer falls asleep in their pod, bad things™ happen. Take for instance the most recent escapades while harvesting gas. It’s not a difficult job and sometimes your mind wanders. This time it hasn’t just wandered, my mind has set out on full scale expedition to calculate the inertial energy involved in blinking. My mind was gone, Gas Gone, as it were. Fortunately, my partner, the estimable scanner extraordinaire and EFT mogul, Mick was along with me, happily sucking in his own share of gas. [With his Tech 2 harvesters and the ability to mount 5 of them, his share is larger than my share.] So at least one of us is on guard, paying attention to d-scan, watching for probes/ships and generally preparing for anything.
Um, no.
Ripping a hole in fabric of time and space, two cocky jockeys in significantly powerful ships step appear right next to us, locking us down and shredding what little is left of our ships, pods and dignity. I know they had to have cheated because sure an alarm would have went off in my head [if I had been paying attention] and no one can sneak up on Mick. Unless of course we happen to be mining gas. I am more convinced that some of the fullerenes either leaked from the cargoholds into our pods, or messed with our sensors.
In a heart and frankly hull pounding few seconds, I am relieved of a small Gallente cruiser with 4 gas harvesters and some expanded cargo modules. Mick is in a similarly equipped Dominix and well insured. In the interminable few seconds that it takes for the foes BS to lock our pods, we are desperately and simultaneously trying to exit the warp disruption bubble the Onyx has thrown up, spamming the ‘warp to’ button and praying that something would go horribly wrong with their systems in the meantime.
The last thing I happened to see before waking up somewhere else is my pod flying through Mick’s wreck and thinking, “It should be bigger for a battleship”. I honestly feel a bit dazed and confused, not unlike waking in an unfamiliar room after traveling and having to remember that you even made a trip. It begins to filter back in bits and pieces. Gas. Exequror. Onyx. Domi. Megathron. Pods. Flash. At first it seems strange to be in a station, having flown so long without docking. And where is my ship? My pod? “Oh, look, someone left a selection of ships for me to chose from. How thought of her.”
So now I get to start over. The ship and modules were relatively cheap and no great loss. I have other. I lost some expensive implants, but frankly I considered them lost soon after I plugged them. If I was worried about losing them, I would have never undocked, let alone fly around in a wormhole. I managed to somehow remember that I had a jump clone somewhere in the universe with some old ‘plants in her head and after running into every conceivable error managed to repeat the whole unpleasant wake up in an unfamiliar place routine of a few minutes ago.
This station turns out to actually be quite far away from anything, which I think maybe why the clone was out here to begin with. I have also neglected to leave a ship in the hangar resulting in a hurried search of the market for an appropriate shuttle or frigate to get out of the system in. A few moments later I am busy flying a Gallente shuttle across seventeen jumps back home, 11 through low-sec. Why choose the low-sec route? Well, I just lost my ship and several million in implants, who really cares if I lose a few more low level implants. Besides, the 29 jumps through high-sec was more likely to kill me.
In a final twist of irony, I had been trying to get out of the wormhole for a couple of days to get some manufacturing jobs installed for some of my corp-mates. Using this fortuitous depodification, I zip over, put the job in the oven to bake. Carpé Diem.
Sensing that enough adrenaline has finally burned off to allow an attempt at sleep, I decide to call an end to flying and dock up for interim. I am immortal, yes, sleepless, no.
Ok, I admit it. I am in awe, struck dumb by the sheer enormity of what has transpired. In case any of you missed it:
Dominion has come.
And it is good. At least every little bit that I have seen from with in our little part of the unknown space we live in. With all the little things that have happened in the client, it really does feel a lot like EVE 3.0 instead of just an expansion. The marketers missed the opportunity to really push this as a major update to many of the parts that make EVE feel like EVE. With all of the updates to the UI as well as the actual graphics used for the systems, it is much more apparent that things have changed. And after one measly day in, I think it’s wonderful.
I’m sure there are a lot of little things going on around 0.0 involving sovereignty changes and support/logistics for them. There are some nitpicks, glitches and annoyances [hide windows?], but on the whole, I think it is a great update.
And finally – I can easily update this from inside my pod. Beware.
Posted from J130554, deep in the heart of nowhere and using the browser in EVE.
For the more observant readers [both of you], this is no surprise. For the rest of you, this wonderful piece of elocution is a wonderful guest post from a frequent partner in Sleeper related homicides and other nefarious asteroid related crimes. Please welcome and read, Penny Ibramovic, author of the wonderful Tiger Ears –Kename Fin
I sit docked at a station, keeping an eye on business. I open up the market interface to see how my orders are selling. I check if stations have received new deliveries and I am being undercut, modifying my prices if necessary and sustainable. Based on the market information, I instruct my production facilities to install new manufacturing runs, hoping that my mineral stocks allow it. If not, I hit the market again to buy more processed rocks. During all of this, my Crane floats serenely in the hangar as I conduct all my affairs through interfaces connecting directly in to my pod.
My thoughts naturally drift to wondering what it will be like when Walking in Station (WiS) becomes a reality, when I am flushed out of my pod goo and set free to explore stations beyond their hangars. Instead of staring at my admittedly beautiful ship behind several windows of information, I could be watching people, probably other capsuleers, from a table in a café, sipping on a cappuccino, albeit still from behind several windows of information. It would make quite the difference to see capsuleers come and go. Individual privateers will get new mission briefs to be completed, or groups of pilots all leave the area at once, boisterously heading off for a scheduled mining operation, or maybe quietly sneaking away to roam local low-sec systems for easy prey. Still daydreaming about the possibilities, I check my current station to see who also is currently docked.
 Space is big, and not just the parts with nothing in it. There are thousands of stars, hundreds under the umbrella of Concord in high-sec. Each system has several planetary bodies, many of them have stations in orbit, and a few planets more than one. Even if a system looks busy, with maybe twenty capsuleers present, the choice of place to dock means you are unlikely to find more than five or so capsuleers in the same station at any one time. Some of them may probably be shaking off a clone jump, or worse, and not feel in the mood to be seen in public. WiS sounds like an interesting idea, until you realise how lonely it is out in space.
Even the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is Jita probably won’t be interesting more than a couple of times, after dodging scams and pushing through crowds to finally get served or find someone you know. And unless you dock in the navy station at Jita IV, moon 4 you still may struggle to find others to talk to. If it weren’t for intricate communication relays, allowing for real-time conversations across the galaxy, many capsuleers could go days without speaking to another person. But maybe that’s the problem, the universality of some channels meaning there is little need to gather in specific stations, so capsuleers don’t. It’s a slim hope, but maybe when it becomes possible to meet outside of our pods more capsuleers will be more likely to dock somewhere specific.
[caption id="attachment_404" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Capsuleers getting drunk before Angel Extravaganza"]  [/caption]
It’s a slim hope to expect pilots to congregate, if only because navigating systems can get tedious. Jumping across several systems is seen as a necessary means to an end for most tasks, but it is yet to be seen how many capsuleers are willing to jump five, six, or maybe a dozen systems to meet face-to-face, for a corporation meeting or a simple chat about ship fittings, when a simple communication channel could be opened instead. Indeed, it needs to be seen how WiS communications are handled before this can be properly gauged. Speech bubbles floating above capsuleers’ heads could make the air crowded quickly, and whilst the ephemeral nature of the conversation may appeal to some shady characters, the necessity of continually having to repeat yourself will annoy others. If WiS relies on the same communication window as other channels, I am sure many pilots will question the wisdom of spending half-an-hour flying to a station only to monitor a chat channel that would be identical ten systems away.
None of this is to say WiS can’t, or won’t, bring new aspects of capsuleer life to New Eden. Personally, a change of background whilst in a station will be welcome, even if it is only me and the waiter in the VIP room. I won’t get so desperate as to mingle with my crew or other civilians. And there is definitely one feature that would make docking in a particular station enticing: PvP. It would really add to the atmosphere of a station and lead to more interesting social dynamics if it were possible to spike a rival’s drink, start a bar fight, or stab a dastardly pirate. And I think this is the real purpose behind Dust 514. It may begin with ground battles for planets and moons, but Dust 514 must surely soon be revealed as the prototype system for WiS. You can leave your pod behind, but don’t forget your weapon.
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