Through circumstances I cannot control, I yet again have no money*. This website is paid for for the remainder of the year but I ran out of my EVE subscription months ago. To be honest, with other things that I need money for (travel to college and other places, phone bills, etc.), EVE isn’t really top priority. Please do not send time cards as I most likely will not end up using them for a few months at the very least. So I’ve got no to choice but to stick up this message.

On an EVE-related note, my brother now plays EVE again after a years long stint of playing WoW. His character name is Kha’To Tamak, so make sure to say hi!

As I’m in need of money more than ever, if you need any non-eve graphics made, contact me on either or via my personal twitter account.

* As you’ve probably noticed from the amount of times this has happened, I’m a poor student!

About a week or two ago now, I created myself a few quick icons and images for the EVE Blog Pack links. And while I originally intended to give them a post of their own, a graphics project caused it to it totally slip my mind.

Any members of the Blog Pack (or any EVE bloggers wanting to promote the blog pack) can use these. Just make sure to save them onto your computer and host them somewhere else. I’d love to host these for everyone’s use but with my currently money troubles, I’d rather not have to pay for extra bandwidth or have my site offline for the rest of the month!

So, we have some “click here” images. One set for dark backgrounds and another set for lighter backgrounds.

And we’ve got some small icons for both the RSS and OPML links.

  |

|

If you need anything else made up (any blog pack other icons, sizes, etc.), leave me a comment and I’ll get to work for you. Free of charge of course.

Number 4 in my EVE fiction story arc. You can find the others at the links below.

1. Recruitment
2. Black Box
3. Drifter

The first thing I remember is a loud crack, followed by a popping sound in my ears. It had been a long time since I’d been anywhere but contained within, what I like to call, the pod goo. You see the chemical and physical make up of the goo, coupled with the internal pod systems keep the internal pressure at a comfortable 1 atmosphere. But every now and then, you may find a ship or station with a slight variation in the atmospheric pressure. I don’t know whether it’s personal preference or a problem with their air filtration and distribution systems but whatever it is; it’s always a tad unpleasant.

As I slowly regained consciousness I opened my eyes to find myself sprawled out on the floor, as naked as the day I was born, in a pool of my own pod goo. I had no idea where I was. As far as I could tell, it was a Minmatar design. The old cliché of rusted walls, pipes sticking out of the floor told me that much. Only a Minmatar crew would shove me and my broken pod into a room instead of keeping us in the docking area. I’ve got nothing against the Minmatar as a whole but they don’t have a reputation of being the gentlest people around.

I usually like to get out of my pod every once in a while, maybe once a week at the least. Otherwise, I find that my muscle mass tends to suffer. Not that I have much mind you, but I have enough to stand up and walk around. At least I used to. It took me what must have been about 10 minutes to get to my feet and regain my balance. It took me about 5 more minutes to get across the 10 meter wide room towards my pod that had been cracked open like someone’s early morning breakfast.

Having not seen a pod like this before (I’m usually in a new body, light years away, milliseconds after the pod’s hull breaches), I decided to have a good root around. It wasn’t long before I could get the internal systems back online and I found the most recent automated logs. It seemed that not long after I passed out, a Concord ship came along and radioed to see if I needed any assistance. I did, but of course I couldn’t tell them due to the inconvenience of being unconscious.
After the Concord ship left, a Minmatar ship came along. Judging by the fact that they picked me up and cracked my pod open, I’m guessing that they’re not the friendliest Minmatar around.

All of what you see above happened over a day ago. I’m still stuck in this room, still alone and still naked. I haven’t heard or felt a thing on this ship since the moment I woke up. There are no footsteps in the corridor outside, none of the stereotypical lurches caused by gate travel, no vibrations from the engines, nothing.
There are only two possible explanations for this. The first possibility; I’m in a sound proof room, surrounded by some sort of substance that acts as a buffer to the vibrations. The second; Something’s made the crew abandon ship and clearly I wasn’t deemed important enough to be woken up and/or taken with them.

I guess we’ll have to see.

Still having problems with my ISP. Called them a couple days ago and gave them the 30 days notice that I wanted to cancel my account with them and that I wanted the MAC code. As I expected, we were bounced around the Demon employees until someone said there is no one that can give us our MAC code and that they would phone back in a few days. 
They did eventually phone back but to try and sort out my problems with them, rather than give me my MAC code. The Demon employee even said “I’m going to keep calling until we help you get your internet back up and running again. They don’t seem to understand that I don’t want to stay with them.

Seems like they’re incredibly desperate to keep their customers.

We’re back!

Man, it feels good to be back in the blog pack again. Those of you that weren’t around during the time EVE blogging was just taking off (i.e. when people started noticing that EVE blogs existed*) might not know, but I was one of the original EVE Blog Pack members. Of course a few months later, I started to get behind on EVE and my graphics so I had nothing to blog about. Then that eventually led to me being removed from the pack. Have no fear though! I’m going to do my absolute best to stop that happening again.

* AKA – A couple years ago.

I can’t wait to see whether my addition to the blog pack brings any new readers to the blog. By the way, if you’re a new reader, leave me a comment and let me know that you’re here!

I almost forgot, if you’re sitting there and wondering WTF the EVE blog pack is, click on this linky and wonder no more.

Or…

In other news. Still no updates on the ISP front. Still being disconnected every few minutes so I’ve had to resort borrowing a T-Mobile USB Web and Walk thingymajig, and even that seems to randomly disconnect due to spotty mobile signal in my area. I seem to get blazingly fast HSDPA speeds sometimes but an agonisingly slow GPRS connection most of the time.

On the graphics front, I’ve got two paid (as in real moneys!) jobs lined up. One is going to be a web site design for a game time re-seller, and the other is for a site that I am under orders to keep secret until launch so my money problems should solve themselves sooner rather than later. Well, providing that the communication problems that we’ve been having clear up.

On a more personal note, I am now (not through my own choice) single.  Well, to be more specific, I’m in the “will we get back together, won’t we” area. As can be expected with things like this, it’s insanely complicated and probably won’t work itself out for a while.

By the way, I also have copies of the graphics above with black text if any blog pack members wish to use them. That is all.
Good luck fellow new Blog Pack members!

It’s been over a week and a half since I last posted and especially after promising to post more often, that makes it even more intensely annoying. Those that follow me on Twitter will have been listening to me complain over and over again about internet connection problems and I’m sure you’re sick of it by now.
For the people that don’t follow me on Twitter (and why not?! ), my internet connection has been going from bad to worse over the past few days. I’d been getting constantly disconnected every 10 or so minutes at first, then yesterday and the day before the internet was connected in the morning but refused to connect in the afternoon and evening. Luckily though, it seems to be getting better and I’ve been connected without incident for about 45 minutes at the moment*.

One good thing about the unexpected internet blackout was that I had a lot more time to get some graphics work done. So, as a result I got two great graphics that I’m pretty proud of done over the last few days.

The first being one I’m sure you’ve all seen already. Almost a week ago Kirith Kodachi, of Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, commissioned me to create a poster for his Support the Rokh campaign. You can see the poster and the three different sizes at his campaign post.

The second job was to create a header for Max Torps of StarFleetComms. It seems that he hasn’t yet uploaded the new header so you can’t see it yet. So, make sure to keep checking back on the StarFleetComms site until you see my lovely header! Even give him a little nudge if you want.
I will however, show you the three other variations I made when we were deciding on a background. As a special treat to all you faithful readers.

I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get a normal post written up but be sure to check back as often as you can as I’m sure that it won’t be long.

* – Looks like I was wrong. Shortly after typing that, my connection dropped out on me and stayed that way for a couple hours.

I’m sure you’ve all already heard about the new game by CCP that was recently announced, Dust 514. Understandably, some people are pretty peeved that after years of keeping CCP going on the PC, they’re releasing a game solely on consoles. Potentially shutting out some of the already solidly established fan base. One of these peeved players (Sable Blitzmann) has started a thread on the EVE forums for other players to sign if they agree that Dust 514 should be on PC as well as consoles.

The idea of an EVE FPS has excited me for a while now, but it’s absolutely infuriating that CCP has decided to release this game solely on consoles. Quite frankly, it’s a slap in the face to the current EVE community (since we’re all on PC’s to begin with).

Please, sign this petition if you’d like this game to eventually be released for the PC too. Apparently, porting a 360 game to the PC is not too intensive and completely possible, so it shouldn’t be too much trouble. Besides, what happens to this new game when the next gen of consoles comes around and the 360 is left in the dust (lol, pun)?

/signed

Personally, I’m all for Dust being on PCs as well as consoles. I massively prefer playing an FPS on PC. I’m all for the improved accuracy that a mouse offers over a controller pad and a little joystick. CCP could even follow in the footsteps of the 2007 Xbox 360 game Shadowrun and implement some very light auto aiming for console players to counteract the improved accuracy of the PC players.

For me, it goes a little like this;

Chance of me playing an FPS MMO on a console = Slim to none
Chance of me playing an FPS MMO on a PC = Extremely effing likely!

If you also agree with this, go ahead and leave your opinion (or even just a ‘/signed’) at the forum thread.

Disclaimer: It’s not 100% definite that there will not be a PC version at the moment as the only news we have is that console versions have been confirmed but a PC version hasn’t been denied. That said, why would they withhold PC release info from the players of their PC only game? Surely, they’d announce that first.

After a few failed tries to compile a list of EVE Online players and bloggers who are also Twitter users (mine was even one of them), we seem to finally have one that seems like it can go the distance. Hopefully, it becomes the main repository for anyone looking for a definitive list of EVE tweeters.

http://00sage00.wordpress.com/eve-tweeters/

To help it along a bit, I’ve taken the liberty of creating a bit.ly short URL for the site which you can see below.

http://bit.ly/eve-tweeters

Hopefully, it’ll make it easier to remember and make sure that EVE players new to Twitter or Twitterers new to EVE can be linked to it it easily.

In other news, my ISP has been jerking me around quite a bit lately and for the last few days, they had capped my internet speed to something that seemed slower than dial up. After giving them a call, they said that I had been capped (although they didn’t say why). After spending the weekend at the girlfriend’s house, I come back to an internet that, while back to normal speed, doesn’t seem to want to stay connected for more than a couple minutes.

What have I learned from this? Is it that I should be more careful with how much I download? Not at all, there’s no way that I went over the limit. It’s that Demon Internet are now an ISP that I would never recommend to anyone, especially after reading the terrible reviews.

Anyway, with any luck everything should be back to normal tomorrow morning and I should be able to get some EVE time in and get a decent update posted where I actually talk about playing EVE instead of just news about it.

By the way, if there is anyone with a graphics request waiting in my EVE-mail inbox, don’t you worry. With any luck, I’ll be able to read your messages soon and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

After a good day’s worth of coding and designing, I bring you all my new graphics page!

And for your viewing pleasure, it comes in four different flavours. Amarr, Caldari, Gallente and Minmatar.
For a while now I’ve wanted an actual web page for my graphics information and whatnot and seeing as EVEGFX doesn’t seem to be coming back any time soon, now’s the perfect time.

To make the transition from my blog page to this new web page easier, I’ve now got the ‘Custom EVE Graphics’ link at the top of this page to link to my web page. So, hopefully all should go smoothly.

So, what do you guys think? What’s your favourite skin? Is everything working as it should? Is there any functionality, you would like me to add? This is my baby, tell me you love it!

As you might have noticed, and I hope you have, I’ve changed the blog theme for the first time in almost a year. Or the first time ever if you didn’t read my blog back when it was WordPress hosted.
I’ve been admiring the themes on offer over at Podlogs for quite some time now and I’d been mulling over which one to get until finally, I chose one and boy am I happy! Since the launch of Podlogs, I’ve been jealous of the simply amazing themes and I had been becoming increasingly more fed up with my old theme. So, what do you think? Good change or bad change?

In other news… there is no other news. EVE’s been rather dull lately, with nothing at all going on in the PvP department. For some reason all the low sec systems in the area have had their usual population cut down by around half and I can’t figure out why.
So, instead of that, I’ve been doing something I’ve been meaning to do for years and started training the Advanced Learning skills. I would post up my little training queue but I can’t seem to find a way to copy a training skill queue to the clipboard using EVEHQ. I really like EVEHQ but I can’t help going back to EVEMon and EFT for certain little things that I’m used to using but that EVEHQ doesn’t have.

In other, other news, my lots and lots of free time this Summer means that I have a lot of time to take any EVE graphics requests. You can find my prices at my Custom EVE Graphics page along with some links to examples. Feel free to contact me via email or my Contact page. Although you can also contact me in-game, the end of my current game time is only a few days away and I’m not sure whether I’ll have the money for another time card right away. So until I can be 100% sure that I have more game time, it’s best to only use email or my contact page.

Fly safe.

On recommendation of reader and fellow blogger, Manasi, I started using EVEHQ to plan my ship fittings. It didn’t take me long to realise how EVEHQ is so much more than just a fitting tool. I managed to find a skill breakdown chart and it got me thinking, how does my skill set look compared to the other EVE players and bloggers?

You can see my skill breakdown below.

To see (and then show me) your skill breakdown, it’s as simple as a couple clicks and you’re there.

Feel free to link to your screenshot in the comments on your own blog. This isn’t a contest or anything so there are no rules. I’m just curious as to how my skills stack up against the rest of you.