OOC: I Actually Like Surveys!

Well I haven't written anything in a bit because quite frankly...there hasn't been anything to write about. Been working on grinding out missions to get my standings up just so i can do higher level missions which means more money which means better toys. And so the ball continues rolling.

Speaking of money, I never did get around to buying a Hulk. Sometime perhaps but instead I spent a large portion of my money on a battleship with already installed riggings for the protege. Got offered a really good deal on it from a corp mate and couldn't resist. Sides, if the protege is able to get up to doing level 4 missions, i'll be making more with that per hour than the amount i'd be making per hour mining in high sec. Good aspect is the way our corp's ship program is set up. Being if I continue to provide minerals to the corp than I'll be able to purchase battleships and other tech1 ships at a very low price.

Other than that, skill training is nearing completion to fly covert ops. I'm a little hesitant about going forward with my skills for probing given the expected changes coming up with the new system patch. Need to do some research I guess to see what people's thoughts are on what skills to focus the training on.

But now for some fun. A few of the other journalists have been filling out this fun little survey started by psychdriver and given how much I actually enjoy filling them out, figured I'd go with the flow. So here it is!

1. Can you cook?
Does putting things in the microwave count as cooking??

2. What was your dream growing up?
To be a fighter jet pilot. Guess Eve's about as close as I got.

3. What talent do you wish you had?
to be an amazing guitarist. Actually....perhaps just being able to do anything more than pluck random strings would be nice.

4. Favorite place?
South Carolina (sweet sweet home)

5. Favorite vegetable?
Sweet Potatoes

6. What was the last book you read?
Anne Rice - Tale of a Body Thief

7. What zodiac sign are you ?
Cancer

8. Any Tattoos and/or Piercings?
Yep. Have basically a black and white painted canvas on my back. Used to have ears pierced but job didn't like that too much. punks....

9. Worst Habit?
biting my nails. horrible horrible habit especially when you got an itch and no nails to scratch it with!

10. Do we know each other outside of blogging?
Depends on who reads this but most likely nope....unless i shot at you in-game. oops.

11. What is your favorite sport?
I surf. 'nough said. :)

12. Negative or Optimistic attitude?
Generally optimistic....or at least do my best to be

13. What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me?
Hope I have ear plugs

14. Worst thing to ever happen to you?
get dumped by the ex-fiance right before we're supposed to get married.

15. Tell me one weird fact about you:
I rock climb quite regularly but am absolutely afraid of heights. Should I mention I'm not too bright sometimes. :)

16. Do you have any pets?
Yep, greatest dog in the world named Lyric, a husky/german shephard mix (with the energy of a jack russell.....)

17. Do you know how to do the macarena?
sadly.....

18. What time is it where you are now?
about noonish

19. Do you think clowns are cute or scary?
i wouldn't say scary but definitly not cute. annoying is more like it. best clown i ever saw was a picture on a punching bag. (okay....so it wasn't actually a picture....and...well...it wasn't a punching bag either.....but it still felt good to hit!)

20. If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be?
bigger mooscles. :)

21. Would you be my crime partner or my conscience?
Depends how well I know ya :P

22. What color eyes do you have?
blue

23. Ever been arrested?
honestly yes. but not for anything evil or such so don't be given me no crap. :P

24. Favorite fictional character of all time?
Batman. So many cool toys...i'm jealous!

25. If you won $10,000 dollars today, what would you do with it?
that's it??? cheap skate. I guess maybe pay off my car.

26. If you could have one superpower, what would it be?
Ever seen the movie "Jumper"? Now THAT would be cool.

27. What’s your favorite hangout?
I'm a big home-town coffee shop nut. There was a really nifty little place in Savannah, Georgia where it was a coffee shop that had live musicians in there all the time. loved it.

28. Do you believe in ghosts?
Yep...and piss me off enough I'll be one of the ghosts haunting you eventually!

29. Favorite thing to do in your spare time?
Play Eve or work on the car.

30. Do you swear a lot?
I'm a prior-service U.S. Marine....so you tell me. :)

31. Biggest pet peeve?
That annoying neighbor in my apartment complex who lets his dog shit right outside the entryway to the apartment

32. In one word, how would you describe yourself?
Asshole (least that's what all the friends call me...)

33. Will you repost this so I can fill it out and do the same for you?
Duh. :)

Your Right. I'm Getting Used to War

Well the so-called "war" with the one-man corp came to an end yesterday as it seems he didn't want to pay the bill to keep it going either. No surprise really and no surprise as well that nobody from my corp had the desire really to go after the guy. We really do have much more important matters to attend to than traveling all the way back to Empire just to beat up on some foolish kid. HOWEVER.....our days of war may not be over...

It seems a new threat has arisen that may have to be dealt with. No war has been declared as of yet but if the offending corp holds true to its threat, we will soon be receiving yet another war dec. This time by an alliance who has tried to claim that anybody living in this little high sec pocket cut off from the rest of empire, is required to pay them, I believe, 50 million isk a month in order to stay there. If the corporation doesn't pay, they get war dec'd. Well hats off to y'all and good luck cuz we sure as hell aren't paying. In fact, if they do take us to war, we've been discussing possibly the only way it will end is either them leaving the region all-together or them paying us 100 million a month to reside there. And we're not alone. An alliance in the region has recently gone from reds to blues as it seems they were threatened as well. The guys in my corp are certainly not ones to be taken for granted and, from what I'm gathering on this alliance that is now turned blue to us, neither are they. If this wanna-be-mob alliance does war dec either our new blue friends or our corp, it might be worked out that both groups will go to war with them.

Good lord these politics can be mind-spinning... I don't even want to imagine what it must be like in nullsec. I mean....can perhaps somebody tell me again what's so great about living in and holding a system in nullsec?? However, I gotta admit, this IS all rather amusing and definitely keeps high sec living interesting.

A bit of irony to that comment though....my protege has actually been spending a lot of her time in low-sec. Running missions mostly but at the same time seeing if she can find and pick a fight with some random pirate in a tech 1 frigate vs. frigate battle. As far as skill training goes, she's turned her attention towards training now to pilot an assault frig as she's accomplished being able to fly every tech 1 gallante ship available. Being a good pilot is a different story but she can definitely pilot a frigate ship well so I figure it's time to start training for a tech 2 frigate. Then I'll build up her skills to fly tech 1 cruisers well and once that's accomplished, get her into a tech 2 cruiser and so on and so forth. This would include a lot of what might be considered "base skills" such as those in engineering, electronics, and mechanics. Either way, I know for awhile she'll be feeling perhaps a little inefficient and unable to be a useful participant within the corporation for perhaps a few more months. However, eventually I think it will payout and will be happy it went that route. When she can fly a tech 1 cruiser better than people older than her in their tech 2 cruisers, then they'll stop doubting her abilities. Hmm...maybe have to make note to prove that someday...

-ML-

OOC: With those thoughts in mind, thinking about tech 1 and tech 2. I think, after reading the recent information released about tech3 ships and such, that for a newer player like myself, tech 3 is and will be a long way out. Especially for PVP use. When your a newer player, every minute of every hour counts as you try to get your skill points up to a level where you can effectively compete within the universe of Eve. To waste time on skills learned just to fly some new, fancy ship, skills that you will lose if your fancy ship is destroyed, well....it just seems....dumb, to put it bluntly. As taught to me from almost the beginning (especially when getting blown up my very first day in my rookie ship) , never undock in anything you're not willing to lose. To the newer players, like myself, everything you have, especially that small amount of skill point base, is a very precious commodity. And everything you lose hurts.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm all about going into the unknown. I'm just as excited as the next guy about the idea of true exploration. About going through a wormhole and getting "Lost in space". About going up against NPC's that will supposedly fight more like real players (though as intimidating as that is for me as a newer player...) Or seeing and helping to gather the resources for this new tech 3 gear. But as for actually using it....I think I'll just settle with becoming more familiar with the already available tech 2 gear first. And I highly suggest to all other newer players to do the same. Unfortunately, as seems usual, I'm sure a lot of em will always want the biggest, baddest toys and waste their time on the skills to fly em and forget the basics... Ah well....just means more ship kills for me. :)

1 Man Against 50

So the war with the larger of the two corporations has ended. Seems they didn't want to pay the bill any longer to keep it going. Now that just leaves one corporation remaining. The solo man and his lonely corp. If it wasn't for the fact that it'd probably be a complete waste of time, I'd try and hunt this man to the very end! But as I said, it'd likely be nothing more than wasted time as he'd probably hide in a station somewhere.

Otherwise nothing too much of interest to report. Spent my time yesterday running to the outskirts of empire to pick up some mining crystals. Silly me forgot to grab a bunch of em before having my gear shipped out to our main base of operations. I really want to get the skills trained up for flying a covert ops frigate as well as better probing skills but after that, I definitely need to look towards getting myself in that blockade runner, the Prowler, and eventually a jump freighter. The area where I reside is seriously delinquent in market goods and what is available is way over priced compared to what you'd find in Jita. Fortunately, the corp is already mulling that aspect over and had some pretty interesting ideas on how to deal with that.

Otherwise tonight I will finally be able to pilot a Hulk! I'm really happy about that prospect and the thought of how much more isk I can make. Just need to get my protege up to a level of being able to pilot a decent sized hauler and I could then be pulling in some serious dough.

On that note, I've been watching the news reels on the great upset in the south. Seems the largest and perhaps most powerful alliance in all of Eve known as BoB, short for Band of Brothers, has crumbled literally over night. This of course has basically created a sort of gold rush as every smaller corporation and alliance sweeps in like vultures, pilfering and killing in an attempt to claim a piece of what remains of their grand, so-called, nullsec empire. I won't deny my base of operations isn't too far from there but without question, I have absolutely no desire to even go near that area for the time being. I imagine it's nothing more than death and destruction really. Would be awesome though if your gutsy enough as a ninja salvager. Hmm.....

Only aspect about all this is my concern over the market prices. As much as people disliked BoB and is glad to see them gone (even if temporarily) one can't deny they had a huge impact on the market and their demise could mean utter market chaos for all those in Empire as well. That remains to be seen of course but I wouldn't be too surprised. I mean, the discovery of some silos only a short time back that were mysteriously producing moon materials was considered to be a huge affair. Now, it's all but forgotten in the shadow of this newer event. But as with most other things in life...only time will tell...

-ML-

Oopsie

So it seems me keeping my journal on a low profile has ended. Myself and my protege's journals have been discovered by a rather popular journalist, a sort of registrar of public journals if you will. My protege was also previously discovered by another popular registrar who I'd also like to give credit to. First, I've mentioned him before but I'll do so again because if you haven't visited his pages, your definitely missing out on a very good source of information. Not only that but he keeps a long list of other pod pilot journals that are publicly available such as mine. This list is formally called The EVE Player Blogroll. Other than scribbling my stuff into the journal, I haven't really familiarized myself on how to put anything extra on the page but perhaps later today I'll see what I can do to make a link to his pages more permanent.

The other person I want to mention because she added my protege is Alexia Morgan and her journal entitled Punishment. Her style is a bit different than Mr. Kinux, in that she likes to do interviews with pod pilots as well as asking those in her listings to fill out and send in a questionnaire to give readers a little better perspective on the person behind the words they read. Eventually I'll get around to forcing the protege to fill one out perhaps.

Hmm....what else? Oh yes.

I need to make a correction on my previous entry. It was not a Megathron class battleship that was destroyed in our engagement at the gate but instead an Armaggedon class battleship. Either way, still a good kill with no losses. I also learned that my fleet destroyed another Armaggedon from Veto corporation shortly after I broke off from the fleet. I haven't really gotten the full details on that engagement but given I'm used to seeing Veto flying around in gangs, I assume it probably wasn't much different than our first Armaggedon kill.

Other than that, just been spending some time mining as I need to build up the bank account a bit to buy that Hulk I'm so close to being able to operate. Only a couple more days. I did run into a little snag though that I'm going to have to ask around and see what can be done. The area where I mine is very much cut off from the rest of empire. Now in some aspects, this is good as it means less trouble, less traffic and thus better mining. On the other hand, the buy orders in the area for minerals are at best... absolutely horrible. Roughly about 2.80 to 3.00 per unit of tritanium. That's nothing compared to what I could sell it for in Jita at about 4.10 to 4.16. Now this may not sound like a huge difference to some but when your talking multiple millions of units at over a 1.00 isk difference....yeah. That's a big hit to take.

There is some low sec regions nearby that are actually buying it higher than what Jita pays but....well...it's low sec and having to make numerous trips through such systems in a Mammoth class industrial hauler isn't exactly what I'd consider logistically sound. We're talking as of right now about 7 million units of tritanium. I'll probably be doing even more mining tonight which will mean probably another 3 or 4 million units of tritanium. For the uneducated, 1 million units is equivalent to about 10,000m3. Given my Mammoth can only carry a little over 1.7 million units of the stuff....well...like I said, numerous trips. Hopefully, speaking to the other guys, they'll be able to help me figure something out. Either that or I'll just try creating a sell order for once and see how well that would work. I'm just concerned about how long that would take to sell so I can get the Hulk. Like I said, I'll have to talk it over with the corp mates.

-ML-

Bringing the War to Them

This weekend has definitely been interesting for me.

As suspected, so far I haven't been a real part or active participant in fighting this war we're in. Not for lack of want but more for lack of skill really. All of the members that are a part of this corporation who have war dec'd us are roughly around a year to two years old. There is 5 of them in their corp, though a second, one man corp, who we know to be friends with them, submitted a war dec yesterday also. Guess they realized they were going to need a bit of help. We've done the research on them through various channels and have learned they're pretty much your standard griefers. High sec goons (not a part of the infamous Goonswarm mind you) who just like to bully other corps. They seem to have a particular fetish towards attacking mostly defenseless ships. In the one engagement we've had so far, we tracked them to their HQ and we ended up camping it outside the station while they hid in their docking bays. We were able to down one of their Megathrons but also lost a Drake. Blasted space trash kept playing docking games! I say y'all started it, now you bring it! (so ends my one moment of cockiness)

Well that engagement I believe was either Thursday or Friday. On Saturday we decided to go on a little roam through low sec in a fleet of about 10 or 12 of us. I'm really impressed by our senior staff's efficiency and skill. They definitely know what they are doing and do it with a skill that truly shows their experience level.

This roam was quite a bit different from what I'm used to. Generally with the old alliance, we would move into a system and keeping to safespots, trying to hunt down or probe out enemy combatants. If the system was dead, we would move elsewhere and hunt around there instead. With these guys, we were almost constantly moving from system to system. We had one or two covert ops scouts staying a system or two ahead of the bulk of the fleet. We had a few near engagements but for the most part, people seemed to flee at first site of us. If we came across another group assessed to be too strong for us, we would move on, keep to a safe spot or retreat back. Most of the time though, the groups we saw were simply passing through.

When we'd reached nearly the end of the roam with no real contact, we then decided to hold short and see if we could bait a few pirates our scouts had spotted. We placed one battleship on the side of the gate in the system where the pirate forces were lurking, while we hugged the gate on the other. Sure enough, it didn't take long before a pirate Megathron class battleship moved in to have a go at our Dominix class battleship. As hard as it was for us all, we held short and glad we did. Only moments after the two battleships were engaged, the rest of the pirate fleet moved in to assist their friend. That was when we activated the jump gate.

At this point, things got a little crazy. Forgive me if I don't get the details right but I believe the Megathron was backed by two more battleships, a couple Falcons, a Rifter, and a Blackbird. For security purposes, given we're currently at war, I won't write at this time what all we had or how exactly we operated, but lets just say in the end, we didn't lose a single ship while the Megathron was destroyed and the remaining pirate forces retreated, another of their battleships deep into armor. For my part, given i was in a light and fast frigate, I went after the blackbird about a 100km out, closing the distance quickly and engaging him more in the hope of driving at least one of their ECM ships out of the fray. The DPS on that little frigate was actually quite impressive. I'll definitely be using it more often. Unfortunately, with his mates pulling out, he was able to get a weapons scramble on me, thus breaking my warp disruptor and was able to flee.

After that, we docked up at a station to calm our nerves from such a large engagement. I think our Dominix pilot, Promephius, had to clean his drawers as well after coming so close to losing his battleship. Though it was rather impressive that he came out alive after having been engaged by I believe the three battleships at the same time.

From that point, I had to withdraw from the fleet and headed back to high sec where I docked up for the evening. I only intended to lay down until the drugs kicked in as a monster of a headache was starting to get to me but ended up passing out for the rest of the night.

The next day, though not quite as exciting was still a bit entertaining to me.

A few of the members in my corp own carriers and were transporting ships for the new corp members, such as myself, to our main base of operations. Again, I won't say where at the moment because of the war, but I will say by all means, I would love to just see these fools try and get to us. Most likely they'll be dead before they make it half way. I loaded up my Mammoth with the few ships I intended to bring to the HQ and headed to the rendezvous point. From there, I handed everything, including the Mammoth over to our carrier pilot's crew they quickly loaded it all on the ship.

I have to say, that was my first time ever seeing a carrier in person rather than just seeing pictures of em. But yesterday I had the luck of seeing not just one carrier but two different types as they undocked from the station. And yet another first (wish I'd had my camera ready), I got to observe them both using jump drives at the same time to jump out of the system to the drop off point. After I get the hulk, I intend to turn my training towards covert ops. As I understand it, with that I'll be able to tag along with another pilot in the corp who is able to use a covert ops jump drive. I'd be REALLY interested to see that.

So anyways, I made the long journey in a frigate to the new base of operations, picked up my ships and gear from the carriers drop off point and went and did a little bit of looking around the area of this new home. I can already see it really is an excellent place to set up operations at. Lots of good mining, quiet, and plenty of places for my protege to hunt in or do assignments for the local agents. Yeah, it's definitely a good place to be.

-ML-