My Uncle

Been a tough week here at Eveoganda HQ, real life rears its ugly head in many ways and then two days ago I got the news that one of my Uncles had passed away. I don't normally mention much about RL events here on the blog, since it is supposed to be about Eve, but this one actually does have a correlation. Hang with me if you'd like to find out how.


My Uncle was an extremely private person, he wasn't much for hanging out, showing up for family events, or coming over to visit. I found out this week that he wasn't much for going to the Doctors either, the man was in his early seventies and hadn't been to a Doctor since he was 20 years old. He was one of the toughest men that I have ever known. We weren't close, I probably haven't seen him more than a few times in the last fifteen or twenty years. But for two Summers, back when I was a struggling College student, we worked together.


I admire true craftsmen, I always have. My own Father is one of those. It runs in both sides of my family. I like to think that in some ways, I have continued that tradition. Although my contribution being more digital than reality. But there are times when I get my hands dirty, working around the house, fixing my car, building projects with my boys. And in those times I think about those that taught me. And I often think about those two Summers.


Another Uncle of mine owned a concrete business, pouring driveways, sidewalks, pre-fabbed pipes, etc. General contractor with a concrete specialty. He did a little of everything. The Uncle that passed away this week was the Foreman. It was a natural job for a young man during the Summer. It paid very, very well. But it was back-breaking manual labor, as an un-skilled laborer. But in those days I loved physical labor, the mindless repetitive nature and the great tans you'd get from working in the sun outside all day.


And yes, I'm getting to the Eve part. Be patient. 


My Uncle was a genius when it came to working with concrete. The stuff that people used levels for, he could do by eye alone. I've never seen anyone create patterns, or dry brush the surface, or measure out the frames, the way he could do it. He took great pride in the finished product. And, more importantly, he took pride in showing a snot-nosed kid how it was done. And while I would rarely, although sometimes, directly use that knowledge in my adult life. The lessons I use every single day. Patience, pride and professionalism. Doing a job right the first time and doing it better than anyone else.


Eve is a craft. There is a beauty to it, a repetition of task, an art, but underneath it all it is a craft. And it involves space-craft. There is a right way and a wrong way, but in the middle there are lots of mediocre ways. Half-assed attempts and wrong-headed fits and stupid execution. To take your game to the next level, sometimes you need someone to show you the way. To take the time to teach, to show the why and why nots. To educate and illustrate.


I've had many Mentors along the way in this game. People who took the time to show a Newb how it was done. And while many of those lessons don't get used on a daily basis, especially the ones involving mining, I appreciate the knowledge all the same.


I'd like to thank those people. I never got the chance to thank my Uncle. I don't feel sad about that because it wouldn't have meant anything to him. It would've only embarrassed him. He didn't teach me as much as he shared his passion with me. And for that, he didn't need my thanks. He needed my respect.


To all the mentors out there, thank you. You have my respect.

Walking In Station Pneumonia

Christmas night I got hit hard by the flu, wham-o!! This effectively knocked me out of the Holiday spirit for four straight days of misery, coughing, snot producing, shivering burning, blah blahs. But I fought, as usual, without giving a single thought to seeing a Doctor or taking actual prescription meds. For me, traditionally, the flu is like a 3-4 day misery, nothing serious, then fine.


This one wouldn't go away, even after I got better. I ain't stupid, just tougher than nails. But even I know when I need help. At first the Doctors thought I had Walking Pneumonia, but it turns out it was a badass case of Bronchitis instead. I'm on meds now and feeling much better.


I don't get sick, but when I do, I do it right. The last time was about six years ago when I was sick for an entire month. The Doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me, poor things. Eventually it was just killer meds, soup and time that healed me then. In my house we refer to that sickness as the "time I had SARS" cause that' was the hot sickness back then.


You know it's bad when the Doctor looks at your chest x-ray and says, "Huh, never seen that before."


I mention all this to let you know I'm back. And to give you some idea of what it takes to keep me away. My life is incredibly complicated, but it has always been incredibly complicated. Because that is exactly the way I like it. I always laugh when people used to say I could never keep up the pace here on Eveoganda. And while burn-out is always a possibility, I mean seriously, how am I supposed to know exactly how long Eve will interest me?  Writing in this blog, doing art, helping the community... in my life these are the fun things I get to do.


Heads up. There are some changes coming to the Eve Blog Pack this week. We'll be adding a few new blogs and there may be some other changes. Today I had to remove one of the EBP Blogs over concerns it may have been compromised, I'm waiting to hear from the author on that.


Happy New Year my friends. The start of the third year of Eveoganda!!!

Happy Holidays

Everything has a way of changing around the Holidays. The plans and schemes of men are given over to the twisted whims of family, friends and obligations. This is the way of things. Neither bad nor always good, in the end it is what it is. We endure.


Beyond endurance however, lies a land of peace and harmony. I've never seen it, but the stories persist. The idea that some truth lies at the heart of those tales is what keeps us going. The tantalizing thread of hope that one day we might just stumble upon such a place.


In so many aspects of my own life, I have found that land. After tribulation, trial, effort, failure and more lawyers than... well, best to leave that for another day. The point is this, I have tasted of that land my friends. At various points I've lived in its suburbs, glimpsed its white towers and smelled the wafting breeze of its glorious foodstuffs.


And this Holiday season, in the context of Eve or outside of it, I have one fervent holiday wish to share. It is my sincere desire that each of you, the carebears, the pilots, the wormholers, the hi-sec gankers, the mission runners, the transporters, the miners, the scammers, the Corp CEOs, the folks at CCP, everyone, each and every, have a chance to taste, to feel, to live - even for a moment - in the fabled land of peace, joy and harmony.


The book that is Eve is closed until next week. I'll be spending my time on-line with friends and family until then. And I won't pod a single one of them, I promise.


Next week we'll spend some time looking back over the past year, at some of the best and worst that 2011 brought us. Until then, whatever your personal beliefs might be, my sincere and heart-felt best wishes for you and yours.


Keep the courage.

Star Raiders: Eve's Great-Grandfather

I'm going to date myself horribly in this post. Way back in 1979 when it came to video gaming the Atari system was all the rage. The Atari 2600 was the coolest thing you could own and one of the coolest games you could play was a game called Star Raiders. ( Asteroids was fine, Space Invaders was popular, but for my money Star Raiders was better. Oh and Defender was awesome too! )


The more I think about this game the more I've come to realize the direct lineage between it and Eve. And while SR was four-color 8-bit and cheesy by todays standards, the game-play and strategy sounds awfully familiar.  Let's take a closer look.


While SR was the direct ancestor of today's first-person shooters, other aspects of the game can't be ignored when considering its Eve heritage and inspiration.

Consider the "Galactic Chart" pictured here. Each square represents a Star System. Your ship could fly around each star system in sub-warp speed, but to get to another star system you needed Hyperspace. You selected another system and jumped to it, much like our Eve Gates today. Some of these systems even had Starbases in them, which you could use to repair your ship.


For those of us alive at the time, the sight of the SR Hyperspace warp tunnel in store monitors was extremely common. Video stores would run loops of the warp tunnel effect to showcase the graphics of the Atari. But the similarities don't end there.


The whole point of Star Raiders was combat. And to aid you in that combat you had radar, in fact you had two types of scanning, short and long range. This "overview" type system also let you know when enemy ships were locked and ready to be fired at. There was even a primitive version of tracking to enable hits on the bad guys.


Unlike many of the multiple lives games out at the time, in SR you only had one life. One ship. Your ship could be damaged by bad guys, by collisions with asteroids ( or Meteoroids as they called them ) but could only be destroyed when your shields get low or won't work. In fact, multiple damage types could hurt your ship in different ways, shields, weapons, engines and even your overview could become damaged. ( something even Eve doesn't have )  You even had to manage your Cap ( Energy reserves ) to effectively stay in business long enough to keep fighting.


Oh wait. While you could dock at Starbases for repair, the enemy could also destroy your Starbases. If they surrounded one and you failed to defend it, it could be blown up and lost to you. Sounds kind of familiar doesn't it?

The picture to the right shows the screen view of a Starbase and the shuttle you used to dock with. You can see the ship information along the bottom and the "overview" on the right.


The entire game took up only 8k of ROM and worked with only 8k of RAM. A far cry from today's system requirements huh.


Understand, I am not saying that Eve is a rip-off of Star Raiders or anything nutty like that. That would be silly. But anyone can see the direct lineage that today's games have with those that came before them. Star Raiders isn't the only game on that tree, but it is probably the most significant example and truly the Great-Grandaddy of Eve.


For me personally, Star Raiders represented the first time I had played anything remotely like a real, immersive ( for its time ) space game. It wasn't the arcade classic Asteroids, or Space Invaders, in which you were displaced from the action by the screen. Star Raiders was unique for putting you into the action, it was first-person before first-person was even a concept.


And it planted a seed in my young brain that became fully grown when I saw Eve for the very first time. And for that, I thank you Great-Grandfather. You rock.

A Hunting We Will Go

My Father started taking me hunting with him when I was five years old. Cray old coot. I have four boys myself now and I can't imagine taking any of them into the woods with me when they were five. But he did.


We weren't crazy obsessed hunters. We were casual, have-fun, serious, respect nature hunters who often went with our cousins and Uncles - who were crazy obsessed hunters.


It was miserable. Cold. Wet. Tiring. And incredible. My Father and I spent some great times together in those trips, hours and hours and hours of saying nothing, sitting in wet grass, peeing on trees, eating ham and potato soup, and watching my cousins drink beer. And then go back out into the woods with weapons.  An attitude, with them and in the general population, that would eventually destroy the fun for us. We were shot at a few times by drunken hunters and once, I was actually shot by a hunter. (I wasn't seriously injured, it was rabbit shot and went thru a pretty thick thicket and I happened to be seriously bundled against the cold.)


I think of those days when I think of low sec and the Pirate life I've chosen. Because they share many of the same aspects. Eve is a hard universe and within that universe there is no harder life than that of a pirate. ( Don't even try to argue that point. Total respect to those that live in Wormholes, which is close, but the isk tips the scale.) I'm not complaining, in fact I suspect most pirates revel in it. Much as we did at 3 am in the morning when it was below zero and my snoot froze in my nose.


There are much easier ways to make a living and certainly many easier ways to participate in PvP within Eve. But the hardship isn't the story. The sec status, lack of isk making, general contempt of the lifestyle, the tears, the ransoms, the skull-duggery, those are not the story. Just like in those hunting days, the killing of an animal ( which you will be happy to know, my Father and I sucked at that part.) isn't the story. The true story is the time spent together, the bonding, the camaraderie, and most importantly the HUNT.


The hunt. The hunt is what is missing from the gate campers, the station campers, the snipers, the bubble waiters, and all the other forms of lazy combat that Eve seems to promote. Oh sure, there are times when we all have to do it, or when we have no other choice. I relate it to one crazy Uncle of mine, who never went with us on our trips because he would drive into the woods and shine a very bright light into a Deer's face. He had one of those large lights on the side of his truck, you've seen them. That is lazy hunting. And it ain't hunting at all.


My favorite times in Eve have been on the hunt. Alone or with my friends. Ultimately it is the search for those moments that drives me to log in, to put up with the hardships of Pirating, the problems with logistics, the sec status, the lack of isk making, the whining about low sec, it is the possibility of the hunt. Superior skill against a worthy opponent. Beating a human being on the other side of the virtual divide. It isn't about conquering a computer, or an AI string of code, but about the most dangerous prey in the world, another person.


The hunt is what brings me back to Eve. It isn't easy. It may even be dying out, but it is still out there, waiting, haunting, mocking, and despite the challenges, the blobs, the camps and the lag, I'll keep looking for it.


Cause I am the hunter.

My Own Steve Jobs

It has become standard practice over the last 24 hours to say how much Apple and by extension, Steve Jobs, changed the world. No doubt that is indeed true. More importantly it is infinitely true for me personally. As a young man I was consumed by creative passions that had no real focus, scattered amongst many, many interests, desires and possible paths. I knew my life would be a creative one, but I had no locus around which to build that life.


I had been involved with computers from an early age, the TRS-80, PET and others, including the early Apple I and II.  I had even taught myself programming, my Brother and I wrote a boxscore machine language program to keep track of Baseball stats. But computers were tools, not creative devices.


That all changed one day. I can still remember cracking the box on the Macintosh. And even though it was still an early, prototype, baby step machine - it changed my life. Right then and there. Since that day I have not been without a Mac. I have never owned a PC and I never will. I can't explain that to you. The mere proximity to a PC sucks the life out of my soul, literally. This isn't a tech thing, a performance thing, a price thing, it is in its purest form, a LIFE thing.


If it wasn't for that Mac and all the ones that came after, I wouldn't be where I am today. I certainly wouldn't be writing these words, I wouldn't be playing Eve and I wouldn't be creating art for the Eve community.  Every single piece of creative energy that I have expelled in the last 26 years has been expelled thru a Apple product. You may not believe me and that's your right, but, if not for Apple, I would be doing something else.  In the early nineties, when we all believed Apple might no longer be with us and we all seriously contemplated a world without Mac - I knew I would quit my job and find something else to do. And I meant it.


If I had to stare at a Windows screen every day my soul would die.  I've tried, on friends computers, at client offices, and other places, but I cannot create on a PC. I honestly don't believe anyone truly can.


I can't explain that to you. And for all the talk over the last day and the days to come, it is that single unexplainable element, the locus of technology (and not always the best technology), art, culture, and life itself, that defines for me the power of Steve Jobs and the vision he had for the world.  It is unexplainable.


I was very fortunate to once spend some time with Woz, the co-founder of Apple. I tried explaining the above to him briefly and he smiled that big Woz smile and I knew he knew what I meant. It was a profoundly moving moment that I will never forget.


As much as Apple has changed every aspect of our lives, the only important one is that it changed mine.  And for that I owe a sincere debt of gratitude to a man I never got the chance to thank in person.  So thank you Steve.