Rather than beat about the bush, here’s the entries, in no particular order.

Written

The first three of the written entries were co-judged by the Evanda-Panda, and the comments associated with it are hers and not my own.

Corelin – http://madhaberdashers.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/fallout/
Perceived Effort: 8/10 Some minor grammar mistakes that could have been picked out if you’d done one more draft, but I say that more as a pointer for a writer than a serious nitpick.
Style/Quality: 6/10 It’s a decent piece but it lacks “Oomph.” Our Hero does something clever to disguise his cargo manifests but it doesn’t feel highlighted enough in the story – needs to be “bigged up” a little to capture the reader’s attention and engage a sense of awe. Likewise, a few more outside views of Our Hero early in the story, painting him a little darker, will make the good deed stand out more strongly in contrast.
Also, a Minmatart poster is NEVER a waste of ISK!
Total: 14/20.

Bucky O’Hair – https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=534065&#post534065
Perceived Effort: 2/10  Various versions of this song have been going around Eve since they first decided to put the “V” in the middle of it. For shame! On the other hand, there were only [four] entries in this category, so you’re quite a cunning fellow!
Style/Quality: 3/10. It just doesn’t seem very festive – fighting, ganking, suicide, these are not very nice things. Also, the beat of some of the lines and the rhythm of the song don’t line up, so you can’t actually sing it without injuring yourself.
Total: 5/20.

Mike Azariah – http://mikeazariah.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/song-thing-different-and-seasonal/
Perceived Effort: 7/10
Style/Quality: 8/10 A very polished effort and Dean Martin is always win. I know you weren’t listening to the Dean Martin version but I was, in my head. A couple of lines don’t fit the beat easily but they’re the kind of thing that’s not glaringly audible in song. The spirit of the song is warm and fuzzy and gives a nice mental image of the couple cuddling over a laptop which seems quite Christmassy to me! Cute as hell, funny and our overall winner.
Total: 15/20.

Jackylhunter – http://flic.kr/p/aYLhEa
Not too bad. Although its an image, I’m dropping this into the written section because I feel that’s where most of the time was spent on this entry. I like the Christmas card imagery, and the song is pretty good, even if there’s a few rogue syllables in there. 6/10 for effort, 7/10 for style/quality.
Total: 13/20.

The Winner (Written): I trust the Panda in literary shenanigans implicitly. Mainly because I know she spends most of her free time either writing, or writing about writing. That said, its still been quite a close battle, but Mike Azariah pulls through into the lead even if there’s no Minmatart poster. Well done, sir.

Stills

Lady SixSkies – http://www.dreamaze.com/temp/eve/rudolph-the-red-nose-rifter_(minmatartsFTW).jpg
I really like this one, primarily the idea. I would never have thought of something like this, but its really very good. Right down the Christmassy light colours on the rifter, and the outpost chimney puffing out all of the snow in the globe. 7/10 for effort, and 9/10 for style/quality!
Total: 16/20.

Sonja Caprica – http://i.imgur.com/gQ3rP.jpg
I can certainly see what Sonja was going for. I’ve often looked at that piece of Eve art and been reminded of a Dickensian Christmas – just with more buttresses and pointy metal things! The ‘sexy santa’ outfit is a nice touch, though I can tell that Sonja is none too impressed at having to wear it… That said, the 3D rendered character against that backdrop do clash. 6/10 for effort, 6/10 for style/quality.
Total: 12/20.

DarkBloodRain – No link
My favouritest Brutor submitted a really lovely image involving Christmas hats, rum, hurricanes and Eve T-shirts. Sadly though, she just entered for the fun of the competition – which is fine, by the way! – and asked for me not to link to the image. This also means that I can’t really grade her compared to the other entries. Sorry DBR! <3

Celara Riraille – http://imgur.com/MTxn8
This is an interesting concept, and it was only a matter of time before someone tried to use it. The entry itself seems a little lacklustre though. Maybe if the Myrm was pulling a sleigh laden with shiny presents or something… Anyway, 3/10 for effort, 2/10 style/quality (its a nice screenshot after all, even if it is a bit over-compressed).
Total: 5/20.

Tacit Malice – http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/846/christmaswreathe.jpg/
Puntastic! Its an Advent Wreath(e)! There’s not a lot more you can say about it, but it gave me a good chuckle when I saw it. 3/10 for effort, 6/10 for style/quality.
Total: 9/20.

Penelope Star – http://dl.eve-files.com/media/1112/minmatartsftw_penelopestar.png
Penelope learned to use Photoshop for this entry. From a critical point of view, I think it would have been better in a widescreen aspect ratio as a desktop image or some-such. That way the horizontal ‘ribbon’ would be central vertically. Its a nice idea, and she should keep learning to shoop da whoop! 8/10 for effort, 6/10 for style/quality.
Total: 14/20.

Inquisitor K’han – http://mavrick566.deviantart.com/art/Jingling-Some-Balls-276847504
Ah K’han, I do enjoy your mischievous renders, and this one is no exception. I can see that the tree is the focal point. Its clearly a quick engineering job by a Sebiestor using whatever was lying around, as a commenter said: the true Minnie way. I like the subtle background image as well; I didn’t see this the first time I looked, but it would have been nice to see more in the scene itself, like some walls, a proper floor and maybe some more ‘scrapheap’ decorations. 6/10 for effort, 8/10 for style/quality.
Total: 14/20.

The Winner (Stills): Stills will always be the most popular category. I think this is because Eve is so undeniably pretty, and videos are such a pain in the arse to make, so there’s some happy middle-ground to be had with Photoshops and the like. Although there’s some close contenders, I think Lady SixSkies steals the show with this one; its such an amusing and festive concept and very well executed. Well done!

Audio

Arydanika – http://www.voicesfromthevoid.net/2011/12/04/vandv-music-sansha-baby/ – and the lyrics: http://www.voicesfromthevoid.net/forum/discussion/68/vandv-music-sansha-baby/p1
A really excellent parody song! Arydanika has one of those voices that could lull me to sleep, or possibly into a false sense of security as she explodifies my ship. Lyrically very clever, and undeniably Christmassy in a very Eve-ish way. 8/10 for effort, and 8/10 for style/quality.
Total: 16/20.

Half Cocked Jack – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbdkdglb_KU
Sure, its a YouTube video, but the content is all audio, so that’s why I’m dropping it into this category. Brilliant, and very funny. Also playing the music as well as singing; you just can’t go wrong with that! 8/10 for effort, 9/10 for style/quality.
Total: 17/20.

The Winner (Audio): There may have only been two entries to this category, but it was a really closely fought battle. Both really good entries, but Jack took the lead purely because he played the music as well as singing. Nice one, Jack!

Video

noise – http://phoenixdiaries.co.uk/minmatarts-ftw
Very silly. I would have loved to have seen the finished thing. I hope you got your laptop back OK, noise. Having stuff stolen is really horrible. 6/10 for effort, 6/10 for style/quality.
Total: 12/20.

noise may have lost a laptop, but at least he got something out of his entry. I know ISK isn’t even close to valuable, but maybe he can spend it on some ships to go explode people with to make himself feel better.

Crazy Stuff

Relicc – http://phoenixdiaries.co.uk/relicc-minmatarts-ftw
Rifter cookies! Hell yes! I hope they were tasty. Just about making the requirements for entry with the red/green colour scheme and token Santa oven mitt. Nicely played sir, nicely played. 8/10 for effort, 7/10 for style/quality. I’m a sucker for baked goods…
Total: 15/20.

Relicc automatically wins this category, because much like with videos, there’s only one entry. Lucky bugger!

Overall Winner

Rather than face a particularly difficult task in deciding which entry I liked the very best, I’m going to award this based on total points.

There were some very high quality entries this year. Still less total entries than I’d like to see, but its always nice to see what people come up with, even if there’s only a few people trying their luck.

Half Cocked Jack edges into the lead with the highest score (17/20), which might make me a stingy scorer, but nevermind. Very well done. If you would care to Evemail me a postal address, then I will send out your goodies. If you’re a really long way away I might have to wait until my payday, since some of this stuff is quite heavy.

Category winners will be receiving their ISK (2.75b each) and their ships shortly in-game.

All entrants who didn’t win anything above with be getting something nice for their efforts as well.

Thanks everyone, and good luck with the next one!

Note: For those wondering about my Jingling Some Bells competition, the results will be out sometime towards the end of this week I expect. My co-judge has curiously disappeared from the interwebs, and I need to don my best detective hat and pipe in order to track her down before I can appropriately grade all of the entries.

So how did I do with my ludicrous goals for the year?

1. Reach 200b liquid isk – I actually did this one. Yay! Though I think I also failed it because a week ago I was under the figure by a hilarious couple of billion, and since I just did my corp’s purchases without doing any sales at all in December, we’re right now looking a little deflated.
   I realised that around 200 is actually my saturation points, and beyond that I genuinely stop caring. So while I actually reached 200 sometime in early August, I then spent a load of it on faction ships I can’t even fly, and buying expensive gifts for close friends.
2. Continue my collection of exotic dancers – I wanted a million, but I didn’t make it. I got to 810,212 which I consider to be a pretty successful year! I’ll continue to plough on for that plump 1mil though, even if it kills me in the process.
3. Open a club when they finally release Walking in Stations/Ambulation/Incarna/Whatever it Ends up Being Called. – lol. Yeah, I guess we all knew this would be the least likely to happen, eh?

Not that brilliant then. On the plus side, we all managed to survive two raptures, which I think at least counts for something…

But what of this year? What ludicrous things do I have planned before we all die in this year’s end-of-the-world shenanigans?

• Create some tools to make my life easier. I seem to spend the same amount of time each month/build cycle doing the same things in slightly different orders in an attempt to optimise the process a little. I think this has about reached its full potential, and I now find the entire process being limited by an increasingly dated spreadsheet. Not only is the spreadsheet dated, but there’s nothing built into how I do things that allows me to record historical data – things like quickly accessible price trends for the products I buy and sell and order histories for both contracts and open market orders.
  So, with this in mind, I am thinking of halting production for the first six months of the year, using the current batch of products (that are rolling off the production line as I type this) to service any incoming private (contract) orders, and focusing on building something database driven that I can evolve as I see fit. I think this whole effort probably warrants its own entry or two, so I don’t send non-techies to sleep with my crazy ideas.
• Focus more on some passive income streams. Not that I feel I’m going to run out of ISK while working on these new thingamajigs, but I need to do something in game or I might as well shut down all those production mule accounts. This will probably revolve around R&D agents and possibly extensive research and resale of various blueprints. Not least because I have a stack of POS labs that are under-utilised right now.
• Continue my collection of exotic dancers. This year I want to break my collection record from last year. So my aim is 1.5mil Exotic Dancers by the end of the year. I think this will be the hardest one, not least because I failed it last year, but also because the orders have been filling slower and slower as time passes by; people who had them stockpiled have already sold them to me, and people that are just grabbing them from missions aren’t selling them just yet. Eaither way, I’m probably going to have to up the amount of ISK I offer for each unit in order to stay in the game. This is no mean feat when I estimate that I’ve probably spent in excess of 15b on them already. Ouch.
• Hit 300b liquid. Another tough challenge, especially with the Festive Competition coming to an end, and the lack of serious income for the first six months of the year. I’m reasonably determined to hit it though; and I might be more inclined to stay on track with the aforementioned lack of income.

Quite a busy one, one way or another.

And so, I ask again of anyone reading this entry: What are your plans and goals in-game for 2012/YC114?

Its competition time!

Who’s the competition for?

Anyone who likes flying about in internet spaceships and celebrates some form of festive holiday. I myself am not in the least bit religious, but I do love the holidays because its a great time to get together with family and friends and just enjoy each other’s company.

Yes, this means that the rules are going to be similar to last year’s. Except this time, its enforced. Dun dun duuuun. That’s right; all entries must have something to do with Eve and something to do with the festive season.

But that sounds like effort!

Well yes, but given that I’m awarding points for Perceived Effort and Style/Quality, it makes sense.

That’s right, effort and quality are the core scoring factors this year.

Each entry will be marked out of ten. If there’s a bazillion entries I might have to break down into decimal places, but otherwise I’ll be awarding whole numbers.

So what sort of things are accepted?

I’m glad you asked!

I’m having categories of ‘stuff’. It works as follows:

• Audio – A favourite festive ditty with an Eve theme?
• Stills – non-moving images; screenshots and the like.
• Video – There was an awesome one of ‘Silent Night’ last year, it’d be fun to see something along those lines again.
• Written – The ghosts of Eve’s past, present and future, perhaps? Could be anything from a poem to a short story. A blog post to a news article.
• Crazy Stuff – Lego, baked goods; anything that doesn’t really fit in the other categories.

Bah, humbug! That sounds like a lot of work.

Well, there is that… But its not like there aren’t prizes…

The winner from each category will get 2bil ISK, along with the following:

• 1x Muninn
• 1x Huginn
• 1x Rapier
• 1x Claymore
• 1x Scimitar
• 1x Mastodon
• 2x Prowler
• 3x Wolf
• 3x Stiletto
• 3x Hound
• 3x Claw
• 3x Cheetah

Feeling tickled yet?

That 2bil also goes up with each legal entry. I’m not saying how much it increases by, but call it a little incentive for spreading the word and getting more people involved. Who knows, maybe you can break my poor piggybank!

Much like last year, I’m not interested in leaving anyone in the lurch, so everyone that enters will get a prize just for engaging in this bit of fun. So what have you got to lose?

But that’s not all…

One overall winner will receive this rather nifty Eve Survival Pack. I’ll ship this bastard wherever the winner wants it, so I’m really hoping nobody from Australia or New Zealand enters. I’m also fed up with competitions that are restricted to specific countries/regions, so lets do this thing!

Now for the boring bit.

Now you know what to do and what you could win, you need to know the important stuff on submitting your creations.

• The contest is open the moment this post is published
• The contest ends 1st January 2012 at midnight GMT
• Judges’ decision is final regarding points and prizes
• Entries should be in some online-viewable format and viewable at the time of judging. If I can’t see the entry, I can’t award any points; sorry
• Entries should have the words “Minmatarts ftw!” scrawled on there somewhere
  • A clear watermark in a screenshot
  • Scribbled on a piece of paper within the frame of a photo of your creation
  • In the description if its uploaded somewhere that allows such things
• There’s a limit of one entry per character. I’d do per person, but there’s no way I can enforce it, so I’ll take it on faith that you’re only entering once.
• Links to entries should be evemailed to Adrielle Firewalker. Only mails sent to this character will be accepted.

Suffice to say, that losing a fully laden Fenrir stings a bit. Not because of the value of the cargo – though 10bil is not a small loss by anyone’s standards – but rather the timing of the damned thing.

As some know, I build stuff. Lots of stuff. Part of building lots of stuff means I need a lot of minerals and moon goo in order to get the production lines rolling. This means a rather large convoy from Jita all the way home. This works out as something like 50 jumps for a round trip. Warping to zero the whole way you’re pressed to do it in 2.5 hours, and i usually takes me closer to 3.

And that’s what annoyed me more than anything. Losing those three hours, on a Sunday, when I want to be chilling out, not doing another freight run.

Not that I begrudge them their fun. Its something I have been half-expecting for a while. Indeed, every time I do this I am amazed that nobody tried to whack me by the time I reach home. In fact, this post isn’t to moan/whine/rage or anything of the sort. Its more of a wake up call to myself to work harder at protecting the assets of the corporation.

So what’s been learned?

First and foremost; poor Ary, she is so slow . Miss Slowpoke will be learning Advanced Spaceship Command 5 at long last. Despite my insistence that keeping her marginally slower made for better timings when switching between client windows (it really does, honest!), her ultimate survival – and that of her cargo – is much more important than losing a few seconds on each gate due to ‘alt-tabbing’.

Travelling without a scout when you are carrying valuable cargo is stupid. Usually, I’m the only one in my corp online. In fact, almost all of what I do relies on a single person; myself. Its not so much a trust issue as it is a “x needs to be done by y date, and nobody else is about, so I should get on with it” issue. I’ve now had some offers of scouting from some long-time allies of myself, my corporation and the services I provide them; its always nice to have favours to call in.

Web stuff. I have no idea if this is as effective now as it was a couple of years ago, but historically at least, webbing something would get the ship aligned super-fast compared the normal uphill battle you face with giant floating space piñatas. I’m going to give this some tests during the week and if it works, get a corpie to train up for some uber-webiness. It makes perfect sense since I produce Minmatar recons as a matter of course.

Keeping an ear to the ground. I should have asked around about this. Since I have told my in-game friends about the ganking, two of them have told me about the Freighter-ganking event that’s going on right now, which means there was fairly useful intel I just didn’t bother to find out. I don’t have the time to go trawling through forums to find out if something like this is on, but if somebody else already has, its utterly redonkulous to at least ask around.

So there we have it. Lesson learned and all that. Now to go replace the stuff I lost.

I’m going to be running another competition this year, but with even more and bigger prizes. I’m talking not only in-game delights such as ships and currency, but also RL Eve swag.

I’m still working on the prize list, as well as the rules, but I’m thinking of adding incentives to help promote a larger pool of entrants compared with last time around. Not going to go into too much detail about that either, since I think spoilers are bad!

In the mean time, put your thinking caps on, because the theme will be festive and eve-ish just like last year.

And to get you in the mood, here’s the winning entry from last year:

If you're wondering, the required 'slogan' is displayed on the Photobucket album where this image originally resided.

This post pertains specifically to WordPress installs that are self-hosted. I know how limited things are if you’re hosted at wordpress.com, but if you can edit the file I mention below, we’re golden. Other blogging platforms probably have something similar, so do a bit of research on where it outputs the date, because the syntax will be quite close as long as it uses PHP.

To illustrate what the goal is. We want to change this:

Into this:

The first thing you need to do is connect to your site by FTP, and navigate to wp-content/themes/YOURTHEMENAME/ and download the file loop-single.php If you only have loop.php use that. Some newer themes (like the pre-installed ‘Twenty Eleven’) have content-single.php instead. Just use that if you have no ‘loop’ files.

Anyway, once you have downloaded the file, fire up your favourite text editor. Something with syntax highlighting is preferable; Notepad++ is quite a good free one. I generally use Netbeans, but its a bit OTT for a simple change like this unless you already use it for projects. Open the file in the editor. You’re looking for the following text:

twentyeleven_posted_on();

Now all you need to do is to change that text to this:

$yc = 'YC '.(date('Y') - 1898);
echo 'Posted on '.date('l jS F ').$yc;

But what does this do? Lets break it down!

• All you’re doing here is saying that $yc contains the string for the date format, preceded by ‘YC’ (naturally). The YC year is always our current real-world year minus 1898 (2011 – 1898 = 113) so where we say date(‘Y’) – 1898, all we’re really doing is some basic mathematics on the current year output.
• On the second line, we’re outputting some text and a full date – without the year – then appending our custom year to the end. The ‘l jS F’ part just tells PHP how to format the date. You can find a list of what you can use over at php.net so its quite easy to play around and find one that you’re happy with.

I’d recommend trying out a few variations and see what you can come up with. WordPress keeps archives by month and year, so you could quickly create those portions of the date as handy links to the relevant archive pages if you wanted. Give it a go, and let me know if this helps at all!

Strangely, I was hoping this was on the way, as I started a discussion within my corp to get more of a representation next time around. Now we have a date for when next time around will be – 22nd-24th March – thanks to a new devblog and the accompanying mini-site.

Much like in previous years, no tickets are on sale yet, but I imagine packages will start at around the same price as before for the super-speedy, round-trip arrive-on-the-first-day-leave-at-stupid-o-clock-on-monday packages. I won’t list the prices here, because obviously they varied depending on where you were flying from. They were pretty good value from the UK though!

Unlike previous years, they’ve gotten a new venue. I saw them building the Harpa concert hall when I was there this year. I didn’t know that’s what it was going to be until I was leaving the country, but from the pictures its not only massive, but really quite pretty. Here’s a little video to better show some scale of the place:

Its big. So what? Well, as attendees this year will tell you – at least those that weren’t totally slaughtered at the party – it got a little bit crowded near the end. By a little, I mean you couldn’t move. Not only this, but the lectures were almost all full or overflowing, not just the higher-profile ones. Not that this is a bad thing, but overcrowding is, and Fanfest has clearly outgrown the Laugardalshöll center. So its pretty good timing that Harpa was finished this year really!

So, since there’s no specifics mentioned as yet beyond the usual suspects, there’s not a great deal to discuss beyond the predictable question: Are you planning to go?

My build cycle came around last weekend. The first since Incarna 1.1 was released.

Since this is the only real time I pay much attention to the arrangement of the items in my cargo hold, I hadn’t noticed a small change that came with this patch. Lets take a look at a couple of images.

Doesn’t look like much does it?

Imagine for a moment that each item from an Antimatter Reactor Unit to trusty old Zydrine is arranged in alphabetical order. You carefully copy and paste the values for each item in order for each factory until your freighter is full of building blocks for whatever-the-hell you are building. Now imagine that you have about 10 different sets – one set for each notional POS factory – and you know that each set ends with Zydrine in the cargo hold, so you can quickly select everything for each factory and drop everything in just as swiftly.

And then you undock.

Oh how handy, its re-arranged everything alphabetically for me!

So which item stack goes in which factory? Damned if I know. I have to cross-reference every cell to make sure its in the right place.

See? Annoyance.

In future of course, I’ll just drag everything out there and split the stacks at the POS, so its not a major thing.

I had a quick look at the 1.1 patch notes and couldn’t find anything about this fix. Is it a bug or a small fixer-upper from Team BFF?

I also had a quick loo at the 1.1.1 patch notes for tomorrow and didn’t see any mention of it being fixed or any mention of it at all actually.

This isn’t really a bittervet post. I’m not going to rage-anything over it; its just… annoying.

So, can anyone think of an instance where this would be a useful thing to have? Because I’m struggling to think of one.

Show Me Da Money, Honey!

We all know about your basic cashflow situation in-game. Try to make more ISK than you lose when your stuff inevitably gets blown up. ISK is the lifeblood of any (active) pod pilot. We rely upon ISK generation to engage in what we shall call ‘funsies’. You make your ISK – in an innumerable variety of ways – and subsequently fritter it all away on shiny ships, modules, implants, boosters, or whatever else floats your boat. Its like real life except with less rent (for most of us), and more explosions (again, for most of us).

Everyone who’s ever made a billion ISK remembers that crowning moment; the sense of achievement that comes from gaining an extra digit on the end of your wallet’s display. Some will remember hitting ten or a hundred billion as well.

Amarrian Nobles

Then we have the recently-introduced Aurum. Skimming right over all the controversy surrounding this one, we can simply imply that (for the ‘foreseeable future’) Aurum is for your characters to get dressed up in a selection of different clothing items ranging in price from the expensive to the extortionate. It also has the potential to be used to other vanity items such as custom paint jobs on ships. I should also note that the market upon which this currency is used – the ‘Noble Exchange’ – is run by an Amarr corporation, and as such shouldn’t be used at all.

Ever.

But then again, I might be biased.

But what else is there?

Trust

How can one measure trust? You can’t. Its a soft property; a direct counterpart to the hard properties of something you can see and touch (at least in an in-game sense), like ISK and Aurum. Its not something you can grind for over a weekend. Its not something you can gain by playing the markets. Its not something you create when you run those industry jobs.

Its something far more precious.

In a game where everyone is institutionalised into a mentality of “don’t trust anyone”, trust has to be one of the most valuable ‘assets’ in New Eden.

But just as you cannot fly around in space and ‘make’ trust, likewise, you cannot fly around in space and ‘spend’ it either. Lets take a practical example.

Chribba is a very rich miner. He has eleventy thousand characters all living under his little umbrella organisation. But where his real wealth lies, is in the trust people place in him; his third-party services are known and respected throughout the game. His external services (such as EVE-Files and EVE-Search) are well-established, useful tools that everyone has come to know and love. He’s made a name for himself as someone in the community, and he has more trust than anybody else.

Bypassing the commonly-believed truth that Chribba has considerably more ISK than you, the trust that hundreds (possibly even thousands by this point) of pilots have placed on him and the services he provides, and his unwavering sense of duty to abide by whatever the rules of the service are, makes him incredibly wealthy; way beyond what any number of digits in his wallet could possibly imply.

Its not all roses and champagne though. Just as it takes a long time to build up trust, its takes no time at all to lose it. You only have to look at the many cases of massive corp thefts, crazy scams that nobody saw coming (and even those where most people did), and dodgy IPOs to see that while there’s the odd instance of the ‘perpetrator’ continuing on with that character – milking the glory and fame it brings – the majority drift into obscurity. Most likely depositing all the valuables onto a holding character and then buying a shiny uber-pilot for whatever they need. And the reason is that nobody is likely to trust them again in the future. I say ‘likely’ of course, because we all know about how often Tyrrax Thorrk has gotten away with stealing people’s stuff only to do it again a year down the line and everyone still be shocked that it happened. This actually makes me laugh.

But anyway, I feel I’m drifting off on a tangent.

There’s other currencies as well. Reputation is a good counter to trust, because while one can have a reputation of being trustworthy, the space pirate ninja, for example, has an entirely different reputation. Nobody is arguing that she hasn’t got any influence though.

And that’s the focal point of this discussion: influence. Everyone has some – to varying degrees – and everyone uses that influence differently.

Do you influence your fellow pilots in a positive or negative way?

Note: If you want to know more, read this and start exploring from there.

Anyway, back to why I disappeared…

As always, real life has a habit of biting you in the bum when you least expect it. Literally the day after I posted the last entry, I got word that my uncle had died suddenly and I disappeared to be with family that same night, and stayed there for a few weeks, where I remained almost entirely Internetless. It was a difficult time, in more ways than one.

In addition, while I was away I was offered a full-time position at a local company, which I decided to accept. So, upon my return home, I had a backlog of three weeks’ worth freelance work to clear up, projects to wind down and a new full-time position to wrangle, including two hours of travel each working day.

Add to this the fact that myself and my house-mates are going to be moving in about three weeks, and you have a very hectic couple of months. The moving thing in particular happened crazily fast. 36 hours from viewing a property to deciding to move there, and a further 12 hours before getting all the forms completed, handed in and people viewing the property in which we currently reside. Those letting agents move seriously quickly!

On the plus side, tonight I am putting the finishing touches on a lemon sponge cake and making a Baked Alaska, which will be thoroughly awesome.

I’ve never been one to conform to a schedule for posting here, so I’m not going to commit to one now. I do have a post planned (two actually!), so I’m not out for the count yet.