Warp Drive Active Shirt Arrives!

All the way from the UK, the shirt I won as part of the science fiction quote contest in Warp Drive Active Episode #5.

Here I am in the back yard, or garden, modelling the newly arrived shirt.

Any sign of middle-age mid-section spread is just an illusion caused by the cartoon on the front of the shirt.  Urban Mongral chose a button front shirt to accommodate my over-sized neck.  Thanks much!

The shirt itself features a print of Warp Drive Active (the cartoon) #116.  I chose this particular cartoon for the shirt because it is pretty funny and has a more universal message.  Somebody who did not play EVE Online would still “get it.”

On the back of the shirt they printed my EVE Online (first) name and the Warp Drive Active *PEW PEW PEW* logo.

I will have to find an appropriate event to which to wear this shirt.  Perhaps if we can get an EVE Online piss-up here in the San Francisco Bay Area going at last.  Lots of people posted “me too” on that thread in the forums, but not much else has been shaking.

Or maybe I will save it for GDC 2008 up in San Francisco.

Thanks to Urban Mongral and Winterblink of the Warp Drive Active podcast, part of the VirginWorlds Podcast Collective.

A State of Ore

For the moment at least, I appear to have crossed a barrier in EVE Online.  For the last few nights I have been logging into EVE to play for at least an hour.

That barrier was the feeling of accomplishment.

A lot of my time in EVE Online up to this point has been spent thrashing about trying to figure out what to do.  I tend to be a goal oriented person (love quests, right?) and I really did not have any concrete goals in EVE.

Missions are fine, but they are too short to fill that sense of purpose.  And faction, while important, is such a long term thing that it is difficult for me to stay focused.

Then I got rolling in asteroid mining.  In his “Quick Thoughts About EVE” post, Potshot has a good description of the impression I think both of us have had recently when it comes to the EVE version of resource harvesting.  It scales with skill and equipment.  And you can make money at it.  How unique!

In fact, I make a lot more money mining than I can currently make running level I missions.

With the Osprey in an asteroid belt mining and jet canning continuously while my hauler makes pick up runs, I end up making what seems to me to be a lot of ISK.

And what do I plan to do with all of that ISK?  To paraphrase Mr. Burns, “Make more ISK!”

Which has given me a plan with a series of goals.  Just to the thing to keep me engaged. 

First I started picking up more learning skills.  My miner already has all of the base learning skills up to level four.  Now with the second tier learning skills I am able to speed up his progress towards flying an ORE mining barge.  I was hesitant before, as those skills run 4.5 million ISK a piece, but now I am making enough to afford it.

I also started scanning the market for strip miners so I can equip the barge.

I will face some choices soon though.

With my current training plan, I will be able to get into the smallest of the ORE mining barges, the Procurer, by Friday.

If I wait another day and a half, I will have the skills to fly the next barge up, the Retriever.

But if I want to fly the aptly named Covetor, I have a good 46 days left to go because it requires Mining Barge IV and V (5 + 24 days) and Astrogeology V (14 days) to get there.

I think the choice of ships is easy enough.  I should go for the Retriever this weekend.  Now I have to figure out how to equip it.

Ironically, by the time I get to the point that I can fly the Covetor I will be literally a day and a half from being able to fly the largest ORE exhumer ship, the Hulk. 

Then I will pwn asteroids!

And then I will have to come up with another plan.

Messing with WordPress.com

I found a minor bug in WordPress.com the other day.

It seems, when it comes to the tag pages, if you are the featured blog, it will show your latest post for that tag, even if it is still a draft.

I reported this to the WordPress.com staff and got a nice note back thanking me for informing them of this and stating that they would get it fixed as soon as they could.

Not that this is an earth shattering, service disrupting issue.

Still, I couldn’t resist screwing around with it.  Somehow I am the featured blog for the tag EVE Online.

Well, not somehow.  I’ve spewed out the most posts with that tag.  As far as I can tell, that is all it takes.

So I took the current draft of an upcoming post and put a silly comment at the top, so that it would show up in the featured blog section at the top of the page.

Some day soon this bug will be fixed.  But here I have recorded it for posterity.