Look ma, I'm on Sov Wars!

As fate would have it, a mere day after I started writing blog posts again I was contacted by Shalee of Sovereignty Wars to see if I'd be interested in doing an interview. I'm sure you all know how well I get on with the opportunity to ramble at length about anything, so I was more than happy to accept!

Direct link to the interview is here.

Frustrational Warfare

With a post title like that, I think I've succeeded at both banishing any confusion about what the topic might be, and losing the interest of a significant portion of anyone who might read this blog. Since I've already managed to accomplish two things with this post, I reserve the right to present the rest of the content in an utterly pointless way. :P

My perspective on Factional Warfare is admittedly narrow; I haven't spent a great deal of time in the FW environment recently, and I've never really ventured into the Amarr-Minmatar side of the conflict at all. If you're interested in getting a broader view of things, I'd highly recommend a blog written by my awesome Amarr counterpart and fellow gamer-chick Shalee Lianne. You can find it over at Sovereignty Wars.

WARNING: This is going to be a long post, even compared to some of the wordier ones I've written here. I won't be offended if people don't read the whole thing, so don't expect me to come out and randomly start quizzing people on its contents or anything like that.

Back with a snap-crackle-pop!

Every time I'm away from the game and intend to come back with a vengenace (or more likely a Jaguar, but I digress), my burst of enthusiasm lasts for all of a week before some sort of external influence takes its toll. So, rather than loudly proclaiming how I'm ready to turn internet spaceships upside down, I'm just going to say that I'm here. Maybe the universe won't see it as a challenge that way.

Still, I can't say my EVE life has been entirely uneventful. I haven't made too much of a flap in the areas that I'm typically involved in, but I've slowly been getting myself re-adjusted to EVE. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call the happenings "exciting", but for the sake of putting a post up for the first time in ages, I'll share a few details here.

What is a Carebear?

If you're at all familar with my background in EVE and in this blog, I'm sure you can agree that I'm eminently qualified to write a post on carebears. (Yes, you may start laughing now.) Admittedly, a lot of the thoughts in this post come from the fact that since I started writing this blog, I've seen myself as less and less of a carebear than I have in the past. Eventually, it lead me to wonder exactly what defines a carebear in the EVE sense, specifically in the context of lowsec PVP.

My thinking on this topic started a few months ago while having a chat with some of the ladies in the Women Gamers of EVE channel. We were discussing different types of ship fittings, and without quite realizing what I was getting into (the fits were related to highsec missions), I started offering a few points before realizing that I'd absent-mindedly been thinking along the lines of fitting said ship for PVP, rather than PVE. The response of one of the ladies in question was, "Yeah, Dian, but you're mostly a PVP pilot anyway."

Oops.

So there I was, lurking around a bit in the EVE blogiverse and thoroughly enjoying the significantly less taxing approach of reading things that other people had written. On one of the blogs - I believe it was Laedy's (congrats to her for going back to uni!) - I saw a link back to my own chronicle, the one you're reading right now. Last update: Three months ago.

The title of this post says it all.

In fairness, I've been suffering an unexpected absence from EVE for quite some time. I won't go into the reasons aside from saying it's RL-based and somewhat ongoing, but I'm slowly making my way back into internet spaceships and seeing what trouble I can cause.

I don't really have anything interesting to post here right at the moment; I've got a ton of posts I've been thinking of writing over the past few months, but none of them are anything I've gotten around to actually doing. Instead, I'll link you an article that's captured my attention recently: a guest article on Azual's blog regarding certain aspects of FCing.

See you all soon!

FC Review - 22 May 2011

So after much needling from some of my partners in crime in Caldari FW, I took the reins for a roaming gang last night. All in all it started out fairly boring - we'd initially shipped for frigates and fast cruisers and set out for Enaluri to roam the pipes toward our mortal enemies' headquarters in Heydieles. The first leg of the roam didn't go as well as I'd planned, ending in a small scrap between Oinasiken and Pynekastoh that lost us a Caracal and Enyo.

The Gallente gang we engaged was somewhat heavier than hours, with roughly even numbers but more battlecruisers compared to our frigates and cruisers, so I pulled our fleet back to the State Protectorate station in Rakapas to clear my head and allow the pilots who were based there to re-ship. While we were there, we picked up a couple more fleet members in Drakes, while losing several due to various other commitments combined with the late hour of the evening. Once everyone was ready to move again, we set out.

Just for the Hull of It

One of the recurring themes of both my PVP career and my "ooo, shiny!" approach to skill training plans is being unable to decide which ships I want to fly. Recently I took the opportunity to sit down and look seriously at which hulls I've been undocking the most. The results I ended up with were very different than I thought they would be.