Welcome to 2017! … What the bloody hell are you doing awake?

While i appreciate your readership, at the very least i hope you’re reading this with a throbbing headache after last night’s new year party. I’ll probably be in the same state, but since i’m technically writing this from the past thanks to the miracle that is post scheduling, if something ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC happened on the cusp between the years, i’m sorry, but you’ll be left uninformed.

That said, welcome to your weekly roundup of what went on in our little, dirty, community this week. Let’s get to it.

If you haven’t kept apprised with the life of that one dude that does fantastic Eve art, the After Hours podcasts and more, RixxJavix, a life story that’s been a matter of public discussion as of late, let’s just politely say that he’s been a victim of the system. While Christmas found him at home with family, it was close to finding him in jail for New Years. Luckily some things got pulled through and he’ll be at home, but things are as complicated as always. If you want to help, please support his patreon and purchase some of the cool stuff he has on his RedBubble store.

In contrast, RocketX apparently has also been having a great December so far, even if it did end on a bang, the bang being the sound of him wrecking his car. A lot of supers dying, tales of betrayal and backroom giggling abound. More on that below.

The CSM forum didn’t get any more candidates this week, minus one made by someone called Winthorp, which by judging from his 3868 likes on the Eve forums, is most likely an oncologist. It’s not to be taken as a real candidacy as such so far due to overwhelming quantity of ‘dank’ and ‘memes’ in his post, but he swears he’ll be back with ‘pearler ideas’. Either way, not how i’d start my candidacy run.

In game news, if you thought the year has been winding down and people were getting settled in for the holidays, you’d be dead-as-hell wrong. As the waves of propaganda hit upon the shores of /r/eve once more, it’s confirmed TEST will head out, expectedly given Obe and Sendaya use, to the space-south of the map, to Catch, Impass, and all the other southern regions under Stainco control so far. If nothing else, TEST can certainly pick their alliance names for max propagandism.

In related news to RocketX’s mention above, apparently a PL Revenant went down due to some “blue-fidgetry” caused by SnuffBox. In case you don’t get the gravity of this, Revenant kills are often ‘big things’, especially if it’s part of one of the biggest supercap coalitions in the game, and especially of one of the biggest super-hunting alliances in the game. While this seems to be a fitting theme for the next year for SNUFF , after the salt on display in that thread, i’m betting that as everything in Eve, consequences will be felt later rather than sooner, and in the middle of an important op. Either way, not like this is SNUFF’s first “betrayal” and apparently they had tried to draw Wrecking Crew in with a neutral bait super before, but when that didn’t work, they pulled out the backup plan. You can find a full recount of it on EveNews24.

So much propaganda… so much propaganda this past week. There hasn’t been much in real bits of art so i’ll just toss here a few to pad out the section. Starting off with this piece posted by Mari-Huana:

And to show no bias, here’s an Imperium one as well, by Destoration:

And this faux-magazine parody of Starship Troopers, by New_Eden_Tourist:

To round it up, this piece by dragonshardz:

I don’t know about you, but i love the quality and drive behind these propaganda pieces.

As just a little over a month went by, the date of Eve’s Alpha programme not that far behind us, newbies have poured into our universe. They have been as fearless, making us proud of their achievements, as they have foolish. But i wonder whether that can’t be said for us as well? We can be equal parts ingenious and silly, the different being in how we are judged and perceived.

They may be our successors and brothers at arms more than we’d like to admit.

While i’m sure a lot of reks happened this week, and a lot of Rorquals got slaughtered as of the last expansion, somehow this has to be the worst example, as killed by CO2:

I’ll start this with a blast from the past, something to remind people of how far we’ve came. Here’s Sadao, showing us what a Nano Typhoon looked like in around 2006.

Wingspan’s still kicking about, and had this fantastic video of a Stratios surviving, and kicking ass, in what should have been a simple gank.

Cadfly here has a fun little LS gank in a Nightmare, that due to a personal target choice error, ended up costing him an Onyx and maybe a Scimitar kill. He gives props to the Anathema for smart play.

A bit different, but the ISD’s also had a cute holiday roam.

Roleplay is something that’s often relegated in conversation to the likes of CVA, Ushra’Khan, various anti-drifter operations and CODE. hardcore believers. It’s not something that people really think they’re doing unless ‘they’re doing it’, the whole nine yards, with engaging in chat on dev-ran events, with keeping in-character throughout your activities in New Eden, and reframing all experiences and actions under that umbrella.

And all of that is fine, and a great outlet for some people, but the average Eve player rarely identifies with that concept. This thread brought around an interesting subject, and even more interesting comments.

Characters in Eve should be thought of as tools. They help to transpose your willpower to within the confines of the game. You, as a player, get to have desires and wishes regarding this fictional universe, and you use your characters to fulfill those goals within the context of the game.

Roleplay is the very act of playing out a character, a sum of wills, of something that acts differently than you would. While commonly we’d play out things far removed from our actual persona, as a matter of escapism but also of enjoying the perception shift, i put forth the idea that the personality each of us chooses to embody within Eve is not who we are.

The effect of the internet acting as a veil and a catalyst at the same time is scientifically recognized[citation needed]. How we act online is different, in ever so subtler ways, if not outright grotesque, due to the cover of anonymity or just the thin wall of separation that we know exists.

Also, the very fact that we play within New Eden, that we coexist in a universe that has different social rules and acceptances for very basic human emotions like fear, greed and viciousness, leaves way to act differently than we’d act in real life faced with the same human emotions.

So putting those together, isn’t it cautious to admit that we are all roleplaying? Playing out our virtual persona? While this would be an easier pill to swallow were we talking of alt-MMOs like Second Life, Eve seems to fit a lot harder in that, given how direct of a contact our real selves end up having with the game. We meet up in real life, we share phone numbers to be called at 3 in the morning for emergency drops twice a year and we end up talking and discussing as we would at a bar.

But the same guy we had drinks with and paid his taxi ride to get home safe, we’d hotdrop in his moment of weakness just a week later, gloating over his corpse in space. And is that not the very definition of roleplaying?

~Cosmo



Thank you for reading this edition of ‘What you missed this week’. If you think we missed something, share it in the comments section, i’m sure a lot of people still want to check out more things. Also please leave any suggestions and ideas you may have in the comments as well, and as always, if you enjoy the work we’re doing here, please toss a nickle or an iskcent into our real or virtual wallets to keep this going with the same aplomb and quality.







PS: Once upon a time, there were crappy memes.