“Isn’t it funny how the most unforgettable scenes can be the most trivial?”

“Isn’t it funny how the most unforgettable scenes can be the most trivial?”

Time for another “life” post. No EVE Online to be found here, sorry friends.

Biting my tongue

If I set any rules for my blog it would’ve had to be that I write what I want to write. Over the past year, that has proven quite successful at producing content regularly, and I was very satisfied with it.

My last post kinda followed on from the post before it, but I don’t think I mentioned that that post (the hurdle one) had people talking about it in-game, to me and to others. I suppose such a post will do that. Anyway, I was a little scared by the attention, mainly because I felt the message wasn’t being interpreted properly. So I tried to address it in my next post.

In doing so, when writing the follow-up, I found myself asking “what do the viewers want to read/what do I want the viewers to read?” I lost the essence of my blog in that moment, because I wasn’t thinking about what I wanted from the post, only what I could use to correct other people’s views of the post prior to it.

People still call me immature even always disagreed with them silently, but sometimes, reading back, I do see the immaturity there, seeping through the cracks of my carefully crafted internet armour.

Our power

I like to think of ways we can overturn the world order and establish a utopian society for the whole world. Fun, fun. Indeed, when people say I’m air-headed or a daydreamer or immature, I don’t bother defending myself, because these are symptoms of me spending too much time calculating just how we could reach a utopia.

-shrug- Perhaps it’s all the games I’ve played and books I’ve read that make me think this is even a remote possibility.

This could be interpreted as optimism, but it’s interesting because I like to bash myself and point out my weaknesses a lot, as well as the flaws in my or others’ reasonings, and enjoy discussing the overarching issues, ranging from poverty to first-world problems, that plague today. I suppose because of that, you can’t really call someone completely an optimist, or completely a pessimist. There’s a bit of everything within us; human beings are complex.

Immortality

Spoiler: not very EVE Online-related!

Spending so much time away from EVE reduced the game in my mind to its few core concepts, and those individual aspects stewed away in the magical cauldron I call a brain, and lots of interesting things spewed out. One thing I contemplated in relation to real life was immortality.

Whenever the question “What superpower would you want?” pops up, I’m always the guy that says immortality. Why?

The main qualm about immortality assuming you’re the only immortal is that you live whilst those around you pass away, even loved ones. Could I withstand that emotional turmoil? It’s hard to answer. I could say right now with confidence I won’t spill my secrets if I’m tortured, but if the torturer is creative enough, I could more than likely be willing to tell them everything.

So how will I know I will be able to keep my sanity as I live whilst the world progresses through its slow meander into the deep, dark unknowns of the future?

I don’t. -grin- And that’s exactly what makes it so appealing. Chasing the unknown seems to be something that strikes a cord within me, whether it’s diving into a maths problem headfirst and swimming through numbers to find the answer, reading through countless fantasy books and exploring other worlds, to flying through wormhole space in an online spaceships game, to even just gazing at the sky every once in a while.

I spent quite a few nights contemplating what it’d be like, trying to imagine being immortal. The negatives are outweighed by the sheer amount of possibilities. As a certain pair of step brothers would’ve said…

I could witness thousands not just a fleeting century, but whole millennia. Thousands, tens of thousands of years. My narrow-mindedness could hopefully expand over those years until I can grasp the true essence of the world and the human race and become some kind of prophetic old monk with an ancient beard who knows everything.

Am I being ungrateful to fate and destiny, for wanting something other than what I’ve been given? Am I just some hopeless romantic seeking to defy the stars? Perhaps both, but nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder what it’d be like never to die.

Anyway, beyond the initial trauma of processing your own immortality, the next hurdle would be time itself. What happens when you get bored? What happens to your concept of time, of life? Living forever would mean you eventually experience everything your body is capable of experiencing, perhaps even find a limit to how much you can fit in your brain. What occurs after that point?

Do you feel utter satisfaction, or utterly destroyed? Do you feel like you can peacefully live another thousand years, or wish you had left your natural lifespan untouched?

Again, I don’t know the answers to such questions.

But again, I would love to find out. I guess curiousity gets the better of me even with the doors that perhaps should remain closed.

In conclusion, I’m very curious to see how long it will take me to change my opinion of immortality. Perhaps in a thousand years I’ll look back at this post and laugh at such childish (ancient?) thoughts. Or perhaps I’ll scoff in a mere decade at ever wanting to live forever. The anticipation is killing me. Ah well, all will be revealed in time.

Food for worms

So… a new category for the blog. Yes, Minecraft. That’s where I’ve been, whilst my alliance thinks I’m six feet under, I’m actually hundreds of feet under, looking for diamonds. I feel quite guilty that I abandoned the alliance like that, and I doubt they’ll forgive me readily if I turn back up and explain all I wanted to do was start a Minecraft server.

Deadlines.

My worst enemy. Posted my story for the EVE Fiction contest today, only to realise later I had missed the deadline by 40 minutes. Wow.

It was pretty damning, but entirely my fault for not starting the story sooner.

OH WELL. There’s always next year. For now though, I will go ask for some feedback in the forum thread.

Warning: slightly less entertaining post ahead. Mainly for myself to have a glance at next time. This blog has become a sort of… diary for myself. Except when I write, sometimes I don’t hit publish. Need less of those.

EDUcation

Soooooooo…

I was selected as a short-form speaker for Eve Down Under.

I actually applied for long-form, because it’d mean I got my ticket free. It wasn’t that I was just doing it for the free ticket, though; I reckon even 9 months into EVE (almost at 15m SP!!!!), I could fill 40 minutes with an interesting spiel about what I’ve done.

So Bam Stroker contacted me a few days ago and I was a little confused because we had never really spoke except for at one Melbourne meetup and that was pretty brief, then it dawned on me: he was contacting me about the speech.

I braced myself and was 100% prepared for the unfortunate apology and how there was simply too many other good applicants, and I would nod and accept my fate and attend EDU and enjoy it as a fellow attendee and try to go for the PvP tourney, and have some fun around Sydney while I’m there, and that would be that.

But Bam, in his grace and wisdom, decided to throw me into a short-form slot instead. So some time during the Saturday of EDU, I’ll be speaking to fellow EVElings about an interesting thing or two about my EVE career so far.

I’ve got to say, all I feel is relief. I’ll admit here I haven’t actually spoken in front of a crowd for 45 minutes before, and I even offered my new short-form place to someone else if necessary. But apparently I’m good to go for the short-form speech, received a confirmation mail today requiring me to get my speech and all that good stuff in some time before the actual event.

Cool beans. My school teachers used to tell me I was good at speaking. But they never had me speak in front of fellow adults on a topic that many take more seriously than anything I talked about in school.

We’ll see, then, how this turns out. If it’s good, good. If it sucks I’ll make sure it’s uploaded to YouTube anyway. Humility is the first step to improvement, right?

Two posts in a day. Binge-blogging.

That forum story is moving on!

Mentioned this collaborative project a while ago. Well, it’s been teetering on the brink of stagnation right now. All of us have been slowly breaking apart as real life and other obligations get in our ways.

The issue with collaborative writing is that for longer stories like ours, it requires dedication from all authors, all throughout. Something that started on a forum dedicated to a game totally unrelated to our writing didn’t help. So I’ve taken it upon myself to move the whole lot onto a Word document.

Word document here. (May take a long while to load)

Once forum format is totally removed, I will also have refreshed my memory of the story once again, and hopefully get it back on track.

By back on track I probably mean wrap it up. By rough estimate we have about 400,000 words. The average word length of a book is 64,000.

And this is but one story, you see. What we have created is a whole world. I believe not just in populating the world with creatures, plants, races, ideas and civilisations of our greatest imaginations, but also populating the world with our stories. A single tale woven by our individual strands is great, but we’re doing the whole bloody WORLD (a WORLD!) we’ve created a great injustice if we leave it at that.

Anyway, that’s after we re-unite everyone, get the Word document of what we have so far sorted, and decide how we will end our current tale. For all I know there’s still a hell of a lot to go. But we are getting a little tired of the forum format. I wonder if I can convince my fellow authors to post through this blog? Mmm.

It’s August already?

I’m nearly done with the first year of my university course?

I’m 8 months old on my EVE-online character?

It felt like only yesterday I was walking into my campus fresh-faced and awestruck.

It felt only like this morning that I delved into CCP’s New Eden universe with grand aspirations.

Time flies…

 

Where has all that time gone?

Not into studying. Well then there really only is one other major aspect in my life I’d invest so much time in, I am ashamed to admit. Games.

Our greatest strength…

Recently I went to the snow for half a week, leaving behind my computer for beautiful snow, awesome runs and no internet. It was interesting, looking back, and seeing how I fared as the days progressed, given the avid gamer that I am.

I certainly felt the familiar urge to want to play games, for sure, throughout my stay. But it faded, and faded fast. What do we attribute this to, this shifting of needs? Was it even a shift of needs? Is me, playing games, a need? Probably not, it was just a product of the environment I live in: one of the Internet and countless entertainment options found online, games being what I found most entertaining.

So when the environment changed, is it surprising that, even though I normally play games more than is probably healthy, it didn’t cause me to keel over and start frothing from the mouth at being unable to satisfy my craving for gaming?

I guess not, because we humans are nothing if not adaptable.