In short, if confirmation is really what you hang your plans and social interaction on, a [insert communication device here] works both ways. Stop griefing the person who stuck to the original plan because you forgot and they didn’t remind you. You forgot. And trying to blame the party that remembered is uncouth, and certainly uncalled for. For the record, the previous statements were not made with malice towards A or 2. Simply commentary on backwards social practice.

It isn’t reasonable that we have grown to require plans to be made, scheduled, and then also confirmed. Making the plans and scheduling them in the first place is confirmation enough. If you are of a mind to take down these plans into a calendar, to write them down in some place that you will refer to later when making plans, then you have already confirmed your plans.

I have on several occasions had my presence requested for technical support. Fixing computers is kind of this thing that I do. When you call me, and ask for assistance, and I schedule an appointment, I will be there. If I do not show up, that is my damn fault. But when you decide to skip out because I didn’t call and confirm that I would be there, because you requested my presence? Guess what? [Expletive] you. That’s what. If I were Geek Squad you would be getting charged for my [expletive] [expletive] time. And it would be a lot more than I charge.

Trust me.

– Vid

Same [expletive] error.

So I figured maybe this had to also leave space for character name, federation, corporation, and other unknown formatting things. Cut it down to 1,743, tried again, and got the same error.

Well, to make a long story short ( ha, puns! ) I eventually managed to get it to keep. Final character count is at 1,598 and it saved without issue. See, I was doing this because I’d put one in place in game earlier, and was okay with it, but for some reason EVE decided to erase it. Not sure why, maybe because I tried to edit it later and forgot to save or something. Still, either way, I figure I’d explain my little row with it’s coding ( coding and I are arch enemies ), and provide a copy of it here for easy referencing later. So, here is Rotevni’s brief history.

Rotevni’s life story reads a bit like a comedy of errors. Born in the late 20th century, Maxwell discovered at a very young age that he had two very unpopular things; a wise mouth, and a scientific progenic mind. Expelled from nearly every public and private academy, he crashed classes, studied on his own, performed experiments, and built facilities and inventions with his own funds.

Late in 2012, there was a very energetic explosion centered in Rotevni’s lab, removing the entire British Isles and the Northern coast of France. He managed to escape by forced jettison of an I.C.E.C. [Interorbital Croygenic Escape Capsule] which threw him past the atmosphere. First found several decades later, by that time Britain was but a memory and no one even knew his name.

With few resources to his name, he worked for various groups. Bringing his very advanced methods of scientific thinking into the current of the time before yet again some strange accident in his new lab would freeze him and throw him through space for more decades. This cycle was repeated frequently. Eventually, both the distance he traveled, and the time he was lost were so great that when he was found, the I.C.E.C. was mistaken for an antiquated and heavily damaged capsuleer pod. With no records, he was entered into the cloning system through a debt work-off program with the Federal Navy Academy.

Industrious, a workaholic, and generally lucky, Rotevni paid off his save-debt in lightning speed. His own man again, he hoped to get back to what he loved most; inventing, and changing the industrial scientific complex.

Hope you enjoyed it. And if you didn’t, then I have some beachside property in the Andromeda galaxy that Rotevni would love to sell you. Only temporally relocated once!

– Vid

By all accounts, people kept their cool. Except when it came to actually staying cool, it seems. Temperatures were running pretty high in the middle of the day, so there was a rush for ice. I’d heard reports that all major markets were out of bags of ice somewhere around 4:30pm-PST. Still, some markets and corner stores were at least still offering service. My local liquor store was doing cash-only transactions until sunset. I was able to pick up a six pack of Shock Top with only a mild wait in line. Pretty cool, guys. Thanks for keeping your community running!

Still, with no power, there were no games. Similarly, both my DS batteries were dead, as was my phone, and the laptop. It was interesting, sitting in the front yard for a few hours, doing nothing but talking, drinking beer and finally having a dinner of cold leftovers that would have spoiled otherwise. All in all not a bad night.

I’ve always felt that I’d be able to handle myself if things ever went so pear shaped that society stopped working altogether, but after what I saw today I’m a little more steeled to the thought. This was by no means a litmus test for a long term outage, but people still managed to come together and handle themselves with some poise and grace.

Well done, local humanity. You have managed to show adaptability.

– Vid

Allow me to explain.

You are a person in a slightly-larger-than-person-sized pod. This pod is then injected into a ship, which is how you play in space. The starting ship is very large compared to your pod. Like comparing a person to a whale. Now, comparing the starting ship to a space station is like comparing a 5.5″ action figure to a blue whale.

I don’t think I can emphasize that scale enough.

Comparing the starting ship to a space station is like comparing a 5.5″ action figure to a blue whale.

There we go.

When you zoom out from your ship in front of a space station, you can actually reduce the view of your ship and the station itself to little specs of pixels on your monitor indistinguishable to the human eye. Seems pointless, right? Well, consider this.

When you do this, the planets in the background stay the same [expletive] size.

Because planets are [expletive] large. And space is bigger than that.

When you warp from one destination to another, as you approach a planet, it gets very big, very rapidly, and then stays in your plane of vision as you pass it, and stays that big for a while before you finally pass it, and then it gets smaller in the distance again. But even as you zoom through space, and adjust your magnification, stars don’t change size, planets don’t get bigger or smaller, but all the minuscule little man made crap that we think is massive changes.

Welcome to the total perspective vortex…

– Vid

To much greater values of “like” than standard.

I’ve been playing games since I was five. I got started on my Commodore 64, in fact. It is something that I have kept very close to my heart. Locked away safely in my closet. Along with my liver, as to prevent horrid, horrid delicious abuses. I am a Sci-Fi pop culture geek as well, do not get me wrong. I’ve found that the two sort of go hand in hand in fact. It– among other factors –lead me to Comic Con over a decade ago, and I’ve gone every year.

Still, I never really felt like I belonged there. It was a brief excursion into a world I was visiting more than anything. I had fun, I enjoyed it, but then I left it behind. Well, about a year and a half ago, one of the Bastards turned to me and said “Let’s go to PAX!”

I will not bore you with the logistics; we went. Welcome home indeed. I have never felt so at home at a convention. It was glorious. As soon as we got back, we immediately began prepping for the next year’s trip.

And so we went again this year. PAX Prime passed this last weekend, and it was five days of non-stop excellence. I have learned a great many things from my time there, which I will share with you now.

▪ Wizards are heavy drinkers, but Vikings are heavier-er drinkers.
▪ Living in downtown Seattle keeps you in shape by force.
▪ Games with friends are good, but games with strangers can be excellent.
▪ Strangers you have played games with become friends.
▪ Always try to eat local establishments. National chains just are not as good.
▪ Make acquaintances while you’re waiting in line; you already know you’re there for the same thing.
▪ 3D cameras are awesome, portrait pictures with a Landscape 3D camera are pointless.
▪ Have “personal cards” as opposed to plain business cards, and include chosen social networking method.

All said I saw some really cool people, and some really cool games. I met a few fellow Commodore enthusiasts, and got stuck in an airport– [expletive] you, Alaska Air –with an awesome game development team that I am a huge fan of– thank you, Alaska Air –and had no idea they were based locally.

I’m not going into spoilers, I’m not a gaming blog or news site. Nor am I really following through with my typical reference linking because there’s no reason for me to break the privacy of people I made contacts with through happenstance. Sure, they may never read this, but I don’t need them to. That reminds me. I left a lesson learned out of the list up above.

▪ Free swag fades, experiences last forever.

– Vid