It all comes down to nepotism - Alternate History Meme

Last night I was chatting with the lovely people in the Eve-Bloggers channel. Jerran Ragnar (author of Victoria Aut Mors) spoke up. "We should all do a post on the same topic tomorrow!" Silence ensued. I offered up that I thought that could be interested and asked what Jerran had in mind. More silence ensued. Someone else pointed out "I thought that what CK's Blog Banter was for?" This time the silence was tinged with that wonderful aura of "Yeah, moron." I came to Jerran's defense saying that just because CK did it didn't meant that we couldn't play Newton to his Hooke and claim it for our own. Sadly we were still without a good idea, but then Mike Azaria spoke up and said "Well, the blog banter tends to usually be forward looking. So why don't we do something looking into the past?" (Please note I am paraphrasing, so Mike - don't pod me.)

Through a quick round of "pass the buck" Jerran was selected to lead us off and has done so with his latest post. He went ahead and summed up the meme as thus -

“What would you change about Eve if you could go back in time?”. It can be something about the world itself, game play, or anything else you can think of.

He went the route of exploring the setting of the game and thought about taking capsuleers out of the capsule. My entry is a bit more focused on a game mechanic that annoys me and I'd like to explore through a short work of fiction with a summary at the end (so if you don't like the fiction you can fast forward.) Enjoy!

Wait... I won what?

So I am not sure whether my college English professor would be ecstatic or dismayed. This is the woman once graded a piece of my fiction A+++ for content, D- for grammar and gave me and average of a C. I tried to argue with her that really the average of an A triple plus and a D minus should be a B. She was unamused.

Apparently my grammar has either improved or CrazyKinux was able to look past such mortal trappings. My story "Abyssus in Terra" was able to land me a PLEX in his recent Tyrannis Contest. While I did not win the grand honor of interviewing a CCP developer I am still beside myself with happiness. It is probably a good thing that the interview went to someone else as I am not the most experienced player and the most probing question I could ask would involve the developers favorite color.

I would like to give congratulations to Cailais who won the interview with Let the Gods be Gods! as well as Mandrill over at I Am Keith Nelson, Illectro with It's Not Just About Planets You Know, and KailJoric with Nothing Personal, It's just Business, as well as the 26 other entries (I will admit I have not yet had time to read them all.) I would also like to thank CrazyKinux for putting together this contest as well as CCP for donating some really amazing prizes.

For Prize Confirmation CK can contact holyyakker[at]gmail[dot]com - in game name is not author name.

Hanger Update

I realized that in my previous hanger update I missed a couple boats.

Angry Phallus - My Iteron IV was my move it boat before I got my Orca and then my Obelisk.
Jamal's Folly - This is the Retriever after "The Flying Dutchman" was lost due to pilot stupidity.

I've been impressed reading all the other posts about peoples hangars. I find it fascinating just how many different ships there are. I'm glad I've never had the pokemon mentality of "Gotta Catch em All!" because this game would drive me batshit crazy if I did.

Blog Readership

Over at Ecliptic Rift casiella put up a great post on how to drive some traffic to your blog. I thought that I would throw my own $0.02 into the mix.

I suppose an article from me on how to drive traffic to your blog seems a bit like a one-legged man writing a "How To" guide for ass kicking contests. ".5 or Higher!" has a grand has a grand total of 9 followers and less than 50 posts, but this is not my first time to a rodeo. I actually run a website for a small local group and it is a blog based medium. The average readership is about 200 to 300 unique visitors a month, which for a local news site is relatively high. So here are my insights into blogging in general.