Oh Canada

I’m at a point in Eve where I think I feel confident calling myself a veteran: 6 expansions, 3 major server meltdowns, the disbanding of BoB, CVA, and Goons (sort of, and then the glorious comeback thereof), as well as Larkonis-Gate, Forum-Gate, and Monocle-Gate.  To top if all off, I’ve been somehow self-indulgently and narcissistically blogging about it all for going on 2 years now. Yikes…

I’m telling you this because this particular post is special. Not that every other post isn’t special in its own special way, but this one has two very important notes attached to it. For one, this is my first international posting here on Finders and Keepers. Thats right kids, we’ve gone global; sort of. At this moment, I’m coming to you live from somewhere in scenic, exotic…Eastern Canada, attending a friend’s wedding. Where exactly, I’m not sure, but I can see the ocean and lots of trees, and there’s nothing much but beer and crappy internet connection for miles. This is a beguiling combination.

This brings us to notable point number 2: I’ve gone mobile, with a very, very snazzy new toy: an Asus N73 series laptop loaded with an nvidia GeForce GT 540m running 6GB of memory. It is, in a nutshell, totally sexy. For the first time ever, I’m comfortably running Eve in glorious, unflinching full-def high graphics settings, and it. Is. Beautiful.

If you can, try and remember your first foray into New Eden; those first couple of hours or days of your free trial that you spent wandering the stars, learning how to fly, bumping off asteroids and (if you’re anything like me) confusing a Concord gate captain for a belt rat and opening fire in a 0.9 system. You spent 7 hrs mining veldspar to afford that new frigate (300k isk!!), you got hosed buying that shiny new autocannon for 4x what you should have paid, and you got ruthlessly shit on by pirates when all you were doing was going after that deal in a little out-of-the-way system named Rancer. You got knocked down, a lot, then you got back up and asked for more, and you loved it. It wasn’t masochism, and it wasn’t stupidity, it was mostly just awe and amazement of this fantastic world where literally anything was possible, and the fact that this world was absolutely stunning.

I’ve been feeling a teeny bit of Eve-burnout recently. Not bitter-vet syndrome, and not tired of the game, its just that I needed something snappy to perk up my interest in playing. This baby is that exact snappy something, and Eve has honestly never been more inviting or gorgeous to me.

So, as astoundingly hospitable and polite the good people of Canada have been (true story: the law man that pulled me over for speeding apologized so profusely I felt like maybe he was in the wrong, and then offered to “let this one go” if I promised to go easy and maybe buy him a beer at the local pub that night if I swung by. Really.), I’m sort of eager to get back to the land of stable internet connections (where a dollar equals $1, not .92 cents) and let loose my newly-replenished Eve cravings in high-def. And I promise you, it will be glorious.

 

o7,

-Aiden

~ by Aiden Mourn on August 13, 2011.