The Hub

On the 18th of January, this site homepage will be host to the SOPA Blackout Protest.  First page view will encounter the truth of how the SOPA and PIPA (Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act) will devastate the Internet as a whole.

The small time business owners, bloggers, and critics will be under the scrutiny of the corporate hounds, and be brought down by their hunters (lawyers), for anything they feel like.  With SOPA, you are guilty until proven innocent.

This doesn’t mention all the message boards, mailing lists, personal bloggers, eBay’ers, Craigslist, hobby artists, Android /iOS developers… the list keeps going.  If you get snooped out, you get brought down.  There will be no more Internet.

As it pleases you, I’ve posted two of my old Redhurst: Academy of Magic short stories on my deviantART account.

Redhurst – Relationships Part 1

Caught on the Blind Side

Please be gentle in commenting, as I wrote these many years ago.

• Empire side initial Sith Inquisitor quest dialogues turned me off by level 2.
• Smuggler class is neat.
• To use Armstech crafting skill, you need Scavenging and Investigation.  Even if Corso gets a bonus to Underworld Market, you won’t get Carbo-plas, a needed material for Armstech.
• Don’t waste money and time to get Conductive Flux.  It’s 10 credits at a crafting vendor, versus 295 credits to run the mission.
• Disassembling parts that you craft can result in learning higher-powered versions of the item.  I went from Skill Barrel 3 as a green item to a Skill Barrel 3 as a blue, then to an Advanced Skill Barrel 3 as a purple.
• When focusing on crafting, just hang out in your local Cantina.  No sense in trying to run missions while your companion is out taking care of your other business.

This is one sexy game.  I am thoroughly impressed.  The game does the standard Elder Scrolls opening scenario; you’re a prisoner, doomed to die, but something happens to make it so you’re not.

First character I made, got up to level 35, and then they updated the game to 1.2.  Constant crash when moving more than 10 meters from where I last saved.

Second character, doing much better.  I made it a point to level my Sneak to 100 (with about four hours of in-game time, no cheats here!).  I followed that up with hunting down Krosis, and getting Throw Voice (Zul Mey Gut).  Krosis and the Blood Dragon that’s on the Word Wall hurt together, but with a little time, patience, and a higher Archery skill, I took them down individually (don’t approach the Word Wall until the dragon is down!).

They’re going to eventually release a patch to allow us with 64-bit OS’s to use more than the 2gb memory limit, and at the beginning of the year, the Creation Kit will be released.  My hope is that Dan the Geek will craft us a player housing that equals his current Fallout: New Vegas bunker.

Okay everyone, here’s the deal.
New players lack a head start. But there are some good tools to help you plan your way into high skill ships, check your planned fitting, give you heads up on your market orders, watch your mail, and all sorts of crazy stuff.
To help out those who don’t know where to look, let’s start listing some of the good tools we use. Remember rookies, you will need your API key to work with most of these tools!

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EVE Online Character API (Link) – Generate a custom access API key for the apps you use.
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EVEMon (Link) – Watches just about everything. Current skills, standings, market orders, industry (manufacturing) jobs, research jobs, your mail, and notifications. The big part of EVEMon is the skill planning. GO to the Plans menu, create new, and find the ship you want, and add it to the queue. It will guide you to reach the required skills, plus links up with BattleClinic so you can find the best loadouts, and train for those too. There are some other tools in there, so play around! Practically a one-stop-shop.

EVE Fitting Tool (Link) – Lets you bring up a ship, and toss fittings at it all day long. Good for determining capacitor stability, and what would happen if you had max skills for the ship and loadout you’re testing.

Aura (Link, Android Market, Free) – For on-the-go types, monitor your pilot skill queue with Aura, an Android OS based app. Easy to use, useful widget for the home screen, and has a notification option to let you know skills finish.

[Space Reserved for iOS App, please suggest!]

RF Freight (Link) – Collected a TON of Mexallon that you need moved to Jita? Look no further than Red Frog Freight. The most trustworthy, player operated shipping corp in all the galaxy. Moving from low-sec (<=0.4)? Black Frog is their branch arm that specializes in moving in and out of dangerous territories.

EVE-Markets (Link) – Want to know what the trend is for the fittings you are after?  EVE-Markets is a website that aggregates data from EVE-Central, and makes it more graphical similar to the Market window in the game. Generally, this data comes directly from players, who utilize a client that picks up the Market data, and auto-uploads it to EVE-Central on game exit.

Mintchip (Link) – Reports on major EVE news and events, and some other stuff.  She’s cute too, so that helps in delivering dry EVE news.

There are other tools out there, and I hope there will be other suggestions. Find a tool useful? Let me know!