狂い死に

So today I activated my jump clone, purchased some second tier implants and made preparations to head out to my new home in nullsec. I decided to travel in a covert ops frigate that allows me to go into stealth mode, or “cloak”, whereby enemies cannot see me. This makes bypassing hostile ships a lot safer and easier. I can’t carry very much cargo with it, but as I’m just exploring right now, it’s not a major concern. That said, even with the ability to cloak, there is still risk.

Since I don’t really know the political situation out in the wilds of 0.0, I decided to base myself with Mordu’s Legion Command (MLC). Since MLC’s territory technically belongs to the game and not any player faction, it cannot be conquered. Thus it seems unlikely that I’d be stumbling into the middle of one of Eve’s many ongoing territorial wars. Basically, my hope is that Mordu’s region is a relatively peaceful area of space with enough people around to still have a functioning market.

This is not to say that it is safe. As I plotted my course from my offices near Jita, the galaxy’s predominant trading hub, to Mordu’s Legion’s Testing Facilities, I noticed something troubling on the map. The border system between Empire space and nullsec, Torrinos, had had 19 ships destroyed in the last hour and 12 pod kills (that is, the destruction of an escape pod). This was clearly a gate camp.

A gate camp is where a group of pirates sets up a no warp field around a gate and wait for an unsuspecting player to try and pass by. The no warp field prevents ships from easily getting away from the predators. It is, in essence, spiders and their web waiting for their flies. Once a “fly” stumbles into the net, the small ships will “tackle” their prey, slowing it’s escape further while the bigger, meaner ones blast it to the verge of destruction. At this point the pirates usually extort money from their victim by requiring a”toll”, or simply blow them away in order to steal cargo or because they are just jerks. With all the pod kills, I was betting on jerks.

As I approach the stargate in Torrinos, I prepare myself mentally for whatever lurks on the other side. Maybe nothing… Maybe a large group of pirates… I activate the gate and it asks me if I’m sure; the warning saying that 0.0 is lawless and the police can’t help me if I go forward. Pausing for just a moment, I hit the Accept button.

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Well, I’m super pleased tonight. As many of you know I’ve been playing an MMO for several years now called Eve Online. For the last several months I’ve been grinding to get faction (doing repetitive missions in order to curry favour with in-game governments/companies) with the Lai Dai Corporation to get access to their cloning facilities. Early this morning I finally made it and have a shiny new jump clone of my own.

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Valve has produced a number of cute videos to promote TF2 which show off it’s new visual style. I’ve got four videos for you from the “Meet the…” series after the jump.

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For those of you who don’t follow the gaming scene, one of the biggest games of the season is Team Fortress 2, which comes as part of The Orange Box by legendary developer Valve. The game is receiving a lot of well-deserved press over its art direction which brings a fresh, cartoony style to a genre which generally opts for a more drab, uninspired motif. The result delivers not only delicious eye candy, but enhances both gameplay and visual longevity as well.

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I’ve got to admit, this is a stupidly great idea. At FigurePrints’ website you can order a custom figurine of your very own World of Warcraft character.

After you’ve chosen a pose and a base, they’ll 3D print the figurine and ship it to you. The quality of the figure looks a bit dodgy, but it’s hard to tell without seeing one in real life. And really, does it matter?

With 9 million WoW fanatics players in the world today, even at $99/figure, these guys are going to make a ton of money. Heck, I hardly play WoW anymore and I want one of these.

Here is a series of ads from Japanese TV advertising Fanta soda. They’re just hilarious, particularly for all you Japanophiles out there. Mr. Shogun is my favourite followed by Mr. DJ.

Many people don’t understand the Mr. Blackbeard one. Basically there is a game out here (for kids or for drinking) called “kurohige” which literally means Blackbeard. It works pretty much as shown; there’s a pirate in a barrel and you take turns plunging the coloured swords into slots until he pops out. It’s a game of luck, but still fun (I played it in a bar in Akasaka).

P.S. If anyone finds a high-res copy of this let me know.

This is not a super complex recipe or anything, but I’ve wanted this functionality for a while and never quite got around to working though procmail’s arcane syntax.

Basically it saves a copy of each incoming mail into a folder ‘$YEAR/$MONTH’ so that I can easily go back and look through older mail. It also lets me delete anything in my inbox, knowing I have a backup.

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