a life of perpetual crisis

I shit you not.  Ran with a gank op today into the new drone space.  Scouted for the gang, until I pass a small Pure gang which passed me…straight into my gang.  I jump back through, and my gang is engaging two harbingers.  And above ALL OTHER TARGETS in my gang, one of them targets me.  And my heart started beating hard.  Hard enough that I could feel it in my goddamn chest.  I can’t buy that in any other game.  I don’t know why.  I’ve been under high-stress situations in games which have similar or higher stakes on the line (Enemy Territory, Battlefield) but nothing fills me with sheer terror than the fact that someone else’s ship is firing at mine trying to kill ME.  It’s as if they actually had a gun to my head.

The last time something like tonight happened was a while ago when Ars Caelestis (my corporation) was still a member of Huzzah.  BoB rolls into the general area with an inty force while I’m ratting.  We hear the intel - this may be an invasion.  I’m in my raven which I had just paid off.  I warp to our POS.  Safety.  But if BoB sets up, I may be stuck there.  I make a break for the FAT gate, trying my luck.  I get in warp, “inties spotted in RR-”…I think I’m safe.  Midwarp I see members of the Band of Brothers in local.  I reason to myself “they’ll never make it to the FAT gate, I’m fine”…until I drop out of warp.  And there are the interceptors, waiting on the gate.  I don’t have enough WCS in my ratting raven, I can’t defend myself from this.  I jump through, because sitting there on the gate gets me nothing when there are more inties on the way.  On the other side, there’s a fellow alliance mate, being picked apart.  I can do nothing - my cruises can do little damage to PvP spec interceptors, and I start to align.  Slowly.  Very slowly.  BOOM goes the alliance mate, and the interceptors turn toward me, as I on the inside damn myself for not attempting to help him despite.  One of them locks me.  I warp off.  I don’t know if he put a scram on me, but it didn’t matter, it was done.  All of this was over in the timespan of a minute.  The warp to the gate, the jump through, and the warp to the station.  At the end, while I docked, the end of my fingertips were literally tingling.

As long as that happens, as long as I can somehow get to that spot - the border between life and death, the not knowing what the hell is going to happen, I will play this game.

Specifically the music of Black Sun Empire and Pendulum. But I’ve got to check out more stuff in the genre, because then I can actually answer the question “What kind of music do you like?” without having an scrunched up face. Most of this stuff (Pendulum mainly) was used for Eve user videos until their name popped up so much I had to investigate further. Out of the 13 or so tracks on Hold your Colour I’ve got to have listened to 6 or so previously, and it’s always “this was such a hot track in (insert eve-vid here)”. I think it’s the fact that most of the DnB stuff I’ve listened to is very clean - there isn’t a sappy singer most of the time fucking up the music, and when there is voice, it’s there to act as an instrument, and complements the beat/melody. I think that’s part of the reason I can get into jpop more than I can normal pop - I can’t understand whatever the fuck it is they’re saying, so I basically interpret whatever vocals there are as an extra instrument rather than something to listen to.
The only possible downside to getting into this music too much is that I’d move to Europe and become a club hopper for the rest of my life. Which wouldn’t be too bad other than I’d have to learn a whole bunch of languages, but it would force me to finish learning French, which isn’t a bad thing.

…is the most boring thing in the history of Eve.  Especially coming from the Caldari side of things.  I’ve basically sat in my implant clone for the past month non-stop, and I still have another month and a half to go before I’m finished.  If there’s anything that’s going to eventually make me quit Eve, it’s the eternal wait to get that next thing you need to get some setup or ship up to PvP spec.  The only good thing about it is that at the end of my blasterthron/hyperion plan, I won’t be too far off from training for a Moros.  Other than the drones. Most of the other stuff, I’ll get as a side effect of more medium term plans (example: Sci 5 comes at the end of the research plan, AWU5 comes at the end of a fitting plan, etc)

Then again, I guess that’s what being a generalized character means in eve.  God I wished I had started Gallente.

This sucks. I’ve known for a while now, but it’s kind of hard for me to verify it until today, where…well, it was patently obvious. It typically looks better when I have my hair cut, so I shall get it cut tomorrow. The only bad thing about getting my hair cut is that I will feel every goddamn breeze on the top of my head for the past month. This is why I so rarely have it cut.