Moveing!

So today I was again asked to come help move my friends store, my appointment book was free so I meandered down there, fully intending to stand around and do little work and talk rampant shit. Mission successful, however, I did bring my camera so you too can laugh along with another episode of the blind leading the blind. But first, some music while you are reading, to set the tone and all.

Oh look, a shelf, however will we move it?

                                          Indeed, a forklift, this should be no problem at all and it certainly doesn't sound dangerous or anything like that.

                                          Note the gentlemen getting the hell out the way.

                                          Yes, it was required that we go backwards the entire time, it was...well, fuck I don't actually know why we went backwards the whole time but it seemed to make sense while we were doing it.

A fine start to getting the shelf into the new place, this should be...

SHIT STOP WAIT FUCK

Playing in the rocks rather then working? How typical.

Look here at these pretty bitches, also avoiding work, while yours truly does all the hard shit.

About that hard shit, we seem to have broken something with the furious pace of moving we were trying to maintain.

Oh look an oily rag over the now superheated engine compartment, this is totally fine, we're all fine here thanks, how are you?

No man, that shit is totally straight, its just your eyes that are crooked.

And so on that last note I put away my camera and actually lifted shit and properly got in the way of everyone else until they made me sit in a corner with my hands under me, like a strip club, just in a warehouse… full of guys and boxes of paintball gear.

After that, I went to Ethans for some more beer hijinks, racked one batch to a secondary fermenter, this went fairly well, other than having the wrong hose on the auto-siphon ie. one that was too short, we made do though with the creative application of Tupperware bins. After that we bottled another batch, into bombers rather than normal 12oz bottles and this time we didn’t fail to put sugar in it, so it should be PERFECT! We found a dead mouse in an entirely inappropriate place, quite foul I must say. This was about the time we noticed Ethan was standing in a puddle, turns out his garbage disposal sprang a quite serious leak just then, fortunately we had a SHAM-WOW! Made short work of that puddle, the disposal on the other hand will take a wrench I suspect.

On the EVE front I got all my PI alts done and jumped down to Fountain, now I just need to train skills moar fastah, however I recently started replaying Final Fantasy 7 again, so I can use that to ignore EVE while my skills train.

I also think I might start painting my Warhammer 40k mini’s again, but we shall see, I cant help but feel black might have been a bad choice, due to it being boring to paint.

Made my day.

Not much of a new post, but I was just shown this, and I approve of this song in all it forms. Also it was made by our alliance mates to the north of us, so mucho-respecto TEST.

Got got.

http://gents.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=8997496

Last night I was ratting with some of the guys from Ascendant in L-A, I was late and rather then travel back to BYXF I logged off in space at a safe. Fast forward to today and I logged on, lo and behold, there were 2 Neutrals in local, but I had 5 or so safes spread across the system so I started bouncing between them waiting them out so I could make my way home. Fountaindef was reporting much activity from PNQY down to Hop, I should have just logged then, but no I had to dick around hoping they would leave. About 10 minutes of this and being chased by some scan probes from a Buzzard and the inevitable happened, I landed on grid at a safe and oh look, a Buzzard was there! He quickly locked and pointed me, my raven was obviously to slow to hope to get away and my cruise missiles would have done nothing to the Buzzard. Then his friend in a Sleipnir and 2 drakes arrived and that was pretty much all she wrote.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have loitered at any safes for any amount of time and really I should have just logged as soon as I saw the reds in local and read all the activity on Fountaindef. As for the fight, maybe if I had sicced my hobgoblins and target painter on the Buzzard I might have been able to kill it, but I doubt it. What would you guys have done?

Didn't really want that Raven anyway.

What a Night in New Eden.

So last night, I was quite bored, it was 11:30 and I was about to go to sleep when a Ping went out on Jabber (our alliance-wide chat client) that some Russians were in need of a most ungentlemanly exit from our space. I quickly logged in and got onto voice, there were only a few guys in voice, none of whom I recognized, but that’s ok, our alliance isn’t that small. I get my Bugswatter Hurricane (my new favorite ship) out and go rally up on the PNQY-Q gate in RP2, our scout was reporting 2 red Canes and a Drake, there were 11 of us in battlecruisers, we totally had this. After a few minutes one of our players says he is done for the night and jumps through to PNQY to dock up at the station, a few seconds later our scout gives up a warp in point, said player, for whatever reason promptly LEEEEEERRRROOOYYYYY’s into the red gate camp. Well our hand was forced, we scramble and jump through and warp to save him. We land on grid with 2 red Canes and a Drake wreck… WTF happened to the Drake? No matter, we lock up the reds, get points and webs on them and start turning their shield bars inside out.

The first Cane Kill:

http://gents.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=8986621

The Second Cane Kill:

http://gents.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=8986622

And his pod, squished by yours truly:

http://gents.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=8986620

Here’s the Battle Summary:

http://gents.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=8986620

We celebrate, high five and make merry, while the FC drives us back to BYXF (our home system) where we are stood down, after maybe five minutes of station spinning and killmail hating we get a message a neutral Mastodon is coming up the pipe from Hophib. A grey Mastodon, in GENTS space, it’s more likely than you think! We quickly undock and hustle to the P5- gate and set up for the uncloak, our scout reports a red gate activation (meaning the target is coming though) and a few seconds later a Buzzard uncloaks, not even my Bugswatter had a fast enough lock speed to catch him so he gets away. The FC in his wisdom orders us to jump and see if the reported Mastodon is lurking on the other side of the gate , turns out his predatory instincts were correct, however the ‘don makes it through the gate and we all hurry fat ass battlecruisers after him. How fortunate then that one of our fast tacklers was already there and had him pointed and webbed as soon as he uncloaked, giving us enough time to jump back and explode him.

The Mastodon:

http://gents.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=8986641

Sadly he was empty but such is life, now this is where the story takes a turn for the surreal, after we wacked this guy, he convos our FC, now this isn’t all that strange but the contents of said convo were quite odd.

Here are some of the chat logs, Daniel is our FC, Skuyou is the victim and my commentary is in bold.

LOCAL - immediately after mastodon died.

[ 2011.02.24 08:42:01 ] Skuyou > what would yall charge to haul soem stuff out of your area? jump freighter
[ 2011.02.24 08:42:24 ] Daniel Essig > i'll do it for free
[ 2011.02.24 08:42:31 ] Daniel Essig > we're gentlemen
[ 2011.02.24 08:42:48 ] Skuyou > lol why dont I believe that
[ 2011.02.24 08:45:31 ] Morolen1 > I say my good man, are you implying we are anything other honorable fellows

At this point I presumed it was just smacking in local, you know, like you do, but it seems as if the rabbit hole goes deeper than that. The following is the private chat between him and Daniel, I will fill in what the rest of us doing as the chat goes along. Sorry about the poor spelling but I think you can get the general idea.

[ 2011.02.24 08:43:47 ] Skuyou > yo

[ 2011.02.24 08:43:51 ] Daniel Essig > what do you need moved?

[ 2011.02.24 08:44:05 ] Skuyou > we have a wh thats a few systems over

[ 2011.02.24 08:44:13 ] Skuyou > c2 with a nice lil pos.

[ 2011.02.24 08:44:28 ] Daniel Essig > k

[ 2011.02.24 08:44:44 ] Skuyou > we have been getting hammered every day in that damd thing and havent seen a hs ent in about a month

[ 2011.02.24 08:45:15 ] Skuyou > today we decided that we would try to get back to hs with it so we collapsed it about 9 times and this is the closest that we have gotten

[ 2011.02.24 08:45:29 ] Daniel Essig > k

[ 2011.02.24 08:46:10 ] Daniel Essig > so... what do you need?

[ 2011.02.24 08:46:14 ] Skuyou > in all honesty. I want the tower. I dont really give a shit about the rest at this point

[ 2011.02.24 08:46:38 ] Daniel Essig > small tower?

[ 2011.02.24 08:46:49 ] Skuyou > large min

[ 2011.02.24 08:47:38 ] Daniel Essig > what do you want from us?

[ 2011.02.24 08:48:20 ] Daniel Essig > you want to bring it out and have us bring it to highsec for you?

[ 2011.02.24 08:48:23 ] Skuyou > most corps in null hiave a jump freighter that runs once every week or every other

[ 2011.02.24 08:48:32 ] Skuyou > yeah

[ 2011.02.24 08:48:47 ] Daniel Essig > what sys is this wormhole in?

[ 2011.02.24 08:49:05 ] Skuyou > this one

[ 2011.02.24 08:49:10 ] Daniel Essig > by?

[ 2011.02.24 08:49:13 ] Daniel Essig > byxf?

[ 2011.02.24 08:49:17 ] Skuyou > baa

[ 2011.02.24 08:49:20 ] Skuyou > cc99z

[ 2011.02.24 08:51:09 ] Daniel Essig > hmm ok

[ 2011.02.24 08:52:09 ] Skuyou > in all reality you just killed our transport ship

[ 2011.02.24 08:52:42 ] Daniel Essig > why did you bring it in here with no cargo?

[ 2011.02.24 08:53:05 ] Skuyou > we were heading up from hs

[ 2011.02.24 08:53:07 ] Daniel Essig > you were probably bringing it back from Lowsec

[ 2011.02.24 08:53:11 ] Daniel Essig > yeah

[ 2011.02.24 08:53:27 ] Daniel Essig > so you need us to grab it

[ 2011.02.24 08:53:56 ] Skuyou > well I can haul the junk to the nearest station with bestowers

[ 2011.02.24 08:54:26 ] Skuyou > after that figure 100m? to freighter it on your next run?

This is where Dan told the rest of us that this was really happening, or at least that the trap attempt was an elaborate one. We were still fairly certain it was a cunning trap on the part of Skuyou and his corp, because, well, come on.

[ 2011.02.24 08:54:46 ] Daniel Essig > sounds fair, tho we will pick it up for you from your wormhole

[ 2011.02.24 08:54:52 ] Daniel Essig > i was looking to see if i could fit it

[ 2011.02.24 08:55:02 ] Daniel Essig > safer even in our own space to do it in a cloaky

[ 2011.02.24 08:55:57 ] Skuyou > yeah

[ 2011.02.24 08:56:18 ] Daniel Essig > so i'm going to invite you to a fleet, can you put my cloaky on your WH to go into 0.0?

[ 2011.02.24 08:56:19 ] Skuyou > its a relitively fresh wh 5 frigs through it

[ 2011.02.24 08:57:13 ] Skuyou > my cloaky on your wh???

[ 2011.02.24 08:57:33 ] Daniel Essig > i want you to give me the BM on our side

[ 2011.02.24 08:57:41 ] Daniel Essig > then go to ur pos, is it ready for me to scoop?

[ 2011.02.24 08:57:43 ] Skuyou > o ok

[ 2011.02.24 08:58:56 ] Skuyou > ok I am out of the fleet

[ 2011.02.24 08:59:13 ] Daniel Essig > is the tower unanchored and ready for me to scoop?

[ 2011.02.24 08:59:21 ] Skuyou > nope

[ 2011.02.24 08:59:37 ] Daniel Essig > unanchor it

[ 2011.02.24 08:59:37 ] Skuyou > I was leaving the defences online till all the easy shit was done

[ 2011.02.24 09:00:22 ] Daniel Essig > you can unanchor it now

[ 2011.02.24 09:00:26 ] Daniel Essig > we're ready to grab it

[ 2011.02.24 09:03:34 ] Skuyou > this is going to be a bitch to do

[ 2011.02.24 09:03:56 ] Daniel Essig > how is that?

[ 2011.02.24 09:04:09 ] Skuyou > unloading guns in a bestower

[ 2011.02.24 09:04:51 ] Daniel Essig > rofl

[ 2011.02.24 09:04:53 ] Skuyou > shield pass is 123

[ 2011.02.24 09:04:54 ] Daniel Essig > thats slow...

[ 2011.02.24 09:05:22 ] Daniel Essig > come get us the WH bookmark again i'll invite you to fleet now

[ 2011.02.24 09:07:52 ] Daniel Essig > k when i see you in local i'll warp to you

[ 2011.02.24 09:07:55 ] Daniel Essig > on my alt

[ 2011.02.24 09:07:59 ] Skuyou > ok

[ 2011.02.24 09:08:28 ] Skuyou > just hope yall are trust worthy

Yea, about that, now Dan was saying he was in a wormhole with this guy and warping to his POS, we were expecting smart bombing battleships or something along those lines. It hadn’t really occurred to us that it might really be happening, it was simply too absurd to consider that a stranger was giving us the keys to the kingdom.

[ 2011.02.24 09:15:14 ] Daniel Essig > is it ready yet?

[ 2011.02.24 09:15:19 ] Daniel Essig > i dropped as they told you

[ 2011.02.24 09:15:51 ] Skuyou > I didnt know if you had warped in yet so I just stayed put

[ 2011.02.24 09:16:06 ] Daniel Essig > thanks

[ 2011.02.24 09:16:36 ] Skuyou > i offlined everything so its safe to aproach it

[ 2011.02.24 09:18:27 ] Daniel Essig > you at it now?

[ 2011.02.24 09:18:36 ] Skuyou > yeah

[ 2011.02.24 09:20:18 ] Skuyou > so I am wondering.. should I be trusting you?

[ 2011.02.24 09:20:34 ] Daniel Essig > as i said

[ 2011.02.24 09:20:45 ] Skuyou > ok coo

[ 2011.02.24 09:21:13 ] Daniel Essig > i see you ahve alot of ships empty

[ 2011.02.24 09:21:30 ] Skuyou > we have been jumping this wh all day long

[ 2011.02.24 09:21:46 ] Daniel Essig > you need my guys to move those ships for you?

[ 2011.02.24 09:22:38 ] Skuyou > I can fly the drake and the exhumers

[ 2011.02.24 09:22:44 ] Skuyou > bestower

[ 2011.02.24 09:23:11 ] Skuyou > if I could get the noctis flown it would be great

Of course we could fly that, we are gentlemen after all, and about all the OTHER ships he had at his POS, well, we wouldn’t want it to be too much of a hassle on this poor fellow. We quickly go and leave our ships at a friendly POS in the system the wormhole entrance was in and we all warp to Daniel. I’ll be damned, the POS password worked and we were in. I quickly got in a Covetor and fled the scene. I was expecting at any moment for the guy to wise up and it all to break down or a stealth freighter to come and trap us all in the wormhole.

[ 2011.02.24 09:23:50 ] Daniel Essig > ok

[ 2011.02.24 09:24:20 ] Skuyou > not sure what to do about that prowler

[ 2011.02.24 09:24:48 ] Daniel Essig > i got it

[ 2011.02.24 09:25:06 ] Daniel Essig > my alt is here in a prowler atm... i'll go drop it off and pod over

[ 2011.02.24 09:26:03 ] Skuyou > if yall have a galint pilot tell him he can have the myrm

[ 2011.02.24 09:36:03 ] Daniel Essig > grabbin what we can

[ 2011.02.24 09:37:28 ] Skuyou > when do you think your freight run will be?

[ 2011.02.24 09:37:35 ] Daniel Essig > we do them pretty much ever day

[ 2011.02.24 09:37:38 ] Daniel Essig > so probly tomorrow

[ 2011.02.24 09:37:47 ] Skuyou > sweet

[ 2011.02.24 09:37:52 ] Daniel Essig > these chinese things on scan

[ 2011.02.24 09:37:54 ] Daniel Essig > orca and shit

[ 2011.02.24 09:37:55 ] Daniel Essig > that you?

[ 2011.02.24 09:38:19 ] Skuyou > orca and shit?

[ 2011.02.24 09:38:33 ] Skuyou > no.. I wish

[ 2011.02.24 09:38:41 ] Daniel Essig > yeah we have orca on scan in this system

[ 2011.02.24 09:39:18 ] Skuyou > its just me and zeeg up here now

[ 2011.02.24 09:39:26 ] Skuyou > and I am boxing him

[ 2011.02.24 09:39:35 ] Daniel Essig > you want us to move that hulk for you?

[ 2011.02.24 09:39:38 ] Skuyou > everyone els is dead from trying to jump the systems

[ 2011.02.24 09:39:40 ] Daniel Essig > or anything else in ship maint?

[ 2011.02.24 09:40:07 ] Skuyou > that was everything out of the ship maint

[ 2011.02.24 09:40:18 ] Daniel Essig > ok

[ 2011.02.24 09:40:24 ] Daniel Essig > ur hulk?

[ 2011.02.24 09:41:11 ] Skuyou > if you want to

[ 2011.02.24 09:41:27 ] Daniel Essig > sure

[ 2011.02.24 09:41:30 ] Daniel Essig > eject

Much to our surprise, he actually ejected from his hulk and one of our guy hopped in and flew it off. This was about the point we were going crazy on mumble since it really seemed this was really happening and there was no real trap.

[ 2011.02.24 09:41:33 ] Skuyou > otherwise I can fly it out

[ 2011.02.24 09:42:55 ] Skuyou > the only thing I really need is that buzz so I can get this clone back

[ 2011.02.24 09:43:11 ] Daniel Essig > we'll escort your bestower

[ 2011.02.24 09:43:18 ] Daniel Essig > we already moved the buzz

[ 2011.02.24 09:44:04 ] Skuyou > its ok

[ 2011.02.24 09:44:11 ] Daniel Essig > 0.0 is dangerous

[ 2011.02.24 09:44:20 ] Skuyou > believe me I know

[ 2011.02.24 09:44:30 ] Skuyou > I spent a good amount of time out here

[ 2011.02.24 09:44:48 ] Skuyou > I was based out of venal

[ 2011.02.24 09:45:00 ] Daniel Essig > ah ok

[ 2011.02.24 09:45:07 ] Skuyou > I left null due to the nc pl war in our back yard...

[ 2011.02.24 09:45:14 ] Skuyou > screw that crap

[ 2011.02.24 09:45:18 ] Daniel Essig > ah

[ 2011.02.24 09:45:46 ] Skuyou > I am going to throw down a bunch of cans for ya

[ 2011.02.24 09:46:23 ] Daniel Essig > ok

[ 2011.02.24 09:46:35 ] Daniel Essig > we're bringing in some transports

We had all scrambled back to BYXF and got what Industrial ships we could, much to our collective amusement none of us could fly his Bestowers, however about 4 jumps from us someone was selling a Amarr Industrial skillbook. One of our guys hopped over and started training it.

[ 2011.02.24 09:47:18 ] Daniel Essig > i'll haul shit in your hoarder

[ 2011.02.24 09:47:23 ] Daniel Essig > go ahead and jet can w/e

[ 2011.02.24 09:50:03 ] Skuyou > yall mine?

[ 2011.02.24 09:50:15 ] Daniel Essig > mmhm

[ 2011.02.24 09:50:33 ] Skuyou > ok yall can have the bits of unporcessed junk we have

[ 2011.02.24 09:50:47 ] Skuyou > its going to take yall a while to haul it

[ 2011.02.24 09:51:01 ] Daniel Essig > how much is a while?

[ 2011.02.24 09:51:55 ] Skuyou > 60k worth?

[ 2011.02.24 09:52:03 ] Daniel Essig > m3?

[ 2011.02.24 09:52:08 ] Daniel Essig > 60km3?

[ 2011.02.24 09:52:08 ] Skuyou > yeah

[ 2011.02.24 09:52:25 ] Skuyou > so 3 runs in a bestower

[ 2011.02.24 09:53:09 ] Daniel Essig > ok

[ 2011.02.24 09:53:35 ] Skuyou > good rocks are heavy as hell

[ 2011.02.24 09:53:41 ] Daniel Essig > yah

[ 2011.02.24 09:54:02 ] Skuyou > and that damd intense thing takes 3 hours no matter how much you put in it

[ 2011.02.24 09:54:46 ] Daniel Essig > yah

[ 2011.02.24 09:54:50 ] Daniel Essig > good turn out tho

[ 2011.02.24 09:59:58 ] Skuyou > hmm

[ 2011.02.24 10:02:47 ] Daniel Essig > sup?

[ 2011.02.24 10:02:51 ] Daniel Essig > anything else?

[ 2011.02.24 10:03:00 ] Skuyou > cans that I have dropped

[ 2011.02.24 10:03:13 ] Daniel Essig > workin on those

[ 2011.02.24 10:03:17 ] Daniel Essig > anything other than those?

[ 2011.02.24 10:03:25 ] Skuyou > guns and the tower

[ 2011.02.24 10:03:28 ] Daniel Essig > k

[ 2011.02.24 10:04:25 ] Skuyou > just looking at downtime comin going o yeah hope we get this done

[ 2011.02.24 10:04:33 ] Daniel Essig > we'll be on after DT

YOU ARE DAMN RIGHT WE WILL BE ON AFTER DOWNTIME, HOW ELSE ARE WE GOING TO STEAL ALL YOUR SHIT BRO!

[ 2011.02.24 10:04:57 ] Daniel Essig > its only like 30 min

[ 2011.02.24 10:05:29 ] Skuyou > yeah

[ 2011.02.24 10:05:45 ] Skuyou > I know... but once dt hits I know I should have been asleep hours ago

[ 2011.02.24 10:05:54 ] Daniel Essig > hmm

[ 2011.02.24 10:06:09 ] Daniel Essig > well we're here after if you're willin to hang up

[ 2011.02.24 10:06:13 ] Daniel Essig > hang ot \

[ 2011.02.24 10:06:16 ] Skuyou > I dont really care that much... just a wake up call... what time is it

[ 2011.02.24 10:06:49 ] Skuyou > I am us west

[ 2011.02.24 10:07:00 ] Skuyou > its 2am

[ 2011.02.24 10:07:13 ] Daniel Essig > im AZ - its 3aM

[ 2011.02.24 10:59:16 ] Daniel Essig > Lesson learned?

[ 2011.02.24 10:59:27 ] Skuyou > honestly

[ 2011.02.24 10:59:33 ] Skuyou > I just didnt want it on a kill mail

So the story ends, with us getting a full Minmatar POS setup and a slew of POS modules and all kinda of other stuff, the cherry on the cake is, mere seconds before downtime, we pop him and his alt, using ships we stole from him.

http://gents.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=8987271

Yes that was Skuyou’s Harby on the km, poetic I think.

http://gents.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=8987176

And the photo of all the stuff we stole.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v503/morolen/20110224121045.jpg

I am fairly certain this was the best EVE adventure I have participated in ever.

Damn you Caitlin!

How do you know EVE is a complex game? After playing for over a year I still don’t know about over half of the major game mechanics and am still finding new utility in the UI. On Sunday my roommate and I took a “class” on Planetary Interaction, done by the Goons PI guru. Like the song says “I’ve got the magic in me” at least once my skills train that is. It was remarkably well done with videos and almost 5 hours of lecture, needless to say I am quite excite about starting PI for myself. In other news I got my Bugswatter Hurricane put together and took it out for a spin, the fleet was hunting a stealth bomber, I set up on the gate, turned my sensor boosters and tracking computer on and waited with my guns armed. The red jumped through the gate, uncloaked and in under a second was exploded but yours truly. The rest of the fleet didn’t even get to lock the red up, they were displeased, I suppose drinks are on me. Other than that our little region of Fountain has been quiet, though I keep seeing Pandemic Legion scouts flying around, looking for a juicy hotdrop target I suspect. There has been talk of getting our mining ships out and grinding some rocks up, might be worth it to get my hulk jumped down here so I can get a little use out of those damn skills I trained for.

Paintball on Saturday was a good time, stormed the Alamo with a team mate of mine, always intense that. Got to use a CCM S6 again, I want one like real bad, though I am somewhat torn as to the colors, Gloss Purple and White maybe. There were quite a lot of people out at the field, more then we have had all year, though considering it was almost 65 degrees that’s hardly a surprise, summer cannot, in fact, come soon enough. I do need to shoot more video and take more photos though, I think on Friday one of the teammates and I are going to be storyboarding for a new PB video, now here’s to hoping the semi-lucid ideas I have in my head can be turned into something that I can actually film and remain coherent. I also think I am going to go out to the field sometime this week to shoot some stock footage without people or my mask getting in the way.

Work was awful this week, due to tear gas, WTF you might be thinking, well allow me to illustrate the situation for you. When someone is in their home and the police decide it’s time for the tear gas to come out, they don’t just shoot one or two round of it into a home, oh no, they have to get it everywhere, since they obviously don’t know exactly where the suspect is in a house. To do this they shoot the canisters through the windows, all of them. Eventually these windows need to be replaced and this is where I come in. The tear gas seems to be, rather than a gas as one might imagine, very fine particulates, that stick to, and get behind, everything. So every time we had to rip the window frame from the wall, SUDDENLY, TEAR GAS IN THE FACE. There were 12 windows in this house, I felt like I was in Cairo (Not Tripoli, because Gaddafi just shoots his protesters with war planes), so by extension I got tear gassed 12 times this week. Though other then feeling a bit like I was at the Battle of the Somme, it wasn’t too bad, comparatively, sort of. I was strongly considering trying to take some of this residue with me to fuck with my friends, but trying to get it off the wall and into a Ziploc bag was far too hard.

Worked on a new IPA recipe last night, hopefully a little less insane then our last one, though we did manage to forget to do pretty much everything while brewing, I blame the tear gas affecting my already poor mental faculties. I finally got to taste our red beer that we fucked up by not carbonating it, I think that one is soon destined to go down the sink, but it was a learning experience… been having a lot of those recently.

Speaking of mental Faculties, as I was on the way home from brewing, I was hailed by a rather attractive girl hitchhiking. The retarded part of the story is after I took her to wherever she wanted me to drop her off, I failed to ask for her number, or even last name. At the time, in my quite sleepy state, my thoughts were “She has already had quite an unpleasant night and getting hit on by some goober that drove her 10 blocks would be in poor taste.” This morning I feel that was the wrong choice and alas it is too late (and would be too stalkerish) to try and rectify it now, but what would you all have done? Yes I know my man card may be revoked and all and generally speaking I think white-knighting is laughable at best so get the mocking out of the way.

Another, unrelated question, would you guys ever use a Facebook connect feature to log into a forum? Or are you like me and you want your online stuff and AFK stuff to never really intersect?

Also here are some of the tunes I have been rocking at full force recently, just felt like sharing I guess.

Kraddy – Steppin Razor

and

The Glitch Mob – Fortune Days

Ok, off to work out I think.

A little long in the making...

Well, where to start, much has happened since my last post so I suppose I can start where I left off…

WTF was that shit?

*Ahem*

Well, I got a new job, one that can work around my other job, for optimal employment time. I am now an official paintball gremlin, with a user name and everything. This mostly consists of replying to emails slowly, writing product reviews slowly, live chatting with customers slowly (slower in Brazil, but we love you Brazilians!), packing boxes slowly and just generally doing what everyone else does, just not as fast. While I’m sure I will get faster it’s a little discouraging at times since these people are my friends and I don’t want to be a shitty worker and make it harder on them. Of course working with friends makes the days go by much faster and after almost 5 years of construction, I can barely believe people get paid for shit this easy. :D I am also working on my healthy contempt of people, something everyone gets once they work in retail for any amount of time.

Our first batch of beer got finished on Monday, I was firmly expecting it to be awful but we seemed to do it quite well, good color, good head (hur hur), good flavor, about what we were going for. It was slightly fruity but that has since gone away after a few days once the yeast was shut down by the cold. In other news pulled pork sandwiches are delicious even when they exhibit glue-like properties. It snowed like a motherfucker Monday night, our next little slice of snowpocalypse. The next day I went in for my first semi-work day at the paintball store, I must say it’s pretty awesome to work with your friends and cruise the internet to good effect all day, getting paid is a bonus on top of that.

Snowed more today, not too bad but such is life I guess, unless of course you drive a v8 rear wheel drive automatic…yea… about that. I got stuck in traffic on a hill, fortunately a nice gentleman in a SUV pushed my Crown Vic up the hill and got me going again, +1 Internets for you good sir. Needless to say I made Ethan drive the next day, his Subaru is a pretty cool guy, it drives up hills (as long as Ethan doesn’t turn off the traction control) and doesn’t afraid of anything. On Friday with quite the full house we did more beer shenanigans, firstly we went about bottling our red beer, it was going along swimmingly until about the last 25% was bottled this was about the time we realized that… we forgot to put in the priming sugar. That is important since without it the beer will not be carbonated, some scrambling later and semi-clever last minutes fixes and we will…probably have fucked it all up, but I suppose we shall see. We should have taken that as a sign but instead we went on to make our first recipe, an IPA, which I composed essentially by the seat of my pants and now in retrospect I feel I likely over did it a little, time will tell.

Saturday is played some EVE with my roommate and Looch, killed some rats, made some money etc. Then our GLORIOUS LEADER Lake sent out a ping to GET YOUR ASS TO MARS err… to the rally point, in a frigate, for something awesome in Delve. This had potential for epic written all over it so I hop in my INVINCIBLE CROW and rally up. Sadly no one really came out to play other than a bunch of sissies who ran from our Frigates in their Battlecruisers, it was a moral victory if nothing else.

On Sunday…I noticed the new season of Top Gear started…4 weeks ago, I fired up the internet and quickly geeked out on the Boys from Britain, mostly I learned that the BMW 325i is the best car ever and you should go buy one (or two, or three) right now. Later in the week my boss and I got carbon monoxide poisoning from the job site we were working at, no bueno. The next day we had to go to a house where the past tenant had been tear gassed by the police and someone had to replace the windows where the gas canisters were shot through them. So yea… got tear gassed the day after I got carbon monoxide poisoning, I think I need a raise.

State of the Goonion

Since it was requested and I mentioned it with such glowing reviews, here is the megaupload for the State of the Goonion speech made by The Mittani, our alliance leader.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QBYAA2R2

PEEVEEPEE

One of the fellows from my paintball team has decided that he wants to give EVE a try. This has potential for much awesome, after sending him a buddy invite and conversating about the trials and tribulations most new capsuleers face he gets logged in and starts doing some tutorials. Fast forward to the next night and I happen to be back in empire space picking up some blueprints when I see him log on. I direct him to our corps old vent server, which is still working somehow. We start discussing EVE careers, pvp, null sec the awful UI and why the overview is your best friend and you should cuddle with it and pour its wine. Eventually I settle on doing a quick low sec roam around Sinq Laison, now keep in mind I know nothing about this region and I find the Gallente to be a bunch of surrender monkeys with little sense of spaceship ascetic, barring their cap ships, those are handsome devils. So armed with a dotlan map of Sinq I look for the closest low sec to Dodixie, only about 3 jumps away, perfect. We fleet up and I give him a crash course in aggression mechanics, transversal, FC commands and various forms of traps we might find. I tell him to hold on the high sec side, while I jump through in my AWESOME RIFTER OF AWESOME, just to see if the gate is camped. Turns out it isn’t, however, there is an Iteron mk3 on the other side, I curse the gate guns and watch it jump away.

Looch (my friend) jumps on through and we proceed to sit on the game for a few minutes while I rant about, well, something or other, eventually we decide that this is getting us nowhere. I open up dotlan to check what the surrounding systems look like only to find we are in a 2 system island surrounded by empire. Well shit, I guess gate camping it is then! After a few more boring minutes of orbiting the Balle gate a rifter shows up on grid, all by his lonesome. A lone rifter, in low sec, its more likely then you think! He flys over and plays orbiting games with us, our two group giving each other (and the gate guns) the stare down, see if noobishness will strike the other one first. He warps off and back a few more times and I eventually get the idea he wants us to follow him, to the top belt, THIS ISNT A TRAP OR ANYTHING, but whatever, I promised Looch some combat and explosions and by Jove I’ll deliver.

A short warp later, Mr. Rifter is sitting there, looking all innocent and lonely and I’m getting excited just to see what the trap is, he breaks the ice with his point and we start exchanging ammo in a most ungentlemanly fashion. Looch and I are doing a fine job of breaking his tank when a new person appears in local, I tell Looch to align to a planet because it’s about to be on like Donkey Kong in a man thing playing ping pong. The new guy lands on grid in, wait for it… an ISHKUR, I was expecting a Hurricane or something at least, though it isn’t as if it matters since it is going to crush me in any case. I tell Looch to GTFO and I wait for the inevitable evemail, a few moments later and the Ishkur delivered said EVEmail. I warp my pod off, gf’s are exchanged in local and our worthy foes congratulated Looch on his first pvp experience.

I think if I am going to do this again soon, a MANthrasher is in order mostly for the amusement factor, but also because I’m a Python Cartel fanboy. Looch was quite amused by this whole situation and hopefully tomorrow we can get his ass out to PNQY and null sec to participate in blobs, erotic harry potter fanfics and other gentlemanly behavior courtesy of the Clusterfuck in general and GENTS in specific, until next time, fly dangerous!

My Snowpocalypse 2011 tale

So last night at around 6:30 I get a text message reply from my friend who was moving out here from Kansas.

He had been in an accident with an 18 wheeler due to the awful driving conditions on I-70. After I find that he hasn’t been hurt I come to realize that I need to go help him, in Limon, about 120 miles from me. Now to put into perspective why this was so daunting I think a list of things my car doesn’t do is in order.

Wipers: These work, just not right in front of the driver, they work fine everywhere else on the windshield.

Wiper Fluid: Might work but there is a hole in the fluid reservoir and thus it leaks out as fast as I can pour more in.

Heater: This works, after the car has been on for long then 2 hours, don’t know why, but that’s the rule.

Rear Passenger-side Window: Is stuck about 5/6^th of the way up, makes for a cold ride on that side of the car, the front seat is fine though.

Of course at the time I considered none of this since my bro was in need, so the plan pretty much consisted of this picture.

Needless to say the drive was quite hair raising, since I couldn’t see most of the time due to the filthy spray off the road slowly covering my windshield. However 5 and a half hours later we returned with Neil and powered down some pizza and vodka in celebration of his coming back to the thin air of Colorado. Welcome back man, I hope this wasn’t a bad omen or anything.

Interceptoring

So how is everyone’s Snowpocalypse going? It’s snowing here again and like everyone else I am getting quite fed up with this, particularly for Colorado, it’s just plain undignified, I want my 300+ sunny days back already. My car also doesn’t seem to approve of the foul weather, starting it is getting harder and harder. Though our volume of snow isn’t particularly high, the brutal cold is making me hunker down at home more than usual. The cold has also been interfering with my workout routine badly since my machine is out in the greenhouse, though I have started to develop a taste for Grape Nuts, those are healthy right? I have also been on a Glitch Mob kick recently, don’t know why but, in any case, go rock this track, it’s likely to be the next song I try and fit into a paintball video sometime. Apologies’ for the lack of updates in the last few days, but as you might have guessed not a lot has been going on.

I have been recruited by Hustle Paintball, a local store and good friends of mine, to act as a Community Manager for the moment. This mostly consists of forum warrioring and putting a good face on, if you happen to be interested, go on over to http://a5og.net/ and see what’s up, it’s a forum mostly for owners of the Tippmann a-5 marker. I have CM’d before, though not gotten compensated for it, so this is both new and familiar to me. It’s a perfect job for me right now since I can play EVE and post at the same time. I also need to go down to Hustle soon to perhaps get in on some of their videos and just generally be useful, but we shall see how my car feels about that plan.

Some things in New Eden, finished training for interceptors recently, which means it time to start losing interceptors! On Tuesday night, got into my first inty, a Crow in case you were wondering, got it all fitted as our alliance prefers and undocked from the PNQY station. After flying Maelstroms, Ravens and Hurricanes, the Crow was…nimble… to say the least, I immediately warp off to a planet to dick around and start getting a feel for just how fast it can warp, and change direction, quite satisfying. I might seriously consider being the fast tackle guy at this point in my inty career, of course around a planet you have no real sense of speed other then the number on the overview, so I warp to an alliance POS. Oh boy, that changes things, going 4km/sec feels almost like cheating, particularly considering the… stately pace most things in EVE proceed at. I was starting to harken back to my FPS playing days when suddenly… a call comes out on the alliance comms, one of our pilots is tackled on the RP2 gate by a hostile Dramiel. “I FUCKING GOT THIS” I said aloud, as I started warping to the tackled pilot, famous last words, other alliance members say they are also in warp to assist.

I land on grid about 30km away from the quickly forming furball just as a red Hurricane and Harbinger jump though the gate to assist the red Dramiel. I quickly decide the ‘Cane is a better target and move over to it, point it and get my orbit and pussy little rocket launchers cooking. The ‘Cane impudently ignores me other then sicing its Valk II drones on me, they are only barely effective, and we both burn in the general direction of our poor beleaguered blue pilot. This was the point I should have started getting worried, but FUCK THAT SHIT I’M IN A INTY I CAN DO ANYTHING! Yea, about that, you see the weakness of intys is energy warfare, aka energy neutralizers, because without the power to run your microwarp drive, and inty goes from “threat” to “expensive tech 1 frigate”. About ¾ of the way to my ally, the ‘Cane driver must have had enough of my antics because I see my capacitor disappear in a lump, Shit, before I could flee outside the range of his neut, my ship explodes in a decidedly less glorious fashion then I had hoped. I quickly warp my pod away, still somewhat in shock and post fight adrenal high. Lesson learned I suppose, stay out of neut range, it’s not just something those crusty old bittervets say. This all happened within about 10 minutes of getting into an Inty for the first time, a fitting start to a fast tackle career I think.

Started seriously looking into training for carriers soon, but damn if that isn’t a fairly serious time and money investment, to be a semi competent Chimera driver, will, according to EVEmon, take me about 160 days. Who knows how much ISK it will cost, obviously I need to rat harder, or get our systems upgraded faster, because I sure could use a complex or ten to fund this. To say nothing of the stack of interceptors I am going to be losing in the coming days.

Well I’m off to see how my car feels about working today, enjoy the snow everyone.

Update- My car works! It must have gotten warm enough for the battery to decide it wanted to play ball, so atleast im not trapped at home.

Things that are Awesome

So I just got out of the shower, while enjoying a Dogfish Head 90 minute IPA after a solid day of paintball and I finally got to under 185 on the scale(that was an awful sentence...) . Still no work this week, but the boss said we will have some nect week, well, im not starving yet so im not complaining, besides it gives me plenty of time to work on this blog and play EVE and all sorts of things. Though this week I get to see an old friend who just moved back, my roommate and I are quite excited about that.

Paintball was quite good, got several lucky kills with my teammates pump gun (a CCM S6), I now want one quite badly, this is problem because I already ordered one, a different one from another company, hopefully I can sell it for a reasonable price. Such is life I suppose, maybe I can find one on the internet for a reasonable price and sell the one I already ordered. Playing with a pump is quite different then with my Ego 11, though it might just be because I have to get right up on someone to hit them at all. Also got some fine photos taken of the team, well, maybe fine… in any case go check them out over at http://www.flickr.com/photos/teamanomaly/ and comment on something! We had the best turnout of people all winter, it was pretty fun, maybe 40 or so people came out but bring on the heat and real crowds already.

The EVE war with -IT- has been going well and by well I mean to say that they have done precisely dick and we all just sort of hung out waiting for them to attack. The last chance for them to try for something is going to happen at 7am tomorrow, ill need to set my alarm and hope they cowboy-the-fuck-up. Though a few random 80 man roaming fleets came in and got crushed, they didn’t really have anything to do with the war and were promptly handled. Those 2 little encounters did illustrate just how awful our dictor and hictor pilots are, I think I spent most of those fights trying to get out of bubbles thrown down by our pilots who can’t seem to read the overview and try to bubble people 90km from us. I did get on a few killmails and our corp, CDEC got on several, but then again, it was a Maelstrom blobfest so they don’t really count as far as im concerned. My roommate learned that interceptors warp QUITE fast and he quickly achieved hero status when he went all alone against 80 Armor HACs, if you know him, make sure you mention his hero status next time you see him.

Friday night we bottled our second batch of beer, a clone of Newcastle brown ale, and it went much better than before. It turned out a lovely color, though it wasn’t as flavorful as we were hoping, perhaps it will get better in the bottles. On the topic of beer, I recently had a Dogfish Head 90 minute IPA, it is now my new favorite without a doubt and I encourage everyone to give it a go, even with its not insignificant cost. There are so many things I want to try to brew, in the near future, a chocolate-cherry Stout, Cider, Barleywine, a porter of some kind and an Oatmeal Stout are all things I would like to try at some point. As well as develop our own IPA recipe that we take the time to get right and maybe go places with. What kinds of beers do you all like?

Well, its time for sleep so I can try to be up for the big throw down with –IT-, wish us luck, also I am going to turn my blog public, so welcome everyone!

The burning of 6VDT-H

I am going to try to write an entry about this massive fleet engagement that is going on in EVE, so I apologize for the stream of consciousness post, the leader of our alliance is going to be making a speech, should be entertaining. Seven hundred people on the teamspeak server and no one talking, moderated channels are good stuff, normally with even a fraction of those numbers, it becomes impossible to hear the fleet commander. With a thousand+ people on the TS2 sever, its amusing to watch it creak under the stress and the user count climb like a drunken ape in pursuit of a banana.

Up to 1200 connections now, not bad for a game about important internet spaceships, this is certainly the nerdiest and largest thing I have ever done in a game, feels epic bro. After a rousing speech by our glorious leader, we mobilized all 1200 pilots in only 20 minutes, a victory of logistics and scrambling if nothing else. Once I get a transcript of it I will post it here, however, I have recorded the speech and it’s a pretty good listen. The speech was generally well received and scared the bejezzus out of our victims, they were scrambling to evacuate all their valuable ships and modules before we locked the system down completely.

After a short bout of waiting for the titan to bridge us to the a connecting system and a short traffic control wait, we jumped into the target system and watched the enemy station get bubbled and locked down hard and fast. We quickly warped to one of our foes POSes and put it into reinforced mode in a matter of minutes, despite the admittedly valiant attempts by a few bombers and one lone interdictor trying to harass us to no avail. After we dealt with that pos we move onto another one, rapidly neutralizing its various guns and ECM modules. This tower, however, was much better shielded then the last one and thus took a bit more doing. That being said, there isn’t much 200 maelstroms and 50 logistics ships can’t do, and doing is what we got done.

We jumped around the system for several minutes, to a greater or lesser effect and with what seems to be no plan or direction, at least that I could discern. Eventually we were directed to a friendly POS that had just finished anchoring and all 250 of us were relegated to guard duty for some time. Eventually we moved on to shoot at still more poses and listen to the antics the capital ships fleet were participating in. At about this time we got to see the cap fleet in all its glory…and it was GLORIOUS, more ISK then I can even comprehend warped in to finish off the pos we were blasting, quite dramatic stuff.

Now we are in for the long haul, and I am in for a long night, we are expecting our foes to counter-attack around 4 AM and the campaign is intended to last for 5 days, so until Sunday evening the grind is on.

Beer and Oranges!

A few things today, our first batch of beer, the beers code name was Lexie after my friends yellow Labrador, was finally ready to be bottled, which was an event in itself. After playing around with the auto-siphon and coming to terms with the fact that the one we had was either broken, or that we were too dumb to figure out how to get it to work properly, we were forced to use the racking cane and tubing to siphon to the bottling bucket. This was another comedy of errors, to prime the siphon, you fill it with sterile water and lower the end below the level of the original container, like siphoning gas from a car into a gas can. We had 3 false starts, due to not filling the siphon up enough to get the vacuum started, these were punctuated with much swearing and accusations of deviant lifestyles. On the upside we now have a proper digital scale and a few other implements that will make the beer brewing process easier, though the important things we don’t have are only becoming more obvious ie. a refractometer. Come Friday we will be bottling our second batch of beer, codenamed Daisy, also named after a dog, with some luck that will go a bit more smoothly.

On the paintball front, a teammate got a new gun today, a Chipley Custom Machines S6, in gloss orange and chrome. It’s quite lovely and I now want one rather badly, even though I preordered a Metadyne Pump marker recently (when are they going to name that gun). I have wanted a pump gun for some time now and haven’t seen one I really like, they are often somewhat plain, and I like my guns to be flashy. It is possible that means I am shallow and have poor taste but I am willing to accept that, besides I have poor taste in many other things so no surprise there. The S6 is a full block autococker (google it if you are curious why they look like), thus one of the downsides is the back block can whack you in the nose every time you pump it to chamber a ball, that could be a deal breaker for me so I will just have to play with it and see. I was also asked to take a few photos for the paintball store, for use on their website, it reminded me just how little I know about taking still life or product photography. Though I can certainly see a charm in doing it and I would like to do it more often, I will just have to see how well, or poorly, those turn out.

The last thing of note that happened today was, well, a job offer of sorts. As I mentioned last time, I have had quite a lot of time off of work recently and I dislike sitting around doing nothing and not making money, though who does? One of my teammates asked me if I wanted to work with him on a few things he has going on. I somewhat excitedly agreed, both the chance to make money and work with my friend was too good an opportunity to pass up, I just hope I don’t disappoint. The drive will be a little more obnoxious then I am used to, but I won’t have to get up any earlier than normal so it all balances out. I will find out tomorrow what the word on it is, here’s to hoping it’s good news.

I also just noticed in the last entry I didn’t mention why I picked The Lever of Archimedes for the name of my blog, despite my two paragraph rant on names. Well, Archimedes has a famous quote "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” I rather like that quote and in the case of my blog it would go something like "Give me a blog long enough and an audience on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Mostly an amusing play on the quote, tragically it doesn’t sound quite as clever now that I am forced to write it out.

First!

That new blog smell, smells like teen spirit and napalm in the morning I suppose. Here is where I am going to record, rant, reevaluate, give rise to and, in general, act a little retarded on the Interblags. Also a personal forum and way to sharpen my writing skills, practice practice eh?

First things first, I needed a name for this right here and to cut to the chase, I like names. Don’t really know why but I have always seemed to like something more if it has a good name to it. I guess names are like mimetic smells, a bit of mental shorthand that can conjure up intense and vivid memories. A good name should be more than just what a thing is, instead it should be a scaled down version of that thing. Epic places need epic names and well, un-epic places don’t, of course maybe the name becomes epic once the places does likewise, but for the sake of this example ill stick to fictional names. Names like Pillars of Autumn, City 17, Midgar and Tristram should all evoke fond memories from the video gamers amongst us.

Others like Enterprise, Millennium Falcon, Batman and Wintermute also have this nostalgic potential for film and the written word, respectively. However, in my case at least, this interest (or perhaps low temperature love affair) with names isn’t confined to things from the past. In EVE Online, my scouting/stealth/spy/exploration ship is named Mata Hari, and to paraphrase from Wikipedia, “A Dutch exotic dancer, courtesan, and accused spy who, although possibly innocent, was executed by firing squad in France for espionage for Germany during World War I.” Did I choose the name to embody my (Serious Business) internet spaceship with a bit of spy mojo? Or was it just because it was appropriate, maybe it was just for the lulz and the off chance someone else would see the name on the scanner and think “How clever”? Truthfully I don’t really know and I suppose it doesn’t really matter and after 2 paragraphs of semi coherence I’m not entirely sure where I ended up or if anything was really said.

In other news, I have been officially upgraded as paintball player from Scrub to Dangerous Scrub. Strange because I don’t really feel any better as a player, and to use a parlance from EVE, got my shit pushed all the way in at the field on Saturday quite often. I’ll just have to trust everyone else’s opinion and not just think they are lying to make me feel better. I think the worst part is I know just enough that figuring out what I’m doing wrong is no longer a trivial affair, the answer is just play more and bitch less I’m sure. If any of you want to see some of the photos I took of the team (GO TEAM ANOMALY) just roll on over to http://www.flickr.com/photos/teamanomaly/ and check them out. Telling me what I did poorly as a photographer would be nice too, practice practice and all that.

Our weekly(semi weekly) Super Hero game came to a close on Sunday, due to player death induced by our Arch-enemies, Arc-Welder and Construct, though I did go down spitting blood into Arc-Welders face, so I got style points for it. Thus ends (for now) the tale of The Alchemist and Hyde,  while our GM did say that we didn’t die this time for good, since its somewhat of a tradition for the villains to leave the heroes alive to show their power and all that, we decided to give the characters a break. We had been playing them on and off for almost 2 years so I seemed to be a good temporary stopping point. Our game is also getting one of our past players back so that will be nice. It will give us a chance to bring back some older characters that have been gathering dust, to say nothing of the fact that seeing him again will be cool.

Since I haven’t been working very much, I’ve been finding other ways to fill the time, like this blog for example, I have also had plenty of time to work out. This is interesting to me still, since for most of my life I have been, well, not the most physically fit or active person. However since starting to play paintball it has become more of a necessity and I seem to enjoy it, even after several months I find myself looking forward to my morning gymscapades. However today I solved one of the nagging problems with the exercise machine I have at home. When I got it didn’t have an ankle strap, I creatively solved this with a somewhat redneck solution involving a towel and length of chain. This means I can do proper leg workouts now, in fact that’s what I did today…and I can tell that I will be quite sore tomorrow.

The last thing I have been doing to fill the time, is playing a lot of Diablo 2, Hardcore Mode, Ladder, if you must know. Playing a minion necromancer, it’s quite different then my usual fair of fury-druids and barbarians, X-fire tells me I have logged 30ish hours of Diablo 2 this week; I don’t know whether to be proud or further depressed by that. If anyone wants to play with me, I’m on US West Hardcore Ladder, hit me up in the comments and we can go kill some monsters.

Now I am off to rebuild our team website since it appears to have disappeared into the nether, I am not excited about doing this again, though perhaps ill get some subway first, a $5 foot long sounds like a fine plan all of a sudden.