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.