Beginnings

Smitty, Mallory, and Mayfield, the crew of The Kestrel, embark on their first ever mission...to deliver news of an enemy invasion across the galaxy.  Smitty orders the crew to use their FTL warp drive to jump into a neighboring system inside of a nebula.  Upon arrival, the crew sees readings of a teleporter being used, and having sensors blinded by the nebula, are unable to see what awaits them in the crew quarters.  Well, turns out it's 4 pirates who boarded the ship and Smitty and his entire crew get beaten like redheaded step children as they frantically run around the cabin.  gg, FTL, gg.  Nothing like a slap in the face after ur first jump to show you how awesome and unforgiving the game of FTL is.

My second life was better.  I made it through about 4 star clusters, then ran out of fuel.  I was forced to wait on the chance that someone would offer me aid.  Instead, someone aggressed me, and after I ran out of missiles to drop their shields, was thoroughly beaten.  As I accepted my fate and was on the verge of hull collapse, the aggressing pirate warped away, leaving half my ship on fire, and half my crew dead.  Opening airlocks solved the fire problem.  To repair the hull ruptures, my crew was forced to work without oxygen, luckily remedied by an intact med bay.  So now I was stuck with no fuel and no missiles.  I activated my distress beacon and waited again.  This time, a Slugman traveler stopped and offered me supplies; with one catch...do not offend him by negotiating.  Welp, I couldn't afford what he had to offer so I was forced to negotiate, turning him hostile, and ending my life.

FTL Faster Than Light is awesome.

I'm back on EVE, and finally have civilian internet (as opposed to tethering off my phone).  I'll have a quite a bit of free time over the next 6-8 months aside from the holiday.

As I take the reigns back as CEO, I can see I'll have to put in quite a bit of effort to get AI back to its prior activity levels.  Nevertheless, I've been settling back in and poking around J-Space the past few nights.  Jumping a ratting Gila, finding 6 faction data/relic sites in our C3 making 120mil, scouting for k-space entrances, trying to get faction warfare carebears to fight me...stuff like that.  But AI has quite a few connections that will prove to be content-generating, and isk generating which I'm looking forward to.  Such as a relationship with DURA LEXX, and our constant low sec relationship with ARMIL.  There are certainly things to look forward to.

I did the free upgrade to Windows 10 today, which did not go as expected.  Upon updating, my resolution and display setting was completely messed up, so I installed my GTX 670's latest driver.  After restarting, my system would begin the Windows startup, then revert to a black screen.  I found people with similar (but different) problems on troubleshooting threads, but could not find a fix.  I ended up re-installing the OS and wiping my drives clean...in hindsight, it was probably better this way.  Had a bunch of games sitting around on my drive that I'd never actually play, and this has forced me to try new ones.

I like Windows 10 a lot.  Definetely a good effort by Microsoft to cater to the desktop enthusiasts.  I've got a GTX 970 in the mail as well as 8 more Gigs of RAM to give my 3-year old setup a nice boost.  That way I can play Witcher 3 and all the great games coming out soon.

Catch you later.

Aim High,
Smitty