Writing for Eve News24

 Wheeling and dealing in New Eden can be a huge risk. The game encourages people to be shady in their dealings, and you can't always take someone at their word. Ambiguity is king, it allows us to become whatever we want and shed our real personality, but also unlocks the door for people to roleplay a person with shady morals. You have to watch your back out there.

I occasionally do some artwork for ISK, things like logo design, photoshops, or even physical paintings. In real life I work from home as an artist and it is nice to be able to make in game monies that way as well. Dealing with this ambiguity in a business setting can be difficult and I have been burned before.

I was recently hired by a corp to redesign their corp logo. It was a big job, and they had an idea of what they wanted that changed a few times during the process, making the job take a few days. At the end I turned over my work, and then a few hours later, my contact dropped corp and became incommunicado. After several days I went to the corp leadership, which claimed they had no idea I was working on such a logo, as I wasn't asked to.

It's the usual run around. I figured I was out the time and effort on this one and like I always do, I inwardly swore to myself to stop doing irl work for video game people. I felt better after firing off an angry mail to the original contact, and went back to playing.

Well a couple days later I was contacted by that fellow. He was sorry for going afk but had rl issues that sounded serious. He was under the impression that his corp was going to pay me and so he hadn't worried on it. He settled up right away, it was a nice resolution to a situation that usually doesn't go that way.

Towards the end of our correspondence he mentioned he was the Editor and Chief of EN24, an enduring Eve Online news site, and I casually mentioned I had a blog. Much to my surprise he had read and enjoyed it, and asked if I would be interested in writing for the site. I agreed that I would like that and have for the last few been contributing articles and design work to the site. A few things from here are cross-posted there.

I really do like writing about Eve, almost as much as I enjoy thinking about it, and way more than I enjoy actually playing it. I think a lot of the hurry up and wait is negated by having something like that to do in the background. I started writing my first blog entry because I was bored and plexing in factional warfare, and my last one while I was waiting on a delivery of doctrine ships so I could get into some action. This blog isn't read by too many people (trust me I can see the stats) but writing it serves a personal purpose and so its been worth it. Contributing on a greater scale to the narrative is exciting. I heard a popular streamer reference one of my articles and really enjoyed that.

I will always write here, but this blog is really more of a journal than it is a news source. I like to post stories about cool moments I have, muse about what-ifs, and complain here, I doubt that will change too much. My stuff over at that other site will be focused more toward all players, while this nonsense here is really just between you and I. If you are reading this, thank you for following me here.