EVE Online – A Pixel Nomad

[EVE] Morning Calculations

Mornings in space are mostly imaginary, but I still mark them. Coffee helps with that. One mug, drifting in a freeport, starfield slowly turning outside the viewport while my hangar inventory stares back at me like it’s judging my life choices.

The Helios sits there, familiar and unassuming. Cheap. Reliable. Invisible in the way that matters most in J-space. It has carried me through more wormholes than I can count, slipped past more dangers than it ever had any right to. No one looks twice at a Helios. That’s the point.

And yet.

Right below it, in the market listings, is the Odysseus.

Sleek. New. Expensive in that quiet way that doesn’t scream wealth, but definitely suggests it. I can afford it — that isn’t the problem. The ISK is there, waiting, whispering that ships are meant to be flown, not admired from a distance.

The problem is attention.

J-space notices things. It notices hulls that don’t quite belong, silhouettes that linger a little too long on d-scan. The Odysseus feels like an invitation to be curious about me, and curiosity out here can get you killed. I like being forgettable. I like being just another scanner passing through.

Still… the temptation lingers. Better performance. Better comfort. A small luxury in a life that’s mostly careful restraint.

I sip my coffee and tell myself there’s no rush. The Helios hasn’t failed me yet. But I don’t close the market window either.

Some decisions don’t need to be made right away. Sometimes it’s enough to just sit with them, coffee cooling in hand, stars turning slowly, and let the universe watch you hesitate.

Fly your way,
E

[EVE Online] Quiet Work in Quiet Places

(I know the screenshot is a shuttle, not a helios, but it’s what I had taken recently, so that’s what I used!)

Filed by E, Helios pilot, full-time wanderer

Some wormholes feel like they wake up with you.

This one didn’t.
It was already watching.

I slipped into the system in my little Helios, cloak humming softly around me like a blanket someone knit out of shadows. Today wasn’t about adventure or dodging hostiles or stumbling into some dramatic rescue. Today was simple:
tend the rescue cache, make sure it’s stocked, make sure it’s safe, make sure some future lost soul has a lifeline.

The hole was quiet. Not the dangerous kind of quiet—just that soft, endless hush that only deep J-space seems to know. The kind that makes you feel like you’re the only heartbeat for ten light-years.

I drifted toward the cache’s bookmark, navigating around drifting ice and slow-spinning gas clouds. Every so often, a particle shimmered off my hull like it was trying to say hello. Cosmic dust is friendlier than half of nullsec, honestly.

The cache was right where it always is—tucked away, invisible to everyone except those who already know it’s there. A tiny container of hope in a place that normally eats hope for breakfast.

I checked the supplies:

probes
launcher
a few nanite pastes
little handwritten note from the last tender, telling whoever finds it that they’re not alone

Everything tidy. Everything ready.
It always amazes me how much meaning fits in something so small.

With the practical stuff handled, I let myself just… float.

The wormhole’s star was off in the distance, a pale blue thing flickering like it was thinking of blinking out but hadn’t quite decided yet. Clouds of energized particles spiraled lazily between shattered planetoids. The universe does this thing sometimes where it looks like art made for no one, shown to whoever happens to wander by.

And here I was, a tiny speck in a stealthy little frigate, witness to all of it.

I know it’s silly, but I swear the ship felt quieter too—like even the engine didn’t want to interrupt the view. These are the moments that remind me why I do what I do. Why I wander. Why I help. Why I keep coming back to wormhole space even when it’s moody and unpredictable and occasionally tries to set me on fire.

The universe is vast and wild and often cruel…
…but sometimes it’s peaceful, and gentle, and full of small kindnesses we leave for each other.

I gave the cache one last look, whispered a soft “stay safe, whoever you’ll help next,” and aligned out.

Just another quiet day in the dark.
Just another reminder that even in forgotten corners of space, someone cares.

Fly your way. o7

[EVE Online] The Breakout at R-AG7W

Filed by Gallente Citizen 4586793463

Three fleets, one plan.

Two of them would muster in MTO2-2 — a solid forward point. The third, smaller fleet, would stage from R-AG, still under the watchful eyes (and smartbombs) of the Goons’ hellcamp.

Gallente Citizen 4586793463 was in that third fleet.

They hadn’t volunteered. They’d just clicked “X up” too quickly in the ping channel, and now they were part of something called “Fleet Three: Maelstrom Shield” under the command of Captain Nina.

It was supposed to be straightforward: break the camp, and slowly head to rendezvous with the others. Easy. Routine. Practically tradition.

Except, of course, it wasn’t.

The staging hangars in R-AG were alive with comms chatter as the fleet assembled.

[Fleet Broadcast]: “Maelstroms only. Shield logi. Bring ammo.”

Gallente Citizen had never owned a Maelstrom.
They were expensive, loud, and looked like flying furniture.

Still, they borrowed one. Temporarily.

Then, minutes before undock, a new ping came through.

[Captain Nina]: “Change of plans. Zealots instead.”

A moment of silence followed, broken only by a confused Maelstrom pilot typing “???” in fleet chat.

[Someone]: “Didn’t we just buy the Maelstroms?”

[Captain Nina]: “Yes. Sell them back. We’re going Zealots. Lasers are prettier.”

[Fleet Member]: “Why?”

[Captain Nina]: “Because gold pen.”

It was an explanation that explained nothing, but it was Horde, and that was enough.

Within twenty minutes, the Maelstrom fleet had become a tangle of mismatched Zealots. Some plated, some not, some accidentally armor-tanked and shield-tanked, all of them eager and slightly terrified.

Gallente Citizen fit one with leftover modules and prayed the lasers would at least fire.

When they undocked, the void was chaos. The R-AG camp still burned with hostile bubbles, but Captain Nina’s voice was steady.

[Captain Nina]: “Keep me at 1,000 range, We’re breaking out.”

They warped as one. Or close enough to one. Explosions bloomed in the dark, a dozen Zealots vanished instantly, vaporized mid-warp, but the fleet punched through.

Against the odds, they reached MTO2-2. The two waiting fleets cheered as the ragged Zealot gang arrived, smoke still trailing from their hulls.

Three fleets now stood united: two proper, one improvised. It was messy, loud, and very much Horde.

Their next jump brought them into HD-JVQ, where the Goons were waiting.

Ravens. Dozens of them. Sleek, expensive, smug.

[Captain Nina]: “Primary the Raven Navies! Burn!”

Beams lanced out. Explosions followed. A few Raven Navies popped gloriously — but then local spiked.

[FC]: “How many more of them?”

[Scout]: “Yes.”

It was not the answer anyone wanted.

The sky filled with missiles and bombs. Horde ships melted under the barrage. Pandemic Horde tried to hold the line, but the enemy numbers were obscene.

[Captain Nina]: “…Stand down. Pull out if you can.”

The silence that followed was almost reverent. A few typed “???” in fleet chat again. One Zealot posted a sad emoji.

But the order stood.

The fleet warped off in tatters, their victory limited to a few smoking Raven wrecks and a lot of existential confusion.

Gallente Citizen’s Zealot didn’t survive the retreat. Their pod awoke in R-AG, the familiar sound of station alarms echoing in the background.

From the observation deck, they watched the system burn, the dual Keepstars glinting against a backdrop of wrecks and bubble fields.

Someone in local typed:

“We killed a few Raven Navies tho.”

Gallente Citizen just leaned back in their chair, coffee in hand, and muttered,

“Gold pen, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.”

Then they opened a fresh notepad entry and typed the title for their next report:

‘The Breakout at R-AG: A Study in Improvised Zealotry.’

[EVE Online] Moving (Again)

I know I said nullsec blocs were not for me, but I do have a single character who has been a member of Pandemic Horde (one of the nullsec corporations) for the past year and a half. It started as an experiment, I was looking for simple ways to make ISK and there was a YouTube video promoting Pandemic Horde and how they would supply you with ships, and you could just spin a vexor (and later an Ishtar, and eventually a Praxis) and make money in their nullsec systems. I had never belonged to a nullsec corporation before so I made a brand new character on a new account and started from scratch.

Back when I joined, things were different than they are now. A lot has happened since then. It took me a lot of time to get over the basic atmosphere (a lot of ‘bro’ type chest smashing, some not-so-polite conversations, etc) I don’t know if it’s the same for all nullsec corporations as this is the only one I have any experience with, but there’s a lot of misogyny in EVE to begin with. It can be incredibly uncomfortable and I’ve definitely had some moments of “why am I even here”. Anyway. I’m not really sure why I never wrote about it much, a lot of covert ops stuff goes on and I suppose I was slightly worried about that, but life’s too short, so expect an onslaught of posts – though I will do my best to keep things paced as ‘events that have already happened’ and not ‘down to the second releasing potentially important intel’ though to be honest I’m a tiny bean on a long pole of more important beans, so nothing I know about is important news anyway.

The point of this post? We got word we’re moving staging – again. We just moved in the summer from our longtime home of MJ-5F9 to E8-432 and now we’re off again. Moving is a huge complex event with a lot of parts. During the first move I actually took it as an opportunity to shuffle 90% of my stuff back to a safe NPC station in highsec (we were not at war at the time, thankfully) and so now I have limited ships to move this time. I’m glad that’s the way I decided to do it. I also moved all of my clones, which was a bigger issue because they’re quite valuable. My preferred method was of course to use wormholes. I scouted out a wormhole close to MJ (where my clones were stored previously) and followed the chain until it jumped out into highsec. Found an NPC station, dropped off the clone and a ship, self destructed back to MJ, rinse repeat.

This time around I have even less ships to move, because I’ve been leaving my PVE ships in the systems I hang out in, so I think I only have some expedition frigates to move, if I even decide to do that. I do have a bunch of NBI gifted ships but those are not worth much at all and I won’t bother moving them.

There are a bunch more posts I want to make, and I may even share some spoof posts I’ve made in the past on another site, but for now I’ll leave it at that. Life in nullsec is very different than other places I play, but I think I’ve done OK with it.

As always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself.

The Search For Hrada-Oki Bivouac

News came through a few days ago about a new wormhole site that acts as a deathless exchange outside of Zarzakh – and someone on reddit claims they found it (and are of course selling it to the highest bidder, unless it moves).

Signal Cartel excitedly posted about it, and of course I wanted to start searching and see if I could find it. Speculation is that it has a red giant star in system but if the site moves, who knows. 2 days later there was no follow up on reddit about whether or not the site had moved on.

I’m still living in a Wormlife Freeport, doing PI daily and hauling with another account once a week, so I headed out to see what was around. One jump from the freeport I found a C1 shattered system, already picked through but a good selection of other wormholes were there. I jumped into a C2 (C1 and HS static) but there was nothing of interest and a few fights had happened recently, so I backtracked and I found one that lead to a ‘dangerous place’ (that means C4-C6) and figured why not give it a peek – turns out it was another shattered system, this time a C4, with a C3 and C4 static. A little imicus showed up and was bouncing around for a while too, so I left one of the data sites up and wandered back home (it was about time for RL dinner anyway). I’ve never found a shattered that lead to another shattered before, so I thought that was pretty unique.

I doubt it will be easy to ‘stumble’ into this new wormhole site, but I like the idea of it. There’s a lot of lore behind the deathless, and I found a few more eve-centric discords to join so I can get more familiar with it. I also plan on running some Signal Cartel TripTik’s in the future, and I’m pretty excited about that.

As always, fly your way! o7