Tuesday, August 10, 2021

First Person Beats No Person

~or "When Inside is as Amazing as Outside"

As I wake & work, fly & die, eat & sleep through the days of my life in Stanton, I find I am drawn in more and more, deeper and deeper into the immersion, captivated by the detail and the scale of what Star Citizen actually IS...

A true Virtuality.

Burning hard towards the rising sun

I'm serious. My relationship with Turamarth in EVE was... a bit removed. Not just the your Avatar is a Ship third person aspect, but it more like someone you read about, or hear about, and yet I was him, sortof...

When I tried to imagine Tur inside his ships I always went through a certain discord, a certain 'disquiet' in my soul over the "lore" of the Capsuleers (a name for us in EVE that I truly dislike and very rarely used).

That we are clones and we do the whole "wavy-hands-instantaneous-consciousness-ego-mind-soul-etc.-transfer-across-lightyears-in-seconds (without data loss or corruption)(riiiiight) thing" is actually ok with me, I don't wanna actually be dead.

No, it's the whole you are naked, drugged & defenseless with cables and umbilicals plugged into ports all over your body, which is then cocooned away in a lightless, pressurized, goo filled "POD"... which is plugged into the ship... meaning YOU are plugged into the ship... meaning YOU are the ship.

I know this is a re-occurring theme in SciFi and I even truly love some of the stories set in this particular sub-genre, but I don't wanna BE ONE. I want to be ME, I want to be Tur... me in the world, my boots on the ground, wind in my hair, rain on my face, gun in my hand.

So I always dreamed, inside my mind, that Tur actually eschewed the POD, that he preferred to stay in the Real World, to be "in" his ships and "with" his crew (and yes, in EVE we do have crew, we just don't talk about them as we kill them off by the millions).

As long as Tur was in his Captain's Chair on the bridge, all was good. Upon hull breach, the ship's AI would raise and slam the clamshell halves of his modified POD around him and eject the POD all in an instant (...so I could have my cake and eat it too).

But this is not Lore, it is not Cannon and therefore it was... wrong. I mean the lore is The Lore, right? Anything Else is just wishy thinking, even in a game. Because History is History, and Facts are Facts, even in a game world, especially in one you really care about, as I do the Lore of EVE and now, the Lore of Star Citizen.

But in Star Citizen I AM Me/Tur and I always will be... well, until Death of a Spaceman that is, but that's a whole 'nother blog post.

So In Star Citizen, I am finally me. First Person, my POV, my view of the verse. And I am as happy as a man can be with this virtual version of Me as Spaceman Spiff in Wonderland!


========== BREAK ==========


OK, that was written back in April 2021 and never got posted.

Some Real Life Stuff Happened...
My lady came to quarantine with me down here in Virginia from Chicagoland back when the World Caught Fire and Lost It's Mind. She then retired from a 30 year career teaching HS Spanish in June of The Year That Shall Not Be Named.

In due course in April of 2021, I retired from a 30 year career as an IT Consultant.

And most recently we just returned home after spending all of July up in Chicago prepping her Townhouse for sale and so we are starting the hunt for our liveaboard bluewater sailboat in earnest now... please wish us luck!

As for Star Citizen... well, I do still play fear not, though just not nearly as much as before cause I'm just busier IRL now is all.

Star Citizen Alpha 3.13 went live August 6, 2021.

Bringing us a new Space Port... This time floating in the strange and wonderful skies of the gas giant Crusader, comes The City in the Clouds, Orison.

Another very long awaited, age old Sci-Fi standard, brought beautifully and incredibly to virtual life by CR & CIG. Space whales man... we got SPACE WHALES!!!


Anyhoo... I'm still around, just livin' my best life, well, lives actually... both Real and Virtual.


Fly, and Live, like there is no tomorrow.
=/|)=