About Me

So who is the person behind the blog?


My name is Gareth Smith and I have to admit I've gamed pretty much as long as I can remember starting out with an Atari 2600 back in the early 80s.


My real progression to PC games was when I was in the late 90s with a preference for anything that involved trying to set-up some form of network so I could game with friends. Around the year 2000 I got dragged into a text based MUD by a friend and my preference for MMOs started there.


I made a few false starts into other MMOs (Neocron and Earth & Beyond being the main ones) until a friend pointed me at the Eve Beta. I was hooked, especially when certain things started to happen (mainly related to corp asset security) and the devs shrugged their shoulders on the forums and said "it works as intended".


The main character I now use in Eve is not my original but Dante has been going strong since 2004 with a skill in training almost every day (excepting a small 7 month break inflicted on me by work). I once got asked (pre-Titans and supercarriers) what I would sell DC for and basically said it wouldn't happen, when told everyone had a price I think I gave something unreasonable (in the region of 500Bn, though this is small change now for some alliances). The person didn't get it but everyone else in the channel did, even though I have other alt characters I have played Dante so long he really is me in game. So most of these posts will be effectively IC posts with references to my alts as "business associates" or the like.


About the Blog Name

Well by the time the "my first blog" falls off the bottom I will hopefully have some new readers who will wonder why the heck I have called the blog what I have.

From the first point of view I've been around a few areas of the universe: 0.0 warfare with a few alliances, mercenary work (good fun blowing stuff up and getting paid if you have a good team) with Trinity Nova, piracy (more of a non-starter on DC but stock-in-trade for my original main in '03), industry and yes even mining when I started out.


The second aspect comes from a bit of religious belief I found when researching aspects of Buddhism a while back and it resurfaced when I started thinking of creating a blog. This is a Vietnamese belief that if a body is not correctly buried in the person's homeland (home town/village usually) then the soul will roam and potentially be in a lot of torment. This seemed to suit the fact that most pod pilots will die away from their original "homeland" (or starting station if we want to meta it up a bit more), be cloned back to life (i.e. not be buried) and roam space again.


The third aspect is the Aborigine ethos of "walkabout", while I appreciate this is a spiritual rite of passage for the Aborigines from a personal point of view (given I am not even from the Southern Hemisphere) its about a journey of learning. I have learnt a fair amount of different things in my wanderings through different corps, alliances, occupations and territories in Eve, I expect to carry on learning as well.