Clear Skies

 I first learned about Clear Skies a few years after I started playing EVE Online and ended up watching it and really enjoyed it. A few years ago someone remastered them in 4K as best as it could be done as the original videos were already dated.

I had rewatched the 3 part series about 2 weeks ago and then TheMadRambo, an EVE Online Twitch streamer, decided to do a stream watching them as he had never watched Clear Skies before. So I stuck around and watched along with him and after finishing all 3 movies he stated he really enjoyed them as well.

As a brief on what Clear Skies is, it's a machinima using both the Source and EVE Online engines that follows the ship and crew of the Minmatar Tempest class battleship named Clear Skies with the crew being John Rourke, Solomon Burke and Charlie Fodder as the primary crew.

This is a great series for people to watch who have never seen it as well as those who haven't watched it in sometime.

Here are the links for the three different movies:

CLEAR SKIES 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_y_g9a5qMQ

CLEAR SKIES 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1SDWhjhcnU

CLEAR SKIES 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IblNnRMT5Pw

There is a Clear Skies 4 in the works and in 2020 the primary person behind the series stated that it would no longer be using the Source engine. I'm patiently waiting for the 4th movie to come out and it will be interesting to see the animation and art style direction being used.

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The End of Pandemic Horde

 It's been quite a few weeks since the Pandemic Horde failscade and I've been having a blast starting fresh and new in a small alliance which helped retake part of The Kalevala Expanse.

However it seems today that Horde had a town hall and it was decided that the entire alliance was fully disbanding and merging into The Initiative.

I first heard about it while watching Zigam on Twitch and then went to the EVE subreddit and lo and behold the very first result was "Horde is disbanding".

This made me instantly sad as most everyone I had known there was pretty cool and nice and they never deserved to get shafted this hard by the leadership.

A final ping went out about an hour ago (from this post) from the new Horde "leader" that was to take the reigns of Horde, but decided to ping out the full closure of the alliance and the merger into Initiative:

Full size version here: https://i.redd.it/5zqly29jtm6g1.png

This is extremely saddening, but I wish the best of luck to all the nice people I had met in Horde over the years and I hope that Horde leadership doesn't infect INIT.

Farewell Horde, thank you for giving me a place to call home when I first started playing back in 2016 and over the years after that. o7

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Things Are Getting Spicy: Round Two

 So two days ago we had a hostile group come right into our home system and drop a Minokawa right in our front yard which I went over in my other post "Things Are Getting Spicy". We brawled with that group and eventually won and defending our home, with our CEO doing a drive by doomsday on the hostile FAX literally deleting it from the game.

Last night the same hostile group showed up with a lot more friends and they attempted to drop a structure in our home. We quickly responded to this and we hot dropped right on top of them next to their structure and a multi-hour and multi-system brawl broke out:

https://br.evetools.org/br/69360f17439ce20012da7b36

Hostiles had another Minokawa on the field, being the same pilot as just the day before in our first home defense. The enemy mainly consisted of Widows and Hurricane Fleet Issues with various support ships. The small gang of Golems was a separate entity that showed up and started long range popping us off while we were trying to fight the HFI fleet.

We had just destroyed almost all the Widows and the Minokawa as the HFI fleet showed up in system and warped to us. The Golems showed up not too long after that.

We eventually managed to destroy the hostile structure while fighting the HFI fleet and they eventually started retreating. We figured we would get out as well, after doing some looting and salvaging of the field.

It wasn't too long after our fight ended that someone found out that the Golems that were third partying us got absolutely turbo dunked in another fight:

https://warbeacon.net/br/related/30005096/202512080100/

We were all laughing at this and both us and SLOW went our separate ways back to our home systems and stand down with objectives completed and a op success.

Then to top off the night we ended up getting a nice juicy snack in the form of a Pandemic Horde Athanor not too long after all this happened:

https://zkillboard.com/kill/131791670/

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Things Are Getting Spicy

We've had our fair share of hostiles roaming into our home space as well as various hot droppers coming through and logging off across various systems.

Last night though things got really spicy.

One of the hot droppers that comes around our space ended up coming with a full on fleet consisting of quite a few Widows with other subcap ships.

Things got spicy when that hostile group dropped a capital ship right in our front yard to our Fortizar. They dropped a Minokawa because they were struggling with our subcap response fleet.

We ended up brawling, losing ships and coming back. Our CEO, Zigam, eventually got tired of them having a FAX (Force Auxiliary) on grid and his response was to bring his Ragnarok into play and landed next to the hostile Minokawa and doomsdayed it into oblivion then took off.

Here is the battle report for that fight we had last night:

https://br.evetools.org/related/30002870/202512062300

Good fight to all.

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Debian: Absolute Perfection for Me

 I've been a Windows user since the 3.x days all the way up to Windows 11 and I appreciate what Windows does for the everyday user (apart from all the crap they have been cramming into Windows 11 lately).

My first venture into Linux was Ubuntu 8.04 back near the end of April 2008 and I thought it was pretty cool and definitely a different experience compared to Windows.

I never fully committed to Linux at the time though and had always kept a dual boot setup. After the years I switched from Ubuntu to Linux Mint and also thought Mint was really nice because it provided a more Windows style workflow.

Alongside Linux I kept my Windows updated and eventually found myself with just solely using Windows having sort of interest dropping out from Linux. This all started to change again as Windows 11 became more and more of a hassle and problematic.

Eventually the updates to Windows 11 started causing so much issues I eventually decided to fully switch to Linux and this time instead of Ubuntu or Linux Mint I opted to go all the way to the source with Debian.

I wiped my entire NVME out and installed Debian 12 (Debian 13 was not available at the time and was the Testing branch) and it was like a breathe of fresh air. Debian was perfection for me. Everything was so fast and responsive. It stayed out of my way and never bothered me. My overall CPU, GPU and RAM usage was so much better and battery life was just almost on par with Windows.

And then along came the Debian 13 release and I thought Debian 12 was nice. Debian 13 blew my mind with how much more snappy and responsive everything felt, due to the newer GNOME version as well as newer kernel and firmware.

It was during this time that I decided to never, ever go back to Windows. Debian is now my home.

So now I watch streamers running Windows 11 and just having constant problems and I want to say something about trying Linux instead, but I know it is isn't for everyone and I doubt most of the streamers I watch would take the time to try and learn it (and also the fact that OBS is a bit wonky on Linux and I don't know how things like WINE or Proton would handle people multi-boxing in say EVE Online).

Anyway I am satisfied with Debian and very happy with it and while I do appreciate what Ubuntu and Linux Mint have done and do for the overall community, I felt like Debian fits my workflow and philosophy more.

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Slimming Down: Multiple Account Edition

 If there is one thing about EVE, it's the fact that it has been designed from the ground up to encourage multiple accounts (and by extension multi-boxing as well).

I got sucked into that tunnel and I found myself with 3 different accounts on my launcher each time. My first one being my primary main nullsec character, the second being an industry focused alt and my third one was a highsec alt (for when nullsec got a bit too spicy and I just wanted to relax).

This was of course setting myself up for failure as my game time is sporadic and random throughout the day. I eventually started to fall behind on keeping up with my 2 alt accounts.

I figured it was time to slim down and I decided to drop both my industry and highsec accounts from my launcher and I plan to focus primarily on my main character, which is of course Carah Baxter.

This comes at a time when holidays are creeping up and as I mentioned in my post Rough Seas Ahead there is a possible incoming invasion into Dronelands (most likely being The Kalevala Expanse where I live since it is the closest to the freeport in LXQ2-T) by multiple hostile groups consisting of Red Alliance and their friends/pets from Providence.

It also makes more sense since we have to be combat ready and all hands on deck should an invasion into our home begin. I got a lot of modules shipped up to our home and multi-fitted a bunch of cheap T1 tackle frigates to use for our standing fleet, roams and future strat ops. It's nice having a jump clone down to the Paragon structure in Jita to be able to do shopping and then self destruct back to our home (after destroying and redoing the jump clone in Paragon since I am alpha and we are only allowed one jump clone).

After everything calms down and the new year comes into play I may get back into having multiple accounts, most likely getting my highsec account back into play moreso than my industry account.

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Rough Seas Ahead

It's been almost a week since my last post and this was due to me being very sick and having not really been in the mood to do any blog posts. I'm still not 100% yet and still have lingering cough and stuff, but I'm well enough to get out another post.

So things have been going good for us. We're settled in our home and our little mini-coalition is helping each other grow and prosper. We're getting our market stocked as best as we can, but still facing some supply issues. We've got our industry going slowly and people have been out mining and ratting. We've also been doing the usual PVP fleets (I tried to do as much as I could while I was sick).

However it seems we might be in for some rough seas ahead of us as our CEO sent out a ping stating that Red Alliance and some Providence groups were coming to Dronelands and looking to take some space for themselves, of which we are the closet region to the freeport Keepstar in LQX2-T.

That mostly likely means they will probably be attempting to takeover parts of The Kalevala Expanse where we currently live alongside SLOW.

So the coming weeks are most likely to be lots of defensive fleets as we cannot allow them to gain a foothold and be able to take systems and drop structures allowing them to be able to stage and hot drop from.

Our CEO has made the order to be combat ready and any pings for fleet, should Red Alliance and co start incursions into our space, is to be all hands on deck.

This is going to be some interesting events happening possibly next month, and also the fact that next month is December so a lot of people will be getting ready for Christmas at the end of the month and then following up with New Years Eve.

We'll see how things play out and if things do go down I am hopeful we will hold our space for us and our friends in SLOW.

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It’s Good to See TEST Alliance Back in EVE Online

While we've (Tactical Withdrawal Team / The Rejected.) been dealing with Goons attacking our first Fortizar, which was placed before the supposed agreement by Goons to ignore all new anchored structures after November 22 00:00 EVE time, I ended up having my things hauled back to Jita and was hanging around in Jita for some time as I didn't feel like having to deal with asset safety if our Fortizar was destroyed.

Now that we've got our new home Fortizar anchored and onlined, I made the move back to our new home structure and am in the process of getting my stuff shipped there.

I had already used my remote clone, so I had to take the long way back to our home system with a shuttle.

The shortest route that was set for me sent me through parts of Geminate, which are now being held by TEST Alliance, an alliance that previously failscaded and was basically just an empty shell of it's former glory. Hitting Geminate on my way to our home, I think I went through their staging system and was surprised to see over 100 in local (including myself) as well as a few Titans undocked. Proceeding on my route I encountered multiple TEST gate camps in the surrounding systems.

It was nice to see TEST having a presence in EVE again. I eventually was nearing the end of the Geminate route and entering into The Kalevala Expanse when I noticed a bunch of TEST in local before I crossed the regional.

I said hello, got some hello's back and told them it was nice to see them around again and dropped a heart for the dinos in local and got reciprocated back. It was a nice little interaction, definitely more friendly than some other groups I've interacted with.

All in all it's nice to see TEST back around in EVE gaining back their numbers and getting themselves a home in Geminate, which means hopefully some good fights since we're right next door in TKE.

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A Few Small Updates: November 19, 2025

 It's been a few days since my last post and I've had a few updates happen in regards to my previous posts, so I figured I'd share what has been going on in a small non-gaming update post.

FIREFOX NO MORE

In my last post I went over updating to the latest point release of Debian 13 (13.2) and switched to using Firefox ESR due to a Chromium bug that breaks power management which caused Brave to not allow my screen to turn off.

Using Firefox ESR didn't last too long, because at the end of the day it is still Firefox and still has issues that annoy the hell out of me. I got so annoyed that I completely purged Firefox ESR and just went back to using Brave, regardless of the power management bug. I just have to remember to just close Brave if I am going to be away from my computer for extended time.

CRUNCHING

In another one of my recent posts I mentioned that I was getting back into crunching for World Community Grid and Einstein@Home.

I eventually decided to put crunching aside for now as I really don't see the benefit of running it compared to the current cost of electricity and the amount of heat stress being applied to the hardware, especially the battery. I'd rather not take the chance of my battery bulging and having a catastrophic failure resulting in a lithium-ion fire while I am either asleep or not at home, which increased heat on the battery increases the risk of battery bulging.

So while I do still appreciate WCG and Einstein@Home for what they do, and for the volunteers who help do the crunching, I just cannot justify myself doing it currently. Perhaps I will continue crunching in the future should I come across a cheap computer tower with better cooling and if electricity rates go down.

END OF YEAR

I've been thinking lately and have decided that next month in December I will make one final post before the final week or week and a half leading up to New Years and that I won't be doing any posts until January 2026 after that.

Just a small break for the holidays (I'm an Atheist, but still half celebrate Christmas for the gathering and not the religious aspect of it) and my usual New Year's Eve drinking and partying. When the time comes for my final post of 2025 I will definitely mention it in the start of the post.

That is all for now as far as a small bit of updates go. Thanks for dropping by.

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Debian 13.2 and a Return to Firefox ESR

Just a little over 2 months since the Debian team released the 13.1 point release for Trixie, the 13.2 point release was released yesterday on November 15, 2025.

I upgraded through terminal (apt update && apt upgrade) when I saw it announced on the Debian subreddit and it went all smooth with no issues and my system continues to run like nothing happened.

It was a nice list of bugfixes and security updates:

https://www.debian.org/News/2025/20251115

With my system updated to 13.2, I decided to reinstall Firefox ESR. I had purged it and installed Brave, but Chromium *still* has an issue that breaks screen sleep. I keep my laptop on 24/7, but I have the screen set to turn off after 5 minutes. Having Brave open, even just sitting on the start page, will break GNOME power management settings and override my 5 minutes screen turn off and keep the screen on. Power management works as normal when Brave is not open.

With that said I kinda got annoyed by this and, while keeping Brave installed for other things, I decided to just reinstall Firefox ESR and use that.

So far things have been working as intended and my power management settings aren't broken with Firefox open (having a Twitch stream running in focus will of course not allow sleep but that is for all browsers).  

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