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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Getting Back Into Crunching

 It's been quite awhile since I have done any sort of serious grid computing using BOINC. I haven't had the best computers for doing it throughout my life and I did do a little bit in the past on a weaker laptop (but I suppose even doing one work unit at a time is still helping more than zero).

Now that I have a much more powerful laptop I've found myself getting back into the thick of things. I used to do World Community Grid back a few years ago and I guess since then IBM let it go and some other organizaiton took it over and even more recently they had to do a full transition over to new software which ended up not going so good and their estimated transfer over was supposed to be short, but it seems like its been over 2 months and still facing issues.

I ended up signing up for both Einstein@Home and World Community Grid a few days ago and I was mostly getting Einstein@Home work units until yesterday when I started getting work units for WCG.

I don't have it going full blast since I have other things to do on my laptop, but I have BOINC set to run at 25% CPU for 100% CPU time on a 8 core/16 thread Ryzen CPU (so it will run 4 concurrent work units at time split between the two projects).

It's not much compared to some others that run literal dedicated servers that can push out like 100 work units at the same time, but I am doing what I can to contribute to science and the cause.

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The First Proper PVP Fleet: Operation Successful

So after Pandemic Horde failscaded in the worst possible and demoralizing way and my getting the EVE itch again I ended up joining Zigam's corporation after a fresh new start and a new life.

We've started off small, Zigam also started an alliance, and we've been growing since then slowly with hopes to take some nullsec sov in the future.

We did a small fleet which didn't last too long as we were up against 2 Hyperions and a Flycatcher and we couldn't really break their tank with what we had (which was initially a few Thrashers and some tackle).

We ended up reforming and got more people and set out and ended up fighting both Goonswarm and remnants of Pandemic Horde.

I didn't get further into the fleet time as I was killed while we were taking down a Raven Navy Issue and I wanted to go do my own thing after that.

Here is the battle report for the entirety of the alliance fleet for the night, which included a 2.8bil Barghest after I was already out of fleet doing my own thing:

https://br.evetools.org/br/6913db9706d75600125c04c0

I ended up helping tackle the Raven Navy Issue, a Flycatcher and a Stabber:

https://zkillboard.com/character/2123890204/

All in all I say this was really good for our first proper PVP fleet and I had a lot of fun even though I got popped pretty early into it.

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Pandemic Horde: Cascading Failure

 So in my very first post on my blog about my new beginnings and fresh start I mentioned that I had gotten the itch for EVE Online again.

Before I started up my character and blog, I was lurking on the EVE subreddit for some time to see what things were going on in New Eden these days.

It was until one day recently, as a former Pandemic Horde member, that absolutely blew my mind. I guess some crazy stuff went down and it triggered a cascading failure, "failscade" in EVE term, of the entire alliance.

I don't really know exactly what went down to cause such a failscade to be triggered, but from what I have read Pandemic Horde leadership had planned a move and essentially started evacuating their stuff before making it public and basically told the rest of the alliance to evacuate and retreat.

Within a short time of public ping, the evacuation proceeded to get absolutely hell camped by Goons and the Horde leadership (having already left and gotten their assets out) basically abandoned the rest of the alliance to get themselves out.

I was reading and watching streams about this and it was an absolute cluster fuck. Lot of alliance people were mad they were just rolling over and not even bothering to attempt a defense. So much stuff was lost to both fighting as they were trying to get their stuff out and so much stuff was just being asset safetied away to the nearest lowsec system (which is most likely also going to be hell camped when the asset safety timer is up).

I was mostly watching from Zigam's stream (MrUnluckie).

Eventually a mass exodus started as the failscade continued and corportions and people started leaving the alliance. As of this post and time, Pandemic Horde has lost nearly 11,000 pilots and over a dozen corporations (expected to be even higher as corps get their people to safety before making decisions on staying or leaving).

The corporation Zigam was in planned to leave and join The Initiative, however Zigam was blacklisted by them and so he eventually left and made his own corporation (which I have joined as of today).

Seeing all this go down is quite saddening, because Horde has a lot of good people and they got screwed over by some bad apples.

I don't know what is in store for Horde in the future, but I do hope they manage to survive and rebuild themselves.

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New Beginnings: A Fresh Start

I'm not very good at these sort of things so I will keep it rather short.

My name is Carah and I will be using this blog to record and share my journey and adventures through real life and my digital life (without exposing too much information about my real self to maintain anonymity).

It has been awhile since I have done any blogging and have been somewhat disconnected from gaming up until recently when I started to get the itch for EVE Online again so I figured I'd start anew and grow from there.

This blog will mostly contain posts concerning my digital life as Carah Baxter, with a dash of real life mixed in.

Thanks for stopping by and hope you drop by again sometime!

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