As this is going to be my first blog post for the year of 2026 I figured I would keep it short and simple and share some updates and stuff.
As my last post was at the end of December there has been quite a bit happening.
LINUX
First and foremost I got curious about trying Debian Sid (the "unstable" development branch) and I had played around with it for a few days. It was a nice change of the pace to see the new packages and what not, but I decided I should just stick with Debian stable and went back to using that. I figured if I needed new certain packages I can just use backports, which would mainly be the kernel, mesa and firmware.
EVE ONLINE
There has been a lot of things happening in our space since my last post and we have had a lot of brawling, small gang and full on fleet PVP. We've had hostile groups reinforce our structures and one of the most recent ones resulted in an epic battle of mixed subcap and capital responses, with our structure fully repairing during the middle of it all (OP SUCCESS).
There is the battle report for that fight over our Azbel which fully repaired.
It's been rough at times dealing with lots of hostiles and hot droppers around our space constantly messing with us, but through it all I have been having so much fun. So much more than when Horde was controlling TKE (still sad to see Horde being no more though).
Other than that I have been working on getting my skills up and have started to train into Blackbird to be my non-frigate PVP orientated ship.
I also got gifted one month of Omega from someone within my corp so thank you to them. I also have an additional month ready to go when I need it as I am just about nearing the 5,000,000 SP softcap for Alpha clones (which will then require me to then use skill injectors/run Omega as Alpha's cannot naturally train past 5mil SP). I do have nearly 2,000,000 SP unallocated stocked up for when I need it. The daily goals for getting 10k SP and also the retroactive login rewards really pushed me to a lot of unallocated SP.
Also did win a Rattlesnake for something I can't remember, but I ended up getting it hauled down to Jita 4-4 and selling it on public contract for 870 million ISK which puts me in a position to be able to PLEX another month of Omega should I also need it besides the $20 I have ready to use (CCPLS STEAM SALE WHEN).
ALBION ONLINE
Aside of New Eden, I've been doing my usual dipping into the Royal Continent of Albion Online as my side game for when I am ratting, mining, waiting for stuff to happen in EVE or just generally relaxing (I really enjoy the gathering and faction warfare stuff).
I did get myself 7 days of premium and got myself a personal island which I have been using daily to do crop farming and in turn doing cooking making soups to increase my levels so I can eventually start farming higher tier crops and cook higher tier foods. I am still in process of just doing carrots at the moment but will maybe soon start doing higher tier when I exhaust my carrot seeds.
I'm still also doing crafting of plate helmets (Fort Sterling bonus) and have gotten to the point now where I can craft T7 helmets.
I've gotten T6 ore unlocked, as well as T5 stone and fiber. I want to get to all T6 for stone and fiber which both are close and probably need another few weeks depending on how active I am gathering.
Outside of gathering and crafting, I have been having an absolute blast in faction warfare. I've been getting a ton of faction points through gathering and also helping my faction (Fort Sterling) take provinces and objectives, which in turn I have been buying faction chests and using the tomes to level up my Blight staff set. I am currently running 4.2 blight staff set with roughly 70/120 spec on each piece. I definitely need to start getting into higher tier to not only do more damage when I am out solo gathering and killing mobs, but to boost my healing and survivability during faction fights.
I may eventually take some time at night to do some lethal zone content either through black zone or red zone faction warfare via bandit assault. I definitely have to get my spec up more and get higher tier gear though to reach a decent IP for that content, but I am perfectly content being in yellow zone and doing what I am doing now.
REAL LIFE
Outside of my internet life, real life hasn't really been much going on. I got myself some rum and a few bottles of wine in December and got fairly drunk on New Year's Eve (I was hitting the rum and cokes pretty hard that night with 50/50 mix).
I've still got this damn lingering cough now and then from when I was really sick at Thanksgiving and I just can't seem to get it to go away.
Other than that everything has been peachy and I've been just going day to day trying to make it through all the insanity.