milites

(Posting this out of sync because wanted to get it out there in case someone figured out where we were and what was happening)

Arrived early Tuesday morning, dumped our packs at the hotel and went for a walk. Checked out a cathedral, looked at some shops then headed back to check in. Siesta!

Went for a walk down the water front, found a Starbucks, which had soya/soja to put in their coffees (only place we've found that does so far). Hurrah! Big marina. Quite a pleasant walk, and ended up walking up the Rambla and getting food from a street restaurant. Quite reasonable calamari and paella at about 10pm.

Slept well. Woke up at a reasonable hour and revelled in our Internet access! Finally got up and headed out to la Sagrada Familia and discovered a queue around the block. Resolved to come back tomorrow early. Caught a train back and explored local supermarkets, another Starbucks, went for an afternoon nap which turned into more internetting. Saw a bunch of signs and pamphlets for "Vaga general, 29M". Asked the receptionist at the hotel if that was a strike. She said that yes, there was, but it almost certainly would be safe, and the trains would probably keep running, and not to worry. We went back to the supermarket and got some more food though. Also went out later for dinner at a restaurant. Not as good as the stuff we'd had the night before.

Got up early, had breakfast at the hotel (with soja we'd bought ourselves from the supermarket) and got on a train to La Sagrada Familia. As we were trying to exit the metro, one of the gates were locked, and they locked the other exit 2 seconds after we got out. Guess the trains were out then.

Stood in the queue for the cathedral for about 10 minutes, no big deal. Explored. It's really quite a spectacular place. The clean lines, the passion entrance sculptures, the basalt columns, all really impressive in a non-religious sort of way, although I realize that for Gaudi it was supposed to be in a religious way. I really liked it.

After a few hours of exploring, we left and decided to walk back to our hotel via another Gaudi building - Casa Milá, better known as La Pedrera. It's quite spectacular too, but as we were standing in line, the demonstration started walking up the main greet next to it. Beloved and I discussed escape routes and trigger points for starting evasion, and then they let us in the building. We spent about 90 minutes wandering the place, again appreciating Gaudi's talent and skills and vision.

As we were nearing the end, looking out the window we could see lots of riot police in vans. Some with batons and shields, some with just batons, and some with rifles that had large cups on the end. Not sure of those were for rubber-bullets or tear gas canisters, as we never saw them fire them, but they did have about two per van-load of cops.

While watching from the safety of the 6th floor, we watched the drama below. The protesters seemed to be standing in the road to disrupt traffic, and the police seemed to be driving from intersection to intersection in a group of vans and driving off the protestors. They mostly went after the people standing in the street disrupting traffic, and even after the protestor got back on the pavement, the police felt a little discouragement from doing it again was in order. Fair amount of shoving, some grab and throw. Lots of cameramen wearing day-glo orange vests running around taking pictures.

I saw a police officer strike a woman with a baton because she was taking a picture of him at close range. He appeared to be trying to knock the camera out of her hands. I saw police make charges at groups of protestors out of view.

My overall impression was that the police were scared. They were definitely keeping someone watching their backs all the time; when a group went forward, there would be a few more police behind them facing the other way to make sure they didn't get flanked. When they pulled back they were very careful to tap the point guy's shoulder to let him know they were pulling back, and they all looked nervous when a lot of protestors were just standing there watching.

Time to leave La Pedrera, and the building security guard would open the gate, let a few tourists out, and then lock it again. Wait until we were close to the gate, open it, and let us out and then lock it behind us. Not exactly reassuring.

It seemed that the protestors were engaging in a certain amount of fade away from the police and then cause trouble somewhere else, all within a block or two of the main drag, which is where we were. So we were in the middle of things. The police would charge around in groups of 4-6 vans of police moving to hot-spots as they occurred.

Mostly we went away from the sirens, and a few blocks east, then started south, carefully following the road-rules for pedestrians and moving away from the police where possible. We saw a few ambulances rushing off somewhere, but we're never actually in sight of violence while on the streets.

Lots of shops were shut, but that wasn't a huge surprise. Some of the ones that were opened had all their windows with the anti-vandalism screens down. Starbucks still had the rail across the bottom of their door so they could slam the gates shut quickly, and looked a little jumpy when we opened the door suddenly. Someone had spray-painted their window, and broken the Starbucks sign, probably with a projectile of some sort. We had a much needed soy latté though. The supermarket also had one grate open to let in customers cautiously, so we got more food for tomorrow.

Sitting here hours later, we can still hear the police helicopters out our window, and the occasional loud noise I suspect is someone tipping over the large recycling bins on the street corner. The police radios can be heard around the corner of the alleyway outside our window, but we still feel isolated from it all.

Might have dinner at the hotel tonight...

We went off to the Tapas bar, and got lost. My memory told me it was at 36 Vestugata, when it was actually at 3b and wasn't helped by their published address being Vestugatu, so there was some doubt about whether we were even on the right street. Luckily we'd left early enough that by the time we found it, we were exactly on time.

It was a dark underground establishment, with insufficient light to read the menu. Beloved went for the fancy set menu, and the miniature lobster in garlic sauce were "fantastic" and she was even nice enough to share. I had a more basic menu, and it was sort of average. Nice to have vegetables and meat etc, but not something I would have gone out of my way for.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the people in the apartment next to ours had a burning desire to have parties until 1:30am. Less than attractive. Next morning, Beloved felt that singing in the shower, loudly, was not an unreasonable revenge.

Out to have breakfast and do some laundry at "The laundromat cafe" - needed a coffee, and did some washing at the same time. A good excuse to sit down for an hour while the washing machine did its thing. Also, best soy cappuccino on the trip so far! And free wireless.

Afterwards we bought a welcome card intending to go to an outdoor museum, but then read the fine-print on an ( out of date, we discovered later) pamphlet, we instead went to the Icelandic national museum. That was both very cool and slightly depressing.

The population of Iceland seemed to have been around 50,000 for a very long time, but their history includes many occasions which included the description "and half the population died" or "and 6000 people died" etc. the black death took out 50%, they had a volcano cough up so much ash their crops fails and half the population died, They got smallpox and 15% died, then because it didn't become endemic in Iceland, they got smallpox again and 12% died...

The Icelanders have put up with a lot.

There was also some quite cool Viking artifacts, including a backsword I looked at and thought it was quite late, but it turned out to be around 1100(?) - I took a photo of the description, but have to wait till I have the camera again to check.

There was a wonderful example of a warp-weighted loom, which we took lots of pictures of, and whalebone beaters, chicken bone bobbins for storing thread, seal-skin slippers with felt inside for insoles. Many interesting things. There was also some research into the genetics of Iceland, where they compared Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA with surrounding countries to determine that about 80% of Icelandic male ancestors came from Scandinava, and about 68% of Icelandic female ancestors came from Britain (one theory is commonly from Ireland).

Incidentally, It is very cool walking through the city and crossing streets like Njálsgata and Grettirsgata and indeed we took a photo of the sign for Baldursgata.

That night we went out to curry and something called the beer monologues, which involved some amusing standup on the subject of beer, while giving the audience samples of each beer along the way. The actor had done that before in Icelandic, and it was his first go in English. Amusing, but he needed to check his notes from time to time. This had been organized by one of the player groups at fan-fest, and we got to meet up with a few people we hadn't met in real life before.

After the beer monologues, we got picked up and taken out to a party deep in the suburbs of Reykjavik. Promised food, we discovered that every single dish had significant amounts of dairy in. We ended up drinking a bit and socialising. Got delivered home by car around 1:30am, and then woken by the neighbours banging on a door at 2:30...

The next afternoon (after breakfast and coffee at the laundromat cafe) we went off to a place called Arbaer museum, which involved exploring the Reykjavik bus system. It's a place with enough room to take historic buildings from around Iceland and move them to the site to look after them. We got to enter and look through a church (watch your head) which had been turned into a house for a hundred years, and then dismantled and reassembled as a church. Tar covered external walls, high turf walls on the sides, and beams low enough to smack the unwary in the head (apparently Icelanders have risen in average height by about 20cm in the last 200 years.)

Then off to a house that was original to the site, had once been a tenant farm house, then became a hostel for travelers to buy food. As well as the front room for guests, there were lofts for sleeping, plus a turf/stone wall on the side that was both a dairy and a kitchen and a cowshed with room for 5 cows. Interestingly, the turf/stone walls are "the oldest and the newest parts of the house". They were part of the original, but need to be rebuilt every 50 years or so. The house was a mid 1800s house, so those walls had been replaced a few times. The roof over that part of the house was turf, which appear to be a double layer, with grass-side towards the wooden supports, then another layer with grass-side out. This is apparently waterproof, unlike the turf/stone walls which leaked a bit.

In the summer, the cow shed has a cow in it to show the tourists, and the stall they put her in has been extended by about 40cm because modern cows are bigger, like the Icelanders.

The tour-guide, a big strapping Icelandic lad, had a thing for fabric arts, and was demonstrating carding and drop-spinning, with the weight on the top of the spindle, which surprised me. Beloved asked intelligent questions, and he let her have a play with spinning using the equipment, and thus sparked the start of a beautiful friendship. The next day at the 871+-2 museum he was there too, so they swapped emails and talked about recreation. Apparently, there are a few recreationists in Iceland, but "they're mostly interested in fighting" (in a sad voice).

After the inn, there was another later house and then we got to see a couple of ancient fire-engines, and a steam-roller, as well as a diorama of a terrible fire where 9 people died. Thus leading to a rule that you weren't allowed to build a wooden house in Reykjavik unless it has iron cladding, which explains somewhat why we've seen so many houses with corrugated iron sides as well as roofs.

Went to try a different bus afterwards, but got on the wrong one. Did a round trip down to the end of he line.

Wednesday night, we were off to a classy dinner with a bunch of people at a place called "Perlan" which is very fancy and the dining area rotates about once per ninety minutes, meaning we get a view of the skyline of Reykjavik that is changing for the length of the meal. Very nice food, very nice wine. And one of the Americans proposed to his partner of 7 years. Luckily she said yes.

Got home late. Got woken by neighbours again.

Next morning was the sign-in for fanfest, I think, unless I have lost track of time. Thus begins the more specifically eve part of the trip

We we at the beginning of the line and signed in just after 10am, then went out to get coffee and food from the Laundromat cafe again, followed by visiting another museum.

In the year 871(plus or minus 2) there was a large eruption on Iceland, which dropped lumps of pumice all over the island. There was already at least one farm set up, since they found the remains of it under the pumice. The museum "871+-2" is a museum specifically looking at that farmstead and the evidence they have about it. Its really quit well done, even down to the very sexy three-D graphics they have of the building in different stages of construction, that will rotate as you move your finger around the touch display, and the HUD that showed the fire in the fireplace without having to actually interfere with the site. As mentioned earlier, the strapping young Icelander with a hobby of fabric arts was there and was happy to talk more about fabrics, research books and swapped email addresses with beloved.

We landed in the middle of a blizzard, with powder snow being blown across the (underfloor heated) runway. Blew too much money on duty free alcohol, and stumbled through the very relaxed immigration/ customs check. Spotted our ride immediately, and ended up in hugs with Kristin, who was happy to drive us from Keflavik to Reykjavik and then drive us around showing us the sights, such as we could appreciate in the still going blizzard.

Went to the supermarket for essentials, like weetbix and soymilk and checked into our hotel room at "Room with a view". Very nice apartment, with a huge bed and a spa-bath. The view out towards Snaefellsnes was somewhat truncated by the cloud and snow, and we didn't realize until the following morning there was anything out there that wasn't pretty much flat.

We did a google search for a restaurant and wrapped up warm and then ventured out into the snowy conditions. Visibility downwind was about 50 meters, and visibility upwind was about 5 meters because whenever you looked up, you'd get ice crystals in the eyeballs in a most unpleasant way.

Of course, we couldn't find the restaurant we were looking for, but ended up picking somewhere that looked warm called "the noodle station". They did us a very nice bowl of beef noodle soup for about NZ$9 each, with enough chile and hot soup to fortify us for our trip back to our hotel. Luckily we didn't get lost on our way back.

The apartment is warm, with old-fashioned radiators pumping geothermal hot water through them to keep us warm. The view in the morning was not too bad, with some rain and a bit of snow. We were expecting a friend from Canada to show up and crash in our room until his hotel checkin time, but unfortunately, his flight got cancelled, and he couldn't make it until the day after. We however had booked to go ride Icelandic horses, and we're picked up about 9:30 and driven to a spot about 20 minutes away with a set of stables where the horses are kept inside for most of the winter.

There was a reasonable discussion of what we were getting ourselves into, and then dressing up in helmets, gloves and rain-gear, then off to be introduced to the horses. I was to ride Ljósbrá, a light brown and off-white horse who seemed not particularly happy to see me. As soon as we got in the saddle the rain stopped, which made it a lot less miserable than it could be. We rode out following the owner, with 4 staff to herd 8 customers. The cloud parted and we had sun! And blue sky! The paths were covered in snow and slush, but the horses didn't seem to mind too much. Going slowly, I felt like I could more or less get Ljósbrá to go where I wanted, and start and stop on command. When the herd was moving though, Ljósbrá seemed to prefer going as fast as whoever was in front.

The Icelandic horse is renown for having a couple of odd gaits - the tölt , which is a 4 beat pace, and is very smooth. Much much gentler than the trot. And the "pace" or when going fast, "the flying pace", which is moving all the legs on one side, then all the legs on the other side. Tends to sway a bit, but can go very fast. The owner wasn't so happy to let us do that one though.

The odd thing about the tölt is that to get the horse to do it, you sit heavily in the saddle and push your legs forward, and pull back on the reins. It felt very much like how I'd get a more conventional horse to come to a stop. So I had a lot of dissonance when riding about whether I was actually doing the right thing or the horse was just doing what it wanted while I held on.

As soon as we got back to the stables and got the saddles off, it started raining again, and was even snowing on occasion by the time we got back to our hotel. So our timing as far as the horsey stuff went was perfect.

The horses live in stables that looked like they had 20 cm of horse manure covering the floor, and had fur matted with manure on their legs, making me a little uncomfortable about whether they were treated well, on the other hand, they seemed happy to be out for a run, and needed no encouragement to break into a tölt or trot. Possibly this is just the price you pay for living somewhere its been snowing for the last 5 months, and this is normal. I just don't know.

Cerui (pron. Kur-vee) rang and arranged to meet, and took us to lunch in a place called Nonnibitis which does good wholesome greasy subs with fried lamb and other goodness. Very filling, and the salt was appreciated. Cerui is an Eve player who lives in Iceland, and is organizing the Iceland arrangements for a bunch of friends.

To the server at Nonnibitis "Takk, :grin: sorry, it's the only Icelandic word I know"
Him, big grin: "It's a good word though"

While eating, a couple more of his alliance mates walked in to Nonnibitis and turned out to be Australians, so we ended up spending the afternoon and evening with them, sharing tea, beer and whiskey.

We visited the convention center Harpur and looked at the nice bee-hive windows. Double glazing, sort of, where the glass is 80cm apart. Might have photos to put online sometime. Good wireless too.

After dinner, we needed up running into Verone and company in the middle of the street, and chatting in a bar for a while, but beloved was starting to fade with jet-lag, so we headed off while they were still warming up.

Turns out the apartment walls aren't so thick, as the neighbors getting in at 1:30am woke us up, even though they weren't being terribly loud. Beloved slept until 9am, which is a good sign that the jet-lag is slowly being dealt with. usually we wake up at 5am for a few days after traveling.

Tuesday morning and we went for a walk. Visited the Iceland national museum, which had a lot of displays with lines like "...and 50% of the population died" although sometimes it was as low as 10% for an event. Life in Iceland has been precariously balanced for a thousand years, and is still here.

After the museum and lunch at Nonnibitis again, we went to Hallgrimskirche which is a gloriously designed church where the pillars look like the basalt rock formations on parts of the Icelandic coast. It's a spare and elegant design, and I really like it. Pictures to follow hopefully.

Currently beloved is out shopping while I'm catching up with the electronica. We're going out to dinner at a Tapas bar tonight, with a friend from Canada. Reviews later.

Check in 40 minutes before the first flight; 1 hour to Auckland; 3 hours wait then 11 hours to Hong Kong. The worst bit of the AKD-HKG was waking up after a nap and realizing I still had 9 hours to go. Knees couldn't entirely straighten in the seats which meant that my legs started hurting after a few hours and I couldn't sleep properly. Low lactose meals on Cathay Pacific were really nice (not just "nice for airline food").

Hong Kong was only three hour stopover - checked the electronica stores for iPad 3 to no avail. Signage was poor getting off the plane, so we picked a direction at random and ended up at the right end. There can be a lot of walking in that airport if you get it wrong.

Back on a plane for 13 hours to London Heathrow. Same problem of thinking lots of time had gone by and realizing that there were still 10 hours to go. Food not quite as good, but still better than I'm used to.

Land in London at 5am and wander at random following signs for "transfer" and was mildly surprised to end up in the right place and not to have passed customs at any point. Security metal detector was set sensitive enough to beep at me even with no belt or boots -the only thing I can think might have set it off was zips on my jeans or Icebreaker jersey. Followed by reasonably ineffective pat down.

8 hours to kill, starting with breakfast, followed by finding an iPad 3 to purchase as a present to myself. The soy cappuccino was not the worst coffee I've ever had, but it was in the running.

Find a seat next to the free charging point and discover that my iPad wants a network connection to register with Apple, and won't let me do anything until that happens. The only wireless available is pay for use, and the "registration" process doesn't allow the challenge response necessary to get that to work. The shop I bought the iPad from was very helpfully suggesting I connect to their password protected network, but then discovered that none of the staff knew the password...

Eventually it let me start using it, though I have no idea what I did differently. Our hotel in Reykjavik is supposed to have wifi, so hopefully I'll get to start installing stuff tonight.

Regularly swapping with Matariki for a stroll around the containment zone while the other watched the bags. Really enjoying the kindle for reading from at a moment's notice. Something about stretching one's legs to Minuit beats on my ear buds made me in a good mood. Possibly that was sleep-dep talking

More coffee from a different bar. Not as bad as the first soy cappuccino, still not good though.

After 8 hours of waiting we're on a plane to Iceland! The movie system is broken, in that there is no software control of the volume (though the interface suggests there should be) and its set way too loud. Thus, this screed. [Queneva note: I was fortunate enough to have volume control, and finally got to watch "Juno".]

Expecting to be picked up by a complete stranger who volunteered. A Facebook friend of a sister-in-law-in-law who lives in Keflavik. Forecast was for -6C with extra windchill (feels like -14C)

At least it sounds like it was worth carrying all the layers of wool.

Quote on the napkins in flight on Air Iceland:
"Ingolfur Arnarson was the first settler in Iceland, more than 1100 years ago.
His trip from Norway lasted four days and there were no napkins. "

I bought the Scottevest standard travel vest via their website http://www.scottevest.com/. Of course, two days after I ordered it, they had a 40% off sale.

The website has a sizing chart which put me on the cusp of Large and XL and at the same time suggested going for the larger one. It's slightly too big for me. The fit, apart from being too big, also tends to press tightly against the back of my neck, something that long-term tends to give me a headache. Its slightly better when I leave it zipped up. If I got another one I'd probably get it a size smaller.

The vest has zips with scottevest logos on them which makes me think they're custom built, but they're not as nice to use as your standard high-quality YKK zips. They tend to catch a bit rather than flow smoothly.

The external surface has been treated with Teflon apparently, which gives it a slightly crunchy feel and might be responsible for it feeling like it doesn't breathe all that well. It does work as a moderately good windbreaker, for all that it has no sleeves.

Pockets! There are two external breast pockets and two external hip pockets which are quite spacious; Two internal breast pockets with touch sensitive covers that allow you to use an iPhone touch screen without having to remove it from the pocket. Is is not quite as useful as it sounds, since the phone screen is sitting about nipple level and involves twisting the jacket to see the screen. It's usually easier to just pull the phone out. Next to each phone pocket is a narrow pocket for stashing a pen in. My standard propelling pencil which is a little longer than a standard pen is too long for this pocket and keeps falling out. There are two internal pockets on the right hand side, one for a pair of glasses (it even has its own glass polishing cloth) and the other for a camera. On the left side is another pocket roughly camera sized, and a pocket that can hold an iPad (although the weight of the iPad tends to pull the jacket off-center). In each lapel there is a small pocket for putting your ear-buds into so they don't get tangled when you're not using them. Across the lumbar region is a pocket easily able to fit most laptops I've seen, but I imagine it wouldn't be very comfortable to carry one there, especially if sitting for any length of time.

That said, things that I'm carrying that don't count towards the weight of my carry-on:
500mAh extra battery (will recharge my iPhone twice over, but really not useful for the iPad)
Cables and plugs for recharging at wall sockets in three countries my kindle, iPhone, iPad, external battery
Sunglasses
Ear plugs, eye mask, neck-pillow
Gps and gps charger cables
iPhone (plus in-ear headphones that run in cable channels built into the clothing to allow me to plug the phone in from most pockets I might want to stick it in)
Kindle
IPad 3
Torch (surprisingly useful in a darkened aircraft trying to find something you dropped on the floor)

and that's without loading the lumbar pocket full of socks, which I contemplated when I found out the Iceland air carry on weight limit is only 6kg

I think the Scottevest made the whole "travel with only carry-on to a place where the temperature will be below zero" possible in a way that wouldn't have been nearly as easy otherwise.

I'd say that the Scottevest is about 90% of the way to being exactly what I want. Lots of pockets= win! The irritations are the zips, the fit, and the pressure on the neck. I'm contemplating buying a silly smaller version when I get home, which probably suggests that the failings aren't critical.

DuckDuckGo.com is a search engine I'm trying out. It claims not to track anything you do, and if you use https://duckduckgo.com it won't send your referrer information to the site you end up visiting. Some of the results are got by outsourcing the search to Bing or other search engines, but as long as it doesn't tell Bing anything about me, I'm happy. So far, I haven't needed to retreat to Google for any queries that DuckDuckGo has failed me on. Fairly often many of my queries can be answered by wikipedia, and those queries usually see wikipedia in the top few links.

My only disquiet is that I have no idea how they're making enough money to pay their bandwidth. There are occasional link ads, but I haven't seen a banner ad. the only reference to financial model I've seen claims that they're privately funded but exploring possible monitisation.

This exploration of alternatives is a direct result of Google's changes in privacy policy.

I have a number of online identities (surprise) and some of those identities I don't want to necessarily associated with the real-world me when, for instance, I'm applying for jobs.

So I have about 4 GMail accounts for different personalities/characters. Most of them have a back-up email (for the purposes of resetting my Google password if I forget it, so Google tells me) that is my home RW address.

And I get this invite to Google+ and I create a profile for one of my online RP characters, with that character's email address. The image for the account is the character image from the game. I play with G+ for a week or so, then I get bored. I decide that eventually they'll figure out that it isn't my real name, and so I delete my Google+ profile.

A week later, I send my CV to a friend who said his work might be looking for new people, and I use my RW home email address.

He plugs it into his contact system (I don't know what it is exactly) and it automatically retrieves contact details from the web somewhere, and the image my contact details get is the character image from the Gmail account for my RP character. He sends me a mail to ask if something is wrong with his systems, since that doesn't look like me, and the name it retrieves is not my name, but the name of the RP character.

Google - WTF?

The only link between those accounts is that the backup email for one of those accounts is my RW address.

Then I discover that all the Google groups that my home address belongs to have now had their subscriptions changed to use the address I created a profile for. I'm not getting those mails at home, I'm getting them on my Gmail account for an address that never signed up to them.

Thank you for trying to tell me how you think I should run my life Google, but please, fuck off and don't change my settings unless I ask you to, and don't assume that everyone wants all their online identities to be amalgamated into one lump.

Don't be evil, yeah, right.

Perhaps one of the reasons that the OWS protests are so filled with rage is that the US health system is so fucked up that the protesters can't afford their anti-depressants any more.

"Take your soma, and everything will be fine."

One of the valuable things I've got out of playing Eve Online is contact with a bunch of people around the world. I've talked regularly to people from the US, Finland, Norway, France, Canada, England, Germany... even Australia!

One of my online friends is a US Marine, and has just been deployed to Afghanistan. I've read a bit about the injuries that are coming out of there - the rate at which veterans are committing suicide, and the effects of traumatic brain injury from the Afghan weapon of choice, the IED. It's much harder to be dispassionate about the statistics when I think that a person I've known and talked to for the last two years is walking into that environment. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the US forces in Afghanistan as a general class, but each specific person there I hope comes home safely and undamaged; sane and un-haunted.

Another is Norwegian ex-military currently working as a paramedic and his pain and rage at the killings in Oslo and on the island of Utøya - and the way he suppresses those emotions because it's the right thing to do; "Fear and anger is what they want" - brings the incident more into reality than the statistics and news can manage.

Connecting to people from different places makes me appreciate their world, their problems, their joys and their fears. If I get nothing else out of playing Eve, that's been a good thing.

edit: I just noticed what my previous post was. Yes. Same guy, 2 years later.

One of the side-effects of playing in Eve is getting to talk to a bunch of people from around the world.

This week I'm very much appreciating the comments of a US Marine who's in the middle of a Farsi language course, and for fun was translating Farsi twitters into English on the twitter feeds coming out of Iran. From time to time he'd make pithy comments about what was going on in our Eve Corp IRC Channel.

Fun is perhaps not the right word, but he was definitely worked up about being involved in helping with a developing situation.

The world is getting smaller every year...