Monday, January 7, 2013

Blog Banter 43: talking back to Makalu

At the turn of the year in meatspace, award season starts to spin up. Across the general media, folk are encouraged to look to their peers and recognise excellence and inspiration from the previous year.

For the past two years I have attempted to do the same for EVE by distributing imaginary Free Boot Awards to an eclectic assortment of community luminaries. This year I thought it might be nice to expand the concept.

For Blog Banter 43 I would like to invite every participant to nominate their peers for whatever awards you think they deserve. Let's start the year with some EVE-flavoured altruism and celebrate the best and the worst of us, the funniest or the most bizarre, the most heroic of the most tragic of the past year. They could be corpmates, adversaries, bloggers, podcasters, developers, journalists or inanimate objects. Go nuts.

There's only one rule: no narcissism allowed (so step away from that mirror and resist the urge to nominate yourself).

Other than that, if it's great, let's celebrate.

Banter On.

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Here's my nominations for 2012!

Each nation needs a Jester!
What’s a court without a jester? As an irregular blogger myself, I can’t help but admire the output created by Ripard Teg, in terms of both quantity and quality. I can’t always establish whether he’s right or wrong on certain issues, but his writing is clear, easily readable, always entertaining and often thought provoking. His guides and fits are helpful to many a pilot. He is a very visible part of the Eve community and capable of influencing the public opinion in important ways. As such, he wholly deserves a nomination.

My corp mates
This may sound very cheesy, but from my perspective my corp mates deserve a mention: they have shaped my Eve year 2012, perhaps more than they realize. Most of us have flown together for years now. They have been loyal friends, supportive and (mostly ;-) )fun to be around. They have also been effective and efficient: we regularly dominated our alliances' killboard, even though we were one of the smaller corps. Frankly, without these guys I might have unsubbed ages ago. Eve Online is a game, it's a sandbox, it's a virtual world - but above all it's a place where I meet my friends. And then we undock to kill stuff :-)

Talking back to Makalu
We currently witness the fall of Against All Authorities, or at least a severe diminishing of their numbers and operational capabilities in the short term. This will probably go down in the annals of Eve history as an important moment, when one of the last independent nullsec alliances' might was broken.

With our previous alliance we were firmly in the -A- camp. Back in 2011 this was a good thing; after the DRF invasion of Catch, late in 2011, we took part in the -A- guerrilla war to reconquer Catch. We had a great time and it remains one of my most cherished Eve memories. In the second half of 2012 however the honeymoon was definitely over. More and more of my corporation and alliance mates didn't want to fly in -A- fleets anymore, often because of the oafish behaviour of Makalu Zarya. A prime example is his infamous 'You don't talk back to triple A' rant, available on Soundcloud (the juicy part starts at 1.45 minutes).

A lot of the animosity regarding-A- was caused by this kind of behaviour towards those who should nominally be your friends and allies. Against All Authorities could have been the admired underdog of Eve, the brave lone alliance fighting the CFC and HBC, but instead they grew to be loathed even by large parts of their own coalition. To me Makalu Zarya, though obviously not singlehandedly responsible, personifies all that was wrong with Against All Authorities in 2012; all that helped a once great alliance to it's demise. I am nominating him for a place in the Eve Online 2012 history books.

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