I’m going to do it

I am going to hire the services of an escort.

Yes, you read that correctly

Why, you ask, would I hire the services of an escort?

Because I want to, is the answer. That and I don’t want to go to a brothel. I’ve heard that some of the working ladies aren’t really interested in providing a good service; all they want is for you to do pay them, do your business and leave. I’d rather spend my time (and money) with a working lady who is going to take her time and have some fun.

However, there are a few things that are worrying me

The first one is, what if I do or say something to offend the lady I decide to spend time with? Don’t get me wrong, I usually don’t go around offending people, but sometimes I do suffer from what I call “foot in mouth” disease. This is an affliction where the mouth is engaged before the brain, usually ending up in words and phrases being said that could be construed by other people as either being silly or offensive. This would ruin the experience for me, as I would feel like a total and utter idiot and, if I like spending time with the lady I eventually see, she may not want to see me again. Escorts (and, as far as I’m concerned, even working ladies in brothels), do have the right to refuse to see someone again. And I don’t want that happening to me.

Secondly, I’m nervous enough with women as it is, even moreso with attractive women. And I’ve heard some escorts are strikingly attractive. I mean, I become extremely fluent in gibberish, a language very few people on the planet understand. Even babies look at me funny when I talk gibberish (but that may be because they can speak the language, and I said something like “my mother likes to eat giants”). I understand that they have a knack for putting people at ease, ater all, they want me to enjoy my experience with them, and I really would like my first experience with an escort (no, this is not my first time havinf sex, I do have a daughter with a previous partner) to be an enoyable, if not memorable, experience.

Thrd, is the fact the condom might break right at the wrong moment. What if she falls pregnant, or I’ve given her an STD? These ladies’ bodies are their bread and butter, and I would hate to think I had taken away her only source of income. Getting someone pregnant I can handle, but right now I am in no financial position to have another child. Emotional support I can give in spades, financial, forget it.

And what if she doesn’t find me attractive. I’m the first to admit I’m no Brad Pitt. I stand about 5′5″, and am 20kg overweight. I know the lady is getting paid, but still, I would rather spend time with an escort who thinks I’m good looking rather than an escort who’s thinking “I wish he’d just get this over with and leave”. But then again, that’s probably the thinking of a working lady in a brothel.

So, those are my fears. If there are any working ladies out there who can put my fears to rest, then please feel free to leave a comment

Until next time

Lord Yu

Current State of my X3 empire

My X3 empire is starting to build quite nicely. I have a number of stations all producing products that are needed by Trading Stations. I’m slowly building my race rank with the Argon (currently at Federation Marshall %14). I have a partially equipped, fully shielded M6 and M3. Currently around 23 million in the account. although if I were to add the credit value of ships and stations to that, I would estimate my empire to worth well over 100 million credits.

My current goal is to build a fleet and take it into the pirate sectors to take them over. After some scouting, some pirate sectors are not only close to the empires, they have a large amount of asteroids which would be excellent for setting up supply lines for my fleet. Rome was not built in a day, and nor will my empire. It will be a long, tiring road. And when my empire is built, my carriers and battleships victorious, the empires of my enemies laying in ruins, then I can sit back and say “I started this empire with nothing more than 5000 credits, a Buster and a Mercury. Now it is worth billions, and all who have stood in our are nothing but frozen corpses”.

God willing, may it be so.

Goodbye to Eve Online

Tis kind of a sad day today. I’ve decided to quit playing Eve Online for 3 reasons

1) Boredom

2) Expense

3) Getting nowhere fast

To play this game properly, you need spare time. I have plenty of that, but what really irks me is I have to spend time making in-game money (called isk) to buy skills that, depending on the what level the skill is currently trained to and the rank of the skills (the higher the rank of the skill, the longer it will take to train. Example: a rank 5 skill will take 5 times as long to train as a rank 1 skill). Some ships require multiple skills to be trained to level 5 before you can fly them. And in Eve, you need to be able to fly ships properly, otherwise even the NPC’s will make mince meat out of you. This means you spend hours in front of a monitor either mining, ratting (going from asteroid to asteroid belt in a system killing NPC rats).

The expense of the game is killing me. I had 3 accounts. While this might be ok for some, I don’t have the type of income where I can justify having even one account at the moment. And with the state of the world economy, the Australian dollar has dropped from buying $0.95 US to around $0.65 US. This means Eve is more expensive for us Aussies to play.

I feel like I’m getting nowhere in this game. Just before I quit, I managed to train the skills to fly my Buzzard, a nice little ship to be sure but a far cry from what I really wanted to fly: a carrier. Just to raise the isk for the skills would take me while, then there would be a year of training to fly the thing properly. Sorry, but I don’t want to wait a year to fly a carrier. Hell, I downloaded a carrier class ship for X3 which I can fly right now. I have the race rank, but not the credits to buy, equip and fill it with fighters.

So, to all my friends and comrades, I bid you farewell, and I wish you luck. There are those who will be glad to see the back of me (I won’t mention names, you know who you are)

To the really big alliances (Goonfleet, Band of Brothers, PURE), we never met, but I kept up with all the news and happenings in 0.0, and was always somewhat amazed at the size of the fleets that engaged in battle.

So without any further ado, I wish you all farewell, and remember, Eve is just a game

Sailing, we are sailing…

Mr Rudd has seen fit to give the pensioners of Australia an early Christmas gift; he’s going to spend approximately half of the surplus and give it to us.

That’s right. A politician is giving the battlers of this country money.

So what am I going to spend my money on. Well apart from the bills, I’ve decided that a radio controlled model yacht might be fun. I have one on lay-by at a nearby store electronics/games store. As you can imagine, I’m a little bit excited as I’ve never had one of these. I had a radio controlled boat as a kid, powered by batteries. Sailing my model yacht will prove to be a bit of a challenge, as I’ve only been on a sailboat a handful of times in my life. I’ve been doing some research into how a boat sails, where to position the sails to get the best speed etc. I will still have to guage in what winds I can sail it, as I don’t want it sinking on her maiden voyage. And I’m not going to sail it in open water just yet, this thing is costing quite a bit ($230 to be exact), so I don’t need to be losing control and have it sailing off into the sunset. Where I live can be quite windy, and there is one place I can sail it, but unfortunately, I will have to wait until school holidays are over until I can sail it safely. The last thing I need (apart from the yacth sailing off on its own) is have a bunch little brats trying to hit it with a tennis ball, or grabbing it and turning it into a submarine.

The other thing I’m a bit nervous about is putting it together. The hull, servos and radio receiver are installed, so I have just have to do the mast and sails. I’ve put together a Tamiya radio controlled buggy before, and the woman behind the counter said if I can put together a Tamiya kit, I can definitely assemble the yacht.

Anyway, enough rambling about my new “toy”, once it’s assembled and I can get it on the water, I’ll take some piccies and post them up. Only the good ones though, not ones of it sinking.

Until next time, stay sane

Lord Yu

X3 as an MMO? No way

So, I’m doing quite well on X3 at the moment. Have a few stations producing things, mainly high-tech, high profit goods. Anyway, there was a thread on the Egosoft forum that someone would like to see X3 go massive multiplayer online. Most of the veteran X3 players (and some of newer players) are totally against it. Here’s why:

1. Universe size

Let’s compare Eve Online to X3. Eve Online has 5000 solar systems. The most people I’ve seen online at one time is 25000, could have been 30,000 at one stage. That’s an average of 5000 to 6000 players per solar system (obviously there are not this many people in one solar system at any one time. If there were, the lag would be horrendous). X3 has 200 solar systems (known as sectors). You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you? 25,000 people in the same universe with only 200 sectors. It would be absolute mayhem, with players forming alliances, indiscriminately wiping out stations and complexes to eliminate the competition. Forget that. You want to go forming alliances and blowing up stations, go play Eve Online, because that’s exactly what they do.

2. The Arsehole factor

Let’s face it, in every MMO there’s a bunch of people who go around killing players simply because they can. Eventually, someone would become so rich and powerful they could afford a few capital ships, arm them with the best weapons (from their own supply), equip them with the maximum number and rating of shields (an Argon Titan can equip 9 1GJ shields, for example) and go blow up some poor schmuck’s only ship, station or complex. A ship, station or complex which has taken many hours of gameplay to attain. Simply because they can. Usually this type of player is joined by like-minded players. Soon you have armies of dickheads going around blowing up the stations and ships of new players because they think it’s funny to do so. The game soon descends into total anarchy as the “good” players are defending the new players from the armies of wankers.

3. Wanker Alliances

Think about it. If you’re going to produce something, you’re going to need three, maybe four resources: food, silicon, ore and energy. Energy is easily enough to come by as it is buyable, but doesn’t make great economic sense to buy it when you can create it yourself with about 10-15 million credits worth of investment. But to do so, you’re going to need access to silicon mines so the crystal fabs can produce crystals to provide to the solar power plant. But what if an alliance controls the sector you wish to set up your SPP in? Do you really think an alliance is going to let you walk in and just plonk a silicon mine down and use their resources? I don’t think so. So you’re going to have big alliances producing everything, setting the price at a ridiculous level (remember, in X3 the selling prices can be set to the maximum price at a player owned station). Unless this was circumvented by the developers so that prices were set at player owned stations to reflect supply and demand (no stock = higher prices, more stock = lower prices) by the AI.

4. Pirates

Part of the reason why I stopped playing Eve Online was because I was sick and tired of being harassed by player pirates and ore thieves. And it would be the same in X3. Only due to the fact that some players would be producing extremely valuable goods, such as laser towers or shields, they would find themselves (or rather their transport ships) targeted more often than not. This could give rise to a new type of player: the hired mercenary, to protect a player’s ships. But then you have the problem of a player not being able to be online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I for one would not play an MMO where I could be shot at just because I choose to produce high end goods. I’d also have the problem of some alliance taking exception to the fact that I’m producing the same goods they are and destroying my stations because they don’t like the competition.

So there you have it. X3, as an MMO, would fail. Not because it’s not a great game, but merely because of the fact there would be so many problems caused by the players themselves that many would get sick of playing. It was simply not designed to be a multiplayer game. It was designed for one player to shape his or her X universe in the way he or she saw fit? Wanna blow up all the stations in a sector so the AI players can only trade with you? Go for it. Wouldn’t be possible in an MMO because the other players would take exception to you attacking their stations. Wanna go pirating? Not possible in an X3 MMO because some players might take exception to you attacking them and taking their freight. You just might find yourself out a few million credits in lost stations and ships because the players you attacked formed an alliance against you and destroyed your empire.

So to those of you who want an X3 MMO, I say leave well enough alone and enjoy the game the way it was meant to be played

Until next time

Lord Yu

Football…pfft

So, the grand final of the NRL is once again upon us, and quite frankly, I could care less

Seriously, it’s one day out of 365. If World War 3 broke out on the same day as the NRL grand final, I can guarantee that NRL fans would place more importance on the grand final than their own survival.

I also have better things to do than watch a bunch of grown men chasing each other up and down a grass paddock jumping all over each other over an oval shaped stuffed pigskin. Seems a bit..weird…to me that grown men would want to jump all over each other anyway, unless there’s something they are not telling us.

Anyway, enough bitching, I have an empire to build, space stations to destroy and credits to make

Until next time

Lord yu

Door to Door Sales People

Ok, these mongrels really piss me off.

They come to my house, ask me stupid questions, and I have to pretty much tell them to fuck off before they take no for answer.

The latest incident(s) seem to be with Origin Energy. Queensland changed its laws so that consumers can now choose their electricity retailers. Supply is still provided by Energex. But the stupid bloody Origin salespeople still insist on coming to my door and asking me if I want to change my retailer.

The straight and simple answer: no

The answer I have to give: I’m happy with my retailer so fuck off, and learn to take no for a fucking answer.

Why the hell would I want to change my retailer when my current one allows me to pay my electricity bill monthly instead of every 3 months? It makes it a hell of a lot easier to manage the budget.

I wish I could shoot some of these arseholes, I really do.

Until next time

Lord Yu