I remarked back at the start of July that this blog might be turning ugly. It appeared from the WordPress spam I was receiving that the account options I used to remove ads and allow customisation were being combined in a more expensive subscription that I was not willing to pay for.
Wilhelm Arcturus from https://tagn.wordpress.com/ suggested the old account options were still being billed for him regardless. That has turned out to be the case for me as well. I must admit some of my blogging enthusiasm had been sapped by the presumed loss of those options. I prefer the site looking – in its own way – neat and clean.
The next in game EVE event, starting in 5 odd days, is one based in the Abyss pockets.
https://www.eveonline.com/article/pdgi51/secrets-of-the-abyss-kicks-off-in-one-week
It is probably just a jaded perception, but I wonder if this is a random idea from CCP, or if they feel like they need to try and get more people to use the sites. Aside some statistics provided during EVE down under, has anyone heard if the Abyss sites are considered a widely used success, or have they become another niche sub-part of the game?
I still have a small collection of Filaments in my main hanger but have yet to use any of them. I have purchased and trained up all the Precursor hull and module skills to rank IV – but again have not used any of them. I just haven’t been enamored by some of CCP’s design decisions around this newer aspect of the game. Maybe I am just a recalcitrant old man now.
CCP have also continued their recent tradition of lots and lots of sales on PLEX and Game time purchases. Most of the bonuses on offer relate to extra ship skins or attire, which I find very underwhelming, but the other day they offered their Value packs with notable discounts. These are packs you can buy only one time for each account.
https://secure.eveonline.com/dlc/
I picked up the Galaxy Pack for half price on one of their sales – for $70 AUD I received an extra 90 days of Omega game time (~$54) on my account, 1100 PLEX (~$55) for skin purchases, 2 Multi-Pilot Training Certificates (~$55), 5 Skill Extractors (~$35), and 7 ship skins and a couple clothing items. The multi-pilot training certificates and extractors I will put aside for a rainy day.
There have been some large battles in EVE recently, with lots of Titans and Supercarriers fielded. During some of these there have been Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on the game infrastructure, impacting a lot of players negatively. Whether triggered by one side or the other trying to give themselves an advantage, or some look at me oddity trying to make themselves feel important, I don’t know. More interesting has been the vitriol directed at CCP for not being able to entirely mitigate the impact, or about how some apparently innocent people are unable to log in as their IP addresses fall into a range blocked by the anti DDoS service CCP is using. It seems very much like Victim blaming at times. More and more often the vocal part of the EVE community seems to be a whiny little shit.
Evehermit 
I was actually reading something else, about food actually when I had a sudden very random thought to drop by and visit.
I still actually enjoy the clean minimal look of the site. While I certainly don’t think it has to stay minimal, I overall still enjoy the clean look though, but that’s just me. I never did select the WP subscription options to remove ads like you might have. I do notice the WP ads though as a result on my hibernating site though, seemingly more especially as well since it’s not really active right now.
Though I did buy a domain name for the game blog and have for last year plus I’ve just never really gotten around to moving site files off of WP and onto a hosted site for the domain as yet. But this does remind me that I need to schedule time to do so.
Probably hasn’t as yet because I know it’s just a cascade of things that will result in doing once I fully try to move the blog to a paid hosted site, thinker with the Theme and all that totally changing the basic minimal look. It would have gotten rid of all the WP ads though to something I more like or affiliate oriented. But it’s a lot of work not actively writing either atm. I just hadn’t bothered for over a year now. But I guess I should get around to it. I’ve just been kinda still working on my cooking projects offline which is more a personal thing to me in all this time. Hadn’t really blogged about it much on my food blog site either for a year I think as well. Just another reason also why haven’t gotten around to tinkering with the game blog. Traveling a lot for work haven’t made things easy either. I get a new personal laptop today that’s smaller and light and easier to carry along with my work laptop so that might help to do some stuff.
Having stepped away from the consistency of gaming/blogging quite a bit for some time to do other things of interest, I’ve had a lot of time to think about a lot. I do regret not staying writing consistently, even if it’s about something else. It can be incredibly hard and I mean very hard to get back to even some resemblance of a normal routine in writing as just getting focused to do so is very tough once your out of the routine.
So I’d say that if you ever choose to not write about EVE or move on to other games or interests that you should keep writing. Keep and maintain that time to write about something that’s of interests to you whatever it is. There is a lot of meaning in doing so I think as well. Your a good writer, it don’t matter that you currently write about something you enjoy in games. It’s communicating your thoughts about your interests in a great way that counts a lot or sharing information. A blog, it’s name may change or get a new domain and evolve over time in the interest of the author. Regardless though, keeping up with just writing about whatever interests you can be greatly meaningful or beneficial in many other ways.
You can usually point your domain to your WordPress site. It is what I do with evehermit.com. That will make partial use of it while you wait for the time and inspiration to turn it into a separate site.
I’m glad you are still enjoying your cooking, even if it isn’t managing to get itself onto your blog.
Falling out of the habit of writing is a recent problem for me. I’ve posted fairly constantly for 20+ years in various online platforms, and have had plenty of kind encouragement such as yours along the journey. In recent times however more often than not what I write is never posted, which has slowly meant I am writing less.
I’ve found the nature of my audience has changed. I’m talking friends, family, colleagues and so on, and not specifically about those who read this blog. They are now less inclined to really consider what I have written. They either leap at the topic in an overly enthusiastically manner as they agree with it – propagating an echo chamber, or they are focused on achieving self-righteous indignation. It gets to the point where it is just not worth it.
I’ve had the domain pointed as forwarding to the blog quite a long time now since I bought it. I don’t know of anyone in our age group that’s not already doing stuff online and I don’t mean social media stuff that understands blogging in the slightest.