The mirage of a safe place and a taste for revenge

This short story was inspired by real events in New Eden. Names and star systems have been changed to protect the anonymity of the pilots involved. What follows is sort of fiction — and another attempt (not my first) at writing.

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Suspended in gel and wired into the ship’s nervous system, a capsuleer’s thoughts were translated by implants into clean data—synthetic voice, clipped text-bursts, or raw intent—riding laser-tight comms hull-to-hull, between star systems, across the void of New Eden — threading light through the dark like a needle through black silk. Replies didn’t reach ears. They arrived inside the pod-feed as overlays and sensations, as natural as breathing used to be.

“Natural,” in the same way a scar eventually became part of your skin.

The corp channel drifted under everything: under route calculations, under market pings, under the soft lies stations told. It was always there, a cold thread woven through the skull.

A presence joined.

ROOK VEYLAN: Greetings...

His salute didn’t make a sound. Instead, it bloomed as a bright glyph at the edge of vision, paired with a faint pulse of recognition—comradeship translated into harmless bytes on a hyperdata-stream.

Another presence flared immediately after—hot, ragged, too fast for the smoothing routines to hide.

SABLE WRAITH: Guys. Quick question.

A hitch in the feed—hesitation rendered as a fraction of delay.

SABLE WRAITH: If someone attacks and my drones kill them… I can strip the wreck, right?

Two replies snapped back almost at once. Clean, low-emotion packets—the kind veterans used when they already knew exactly where this was going.

HASK MEREV: Yes.

IRON KADE: Yes. If you’re still on grid.

Sable Wraith’s signal surged again, spilling context like a cracked seal.

Getting dropped into a Fallout TTRPG mid-campaign? Obviously I picked the glitchy murder-maid robot!

It's mid-evening earlier this week, and I get a message from my favourite DM, who's been running D&D campaigns I occasionally play with a few former work mates and their buddies.

He tells me they're running this cool Fallout campaign and are down a player. Would I consider joining them even though they're already four game sessions in?

My answer: you had my YES at hello!

So I'm basically getting dropped into an ongoing TTRPG campaign mid-season, come Monday evening. And suddenly I'm doing the narrative version of jumping onto a moving train.

No slow “meet the party in a tavern” intro. More like “welcome to the wasteland, try not to freeze.”

EVE Online Glossary: Essential terms every capsuleer needs to know

As I've been putting together these EVE Online guides, I've been constantly stumbling over terms and abbreviations that left me completely lost.

Some terms I already knew from experience, playing back in 2004 through 2011. But for plenty of others? I've had to stop mid-draft, go digging, and find out what people actually mean when they say things like "brick tanked," "kite," or "burn back."

Sometimes the hardest part of EVE isn't fitting a ship or learning the UI—it's understanding what people are saying, or what the guides are telling you.

If you're new, returning after a decade or more, or just tired of feeling like everyone's speaking in encrypted abbreviations, this is your decoder ring.

This glossary gathers the terms you'll actually hear in corp chat, on comms, in local, and in the places where you'll find the info you need, but need a dictionary to make sense of it all. It's not a complete encyclopedia—it's meant to be useful: the words that pop up when you're hauling, exploring, joining fleets, or trying to figure out why everyone suddenly got quiet after someone said "combat probes."

Bookmark it. 

Keep it open on a second monitor. 

And when a guide starts sounding like a different language, come back here.

The Safe Spot is LIVE! (and I'm equal parts thrilled and mildly terrified)

Alright. We did the thing.

Rixx Javix and I have officially launched The Safe Spot "The Rixx & Kinux Show" — a bi-weekly EVE Online podcast — and I'm sitting here with that strange cocktail of feelings you get when you ship something you actually care about: excited, anxious, hopeful.

Excited because I'm back in New Eden after a long time away, and EVE still has that "you're never fully in control" living on the edge magic, and I get to talk about it with my good friend Rixx.

Anxious because launching anything public is basically inviting the universe to throw tomatoes while you're still adjusting the mic stand (speaking of which, I'm still waiting for my Blue Yeti mic ordered this past Saturday, but stuck in some warehouse somewhere this side of the Hudson). 

Hopeful because this isn't some one-off "hey we made a thing" moment. This is a long-term project — something Rixx and I have been talking about, poking at, shaping, and slowly building for months.

Hauling safely in EVE Online: Hard-won lessons from high-sec gankers

After a few months back in New Eden, one major shift stands out from my time away since 2011: ganking in high-sec has gone from occasional chaos to predictable business. It's not random violence anymore—it's optimized, profit-driven hunting. Which means you need to stop thinking of high-sec as "mostly safe" and start thinking of it as "safe only if you're not worth killing."

This guide distills practical hauling wisdom I've been collecting as I rebuild my instincts. Most of it comes from watching experienced players review catastrophic losses—particularly MarkeeDragon's "Ganked Awards" killboard reviews, which are equal parts hilarious and educational.

If you're new to EVE, returning after years away, or just tired of losing ships you didn't need to lose, these rules will help.