That gameplay trailer for Resonance absolutely stopped my YouTube scroll.
There’s this immediate “okay, I need to know what this is” vibe: a lone alien explorer following a signal into the ruins of a dead (robotic) civilization… and then—because of course—waking up something colossal that really wasn’t asking to be disturbed.
The tone feels quiet, mysterious, and big in that “ancient machines + lonely planet” kind of way.
The atmosphere is gorgeous. The visuals absolutely attention-grabbing.
Not a questline living. Not a “the game hands you gold for showing up” living (though there's a bit of that of course).
But a real one.
New Eden is one of the only game worlds where “making money” isn’t a side activity. It’s a whole ecosystem. You can be a scavenger, a prospector, a courier, a trader, an industrialist, a pirate, a soldier-for-hire… and the economy actually has room for all of it because other players create the demand (and the chaos).
Crazy, eh? I know!
That’s the hook for this series. I’m putting together a practical, blueprint-style set of posts that maps out the major ways capsuleers make ISK—from the stuff you can start doing today, to the systems that feel like you accidentally enrolled in an MBA program run by space criminals.
No fluff. No “top 10 secrets.” No pretending there’s one “best” way.
Just a ladder you can climb.
The above is "After Hours Podcast – Episode 3", and it’s a nearly-decade-old (May 2016) chat between the infamous pirate Rixx Javix, and myself — looking back on the “golden age” of EVE blogging and how that whole scene shaped a lot of us.
I came across that old episode while researching for an upcoming project on EVE Online podcasts, past and present (more on that later).
It looked nothing like the cartoons I’d grown up with on TV or in theaters. This was before I’d even stumbled into Akira, Nausicaä or Robotech—back when “animation” mostly meant one familiar lane: Disney, Warner Bros. or Hanna-Barbera. And then this showed up, looking like it came from a completely different universe.
Some games don’t just start — they announce themselves.
This sub-minute Blender tribute to the Homeworld opening sequence absolutely nails that feeling. The quiet dread. The impossible scale. That slow, inevitable moment when the Taiidan fleet drops out of hyperspace and you know things are about to go very wrong.
For me, this hits straight in the nostalgia cortex. Homeworld was one of the first PC games I played after jumping ship from Macs in the late ’90s, and that opening — paired with Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber — never really left my head. It wasn’t bombastic. It was solemn. Operatic. Like space history unfolding in real time.
This tribute gets why that intro worked. It’s not about flashy dogfights or camera gymnastics. It’s about weight. Fleets that feel ancient. An empire arriving not in a rush, but with absolute confidence. You don’t need dialogue when the music and motion already tell the story.
Huge props to Venture Pictures for capturing the soul of it so cleanly.
This feels like a quiet reminder of why that original reveal mattered so damn much.
One of the things I’m genuinely enjoying right now is rediscovering how much of EVE Online lives outside the actual game play.
What?!! I hear you say. Bear with me a second...
In EVE, skills matter, obviously — but they’re only part of the equation. The real learning happens in the fit and in how a ship is meant to be flown. Lately, that’s been my trusty Merlin, and figuring out how to lean fully into its brawler nature instead of fighting it. Short-range blasters, afterburner over speed tricks, scram and web to keep fights close, and a solid shield buffer so it can sit in the pocket and trade blows. I’m training into the guns and support skills that make that setup work, and paying attention to why each module belongs there.
That process — reading, testing, undocking, exploding, tweaking — is where the fun is.
Seriously! That might sound like a chore to some, but it's allowing me to learn the game nice and slow. At my own rhythm.
In EVE, your ship doesn’t reach its potential just because your skills say it should. It does when the fit makes sense and you fly it the way it was designed to be flown. Now go back, and read that last sentence once again, cause it says a lot about the game.
I’m pulling all of this together into a more detailed post soon, in which I'll be digging into the Merlin itself, the modules and fittings I’m training toward, and how brawler and kiter tactics actually play out once you’re on grid.
But for now, I'm heading out 12 jumps, getting myself a new skill in order to use my new Tech II blasters!
Fly safe!
Let’s get the rating out of the way first, because it frames everything else.
If Avatar was a 4.5/5, and Avatar: The Way of Water landed at a solid 4/5, then Avatar: Fire and Ash sits at a 3/5 for me.
That doesn’t mean it’s bad.
It does mean it didn’t stick with me.
And notably, my two teenagers were even more disappointed than I was. These are kids who watched the first film over and over again, and who happily went to see the second Avatar film twice on IMAX (they were much too young to see the first in theatres).
This time, walking out of the theater, the reaction was basically: “Yeah… that was fine.”
Which, for Avatar, feels telling.
**Warning: spoilers ahead!**
