Dune: Part Three trailer — the hero and the poison

I shared the teaser back in March, but the official trailer has me thinking about Paul in a different way.

I first read Dune in CÉGEP, and it felt unlike any science fiction I’d encountered. The closest comparison I had was Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, though even that didn’t prepare me for what Herbert was doing with religion, politics and the weight of a single person’s destiny.

In Villeneuve’s first two films, it’s easy to see Paul Muad’Dib Atreides as the hero. The Harkonnens destroyed his family and oppressed the Fremen. Of course you want to see them brought down. What fascinates me about this trailer is that it lets the poison inside Paul’s messiah story come into view. I’m eager to see how far Villeneuve takes that turn.

I loved Parts One and Two, so yes, I’m excited for this one. I’m also waiting on my limited Portfolio Edition of Dune: The Storyboards, which I backed late last year. If it arrives around March 2027 as expected, I’ll get to revisit the whole trilogy through the storyboards, artwork and proofs. First, though, I want to see where Paul’s story ends on screen.

December 18th can't come soon enough...

Skill Points (SP) in EVE Online: What’s worth your time and ISK?

Oz has a new guide to skill points, and it’s worth watching whether you’ve just started playing EVE or have been training characters for years. If you don’t know him, he’s best known for making sense of EVE’s markets and economy through his videos, The Oz Report, and his trading tools over on TheOz.Space. He was also our guest on episode 9 of The Safe Spot.

In this recent guide, he covers how to earn, buy, and speed up skill points, then walks through the numbers behind skill farming. 

The Safe Spot episode guide: all episodes so far!

One of us has spent 18 years living in New Eden. The other came back after a long absence and still has questions. I co-host The Safe Spot with Rixx Javix, and this is the place to find every episode, newest first. Pick a topic, read the full post, or jump straight into the conversation on your preferred platform. I’ll keep this list updated as new episodes go live.

What does the leader of EVE's largest coalition actually do all day?

I just spent nearly 90 minutes listening to SchadSquatch—Schad—interview The Imperium leader Asher Elias. 

There's a lot to unpack.

Millions of assets later, I'm finely done. For now...

Last night Arya, Mantis's CEO, and I finished collecting the last of Lonetrek's assets. It was by far the biggest region I had to cover this time around, with an almost ridiculous amount of stuff spread across far too many stations.

That brings this latest run to four completed regions: The Bleak Lands, Devoid, Molden Heath and Lonetrek. Altogether, that meant collecting assets from 153 systems and 501 stations. More than four million items, spread across those regions. Most were small individual items, while others took more than half of my Hecate's 1,700+ cargo hold.

For the last three and a half weeks, whenever real life gave me a little time to play EVE, this was ALL I DID. Fly out. Dock. Load whatever fit. Fly back to a central location in highsec. Unload. Repeat.

Again, and again, and again.

Book review: Crawlspace — A slow-burn science-fiction mystery

A quick note before I get into it: I’ve tried to keep this review fairly spoiler-light, but I do touch on the book’s tone, setup and a few elements of how the story unfolds. If you want to go in completely blind, you may want to read the book first.

A lot of the reviews I read mentioned that Adam Christopher’s Crawlspace was too slow and not scary enough for something being sold as science-fiction horror. They were right about one. They were wrong about the other.

I picked it up because the premise sounded interesting—a small crew, an experimental spacecraft, a prototype SLIP drive that takes them nowhere they expected to go. Going in, I was braced for the complaints. But what kept me reading the whole way through wasn't being scared; it was not knowing what the hell was happening.

The real tension comes from active uncertainty.

The Safe Spot — Episode 16: Rixx Javix's 18 Years in EVE Online

Rixx's been flying around New Eden for 18 years, so this episode turned into a look back at how he got here and why he still undocks. We also get into my recent hauling adventures, the things EVE keeps teaching us, and a few ideas we’re saving for another day.

If we had six months to make EVE Online better, where would we start?

A few days ago, I asked a fairly simple question on r/Eve:

“You’ve been given 6 months to "fix" EVE. What are your top 3 priorities?”

These could be mechanics, balance problems, old systems in need of reworking, new-player issues, economic problems, PvP, PvE, industry, sovereignty, Faction Warfare, whatever.

The only real constraint was that I wanted people to choose three. Not twenty. Not an entire imaginary expansion roadmap. Just three things.

Predictably, some of the responses were jokes. Some wanted Hilmar gone. Others wanted multiboxing restricted, Local removed (would be interesting to remove it in null sec for sure), citadels changed, nullsec shaken up, ships made cheaper, or Fenris to stop spending time on anything that wasn’t EVE.

But buried among those shorter answers were some genuinely thoughtful responses.

Players wrote detailed proposals about resource distribution, sovereignty, PvE, exploration, structures, force projection, industry, small-gang warfare, new-player retention and even how information itself works inside EVE.

I also shared the question privately with a longtime EVE player whose opinion I trust. His answers went in some very different directions—dynamic space weather, huge asteroid belts, mineable comets, shifting resource availability, abandoned structures that could be captured rather than destroyed, and wrecks that salvagers could actually hunt down.

Once I stopped looking at the individual fixes and started looking at why people wanted them, something interesting happened.

The dozens of suggestions started collapsing into three much larger ideas.

Is EVE Online still worth playing in 2026?

Is EVE Online Still Worth Playing in 2026? Short answer? Yes. Absolutely!

But I'm not sure I would recommend EVE Online to everyone.

That probably sounds like a strange way to start an article arguing that a 23-year-old MMO is still worth playing in 2026, but after coming back to New Eden myself, I think it might be the most important thing to understand about EVE. 

EVE Online is difficult. It can be frustrating. 

It wastes your time. It lets other players interfere with whatever carefully constructed plans you had for the evening, and you can spend hours preparing something only to lose it in seconds because you made one bad decision. And somehow, those are also some of the reasons I've fallen in love with it again.

The Safe Spot — Episode 15: The Mike Azariah interview

Mike Azariah has spent nearly two decades showing that trust often matters more than ISK in New Eden. When Rixx and I sat down with him this past weekend, he walked us through the early blogging days (him and I go way back, to my days as the Blog Father), Operation Magic School Bus, his CSM campaigns, and what it actually means to lead from the edges.

Learning how to haul safely in EVE Online with a blockade runner

One red flashy docked with his wing mate in the same station where I was holding cargo. Both of them after following me in. And I had no idea what they'd do next.

This was the result of instinct kicking in. It had brought me straight to the station. The obvious place.