As of this moment, there are only about forty-five hours left before it is officially Christmas day. I am both ecstatic and depressed with this observation. I love Christmas, the atmosphere, the family gatherings, and the presents. I’m still just about as excited waking up Christmas morning with the knowledge that there are numerous boxes that need to have their outer-layers torn about as I was when I was seven years old… Well, I would be, anyway, if we hadn’t switched the “opening presents” start time to late Christmas Eve about four years ago. Though even with this change I still manage to maintain a pretty hyper state of mind throughout Christmas Eve day as well as the days leading up to it.

I’m also immensely enjoying being home. My Christmas break (December 19 - January 4) is, by far, the longest vacation that I’ve had, sans summer, since I’ve been going to school. And even though the first few days home are plagued by some unique brand of bug that makes me feel fairly ill all evening, this break has already been incredibly enjoyable and relaxing. As for the bug, I’m not even sure how I could classify it. I’m fine all day, except for the evening (roughly 6:00pm - 12:00am), at which point I’ll feel pretty good again. It’s been fairly annoying to say the least, but it hasn’t really prevented me from doing a whole lot. It’s just enabled me to sleep a bit more than I’m used to. Oh, and it makes rooms spin on occasion.

An eruption of hype and general praise of EVE Online has been given within the last month. It seems odd that a game released almost two years ago would receive a sudden surge of attention after all this time, but that’s what’s happening. Penny-Arcade has a link to a 14-day trial (no credit card required to take advantage of) of the game, and Tim Buckley has been spreading the EVE love as well. PC Gamer also has a three-page story of an in-game corporation (think guild) being taken down for over $20,000 worth of in-game assets and cash by a select number of in-game individuals. EVE seems to embrace the fact that players can really run an entire economy as well as social events given time and a fairly flexible game design — something that Star Wars Galaxies‘ new NGE has completely obliterated for an otherwise complicated player-run universe.

Anyway, as for EVE so far, I’m actually quite enjoying the game. It’s a fairly slow-paced and very deep MMO that seems to be as much as the players put into it. All the downtime in the game is perfect for how I like to play games, in that I can play for a while, and then set up a destination to auto-pilot to while I talk to people or work on a site update. Plus, the fact that I have a ship named Serenity just makes me all sorts of happy. The biggest trick to getting into the game that I can tell thus far is just making it over the tutorial. It’s a nice three-four hour trek through a mildly boring series of learning tasks. Though once I finished that thing, and got into a situation to talk to some good friends (including Akamu, the main guy who was able to finally talk me into playing), and doing some missions the game got quite entertaining.

I have a number of other things that I’d like to talk about, but I think I’ll save them for an entry to be written in the not-so-distant future. This one seems to be too focused on Christmas and EVE to really warrant a complete subject change at this point. Screenshots of EVE and new pictures of Hobbesy-Kitty should both be up tomorrow.