Tonight’s celebration was, in a word, awesome. Inspired by a late fall mountain road trip and an awesome restaurant which specialized in fondues, we did a special new year’s fondue dinner at Chez Winterblink. Seafood in vegetable broth was followed up by a dessert fondue which would inspire New Year’s resolutions even if I just described it.

I can only hope, whether you’re spending your time in EVE or out, that you’re enjoying yourself in a safe and responsible, yet really fun manner.

It’s been a pretty busy time for me here the last few months with work (it’s seems like a seasonal thing or something), but things should be looking up for more comics and podcasts very very soon. I also totally forgot to mention, all of the comics are back online now, so browsing through the comics category will be a rewarding experience once more.

Fly safe, and we’ll speak soon!

Oh, hello.  Howsabouts some news?

1. Rumored Death of Urban Mongral

This is, like, a total lie.

2. Biatch, where my podcast?

Well, August turned out to be an utter hell month for me, so we’ll be getting back to doing these soon.  Really soon.  You see, when you work for a living (and I don’t mean at McDonald’s), sometimes you go through busy periods where you have to adjust your priorities.

All is well though, and I’ve been frequenting my consoles to fill in for the short periods where I can actually spend gaming.  EVE’s funny like that… great game, but you can’t take it in small doses sometimes.

3. Ok, where my comics?

You’ve got two new ones, more on the way.  Sheesh.

4.  … and where my stories?

I’ve been promising new ENVs for a long time now and guess what? If you don’t get at least one by the end of this coming weekend you can make fun of me here.  What a deal!

5. New WDA Site

That’s coming too.  If you’ve been to winterblink.com you’ll have seen the theme I’m going to go with, but it’ll get spiced up a lot more.  Think a black text on white version of that, mixed with a bit of Designer’s Republic (Wipeout) inspiration, and EVE.   In short, this site’s about to get a bucket of love poured all over its face.

I think that’s about it.  Not sure if anyone’s got any other questions that haven’t been answered here, but hey that’s why there’s a comments section below.  I do pay attention to it, even if Urban Mongral does not.

First lets get the podcast status out of the way.  No we’re not dead, Urban is just nursing a hell of a cold.  Most people have probably been hit or known someone to be hit by whatever bug is floating around, Urban just took a lot longer.  Most likely that’s due to him working so much he’s barely had any human contact.

So as soon as possible you’ll probably be getting some ridiculously long show (like last one) when we catch up on all the stuff we missed because one of us got sick or busy (like last one).

Comic’s going great, thanks for asking.

Other stuff, like Weekly Tinfoil and Frontline Dispatches.  In both cases, the authors who wanted to try doing this have found other things to focus their time on.  No hard feelings of course, it’s just unfortunate.  I don’t want to retire the content, what’s there is great and at some point someone (maybe me?) will step up and start filling in.

I’ve done a bit of tweaking on the site, just tightening up the layout a bit so things aren’t totally spread out.  I’m still doing more there, so expect some improvements as I start ticking off items on my to-do list.

That’s it for the quick update.  Feel free to post any questions or comments about any of this of course, and you’ll be hearing more podcast goodness as soon as Urban’s weak English immune system starts doing its job.

First, we managed to get a podcast recorded, it’s probably in its latter stages of being edited and should be online soon.  Yay!

Second, was busy playing EVE and didn’t get a chance to do a comic this week.  There’s one partly complete though, so will probably get that out as soon as I can.

I appreciate the patience of everyone.  Summer time tends to dig into everyone’s time with lots of out-of-game activities.  I hope everyone else is enjoying it too. :)

Andrew Cruse (Jade Constantine) is the Council’s chairman having received the highest number of votes. The first order of business for the Council will be to elect a vice-chairman, secretary and vice-secretary.

Congratulations to Jade Constantine for the win, as well as the rest of the Council! Click here for the full dev blog with the full results and commentary by CCP Xhagen.

Right click here and ‘Save As’ to download, or listen to it below:

[audio:http://www.warpdriveactive.com/audio/FactionWarFareEveOnlineSmall.mp3]

The four major Empires of EVE have broken their long-standing peace and are marshalling their forces for war.

The website for the new expansion for EVE called Empyrean Age is now available at the link above. There’s a new trailer, some wallpapers, a list of features, information about the Tony Gonzales novel The Empyrean Age, and much more.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think this is going to be one amazing event for EVE. It looks to be finally making the compelling combat of the game accessible to those who might have otherwise avoided it, without watering the experience down for anyone. I can’t wait.

Thankfully they’ve agreed, so you’ll notice a new category of “industry podcast”. That’ll show you all of their episodes thus far.

Just a quick note about the RSS feed here, if you subscribe to it you’ll get everything: the general blogs and news, the comic, and both podcasts. That might be a bit meaty for some who may prefer to subscribe to specific content, so I’ll be adding a nice RSS feed list for anyone to pick and choose how they’d like to receive their content.

Hope that helps, enjoy the new addition to the site, and keep the feedback coming! Also don’t forget about the live dev blog tomorrow, and the Faction Warfare testing happening this Saturday.

Gone is the old site hanging off of my own personal domain, winterblink.com. It took a while because someone was squatting this domain a little while after I started the comic, but I noticed it’d become available so I nabbed it and go to work.

This is a bit different than the last one, with more of a blog feel, but it should help out a lot going forward as I’m sure you’ll start to see soon. Things may look sparse here but expect improvements to come over days ahead.

Yes you’ll have to register to post comments. It’ll require an email address to verify you’re who you are, after that feel free to post comments at your leisure. If you want a fancy avatar of yourself to appear next to your post, this is dirt simple. Check out Gravatar. It’s free to sign up, and any blog software that supports it will grab your avatar from there without you having to do a damn thing. It’s based on your email address, so if it matches what you register here with then you’ll see a pretty picture next to your comments.

This all means a couple of things. First, there’s no more IGB support (for now). Second, this means you can post comments from home or at work, without requiring an EVE client to do so. I think this should open things up a lot to people who’ve been left out in this regard, and make things a lot more accessible overall.

If you have any suggestions or comments, please feel free to voice them to me personally by Evemail if you’re more comfortable with that, or by email. Hit the About page up top for that information.