The Cranky Sysadmin

There is a writing contest over at Starfleet Comms. The aim is to write a short piece inspired by the image of a Taranis warping through space. I don’t usually write fiction, but I figured I’d give it a shot since I’ve spent a lot of time in the Ares and Taranis. Find my story below the fold.
Bad Fiction Follows

If you’ve been keeping up with my posts, you’ll know that I am working on increasing my standings with several R&D corps. I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting and I’ve wasted a lot of time doing things inefficiently.
Pushing a Stone Uphill

Now that my two main characters are close to starting their datacore farming careers, I’m looking into what is needed to press my mostly unused toons into service farming datacores. The question I must answer before going down this path is, Will the passive income be worth the month and a half of skill training (and two weeks of grinding or more) required to bring the toon up to speed?
Datacore Alts

Now that I have the goal to build some passive streams of ISK, I’ve started at the top of my list at research agents. My main already has standings to use level 4 research agents in one corp, but they only have two good agents. As I get more skilled, I will need more high quality agents. This means I have to gain standings with other research corps.
The Great Standings Grind of 2010

As I’ve said in and earlier post, I’ve started purchasing PLEX’es in-game to continue my EVE experience. This means that at current prices, I have to come up with 600 million ISK per month. For a mission runner/ratter, this is a significant amount of time. If I make 20M per hour (and that’s actually aggressive for my skills), that’s 30 hours of game play per month dedicated to keeping the subscription alive. Yikes!
It’s Like a Job…