Just an update from Flashfresh.

Just wanted to give a shout out to all those readers who have emailed/evemailed me - I am fine and doing well. I have been with my mother most of this and last month: she's still in hospital and it's been a slow process for her. Another two weeks at least before she can be discharged but she's already got a secondary infection (bloody NHS!)

One never ever assumes that sickness and injury will be visited onto one's own family and when it does happen; your world tilts on it's axis and it can be difficult to find balance.

Naturally, my online time has been nil - though there's been many an occasion where I wanted to log in, jump onto vent and link it up my pirate brother and sisters and find plunder and ransoms. When I finally had time to check the forums after a long hiatus, it was with some sadness to see three of our pirate brothers leave the group - one entirely from New Eden while the other two went to other pastures anew. Our CEO was unavailable due to his own crisis and most of the board of directors were unavailable as well. However, the vitality of any corporation is from the injection of new blood and ideas and the newer members have largely stepped up and continued the looting and killing in our finest traditions. Check this tasty triple combo meal: a thanny, hulk and orca. Well done to Gorgoleon for (I think) organising it. He's turning out to be a right nasty Bastard. In the finest sense of course and younger pilots can learn a lot from him. He is an acknowledged expert in most things Minmatar, so seek him out if you want to find out about fitting a typhoon or maelstrom or cyclone. He's your man.

Happy San and Kamoonga and Persephone too. I love them all. Oh, just wanted to give a shout out to Happy San... he's been working hard on our ransom board and has a stylish blog to boot. Kamoonga is a killer of the highest order and Persephone has been fitting her size nines wonderfully in The Bastards.

So yes, pilot churn is inevitable in New Eden: no-one actually gets paid to log in daily and one's interest can wane quite quickly especially when the corp has too loose a structure with no organisation and active leadership. Luckily, The Bastards are not like that, we have, though it is far from perfect, organisation, structure and RoninData's distinctive style of leadership. An active forum and killboard and free corp resources as well. I can say the same for our sister corporation, The Hellcats though it is an interesting contest over who cracks the whip harder: Mynxee or RoninData. Both are excellent leaders with vision and so long as they're leading, others will follow.

A new cycle of recruitment will be starting very soon; we still have a few holdovers from previous cycles but each has a special case for retention. I hope to be involved in the next recruitment cycle, we've had to up the skill point limit to 6M now and would prefer more. There were some discussions to keep the skill point limit to 4M as a deference to The Bastards roots as a bunch of sweaty, inexperienced but enthusiastic pirates but pragmatism won the day.

This should be a the ideal way for me to keep involved in The Bastards considering my reduced time. I have been told that our new and improved FAQ will be made available and visible on our website so that most of our enquiries can be answered without the need for a personal reply.

Other news: The Bastards alliance is reforming and we've dropped all our war declarations - it's a tad expensive for an alliance to war dec it would seem and since we're poor pirates, our income being solo from piracy, it was, again, the wise and pragmatic decision. In this alliance we bring in The Hellcats as before. Makes the synchronisation of standings so much easier now! Finally, Flashfresh is on Twitter, join in and er, tweet away.

I hope to be back very soon and will start to get involved in the new recruitment and then build up my flight time until I get my pilot's license back....

[OOC] - I have been working on a creative writing course for some time now and been asked to submit various pieces of short work. Here's one of them. Got 85% for it, so it can't be too bad? Had to work to a word limit of 1500 and the theme was about waiting and anticipation. Decided to use dear Old Flash as the subject and what goes through the mind of a pod pilot after his first pod death?

Anticipation

Anticipation filled Flash’s chest like hot exhaled air in a balloon. He pumped more and more of it until he felt like he was about to burst apart. He was simultaneously excited and afraid as he waited.

Flash, like the majority of the Brutor race was big-boned, black-skinned and bald. Even in the dimly lit room, he was wearing a pair of matte black sun glasses, protecting his eyes. A legacy of the perpetual darkness in the slave mines in Aridia prime where he grew up. It was all in the mind, said the brain doctors, there's nothing wrong with your eyes. He was tense and still, with his breath light and economical. He focused intently on the mirror, the same one hanging on the back of the door marked ‘exit’ as last time. An old analogue clock slowly thumped down the remaining minutes. I have time yet thought Flash as he tried to relax, just a little.

Fresh kill markings were being chiselled onto his skin by an auto-engraver. It hummed quietly as its needle drew and coloured in complex symbols. Blood welled from the shallow wounds and wept down his arms and legs. Flash, having refused an anaesthetic, relished the sting; this was not the first time that the same tattoos were done on his skin. It was an inescapable fact of his new life and status.

Flash glanced back at the clock. It read twenty seven minutes past three in the afternoon. He had three minutes left and inhaled slowly. His fists, meaty instruments of his indomitable will, smooth skinned and bearing no scars clenched and released slowly and rhythmically, in time to his heart-beat.

Would she recognise me? Thought Flash as he reached up and touched his right cheek. His bones, high and well-defined, were exactly as he remembered them. Of course she would recognise me! He was still himself, thought Flash as his finger traced an invisible line of an old ugly scar. On this occasion it was gone. It had never marked this body and thus the memory and evidence of that particular event, was gone. It had never existed.

Flash slowly exhaled, as he realised that she loved that scar and would spend hours tracing it with her fingers.

In fact, this body, grown from a strand of his own DNA, was one hundred percent his own. However it was too new, too unspoilt for Flash to feel like it was his. His body, until his first death, carried the echoes of his life. His struggles and his disappointments recorded in the numerous scars, countless bumps and imperfections in his skin, bone and flesh. He now felt like a fake, a fleshy impostor.

With a hiss, the auto-engraver automatically folded away and his tattoos were completed. Flash inhaled and slowly released it. It was now time to see whether he had managed to reclaim some small part of him from the prison of immortality. He got up and looked at the mirror, then at the clock and tensed as he heard footsteps approaching the door. There was a knock, uncomfortably loud. It was time.