[Jester's Trek] Best of 2013: 1
Best of 2013: 1
As I do every year, I want to wrap up the pledge drive week by saying thank you. Whether you contributed or not, all of you out there reading, commenting, agreeing with me and arguing with me, sending me EVE mails to encourage me or teach more more about this game... all of you are why I do this. Thanks for reading along with me in 2013!
But a particular thank you to everyone who chose to help me out this year! I had to all but shut down my industry play in 2013 to give that time over to CSM duties so pretty much 100% of my income this year has come from syndication ISK and donations. That and my savings are all that's keeping me going right now so it was truly wonderful to see that a lot of you appreciate what I do enough to send me some of your hard-earned ISK. Your support means a lot to me, particularly those of you who are newer players. Personal thanks today go out to Steven Kurson, Ennor Odunen, Kyria Shirako, Aurora Madri, Tas Exile of Pilgrim in Exile, Dersen Lowery, mattceza, Guumba, Noslen Nosilla and finally... to everyone who wished for their donations to remain anonymous. Thank you so much to all of you!
There will be one more "thank you" post before the end of the year. I sent out some EVE mails to contributors asking if they wanted their contributions to be public or not, and some of those EVE mails haven't yet been replied to.
This is the last post of the pledge drive, so there will be no further shaking of the tin cup after this. Of course, any time you want to send contributions to Ripard Teg, I won't say no. ;-) Again, thanks very much to those of you that have contributed! To those and the rest, thanks for reading, and I hope you'll continue to do so.
My favorite post of the year is rarely hard to choose, and this year was no exception...
#1: Riley
...but it had nothing to do with EVE Online or any other MMO. Sometimes this blog is about life. And when the elder of my family's two dogs passed away in March, I was heart-broken and could think of little else. Into the night, I remembered his life and as I did it seemed perfectly appropriate to celebrate his spirit in the same place that I write about so many other things. And in further proof that EVE players aren't nearly as nasty as the rest of the gaming community makes you out to be, dozens and dozens of you generously shared your condolences and your stories of loss of your own family pets over the years.
Riley was an important part of my life and my family's life for almost a decade, I still miss him, and he was a welcome interruption from spaceships. I'm happy I was able to share a little piece of him with all of you and I can't reread this piece without being flooded with the same emotions of that day. So that pretty clearly makes it the strongest piece of writing I did this year. Even if it had very little to do with a game made by a bunch of Vikings on a rock in the middle of the north Atlantic.
I sometimes catch heat for doing these little introspectives, but I enjoy them. Based on the hits some of this year's list is getting, for a lot of you this is the first you've heard of some of these posts so I hope they were interesting to you! I do this every year so if you'd like to look at last year's list or the year before, just look for the posts tagged "Pledge Drive".
Thanks for reading in 2013 and I look forward to writing more for you next year!
Source: Best of 2013: 1