Name Challenge | Enjar, Unconfirmed Time Traveling Cat

enjar (69)in #steemitnamechallenge • 7 years ago (edited)

In the crazy world we live in it only makes perfect sense a talking cricket named @lemony-cricket calls out a time traveling cat named @enjar. This has caused many to speculate what is the meaning of the universe and why is it ruled by cats. It’s been over a week now and like any cat, I’ve taken many catnaps on this. It’s a rather long story. One where I could write entire books on my adventures and well one day I could. I am after all a demi-god who roamed the heavens for a number of years.

CCP Games

Enjar itself is not something I ever google or cared if it already had some ancient meaning. In life, you give a name meaning yourself or other people will for you. As far as I’m aware when creating it I just made it up from two words that I squished together. Therefore, it’s a rather moot point what its past was as I created that backstory myself.

Birth

Like any birth, there should be some kind of recordkeeping of it. Thankfully others have as I have a horrible memory for recalling these short of things. Enjar was born back in June of 2017—no wait our story starts much sooner than that. It was back on December the 19th 2008(3.)

He was born to the Royal Amarr Institute in the Amarr Empire sovereignty of space in a system called Emrayur. Royal Amarr Institute corporation itself still has over 578k remaining members to this day (1.) I have since long left my home planet and starting corporation.

My Early Years

New Eden the Eve Online Universe can be such a hostile place. The game does not force on its players a moral compass or ethical standards to conduct war. That is entirely left up to you more or less. If you like to be a space pirate who swindles his way through life as a lone wolf by all means. If you like to be someone who honors their corporate bonds and remains loyal to them while upholding honor, respect, and righteousness by all means.

The most impactful thing about Enjar and my journey was the first corporation I joined called Galactic Hegemony. While it’s a dead corporation these days it had an immense pull on what I became. They were for better term casual carebears that just wanted to have a good time in high security (sec) systems at the start. They focused on running missions, mining, manufacturing, and trading as their core.

I ended up joining because they were willing to take in fresh pilots who were clueless and teach them the ropes. A game as vast and complex as this almost requires such things to happen within its ecosystem. Otherwise, you are just a blind and lost person never understanding the true power of New Eden.

Nightmare was one of my favorite ships to run missions in later on
While originally I wanted to get into mining and manufacturing. I found mining to be rather dull and manufacturing requiring a very long and expensive journey in training for requirements; along with being effective as possible. It was hard to compete with players who have been doing that for years that it was better left up to the veterans. Instead, I ran missions and turned in my loot for a weekly paycheck to the corporation.

I did this for quite a few months and I made many friends within this corporation. I was at a point in my life where I had quit one game I had been playing since middle school. All my friends either had left or turned into manipulating sociopaths who feared being left alone in the game and did whatever necessary to keep you around. Enjar was created in a time of need and want to reset and start new again. In fact, Enjar seems to appear when such events are a welcome sight in my life.

There are only so many missions you can run and so many people to take a cut in the profits that you decided to explore more. Not to mention high sec wars where rather boring. People would come and steal from your members who were mining or suicide gank your mission running ships. Any retaliation and suddenly you were to meet with massive and excuses force from the wardecs on you. It was boring either sitting in a station all day not being able to play the game or being so out a number when you undocked that there was no point of being in space.

Wormholes

One thing I really started to enjoy was living in a wormhole. Players in those kinds of systems where not listed on local chat. You had to scan and look for signs that someone was even there.

I lived out of player-owned structures (pos) that you had to maintain the fuel for. They were more or less just giant bubbles in space that had a place to store ships and materials at the time. I enjoyed running the sites in there from killing sleeper NPCs to mining asteroids so big they would take days and days of flat-out mining to deplete. This created a very high-risk high reward and the kind of thing I enjoyed. Lots of profit could be made and for greater parts of it, I was a lone wolf. Once a week or so someone from the corporation come by and refined down the ores into minerals and hauls them out to market to be sold or to the manufacturing division to be used.

Between the wars, the corporation was getting itself involved in and paychecks not being that great. People came and went and so did me a couple of times. Sometimes people who you became friends with would leave and you would just go with them hoping for a far more fun adventure. You unusually left with very little in-game money and came back even poorer.

Wanting More

After a while I got bored of being a carebear and being solo in a wormhole for weeks was well boring. I wanted to get in on the action of pvp and so I joined a couple of different places. When you are a noob looking for a good time places will sure sell you the moon that’s never as great as they make it out to be.

I gave really cool and interesting things a try. One such thing was Blue Vs Red where two sides wherein an endless war with each other in high sec. Most time you just sat around waiting for both sides to agree to fight each other. More times than not people would wardec one side or the other in hopes of getting some free or easy kills.

Classic bait ship a Maller
Nothing worse than undocking as the bait ship thinking you have a fleet of 15 to match the 15 wanting to fight to only have 3 on your side. So I left after a few of those “let downs.”

I moved to 0.0 a couple of times. Lawless space as it were. Where people could use the biggest ships in the game and not have to deal with the police NPCs and other mechanics you find in high sec or even low sec. Most time I was just bored. I flew amarr ships with armor plating and used laser weapons. Somehow despite being told so many times that “yes we fly those kinds of fleet…” They just flew shield tanked drakes that fired missiles. Which resulted in me not being able to join in since I never trained for those skills or even had the correct fittings to join those fleet.

Z.E.R.G

Finally, I found what I was looking for in the game. it’s a shame it only lasted for me from 3/27/10 to 6/5/10 (3.) I felt at home and I made quite a number of new friends.

Harbinger my go to pvp ship
Most of the fleets they flew for pvp I could join in. We had carved out a small low sec area where people knew during our active times that jumping into the area was going result in losing your ship or worse.

With our base I believe in Ami system and the kor-Azar region. They also started to run quite a number of medium scale operations taking down pos’s and claiming low sec moons.

evemaps.dotlan.net
True to its name massive amounts of people kept joining in day after day. I joined and not too long after the numbers just ballooned up like crazy. Well over 50 corporations and 1k characters (2.) It was one of those places I felt I was going spend the rest of my Eve Online Career in. If not the very least a year or two.

After some talks of wanting the riches found in 0.0 and the adventures that could be found we set our sights on it. We wanted more and if we could find our place within it we would keep growing and become a true Z.E.R.G like no one has seen. So the plans where set for some “easier” part of 0.0 space. I believe it was the system HED-GP or near it in the catch region. These days controlled by Test Alliance I’m not don’t recall who was there other than AAA back then.

Then it all went wrong in no time flat. What I would consider the front line members. The always first people had all our ships shipped down to 0.0 by the logistic fleets. Out of all those players in the alliance, something like 50 moved down. Turns out just about everyone just wanted to be a carebear and moving 0.0 was a “well if someone else does all the work I’ll come down in a few months for the profits.”

The people who roam that 0.0 part of space where AAA and looking at recent kills in that area they are still there. For every ship, we would field we joked they bring a falcon to jam us and keep us from attacking.

A couple of key players went missing. In real life, they worked along the coast and The Deepwater Horizon oil spill happened around the same time. Talk about bad timing but people wanted to move forward anyway.

With confidence dropping, and people not wanting to come join us and basically lose their ships it became a no-win situation. One of the pvp corporations who had access to logical support within the alliance shipped all their stuff back up to low sec and they left the alliance. They started to attack all our low sec assets. With the entire remaining pvpers trap down in 0.0 where they had spent the majority of their funds in ships-- this ended up being the end. I think it took me almost a year or longer just to sell off all the assets I had down in 0.0 for very little. We did try a few final last stands in 0.0 since we were down there to fight. it was mostly a moot point as we were outnumbered, outgunned and out jammed.

Pirate Life For Me

After Z.E.R.G I joined a couple of friends corporation or they would join mine. Just about anywhere a friend would invite me into I was happy to try out. I had met some great people and for a while, things were ok.

I did a little bit of faction warfare pvp and some low sec piracy. Faction warfare treated every new person who signs up for it like they were a spy and thus you never got into any of the fun fights. So that ended up being rather boring. Most of the time it was just me and two other friends and we would hang out in our old low sec areas from our Z.E.R.G. days.

I joined a couple of bigger alliance and sadly things just never worked out. Including one of them getting disbanded if I recall by someone rising to power so they could rob the place. Just my luck I was there only for a couple of days about to have all my stuff shipped down to me by one of their logic fleets and the entire alliance just feel apart. At least I did not spend another year with all my assets trapped in 0.0 and no money left to my name.

This was a low part of my eve online career. I felt like a kicked dog who had no home and all the fun seem to be gone from the game. There was no pvp winning anymore and it was hard to just go back to mission running in high sec. mostly because no matter where you went quite a number of people went into suicide ganking expensive mission running ships to the point it was not worth the risk.

During this low point, I also took a number of breaks from the game. Up until this point in my journey, it was not the first time I had taken a couple of breaks here or there. It’s a very long and slow game and when you are dealt a major blow sometimes you just need a break from it all.

Back To Wormhole Life

My preferred ship to use while in them is called a Legion
Now it is March the 11th 2014 (3.) Like I said a fair amount of time has passed and very little luck. Some of my first ever friends I had made back in Galactic Hegemony I had been gaming with on and off in other games wanted to play Eve Online again. In fact, that is what lead me to play this game a few times since then.

We joined a wormhole corporation and lasted about a month. We wanted a somewhat medium size place where they just let us game with each other and anyone else that wanted to just jump in. Basically, it was a place like Galactic Hegemony where they take our resource and sell it but we got a much better deal. We could just focus on pvp when needed and farming when it was not busy with people trying to gank our members.

Kill Report
At first, we had to start in the new player pos. This meant back than a bunch of strangers all had access to each other’s ships. One night while I was out finishing cleaning up things I got ganked by an alliance called THE H0NEYBADGER. One of their members joined using an alt so they steal everyone’s ships from the new member's area.

While at first they asking me questions just to make sure my story check out. The other guy in question was a horrible liar and they got him a few times saying a thing and even trying pin it all on me. It was not hard for them to not only know it was the other guy but also which alliance he belonged to. They got revenge at some point but that was far after we had left.

After my friends and I lost billions in ships and assets from this we demand to have our own pos that no one else could steal our stuff. They really help out by taking care of hauling in the fuel every week to keep it powered and I believe we even bought a discounted one they already had which they help us set up. They simply took the costs out of what we earned every week and paid out the rest. They were really great people to hang out with we just wanted to make sure our stuff was more secure.

We had a couple of other people we played within that corporation. Many of them ended up leaving after some very bad luck getting caught running sites by overwhelming numbers. If I recall one poor guy had lost ships in the robbery;then, lost a few more billion in ships in pvp. He went into high sec to mission run and rebuild and got ganked again in his final and expensive mission running ship. Needless to say, no one blamed him when he announced he was quitting the game. Eve Online can be a very cruel and unforgiving lady.

With him gone along with a few others and not everyone in our small group being online it became difficult to run sites in the wormhole space we had connections too. Which resulted in us yet again packing up and taking another break from the game.

Betrayal

Like always we could not stay away from this game forever. In fact, it’s one game we all could agree on to play and thus the band was getting back together again except this time we were going run the operation. It was March the 27th 2015 and this corporation lasted until July the 19th 2016 (3.)

If I recall we came back and took a couple of breaks between this time frame. Since we had more than become season veterans at this point we decided to pass down our knowledge and recruit some new players or just anyone who wanted to join us.

We really loved wormhole space. The great thing about it if you're small or massive there's a place in that kind of space you just have to find it and make it your own. It is nothing like 0.0 or even low sec.

while I loved running missions in a Paladin as well it did get boring
We all were rather tired of mission running. So I started to get into what I thought I was going to do at the very start of my journey in this game. I got a second account up and running and used both of them to spend my day's mining; while also, starting the process of training manufacturing and research skills. In fact, we were a bit of a mining corporation for a while. As an old battered veratrin of this game, I welcome the slow pace of mining. It was relaxing and I started to enjoy it.

We wanted to spend a fair amount of time in high sec so we worked out an easy process. We haul all the ores that were mined in the belts and keep track of who mined how much. Since we had the better refining skills and could get more we took care of that and the sales as well. In exchange, we would do a paycheck system every time we sold. With a portion of your earning going towards corporation needs. There were a few big and expensive items we wanted to expand our operations along with our end goal of relocating into wormhole space. Our higher refining skills, fleet bonuses for mining, and time spent hauling more than made up for the corporation taking a cut so we felt it was a rather fair deal.

One time logging in I was told we had been robbed. I thought “oh hahaha funny joke.” We had a hanger full of ores that were going be refined and sold that day. After I was told it was not a joke I thought “how did we mess up the role settings so a ‘new’ player could rob us?” While it sucks a lot of trolls in the game join corporations to try and steal or cause damage. Turns out it was not that either.

A guy who we played with back in our Galactic Hegemony days. A guy who we had played with in other games. A guy who had been a founding member of this new corporation fire sold all the ores for next to nothing.

As being a new player once myself I understand when you get screwed over like this it can give people the wrong impression of the game. The last thing I wanted was a bunch of people to quit the game because they thought that all this game was backstabbing and thieving. While that does happen a lot there are good guys in it as well.

I ended up covering what was not in the corporation wallet to make sure the new players got their fair share of pay despite what happened. Since I was one the one that leads the mining operations day to day and mined the most it was not so bad paying out the little guys who really did not make much anyways. Sure I lost out on hundreds of millions of ISK and yes I needed that to buy in-game time since I did not have money to pay the monthly sub myself. For most of my time in Eve Online, I have been farming enough money in the game over all these years to buy game time. I could have easily said “nope” nothing we can do. I’m a better player than that and wanted to lead by example.

This person kept coming back trying cause damage to us any way he could in this game and we assumed other games as well. Even during one of our breaks, he came back. Since he was a founding member and the corporation was “inactive” he was able to use a game mechanic and perhaps help from support to join back into the corporation. We were certain his voting share for being a founding member were rejected so it’s anyone’s guesses how he was able to rejoin and had voting shares again in the corporation.

He then spent a month(s) logging in every week to issue new things to be voted on of which he was only active member to vote them. As a result, he slowly kicked and rejected everyone’s shares out. Now he just sits in the dead corporation as his final prize. Which is no matter as we just reformed and had an amazing time without him.

The Final Years

Again the calling of Eve Online lures us in with a new expansion. While I’m not sure how long we were inactive since I had remained inactive even after I was kicked out. It was now November the 16th 2016 (3.) This time it was just the three of us. We were going to wormhole space and not taking anyone else with us. As a result, we did just that.

Farmed up enough money in high sec running mission to not only get ships we needed but enough to get ourselves a citadel to set up a base from. We took a few breaks here or there but kept coming back and just having a blast in wormhole space till it stopped being fun or everyone go too busy in real life that another break was taken.

While I do feel a bit of a calling back to Eve Online writing this. With our absence, our wormhole system was taken over by Russians who paid to clear out our structures and we lost some assets in the process. The process of raising funds again, finding a new place to call home, and a bunch of other stuff is just way more time consuming than I like. Not to mention this game changes so much I’d have to relearn a lot of basic things yet again. After you have played a game for so many years you just wish for things to stay unchanged.

zKillboard
If it was not for the gaming being so slow, so punishing, and so heartbreaking I would have returned by now a few more times. Other than that I had quite a number of amazing years. I did a little bit of everything the game had to offer and went on some amazing adventures with others. A few kills seem to be missing from my killboard but I’m fine with that. It is interesting how things are lost in the void over time.

Meaning Behind Enjar

Now that you understand the backstory I hope this gives a bit of a reason why I choose to use Enjar here on Steemit. Both Steemit and Eve Online where more or less wild west lawless places. In Eve Online I had developed a moral compass to guide me through tough times and I plan to use that here as well. I’m just a guy hoping to make enough to cover some of my time to keep doing this much like I did in Eve Online. I made many friends in Eve Online and I hope to do that here as well. Even more so if they last far beyond however long I stay here.

Enjar

The name is quite simple there are a couple of people who have read my intro post who got the short version of it. What they never got was this backstory and that moment when I created the name Enjar.

I’ve always been bad at creating names. It’s one of the things I hate when joining a new game and being stuck on the name creation screen. You try a few dozen names you have used before with no luck and then go “darn it now what.” I decided to poke some fun at myself with the name. Enjar is English Jar. Yep, it's that simple. But why? I’m American so it’s not like I’m an English (British) person. I’ve always had issues with spelling, grammar, and even saying certain words. As such this has led some people to certain conclusions and I’ve always been fine with them. If you will fill a jar with vodka; then, toss in the dictionary. Shake that jar up really well and pour it into a glass you now have an Enjar. Something fun, something a bit creative, and thankfully unlike Eve Online the Russians and their love for vodka are off on a different version of Steemit. I don’ have to worry about them getting in my way this time of total blockchain domination –meow meow meow.

Time Traveling Cat

Since Enjar is a demi-god who roamed the heavens in spaceships in the future that makes me rather out of place here. Even more so since before here I was not a blogger or someone who used social media much. One could say I’ve broken all the rules and traveled back in time. It’s the most logical reason why an Enjar would even be in a place like this. After all, he should be off living in some wormhole right now shooting things with space lasers making billions.

Also when I joined Steemit I did so with the hopes of making a better life for my cat and myself (my profile picture and hence a time traveling cat.) Sadly last year he passed away. It’s a consent remind to keep going on Steemit during the ups and downs here. As he is watching over me with every blog I make and every comment I place on the blockchain.

Well, @lemony-cricket was this worth waiting over a week to find out? I hope you do mind the delay in me getting around to it. I knew it would be a long one and hence I was a bit tentative on doing it.

As far as the rest of the bits for this challenge. I hope people understand this blog is getting very long. I simply don’t wish to double its length or write a book here. I hope my backstory of Enjar and who he is will be good enough.