A couple of Saturdays ago I managed to finally make it to a Glasgow meetup. I've been trying to go for ages but never yet made it. I decided to put in extra effort this time after the organiser,
Glasgow Dunlop, identified me in Iceland as the person who keeps saying they're going to come through for a meet. I had the additional incentive that I would get to meet some people I know from the only additional alliance I have alts in -
The Bastards. Despite moving to a new house and having plenty of boxes to unpack I had permission from my wife to disappear for a whole day and get drunk with a bunch of other internet spaceship captains.
Come the day it looked like fate wanted me to miss yet another Glasgow meet. First our car refused to start and it was through sheer willpower alone the battery didn't die as I churned the engine over and over and over.... Once it grumble to life the oil warning started flashing. FFS! In 5 years that car never once wanted oil outside a service. So I found the oil which by some miracle was left accessible and not packaged into a box somewhere at the back of the garage behind several tons of children's toys. By now there was no chance I'd get to the train station in time. I had 8 minutes to drive the 10 minutes to the station. Exactly 10 minutes later I got into the station carpark just as the train also arrived. I abandoned the car with the door flapping open and ran for the train. As the train pulled away I could see my wife still trying to extract herself from the back seat. Oops!
I have a history of getting lost in Glasgow. I managed to meet up with
Ithica Hawk by using the powers of
Whatsapp. He successfully guided me through Glasgow to the
Hillhead Bookclub where everyone else was gathering. There was a good number of people already there so we grabbed some beers and got chatting with folk. Glasgow Dunlop presented me with a voucher work 300 Million ISK with
Eve-Bet.
Nashh Kadavr then inducted me as an honorary Bastard by giving me a t-shirt embroidered with The Bastards' logo. Of course I immediately changed into this.
Over the course of the day more and more people arrived including
CCP Logibro and
CCP Leeloo who were carrying a combined 40 kilos of swag! More drinking and chat about EVE was the order of the day until at some point we were all herded inside for the raffle draw to distribute swag. By this point I had swapped memory capacity for beer so can't remember all the things that were given away. I seem to recall the shiny new EVE Source book being passed around. I got to take home a foil pack of cards for the EVE trading card game as well as winning a set of high grade slave implants. The latter I will never dare plug in to my head. The draw went on for a long time emphasising the sheer amount of swag provided by CCP and EVE-bet.
At this point some of us were invited to a BBQ in some distant suburb of Glasgow. We decided to kidnap CCP Logibro and I was reminded by reading twitter that we
slid him on his chair through the bar to the door before bundling him into someone's car and heading off on a long car journey. At the other end we were provided with very tasty sausages, burgers, kebab skewers and more alcohol. A perfect end to the perfect EVE meet up.
Thanks go to Glasgow Dunlop for organising such a great EVE meet. He put my own attempts at starting a regular EVE: Edinburgh meet to shame. Thanks also to EVE-Bet for the free ISK to blow on bets. Thanks to CCP for sending CCP Logibro, CCP Leeloo and all the swag. We promise we'll return Logibro at some point. Thanks to Nashh Kadavr for The Bastards t-shirt which my wife keeps having to prise from my back in order to wash. Finally, thanks to the Hillhead Bookclub for allowing us to invade their wonderful establishment for the day.
