Thoughts on the future

After a week stuck outside my wormhole I figured I'd be itching to get back to the grind.  It has now been a week and a half since I got back in, and I've done nothing but PI and some fuel production during that time.  Most of that is from lack of trying, but there was one day where it was a lack of opportunity.

For the entire time I've lived in this wormhole, almost 3 months now, I've had an embarrassment of riches when it came to anomalies.  There were always enough that I didn't need to bother counting them.  One time I did and found there were 27.  During the week I was out of the hole that number dropped like a rock.  My alt logged in one day to find 4 of them.  I figured that number would start to grow again, but when I logged in this past weekend it was down to 3.  None of the anomalies were combat sites, which is what I was looking for.  I hadn't run one in a while and wanted to get back on the horse.

Already low on motivation, I declined to do anything else, despite two gas sites being up.  The last gas I listed on the market hadn't sold yet, and I just wasn't feeling it.  If there was any question before, there wasn't any now, I had reached one of my recurring apathy phases.

It's never the fault of the game, it's a personal problem I have with all things in life.  Whether it's work, a game, or people, I reach a point where I lose interest and withdraw.  This has been most problematic when it comes to work, but over the years I've found ways to deal with that.  My current job has good variety which helps slow the build up towards apathy.  In the gaming world it's a bit harder, because I'm doing that for fun and not a paycheck.  If I'm not having fun then there is little else to motivate me.  The upside is that I'm well aware of this flaw and know that it's temporary, in time it will pass.  Of course my POS eats fuel whether I'm interested in playing or not, so I have to think about the future if I want to get past this.

For now I'm treating this like a preparation for summer.  In the summer I could easily find myself pining for the coolness of the basement one week and wrapped up in something else the next.  Sure that is months away, but I think it'll sneak up on me pretty quickly.  Spring tends to be a busy time around our house, so it would be best for me to figure out a long term AFK strategy now and test it before it's too late.

The main question is, can I keep the POS fueled through PI alone?  That would mean selling extra Robotics and Coolant to pay for ice products, as those are the ones I seem to have the most of.  The second question would be, how often do I need to log in to make that feasible?  It's not just about keeping PI extractors running, I'd need to exit periodically to buy and sell.  More importantly I can't guarantee that the days I'd choose to play would give me the exits needed to make it work.

I'll be looking at that over the next week or two, starting to keep track a little better.  Mostly because that's what is interesting to me at the moment, and I have to follow the interest to keep going.  Of course having said that, by tomorrow my feelings could change and I could find myself wrapped up in wormhole life again.  Sometimes all it takes to pique my interest in something is to realize all the other options are more boring.

I should be clear that I do like living in a wormhole, and specifically that I really like the one I live in.  If things were to go south I'd certainly want to retain a hold on this wormhole and not lose it to the randomness of Bob's levers.  When I moved in my contingency plan was having the ability to pack it all up and log off in the hole.  Essentially to pause the whole experiment.  I'm still roughly in the vicinity of that plan being feasible, but I'm a little short on space to pull it off.  As I'm testing my extended AFK options I'll review that plan also.  Leaving an offline stick in space isn't an option, no matter how unlikely it is that it would be blown up.  I'd need to disappear without a trace, and return just as quietly.