Awards Ceremony

Blog Banter 43: Celebrating the Nation of EVE
At the turn of the year in meatspace, award season starts to spin up. Across the general media, folk are encouraged to look to their peers and recognise excellence and inspiration from the previous year. For the past two years I have attempted to do the same for EVE by distributing imaginary Free Boot Awards to an eclectic assortment of community luminaries. This year I thought it might be nice to expand the concept. 

For Blog Banter 43 I would like to invite every participant to nominate their peers for whatever awards you think they deserve. Let's celebrate the best and the worst of us, the funniest or the most bizarre, the most heroic of the most tragic of the past year. They could be corpmates, adversaries, bloggers, podcasters, developers, journalists or inanimate objects. Go nuts. 

There's only one rule: no narcissism allowed (so you can't nominate yourself).

There are a lot of people who deserve awards for doing good work. I'm not going to name everyone because this post would get too long, so instead I'm going to give awards to a few hard working individuals who have had exceptional results.

Guess which one is for the best sport? Size Matters.

The "Fuck You Ninja Turtle" Award goes to Ripard Teg of Jester's Trek blog. I don't always agree with everything he posts, but a lot does make sense and he consistently puts out quantity and quality with readable posts that are never a chore to slog through no matter how long they are. He writes numerous guides as well as political posts from perspectives most players never even imagine looking from. Agree or disagree, his is a must-read blog and a huge boon to the community.

The "Blogfather" Award goes to the master of the Blog Banter's himself, Seismic Stan of Freebooted blog. When CrazyKinux stopped doing the blog banters, I considered picking them up and running with them but Stan beat me to the punch by a second. I'm so glad he did because he has taken the banters in a superior direction than I ever could. No one has been as tireless and as visible for promoting the blogging community as Stan has, while still maintaining a good blog and a writing gig (career?!).

The "Podmother" Award goes to Aryidanika of Voices from the Void podcast. Not only does she manage her own podcast, she worked to bring the podcasters and audiences together in the Eve Pod Pack so that players have the chance to find podcasts they might have otherwise missed, and then more recent created the Eve Pod Pack channel to bring podcasters together to share knowledge and ask for help and then worked to bring in CSM and CCP members so that podcasters have easier access to request interviews, ask questions, and just basically network. Despite the manufactured controversy surrounding the Eve Pod Pack channel, it has been a net positive overall and everyone I've talked to in agrees.

Without those three people, the community would be a much poorer place. Thank you!