This is a treat for folks who end up getting this newsletter via an old fashioned web bookmark or via RSS: virtual postcards!

As mentioned in Note 1, I’ve been completely smitten with “Elite: Dangerous”. It’s mindblowing on several axes in ways that other MMOs like “World of Warcraft” are not. Players joke that it’s not really a game or a simulator, but a wallpaper generation program for the beautiful vistas that players can see (and capture).

So, without further ado…

Postcard 1: As mentioned in Note 1, I’m currently journeying from the center of the Milky Way back to the bubble of human habitation in the Orion Arm. The distance between the two points is too far for the route-plotting computer to calculate a single route, so I’ve adopted a waypoint/landmark approach where I’ll jump from interesting point to interesting point to give myself smaller goals to stave off Space Madness (more on that in a future post). The nebula above was my first landmark on my journey and it looks pretty cool as it gets bigger and bigger as I jumped closer and closer in 43 light-year increments.

Postcard 2: Nebulas tend to be popular tourist destinations in the game and after discovering 200+ systems that had never seen a human, I started to see evidence of humanity in the nebula. Someone parked a fleet carrier towards the top of the nebula to mine tritium, so I stopped by for repairs and to see what the discovery data I collected was worth. This one was orbiting a beautiful gas giant with some nice rings, as seen above.