Community Spotlight: Kirith Kodachi
Contributing to the EVE Online community can take many forms. People have blogs, podcasts, guides, fiction, and more. Many people specialize in one form or the other. But there are a few people who have gone above and beyond and contribute to EVE in multiple ways. One of those people is Kirith Kodachi, who in his 7 year EVE Online career has produced an amazing amount of content for the EVE community.
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah
Kirith started playing EVE in September 2006 with some friends who lived in Placid low sec. Soon after, they moved out to a pocket in Syndicate where he proceeded to rat Serpentis battleships in a badly fit Caracal. Around this time, he made his first steps into becoming a rock of the EVE community when he began running his blog, Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah.
He spent the next two years flying with various corps across null sec, participating in the various wars that raged across New Eden. Then in 2008, his wife delivered twins so he took some time off from null sec and lived in Minmatar Faction Warfare for six months.
He then rejoined null sec with a corporation called m3 Corp that lived in Tash Murkon low sec and Providence for the next two years. During that time he saw the fall of the First CVA ProviBlock as part of Paxton Federation, then watched Northern Coalition fall apart from the inside as part of RAGE Alliance.
One of his favorite things to do on the blog is speculate about the future in terms of mechanics and changes and sometimes offer suggestions as to what he thinks should be changed or added. One such post was about changing the overview icons in late 2010, then in March 2011 there was a build on SiSi with similar changes (though these were ultimately not implemented).
In 2012 he returned to his low sec pirate roots and spent some time in the Shadow Cartel before returning to Faction Warfare as part of the Gallente militia. He has been fighting and developing his skills as a small gang fleet commander ever since.
Of course, like every other EVE player, he has had alts for other parts of the game. He has been involved with wormholes, T2 invention, mining, trading, planetary interaction, and most recently capital construction.
Broadcasts of the Ninveah
As mentioned above, Kirith had been running Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah nearly since the day he started EVE. He had been successfully blogging about EVE and gaining some notoriety in that community for four years, but he was fascinated by the dynamic content and conversations produced on podcasts such as Warp Drive Active, Podded, and Not a Lot of News Newshour. He realized he was good at typing blog posts, but wanted to improve his public speaking.
To do this, he started recording segments to air on the Not A Lot of News Newshour in the summer of 2010. After doing this for a couple of weeks, he realized he wanted to do something of his own. He set up his own podcast, Broadcasts from the Ninveah.
It started off with him spending about ten minutes talking about recent EVE-related topics. But after a year and 50 episodes, he started doing Blog Highlights episodes where he would read excerpts from blog posts around the community. Through this, he would direct listeners to the blogs, hopefully giving exposure to the best writers in the EVE blogosphere. The episodes are almost always in the 10-15 minute range, covering 3-4 blog posts. He points to his 74th episode as a good representative of his work.
Due to the minimal editing and self-proclaimed terrible speaking skills of its host, it proudly self-identifies as EVE Online’s Worst Podcast. Of course, for such a terrible podcast, it is the oldest continuously running active EVE podcast, with 98 episodes that average 1200 downloads per episode.
EVE Masterclass
The EVE Masterclass post is an in-depth look at a set of mechanics in the game related to a single topic. After a couple of years playing EVE, Kirith found he had gained a significant audience of readers and a wealth of knowledge from his own research.
He had a lot of free time, so he started writing researched blog posts on various advanced EVE mechanics. Some of the them started as articles for EVE Tribune, while others came out of research he did for writing Test Flight articles for EON Magazine (which he did for over two years).
Of all the Masterclass articles, his favorite was the two-part article on boosters and their manufacturing. The in-depth articles cover everything from beginning to end on the creation of boosters.
For the past few years, he’s had less time for well-researched mechanics articles and the community has improved to the point where many other blogs and sites cover the mechanics very well. Thus he’s directed his efforts elsewhere, such as his fiction and high-level opinions on the EVE Universe.
Fiction
When he was writing for the EVE Tribune, Kirith was impressed by the Archeron’s Fighting Spacecraft articles. After Archeron left, he took up the torch and started writing Kirith’s Fighting Spacecraft articles for the Tribune. These were articles written to look like historical dossiers with information about the various subtypes of a particular hull, including T2 and faction variants. They took the form of fictional accounts of the history of the hull and the various ship classes it has been used in (including some that have been entirely made up!)
He eventually collected all of these articles into one document. To help out, he solicited volunteers from the community in the form of editors and a graphic artist. Together, they compiled the articles into a single PDF which he has called Project Athena. So far, it has been his most well received piece of work in the community and something he is very proud of.
He enjoyed writing the fiction for these articles, so he decided to flesh out his character’s background on his blog with a small part of fiction every Friday, starting in 2009. The fiction is released weekly and so far there have been four series over the course of four years. The stories are loosely based on his adventures in New Eden and so far have totaled over 50000 words.
He has also done a number of one-off pieces. One of his favorites is a piece titled The Rifter, which won a fiction contest run by the now-defunct Starfleet Comms podcast. He is also quite proud of a pseudo-academic piece on stargates he wrote.
Final Thoughts
Over the years, the community has been very responsive and positive to all Kirith’s endeavors, both written and spoken. The latest example is when he took over hosting the Blog Banters from luminaire Seismic Stan of the Freebooted blog. Every month they have a new banter and the community comes out in droves to not only write excellent articles, but also promote the initiative. He also gets support from EveNews24, who promotes select articles of Kirith’s which are relevant to the wider community. Finally, the EVE Podcasting community has been supportive of each other, regardless of in-game political differences.
Kirith says that without this community, he doubts he would still be playing, writing, and podcasting about EVE.
