We have lost a friend.
On May 13th, 2024, Padrick Millar (AKA Padrick Gaterau in some circles) very sadly passed away due to some complications related to a surgical operation. This was an unexpected shock for everyone who knew Padrick, and we share his family’s grief in his passing.
There will be a cyno vigil for Padrick, taking place today in 1DQ1-A at around 19:20 EVE time. We invite everyone who will respect this event to come and pay tribute to a fantastic member of the EVE community.
Padrick’s Path in EVE
Padrick’s EVE career was a story of loyalty to his friends and his wider community, overall.
He joined the EVE community in April 2017, finding a home early on in The Bastion. He joined Generals of Destruction in October 2017, moved to Asteroid Farm Unlimited in 2019, and joined Goonswarm Federation with them in mid-2022 when The Bastion officially closed its doors.
While he was a consistent member of a small number of alliance communities, Padrick touched many organisations during his career in EVE. He was an industrialist, diplomat, journalist, editor, logistician, spy, and more.
Padrick was a polite and well-spoken gentleman, too. He made sure that he took a measured approach to all of his interactions, and always took care to consider other cultures and perspectives – he was a gentleman above all.
Padrick joined us when The Bastion was deployed/living in Fountain. He saw that 1DQ1-A had a standing cyno and he decided that The Bastion needed one and he would provide it. No charge. So he set it up and ran it every day for months. Gradually we gave him gunning rights to the Keepstar, etc. At one point he needed a new corporation and I pulled aside the CEO of ADFU and suggested a possible fit. It worked out well and Padrick joined them and quickly became a director in the corp as well.
Wherever he went in New Eden, he played for others and helped others. He started talking to some industrialists in Placid and helped them organize their product and some of their diplomatic relations and contracts. But his main loyalty was always to The Imperium.
Carneros, executor of The Bastion
I knew him, Horatio…
On a personal level, I first encountered Padrick right at the tail-end of 2017 and into early 2018, through two different roles.
To begin, he enlisted with us here at INN as a staff writer – he wanted to engage with some media and journalism, writing articles that brought a different perspective to current affairs. He had also signed up within the Bastion to work as an alliance diplomat. At the time, I was part of GSF’s Corps Diplomatique, assigned to work with Carneros and his team, including Padrick.
For the next three years, I worked with Padrick across both organisations. At INN, he moved from a staff writer role into copy-editing, and then became a full editor. He both wrote and managed articles for publishing, and consistently looked for ways to improve our organisation. As a diplomat for The Bastion, he remained staunchly focused on his alliance’s objectives and being the best representative possible for his team, his alliance, and his community.
From here, he moved into other space-roles, and yet he brought the same focus and perspective to his new alliance and the opportunities available to him. Padrick saw out his career as a member of both GSF’s Black Hand intelligence agency, and also as a member of GSOL (Goonswarm Offensive Logistics), working on supporting the community he enjoyed in numerous ways.
An Anecdote for Posterity
One story from back in 2019 I feel is well worth recording here was a hilarious situation in which we moved a Keepstar from Jita to J5A-IX, without titan bridging. At the time, Padrick was with The Bastion, and his corporation had built this Keepstar but failed to anticipate how it would be moved to the deployment location in Delve. So, we scheduled an operation: The Keepstar would be moved to a lowsec border system, I would FC a cover fleet, we’d escort the freighter from its lowsec transition point through to Fountain, and it would all be fine.
Inevitably, it was not, despite the solid week we’d spent planning this operation.
The first complication was that the intended pilot of the freighter did not have voice comms access, so I had to relay commands on the fly to Padrick, who would then send them to the pilot via Discord text chat. This is a horrendous way to manage any high-value asset.
The second complication was that the planned actions for the operation, such as double-wrapping the keepstar, were not being executed according to plan. We were delayed starting because we were relaying instructions via complication 1, and so we got moving probably 20 minutes later than expected.
I had an emergency webbing alt available, but also we were covering with a large fleet, and this pilot was struggling to align for warps. By three or four jumps in, we were already having issues, and had to eventually find a safe docking point because the comms issues caused such confusion – a callout of “warp the freighter” took 90 seconds longer than it should have to even get to the guy flying the freighter, and we were conspicuous.
Eventually, we had to just dock the guy up in lowsec – after all, we’d come through Tama, half of Black Rise, and were now in the dangerous part before we got to Cloud Ring. We had a noticeably large fleet, a slow, tankless freighter, and no support within any jump range. Once docked, we switched out the freighter pilot to someone with actual voice comms, we moved a titan to bridge it the rest of the way to Fountain, and eventually this keepstar was erected in “Fortress Delve” for The Bastion. It was a comedic journey, and it felt like we were making half of it up as we went along.
However, throughout all of this, Padrick was steady and willing to do whatever it took to get a successful op out of the way. The complications of the op were just another thing to deal with directly, and I respected him hugely at the time for his ability to focus up and simply work the problem. Padrick was upbeat and having fun the entire time, and he made sure that while it was a struggle overall, it was a fun and engaging struggle.
Not just an EVE Nerd!
Padrick also engaged with his local community in real life wherever he could. He once noted to me as an aside at New Year that he was taking some time off over the holidays, but on Christmas Day, he had been busy, cooking for a relatively small free buffet at a community centre, as he usually did.
That “small buffet”? It was for 100 people.
He was also a guy who had worked extensively in IT for his regional healthcare providers. After he left that as a direct profession, he continued to work in the healthcare sector, volunteering to work with recovering addicts in a “recovery house” – facilities designed to help people get back on their feet and back into the community. Padrick was a long-term recovering addict himself, but he always made time to help and support others.
It was rare to go more than a couple of months talking to Padrick without a mention of some event or another he was involved in, doing something for, getting stuck in.
He is gone, but he certainly will not be forgotten.
From all of us here at INN, Padrick – rest well. You will be missed.
