ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM!

My brain cells have finally recovered from the crazy, intense weekend that ensued after the public launch of Signal Cartel last Friday evening (EST). I admit that I wasn't sure how our unusual corp credo would resonate with capsuleers. Prior to launch, I wondered if we'd even get 10 new members over the weekend.

Turns out...that credo resonated with a lot of folks. New member and famed explorer Katia Sae talked about how it resonated with her in her blog post "Can't stop the Signal". We have heard a similar response from new members and it is delightful! We now stand at 36 members, some extremely experienced and even well-known explorers and quite a few very new players. This is not a lot compared to the join rate of larger entities such as BRAVE, RvB, or EVE University. But it is a lot for a new corp that had 6 members at public launch and that is still in the process of getting all its ducks in a row in terms of policies, programs, resources, and so forth. So to say I am thrilled is a wee bit of an understatement!

At any given time from Friday through Sunday evening, Alliance chat was zooming by at the speed of a runaway train while I was in mentoring convos with rookies who had just joined, responding on Twitter, updating permissions on our corp's private subreddit, clarifying and adding corp bulletins and other information sources as the need to revealed itself, resolving various issues with Signal Cartel leadership, processing apps, personally welcoming new members...and on and on. But it wasn't just me doing all the work, so some shout-outs are in order.

First, a huge thanks to my two EvE-Scout partners, G8keeper and Johnny Splunk! Without their original vision, none of this would have happened. I am very grateful that they approached me about joining forces to make Signal Cartel a reality. Two nicer people you could not hope to meet or work with! Thanks to G8keeper for organizing and overseeing our ship replacement and exploration loot buy-back programs which I am sure will be well-used by members. And thanks to Johnny Splunk for the genius behind the EvE-Scout Web site, our Signal Cartel pages, the coding for our Application Form, and making requested feature changes on the fly to improve our recruiters' quality of life and clarify the requirements to apply. By the way, have you followed @eve_scout on Twitter yet?

A million thanks to our lead recruiters Helios Anduath and Ashoka Maurya for being on the ball the entire weekend fielding questions from prospects, processing apps, answering rookie questions in private convos, and more. A special thanks to Helios for somehow managing to have brain bandwidth to write a great instructional guide for members on consistently formatting corp bookmarks for wormholes in Thera.

A big shout-out and thank you to every single one of our new members for coming onboard to share our vision of an explorer's life in New Eden! Special thanks to all of our experienced players who so patiently answered questions and helped others in Alliance chat. It was a wonderful thing to observe the intelligent, civil, helpful discourse in that channel all weekend. We have somehow managed to attract an amazing number of knowledgeable, good-humored, and well-spoken people who are keen to actively contribute to logistics, mentoring, and more. What a foundation to begin with! Warms this old pirate's heart, it does!

Many of us in Signal Cartel who were engaged in handling the influx of new folks were as a result not out scouting signatures in Thera. A big thank you to our friends in Furtherance. and our affiliated EvE-Scout scouts who took up the slack and helped keep the sig data on EvE-Scout up to date.

And finally a huge shout-out to #tweetfleet for Tweets, reTweets, and sharing of information about Signal Cartel in your channels and on your blogs. It was seen and people responded, so many, many thanks for your support and positive encouragement.

Hopefully I've not missed anyone...if I have, call me out and I'll update my post!