Catching Up and Rebooting

This has been one seriously neglected blog. It's not like there haven't been things to talk about related to my EVE Online activities. It's simply that in the crush of the day to day, I either didn't have time, energy, or motivation. And to be fair, this blog has never enjoyed much in the way of engagement from its few readers so posting often felt like shouting into an echo chamber.

But lately, I find myself wanting to muse more about Signal Cartel, the things our amazing members do, the challenges of leadership in a corp like ours, and my own EVE-related fan art, among other things. Although podcasts and Twitch streaming seem to have trumped blogs in recent times, I still prefer a blog for my own blatherings.

Catching Up

Since my last post, EVE Vegas 2016 came and went and was awesome! Johnny Splunk and I gave our talk "Cultivating a Counter-Culture in New Eden" which was very well received.

In mid-November, the Ascension expansion brought Alpha Clones to New Eden. In anticipation, we ramped up on T1 fitted exploration frigates and new player welcome packages. As expected, we had a huge influx of new members. Our Alliance chat and forums were crazy busy helping new players get a good start in EVE. I wrote "Alpha Positive" for Imperium News to share our own and other new player friendly corps' experiences as a result of Ascension.

On January 20, 2017, Signal Cartel turned two years old. It has been quite an experience watching our little idea bloom and see our culture evolve and mature. I am constantly amazed and delighted by the interesting, smart, engaging, dedicated folks we are fortunate enough to attract to our ranks. To-date, we've received over 3,600 applications from those wishing to join us, with an average of 600-700 members at any given time (I rigorously remove 60+ day inactives in support of our desire that membership count should at least roughly reflect how many members actively log in and play). Our lean management and relatively unstructured organizational style have worked very well so far, both from a security and a "demands on leadership" perspective. Most surprising has been how well our Credo has held up after all this time, with relatively little change.


Rebooting 

I'm calling this a reboot but it's still my same old EVE blog. I'm just focusing my content going forward:

• Signaleer Spotlight. Our folks have come up with some great programs to serve the community, such as the EvE-Scout Rescue Cache program, Signal Converter program, Johnny Splunk's amazing Twitch stream The Life Galactic, and more. Besides that, the stories of their encounters with other players are often delightful, with amusing or unexpected outcomes. I aim to give these things more public attention here.
• Wanderings Illustrated. I started something like this before using the hashtag #podjournal; you can find those posts in the archive. Then the puppy LITERALLY chewed up my work and I stopped. But as an artist who is addicted to sketchbooking in real life, I am itching to create another illustrated journal of my wanderings, written in-character.
• EVE Portraits. I'm going to start accepting character portrait commissions again on a limited basis but haven't decided on how to structure that nor how much to charge. Stay tuned for those details. Meanwhile, I'm going to do a narrated speed painting of the portrait for Illectroculus Defined. His commissioned portrait has lingered in my queue since last year. I got a good start on it, then things went wobbly and I trashed it, intending to start over. Then life got super busy with a book illustration project that went on forever and Signal consumed all the time I was able to allot to EVE. But things are calmer now, so I am ready to revisit this portrait and produce the video of its creation as a bit of a thank you to Illectro for his legendary patience. 
• Leadership Musings. My co-leader Johnny Splunk and I spend a considerable amount of time discussing various questions and challenges related to Signal Cartel organization, policies, security, programs, culture cultivation, serving our players well, managing reputation in New Eden, and more. In the interest of inspiring or helping those contemplating or involved in their own leadership adventures in New Eden, I will share some of our insights  and lessons learned here.
• In-Character Fiction. I love writing this stuff, spinning out the history and stories of Mynxee's life in character, in game.
• Just EVE Things. This is a grab bag category for thoughts and opinions about game changes, community related stuff, or whatever I want to talk about that doesn't quite fit anywhere else.
• Real Life. Because sometimes it's fun to get to know the person behind the avatar a little better.

My new goal is to post at least twice a month. And as part of the reboot, I've tweaked font size and color in posts for better readability and updated the sidebar with links related to Signal Cartel stuff.

So that's that for now, I hope you'll share your thoughts on upcoming posts and add a link to this blog on your own EVE media site.

Edited on 3/26/2017 to add In-Character Fiction to the content list above. How could I have forgotten it before?!

The Engine of Interesting Experiences

In 2007 when my first EVE character was a two-day old newbie mining her little Gallente heart out in the rookie system Bourynes, a friendly 2003 pilot named Edohatrem Inur struck up a conversation. He convinced me to join his corp along with a bunch of other newbies he'd recruited. The opportunity to harvest knowledge directly from a veteran player fast-tracked my EVE experience in many valuable ways. 

What goes around, comes around...in more ways than one. Not only do I now find myself leading a corp doing the very same thing for exploration-minded newbies, but in full-circle fashion, Edo recently joined Signal Cartel. A self-styled glittervet (kind of like a bittervet but with more optimism and an interest in helping new players), he is still up to his old tricks in Bourynes and elsewhere engaging "adorable newbies" (as he calls them) with his special brand of tough love and carrot-on-stick recruiting tactics.

Edo is fond of pointing out contradictions and questioning assertions. I learned long ago to be amused rather than annoyed by this, since it can lead to interesting discussions and reflections on how we change and grow as players. Case in point: I grumbled recently about the time demands that leading Signal Cartel imposes on me. He immediately pointed out the contradiction of the situation with assertions I posted just over a year ago upon my return to New Eden regarding what I wasn't interested in, to wit:

• Leadership responsibility
• Restrictive corp rules
• Non-PvP, non-low-sec corps
• Newbie corpmates

HA! Guess I'm eating those words now, as my peaceful, credo-bound corp is at 275 members not quite 3 months after public launch...

The contrast between a year ago and now is amusing. But I can roll with it because I've been around EVE long enough to know that nothing stays the same. Anything can happen. Being open to new things--like EvE-Scout founders G8keeper and Johnny Splunk approaching me to lead a peaceful exploration corp--leads to new friends and new experiences. As I've said before, the Signal Cartel experience has given me a fresh perspective on the game, a sense of purpose, and interesting new challenges. All of that is made even better when old friends like Edo decide to come along for the ride...and he is by far not the only one who has done so. Quite a few friends and acquaintances--many who were or are pirates, amusingly--have joined Signal Cartel and contribute significantly to the camaraderie and success of the corp.

Relationships are clearly the engine of interesting experiences in New Eden. Whether those experiences are dramatic and sweeping (e.g, BRAVE's recent troubles) or result from taking a path less traveled (as in Signal Cartel), they all create ripples--sometimes with far-reaching and unanticipated outcomes. The unpredictable way that those ripples, even the tiny ones, intersect with others and evolve will trump assertions every time!

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!

Another Exciting Sandcastle

EvE is a sandbox and thus your experience in the game is what you make it. A lot of that has to do with the people you interact with, the friendships you make, and the stories you share. I've had the delightful experience of conceiving an idea and working to make it an in-game reality with Hellcats. And as an extension to that, getting elected to CSM5 by campaigning on a mainly "fix low sec" platform. It was a lot of fun and a lot of work. Draining work at times--which is why I took a couple of years off from the game after my CSM5 term (2010) ended. When I returned last year, I vowed to play casually--just wandering around with no particular agenda, enjoying the sights of New Eden and interaction with the community.

But I swear they put something in the sand in this sandbox. Something that makes it impossible NOT to want to grow ideas into realities.

Thus I find myself at the beginning of another exciting endeavor in affiliation with the fine folks at EvE-Scout ("We scout so you don't have to."). Soon after my arrival in Thera, I started scouting for them. We began talking about exploration as a career and what a fine thing it would be to create a home, a haven, for explorers who just want to wander between the stars on their own agenda.

Much talking later, Signal Cartel was born: a corp devoted to the highest ideals of exploration, nurturing to new players, and many other things besides that are practically foreign in New Eden culture.

We are, as they say, not your average EvE corp.

But I--a former pirate who adores PvP and believes that EvE should always remain deadly dangerous for the inattentive and unwise--am completely excited about what we hope and plan to do, even though it most decidedly has nothing to do with PvP.

Rather, the mission of Signal Cartel is to embrace and promote exploration as a career choice, to provide a haven and home for explorers, to help new players fall in love with New Eden through the lens of exploration, and to provide useful services to all of New Eden through our membership in the Eve-Scout Enclave alliance. All in a corp with a culture of neutrality, respectfulness, non-aggressive behavior, generosity of spirit, helpfulness, and friendliness to all. Such things are antithesis to many EvE corp cultures but we believe that there are a lot of players out there with an explorer's heart who will embrace just such a culture with enthusiasm. If you're one of them, we invite you to learn more and consider joining us.

And to those of you who say, "OMG where is Mynxee and what have you done with her?!", I say "I'm in the sandbox, building another exciting sandcastle!"

Recruitment Post on EvE Online Forums

Homebase Thera

After finding an easy way into Thera thanks to EvE-Scout, I have spent several days wandering around the system looking at the sights and being entertained by the Local banter. It kind of reminds me of Amamake in the old days when that system was a brawling, chaotic lowsec Wild West kind of a place (it might still be actually, haven't been there in awhile). I love the nebula colors in Thera and exploring the mysterious ruins. Certainly makes one wonder what happened here (and whether the recent changes to and disappearance of Caroline's Star--leaving only an oddly symmetrically shaped glowing artifact--are somehow related to any of that).

After chatting with the EvE-Scout folks, it turns out scouting for them is is a natural fit with what I currently enjoy doing in-game. They have a great project underway: their growing network of scouts scan down signatures in Thera. Those sigs are put into Tripwire, which in turn feeds the Eve-Scout Web site. Scouts also aid people in system by providing intel about camped wormholes and stations among other things. If you'd like some help or eyes getting into or out of Thera, join the in-game channel EvE-Scout and ask for assistance. 

EvE-Scout has some exciting plans and ideas for expanding their project over time. I am thrilled to be involved with such a useful and community-minded effort in these early and formative days.

Anyway, because I enjoy the scouting there and because Thera provides opportunities to jump out and roam to so many other places, I'm going to make it my homebase for the foreseeable future. If you come to visit, say hi in Local!

My little Astero Pocket Rockets is my favorite ship to fly right now. Isn't she pretty? I never get tired of looking at her.