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?!