Oh fresh, sweet air of freedom.

I resigned from all alliance leadership last night, in what was a tough decision but also turned out to be a huge relief for me. Frankly, I was a bit of a relic of previous times, increasingly at odds with the current direction of the alliance, so I’ll skip the e/n details (moderate betrayal, some scenes of backstabbing unsuitable for younger children) and just say that I hope to get to join (and even badly FC) more Bat Country roams again.

I debated not even posting about this – it is hardly huge news beyond corp chat since pretty much all I did in alliance leadership recently was to say “I think that’s a bad idea” and be tolerated in my dissent.

I’m not quitting the CSM (I got nominated by alliance leadership but elected by a huge range of people inside and outside of the Imperium) nor Eve and certainly not Bat Country.  I intend to stay committed and active and to keep interacting with the community.

I also don’t intend to get into a bunch of he said she said stuff about what went wrong.  I’m still a filthy, freeborn goon and have huge numbers of friends in the alliance.

Dammit, since I have your attention, here is some of the Stuff I Did. This post is about me so I get to do this introspective boasting shit, even if it is alien to every bone in my Scottish body.

• Got Deklein for Goons. We were homeless, fucked, and about to reset the NC and move to Venal to die, shortly after being unable to get two squads in fleet in Syndicate and losing Cloud Ring to Ev0ke.
• Served as Chief Diplo whenever VR was burned out, with important successes like the Curse deployment where we went from 15 man fleets to killing alliances: our first post-Delve success and a huge gamble at the time
• Took over the GIA when it had literally zero agents left and used it to win several whole wars (White Noise/NCdot in particular, Fountain vs Test to a large extent), and ran it for four years
• Made Bat Country, a tiny corp which at one point had more supers than all but three *alliances* in the CFC, which has created and ran the Ministry of Love, rebuilt the GIA (three directors), has repeatedly came top for participation in wars above every corp in the Imperium (including the last war) and which I believe has the best posters in Eve.
• Very unpopular this one: nearly stopped the Goons vs Test conflict. These days, Goons hate Test, and Test hates Goons in general and me in particular, but I came within an ace of peace in our time on this one, to be stymied by the staggering misjudgement of some guy called Viktor Villiance or something. Talk about might-have-beens.
• Cut the resulting war far shorter by running it for the first week while Mittens was away, and stopping the then-Skymarshal (this was before Blawrf) pulling back to a single system in Fountain, which we would have lost at once, and instead using the indefensible outlying systems to buy time using our spy access to hostile command channels (both N3 and Test).
• Launched the mittani dot com and spent six hours a day for months on end editing awful, unreadable articles into content that won the news wars in Eve, all for free because my friend needed a hand (and I am a sucker)
• Created European Goonion and put it under the care of a week-old newbie called Dominionix who I thought had what it took. I was told I was stupid.  He’s still there and EG has decided wars
• I have played the game hard but fair, and have friends across just about every group in Eve.

And so on.

Stuff I came up with that proved influential but which I kinda regret:

• Participation. I put tables of kills-based corp performance as a fun  competition thing in war updates for the eight or nine tight-knit corps then in the alliance, but then came up with the paplinks idea based on stuff Mynas had done in Mostly Harmless in the old NC. In my defence, I argued against actually doing it, on cultural grounds. It’s a brilliant tool but I think on it not without some regrets.
• Plex for [whatever] It seems natural now but when we were having difficulty getting FCs, logisticians etc (the best part of five years ago) I suggested that in Bat Country we paid corp FCs a plex for every four fleets per month they advertised that anyone in corp could join. Now everyone in the Imperium gets paid for everything. I never accepted payment though, because I was a weirdo amateur that did stuff out of love of my fellow-goon. Awwww.