Mar
12
Welp
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ’men
Gang aft agley,
An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!-Robert Burns
Half the time I couldn’t understand a Scotsman if you offered a million bucks to me to do so. Other times, I understand the bastards far too well. It would seem that my tumultuous entry into internet spaceships politics is at a close, my friends. Due to family medical issues (those of you who I know will know what this means, those that don’t probably shouldn’t), I am withdrawing from the campaign for CSM8. Before I say another word, I want to apologize to those who put their time and faith in me as the lowsec candidate, as well as those who gave me a platform to speak from. Kirk, Xander, Jaxley, Rixx and many more have all earned my gratitude and appreciation – and most important, my apologies. However, a couple of days ago I got a bit of a wake up call in a none-too-pleasant manner involving the medical industry (why are they always near bad news but never tainted by it?) and my family.
In these types of situations, you immediately have to triage your life. What goes and what stays. Obviously this is a pretty hard series of decisions to make, in particular when your time is already stretched to the max, to the point that life resembles a bit of a plate spinning act. Unfortunately, the plates must come down, and the CSM run is one of those. There are other hard choices in the days ahead, but I’m trying to take these things one at a time. Essentially, I was faced with a choice in regards to the CSM: sacrifice time with my family to pursue this thing, or coast along and become a do-nothing CSM member. Neither one of those was acceptable, so I’m taking the third way, which isn’t fun for anyone but is the best for all.
Of course, such an abrupt withdrawal is sure to have consequences, the first of which is already on the horizon. Upon being informed that I was withdrawing from the race, QCATS leadership let me know I should pack up my things and gtfo. I am assured that this has nothing to do with the effort of at least one director to give me the boot on my second day in corp, during which I went on a roam into Providence with other members of TheMittani.com staff, while waiting for the bulk of my assets to get Black Frog’ed to Nisuwa. Ultimately it was discovered that said director (I was never given a name) simply had a hard-on for anyone with Goons in their corp history. Some people really need some therapy. At any rate, I am assured that this was simply because my ‘utilization’ was too low for QCATS standards. I can respect that, though it seems that while being busy running for CSM is an okay excuse not to be out and about very often, being busy with family is not.
In short, the reason I applied to QCATS was not for CSM purposes, but rather because I genuinely believed them to be a good fit for my limited play time. Faction warfare really excels at undock and shoot playstyles – quickies, if you will. However, from day 2 of my time in the organization, I’ve been left with nothing but a bitter taste for them. It may all be legit, these assurances I have received, but the timing of things strikes me as a little too coincidental. Unfortunately I have bigger concerns these days, so I don’t have much time to think on the issue.
Where does this leave me? Well, in a bit of purgatory for the time being. I have no home in EVE, but perhaps that is a good thing. As Rixx noted on his blog awhile back, EVE often plays the inverse to life – when things are tumultuous in EVE, real life tends to be smooth sailing. When real life kicks up a storm, you often find yourself on autopilot in EVE. Maybe this means my priorities are straight for once. At any rate, stay tuned to this space for more bad news (regarding EVE) in the near future.
