Capsuleers now major source of memes in all major powers

Fiction Portal Intergalactic Summit
21

I mean, capsules are connected directly to our neural pathways, opening us up to almost seamless electronic interface to our technologies.

We can ■■■■post on an entirely theoretical level.

3 Likes
22

With respect to Soter being a style icon, it just goes to show that true trend setters are often those who have the least concern for trends or setting them.

1 Like
23

Except the clerk in question has a cadre of big, heavily-muscled soldiers nearby that will readily administer some percussive attitude adjustment to anyone who steps over the line. I was referring to how capsuleers will use handles like @Xtra_Squishy_lol, name corporations things like “Incompetent And Proud”, and behave in a manner that indicates they’re either frakking with you - and thus not taking you seriously at all - or are completely off their gourd. See here, where the aforementioned Xtra Squishy engages Pandemic Horde in what I can only describe as a series of playful deathmatches.

2 Likes
24

I’m not sure I see it as all that different from a sort of very self-aware kind of face paint, sir.

1 Like
25

I was always just under the assumption that capsuleers who picked things like ‘Xtra Squishy’ or ‘MantelGlobalIndustries’ as callsigns had already gone insane by time they picked those names.

4 Likes
26

Considering your position as an archbishop, I presume you regularly interact with people whose job revolves around dealing with capsuleers. Do you have anything you’re willing to share about what effects their has had on them, particularly the the weirder groups.

Or they just don’t care to use anything more serious. I’ve heard it said that some have decided if the universe is insane then they’ll just go with the flow and drag the rest of us along for the ride. I’ve also heard it said that if the universe is already mad then anything else would be redundant.

1 Like
27

Unfortunately, as a member of the clergy, I rather don’t like repeating what’s told me by anyone in confidence. And if I don’t know whether or not it’s in confidence, it is. There are plenty of people with a broader sociological background who can probably give you better insight.

2 Likes
28

Well, I was referring to anything that hadn’t been told to you in confidence, but enough. I asked you because you were the first person here with a high-level position and might have been able to shed some light on the subject.

1 Like
29

I can only apologize.

2 Likes
30

I’ll gladly become a minor source of memes for minor powers.

1 Like
31

There’s nothing to apologize for. I completely understand the obligation to keeping quiet on what is told to you in confidence. That’s part of the job description for the vast majority of clergy across the cluster.

2 Likes
32

You mean other than the Goonswarm Director? :wink:

(Edit: After all, ‘high-level’ is all about context, and when you’re asking about capsuleer mindsets in capsuleer organizations…)

1 Like
33

I wouldn’t be surprised if using these memes could change the course of the upcoming Gallente elections. I could imagine a billboard of a swarm of Fat Bees promoting the Sociocrats, for instance.

1 Like
34

I suppose my choice of callsign to those that do not know the reason why I chose it in particular would consider it a questionable one, even more so one borne out of a mental deficiency to choose the name of a corporation over you know, an actual name. So, I shall do my best to explain why I did.

My mother, Hana, was a Chief Researcher for a company based in Kallaste Metropolitan City on Itamo IV. That company’s name was Mantel Global Industries and was an associated firm under the umbrella of Ishukone, primarily dealing in research related to electromagnetic physics and railgun development. My mother was along with many of the other scientists and employees of MGI invited to the Malkalen Summit in YC110 to be part of the delegation there. It was shortly before my graduation as an independent capsuleer and I remember watching the feed in the Academy of the procession outside and the grand display of Federation and Caldari Navy might as they took their position, the former under the command of an Admiral that had long since won the respect of people like myself and my father in the Naval Service.

I also watched the same Admiral, and that grand majestic vessel of his, plough into the station where my mother was, where MGI’s people were and where three hundred thousand people that perished that day were, live on television. I saw my own mother die and I couldn’t do a thing about it to prevent it. MGI as a company folded soon after that. The loss of so many people there tore the beating heart out of the chest so to speak, and even though there was assistance financially to rebuild from Ishukone’s ever faithful ally Hyasyoda, sometimes it is best to let something rest in peace than continue to attempt to keep it alive.

So yeah, I was angry. Infuriated, distraught. And when it came to choosing my callsign, I chose the name of the company. To keep their memory alive and to honour them for what they meant to me as people. And to those that know and remember my callsign, it acts as their living legacy in a world that is oft too quick to forget those that mattered.

Admittedly when I first saw this I wanted to bombard this forum with all sorts of insults and snipes, but after a moment of reflection it would not be what my late mother would have wanted, may her spirit watch over me. I know you share the same pain that comes with the loss of people close to you from the actions of a criminal, and thus why I took the time to write this post.

I hope you can understand.

15 Likes
35

I can and I apologize. Most strange capsuleer callsigns are simply that, so I assumed yours was such and I put my foot in my mouth it seems.

I’m sorry.

12 Likes
36

It’s alright. Most people do not know the story unless it is told and I wouldn’t assume that a company long since dissolved would be on the radar scope of anyone, let alone an Imperial that had no connection to it whatsoever.

I accept your apology graciously. Thank you, Lady Elkin.

9 Likes
37

I was referring to the empires’ side of things, I should have been more specific. But if you want to tell us about all of the unfortunate government employees who have to deal with the Goons, feel free to do so!

1 Like
38

Well, the only governing agency that deals with capsuleers, as a rule, is CONCORD. And CONCORD doesn’t deal with individual line-members, unless they shoot someone in highsec and need to be on the receiving end of what eggers lovingly refer to as “CONCORDOKKEN”.

Organizationally, our relations with the empires and their bureaucracies—including CONCORD—tend to be fairly professional. Within empire space, our organizations are no different than smaller groups that operate entirely within highsec. We pay our local takes and fees, have to comply with local regulations and contraband restrictions, etc. When individual members are being idiots, they get dealt with individually[1].

The government officials who ‘have’ to deal with us are dealing with people who—other than being capsuleers—aren’t so different from themselves. We’re administrators and managers, people who have to deal with bureaucracy on a massive scale, paperwork, budgetary concerns… I mean, you don’t put the nutjobs in charge and end up with a functioning leadership structure, you know?

Most of the dealings, even at those levels, are completely automated. It’s all paying bills and updating statuses. And that’s how we like it, too. Administrators are like anyone else: we like consistency. We prefer to have our regular dealings be… regular. And even the groups that like to bill themselves as bloodthirsty maniacs basically have to play by the rules. Don’t pay your sov bills, you lose your sov. And of course, we all tend to be well-educated, intelligent people, or we wouldn’t have gotten our jacks in the first place[2].

So the government officials who have to deal with us? I can’t imagine they have any real issues along the way. After all, outside our eggs, we’re no more dangerous than anyone else. Inside our pods… we can’t actually do much of anything to them. Especially since 99.9999% of all interactions will be via FTL communications. Neither we, nor our guns, are ever anywhere near those ‘clerks’.

But I was more immediately thinking of statements like

and

Your ‘reasonable certainty’… is wrong. Point blank, full stop. First, nobody has ever expected any government functionary to say ‘State of the Goonion’. SotGs aren’t aimed at public consumption among the empires. We don’t particularly want people outside the Coalition talking about them. We don’t object to it, either… really, we just don’t care, any more than you might care about some government functionary talking about your grocery list last week. SotGs are internal addresses to the alliance, and by extension, to the coalition that alliance leads.

Similarly, the names of alliances and coalitions aren’t devised with even a single thought toward government functionaries, reporters, or literally anyone who isn’t already a part of that alliance or coalition. Instead, the names tend to have significance for the members, toward the members. It’s all about tribalism, and establishing common bonds and a common sense of belonging, just like things like the ‘State of the Goonion’. It’s tribalism. “Oh, It’s not just a SotA address… it’s ours. It’s different.”

Let me give you a few examples, re: coalition names:

First, the obvious type of coalition name: PanFam, DRF, HRE, Project Wafflebox.

  • PanFam is, well, the ‘Pandemic Family’ of alliances: Pandemic Legion, Nothern Coalition. (NCdot), and Pandemic Horde. Waffles were in there for a bit, and now Fraternity’s joined, but by the time FRT joined, the coalition name was well-established. And the name is pretty self-explanatory. PL and PH are obvious. Waffles, let by Sniggwaffe, was originally a feeder alliance for the Pandemic Legion corp Sniggerdly (thus, part of the greater ‘Pandemic Family’). NCdot and PL have long operated as a single entity, with NCdot handling the sov-holding and business end of things while PL’s provided the supercapital muscle—that balance of power has shifted some recently, but it’s still ‘all in the family’, as it were. So the name is… well, a no-brainer.
  • DRF: The Drone Regions Federation, before their eviction, lived in… well… the Drone Regions. 'nuff said, eh?
  • HRE: The Holy Rental Empire took over the Drones for a while, with the intent of running it as a rental empire. Again, pretty straightforward.
  • Project Wafflebox, when it existed, was comprised of Project Mayhem, Waffles, and Snuffed Out—their executor corp at the time (and the long-term core of the alliance) was Snuff Box. So it was Project (Mayhem) / Waffle(s) / (Snuff) Box.
  • Other examples off the top of my head: Stainwagon (lived in/around Stain), SoCo (the Southern Coalition, lived in the ‘south’ of the map), Northern Coalition (no dot, lived in the northern parts of the map), DekCo (Deklein Coalition. Guess where they lived), and of course, ProviBloc.

Then you get the second common type: the self-referential, self-deprecating coalition names. Our examples for this are GotG, the CFC, N3

  • Guardians of the Galaxy got saddled with that name by leaders in Pandemic Legion (who are not, and have never been, members). Their preferred internal name for their coalition was ‘Dumpster Coalition’ and now ‘Dead Coalition’. Both of these are self-deprecating names, coined in defiance of enemy opinions of them. Basically, when their enemies accused them of being a ‘dumpster fire of a coalition’ or of being ‘dead’ as a meaningful player in null politics, they wrapped themselves up in that scorn and used it as a rallying cry for the levels of tribalism needed to sustain in null.
  • The ■■■■■■■■■■■ Coalition was basically borne of not having a formal name. At some point, Mittens referred to the whole thing as one giant ■■■■■■■■■■■ of a coalition, and it stuck—again, a self-deprecating name invoking the contrarian nature of most nullsec pilots in order to rally them together as an in-joke that could be embraced to foster a tribalist ‘us against the rest’ mentality[3].
  • The N3 Coalition. Kind of a precursor to PanFam, but only because NCdot and PL were already working hand-in-glove at the time, PL was never actually a member. The name was commonly thought to refer to the names of the primary coalition members: NCdot, and Nulli Secunda (S2N + NC. No, I do not know where the S and C. were supposed to go). However, it was actually a result of a similar issue as the CFC: nobody thought of a name. Eventually, they just called themselves the ‘No Name Needed’ Coalition… or N3, as a self-deprecating reference to their own inability to think of an inspiring name.

Similarly, alliance logos tend to be riffs on alliance names, or have something to do with the mentality and approach of the alliance. Pandemic Legion’s logo is a phage, because ‘Pandemic’. Horde’s is a squid, because it looks sort of like a cute baby phage, and someone with decent art skills made a squid out of the baby phage. Fatbee is a representation of the nature of the swarm, MMDino follows along with TEST’s original in-joke of being useless and incompetent, so safe to ignore, etc. Darkness’s logo… self-explanitory. Get Off My Lawn uses a gnome, originally a full lawn gnome, and so on, and so on.

Absolutely nothing to do with making anyone else say a ridiculous name. Honestly, the null groups tend to be focused on internal cohesion. They emphasize not giving a damn what outsiders think, so why would an outsider having to say a ridiculous name be worth that much cultural investment?

It’s not.

Along those same lines, capsuleer callsigns—no, they’re not about you. They’re not about you having to say the name. They’re about staying sane. And that isn’t the ‘it’s a crazy universe, go with the flow’ line, either. It’s something a lot more fundamental than that.

We live more or less constantly at war. No, it’s not usually a declared war. It is, however, a sustained state of conflict and violence. We deal with death almost every day. On the days when we aren’t directly dealing with death, we’re preparing to deal with death. We die… a lot. And even among the people who insist those deaths aren’t real, that it’s really the same person, not just an indistinguishable copy, that wakes up in the medbay… it takes a toll. Disorientation. Download imperfections. Just knowing that X number of people in your crew are dead. Knowing that someone out there has just experienced killing you, and probably liked it…

And then as soon as you get out of that clone bay, you’re on the treadmill again, racing toward the moment when it happens again, and ‘you’ wake up in another clone bay, knowing all those things… again. And again. And again. Without end. It takes a toll. It adds up. It’s all stress, and stress will drive you mad, especially when it can’t kill you… or does, and then you wake up in that same damned clone bay…

One of the mechanisms people have for dealing with that kind of stress is humor. Absurdity. So they revel in it. They laugh, so they won’t cry. And they keep on laughing, whenever they’re in public, because if they stop… maybe they’ll cancel their clone contract and chew on a bullet. It’s how they stay sane enough to deal with the stress and live something like a relatively normal life when they’re not in space, not in public.

And yeah, some of them are legitimately cracked… but they’re very much the minority, even among the people with the stupid names.

So, on the whole? We capsuleers, including in null, are really just like everybody else. We just like to delude ourselves into thinking we’re something special, that the stresses and weight of it all doesn’t really touch us.

But no. It’s never about making government people have to say silly things. It’s never about them at all.

1 - Honestly, there’s plenty of times when I wish they weren’t. If capsuleer organizations were held more responsible for the actions of their members, there’d be a fair amount more quality control in general. And really, we hate having to put up with the slavering idiots, too… and we have too deal with them more often than empire governments do.
2 - No, I don’t know how the hell Napkins happened.
3 - He never actually liked the name, though, and eventually decided to change it. We did a bunch of internal polling to decide on the new name. The options were legitimately the following:

  • The ■■■■■■■■■■■ (CFC) [You are ‘a CFCer’, or ‘in the CFC’]
  • The Overreaction Coalition (ORC)
  • Checkbox
  • Look we all know democracy is a total sham and you’ll just do what you want
  • Blawrf = Furry (This was a reference to a common joke within the coalition.)
  • Mittens’ Kittens (I HATE YOU DO NOT PICK THIS UGH) (NOTE: This one went onto the poll specifically because it annoyed Mittens.)
  • SOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBAN (NOTE: This was the name of the original alliance that eventually became Goonfleet and later Goonswarm)

Coalition members were also encouraged to submit their own suggestions (which is how ‘Mittens’ Kittens’ got on the list). About 280 posts in, someone suggested ‘Imperium’ and the poll was largely ignored after that because people liked that better than ‘Checkbox’. For the record, ‘Checkbox’ won the poll, at 20.78% of the vote.

5 Likes
39

Where did “those bee guys” place?

1 Like
40

Wasn’t suggested. TNT, LAWN, Bastion, Init, EXE, RZR, FCON, and CO2 (all members of the CFC at the time) might have objected. Some of them certainly get their backs up when they get called ‘Goons’.

1 Like