Fireside Chat Transcript 28 Mar 2k20

I'm getting pretty bad here.
Okay, so that's one of the things I want to talk about.
We've talked about this at Illuminati,
we've talked about this at Kremlin,
but I'm not going to spend 20 minutes on this
because I'm sick of giving the same speech over and over again.
Leadership has a couple of different functions.
Many of you are leaders in the real world,
and certainly there's lots of corporate directors,
alliance leaders, boss types.
Leaders have many functions.
One, of course, is making their people feel safe.
But another one is also setting the permission for discourse.
If your leader tells you you can't talk about something,
then there's a strong incentive because humans are very hierarchical oriented.
People feel uncomfortable talking about it.
Shit's fucked, things are awful,
people are feeling anticipatory grief.
We need to be here for each other.
That does not mean that everything gets to turn into like Kumbaya stuff.
People are going to be in need and we are an organization that has
always been based around looking out for our people in the trenches together.
Because the strength of an alliance is always based around not how much you win
or how well we work when things are good,
when you have thousands of titans.
The strength of an alliance in Evil Online has always been around
how well you care about your brothers and sisters.
Well, these things don't actually exist in a spaceship game,
but you know what I mean.
When you have things that are dire,
your bonds with each other are what makes an alliance strong.
That's what gives resilience.
Now, among us have thousand-yard stairs and
complex PSD and we've seen some shit and we've been through some shit.
We know how to compensate and we know how to deal with things.
We know how to take care of our mental health because we have been through awful things.
Those of us who have done that are going to be in
a better position to help those of us who have not.
People are going to be reacting to what is going on with the pandemic in a variety of ways.
Some people are going to be angry,
lashing out more. We want to avoid that.
Some people are going to compensate with dark humor.
Some people are ready to compensate by trying to go to
denial and basically act like this isn't
happening or they don't want to hear about it or anything like that.
We are aware of this and we've had meetings about it and we're
discussing it because we want to take care of each other because that is why we are
here. Speaking as a leader guy,
it is okay to be anxious.
In fact, being anxious is normal because it's your literal survival instinct.
Instead of just talking about feelings,
I actually have a couple of useful action items that will help people at times like this.
I have adopted from my girlfriend the zombie land paradigm.
I have decided that instead of looking at everything getting worse and worse
every day and going slowly insane,
that I'm just going to trick myself into thinking that I'm a protagonist in
a zombie land where it's an apocalypse and everything's awful,
but you can basically be a character.
You can do things, you can plan things,
you can learn a part, as it were.
Whatever you need to have it.
One of the things that we have is a lot of people are going to lock down and
figuring out where is a safe place to get groceries.
My girlfriend had a brilliant idea and we already tested this and it worked,
which is if you're in a place where there are Asian grocery stores and you also
have white people that are now scared of Asians because they're racist idiots or something like that,
probably one of the safest place to pick up groceries that have not had
runs on them is to go to a fucking Asian grocery store.
We just did this the other day,
I went full PPE and stuff like this.
You want to cover your eyes if you can,
get some 3M safety glasses.
They're not a full airtight seal,
but we now know that walk into somebody's cough from 20 minutes beforehand,
it could get into your eyes.
Try to have masks, try to have eye protection,
just the usual stuff, gloves.
But go to a fucking Asian grocery store,
there's tons of stuff there.
You can't buy yeast on Amazon.
Not too much yeast gets used in Asian cooking,
but there was just a ton of dry yeast that I only got a couple of packs,
I didn't hoard.
But that is the kind of thing that you can do.
You go where people aren't and you go to places where people know how to handle pandemics.
Probably the safest fucking place if you've got to go outside is anywhere in Chinatown,
anywhere. That's the place you want to be if you're going to have to make a run for
supplies go there because they're going to know how to handle it,
take a protection, and also why he ain't there. So there you go.
Now, as we go through this,
we are finding out more every single day.
So the same stuff applies as before,
which is to don't go outside if you absolutely can't.
Like if you're going to avoid going outside, go outside.
I didn't leave my house for fucking 26 days,
but I'm a turbo nerd and I planned ahead,
so it was felt really easy for me.
The question is, oh my God,
is it like droplet transmission or partial aerosol?
The thing is, again, we're finding out more about it each day.
Studies are coming out.
So basically, spending time in your house now is far more valuable than spending time in
your house three months from now. Three months from now,
we'll have much more understanding of all the science of these things and everybody will
have protocols and understanding again with an exponential curve.
The stuff that we do now is better than stuff we do later.
The other couple of things that I want to tell people to do is lose fucking weight.
I know a lot of you goony motherfuckers are fat,
and that's one of the biggest comorbidities is being fat.
So lose weight.
BMI is highly correlated with having negative outcomes with this thing.
Even if it means going on a diet and doing some fucking push-ups and having a home exercise routine.
I would rather your fat ass survives than your alliance needs you.
So stop being so fucking fat so you don't die,
so we can still be there for each other. Thank you.
Also stop smoking.
If I can stop smoking weed and shift to
edibles and make the terrible sacrifice, so can you.
Now, of course,
I'm not running around outside when I'm working out.
I am just doing bodyweight exercises at home.
You can find stuff like that on YouTube.
I don't give a shit about fat shaming.
I care more about your survival than fee fees when it comes to this.
It's an interesting thing because for many years,
my only three emotions were,
I love it, I hate it,
and stop wasting my time.
Pretty much the last person who should ever be talking to anybody about feelings because of,
yeah, but feelings are important from a strategic perspective at this point,
because we don't want people to be compensating online.
We want you guys to be working together to help each other through this,
and as a by-product of that,
that will also result in us having a more effective organization
that will be stronger at the end of this rather than weaker.
We are going to seeing alliances imploding in drama across this game because they did
not get ahead of the resilience challenge that the pandemic presents to the organizations.
You're going to see schisms,
FC drama, flame outs,
Reddit's going to go insane,
the whole Internet's already starting to go batshit.
People are posting horny on main,
e-girls are talking to their reply guys.
It's fucked up. So organizationally,
we're planning for it. You guys should know this so the discourse can happen.
There you go. All right, boys and girls.
So let's talk about something involving positive stuff.
Again, I think this is awful.
This is shitty, but we should,
we're planning around it, we're going to take care of each other or else.
We will take care of each other or there will be commissary.
You don't have to worry about that. I'm not actually going to be shooting anybody yet.
But a positive thing is that Enominate has created the job board.
I know that a lot of people are in countries that are taking
care of their citizens and giving them unemployment and stuff like that.
Some of your own countries,
you're pretty much left on your own and are potentially fucked,
but the Space Empire will do its best to provide.
So we have a job board that has been created.
Enominate, if you could explain to everybody what the fuck.
>> Yeah. Sorry, it's taken me so long to actually do this.
But the company I work for,
we have hired a bunch of goons.
It has all worked out fantastically.
This is actually a common story.
We all know somebody who got their job because of a goon.
So this is trying to formalize it.
So anyone who you work at a company,
you want to help goons get jobs,
hell, you want to help your company hire.
You can use this forum to post your company's job ads there and get goons jobs,
and connect goons looking for jobs with goons working to hire.
I would like to stress a couple of things here that this is for helping goons.
This is not for posting job ads for profit.
This is not for headhunters.
This is not for recruiters.
More importantly, MLMs are not a fucking job.
>> Yeah. If you do any stupid shit related to something that is
critical to people's life and improving their life in the real world.
I love the whole idea of us being basically like
the Freemasons in space with making jokes that for years now,
and it's becoming more and more of a reality.
I've watched our people take over companies,
build up companies, goons hiring goons and all this stuff.
There's never been a better time to do this.
But if you come to this in any way that I find to be exploitative of our people,
or anything even remotely bad faith,
I will purge you and blacklist you.
So it's a fucking third rail.
Come there with real legit stuff, help each other out.
But if you're like, "Well,
I want to," I don't even know what's a good example of an MLM.
I want to sell Mary Kay cosmetics or something, fuck off.
So that's a thing. We're going to be promoting that a lot as these things go.
Let me see some other items here.
Two other points about feelings.
Feelings are, again,
I'm like the last person in the world to be talking about them,
but it's a lot easier to deal with them if you have a label for them.
People who are not normally anxious are feeling anxious,
perhaps for the first time.
People who are anxious are sometimes calm,
and there are these weird feelings that aren't actually anxiety.
In the United States, we just call most bad feelings either anxiety or depression,
and whatever. Again, I'm like the last fucking person to be talking about this.
But there is a name for something weird that a lot of us are feeling.
I read an article about this.
Something called anticipatory grief,
because it's very uncertain and you don't know it.
Grief will often, particularly anticipatory grief,
will fuck people up because it's not a emotion we regularly feel.
So particularly if you are an emotionally repressed internet spaceship nerd,
hi, I'm an emotionally repressed internet spaceship nerd.
When I read this article,
I was like, "Oh, anticipatory grief, this is how this works.
There's a framework for it. There's a way to explain
this weird shit that's happening in my head.
Yeah, of course, I'm worried about my parents dying because they're 78,
and it's not quite anxiety,
but it's not quite like being sad.
It's this weird, strange thing.
Oh, okay, there's a name for it.
Here's what it is. This is what everyone is going to be going through.
It makes sense. You're not going crazy.
This is a normal thing.
It's got a name. It's got a framework.
That helps for me. It might not help for you, but there you go.
In terms of practical stuff,
the Asian grocery store thing and the eye protection and the masks are a key thing.
We're seeing some countries that are big on masks.
There are some countries that are saying, "Oh,
you don't need masks because they want their health care workers to have them."
Understandably, a shortage.
But there is no scientific argument that having a mask and having eye protection,
it's something that you want along with gloves if you're going to go the fuck outside.
Now, Darkfire is asking the question,
which we're going to be getting a lot of,
is there anything e-related in this fireside?
Now, we are going to be talking less about the virus as these things go on,
because this is going to become the normal.
We're getting ahead of this now,
so we can spend more time talking about spaceships.
But this is one of the things that people are going to do.
Three ways that we see people talking about this.
People don't want to hear about it sometimes.
Some people do want to talk to each other,
and some people just mad and lash out at each other.
The key thing here is that we want people to be okay to talk about it.
If you don't want to hear it,
you're not going to be having to worry about it too much going forward,
but you can always leave.
But we do not want people who don't want to hear it to try to
silence people that want to talk about it.
It is a normal reaction to not want to talk about it.
It is a normal reaction to get angry and lash out,
and it's a normal reaction to also want to talk about it.
So we as an organization need to manage these competing emotions
such that our org will be stronger compared to the other organizations.
So all of these reactions are normal.
But good news, we're now going to be talking about something that you
will look even less at COVID-19.
We are going to be talking about moon stuff.
I'm projecting, I hate talking about moons.
I would rather talk about the fucking virus than talk about moons,
but there's moon stuff to talk about.
So here, if you were suffering for the last 20 minutes listening to me talk about
the fucking virus, understand that I am now suffering because I have to talk about moons.
So sometimes we don't have to talk about stuff that we don't want to talk about,
or listen to things that we don't want to listen to. That's life.
So CCP is fucking with moons.
We know this. They've released a dev blog a couple days ago.
They're taking the low-end, like the ord out of MootGoo,
and they're claiming that they're going to be redistributing moons soon.
We don't know all the details for it.
They're saying everything's going to be fine,
while also saying that everything's not going to be fine.
It's the usual mixed messages dance. That's fine.
What you need to know is that our policies about who has what moons
are going to be dealt with in the same way that we did the last time
CCP diddled with everything.
When CCP changes everything, we've got to run around, recon,
and do an insane amount of work to find out what CCP has done.
And then we look at all the spreadsheets, and the experts say,
"We need X, Y, and Z to change."
So we are already getting people asking questions about
"What's going to happen to my moons? What's going to happen to this?
What's going to happen to that?"
And the answer is, we don't know yet,
because we only deal with the facts as they present on the ground.
When we have the data, after the change is implemented,
we will then do what we always do,
which is some moons may be nationalized by the state.
If so, magically, you had a moon that was crap,
and it turns into the bestest moon ever.
The state will nationalize it, because we always do that.
But we don't know whether that's going to be necessary,
because we don't know what CCP is actually going to change.
So I'm essentially just reiterating the thing that we do
every time CCP diddles with moons every few years.
[silence]
And so many of you have questions about
"What's the issue of this versus that?" or whatever.
It is that I don't trust anything CCP says until it hits the server,
because the devlogs are often contradictory,
and things get changed at the last minute.
So that's one of the things why I'm saying,
"Hey, dude, you're going to have questions,
and we're not really going to have answers,
other than that the state will nationalize what the state usually nationalizes
once we have the facts on the ground.
I hope that might not be necessary."
So we'll find out.
[silence]
Is CCP trying to go out of business before the world ends?
I think that they have a real inflationary problem in the economy,
and that a general nerf to supply is kind of important.
I'm not sure whether I'm going to like what they do until we see what they do,
because again, I'm not going to buy into anything they say
until it actually hits the ground.
[silence]
Were the Mayans predicting the apocalypse in 2012 just dyslexic?
That is possible, but again, this is not the end of the world.
There is still going to be something really awesome
on the other side of this.
I think society is going to be really cool on the other side of this,
because it's a cyber apocalypse,
so there's a huge technological boom in medicine
that is going to result in a lot of really interesting life extension technology
that comes from studying the anti-inflammatory
and anti-cancer mechanisms in bats.
Oddly enough, bats have a really interesting biology,
and the entire world is restricting bats now for some reason.
Due to their supercharged mitochondria,
which spit off lots of cancer-causing things,
anyway, the bat biology turns out to be really, really fascinating
from a future medicine perspective.
All right, so, NGSA is going to be undeploying and going into hibernation
while we figure out what we're going to be doing org-wise with that.
PSA, to refine all of your moon ores as soon as possible,
or you'll lose out on the minerals that are in the Nets at the time,
assuming that the deadline is by Tuesday.
Yeah, to be clear, do it before Tuesday.
Because after Tuesday, the same ore that you had before Tuesday
is going to have lower yields on a lot of different shit,
and you're going to lose out on minerals.
So do it before Tuesday if you're currently holding ore.
All right, we have a shout out.
Gooniversity is going to be doing a free-for-all
to mark four years of the WGF class series in two weeks,
so that'll be fun and cool.
We talked about doing something with the Kings of Losec last week.
We're obviously not doing that because we got distracted
by all the shit that's going on.
Let's see what else we got.
So let's take some questions here.
Also, the Meta Show today is going to be a chill zone Meta Show.
We don't really have too much space news to talk about,
so Brisk and I are going to be—
I'm wearing a button-down shirt and no suit,
but I'm wearing sweatpants underneath,
and I'm not going to be getting messed up.
We'll just be doing story time with Uncle Mittens
and shooting the shit,
so sort of like a fireside Meta Show, actually.
"What's up with the Kiki Doctrine fit?"
That's a very non-specific question that I can't answer.
I don't know what you consider to be up with it.
"How is the Goon Perimeter Trade Hub going?"
You mean the TTC? It's going quite well, thank you.
"How do I feel about skipping Burn Jita 2020?"
We do Burn Jita when we can.
Black sweatpants. I have like three colors in my wardrobe.
Everything's like black or red or blue, I guess.
"Can we have more actions as we're staying at home, like a quick war?"
There's no such thing as a quick war, one.
Two, a reasonable question.
Three, we don't really talk about future plans.
Four, we do have future plans.
Like, yeah, we're definitely going to do something.
We're not going to do a full war deployment,
and we just undeployed the Jeff.
So we talked about this last week, and again,
normally I don't like to say, "Hey guys, we're going to deploy X, Y, and Z,"
but shit's fucked.
So I do want to give people something to look forward to.
As soon as is reasonably possible,
we will want to redeploy the Jeff, right?
Like, that's what it's for, and it's a lot of fun, and people love it, right?
So that means that probably sometime in late April,
you could see a Jeff deployment.
I don't want to be wedded to anything maybe sooner,
but things are obviously kind of hard,
because normally the people that would be spending a lot of their free time
planning on like Eve shit are also having to deal with like real life stuff.
But yeah, we want to redeploy and get Jeff out there
as soon as is reasonably possible,
because we want to blow stuff up with our new cool doctrines,
which we're also working on.
What are his favorite things to do stuck at home in isolation?
I personally have been really enjoying documentaries from the Internet Archive.
So I've been watching all of the James Burke Connection series,
and then probably going to move on to the Daily Interested still,
which is I like this history of science and technology shit.
That's my current kick.
There's lots of good documentaries there.
I'm a big fan of just wanking a lot, ideally when I'm on drugs or fooling around with my girlfriend.
I'm actually not wanking when I'm fooling around with my girlfriend,
but basically like sex, drugs, video games, watching Netflix or documentaries,
building toy soldiers, board games, nerd shit.
I mean, I actually really kind of enjoy staying in my house and just doing all the stuff,
and now I have a perfect excuse to do it,
because it's not pro-social for me to be a genetic slacker who just wants to be left alone and play with his toys.
[silence]
Yeah, it's really the other side of the aisle.
That's not how I roll.
[silence]
Have I watched the Tiger King documentary on Netflix yet?
Now, as Mr. Socks says, a lot of our guys actually have the fucking RONA now.
So that's another thing. The dudes who have the RONA, we need to start looking out for each other.
This is the way of the job board.
We're probably going to end up needing to have some sort of system implemented where people who flag themselves as having the RONA,
like, let people know so we can check in on them.
We're making this shit up as we go along.
And again, the moment that I see one of our people saying, because, you know, again,
one of my good friends, Wibbla, has it, and he's lost a lot of weight going through this thing,
is the moment that I see somebody going through this and suffering,
I immediately stop giving a shit about the people who are going, "I don't want to hear it."
You can leave the channel if you don't want to hear about it. That's fine.
It's not the end of the world. I'm not going to shoot you or something.
You do not have to care about this, but I care about my sick people.
That is who I am. This is what I do.
So if you don't want to hear about it, you can just leave the fireside.
But when I see one of my guys trying to warn more of my guys to take this seriously and to be careful,
I want us to look out for each other at our time of need.
And this is our time of need.
"How will you let the 1DQ1 home and validate it with all the neutral killer logistics en route to the market hub?"
I never really want Delve to be completely safe.
It's an interesting question and it comes up relatively regularly.
So I just want to tell people that are new to our organization, a philosophy on risk.
One of the things that we saw early in the Great War,
which was obviously more than a decade ago with Band of Brothers fighting in the frontier,
is that it's in a frontier, tried to build a completely safe place for their hobbits in the southeastern section of the galaxy.
They wanted to build literally their design philosophy was to bring empire to Nolsec.
They wanted safety and secure, kind of like what the province were going to going for, but in a much more grand scale.
It was a horrible idea because safety results in weakness.
Safety results in people letting their guard down.
Safety results in you not being on edge, not having that killer instinct,
not having that understanding that you need to fight to survive.
That people are trying to kill you and that if you relax, you will get killed.
This is a very useful kind of survival anxiety in the video game and in the real world.
So, you know, one of the reasons why Delve, I think, is a great region is that it has NPC Delve,
which means that we will never get rid of people trying to kill us, which I think is good.
Goon Swarm was born in Syndicate.
Our culture comes from SU-884, which had 500 goons jammed into one system,
restricted to using only a handful of belts, while everybody in the galaxy came to shoot the innocent newbies and make fun of us while we die.
And so we became cold and hard and strong and the stupid were weeded out.
They either we laughed at the people that died in stupid ways because they were tackled in a belt,
and either those people died, learned from the experience,
or they at least provided a useful example for everybody else of what not to do.
And that is why we don't really want Delve to ever be completely safe,
because complete safety results in weakness and then we will lose wars.
There you go.
The meetings will continue randomly when you least expect it.
That is an example that is actually a really good way of looking at it.
If you're always planning on getting attacked and needing to be safe and looking at intel channels and being a fucking adult,
then your outcomes will be better.
All right.
More questions.
All right.
I think that's going to be about it.
We have a couple of projects coming up, but we're not really ready to announce them.
I'm glad we got the job board going today.
Thanks to Anomaly.
And we have a couple of projects.
I want to announce one of them next week.
So we actually have a bunch of shit to do that we're going to be putting in front of you guys to do in addition to mining everything that's not nailed down.
Do we have a locust fleet tomorrow?
I forgot to mention that.
No, next Sunday.
Okay, next Sunday.
No locust fleet tomorrow.
Let's go.
All right, boys and girls, for each other, take care of each other.
I really like these movie nights.
A lot of corporations are doing movie nights and, like, together some things to keep each other sane and safe.
Continue to do that.
That's exactly the kind of thing I want to see.
If you don't want to hear about virus stuff and people are talking about virus stuff, instead of trying to shame them about it, just wander off and go do something else.
If you want to hear about it, that's fine.
That is okay.
Denial and just blocking it out is an okay thing.
So don't shame the people that don't want to hear it.
Don't shame the people that want to talk to each other.
We've got to find a way that we can all manage this shit in a way that results in us not trying to turn our guns on each other so we can keep our guns pointed at either back in space or at the virus.
So thank you all for coming.
And, yeah, take care of each other.
to do the meta show here in 20 minutes.