And Then There Were 14

What a crazy yesterday was. Being perfectly honest, I didn't put my chances at gaining a seat on the CSM at much above 1 in 3, so when the time began to approach for the announcement to happen, rather than watch it live and set myself up for disappointment, I decided to be a good husband and help the wife around the chateau for a bit with some cleanup.

I kept telling myself, "Well, at least if you don't get on you won't have an NDA hanging over your head preventing you from writing about stuff."

As it happened, I was out at the dumpster heaving some garbage bags when my phone chimed. Then it chimed again, and again, and about 12 or 13 more times. It seemed a bit much for people consoling me on not getting in, so I checked it and stood open mouthed for a moment wondering if I was getting trolled. Then the phone rang, it was one of my ER co-hosts, Elijah Ghost, calling in from Ireland. Did I hear? Yeah I was just reading it, wondering if it was a troll. No troll, it's for real, you're in. Doc Nielsen, another co-host from Denmark rang up a few minutes later, same conversation.

Well, shit.

Truth be told I was worried that there would be some low voter turn out this year, and the null blocs would run rampant on the CSM. They did pretty well, but it also looks like low sec didn't take getting left off CSM8 very lightly, and between FW pilots, pirates, and people who would like to do industry in our space, we seem to have managed to drum up enough support to land not one, but TWO of the 14 seats on the council. I don't think low sec has ever scored 2 seats on the CSM, and this is HUGE for us.

I'm also quite sure that a lot of people outside low sec threw in their support for us. I know I won't forget that moving forward, and I doubt Sugar will either. I'm especially conscious of the community over at minerbumping.com and the endorsement from James315 at a time when I was getting hammered by a good section of the Eve Media community over my stance on the Erotica 1 situation. I really wanted to see Psychotic Monk on the CSM as well, and I suspect that I may owe part of my seat to votes that passed to me when he got eliminated in the process. Aside from my obvious support of all things low sec, I feel I also owe it to those guys to have their backs if there is a push in the coming year against high sec villainy. For those who choose to do it, being a bad guy in Eve is an important aspect of the game's content, it adds a lot of color to our world... it also keeps me on my toes when dealing with people I don't know, and makes life more interesting.

So what now? For those of you that voted us in, you've done your part. Now it's up to us to make good on our promises to represent you to CCP the way we said we would. Communication is going to be huge going forward. Once things get moving on CSM9, I'll be opening up some time on my regular Eve Radio shows for questions people want to throw at me, and I'll continue blogging of course and getting into what I can here. I'll have a fat NDA hanging over my head pretty soon, so I may not be able to shed light on everything, but I'll certainly say what I can, and I'll have plenty to say on stuff as information is publicly released.

I think this is going to be an interesting year.