Doubts and Faith

A few hours ago, I made a draft for a new blog entry, which would explain in detail about the recognition I have achieved over the few months, and how that some day I would have to stand up to our beliefs and argue for our cause. I was doubtful if I could actually make compelling arguments which would hurt the credibility of our organization. I had it nearly finished, and fully intending to publish it for the greater audience to read, when I started thinking: Do I really need to know how to debate on the Galnet?

From what I have witnessed about the arguments in the Intergalactic Summit and Galnet in general, they hardly if ever actually change anything, most of the time all the involved parties remain firmly rooted in their own beliefs. I have yet to witness any debate ending: "Yeah, you're actually right and I was wrong, I'll believe like you do now!", instead they continue on forever until they degrade into just insults being thrown around. Several Amarr have to deal with ignorant people constantly insulting their beliefs in reclamation and slavery, and especially their faith. One of them replied:

"And why should a God show itself? The purpose of the Faith is to believe, not to know for a certainty. Its is my Faith that armours me from doubt so that I do not fear the darkness of New Eden."

- Kador Ouryon

It may not be quite the same context as the matter I am discussing right now, but there is some merit to his words. They get a lot of crap thrown at them for their beliefs, some of it might be even true, but they continue have faith in their God. Isn't that really all that I need, unwavering faith on our cause? I might not be as good on defending it as Sakaane or Bataav might be, but I will still stand up to my beliefs when they are questioned.

ཟར༴ཐ٦ཡཐ༴ འཤན༴བ བ༴ཏ༴མ༴ར٦ ٦ནད༴བ٦ ༴འ٦٦ད ན٦བ༴༴ٲ 

Identification

How do we identify ourselves on the battlefield, or outside of it?

Most of us wear dropsuits nearly around the clock, and under the armor is nothing but a stock clone with barer than minimum facial characteristics. Most of the time during the heat of battle we sometimes can't tell the difference between a friend and a foe even with the IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) system, nevertheless identify specifically who is the person wearing the dropsuit.

When outside of combat in our quarters, we never meet other people in person, we just talk through text or voice comms. The only place we can have physical contact with other clone soldiers outside of battle is in the Warbarge for a minute or two. This is a problem not only from a tactical and logistical, but a psychological viewpoint too.

I feel, and quite a lot of my friends also feel, that we are all too similar. We blend in to the mass and are indistinguishable from each other. Many capsuleers have pointed this out, since they have troubles distinguishing us from each other while communicating with them. We can not select the portrait we use for text communications, we can't customize the looks of our dropsuits. It has a toll on your morale when you feel like you're just a faceless clone, a tool to be used by others with no free will of yourself.

In essence, the only identification we have over ourselves is our callsign, and our voice. Some people come up with the whackiest callsigns to try and single themselves out, some being very silly. Others use voice modulators to make their voices sound funny to make their squads memorable experiences. But most often of all, people use special dropsuits.

Over the course of our mercenary careers, after doing special contracts or achieving something special for our empires, we get rewarded special equipment, dropsuits and vehicles. Usually these dropsuits have special paintjobs or other characteristics that makes them different from other dropsuits. For instance I have a stock of Federal Defense Union Scout G-1 dropsuits, colored Gallente green. They're horrible and I would never imagine using them during combat, but it makes me singled out, different from the sea of grey assault suits.

Even if people can see these special dropsuits for only a few minutes at most, it still makes me feel more unique, more like an individual and not just another grunt paid to shoot someone who was paid to shoot you. And finally, we use our memory. We memorize the voices we talk to, we associate them with names, and address to each person by their name during the heat of battle. It also increases the sense of trust and brotherhood among the squad, when we can call each other by name and can rely on our squadmates to keep us alive and win the battle.

Oh yeah, in case you are wondering, the piece of Intaki on the bottom of each post is my name and rank within the Intaki Liberation Front. It reads "Grahisha Denak Kalamari Intaki adiit nikaay.", translated into Sergeant Denak Kalamari, Intaki Liberation Front. It used to be padati - private, but since I was recently promoted, it is now Grahisha, sergeant. Yay!

ཟར༴ཐ٦ཡཐ༴ འཤན༴བ བ༴ཏ༴མ༴ར٦ ٦ནད༴བ٦ ༴འ٦٦ད ན٦བ༴༴ٲ  

Independence of Mercenaries

in·de·pend·ence 

noun

Freedom from the control, influence, support, aid, or the like, of others.

That is the dictionary definition of the word independence. It's kind of funny, how the life of us clone soldiers is often thought as independent, free from the control of the empires, like capsuleers. But honestly, we are more dependent on the empires than we think we are. Sure, we can select the contracts we want to take, take control of districts in Molden Heath, form our own corporations, participate in the Empyrean War etc. etc. Capsuleers can do all this and even more, even CONCORD can't do much about them other than blow up their ships if they happen to break law in highsec space.
 

But let's ask ourselves, what can we really control ourselves?  The contracts we take are exclusively made by the empires or subsidiaries to those empires aside the few pirate corporations. The entire Empyrean War is nothing but a huge pendulum, as I have described in my earlier entry, anything we do there has no real effect to the galaxy at large. You might say that we have real control over the fight in Molden Heath, but even then those districts are nothing but status symbols and free ISK generators for the few huge corporations that control the majority districts.

And what about our equipment? Vehicles, dropsuits, modules, even our implants, all manufactured and controlled by the empires and their subsidiary corporations. If they wanted to, they could remove every single Sagaris and Surya that exist. 

Oh wait, they did that.

Not to mention that CONCORD could restrict us from doing any kind of contract, or just straight out biomass all our clones and permanently kill the entire clone soldier population.

Oh wait, they do that too in a regular basis.

When a battle ends, all of the clone soldiers fighting at that moment will instantly black out and get transported back to their mercenary quarters. It's sudden and comes without warning, all from just a push of a button.

We might be immortal, unphased by death itself. But we are still very vulnerable, we could simply stop existing from the push of a button. It's a very scary, but real possibility.

ཟར༴ཐ٦ཡཐ༴ འཤན༴བ བ༴ཏ༴མ༴ར٦ ٦ནད༴བ٦ ༴འ٦٦ད ན٦བ༴༴ٲ   

Celebration Entry

So, I've been looking at the statistics of my blog quite a lot recently, and my blog has now reached over a 1000 views ever since its creation. I'm honestly happily surprised that my blog has reached this kind of popularity in just a few months, I have even received appreciation from a high-ranking CONCORD employee for this blog, which I am very glad for. Since it has been a while from the last entry, I decided that I would tell you readers a little about the reasons why I created this blog in the first place.

The first entries to this blog were created over half a year before the creation of this blog, when I was still a relatively green recruit within the clone soldier world. I had purchased myself a leisure clone just recently and was exploring my mercenary quarters in this new body. With this newfound body, I also got access to some equipment a normal clone soldier usually had a lot more difficulties acquire, one of them being a camera drone. I happened to be particularly bored for that day, so I decided to purchase myself a camera drone and started recording.

From there was created the first entry, which was a fairly lengthy and dull description of my past and how I ended up becoming a clone soldier in the first place. I never expected to release this to the public, and for a long time it stayed within the logs of my NeoCom for several months, since my corporation, BurgezzE.T.F was undergoing some major changes, and Molden Heath was just recently opened up for mercenaries to conquer.

A few months later, I had started to progress to the point in my mercenary career that I was pretty much just a pointless wanderer. I had no higher goal to strive for, my corporation's attempts at conquering a district in Molden Heath were less than successful and I just didn't care at all anymore. I thought that if I found myself a new corporation, I might find a purpose to what I am doing, and not just slog through each battle to get paid and be done with it. Soon enough I found the Intaki Liberation Front, when I was looking through the capsuleer Intergalactic Summit, a member of the ILF was talking something about the Ida faith.

I remember reading about the ILF before, but until now I had no interest at all in them. So after reading through this member's, Tiberius Wenchel's thread, I decided to check on the corporation, properly this time. It didn't take long before I decided that the ILF was at least worth the try, so I wrote up an application and was soon invited into an interview with the Suresha, Sakaane Eionell. That very old video entry I had made a few months ago I had published into a fairly unknown part of the GalNet, but our Suresha found it anyway, and mentioned that I could possibly convert it into an ILF blog. So I read through the pilots blogs other ILF members had created already, and after I was accepted into the ILF, I recorded another video entry.

I was still debating how I would create my blog, and I had concluded into a text format after my second video entry was done. So after about a week or two of tweaking my page, I made a transcript out of my video log entries and published them, and thus my blog was born.

Finally, I would like to thank all of you readers who have shown your interest on my blog and continue reading them. I was never intending this to be more than a personal leisure time project of mine, and it keeps me motivated when you keep reading my blog. I would also like to thank the Intaki Liberation Front and all of its members for giving a meaning to my mercenary career and supporting me throughout it, I am glad to have found such a corporation, and I am proud to be its member.

ཟར༴ཐ٦ཡཐ༴ འཤན༴བ བ༴ཏ༴མ༴ར٦ ٦ནད༴བ٦ ༴འ٦٦ད ན٦བ༴༴ٲ