OOC: I'm It

I have been double-tagged, tagged by Flashfresh then Wensley in the space of 15 minutes. Here are the rules of this game of tag:

• Link to the original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share 7 facts about myself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

And so, 7 random and/or weird things about your humble blogger.

1. I was my troop's first-ever Eagle Scout.
2. After securing the offer of a full scholarship for a 5-year degree in Nuclear Physics I answered the call to ministry and have been a foreign missionary for over 22 years now.
3. Back in the early 1980's I hiked to the highest peak in Poland--from Czekoslovakia.
4. I am conversational in 4 languages and can "read" (an academic technical term) 5 others.
5. In the old days, I would be dead several times over. I have had appendicitus, maybe hepatitus (after two of my brothers were diagnosed with the disease, Mom didn't bother taking me in when I displayed similar symptoms), Guillan-Barre Syndrome, and gallbladder surgery.
6. I enjoy SCUBA diving.
7. I chose the nom de guerre Ka Jolo as a nod to Filipino pirates plying the Sulu Sea. Jolo is the name of a city in the area, and "Ka" is an honorrific which can stand for the Filipino words for "brother" or "comrade."

It seems most of the blogs I usually follow have already been tagged. I perused CrazyKinux's Player Blogroll to add to a couple I found who have so far evaded us I hereby tag the following bloggers:

25081197, aka 250
Wreck Count by Rakkar Than
Yarr Yum
The Bastards' VB Sarge
Blackheart
Cussbeard's A Fistful of ISK
Kitochi Oritsu's Surviving Within the Void

Not it!

A vision becoming reality

I just have to say that, as I watch the Tuskers coming together as a corp, I continue to be impressed and my expectations are being exceeded.

The Tuskers are by-and-large an unskilled crew. We have only two or three pilots who can skillfully pilot battleships or battlecruisers. Most of our bread-and-butter combat is done at the helm of T1 frigates and cruisers, assault frigates, and interceptors. But just look at the glory with which we are cloaking ourselves!

Last week a small 6-man Tusker gang consisting of an Incursus, a Griffin, a Vexor, a Retribution, a Myrmidon, and a Drake pounced on an Ishkur, Megathron, and Kronos. That's 2 T1 battlecruisers, a T1 cruiser, an assault frigate, and two T1 frigates vs. an assault frigate, a battleship, and a Marauder (a T2 battleship). The result: the Tusker gang completely wiped out the heavier gang, at the loss of a single frigate.

Then, the next day, the same heavy gang came back looking for more! This time Tuskers in a Helios (covert ops frigate), a Retribution (assault frigate), a Vexor (T1 cruiser), a Hurricane (T1 battlecruiser), two Myrmidons (T1 battlecruisers), and a Scorpion (T1 battleship) obliterated a Thorax (T1 cruiser), a Hurricane (T1 battlecruiser), a Hyperion (T1 battleship), and a Kronos (T2 battleship)--while losing not a single ship.

These guys were not playing around. Their ships were well fit, sporting several faction modules adding up to hundreds of millions of ISK. Kronos-class Marauders are menacing powerhouses of destruction. Yet the pilots were inexperienced in combat, leaving themselves vulnerable to our more experienced fleet in lesser but well-chosen vessels. In those two engagements, Tusker pilots in relatively inexpensive ships destroyed faction-fitted spaceships worth about 2.48 billion ISK--at the cost of a single 3.22 million ISK Incursus.

What do these engagements tell me about my fellow Tuskers? First, they're not afraid of a good fight. I can guarantee you that going into that first engagement, each Tusker had already accepted the chance he would be killed, yet was willing to lose his ship for the opportunity to score a Kronos kill. Second, there are now enough Tuskers that when a juicy target-of-opportunity such as these shows up, we can throw together a decent gang and get the job done. Third, I'd better keep my combat skills honed if I want to command the respect of such pilots.