The chrysalis

A couple of nights ago my other-half found a moth chrysalis in the garden whilst having an argument with a Holly bush. We put it in a jar, in the kitchen, so that our 4 year old daughter could see the moth when it emerges. I sat with her yesterday, showing her the jar and trying to explain the process.

The caterpillar eats and eats until he is all grown up and ready to change. I explained.

Then he builds a cocoon around his body and he sits inside and turns into a butterfly (well, a moth in this case).

Now whilst she is very familiar with The Hungry Caterpillar story she couldn’t quite get her head around the idea that the change was not an instant process. We had an on-going debate for the rest of the afternoon with my daughter regularly insisting that it was time to go and “poke the cocoon to wake the butterfly up". I had quite a hard time explaining that it takes time to go through such a big change.

I cannot help but see the similarity between this and the current state of SoTF.



It seems to me that we are very much in a “chrysalis stage” right now. We are undergoing a huge state of change ; everything from where we live, to our allies, the pvp we take part in, our rules and ROE.

It takes time, debate, patience and hard work to move from where we came from to what we are becoming and some folks are certainly finding it harder than others. I really don't envy our leadership right now.

I consider myself to be a pretty sensible person in general but even in my own attitude I find resistance to these changes.

In my mind, I am a Shadows of The Federation pilot. These are the guys I've died and fought alongside, got drunk and giggled with, argued against and confided in for the past 2 years. They are my comrades and the respect I have for them is well earned. I'd do pretty much anything in game for them.

But now I find myself in an Alliance; a big pool of corporations, many of whom I'd never even heard of previously. Add to that the whole of the Northern Coalition which we now work alongside; that is quite a list of corps and pilots that we are suddenly expected to have some sort of allegiance to and play nice with. It is a hard pill to swallow sometimes.

And of course this works both ways and I know SoTF's FCs and leaders have done a lot of shouting of late, to make our views heard over a din of pre-conceived opinion.

Slowly, we are adjusting to our new way of life. But it is not easy.


We will shortly pass the one month marker since our move to Vale and I don’t think I’ve seen a more difficult 4 weeks in all my time with SoTF. We've had many ups and downs and for some members it has been too much and they have moved on to pastures new.

But we’ve also achieved a great many things in this month of change. Our 0.0 station is up, we've moved over 1400 ship from low-sec to null, our members are getting settled and we're slowly making the impression we want to within our new circle of allies. At the time of typing we are also in the top 10 corp killers for this month in RAGE.

We always knew this was a massive undertaking and that has not been an understatement. But with a little more hard work, a little more patience and a little bit of luck, that drunken butterfly will be on its way out very soon.