It was sometime in late February 2018 when I sat in my office at work and got annoyed by the coffee circles on my desk and on papers scattered there. I started to search the web for coasters but could not find any which satisfied my special needs and suddenly I got an idea.
I wanted coasters with the Signal Cartel Alliance logo on it.
So I started another search to see how I could get custom coasters printed. There were not so many hits when I narrowed the search down to custom shaped coasters, but I finally found a print shop which offered them made out of mousepad material at a reasonable rate. In the next few days I asked Mynxee about the copyright situation of our logo, and a friend of mine helped me to meet the requirements of the print shop since I am really bad with Photoshop stuff and the requirement was to have a 1pt pink line along the cutting border.
After a few days I had everything in place and had to decide about the number of coasters to order. The costs were roughly 10€ for a professional checking my image for problems (which was really necessary because I needed three tries to get it right), 10€ for cleaning the machine after printing, and 0.7€ for each coaster. With the basic costs in mind, I decided to order 50 pieces so the price for a single one was in a reasonable range.
Now came the next thing – what would I do with 50 coasters where I needed just a few myself? A Signal Cartel event where these coasters could be handed out to my fellow corpmates!
I thought about what kind of event I would like to see myself and maybe even something different as well. Since we are Signal Cartel and do things differently, I thought about creating a group event where nobody can really win but everybody can participate, like our ESRC and SAR division. Since we already have some ESRC competitions and events, I focused on SAR and came up with the idea of an orchestrated rescue of somebody. Later it turned out that this somebody was me, and I would be kind of locked out of my own story most of the time – haha!
I reached out to Thrice Hapus since my favorite Signal Cartel video is the one about our ESRC division. (It’s so exciting to hear „Base, this is Thrice checking in…“) I only asked who did all the sound and video bits and pieces and wondered if I could get some help from that end. But as soon as I told Thrice about the idea, he explained that the one year anniversary of ESRC was about to come up in March and he was looking for an event to be held at that time. We pulled A Dead Parrot into the story a few days after first contact, and from then on, we chatted daily on Discord, had a few voice calls, and started to work out the story together.
So that’s how content gets created in EvE!