Chocolate Heaven

The Misadventures of a Minmatart

What's New, Pussycat?

So everything has been quiet around here. In fact, the last twelve months have been a bit sparse in con­tent. Just look at the yearly post counts:

  • 2010 — 44
  • 2011 — 24 posts
  • 2012 — 14 posts (includ­ing this one). Embarrassing really.

My time in-game has dimin­ished quite sub­stan­tially as well. As some my remem­ber, I inten­ded to take a break from my build cycles for six months while I focused on devel­op­ing bet­ter tools for man­aging the pro­cesses involved. Thanks to my lazi­ness, that didn’t work. Coupled with this, I had a bit of an acci­dent shortly after start­ing the builds again, which put me off doing any more for a while. Not that I would whine about it; it was my own stu­pid fault.

So What Have You Done Then?

I have used the time to work on this blog though. I’ve doc­u­mented the lay­out and theme on the About page. But its more than that, as I’ve been dig­ging in my old archives of doc­u­ments from the his­tory of the game, and declas­si­fied a lot of con­tent from the 2003/2004 era. You can find these things in the fol­low­ing pages:

Its not a lot, but there is a lot more to come. There’s also altern­at­ive themes for both PRM and AWEI sec­tional con­tent, but they weren’t quite ready by the time the rest of the site. I’ll talk more about those when they are ready.

As for con­tent, I know its sparse, but I’ve got ideas for a few dif­fer­ent series. These will mostly focus on his­tor­ical doc­u­ment­a­tion of stuff from EVE’s rich his­tory, since that’s what I’m quite good at blath­er­ing about.

That and old EVE com­ics from 2004–2006, since they should prob­ably have some­where semi-permanent to live.

So, until I have new things ready — and let’s be hon­est, nobody knows when that will hap­pen — I wish you happy spacetrails!

YC Year Archives

In tra­di­tional Min­matar fash­ion, I’ve been tinker­ing and come up with more use­ful little tid­bits for people to mull over and use in their own blogs.

And in the tra­di­tion of my former cor­por­a­tion, Re-Awakened Tech­no­lo­gies Inc. it’s based on some­thing that looked inter­est­ing; so I nicked it.

First of all, what we’re try­ing to achieve here is a list of links to yearly archives on a blog. Except we only want a list of years when a post was made in said year, and we want it to out­put the ‘YC’ year, not the lit­eral, real-world year.

As a dis­claimer: this is for Word­Press blogs/sites, but you can prob­ably adapt it accord­ingly for other types.

function minmatarts_get_archives() {
  global $wpdb;
  // Select the years that have posts in the database
  $query = "SELECT YEAR(post_date) AS `year` FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE `post_type` = 'post' AND `post_status` = 'publish' GROUP BY `year` ORDER BY `year` DESC";
  $ycresults = $wpdb->get_results($query);
  $years = array();
  if ($ycresults) {
    echo '<ul>';
    // As long as there were results (which there should be), do the following for each year
    foreach ( (array)$ycresults as $ycresult ) {
      array_push($years, $ycresult->year);
      // Format the year to YC standard
      $year = $ycresult->year - 1898;
      //Output the result with a nice title on the link
      echo '<li>';
      echo '<a href="'.  get_site_url().'/'.$ycresult->year.'" title="View all posts from YC'.$year.' ('.$ycresult->year.')">YC'.$year.'</a>';
      echo '</li>';
    }
    echo '</ul>';
  }
}

You want to drop this into your functions.php file. Then you can call it some­where in your tem­plate like this:

<div class="annual-archives">
  <?php minmatarts_get_archives(); ?>
</div>

And that’s a quick and dirty way of get­ting a list of, and links to, all of the years in which you have pos­ted entries.

Of Standings and Ships

Yes­ter­day, I hit an inter­est­ing mile­stone that I have ‘meandered with intent’ towards for sev­eral years. I reached 9.9 fac­tion stand­ing for the Min­matar Republic.

Now, this in and of itself is hardly some­thing to shout about. In fact, many ded­ic­ated mis­sion run­ners get to this stage a hell of a lot quicker than I did. But what makes this par­tic­u­lar mile­stone inter­est­ing, is that at 9.9 stand­ing towards a num­ber of fac­tions, you are entitled to toot your Loy­alty Horn, hand in some tags to an NPC, and have a 2 run BPC of said faction’s battle­ship delivered thusly to your act­ive ship’s hangar:

fleet issue tempest blueprint copy

It’s ME20 as well, so that’s pretty cool. And the tags I needed to hand over only cost me 5 mil­lion ISK!

Almost Free Stuff? In MY EVE?

It’s more likely than you’d think.

This is not just for battle­ships either. I have pre­vi­ously tooted my horn for fac­tion cruiser and fac­tion frig­ate BPCs as well.

The reason I’m even men­tion­ing it, even though it is doc­u­mented online, is that every time I do hit one of these thresholds, someone I hap­pen to be talk­ing to at the time has no idea that these kinds of offers exist. So, for the sake of fur­ther expos­ure, I’ll explain a bit about it here.

Firstly, you need some decent stand­ings towards a faction:

  • 8.5 for frigates
  • 9.2 for cruisers
  • 9.9 for battleships

Even though in the above-linked art­icle, it men­tions that skills count towards the stand­ings require­ment, his­tor­ic­ally, these was not the case — at least it wasn’t when I got my cruis­ers, so I am going to err on the side of cau­tion and spec­u­late based on my own per­sonal exper­i­ence that skills don’t count. I’m happy to change this text if someone can con­firm that they do now count, how­ever — I’m not here to misinform!

Once you have these stand­ings, you need to buy 30 Sil­ver, Gold, or Dia­mond tags for the frig­ate, cruiser and battle­ship offers respectively.

For the Min­matar ships, you need to fly on over (with the tags in your car­go­hold) to the Hjoramold gate in Barkrik. The loc­a­tions of the agents for other fac­tions are also lis­ted in the art­icle I linked to, above.

  • Mutama Czeik deals with the Repub­lic Fleet Firetail
  • Thora Desto deals with the Stab­ber Fleet Issue
  • Makor Desto deals with the Tem­pest Fleet Issue

I’m not sure what tags are needed for some of the fac­tions’ ships, and the inform­a­tion is sorely lack­ing on the EVElo­pe­dia art­icle. Per­haps someone in-the-know could add it?

So there we have it. Hope­fully the inform­a­tion will be use­ful to some­body someday!