I Used to be a Blogger Like You, Then I Took an Arrow in the RSS Feed…

When looking at an old post… my very first post… I decided to update the tags while I was there.

I do this all the time.  My tag and category policy has evolved over time, and when I read old posts I often stop to bring their tags and such into line with newer posts.  I also correct typos, which I seem to be able to find immediately in any post over two years of age, much to my chagrin.

But, for some reason, my update today fed the post… my very first post… back into the RSS feed as a new post.

So, if you are sorting your feeds by date, it now looks like I stopped blogging five years ago.

Look at the age on that most recent post!

(Picture courtesy of Player Versus Developer.)

Oddly… or maybe not oddly… this only appeared to impact the RSS feed that comes directly from WordPress.com.  The Feedburner feed, which is my backup feed, seemed to know that this post wasn’t new and dealt with it accordingly.

So if you used the RSS feed link at the top of the side bar, you didn’t see anything.

Anyway, I apologize for any confusion, for feeling the need to make a post about this (which will hopefully pop me back into the 2012 range of updates), and for using that Skyrim meme when I haven’t even played the game.

I might as well have made the title, “The Feed is a Lie.”

On the bright side, at least  I am not clogging my feed with test posts. *cough*

And we now have written confirmation that Bhagpuss uses an RSS reader to read blogs.

Watching the War in Branch So Far…

The war in the Branch region of null sec continues, mostly without me.

Imagine that.

I did get some hits in early, going on that POS shoot back before Christmas.  That was fun, in a “I’ve never done anything like this before” and “OMG would you look at that” kind of way.

And then there was the reinforcement fleet to Burger King, which left me stranded out in Branch where bad guys were roaming.  My accomplishment for this week was getting my Maelstrom back to Mittaningrad in one piece.  Essentially I flew 11 jumps last night, including a jump bridge, and only saw a single person in local besides myself until I got close to Goondom.

Safe back in Mittaningrad

It seems that the fighting had moved on.

Back in December the map of the area looked like this. (Maps from here, cropped by me to focus on the area of conflict.  That little purple dot in the yellow is still where I fly most of the time.)

Deklein and Branch Sov, Dec. 27

As of 18:00 UTC yesterday, the map of the area looked like this.

Deklein and Branch, Jan. 4

So it is starting to look as if the White Noise statement about Deklein being rid of Goons by February might come to pass because the Goons will be living in Branch.  White Noise is either losing badly or conducting the most ambitious maskirovka attempt ever.  Consider me lulled into a false sense of security.

There was actually a bit of coverage of the war over at EVE News 24 last week, something of a summing up of the story so far, once you got past the initial moaning paragraph.  My favorite quote from the comments was, “You know an article is going to be good when it opens up with a lot of excuses and bitching. ”

There was not much new in the article for me, as Gaff tends to IM me all the juicy bits.  My personal favorite was Goons sending doctored kill mails to the White Noise chief and getting reimbursed for their “losses” because he was too busy to validate them.  That and the great buy-out of the market, where Goons spent as much as 20 billion ISK buying vital supplies on the Branch market so White Noise could not use them.  Go economic warfare!

After that, EVE News 24 seemed content to ignore the war and focus on a mercenary corp who headed into Goon space, presumably to audition for White Noise by showing that they could, you know, kill Goons.

So the only news is the official Goon variety and associated rumors and comments over in the Kugutsumen forums.  The official propaganda posts are always fun to read, doubly so since they tend to include official White Noise communications.  Go meta game!

As for me, now that I am safe and sound back in Deklein again I feel I had best turn right around get in on the action once more.  Getting on the kill boards seems to be the best external indicator that you are on the team and helping out.  We have to get out there and uphold the honor of the corp and the alliance.

Living on the left coast of the United States does that make it a bit of a challenge.

As noted in the report from that last link, the war is being fought largely on European time.  So when I see posts about planned fleet ops, they tend to occur either while I am at the office or when I had best be turning the lights out and going to bed.  My best bet seems to be what happened with that POS shoot, where the op took so long to get together that I managed to get home from work, have dinner, get online, and sneak in at the very last second before it kicked off.

With a weekend coming up, I am hoping I can get in on an operation somewhere.  We shall see.