Inventory Full

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

Is This The Place I Come To Complain About Blogging?

The image at the top is there because this was going to be a post about the new fishing event in Neverness to Everness. That's not happening any more (Tomorrow, probably.) but the picture still has some relevance qua "picture", so I'm going to leave it in. It's a lot prettier to look at than the rest of the pictures in this post, that's for sure.

Now it's not about fishing, this is a post about blogging. More specifically, it's a post about Blogger, in which I moan about it.

Whining about blogging? Really? Do you have to? Can't we have fishing?

No, you can't. My blog, my prerogative. It's Blaugust and if you can't moan about blogging in a blogging festival, when can you moan about blogging? Also, is anyone else starting find the words "blog" and "blogging" sound weird ? And there's nearly a month of this left to go...

Before I get into the moaning proper, I will just say it's possible some of what I'm going to complain about could be caused by my PC rather than Blogger itself. It's not like I haven't had other issues there. My money's on Blogger, though.

Yesterday, when I was talking about "my very first blog", which of course is this one, I mentioned that, back in 2010, I'd considered both WordPress and Blogger for the honor of hosting my nascent blog. That suggests I'd done some research on both of them so I could make an informed choice. It might suggest it but it's not what happened.

About all I can remember is that I signed up for both then looked at the UI and the controls and decided Blogger looked easier to understand than WordPress. I can't honestly remember but I very much doubt I did more than take a glance and maybe try to make a page. Might not even have done that much.

I very definitely had no clue how popular either of the platforms would have been at the time or which blogs I was following used which. I also wouldn't have had the least idea how well-maintained or frequently updated they were. So it was pure luck that I picked the one that never changes.

That's the Gold Standard for software, for me. If I could, I'd lock every app at the point where I decide I'm satisfied with it, which would usually be five minutes after I've chosen to use it at all. If I'm not satisfied by then I'll already have uninstalled it.

I won't say developers never make changes I appreciate but I will say that it's a racing certainty I won't need or want the huge majority of their "upgrades" or "improvements", almost all of which I'm virtually certain only exist either because someone's job depends on them demonstrating their worth to the company by "innovating"or else on the company's desire to find yet more ways of squeezing money out of the customers.

Blogger is owned and operated by Google, the megacorp that shuttered its much-loved RSS service, Google Reader in 2013, citing declining use. Google Reader's primary function was to get blogs into the hands of readers, so logic would suggest Google's blogging platform, Blogger, ought to have been next to go. If the readership was declining, surely the authorship must have been dropping away too.

And yet, more than a dozen years later, here we all still are, some of us writing, a lot more of us reading Blogger blogs. (That word's not getting any less weird the more I use it, is it?) Did Google decide they'd made a mistake, canning Google Reader? There was business there still, for sure. Plenty of new RSS readers moved into the space Google had vacated. Perhaps they saw that happening and thought they'd leave Blogger alone for a bit, just to stop anyone getting ideas.

These things do happen. There's a furniture salesroom around the corner from where I live that's been there for a decade. It never has any customers and I mean never. I have literally never seen anyone go in or come out.

Before it was a furniture store, the building used to be a supermarket. The new business puzzled me for a long time until someone, who keeps an ear to the ground where these kinds of things are concerned, told me that when the small supermarket moved out, one of the big supermarket companies bought the lease, although they were aware that, due to longstanding issues of local politics in the city, they wouldn't able to open their own branch there. What they wanted to do was to stop any of their main rivals getting in there instead.

Since then, nothing's changed in local politics, so it's still an imaginary furniture shop. I imagine the cost of running it empty (Well, it does have furniture, to be fair. Just no-one to buy any of it.) isn't even a rounding error for the huge supermarket company behind it, just like Blogger won't even be a dot of dust on the screen when someone at Google is looking at a spreadsheet for those rounding errors. Blogger most likely still exists because Google is so unfeasibly huge, no-one who matters remembers it exists.

Not that I think anything so calculated is going on with Blogger. Benign neglect is the story there, or so I've always believed. And it suits me very well. I get a frisson of schadenfreude every time I read someone complaining about the latest thing an update to WordPress has broken.

I got used to Blogger in a matter of weeks, did all the fiddling with it I ever planned on doing and now it'd be my preference if it stayed the way it was then until the heat death of the universe. So I'm not best pleased to see very worrying signs that someone at Google is starting to tinker with it.

For as long as I can remember the Insert Image function has been nothing much more than a drop down menu leading to a blank window with a blue Browse button in the middle that lets you select a file from your PC or from various other sources. And that's still all it is, except one day last week or the week before, the blank window got a makeover.

Now it has a dotted line all round it and gentle curves at the corners. And there's a big, green cloud in the middle to let you know you're about to upload your image to the cloud.

Fine. If you must. And it was fine. Until it wasn't.

I've been using Blogger's Insert Image function ever since I started this blog. It's always worked flawlessly. I've developed the habit of editing my images in Paint.net, saving them in a file cleverly named "Blog", then uploading them to Blogger via the Insert Image window before positioning and resizing them on the page, using the tools provided by Blogger for the purpose.

For a while, after what seemed to be purely a visual update, nothing changed. And then, a couple of days ago, the whole thing stopped working. Now, when I try to upload a picture, I invariably get the message "Transfer encountered too many consecutive failures".

A Google search offers a number of possible fixes for the problem. I tried a couple and they didn't work. I might have gone on to try the more invasive options but luckily I remembered that you don't actually need to use Insert Image at all. I just liked it because it was neat and tidy.

You can simply cut and paste images straight into the draft. All the images in the posts for the last few days were added that way. They appear there huge, bloated and falling off the page but the same tools I always used to resize images soon fix that. Once they're there, you can mostly drag them around the same as always, although they're a bit more pernickety to handle.

Overall, though, it's actually faster and easier than the old way. And it means I'm not duplicating images in storage the way I always have (Because of course I never cleared the dupes out or deleted anything.) In an odd way, I'm kind of happy with how it's turned out but it is undeniably a more primitive method and I'm only using it at all because Google broke the more sophisticated one. (Unless, as I say, it's my PC playing up...)

The first signs of this renewed interest in Blogger came a few weeks ago, when a new button appeared in the line of controls along the top. It's hard to miss. It's the only one that's not in black&white. On a mouseover it identifies as "Insert widget or AI powered enhancements" and until this moment I have never pressed it to see what it does.

I'm going to do that now. Hold on to your seats! Aha! It pops up another button that says "Insert Google Search Widget". I am not pressing that!

Instead, I googled it, in part because having google interrogate google to tell me what it's up to always amuses me. According to this very helpful link the button ought to give me a two-option drop-down menu, with the option I'm seeing plus another that would allow me to "auto add links to search."

Apparently both of these options "create links to Google Search pages". The first, the one I have, adds a colored icon to your links, along with a relevant picture. Apparently it doesn't work very well yet, which is fine with me because I'm not going to be using it unless it's for humorous effect.

It does, at least, only put those pictures where you tell it to put them. The other new feature, the one that has an icon that looks like a magic wand, uses AI to go through your post and figure out for itself what might be worth linking. Then it goes to google search, finds a link and adds it to your post, all without bothering to ask you if you approve.

Like hell it does! Look, I'm somewhere towards the positive end of the AI spectrum, by the standards of this community at least, in that I can see uses for it and I think of it as merely a tool to be used not a threat to be stamped out but I'm sure as hell not going to abrogate responsibility for placing links to external sites on my blog and hand it over to some algorithm with delusions of adequacy!

Then again, I don't even have the magic wand in the menu, so it's a notional issue for the moment. I remember now, I did see it wafting around at the bottom of the screen for a while, which apparently is what it used to do before they added the button at the top, but it's gone altogether now. And good riddance!

Finally, when I was writing yesterday's post, I kept getting the feeling Blogger was trying to make me type in blocks, the way WordPress does. I kept having to move the cursor back up a line after every paragraph. It's stopped today, so maybe I was imagining it.

I'm very familiar with the Block method from the comment sections of WP blogs, which also use it. I quite like it. Well, I certainly don't hate it. It sort of fits the way I put a post together so I'm not opposed to something like that being added to Blogger... as an option.

My feeling is that all changes of this sort should be optional. I'm sure some people have been crying out for little colored icons next to their links and I'm happy for them to get what they asked for. Just so long as I don't have to have them too.

I fear, though, that now someone at Google has noticed they own a blogging platform this will just be the start of it. At what point the whole thing will become so annoying I'll have to start thinking about other options is impossible to say but I'm sure that time will come. For now, though, I'm going to carry on as before, with work-arounds as necessary.

And I'm not going to press any more brightly-colored buttons. You never know what they might do.

Tuesday, August 4, 2026

The First Time

I can't say I had any plans to do the Community Builder thing for Blaugust this year. The very fact that I'm calling it "the Community Builder thing" suggests a distinct lack of empathy with the concept. I'm not a great one for achievements or badges or titles, although I do quite like a title in a game. I'm not that struck on socializing either although I'd say I was social enough. Emphasis on "enough". Just enough. Not more.

One thing I do like, though, is talking about myself. And another is talking about blogging. One of the biggest attractions of Blaugust for me is that it offers an opportunity to do both. Or perhaps not so much an opportunity as a license.

Of course, I shouldn't really need a license to blog about whatever I want. The longer I blog and the more Blaugusts I endure - Enjoy! I meant enjoy! - the more I lean into the mantra: your blog is your blog. When you're there, no-one can tell you what to write or how to write it. Your blog: your rules.

If that's how it works, though, I could blog about blogging every time I get the fancy, couldn't I? I could write about AI, a topic that fascinates me more, the more difficult it becomes to talk about without getting blocked or unfollowed. I could put up a music post every day for a month or write about nothing but the single game I was playing, every day, even if it was a game no-one else was ever going to find remotely interesting.

Okay, that last one I have done. More than a few times.

But you have an audience, don't you? And a responsibility to the readers. I suspect almost every blogger with a publicly visible blog feels that, at least a little. Even if they're not convinced anyone is reading. But they might be...

As the blogging years drift by, though, I feel more and more keenly that the person I'm writing for is me. I love comments and I love interactions between blogs, bouncing off other bloggers, echoing or riposting their posts, leaving comments scattered everywhere, the way Beryl leaves her toys around the house.

But if all that went away, I'd most likely still write a post most days, even if I knew the only one reading it was going to be me. Even if it was offline, although then I guess it would just be a journal and I'm damned if I'm going start journaling.

A small fraction of the whole.

As time goes on, I find I have less and less interest in attracting new readers or sending my words out to be found by the world. Instead, I have fantasies about taking the blog private; sending invitations to everyone who's ever left a comment and an email address so they can carry on reading if they want to, letting it be known to the select readership that gets me that I'm open to referrals, should they know of anyone that might like to join the private club. Then closing the doors.

I guess it's a fantasy. But Blogger does, in fact, offer that as an option. Or it did when I started this blog sixteen years ago. And I considered taking that option, very seriously, before finally opting to let my words be seen by anyone who cared to look.

OMG! He's got to the point! And after less than a dozen paragraphs! That might be some kind of record.

Inventory Full is my first blog. It's my only blog. So far, anyway.

I thought about starting a blog maybe as early as 2009. By then I'd been reading other people's blogs for two or three years and I'd reached the point where the comments I left on some of them were so frequent and so lengthy it was starting to get awkward.

I wasn't the only one. I remember Tobold tetchily suggesting to Nils, who seemed to write more in the comments some days than Tobold wrote in his posts, that perhaps Nils might think of starting a blog of his own. Nils did and his blog became quite popular for a while. It certainly used to send me a lot of traffic in the early days.

It's gone now. But Tobold's blog is still here. Tobold's like the weather. He's always here.

After a few months thinking about it, I looked into the options, which at that time seemed to be Blogger or WordPress. There were others but I forget the names. I only seriously considered the big two.

I made accounts with both. I still have the WP account, which is very handy for commenting on WP blogs, but I've never used it for blogging. I set up a test blog on Blogger and published a Proof of Concept post on February 5 2010. Then I did nothing with it for a year and a half.

I'm fairly sure the main reason I prevaricated so long was the usual newbie blogger's fear of Bad Things Happening if I did. Actually, you don't hear it mentioned so much these days but back then and certainly into the days of the Newbie Blogger Initiative, one of the more commonly expressed reasons for not starting a blog was that the internet was full of horrible people who would come to your comments section and kick virtual sand in your face.

And it does happen. Probably quite often if you post things that are likely to annoy unpleasant people. I get the odd snarky comment and a few extremely odd ones, now and then. One or two people have felt it necessary to flounce out and make sure everyone sees them go.

But mostly, for most bloggers, it's never an issue. In fact, as most bloggers would probably be only to quick to tell you, the real buzzkill of blogging isn't the snark and spite in the comment thread, it's the total silence. Comments of any kind, especially when you're starting out, are rare.

Eventually, I managed to convince myself it was worth the risk. If it all went horribly wrong I could just stop, anyway, couldn't I? On July 30 2011 I published my first proper post. Looking back on it now, it's astonishing how much of a template it is for the 3,674 and counting that followed.

That first post was called "My Bag", which is the title of a song by Lloyd Cole. I linked to the song in first line of the post. And now here I am, linking to it again.

The next four posts, which was as many as I wrote in the whole of August back then, so that was something that didn't set a pattern, all used either the names of songs or song lyrics for their titles. At one point in the run, I think I went for several years using nothing else, to the point where I had to do quarterly posts explaining the references and linking the songs. It got entirely out of hand for a while...

That first post was about the game I was mainly playing at the time, which happened to be Rift. It was about the inventory system, something with which I was obsessed. I named the blog Inventory Full and the first post was called My Bag. You do the psychological evaluation.

The tone of that first post is conversational, not to say chatty. It links out to another blogger, who just happens to be Tobold, the very same blogger I mentioned earlier. Good old Tobold. As I said, he's always with us.

And never with us because Tobold never leaves comments anywhere. He does, or did, link to other bloggers so he's not completely outside the social envelope of the blogosphere but he doesn't join in events like Blaugust or even mention them. Like the cheese, he stands alone.

Tobold didn't leave a comment on my first post but someone did. I don't think I realized at the time how unlikely that was. I'd love to name-check whoever left it now, a decade and a half later, but I can't because whoever it was chose to be anonymous.

Many blogs, possibly most blogs, don't allow anonymous commenting. I haven't always allowed it myself and I'm frequently on the verge of disabling it again. I only enabled it a few years back because commenting on Blogger had become so difficult people were complaining they couldn't get their comments to appear. Well, when they managed to get one to work, they were...

That first post was just under 750 words long. Short by my current standards but already setting a marker. I do not write short posts. I wish I could. I have tried. I just love the sound of my own voice too much.

Image for illustration purposes only.

It was illustrated, of course. Badly illustrated, I'll give you that, but there were pictures. There have always been pictures on this blog and there always will be. In fact, the only time there ever haven't been pictures is when I wanted to make a point by leaving them out because to me, a post without pictures is thin gruel.

Looking at that first post, the background is the same darkish blue I've always used. The banner is the same picture of my pet cat from the EverQuest II beta. The sidebar is the same as it is now, unchanged.

Well, of course it is! When you change any of that, Blogger changes it for every post there ever was. All your old pages look like all your old new pages, outside of the posts themselves, which stay the same.

Or I think they do. Hard to tell, because in my case nothing ever has changed. In the lifetime of the blog I've only ever changed the layout once. And that was only to get wider margins.

A lot of bloggers fiddle with the settings and swap the themes every so often, just to keep things fresh or because they get bored. But here's the thing. I got my first blog just how I wanted it almost from the start. Other than a couple of tweaks, I've never felt the urge to change anything about how it looks.

About the only major difference I can see between those early posts and the rest is that I used to think it was fine to jump straight to the text without a header image. It's not, of course. I was so callow, then! I wonder when I learned better?

Over the years, the posts have gotten longer. Sometimes a lot longer. The range of topics has expanded. It was all MMORPGs around here once. Now it hardly ever is.

There have been experiments in style and I've gone through fads and phases that would almost qualify as Eras if I was young enough to get away with using that buzzword unironically. But basically it's the same blog. I write long, rambling blog posts about gaming, music and popular culture and I do it more days than I don't.

I've often thought about starting a second blog, most likely focusing on music, but in the end I always come back to the benefits of keeping everything in one place. Don't lets anyone mention eggs and baskets...

This, then, is my first blog. My very first blog.

For now...

Monday, August 3, 2026

It's All Just A Little Bit Of History Repeating

Well, this is embarrassing...

Remember when I complained about not being able to remember my login details for Wuthering Waves? I wrote a whole post about it under the (entirely intentionally) click-baity title "Wuthering Waves Is Dead To Me Now." Remember how, in that post, I said "I've tried everything and every account I can think of and nothing works"?

Yes. Well. About that...

It turns out either I didn't try every account after all or else my capacity for thinking is so diminished I probably shouldn't be allowed out on my own. Either way, I now have my account back.

So that's good.

This morning, for absolutely no good reason other than that I was idly fiddling around on the desktop while I was trying to come up with something to write about today, my attention settled on the Wuthering Waves icon. Since it was there, I thought I might as well update the game, just in case I decided to start over from the beginning again some day or something crazy like that.

I figured there might be a biggish update waiting but it couldn't be very big, surely, given I'd patched up about six weeks ago. I was half right.

There was an update and it was huge. 56GB. WW (I refuse to call it WuWa. It reminds me too much of Al Pacino going "Hoo-ah!" in Scent of a Woman.) seems to be one of those annoying titles that insists on re-downloading the entire game every time it patches.

That annoyed me a little but what it mostly did was remind me that even if I could play the game, which I couldn't, I'd be playing it on GeForce Now anyway, not on my own PC, so I wouldn't need to update it at all. Let some NVidia technician worry about that. Otherwise what am I paying my £6.99 a month for, right?

I logged into GFN and started WW going and then I noticed a link that said something about registering your character to see more. Well, you always want to see more, don't you? Unless it's body horror...

The link, when I clicked it, opened a dialog that offered me two accounts that were both, apparently, logged in already. I could tell by the names which email addresses they were using and it momentarily made me think one of them might be my original account to which I'd lost access.

I went through the various stages to log each of them in and of course neither of them was The One. They were the two new accounts I'd made the last time I did this, each with a single, unplayed Level One character and nothing else.

In the process of logging them in to check, though, I reminded myself which two email addresses they were. And neither of them was the one I'd say was the most obvious choice. The one I'd have been likely to use when starting a new game I wasn't planning to play for long.

Imagine the screen going all misty as we wind back to how I got started in Wuthering Waves in the first place. It was all because of a passing mention by Naithin, who'd tried the game and not thought all that much of it, mostly because of certain issues he had with the quality of the sound recording as I recall. For some reason. that spurred me to take a look at this oddly-named gacha title and the rest is... well, it's forty posts about the game on this blog for a start.

Back then, I wouldn't have been expecting to do much more than take a quick a look, which is why I didn't bother to set up a proper account. I just used Google's very convenient handshake protocol, the one UltrViolet has just implemented to handle comments on his blog. I tend to use it wherever it's offered because it's so easy and saves so much time. This is how billionaires groom us, isn't it? (Adjusts tin-foil hat...)

And I'm sure it's very nearly foolproof - if you just use the one gmail address for everything, like a normal person. As I'm only just beginning to realize, though, it's a lot less reliable if you have a couple of dozen of them. I'm really going to need to make a note of which address I use for which application in future and if I'm going to have to do that, I might as well just make a regular account the old-fashioned way.

All of this is there and thereabouts a repeat of the process I went through back in June. The one I wrote about in excruciating detail back then. So why am I repeating myself, other than for the sheer, visceral joy of listening to myself talk, of course, always a given on this blog. (I throw that in for any New Blaugustians that may still be plowing through this wall of text in the fading hope some point or purpose might eventually emerge. It won't. Or if it does, it won't be for a while.)

Sidebar - New Blaugustians sounds either like the name of a second-tier superhero team, likely made up of characters who never managed to hold down their own title or if they did it only lasted a dozen or so issues. They'd be based in a city like Denver or Omaha, a good way from either coast, which is where all the action in super-hero comics always happens.

Or it could be an acid-jazz outfit from the '90s...

At this point, if I had any sense, I'd have admitted I was just repeating the same exact steps as last time and I was going to waste another morning on the hopeless task if I didn't accept the loss and move on. It's that saying about not learning from the mistakes of the past, isn't it? You keep on making them. And that other saying about people doing the same things over and over and expecting them to turn out differently...

Yeah, well, that's a bunch of crap. And I can prove it. I didn't learn the lesson and I did do the same thing again and it turned out differently!

Okay, maybe I didn't do exactly the same thing. Maybe, when I said last time I'd tried "every account", what I really meant was "Every account except the most likely one. The one I should have tired first. The frickin' obvious one."

Or, I guess, maybe I did try that one but something else changed since I did it. I'll leave myself an out because who knows what happened? Not me. I won't say I don't care - it would be nice to know for sure - but I will say I'll never find out so there's no point worrying about it.

Whatever it was, I'm back in Wuthering Waves on my old character, Califlora. She's level 40 and almost at the end of the Riniscitta storyline. To be precise, she has the final Act and the Segue left to do before starting the next big chunk of main storyline, the one I've missed, which itself is the chapter before the current one, which has just begun.

I'm about an update and a quarter behind, I think. Not much further than I was the last time I had to catch up. It's doable.

And I've already started. After I spent what felt like half an hour opening a hundred windows to read about dozens of events I didn't understand and clicking on all the rewards that had been patiently awaiting my return, I looked up how to access the content I was trying to play through back in June, the Edgerunners Collab.

That event is over now but I thought I remembered reading somewhere that the Night City adventure itself was permanent content. I also seemed to recall you can jump straight into it without having done the MSQ first.

It is and you can. It took me some googling to find out how, though. I couldn't figure it out in-game. And even when I did figure it out, I didn't do it.

I was about to and then I noticed you can get to Night City more organically by progressing the main story to the point where you reach "the transport dock" in a quest called "What Burns Beneath The Frostlands". I checked how much I'd have to do to get there and it was "only" four quests down the line, in the first Act of "To The Stars Yet To Shine". It's not like I'm in a mad rush. I thought I might as well walk there.

Of course, first I'll need to remember how to play. To that end, I worked my way through an exploration quest Califlora had up. She must have been doing it when I last played her although I don't remember it.

By the time I'd finished it, I had a vague idea of how things worked. Who I had in my team. Which buttons to press. That sort of thing. Annoyingly, the combat controls are just very slightly different from Neverness To Everness but it didn't seem to make too much difference. It was surprising how fast it all came back.

Whether I can juggle two story-heavy gacha games at once is another question. That's a lot of cut-scenes and voice-overs to get through. But I ought to be able to get to Night City, at least. If I buckle down, I might even be there before the next big content drop in NTE, which ought to be in about two to three weeks.

If nothing else, it'll give me something new to write about for Blaugust. Always provided I don't forget my login details again...

Sunday, August 2, 2026

Dress Sense Or Dress Sensibly?

There's not much I don't like about gacha games. I like the way they look, the way they read, the way they sound and the way they play. I would never have expected it but it turns out the genre fits me to a T.

The monetization that gets some people mad doesn't bother me. In fact, since the Free To Play revolution, which suppose must be well over a decade in the past by now, which did, genuinely and literally, make most games completely free as far as I was concerned, about the only kind of monetization that gives me pause is the good old monthly subscription model.

If EverQuest Legends had launched as Buy To Play, with no sub needed to go on playing after the first month, you'd most likely be reading a post like Tipa's about that game right now (I'd definitely be playing a Kerran.) instead of looking at some screenshots of Flora in her new 1970s-style trouser-suit. That isn't to say I won't buy EQL eventually but it is the reason I haven't bought it yet and it will almost certainly be the reason I don't play it for more than a month.

There is one thing I don't like about Gacha games, though. I've mentioned it before. It's the way my characters tend to look the same all the time. It varies from gacha game to gacha game but it may not be a coincidence that the ones that put the least friction in the way of changing your apperarance are the ones that fold soonest.

Neverness To Everness is fairly standard in that you can roll for outfits on the gacha board, buy them for in-game currency and win them as rewards for in-game activities but none of those options is both easy and cheap. I've been playing for three months now and only yesterday did I finally get Flora a change of clothes. And even then it was only by way of the alternate NTE universe that is Warrens Continent.

The 999 Nights update that added an entire medieval fantasy ARPG to the magitech modern world was bizarre in all kinds of ways but not least in how it blew a giant, smoking hole in the gacha dress code. In Warrens Continent, characters have a traditional RPG paper doll with gear slots and whatever you put in most of those slots shows up on the character. Mobs drop wearable gear and there are plenty of different looks.

You can take a pretty good shot at getting your character to look how you want them to... for a while. Then, of course, you have to start paying attention to stats and the whole thing falls apart, just like in a traditional MMORPG, which is how things like transmog and appearance tabs end up being added to every MMO that lasts more than a few years.

Luckily, whoever designed the gear for Warrens Continent had an infinitely better fashion sense than the average MMO dev, so most of the pieces look pretty good together. And there are sets that have bonuses that make you want to wear all the pieces and naturally sets fit together quite nicely so it all works out.

I very much appreciated all of that, while I was playing Warrens Continent as if it was the main game. I was a bit miffed when I had to upgrade Flora's excellent starting look, probably the most demure and modest outfit in the entire game, to something that looked like it wouldn't be out of place in a Slayyyter video but stats are stats.

The best thing about that original outfit was that you can wear it in Hethereau. I was looking forward to doing just that for a while but then, almost inevitably, I stayed so long in Warrens Continent and changed my gear so many times I forgot all about it. It didn't help that the outfit, appropriately called "Unassuming Warrior", is only available through the "Button Shop" and I had no clue where that was.

I did look for it. My immediate thought was that it would be the Mysterious Fuzzy trader but that was a dead end. I looked at every trader I could find and pored over the map but I couldn't see any sign of a "Button Shop". And then I just sort of forgot about it. Don't ask me why I didn't google it but I didn't.

And then on Wednesday I mentioned the Button Shop in a post and Mailvaltar dropped into the comments to explain where to find it: in the F4 Event Menu.

It is. And I never noticed. I will say in my defense that a) I very rarely look at the Events Menu and b) the Button Shop Button isn't actually part of the menu itself. It's on its own at the bottom of the page. Even so, there's no excuse for missing it.

The upside of having waited so long is that when I finally found the shop I had plenty of Buttons to spend. Over ten thousand, in fact. More than enough to buy me both the outfit and the dyes to change the color. So I bought them all, which may have been a mistake.

Oh, not the outfit itself. The outfit is excellent. Flora's wearing it now and it makes a very nice change from running around in Lycra bicycle shorts under a netball skirt. It's the dyes I'm not so sure about.

They come in a pack of three - red, green and blue. At least I think those are the colors. It's hard to tell. They're very muted, particularly the green. Or maybe I mean unassuming. None of them is bad in any way, it's more that I'm not convinced any of them is an improvement over the basic silver and black look, which has a timeless kind of elegance about it.

Still, it's nice to have some wardrobe choices at last. If only the outfits weren't character-specific. Then all my characters could be unassuming, which would come as a huge shock to several of them, I'm sure. Not to mention they'd all be able to wear the Archmage outfit I won on the gacha board a couple of days back. That won't see use until and unless I win Iroi, too.

All the poses in the post, except the one below, were taken on the roof of Mint's building, which turned out to be the perfect place for a fashion shoot. I was there because visiting the Button Shop reminded me I hadn't finished everything I wanted to do in Warrens Continent yet.

It's funny how a couple of weeks ago we (That's just me, Nimgimli and Mailvaltar really, I guess.) were complaining, or at least observing, that it looked as though we'd be doing nothing but the 999 Nights content for weeks and now here I am, having almost forgotten it was there, back running around Hethereau every day as if the update had never happened.

But it did and I'm back with it now. Not only do I want to finish the event itself but now I've seen inside the Button Shop there are a few more things I want to buy there. Not least the money.

Yes, you can buy money with buttons. Fons, specifically. If I can get enough buttons I might even be able to buy enough Fons to cover my losses at the Catzebo. They are substantial.

Also, I just realized this minute, as I typed the word "Catzebo" for the umpteenth time, that it has to be a pun on "Casino"; not, as I've been thinking until now, on "Gazebo". I really did think it was a joke about the cats all standing around in little, wooden huts...

And with that, I think I'd better make my exit. Fast.

Saturday, August 1, 2026

And Off We Go!

Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of Blaugust! Or is that too aggressive? How about Blaugust, come she will? No, I think I might have used that one before. After a while it gets hard to remember.

But here we are again. And how many of us are there this time? Let me see if I can find the list. You'll have to excuse me a moment. Usually I'd have sorted all this out in advance but the weather's been so lovely and there's been so much else to do...

Aha! that took a minute but here we go, courtesy of Wilhelm's trusty Formatted HTML List. If you'd like to add all of these blogs - there are ninety-six at time of writing - to your RSS feed, Owls has an OPML list too.

Both of those invaluable resources will, I'm sure, be kept updated as the month rolls by. Last year we had quite a lot of latecomers so it's worth checking every so often to see who else has thrown themselves onboard.

I don't plan on updating this post to reflect any further additions (Or subtractions...) and I am not going to add all the new blogs to my blog roll, mostly because it's insanely long already. If any of the newcomers turn out to be particularly to my taste, though, I'll be adding those at some stage.

And that's a good opportunity to mention last year, when we had I think it was 178 people participating by the end. I haven't fact-checked that number but it's stuck in my memory for some reason. It was a lot, anyway.

I wrote a post at the end of the event naming a round dozen of my favorite new discoveries from the Class of '25. Of those twelve, eight are still active in my feeds. A couple stopped posting and I dropped a couple more over this and that along the way. I think the only one that's returned for another round this year, though, is Axxuy. Quite a high bounce rate, that. (Notes by JC Probably just re-upped since I posted this so that's two!)

I realize now (And only now...) that despite having enjoyed those eight blogs for a whole year, I never added any of them to my blog roll. I might have thought about it right at the start but I wouldn't dignify it by calling it a conscious choice. It was almost certainly laziness.

Well, I'm going to correct that oversight now. Apologies to everyone who might have had the traffic for the last twelve months, such as it would have been. Talk among yourselves for a bit while I go add them all. It's a fiddly job. You've got time to make a coffee.

And drink it.

And wash up.

There! All done. I think a year is altogether too long to decide on which blogs ought to have a permanent place in the sidebar but maybe it does no harm to allow a settling-in period.

That is what Blaugust is for, though. Or it's one side of the coin. We talk a lot every year about the role the event plays in encouraging people to start a blog or dust off an old one or just find ways to enjoy posting more often but we don't always say as much about what a great opportunity it is to find new blogs to read.

Blogs are like games in one very important way. It takes a lot more time and effort to create and maintain the content than it does to consume it. On average, every post here probably takes me about two or three hours. Sometimes I knock one off in an hour but sometimes it takes all day.

Even the longest posts (Hi, Kaylriene! Hi, Jeromai!) probably only takes me ten or fifteen minutes to read. Most take more like two or three. As a writer, one post a day is enough. As a reader, I can get through a lot of blog posts in a day. Dozens. Easily.

Blaugust is an opportunity to deepen your resource pool as a reader and also to expand your range. Most of the dozen blogs I stuck with after last year I would never have known about without Blaugust. And my reading year would have been poorer without all of them.

That said, I would warn against trying to read everything. Again, veterans and mentors always make a point of warning newer bloggers not to try to do too much, not to over-extend themselves trying to blog every day if they're not feeling it, to pace themselves, allow for breaks and pauses, not to burn so hard and fast they burn out before the month is over.

And the same applies to readers. I found last year's Blaugust exhausting. Not as a writer - as a reader. We had the biggest intake ever and at the start, as happens every time, nearly everyone was posting every day. I said I could get through dozens of posts a day. By that I meant maybe two or three dozen. Not a gross!

Things had calmed down a lot by the middle of the month as people either dropped out or reduced their posting frequency as they realized they weren't going to make 31 posts after all. It always happens. But for me, and from what I read as people summed up after it was all over, for a few others too, by then the damage had been done. I ended up skipping a lot because I'd burned myself out as a reader, trying to read everything in the first week or two.

This year I'll take my own advice and pace myself. I'll check everyone out, eventually, but there's no need to read every single post every day, let alone to comment on them all. All the older posts from any blog that really sings to me will still be there when I come to it. I'll go back and read those with pleasure. And maybe add them to the blog roll later still.

These things you learn, over time. Over a long time, apparently, because I'm only figuring all this out now and I've been doing this a while now. Just don't try to do everything all at once, that's what I'm saying.

And that's enough of a pre-amble. Let's have the list and then I'm done. The sun's out, it's another beautiful day and there are other things to do than write blog posts.

I won't say better things...

Inventory Full

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

Is This The Place I Come To Complain About Blogging?