The Surprising Afterlife Of Blogs

I wasn't planning on writing two posts about blogging in a row. That would be gauche. But, oh well, what the heck. I guess it's the season for it, isn't it? So here we go...

It all started when I was idly pondering if, whether and how far, if at all, to add, link to or include the inevitable torrent (The Blaugust Firehose of Posts, as owls has it.) of new blogs, either here, in a post, or in the blog roll down the side, or in my Feedly feed. 

My current feeling is that I'm not going to bother. Just trying to keep up with the names was overwhelming last year. When I started participating in Blaugust, I got into the habit of putting up a post at the start with all the links and maybe updating it once as we went along. Some years I added them to the blog roll as well. A couple of times I gave them their own section there.

It's always been a bit of a chore but it was fun at the start and for a while the numbers made it very manageable. The last couple of years, though, the increasing popularity of the event has made it a challenge to keep up and as long-time readers will know, I am not one of those who reads "challenge" as a positive. More like a threat.

Last year, it wasn't just the initial rush that was the issue. We kept picking up blogs all the way through, like a stone somehow magically managing to gather moss, so keeping up to date would have meant an ongoing process, not a just couple of isolated posts. 

Adding blogs to the roll would avoid having to write whole posts but my blog roll is already unfeasibly long and Blaugust has spread its net so wide now, most of the new blogs each year aren't really in my sphere of interest. The blog roll is broadly supposed to nudge readers towards other blogs I read and enjoy and I can't pretend that applies to the majority of the intake, these past two or three years. 

On that topic, I wrote a post at the end of last year's event where I listed all the new blogs I proposed to keep following. There were only a dozen and a year later I'm still reading seven of them. A couple just stopped, either during or at the end of Blaugust 25: the others three I got fed up with for some reason during the year and dropped from my feeds. 

Even the ones I still read, though, I mostly follow through Feedly. They tend not to make the blog roll because they don't really have much to do with anything I write about here. Not that I pretend to be consistent about that. It's a mood thing, mostly.

And so, I was looking at Feedly this morning, wondering if I'd even have room to add this year's crop. I'm on the free plan (Of course.) and I think there must be some limit to how many feeds you can follow for free. (There is.  I just checked. It's a hundred. And I'm up already up to eighty-five, not counting the nineteen at the bottom marked "Unreachable". I guess those don't figure in the tally.)

If I want to add another tranche this time, I'm going to have to make a cull. But as I've said many times, I don't remove old blogs from the blog roll when they go silent because you never know when one will sputter back to life. Only this month, for example, Domino, the ex-EverQuest II tradeskill dev, posted on her blog, The Domino Effect, for the first time in nearly a decade.That's exactly the sort of moment I don't want to miss.

That's great for blogs that have gone dormant but some blogs are fully dead. The links go nowhere. They're not coming back. If I was going to start clearing the deadwood, that would be where I'd begin. And as I said, Feedly flags the ones it can't reach any more as "unreachable" and dumps them into a holding pen at the end. So I thought I'd check if those really were dead or if Feedly just wasn't looking in the right place.

Oh boy. Did that open up a can of fresh fish... 

The first dead blog I tried was Killed In A Smiling Accident. I used to like that one. I clicked on the link in Feedly and got a page flagged Unreachable in red at the top. But it also had the usual, big green View All Articles button at the bottom. So I pressed it. 

That gave me the familiar list of post headings, just the same as any current blog would show. I clicked the first on the list and it opened the text of that post, still in Feedly. It was a post from March 27, 2024 in which Zoso informed his readers he was giving up his self-hosted site and moving back to Blogger. 

The text on Feedly included a link to that new blog, which worked, although presumably some internet magic was at work, because as far as I could see, even though it shows the Blogger symbol on the tab, the url is still kiasa.org just as it was before. 

How it was deemed "unreachable" by Feedly isn't clear (I'm guessing the rss feed data doesn't migrate automatically? Not really my field.) but there were newer posts, going up to March of this year, so I added the "new" blog to Feedly and now I have a link to KIASA in both the Live and Dead sections. 

That got me thinking. Again.

Another blog I used to enjoy was We Fly Spitfires. That hasn't seen action for at least a decade and a half but it's still there in the Live section of Feedly. I have checked on it in the past but not for a while. I clicked on the link and got a completely normal-looking Feedly page, exactly as you'd see for any operant blog. 

Only, when I clicked on the the name, all it got me was Server Not Found. A google search gets "The domain weflyspitfires.com, formerly home to an EVE Online gaming blog, is currently inactive and listed for sale." along with a link to someone that can sell it to you. I guess that's why Feedly still thinks it exists even though, in any meaningful way, it doesn't. 

So far, so very confusing. But one thing I'd noticed as I was wading through the swamp was how all these sites, dead, alive or something in-between, still showed lists of posts on Feedly, just like any other blog. And now I came to think about it, the two I'd clicked on had both opened full texts of those posts with working hyperlinks. Intriguing.

For my next experiment I chose Fluff Factor, a blog I barely remember. Fluff Factor is rated "Unreachable" by Feedly and the last post was in.August 2017. I clicked on that and got "flufffactor.wordpress.com is no longer available. The authors have deleted this site." which was, at least, unequivocal.

So all the content from that blog is lost, I guess, unless it got picked up by the Internet Archive?  Nope! Not at all. It's still on Feedly!

Well, actually, Fluff Factor's a bad example because it was one of those annoying "Here's a taste, now come read the rest at the blog" ones, so all Feedly still has it whatever crumbs the blogger chose to throw it. Any blogs like that, you can write off for good. By confining their audience to their own specific websites they've effectively written themselves out of history. Don't make that mistake, would-be bloggers!

For those of us willing to risk our fine words being seen through an rss feed, darkly though, a faint glimmer of immortality beckons. Or if not exactly immortality, then at least life after death. Depending on how they were embedded, even some of the images still remain.

At this point I imagine all the rss experts, of whom there will undoubtedly be many in this part of the blogosphere, are probably going "Well, duh! Of course! That's the whole point!" And maybe it is but it was news to me, which is why I thought I'd share it. Maybe someone would like to go back to an old blog they remember, that they thought was gone forever, and have a pore through the back pages.

Take, for example, West Karana.  That's the blog Tipa used to have, then lost, and now has back again. Only that's the new West Karana. The old West Karana is still there in my Feedly, down in the Unreachable Zone. And if I click on it, I can read nearly three hundred posts, going all the way back to May 2013.

It even includes the five posts from whoever stole the site in 2019, although no-one in their right mind would ever want to revisit those. But the rest... that's a treasure trove! 

In fact, the whole of my Feedly Index must be like a dragon's hoard of blogging gold by now. I'm not sure if there's a limit how far back you can go but for me it goes all the way to when I first started using Feedly, right after Google announced they were shuttering Google Reader in 2013. (Actually, I  found some posts going back to 2012 so who knows?) 

I only started blogging a couple of years before that, so for me it's not far off the whole time I've been active in the hobby. I did read a lot of blogs before, but that's blogging pre-history now.

For some blogs, it's a mountain of content I couldn't even bring myself to scroll through but fortunately those are exactly the blogs that are still up and running so I don't need to. For the ones that were prolific once but no longer, it's manageable. And for all those that shone brightly but briefly, it's everything. 

At the moment, most of the blogs I've added to Feedly over the years are still in the main section, alive and available even if they haven't posted for a very long time, although as the We Fly Spitfires example shows, just because Feedly knows how to find them doesn't mean there's anything there. 

And anyway, as time passes, more will inevitably slip below the line to become "unreachable". Until today, I thought that was the end. Now it seems it's just the start of a new half-life, lurking in the shadows of the rss feed.

All of which raises some difficult questions. Presumably this invaluable historical record is only going to exist as long as a) Feedly itself and b) the people who run Feedly choose to allow it. Should I attempt to construct a local archive of any thought-to-have-vanished blogs I have a particular fondness for, before they really do slip away into the night? 

Now that I've discovered the inconsistencies in the records, should I check every silent blog, just to see if it's still there or if there's nothing left but the shell? Is it worth the effort? (I imagine UltrViolet or Tipa would just get an AI to do the grunt work for them but my LLM-whispering skills aren't quite up to that, yet.)

And finally, what am I going to do with all the new Blaugust blogs, when they come flooding in? That's how all this started and I still don't have an answer. 

On this evidence, I can't be deleting any blogs just to make space... although I guess I could clear out the ones that only give you a paragraph before you need to leave the feed. At this rate, I might even have to subscribe to Feedly to get more blogs on board, which really would be a last resort.

Then again, this blog post suggests older users of the Feedly free plan may have unlimited feeds grandfathered in. I think I might just keep adding them and see when Feedly balks. Blaugust is certain to give me enough ammunition for a test run.

Kick the can down the road, then. Always works for me. 

Blaugust Is Back, Baby! Or It Will Be In A Couple Of Weeks...

Roll up! Roll up! Roll up! The circus is in town! For one month only, the amazing Festival of Blogging returns to amaze, delight and entertain! Get your tickets now!

Erm... or next month, actually. It doesn't start until August. And there aren't any tickets. Other than that everything I just said was totally accurate...

Every year I do this and every year I think to myself  "But surely everyone knows all this already?" It's hard to imagine many people reading this blog and not having previously participated in, or at least heard about, the traditional summer event. I mean, it's been going for thirteen years. (Actually fourteen but it lay fallow for one.) 

For the few who don't know all about it already, let me direct you to Contains Moderate Peril, where  Roger "Mr. Peril" Edwards engages in conversation with himself to explain what Blaugust is all about and how it came to be. For the rest, I'll do my best to keep things entertaining.

And now I see that, since I added that link, Krikket has posted the official version. Well, as official as we're going to get now Belghast isn't here to set the tone, pace and agenda.

As most people reading this will likely know, Belghast was both the instigator and the inspiration for the whole thing. Very sadly, Bel's no longer with us following his sudden, unexpected and tragic death at the beginning of July but his spirit remains and sustains us in making sure the event he created continues in both his absence and in his memory. 

Krikket took point last year, when Bel was also unable to take charge through personal circumstances, and she and some of the other Mentors are stepping up once again to make sure this year's event goes ahead as Bel would certainly have wanted. Between her post and Roger's, I imagine most questions should be answered but if not, you're always welcome to drop into the Blaugust Discord and ask.

In fact, why not just go there and hang out? It's fun! And friendly! And free! 

Let me also show you where to go to sign up. That's probably the most important part. Maybe I should have led with that...

But Bhagpuss! Didn't you say I wouldn't need a ticket? Yes, Victoria, I did! And indeed you won't, if all you want to do is enjoy the show. But if you'd like to win some of the many, many prizes on offer you will need to leave your name at the door. 

Ah, yes, the prizes. What are they? Well, these are the ones we've been using for years. Belghast invented them and tweaked them as the event developed:

Newbie Blogger Award – You did it! You joined Blaugust for the very first time and we are extremely happy to welcome you into this raucous community. As a result, we are going to recognize your efforts just for signing up.

Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the month of August 2026.

Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the month of August 2026.

Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2026.

Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the original challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2026. 

This year, The Committee (Please don't call us that! - Everyone.) has come up with a lovely, inclusive, attainable, set of goals intended to drive community engagement:

Make a post on your blog on or before August 1st, 2026 inviting other bloggers to participate in Blaugust. Make sure you link the signup form.

Make at least 5 posts directly inspired by a post by another Blaugust participant. Make sure you provide a link back to the post in question.

Engage with other Blaugust participants at least once per week.  Read posts, leave comments, join discussions in the Blaugust Discord and share posts written by others on social media. 

Guest post on another Blaugust participant’s blog – or have someone else guest post on yours!

Create or join in a group project – choose a topic, find some other bloggers, and each post your own take on that topic on the same day.

You don't have to do all of them. Okay, since they're entirely voluntary, technically you don't have to do any of them. But if you do decide to join in and you want a badge at the end, you need to do at least three of them. That will entitle you to the Community Builder Badge which I'm really, really hoping looks something like this:

Ah... That reminds me.

One thing that's worth mentioning is the room-elephant known as AI. Funny name for an elephant. Although, what would be a normal name for an elephant? Blessed if I know. They can't all be called Jumbo or Dumbo, surely?

Anyway, we have some rules about AI this time. (I imagine we had some last time, too. I just can't remember what they were.) This year, though, they're very simple. Roger summed it up as "AI may assist your creative work, but it should not replace your creative contribution." and I'm going to gloss that as "Make AI your servant, not your master." It's a tool, much like spell-checkers or image editing software. 

Here's an example, from this very post, of a totally legit use of AI no-one is likely to have problems with. (And even as I type, I know someone is taking umbrage with at least two words in that last sentence...) 

In the earlier paragraph, I was going to say "...and Paint.net"  because that's the app I use but then I thought I really ought to use a generic description rather than a brand name. Only I didn't know what people generally called programs like Paint.net.

So I googled it and an AI, presumably Gemini although it didn't introduce itself (Rude!), told me "These programs are called raster graphics editors or image editing software." I didn't like the sound of "raster graphics editors", which didn't seem like anything a lay-person would say, so I picked "image editing software", which sounded vaguely familiar and not so much like something an AI would have made up.

I'd call that an acceptable use of AI. It's very definitely acceptable under the rules. Asking AIs for advice, guidance, clarification or even suggestions is okay. I mean, asking is okay. I'm not saying the answers they give you will be. It's a crap-shoot still.

More likely to get me some side-eye but still well within the rules is the picture of a badger I used up there to make my little joke. I had the highly amusing idea of adding an "r" to the phrase "Community Builder Badge", a bit like the old "Lost Consonants" feature that used to run in The Guardian back when I was working somewhere that provided free newspapers for the staff to read at lunchtime, only in reverse. (Yes, Victoria. Free papers. It was the '90s. A different world...)

The joke really needed a picture but if I tried to draw a badger it'd be more likely to come out looking like a bagel, so I asked an AI to draw one for me. And I think it did a pretty good job. Probably nicked it from somewhere but then I've been "borrowing" images and fucking them up in Paint.net here for years and no-one's ever said anything. 

It's a tradition that long pre-dates blogging. I was doing it with found images, SprayMount, a scalpel and a photocopier nearly fifty years ago. In that respect, AI's just another photocopier to me.

Under the new rules, AI Community Builder Badger is permissible, although I'll lay good money a few people will be hissing and booing just at the thought. (And now I want to go generate an "AI Community Builder Badger" too. For all the angst over AI, it's still fair game for a cheap laugh in my book.)

Not all blogs are literary, though. In the past we have had several that featured almost no writing at all, relying instead on nothing but images. For a blog like that, AI images are not allowed. (I'm not sure if an image-focused blog would be entitled to have AI write the captions or the linking text. It would only seem fair...)

But let's not get bogged down in pettifogging, nit-picking detail, hugely entertaining though some of us (Well, me, at least.) may find it. The whole point of Blaugust is that it's a celebration of blogging and an encouragement for people to start a blog, dust off an old blog, get some extra use out of the blog they already have or just generally carry on blogging as usual but in company.

The event is all about inclusion and encouragement. No-one's going to be policing any of these rules beyond the minimum necessary to keep the whole thing on the rails. The badges rely on self-certification and trust. 

The absolute bottom line for all of it is "Don't be a dick", to which I'd add the other golden rule - "If you feel uncomfortable posting something, don't." 

In other words, we all know where the boundaries are, both our own and the community's. And we know they're there to keep us safe. Stick within them and you'll find there's more than enough space to play.

And play is what you should do. Have fun. Try new things. Experiment.

 Blaugust is a safe space. And it only comes around once a year. Make the most of it!

 

AI used in this post. Community Builder Badger! I love him already. I might get Gemini to knock up one of those picture books with him in it. 

But for the single image in this post I used a freebie I had for GPT Image 2 Low at NightCafe.  The prompt was "Community Builder badger. A socially-minded badger in overalls, wearing a hard hat and possibly carrying a hammer. 1930s childrens' book illustration." All settings, weights etc left on default.

And They All Lived Happily Ever After... Or Did They?

I was going to skip posting today [Edit: yesterday.] seeing as how I posted yesterday [Edit: the day before yesterday.], when normally I'd have been at work. 

Sidebar: I'm on holiday again. I didn't book any holiday this year but leaving it until you actually have a reason to book it isn't deemed acceptable any more. If you don't book the whole year by the end of April, someone you've never met, who works in another city, books it for you. So that happened and I got given a week off in every month from June to October which, unbeknownst to the person who booked it for me, is when I'm going to retire. All of which means I'm not working another full month, ever. And I only work two days a week now to begin with. Yay me!

Sidebar: Wow! Sidebar after one sentence! That's a record. And now another! They don't teach you this in blogging school.

Getting back to the point, although whether you can get back to somewhere you never went in the first place is an interesting piece of metaphysics, I was going to give myself a day off from posting but then I finished Warrens Continent on Story Difficulty and I thought I probably ought to record that somewhere for posterity. It's 8pm though [Edit: 8.40 am now.] and I can pretty much guarantee Beryl will be in any moment to demand at least an hour's entertainment, so chances are this won't get posted tonight anyway. [Edit: It did not.] I could have left it for the morning but we're here now, so let's press on. [Edit - For a while, at least.]

As Nimgimli said the other day, "if AI wrote these posts it wouldn’t add all that superfluous preliminary junk. That’s how you can know I still write my own posts!" Whether that's a good thing or not, I'll let the reader be the judge. 

Getting back to getting back to the point, finishing the story in a major update in a gacha game isn't all that unusual for me, although doing it less than a week after it landed certainly is. What's more unusual is that I've also completed most of the associated Event Table. There are three parts to it; I've done two of them and I'm 7/9 on the third. I just have to repeat-kill a couple of bosses and get Shinku to 60 to finish but I'm not logged in right now so I can't check.

That puts me at 21/23 on the full Events Reward progress bar, the "Grand Prize" for which is five Fabricated Dice. That strikes me as the kind of  "Grand Prize" you'd give a seven year-old for coming third in the sack race at Sports Day but what can you do? It's not like I paid an entry fee.

And anyway, I didn't do it for the reward. I didn't do it for the glory, either, although it's true the Fuzzies are building a statue in my honor. Well, in Shinku's honor mostly but Flora gets a smaller statue as one of her Trusted Companions. The Dice Lord told us that in the epilog.

No, I did it for the fun. And boy, was it fun! Most fun I've had in a game for ages and by that I mean sheer, knockabout, punch-em-inna-face, rock-em-sock-em fun. The story was up to NTE's expected, excellent standard but it was mostly the non-stop, explosive combat and the showers of loot that kept me coming back. Twice a day most days. Playing longer sessions than I most likely would have otherwise.

GeForce Now can take some credit. Super-smooth 99% of the time. Never lost connection. Maybe 30 seconds of intermittent lag in ten hours play. All with my PC sitting there, quiet and calm as you like despite the weather. The only one overheating was me. 

Sidebar: I do have to give NVidia a demerit for not allowing the use of keyboards to control games on GeForce Now when you play via TV. I'd have been downstairs in the relative cool of the lounge if they'd let me use my keyboard. I didn't find that wouldn't work out until I'd already set the app up on our Google TV and bought a new wireless keyboard and mouse to go with it. The mouse works fine but the keyboard isn't recognized once you get past the GFN front-end. 

I had to google it to find out why. It's NVidia's policy, for some bizarre reason. You can only use a controller to play games on their servers if you're playing on a smart TV. No idea why. And just to make it even more awkward, GFN isn't fussy what controller you use but NTE is. Neverness To Everness only officially recognizes the PS5 Dual Sense Wireless Controller, apparently, which is not what I have.

I don't want to play NTE with a controller anyway so I'm not going to get one. I can just run an HDMI cable from the laptop to the TV and do it that way if I really want to play couch-style. I bet NTE would look amazing on the big screen though...

All of which tells you very little about the actual in-game experience of the Warrens Continent end-game. Or the Story Difficulty end-game, anyway. What happens when you go back to do it on Challenge and Nightmare difficulty I can't say because I haven't done it. Yet. [Edit: I had to go back in to get a screenshot so I can tell you a little but that's coming later...]

That "Yet"speaks volumes. I never repeat content on higher difficulty. I'm not sure I've ever done it, in any game. I've always struggled to understand why anyone would want to do the same thing but harder. Personally, if I was going to do the same content again, I'd want it to be easier. 

But this was so much fun the first time... And who knows if it's going to be the same each time? Maybe something different happens on each difficulty setting. If so, I'd want to see it. 

It's not like I saw everything the first time. I didn't even take a look at all the mini-games and events, much less finish them. I only completed one of the half dozen or so quests I took. I could maybe catch up with all of that on Challenge, if the content is exactly the same. If not, maybe there'll be new quests and events.

One thing I definitely won't be doing is going back to Story Difficulty to catch up on all the things I left undone. I tried that this morning and you can't. Once you kill the Crimson Dragon, watch the cut scenes and get transported back to Hethereau, you're done with Story. If you try to go back, you'll find a big "Completed" over that button and no option other than to start again on "Challenge".

That did irritate me. I bet it will irritate some completionists a lot more. All those unticked boxes! Fortunately, Hotta are on the case, as usual. When I poked my nose into Challenge mode, I found I'd already ticked off quite a few of the goals there. Things like "Gather 100 Resources" or "Activate 2 Set Effects" that I'd done in Story Mode turned out to be on the list and my prep-work counted. 

I hope that works both ways because there's only one thing I missed in Story Mode for a full sweep - lighting a single campfire. I lit 29/30. I don't generally care about loose ends but coming that close and missing would rankle even me. If I'd noticed, I'd have made sure to have found one extra fire but I was having too much fun to check fiddly little details like that.

This has been a fairly spoiler-free report so far, except that thing about Shinku and the statue at the beginning. I'll try to keep it that way but I'll give fair warning now there may be a few minor reveals in the rest of the post.

There's more about Shinku for a start. It turns out she's the key to the whole thing (No surprise there.) She goes through every fight as a passenger until almost the end. She doesn't have a class, she can't equip anything that drops, she levels more slowly than the rest of the team. She'd be a liability if you ever let her do anything although if you have any sense you'll just keep her on the bench the entire time.

And then, very late-on, she gets her moment and suddenly she's the big hero. I'm not sure if you have to use her for the final battle with the Crimson Dragon but you'd be daft not to. 

She did about two-thirds of the damage when I did it. I started off using Iroi and the Lambs but the Crimson dragon was too smart for that so I brought in Shinku and she soon fixed his wagon. The team beat the dragon on their first attempt. I doubt they'd have done it without her.

It would be a bit weird if you weren't using her, though. You'd have to be pretty stubborn not to take the hint. And it would mess up the story. There's a big cut-scene when you get the dragon to about a third of its health and it all revolves around Shinku. If she'd not been in the fight before then, as she hadn't been for me in every other, it wouldn't make a lot of sense. Luckily, as soon as she had her epiphany, I'd given her the lead so the plot flowed perfectly for me.

There's a fair amount of exposition in the cut-scenes but I still wouldn't say I understand Shinku's backstory. I was a bit confused over what was metaphor, what was internalized conflict and what was memory. Maybe that'll be clarified later but if not I don't mind. I prefer a little creative ambiguity in my narratives.

Speaking of which, there's some of that after Flora and her pals return to Hethereau. They all go their separate ways. Bizarrely, the Appraiser gets to stay on, alone, in Mint's apartment, where I'm ashamed to say she took every opportunity to snoop around like some kind of creepy stalker.). Then Shinku sends the Appraiser a message to say she had such a good time playing 999 Nights she's tried to buy a copy of the game for herself but it's sold out.

No big surprise there. It's the most popular game in Hethereau right now. But she's also discovered no-one selling the game has even heard of the Warren Continent scenario. She names a couple of other scenarios she was offered (Which I'm thinking could be content for us, some day.) but the one they all just played? No sign of it anywhere.

Flora, being the smart cookie she is, asks Shinku why she didn't just get Mint to tell her where she got her copy. Shinku, also being a smart cookie, tells Flora she asked her but Mint couldn't remember. 

Now, as we all know, Mint is a bit of a dumcat, but in this case I'm pretty sure it's not just absent-mindedness. The Warren Continent version of the game just somehow appeared in her apartment. She can't recall buying it, even. And Mint herself said, when they emerged back into reality, that the whole thing hadn't even felt like they were in an Anomaly Realm. It had felt like somewhere real.

I suspect if 999 Nights turns out to be a very popular and successful addition to the game, we might find out more about what all of that implies. If, on the other hand, as seems quite likely, the overall reaction is "That was fun but can we please get back to the real game now?", we might never find out what was going on.

And I'll be fine with it, either way. I hope it's all going somewhere but if it's a mystery never to be solved, that's okay too. Pursuing this storyline to far might be a mistake, anyway. For the health of the game, that is.

Dropping an entirely different game into the middle of one that's barely gotten going was an extremely high-risk choice, both commercially and aesthetically. It looks like Hotta are going to get away with it through the sheer quality of the work they've done but maybe it would be best to quit while they're ahead. 

I was skeptical when I heard about it but I'm having a great time. If it was a game in its own right, I'd carry on playing it. Even so, it'll be good to back to the city. There are more fantasy RPGs than stars in the sky and quite a few cyberpunk dystopias but upbeat, cheerful futuristic cities make for a much rarer backdrop. Maybe stick to your lane in future, Hotta?

Or maybe that's just what they are doing. Maybe they plan on making unpredictability NTE's USP. 

I could live with that. 

Chocolate Milk - or - The Dragons Of Warrens Continent

I'm not sure I can think of any precedent for what Hotta's done to Neverness To Everness with the 1.2 update that landed last week. Something similar must have happened somewhere before because there's nothing new on this earth but if it happened in any game I was playing, I can't remember it. And it does seem like something you'd remember.

The closest I can think of would be Super Adventure Box in Guild Wars 2 but that wasn't remotely on the same scale. 999 Nights (Which, I'll remind you, because it never ceases to amuse me, is pronounced "One Thousand Less One Nights.") is a complete, full-featured ARPG, playable from within NTE. 

It's not a holiday event or a mini-game or even a special zone. It's a whole fricken' game! Last time, I estimated it might keep someone busy for about 30 hours but having played through the first two big dungeons, I'm going to have to revise that upwards. There are two more to go so it's going to take me maybe fifteen hours just to do it all on Story mode and there are two further difficulty levels.

That's just the main quest, which is what I've mainly stuck with so far, (There are also side-quests. I went all round the Fuzzy Village, where the not-really-sheep live, and picked up about half a dozen, although so far I've only finished one.) but there are a large number of other attractions, quite a few of which I've done, some several times, mostly because curiosity has led me to go up to a lot of creatures and objects and most of the events are on a proximity fuse.

Some you have to speak to an NPC to start, some start automatically when you get near and some have portals you can go through. The overworld is handled very much like the way Shroud of the Avatar does it, albeit a lot more stylishly. The map is some kind of model village, with the player character taller than the buildings as they wander down the paths from place to place. 

You can't jump or climb and there are lots of invisible walls. It's a representation of a place rather than a place in it's own right and I find it works very well.

There's a good variety - ring events, jumping puzzles, arenas, logic puzzles and more - and they're all as repeatable as you care to make them. I wandered about, doing some at random for a while in an attempt to level up and it was good fun. 

I wanted some more levels because, as I mentioned last time, Flora and her team did not do well on their first run at the Molten Dragon. Defeat was so swift and inevitable, I figured there had to be some trick to it, which did indeed turn out to be the case. Before I even tried to figure out what that trick was, though, I thought I'd give the the tried-and-trusted over-leveling method a go.

Gaining a few levels does help but the effect is limited by the much higher influence of gear on combat effectiveness. The primary way more levels help is that they allow you to equip higher level-limited items but since, at least as far as I can tell, you need to beat the bosses before you gain access to the areas where the next tier of gear drops, it's kind of a Catch 22. 

Luckily, a random comment I just happened to spot on a reddit thread gave me a clue what was needed. Someone tossed an aside into a thread where people were talking about the problems they were having with the first boss, saying there was an "artifact" that would protect one member of your team against dragon fire. 

It was the fiery breath of the dragon, or possibly some kind of massive fiery AE, that had done for my entire team in seconds. I figured if I could find the artifact and give it to Iroi, she could heal herself well enough against the rest of the dragon's damage to solo the damn lizard if she had to. 

That would turn it into one of those long, attritional boss fights I'm all too familiar with from both GW2 and EverQuest II. Not much fun, sure, but if you get it right, you only have to do it the one time and that's bearable. 

I was settling myself into the idea but first I had to find the artifact. I thought maybe the mysterious sheep vendor might sell it but it was more obvious even than that. It turned out the person who'd left the comment on reddit was making it sound more abstruse than it really was.

The so-called "artifact" that nullifies the effect of dragon flame isn't an artifact at all. It's an accessory and it drops off... who knows? Not me. Not google, either, as we'll see. Probably just a low chance off any mob in Chocolate Volcano, I imagine. When I came to look in my bags for it, I found I already had two of them. 

They were still in there because I hadn't even noticed there were accessories or slots to put them in. It tells you something about how I play games because the slots are right there on the paper-doll and yet somehow I hadn't noticed them.

My feeble excuse is I hadn't been looking at the paper dolls when I was gearing my team. I'd been using the scrolling list of slots down the left of the screen to swap out and upgrade gear and you have to scroll that one down past the bottom of the display to see the accessory slots. They're right down the bottom, after the boots. 

I found that out by chance, not long after I'd been reading about the artifact. I just happened to scroll a bit further down than usual by mistake as I was swapping out gear. Once I'd noticed the slots for accessories were there, I clicked on them, which brings up anything in inventory that might fit the slot and it turned out I'd already looted quite a few rings and gewgaws. I'd been lugging them around in my bags for ages without knowing about it.

And guess what? There were two copes of the "artifact" I was after. It's called Hot Spring Egg and it "Grants immunity to monster burn damage." Perfect! 

Here's the really weird thing. Google doesn't seem to know the Hot Spring Egg exists. None of my searches then found it and even now I know what it's called, I'm still coming up blank. Even with the name of the game and the item there are no results. Well, no meaningful results.

If you search, as I did just now, for "Accessory in Neverness To Everness Warrens Continent that negates NPC fire damage.", the AI summary confidently informs you "In Neverness to Everness, the "999 Nights" (Warren Continent) content does not feature a single accessory that universally negates all NPC fire damage." Even if you use the exact wording from the egg and call it "burn damage" it's the same. Doesn't exist, apparently.

Yeah. Well, it does.Shows what you know, Gemini!  I have three of them now after another dropped yesterday. And you're not restricted to using the Egg on just one character, as the reddit comment implied. They're not whatever NTE's equivalent of Lore-Equip in EQII would be. Everyone on the whole team can have one. 

I probably wouldn't have known that if I hadn't found two of them in my bags. I'd have gone with my initial plan to use just Iroi and it would most likely have worked, even if it would have been teeth-grindingly slow.

With two Eggs, I had a better plan. I stuck one on Iroi and one on Flora, figuring the two of them could duo the dragon easily enough if they weren't on fire. The Appraiser has good DPS and Iroi is an amazing healer. Since plot mechanics mean Shinku has barely contributed anything to the team anyway, I've effectively been trioing the fights all along. Things would go slower without Mint's DPS but with Flora involved it would certainly be a lot faster than with Iroi on her own. 

I was almost looking forward to it now. I was about to port back and give it a go right then, when it occurred to me I might as well fight my way back through the whole volcano and get a couple of levels while I was doing it. 

That really says a lot about how much fun I'm having. It's the first time I've ever felt like I got the point of an ARPG. Killing hordes of mobs and picking through heaps of loot for upgrades hasn't really been my thing until now. I guess it can't have been the mechanics that were putting me off when I've tried other games that use them, after all. It must have been something else - the setting or the aesthetic, probably. 

It really helps that all the main armor slots displays, there's a great variety of looks to discover and the avatars are large enough to see what it all looks like, something that's never been the case in any isometric-perspective game I've played. The developers have done a really great job, not just adding a complete ARPG to the game but making me enjoy it, too.

So that's what I did. I enjoyed it. Specifically, I enjoyed the return match with the Molten Dragon and I especially enjoyed kicking the crap out of it. 

By the time I got to the dragon's room, the whole team had dinged 21 except poor old Shinku, forever a level behind. But she wasn't going to be fighting anyway. 

Flora woke the dragon up up and whacked it about with her sword. Iroi tagged in to drop her big heal when it was needed. I think Mint might have made a brief appearance, too, mostly to drop her Ultimate then vanish again. She couldn't hang around for long, not having an Egg of her own.

With its fire and lava attacks proving utterly ineffective, the dragon went down pretty easily. As did the  second dragon, over in the Milk Ice Mountain, which was where I went next. I was expecting to have to find some new item to protect me against freezing damage for that one but no. I never checked what damage the Frostspike Dragon who lives there was doing but whatever it was it didn't have much effect on my team, three of whom had the Hot Spring Egg by then.

Maybe that dragon does burn damage too. Or maybe it was my clever strat that did for him. 

I'm being ironic, at least somewhat. No strat I ever come up with is likely to qualify as clever. I think I'm doing pretty well if I know what my characters' main abilities do. Combining them for some kind of dramatic payoff is generally well beyond my remit. 

That is what your supposed to do, I think. NTE, like all the gacha games I've tried, assumes players love complexity. It's ferociously complex in terms of synergies between characters, gear, effects, abilities and a whole lot of other factors, all of which I'm sure the developers imagine the players will just lap up (And probably spend money trying to min-max.). Luckily for me they also seem quite forgiving of lazy bums who can't be bothered to figure out how it all fits together, which is just as well or I'd not be playing.

Sometimes, though, things happen that are hard to ignore. On the way up the milk mountain, something weird occurred often enough to make me tab out to try and find out what the heck was going on. Three-quarters of my team kept turning into flying lambs mid-fight. After that, I couldn't control them at all until combat ended, when they snapped back into their own forms as if nothing untoward had happened.

Fortunately, google knew what it was. It's what happens when you hold down "E" for a little longer than just a key-press, when Iroi's on the field. E triggers what I think of the "ranged" skill. (The game calls it Redirect.) Everyone has one but I'm not sure they all vary on a short and long press. 

I wouldn't necessarily know without looking it up because I rarely use the long-press at all. I hadn't been doing it intentionally this time, either. It was just a fluke but a very fortunate one. What happens when Iroi does it is that she turns the whole team into her puppets. In that form, they can't be damaged at all but they can still attack. 

Given that Iroi is an amazing healer who can keep going for ages on her own, it means she can tank the mob while her flock of lambs whittle away at it. (The lambs all have special attacks as well but I haven't figured out how to get them to work yet.) Perhaps best of all, if Iroi does die, all the characters who were lambs pop back up as themselves, at full health!

That's what happened in the Frostspike fight but by then the dragon was at about 10%. Flora and Mint finished it off with no trouble. And that was the second mountain done.

Next, it's off to the lake. Amber Syrup Lake, to be exact. And to tell the truth I've already made the trip. But that's a story for another day, if only because so far I've only gotten as far as the first campfire so there's not a lot to tell. 

It's Too Hot For Clever Titles - Just Play Us The Damn Songs Already

It's really hot today. In my room especially. Too hot to play games or write a blog post or do much of anything. Maybe I won't bother. 

Or maybe I will. It's been two weeks since the last What I've Been Listening To post and I did say that was the cadence I was aiming for. If nothing else, they're easy to write. Do I have enough songs, though?

Hmm. Not at all sure I do. Still, I expect I'll come up with something.  Might be a short post, though. Stop that cheering at the back...

Terri - Micky Dolenz (Paul Westerberg cover)

I bet that was a surprise. Certainly surprised me when I heard it. Last man standing and he's making it count.

I love the Monkees. They've had an up and down kind of career. I grew up watching them as a kids' show but they were also in the pop charts, which might have confused me if I'd been just a few years older. They went out of fashion to the point of derision and then weirdly came back in with punk, when the Sex Pistols covered (I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone. Since then it's been mostly acceptance into the canon if not outright adulation although it didn't help that they reformed and made some not very good records.

Not that Steppin' Stone was really a Monkees song. It was written by the men who made the Monkees, Boyce and Hart, but they shopped it around to a bunch of bands before the Monkees had the hit with it. And this isn't a Micky Dolenz song either. It's a Paul Westerberg number although kind of an unofficial one.

It's from a bizarre solo album Westerberg released as a 49 cent Amazon download in 2008. Full story at Stereogum, which is where I learned it and from where I'm ripping it off. The album had one, continuous forty-nine minute track and included no information about the songs on it, not even the names. Apparently this one is generally referred to by fans as "(Tell Me) Who You Gonna Marry." Mickey obviously prefers something shorter.

I have never really got Paul Westerberg. He's one of those people, like Alex Chilton or Nick Drake, who I do get, who constantly comes up as a reference point for other artists. I listened to his original version of this one and it sounds a lot more like Eve of Destruction than Micky's cover.

 CPR - Wet Leg (horsegiirl remix)

I still haven't acquired the second Wet Leg album. I say "acquired" because I probably was never going to buy it for myself. It seems like I would have put it on my birthday/Christmas wishlist last year but I didn't. 

Partly it was over-exposure. There was a while when you really couldn't get away from Wet Leg. There was a brief respite and then they came back, firing off singles ahead of the sophomore album and doing interviews non-stop and honestly I felt like maybe I'd had enough of them for now.

Which was a bit silly given the new singles were all good. Just not as good as the old singles from the first album, which were all great. But it turned out the lack of immediacy with the second batch might have been because they were growers. I've heard some of them a few times now and they get stronger with familiarity. 

That could be significant. The main reason I didn't put the second album on a wishlist was that, great though all the individual songs on the first were, listened to all in a row they could be... enervating. That's the bane of all great singles bands and Wet Leg are categorically a great singles band. It's why I can barely stand to listen to Greatest Hits albums by anyone, even people I really, really like.

A good album needs pacing as much as it needs bangers. Light and shade. Otherwise it's like eating a whole box of chocolates, one after another. I realize some people aren't going to see why that's a bad thing...

This, though, is very different. horsegiirl (Not to be confused with Horsegirl.) takes the sugar out and replaces it with a bit of acid. Not that kind. The sharp stuff you get on acid drops. (Seriously? Acid drops? How old do you think your readers are? Even you don't remember acid drops. When you read about those in the Beano when you were a kid, you had to ask your grandmother what they were...)

Talking to myself in the second person now... I told you it was hot.

 CUT THE LINE - deBasement

Okay, I have no idea what that is. I just had it bookmarked. It's great though, isn't it? I love snippets of conversation used as lyrics. Used to be a bit of a thing back in the '90s. Don't hear it so much any more, more's the pity.

Shall I look them up? See who they are? Okay...

"deBasement are a queer/trans electropop-bass duo based in LA, comprised of Alli Logout (front person of the critically acclaimed punk outfit Special Interest), and Margo XS (esteemed DJ and in-demand producer who is a primary collaborator for Kim Petras, Zara Larsson and more)."

 Ohh... that makes sense!

MORNING DEW (DONK) - Beyoncé

I'm guessing I don't have to explain who Beyoncé is. Although she doesn't crop up here very often. She's in the "I understand why she's good but it's not doing it for me" pot most of the time. And honestly, I just like the way she goes "DonkyDonkyDonk."

I mean, who wouldn't?

Come and Go - Bodywash

Alright, I'm not going to gab on about who every last act on the bill this week might be. I have no clue who this lot are although I'd lay good money they're Australian. 

The way this works, or one way, is that I listen to a bunch of new stuff every day and if I like it I ignore it because I like a lot of things. Just liking something doesn't get us anywhere. 

If I really like it, though, I bookmark it to come back to when I'm considering candidates for the honor of being included in a post on a blog that's mostly read by people whose main interest most likely isn't music and whose tastes most likely aren't all that close to mine. (Then again, this one has less than a thousand views on YouTube so maybe they'll be glad of even a couple more.)

If I really, really like something, though, I listen to it a few more times and chances are I'll go take a look to see what else they've done, meaning when it comes time to write the post, I usually at least have a vague idea who they are. 

This is one I really liked.

Florida Water Blues - Twisted Teen

And this one I really, really liked. So I looked up who they were. Which was a mistake. I liked it better when I thought the band was the guy and the girl in the video. It's not. It's the two riding in the pickup at the end.

Sometimes, the less you know the better. 

I still really, really like it though.

Nobody - Computerwife

Takes a while to get going but it's worth the wait. Video needs a motion-sickness warning.

Couple of covers to end, I think. I did say I didn't have much and it's too damn hot still to go looking.

 Go F*** Yourself - Fat Dog

Their asterisks, not mine. So coy!

 Dog Dribble - Getdown Services

Oh, I see. It's like that, now, is it? Maybe it's time to stop. How about we go out with something tasteful?

 The Chain - The Tullamarines (Fleetwood Mac cover)

I liked the Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac, back when even getting to hear music from five years ago was like finding fragments from the Great library of Alexandria. Then punk came and they were the antichrist for a while. Now I can see them in the round and I like some of it and not the rest.

The only bit of The Chain I really like is the bit they used for the motor racing on TV back in the eighties. And I mostly liked that because it gave me warning so I could change the channel.  

I like Tusk. Shame they didn't pick that one.

And that, I think, will do for now, especially since my PC just crashed, either because it's fucking up again or because it's hotter than the surface of the sun in here. Think I'll give both of us a break to cool down.

Owning The Problem

Sony's recent decision to abandon the physical format for Playstation games kicked off a frenzy of hand-wringing and name-calling across the gaming media but, perhaps surprisingly, there didn't seem to be much of a reaction here in this neck of the blogosphere, other than this excellent post by Yeebo, to which I'll return later. 

The main concerns I've seen revolve around three quite specific issues:

• Archival
• Income
• Ownership

The first seems like a very niche problem indeed from where I'm sitting. It pre-supposes a future in which academics are sufficiently interested in the social, cultural, technical or creative history of video games to feel they need more than a broad, historical overview. It also assumes academic institutions won't have the capacity or the will to arrange storage for themselves, outside of stockpiling commercially available disks. 

We know there's already a huge problem with archiving always-online, live service and digital-only titles. It would seem Sony's opt-out from physical media just adds their future catalog to that vast, intangible pile. 

You might think the onus for preservation would fall on the preservers rather than the producers, in either case. It's not as though Sony is asking for the games to be archived. I'm sure if they wanted to keep an archive of the games they've issued, they'd be perfectly capable.

I find it hard to worry unduly about the convenience of notional professors in twenty-second or twenty-third century universities, too. If I was going to try to work up some kind of concern on their behalf, even as a life-long gamer I'd be more likely to be bothered that they were fussing about two hundred year-old video games in the first place. I'd like to imagine there'd be better things for them to spend their time and energy on by then.

The whole "Everything Must Be Preserved" attitude, which really only goes back maybe fifty or sixty years, bothers me more than the blasé "Let it all rot" attitude that preceded it. Even for the purposes of academia, representative samples and contemporary accounts usually suffice to recreate an era. Why we need to keep one of everything, in working order, like a gang of crazed, technological half-Noahs, beats me.

That may just be my lack of sympathy with the whole concept, of course. One thing that seems to have gone out of currency during my lifetime is ephemerality. We used to talk about some things being "built to last" and others being "throwaway" and pop culture was firmly in the latter category. Now it seems every last flyer and graffito must be saved for posterity.

There used to be seven day wonders and five-minute fads. There were trends that came and went. There still are, of course, but at some point we seem to have decided, collectively, to assign lasting value to them, meaning they need to be saved, cherished, preserved for future generations and studied in schools and universities. 

In a way it's a welcome recognition and celebration of the work that went into creating these things as well as the pleasure and joy that came out of them. That's nice. On the other hand, it's dead-wood strewn all over the floor of the cultural forest, getting in everyone's way and stifling new growth. 

It's pretty much a truism now that popular culture feeds on itself but the scavenging goes wider and deeper all the time. I'm always moaning that no music I hear any more fails to remind me of something I heard years ago. It's not old geezeritis or not just that. 

Musicians wear their influences not just on their sleeves but as badges of honor. Music critics are all but incapable of describing any new song or act other than in terms of who, in the great back catalog of their memories, it most reminds them. I try not to do it myself but often I just can't help it. Everything really does sound like something else, now.

As for movies, almost all the successful ones are are either sequels or adaptations of familiar IPs from other media. Originality is almost a commercial flaw.

And games are in perhaps the worst state of all, when it comes to living off their past. Most of the most-successful games now are old. We're constantly celebrating the 10th, 20th and even 25th anniversaries of MMORPGs, but mainstream gaming is chock-full of decade-old hits that won't quit. The most ironic thing about Sony's decision is that it's not impossible that, in a hundred years' time, some of those diskless games might still be in the top twenty!

I wonder, more and more, if it wouldn't be healthier and more aesthetically satisfying to let everything have it's natural run and then slip away. That way, one day, a decade or a century from now, maybe some diligent researcher would write a paper and a new generation could marvel at how the elders and ancients amused themselves. And, I hope, think themselves lucky that their own entertainment is so much better! 

So much for the archivists and their problems. On to the developers.

I was quite surprised to learn that developers, who put out games for Playstation, rely in part on sales of physical collectors' editions and the like. The last console I owned was the Atari 2600 and if there were any Special Edition cartridges for that, I never knew about them.

I do know something about online games, though. Digital online games. With no physical editions. All MMORPG players know about those. We have no choice. There used to be boxes but they went away. I have a whole row of them on the shelf of a bookcase next to me right now. I don't think there's anything there less than a decade and a half old.

I remember there being a good deal of angst about the end of physical media for online games. People liked their boxes. I liked my boxes. And honestly, if games came in boxes now, with manuals and posters and cloth maps, I might still buy them. They make nice keepsakes.

The question, though, is did MMORPG developers deny themselves the revenue that comes from being able to sell people a bunch of tat in a box, when they went all-digital? No, they did not!

I refer you to Daybreak's near-infamous Collectors' Editions of every expansion for the aging dinosaurs in their stable, EverQuest and EverQuest II. What were they asking for the top-end imaginary boxes last year? Let me see...

Two hundred and fifty fricken' dollars! That's what! Makes all that fuss about GTA6 costing $80 look a bit wet, doesn't it?

And did you get a disk for your $250? Hell, you did! 

I'd call that precedent. I'd imagine any games with an actual fanbase could make out like bandits, selling digital special editions, always assuming Sony would cut them a deal. Although maybe there are console-specific technical considerations there I'm not seeing. As I said, not a console person. 

But even if there are, there's always merch. Bands worked out years ago that's where the money is. Daybreak cottoned on late but they're all-in on it now. Want a mug with the symbol of your class? A poster? A mouse mat? A T-shirt? Any of the extras they might have bunged into the Collectors' Edition box, back when there was a box?

Anything, in fact, except a disk with the game on because you can't fit the fricken' game on a disk! How small would your game have to be now to fit on a single disk? EQ is ancient and quite small. The installation on my drive would fit on three DVDs. Neverness To Everness, though, would need a dozen. And what's actually going to be on these disks the archivists want to preserve? 

Sorry - we covered archival already. Let's move on.

And so we come to ownership, which I'm now realizing probably ought to have a post of its own. Ironically.

That was Yeebo's main concern, I think, and so it is most peoples', for very good reason. Some very, very big businesses are hell-bent on converting the capitalist system to a quasi-feudal Lords and Peasants arrangement, where at best we're all tenant farmers on the Lord's lands and most likely we're merely digital serfs.

It's not an appealing prospect although, just as it was in the middle ages, it does depend on what sort of Lord you've got lording over you. If it's the typical squeeze em 'til they bleed then feed what's left to the hounds type, you're pretty much screwed but if it's the responsible steward of the land sort you might at least hope for a quiet life with Sunday mornings off for church.

Badly thought-through metaphors aside, we are clearly slipping into a rental culture without necessarily being aware of it. When I was pondering the virtues of playing my games on someone else's servers on Tuesday, Angry Onions, the appropriately-named regular commenter (The angry part, not the onions...) popped into the thread to point out the shortcomings, namely that NVidia could switch the servers off any time they felt like it and I'd be S.O.L.

That, though, is a somewhat bad example. GeForce Now only lets me play games I already own or games I don't need to own because they're free to play anyway. It doesn't pretend to sell me games that only exist on their servers for as long as they care to keep them running. No, for that you need to go to Steam.

We all talk about our Steam libraries as games we own but ownership there is predicated on Steam a) continuing to exist and b) not morphing into something else. As everyone always says, if you want to own your games, you have to go to GOG. 

But do you want to own your games? Some of them, sure. The ones you know for certain you'll play again. The rest, though? Not just the ones you bought in a sale and never played or played for an hour and didn't much like or even the ones you finished and were glad to see the back of? 

Not all games have much replayability and not all of those that do actually get replayed. I can count the number of games I've replayed on the fingers of... hold on... yes, one hand.  

Re-experiencing entertainment is a bit of a niche hobby anyway. Most people don't do it or that's been my impression. 

I re-read a lot of books, often more than once, but when I talk about re-reading at work, in a bookshop, with people who read obsessively, nearly everyone thinks it's a downright weird thing to do. I was thinking about movies the other day. I re-watch those as well, or I used to, but I doubt there's any movie I've seen all the way through more than three times and not many of those. For most people it's once and done and then maybe once more that they didn't plan on, like when a friend drags them to see a movie they saw already.

And that's probably the right way for everyone other than the poor old professors and students who have to study this stuff. I'm in the process of clearing cruft out of my house. It's going to be a year-long job, if I'm lucky. I have a lot of comics, magazines, books, DVDs and VHS cassettes. That I own. Most of them I read or watched once, if that. 

Would I have been better off to have rented them? Then rented them again, if and when I ever wanted a second go? I'd sure as hell have a lot more space in my house now. And probably more money in the bank, too, assuming a rental culture priced itself appropriately. 

As for games, of which I also have quite a few boxes from the old days, I was delighted when I could just download the damn things so the only space they took up was hard drive space. And even that's a pain, frankly. Cf. my current enamorment with playing the things on someone else servers.

The real problem I see with the current push to get us all to rent rather than own is the blatant dishonesty behind it. I'd say a big notice you absolutely could not miss, right at the point of purchase, saying "YOU ARE RENTING THIS ITEM. YOU ARE NOT BUYING IT AND YOU WILL NOT OWN IT" would solve the problem altogether.

And I'd be happy to rent. I'd prefer it, honestly. The only hard copy media I use these days are CDs for music and physical books, the former only because I have to have something to put on wish lists for birthdays and Christmas and the latter because I work in a bookshop and I get a shit-ton for free.

I'd love to drop both and go all digital. And also I wouldn't. I'd hate it.

Because physical objects feel nice and look nice. It's not about ownership for me. I really don't care about ownership all that much. I care about access but that's a different talk. 

No, it's about tactility. Touching stuff is hard-wired into us. You can't touch your digital games which I'm guessing has as much to do with the furore over Sony's decision as anything else. How many people really go to Gamestop to sell their old disks or hand them on to their friends or descendants? I bet most of those disks sit on a shelf to be looked at and sometimes taken down and handled for the sheer pleasure of it.

That's what I do with my old PC games, anyway. The question is, do I miss not being able to do it with the new ones? 

Hmmm.... well, I didn't until you asked me but now I'm thinking wouldn't it be nice to have a box with Neverness To Everness on the front and a cloth map of Hethereau inside that I could pin up on the wall.

As I knew before I started, there's no answer to any of this. I like it and I don't like it. I think it's important and I think it's trivial. I think we should keep everything and I think we should let it all fade away. 

But what I really think is I'm glad it's not me that has to decide. Well done to Sony for pulling the plaster off. Let's just hope too much skin didn't come off with it.