Go Directly To Blaugust. Do Not Collect 200 Gold Pieces

It's Blaugust tomorrow and I have nothing planned. I do have a few, vague ideas floating around but all of them would require annoying little things like research and planning and forethought and I just don't seem to be in the mood for any of that right now. I'm more in the mood for winging it so we'll see how far that gets me. 

I'm not worried about it. If I was, I wouldn't throw several perfectly reasonable topics into a Grab Bag the day before the event, now would I? Just be thankful I haven't held these back to spin up into whole posts of their own just to meet a quota.

Is Your MMO As Famous As RuneScape? 

Who hates Monopoly? No, not monopolies. This is a blog about gaming and popular culture, not politics. I mean Monopoly the incredibly tedious board game I used to play when I was ten but only if no-one would play anything better. 

I haven't played the damn thing in well over half a century but where I work, Monopoly occasionally blows up into some kind of a big deal because Waddingtons  (Showing my age there...) Hasbro keep pumping out special editions. The year they did one for the city where I live, we literally couldn't keep the things in stock.

I very strongly suspect the same will not happen with the latest Monopoly Special Edition: RuneScape.

Yes, hard to believe though it is, RuneScape is getting its own Monopoly board. How many video games can say that?  

Oh, yes, World of Warcraft, for sure. We had that one in. Didn't sell many.

I just looked it up. There are fifteen video game editions of the family fun-wrecking game, according to the Fandom wiki. How many can you name? 

Well, all of them, obviously, since I just put a screenshot of the lot next to this paragraph. But you could have guessed most of them, I bet. 

It doesn't look like it's purely sales-based, although huge sales are clearly a pre-requisite. It very much looks like the key factor is being a big franchise with a presence outside of gaming. More than half of the fifteen also have Hollywood movies or big TV shows based on them. 

All of which makes it doubly impressive RuneScape got in. Is your favorite MMORPG on there? Thought not. Ever wonder just how big a deal RuneScape really is? Here's a clue. It's in the same league as Pokemon, Sonic, Roblox and GTA5.

It's available for Pre-Order on the RuneScape store. The MMO Bomb piece says it's available from October but the store says delivery February 2027. Also, why is it rated 16+ on the box? Regular Monopoly is half that. What is there aboout RuneScape they're not telling us? 

It's Metal, Jim...  

If you didn't know William Shatner once made a very, very bad album of cover versions that included his crazed takes on the sixties staples like Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and Mr. Tambourine Man, you'd better hand your nerd badge in at the desk on your way out. That's Popular Culture 101.

You may even know he's made a few more albums since then. He likes to keep up, even if he's often a decade behind. But did you know he fronts his own metal band? I didn't. Not until I read about it on Stereogum this week.  

Maybe be you did know already. It's not like it's a secret. As the piece points out, Stereogum itself reported back in February that the Shat was prepping a metal album. 

I missed that bombshell, somehow, but I'm doing my due diligence now and telling you about it because I'm sure you won't want to miss the opportunity to hear the 94 year-old cult actor (I nearly put actor in quotes then but that would be a cheap shot. I'm sure he must have acted in something, once.) give his unique interpretations of classics by Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.

And would you like to see him perform those songs live? I just bet you would. Well now you can! Or you will be able to at next year's Coachella, always assuming he's still up for it then. I mean, he'll be 95...

I know no-one reading this is going to be at Coachella 2027 but these days the whole thing is livestreamed. They wouldn't miss the opportunity to share something like this with the world, would they? We should arrange a listening party...

New Jeans For Old

Gasp as I segue effortlessly from gaming through geek culture to music. It's a veritable masterclass in grab-bagging. It also needs a lot of padding because as must be increasingly obvious I don't have a lot to say about any of this other than sharing the links. 

Seriously, we get all knotted up about people using AI to write blog posts but it's perfectly fine just to precis other people's stuff, throw in a few smart-alec remarks and call that original work, just so long as you don't forget to credit your sources to let everyone know where you stole it from. Is it something to do with the dignity of labor? Does hammering a keyboard add some protective veneer of authenticity or humanity?

Oh dear, he's off on one again. Someone bang him on the back of the head. That usually resets him.

One of the saddest music news stories of the past year or two was the doomed attempt of New Jeans to free themselves from the indentured servitude that is the Idol system. I am no expert in how it all works but you really don't have to be to see how desperately exploitative it all is. That many of the people being exploited have worked hard to get themselves into a position where someone wants to exploit them does nothing to excuse the process.

Not particularly unusually, New Jeans hit a point where they'd had enough but very unusually they tried to do something about it. It was a little like a scene in a horror movie for a while. You could watch them struggling to get free, almost making it to safety, then being seized by a tentacle at the last moment and dragged back under.

And now they've emerged again. Well, four of them have. One was lost, never to be seen again. Eaten by the monster. As yet we haven't had any new music but no doubt it's coming, which poses an awkward moral question over whether to engage with it or not.

New Jeans were my favorite K-Pop band before all this happened, not that it was a competitive field. I guess it's best to hope it all goes well after all they put themselves through but I'm not sure whether I want the New New Jeans to pick up where they left off, making excellent music and uplifting, super-happy videos, or if it wouldn't be easier all round if the new stuff wasn't up to much and they all looked glum singing it. 

Luckily, I don't have any say in it so I'll just take what I get. And probably feel slightly uncomfortable if I enjoy it. But then, I know that feeling... 

At which point I really should move straight into some mildly embarrassing music choice. I'm sure I can find one. Give me a moment...

I Want You (And I Want Him Too) - New Weirdos

Oh, I think that'll do it! In so many ways...

If At First You Don't Succeed, Do Something Else

I had an idea for today's post but it didn't work out exactly as planned, for technical reasons, most of which I can't say I really understand and none of which I propose to try any harder than I already have to fix. 

What I was going to do was make an online zine, link to it, and explain my process. Only I haven't managed to make one yet. So, as a poor substitute, I thought I'd just make a very short post describing the problems I'm having and what, if anything, I plan to do about them. So that's what I'm doing.

A while back, I happened to be reading a post by either Aywren or Syl that mentioned, just in passing, something called Zines Forever. I'd love to link to that post directly but I can't find it on either of their blogs now, although Syl does have the Zines Forever website linked right at the top of hers, where it goes to her own Indie Game Review zine.

The word "zine" immediately caught my attention. I won't rehash the whole story again but I have a long history with zines: reading, writing and publishing them, that starts in the 1970s and carries on into the 21st century. I've observed numerous times how blogging has in some respects taken over from physical zines, although those very much still exist. Until now, though, I hadn't appreciated that there's an online zine scene as well.

I had a shuffle though a few of the zines on Zines Forever. They cover a wide range of styles and subjects. A lot of them read more like fliers than zines to me. Nothing wrong with fliers. Fliers have a vibrant subculture all their own. I've done my time, too, out there with the bucket and paste under the flyover...

Ahem...

Getting back to the zines, Zines Forever looked like it might be the perfect solution for my back-pages problem. Over the past few years I've managed to find and sort through a fair percentage of all the zines of varying sorts I've been involved with, from my first effort on the school duplicator at the age of twelve to the one and only issue of Mrs O'Reilly's Dog, a punk zine circa 1977, to the many different titles I distributed through several APAs in the '80s and '90s. 

For no particularly good reason, I'd quite like to upload some of those to the internet, where they can roam free and perhaps survive longer and have a better chance of being seen than the aging photocopies here in my house, all of which will, I'm sure, end up in landfill not long after I do. 

Not that I'm going to be buried. Eww! Creepy!

I've been pondering ways to do that but when I saw the Zine Forever site, with its eight-page standard format and very satisfying page-flip, I thought I'd found my answer. I left it a while because it's hardly an urgent project but this afternoon I thought I'd have a go at making a zine.

 When I say "making", what I really mean is converting, of course. I wasn't about to start putting a new one together. I just wanted to upload one of my old ones and see how it looked. 

I picked a short one to start with. Just four pages and two of those only pictures. I got my scanner hooked up and scanned the first page then I went to upload it.

The good news is you don't even have to make an account to upload a zine. And that's all the good news.

The first, trivial, problem was image format. I'd made a .jpg and the site wanted a .pdf. I rescanned the first page and then the other three, all as PDFs It only took a couple of minutes. Then I tried again. 

Trying to upload threw an AMD driver error. It didn't crash the whole PC but it froze the website. I tried a few times with the same result so I googled it. There were no matches specific to Zine Forever but a host of people were complaining about similar problems with AMD drivers for all kinds of things. Apparently they aren't very reliable, to put it mildly, and Windows hates them and keeps trying to overwrite them.

I read through a few of the fixes and tried a couple of the easier-looking ones, all to no effect. I tried in Firefox and Chrome and they were both the same. I thought about starting in on the more complicated fixes, involving changes to the registry and clean installs and fiddling with the bios and I decided I didn't care that much about getting it done.

I must have changed something while I was messing about, though, because when I tried one more time for luck, as I tend to do, I got a different error. This time I was supposedly missing something called WebGPU. I googled that, found out what it was and how I could enable it in Chrome and that it was supposedly already enabled, by default, in Firefox.

Chrome wanted me to give it permissions that it warned might open security holes so I passed on that. Firefox gave the same error message even after I went in and made sure WebGPU really was enabled. There were more fixes for that but it looked like a lot of work and sod's law says I'd probably break something else if I tried. Pass. Again.

Instead, I googled to see if there were alternatives to Zines Forever. There are a few although none looks as good. Still, I thought I'd try one. I remembered Syl (Or Aywren.) had also mentioned using Itch.io for zines. There was an app there called Electric Zine Maker that looked like it was mainly designed to facilitate making printed zines but I thought I'd give it a go anyway.

I downloaded that one, unzipped it and fired it up and it worked just fine. I figured out where the upload button was, which wasn't easy given the pre-schooler-with-a-paint-pot graphic style. I started to upload the first page and...

...it wanted a .jpg file. Or any image file other than a .pdf, pretty much.

At which point I thought, y'know what? I'm going round in circles here! I think I'll get off this roundabout now. It's making me dizzy.

When I can summon up the enthusiasm, I'll re-scan the images as .jpgs. Or convert the .pdfs. Or something. Then I'll try again. But for today, I've had enough.

At least it gave me something to blog about so it wasn't entirely an afternoon wasted.  

By the way, for anyone that's interested, I made eight songs on Suno out of the text on those two pages above. Eight. Yes, eight!

I collected them into a playlist for this blog and here it is.  I think I got them all in the right order. And for anyone who's just a little bit intrigued but definitely not eight songs-worth, here's the title song

It's called I Wish I Could Go Roller-Skating... Chapter 21 of Catcher In The Rye is the obvious touchstone. Phoebe might be who you think she is. Or she might not. She certainly doesn't know. 

I sometimes wish I did...

Themes, Prompts And Footnotes: It's Blaugust All Over Again

 

 

Blaugust! 

Blaugust Blaugust Blaugust!

Blaugust! 

We should have a theme tune! Anyone want to write one? 

So, here we are again. Just a week to go. Are you excited? I'm excited!

So very, very sad that Belghast isn't here to jolly us along and yet the irony for me is that I was thinking of sitting this year out until the dreadful news arrived, after which I couldn't think of any better way to commemorate our friend than to join in once again with the amazing annual celebration of the written word he invented, curated and cheer-led for more than a decade.

Which isn't to say I have anything special planned. I very much don't. My own Blaugust journey goes roughly like this:

Never heard of it.

Knew the name, didn't know what it was. 

Knew what it was, didn't join in.

Shadowed-posted without signing up.

Joined and winged it.

Started preparing months in advance.

Went back to winging it.

Of all the approaches, I recommend winging it, but only if you aren't after the badge for posting 31 times in a month. That's the killer because you daren't miss a day and some days you just might not be feeling it or something might crop up to stop you. 

For those days, I recommend having maybe two or three posts pre-written or at least drafted. Life-savers, those are. I did that for two years and it really helped. Also helpful is having a feature or theme you can go back to several times during the event. Saves you having to come up with a brand new idea every day.

On the other hand, one year I ended up doing so much prep work it was like Blaugust lasted two months, not one, not least because on some days, having slotted in one of the pre-written posts, I got the urge to write another anyway. I definitely do not recommend doing that. We all feel burned out after a month of reading and posting like crazy people. Front-ending the whole thing with a prep month does not make it any less stressful.

This year my safety buffers are

Having no intention of posting 31 times in a month

Having a very vague backup feature I could drag out if absolutely necessary

This year, I've been posting slightly less often than my post-pandemic norm so I'm already feeling chill about not hitting the full 31. I know my post count for the year will be down on last year and the year before that so I'm already slacking. 

I plan on leaning into that for Blaugust by just sticking to my regular pattern of posting all the days I don't work. That should get me close to a couple of dozen posts. Of course, what tends to happen is I get all swept up in the frenzy of the event and end up wanting to post even on the days I normally wouldn't. So who knows?

Blaugust is also the easiest time to blog. There are so many things you can spark off or lean on for inspiration. The main reason I'm writing this post today, given that I've already done one promo post, is to plug the Theme Weeks and the Prompt Lists.

Those weren't available when I wrote my last post because I jumped the gun a bit due to the aforementioned excitement. They are now and here they are:

 

Those are the Theme Weeks. I stole that image from Wilhelm's much more comprehensive post, which I strongly suggest you go read, if you haven't already.

As for the prompts, I'm going to give the whole list rather than just the link because then I can refer back to my own blog when I need inspiration in a few weeks time:

How did you get started in content creation?

What are some key sources of media (games/movies/etc) that have shaped your worldview?

Tell us about some of your favorite protagonist/s and explain why.

Tell us about some of your favorite antagonist/s and explain why.

Tell us about some of your favorite creatives (writers/artists/bloggers/streamers/etc) and explain why/provide examples.

If you could meet any person you look up to, who would it be?

What piece of content would you most like to have a sequel or reboot?

What type of content do you feel is severely underrated?

What is your greatest fear, and how does it impact the type of content you create or consume?

What is your earliest memory related to one of your core fandoms?

If you had a mascot to represent you, what would it be?

What skill do you want to improve on the most?

Tell us 5 facts about yourself.

What are some of the things that get you excited in life?

What piece/s of technology would you have the hardest time living without?

What is your favorite thing to do in order to relax?

What are some things that you do in order to stay creative?

Tell us about some of your hobbies outside of the realm of your specific niche.

What are some of the things that you wish you knew before you started creating content?

What is something you have lost along the way that you would love to have back?  Can be serious or frivolous.

Tell us about your physical creative space, and how it influences your content creation.

Everyone has specific rituals that they follow, tell us about one of yours.

Share the process you go through in order to create content, both mental and mechanical.

What is a favorite Quote/s, and tell us why?

How did you get the name that you regularly go by online, and what if anything does it mean?

If you could change anything about one of your core fandoms, what would it be?

What is some popular piece of content/media that seems to be universally loved that you have never been able to understand?

With the pandemic, we are going through an unprecedented time.  In what ways has this shared global event impacted your content creation?

Tell us about some community that you are part of and why it interests you or how it impacts you?

Tell us about a person/s or something/s that has greatly influenced you.

What are you looking forward to the most over the course of the next year?

There's got to be something in there that works for everyone, surely.

That's pretty much what I came here to do but since I have your attention, let me just give you all the important information all over again. It's the three Rs - repetition, repetition and repetition.

• Blaugust initial Announcement 
• Blaugust Sign-Up Page 
• Blaugust Discord Server 
• The Blaugust Prompt List 
• Blaugust Media Kit page 

Yes, I stole those from Wilhelm's post, too, but that's okay because Blaugust is a co-operative, collegial, community event and bouncing off other people's posts isn't merely allowed, it's actively encouraged. If anyone wants to take a chunk out of anything I write for the event and reformat, rephrase or just plain repeat it, be my guest! It's generally considered polite to include a link back to the source but other than that, free money! 

That said, I suppose there are limits. I see from Wilhelm's post that just shy of fifty bloggers have signed up so far. I'll restrain myself from just cutting and pasting the whole lot from TAGN to here. Well, not today. I'll very likely pinch the updated version when the event's about to start and slap it up here then. I usually do. 

In fact, I used to put my own link-lists together but that'd be duplication of labor now both Wilhelm and Owls are keeping the records so meticulously, not to mention so much better than I could. Stick to what you're good at, I say, and I'm good at waffling!

And that, I think, is about all I have to say on the matter. Today, that is. I might think of something else tomorrow. Who can say? I would apologize to any regular readers who aren't one hundred per cent on board with Blaugust yet and may already be thinking they've heard quite enough, only I'm not going to apologize! 

What's wrong with you? Start a blog, already! If you're waiting for an invitation, this is it!

Ahem. Sorry about that. Got a bit carried away there. But that's Blaugust for you. It kind of takes you over if you let it. 

I suggest you let it. 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

I love writing these little notes. I'll let you into a secret. Sometimes I use a bit of AI just so I can write one at the end. Usually the AI in question is an image generator. Nearly always, in fact. But there aren't any AI-generated images in this post. 

Here's what happened this time. Blogger generates all the HTML for me when I write a post. That's one of the big attractions of the platform. As time goes on, though, it seems to be getting a bit pernickety. Google doesn't pay it much (Or any.) attention, which is how most Blogger-users probably like it, but I get the impression a few things may be starting to fray a little with age.

One thing that no longer works as reliably as it did is changing the colors of links. I have a format for links: websites are shocking pink and videos are green. I didn't say it was a complex format. 

For years, that worked 100% of the time. I'd add the link, change the color, move on. In the last year, though, the change of color frequently doesn't take. The links come out dark blue. I have to go into the HTML and move stuff around to get them the right color and it's a pain. 

After reading several bloggers going on about how great the AIs are at writing or fixing code, I thought maybe one of them would like to fix Blogger's mistakes and it seemed only fair to let Gemini have first crack. They're cousins, after all. 

So I cut and pasted the offending section, which was the five links towards the end of the post, into Gemini and asked it "The following html doesn't produce magenta-colored links correctly. Can you correct it so it does?" 

Gemini replied "The HTML doesn't color the links magenta because browser default link styles override parent element colors. To fix this, you must apply the color styling directly to the <a> tags (or use a CSS rule for links)." Then it gave me a revised version, which I cut and pasted into Blogger to replace Blogger's own version. 

And it worked perfectly. I did actually know what the problem was, having manually corrected it many times before, but I didn't want to bother doing it five times when an AI could do it in the time it would take me to do it once. If you want to consider that as AI taking my job, fair enough, but it was a job I never wanted in the first place and if Blogger was doing its job properly, it's a job I would never have had.

Hmmm. I guess Gemini is taking Blogger's job, then...

Going to be fun round Google's house at Christmas, with those two not speaking to each other.  

More Notes on AI used in this post.

I wrote the above before I started editing. During the edit I found the Theme Week image would not center on the page, despite Blogger having a function designed specifically to make it do just that. This is another annoying thing Blogger used to do perfectly and now can't seem to manage.

So I cut and pasted the code into Gemini and asked "Okay, any idea why the following HTML fails to center the image on a Blogger blog page? It's generated by Blogger itself and it used to work but now it doesn't." 

Gemini came back with a detailed explanation of the problem "The issue happens because an <img> tag is an inline element (or inline-block depending on the browser), meaning it generally ignores text-align: center; applied to a parent <p> tag unless forced. In the past, many browsers were forgiving of this, but modern browsers strictly adhere to standards where text-align only centers text or inline content, not block-level media unless specified. Furthermore, WordPress/Blogger migrated markup schemas where themes often force images to behave as display: block; without automatic margins, breaking the old centering behavior"

All of which basically amounts to "Blogger's starting to screw up because no-one's updating any more." 

Of course, Gemini was able to fix it. I just dropped the HTML it gave me into Blogger and it worked perfectly. Maybe Google should get Gemini to rewrite the whole of Blogger. That'd save us all some time. 

Say Anything? Challenge Accepted!

I have a few ideas for full-length posts floating around but I don't feel like going deep on a warm Saturday afternoon so I guess it's Grab Bag time again. Saturday Selection I could call it, if I had no shame at all. Or no standards, for that matter. 

Usually, when I do one of these things, I have a few ideas bookmarked but not this time so I'm just going to have to wing it. What's the minimum number of sections for a Grab Bag anyway? Got to be at least three, doesn't it? And in my case a song to end, like the old vaudeville performer I have apparently become.

There's an interesting beginning. I'm a couple of years shy of seventy now, terrifying though that is, but even that advanced age puts me well shy of any age you'd need to be to have experienced Vaudeville. Hell, my mother, who was 93 when she died earlier this year, was too young for Vaudeville. Wikipedia dates it from the 1870s to the 1930s. 

Added to that, it was distanced from me by space as well as time. Vaudeville was a purely North American phenomenon. Over here we had Music Hall as our nearest equivalent. Music Hall flourished from "the early Victorian era until around World War I" (Wikipedia again. This is why I occasionally give them money when they come begging. Without Wikipedia, I'd have to do some secondary research. Or get an AI Agent; which, screw that!)

So how and why do I even know what either of them is? 

There's some excuse, or at least an explanation, for Music Hall. When I was growing up I had to suffer through the interminable tedium of a TV show called "The Good Old Days" (To which I will not link. You can thank me later.) in which much the same bunch of comedians and singers that did the rounds of all the variety shows back then (And there were far too many of them - performers and shows both.) got themselves dolled up in nineteenth-century drag to drone their way through the kind of material that got stage door johnnies hot under the Eton collar, back when Marie Lloyd or Vesta Tilley flashed an ankle.

O. M. G. ! Just look at that last sentence!  Why in the name of sanity do I know what a "stage door johnny" was or what they wore? Or who Marie Lloyd or Vesta Tilley were? How does this stuff get into your head in the first place and why doesn't fall out again, seconds later? I can't remember 90% of anything I actually want to remember and yet apparently I can trot this stuff out without blinking.

Before someone chips in to correct me on Vesta Tilley, she's there to both prove and disprove my point. I did easily remember her name and she was a massively popular Music Hall star but she wouldn't have been flashing her ankles because she was a male impersonator. I had to google her to check what she was famous for and it was that. 

I heard a whole program about her on the radio once and yet I only remembered who she was and when and where she performed, not what she did, which was the important part. Shows how superficial this knowledge is, much of the time.

As for Vaudeville, my knowledge pretty much starts and ends with the Marx Brothers. I love the Marx Brothers but then who doesn't? I was introduced to them at an early age, when they may even all still have been alive (I'd have to check the dates.) although none were still performing. 

My mother was a big fan and I grew up watching their movies, not only on television, whenever they came on but at the cinema. The Marx Brothers became swept up somehow by the counter-culture as did a whole slew of icons of the past (Viz. Peter Blake's cover for Sgt. Pepper.) and their movies were shown surprisingly often in art-house cinemas when I was still at school. They were also a staple of the college film societies when I was at Cambridge at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties.

How the hell did I get started on this in the first place? Oh yes, I remember. (I don't. I had to go back and read the beginning of the post to remind myself...) I was saying how a grab bag post had to be three items minimum plus a song at the end, although that last bit's just me. 

Hmm. I'm nine paragraphs in now (Actually thirteen after the edit...) That's six hundred and fifty words. (Seven-eighty now...) Is it worth getting back to the original Grab Bag?  I could just carry on riffing on Vaudeville, I guess, but I don't know anything about it or indeed have anything I want to say. Still, when has that ever stopped me?

It occurs to me this is one of those post I sometimes do for Blaugust, when we hit Advice Week or whatever we're calling it that year. Are we doing those this time? The themed weeks? I didn't see anything about it in the opening posts but I'm not sure we've had the full agenda yet.

Based on the last couple of years, though, I don't feel qualified to offer advice to would-be bloggers any more, even though I've been doing this for a decade and a half and I've written well over three and a half thousand posts now. Blogs in the third decade of the twenty-first century don't look much like the blogs I learned from before I started, let alone like this one. 

In a way, they tend to look more like, well, web-logs. It's like regression to the meaningless. 

Rather than long-form posts on specific subjects, topics or activities, most of the newer blogs I still read, the ones I picked up from Blaugusts past, are day-to-day diaries or sets of notes or quick thoughts on this and that. My go-to advice on sitting down and typing to see what comes out, then calling it a post, looks a bit redundant these days. That's what everyone seems to be doing already.

And why not? It's bloody easy, isn't it? Yesterday's Palworld post took me all day, on and off. Probably at least four hours altogether. And here we are today, almost a thousand words done (More than a thousand, post-edit.) and how long has it taken me? About half an hour so far. 

And I can keep this up all day. I'm not kidding. It's the easiest thing in the world, just tapping away at a keyboard, letting your thoughts flow onto the page, lightly editing as you go along and giving the whole thing a final pass at the end. If you ever get stuck for something to say, just say anything.

Ooh! Now I want to watch Say Anything, the 'eighties movie starring John Cusack and Ione Skye. You know it! It's the one where he stands on the lawn under his girlfriend's bedroom window, holding a ghetto blaster over his head. Iconic image. I'm going to grab it and stick it in here later. (Or, in fact, use it as the header.)

That's not my favorite part of the movie, though. My favorite part is where he has dinner with his girlfriend's family and when her father asks him what he's going to do with his life he says "Kickboxing. Sport of the future!". (Except he doesn't, as I'll explain later. It's just another misremembering.)

I used to quote that a lot, often à propos of nothing. Kickboxing! Sport of the future! I'd say. Just like that, out of nowhere. I'd like to say I've stopped doing it but I'd be lying.

It's curious I can remember that quote and those scenes (Albeit in a mistakenly composite fashion, it turns out...) but I have no idea what song was playing on the ghetto blaster. I'm sure it would have been significant. I'm pretty sure it was some awful power ballad. Probably Huey Lewis and the News or Phil Collins or something equally unbearable. 

Oh, you know I'm going to have to look it up now. I was going to embed the clip anyway. 

Hah! It's Peter bloody Gabriel!  I guess that's a step up from the drummer of his old band, at least. Still a horrible song, though, but then Lloyd Dobler isn't exactly Mr Sophisticated. That's kind of the point.

As for the scene where he actually says "Kickboxing. Sport of the future." it's weirdly hard to find online. It's not, as I always misremember, the dinner party scene although everyone else seems to think it is, too. The quote is used numerous times as the title or in the description of clips on YouTube but then the clip is almost always the dinner party scene, where he doesn't say it at all. 

That one does include the superb speech, where Lloyd explains what he won't be doing for a living:

 " I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."

If you haven't seen that one, do yourself a favor but the only clip I can find on YouTube of the actual scene where he says the key phrase, which is when he comes to pick Diane up for a date, has almost inaudible sound. I might have to find my copy and upload the damn thing myself... 

The key moment is in the trailer above, though.

I said earlier I was too young to have any excuse for knowing literally anything about Vaudeville or Music Hall but I'm also too old to have a deep emotional attachment to teen movies from the 'eighties, aren't I? Say Anything came out in 1989, when I was 31. And I doubt I saw it until the early 'nineties anyway. 

I must be emotionally unstable anyway, I guess, (Quiet at the back!) One of the reasons I haven't rewatched a lot of those 'eighties classics for the longest time is that I get too emotionally involved. Pretty in Pink, Fresh Horses, The Sure Thing, Some Kind of Wonderful... I want to watch them all again but do I want to put myself through the trauma? I'm just going to have steel myself and buy some tissues.

The only one I have re-watched in recent years is Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I think we have about four copies in the house, in different formats. We kept re-buying it for a while. It's a lighter watch, on the surface at least, although not once you stop to think about it. Plus it's the gift that never stops giving. Always something new. 

I have plans to start re-watching and re-reading a lot of stuff once I officially retire. Not that I'll have that much more free time. It's more of an existential decision. Much though I love new things, I'm starting to think I might have overdone the neology just a tad in recent years. The past has its place, too. And not just as somewhere to run to for comfort. There are always new things to find there. 

If I follow though, and I think I will, expect more posts like this, only much more focused and coherent. Not that it would be possible to be much less focused and coherent. Although I could give it a shot if you like...

And with that, I think I'm going to stop. Absolutely not the post I thought I was going to write, although I guess it's kind of a grab bag in its way. A grab bag of memories and associations. 

Didn't I say I was going to end with a song? I think that's how all this started. And it's not going to be Peter Gabriel, I'll tell you that for nothing! 

Modernism - Perennial

Weirdly appropriate, wouldn't you say? 

Also, 2000 words, ninety minutes, including the edit and an hour off for tea but not counting the digression into exactly when Lloyd Dobler talks about the sport of the future. That's how to do it! 

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.

Farewell Bel

A couple of hours ago, I had a post almost finished. I stopped so we could take Beryl for a walk. When I came back, I checked my feeds before finishing the post and saw on MassivelyOP that Belghast had died.

I'm sure I don't need to clarify to anyone reading this who Belghast was. I probably don't need to explain how he'd been undergoing a difficult course of chemotherapy following a cancer diagnosis. Reportedly, it was complications with that course of treatment that led to his extremely untimely death.

Everyone who's likely to be reading this most likely followed Bel's blog, just like I do. We all learned about everything in his life, good and bad, through his conversational, very open posts. We all know he'd had the worst of years, with his wife dying suddenly and unexpectedly and then his own illness appearing.

But I imagine most of us were confident he'd get through all these very bad times and come out the other side, still Bel. Still himself. Still positive, forward-looking, optimistic, ready to give life the benefit even if it didn't seem to want to cut him much slack.

I knew from his posts that he was struggling with his chemo routine. I know from experience how difficult chemo can be like although my own experience was a lot milder than his. But I also know how unpredictable it can be, filling yourself with poisons week after week. Sometimes very bad things happen.

I had my own brush with death thanks to complications with chemo, as documented here on this blog. It's such a terrible shame Bel didn't survive his own to tell us all about the experience on his blog, too.

He would have, of course. He was a fearless examiner of his own life. He talked about all kinds of issues, practical, medical, emotional and personal on what was supposed to be a gaming blog. He was a core influence on my own move to make this blog about more than just games, although his willingness to share far exceeded my own.

But then Bel was ever the sharer. He tried to help wherever he could and he led always by example. His influence has been both deep and wide.

I knew Bel from his blog and also from Blaugust, of course, but he was very active in all kinds of social media and in gaming communities. He was always willing to talk to new people and turn them into friends, even though he didn't always find socializing easy, something he often mentioned on his blog. 

A lot of people knew Bel. A lot of people are going to miss him. No-one's going to forget him easily, not least because his legacy will live on.

According to Roger, Blaugust is going ahead. I'm absolutely certain that's how Bel would have wanted it. I'm sure everyone will have plenty to say about the inspirational figure who started the whole thing when it rolls around again next month. 

For now, though, I'll leave it at that. There's only so much you can say when something like this happens. I just hope someone's looking after Bel's cats. He really loved those cats. 

Things To Do On A Hot And Sunny Day

Well, it turns out the problem with my PC I was talking about on Monday may not have been anything to do with Neverness To Everness after all. I logged out of EverQuest II yesterday and the same thing happened, only this time I couldn't get the machine to wake up again. 

I spent most of this morning trying every fix Gemini, reddit and YouTube could suggest, including but not limited to reseating the ram, swapping it around, reseating the GPU, changing cables, changing monitors and removing and replacing the CMOS battery. Nothing had the slightest effect. 

So here I am, blogging from my old PC, which works fine (Fingers crossed, touch wood...) It's still on Windows 10 but I'm good for security updates until October, when all support ends, so it'll do me until I either get the other repaired or replaced. It's still under warranty but it's back-to-base of course, which is pain. I've submitted a request so we'll see how that goes.

The only real drawback of (Temporarily.) reverting to the old PC is that it won't run Neverness To Everness. I'm a bit surprised because it ran Wuthering Waves flawlessly and I wouldn't have thought there was that much difference. I think it's one of those annoying hard-coded blocks, where the launcher checks the exact specs of the machine and refuses to go on if they don't meet the minimum. I'd much rather they just let me try it and find out. I've run plenty of games perfectly well on machines that didn't meet minimum spec before.

Actually, I just googled (Yay! Live blogging!) and it isn't that at all. Apparently NTE does run on sub-standard hardware, so I need to look into why it's not doing it on mine. 

It'll be a shame if I have to stop playing for a while, not only because I was really enjoying it but because I was up-to-date, for once. I've finished all the main story quests that were in the game at launch and I was ready to start on whatever comes with the new update, Dreamwalk Corridor, which lands on June 3. 

And the live blogging continues... I looked into it and NTE runs on Google Play Games for PC, which I have installed on this old machine already although I don't think I've ever used it. And i'm not using it now, either.

I tried it and it told me I wasn't entitled to play games with Google because I don't have hardware virtualization enabled. Also, while it was pointing out my deficiencies, it told me my graphics drivers were out of date.

I just updated those the other day on the new machine and when I swapped to this one I also moved the good graphics card across so I knew where to go and which ones to get. I did that and then looked up how to enable hardware virtualization, which requires going into BIOS and flicking a switch.

I powered down and restarted and... nothing. Well, something. I got as far as the Windows logo, then a spinning circle and then nothing. I tried doing that a few times until the fun wore off, then I tried booting into Safe Mode and that didn't work either because there didn't seem to be any such option.

I did manage to get into the BIOS, though, by accident, so since I was there anyway, I enabled hardware virtualization. Then I got on the laptop and looked up how to enter Safe Mode now there's no sign of it at boot-up. It's a good job there are three PCs in the house, isn't it? (Actually, I think there at least five that work. Well, four now, I guess...)

I followed the instructions on how to get to Safe Mode, which are ludicrously complicated these days. The walkthrough is literally a 12-step program, which is what you're going to need if you try and fix your own computer problems. At the 11th step, whoever wrote the list whispered an aside ("Isn't this so much easier than pressing F8 on start-up?") Litotes and irony! Gosh-wow! They really must have been pissed.

Anyway, at least it worked. I was able to get in and roll the video drivers back to the last ones. You know, the ones that worked. 

And now I'm wondering if that could have been the problem with the new PC. When did Forza Horizon 6 come out? 19 May. I have a feeling I updated my GeForce drivers the same day, although not for that reason. Which would have been about the time I started having problems...

Tempted though I am to open the cases and swap everything around again just to find out for certain that it wasn't the reason, I have a better idea. I'll stick an old Radeon card in there instead and see if that works. It's not going to use the GeForce drivers so it should, if the drivers were the problem. Hang on...

Nah. Wasn't that. Never thought it was, really. The PC also has integrated graphics that don't use Nvidia drivers as far as I know and they weren't working either.  Still, nice to be sure.

Getting back to the main plot, once I was able to get in again, I went back to Google Play Games to get NTE and bloody Google told me it still wouldn't let me play because my CPU wasn't up to the job. Well screw you, Google! Just because it's, like, a decade old...

It's looking like no Neverness To Everness for me until I get my PC fixed or replaced but the good news is I just got confirmation that the company I bought the PC from is happy to look at it under warranty.  Even if they can fix it, I very much doubt they'll do it in time for the big NTE update, especially since I don't even have the boxes to send it in yet. They want me to send it back in two boxes, one inside the other, assuming I didn't keep the original packaging, which of course I didn't.

As it happens, I did keep the box. It was a nice, big, solid one and I thought it might come in useful for something but luckily it hasn't so it's just sitting there, waiting to be used. Believe it or not, though, I don't also have a second, slightly smaller box to go inside it or indeed a second, slightly larger one tp put it in. I'll have to get one or the other before I give a date and time for the courier to collect it.

And that was how I spent my day. Aren't computers fun? 

Luckily, it was only the second-hottest of the year, after yesterday's record-breaking hottest Spring day ever. (33C in the shade in our back garden. I took a theromemeter out and measured it. Don't tell me I don't know how to have a good time!) Nothing I like better than doing several hours of fiddly tech stuff with sweat dripping off my nose into the electrics...

For the time being, I imagine there'll be a pause in posts about Neverness To Everness, which will probably come as a relief to some readers. On the other hand, they might be replaced by posts about Wuthering Waves, if I decide to get my anime fix there instead for a while, so don't get too comfortable.

Or I might just play EQII for a bit. I was doing some things there before NTE knocked me off course. At least my old PC can run that one. Suck on that, Google Play Games!  

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

Three images from the AI-generated suggested prompts I use every day to get my daily done at NightCafe. I never even look at the details beyond checking if there's some kind of animal involved and if there's neon or cyberpunk or noir in the description. I also never change the model so I guess it's whatever I used the last time I cared. Since I'm burning up the planet making these things, I figure I might as well get some use out of them. 

And they are quite pretty. Particularly the fox. I really like that fox, with his waistcoat and his weak left eye. It's not his fault he's artificial...