The Attraction of the New

Have you ever had that urge to start a new game, but you were reluctant to pull the trigger because your lack of impulse control would mean that you'd spend all available time on it?

Yeah, that's me.

Oh, I have some impulse control, it's that the interest in the game would override whatever I do have until that initial 20+ hours are out of the way. 

Then there are games where you make a poor decision very early in the game and you pay for it hours later when things are a lot more difficult to course correct.

Like this game.

For some reason, I pick a starting location that by the time the city gets to a pretty decent size --typically when you need post-secondary education-- I suddenly realize that my starting location was really crappy. 

I guess that means I'm like just any other urban planner out there.

That "poor starting location" is not confined to traditional city simulators, but also those in another world.

What made me think that starting a colony
on Mars while surrounded by mountains
was a good idea?

That screencap, from a Surviving Mars game from earlier this year, highlights my lack of planning. I look at the mountains and think "Ooo, pretty!" or maybe "Ooo, resources!" but it never works out that way. It just ends up being a royal pain in the ass to maneuver and build around. Gameplay like that emphasizes that people who do this for a living and have spent years trying to figure out where to build a base on Mars (or the Moon, for that matter) are much better at it than me.

Oh well. I suppose there's always playing Civ V for a change...

It could be worse, I suppose.

#Blaugust2026

Meme Monday: Saved Game Memes

Yes, I play MMOs, which technically have no "saved game" feature. However, I do play a lot of other video games that are not only single player but also allow you to save your progress. 

(Just because I can knock out a game of Age of Empires or Civ IV in one day doesn't mean that I'm not familiar with saving my progress.)

Of course, saving your progress and coming back to it later have their own issues. Hence this Meme Monday.

Of course you did, Joey. 
From Reddit (and Friends).

Yes, this is me. From Pinterest.

Again, this is me. From Reddit.

This happened once in a game of TI-99 4/A's
Tunnels of Doom. However, I was the older brother
and it was I accidentally overwrote my younger
brother's save. From Memedroid.

Yeah, I automatically think that this is gonna be bad.
Video games have conditioned me to think this way.
From Pinterest.

Wait, what?
From Thunder Dungeon.

#Blaugust2026

Do We All Use Quest Logs?

I sometimes wonder just how much real life mimics video games. Or novels, for that matter.

Sure, there's the obvious comparison, that the latter two are not reality, and reality is closer to a stream of consciousness than the latter two are*, but I often wonder whether we view life as more of a series of tasks just to make things manageable.

I suppose the most obvious form of that is how games and stories --particularly in Fantasy-- emphasize the quest as basically a task manager.

From Matthew Willis and swordscomic.com.
Also from the BBC.

When I used to keep track of my work activities in a daily calendar** about 30 years ago, I never looked at it as a "Quest Log", but in it's own way it was. Even today, while I don't keep a formal to-do list, I run over all of the things I'm supposed to do in a given day and set about doing them. You know, things like "do a load of the laundry", "cut the grass", and "write a blog post"***.

Okay, cutting the grass might not happen since we're supposed to have rain today, but the other two are getting done.

Is this us attempting to make sense of the world and cutting down to easily serviceable tasks, or did we train ourselves to do this because we looked at what we did in video games and books and thought "You know what, we could do something like this in real life!" Either way, I think Franklin Planner is making a lot of money on this.

From Wikipedia on Franklin Planner.

*Although my reading of Mrs. Dalloway for an English seminar at university might beg to differ about the "stream of consciousness" part.

**I had so many things to do in a day, I was lucky if I got about half of them done in about 12 hours.

***That's mainly a "during Blaugust" thing. Admittedly, I start writing after 9 PM when I remember that I ought to write a post.

#Blaugust2026

Happy Hour at the Dungeon

It's kind of a tradition in MMO group content to find someone who's been imbibing some alcoholic beverages. I mean, it's typically an after hours activity, and if you're at home (or at an internet cafe) and you're of the right age, why not have a drink or two?

Unfortunately, it's also a tradition for people to over imbibe in group content.

There was one time back in January 2022 where our TBC Classic raid team was raiding Serpentshrine Cavern, and we were testing out a new Main Tank. He seemed competent enough, and while I could hear the occasional glug of a drink, I didn't think anything of it. I mean, I used to have a beer when I raided before my hospital stay, so why not someone else? Well, right before we were to take on Lady Vashj, we'd prepped for the pull and.... Nothing. The "new" Main Tank didn't pull. He didn't respond to our calls in Discord.

He had passed out right before the pull of the last boss in the raid.

Oops. 

We quickly scrambled and to a replacement MT to show, but no, we didn't kill Vashj on that raid. 

Oh well.

Anyway, I bring this up because last night I was taking a break and goofing around on the Anniversary servers, and I figured I'd get into an instance or two. If nothing else, they ought to be pretty standard runs for a Friday night. 

Have I ever mentioned my naïveté before?

On the first run, there were three guild members: tank, healer, and Enhancement Shaman DPS. The Healer was drunk. And by drunk, I mean "he was doing shots of tequila" drunk. Despite that, we were doing okay, until the latest shots hit his system, about 2/3 of the way through. 

How do I know this? He started speaking of himself in third person. 

At one point, the Shaman had died and I made a quip about reaction times and the Shaman replied saying "I'm laughing so hard I'm crying right now."

People died enough times that someone thankfully dropped a repair bot, so we could repair without our gear breaking.

Still, it was a fun run, if for nothing else that the Healer provided enormous amounts of unintentional comedy.

The second run was a bit different, because the Mage didn't speak English other than "GO" or "YAY" or "SAD" or "HAPPY".* Still, I could tolerate that were it not for the tank being inebriated, so he wasn't being that attentive to the Healer. At one point the Healer specifically said after a boss fight "brb bio", and the tank kept right on going. When the Healer came back and managed to rescue a bad pull, she pointed out she said "brb bio" and tank replied with "we didn't die".

::rolls eyes::

The tank made a couple of other bad judgements in the run, one we recovered from and one... we didn't. Luckily I was on Joan, and therefore I had Soulstoned the Healer just for such an emergency. The Healer then called out the adds that we had on that pull and the tank claimed innocence.  At least that didn't turn out to be a big row, but for certain the Healer split right after the last boss. Can't say I blamed her.

I guess it's a pick your poison sort of situation: if you make people laugh and you're obviously silly about it, that forgives a host of sins. But if you're pushing when there's no reason to, and because you're a bit drunk you're not quite as fast with reflexes as you think you are...

Hey, it wasn't my fault this time!!!

*At the end of the run, I asked for a portal in both English and Spanish, and no bueno.

#Blaugust2026

Amusing Guild Names, 2026 Edition

Here's something I haven't done in quite a while: Funny Guild Names.

I have a bunch of them that I haven't done anything with, and now's as good a time as any to post some of them. (That's the polite way of saying I couldn't schedule a post correctly and it accidentally posted last night instead of today.)

#Blaugust2026

Duck Duck Go Goes Where Google Doesn't

Well, duh.

If you've heard of Duck Duck Go, you know that it has hung its hat on your privacy, whereas Google has prioritized company profits. I've been moving my search more and more over to Duck Duck Go, and one big relief from my end is that DDG does believe that this blog exists:

I even got ahead of the AI Context Parallelism
blog. From August 12, 2026.

That makes me feel pretty good to know that both Bing and DDG know I exist. Alas, Google still thinks I'm a figment of people's imagination:

As of August 12, 2026.

Their AI doesn't even have the correct blog, much less a direct entry to it. Thanks to Atheren for referencing me at least that one time, which is how Google knows there might be something there.

And for completeness, here's Bing's results:

As of August 12, 2026.

Funny how the graphic they have there is a pretty old one about Mass Effect, but hey, at least I'm at the top of the search results.

I've kind of given up trying to understand why the supposed "best search engine evah" can't find a blog that's been around since 2009 and has over 1800 published posts. I guess they want money from me to suddenly "improve" my search results --I know that Bing does-- which would effectively turn Google into the 2020's version of Yahoo. You know, that's not exactly a comparison I'd be proud of if I were Google.

#Blaugust2026

Teaching That Old Dog (Again)

I will say this about AI: it's driven me to learning a new programming language for the first time in 30 years.

In O'Reilly We Trust, which I guess
makes me an old fart (tm).

I know Python has been around since the early 90s, but when I was learning Perl and C++ in the mid-90s for my then software QA job, it seemed to have no really big use for me. In the late 90s Java was the new hotness --despite how crappy the memory leaks were-- and Python only really took off in the 2000s when my job utilized Perl and shell scripting, so... Python wasn't needed.

And now, with Claude Code from Anthropic being the new thing, I have to learn Python so I can perform proper code reviews when necessary. Apologies to all of those YouTube sponsorships from Boot.Dev, but I'm going to learn it how I taught myself Perl: reading a book published by O'Reilly* and figuring it out myself. I might not have code to review, but I'm sure that'll be how I'll end up learning it: by looking at code to see what it does and whether it does what we want it to do.

So... thanks, AI? 

But could you at least have given me an extra year of puttering around with amateur radio before you exploded like you have in 2026?

*Mine was Learning Perl by Randal L. Schwartz, 1993. Yes, the First Edition:

Here it is in all it's glory.
It's still holding up fairly well for
a well-loved 30 year old book.

#Blaugust2026