Why Am I Now Getting Google Analytics Ads?

Seriously.

Email received as of September 8, 2026.

I don't get it.

I've not had a blip of email from Google Analytics --aside from the rare Google Notifications email-- in ages, and now within the past couple of weeks I've begun getting semi-regular spam from Google itself.

Email received as of September 3, 2026.

This is the sort of thing that appears when a post --typically a Meme Monday-- gets an inordinate amount of clicks. Let's be real here: those clicks are most likely web crawlers and LLM bots and they just happened upon this blog. It's not as if I suddenly gained 10k readers or something. Yes, Google Analytics shows a bit of a boost at the beginning of September, but like I said, it looks like it's going to be pretty temporary:

Screencap of Google Analytics' active user
trend for the past 90 days as of September 14, 2026.

As you can see, it's already reverting to the mean, so I'm not exactly shocked here. Still, why all the sudden spam from Google Analytics like the email I led with, anyway?

I figure it has to be that the results of two weeks worth of 80k+ users has something to do with it, and that Google's algorithm has decided I'm worth "investing" in.

I did hop on the Google Search Console just to see if that translated into Google finally acknowledging that PC exists as a Blogger blog, but...

Google Search Console Indexing Chart
as of September 14, 2026.

Google still hasn't indexed anything from PC lately. However, note the sudden spike on August 10, 2026. I went from 1031 to 2646 pages "Not Indexed". I'm not sure what to make about that, but there was one change to the environment: 

Google Search Console Sitemap Info
as of September 14, 2026.

I periodically re-submit the sitemap.xml that Blogger automatically generates, just to see if one part of the vast Google Empire can interact with another. And whaddya know, this time it actually read the XML file! It may not have all of the pages on PC discovered, but it's a lot better than what I have had in the past:

Google Search Console as of January 17, 2026.

We'll see if anything comes of all this rigamarole, but I'm still confused as to the big question: Why now?

The only reasonable explanation is that PC suddenly became big enough to register, but that just doesn't feel right to me. I'm more likely to believe that the wheels of Google just suddenly aligned and spat out some weird results. I'm not about to ascribe the sudden interest to anything I did, since I've been doing the same thing for years. 

So... Thank you, LLM bots... I guess...

***

There has been one other weird development that I wanted to mention and see if anybody else has noticed:

PC Front Page as of
September 14, 2026.

It may not look that interesting to you, but I noticed right before I left this past weekend that Bhagpuss of Inventory Full hadn't put out a new post in several days. Given that Bhagpuss is quite prolific, I found that quite odd. At first I thought "Well, he probably went on vacation," but when I looked on his blog he quite obviously had more recent posts:

Inventory Full's front page as of September 14, 2026.

I thought that maybe there was a problem with his feed, but then I noticed that all of the blogs on my Front Page that use Blogger hadn't been updated in over a week as well (see above). 

And yes, I did check several of them, so I'd need not bore you with extra screencaps.

So yeah, there's an issue with Blogger where the feed isn't getting updated. Is that happening with anybody else?

Meme Monday: Missing Out Memes

Well, I'm back.

How's things going?

What's been happening? Anything interesting?

Temperatures up in Milwaukee were really warm for mid-September, low-to-mid 80F/26C or so, but by the time Sunday morning rolled around, the temperatures were becoming more seasonal (60F/15.5C) for the late morning. And rain rolled in just as we were leaving, so we narrowly avoided bad weather.

There was at one point during the trip that I wondered if it were more cost effective to fly up there and back rather than drive, but I doubt that the price is worth it. Really, avoiding Chicago traffic is the primary reason to fly up to Milwaukee, but it wasn't that bad this time around.

But anyway, I figured for this Meme Monday, I'd focus on the other things that happened this past weekend, and the consequences of being away from all that.

Such as Week 1 of the NFL season. (Go Bengals!)

Tee Higgins makes a catch while a Tampa Bay
Buccaneers defender is hanging onto him. From WCPO.

Hey, I'll take a victory, after baseball's Cincinnati Reds were abjectly terrible this year and our MLS soccer team, FC Cincinnati is fading horribly down the stretch.

This does bring up the question: what about people who are missing out on what they love when they're doing other things?

Hence this Meme Monday.

Okay, I thought this amusing. From Facebook.

Whenever I'm in that situation, I shudder.
From Cheezburger.

And then there are days/weeks/months where
I've totally missed out on things in game worlds.
From 9GAG.

Sometimes Marvin Gaye just knows what
to say. From Cheezburger.

And then I'm missing out by not paying attention.
From Reddit.

Checking Out

And it seems such a waste of time

If that's what it's all about

Mama, if that's movin' up

Then I'm movin' out

--from Movin' Out by Billy Joel

By the time you read this, I'll be on my way to Milwaukee to spend a weekend up there visiting my oldest and her partner.

I had to explain to the members of my amateur
radio club that Ham Radio Outlet having a store
in Milwaukee had absolutely NOTHING to do
with our trip. (Honest!)

We'd set this weekend up before I even realized it was also the weekend of BlizzCon, so I guess I'll be out of the loop regarding what'll be going on over in California. Probably for the best, if you ask me, considering I expect this to be the last BlizzCon for a few years, if ever. 

Microsoft isn't a company that will throw "extra" money into brand building unless corporate purchasing is involved, and even their ongoing Copilot debacle didn't get much in the way of actual face-to-face interaction with their corporate partners beyond the C-suite level. The costs involved to put on a BlizzCon, from renting the convention space to all of the physical items, come straight out of the XBox budget, and you can imagine that Asha Sharma isn't thrilled about losing money for a physical convention when they could simply give you some digital assets and do a virtual dog-and-pony show instead.*

So, if there's anything prediction-related about this year's BlizzCon from me, it'll be that you'll not see another physical BlizzCon for quite a while after this one.

Oh, and I'd also expect another Dan Olson video in a few months, especially if there's another debacle like last time.

***

Wilhelm Arcturus had a post that provides you a link that creates your very own BlizzCon Keynote Bingo Card, based off of a bunch of potential predictions that he inputted into the site.

Here's a graphic of the Bingo Card I got when I clicked on the link:

Generated on September 6, 2026.

I did print out a hard copy just for reference, so we'll see how I do when I find out the various summaries of the Keynote Speech.

What, you expect me to listen to the replay of the Keynote Speech? I haven't listened to a Keynote speech for anything --no matter what convention or topic-- in at least a decade, and I likely will continue to do this until Jensen Huang stops wearing his leather jacket.

As far as the rest of BlizzCon is concerned, take a gander at the Graphic on the Battle.Net Main Page, snipped for this post:

Here's the BlizzCon 2026 logo on the Battle.Net Main Page.
Looks like (in clockwise order from the left): Diablo, Starcraft,
Hearthstone (judging by the cards), and Warcraft.
Missing: Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm.

Pretty safe to say that these four franchises will be represented at this BlizzCon. Also missing from the above: Arthas, Xal'atath, and Lilith.

*Wizards of the Coast, and their corporate masters Hasbro, haven't really done much in Gen Con for several years since it's a lot cheaper to farm out management of their floor space and whatnot to third party companies. So, beyond the presentation they put on annually for D&D, WotC doesn't have that much of an official presence at Gen Con these days. It still feels kind of weird to be saying that, given that Gen Con was founded by D&D co-creator Gary Gygax back in the 60s, and it was officially owned and operated by TSR (and its descendants) for decades until it was sold to WotC founder Peter Adkison in 2002.

More Surprise Email

Hey, did you know there's some convention going on this week?

Oh, sure, there was some political convention that happened in Dallas the past few days, but I'm pretty sure that there was something out in Anaheim, California. 

Oh look, someone sent me a nice email reminder...

As of 11:50 PM EST on September 10, 2026.

Yes, I too can watch BlizzCon! All I have to do is hook my Twitch account or my YouTube account to Battle.net.

And here I thought they were going to use Discord, since they were wanting me to connect Battle.net to Discord a short while ago.

Was There a Full Moon Out?

I had a distinctly weird experience the other day.

I'd gotten on Neve and was mainly working on things such as leveling Tailoring when I figured that I had enough time that evening that I could try to squeeze in an instance. And by saying "squeeze in an instance", we're talking an hour or two's worth of an instance, such as Blackrock Depths or Sunken Temple. Since I was relatively close to Sunken Temple at the time, I decided to try to get into a group for that. 

Sure enough, being a Mage meant Neve didn't wait long for an invite.

As I was the only one nearby, it was a few moments before I arrived at the Summoning Stone and waited for someone else to appear so we could summon the rest.

I waited.

And I waited.

I also spent some time dancing with a nearby Night Elf.

I took a look at the map, and everybody else was scattered throughout and... They weren't moving.

"I'm at the stone," I announced. "I just need another person here and we'll summon the rest."

Again no response. And no movement on the map.

Finally one person began moving on the map, and they got to Booty Bay, and... That person dropped.

Then two others dropped.

"WTF?!" The remaining person asked.

"I have no idea," I replied. "It was as if nobody wanted to actually travel and they were waiting for somebody else to do it."

It was at that point I just made an executive decision to not bother with a dungeon that night and just spent the evening crafting and questing instead.

And flying. Can't forget that.

Meme Monday: Book Memes

This past weekend my wife and I ended up at a couple of bookstores, at whom I found several items I took photos of and shared with my Questing Buddy. She's a Romantasy fan, so I knew that she'd find them interesting.

You get the idea.

Oh, you want to know what I found?

The historian in me had a field day when I discovered this...

He also has a new book out about
Bablyon, but I'm going to wait for the
paperback edition...

Anyway, that got me to thinking about book memes. I mean, it's technically Meteorological Fall, so I could get away with Fall Memes, but I think Book Memes is a better choice today.

Here's a counterpoint: have you READ HP Lovecraft's
works? From Pinterest.

This is why I don't read George RR Martin.
From @jkcomics.

Ha! I'm absolutely sure that when I finally
start reading the Fourth Wing books, my
Questing Buddy will have this expression on
her face. From Kindlepreneur.

Um, I need bigger walls first.
From Pinterest.

I've mastered this look. From Instagram.

I have been there, only that I reach that point
in the novel around 4 AM for some reason.
From Thunder Dungeon.

Saturday Morning DIY

Saturday mornings are my crafting time.

No, I don't mean crafting in an MMO or any other video game, but in real life.

After I'd outgrown the Saturday Morning Cartoons as a kid and sleeping in until noon for my college years, Saturdays became another sort of video-related ritual.

Our local PBS station had the following television shows on Saturday mornings back in the 90s:

•  8:30 AM - The Woodwright's Shop
•  9:00 AM - This Old House
•  9:30 AM - Hometime
• 10:00 AM - The New Yankee Workshop

For a guy who liked to work with his hands, it was like mana from heaven. 

I'd sit in our apartment, newly married, and watch these shows and dream about being able to work on a house of my own.* Or maybe I'd dream about radio related projects, or even what we'd now consider to be cosplay or renaissance fair related projects.

Yes, I'm the sort of person who likes to do things with their hands.

Those days of the 90s are long gone, but in their own way my Saturday morning craft binging still continues. The only difference between now and then is that I can no longer watch This Old House --the projects are far too expensive for me to dream about-- Hometime's last show aired in 2016, The Woodwright's Shop's last show aired in 2017, and Norm Abrams has since retired from all of the shows he helped shepherd: This Old House, Ask This Old House, and The New Yankee Workshop.

Enter YouTube.

For starters, the late Russ Morash of WGBH Boston and the legendary producer of many classic shows** created a YouTube home for all of The New Yankee Workshop episodes. They've been able to upload a ton of them, upscaling them and utilizing AI to correct and improve the visuals, so that they're in as good of a condition that they can be at this time. Some of the videos were on videotape that was in poor condition, so the work performed on them is quite amazing.

The episode shown above was the inspiration for a lot of my feverish work on what a grill cart of my own should look like. I will be making some changes to the design, notably the wheels so that I don't necessarily have to lift up the cart any time I want to move it around, but the basic design will remain the same.

There are other creators on YouTube who regularly post on Saturdays (or Fridays so that I watch them on a Saturday morning) who scratch that "maker itch" that I have. People such as Shara McCuiston of Shara Woodshop Diaries...

And Brad Rodriguez of Fix This Build That...

both of whom give off real engineering vibes to me when I watch their episodes. 

You get the idea here: I get some interesting ideas as well as some tips about how to create things from a wide range of creators and topics. Shout out to Bernadette Banner for her videos that are more inspiring and amusing than anything else, because I don't have even a tenth of her design and seamstress skills...

And to Max Miller who intersects his interest with history with his interest in cooking with Tasting History...

*Of course, once you own a house you end up doing a lot more involuntary work than actual projects meant to improve the house, but I was in blissful ignorance of that reality.

**Which includes Julia Child's The French Chef and Crockett's Victory Garden.