Oh, For Pete's Sake, Blogger...

I guess it's too much to hope for Google to stop mucking around with Blogger.

This is what greeted me this morning:

On October 23, 2026.

It takes a certain amount of skill to break everything, I suppose.

And then just like that, it was back to working properly.

EtA: Blogger is now personally messing with me. Just after posting this, it's baaaack....

Alas, BioWare

The news broke today that BioWare is being shut down. 

EA continues it's rather dubious streak of buying game companies, mismanaging them, and then shutting them down, although in this case it took a mountain of debt in the form of a leveraged buyout to do it. 

SWTOR, now being part of Broadsword, has now outlived BioWare. Wow.

***

I can't say I was surprised at the announcement...

From Reddit as of October 21, 2026.

If anything, I'm surprised that BioWare lasted as long as they did, because EA's insistence on trying to turn BioWare into a live services studio pretty much went against their DNA, and their biggest entry into the field, Anthem, became its biggest failure. 

At least you can still find BioWare games out there, such as Beamdog keeping Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 alive, but I also wonder just how much longer the "new" EA will keep the old BioWare games out there. 

Time to Re-engage a Bit

I received an email from The SWTOR team last Friday, and along with a new subscriber reward there was an announcement:

I received this on October 16, 2026.

Hmm. I was wondering when they were going to perform a character name cleanup. 

I'd never had to worry about that sort of thing before, because I'd been subscribed for such a long time, but now I actually had to consider which toons to save.

Luckily for me, there's a simple fix: login to each toon I want to save and that's that.

Yeah, about that "login" part...

I should have gotten a screencap of this, but when I logged into the launcher, it began to upgrade my SWTOR installation. Typically that's no problem these days, as my internet connection is around 600 mbps, far faster than I used to have when I regularly played SWTOR. This time, however, the download from the SWTOR servers slowed to a crawl, and no matter what I did I simply could not make it go any faster.

At that point I accepted my fate, uninstalled SWTOR that I'd downloaded from swtor.com, and signed up for the game on Steam.

THAT installation took all of 5 minutes.

I know these three, at least I think I do, but
the names of the two to either side of Darth Malgus
escape me. This is October 18, 2026.

I logged in and set about accessing all of my toons.

Since I'm now Preferred Status, I get all the "Hey, come back and subscribe!" screens that I simply ignore --Blizzard has trained me well to ignore "Come Back!!!!!" groveling in Retail WoW-- 

Except for the different color schemes and organization,
this feels remarkably like whenever I login to Retail after
what feels to me like a short absence.

Yeah, like this.

but since I'm Preferred, I only get 13 toons maximum per server. Well, let's see what I have to work with:

Oh.

I guess I'm not that alt crazy as I thought.

Sure, Satele Shan sounds like a good place to start...

This was obviously taken after I'd reenabled all of
my toons, but Sreeka was the closest thing I had
to a main back then.

The last time I'd logged in to SWTOR, I was grumbling about the companion pathing issues I had and had used Sreeka as an example at the Nar Shadda spaceport. I was curious if installing the game via Steam had any impact there, and... Kinda? Maybe? I mean, the companion doesn't dither around and do nothing for a while, so there's that. But when they run with you they are obviously slower than you and quickly begin to lag a bit. I'd have to look at Sreeka's gear, but that might be due to a trinket or something else she has, so I'm not about to discount this, but I guess we'll see how things go.

Anyway, I was reminded of something about not being subscribed when I got to my first Trooper:

It used to be that if you weren't a subscriber, you couldn't hide your head slot unless you purchased that ability (or you subscribed). I'm glad to see that I can hide Kiannala's helmet, because I'm not a big fan of helms in game overall. 

Much better.

It took me about 1/2 hour, but I logged into all of my toons and kept most of them. There were a few that I'd gotten to maybe L7 or L16 and stopped playing them, and given that I never got very far I was fine in deleting them. Their names weren't worth keeping around either, so that was fine. 

There was one thing that I found particularly funny, however. Since I'd been using the swtor.com installed version of the game since shortly after its launch, the Steam Achievements kicked into overdrive when I began logging in.

"I dunno, Boss. This guy logged in and it started going
crazy! Should I check his account for something suspicious?"

Not too shabby, logging in once and getting 72% of the achievements unlocked. Good thing I don't keep track of them any more, that's for sure.

So, I've protected my toons for the time being, and I've got some wiggle room as far as new toon creation is concerned. Now, if only SWTOR had "Vanilla" servers, just like they were back in the day, and I'd be set.

Meme Monday: Gamer Cleaning Memes

This past weekend my wife was visiting her parents and our youngest down in Louisville, so I had the place to myself for a couple of days. You'd expect that I'd use that time to play some games or get on the radio --and to be fair I helped working on the radio room and my club's antennas at the Red Cross building on Saturday morning-- but I really spent my time cleaning around the house.

Maybe some people think "seasonal cleaning" and immediately think of "Spring Cleaning", but for me I do a major cleaning weekend every season, so every 3 months or so. It helps to keep the worst of the dust at bay, and it also means that the curtains and whatnot get a good scrubbing so they look refreshed.

So, in honor of my past weekend, here's some cleaning memes with a gaming twist...

Fair point, but I also play Stardew Valley. So...
From Quickmeme.

I honestly don't get it. When I get in a cleaning mood,
I'm good for multiple hours. From Memedroid.

The best part is that chores are done.
From Thunder Dungeon.

You just kind of sigh and just try to reach
some inner peace. And you let it slide for a day
or two. From Bored Panda.

This is the reason why videogames
have soundtracks: to make the mundane
feel epic. From Bored Panda.

Of course there'd be a Thanos here. After all,
he performed the largest cleanup in history.
From Cheezburger.

Correcting an Oversight

I somehow missed the passing of David Clayton-Thomas this past June.

For a lot of people of my generation, they may not remember the name, but they'll remember his voice on a couple of iconic songs from the end of 1968.

Yes, he's by far the most well-known singer of Blood Sweat & Tears.

David was also living proof in the power of music to inspire and better yourself. He was raised in an abusive household and ran away at the age of 14 to escape his alcoholic father, living on the streets and often finding himself in jail. While in reformatory he came into possession of a guitar and taught himself to play. In the early 60s, while surviving in Toronto, he managed to attract attention with his singing voice. He spent time playing with Blues players, including John Lee Hooker, and fronting some minor bands, but caught a huge break in 1968 when Judy Collins heard him sing and told a friend in Blood Sweat & Tears about him. BS&T had just released their first album but had suddenly had 3 members quit on them, so after a short audition Clayton-Thomas joined the band along with 3 others.

The album they released afterward, the self-titled Blood, Sweat & Tears, was an absolute smash. Between the first two songs above and And When I Die, BS&T dominated 1969's record charts in the US. 

My dad loved Spinning Wheel --or rather the single version of the song-- so I knew of the song since I was little, but I'd never heard the entire album until recently. To my mind, it is so unlike many other pop albums of the era I could see how it simply exploded on the scene. From a version of Erik Satie's Trois Gymnopedies to Billie Holiday's God Bless the Child to the Motown sound of You've Made Me So Very Happy, the band charted their own path. 

David played and sang well into his 70s, as this video of him at Eastman Theatre in Rochester, NY shows:

Godspeed, David Clayton-Thomas. He was 84.

Not Your Typical Branding

Of all the crossover branding with video games these days, I certainly didn't expect this one.

I was on Curse Forge the some weeks ago, updating my addons as I usually do, when I caught an unexpected advertisement:

No, not the ESPN one.

For those who aren't familiar with the Lodge brand, they make cast iron cooking pots and skillets. No, I don't have a Lodge cast iron skillet myself; mine I'd inherited from my grandmother, I can't recall the brand offhand but hers was cast in ~1954.

I'd forgotten this screencap --work has a way of doing that-- but I stumbled upon it now.

Still, World of Warcraft branded Skillets? If nothing else, it opens a new area in video game branding. And yes, this link to the Lodge website proves it legitimate:

As of October 16, 2026. I took this screencap
for when the offer ends.

Typical video game branding is for items such as soft drinks, snacks, pizza, and even alcohol. But actual cookware? Wow indeed.

Third Verse Same As The First Two

I swear that Murphy must love those of us on Blogger.

The other night, I was getting ready to log and head to bed when I noticed something odd: the listing for my MMO Blogroll feed was messed up again:

As of 11:50 PM EST on October 13, 2026.

See all those regularly updated blogs unfairly shunted to the bottom of the pile? Yeah, I couldn't explain it either, but when I clicked on one of the links I got basically a bunch of HTML garbage, as if Blogger couldn't understand what the feed was. 

Anyway, by during the day yesterday it certainly looked like things were back to normal, except for poor ol' Wilhelm, who had somehow avoided the issues last time but was stuck in hell this time:

From 5:00 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

I Have Touched the Sky has been broken since forever, so I discounted that one, but I did check and verify that The Ancient Gaming Noob has a brand new post as of October 14:

As of 5:01 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

Ironically enough, both the old post found in my Blogroll and the current post have to do with Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, only 14 years apart. Wilhelm's post encapsulates my opinions of Garriott quite well, so I don't need to hash it out here. I will say, however, that there must have been something in the water at Origin Systems, because both Garriott and Chris Roberts of Star Citizen have what I will politely describe as gone off their rocker over the years. I guess you could call them both a case study in people who have come into too much money and 'street cred' far before they were mature enough to handle it, but I digress.

I guess I was going to have to wait for Wilhelm's blog to be properly read by Blogger, until I was perusing the blogroll and noted something odd:

As of 6:30 PM EST on October 14, 2026.
Yes, I went back and got this screencap after I'd
started writing this.

Knowing Shintar and her current interest in WoW Forever, I didn't trust that that was her most recent post. Sure enough, when I clicked on her blog, I found that yes, she'd made a new post today:

As of 6:12 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

So yeah, something is up once again. In the meantime, Blogger has been active in other areas:

I noticed this early in the day on October 14, 2026.

I read the notice, and it was all about adult content, non-consensual adult content, scams, hate speech, etc. My first thought while reading this was "You mean to tell me this wasn't there before now?" Better late than never, I guess, although in today's world some people might read this rather reasonable announcement and cry "Censorship!" or worse, "Woke!" But that's the world we live in today in 2026.

Stay tuned, peeps, because I'm sure this whole situation will change in a few days. Again.

***

And just as I was prepping this entry to post in the morning, this happened:

As of 7:06 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

Yeah, I don't get it. I mean, it's a feed, and all you have to do is poll it when you reload the blog and you get the latest post. Why did it take so long for Blogger to realize it was there? And still no sign of Wilhelm's blog either.

There are days when I wish that this was 1998, because at least the hypertext was simpler and I knew that if something broke I could fix it. But now, I'm completely dependent upon a company whom is little better than Microsoft at rolling out patches for a platform that I'm not quite convinced that they want to keep supporting.

***

And guess what? The issue on last night HAPPENED AGAIN.

Taken on 11:45 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

This time at least I took a screencap of what happens when I clicked on a link or two, such as Priest With a Cause:

Taken on 11:49 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

And here's Kaylriene's Blog:

Taken on 11:49 PM EST on October 14, 2026.

About the only thing I can say is that if you hover over the blog entry on the problematic links, it definitely shows the /feed hyperlink, not the actual blog hyperlink. On the properly working links, you see the actual blog URL address. How Blogger is screwing this up after well over a decade of stability is a complete unknown to me.

/sigh

Meme Monday: Quiet Memes

There are times when I want peace and quiet. 

That doesn't always happen, of course, but a guy can dream. Sometimes, however, I find the most peace and quiet in an MMO, where you'd think that is most likely NOT the case. I mean, the acronym means Massively Multiplayer Online, but hey, it happens. Especially when you do what I do and go against the grain.

From SrGrafo, via Reddit.

If you play it just right, you can find
some peace. From Instagram.

It needs to be said that this is merely
an illusion. Having been on the progression
train, I know that this peace only lasts
for a few moments at best. From YouTube.

Sometimes the peace and quiet finds you
standing in awe someplace for the first time.
From Instagram.

And then there's this image. (Minus the
murloc. Come on, don't ruin the feeling!)
From Facebook.

What am I Doing at 5 AM on a Saturday (Again)?

Who, me? Oh, not much...

This was around 7 AM. 7-ish.

Today was the morning of the Queen Bee Half Marathon, and I along with 40 or so other hams were providing communications for the staff.

As this was my first marathon, I was grouped up with our club's president, and I carpooled with her to our station (shown above) at the designated time. Since I was driving to her place first, that meant I was up at 5 AM to have an early breakfast, get dressed, and get out the door with my equipment by 6 AM.

I think I'm going to have to stop by this
coffee shop for a visit soon. The coffee
smelled delicious.

The water station was manned by kids from one of the nearby high schools, and we were joined soon after our arrival by spectators wanting to cheer on the participants. 

Our presence was there to not only contact Net Control for assistance --medical or otherwise-- should it be needed, but to also let Net Control know who the lead runners were so others would be on the lookout farther down the race course. Our water station was one of the earlier ones, so I expected people to be clumped together once they reached us.

To my surprise, that wasn't what happened.

The lead runners were moving at a really fast pace and were already well ahead of the main body of runners by the time they passed us, but eventually the field swelled. I could have easily taken dozens of pictures, but these two will do:

These were some of the first runners after the lead
pack came through.

Once the runners had mostly passed by, the race
walkers were behind them, moving at a steady
pace by themselves.

Typically the Queen Bee draws between 4000-6000 participants*, and that jives with what I saw this morning.

As far as incidents goes, they thankfully were few and far between, so it was an enjoyable morning for the two of us. After the sweep bus came through (following the last of the participants) and we were discharged, the a few of us hams grabbed a mid-morning breakfast at a local restaurant before heading home.

Okay Pippin, you win. Yes, it was a Second Breakfast.
From Pinterest, but really, it's from Fellowship of the Ring.

So... That's what I was up to.

*There's both a Half Marathon and a 4-Miler race, so unofficially there were 3174 who completed the half marathon and 2209 who completed the 4-Miler, which makes it about 5383 total. There were a few hand cyclists on the course as well, and they started (and finished) ahead of the official Half Marathon. Our station would have seen both the Half Marathon and the 4-Miler crowds, and given that not everybody who started was able to finish, we probably saw even more than the people who actually finished.

Being Reminded What My Age Actually Is, Part Whatever

In case I didn't know I was getting old, my body reminded me of that this past weekend.

On Sunday, with the weather finally settled into a more traditional October sunny day, I decided I was going to work on my outside antenna a bit.

Now, to set the scene properly, I'd already planned on driving a ground rod into the side of the house where the antenna would reside, and I bought some 6 gauge solid copper ground wire to bond it to a ground rod on the back of the house. I'm eventually going to bond it to the house ground on the south side of the house, but unfortunately the fiberoptic cable that brings my internet (and phone service) into the house happened to have been run right on top of where the ground rod lay buried underground. 

The PVC pipe for the fiber line is on the left, the one for
electrical is on the right, and in the middle is an oxidized
ground line that connects directly to the ground rod
(buried) directly beneath it.

Sometimes you can't make this stuff up.

Anyway, I decided I'll deal with that house ground another day, but I could bond the two other grounds together this past Sunday.

To do that, I needed to run the ground wire along the edge of the house, under the deck and the raised porch, and then I could use the clamps I'd bought at Lowe's to finish the job. 

Easy peasy, right?

It may sound easy, but that involved me crawling around under the deck and the porch for upwards of an hour.

The amount of vertical space I had to work with was between 2 to 3 feet (2/3 to 1 meter), and most of that large end was under the porch section, where ironically enough most of the rocks strewn about the ground were as well.

I hope you're not claustrophobic.

So I didn't really have a lot of room to move over things, such as the PVC pipe there that redirects the sump pump from simply emptying out there under the deck* to a spot beyond the deck. I could have brought a screwdriver with me to disconnect the pipe and remove it, but to be honest that was going to be more trouble than it was worth. 

When I snuck under there, I quickly discovered it was still damp. The right side of my clothes were soaked before I'd gotten very far --I'm a lefty, so my right side was on the ground-- and then to avoid the pair of center beams I had to crawl to the left and then up toward where the wire had gotten stuck. 

No, I did not bring a smartphone while I was under the deck; the rocks would have destroyed it. 

I was able to free up the wire and shoved it forward to where it then reached the porch portion, and I had to exit and then head up that way.

Sure, I love rocks, but this is a bit much. Plus it's broken
pieces of concrete, so likely from a slab that was once
here. Just a guess, but given what I saw probably accurate.

If I thought the rocks I'd climbed over on the deck portion hurt, the porch side said "Hold my beer."

Also, I found some very unusual items there under the porch:

Trust me, they're there.

The item on the left is the remains of a small individual-sized yogurt cup which you can make out fairly well, but the one on the right... I began crawling closer and I thought "That CAN'T be what I think it is, right?" Oh yes, it was: a suction cup attachment for a breast pump, complete with the screw top connection for a baby bottle.

Okay, both of those items point to a family with really little kids, but how did they get under here? When our kids were little you couldn't even get under the deck because the skirting blocked any access, and the porch floor is tongue-and-groove, so you can't accidentally drop these items to the ground. So either a critter pulled those items under there, or they were dropped there during the construction of the porch itself. 

When I told my wife later what I'd found, she disputed the breast pump suction cup, saying it had to be something else. "A lot of things use suction cups," she insisted.

"Just how many have the screw tops for a baby bottle?" I countered. "And believe me, with three kids around here I know what the breast pump cup looks like."

She had nothing to say to that.

Anyway, once I got the wire pulled through to the far side I was able to connect the wire to the ground rods.

Here's the new one, hidden behind
a row of burning bushes.

That was a lot harder than I expected. Being in your mid-to-upper 50s and trying to crawl under a tight space like that like I was 30 years younger was probably not the smartest thing I've done, but it is finally finished for now. 

I woke up Monday morning feeling like I'd been run over by a truck. No amount of coffee or Tylenol could help with that, so I was a wee bit grumpy when I started work. Still, a very necessary part of antenna work was completed, and I won't have to crawl under the deck for a while.**

The next step is to simply wait for the roof to be replaced and then I'll proceed from there. Unfortunately, it might not be until Spring before I finally get an antenna up outside, but we'll see.

*Yes, when we first moved into the house I had no idea where the sump pump exited, and then on the first big rain it became quite obvious that it was just being dumped right under the porch itself. "Hell no," was my reaction, and I redirected it out to farther away under the deck, and I have since extended it to beyond the deck itself. That little indentation you see on the ground in the first photo is where the sump pump exited after my first "fix". 15 years created that little mini-valley where the dirt had washed away. 

**Note that I didn't say "never". I know better.

EtA: Corrected grammar. 

EtA: Also corrected that this was to be posted on Tuesday, not Monday. (Monday is for Meme Mondays.)

Meme Monday: Being Wrong on the Internet

In honor of the fact that I completely misinterpreted what the first video I posted the other day was about, I figured I'd touch on something that is incredibly common yet you'd never guess it from the way people act: being wrong on the internet.

Yes, I know, you're thinking of the XKCD comic:

From XKCD. But you knew that already.

If this was the only thing Randall Munroe was known for, he would live forever online. Of course, he's done FAR more than just this comic, and I heartily recommend his books as well as the entirety of the XKCD back catalog to peruse. 

Still, there's more than just this meme to cover for being wrong on the internet.

There is the Da Vinci method. From Idea Link.

Isn't this a sign of maturity that you don't wallow
in the pig sty (or the minefield)? Well, I don't often
have such restraint. I'm still trying, tho. From Quickmeme.

Or to put it another way, "You mad bro?"
Yeah, if people were saying that and put THAT
face in front of me, yeah, not good for my stress.
From memecoup via Instagram.

I've done something similar. At work. About
a decade ago. It could have gone really badly,
but the person I was complaining about did
de-escalate things. And we patched it back up.
From memegenerator.

Hoo boy. This reminds me of some of the holy
wars on soc.history.medieval on Usenet back
in the day. From Reddit.

This got me. /raises hand.
From Cleanmemes.