"I'm a WHAT now?"

One of the more interesting things about my struggle to figure out why this blog has not been indexed by Google Search lately has been that I've discovered that the term "parallel context" is now being used by Large Language Model training.

The term "Parallel Context Windows" appears to have been first utilized in 2022 in a paper published here, which is alternately amusing and vexing. It wouldn't shock me if a lot of the bot traffic here has been attracted to PC simply because of the name's utilization in AI development.

This is the search result using incognito mode
(to remove any trained tendencies from my
account) on January 17, 2026.

Yeah, I mean, "parallel context" as a naming convention isn't exactly unusual, but the annoying part is that it just HAD to show up in AI-related activity. 

That being said, I did update the "About Parallel Context" to reference that this blog predates the usage of the term with LLMs and AI by over a decade*, so hopefully nobody comes knocking on my door with some weird cease and desist by my usage of the term on this blog. If someone does, I might need to get in touch with Rick Beato to find out what lawyer he uses to fight off YouTube strikes from the big music conglomerates.

As for whether this little discovery has an impact on PC's search engine indexing, it probably doesn't. Just a hunch here, but given that Google has started slowly indexing some of my blog posts over the past week or two I don't believe it actually has an impact.

As of January 17, 2026.

The indexing listing above shows that I'm actually getting some pages indexed. And that's despite Google Search still hasn't acknowledged the sitemap.xml that Microsoft Bing approved back in September 2025.

As of January 17, 2026.

So, you've got me as to what changed.

I did try to see if I could "fix" the issues with the "Alternate page with proper canonical tag" error by removing the mobile device option for the blog,

The main error listings as of January 17, 2026.

And the detailed results of the "alternate page"
error, on January 17, 2026.

which as you see all have the mobile designation of "m=1" present. After several days, however, the resubmission still returned an error, so the issue isn't with that.**

But there are posts being indexed, so... Again, go figure.

If nothing else, I either need to 'git gud' with understanding the details about Google Search results or hire a "Search Whisperer" to understand the arcane details of the search process.

Cardwyn: You need someone to help you understand the Arcane?

Me: I said arcane details, not the Arcane.

Cardwyn: Oh. Because my rates are low, and you could use the help.

Me: ...

I ought to not let this stuff bug me so much as it does, since I've got enough things I'm working on the past several months, but the lack of understanding the why of it does get under my skin. And now, knowing that the blog's name has been utilized in a field that has nothing to do with the subject of this blog is like a mosquito bite that you can't help but scratch because it itches so damn bad but you know you shouldn't scratch it at all. 

Oh well.

*For any people doing research on "Parallel Context Windows" and happened to stumble on this post, This blog Parallel Context has been around since September 2009 and is still being actively updated with posts as of January 17, 2026. So yeah, PC has been around a lot longer than the current LLM and AI research.

**I did switch it back this morning, likely after Shintar posted a comment this morning about potential changes but before I saw her comment myself. So, Shintar and others who use mobile devices to read the blog can read it much better.

EtA: I cleaned up some formatting.

At Least I'm Recognized in China

Call me amused, but it seems that while Google can't figure out that Parallel Context exists, Chinese web crawlers can.

I was alerted to this little item when I received a Google Notification about the blog that there was a spike in activity on the 6th:

As of 12/8/2025.

Of which was primarily from China:

As of 12/8/2025.

And yet when I got onto the Google Search console, this greeted me:

As of 12/8/2025.

So you can see that Google still refuses/ignores the presence of Parallel Context, while the Chinese web crawlers seem to have found PC. Once again, I've found that Google's search engine isn't really as impressive as they like to think. They can't even blame it on Blogger, which is owned by Google itself, because Bhagpuss' blog Inventory Full is easily found via Google Search:

As of 12/8/2025.

This is starting to get to ridiculous levels of incompetence, because there's no apparent reason why the blog doesn't show up in Google's direct search results. After all, PC continues to show up in Microsoft's Bing Search console:

As of 12/8/2025.

And in true Microsoft fashion, they want me to pay to "improve" my visibility on search results, 

As of 12/8/2025.

But I think I'll pass. Just goes to show that Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in their quest to monetize everything so they can then pump that money into AI (and Satya Nadella's compensation package). But at least their own search engine, Bing, can actually find a 16 year old blog that has almost 1700 posts on it, whereas Google stumbles over itself in the dark, claiming that a Blogger-inserted mobile option "https://parallelcontext.blogspot.com/?m=1" causes a Redirect error...

Again, as of 12/8/2025.

...when you can click the link above and see that the link works perfectly fine in bringing up a mobile-friendly version of the blog. If Google wants to bitch about that, they should talk to their Blogger division. But then again, since Inventory Full is working fine and it's a Blogger blog, I'd say that the problem has less to do with anything Blogger does and more between the chair and keyboard on Google's search division.

At least I know that Google won't enact any retribution on PC, because they'd have to FIND IT FIRST, and they've already proven they can't do that.

Under the Heading of "Things I Didn't Ask For"

There's an AI "Google Search" button right next to this post as I'm typing, and it floored me so much I took a screencap just to prove that it's there:

I even stopped typing to do this, and I realized
my writing made no sense because I was so discombobulated
by it all. (This was observed on October 7, 2025.)

I kid you not.

Anyhoo, here's the original thing I noticed when I popped up Blogger today this afternoon*

On October 7, 2025.

Under the header of "Who asked for this crap?", I was almost instantly annoyed by this new Blogger "feature". 

How about Widgets that are kept up to date, or you can put YouTube Channels (or other social media (tm) channels) into your blog without having to figure out the arcane systems on your own?

Or, in my case, how about bringing my freaking blog into Google Search itself? You know, the thing you tout as the best search engine on the internet?

But noooo... We get an option to add Google Search and Google Search links and previews to our blogs, thus creating "a more engaging reading experience with the help of Google".

Right. Because long form writing needs to be turned into something more "engaging". (As in... "shorter".)

/sigh

*I was not home for part of the day, taking my mom's car in for maintenance.

How to Vanish in Plain Sight

I'd noticed that Google's search engine isn't as good as it used to be for quite a while now, but I wasn't expecting this. 

Okay, that's hyberbole*, but I'd not really thought about it that much until Shintar pointed out to me on Monday that Parallel Context doesn't show up in search in Google. 

Don't believe me?

I made a search using the "site" option and put it in Google and Bing.

Here's Google's result:

As of September 2, 2025.

And Bing's result:

As of September 2, 2025.

For curiosity, I reran the search on Google while removing the "site:" option, and...

As of September 2, 2025.

In case you're wondering whether it's my settings, I run Google with SafeSearch set to "Off", so my occasional usage of profanity shouldn't be caught by the search engine.

I also did verify that the blog is visible to search engines:

Again, as of September 2, 2025.

***

My first impression is that Bing doesn't do a very good job of searching PC either, since I deliberately chose the title of my most recent work of fiction which happens to be the title of two blog posts, but it couldn't even find those two as a top result. Still, that's better than absolutely nothing happening on Google's side.

I'm pretty sure that Google's search engine ought to have picked up entries on Google's own blogging platform, and they actually do. Just not my own blog.

Here's a quick search with the site command for Shintar's post on a farewell to the long running SWTOR podcast The Ootinicast:

As of September 2, 2025.

So... apparently Google's search doesn't believe Parallel Context exists as an actual destination site, despite the blog's age. If I were using this blog for income** I'd be appalled by this development, but since I kind of prefer to be out of the limelight I'm fine with that. Shintar knows me well, as she told me she figured that I'd not be too torn up about it. Still, as she pointed out to me, it's an annoyance when you want to search for something but you can't find it. 

Yes, that's Michael Richards before his role in
Seinfeld, playing someone who thinks he's invisible.
IIRC, Judge Harry Stone had issues with his eyes
in the episode so he was temporarily blind.

From Night Court's Season 2 Episode 11.

I personally think that it demonstrates that these gigantic tech companies aren't as all-seeing as they think they are. If there's one thing that life has taught me it's that karma is a bitch, and Big Tech has hubris in spades. 

*At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling to get off my lawn, Google's been going downhill for a while. It's no surprise that I've been using Bing more often than Google these days.

**I'm not. I have all monetization options turned off. Besides, I think that monetization would actually go to Souldat, since he was the blog's "creator". 

How The Other Half Lives

I'm kind of grateful that my little corner of the internet isn't that popular. 

As I've said in the past, there's less than 100 people who regularly follow the channel (likely closer to 30 than 100), so I very rarely see much traffic beyond web crawlers out there. When you see traffic to the blog on blogger.com that says "5K" but when you go on Google Analytics and see "15", you know that you have a LOT of bot traffic.*

Truth, but I have it anyway. From StatsGlitch.

I realize I'm a bit of an outlier in that I'm perfectly happy not having much of an online presence. There's tons of people creating online content for various reasons, and here I am not really worried that I'm monetizing my blog that much.** 

Consequently, my normally shy self is served by not being recognizable out in public. Ever since I grew a beard in college, I've been able to be anonymous out in public despite being a redhead; people who knew me in grade or high school have a hard time recognizing me now. It's not perfect, since some people do recognize me every couple of years in this metro area of ~2.3 million people, but I can live with that. If I ever became a published author, my nightmare would be that I'd have to go out on a book tour, so maybe it's for the best that I'm not that good enough of a writer to have to worry about that sort of thing. 

But sometimes I do wonder how I'd handle that "being recognized" scenario.

Luckily for me, some YouTubers who are far more well known than I'll ever be have had to deal with that, and they made posts about their adventures.

This first one, from Rebecca Parham, stumbled into my feed a couple of weeks ago. Until that moment, I was blissfully unaware of who she was. While I'm happy that she's doing well, I'm also perfectly aware she exists in a completely different orbit than I inhabit.

Because I watched a few of Rebecca's videos, the algorithm started suggesting to me JaidenAnimations' videos, and as a consequence this one appeared as it dropped Saturday afternoon. If Rebecca's in an entirely different orbit than me, Jaiden is in another solar system. 

I think that it's a good thing that both of them are in the sort of fandom where they don't have to deal with creepers all that much, but I'm also quite aware that their part of the internet only has occasional interactions with mine at best. There was a bit of culture shock involved when I said to myself "Just who are these people?" and went down the rabbit hole for a while, the same sort of culture shock when I noted that the mini-Reds were watching videos some somebody named Pewdiepie and I felt obligated to find out what that was all about.***

Yeah, I think I'm happy being in my own lane. I'm not sure how I'd handle it if the spotlight of fame were to shine on me, even within such a limited topic as MMO video games.

*There's also the fact that apparently a lot of traffic suddenly began flowing from Brazil of all places, and you know that it's a bot of some sort.

**Because I use an ad blocker on all of my browsers, I don't even know if my blog has any ads visible to people. Since I've not allowed custom ads on the site...

Here's the proof.

there ought to not be any ads. If there are any ads, however, I get so little "real" traffic that I'd never see a dime anyway.

***It was a short-lived interest, which was fine with me.

Permanence in a Fluid Environment

I occasionally go back through some of my old posts when one of them unexpectedly makes an appearance on my analytics, and inevitably those posts have some issues. Yes, I'm not very fond of my writing in old posts --if you ever have flashbacks to really stupid mistakes you did in the past, that's what it's like-- but for a change I'm not talking about that. 

It's this:

Apparently the Snipping tool that replaced the old
Snip and Sketch in Windows 11 kind of sucks.
From a PC post on January 17, 2016.

What you're not seeing is a graphic that I linked to rather than made a local copy and uploaded. 

I realize that the internet can be a fluid thing, and since storage space costs money, old graphics have a habit of getting deleted. Of course, that's only one issue with graphics or videos disappearing: there are people who die, people who try to hide past involvement, lawsuits, etc.

The point is that the internet is fluid, and you can't necessarily rely something to be there in the future.

That's why I began several years ago simply downloading graphics and then uploading them with a reference, rather that simply linking to them. It's kind of sad that I can't rely upon a link going forward and instead using low-key piracy for references, but when things are made to be temporary the concept of permanence is a foreign idea.

***

That does bring up the question as to what will happen to all of that digital data I've accumulated when I die. 

I'd like this blog to remain in place as a record. That's not strictly an egotistical thing, but rather as a reference to the era PC was created. Over the years I've seen blogs die and get removed, such as Righteous Orbs, and I'd hate for PC to join them.

At least The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation years ago has been pulling data from blogs such as this one into a central location for recordkeeping, but even then that's an inexact science. 

I discovered that they weren't getting any recent data out of PC because I'd moved us to HTTPS from HTTP, and it took a little bit of back and forth with the Web Collection Librarian for the Ivy Plus Confederation before the crawls began working once more.* It's nice to have an independent backup going on, but I'm always concerned that politics and whatnot will interfere with the storage of this data in the long term. I used to think we'd learned the lessons of the past regarding data storage, but apparently not.

I guess I ought to look into another solution going forward, one that won't vanish at the whim of someone I've never met.

*If your blog is listed in there --don't rely upon the blog name but instead search for a title-- you might want to see if the data is being accurately captured.

Making Sense of Incomprehensibility

Sometimes I wonder just how traffic flows on the internet.

Oh, not the technical version, mind you, because at one point I could tell you precisely how networking via TCP-IP actually worked*, but I meant in terms of why traffic flows to a specific location.

If you know the name of this character that Peter
Falk is playing, you might want to go schedule
a colonoscopy. From Tenor.com.

I keep up with the Meme Monday posts for a couple of reasons, namely to push myself into posting more often by having a regular column and having an outlet for my snarky sense of humor. However, another reason to post Meme Mondays is that --by and large-- more eyeballs look at those posts than any of my other ramblings on this blog. That shouldn't be a surprise since those posts have the broadest appeal as opposed to the gamer-geek centric fare typically found on the blog.

Still, I can be surprised by what takes off and what doesn't.

When a post takes off within gamer space, that's typically driven by eyeballs on a post itself. What I mean is that traffic goes directly to that post because it got a bump from somewhere out there in the blogosphere, such as the times when a post from PC would get a mention on the now-defunct WoW Insider. The first time that happened, on the series of posts I made comparing Blood Elves and Draenei back in December 2011, caught me by surprise. All I knew at first was that our traffic had spiked from a dozen or so views to 2000 or more, and I had no idea what the hell was going on. It was only after I dug into the data that I realized almost all of the traffic was coming from WoW Insider, whereupon following it back I discovered we'd gotten a mention in their weekly blog spotlight column. The traffic eventually reverted back to normal levels, but for a week or so PC got a nice boost.

This sort of behavior has happened from time to time, based primarily upon getting a mention in other blogs or websites with readership far greater than our own, but it could also be due to pertinent data appearing in a post. Such as Souldat's post on How to Effectively Tank the Lich King from 2010, which remains our single most viewed post on the blog. It didn't get a spike in viewership, but it had a steady number of views for several years. That it used to get on the main page of Google Search results didn't hurt.**

That being said, by and large the majority of spiky traffic that does come to the blog goes to the blog's main page rather than a specific post, which tells me that that traffic isn't driven by the gamer geek ecosphere.

Here ya go; the last three months' worth of traffic.

While I can guess what might have driven some traffic --the spike at the end is likely due to the magic words "Discworld" and "Kickstarter"-- a lot of those spikes come from way out of nowhere. I can't assume that a single post drove traffic to the blog, because the spikes in July, September and October show up during my "dead time" between posts. Blaugust is also no help, since you can't look at an individual post and say "yeah, that's brought people here". There's also the undercurrent of web crawlers and whatnot that will flow through all of your website creating a higher base level than what I'd call the true number of regular readers.

***

I've always known that the internet is a fickle beast, but blogging over the past decade and a half has reinforced those opinions. I still laugh at people --typically business types and marketers-- who think that "making something go viral" is just what internet creators do. "We need you to create a viral video for this" is a query I've heard on occasion***, as if you can snap your fingers and views will magically appear, but it's the sense that some people who "get" the internet and can manipulate it to their own ends that drives me batty. 

The internet doesn't work like that; what goes viral and what doesn't is pretty much an unknown. So I'll just continue to wonder just what the hell it is that occasionally makes PC's viewership spike.

*If you gave me an hour or two I could refresh my memory on all of the details beyond the basics of hubs, routers, setting up a local LAN behind a firewall, etc.

**In case you're wondering, the advent of Wrath Classic and the opening of Icecrown Citadel did not result in a corresponding spike in views. I presume everybody ran to Wowhead to find out what the currently accepted strat is for the Lich King fight. Since I never actually got to raid ICC, I couldn't tell you whether the current meta matches what Soul had written down over a decade ago.

***Never directed at me, thankfully.

Sometimes, It Doesn't Mean Anything

In the years that I've been blogging here, I've watched this medium's popularity peak and decline.

To be fair, in 2009 blogging had likely already peaked, but in MMO space we were still riding the high point of the MMO wave with WoW's Wrath of the Lich King and the impending release of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Parallel Context was just one of many MMO (and WoW specifically) oriented blogs out there; if you went to any of the big MMO sites back then, it certainly seemed like there were a lot of people starting up or maintaining blogs. I guess it feels kind of weird when I sit back in 2024 and realize that PC is a survivor.

Blogging is, at it's heart, a solitary kind of experience. When you write, you don't get much in the way of feedback until you actually post.* After a while, that can get kind of old. Here we are, blogging about a genre that is at its heart a social endeavor, and yet we operate in solitude while writing.

It takes a certain type of person to keep blogging, year in and year out.

From wpbeginner.com. Yes, there's a site for
purchasing tutorials on how to blog using Wordpress.
Not sure how I feel about that one, given the
complaints I read about WP from my friends.

This isn't a lead-in to me saying how wonderful I am at blogging, because most days I'm just happy if I can get something off my chest and posted here. And really, if people actually knew how to write something that was guaranteed to go viral, they would go and do just that. Human psychology being what it is, you can't operate with certainty about anything. You can establish trends and have a really good feel on tendencies, but prediction is an inexact science.

And people's tastes can be fickle and change on a dime. (Just ask Billy Squier and his sudden plummet from popularity after Rock Me Tonite.**)

For me, the head scratcher is that while I've been doing Meme Monday for close to 1.5 years now, the Meme Monday about Playing a Female Toon is the one that by far got the most eyeballs to Parallel Context.

The memes themselves were kind of tame, because I didn't want to retread the same old female armor memes or the sexy fun times memes that are all over the place on social media, but for some reason that post got people to the blog. 

Go figure.

***

I will admit that blogging in the age of streaming and Tik-Tok does feel kind of weird. I thought of this while I've been reading Pride and Prejudice, because I can see the forms that modern novels take in the story, but the novel is most definitely a product of a bygone era. But if an author writes what is important to them, so do bloggers today. 

That's not always the case, given the metric ton of "how to write for profit" books/websites/etc. that are out there, but when you get to the heart of it all we do tend to write what we like and what we want to say. 

And what do I want to say? I'm not sure, really. I just write about things that pop into my head. Are they interesting? To me, yes. 

For example, reading Jane Austen has given me a bit of a window into what she found interesting over 200 years ago, and in turn I wondered what someone would think of my own output if they were to read this blog in 2224. How much could that reader glean from my posts?

It's a question that I can't really answer, because I think I'm too close to the blog to be able to stand back and take a more critical approach without coloring my opinions. But I do wonder what authors thought their work might appear to people in the future, or whether they were more concerned with simply providing a living for themselves and their family to worry much about what future generations thought.

I certainly hope that they won't think that the high point of my output is a Meme Monday on playing a video game as a Female avatar.

*Unless you bring other people into the writing process, or have multiple bloggers for one blog, such as what PC originally had. 

**Whether or not the video played a part in Billy's fall from grace is debatable, but what isn't is that Rock Me Tonite was Billy's last charting single in the US, and he suddenly vanished from the pop charts after that single.

Getting Back on That Horse

"[Now, there are two ways of learning to ride a fractious horse.] One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and, at leisure, figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders. It is very much the same in learning to ride a flying machine; if you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial."

--Wilbur Wright, 1901.  From The Wright Brothers, by David McCollough, pp 67-68.

I've been thinking about what works and what doesn't work in a story lately.

(Yeah, it's gonna be one of those posts, so buckle yourself in and hold on tight.)

Normally, I'd start writing something about this, get partway through, and then shelve the post for an indeterminate amount of time. I sometimes come back to them --like this past Meme Monday-- but a lot of times they just sit there in the Draft portion of the blog, never to see the light of day again.

This is a screenshot of some of the posts still in draft form from early 2023. Some of them are musings, some are fiction with placeholder titles, and oh look, there's an RPG From the Past still in there.*

However, I've more of a mind to plow though this, since I've been in more of a contemplative mood lately.

My first contemplation, that work sucks and takes up too much of my time, is hardly a new revelation. Those people who absolutely love their job genuinely worry me, because it feels that they've got blinders on and fail to notice the reality and drama of day-to-day life working with people whose goals are different than yours.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. It's about stories and what makes them tick.

Kaylriene had a post yesterday about what worked and didn't in the story/lore for Retail WoW's Dragonflight expansion, and that got me to thinking that what ails Retail WoW isn't something that could be fixed by returning Warcraft to its "more manly" roots or any other politically charged bullshit, but rather by going out and actually stepping away from Warcraft itself.

No, I'm not talking about any bullshit such as when people who want to break into upper management go to get their MBA**, but actually going out and working on their craft the only way you truly can to improve yourself: by expanding your horizons.

As I mentioned in my comment on Kaylriene's post, my high school guidance counselor back in the 80s used to constantly tell me to go and read more. "It'll help you get into college," he added, and whenever we met*** he'd check in to see what I was reading and how much I was reading.

Did he care about the quality of the books? No, not really. I mean, he knew me well enough that I wasn't going to read middle or elementary grade material****, but he wanted me to get out and simply read. And before you ask, I could tell he had absolutely no clue as to Science Fiction and Fantasy novels that comprised the bulk of my reading habits, but that wasn't the issue for him. 

Now, my senior English teacher in high school --it would now be considered AP English, a combination of English Literature and English Composition-- did care about the quality of my reading, because it reflected in the quality of my writing. He and my other English teachers insisted I keep writing, because the more I wrote the better I wrote. This was reinforced by, of all people, one of my Physics professors. 

No, really.

He was my professor for Advanced Lab I and II, which were Junior and Senior level Physics lab courses. Unlike a lot of the Engineering labs that my friends had which were cookbook in nature, my Advanced Lab's experiments were along the lines of the professor saying "Here's some journal articles and literature, go and reproduce the Photoelectric Effect with the lab material in Room 101B."

Given that I had to write an average of 15-20 pages per lab report, my professor would push me to write better. "The only way you'll get better at it is to do it more often," he told me. I certainly didn't see how my writing improved over the course of those two semesters, but he did and told me as much.

Why bring all this up? Because from what I've seen, Blizzard's story team needs to break out of their rut and do the two things that will truly improve their writing.

***

It's far too easy to claim that Blizzard's story team as a whole was better back in the days when gaming was far more a masculine endeavor or some other politically charged bullshit*****, but my opinion is that they were better because they abided by the 'less is more' dictum. But the longer they worked on their games, the more internally focused they became and the more the writing became bloated.

Their writers need to write more, and not simply Warcraft. Or Diablo. Or whatever.

Stop abiding by the Rule of Cool.

Stop trying to shoehorn in a backstory that's simply not there.

Stop writing cutscenes that have nothing to do with the player. 

Stop writing novels and other media that end up being a requirement to understand what's going on in a game. If you can't follow along in a game without leaving the game, there's a problem with the game.

Stop trying to write cutscenes and story text with gigantic info dumps and passing it off as being normal. As one of my English teachers once told me, people don't talk like that. If they're giving a lecture, sure, but if they're just talking to people? Come on...

Info dump aside, they're freaking DRAGONS.
Why are they in, well, our form? I think we could
cut Blizz some slack if they were in their 'normal'
form for these conversations.
Pic from GameRant of a Dragonflight cutscene.

But more than anything else, they need to read more than just Blizzard material. Or other material written for video games. Break out of your rut and try different genres.

***

I can actually speak to that last one from experience.

Last April, when I posted about my experience reading a Romantic Fantasy novel written by a friend of mine, I mentioned that I'd not read very many Romance novels. I think Sharon Shinn's novels count, and I've read Jennifer Crusie as well, but beyond that, not very much. I mean, the novels I have read have had sex and romance in them --to varying degrees of authenticity-- but not nearly enough to qualify for the Romance genre. 

But I know enough to know that I need to read more to be able to write better dialogue and human interaction, and while I'm comfortable in my own skin for the most part, I have perused the Romance section of our local bookstore and... Yeah, I'm kind of lost. At least with the Literature section I know what I'm getting into with the mishmash of classics with purely literary stuff with popular novels, and I've a working knowledge of the Mystery section as well given that I do read Mysteries from time to time. But Romance?

Sorry, couldn't resist. This was all over
social media last Fall.

Well, I figured that if I was going to do this right, I ought to go back to the original Romance novelist.

Jane Austen.

My mom, the one who gets flustered by anything in a novel beyond a PG rating#, requested a Regency Romance novel for Christmas, so when I bought the novel I kind of slid on over and took a look at what Jane Austen novels were available.

From the Amazon page for the Oxford World Classics
edition of Pride and Prejudice. No pressure. None at all.

I knew going in that while Jane Austen is highly regarded, she's very much a creature of her time. To be blunt, writing has evolved mightily over the couple of centuries since Pride and Prejudice came out, so using Jane to improve my writing is kind of like taking editing lessons from Herman Melville. (Or Tom Clancy, for that matter.)

So I bit the bullet and did this:

And oh look, an excuse to pick up an issue
of BBC History Revealed. Yes, I am SUCH a nerd;
I swear Dan Snow's History Hit and PBS'
NOVA and Secrets of the Dead
were made for people like me.

***

Now, tying this back to Blizzard's writing team, if I can go out and break out of my comfort zone so I can write better, surely they can as well. 

This isn't something that can't be fixed. It really can be fixed, but you can't simply take a seminar and suddenly everything is better, despite what advertisements for LinkedIn Learning or Brilliant would have you believe. You have to put in the time to read more diverse works and write more.

But for all of those who are celebrating that Chris Metzen is back at Blizzard, I have to ask: did he learn the writing and plotting lessons that are necessary for the ship to be righted at Blizzard? Will he allow the Blizzard writing team to do the necessary work to improve their craft? Or did he merely go to CEO School just to make investors happy?##

*I ought to do something about Pendragon, since Chaosium has the new edition coming out soon and they already released the Starter Set for Pendragon last Gen Con.

**The people involved are long retired, so I can actually tell this story. This happened upwards of a decade ago. The company I contracted for --and was outsourced from, BTW-- had an all-hands meeting at 8 AM for all of us contractors. Those of us who worked near their company headquarters came into the hall, sat down, and we met with one of the Executive VPs for the company, who proceeded to give us a pep talk about how well we were doing and how much she enjoyed working with us, her "favorite account". I may have made a few whispered snarks to people around me about that, given that she was my boss two levels up when we were outsourced, and she managed to jump ship from being outsourced herself to being safe on the "mother company". But when talk turned to the new CEO, who returned to his old role to help the company regain financial footing, she described him as being a totally new person. "He'd gone to CEO School and now he knows how to lead this company like a real CEO," she enthused. Given that their "new" CEO's first two orders of business were an announcement of impending layoffs and a gigantic compensation package, I thought the entire thing was bullshit. 

***Which was about 3-4 times a year. I don't know how it worked for you, but for me he'd send an invitation to the high school's main office, and they would track me down as to what class I was in and forward the request along. As long as I didn't have a test that day, I would then inform the teacher and show them the scheduling slip and then head on out to meet with the guidance counselor. Hey, I got out of class for upwards of half an hour, so I was fine with this.

****Remember, this was before the Young Adult genre explosion of novels, so novels that today would be classified as YA --such as the five books of David Eddings' Belgariad-- fell under the fictional genre or in the generically "Adult" section. Yeah, there really wasn't even a YA SF&F subgenre, either. 

Also it needs to be said that I was exiting high school when the original Watchmen comics and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight were coming out, so if you want a delineation of when comics suddenly swerved into being "serious" and "adult", I was a teen during that time. It's all bullshit, since comics had been covering adult themes since forever, but it was in the mid-80s when some critics finally "discovered" what comics had been doing all along.

*****I'm starting to throw around "bullshit" in this post like Holden Caufield tossed around "phony" in The Catcher in the Rye. Sheesh.

#I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but one time my mom was visiting her mom --my grandmother-- and noted a novel on the table. Inquiring as to how good it is, Grandma quipped that it was good but "Oh, you wouldn't like it. It's got sex in it." And this was when Grandma was in her upper 80s. I still sometimes wonder how on earth my parents had my brother and myself, given how icky my mom is about sex, especially when compared to her own parents.

##See ** for the CEO School comment.

To Chase or Not to Chase

I have a cousin who writes for a video game site --none of the ones in MMO space, in case you're wondering*-- and back in 2015 the pageviews frequently reached the 50,000-100,000 mark. Given the average pageview of an MMO blog is measured by a much smaller number (and PC, in particular, seems to have a relatively loyal audience of 30-40 people), I was curious about how the site he writes for got that big.

"I don't know," he said, "we just write about what people want and we promote ourselves a bit, and things just took off."

In 2015, that meant MOBAs and console games. But still, the sheer size of pageviews caught my attention.

And really, if I thought that was big, I hadn't seen anything yet.

***

I'd been reading up a bit lately on Influencers and "Influencer Culture"**, because I've been trying to understand the appeal that influencers draw upon. They aren't celebrities in the purest sense, but some of them have become de-facto celebrities in their own right. They have their own followers and detractors --I mean, look at Asmongold for one obvious example-- but a lot of the influencers', well, influence comes from being perceived as a source of trust.

Truth is somewhat malleable, depending on the influencer, but trust is the engine of the influencing process. You don't even have to trust in what the influencer says, to put it another way, but you have to trust that you'll be entertained in some manner. Quite a few people may put eyeballs on controversial influencers, not because they believe in what bill of goods they're being sold, but because the influencer can pull on their emotions.

That's why, love him or hate him, people watch Asmongold's videos. If you didn't give a whoop about him, you'd not be watching.

***

But I think one thing that my cousin mentioned, about writing what people want, is highly important.

In an age of AI generated posts based on what will generate the most clicks, finding what people want isn't exactly rocket science. The blandness that permeates most AI created written content, however, will turn people off. I know I don't like anything that resembles a poorly written technical manual, no matter how tailored the content is toward my interests, and I work in IT. 

What my cousin missed was that it's more than just promotion and writing relevant content, but writing relevant content that people enjoy reading. It's that human element***, the writer's voice, that will keep people interested and coming back for more. 

Yes, there's a "lightning in a bottle" aspect to some website or person hitting it big, but that emotive element has to come from somewhere. And once people know they can expect you to provide that element, that's when you've got them.

***

Sounds easy, right? Heh. If you've ever tried to make creative content before, you know how hard it can be. Or how much self doubt can cripple you. I can actually speak to this with some experience here, given that PC is pretty long in the tooth as far as continuously active creative content goes. So if you think I can look at the success of my cousin (or others) and only feel jealousy, you're sadly mistaken. I have a lot of respect for what they accomplished, and I realize that what they've been able to do does come at a cost. My determination to do things my own way is a reflection on what I feel the personal and professional cost might be if I decided to start chasing clicks and generate content at a level I don't feel comfortable with and with a personal slant I disagree with. And those that actually can pull that off and generate eyeballs? My hat's off to them for what they've accomplished.




*Not my place to say which one, because he goes by a pseudonym.

**Sadly, MMOs were not on the radar. That would have been in 2005 rather than 2015. But the book that kicked off this interest is Influencer by Brittany Hennessy.

***For the time being, anyway.

EtA: Corrected the "**".

The Blogging Version of Sitting on the Fence Returns

Apparently there's some blogging thing that's starting today in our little corner of the internet. 

Given that blogging is now so passé that it's due to come around and be ironically trendy again*, that some of us old farts have kept up with blogging all these years means we're either persistent, delusional, stubborn, or a combination of all three. 

Either way, giving a bunch of MMO players --who are used to min-maxing the hell out of everything**-- the opportunity to post for a "celebration" of blogging and potentially win prizes in the form of badges as proof of, oh, I don't know.... "winning at blogging", that's certainly going to bring out some people to post a lot.

Or, if you're like me, refuse to formally participate yet go ahead and post a bunch anyway.***

***

Am I going to post a lot? Mmmmmaybe?

It's still too early to say, because 31 days is a long time, but we'll see. 

#Blaugust2023

*In the same manner as cassette tapes have been. Sure, there were good cassette tapes made, but from a record manufacturer? Oh hell no; you had to make copies off of records yourself onto quality tapes, such as Maxell or TDK, if you wanted a quality cassette made. Ironically enough, the best tapes were made from CDs in that period when CD players were a rarity in cars and you wanted your collection of CDs copied onto tape.

**Or know that everybody else is min-maxing the hell out of everything.

***If you want to call me hipsterish for behaving like that, go for it. I've been like that since before the current hipsters were even born. For example, the summer after my Freshman year of college I spent working at my Dad's office for one of his friends. When the time came for me to leave and go back to university, my Dad's friend wanted to take me out to lunch. I passed, because I didn't really feel like I earned anything special. He tried to convince me otherwise, but I held firm.

That's my secret: I'm always motivated

(Apologies to Bruce Banner for that modified quip.)

Something that nobody --and I do mean nobody-- has ever asked me in my years of writing is how I stay motivated.

Probably that has something to do with the size of the reader base of this blog, which I'm pretty sure is around 30-ish regular readers, when you filter out the web crawlers, spambots, and the individual spikes due to someone linking a post back to PC. Sure, a lot of the articles may eventually reach about 100 hits, but that's a long, slow drip-drip-drip over the course of months.

We used to have more regular readers, back when the major WoW/MMO watering holes were active*, but you could tell almost instantly when a site went dark because we'd see a corresponding drop in traffic. In my experience, people didn't migrate from a central watering hole to a Feed Reader, they simply stopped reading. People didn't come here for WoW (or MMO) news, for that they'd go to Wowhead or WoW Insider/Blizzard Watch or Massively/Massively Overpowered.

I've said numerous times over the years that if you're looking for validation by having people read your blog, you're going to be disappointed. Once you make peace with the reality that blogging is a niche format and very few people break through into the greater consciousness by blogging in this day and age, you'll be fine.

***

So that does beg the question: why keep blogging? Why stay motivated?

Well, I'd be lying if I said that I don't get any gratification at all from PC. When I see the page views go up after I posted something, I get that good ol' dopamine rush of "Hey, somebody wants to read this!" It's similar to that initial high you get when you discover that someone you've developed feelings for actually reciprocates. It's somewhere between "YESSS!" and "How did I get so lucky?", but before those doubts of "Okay, this can't really be happening, can it?" creep into your head.

That first time that Tam from Righteous Orbs commented here on the blog, I was about over the moon with excitement. Or when WoW Insider linked to a series of posts I made, I had to be walking on air for an entire week.

Personal gratification notwithstanding, I have a confession to make: I've always wanted to be a writer, and blogging gives me that outlet.

I can turn my head from where I'm sitting right now and see this up on a bookshelf:

This wasn't the first book on Science Fiction and Fantasy that I'd read --Lord of the Rings and The Sword of Shannara had that beat by a few years-- but this was the first collection of short stories that I owned. I devoured the stories within and began hunting for more. When I realized that there were actual magazines that published F&SF short stories**, 

Some publications lasted only as long
as the driving force was alive, such as
Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine.
Given how well MZB's reputation aged over
the years, it's probably for the best.
(From ebay.com.)

and that publishing three short stories would qualify someone membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America, I made it a goal to try to get published. 

I should add, this is despite my mother's obvious distaste for my dad's mother being a regular reader of Reader's Digest and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, as if both were inferior products. My mom loved the cozy type of Mystery novels***, and I guess between the two major mystery magazines her tastes would have run more toward Ellery Queen than Alfred Hichcock's, but I interpreted her dislike as a putdown of the short story format itself, which motivated me all the more to try to write better. 

***

Here I am, over 40 years later, and I'm still not a published author.

There was a time when I used to get
a copy of this from the library
on a regular basis, so I knew what
the submission requirements were
for all of the F&SF magazines.
(From amazon.com)

Writing fiction, especially short fiction, is harder than it looks. 

Okay, I should qualify this a bit. 

Writing fiction is easy; writing good fiction is hard; writing good fiction that is publishable is harder still.

If you want to find out how easy it is to write fiction, go check out the fanfic websites. (I'll wait.) A lot of SF&F fiction put out on the web isn't very good, and that has nothing to do with the nature of fanfic itself. I've wondered about why the writing isn't that good, but having gone back and read some of the novels and short stories I read as a kid, I think I can understand why: the quality of stories back in the "golden age" of SF&F overall wasn't really good.

Oh, don't get me wrong: I loved those stories, but the writing itself needed work. 

A lot of SF&F writing back then had, well, a ton of info dumps. The concepts of world building were such that in order to set the scene, authors basically spent pages setting up the world rather than simply letting the story fill in the gaps along the way. There was also such an emphasis on getting the science right that the quality of the writing suffered as a result. 

And the Mary Sue/Marty Stu protagonists. Hoo boy, there were a ton of them.

That's not to say that I don't like a heroic character, because I do, but some of the protagonists in the stories back then were so perfect that I have a hard time going back and rereading them.**** I like characters who do heroic things, not heroic characters doing, well, their thing.

Because I internalized a lot of these stories in my youth, when I started trying to write my own fiction, it just didn't sound right. The flow wasn't there, and the info dumps didn't mesh well with how I wanted stories to proceed. The characters were either too good and perfect, or I'd swing too hard the other way and torture the characters for no good reason other than "the characters have to suffer or have angst" for it to be legitimately good fiction. And I'll be honest in that I hate that. As I've said many a time, if I want that out of a story, I'll watch the news.

"What about catharsis?" someone once asked me.

Thanks for saying so, Mr. Crews.
(From Brooklyn Nine Nine, meme from GetYarn)

"Catharsis is fine, so long as tragedies and black comedies aren't the only things you're consuming," I replied. "After a while, reading all that will merely get you depressed."

And when life is going shitty for you, or even just kind of shitty, reading tragedies --or their close cousins, the stories where tons of main and secondary characters die-- isn't exactly a big pick-me-up.

***

My writing foibles aside, when Souldat asked if I wanted to blog about WoW, I felt that at least here was my chance to actually write something and get it out there without any internal pressure to get published. I could just write, and by writing, improve my craft.

I'm grateful that over the decade plus I've been writing PC I haven't had people tell me that my writing sucks, or been critical of the overall quality of my work. And I'm doubly grateful for that because I've read some of my old stuff, and boy does it stink.

Truth.
(From youngwriterssociety.com.)

I have no idea what made me think I was "writing gooder" back then, because I wasn't. And I realize that a few years from now I'll look at these posts and groan to myself about how terrible they are. I mean, I do that already with One Final Lesson, and that's the only story of that length I've ever finished and released into the wild. 

But that's the thing that keeps me motivated: the knowledge that I'm improving with every post I write. It may not be obvious to me now, but it will show up some years later. 

It's something that keeps me posting, because even if I never get published I'll at least have a body of work I can look back on.

"Well yes, but not in the traditional sense...
Wait, are you in Eversong?"

"Oh. Well, it's nice of you to keep up
with your Instructor's relatives."

#Blaugust2022

*Blogs such as Righteous Orbs, MMO Melting Pot, The Pink Pigtail Inn, Orcish Army Knife, and when WoW Insider (now known as Blizzard Watch) used to have a weekly update of activity in the WoW Blogosphere. All of these are either defunct (Righteous Orbs and MMO Melting Pot), have bloggers fall away from blogging (PPI), pass away (Orcish Army Knife), or just shut down their regular articles highlighting bloggers (WoW Insider).

**And still publish, despite the decline in circulation among paper magazines. Venerable names such as Analog (launched as Astounding Science Fiction in 1930) and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949), and more recent fare (in a relative sense) of Asimov's Science Fiction (1977) still are kicking around. There are others out there as well, but I can always count on these three to be on the shelves at my local independent bookstore, right next to the two long running Mystery magazines Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (1941) and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (1956). 

***I remember one time my mom's mother, my wife, and I had a conversation about books. Grandma told me about a book she was reading, and that my mom was interested in what it was like. "Oh, you wouldn't like it," Grandma had told her, "because there's sex in it." The fact that my grandmother knew her own daughter was too much of a prude to enjoy a novel she obviously liked tickled me to no end. That was when I realized that my grandmother was far more comfortable with sex and modern society than her own daughters were.

****This is a problem even with current fiction. There was a novella in one of the magazines I have from the mid-2000s --I think it might have been Analog-- who had a protagonist that was smart, scientifically trained, witty, and athletic. I struggled to find any flaws in him at all. Ironically enough, I found a novelette in a 1986 Analog magazine, The Barbarian Princess by Vernor Vinge, that turned the Mary Sue concept on its head. 

I think I still have my copy
around somewhere, but this came
from abebooks.com.

Even though Tatja Grimm was definitely the Mary Sue type, that didn't mean she was perfect. And seen from another character's point of view, which is how the novelette is told, their own internal biases against the "barbarians" played heavily into making that an enjoyable story.

EtA: Corrected some grammar. As usual.