Seventeen years ago, the first post on Parallel Context appeared.
That was long enough ago that the graphics that Souldat* linked to in that first post no longer work. Hell, the site warcraftrealms.com itself resolves to warcraftdb.com these days as it effectively shut down in 2023.**
Oh, and if you ever wondered, Souldat was biased toward the Horde from the beginning as his first post made pretty plain. Given that I now play Alliance most of the time, it certainly feels odd reading that first post again.
Anyway, PC has been around long enough that it ought to be applying to colleges right about now. I certainly hope that it has a decent safety school selected, because the cost of attending a university isn't cheap.
*He used Murtaugh as his handle back then, and changed it several times over the next several years as his main changed.
**Links not being maintained are a big reason why I make local copies of pictures and/or other graphics these days; that way I know there will be a working graphic when I return to a very old post from the future. I suppose I could spend a month cleaning up old links and trying to figure out what ought to go there, but I'd rather get it right the first time.
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?
If you've heard of Duck Duck Go, you know that it has hung its hat on your privacy, whereas Google has prioritized company profits. I've been moving my search more and more over to Duck Duck Go, and one big relief from my end is that DDG does believe that this blog exists:
I even got ahead of the AI Context Parallelism blog. From August 12, 2026.
That makes me feel pretty good to know that both Bing and DDG know I exist. Alas, Google still thinks I'm a figment of people's imagination:
As of August 12, 2026.
Their AI doesn't even have the correct blog, much less a direct entry to it. Thanks to Atheren for referencing me at least that one time, which is how Google knows there might be something there.
And for completeness, here's Bing's results:
As of August 12, 2026.
Funny how the graphic they have there is a pretty old one about Mass Effect, but hey, at least I'm at the top of the search results.
I've kind of given up trying to understand why the supposed "best search engine evah" can't find a blog that's been around since 2009 and has over 1800 published posts. I guess they want money from me to suddenly "improve" my search results --I know that Bing does-- which would effectively turn Google into the 2020's version of Yahoo. You know, that's not exactly a comparison I'd be proud of if I were Google.
I wanted to give a shoutout to fellow blogger Aywren of Aywren's Nook for her foray into YouTube videos. She saw a need to present positive material for introverted, shy gamers to successfully navigate MMOs. As she puts it from her description:
Welcome friend! I'm an introverted, casual, Gen X gamer gal. As a long-time MMORPG player, I'm hoping to provide thoughts and support for common struggles that shy gamers like myself face in online worlds.
You're not alone! There's more shy gamers out there than you realize!
As of writing this post Aywren has seven videos up already, and the further she's progressed I've found her presentation to be more and more clear and confident as she finds her footing. She admitted very early on that this was her first attempt at creating YouTube videos, and she's definitely a quick learner.
Admittedly, her field of expertise is in Final Fantasy XIV, which I've not played, but a lot of her advice is easily adaptable to all sorts of MMOs.
Here's her first video to get you started.
I do have to admit that's quite a large... pirate hat there.
Would you believe me if I told you I didn't know who (or what) Mr. Beast was until June of 2025?
Apparently Mr. Beast is the most followed YouTuber, and despite that I'd never run across anything related to him (or his organization) until I discovered this video by Jaiden Animations:
This was when I first discovered Jaiden (after discovering Rebecca Parham's YouTube channel first) and a couple of her videos referenced how absolutely crazy some of Mr. Beast's followers were. However, even after watching Jaiden's video I didn't have any desire to go and hunt down Mr. Beast, so I tucked that little bit of knowledge away and just went on with life.
Then two things happened. First, Dan Olson dropped this video:
If you've got the time, it's worth a watch as Dan was most definitely NOT the sort of influencer that someone of Mr. Beast's ilk would typically be interacting with. I mean, Dan does long form video essays about deep topics --gaming related or not-- and is the polar opposite of Mr. Beast's stuff.
After watching Dan's video, I still had no desire to go visit Mr. Beast's site on the internet. I mean, Dan had pretty much reinforced my opinion that Mr. Beast was NOT for me.
Finally, I opened up my email last morning to find this from (of all places) Lowe's Home Improvement:
This arrived in my INBOX on 5/18/2026.
You're kidding me, right?
Lowes? The hardware company that partners with the NFL and sports figures like Messi?
No, I'm still not interested in seeing Mr. Beast's stuff, and after having watched Dan's video, I think that Beast Industries is throwing jello at a wall to see what sticks. After all, I'm about 45 years too old to be Beast Industries' target audience.
***
The presence of Monsieur Beast in my email provided me a necessary intro into something that I'd been thinking about after my attendance at the Dayton Hamvention: the prevalence of YouTubers and other influencers.
Outside of Salty Walt, I noted the presence of several other YouTubers at the Hamvention. One of the first people who came by our tables on Friday I recognized immediately.
"Hey, it's the CB guy!" I exclaimed.
"Yes it is," he replied with a slightly sheepish grin.
It was Erik of Farpoint Farms, whose YouTube channel focuses a lot on CB radio with a side helping of shortwave and scanner radios, solar power, and other items he uses at his farm in the mountains of North Carolina. He was a pretty genial guy, so he was exactly like he presented himself on his channel. That morning he was just rummaging around for anything interesting to purchase, not record for the channel.* Alas, one of our club members tried hard to sell him on items rather than let him look in peace, but at least Erik took it in stride.
However, as the Hamvention progressed, I noted other YouTubers around, some livestreaming with cameras and some without, but obviously all looking at things with an eye toward content. There was one moment where I was walking in one direction of the flea market, saw a well-known YouTuber with phone on a selfie stick, recording, and I spun around in the opposite direction and "noped" my way out of there. When I was looking at antennas with one of the indoor vendors --hey, I'm a ham, what do you expect?-- another guy appeared at my elbow and began talking to the vendor, explaining he was a YouTuber, and wanted to ask him some questions. After a quick side glance to make sure he wasn't recording at just that moment, I skipped out again.
I get it, people are creating content for a living. That's the name of the game. But holy cow did there seem to be so many of them around. And given that while the Dayton Hamvention has attendees worldwide, there are only ~730,000 hams in the US. (Yes, it's on the public record; as the link shows.) There were around 36,000 Hamvention attendees, and probably 25,000-30,000 of them were actual amateur license holders.** So the size of the potential audience in a YouTube channel isn't all that great to begin with, and it certainly seems that a lot of folks are fighting over that smallish slice of the pie.
But you know, that's okay. I can just do my thing as long as they don't intrude on it, and I'll let them do their thing.
***
I do realize that I'm griping a bit about this on a blog, which is the older form of social media. I have enough self awareness that I can acknowledge that, but there are two significant differences: scale and goals. as my other influencer post pointed out, I'm not even close to their league in terms of visibility. And for someone who prefers to keep himself largely out of the spotlight, that's perfectly fine with me. The second is that I'm not doing this to generate clicks and/or income. I'm doing it as an outlet for my urge to write. I don't have to worry about critiques, rejection letters (if I'd even merit one out of a slush pile), and god forbid any chaos that'd arise out of any potential professional publications.
Isn't blogging a form of self-publishing? From Imgflip.
The YouTubers do put themselves out there in a way I never do, and consequently open themselves up to criticism I don't receive. For that, I salute them, and yet I'm glad I am not them.
(Also, I have now developed what appears to be Con Crud, that low grade cold that afflicts people when they have been to a conference of any sort. I was just telling my wife this past evening that this was the first real "cold" that I've had since my health scare in 2021. Not sure what kind of record that breaks, but for me it feels like forever. And I simply hate hate HATE a sore throat.)
*That came later. Judging by the footage, I was not around the booth at the time; probably at a forum or something. Oh, and for the record, while I might disagree with some of Erik's stances on things, he is living proof that people can disagree without being disagreeable.
**For example, I only got my license in the Fall of 2025, and I'd attended around 5 times or so before this year.
Last afternoon, I was noodling about on Quintalan when I noticed that Ancient, of the blog Tome of the Ancient, was on. Since she'd invited me to come and see her house, I figured I'd whisper her and take her up on the offer. I figured that my last Retail toon I'd leveled to (what was then) the level cap would be appropriate to visit with her. So, I pulled Azshandra out of storage and got a hold of Ancient.
Hey, Catwynn can be a sneaky druid...
And away I went...
Knowing Ancient's Druid, Catwynn, there were two things that stand out the most about her: she likes peaceful, wide open spaces, and she likes to fish.
She did not disappoint.
Here's a few screencaps of my time at Catwynn's place...
She does like to look at the stars, like all Night Elves...
And she has a relaxing hot tub to hang out in...
For flowers and fishing... Check.
The house is a nice little rustic bungalow.
But Catwynn's home is a lot like the TARDIS: bigger on the inside!
And like the TARDIS, it certainly seems to be able to warp space and time. See above.
And even a drafting station! This was something I didn't know about Ancient, that she used to do drafting work.
All in all, if I closed my eyes and imagined Catwynn's (and Anicent's) house, this is what I'd picture it as.
Thanks much! But there's just one more thing...
WoW! That was one hard to do achievement, and really worthy of the title!
Okay, two things... A doggo!
I took waaay too many screenshots to fit into this post, but believe me it was all forth it. Thanks to Catwynn for showing me her home, and it was great to see it!
Fellow blogger Kamalia, of Kamalia et Alia, posted yesterday about wanting friends to hang with her at her house for a weekly quest. Since she plays solo for the most part, she'd prefer it be Battle.net friends, but if that wasn't happening she'd be open to grouping.
Well... that intrigued me a bit, so I asked a few questions in the comments, and then one thing led to another, and...
Surprise!
Yes, I pulled out my first max-level toon from 2009, Quintalan, for the visit. It's been a while since he's been out and about, as he's wearing his Tier 9 armor and wielding Quel'delar, but I thought it appropriate that he be the first toon to visit.
Kam showed me around...
From the foyer...
To a parlor/reading area, complete with a floating book. That book tickled my funny bone.
Cardwyn: "Hey, me too!!"
And it wouldn't be Kamalia's house without several Tauren-themed rooms.
She even had a laundry area put together, which given I was actually finishing up a load of laundry at the time, this was perfect.
This is the kids' room, complete with bunk beds. And Ancient, if you're reading this...
All in all, she's done an amazing job of decorating. But if you've ever read of my admiration of her innate sense of decor and fashion, it's not a surprise.
We went to the edge of her property, complete with tallstriders. No hawkstriders around, alas.
I had to admit that I wasn't sure if Quintalan even had flying in the Old World, but at least the Community Center is reachable by ground mounts. From there I could take a portal to Orgrimmar.
I took a lot more screencaps than I posted here, but this should give you a feel for what it was like visiting Kamalia's house. I told her that if she just needed a body to hang around every so often, I was more than up to the task. After all, I'm not raiding or anything, and it'd feel good to reconnect with more of my blogger friends in-game.
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.
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.
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.
