Signs of the Apocalypse, Part Whatever

I guess I should be happy that Google can't really figure out if this blog exists, because AI bots are starting to become a real problem. 

(As if they're not one already.)

Yes, the number of indexed pages on this blog
actually went down over the course of the
past month. I guess Google kind of lost
the plot. Graph as of February 17, 2026.

Tech engineer and Raspberry Pi enthusiast Jeff Geerling experienced problems due to AI swamping his GitHub and AI agents causing disruption in the open source community:

And the popular LINUX distro, LINUX Mint,* had their forums swamped with AI bots back in January, nearly bringing down the entire system:

These are just two that I'm aware of; I'm almost certain there's more out there that I haven't observed yet.

This bubble can't pop quickly enough.

*I found out about LINUX Mint while researching a LINUX OS to install on my mom's old laptop that doesn't support Windows 11 yet is perfectly fine for use.

"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.

False Positives

There are times when I really really dislike bots and web crawlers.

This is what I discovered when I looked at the results for the past week on Blogger:

Observed on November 20, 2025.

As you can see, the number of people who actually read my last post is around 29, which is on the low end but it hovers typically between 20-50 views. I'm used to that.

But look at the numbers for the site as a whole, and things are a wee bit out of whack.

Almost all of that I can attribute that to bots and crawlers, as it gives the false impression that people are swarming all over the blog. If they were, I'd expect to see more comments this past week than I have.

This stuff comes in waves, so we're in yet another wave that'll likely end around Black Friday. 

EtA: The number of views were originally 22, but by the time I got to a screencap they were 29. Corrected in the post.

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.

Still More Technical Silliness

An addendum on my post on Tuesday...

Is there some circle of hell where Microsoft is better than Google at something? Asking for a friend.

I'm not being (very) facetious, because Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools has accepted Parallel Context's sitemap.xml file, but Google has not:

Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools...

Google's Search Console...

I even looked at the XML file just for curiosity's sake and discovered there are so many posts on PC that there's three sub-XML files. So, I tried uploading them directly to the Google Search Console with the same result as you see above. At this point I'm tempted to think that the problem is with Google, not with the XML file. After all, the sitemap.xml file is created by Blogger, not me, and last I checked Blogger is owned by Google.

Oh, and I got yet another response to my request for indexing after fixing my "Redirect error".

This came in on September 24, 2025.

Yeah, right. I followed their analysis tools linked in the help section and discovered that they're being redirected to the mobile version of the website. Yeah, so... There's a mobile version. That's a problem how? If you're running a version of Chrome that is mobile in nature, you're going to get the mobile version.

/sigh

Anyway, I apparently had poor ratings for Accessibility, so I had to change PC's layout to one of the "new" standards, which is a slightly different colored version of the original, and got this:

This is for desktop, as of 9/25/2025.

And mobile as of 9/25/2025.
Note the comment about redirect in the listing.

I had to change the mobile settings to show the full website, which I really dislike. The whole point of a mobile setting is to make it easier to read on a mobile device. So after some more tweaking and switching it back to what I consider a "better" mobile setting, I got this:

As of a bit later in the morning on 9/25/2025.

Accessibility went down, but the other scores went up. 

Still, there was one last trick to pull off, and one that I'd been meaning to do anyway, which was to change the main art piece.

It'll do for the time being.

However, the result in the tools was a whole lot of "meh"...

Well, I like it...

Anyway, I'm no longer in the red for any of the scores, so I'm going to give it another try.

How Do You Fix Something When You're Already Dead to Google?

Curiosity can be a real bitch at times.

After I’d made this post about how Shintar had discovered that Parallel Context wasn’t showing up in Google’s search results, Bhagpuss’s comment led me to investigating what the Google Console was all about. For a guy who likes to pride himself about being on the internet before the first browser was invented, the fact I never knew the Google Console or its Bing equivalent existed was a blow to my ego. Still, I swallowed my pride and poked around.

Once I started looking over the Google and Bing consoles, that was it. Like any kid who read his share of Encyclopedia Brown books (and Sherlock Holmes stories) I love a good mystery, and on the consoles I found mysteries in spades.

For starters, why was the Google Console telling me that I had a security alert on my blog?

I knew I hadn’t deliberately done anything stupid such as linking to a picture from a sketchy website –I’d gotten tired of picture links vanishing underneath me so I simply made local copies with citations—so it had to be a link to a website that had gone bad. Or worse, something about Blogger that had raised the ire of Google.* The Google Console was completely unhelpful as to which post or link was the offender, so I was left to my own devices to try to puzzle through this.

The best course of action was to start with the links on the main page, because those are found on every blog page. If that didn’t work, then I was going to have to slog through every single post to find the culprit. I began with the blogs with the longest period of inactivity and worked my way back toward the newest, and I eventually found the culprit: it was Hawtpants of the Old Republic, Njessi’s SWTOR blog. She’d had periods of inactivity followed by a few clusters of posts, but the last post on her blog had raised my eyebrows because it didn’t have Njessi’s authorial voice. I’d even fired off an email to her asking if her blog had been hacked, but I never got a response. This time when I clicked on the link, however, her blog simply exploded with all sorts of spam pop-ups and stuff completely unrelated to an MMO blog (such as online gambling). I cried a little inside, removed the link to Hawtpants of the Old Republic, and submitted the blog for security review to Google Console.

It took a few days, which surprised me given how quickly Google tends to yank people's access to things, but I got this emailed response:

This was on September 3, 2025, for the curious.

Okay, so I then submitted the site for indexing, and several days later I got this response:

This was on September 14, 2025.

WTF, Google. I tried hunting down what they meant by that, and at that moment I learned something important: Google's help pages aren't worth crap. There was very little in the way of anything resembling constructive assistance, probably because Google, like Microsoft, wants you to pay for the privilege of fixing your website. Eventually I figured out that there was another problem on the blog, likely a link that is going to a different location than what the link expects.

Well, this is going to suck trying to figure out which link is the problem. Just because the link doesn't go to where you expect --yet is NOT a link to a security risk-- shouldn't be a reason to not index the blog. My disgust with Google's lack of assistance aside, I started poking around once more. 

"URL is not on Google". No shit, Sherlock.
From September 20, 2025

Turns out it was this little widget that was the problem:

NOTE: This is the correct widget, not the one
originally posted here.

Despite the description, the RSS feed has long since gone away, one of those few times that Blogger has actually been proactive in removing something that was being sunset. That left Atom and links to Yahoo and Netvibes (or something like that). Atom worked, although it wasn't in "normal" HTML format, but Yahoo and Netvibes went to each website's 404 address.

Surely, this couldn't be the root cause, could it? Could it? I tested the live URL, and...

It's the same result as I got a few days ago.

Okay, we're getting somewhere. So I resubmitted the page for indexing and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And I finally got a result:

Really? I mean, REALLY?
From September 21, 2025.

Basically they didn't index the page because the page hasn't been indexed. If that wasn't a truly abominable case of circular reasoning, I don't know what is.

So... I pretty much have gone as far as I can with indexing, because Google will eventually fix the "Crawled - currently not indexed" issue when it gets around to it.

At least on the bright side I cleared up a security issue and a couple of bad links, but nothing resembling a positive result. Parallel Context is still dead to Google.

*Oh, the irony of THAT one. If Google were complaining about its own Blogger service, someone should get these two to talk together. Well, maybe not, now that I think about it; Google might decide the easier course of action would be to kill off Blogger instead.

EtA: Corrected the "Feed" widget with the "Subscription Links" widget, which is the actual widget used. 

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". 

Brushing off the Cobwebs

I just took a look at PC's design last night, and it's pretty out of date.

Well, not the overall design, since that's pretty much a blog design in a nutshell, but more like the references are dated and ought to be revamped. 

Geek and Sundry? That place kind of imploded when founder Felicia Day and then Critical Role left.

The About Me section? Hoo boy is THAT dated.

Some parts of the blog design I can't get around Blogger's limitations, such as it's inability to provide the latest YouTube content in the same way that you receive blog feed content. You'd think that Google owning both Blogger and YouTube would want better integration in the same way that Google+ worked, but nooo.....

Still, I'm not giving up on the platform right now. I just need to freshen this place up a bit.

Yeah, there went my motivation.
From Cheezburger.

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.

Time for a Learner's Permit*

On September 29, 2009, Souldat published the very first post here at Parallel Context. 

Fifteen years ago.

In blog years that's pretty old for a continuously updated blog, but not nearly as old as some other blogs I follow. You probably know one of them --The Ancient Gaming Noob-- and there are others that PC is almost but not quite as old, such as Priest With a Cause, but that's the breaks. We're survivors in a field where participants' timeline is typically measured in months, not years, much less decades.

And for the love of God, don't read my early posts. I still cringe at them when I occasionally wander back that far, hunting for something I might have written back then.

*Well, in six months or so, according to Ohio law. You can get a learner's permit for driving at age 15 years 6 months, but you can't pass a full driver's test until age 16.

The Soft Glow of Electric Sex Gleaming in the Window*

When you were a kid and you wanted to be outside but couldn't, you'd press your face against the glass window pane, smudging the window to the point where you left a soggy mess when you pulled your mug away. Rainy days, frozen days, days where you had to go to some important family event, just pick one and they're all the same. That longing of wanting to be where you couldn't made your entire day miserable. Even later in life, when I wanted to be reading about different worlds found in SF&F novels, if I had to be somewhere else I'd not be in the best of spirits.

I mean, who wants to go take a Chemistry test if they had the option to go play Risk or read Dune instead?

This is my copy, circa 1985.
I mean, look at the price on
this paperback! $3.95!!

Tonight is my questing buddy's regular Wrath raid night, and while for the most part I'm quite happy to be no longer in the grind given all the Heroic Plus Plus** "runs" she's been doing lately***, I will confess to missing out on all of the trappings surrounding those raids.

More than anything else, I miss the camaraderie in the raids, chatting and enjoying the company of each other, than the raid itself.

Ever since the transition from 40/20 person raids in Vanilla Classic to TBC and now Wrath Classic, the raids have felt "less than" compared to those early raids. I know that it could be argued that 10 person raids in Wrath Classic truly are less than, particularly given the differences between 10 person Wrath Naxx and 40 person Vanilla Naxx, but I've felt that way ever since I set foot in every 25 person TBC raid I participated in****. Blizzard may have made it easier to field a raid team in terms of numbers, but they also left some magic behind. 

It's an acceptable trade-off, I guess, but for me raiding hasn't been the same. 

But it's a bug I can't completely leave behind, despite my obvious refusal to "play the game" and catch-up to the current raid tier in the most expedient way possible. The raids themselves don't exactly hold much in the way of charm for me, and Trial of the Crusader holds bittersweet memories for me.

***

Back in 2010, I almost became a Wrath raider.

Oh, you never heard about that? Well, there's a reason why I never blogged about it: why blog about an event that ended up not happening? I didn't expect that I'd ever be back in this situation in a Wrath of the Lich King Classic edition of WoW, either, but here we are.

Remember this guy? Here's Quintalan,
complete in his T9 Liadrin's Battlegear, earned
the hard way by running plenty of dungeons.

Back in Satyana's very brief period of joining Parallel Context, I'd been logged in one evening when she whispered me "Hey, you want to join a raid?"

This was back when I severely restricted my WoW time because the mini-Reds were truly "mini" and they took priority over my game time, but this particular evening I had a few hours to just kick around. Still, my brain kind of froze at the prospect. I still had a hard enough time dealing with the 5-person pugs in the LFD tool --not that I didn't now what to do in those instances, but the very nature of dealing with random strangers on the internet-- and here I was being asked to make a huge leap into raiding. 

"Uh..." was my oh-so-brilliant reply. "I've never been raiding before."

"Oh, you'll love it! It's fun!"

She kind of had me over a barrel there. "Okay, what are we doing and do I have enough time to read up on it?"

"It's Trial of the Crusader, and don't worry, I'll tell you what to do."

That didn't exactly make me feel any better. But since I didn't want to let my co-blogger down, I joined the raid team that Satyana was putting together, and she cast about for 3 or so more people to finish filling out the raid.

Raiding was such an unknown to me that I didn't even realize there was a "raid" channel, so imagine my surprise when I started seeing chat messages with an unfamiliar color popping up in my dialogue box.

I, uh, kept my mouth shut throughout this, but I had a feeling that I was going to need to go on Ventrillo if we were going to run this raid. Oh yay, I thought. Mister Introvert is going to have to be in a voice program with 8 strangers and look like a complete idiot along the way.

I hung around Dalaran for a few minutes and after consulting with a WoW website --maybe Thottbot-- I flew up to the Crusader area in Icecrown.

It was then, while I felt like I was waiting for my own funeral, that it began to dawn on me that Satyana was having trouble filling out those last few spots. 

Over the next 15 or so minutes we got to 9 raiders twice, then someone would drop.

"Anybody know anybody who can join?" Satyana asked in raid chat.

Nobody said anything, and my hopes rose some more.

A couple more people dropped, and we went down to six raiders.

"Okay, I'm going to call it," Satyana finally said. "We'll try another time."

I breathed a big sigh of relief. 

That "another time" raiding with Satyana didn't materialize, as she moved on from both the server and from Parallel Context shortly after that aborted raid attempt.*****

***

Thirteen years later, Wrath Classic has returned to Trial of the Crusader, and I can't help but think of what might have happened then. 

Would I have liked it? (I don't know.) 

Would I have screwed up royally? (All signs point to yes.) 

Would my fellow raiders have tolerated my mistakes? (Come on, this is World of Warcraft we're talking about; what do you think would have happened in a pug like this in the era of GearScore?)

I do believe the trajectory of my MMO career might have been totally changed if that raid had actually happened, but my suspicion is that it would have made me even more reticent about raiding when Vanilla Classic became a thing. Even then, I had to be fast-talked into those first raids I went to in Vanilla Classic: Zul'Gurub and Molten Core. Yes, I ultimately had fun in both raids, but there was a learning curve. And the weight of expectations was not upon me. If anything the only expectation was that if we didn't loot the Corehounds like we were supposed to, we were gonna get called out in that first Molten Core raid. (Luckily for me I stayed on top of that job; I only got called out once and was in the middle of looting when it happened so it went something like "Cardwyn, loot the-- oh, nevermind.")

At times like this, I do wonder whether I deliberately sabotage my gearing and playstyle just so I am never put in the situation where I'm asked to join a raid. You can't have someone reach out to see if I'm interested if I'm not geared enough, and with my avoidance of running 5-person H+ and H++ instances, I'm guaranteeing that I won't have the gear.

Still, I do have to periodically clean the smudge from the window, looking at all the fun, wishing I was there.

*From the movie A Christmas Story. Here's the reveal of the now classic "leg lamp":

**For those who remember their programming languages, I always hear Heroic Plus Plus and think of C++. Kind of weird how this stuff comes back into your life after being away for a couple of decades.

***I put runs in quotes because the current strat for those runs is to basically run through all of the boss encounters to get to the final boss because badges for the current raid tier only drop off of the final boss.

****For the record, that does not include Hyjal, Black Temple, or Sunwell.

*****It's been forever since I've thought about her, but my biggest memory about her time here was the time she made a post criticizing someone and disparagingly wondering if someone had Downs Syndrome. My biggest regret was not standing up to her more forcefully than I did for that behavior.

EtA: It's co-BLOGGER, not coworker. Sheesh.

It's All Filler in the End

Given that for almost a decade I never bothered to update the header to Parallel Context, it feels a bit weird to have people comment whenever it changes.

To be honest, I'd really like to have a series of headers that are rotated through every time you access PC like what Rav has on her blog Ravalation*, but I also recognize that it's likely a Wordpress plugin that she's using. And Blogger gets less than minimal support from Google anyway, which drives me nuts because if there was even a little bit of support Blogger would be a fantastic platform. Of course, if Google actually did what they usually do they would have pulled the plug after a couple of years when they realized they weren't gonna make a quick buck on the platform, over a decade ago. 

So.... Yay that they're not paying attention to Blogger?

Without a plugin to use I've tried building a GIF that cycles through 3 or 4 screenshots, but if you want something resembling decent quality you have to pay for it. And really work your ass off to get over the learning curve (::cough:: Gimp ::cough::). Besides, I'm not dropping a ton of money on something like Photoshop just to make a few GIFs. 

This would have been one of the pics
I'd have used in that GIF or plug-in.
If nothing else, Guild Wars 2 has some
fantastic graphics. And yes, Mikath
is yet another redheaded bearded guy.

***

All that's past is prologue, I suppose.

I changed the header of Parallel Context this time around because I wanted to distance myself from Wrath Classic a bit. No, I'm not planning on dropping Wrath Classic, it's that I'd rather see something on the header that brings back fond memories rather than resentfulness. I had to learn that one the hard way by stubbornly sticking to my TBC Classic header cadence just because that was the current phase of the expansion. So this time, since I'm not planning on raiding anymore** I decided to plop in a graphic from a more pleasant memory, Blackwing Lair. Blizzard's Season of Mastery used that graphic when BWL was released, so while it's not from an actual raid the picture still brings back a memory of the time when our best Mage pulled threat on Chromaggus and wiped the raid. We collectively laughed our asses off when that happened, because no more than 5 minutes beforehand the tank had boasted that he wasn't gonna have any problems with threat on ol' Chromag, and one of the Mages proved him wrong in the blink of an eye.

It was also a time before TBC Classic, when the raid split up into two and both doubled down on the hardcore route. Compared to TBC and Wrath Classic, those WoW Classic raids were just, well, fun. 

Feels kind of weird seeing this graphic.
I tried using this as a background for a short
while but it was far too busy. This was even
before my (brief) raiding career.

***

One thing that I have found is that I still enjoy the Classic leveling dungeons far more than I have a right to. Kind of like how if you're in a group that isn't wearing a ton of heirloom gear*** you can't simply steamroll over the content, you have to work at it. Plus the background to a lot of these Classic dungeons are fantastic, such as the quest lead-ins to The Deadmines or exploring an entire freaking city in Blackrock Depths. Now that I've been around the block more than my share of times, I do find that some of these old leveling instances in MMOs to be the most fun for me, such as Mandalorian Raiders and Athiss in SWTOR, the Garth Agarwen and Great Barrow instance clusters in LOTRO, and The Sanctum of Burning Souls in Age of Conan.

Sith Inquisitors are the Warlocks
(aka Purple Mages) of the SWTOR universe.

Maybe I should stop being so narrow-minded and spice things up a bit with a greater variety of headers from a greater variety of games. And not just MMOs, either...

The inner cover of the old Moldvay
D&D Basic Set. Willingham's artwork still
holds up to this day.

*If you reload her blog you'll see the header pic changes each time. I'm jealous. (Oh, and yes, it's HTTP, not HTTPS. Rav is still around, but hasn't updated the blog in ages.)

**Maybe the occasional Vault of Archavon, because it's pretty simple to do.

***Until I finally reached max level for the first time back in 2009-2010, I used to complain about the unfair advantage that heirloom gear gives a player compared to those without heirloms. I mean, you not only have to be max level to buy them, but you have to have enough badges from running heroic group content at max level to afford them; you can't just walk in and buy them with gold. Then, when you get them, you have a built in advantage of having gear that "levels" in quality with you. Still, a couple of my toons do have heirloom gear because they do make it easier to forget about trying to scrounge for the best gear on several of your item slots while questing out in the field. And this is coming from someone who tends to forget about selecting talents on a talent tree for, oh, five levels' worth of talents at a time.

EtA: Corrected some grammar.

Oh, How Nice

Apparently PC has been reported as a "Deceptive Site", so I filled out a form to Google to dispute this.

This blog is so freaking old that I'll have to go back and see which link is the "bad one", which is likely an old blog that no longer exists.

Oh. Yay.

On This Day...

...in 2009, Souldat posted PC's first blog entry. I'd already posted the long, sordid details in the last post.

In lieu of cake, have a cookie:

What a Long Strange Trip It's Been

Truckin' got my chips cashed in. Keep truckin', like the do-dah man
Together, more or less in line, just keep truckin' on.

--Truckin', The Grateful Dead

In August 2009, I was having a Livejournal mail chat with Souldat's wife when she broached a specific topic.

"[Souldat] and I were thinking of playing World of Warcraft again, and I was wondering if you wanted to play," she wrote.

I'd heard of WoW --it had penetrated the popular consciousness several years ago-- and I knew of its reputation among gamers. Namely, that it is one of those games that ends up consuming your life if you're not careful.

Still, I was happy to be asked. I'd joined LJ less than a year ago --mainly so I could read and comment on SF&F authors' LJ pages-- and I'd made a few new friends online.* But this was the first time one of them had asked me to essentially hang out with them online.

I figured I could at least try the game out, and so I spent one Saturday watching as World of Warcraft slowly downloaded** while the rest of the family watched National Treasure.*** And just when I thought it was finished and I could at least make sure my account worked by starting the game, it began downloading even more stuff.

"Just what have I gotten myself into?" I wondered as I took a bit of heat from my wife for not watching the movie with the rest of the family.

The WoW website didn't exactly help me that much, because the history of Azeroth began thousands of years before the era of WoW, and I kept losing track of who was who while perusing the history. "Okay, is Illidan a good guy or a bad guy? And what about this Burning Legion? And the Scourge? And the Plague?" I had so many questions, and but I figured I should be polite to Soul and his wife and keep them to myself for the time being.****

***

Those first few game sessions were, well, chaotic at best.

Soul and his wife were saints with me as I fumbled around, not really understanding how things such as headsets integrated with a game that took up a full screen and already had taken over the PTT button for its own use. In 2009, I was far more used to games such as Civ III than games that required quick reflexes, so my fumbling and flailing was made all the worse by switching game genres. My first WoW sessions were so awkward that I had my headset hooked up to my work laptop behind me, and every time I wanted to talk I had to reach behind me and press the space bar.

After a couple of sessions I left the sound on, but all it took was about 10 seconds of what I thought was silence when Soul told me that he could hear my breathing. (It didn't help that I had seasonal allergies at the time.) So I learned about dialing back the microphone's sensitivity, which I'd never had to deal with because I used telephones/cell phones for work.

But eventually, after a class suggestion by Souldat to switch from a Priest to a Paladin --the former being too squishy for someone more acquainted with the D&D Cleric class-- I began to enjoy myself. However, I was still pretty self conscious about my online persona, and the first time I followed Soul into Orgrimmar I had the feeling that everybody there was watching me as we crossed the gate. This awkward feeling was made worse when I was accosted by a random player trying to hit me up for a charter signature, and I had a few moments of terror, not knowing how to respond, before the guy went away to pester somebody else.

It was then, in mid-September, that Souldat contacted me outside of the game. I was sure that he wanted to say that the WoW thing wasn't working out for us, and I steeled myself  for what he was going to say.

"Would you like to start a blog with me?" he asked.

***

The idea, Soul pitched, was that we'd write from the perspective of two different people in the WoW experience: I was the newbie, and he was the experienced player.

Soul really didn't have to pitch this very hard, because I looked at the blog as a chance to improve my writing skills.***** I've had ideas in my head for stories, and I've started writing a novel numerous times, but I've never been able to get more than halfway through the a story. Blogging, I figured, would allow me to actually finish something for a change.

But there were two big questions that we needed to answer before we started: what blogging platform to use, and what the name should be.

I personally preferred Livejournal, since that was what I was most familiar with, and I figured we could make that work going forward. Soul, however, researched the most popular blogging platforms and decided that Blogger would require the least amount of maintenance to keep going.# Given that he'd done the research, he didn't really have to push hard to convince me.

But the name, that was a problem.

I couldn't tell you just how many blog names we tried out, but it was over 15 for certain and probably closer to 30. Each time we'd come up with a name, Soul would try to see if the domain was taken, and inevitably it would be rejected. The names themselves are now a blur, but among those that were tried and rejected included Parallel Views and Different Perspectives. The latter was well after the first dozen or so, when we were running out of ideas.

Now, I can't remember exactly who came up with Parallel Context, but when Souldat put the blog name in, it was actually available. So Parallel Context it was.

***

I'll freely admit that Soul put the blog together and I was --more or less-- along for the ride.

While I had a LJ account, I never really considered posting in a blog on a regular basis. It's not as if I had a lot of time set aside to write to begin with, and committing to a blog would mean I'd have a self imposed deadline on top of all of the other family and work commitments I'd have. Sure, there was going to be that initial burst of activity, but sustaining it is the key to making a blog that lasts.

And there's that promotion thing.

Soul had reached out to some bloggers he liked and mentioned that we were starting PC, and after a few posts into the launch we managed to get on a couple of people's blog lists. Meanwhile, I worked on integrating Google Analytics into the site, so we could see just how many people were viewing the blog after our outreach. And the result early on weren't encouraging: the numbers were disappointingly small. Like "this is us shouting into the void" small.

Oh, and during all of this, I was learning how to actually play WoW, so I wouldn't have anyone yelling "Get gud, scrub!" at me while playing the game. Hillsbrad Foothills and Tarren Mill taught me the true meaning of what being on a PvP server really was, and I can't say I was really thrilled. Sure, there was the adrenalin rush of trying to hide while being ganked by a swarm of Alliance raiders from Southshore, but the concept of "we're all in this together" took a real hit during those days. My work schedule and the kids' school schedule meant I was best off playing in the early morning, which meant that I was on at 5-6 AM EST on a server meant for the US West Coast.

That means... Say it all with me now: "Nobody was on while I was learning how to WoW."

I had the freedom to fuck up and nobody was around to see it.

Afterward, I'd return to being a normal husband and father, but during my lunchtime I'd write for the site.

Early on I decided to try to write a post at least once a week, and between Soul's and my output we kept the blog on a steady pace.## Still, there was this big WoW/MMO ecosystem out there, and we didn't know how to really break into it to have our voices heard. Soul suggested a few blogs for me to read to a) help me improve at WoW and b) so that we could learn how to blog better. But for me, I decided that I wasn't just going to read, I'd comment as well.

But that assumed that I knew what the hell I was talking about. So back to playing WoW a bit more to muddle my way through.

***

I think it was way after I dinged 80 for the first time in Wrath that we finally had a breakthrough. I'd made some post about a 5-man PUG fail and why they fail the way they do --that much I remember-- when I discovered a comment from "Tam" making some thoughtful observations.

"Holy crap!" I exclaimed. "Is that who I think it is?"

I followed the name back, and sure enough, it was Tam from Righteous Orbs, who (along with his friend Chas) at the time ran one of the most well read WoW blogs.

My brain processed the information, but I still couldn't believe it. It was as if Geddy Lee from Rush called me up and said that he, Neil, and Alex were going to be in town and wanted to know if we could hang out.

Somewhere in my amazement I clicked back to see the Righteous Orbs Blogroll, and sure enough the words "Parallel Context" was in there.

Other blogs added us shortly thereafter, such as Larisa's The Pink Pigtail Inn, and our readership began to increase. What I also found was a community of MMO bloggers who were supportive of each other and promoted each other's work. Almost all of them were more social media savvy than Soul and myself, as they took to Twitter to promoting each others' blogs and utilizing Facebook and Google+ as well.

I thought things were looking up, and that we'd get the active site we'd always hoped for, but I didn't reckon on life. Or the video game development cycle.

Blogs faded away, such as Righteous Orbs and The Pink Pigtail Inn, due to burnout. Those two tore a huge hole in the WoW blogging community, as they were the watering hole for WoW bloggers where you could see an accurate and current list of blogs. When PPI in particular shut down, PC suffered a huge hit in readership; something around 35-40% of the views came from PPI as a starting point. Blog Azeroth and Orcish Army Knife have tried to fill the void, but the WoW blogging community also suffered hits from the divisive nature of the WoW Cataclysm expansion.#### Others gradually faded away as real life intervened. Soul himself has mostly moved on as he and his wife bought a house, started a family, and have been kept busy every since. Soul still plays, but not nearly as much as he used to.

Even I dropped my WoW subscription toward the end of Mists, when I realized I wasn't having fun any more, and I focused on other MMOs instead.

***

Yet here we are, almost 10 years in, and PC is still around.

What have I learned over the years?

• That I could live on 4-5 hours sleep for an indefinite period. I tend to get my best writing done late at night or early in the morning, when everything is quiet and I can just focus. 20 years ago, I used to get up at 4 AM and get into work by 5 AM just so I could get about 3 hours of uninterrupted coding and analysis done without interference from the hustle and bustle of the day. Ever since, I've treasured the night as when I'm most productive. 

• That I don't have to look for approval to write. I used to worry about things such as pageviews and building PC into a real site, but I finally figured out that PC is a real site. I don't need to ask for approval to post articles, and I don't need to worry about how a post might impact the readership at the site. After all, what readership? I know our pageviews quite well, thankyouverymuch, and I know what our number of readers is, give or take about 10-20 people. I've never bothered with monetizing the site, because I'm not an Influencer and I don't seek to profit off of my friends.

• That persistence is just as important as talent. A blog isn't an easy thing to keep going, year after year. The sort of persistence in keeping a blog up is the same sort of persistence found in a Ph.D student, who keeps the dream alive of getting their Doctorate, through force of will alone. My university degree is in a scientific field that almost requires a Ph.D to get to do significant research, so I've known more than my share of Masters and Doctorate students. And the one thing the successful ones all had was the persistence in getting the work done, day after day and year after year. They weren't necessarily the smartest in their field --I can easily think of examples of the "smart person who never finished"-- but they were persistent. They never gave up. And with this blog, there are times when I thought about shutting it down, but then I've told myself I'm not giving up on my creative outlet.

• That MMO bloggers are a weird breed. We see things that happen in MMOs and think "that'd make a great blog post". We see Gen Chat discussions and get inspired to write something. We take goofy screenshots because hey, the blog.

• That MMO bloggers are family. I found people whose blogs are long since in mothballs, but I still talk to them on a regular basis. My fellow bloggers have been through a lot, through weddings, births of their children, and even deaths in the family. Small victories as well as crushing events. But the MMO blogging has kept us together. I exchange Holiday cards with several bloggers, and we chat about life. I've laughed with them, I've cried with them, and I've been willing to listen to them pour their guts out over what's been bothering them. Because that's what family does. You may not be able to choose your genetic family, but you can choose your online family. I'd like to say that I chose these bloggers as friends, but I know what the reality is. They chose me.

***

So here's to an (almost) 10 years.

To people who have shared the journey and have moved on.

To people who still come by and say "Oh crap, what is that guy up to now?"

To people who share the same weird passion for putting themselves out on the internet for a living.

To Parallel Context, the blog that almost didn't have a name.

Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me,
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been.

--Truckin', The Grateful Dead

*Online friends weren't a new thing to me; I've been on the internet since before the WWW was a thing. It's that I'd not kept up with the SF&F community since the GEnie online service imploded, and the community had a large presence on GEnie.

**We had a 2.5MB download connection back then. I suppose you could say that "I was unprepared" for the size of the download.

***DON'T get me started about the historical accuracy of that movie. When I first watched it, with my wife, I had to go walk into the kitchen to keep from blurting things out in the TV room. I was told my face turned a bright shade of red numerous times.

****To be honest, I still have questions to this day, but they're more of the "why did you decide to make the history this way, rather than another way?" variety. There are plenty of times when I think that the history of Azeroth sprang from somebody's homebrew D&D campaign that was created when the players were attempting to be worldly and sophisticated.

*****Despite my output here, roughly 4-6 posts per month, I do like to write; I just don't force myself into constant writing when I know it's just not going to work out.

#Blogger's restrictions are far more of a nuisance these days, when most of the blogging customization tools are written for Wordpress. Every time I look into changing the blog around, I run up against Blogger's limitations, and I really don't have the time to spend writing custom code for Blogger itself to do what I want it to do.

##We had also added a third blogger on two separate occasions, but both of them didn't last long. One had a particularly dislikeable post and both of us called her out on it, and she kind of vanished shortly after. We lost the other due to real life issues pulling her away.

###We ran the instances with 3 people, given that Soul was much higher in level than the content and was --at best-- a middling healer. Soul's wife provided ranged DPS as a Mage, and as long as we weren't overwhelmed by adds we did okay.

####Looking back, I can see that a lot of WoW bloggers that I read vanished over the course of Cataclysm and Mists, and I don't believe that was an accident. I've heard from quite a few people in groups in WoW Classic how they dropped their subscription during those two expacs, and it would make sense that the WoW blogging community merely reflected that.