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.

Meme Monday: You Meet in a Tavern Memes

While I was conducting some research into that time-honored starting point for RPG campaigns, I went down that rabbit hole and discovered far too many memes.

Well, duh. Of COURSE the Bard would
be all for that. From imgur.

"It's ron-de-vou.... OH..."
From Twit.

Yeah, been there. "Why are you..."
"Oh, no reason."
"Riiiight..."
From Cheezburger and Grimgrinner.

It's true! I have pics!
From someone on Reddit who used mematic.

Reddit again, and yes, mematic again.
But still, I laughed. Actually, I think this
is the plot of a video game.

And for those tired of the tavern meme,
there's always the next level baseline encounter.
From Reddit.

This Just in: Toons Have Leveled Up. Film At Eleven.

The L50 boundary has been crossed.

Of course the Songshine sisters would be first
to L50. Because competition between siblings.
This is as of Thursday, October 2nd, 2025.

You may now return to normal programming.

Seriously, though, it's nice to have gotten not only one but two of the four toons to L50 by the first week of October. I've not been playing as much as well, but I'll be mentioning the reason for that in about a month in another post. 

My friends have been saying they're going to get me running BRD once I have a toon that hits L50, but --surprise surprise-- The Scourge Invasion event prior to Naxxramas began yesterday, so I'm sure they'll be busy doing that. Not exactly as I planned it, but it's working out in my favor, I suppose.

I never really noticed it before, but that crystal
off the bottom of the Scourge floating fortress looks
a lot like those floating bases from Independence Day.

Before you ask, being in the upper L40s meant that I was running Maraudon a bit on the toons. Usually a run would take up most of an evening's worth of gaming, so I didn't do that too much. I kind of preferred having places like Feralas to myself, as most people don't tend to hang out there unless they're running Dire Maul instances. 

Sometimes the setting sun hits you just right...

That doesn't mean I shun human contact, because I do like it when people are around. It's just that I've been in a mood where when I'm not in an instance I prefer to just focus on questing and zone out, like how I used to approach Tetris as a zen-like exercise in meditation. And really, grouping up can generate some of the most oddball conversations if the group is up for it.

Now I've got that old song "Me and You and
a Dog Named Boo" stuck in my head.

See you in a bit!

A Company Not Named The Embracer Group Makes News

Well, EA just got bought out by the Saudi PIF, Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake Private Equity. For a grand total of $55 billion dollars.

So... Private Equity bought out EA. Not sure which is worse: that it's a private equity buyout or who is now the owner.

If you thought that EA was already bad, I guess the company can now say "Hold my beer."

If you want speculation, I'd imagine that with the Saudis involved there will be a lot of "selective editing" of content in Bioware's Mass Effect and Dragon Age, Maxis' The Sims, and other games to more "align" the games with Saudi-approved content. And no, I don't mean removing only LGBTQ content, but all PG-13 and M (for Mature) rated sexual/adult content. Except head shots and explosions, of course.

My second guess is that EA will largely replace all development staff with AI-powered coding. Saving money on salaries, you know, to boost profits. If AI creates skins for The Sims or Apex Legends to sell online, there's a boatload of profit created by, well, nobody. Same thing goes for AI-generated maps for Apex Legends, Battlefield, and Medal of Honor.

I guess EA is going to forge ahead into game development oblivion much faster than Microsoft is, even though Microsoft is forcing all employees to utilize Copilot to the point of integrating it into employee evaluations.

I sure hope that AI bubble bursts soon, because this is getting ridiculous.

Meme Monday: Character Name Memes

Naming a character is an art.

Or a science.

Or maybe an exercise in drunken silliness. Your choice.

That being said, I could fill this with screencaps I've seen around several MMOs, 

Like this one.

but I wanted to have something that others have seen (or done). Hence this Meme Monday.

From Tiktok.

I must admit I laughed at this one far more 
than I thought I would. From Amino Apps.

I have to admit this is a good one.
Much better than Internet Explorer, anyway.
From Amino Apps again.

Okay, this one needs some explanation: Both
The University of South Carolina and Clemson
University are located in South Carolina. And yes,
they are big rivals. From Reddit.

Ha. From Facebook.

I once named a Cleric "Dominic", so at least I was
in the ballpark. Of course, the story of why the
Baldur's Gate NPC was named Minsc was basically
a "Why the hell did you name your D&D character
after a city??" thing, so... yeah. Jeff it is.
From Reddit.

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.