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I have been back and forth on the whole WordPress.com integration with ActivityPub, which theoretically allows you to share your posts automatically with the Fediverse.

I turned it off here on TAGN because it was too broken, but I have left it on for my other blog, EVE Online Pictures, because it seemed like the ideal test; a site that basically posts a picture with a brief description three days a week.  And, after ages of the integration working for a bit, then being totally broken and failing to post, it finally seemed to settle down at the start of the month and just work.

I decided to stop manually posting links to Mastodon from the site and just started boosting the Activity Pub posts to get people to just follow that if they wanted those posts.  And then I noticed the integration does NOT post links to the site.  All it posts is a 549 pixel wide preview image of each post.  So the reader has a shrunken version of the image posted and no way to get to the site or the full image.  Fucking WP.com doing the wrong thing yet again.

So, more than a year later, I cannot at all endorse the WP.com ActivityPub integration.  It is clearly a checkbox feature to them that they do not otherwise care about.

I have since turned off the connection.  Sorry to the five people who actually followed that account.  I was hoping it would work out.

Instead I am now experimenting with MastoFeed, a service that will post from your RSS feed to your Mastodon account.  So far it seems to be working well… which probably means it will die from neglect or get acquired and over monetized or something like that.  Nothing that works is allowed to survive on that trait alone in this world.

Meanwhile, the depredations of WP.com continued elsewhere.  On the mobile JetPack app, which replaced the WordPress app a while back they have a new layout for the stats page.

This is about par for the course where they have some updated visuals that are too busy, too crowded, and that contain useless data.  Sleek doesn’t enter into it, while I am not sure what “powerful” even means for stats.  Certainly there was nothing more powerful than the way they were.

Still, at least for now I could revert to the old view for now.

One Year Ago

The blog turned eighteen and there was that annual post again… even through I was traveling when it posted.  We were in Honolulu for our anniversary, and it is a Pokemon Go kind of town.  But I did complete my Vivillon collection.

I also posted the bottom 100 search terms that still bring people to the blog, according to Google Console.

There was also the summing up of Blaugust 2024.

Over in the World of Warcraft, Blizz declared that people were leveling up too quickly in The War Within… and it was time to put a stop to that.  It is almost like they realized not everybody cares about end game raiding.

But they also gave all subscribers access to the Dragonflight expansion.  There was some more leveling for some of us!  I tried it for about fifteen minutes.

Over in Cataclysm Classic we were struggling with item levels in Grim Batol.  But we came back for another run the next day and succeeded.  We also tried Tol Barad to help gear up and… it was pretty awful.  But we went on to the Halls of Origination and wrapped that up.

I went off to Uldum in my personal quest to finish off all of the Cataclysm zones.  Later I ranked the expansions overland zones.  I favored Vash’jir and Uldum on most points.

On the EVE Online front, CCP announced the schedule for the CSM19 elections.  The MER for August 2024 came out as well, and the invasion of Catch looked more like the summer slump of legend.  There were also changes to the AIR Opportunities daily tasks. Meanwhile, CCP kept trying to get the Equinox sovereignty updates settled.

Meanwhile, we learned that CCP’s Marc Andreesen backed blockchain bullshit game was to be called EVE Frontier.

Then there was an EVE Online focused Friday bullet points post about the coming Crimson Harvest event, the CSM19 elections, Alliance Tournament XX, the coming of EVE Galaxy Conquest, skyhook changes, Zarzakh being under siege or not, and how CCP was trying to hide the crypto garbage aspect of EVE Frontier.

In New Eden, my main hit the 270 million skill point mark.  I also used the new chat filtering options to clear up most of the spam in Jita.

The EverQuest team announced the Scars of Destruction expansion.

In EverQuest, as the 25th anniversary celebration continued, I won or completed or was done with the Overseer aspect of the game.  It has always been a strangely adjunct mini-game whose purpose has been somewhat opaque to me.

The Stars Reach per-alpha testing continued, with a terrain modification test that demonstrated that players can screw up a planet pretty quickly.

Firaxis said that one of their goals for Civilization VII was to get player to finish their games.

Battlefront.com was bought out by Matrix games, and it looked like the old Combat Mission titles, like Barbarossa to Berlin might be no longer available.  But then somebody pointed out that they were still available over at GoG.com, so I bought the trio of titles once more.

There was a Friday bullet points post about video game industry news that included more layoffs at Microsoft while they announced increased shareholder dividends and more stock buybacks, a $60 Overwatch skin, Diablo IV making a billion dollars, Sony’s screw up with Concord, EA being all in on AI, a crypto version of Flappy Bird, Nintendo suing the Palworld devs, a Sony exec suggesting game devs drive for Uber, and game devs leaving the industry for good.

In my Telephone Tales series, I reflected on my time spent in management and my struggles with the internship position I created.

Five Years Ago

The blog turned fourteen and I made my usual post about stats and the passing of time.

Nintendo announced the end of their long running DS hardware line.

Chris Roberts was annoyed because people are so cynical online, threatening to unleash an irony-quake.

With no BlizzCon planned for 2020, Blizzard announced BlizzConline for February of 2021.

My third entry in the ongoing binge watching series was posted.  I was also looking at the main streaming channels I was viewing as well as some secondary channels.

In my play through of Diablo II on its 20th anniversary I wrapped up Act II, then launched myself into the somewhat forgettable Act III.  When it came to Act IV I had to go use that one time respec to finish Diablo.  On finishing Act V I summed up with some thoughts about the game.

In WoW Classic we were taking on the upstairs portion of Sunken Temple, though it took a third run to get to the Avatar of Hakkar.  I was also still plugging away with some alts.

In EVE Online CCP introduced quantum cores for Upwell structures.  Abyssal sites also got some updates, with T0 and T6 sites opening up with the Depths of the Abyss update.  They also tried to breath some life into the EDENCOM ship lineup.

Meanwhile, metaliminal storms were doing whatever it is they really do.  There was the GM Week bot bash in Yulai, where high sec players got to blow up some capital ships, including two titans.

My own main character hit 220 million skill points in the game.

And then there was World War Bee, which I will just list as bullet points:

Then, in a final Friday Bullet Points post for the month I looked at LOTRO’s mini-expansion, Microsoft buying Zemimax, PlayStaion 5 pre-orders, the end of FarmVille, EA being dumb about lock boxes again, EVE Online ship models, and something about CCP planning to do some sort of resource redistribution thing in New Eden, which became the whole economic starvation plan that drove players from the game.  Kind of a lot for one post.

Ten Years Ago

The blog turned nine years old.

Some survey said it could guess my age based on my video game preferences.

World of Warships officially went live after its open beta.

As part of the Heart of Thorns expansion, the Guild Wars 2 base game went completely free.

Also on the free front, WildStar went free to play, bowing to the realities of the MMORPG market.

In World of Warcraft, the ability to fly was finally unlocked in Warlords of Draenor… provided you had all the achievements.

In Diablo III I was looking at the whole season thing.

Lord British was on again with some quotes, allowing that Blizzard could do some things well… like Diablo.  But he was more on about sandbox games, like his upcoming Shroud of the Avatar, because sandbox games generate news headlines.  His example was EVE Online, though it wasn’t clear to me that SotA was going to get the same sort of coverage.

In Minecraft I was making friends with the zombie pigmen and using a utility to see a map of our world.  I needed that map as we were all out exploring.  Aaron was kicking of our transit hub in the roof of the nether and I was ruining Xydd’s neighborhood.  Meanwhile, our hosting service was going out of business.

On the Daybreak front I was reflecting on the status of EverQuest Next five years after it had been announced.  The status moved to “cancelled” eventually.

There were expansion plans for EverQuest and EverQuest II.  The Ruins of Kunark expansion was unlocked on the Ragefire progression server while the vote for the Desert of Flames expansion was up on the Stormhold server.  Daybreak also killed off enforced raid rotation on Ragefire, having “fixed” the underlying issue finally. There was talk of the new server names for the coming server consolidation in EverQuest II.  I am not sure I liked the results.

In EVE Online I was happy, in the age of Fozzie sov, that POS towers still gave kill mails.  Even CCP seemed to think that maybe blowing things up was better than sov wands.  They were also considering going back to bigger expansions, putting less emphasis on the monthly updates.  The monthly updates still had names for the moment… the Vanguard monthly update for example… but that would go by the end of the year.

Asher Elias started off his podcast and led us off to a fight with Ron Mexxico, who was one of his early guests, and brought us to Cloud Ring in Fozzie Claws.

The monthly EVE Online blog banter… which seems to have died off recently… wanted to know what we would do were we put in charge of the development of New Eden.

Finally, I was reflecting a bit on lifetime subscriptions and noting Asheron’s Call downtime, Lord of the Rings Online server transfers, the Drunder server in EverQuest II, and Windows 10 in one of my Friday bullet point posts.

Fifteen Years Ago

Well, there was that whole four year anniversary thing.

Planet Michael, the Michael Jackson virtual world, was announced.  How is that coming along?  The Twitter account have been pretty quiet since… 2011.

The whole David Allen, Derek Smart, Quest Online public blame and shame fest ended when Quest Online gave David Allen some money and he went away.  Derek Smart could not help but throw in a couple final comments.  Good thing he’s been quiet since then… *cough*

CCP was talking about Public Fleets and such that were planned for their Incursions expansion.  We wouldn’t actually see them until December, but there was talk.

More interesting was a guide to suicide ganking in EVE Online put up by TooNuRacoon.

Meanwhile, I was kicking off my EVE Online screen shot contest.  All of the entries have since been posted on my other site.

I tried turning an old joke into an MMO joke.  Some people got it.  Some did not.  Some got angry, because this is the internet and that is what people do on the internet.

I looked at cloaks in MMOs, and how little they resemble what we would call a cloak in the real world.

In World of Warcraft I finally got that Brewmaster achievement.

Lord of the Rings Online flipped the switch and went free to play.  We were truly among the free (to play) peoples Middle-earth then.  There were some issues with Turbine Points, though I did get my 5,000 point pay-off.

The instance group was still summering in Middle-earth.  The group was finally into the meat of the Lone Lands.  We also tried some skirmishes and talked about Anderson Cooper.

In LOTRO I also ran into somebody who was looking for a social environment similar to old EverQuest.  I wonder if he ended up on Fippy Darkpaw which, for a short time, had all the best aspects of early EverQuest.

Twenty Years Ago

Over in EverQuest II the Desert of Flames expansion launched, the first full expansion for the alleged EverQuest successor.  (There were a couple of adventure packs, The Bloodline Chronicles and The Splitpaw Saga, that were released before.)  While it was a quite stunning new place in Norrath, I was really against those flying carpet mounts.  They just were not very “EverQuest” to my mind.  I have since softened on that opinion, SOE and Daybreak having added so many more hideous mounts to the game since then.

Meanwhile, in EverQuest, where two expansions a year was still the norm, the Depths of Darkhollow, the tenth expansion for that game… only six and a half years old at that point… went live.

Thirty Years Ago

Sony jumped into the console wars in the US as the PlayStation finally arrived in the here.  It had already been available in Japan for almost nine months, so quite a bit of anticipation had built up.

Thirty-Five Years Ago

Wing Commander, the first entry in the series, and the root of Chris Roberts’ fame, launched.

Most Viewed Posts in September

1. My Music Listening was Wrecked by iTunes
2. No Man’s Sky – Playing with Friends
3. Binge Watching – Wednesday Season 2
4. Palworld and our Visit to the Oil Rig
5. Building My First Corvette in No Man’s Sky
6. Stuck on the Level 47 Requirements for Pokemon Go
7. Labor Day Musings 2025
8. Level 48 Achieved and the Level 49 Task Requirements in Pokemon Go
9. The Blizzard WoW Classic 2025 Road Map includes Pandaria and New Vanilla Progression Servers
10. No Man’s Sky, Voyagers, and the Corvette Effect
11. TAGN Fantasy Critic League 2025 – Week Thirty-Six and the Hollow Knight: Silksong Reckoning
12. World of Warcraft Midnight Editions and Pricing Revealed with Early Access for Housing

Search Terms of the Month

no man’s sky corvette
[Oh yeah!]

no man’s sky first corvette
[First corvette, best corvette]

no man’s sky custom corvette
[They are all custom!]

nms corvette editor
[It has flaws for both good and ill]

no man’s sky corvette builds
[Best go to Reddit]

no man’s sky star wars corvette
[Again, Reddit is your best start]

buy corvette
[No, build corvette!]

2008 corvette for sale
[Yeah, now we’re off topic]

no man’s sky corvette landing pad
[Only in space stations… I want one at my base]

nms corvette parts list
[The Wiki has you covered]

(Not listed, literally a search for a Chevy Corvette for every year from 2004 forward, plus one for a 1962 Corvette specifically)

Game Time by ManicTime and iOS

Given which title I have probably been gushing about the most, it is probably no surprise who is at the top of the list for September.

• No Man’s Sky – 60.15%
• Pokemon Go – 17.91%
• EVE Online – 10.18%
• PalWorld – 6.81%
• Balatro – 4.96%

That represents a lot of time in NMS for sure.  High fantasy fell completely by the wayside this month, with no LOTRO or WoW or any other flavor in that niche of the MMORPG genre.  Even my spaceship time seemed to be yoinked from EVE Online.  Or maybe I just liked titles with longer names as the list also seems to be in descending order of name length.

EVE Online

Things happened in New Eden in September, but I was mostly absent.  After kind of binging on ratting and exploration and a couple other ISK making ventures I hit that wall where I got tired of the whole thing.  Also, No Man’s Sky was scratching that space itch a bit, but we’ll get to that next.  I did go on a couple of fleets and got on a few kill mails, so I can prove I was still playing.  But I wasn’t all that invested.

No Man’s Sky

The Voyagers update, which landed at the end of August, clearly got me back on the NMS train.  I built a corvette, then went on the expedition, then just kept on playing… and writing about… the game.  How long will it stick?  I do not know.  But the corvette changes were just enough of a change up to make the core game play loop interesting enough to stick with for now.

Palworld

Our jump into Palworld was interrupted some during the month by travel plans and the coming of the NMS update mentioned above.  Still, once we got into the back half of the month and things settled down a bit, we continued plugging away, trying to find a path forward that was good for the four of us and our varied commitment to the title.

Pokemon Go

The game has been tossing small xp focused events at us all month as we wait for the October changes that have been promised.  In a bit of luck, I ended up getting Keldeo, my last entry for the Kalos Pokedex, which is what I said was the Pokemon I wanted last month.  That never happens.  Otherwise, I have been in the usual daily play routine.

• Level: 48 – 63.2% of the way to 49
• Pokedex status: 896 (+3) caught out of 1,008 in the Pokedex
• Pokemon I want: Hawlucha
• Current buddy: Toedscool

WoW Classic

I played no WoW Classic in September.  My attempts to wrap up the Jade Forest and move on to the Valley of the Four Winds in Pandaria fell off this month.  I actually cancelled my WoW subscription, but in the way of things, I was on the six month plan to get the pets and mounts that come out (FOMO works on me too) and September was the mid-point of the cycle.  So I can still play until the holidays, if the motivation takes me.

Coming Up

There is always the Steam Autumn Sale… which is early this year… and which started yesterday.  My whole wishlist is on sale again… or at least the titles that have reached some point of availability.  There will be some other event closer to December in order to nominate titles for the Steam Awards.

We will get the big update to Pokemon Go on the 15th, which will change up the leveling experience and raise the level cap to 80.

In EVE Online the CSMXX elections will get rolling, with voting kicking off at the end of the month.

Likewise, Alliance Tournament XXI will be running October 24, 25, and 26.

We will also be getting the annual Crimson Harvest event and maybe some tidbits about the winter expansion.  A busy month for New Eden.

We will probably be getting some announcements and details from Daybreak about expansions for EQ, EQII, and LOTRO.  LOTRO is already available for early birds and the other two will follow suit soon.

The instance group will probably stick with Palworld now that it feels like we’re making some progress, though Ula has picked up Palia, a title I played a bit of before Daybreak bought it.  I’ll have to check in on how that is going.  Maybe it is time for another peek at that.