Stage Clear: April 2025

Hey, folks! Trying something new here. This is the first of a series of monthly recaps of the things I’ve been working on. Until recently, the only place I could share updates like these was on Patreon, but now I can crosspost them here!

After a March that was all about getting this site up and running, April was a month of magazine-material-related matters. Yup, this month I had issues. Lots of issues…

• I saved ███ ██████! Okay, I wasn’t the one who saved the company, but in the first week of the month I did figure out how to save the 140 digital issues they have available to view behind their free site registration, reassembling them from their constituent parts into clean PDFs. Though these files aren't yet public, I’ve shared them with several trusted archivists; they’re in the hands of the right people, to be uploaded — by me or someone else — to the Internet Archive if the site disappears.
  
  These back issues, many of which weren’t previously available, have gone from existing only as JavaScript-viewable images to existing as offline copies that can be opened in any PDF viewer and will outlive the site. It feels great that I was able to accomplish this, though it isn’t one of my usual areas of expertise. Though it might take years before the benefits become obvious, I think I truly made a difference here.
  
  I wrote about the process of ripping these files, which were hosted in a not particularly rip-friendly way.

• I’ve been reindexing thousands of magazines using Magnus 2’s new cloud-OCR-based workflow, focusing my efforts — at least initially — on English language PC and multiplatform titles. Imported in April were full or near-full runs of Game Informer (33 years), Edge (31 years) and Next Generation/NextGen (7 years), along with a couple of shorter runs. As I write this, the crawler’s chewing through 25 years of the Australian magazine PC Powerplay.
  
  (Magnus is my MAGazine New Search project, and is basically an indexer and search engine for old mags. Planning to post about this in more detail in the future, and make more use of it for research.)

  Database (version 2) stats as of the end of April 2025:
  
  Titles indexed: 16
  Distinct issues indexed: 2,126
  Pages indexed: 384,448
  

• I scanned a previously unpreserved issue of MCV, the UK games trade magazine, from January 2001. I’ll continue slowly scanning my way through the stacks of these and upload them to the Internet Archive — my target is at least one scan a month.

• After running through PC Gamer (UK) last month, it’s highlighted the fact that several issues (not counting recent years) are missing from my digital collection. Seventeen of them, to be precise, mostly from 2010 and 2011, which nobody seems to have. Official back issues only go back to 2012, and there’s nothing to be found on any of the usual sites; they are (provisionally) totally unpreserved. So, quietly, I’ve been purchasing some of these issues from eBay in order to eventually fill these gaps for everybody.
  
  
  
  Scanning these issues will present a new challenge: not only are there more pages than in the average MCV, but they’re also glue-bound rather than stapled. Following expert advice, I’ve bought myself a heat gun to make it possible to debind these issues into loose leaves, but haven’t yet dared to use it.

I didn’t set out to make April such a magazine-heavy month. I’ll try to mix it up a bit next time. Who knows, maybe I’ll blow the dust off that half-finished video…