Stage Clear: November 2025

'Tis the season! The season of cold wet days and seasonal affective disorder, that is; what did you think I meant?

Here's November's roundup of activities, achieved despite the season's best efforts to thwart them.

This site

I finished and published a new section that I've wanted on the site from the beginning: a list of projects. This feels significant because every time I've posted to social media about magazine indexing, or old videos, or the wiki, people needed to know my whole thing to stand a chance of understanding what I was talking about. Of course, that's not how it works! People can (and do) see your stuff with no knowledge of who you are. It's quite possible you're reading this post right now having never read anything I've written before. (Hi!)

I already had a bio page (unnecessary, might remove it), but the purpose of the projects page is much more strategic: it's explicitly designed to catch people up. It's linked on the front page header and in the top-level site navigation, and I'll update it regularly.

Icons

At the start of the month, I stumbled upon a social media post featuring a screenshot from the BeOS operating system from the late nineties. The consistent dimetric projection and shading used on the icons was unlike anything I'd seen before, and I found the colour palette and overall look extremely pleasing to the eye.

I went from zero to utterly obsessed in five seconds flat, and started digging for more information. Helped by a poster who shared a gif of the icon editor from an old user guide, I managed to rip the full 247-colour BeOS palette, uploading it to Lospec, the undisputed hub for pixel art palettes.

This was a prelude to a new project: creating an icon set of computer and console platforms, matching the BeOS house style as closely as I could.

After the first four tests turned out better than I hoped and proved the concept had legs, I launched into the full set of Nintendo handhelds; so far I've made it through the ones with names that begin with "Game". (Itemisation is left as an exercise for the reader.) Next comes the DS range, and then... well, we're looking at over 200 icons if I do every platform listed in the IGDB. And the goal is to do everything. Pixel art is incredibly fun to make, and on average, one of these icons takes 20–30 minutes, so it's a bite-size task I can handle at least a couple of times a week.

Though I may end up using these icons on the Morgue File, that's not why I'm making them; I'm truly just doing them for the hell of it. But the tentative plan, once my workflow's polished and there are enough icons to merit doing so, is to release them for free for anyone to use for whatever they like, no strings attached.

This may not be a particularly profitable strategy, but as we all need reminding from time to time in this capitalist dystopia, not everything needs to be a side hustle.

Retrohistories YouTube channel

I actually worked on a video in November, gods be praised! I did a fair bit of rewriting on a script I wrote last year after noticing some imperfections I could fix, which necessitated recording a new VO. That's now out of the way. Still not 100% sure about this video, but I'm going to proceed with it as an excuse to get back in the saddle. It's not a long script, but it has some specific production needs that mean learning how to do particular things in Blender; tentative completion date is February.

Morgue File wiki

After the server migration, a regular contributor alerted me to a problem where image thumbnails weren't being generated from file uploads. Turned out that when I set the new machine up, I'd missed installing a package. Fixed the root cause (which was easy) and then forced regeneration of the missing thumbs (not so easy).

I've struggled to come up with a snappy pitch for exactly who and what the wiki is for. In writing the projects page, I think I articulated it better than I ever have. Sometimes finding the right words rallies your brain around an idea that was originally kind of vague and loosey-goosey; I think that's what happened here.

There are a couple of pressing needs with the wiki as it stands. The first, as I've mentioned before, is the need for updated help and onboarding, which needs to be in place before I can make any serious appeal for potential new users.

The second is how sources should be presented. On a regular encyclopedia-style wiki, references go at the bottom of the page, in small print. But this is a resource wiki, and it feels like primary sources—interviews, talks, books—are the most important starting points for researchers, and the page should lead with them. I'm still trying to come up with a functional and appealing layout for that.

In other developments, while I was putting together graphics for the projects page, I stumbled upon a rough idea for a logo.

Don't have the faintest idea what I'm going to do with this, and it needs finessing before I do, but I love the throughlines on the V and M here. A fortuitous, if entirely accidental, discovery.

Podcasts

No new feeds this month, but things didn't stand still. I attempted to make a feed for the old Joystiq Podcast, but ran into several complications that hadn't impacted prior podcast feeds:

• Each Wayback snapshot of the RSS feed contained only a handful of episodes
• There were dozens of these snapshots across two different URLs
• There were gaps in between snapshots large enough that episodes appeared in the feed, then fell off the bottom, between snapshots, so have no recorded metadata
• The description tags were unusually dense, with both relevant information I wished to keep, and irrelevant links to the original site and share button functionality that I wanted to strip

I've been writing some new Python scripts to deal with these complications:

• A script that, given a feed URL, downloads every snapshot of that feed that can be found on the Wayback Machine, adding timestamps to the filenames and placing them into a directory
• Another script that merges a folder of RSS files into a single file, with items in the correct (reverse chronological) order and all duplicates removed

Run in tandem, these scripts will produce the most complete RSS feed that it's possible to derive from the Wayback Machine. I still need to write a third script that'll comb a folder for text scraps and remove anything matching one of those scraps from the description tags in the feed; that will hopefully be a general solution to information I want to drop from descriptions in the new feeds (usually because they link back to sites that no longer exist, or are otherwise irrelevant). I ran out of time in November, but I hope to get that done, and the Joystiq feed up, in December.

Also on the podcast front, I made another one of those audio-to-video clips, this one marking the 20th anniversary of the Xbox 360 with a clip of Jeff Gerstmann giving one of the earliest commentaries on Xbox Live Arcade several days in advance of the console's launch.

This segment got almost no traction, socially; I'm glad I made it, because it felt like good history to surface, and beneficial on its own terms, but making it wasn't a particularly worthwhile use of time from an outreach perspective. I'm not capitalism-brained about this, but I would like the things I make to be seen by the people I think would be into them. I'll persist, but Bluesky and Mastodon might not be the right venues. Maybe I'll try crossposting to YouTube next time, perhaps even to TikTok.

Scanning

Another issue of MCV, the last one I have from 2000, is scanned and uploaded.

December will be a short month—I'll be away for the back half of it—so I'm not going to attack the PC Strategy Games just yet (I plan to give them the full, time-consuming Retromags/OGM/archive.org treatment). I'll probably do another MCV this month instead. Sorry to keep you waiting a little longer.

And I picked up something new: all 12 issues of Personal Computer World from 1997. This isn't a games magazine, it's a business/enthusiast publication, and has a ludicrously high page count, largely due to the myriad multi-page adverts that constitute the vast majority of its contents. These twelve issues weigh—I kid you not—a combined 17 kilograms. The December issue alone is over 900 pages; in most other magazines, that would be 6–10 issues worth! They're full of foldouts and variable page sizes, are going to pose an inordinately complex scanning challenge, and will be useful to approximately nobody. I can't wait to get going with these stupid things.

I didn't buy these only because they were unscanned; I also bought them to help out a mutual with her research. Misty De Méo (who runs digipres.club, my home Mastodon server) had been trying to hunt down a particular review for months. Attributed to PC World magazine, she'd found that it wasn't in that magazine, and believed it might be found in PCW instead (but wasn't certain). After picking these issues up from eBay (at a pretty reasonable price), I found the review in question, photographing and pinging it over to Misty. Research assisted!

Magazine Indexing

Database stats at the end of November 2025 (delta from October):

Titles indexed: 52 (+2)
Distinct issues indexed: 4,521 (+113)
Pages indexed: 653,603 (+27,022)

Indexing was on the back burner again this month, but I did find time to import all the 1980s issues of Computer and Video Games; that's only about a third of the run, so I'll continue the process in December.

(The index isn't public, but if you're a game historian—pro or amateur—and you'd like me to run off a query or two, let me know! Time permitting, I'm happy to do it.)

Playing

• Rolled credits on Far Cry 6—the only Far Cry I ever finished other than Primal, I think. It did exactly what I expected it to do, no more, but at least Giancarlo Esposito added some credibility to the occasional cutscene. I'll probably get the Ubisoft bug again in a few months, but for now it's nice to have it out of my system.
• Grabbed Shiren the Wanderer 6 on sale. I never got into 5, but I'm enjoying this one; it's filling the role of the pick-up-and-play-for-20-minutes roguelite of the month.
• And I started Cyberpunk 2077; damn, this is a nice looking game, the current unbeaten champion of urban environments. I can forgive a lot in a game when the settings are enticing, but the rest of this game is also legitimately good. I'm 50 hours in and it doesn't feel like I'm nearing the end, but I already sense that it'll leave me wanting more; maybe I need to follow it up with Edgerunners?
• My wife and I are continuing to play Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams, which is an enjoyably chilled-out multiplayer activity. After playing the free version extensively, we both invested in the DLCs in the sale, which means we can now upload our own photos as puzzles. We're enjoying challenging one another with mystery images, turning off the preview so the photo is slowly revealed as we solve it.

That's it from me for this year. In a month's time, it'll be the middle of the holidays and I'll be spending that time with family. So, though I hope to get a few things done before the wind-down starts, there won't be another update post until the end of January, which will cover two partial months.

Enjoy the holidays, stay warm and toasty, and I'll see you in 2026!