Stage Clear: October 2025
Happy Halloween! I've made this project update post especially spooky by embedding the ghost of a lost soul I found wandering around the local cemetery. Fortunately, this ghost is invisible and unable to affect the material world in any way, so it'll be as though it isn't even there. (Sadly, while catching it I got my whole family cursed, and now we all have duck feet.)
Wiki
The migration of the Morgue File to a new and better server was a complete success! It's now running on MediaWiki LTS 1.43, which doesn't reach end-of-life until December 2027, so it should be a couple more years before I have to do this again.
I also took the opportunity to give it a modest visual refresh: a new colour scheme and main header font:
The font is Cartridge by Dan Cederholm, based on Atari 2600 labels. Check out that alternate V in the sitename! So good.
Now that we're moved, the next big wiki push will be to rewrite the help pages, bring in some much better onboarding and push for new users. It's pretty offputting to newcomers in its current state, I think.
Podcasts
September's new-old podcast feeds were Active Time Babble and Roleplayers' Realm, two RPG podcasts presented by Kat Bailey from 2009–2013. This was a tribute to Kat's retirement from their spiritual successor Axe of the Blood God; she's now moved to the UK to take up her dream job as Storytelling Lead at Larian Studios!
I spent a few hours figuring out how to convert a snippet of one of those old podcasts to a social media video, with rolling captions. There are premium services that do it (Headliner is the big one), but I figured it out myself in Premiere and After Effects.
The clip I chose was from the first episode of the then-unnamed 1UP RPG podcast, where they very nearly called it Min-Max (as well as Axe of the Blood God). MinnMax founder Ben Hanson, who picked that name ten years later and didn't know about this, commented on it on Bluesky and then talked about it on the show! (That's two months running, somehow.)
I'll probably do more of these social videos occasionally. Would be a waste not to, after spending all that time figuring the process out. Just need to find good 2–3 minute segments to clip.
Scanning
Another January 2000 issue of MCV. I have one issue left from the year 2000 (the vast majority are missing, and they hardly ever come up on eBay), then I think I'll move on to those four PC Strategy Games issues, which should be pretty interesting since barely anyone knows they exist.
Magazine Indexing
Database stats at the end of October 2025 (delta from September):
Titles indexed: 50 (+1)
Distinct issues indexed: 4,408 (+191)
Pages indexed: 626,581 (+24,955)
Indexing, again, wasn't a priority this month, though I did manage to index:
- all 25 issues of GMR (US)
- a bunch more PC Gamer (mostly US editions)
(The index isn't (yet) public, but if you're a game history mutual, and you'd like me to run off a query or two, let me know! Time permitting, I'm happy to do it.)
Playing
- I finished Promise Mascot Agency! Loved this oddity, an incredibly Japanese game made by a British indie studio. Platinumed it, which is rare for me.
- Also dived head-first into Far Cry 6. Sometimes I just have the itch for a dumb ol' AAA Ubi-game. I usually don't see the end (I didn't finish 4 or 5), but who knows with this one?
- My ten-minute roguelite of the moment: Nubby's Number Factory.
- Played two No Man's Sky expeditions, and if rumours are to be believed there'll be a third immediately following this one. I may never escape the orbit of this game.
- This month's married-multiplayer fun has been Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams; a competent jigsaw puzzle solving platform that is as close to the real thing as I can imagine. No story, highly relaxing, ideal for chatting while we're solving.
Acquisitions
I wasn't planning on spending much money this month, though I did give myself wiggle room to buy one book: a second Geeks-Line reference volume:
Then I ended up getting some unanticipated paid overtime at work to deal with a server that wouldn't boot (failing hard drive in a RAID), so I treated myself to a real indulgence: the three just-published-in-English volumes of the PS2 Anthology from the same publisher.
These books (all of them, not just the PS2 ones) are stellar reference works, featuring deep details on the machines' inner workings, hardware revisions, and history, as well as capsule descriptions of every game released in any region. There are certainly writers that have gone deeper into individual games or aspects of a console, but I'm unaware of more exhaustive references for the complete picture — hardware and software — than these Geeks-Line titles. Being a French publisher, they're a little less well-known in the English-speaking sphere than publishers like Read-Only Memory and Limited Run, but they should absolutely be up there.
And then this morning, this Kickstarter reward arrived:
So it's safe to say I'm not wanting for stuff to read in the next month.
That's it for another one. More of *gestures at all of this* next time, but also I'm still gearing up for a Patreon relaunch before the end of the year, and hoping to get a video out too. Yeah, safe to say it's on. See you in November!
