Month: October 2025 Page 1 of 3

The Devil Has a Lot of Fairs in Grimbergen + Pooping on a Train a Decade Ago

On 2025-10-28

We seem to get a lot of sunshowers [LGT: Wikipedia] here in Grimbergen, BE. The weather mix where it is raining while sunny.

Back in Alabama, I feel like you’d maybe see it once or twice a year. In Belgium, I’ve already seen a good dozen times over the three months I’ve been here. I have no idea if it is normal, or if I have some magic touch. Though, since the Flemish word for it seems to be Duiveltjeskermis (Devil’s Fair), “magic touch” might have a cursed connotation there.

You can probably not see much rain in either photo. Consider this something like a trust fall.

It’s also non-Summer Belgium, so you can barely see any sun. So it goes…

Three fun facts in which one is a follow-up of another:

(1) I had the window open [obv] in that second photo and while taking the picture, noticed the wind had shifted enough that it was starting to blow rain inside. Before I could shut the window, a quantity of rain poured all over my radiator, electric cords, power bank, and so forth. I had to rapidly shut everything down and unplug stuff while still covered in rain water.

(2) Whenever I see sunshowers, the Southern US phrase “The devil is beating his wife” pops in my head, which is frankly some Punch and Judy-level nonsense.

(3) Only that specific phrase doesn’t. My brain loves to say “God is beating His wife.” Which is potentially more blasphemous, though I’d argue that the extra-Biblical depiction of “The Devil” is plenty enough to go around to start.

Anyhow, the linked Wikipedia article has lots of fun phrases. My second most used, after “X is beating his Y” is “fox wedding” because I’m a weeb at heart.

I did have to check, though, because I was sure I had blogged about this before. Which I have. Though it seems like the actual discussion was on my old Livejournal, which has gone the way of Punch’s baby.

BONUS PHOTO: Pooping on a Train a Decade Ago

Ten years ago, today, Kaz and I were on our way to Providence, RI¹. It was a nice trip. Since one part was visiting H.P. Lovecraft’s graveside, I might post during spooky week.

That photo shows our toilet in our compartment. If you notice, it is right up against the seat. Meaning either you had to sit next to the person pooping or you had to sit across and stare them in the eyes. Good times.

That’s not even the worst “toilet business on a train story” I have. The worst was on a trip back from New Orleans when I was trying to pee. I was standing because I was not trusting the cleanliness of the shared seat. The train took a corner at speed which caused me to slip a bit and, well…

Sorry, Amtrak folk who had to wipe that down. I did do my best but it was a bit past what you could accomplish with train-quality toilet paper.

You can go ahead and put the “whoops” GIF here, too.

The photo was tagged by Google as being exactly a decade ago. It might have been the day before, since I would have had to get to a good connection to upload it. ↩︎

NYTimes’ Connections just Admitted the TRUTH [spoiler free, I promise]

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-27

In Games, Humor

Kaz and I both enjoy playing New York Times’s Connections. It is a nice puzzle for me to solve each morning. However, I have been a bit irked at how much it obviously borrows from Only Connect‘s “Connecting Wall.”

While I appreciate you cannot copyright gameplay algorithms and mechanics [we’ll leave the idea of Nintendo having a patent on fall damage for a later date], the fact that a “homage” to Only Connect‘s “Connecting Wall” was called Connections is perhaps a bit on the nose. When the style of gameplay and three of the four colors are obviously in line (an image of a potentially actual (?) Connecting Wall , found on Wikipedia):

I had a bit of a smirk this morning when today (2025-10-27)’s Connections puzzle started with the following in-joke [it is semi frequent that a few fun messages like this are embedded]:

JUSTICE!

Obviously, I am being a bit cheeky but I found it very nice.

And to shout to the Connections team, I appreciate they have found a way to take the format and make the puzzles mostly approachable. Only Connect is the only game show I have ever seen that regularly leaves me feeling like a complete idiot. It’s that good.

I would not thrive in a Connecting Wall environment.

Credits

The image from Only Connect was taken from the Wikipedia article linked above and is credited as by Wdcf – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22950288.

The screenshot from Connections was taken by me. Featuring content from October 27, 2025’s Connections #869 by Wyna Liu.

Just deleted most of my Patreon follows, including the free ones

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-22

In Internet, Rants, Technology, The Algorithm

This morning I got a message from a Patreon Creator that was a simple “Hey” but based on previous interactions, I know any response to it would result in this person asking for more money. Let’s call them Person K.

I one time, now years ago, actually did send them some money outside of Patreon. I eventually said I wasn’t going to send them any more and after a few exchanges stop replying. Over the next few years, they sent me a lot:

I obfuscated it because I’m not interested in real naming-and-shaming but that should give you an idea. Each of those blue-boxes is a message, more or less. Most are friendly. Some are a bit insistent. All are basically asking for money. I skipped a few because I think I had enough to establish the point.

Not a single Doug-reply is in there. I left their Patreon a bit back, including the “free tier” [they sent me a “bye Doug :'(” response]. Then they kept messaging me. Not so frequent that I cared all that much.

Today was just a different sort of day, though. The kind of day where I was ready to delete most of the flack off my digital landscape.

I figured out how to block Person K — which gave me a message that Patreon had removed me from their page, so I guess somehow I was a zombie there — and gave a pretty big think about how I wanted to use & engage with Patreon if I kept using it. The final answer, after around thirty total seconds: not much. Very nearly none.

My problems with…well, sort of with Patreon but buckle up because Doug’s about to go off

I have always been a moderate- to lower-tier user, even at peak. There are lots of reasons why I have never gotten deeper into it. Let’s come up with something like a starter three really quick (# given is roughly the order I’d put the problem):

(5) The interface is fairly poor for a website that is one of the major backbones of the indie creator scene.

(3) It quickly gets costly. While backing a couple of Creators is not a whole lot of cash, it is easy to end up backing 10+ and seeing a monthly bill rivaling old school cable bills. Especially with how many Patreons have that stupid “$20+ a month to get your name at the end of my videos” thing.

“I’d like to thank DickMaster2000, the Might Gooble, Tom the Tominator…”

I personally don’t tend to engage with content on a subscription basis, ever. (4) I do things in little bursts.

This means I would back a podcast, listen to some of their backlog, wait a few months (paying the whole time to not use them), and then do another backlog. At this point I might leave or I might wait another few months to pick up another backlog.

If I ever left, if I ever downgraded, I might be losing out in months of content that I could access as long as I kept paying.

Which brings me to a fourth reason which is #2 in the final list, though this is less Patreon-specific and more the whole damned thing that is happening right now:

(2) Business models that promote FOMO [fear-of-missing-out] are inherently problematic: freemium memberships, gachas, crowdfunding with backer-exclusives. Even when they enable some creators to make special content for their best supporters, there are very few safeguards for the backer-side and drive creators to work around this “value added” model.

FOMO is a billion-dollar industry driver across its many facets and a major slice of a lot of the modern hobby landscape. Apps that allow extra features, sites with minor upgrades, games with a few bonus aesthetics, gacha pulls, overspending on crowd-sourcing for extra features, member videos, etc.

I am not necessarily blaming all content-creators. Some do try to take care of their content-consumers. Some are in a place where this is the best way for them to publish their content. Some work very, very hard to make it worthwhile.

And, to clarify: exclusive content is not necessarily evil, no more than having a unique painting for sale at an art festival is evil, but when combined with the structure of the modern content marketplace, it has to be careful.

These massive third parties that run the websites and portals make it a constant focus for content-creators [from big media empires to smaller creators] to drive content-consumers to enter into a buy-in relationship. Break the old game with new characters. Make your character look more unique. Get a campaign exclusive t-shirt that you might never wear. A bonus chapter for your favorite book series. An exclusive series of videos shot in the director’s bedroom!

Come inside, friends, here is exclusive!

Which is where we get to #1 in the ever growing list:

(1) Business models that thrive on parasocial relationships, pseudo-communities, and consumer addiction are inherently evil.

In many cases, they force consumers to spend a lot of time and effort to keep engaging with these communities and hobbies. Not just with the central creators but also the other members of the community, including trophies for heavy interaction and fake incentives to share memberships and similar addiction-driving behaviors.

We all lose (maybe not the platform owners)

These last two feed on each other. Creators are driven into increasingly less-profitable time-sinks to push a business model that has the real capability of driving consumers into feeling actively responsible for the well-being of their favorite creators.

That latter point cannot be stated loud enough. Whether it is time [like, comment, subscribe, share] or actual money and effort, our relationship to content creators is in a terribly strange place now. With many smaller creators having no other real options but to encourage the same predatory behavior that enables other entities [larger content creators and platforms] to also feed upon those same consumers.

Platforms like Youtube and Twitch have created a new type of rock star for us all to want to be. One with the doors kicked wide open. Only, the rules keep changing. The revenue keeps dropping. The user experience gets worse. Creators start tacking on Patreons, memberships, donation drives, subscription drives, an all sorts of behaviors that take away from the core experience that justifies the content creator even being on the damned platform to begin with.

Too often, your success is not about whether you are good or talented or just in it for fun and having a good time. Over and over the message is driven home: success is doing exactly the sort of thing that increases profits for the platform owners, the revenue handlers, and all the people who use them for advertisement. Keep your fans engaging so their data can be more widely shared with entities that are barely required to even admit they in the food chain. .

At best, it is a terrible stop-gap for a broken creator-consumer relationship where a few entities own so much of what we can consume while more indie folk are constantly trying to stay afloat [and here comes GenAI to tighten the screws further while eating the indie creations to learn how to emulate them].

At worst, this is an active abuse of psychological principles that have plagued humanity all the way back to our hunter-gatherer tribal roots. The need for community. The need for recognition. The need to provide. The fear of scarcity.

[Recap] The list in order of importance and slightly expanded

Business models that thrive on parasocial relationships, pseudo-communities, and consumer addiction are inherently evil.
Business models that promote FOMO [fear-of-missing-out] are inherently problematic.
Patreon quickly gets costly if you support more than a small number of Creators or feel the need [see #1 and #2] to engage at a higher tier.
I do things in little bursts, which systems like Patreon take advantage: you either engage constantly or you generate a backlog where you keep paying to avoid missing the content you already “own.”
The interface is fairly poor for a website all about connecting Creators to their consumers, which again means you have to engage frequently or spend time navigating past other temptations.

Um…Doug? We were talking about Patreon…

Right. RIGHT. Sorry, I get a bit ranty when I have a headache.

Also, like…when I don’t have a headache. Just, you know, in general.

The above thoughts had been on my mind for a while. The three “about Patreon” parts (#3, #4, and #5) are really why I just never could enjoy Patreon, personally: the UI, the cost, and the way I actually like enjoying the things I enjoy.

I didn’t like going to the website very much. I refused to get the app. I would get notifications and sometimes actually follow the link to get whatever file or post it was about. I would sometimes skip a month or two and just miss stuff. Every time I had a backlog I would just get frustrated trying to figure out what stuff for which I had “paid” was actually available [note: about that paying for…it’s complicated for such a model].

I still kept it up for a small handful of creators, some just a month or two, because I liked to support them. What’s that, did I feel responsible for them? Yeah, kind of. That is part of the problem, see? You start to feel like you, the viewer, are somehow beholden to pre-pay for content you may or may not enjoy because a lot of those content-creators are nice people with a dream.

However, when Person K from the first section of this post contacted me, it was a breaking point.

I went through a list.

Every Patreon I followed, paid or not, that I primarily enjoyed off-Patreon, I instantly unfollowed.

If I like their content on Patreon but was only there for short glimpses into the background “behind the scenes” type commentary [i.e., one that played, inadvertently or not against my sense of FOMO], I unfollowed.

If I was just there to support them for a bit and had already accomplished that, I unfollowed.

If I was only keeping one around to eventually get around to getting the content to which I had already subscribed but hadn’t actually consumed, I unfollowed. Yes, I lost all that content.

And on a personally selfish level: was I getting my money and time back or more? If not, I unfollowed.

Finally, was it sparking the hell out of some joy..

…if not? Yep.

There were times these points clashed. There were some that actually sparked joy but had exclusive tiers I didn’t want to bother with. Some were worth it but I would rather engage with them elsewhere.

Absolutely none of the people I unfollowed today were honestly bad actors (Person K is the closest to an exception but I can understand wanting money). They were all lovely creators. Just Patreon and all those points above showed up on a day when I headache.

The two which remain + some bonus shout outs

To end this on a kind of positive note, here are the two that survived all the cuts:

Witch House Media: I have been following them since their HPPodcraft days and they put out regular, good content about a niche genre that I adore.
Tana Pigeon | Mythic: I use Mythic a lot and I love reading the magazine. While I do get to take part in some polls and such and ask questions and whatnot, the Patreon is well worth the fee since I would have spent that money on the books and zines anyhow. It also lets me get some news about something that is a major hobby of mine. Excellently run.

Two that I did not keep for various reasons but did deeply appreciate are Dean Spencer Art and Brandon Scott. Dean Spencer puts out some of the best stock art for content creators and has regular posts and engagement. I just would rather go back to buying the pieces I will use, when I use them. Brandon Scott makes wonderfully creative stuff. He is the most likely candidate for someone I will go back and refollow once my headache clears.

Bonus shout out: Cracking the Cryptic. Lots of interactions, lots of content. I just reached a point I’d rather watch them on Youtube and buy their games/books.

Credits

The “Empty Tunnel”: Photo from from Getty Images via Unsplash+ License.

Photo: Absolute Unit of a Slug

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-21

In Belgium, Discoveries, Photos

After this morning’s rainy walk, there was a lot of waiting out the rain to finish. Got in my work out. Showered. Ate “second breakfast” [read: a banana]. Drank tea. Did some online errands.

Finally, got a slight break before what looks like round 4 or 5 hits, and so went outside to pick up a couple of things that had gotten blown around a bit like the bucket we use to our restafval¹ and just checking the outside plants. Remember, one of the previous storms took out our granny statue.

Anyhow, while knocking water out of buckets and such, I saw this absolute unit of a slug:

I would guess around 10-12cm. Not the chubbiest I have seen but still an impressive chad.

Translation: residual waste. In Grimbergen, we divide our waste up into various types. PMD [Plastic, Metal, Drink Cartons]; P&K [Paper and Paper Cartons]; GFT & SH [Food Waste and Clippings (groenteafval, fruitafval, tuinafval, en snoeihout, to explain the acronym); Glass [not including beer/beverage bottles, which we return to stores]; Bulky items [grofvuil]; and Small Hazardous Items [klein gevaarlijk afval]. Restafval is essentially everything else. ↩︎

Rainy Walk to the Bus

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-21

In Belgium, Daily Life

Dear Space Pilgrims,

I will see yesterday-Doug’s Still Getting Used to Dark Mornings and raise him with this morning’s rainy walk to the bus.

Note, these pictures are a bit blurred out because of, you know, rain. It was relatively impossible to actually wipe the moisture off the lens without adding additional moisture. Take them as mood pieces, if you will.

My weather app keeps insisting it’s going to stop raining, soon. It has been doing such since around 20:00 last night.

The above is actually waiting at the bus stop for B’s bus.

Here is the walk through the woods between our house and the bus stop:

Yes, I’m taking the piss just a little. No, that’s not just a black PNG like last time. It’s a photo I took, in the rain, of some very dark woods. Toss in the sound of crackling branches and running water and not being able to see a dang thing.

If there were ghosts there, I probably would have spotted them. An unearthly glow would have been welcome.

This is the last one where coming out of the woods into a rain-drenched, leaf-strewn street makes an interesting juxtaposition where nature ends and my ability to see began…

I should probably get a better camera for taking dark, rainy photos. I have a feeling I am about to see a lot of them.

Still Getting Used to Dark Mornings

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-20

In Belgium, Daily Life, Discoveries, Expat Stuff, Memories

I know it’s a common features of expat blogs, of which this tangentially one, to focus on “10 things which shocked me!” type content but while there have been two dozen stacks of things to which I have had to adjust, I am not sure if many are really “shocking.” There’s a few I might share because of humor and anthropological studies type reasons, but overall I am pretty boring in that regard. Stuff is kind of the same but definitely not the same the world over.

There is one thing of which I was previously aware intellectually but in everyday practice has taken a bit of adjustment: the later morning sunrises.

That was taken at something like 07:08 this morning [2025-10-20]. My phone camera slightly lightened it. The sky was more true black at that angle though the light pollution of Brussels was pushing through a bit to the south.

I think you should at least get the idea. Squint a little while looking at it.

I appreciate this is a reality for millions of people and not really a big deal. It is fairly new to me, though.

I grew up in southern [aka Lower] Alabama in the United States. For most of my life, there was a rough idea of sunrise and sunset being similar throughout the year (there’s a four hour swing but Daylight Savings Time imbalances this to the evening side). 7am was pretty definitely post-dawn. 4pm was pre-Dusk. It got fuzzier after that.

Up until my 30s, all of my travel was across the American Southeast region. Alabama, Florida, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana. Probably in that order, though maybe more LA than GA. I think the furthest north I had ever been was Norfolk, VA. The furthest west was near-ish New Orleans, LA.

Occasionally I would read books like Dickens’ Pickwick Papers and it would talk about the sunlight fading at 11pm [aka, 23:00 in here terms] and I would be confused. I was aware of stuff like the so-called “midnight sun” but it took me a long time to really appreciate the difference. Even when I traveled to places like Boston, it never quite stuck.

My trip to Scotland, near Glasgow, in 2018 was probably the first time where I had that all important realization of proper first-hand experience. Around midsummer, the days were delightfully long which was probably terrible for jet lag but it was nice having a practicum.

It was similar to student-era me figuring out that integrating a curve = acceleration & area under curve = total distance traveled by an accelerating body. The kind of thing I could rationalize but actually using the math to predict real life objects and extrapolating that into new formulae was a big deal for me in my astrophysics days. Or when I began to work out multidimensional math and how frames of reference could be shifted and calculated in high school.

All that said, moving from a place with something like an 4-hour swing to a place with an 8-hour swing has been kind of neat. The ultimate practicum. I’m sure I’ll be fussy around mid-winter but we’ll see.

A Day in the Life: #17673, Mostly Music Stuff and Sickness Stuff

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-17

In Health, Music

For the second time of this Autumn/Winter season, we are starting to fall into sickness [pun!]. Barbara was the first to go after a week or so of having sniffles. Kaz and I are getting hit about the same time.

The first usual harbinger that announces I am getting ill is that certain smell/taste that my sinuses get. I don’t know how else to describe it but to say it is something like stale turpentine plus a kind of organic earthiness. Like a cup of black tea left out for a couple of days in a rainy pine forest. Can you picture that smell?

The second harbinger is a bit grosser. Not lose your lunch gross but I’ll be kind and obfuscate it: q mgX o XPu5B 1OVX OC igVI 1O3V 1KgoX. bPusB “CgigV 1KgoX.” qX 1POK1 3H Bust OC VostOfUI ost u1 VosB XO fg. q’ig oHOUOmuxgt FgCOVg oFO3X uX XO HgOHUg F3X OXPgV1 Poig XOUt fg XPgI 5os’X 1fgUU uX. bPg Fg1X q 5os m3g11 u1 XPoX uX 5Posmg1 XPg 313oU 15gsX gsO3mP XPoX fI FOtI XoBg1 uX o1 1OfgOsg gU1g’1 1fgUU ost uX XVummgV1 o Vgi3U1uOs.

The third harbinger is when my bones feel like that weird disorientation that your brain gets when you feel deja vu. Know what I am talking about, like your brain is in a hole slightly too large for it but yet your brain fills it? That, only it also slightly hurts.

Usually fourth harbinger is just getting sick and by then we are pushing the definition of an harbinger pretty hard. If the fourth sign that God is showing up is He is standing next to you, you are perhaps past Revelations.

I’m somewhere between #2 and #3. The last sickness that passed through the house, my body decided to fight it off long enough for me to build up a huge viral load and then I got knocked around with bonus dice.

Here’s hoping my body just compromises this time. Just get it over with. Don’t be a hero, body.

Music Stuff (at least, part of it)

I was actually going to talk about some of the new music and stuff I was doing today but in typing that it up, I realized it was really its own post. I’ve cut-and-pasted into a different post and will work on that one tomorrow.

The tl;dr is basically that I am back to getting physical CDs where I can and have been playing on ripping those to both AAC and FLAC formats. FLAC goes to my file server for longer-term storage. AAC I then keep on the computer and upload to my media server. Also copy over to my phone. I miss OGGs but enough players whine about having to touch them. Feck it, maybe I’ll just switch back, anyhow.

While doing this, I ran into the ghost of an old problem I had practically forgotten all about. Back deep in my Linux days {which I miss}, mplayer was my boy for playing music. Then, as I started using more devices, I gravitated to VLC for most of it since it was more compatible with more things.

Only VLC still has issues with gapless playback despite years [decades?] of people requesting it. For a lot of things, such as shuffling your playlist, it won’t matter. For some albums where each track is supposed to blend the next track, it starts to annoy having that quarter second reset.

The long and short of it is that I decided to give foobar2000 a spin. My very short “have played it for around 2-3 hour” review is: it works. It’ll take longer before I know for sure if it is for me but I don’t really see why not.

I guess that exposes a lot more of my musical tastes than I was planning on but I doubt anything is a shock.

Quick Review of the Two Albums Shown

Two of the four “test cases” for the workflow of backing up things are shown in the active playlist: alt-J’s 2022 The Dream and Ado’s 2024 Shinzou. The other two albums were Paul Simon’s Graceland since that’s one I’ve ripped a couple of times (first into ogg, later back into mp3) so it was a good baseline and Babymetal’s Metal Galaxy (I got their Metal Forth, recently, and really liked it so am moving back through their catalog).

The two I have played the most are the two shown, a couple of times each. My quick reviews are…

Ado’s Shinzou

Absolutely phenomenal album. The concert video is also top notch and immense fun to watch, but has enough flashing lights to make it a bit rough for me to watch in a single setting. The double CD that came with it has the audio-only portion and there are so many moment’s to love. The screaming her voice to the brink and then bringing it back down.

It’s hard to explain how entertaining she makes a concert designed around not showing the star, but here’s a sample (just keep in mind that whole “flashing” thing I was talking about):

alt-J’s The Dream

I have enjoyed playing this album but something I noticed on the second round through is that there doesn’t feel like a single song that really reaches out and punches me. The album feels more like a whole, a sustained mood that satisfies the “alt-J vibe,” but one where the whole fits more into the background of the day. Looking into it, there does seem to be singles from the album but even listening to them out of context feels kind of off.

A good album to space out into the liminal.

Also, the limited edition comes with a cool facsimile copy of the handwritten notes leading up to it.

Credits

“Forest Tea” is Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash.

A Day in the Life #17671: Cool Snail, “How Dare you, Wordle!?,” and Website Whoopsie

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-15

In Coding, Dougiverse, Games, Photos

First off, while out fixing our doorbell this morning and cursing the curse of tiny screws, I saw this cool looking snail:

How Dare You, Wordle!?

Second, how dare you Wordle!? It is October for goodness, sake…

And yes, I partially posted that just to see if I can work out the mechanics of a “spoiler” type image. It should “enlarge” to the unspoilered image. If it doesn’t, I might just remove this whole section.

Just in case you don’t want to do that, here’s my explanation (click to expose spoiler): 2v Zo oj336s oS0o35, o3 2 J0o vEZ56Z5h vE0v W0szS vES J3RI J3pYI zS blxx4 05I h3v S9mZvSI 0z3pv Zv. n3JSkSR, V3RIYS jY0sSI WS YZ6S 0 M33Y!

EDIT: I’m going to leave it like th at for now, where instead of opening into a lightbox it opens another tab with the unspoilered version. I really don’t think it’s worth it, but I’ll give it a think about how to do it better without needing plugins.

Big Old Whoops on the Website Backend

I have been cleaning up a good bit of the backend of my old wyrmis.com website and today was chunking out a few hundred-ish tiny files from the file structure that were no longer used and at least potentially, therefore, a security risk [at worst] but just a hindrance to sort through, at best.

I ran what I took to be a basic rm -rf * type command but apparently the software does it a bit more complicated than that (and even has the option to move the files into a local recycle bin).

~~This was treated as me {moving | uploading | downloading} a lot of files and triggered an automatic kick. The software got booted from the server and I am at least on a temporary ban.~~ My assumption here was very wrong, see UPDATE below.

I can still log on to the server through other means, and the website seems completely unimpacted. Now I’m waiting an hour or two to see if it clears up on its own or I might have to contact someone for some technical support.

While I can still edit the website in a number of ways, I had a nice workflow going.

I’ll spend the time, instead, building up a tool that might help me to semi-automate some of the process of fixing hundreds of HTML files and then like, get back to house repairs, instead.

Now I am off to take some photos of damaged bookcases that the shipper broke and wants more photos to prove despite sending them a number of photos.

[2 hours later] Update to Website Woes

Turns out my previous assumption was just plain wrong. The [re]moving of a large number of files might have exacerbated the situation by making it harder to tell what was happening, but the actual culprit was that after I backed out of the directory that had the files, I thought it was sending me {Doug's Directory} while instead it was sending me {The Directory ABOVE Doug's Directory} and then, because the program I was using had the option to recall last directory, it entered into a loop where it kept trying to enter a forbidden zone.

I figured this out when at a whim I tried to enter directly into a sub-directory, which failed and then kicked me back out into the directory I was supposed to be in and I realized what was wrong.

The reason it wasn’t immediately obvious before was because when it kicked me out it essentially prevented me from even seeing what sort of directory I was in. It was the sort like finding a NO ENTRY sign in the middle of a very dark room and having to guess your location. Only every time you re-enter the room, a helpful guide runs up and escorts you to the same place you were just told you not to enter.

500 Day Reading Streak: I would like to thank the constant gamification of everyday pleasures! Also, my mom…

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-14

In Reading

Last night I hit a 500-day reading streak on my Kindle.

Which is to say on my Kindle App because I don’t think my Kindle, not even my newer Colorsoft one, has any sort of streak/days-of-reading/Kindle Challenge type screen. Maybe it does. I’m not going to look for it.

That’s neat though, hitting that. Only you can likely tell from the fact that the number of books I read on Kindle are only 31 this year [roughly 3 a month] so it doesn’t quite line up. With the move and all, it’s been a rough year for reading a lot.

I have maintained the act of looking at pages on a screen in a prescribed manner. I am the best.

Four quick thoughts and then to my morning workout with me! Why this streak is a lie…

The Streak Is a Lie Because: it’s actually longer…

The real total is something like 800 days. Twice over the past 2-3 years, the system has essentially not counted days when I have 100% read something. The last hiccup, apparently 500 days ago, was after I had spent a couple of hours finishing the back half of some book.

I remember being irate at the time because not only had I read for some time, but because I had the book in my library clearly marked as finished and had submitted a rating through the app. The “Finished Date” and presumably the “Rating Date” would have been for the day that the same app was claiming I had skipped reading.

Part of the reason I got to 500-days this time is because I was initially fussy about that and then it just became a habit.

I don’t recall the time before but I remember irate at that time, too.

The Streak Is a Lie Because: it only tracks the bare minimum…

I don’t know what all it actually tracks, not really. Is just opening the app enough? Just opening a book? The truth is that at 100-days of those 500-days were me opening the app or my Kindle (etc) and just reading for maybe 3- to 5-minutes. I would guess my average duration per day would not be all that high.

It is nice to have a gentle prod to keep up some reading because reading is a habit you have to nurture. It just might be better if I could set a minimal threshold [e.g., 10 pages, 20 minutes] to actually count.

The Streak Is a Lie Because: it only counts books-on-Kindle…

Probably half my reading, or more, in that whole time period was via physical books. Which means I either have to do the bare minimum opening of the app to satisfy above or I have to get a book on Kindle and on paper and then move the Kindle version forward.

I have done a bit both. Where both feel silly.

The Streak Is a Lie Because: the constant gamification of everyday pleasures is a poison…

In this case, the streak is not so much a lie as a constant external stressor to stay addicted to an app for reasons only tangentially related to the purpose of the app. Reading some is not hard for many of us but reading regularly is hard. Much like diet apps and exercise apps and productivity apps and language apps and many others: having this gamification added to them can help you to hit goals. That is true.

However, the fact that so many apps have such streaks and such baked in is mentally draining. We can no longer just play our games. Now, we have to play our games daily for shiny lights and particle effects to keep blessing us. Skip a day and you might just receive a meaningless warning. Our gentle hobbies to survive the soul-crushing march of modern life have been turned into just another stress for us to endure.

The whole time our personal data and habits are being scraped and digested by The Algorithm. Using the app is giving them permissions to dig deeper into our lives.

And we don’t even get paid. Hell, we pay for it.

Anyhow, off to see if I can hit 1000-days.

Blogging Down Memory Lane, Part 1: Doug’s RPG Page >>> “wYrmhole Games”

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-13

In Blog Stuff, Memories

When I was typing up the post about “reclaiming” Dickens of a Blog, I mentioned making a “Part 2” that would be a trip down memory lane. As I started gathering screenshots I realized that such a trip would involve three decades of websites and some of the early days would be awfully hard to document. I was still interested.

Then I started doing just that and realized that the post that resulted would be very long if I included any real detail.

I have now decided to keep up with the Blogging Down Memory Lane idea, but I’ll break it up into three or four posts, potentially more if there is good reason.

Let’s start:

Doug’s RPG Page

That is a rough mock-up since as far as I know, no actual record of the site remains.

My second ever website. Maybe my third. The early ones barely counted since they were largely just me typing some words and being amazed that hypertext worked.

Doug’s RPG Page represented the first time I was actively interested in having a complete website. It would have started sometime in 1997, likely near the summer of that year.

To this in perspective as to how long ago this was, if you do a search along the lines of “Top 10 Websites,” the only two that I can think of that would have existed at this time were Yahoo and Amazon. Google came out a year later. Most other big websites that are the cornerstones of the net nowadays were a fair bit later, still. Heck, it predated Goatse. We are talking about the days where HTML 3 was replacing HTML 2.

I used frames for goodness sake.

That was one of the lesser sins. There was a MIDI player that played a selection of music for visitors. There was a blinking marquee that scrolled and I cannot recall why I put it there (but I’m pretty sure it was red). Possibly irony. Probably something like “big updates” or some such.

If HTML tags like <frameset>, <marquee>, and <blink> mean nothing to you: you are lucky. It was a terrible time. Everything smelled of cigarette smoke and we had terrible websites.

Why I Made Doug’s RPG Page

Quite frankly, with apologies to Mallory, because it was there. The “it” in that quote would mean “the internet” as well “the ability to make your own websites”.

In 1997, my friend Jason and I offered to do something somewhat silly in retrospect: make a website for Jefferson Davis Community College. Not only is it frankly ridiculous that a couple of eighteen-/nineteen-year-olds would take it upon themselves to write a website for a business but neither Jason nor myself had any real web development experience. We knew the basics. That was it. No servers. No development team. Just an idea.

It ended up being a beautiful failure but by the end, we had worked out enough concepts that the college gave us thanks and then tasked someone much more professional to actually do it.

While doing that, the interest in making my own website grew and grew. Then I found out about Geocities. I’ll let you read the Wikipedia article about it but in the mid-90s, Geocities was a massive website hosting complex that allowed users to make a free website inside of “neighborhoods.” It was one of the highlights of the earlier web.

I made an account and plunked myself down in geocities > area51 > dimension > 9180 (it is strange how quickly I was able to recall that). Then I started posting stuff.

Remember that back in these days websites tended to have purpose so it was pretty common if you had things you wanted to say to the world you would find some excuse to express them. Jim’s Truck Page. Donna’s Potato Recipes Page. Doug’s RPG Page. There were plenty that would show up that would be Justin’s Random Stuff or whatnot but it felt odd to a lot of us back then to just post a blog-type page without something happening to make it feel justified.

And yes, blogging was already taking shape by this time.

What I Recall About It

Besides some of the stuff I posted above, I do not recall a lot. I do not even remember if it was organized around specific RPGs or by genre. There are some memories that stand out, though:

The biggest element that came out of that time period was Ghostlight. A quick, odd RPG I made about ghosts who live in an echo of the real world where their interaction with it is based on their emotions. Over time, emotions increase and wane.
I made a post showing a potential way to play games without a GM. The gist was to generate content on index cards as possible encounters and then to pull a few at a time and mash them up to tell short scenes and stories. While it was designed for GM-less play, it ended up matching some elements of Solo Play.
I had some non-RPG elements that included discussions of music (I do recall writing a rant about liking techno music and being irritated by people who kept asking me why I liked music with no lyrics) but do not recall how many sections that stuff had.

Over time, the non-RPG elements and elements about my daily life and stuff started taking over. Which is what effectively brought the project to a close. I was basically getting into blogging while still being in the mindset that websites needed purpose.

Other scant details drift to mind. I know I would toss in random coarse language and people would call me out for it. I think there was an old school chat room built into one of the pages?

Besides Ghostlight, there was at least one other RPG I posted to it, A.S.I.A. RPG. I have no archives of this but I’m guessing/think it stood for something like A Simple Interactive Adventure Roleplaying Game. Around this time and for a few years after, I was working on concepts like using short phrases and a system of wide | normal | narrow rankings so it might have used that. I think I wrote some stuff for FUDGE. I feel like I had some Call of Cthulhu / Beyond the Supernatural elements.

That is mostly guesswork.

I made a friends from it. I talked to other game designers. I met some people into the techno/edm scene who liked my discussions. It was mind-blowing for a person from the backwoods of lower alabama to suddenly be talking to people not only around the country but from other countries. It was nice.

My online username at the time was “dreamwyrm” and because of that I ended up getting a cameo of sorts in the webcomic Gaming Guardians and was friends with Graveyard Greg who wrote it. The Web Troll (artist) even made art that had my “Dream Wyrm” persona turned into a Buttonman.

For a country bumpkin to create a somewhat cringey 90s email address and a cringey 90s website, that was really cool. Heck, I still find that to be pretty damned cool.

The Death of Doug’s RPG Page and the start of wYrmhole Games

That above image is around 90% of what I know about the next part of this chapter. I grew unnecessarily frustrated with how much of the page had become a proto-blog and so took most of it offline (or at least delinked most of it). I wrote a short, rambling paragraph about how I was going to embark on a new design.

Just look at the stolen Michael Whelan artwork. Lord.

Also, while I had already started using “wyrmis” as an online name, it seems like “The Wyrm” and “WYRM” were frequent. Somewhere in here is where I came up with Wyrmis X. Simryw as an online name and sometimes started capitalizing only the Y: wYrmis. There was some joke about my name had a capital WHY. I’m a damned fool.

From that above screenshot, I am reminded of two elements that I had completely forgotten. First, I had had some discussion of videogames on the original site and wanted to expand that. We are entering the time period of the Playstation RPG explosion but were still close enough to the Super Nintendo days to still be reaping those benefits. For some dumb reason, I wanted to call this “Electronic Portals.” I don’t know if I ever did.

Second, I forgot that I had a period where I was pretty vocal about Christian roleplaying. A response of sort to the Satanic Panic and its continued presence in the mid- to late-90s in Lower Alabama. I don’t think anything really came of it. It has been a long time since I have identified as Christian.

The “Silver” there was another friend from my early college days: Lance.

After posting my, “Back soon, I promise, guys!,” I don’t think I ever returned. My protest about how my personal page had become too personal essentially just killed the whole project.

The other 10% I know, by the way, is that I had kept working on whatever the hell A.S.I.A. RPG was. I only know this because later on I had a post in later blog about moving version 2 to the new blog and making it version 3.

The mind truly boggles.

A Rough Timeline

A rough timeline of this area seems to be…

1997: Doug’s RPG Page is started
- 1998 (Summer): Ghostlight is added
1998 – 1999: Doug’s RPG is changed to “Wyrm’s Play”
- Most original pages were hidden but maybe not deleted
- Split into three sub-pages, all RPG focused
  - wYrmhole Games: Essentially the OG page
  - Electronic Portals: Console and Computer Videogames
  - Circle of Paladins: Roleplaying as a Christian
1999?: Rebranded back to just wYrmhole Games
- Other elements dropped? No clue.

Next Chapter

Next time, assuming I write the next part, will focus on a massive reversal to the mindset that destroyed Doug’s RPG Page: I rebranded the project to “Doug’s Webpage of Doug.” I am only half joking.