I’m about six months shy of twenty years of posting stuff here, and about a hundred people – or, more likely, random web crawlers – stumble across one or another of my posts every day.  That’s not exactly huge, but it’s still kind of flattering.  Hopefully, most of them have found whatever it was they were looking for when they came here.

It’s also been a little over nine years since I changed the header at the top of all of these posts, and I figured it was about time.

The old header, here, was a photo of a segment of my games shelf taken back in 2017:

And this is roughly the same part of the alphabet today:

Here’s a bigger version, if you’re curious and want to read spines:

As recently as a year ago, this would have been rather less interesting.  Sometime in the middle of 2018, shortly after the release of Dark Souls Remastered, I decided that I was done with collecting physical games, would sell most of the ones I owned, and was going to be a strictly digital gamer going forward.  And, with the exception of buying cheap Japanese and Asian releases of Nintendo Switch games, I even managed to stick to that plan.

I mean, yes, that’s a pretty big exception.  My only defense is that the yen exchange rate has been quite nice if your paychecks are issued in $USD.

You would think, then, that Sony’s announcement that they were killing physical media in 2028 would have had me smug in the notion that the world had finally gotten around to catching up to me, but it had entirely the opposite effect.  I’ve been getting new releases on disc and even buying some slightly older releases for cheap.

Fortunately, I have no interest in rebuying all of the Saturn and Sega CD games I owned once upon a time.  When I sold off THAT particular collection, well over ten years ago, I was gobsmacked at the absurd amounts of money people were willing to pay.  I did not have any inkling that the real absurdity had yet to begin.

I try to avoid looking at what a copy of, say, Panzer Dragoon Saga or Keio Flying Squadron sells for these days, because the last time I looked I discovered that both are well past “new motorcycle scooter” territory and flirting with “used car”.

That level of madness has not, fortunately, affected PS4 and Xbone games… for the most part.  I’m glad I picked up Gravity Rush 2 when it was like $40.

Looking at the old header, I count 30 games, and about six of them came into my life, sat on a shelf, and left my life unplayed.  That’s a little embarrassing, but at least that’s 80% “I bought this thing and actually played it” which is something.  The new header has 45 and, well, I’ll work on getting to at least that 80% mark at some point. Probably after retirement.  Many of them are duplicates anyway.  I need to stop buying Fatal Frame II.

Also, I have a 3D printer now.  I’m sure 3D printing was a THING back in 2017 but it definitely wasn’t at the “want thing -> look up on Maker World -> push button -> thing appears” level of accessibility that it is now.

Furthermore, a decade ago I would not have measured dollar amounts in terms of how much scooter it could afford me.  That’s a notable change in my outlook on life.

I’m impressed that WordPress continues to be a thing that exists and where I can continue rambling at the internet strangers who come this way.  I know that the actual WordPress SOFTWARE is still a thing, but I half expect them to get rid of their blog hosting gig at any time.  I guess if and when that happens I’ll need to decide if I should move this to a dedicated host or start a Substack or something.

Followup: After mentioning that probably only web crawlers even visit this site anymore, I got curious enough to go to my Google Search Console, which I haven’t logged into in some years, to see exactly who was visiting and why.

It turns out Google hasn’t been indexing me since WordPress moved all hosted blogs over to https.  In 2016.  So, anyone who HAS been coming here has been coming here looking for very old articles indeed.  I’ve corrected that, and maybe there will be a resurgence of people looking for helpful information on, uh, whatever the topic of this blog is on any given day.