I’m making some changes around here. You may have already noticed the new dark theme. Considering how often I complain about websites that don’t have night mode, I don’t know what took me so long to do this.

Older pages of this blog are undergoing an extensive though time-consuming effort to combat link rot and to clean up some strangely broken HTML artifacts created from the multiple platforms and text editors I’ve used since I started this blog in 2008. If you see anything broken in the archived posts, I will fix it… some day. The broken content is, for the most part, readable, but it just looks messy and it’s been bugging me ever since I moved from Blogger to WordPress a lifetime ago.

I’m starting with the oldest post and working my way forward, one entry at a time. This typically involves opening the post in the current editor, converting it to use the newest editing tools, then copying and pasting it all into a plain text converter so I can paste it back here. The problem is so many of the links I referenced now point to 404s and deleted videos. The links can rarely be found in The Wayback Machine. And it’s a pain in the ass trying to source newer links that—let’s face it—are just as likely to die in the foreseeable future.

It’s depressing to think how much information is lost every day. After all, parental figures always warned us that you can never delete anything from the internet. Maybe they were right, but you can’t reasonably ensure you can archive anything, either.

At any rate, I won’t be relying on embedded YouTube videos quite as much anymore, though I’ve already been making a conscious effort to reduce my reliance on them for years. Sometimes it can’t be avoided, unfortunately. Not only has there never been a worthwhile competitor that focuses on exploiting what YouTube did best, even YouTube seems to be shifting its focus from what it did best by pushing their garbage short content. (To be clear, I actually like TikTok… I do not like YouTube Shorts.)

I’ve got a couple of posts that are nearly finished and you can expect another Death Mage Tale soon. Here’s the first one.