This is where I note random updates to the site that are too long for an RSS note but are not new features. This is mostly a list of housecleaning items I guess.

October 29, 2022

I stopped putting dates on everything here because this site is a continuously changing thing. At any moment I might update anything here for any reason I feel like. Often these changes are trivial and make sense only to me. This is maybe the only personality trait I have in common with George Lucas, an unwavering obsession with tweaking things best left untouched. He has me totally beat in terms of creativity and work ethic, it's just this one thing we share.

Other times my updates make total sense. This piece I posted called Closing Time is updated whenever another video game system meets its end. The sort of companion piece to that is my giant Console Timeline. I originally posted that in 2009 if web.archive.org is accurate. I update that when I update Closing Time, or when a new system launches, or when a year passes. It's been tougher to do each time because of a decision I made at the start.

In 2009 I was a Windows user - a 2000 holdover at the start and 7 adoptee by the end. I was also big into the Visual Studio scene and a heavy Microsoft Visio user. Over time I gravitated to Linux and the associated development tools. It meant updating this giant Console Timeline diagram was a hassle. The last few updates were done on a VM of my old Windows 7 PC that I literally keep around to update this one document.

I finally made the jump and converted this to an OpenDocument diagram. There's no automatic converter from Visio so I had to manually recreate it. It looks a little different but not too much. Visually I mostly made the font bigger and the overall diagram even more impractically large. I also did a little research to confirm dates and found I was wrong about a couple. Just for fun, I added 5-6 systems that I considered too insignificant in the past.

The really good thing about this switch is now the source document is in a format that is easier for people to edit. Instead of requiring Visio, it can be edited in free software like LibreOffice or OpenOffice. So if someone wants to edit it for a different region or timeline criteria they are free to do so. I get requests like that once in a while and lacking time I'd prefer people take the DIY path.

This leads to my next update, and it's not really an update at all. Recently I read that GameFAQs was acquired by Fandom. It seems every site they acquire turns into a spammy ad-portal with a massive decline in new content. I have text versions of a couple walkthroughs I wrote on GameFAQs. The originals on this site will remain free and ad-free. If Fandom tries to claim some ownership of the copies on GameFAQs I will delete them. The versions here are better anyway.

The GameFAQs purchase reinforced my commitment to keeping this site 100% free. I realize life circumstances can change. At this moment, it is my goal to never monetize anything on this site. No ads, no selling visitor data, no affiliate links, no store links, no crowdfunding, not even a donation link. I tried some of these in the past and they felt wrong at the time. This site is a hobby for me, nothing ruins a hobby faster than trying to make it a source of income. In recent years I've yearned for the early days of the internet when most web sites were created purely for fun. I enjoy everything I do on this site a lot more when it's totally free content shared under a permissive license.

In terms of real updates… I suppose I'll post another new Xmas feature around "Black Friday". That's not a promise, just something likely to happen. I'm also planning another year-end virtual Xmas card. I wanted to post another Sega Genesis demo this year but it's not going to happen. 2023 is a strong "maybe" but not a guarantee.

Thank you for your (free) support.

April 4, 2021

Pardon the dust.. over the next few days, or maybe weeks, I'm doing a few updates like:

• Upgrading to Bootstrap 5 which breaks many things. They seem to be obsessed with breaking navbars on every major release. Overall it's a still a great and easy framework to work with though. There isn't an alternative I like better. Even with the conversion script I wrote I expect a couple pages to look funky until I fix them.
• Archiving some applications and articles that are now obsolete.
• Generally re-organizing things.

As for the remainder of 2021 plans... I don't have any. If I stop being lazy there will be one new project posted but that's all I'm thinking of for now.

January 1, 2021

This site is definitely 20 years old now. I don't remember the exact date I started this site, only that it was late 2000. I planned some kind of article about it but every draft came across as self-important. Instead, here are a few assorted thoughts I have on the past 20 years of running this insignificant site:

• I originally created this site to post Phantasy Star III maps and software projects that mostly turned out to be bad ideas. I'm not certain but I believe the Phantasy Star III maps are still why most people visit.
• I've only had a couple articles go viral, they were a mixed blessing at best. My Sears Catalog scans went viral in.. I don't recall. That mostly led to receiving a ton of hate mail about my Sega Master System comments. In 2013 a gallery called If NES games were made today generated so much traffic my web host shut the whole site down. I had to move that gallery to Tumblr to appease them into restoring my site. This experience left me a little jaded initially but ultimately led me to a place where I'm happier with this site more than ever. For starters, it got me to remove all attempts to monetize content on this site. Throughout the years I tried various affiliate programs. That gallery generated a couple million views and less than $1 of affiliate revenue. I deleted all my affiliate accounts and vowed to never consider it again. I also stopped looking at my traffic stats. This site is so much more fun for me now that I don't worry about trying to make a few pennies. This incident also led me to move the site to AWS. Not only is this significantly cheaper than a web hosting company, it's also awesome to be rid of their limitations. I could host ~60gb of scans and not worry about storage or bandwidth. These web hosting companies all claim to have "unlimited" bandwidth & storage but in reality they will shut off your site if it breaks some secret limit. In the off chance I have another article go viral it means I might pay $2-$3 more that month now. Everything that I temporarily moved to Tumblr is back here now and I even survived another catalog scan going semi-viral last year.
• Recently someone asked why I don't care if other sites re-post images/scans from this site without attribution. It seems like I should care. Over 20 years I've posted 100s, probably >1000 if I counted, pages of catalog scans. Here's the deal, caring would cost me countless hours of time with no real results. It would be a constant game of whac-a-mole. And what would I get out of it? A link back to my site? Don't care. Recognition for taking the time to scan and post stuff? Maybe a little nice, but ultimately not important.
• A whole bunch of people took issue with my opinion that the Optional class in Java is useless. It is usually accompanied by a code example showing how great it is at solving a problem you can solve in far fewer lines by simply including a null check.
• There was a time when I posted political opinions on this site but have long since removed them. One reason is my views aren't static. Many things I believed 10-20 years ago seem cringey to me now. Also, nobody cares what I think. It's also very cringey to think I once believed my opinions were important enough to share. All I accomplished was giving people an excuse not to visit. A big reason I quit social media was due to the polarization it creates. I don't want to be part of that anymore. I just want to talk about video games and programming topics I find interesting now.
• Overall, running this little site has been fun and I suppose therapeutic. If a few people found it entertaining or informative along the way that's a nice bonus.

As for 2021 plans.. here's what I'd like to post here:

• Some sort of Ys III guide.
• Another Sega Genesis demo... this was a 2020 plan. I reached about 50% done with one then lost all motivation to work on it. I'm blaming general 2020 malaise. I am hopeful my attitude will change soon. Alternatively, I might post the sort-of-build-like tools I've been working on.
• Scans from a video game catalog that turns 20 this year. That's as much detail as I'm willing to provide since I'm not really feeling excited about this yet and the odds of it happening are <50%.

I expect that I will actually do something completely different.

Happy New Year and thanks for visiting.

June 1, 2019

There's no better time to start thinking about holiday features than the first day of June. Here's what you can look forward to this year:

• Black Friday - Retail Clerk '89 v1.0! Assuming I don't hit a weird roadblock, I expect the final demo of Retail Clerk '89 to be released 30 years after the story takes place. The thought of 1989 being 30 years ago makes me feel very old.
• First weekend in December - a new Xmas catalog scan. I know I've said 100 times I'm not doing any more catalog scans but I never hold that promise.
• Mid-December - a review of an Xmas-themed game sampler. No one is interested in this other than me.
• January 1st - my second decade in review article. Almost 10 years ago I posted a recap of gaming the 2000s, since at least 5 people read that I'll be doing the same for the 2010s.
• Update: Since I finished Retail Clerk '89 early I'll be moving the dates for most of these up.

May 4, 2019

For no particular reason I'm upgrading the site to Bootstrap 4.3. I wrote a little code to convert from Bootstrap 2 -> 4.3 but there are likely some broken pages. Please pardon anything that looks odd over the next week.

February 12, 2019

Goodbye YouTube. I'm tired of dealing with random copyright/monetization claims on the small number of insignificant video game promo VHS rips I posted on YouTube. These videos will now be downloads on the pages about them in the Features section. If you want higher quality versions and ask nicely maybe I'll share them. I expect to close my YouTube channel completely in a couple days.

December 28, 2018

As 2018 winds to a close I want to wish all my site visitors a happy 2019. Thank you for visiting this site, and subscribing to the feed (which you obviously are if you're reading this). In the early days of running this site I obsessed over visitor counts. Now I rarely check them but I know there are a few of you who visit often and I appreciate it.

2018 didn't end how I expected. The retro gaming podcast I co-hosted for 9 years ended in early December. It wasn't an event in my life that caused it so it's not my place to discuss details publicly. It's safe to say it's gone for good now and I need to move on. Several people asked if I'm considering another podcast and I can't say for sure. I've been kind of enjoying the extra time to work on other projects. I won't rule it out though so check back in roughly a week for thoughts on podcast ideas I might consider.

I'm not one for resolutions so I'll keep the 2019 plans to minimum. I'd really like to finish the main story for Retail Clerk '89. I won't say the demo will be done then because once this milestone is complete I'd like to build side stories around it. This feels like a realistic goal but I'm probably underestimating.

Right around December 31st 2019 I'll be posting the longest feature I've done in a long time. It's already 56 pages in draft form. It's a piece that I fear only interests me but perhaps 1-2 others will enjoy it. The target demographic for this site has always been me. My philosophy has been to post things I find interesting and then be surprised when anyone else reads them.

Time-permitting I have a few half-finished articles and features that I'll post in 2019. It would also be nice to update my various .NET and Java applications to the latest runtime versions. Let's just call these stretch goals for now.

Life could always interfere with these plans like it did in 2018. No point speculating on what may happen. I'll just try to make 2019 a fun and productive year, I hope the same for everyone reading this.

December 16, 2018

I made a bunch of updates to my Game Hunter galleries. I've been down on that section for a while since I haven't been finding anything good lately. There are two primary reasons I think:

1) The bubble in retro game prices is causing more people to hunt for games in the wild.

2) I just plain don't have a lot of time to go out to garage sales every weekend.

So the 2018 page might be my last update to it - unless I change my mind in a year.

December 8, 2018

Here's a very hastily prepared page to cover a bunch of recent updates...

"Hey what's up with that podcast thing?" - I know I won't make anyone happy with this update but right now I'm not discussing what happened. There may be a right time to discuss, but it's not today. It's not going to return, sorry if that's disappointing. Everything is fine with me, no life-changing catastrophes or anything like that. The event that led to the abrupt end doesn't involve me in any way outside of "well I guess that podcast thing is done". I'm going to use the newly found free time to finish that Sega Genesis demo I've been slacking on and work through my backlog of Falcom games.

Social media - I planned to make "completely quit social media" my 2019 New Year's resolution. Then I remembered New Year's resolutions are silly and decided to tear the bandage off all at once. This is completely unrelated to the podcast thing, I started deactivating accounts earlier in the year. The reality is I didn't enjoy social media but couldn't stop checking it for updates. The updates never made me happy though, usually just depressed or angry, it's a really bizarre feedback loop I can't understand. Each social media platform had something unique that drove me off it. Facebook I quit because I was tired of political posts. Twitter is clearly a platform optimized for trolling. I lost track of who owned Tumblr and what rights they reserved to content posted there. I may still technically have a Google+ page but I hear Google is taking care of that for me soon. I'm still on LinkedIn because I have to be until I retire (so forever I guess). Other than LinkedIn, I think it's possible none of the other sites mentioned will be around in 5 years anyway.

Scans are back - Getting rid of Tumblr meant moving all the scans I've created back here. They were on Tumblr initially because the super-awful web host I used kept taking my site down due to bandwidth. This site is now hosted where that shouldn't be an issue.

SSL - In addition to resolving bandwidth problems, I moved the site to somewhere that made mandatory SSL easier. There are no forms on this site so that seems pointless on the surface. The real reason is to avoid search engine down-ranking and scary Chrome messages.

Phantasy Star III site URL - ps3.huguesjohnson.com is now at https://huguesjohnson.com/ps3/. I broke the old URL while setting-up the SSL redirect. I could probably fix it but, eh.

Upcoming stuff - I have one really large feature planned for 2019. In general this site has a lot of dead links, obsolete content, and other clean-up needed that I want to take care of. I'd really like to focus more on programming though so there might not be a ton of new content for a while.

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