What the blog/archive actually is
The supplied archive shows a remarkably long-lived gaming diary: 254 post URLs spanning from September 2005 to May 2026. The homepage still introduces itself with the cheerfully self-sabotaging line, “Don’t bother reading this. Read Penny Arcade instead,” which turns out to be the wrong advice; the real appeal here is not polish, but continuity, memory, and a very specific group chemistry. Read in sequence, the blog has three big lives: an early guild-and-screenshot phase, a long intermittent “History:” phase, and then a late-era explosion into weekly, fully written ensemble comedy.
What makes the archive interesting is that it does not read like a sterile record of “games played.” It reads like a record of people learning how to narrate themselves. The early titles are brisk location- or incident-labels such as “Gates of Kryta,” “Lion’s Arch Cakewalk,” and “Sorrow’s Furnace”; the later titles become miniature comic essays such as “Sir Stripes and the Questionable Leadership Initiative” or “Climactic or Anti-Climactic – You Decide.” The blog’s history is therefore also the history of its voice: from captioned snapshots to serialized after-action farce.
The Guild Wars foundation
The first, clearest, and most concentrated era is the Guild Wars era. The 2005-06 archive is packed with unmistakable Guild Wars place names and guild-life markers: Beacon’s Perch, Lion’s Arch, Bergen Hot Springs, Gates of Kryta, Droknar’s Forge, Sorrow’s Furnace, and repeated references to guild halls and the “Torps guild.” Counting the supplied URLs, this first phase makes up 32 posts, which makes Guild Wars the single largest clearly named game-footprint in the archive. It is the blog’s origin story in both senses: the first identifiable game world, and the first durable social setting for the people who keep reappearing later in other forms.
The early titles also show what the blog initially valued: game spaces, communal milestones, and the oddity of bodies in those spaces. “GuildWars - My first image,” “GuildWars - Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Torps Guild Embedded Journalist,” “Nude Day at Beacon’s Perch,” and “Magic Piss” suggest a page built less around formal review than around “look at what just happened here.” That matters for the whole history: the blog’s deepest subject, from the beginning, is not the game as product but the game as backdrop for a shared joke.
The museum years
From 2007 through roughly 2018, the archive turns sparse and oddly curated. There are fourteen posts explicitly titled “History: …,” and many of them function like postcards from entire game periods: Tabula Rasa, Left 4 Dead, Borderlands, Magicka, Portal 2, Battlefield 3, Left 4 Dead 2, Dungeon Defenders, Team Fortress 2, Borderlands 2, The Secret World, Firefall, Dota 2, and Battlefield V. In other words, the middle archive often compresses a whole season of play into a single memory marker. That is why these years feel less like a diary and more like a museum corridor.
This is also where the answer to “what games did we play?” becomes unusually broad. Alongside the “History:” posts, the URL list also names Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands and Star Wars: The Old Republic outright, while 2015-16 looks like a return to regular screenshot-posting without consistently naming the game in the title. That combination is important. The archive does not show a group narrowing its tastes over time. It shows the opposite: a co-op circle moving from MMO spaces into shooters, horde games, looter-shooters, puzzle games, survival games, CRPGs, and strategy/base-building titles, with the blog only sometimes keeping up in a formal way.
At the “least posts” end, the long tail is striking. Many clearly named games appear only once in the archive at title level. That is not a sign that they mattered less to the group in playtime terms; it is a sign that blog representation was never proportional. Some games produced a season of incidents. Others produced one commemorative post and were gone. The archive is selective, not exhaustive, and that selectiveness is part of its personality.
The late renaissance
The archive’s real second life begins in 2023. Using the supplied URL set, more than half of all archived posts arrive from 2023 onward, and 2025 is the single busiest year in the run. From there the blog stops behaving like a scrapbook and starts behaving like a weekly serial. The title style becomes longer, funnier, and more novelistic; the posts develop subtitles, songs, “lessons learned,” achievement callouts, and “next time” teasers. By the 2026 posts, the blog is essentially writing sitcom episodes out of survival-game sessions.
The named itinerary in these years is rich and recognizable. There is an explicit Warhammer: Vermintide 2 stop, an explicit Back 4 Blood post, an explicit Diablo IV entry, a long and obvious Baldur's Gate 3 campaign in late 2023 into early 2024, an explicit and then extended Helldivers 2 stretch, a grimdark arc that clearly centers on Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, a prolonged summer-and-desert residency in Dune: Awakening, a late-2025 pivot into The Riftbreaker, and then the 2026 run that is unmistakably Icarus. The titles also strongly suggest a western cluster in early 2023 that looks like Red Dead Online, a Washington/D.C. action stretch in 2020 that looks like Tom Clancy's The Division 2, and a late-2024 “Shrouded Lands” sequence that strongly points toward Enshrouded. The effect is less “genre drift” than “genre fluency”: the same social unit keeps finding new worlds to break in entertaining ways.
If Guild Wars is the foundational continent of the archive, the late years are the archive at full creative power. The recent Icarus posts are not just records of missions; they are comic prose with recurring motifs, callback structures, pseudo-ballads, domestic subplots about crops and cupboards, and mock-epic chapter headings. One April 2026 post turns a defense build into a joke about overengineering and AI pathing; another turns a desert supply run into a story about buffalo pregnancy, egg insurgency, and Craig’s shell-hoarding. The blog’s late form is what happens when years of in-group shorthand finally become a confident literary mode.
The cast and the running jokes
The blog is posted under the Blogger identity “moles,” but the recurring cast in the readable late-era posts is much more ensemble-driven. The names we can state with confidence from the text are Myles, Dave, Craig, and Zaph, with Sturnim appearing in the archive titles as another recurring participant. The archive also contains recurring named figures who read as companions, avatars, mounts, pets, or mascots rather than the stable human roster: Lucy in the early Guild Wars phase; later Sir Stripes, Mr Laggy, Mojo, Lazarus, Wulfar, Yrliet, Pascal.exe, and Sir Vegetable. In other words, the blog keeps blurring the line between player, persona, and running bit.
The clearest modern dynamic is wonderfully legible. Myles is the planner and dry narrator; Dave is the builder, improvisor, farmer, and systems-man; Craig is the chaos engine, pyromaniac, aggro magnet, and defender of ammunition excess; Zaph is the competent fixer, scout, and practical adult who appears to improve whatever everyone else has already overcomplicated. The recent posts make those roles explicit again and again. Sir Stripes becoming a better mission leader than the humans is funny because the humans have already been sharply typed. The same goes for lines like “CRAIG!!! Why is the forest on fire?” followed by Craig’s “It wasn’t me!!,” or the later 9mm-ammo debacle culminating in “Oops.” These are not random jokes; they are jokes built on long familiarity.
The recurring themes are equally stable. Fire keeps returning. Falling keeps returning. Death keeps returning, but usually as punchline rather than tragedy. So do bad architecture, overengineering, failed stealth, bodily humor, and domestic absurdity inside supposedly high-stakes worlds: cupboards, coffee, eggs, farming plots, baths, buffalo, fishing, “lavatorial” emergencies, and whether a fireplace will or will not burn the house down. Just as importantly, the blog loves turning game systems into character comedy. Even a lesson list becomes a bit: “Farming (305) beats Hunting (195) beats Fishing (2).” What should have been small stats becomes another joke about how these sessions actually felt.
The quiet gaps
The blank periods are real on the page, even if they were not real in play. Looking only at the supplied URL chronology, there is a 16-month publication silence from June 2006 to September 2007, then a 21-month silence from November 2007 to July 2009, then another 18-month silence from September 2009 to February 2011. Later there are shorter but still notable quiet runs, including October 2013 to September 2014, most of 2017 before December, and December 2018 to August 2019. The pattern is clear: the archive is not a continuous gameplay ledger. It is an episodic memory function. It flares when a game, mood, or group dynamic produces good material, and it goes quiet when the playing continues but the urge to document does not.
That interpretation is supported by the shape of the middle years. The sparse “History:” posts read almost like recovery points after long stretches of uncatalogued play. A single post stands in for an era, then another single post stands in for the next era. The important thing is not that the blog is incomplete; the important thing is that its incompleteness is revealing. What survives in the archive is what felt narratable. That is why the loudest phases are the ones where the games are especially good at producing repeatable social theater.
Open questions and limits
The chronology is high-confidence because it comes from the full supplied URL list. The game names explicitly present in titles are also high-confidence. What is less certain are a handful of title-runs in the middle and late archive where the game is implied rather than named; the strongest title-based inferences are the Red Dead Online-like western run in early 2023, the Division 2-like D.C. run in 2020, and the Enshrouded-like run in late 2024. Likewise, the core modern player roster is clearly visible, but older named figures such as Lucy are harder to classify cleanly from titles alone as player, character, or one-off joke.
In closing
What survives across twenty-one years is not just a list of games. It is a durable social form. The blog begins as guild-era screenshot logging, passes through a long postcard phase of “History:” markers, and matures into a weekly comic chronicle in which co-op gaming becomes a vehicle for serialized character work. Among clearly identifiable games, Guild Wars left the deepest named footprint; at the opposite end, many mid-period games are one-post visitors. But the real constant is not any specific title. It is the group’s habit of turning mishap into folklore.
The funniest thing about the archive may be that its homepage still tells people not to read it. After two decades of fires, falls, bad planning, overbuilt defenses, confused animals, suspiciously competent zebras, and Craig-related legal denials, that disclaimer reads like the oldest running joke on the site. The blog’s real history is the history of a group that kept finding new games, but never really changed its preferred genre: friends being ridiculous together.
ChatGPT spent 30mins of deep-research to come up with this review of 20 years of blogging
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