Greendale.tk

From Greendale.tk to WickedMessenger.net: A Domain Migration Story

About a week ago, I noticed something troubling—my old domain, greendale.tk, was no longer reachable. After a moment of confusion, it dawned on me: the registration renewal was up. The domain had been extended back in December 2023, and I’d completely lost track of time.

Here’s where it gets weird: you can still log into Freenom and see your domain listed there, but they’ve stopped sending renewal notices. The domains just… fade away into the digital ether.

Naturally, I did some digging and discovered that Freenom has been embroiled in legal troubles. They were sued and are facing serious financial difficulties—articles like this one and this one here paint a pretty clear picture. Their website still exists, but they’re no longer renewing or handing out domains. Somehow, I’d completely missed this news.

The silver lining? I still had wickedmessenger.net sitting unused in my portfolio. So I rolled up my sleeves and migrated the site—running some MySQL queries on the database, updating my information with Google, and adding the new domain to their search engine.

Not that I’m drowning in traffic these days. A few old LOST reviews still get the occasional visitor, and honestly, the golden days of blogging are long behind us. But this site remains something I treasure: a living archive documenting nearly 20 years of thoughts, interests, and moments in time.

So here’s to new beginnings: greendale.tk is dead—long live wickedmessenger.net!

ESO – Worm Cult Saga

This year instead of a ‘Chapter’ like previous years we got a Season Pass. Although in practice it’s not that much different. It’s called Season of the Worm Cult and it’s a continuation of the original ESO main storyline. It comes with a nice new island new bosses etc, you know the drill ;). It’s a pretty looking island and I liked the story as well.

The island was released in two parts. As you can see in the shot above, there is a huge wall dividing the west and east part. I thought it was a neat idea to split the content, June the 1st part and October the rest. I was expecting a week or two some events and then we could finish the story. But the execution was pretty bad. There were a bunch of daily quests, that you could repeat over and over and over again!

You can only defeat a camp of Deadra with 100 players spamming AOE damage so many times before it gets boring ;). But anyway, the other part of the island is now open, so I am now in the process of completing the story arc, overall it’s pretty good! If it wasn’t for the opening events dragging along. Anyway, here are a bunch of pretty shots.

2024 Gaming Highlights: Old Favorites and New Discoveries

This blogpost has been in the back of my mind since December 2024, for some reason now, more than 3 months later I decided to pen it down! Anyway, what I played in 2024 were mainly ‘older’ games. The steam replay for 2024 even mentioned this, only 8% of gametime was spent on new releases. What were those release you might ask, well some Tales and Tactic, Deep rock galactic and Last Flame. Some auto battles and Vampire Survivor likes.

The older games I played were a lot of Warcraft and Elder Scroll Online, and of course Oxygen Not Included. They released two content dlcs the past year that I enjoyed a lot.

ESO had a big chapter as they call their expansion, but it might have been the last one as they are now moving over to smaller but more frequent content patches. I had a lot of fun with Gold Road and the new West Weald zone. It was very crowded the first few months, then it started to quiet down a little. But there were also a lot of 10th year anniversary events that brought back a lot of players, even in the usually desolate areas, you ran into players. It was wild!

Morph looking over the new Main City in The War Within, Durnogal

In Warcraft I played some of the Dragonflight expansion and of course the new one, the War Within that was released in august. The delves were the main new dungeon type instances that were added. And they’re pretty fun, but there being only 8 (and now 2 more after a recent content patch) they’ve grown a little stale. I expect to play wow a bit less now, i’ve seen most of the war within and the recent content patches weren’t that great, so I’ll just level up some characters to 80 and do some of the sidequests I haven’t done yet, waiting for the next DLC.

In October the much awaited dlc for Factorio arrived! Space age! And it was even better than I expected. I should really dedicate a separate post to that. It was pretty much all I played for a few months and managed to even finish it. The dlc added some new game elements, like quality and elevated train tracks, but also as the new suggests, space travel and a few new planets to conquer. It’s definitely one of the best epansions of any game I played!

So that was about it for 2024. There isn’t anything in particular I am looking forward to for this year, currently I am playing some Hogwarts’s legacy, which I picked up for cheap and two point museum! Actually a new game :).

Skilgraad ESO West Weald — ESO Skilgraad, West Weald

Limited Edition Of One – Steven Wilson

Regarding Steven Wilson, I arrived a little late on the scene. It wasn’t until 2022 I began listening to Porcupine Tree & his solo efforts. And I did so in reverse order because of the release of CR caught my eye, on the Steve Hoffman forums.

Of course I had seen his name popup often at remasters and remixed, for example Jethro Tull’s aqualung, songs for the woods and many others but I somehow was under the impression he was more an engineer type person. I do remember I checked out PT a few times but it didn’t quite click.

I might have checked the more heavier stuff at the time and didn’t really care for it, not quite sure. But somehow since 2022 that changed :).

Favs are now Deadwing, Light Bulb, and of course the solo albums Raven & Hand Cannot Erase.

Steam hardware survey

The past week Steam asked whether it could upload my hardware specs for the hardware survey. Afterwards you can check out the results on the hardware survey page.

So it seems the ‘average’ PC has 6 cores, a 3060 and runs Windows 10. The cpus vary quite a bit but it seems that there are a lot of people running games / steam on a relatively older PC. That is probably why they’re still running Windows 10. I don’t see why else you would still run Windows 10, since 11 works for me pretty well on several PCs.

It is however easy to get caught in a bubble, where you regularly frequent hardware forums and or reddit where people run the latest hardware to think that most people do that. It seems the average person just buys a PC every 5 years or so and keeps that running, maybe upgrading the video card and that’s it.

About 1/3 vs 2/3 amd vs intel, which is nice. I am glad Intel doesn’t have a monopoly here.

I also would have expected more people running 1440p, but it’s only 14%. Most people still game at 1080p as you can see below.

All in all an interesting page to look at.

ESO: Tenth Year Anniversary

Earlier this month, Elder Scrolls Online celebrated it’s 10th year anniversary! I took advantage of the xp boost and event tickets and played mainly a new Templar character. Though the others saw some action as well! It was very crowded every where and the group quests and events all over Tamriel were very busy.

Here are some screenshots.

Fallout Revival

Thanks to the TV show over at prime video, Fallout is topping the steam charts again! Some of these are even over a decade old. Fallout 76 is making a comeback as well.

After a rocky start the game is much better now and becoming quite popular. It’ll be interesting to see how many will still play in say a month or so.

I have been playing Fallout 76 as well again, after a hiatus of 4 years. My level 13 character was waiting for my return. I mainly wandered around in confusing where I left off in 2020 ;). But it was fun though. The shooting and the modding of weapons is great. So is the base building. And the multiplayer aspect isn’t annoying. The quests are good as well.

And I also picked up where I left off years ago in Fall out 4. not quite sure why I never finished it. I think i am going to focus on FO4 for now, will be nice to conclude the main quest at least and some of the DLC is excellent as well.

https://fxtwitter.com/Okami13_/status/1782120086091829575

Thoughts on Dave the Diver

Earlier this year I finished Dave the Diver. Well the main story line, it’s just long enough to not get annoying. It is a great game but after 30 plus hours I had seen enough.

I assume everyone knows the game by now, but in short, you start taking care of a sushi restaurant, but the catch is that you have to catch the fish for the restaurant yourself. And by doing so a whole story line unfolds where you meet an array of characters. The main game play loop is diving in the sea and catch fish, do some bosses and upgrade your gear so you can dive deeper and catch better fish (as in more valuable for the restaurant).

There are multiple mini games, even new ones are introduced well into the game. The boss fights are not too bad, a few were annoying or I had to look up what to do exactly but nothing I got stuck on.

All in all a very enjoyable experience, that I would recommend to anyone. There is still some stuff to do, upgrade the restaurant, finish catching all fish etc, but since I finished the main story line I haven’t had the urge to go back to be honest. There is more content coming soon, so I’ll keep an eye on that.

IGN review is pretty spot on.

https://www.ign.com/articles/dave-the-diver-review