Return to the Mail Bag for some Headlines

Back in the middle bronze age of the blog I started in on a recurring feature centered on items that landed in my email inbox.  I was apparently committed enough to the bit that I even made a “Mail Bag” category, which means you can see on the side bar category list drop down that I managed to farm that for a good 16 posts between mid 2011 and late 2013. (The count is 17 now with this post.)

That time frame happens to correspond to the peak of the popularity of the blog, though I suspect my dropping the mail bag bit was not a key element in its subsequent decline.

Anyway, the idea was founded in the fact that, back when I started the blog, I created an email address just for the blog and blog related items.  It was a Yahoo address, which was the style at the time, and it appeared on my About page for many years.

Yahoo, back in the day… like a decade before I started the blog, but I had the picture handy

And I used to get a lot of email.  Not from readers, though that was not unheard of.  I still get the occasional email on that front.  The main senders were PR and marketing people with press releases to push and post ideas to suggest.

Somewhere around 2015 or so I changed the blog email address on the About page to a Gmail address (same user name though, wilhelm2451) because… reasons.  I think there was some worry about Yahoo at the time and how they might no longer allow free email or some such.

It has been a tough couple of decades for Yahoo.

Anyway, the swap was made and now anybody more recent than that time probably sends me email there… which is a very small number, because by 2015 this blog, and blogging in general, were in serious decline.

But I didn’t throw away the Yahoo account, and Yahoo didn’t end up breaking email or demanding payment or anything, so I still have the account.  I still even email some people from that account if our relationship started in that era.  Hey Bhagpuss.

The thing is, I still get a lot of email on that account.  A lot of press releases, PR items, and blog post suggestions from various agencies.  More on a typical day than I get on my blog Gmail account in a week.

Lately I’ve become a bit fascinated by the pile of stuff I get there.  I certainly didn’t sign up for all of those mailing lists.  Somebody must have just collected a random set of web site email addressed and sold them to unwitting PR people.

I often just let it all collect and then delete it in great bunches, but sometimes I let it sit and gather and then wander through it to see what is there.  I don’t think I have received a single item that has prompted a blog post in years.  But still it keeps coming in.

So, in furtherance of very little other than my own amusement, I gathered the last sixty or so subject lines and pasted them below, just to give you a simulation of what it is like to open my inbox at the end of any given week.

  • Newsweek’s Atari VCS Review: Retro Tech Meets Geek Chic!
  • OUT DAY: BEDROOM POP AUTEUR ZEPH RELEASES DEBUT SCARED OF EVERYTHING EP ON NEON GOLD
  • TV Priest (Sub Pop) start first UK headlining tour | Guestlist available on request
  • Swedish BrainTech Company Mentalytics Signs Agreement with Kia
  • Survios Sells Over One Million Copies of CREED: Rise to Glory, Inspired by Hit MGM Franchise, Across All Platforms
  • STEM Toy of the Year Nominee Roto Brain – Sample?
  • Jooki Kids’ Streaming WiFi Speaker Available for Review – Screen-Free Music & Audio Book Entertainment 
  • ‘Len’s Island’ gets new gameplay trailer – moves launch date to 26th November
  • Virtual tickets are now available for AWE USA 2021!
  • Starlight Alliance debuts on Steam and Nintendo Switch [review copies available]
    Gaming and the Sustainability Problem: Console Power Consumption Increases by Up to 2,520% [Infographic]
  • One of the World’s Top-Selling Video Game 3D Artists
  • CNBC Transcript: Chipotle Chief Diversity, Inclusion & People Officer Marissa Andrada and Chipotle CFO Jack Hartung Speak with CNBC’s Kate Rogers Live During CNBC’s @Work Summit Today
  • China’s Impact On The Gaming Industry Is Going To Be Massive
  • North of Nowhere Launches a Kickstarter!
  • New Gameplay Trailer Out Now for ‘They Always Run,’ Set to Launch on October 20th, 2021
  • Pinball Expo 2021 October 27th-30th
  • DoubleDice develops decentralized gaming platform allowing multiple games in a no-house/no-casino setup – democratizing the gaming industry
  • OKLOU SHARES GALORE ANNIVERSARY EP + DEBUT AMERICAN TOUR WITH CAROLINE POLACHEK
  • New York’s Bambara announce new mini-LP “Love Is On My Mind” | Out February 25th on Wharf Cat Records | UK + EU headline dates announced for 2022
  • The Journey thru Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life
  • Minecraft most malware-infected game on the market with 228k users affected
  • Stocking Stuffer: Gaming deodorant for your forehead – actually a sweat liner for your VR headset
  • Google Play Quarterly Revenue Jumped to $21.5B, Almost Double than App Store
  • Enter the Multiverse & Discover Every Spider-Man Variant [Infographic]
  • Pinball Expo 2021 located at Schaumburg Convention Center
  • Silverbacks announce new album “Archive Material”
  • Self Esteem reveals “Moody” video ahead of release of highly anticipated album Prioritise Pleasure (out 10.22 on Avenue A / Fiction Records)
  • iRacing Petit Le Mans glory for RLR eSports Porsche GT3 duo
  • Is a Metaverse Possible?
  • DreamHack Anaheim To Take Place in Feb 2022
  • AP Style Reminders, Scary PR Pitches & More
  • New research reveals how you can take up to $339 off your new PS5 and Xbox Series X
  • WATCH: “I’m On A High” by Rick Eberle (music video premiere)
  • The Number of Twitch Streamers Plunged by 1.8 Million YTD, Average Viewership Down by 20% Since May
  • New GamePlay Trailer Out, Cradle of Sins, Brings VR & PC Players Together in an Adventurous Multiplayer Game
  • [CORRECTED]: Users globally spent over 140,000 years watching Twitch in H1 2021
  • Press Release: 2 IN 5 PEOPLE ARE CONTENT CREATORS: SHURE UNVEILS FINDINGS FROM FUTURESOURCE’S NEW STUDY
  • Review/video Consideration – Striking visuals spooky Fairy tale – Puzzle platformer – Tandem a tale of shadow
  • Email Vulnerability Pandemic. Are All Emails Worth Opening?
  • Quick Pitch: The Gen Z EV That’s GAS –Alexis
  • NEW RELEASE: ‘FAR CRY 6’ The Music of Yara – Music by Various Artists
  • Data: San Jose is the most expensive major metro for household bills
  • Xbox Players Most Toxic on Voice Chat, Swearing 6 Times per Minute
  • Greatest Music of All Time Podcast
  • Introducing Lowel EGO LED™ Light
  • Kills Birds share the anthemic and incendiary “Cough Up Cherries” | New album “Married” out 12th November
  • NEWS RELEASE – REDBOX Expands Distribution Footprint of its Streaming App to the PlayStation5 Console
  • Little Bug, a lovely adventurous platformer is coming to Switch and Xbox consoles later this year
  • Aloof release date revealed. Super cute puzzle-fighter is coming to Nintendo Switch
  • STEVE JONES PROMOTED TO PRESIDENT OF GEARBOX SOFTWARE
  • It’s not the same old internet
  • GKIDS To Release Mamoru Hosoda’s BELLE In Theaters January 14, 2022
  • Nintendo Switch Outsold PS3 and Xbox 360 with 90.5 Million Units in Lifetime Shipments
  • Environmentally conscious underwater adventure SAMUDRA heading to Steam
  • Revealed: The highest earning games per player – Clash of Clans a billion dollar earner
  • Fintropolis uses Minecraft to teach students about money – Over 1M Downloads in First 25 Days
  • EXPERT INTERVIEW OPP: Overdose CRISIS: Highest Number EVER; Rehab Owner and former addict weighs in

To be fair, that one at the top of the list about the new Atari VCS, which arrived just last night, also showed up on every other email account I check regularly.  They are more serious about finding me than most.

There is quite a bit of music related press releases landing in my inbox, which is odd because any long time reader would probably be able to suggest a half a dozen more suitable blogs than my own for that.  Once again, hi Bhagpuss!

And there are a number on the list that really look like they might be on topic for the site, but which end up being either a bit skimpy… that one about swears on Twitch streams was the result of somebody watching the first 15 minutes of 100 videos on YouTube, which doesn’t exactly feel like a sufficient sample size… or are sponsored and hosted by online gambling sites.

The Is a Metaverse Possible? pitch seemed interesting, given Raph Koster’s current project.  It is pushing a book from Frank Rose, The Sea We Swim In, which seems to be more focused on manipulating your fan base with your stories than the technical feasibility, or practical implementation, of the whole metaverse idea.  Looking him up, the same author wrote a book on immersion a decade back.  Maybe I’ll look into that.  But no meat in there for a post despite he promise of the subject line.

Such is life online.

And I didn’t even think to look in the spam folder on the account, though peeking in there it seems that not much gets flagged as spam.

Anyway, there wasn’t much of a message behind this post other than to give yet another peek into what goes on here at TAGN.

8 thoughts on “Return to the Mail Bag for some Headlines”

  1. bhagpuss

    I’d never actually noticed you email me from a Yahoo address. You have to mouse over the name to get the address in GMail and I generally just click on reply if its someone I know.

    I remember that Yahoo scare. Mrs Bhagpuss and I both have Yahoo email addresses we use for a few mmorpgs – there was a time when I tried not to put all our eggs in Google’s basket but I’ve slacked off on that a lot in recent years. I remember thinking about changing the emails on those accounts but I figured even Yahoo would give us some warning before they closed down so I never did and when it didn’t happen I forgot all about it.

    Reading this post made me check my own blog. I was under the impression I’d made a new email address for it when I created the blog but it doesn’t seem that I did. I don’t in fact appear to have any email address attached to it, which goes a long way to wards explaining why I never seem to get these various offers other bloggers often mention. Of course, had I added an email address you can bet I wouldn’t have checked it more than once or twice a year, which is about as often as remember to look at my “moderation” folder. I am an absolutely terrible blog administrator.

    I wonder if I should add an email address at this stage? I guess it’s never too late.

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  3. Mbp

    Wilhelm, would you consider writing a post about the current and future state of blogging? Does it even have a future? I realise that other formats, in particular video have exploded over the last decade to the detriment of the mere written word but surely blogging still has a place. What do we all do to goof off in the office any more?

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  5. kiantremayne

    “China’s Impact On The Gaming Industry Is Going To Be Massive” – err, by closing it down, probably.

    On the metaverse thing, I’ve been r4eally enjoying reading Raph Koster’s posts recently, but that’s with my professional software architect hat on. I suspect a lot of what he’s saying has gone “whoosh” past a lot of readers – actually, looking at the comments on Massively OP when they linked his posts, I KNOW a lot of it has gone “whoosh”. Still, it beats most of the coverage out there, which boils down to “Metaverse is a cool buzzword! It’s gonna be big! Maybe Facebook will dominate it! Or Google! Or maybe some scrappy outsider will emerge! Hey, NFTs are a cool buzzword too!! Maybe the future is a Metaverse… with NFTs!!!”

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  6. Wilhelm Arcturus Post author

    @Bhagpuss – Well, if you set up a blog email address, I have some music related PR firms I could send your way. (Also I am glad you confirmed the great Yahoo email scare, because that was pretty hazy in my brain.)

    @Potshot – I think the situation pretty much demanded that I open it up. I did not click any links however.

    @Mbp – I am not sure I could get much mileage out of such a post. My mentioning Yahoo probably lends itself to an analogy. Yahoo was in a panic for a ten year stretch, with dire headlines and such, not because it was losing money, but because it had ceased to make money and expand like a crazy new tech company. It became a normal company and had to adjust to that.

    Same for blogging. It was an exciting new frontier for a bit between 2003 to 2008 or so, and then it just became kind of normal. There are still lots of blogs, and bloggers are still looking for ways to turn it into income here and there, but nobody starts a blog because blogs are cool anymore. It is just another medium.

    @The Duke – I appreciate it!

    @kiantremayne – I have been interested in Raph’s talks as well, but I am keeping my powder dry until things get more concrete. As might be apparent from some of my past posts, I am quite interested in how much this metaverse is going to cost and who will be paying for it. Raph is big on the thin client and cloud, which is where I work currently and I know there is a meter there ticking up the price for everything you do. I am also waiting to hear what the hook will be, because even Raph has been very clear that they need to have a game up front to bring people in and get them invested.

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  7. Halum

    Sixty emails and nothing on anatomical enlargement or helping Nigerian princes? I don’t know, man, this list looks censored to me (someone had to make the obvious joke).

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  8. Wilhelm Arcturus Post author

    @Halum – You know, I looked in the spam folder and I don’t even have either of those in there either. But I haven’t seen any of those lately in any of my email inboxes. Maybe spam filters are beginning to work. Or maybe they’re all just texting spam and robo calling now. I get a lot of that on my phone.

    And then there are the spam comments on the blog. That can be a wild variety. The current most recent spam to hit that folder has the name “Midget Porn Videos & Sex Movies” I thought midget porn fell off in the 80s.

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