A Ramble About Updating Things
Everything these days seems to need updating. It’s rare that something will just go on working without any sort of outside influence, at least online. And since everything is online now, it’s easier to update things. But frankly, updates for the things I regularly use have been pissing me off lately.
Recently, I got a notification to update the theme we use here on the Daily SPUF. It’s a pretty simple thing, nothing unusual. Unfortunately though, an update to the theme actually kinda broke the website. For some reason, the menu was broken and massive icons filled the screen. I didn’t know what was causing the problem, because it was the same both on the parent theme and our child Daily SPUF theme. Thankfully, rolling back the update fixed the problem almost instantly, and now the blog works again. But it’s a good thing that I could roll back the update, otherwise I’d have to switch to a default skin.
A quick detour here, one of the main troubleshooting tips on a WordPress site is to switch to the default theme. But the default theme changes every year, with the current one being Twenty Twenty Three. It’s worth having a default theme as a backup. But WordPress’s security settings say to delete themes that aren’t currently in use. Including default themes. That makes no sense to me.
Anyway, back to updates. Sometimes they are really forced down your through. Like Windows updates, which pop up occasionally. They’ll keep on pestering you, saying they’ll update ‘out of hours’. Joke’s on them though, out of hours for me is like 2am, and I only update once I’ve secured everything else. The last thing you want is an update to break something. Windows also occasionally pesters me to upgrade to Windows 11, but I’m not going to let that happen.
But you can’t always just trust things to automatically update either. A while ago, I wrote about how a bug had become an absolutely great quality of life feature in Pokemon GO. That bug or unintended feature genuinely made Pokemon GO really good. Unfortunately, Pokemon GO was hit with a forced update, so that unintended feature was quickly destroyed, despite how much people liked it.
Going back to video games, namely online multiplayer games, you get updates for those on the regular. In Warframe, you at least have Red Text, which announces that an update is coming, and gives you time to finish your mission. Red Text is vital in keeping things like Fortuna 69 alive, although the forced updates do require a little coordination to make sure that the people with the slowest internet hold the fort while those with speedy connections quickly download and install the updates. I’ve also seen similar shenanigans in Destiny 2, but Destiny 2 has forced maintenance where no one can get in and play.
On a less urgent time frame, you have updates to games like Skyrim, which seem reasonable but can break mods easily, especially if they rely on Skyrim Script Extender. With Skyrim, it’s best to turn automatic updates off, then wait for your mods (like the aforementioned Skyrim Script Extender) to update. Most mods don’t need updating, but anything relying on tools or SKSE will need to be updated to work with the new Skyrim version. It’s pretty darn weird.
But one of the stranger things when it comes to updates is the Day One Patch, which many, many games seem to have these days. An update to a brand new game, catching bugs that were missed in development. After all, there’s no easier way to test things and find bugs when your community can do that for you.
Really though, there’s no real standard when it comes to updating things. Everything updates in its own different way, whether it’s a WordPress plugin or a brand new AA game with a day one patch. And it’s really damn annoying. Especially when an update can break things or make problems worse.