Don't leave a message. Don't even call.

They're facetious, mostly - the only person who calls you is not your Mum (it's the Guardian, hence Mum) - but I endorse the idea. VMs will fade when the teens of today take over. They don't make phone calls, let alone leave messages.

ART More on saving old games, which may strike some people as an utter waste of time. Games? Is it necessary for future generations to behold the glories of DigDug 2? Yes. ArsTechnica:

The only pieces left will be screen grabs and player-generated movies. Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 has a million search results on YouTube, but you've no idea how many accounts are teens who will delete their early work out of misplaced shame. Back in 2008 I worked forever with my daughter on a RCT 3 park, and if I say so myself it was magnificent. It's lost now, except for some videos I made while testing out some coasters and trams. I wish I could bring it back to life, because seeing the park thronged with all the patrons, rides spinning in the sky, people swimming in the pools - the amount of detail and action was incredible, and you could enjoy it for at least four minutes before it slowed your machine to a grinding, stuttering halt. As complex as it was, it's nothing compared to Cities: Skylines:

You can zoom down to street level anywhere in the game. It's astonishing.

Do we need all the saved games in Skylines, though? No. But if users create hundreds of thousands of imaginary towns, either dystopian or utopian, and the cost of saving them is almost nil, why not store them in the Internet Archive? If we could discover a huge database of citizen-generated urban plans from 1950, it would make a fascinating look into what they'd build if money was no object. Does this mean we have to save the bad games, too? (That's io9 on bad games for which people have misplaced nostalgia.) Sure. Let history sort it out.

By the way: this game . . .

. . . should have been a movie. It had Nazis. He hates those guys.

VotD Russian highway paint? You're soaking in it: