Meme Monday: Expansion Related Memes

All MMOs have them, and people expect them.

Expansions.

Without expansions, people would merely sit around wherever, saying "I'm bored" into General Chat. Or, worse for the game publisher, people would stop paying to keep the MMO afloat.

Of course, expansions also mean memes. Lots of memes.

I had to look this up to find out what movie
this was referencing. It's the end scene of
The Dark Knight Rises. From the Blizzard Forums.

The irony was that this didn't exactly age like milk,
but it's entirely feasible that they were channeling
the entire Worldsoul Expansion Set instead.
From Reddit.

Sorry about the size on this one, but it's amusing
in its own way. From Reddit.

Yes, I'm aware that Legion has been out for so long
that it now is "out" again  as a "Remix" version. But hey,
Legion Classic will likely be out by 2027.
And before you ask, no, I've never played it and
I have no desire to ever play it, so don't try to
tell me about it at all. From Imgflip (original) and ifunny.co.

Say Hello to Sunken Temple for Me

When a toon reaches L50 in the Vanilla portion of WoW Classic, you get a quest for your class. (Okay, most classes; I haven't gotten all classes to L50, so there might be an outlier.) That quest chain inevitably sends you to the Sunken Temple dungeon, where you go get a McGuffin to bring back and get a (relatively) decent item as a reward. Sure, it's not world beating or anything, but I'll take it.

Hey, Joan. Don't worry, your turn is coming soon.
Just try not to think about farming Felcloth too much.
The listings are as October 16, 2025.

Typically there's a bit of a wait to find a group for a Sunken Temple run; nothing too terribly bad, but waiting on a Tank is pretty much a time-honored tradition these days. 

Except that this past week has been really bad for groups for ST.

At first I couldn't figure out why, since Sunken Temple does have enough people interested in running it, but then I remembered two things:

• Naxxramas opened up on the Anniversary Servers
• Legion Remix opened on October 7th

Yeah, those two things will do it.

In the meantime, I've been kind of doing other things than leveling my toons. Such as Linna spending time leveling Blacksmithing instead, which led me down the gold sink of working on Blacksmithing quests. (Yes, this was a thing in Vanilla Classic.)

I won't tell you how many times I farmed Mithril Ore
for this. Let's just say that I got to know all of the mobs
around Tanaris. ALL OF THEM.

Even after farming for ore for what seemed like forever, I still decided to buy some extra ore off of the Auction House because I was constantly fighting with other Paladins out there for those Mithril and Truesilver ores.* The net result was not only that I completed those Mithril Order quests, but I now have to go fish a bit to get my gold supply back up. 

Ah well. Not like I'm going to have to worry about an fast mount anytime soon. Or even in TBC, where I didn't get an fast ground mount on Briganaa at all until she hit max level L70.** And throughout all of my playing WoW Classic I never had enough gold to get an Epic flying mount because constantly farming gold and "playing the gold game" didn't interest me.

Remember, kids, when you talk about rushing out and getting your epic flying mounts and whatnot that there are people who didn't want to (or couldn't) spend tons of time min/maxing their gold farming to get their own epic mount. (And didn't want to buy gold illicitly or from Blizzard.)

If you say his name three times really fast,
@madseasonshow will appear and say "Told you so."

Given that I've been slowed down by external factors, I'm actually quite surprised that I've gotten to L52 on two toons by mid-October. With some luck I'll get all four to L52 by Halloween, and just continue onward. I'm expecting TBC Prepatch to hit in January 2026, but we'll see how it goes.

*Before you ask, yes, I'm aware that in Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien used Truesilver and Mithril interchangeably. The first time I saw a Truesilver Ore out in the field in 2009 my brain went "Wait, didn't they know that they're the same damn thing?"

**A little side effect of that Bataan Death March of speed leveling. Another side effect of that experience was that I had to go back and level Leatherworking and Skinning after I leveled to L70, and by then there was almost no reason to do it because by the time I'd have gotten Leatherworking high enough my gear would have been better coming from raid and dungeon drops (theoretically speaking) than anything I could make. 

Pendragon Classic Returns

The RPG nostalgia tour continues with Chaosium bringing back another 1980s classic of the RPG genre, Pendragon Classic. 

I'd read through the original version once before, and yes, I'm a product of those old classic movies such as The Adventures of Robin Hood and Prince Valiant.* Hell, I am still fond of the 1982 mini-series adaptation of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe on television.

The more I've delved into Pendragon the past few years, the more I've been impressed by Greg Stafford's adaptation of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur into an RPG that's designed to last 50+ years in a campaign setting. That concept alone is something that people who play D&D and its ilk would have trouble wrapping their heads around. 

For those people interested in old editions of RPGs, or for those interested in how the concept of the RPG was stretched far beyond what was originally envisioned by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, this might be something you'd be interested in.

I think I ought to finish up my RPG from the Past on Pendragon soon. Maybe in time once this is released...

*Independent television stations used to broadcast those movies --and many others-- on Saturday afternoon matinees. 

Meme Monday: Apple Picking Memes

My oldest went apple picking up in rural Wisconsin this weekend, and so I was inspired for today's Meme Monday.

Besides, it's that time of the year, and part of the Autumn rituals in our part of the country.

From Someecards.

They honeycrisp variety of apples may be sweet,
but not THAT sweet. From Legends of Windemere.

Honestly, I expected this meme to appear
sooner this year in my perusings, but...
From Imgflip.

I can get behind this. Well, without the medical
issues, that is. From Someecards.

Ha! Yeah, been there. From Memedroid.

Found the original apple picker fan. From Reddit.

Farewell, John Lodge

I first heard The Moody Blues on the radio in 1981, as their Long Distance Voyager album came out in early Summer. It got heavy airplay on Top 40 radio stations in the US, courtesy of The Voice and the disco-influenced Gemini Dream. You'd think that with my love of Rock music I'd have been exposed to The Moodies earlier, but I switched radio station loyalties a few years later, and only then became exposed to their extensive back catalog. 

A neighbor* pointed me in the direction of one of their early "Greatest Hits" compilations, This Is The Moody Blues, and two of the songs from that album that I really loved were (I'm Just a) Singer in a Rock and Roll Band and Ride My See-Saw. It's with sadness that I saw that the composer of those two songs (plus the aforementioned Gemini Dream), John Lodge, died yesterday.

If Justin Hayward is the voice of The Moody Blues, John Lodge held down the bass lines. Sure, there are other characteristics of what makes up a classic Moody Blues song --strings, anyone?-- but they'd be nowhere without John Lodge's bass. That he wrote some of my favorite Moody Blues pieces was just a cherry on top of the sundae. 

They finally got a "golf clap" award by being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, and although their voices and sound had faded quite a bit by then (as evidenced by their rendition of Ride My See-Saw above), you could tell that they still enjoyed playing together.

I'll miss you, John. Thanks for all the years of playing and recording.

*This is the same neighbor who fed my interest in what is now Classic Rock by providing me album suggestions for bands such as Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, and Cream. He strongly emphasized listening to albums because you got to hear the entire context of songs together, something I put to good use with bands who released concept albums such as The Who, Pink Floyd, and Rush.

Under the Heading of "Things I Didn't Ask For"

There's an AI "Google Search" button right next to this post as I'm typing, and it floored me so much I took a screencap just to prove that it's there:

I even stopped typing to do this, and I realized
my writing made no sense because I was so discombobulated
by it all. (This was observed on October 7, 2025.)

I kid you not.

Anyhoo, here's the original thing I noticed when I popped up Blogger today this afternoon*

On October 7, 2025.

Under the header of "Who asked for this crap?", I was almost instantly annoyed by this new Blogger "feature". 

How about Widgets that are kept up to date, or you can put YouTube Channels (or other social media (tm) channels) into your blog without having to figure out the arcane systems on your own?

Or, in my case, how about bringing my freaking blog into Google Search itself? You know, the thing you tout as the best search engine on the internet?

But noooo... We get an option to add Google Search and Google Search links and previews to our blogs, thus creating "a more engaging reading experience with the help of Google".

Right. Because long form writing needs to be turned into something more "engaging". (As in... "shorter".)

/sigh

*I was not home for part of the day, taking my mom's car in for maintenance.

Meme Monday: You Meet in a Tavern Memes

While I was conducting some research into that time-honored starting point for RPG campaigns, I went down that rabbit hole and discovered far too many memes.

Well, duh. Of COURSE the Bard would
be all for that. From imgur.

"It's ron-de-vou.... OH..."
From Twit.

Yeah, been there. "Why are you..."
"Oh, no reason."
"Riiiight..."
From Cheezburger and Grimgrinner.

It's true! I have pics!
From someone on Reddit who used mematic.

Reddit again, and yes, mematic again.
But still, I laughed. Actually, I think this
is the plot of a video game.

And for those tired of the tavern meme,
there's always the next level baseline encounter.
From Reddit.