Checking Out

And it seems such a waste of time

If that's what it's all about

Mama, if that's movin' up

Then I'm movin' out

--from Movin' Out by Billy Joel

By the time you read this, I'll be on my way to Milwaukee to spend a weekend up there visiting my oldest and her partner.

I had to explain to the members of my amateur
radio club that Ham Radio Outlet having a store
in Milwaukee had absolutely NOTHING to do
with our trip. (Honest!)

We'd set this weekend up before I even realized it was also the weekend of BlizzCon, so I guess I'll be out of the loop regarding what'll be going on over in California. Probably for the best, if you ask me, considering I expect this to be the last BlizzCon for a few years, if ever. 

Microsoft isn't a company that will throw "extra" money into brand building unless corporate purchasing is involved, and even their ongoing Copilot debacle didn't get much in the way of actual face-to-face interaction with their corporate partners beyond the C-suite level. The costs involved to put on a BlizzCon, from renting the convention space to all of the physical items, come straight out of the XBox budget, and you can imagine that Asha Sharma isn't thrilled about losing money for a physical convention when they could simply give you some digital assets and do a virtual dog-and-pony show instead.*

So, if there's anything prediction-related about this year's BlizzCon from me, it'll be that you'll not see another physical BlizzCon for quite a while after this one.

Oh, and I'd also expect another Dan Olson video in a few months, especially if there's another debacle like last time.

***

Wilhelm Arcturus had a post that provides you a link that creates your very own BlizzCon Keynote Bingo Card, based off of a bunch of potential predictions that he inputted into the site.

Here's a graphic of the Bingo Card I got when I clicked on the link:

Generated on September 6, 2026.

I did print out a hard copy just for reference, so we'll see how I do when I find out the various summaries of the Keynote Speech.

What, you expect me to listen to the replay of the Keynote Speech? I haven't listened to a Keynote speech for anything --no matter what convention or topic-- in at least a decade, and I likely will continue to do this until Jensen Huang stops wearing his leather jacket.

As far as the rest of BlizzCon is concerned, take a gander at the Graphic on the Battle.Net Main Page, snipped for this post:

Here's the BlizzCon 2026 logo on the Battle.Net Main Page.
Looks like (in clockwise order from the left): Diablo, Starcraft,
Hearthstone (judging by the cards), and Warcraft.
Missing: Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm.

Pretty safe to say that these four franchises will be represented at this BlizzCon. Also missing from the above: Arthas, Xal'atath, and Lilith.

*Wizards of the Coast, and their corporate masters Hasbro, haven't really done much in Gen Con for several years since it's a lot cheaper to farm out management of their floor space and whatnot to third party companies. So, beyond the presentation they put on annually for D&D, WotC doesn't have that much of an official presence at Gen Con these days. It still feels kind of weird to be saying that, given that Gen Con was founded by D&D co-creator Gary Gygax back in the 60s, and it was officially owned and operated by TSR (and its descendants) for decades until it was sold to WotC founder Peter Adkison in 2002.

More Surprise Email

Hey, did you know there's some convention going on this week?

Oh, sure, there was some political convention that happened in Dallas the past few days, but I'm pretty sure that there was something out in Anaheim, California. 

Oh look, someone sent me a nice email reminder...

As of 11:50 PM EST on September 10, 2026.

Yes, I too can watch BlizzCon! All I have to do is hook my Twitch account or my YouTube account to Battle.net.

And here I thought they were going to use Discord, since they were wanting me to connect Battle.net to Discord a short while ago.

Was There a Full Moon Out?

I had a distinctly weird experience the other day.

I'd gotten on Neve and was mainly working on things such as leveling Tailoring when I figured that I had enough time that evening that I could try to squeeze in an instance. And by saying "squeeze in an instance", we're talking an hour or two's worth of an instance, such as Blackrock Depths or Sunken Temple. Since I was relatively close to Sunken Temple at the time, I decided to try to get into a group for that. 

Sure enough, being a Mage meant Neve didn't wait long for an invite.

As I was the only one nearby, it was a few moments before I arrived at the Summoning Stone and waited for someone else to appear so we could summon the rest.

I waited.

And I waited.

I also spent some time dancing with a nearby Night Elf.

I took a look at the map, and everybody else was scattered throughout and... They weren't moving.

"I'm at the stone," I announced. "I just need another person here and we'll summon the rest."

Again no response. And no movement on the map.

Finally one person began moving on the map, and they got to Booty Bay, and... That person dropped.

Then two others dropped.

"WTF?!" The remaining person asked.

"I have no idea," I replied. "It was as if nobody wanted to actually travel and they were waiting for somebody else to do it."

It was at that point I just made an executive decision to not bother with a dungeon that night and just spent the evening crafting and questing instead.

And flying. Can't forget that.

Meme Monday: Book Memes

This past weekend my wife and I ended up at a couple of bookstores, at whom I found several items I took photos of and shared with my Questing Buddy. She's a Romantasy fan, so I knew that she'd find them interesting.

You get the idea.

Oh, you want to know what I found?

The historian in me had a field day when I discovered this...

He also has a new book out about
Bablyon, but I'm going to wait for the
paperback edition...

Anyway, that got me to thinking about book memes. I mean, it's technically Meteorological Fall, so I could get away with Fall Memes, but I think Book Memes is a better choice today.

Here's a counterpoint: have you READ HP Lovecraft's
works? From Pinterest.

This is why I don't read George RR Martin.
From @jkcomics.

Ha! I'm absolutely sure that when I finally
start reading the Fourth Wing books, my
Questing Buddy will have this expression on
her face. From Kindlepreneur.

Um, I need bigger walls first.
From Pinterest.

I've mastered this look. From Instagram.

I have been there, only that I reach that point
in the novel around 4 AM for some reason.
From Thunder Dungeon.

Saturday Morning DIY

Saturday mornings are my crafting time.

No, I don't mean crafting in an MMO or any other video game, but in real life.

After I'd outgrown the Saturday Morning Cartoons as a kid and sleeping in until noon for my college years, Saturdays became another sort of video-related ritual.

Our local PBS station had the following television shows on Saturday mornings back in the 90s:

•  8:30 AM - The Woodwright's Shop
•  9:00 AM - This Old House
•  9:30 AM - Hometime
• 10:00 AM - The New Yankee Workshop

For a guy who liked to work with his hands, it was like mana from heaven. 

I'd sit in our apartment, newly married, and watch these shows and dream about being able to work on a house of my own.* Or maybe I'd dream about radio related projects, or even what we'd now consider to be cosplay or renaissance fair related projects.

Yes, I'm the sort of person who likes to do things with their hands.

Those days of the 90s are long gone, but in their own way my Saturday morning craft binging still continues. The only difference between now and then is that I can no longer watch This Old House --the projects are far too expensive for me to dream about-- Hometime's last show aired in 2016, The Woodwright's Shop's last show aired in 2017, and Norm Abrams has since retired from all of the shows he helped shepherd: This Old House, Ask This Old House, and The New Yankee Workshop.

Enter YouTube.

For starters, the late Russ Morash of WGBH Boston and the legendary producer of many classic shows** created a YouTube home for all of The New Yankee Workshop episodes. They've been able to upload a ton of them, upscaling them and utilizing AI to correct and improve the visuals, so that they're in as good of a condition that they can be at this time. Some of the videos were on videotape that was in poor condition, so the work performed on them is quite amazing.

The episode shown above was the inspiration for a lot of my feverish work on what a grill cart of my own should look like. I will be making some changes to the design, notably the wheels so that I don't necessarily have to lift up the cart any time I want to move it around, but the basic design will remain the same.

There are other creators on YouTube who regularly post on Saturdays (or Fridays so that I watch them on a Saturday morning) who scratch that "maker itch" that I have. People such as Shara McCuiston of Shara Woodshop Diaries...

And Brad Rodriguez of Fix This Build That...

both of whom give off real engineering vibes to me when I watch their episodes. 

You get the idea here: I get some interesting ideas as well as some tips about how to create things from a wide range of creators and topics. Shout out to Bernadette Banner for her videos that are more inspiring and amusing than anything else, because I don't have even a tenth of her design and seamstress skills...

And to Max Miller who intersects his interest with history with his interest in cooking with Tasting History...

*Of course, once you own a house you end up doing a lot more involuntary work than actual projects meant to improve the house, but I was in blissful ignorance of that reality.

**Which includes Julia Child's The French Chef and Crockett's Victory Garden.

A Short Diversion into IT Space

Allow me a diversion from anything gaming or geeky related to dealing with one of my jobs around the house: the IT guy.

My wife's PC has been having a strange symptom: her PC won't go to sleep. When I try to find out why, I discovered that her Sleep option under the power icon simply isn't there. Since there's no Sleep button, it doesn't time out and go to sleep at all.

I've been chasing this down for a while now, and after diving down the rabbit hole of Microsoft forums and Stack Exchange and all sorts of other places, I think I've figured out what's going on.

And, naturally, it comes down to AMD.

Unlike my PC, which has an NVidia GeForce 3070, she has an AMD Radeon graphics card. That distinction is important here, because on my PC I have it set to inform me when new NVidia drivers are present while my wife's PC automatically installs new Radeon drivers. That's mainly because NVidia has a history of having some janky driver updates, and I figured that if I didn't want to get involved with being the IT guy even more than I already am I'd just let it roll on her PC.

Well, as it turns out, if the AMD Radeon drivers get too far ahead --version-wise-- of the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition, then the Adrenalin Edition craps out and the Sleep option vanishes. If you then go and manually fix the drivers and the version of the Adrenalin Edition, the Sleep option comes back and everything behaves normally. 

It's one thing if the version/corruption issue is strictly AMD's fault, but come on. Why does it affect Microsoft Windows 11 and its freaking SLEEP option? Are you telling me that there's a memory leak somewhere in one of these two areas that's big enough to drive a truck through that's causing this?

/sigh

Meme Monday: Raiding Memes

Yeah, it's been quite a while since I've raided, even in a one-off, but I've got my share of raiding memes I have around. So after my chat with my Questing Buddy the other day, it reminded me about those raiding memes that needed a post.

So here we are.

Can confirm that I was mentally freaking out whenever
that was my job. From Reddit.

My Rogue only got MC hand-me-downs, so
I can confirm this exists. From Reddit.

I have the original around somewhere, but
I kind of liked this updated version.
From Reddit (again). I think I detect a trend.

And yeah, I've listened to raid leads behave
like this. Some of them really do love to hear
themselves talk. From imgflip.

Every time I hear people talk about how easy
Classic raids are, I'm reminded of this little fact
from back in the day. From Reddit.

And yeah, I couldn't resist. Redbubble put
this on t-shirts! From Redbubble and Midsummer1942.

#Blaugust2026