If there's one thing that I prefer out of my SF&F, it's the concept of the "regular guy" going out and doing things.
Not this Guy, but hey, it works.
Doesn't have to be a world-ending threat, and to be honest I prefer it if it's not. Maybe it's because I've been all "Tolkien-ed" and "Marvel-ed" out about world threats.*
But just being a regular person in a game going from zero to kind of something, I can work with that. And these memes are a celebration of that belief.
At least regular ol' folks in MMOs can be polite. From EBaum's World.
Sometimes, however, the DM doesn't really give you what you want. From Pinterest.
And sometimes you just want to plant a garden, not save the world. From Pinterest.
Well, crap. From Pinterest.
Then again, I guess I found myself. From Reddit.
*Admittedly, most of my D&D and MERP campaigns in my seminal early years had nothing to do with world-ending threats. Even the 20+ year campaign, which was ostensibly about a world-ending threat, never got close to that level because it took us so long to actually, you know, level up our characters.
EtA: Forgot to reattach the "*" at the end when I was adding the memes. Corrected.
I came back from spending several hours being part of a club activity clearing away brush and mowing the lawn at my amateur radio club's remote site, propped up my aching feet and ate some lunch, and discovered this awaiting me:
I watched it and the first thing that popped into my head was "I guess Blizzard still has some real people as GMs". Kind of sad, I know, but given how Microsoft is pushing all of their employees to adopt AI in everything*, it's pretty much expected that Blizzard would cut costs by eliminating personnel in "customer facing" roles such as GMs in favor of bots. So to discover that an actual GM did what they did...
Wow. Just... wow.
Okay, I should back up and provide a short summary:
In Retail WoW there was a Mythic+ dungeon run that included a WoW streamer and a pug tank. During the run the group wasn't doing so well, so the GM "assisted" the group by insta-killing mobs. They got caught and the GM was fired and the players involved were banned. What made this even a bit juicier than your average MMO-related drama is that the GM was friends with some of the group participants and the GM was also interfering in the run to impress the WoW streamer.**
Here's the Reddit thread that kicked this off for reference.
The group would have likely not been found out by a Redditor if it weren't that the pug tank had logged the Mythic+ run and therefore it showed up in Warcraftlogs. I'm not sure how they thought they were going to get away with it, since the info is in the logs and there's always someone obsessive enough in the WoW community to go digging for group content data and discovering the pretty obvious outliers in the data pool. And I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that since Blizzard crunches data all the freaking time, those outliers would have showed up in their own internal data.
I guess there's also the aspect of this being a Mythic+ dungeon run, which gets into the competitive/hardcore nature of WoW, that has people so up in arms about it. This was a Mythic+ 23 run, which according to Ye Olde Internet is a very high end run, so the specter of cheating on a run such as that is like direct interference from FIFA in the recently concluded World Cup.
The one thing that I hope that comes out of this little brouhaha is that Blizzard doesn't to all-in and simply replace any remaining GMs with bots, which would make an already poor situation (where GMs need to be out to enforce the rules) worse.
*And the subsequent decline in quality across all of their products, including gaming. I fully expected that there's a direct connection between the increase in usage of Copilot and other AI tools with the decline in QA testing in Retail WoW, let alone Windows 11.
**OF COURSE the streamer just has to be a girl. Why can't these GMs try to impress male streamers to eliminate the obvious sexism-loaded commentary?
I wanted to give a shoutout to fellow blogger Aywren of Aywren's Nook for her foray into YouTube videos. She saw a need to present positive material for introverted, shy gamers to successfully navigate MMOs. As she puts it from her description:
Welcome friend! I'm an introverted, casual, Gen X gamer gal. As a long-time MMORPG player, I'm hoping to provide thoughts and support for common struggles that shy gamers like myself face in online worlds.
You're not alone! There's more shy gamers out there than you realize!
As of writing this post Aywren has seven videos up already, and the further she's progressed I've found her presentation to be more and more clear and confident as she finds her footing. She admitted very early on that this was her first attempt at creating YouTube videos, and she's definitely a quick learner.
Admittedly, her field of expertise is in Final Fantasy XIV, which I've not played, but a lot of her advice is easily adaptable to all sorts of MMOs.
Here's her first video to get you started.
I do have to admit that's quite a large... pirate hat there.
Everybody has to start somewhere, and being a gamer is no exception. I mean, we all started somewhere, right? And while that starting point is different for different folks...
This is mine. From the University of Texas.
we all have one. So, in honor of those first baby steps into gaming, here's a few memes.
If I had to point one out, it'd be #1, but as you can see from the above Colossal Cave reference, that's likely a keyboard. From Thunder Dungeon.
Well, that wasn't me. We didn't have a separate color television at home. Ever. (Ours was black and white.) From Pinterest.
Yes, they do. I did my part! From Pinterest.
Yes, this. From Reddit and ifunny.co.
There is this little problem of people not being used to having your character die, as in "it was nice knowing you, better roll up another." From Pinterest (with a nod to Mel Brooks).
And yeah. This is what it's like. Kind of reminds me of those free "First Part of The Eye of the World" by Robert Jordan books that bookstores had in the 90s. As a bookseller once told me as he picked one up, "You know what these are? These are your first free hit of Crack." From 3 Wise DMs.
I've occasionally mentioned the local music scene here in Cincinnati, even though I didn't spend my college years here in town. Still, they did have an impact on me, demonstrating that once in a while a bunch of local folks can hit it big.
Or at least big in my own mind.
The Raisins not withstanding, there have been some big acts that originated here in Cincinnati and the local region. Bands and acts such as The Isley Brothers, Bootsy Collins, Pure Prairie League, Blessid Union of Souls, 90 Degrees, The Afghan Whigs, Walk The Moon, The National, Adrian Belew (King Crimson) and even older icons such as Doris Day and Rosemary Clooney have called Cincinnati Home.
My mom still has the '45 for this.
But for every band that has made it, there are the corpses of thousands that never even got a shot. Still, there's a lot of bands that did generate a local following, and a few of them found themselves with local airplay.
Or, say, an actual album or eleven.
This was about 6 of them. From Reddit, and the redditor who found these is incredibly lucky.
Back before WEBN became their current soulless corporate self today, they put together a series of album projects, all featuring local acts, that were local cult classics. Even though you'd expect them to at least be album oriented rock, since that's the format WEBN played under, the albums were a very eclectic mix. Folk, Pop, Funk, and even the occasional Classical piece were mixed in with the Rock music. But there were also some real Comedy/Novelty gems in there too, which is what I remember the most about them.
A lot of those novelty songs got airplay on WEBN, because they wanted to sell the albums, but they have since entered the local lexicon as touchstones for my generation.
Such as Dan Barr's Bus Full of Nuns from the 8th Album Project:
What made the video more hilarious to locals was that it also featured longtime Channel 9 news anchor Al Schottelkotte and 70s/early 80s Channel 5 news anchor Tom Atkins. Al, in particular, was very straight-laced, and seeing him lip-synching to the song was had us laughing our heads off as kids.
There's also the Doctor Demento favorite by George Uetz, a professor at the University of Cincinnati:
Obviously given its refrain, my high school classmates and I would occasionally sing this song at football games and other events. From the 3rd Album Project (1978), it still received occasional airplay up until the early 90s.
Speaking of sex, there's also this quirky song by The Modulators from the 9th Album Project (1986):
Yes, the song predates the WEBN album project by a few years, but as you can imagine the lyrics got sung a LOT by my classmates.
Of the three listed above, I think The Modulators are still active locally, while George Uetz is now a Professor Emeritus at UC and The Dan Barr Band at least had a video uploaded to YouTube in 2011.
I'd completely forgotten about the song "Just Chili" (which Dan Barr created as "Dave and the One Ways" for Album Project 9), but yeah, that song got a lot of airplay too.
None of these bands ever struck it big, but they remain a part of the local landscape for people who grew up in the 70s and 80s.
Atheren commented on my last post about wanting more guinea pig pics (in so many words). Ask and ye shall receive...
Bleu and Brie are back at home. Have I mentioned that their original owner was a French teacher?
They're back up in Milwaukee just in time for pretty nasty air conditions due to wildfires in Minnesota, Manitoba (Canada), and Ontario (Canada). My oldest reports that they can't even see down the street due to the smoke, and her eyes hurt when she went to a store right across the street.
"I thought it couldn't get worse," she reported this morning. "I have been proven wrong."
Oh, and if that isn't enough, my youngest now has a cat. Say hello to Mooch.
I'm allergic to cats, so I don't think Mooch will be visiting any time soon. Still, I can probably handle her in short doses as long as I take some Benadryl. But I have been told she's very affectionate...
It's been a busy couple of weeks around the house. Family, guinea pigs, amateur radio club stuff, things like that. And not to mention cleaning and more doctors' visits.*
Oh yeah... And work, too.
From Tenor. (And Warcraft.)
Consequently, not a lot of game playing has been going on.
But I can tell you a lot about grounding and bonding antennas and radios!
There ought to be a lightning arrestor in that diagram, as well as bonding between the shack ground and service ground. From W8JI.
Anyway, I should mention a few things.
As of July 14, 2026.
Joan is at L64, and instead of spending money on other things I bit the bullet and bought a dual spec option for her so I could switch to Demonology and get the Felguard tank, who is much better at holding threat than the Voidwalker ever was. Although I do miss some aspects of Affliction, such as some instant casts and some extra Curses and whatnot, I kind of prefer not dying more.
I overall have had good interactions with people while playing Joan, but there are a few here and there.
You kind of get the idea. The person's guild was "Big Pull Energy", so I didn't encourage him.
There's getting licked by the occasional Troll or Forsaken, to which I respond by a "/flirt" which tends to make them stop in their tracks long enough for me to move along. Maybe they were expecting me to be grossed out or do a "/slap" but I wasn't about to ask them any detailed questions while I was getting away from them.
I still do forget just how tall Draenei are until I'm right next to one. They make Joan look like she's in 5th grade or just about to hit puberty.
Right now she's finished with Hellfire Peninsula and is about halfway through Zangarmarsh, which makes her pretty much on point for matching what the others have done. The only difference is that she's doing it faster, because I'm only leveling her.
As for Neve, she's still in the mid-L40s, and that's fine. I play her when I want to get on WoW but not do Outland, although I know she'll eventually get there. Whether that happens before TBC Anniversary ends is kind of up in the air.
Outside of these two, I've pretty much retired the other three toons that made it to L70.** There's no real reason to play them --I've already covered that before-- and despite that just the other day I turned down a spot in a Karazhan raid for Linnawyn because even though they wanted her for the Paladin buffs, she'd be next to useless in the raid itself. When you have gear mostly from Nagrand (mid-L60s gear) and a few mid-level instances, your ability to actually DPS is so bad compared to people who have run heroics and whatnot that it would be effectively a 9 person raid, not a 10 person raid. Since I didn't want to grind for gear just to "not suck", which is a sliding scale given that my friends who were asking had been getting pre-raid BiS (best in slot) gear for their toons prior to running Karazhan, by the time I got gear I'd consider "good enough" to raid with, they'd have all moved on to much better gear themselves, leaving me in a perpetual state of trying to play catch-up.
No thanks.
As for the future, I can see Joan finishing up sometime early-mid August, and then I'd likely move on to leveling one of my other toons to L70. If I play my cards right, I can actually get about 5 Alliance and 1 Horde toon to L70 in time for whatever happens next.
*My numbers are still good, thanks for asking.
**Except for working the guild bank I created. Card's the GM, so I've retained most guild bank capability strictly to her.
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