Happy Hour at the Dungeon

It's kind of a tradition in MMO group content to find someone who's been imbibing some alcoholic beverages. I mean, it's typically an after hours activity, and if you're at home (or at an internet cafe) and you're of the right age, why not have a drink or two?

Unfortunately, it's also a tradition for people to over imbibe in group content.

There was one time back in January 2022 where our TBC Classic raid team was raiding Serpentshrine Cavern, and we were testing out a new Main Tank. He seemed competent enough, and while I could hear the occasional glug of a drink, I didn't think anything of it. I mean, I used to have a beer when I raided before my hospital stay, so why not someone else? Well, right before we were to take on Lady Vashj, we'd prepped for the pull and.... Nothing. The "new" Main Tank didn't pull. He didn't respond to our calls in Discord.

He had passed out right before the pull of the last boss in the raid.

Oops. 

We quickly scrambled and to a replacement MT to show, but no, we didn't kill Vashj on that raid. 

Oh well.

Anyway, I bring this up because last night I was taking a break and goofing around on the Anniversary servers, and I figured I'd get into an instance or two. If nothing else, they ought to be pretty standard runs for a Friday night. 

Have I ever mentioned my naïveté before?

On the first run, there were three guild members: tank, healer, and Enhancement Shaman DPS. The Healer was drunk. And by drunk, I mean "he was doing shots of tequila" drunk. Despite that, we were doing okay, until the latest shots hit his system, about 2/3 of the way through. 

How do I know this? He started speaking of himself in third person. 

At one point, the Shaman had died and I made a quip about reaction times and the Shaman replied saying "I'm laughing so hard I'm crying right now."

People died enough times that someone thankfully dropped a repair bot, so we could repair without our gear breaking.

Still, it was a fun run, if for nothing else that the Healer provided enormous amounts of unintentional comedy.

The second run was a bit different, because the Mage didn't speak English other than "GO" or "YAY" or "SAD" or "HAPPY".* Still, I could tolerate that were it not for the tank being inebriated, so he wasn't being that attentive to the Healer. At one point the Healer specifically said after a boss fight "brb bio", and the tank kept right on going. When the Healer came back and managed to rescue a bad pull, she pointed out she said "brb bio" and tank replied with "we didn't die".

::rolls eyes::

The tank made a couple of other bad judgements in the run, one we recovered from and one... we didn't. Luckily I was on Joan, and therefore I had Soulstoned the Healer just for such an emergency. The Healer then called out the adds that we had on that pull and the tank claimed innocence.  At least that didn't turn out to be a big row, but for certain the Healer split right after the last boss. Can't say I blamed her.

I guess it's a pick your poison sort of situation: if you make people laugh and you're obviously silly about it, that forgives a host of sins. But if you're pushing when there's no reason to, and because you're a bit drunk you're not quite as fast with reflexes as you think you are...

Hey, it wasn't my fault this time!!!

*At the end of the run, I asked for a portal in both English and Spanish, and no bueno.

#Blaugust2026

Amusing Guild Names, 2026 Edition

Here's something I haven't done in quite a while: Funny Guild Names.

I have a bunch of them that I haven't done anything with, and now's as good a time as any to post some of them. (That's the polite way of saying I couldn't schedule a post correctly and it accidentally posted last night instead of today.)

#Blaugust2026

Duck Duck Go Goes Where Google Doesn't

Well, duh.

If you've heard of Duck Duck Go, you know that it has hung its hat on your privacy, whereas Google has prioritized company profits. I've been moving my search more and more over to Duck Duck Go, and one big relief from my end is that DDG does believe that this blog exists:

I even got ahead of the AI Context Parallelism
blog. From August 12, 2026.

That makes me feel pretty good to know that both Bing and DDG know I exist. Alas, Google still thinks I'm a figment of people's imagination:

As of August 12, 2026.

Their AI doesn't even have the correct blog, much less a direct entry to it. Thanks to Atheren for referencing me at least that one time, which is how Google knows there might be something there.

And for completeness, here's Bing's results:

As of August 12, 2026.

Funny how the graphic they have there is a pretty old one about Mass Effect, but hey, at least I'm at the top of the search results.

I've kind of given up trying to understand why the supposed "best search engine evah" can't find a blog that's been around since 2009 and has over 1800 published posts. I guess they want money from me to suddenly "improve" my search results --I know that Bing does-- which would effectively turn Google into the 2020's version of Yahoo. You know, that's not exactly a comparison I'd be proud of if I were Google.

#Blaugust2026

Teaching That Old Dog (Again)

I will say this about AI: it's driven me to learning a new programming language for the first time in 30 years.

In O'Reilly We Trust, which I guess
makes me an old fart (tm).

I know Python has been around since the early 90s, but when I was learning Perl and C++ in the mid-90s for my then software QA job, it seemed to have no really big use for me. In the late 90s Java was the new hotness --despite how crappy the memory leaks were-- and Python only really took off in the 2000s when my job utilized Perl and shell scripting, so... Python wasn't needed.

And now, with Claude Code from Anthropic being the new thing, I have to learn Python so I can perform proper code reviews when necessary. Apologies to all of those YouTube sponsorships from Boot.Dev, but I'm going to learn it how I taught myself Perl: reading a book published by O'Reilly* and figuring it out myself. I might not have code to review, but I'm sure that'll be how I'll end up learning it: by looking at code to see what it does and whether it does what we want it to do.

So... thanks, AI? 

But could you at least have given me an extra year of puttering around with amateur radio before you exploded like you have in 2026?

*Mine was Learning Perl by Randal L. Schwartz, 1993. Yes, the First Edition:

Here it is in all it's glory.
It's still holding up fairly well for
a well-loved 30 year old book.

#Blaugust2026

Not Exactly a Gaming Evening

Yesterday was pretty wild here for non-gaming reasons.

From the livestormchasers.com Instagram feed
for August 11, 2026.

There were a about 3 or 4 of what I'll charitably call F0 or F1 tornadoes in that line of storms that hit us last afternoon --including one just across the Ohio River in Northern Kentucky-- but my neighborhood was missed. One tornado was a couple of miles south of us, another a couple of miles north of us. 

And really, you don't need a tornado to do some massive damage. This is what happened to a gas station in Brown County, Ohio, a couple of counties to the east of Hamilton County (where I live):

We lost some vinyl siding on our house, but luckily for us it landed across the street completely intact. That's relatively so, because it slammed into their front door before flopping to the ground. (I'm still not sure how it stayed intact.) I ought to be able to put it back into place when the roof over the garage dries out and I can safely get up there to put it back. We got extremely lucky overall, with only that damage, whereas our neighbors had chimney caps torn off, trees toppled, and debris crashing into the side of their houses, damaging the siding. There has also been downed trees, power lines, and even in the Columbus area (the central part of the state) a car driving on the I-71 interstate was flipped over by the winds that hit them in the late morning. 

As for us, a tree toppled across I-71 here in Cincinnati and crashed into a truck that had the bad luck to be driving by.

Before you ask, yes the two of us are both fine, and my son who lives on the east side of Cincinnati was fine as well. My wife was at work, and they closed up the store and ushered everybody --employees and customers-- into the fire safety corridor, which was the safest part of the building. They were there for 45 minutes, but outside of hearing the noise from the storms they had no idea what was going on. 

As for me, I had a doctor's appointment earlier in the afternoon and got home in time before the storms hit. When the sirens went off I turned on the news, and when WLWT's Meteorologist Kevin Robinson said for my immediate area to head for shelter something slammed into our back door, picked up by the wind, and I scampered to the basement and stayed there until the worst of it passed.

So yeah, gaming hasn't exactly been on my mind this evening.

This intersection is 2 miles from my home as
the crow flies. And no, that's not mountains;
That's clouds and rain. From Steve Bowling via WCPO.

#Blaugust2026

Not Exactly a Unicorn Week

Even though I didn't play much on the Anniversary servers the past week, when I did play I had a good time grouping with people to run some instances. If you're used to pseudo-random groups* being completely silent during instance runs, then the runs I was involved with last week were anything but that. 

Yes, yes, I know, I can be chatty when I'm in a group and someone breaks the ice, but this time around I was far from the most active in any of the groups. When I was on Joan, that didn't come as a surprise because inevitably someone would comment on the name "Joanofdark", but when I ran as Neve on the Horde side there was another chatty person far more interested in social connections than I was in her dungeon runs. 

What struck me the most last week, however, were the number of people who mentioned to me at the end of the run that they'd added me to their Friends List. In all of the cases, they mentioned that in addition to a smooth run they had a good time just hanging out with me. As I told one of my friends group later, "It's amazing how not being an asshole works out."

Hey, why is everybody looking at me?
From Memedroid and Dogeloaf using
the OG 'Scooby Doo, Where Are You?' cartoon.

There are times when it feels like being nice to people in an MMO is an exercise in futility, but last week proved to me that there are still people who prize a good connection in an MMO over other things. I have no idea what the rest of this week will be like, but you never know.

*The LFD automated queue finder doesn't exist on the WoW Classic Anniversary servers. Instead, it's a semi-random process where your name gets thrown up along with everybody else who is looking for people for a group, and it's up to you or another person to actually assemble the group based on what person you want. Some classes (Mage, Protection Paladin) have an easier time of finding groups than others.

#Blaugust2026

Meme Monday: Miscellaneous Memes for August 2026

Wow, it's been March since my last Miscellaneous Memes post? That explains why I've got a bunch of memes lying around.

Uh, I can't remember where I got this
meme. It's been a while since I obtained it.

Heh. At least it's better than some MMO names.
From Imgflip.

It actually was pretty humid outside today.
From iFunny.

Truth. From Pinterest.

I have actually been that person who gets beat
on multiple times. From the Blizzard Forums.

Will installing Microprose's Darklands count?
From Fity Club.

#Blaugust2026