Yes, I know, board games are a pretty broad category. Still, I've got enough memes that I figured I might as well put them in one Meme Monday.
There have been times when I've discovered that simply doing things randomly throw other players off their game. From that social media site that whats-his-face owns.
I'd like to have the one on the left, but frequently things deteriorate into the one on the right. From that same social media site.
Uh... When you get really into board games as a hobby, that is SO much a lie. From Instagram.
That's a truism of playing board games. The most dastardly ones are the "cute" looking ones. From that social media site again.
Okay, TECHNICALLY it just said "games", but I saw that and I immediately thought of Eurogames. From Thunder Dungeon.
We don't have a cat, but... Yeah, I get it. From Memedroid.
It's September, and I presume that Naxxramas is coming quickly to the WoW Classic Anniversary servers. People have been raiding AQ40 and AQ20, doing goofy things such as pulling Teremus the Devourer to Stormwind, and in general causing a bit of a ruckus.
One of many little visits to Stormwind by Teremus.
Meanwhile, I'm still plugging along in my own little way.
The listings are as of September 4, 2025.
Getting a chance to melt enemies in Zul'Farrak is good for the soul. My soul, to be clear, not the souls of the trolls we've been fighting in there.
Speaking of pour souls, there's been a dead Tauren floating over the mailbox by the Stormwind bank for several weeks now. Every Patch Tuesday I think that a reboot will fix what has to be a perpetual amount of embarrassment visited upon this Tauren's clan, but he's not vanished yet.
Your eyes do not deceive you. There are two Tauren there.
For a while there were actually TWO dead Tauren there, but the last I checked we're back to one. Things like that demonstrate two things: that the denizens of the Anniversary Servers have a sense of humor, and Blizzard doesn't really devote much in the way of resources to the Classic Era-esque side of the house. If they did devote resources, this dead body would have been cleaned up by now.
I've also been experiencing class quests that I've never seen before, such as the quest chain for the Warlock's robe and offhand weapon.
This is part of the reason why I want to go back eventually and work my way through the other classes I've left behind during this leveling process: I've never seen a lot of these class quests, and it'll be interesting to go through them when you never can experience them in Retail (or Mists Classic) at all.
Well, onward and into Autumn.
EtA: Corrected grammar and reinstated the comment over the third graphic.
I'd noticed that Google's search engine isn't as good as it used to be for quite a while now, but I wasn't expecting this.
Okay, that's hyberbole*, but I'd not really thought about it that much until Shintar pointed out to me on Monday that Parallel Context doesn't show up in search in Google.
Don't believe me?
I made a search using the "site" option and put it in Google and Bing.
Here's Google's result:
As of September 2, 2025.
And Bing's result:
As of September 2, 2025.
For curiosity, I reran the search on Google while removing the "site:" option, and...
As of September 2, 2025.
In case you're wondering whether it's my settings, I run Google with SafeSearch set to "Off", so my occasional usage of profanity shouldn't be caught by the search engine.
I also did verify that the blog is visible to search engines:
Again, as of September 2, 2025.
***
My first impression is that Bing doesn't do a very good job of searching PC either, since I deliberately chose the title of my most recent work of fiction which happens to be the title of two blog posts, but it couldn't even find those two as a top result. Still, that's better than absolutely nothing happening on Google's side.
I'm pretty sure that Google's search engine ought to have picked up entries on Google's own blogging platform, and they actually do. Just not my own blog.
Here's a quick search with the site command for Shintar's post on a farewell to the long running SWTOR podcast The Ootinicast:
As of September 2, 2025.
So... apparently Google's search doesn't believe Parallel Context exists as an actual destination site, despite the blog's age. If I were using this blog for income** I'd be appalled by this development, but since I kind of prefer to be out of the limelight I'm fine with that. Shintar knows me well, as she told me she figured that I'd not be too torn up about it. Still, as she pointed out to me, it's an annoyance when you want to search for something but you can't find it.
Yes, that's Michael Richards before his role in Seinfeld, playing someone who thinks he's invisible. IIRC, Judge Harry Stone had issues with his eyes in the episode so he was temporarily blind.
From Night Court's Season 2 Episode 11.
I personally think that it demonstrates that these gigantic tech companies aren't as all-seeing as they think they are. If there's one thing that life has taught me it's that karma is a bitch, and Big Tech has hubris in spades.
*At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling to get off my lawn, Google's been going downhill for a while. It's no surprise that I've been using Bing more often than Google these days.
**I'm not. I have all monetization options turned off. Besides, I think that monetization would actually go to Souldat, since he was the blog's "creator".
Well, I pulled off another "Not Quite a Blaugust" Blaugust.
No signups, no fanfare, no topics. Just writing for 31 days.
Things turned out better than I expected. I didn't have any real annoyances that kept me posting multiple times a month --nothing earth (or Azeroth) shattering, really, just the usual stuff-- so I just kind of leaned into my various interests to keep the posts coming.
Oh, and I got some fiction written along the way, too. Nothing ready for posting yet, but stuff that's been needing to get done and I'll be sending drafts along to my beta readers for feedback soon.
It felt good to get this past month's posts done, especially getting the radio stuff off of my back. I'd been thinking about it for a while, but Shintar gave me the impetus to finally write it up and post that part of my past. I've got other topics that I can write about that are geeky in nature but not strictly gaming related, so those might begin to make an appearance here as well. Nothing quite as fascinating as Wilhelm Arcturus' posts about his employment history with telecom, that's for sure, but they're something to get off my chest.
Speaking of things to get off of my chest...
From eBay. Of course.
My old 1989 Who concert t-shirt has likely bit the dust. I no longer fit into it anyway (it was an XL and I now wear a 2XL size), but I'd been using it as a shirt I wore when I painted rooms in my great-aunt's house back in the early 90s, so it had splatters of paint all over it. I recently became curious whether some enterprising soul (likely The Who's management) had decided to reprint old concert t-shirts, and I came across this entry in eBay.
I suspect that they're knock-offs of the originals, but the shirts do look correct at first glance.* I mean, it'd be nice to have a reprint to wear around the house again --no, I'm not wearing it to paint or work on the car or something-- but I won't be torn up about it if I don't manage to find one.
Now, I need to find some old D&D t-shirts from the 80s...
*I saw them in Cleveland on July 19th, and the story behind that road trip is worthy of a post.
If you ever wondered about the impact of geek culture on the public consciousness, I give you these pics of stone sculptures from one of our local garden centers:
I'm not sure what happened, but those four posts this week got more views --bots or not-- than I've gotten on this blog in quite a while. Admittedly, we're talking about up to 10 times more than usual views, but still it was enough of a jump that Google Analytics (who apparently knows just how many bots and webcrawlers are out there so they're removed from their numbers) sent me an alert.
I keep looking at the posts, wondering where the trigger might have been, because it was four posts on a geeky subject that has limited appeal. I do find it ironic that the one with the overall largest appeal, on CB radio, got the fewest views, but after four days I guess that's to be expected.
While I should make some more posts on radio related topics, I'm going to hold off for a while for now. For starters, I don't have any real topics to follow up on at the moment. Yes, I'm still working toward an amateur license, but I'm not there yet. I have outdoor projects I'm working on, although with Autumn looming that's going to come to a close.
I am glad I finally got around to exploring one of my other long-running hobbies. I've tried writing posts about it before, but I ended up shelving them or deleting them as they just didn't feel right. This time around, however, something clicked and I was able to pull stuff together and get it out in a reasonable amount of time. (I still would have liked to have found that CB radio, however. I certainly hunted long enough.)
