Wednesday, September 10, 2025

It's That Midwestern Mentality

Alas, I did not win the $1.80 billion Powerball jackpot last Saturday.

Of course, there's the small matter of actually purchasing lottery tickets if you want to have a chance at winning.* I'm very much in the "if the winnings are high enough I'll buy a few tickets" camp, but that mentality also wars with a line an old friend from college used to say about lotteries: "Lotteries are a tax for people who can't do math." I'm an irregular-at-best lottery player, although I did buy a few tickets on Saturday.

Even if I had won you probably wouldn't have noticed any changes to the blog, because I'm not the sort of person who runs around showing off what riches they have. (And before you ask, no, I'm not rich.) Luckily for me, I live in a state where the identity of major lottery winners can remain private, so there's that at least. I used to joke that the way you'd find out if I won the lottery was not because I bought a new car or something like that, but that I finally got some major repairs done to the house.

Growing up and living in the Midwest has given me a very specific set of values where the ostentatious display of wealth and/or success is frowned upon. Obviously, that Midwestern mindset has declined a bit over the years as pop culture has penetrated even the most remote parts of the country, but at the risk of sounding once again like an Old Man Yelling 'Get Off My Lawn (tm)', I'm a not a fan of the "Oh, look at me!" sort of mentality.

Sure, dress the way you want. I'm fine with that. Hell, I admire people with a fashion sense (such as Kamalia) that I don't have; if you want to see what you can do with fashion in an MMO such as WoW, go read her blog Kamalia et Alia, because she is amazing at what she can pull off. But if you go running around acting "Hey, look at ME!", I'm more likely to grouse along the lines of quite a few old football coaches (I'd heard it said by Paul Brown) by thinking to myself "Act like you've been there before."**

It needs to be said that I'm not immune to that "look at me" mentality. 



Every time someone comments or whispers to me when I'm on Joanofdark about how much they love the name, I get this small flush of pride. Then I frequently tell them that a friend came up with the name and I just ran with it. Okay, I don't have to do that --and I've simply accepted the compliment as-is a lot of times just like above-- but I do feel guilty otherwise. 

***

A lot of multiplayer video games tend to utilize the peer pressure inherent in groups to sell things to their players. Okay, this isn't exactly confined to video games since you see it everywhere, even in what smartphone you use, but since I play video games more often than I use my cell phone*** I see it there more often.

It's just like people showing off their mounts in MMOs:

Although I'd hesitate in calling a giant, floating,
cigar-chomping face a "mount".


And yes, definitely a mount, but I was never
really a fan of their brethren back in Wrath days.
All it takes is one mounted toon standing on top of
a mailbox, blocking your access, for you to understand.

It's not merely a Retail WoW thing, because I've seen people showing off their gear and mounts in all sorts of other MMOs where people congregate. Oh, and there's plenty of MMO pundits out there who love to mention that a big motivation to getting gear is to show it off. (You know who you are, YouTube creators who never read this blog.) To me, that's akin to going out on a date with your spouse or significant other primarily to show off how great a catch they were. Which says a lot more about you and your priorities than it does anything else.

In the end, this is just me grumping a bit about priorities. I can't make people change, and really I shouldn't be able to anyway. I guess it's an acknowledgement that I'm going to do my own thing, other people will do theirs, and that'll be that. 




*That reminds me of an old joke I once heard that goes something like this version I got from the Harvard website

A deeply religious man, whom I will call Dave, finds himself in dire financial trouble. He prays earnestly to his God to help him out of his predicament. "God, I'm about to lose my car. Please help me. Let me win the lottery." Lottery night comes, but sadly, Dave is not the winner.

Things go from bad to worse. Without a car to get to work, Dave loses his job. Without a job, his mortgage is foreclosed on, and he loses his home. Without a home, his wife leaves him, taking the kids. After each horrible step in the mounting crisis, he pleads with God to let him win the lottery, but he never does.

Finally, broke, hungry, living on the street, he tries again. "God, please, my life is a wreck. I have no car, no home, no family. Please let me win the lottery just this once so that I can turn my life around. I beseech you."

Suddenly, a flash of light rends the sky, and the voice of God echoes down from the heavens. "Dave, meet me halfway. Buy a ticket." 

**The late North Carolina University head basketball coach Dean Smith built a culture that emphasized teamwork. After one of his players would score, that player would turn and point to his teammate who passed him the ball. It was a visual acknowledgement that the basket was a team effort, not simply an individual one.  

***No, I don't play games on my phone. To me, my phone represents the 24x7 on-call nature of my work, and I try to use it as little as possible. However, my kids are far more used to utilizing their phones for keeping in contact than I am, so I've grown used to smartphones in my life more than I'd like. Although I primarily use a smartphone to listen to music and/or podcasts when I can't have access to my stereo or PC.

Monday, September 8, 2025

Meme Monday: Board Game Memes

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.


Friday, September 5, 2025

Dead Things in Stormwind

Oh, look at the time!

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.

Wednesday, September 3, 2025

How to Vanish in Plain Sight

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". 

Tuesday, September 2, 2025

A Short Post Mortem

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.

#Blaugust2025

Monday, September 1, 2025

Meme Monday: Work Related Memes

Given that it's Labor Day here in the US, I thought it appropriate to cover some work-related memes today...

My boss doesn't play WoW, but I understand this one.
From Memebase/Cheezburger.


Bus driver is a job, you know. My school
bus driver had a "no talking" rule, and
he could be a real ass about it sometimes.
From Reddit's DNDMemes.


Technically a nurse meme, but I find it applies
to IT as well. From Nurselabs.


Oopsie.
This is from Linkedin of all places, which I find
funnier than the meme itself.


And then there's the people to whom gaming
IS their job. From Memedroid.


Sunday, August 31, 2025

Better than Concrete Geese if You Ask Me

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:









#Blaugust2025