When You're Not Sure If It's Real or Not

You know, the saying about how the hero lives long enough to become the villain is pretty accurate in its own way, but I wonder about a corollary that if you live long enough you see movies about the creation of the original movie.

Or in this case, about Sylvester Stallone getting the original Rocky movie made.

It feels somewhat surreal seeing this trailer, because I've seen "remakes" and "resets" that were basically comedies masquerading as a movie or television show reboot but were there to poke fun at the original piece. 21 Jump Street comes to mind, where the original television show was on FOX back in the 80s as one of the few shows that actually survived a few seasons and was anything but a buddy cop comedy, which the 2012 "remake" was. Starsky and Hutch is another, where the 2004 film made fun of the (admittedly not that great) 1970s television cop show. 

So when I saw the trailer for "I Play Rocky" in my YouTube feed in between amateur radio and gamer videos, I figured someone was going to spend the entire movie mocking Sylvester Stallone. After all, he is the guy whose acting prowess was once described by Dennis Miller as "having the range of a Daisy Air Rifle". 

I was quite shocked that this was a serious take on the story behind the original Rocky movie.

I'm not here to throw shade on the attempt, but I'd bet money that Sly was behind this film, and I have to wonder whether anything --ANYTHING-- was mentioned about his acting career prior to Rocky coming out. There's Death Race 2000 and Capone, for two examples, as well as bit parts in other films. Yes, that includes at least one adult film. You can even check Snopes, which confirmed the accuracy of the oft-repeated story about Stallone acting in a film they can't show clips of on regular television.

Still, who knows? There's a lot of other celebrities who got the biopic treatment, so I guess it was Sly's time. And it's not like Stallone will have been the first celebrity to have their biopic conveniently ignore certain parts of their lives.

Hmm... I wonder if they got Bill Conti to write the soundtrack for this movie too, or whether they'd only refer to the iconic bars of Gonna Fly Now in the same way that John Williams' themes are used in later movies (such as Superman). 

Meme Monday: Just a Regular Guy Memes

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.

This is Plumbing the Death Star Episode 512.
They had me at that title. From Plumbing the Death Star.

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.

And Now For Some Ethics in Gaming

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?

YouTube Shout Out: Aywren Sojourner

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! 

Let's sojourn, shall we? 

--From Aywren Sojourner's YouTube Channel 

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.

Best of luck, Aywren!

Meme Monday: When You're Just Starting Out Memes

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.

How About Some Deep Cuts?

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. 

EtA: Corrected a formatting issue.

Upon Request

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...