Field Day 2026, or 'Why Was Red Awake after 3:30 AM?'

As I mentioned the other day, I participated in ARRL Field Day 2026.

This is the official logo. You can find it on all
sorts of merch in Ham Radio circles. From the ARRL.

As seen in the official name, Field Day is put on by the ARRL, the largest ham radio organization in the US.* The basic idea is to get hams out and away from their local shacks and out into a park or some other place, set up shop, and make contacts. A side effect of this activity is that hams can promote amateur radio by being available to the public during these times** and allow the public to see amateur radio in action.

To answer one of the most basic questions about Field Day, yes, it's a contest. And yes, some people take this more seriously than others. Think of it as how different people participate in raiding in MMOs: some people are very casual about it, some are a bit more serious, and some are really hardcore. 

I didn't realize just how hardcore people could be about Field Day until I attended a forum at the Dayton Hamvention about Running a First Class Field Day Operation. Our club president and I were really interested in what the presentation focused on, and boy were we surprised. We kind of expected the presentation to cover a wide range of Field Day approaches, but the presenter went with what he knew, and it was a truly hardcore operation that consistently places well in the rankings. 

Needless to say, my club's Field Day participation is a lot more casual than that. (Thank goodness.)

We had a sign-up sheet that was passed around on the club's email, and given that Field Day landed the same day that both Free RPG Day and Cincinnati's Pride Parade were held --and that our youngest was coming up from Louisville for dinner-- I chose part of the late shift: 8 PM to 2 AM.

Well, things changed, because of course they did. My youngest wasn't able to make it up, so I had more free time than I expected in the late afternoon and early evening. Still, I rolled into the Red Cross building around 7:30 or so to eat some of the food that people had brought.*** To forestall your next question about why the Red Cross building if we're supposed to be doing "Field Day", the Red Cross building counts as a remote location for Field Day purposes. It does have its advantages, given that we weren't sweating out in the heat and humidity like some of the other Field Day participants, but there are times when it feels like we're violating the spirit of Field Day.

I ate, chatted with some of the club members, and we groused about the weather. There were a few counties in Kentucky that got hit really hard by storms, and a few counties were declared disaster areas. There was also talk about one of the dams south of Louisville being in danger of failure, but thankfully that didn't come to pass. The ARRL had put out a bulletin that one of the frequencies in the 40 Meter band was off limits due to it being in use for earthquake rescue communications in Venezuela, which also had a sobering effect on us. 

While I was supposed to go on at 8 PM, the radio I was supposed to use was in use by another club member, and I was fine with waiting until they were done for the day. So it was close to 9 PM when I got started, and we waited for a digital bulletin to be transmitted by the ARRL over the three different amateur radio digital modes. 

Here's what the transmission looked like
on PSK31 mode.

I was planning on using the digital mode called FT8 to participate in field day, because I still am reluctant to talk on voice. Sure, I participate in our club's weekly net, but those are people I know so I'm comfortable with talking there.**** Besides, FT8 is a mode that is quite similar to the chat communications I've had for work (Microsoft Teams, IBM's Sametime, etc.) so there's that added comfort factor.

Anyway, I got to work, attempting to make contacts over then next several hours. 

This was my station in the radio room. The radio
is an Icom IC-7300 Mk1 (there's a Mk2 out now)
which is fed into a PC with dual screens.

The bottom portion of the left monitor shows the band activity for digital modes, and as you can tell the bands were busy as hell. Normally at that time of night the bands would be mostly empty (a sea of blue), but everybody and their grandmother was working the bands for Field Day. 

I spent a lot of the evening chasing contacts, and constantly moving my send frequency around into clear areas to avoid the crowds. I was quite aware that night time isn't the best time for operating on the 20 Meter band, but I was determined to make as many contacts as I could without interfering with my late night companion, a club member who was operating voice on 80 and 40 Meters. 

My fellow club member working the bands was scheduled to work the entire night and leave sometime around 8 or 9 AM, so until the club president came in around 5 AM there was a stretch of 3 hours where he'd be the only person in the radio room attempting to make contacts. He kind of preferred it that way, because he had a schtick where he would create what's known as a pile-up attempting to make contact with him during the overnight hours, and he relished the attention. During breaks, he regaled me with stories about Field Day and other assorted things that would pop into his head, so I think he was happy to have someone else there to share in the zaniness of Field Day.

Over those hours I spent there, I became familiar with the come-and-go nature of FT8 on a busy night. I also learned one truism about amateur radio: just because you can hear them doesn't mean they can hear you. There were plenty of stations out on the West Coast I attempted to make contact with, but I was simply not being heard by them. I got lucky with a few, making a contact in Western Washington state and one of the central locations in California, but a lot of my other attempts out west went nowhere. My greatest success came from stations closer to me, such as Illinois, West Virginia, Michigan, and other states.

However, there was one experience that I was really excited about. About 11:30 PM or so, in the middle of a bunch of European stations starting to come online I received a station from the Cook Islands. The signal was really poor and down in the weeds, but I mentioned it to my companion. 

A light turned on in his eyes, and he said "Do you know where that is?"

Being familiar with the history of exploration, I said, "I sure do; it's way out in the Pacific."

"Go for it!"

"Yeah, but it's not part of Field Day."

"Doesn't matter. GO FOR IT!"

I shrugged and gave it the ol' college try and sent out a reply.

About 3 minutes later when I was talking to my companion all of a sudden a response popped up on my screen. 

"HOLY SHIT! HE GOT IT!" I'm pretty sure I raised my voice a few octaves.

My companion gave me a huge thumbs up as he was working a contact at the time, and he was grinning from ear to ear.

Here's where the Cook Islands are versus
where I was located at. And I ought to remind
you that 20 Meters wasn't really doing so well
for me at that time of night for contacts in California,
Oregon, and Washington. Propagation can be weird at times.

Around 1:30 AM or so I heard a door open way down the hall.

"Hey," I asked my companion, "does security walk the floor at night?"

He took off his headset and I repeated the question. "No, why do you ask?" he replied.

"I just heard a door open."

"Well, let's find out." He got up and began heading down the hall.

Right about then I got a brief case of the heebie-jeebies. 

"Hello?" he called out. "Anybody there?"

"Hey!" came a response.

"Oh," my companion said as he returned to the radio room. "It's just [another club member]."

Our newcomer had apparently been making a circuit of all the local clubs today after having helped set up our club's operation, and he was dropping by before heading to bed. We had a brief chat, although my companion kept dragging it out to the point where I butted in and said "Let the man go to bed!"

Our fellow club member yawned and laughed and hit the road for home.

I looked up and it was around 2 AM. "Damn," I said. "Just one more contact."

That "one more contact" took about 20 minutes, but I finally got it done and then headed home myself, pulling into the driveway around 3 AM.  Because I'm me and I can be a bit idiosyncratic, it took me about 1/2 hour to get ready for bed and then I lay down, only to find myself wide awake until finally konking out sometime close to 4 AM. 

A long night for certain, but it was also a fun one.

***

So... What did I learn?

That there's always something new to learn, which is kind of the point of amateur radio.

That a lot of fun can be had if you step outside your comfort zone. Which is why I was doing this in the first place.

That a fellow club member makes really damn good desserts. (I was surprised my blood sugar didn't go through the roof.)

That another club member makes really good Skyline Chili Dip.

That a blind club member who operated on CW (Morse Code) was an absolute monster on the bands, getting the second highest number of contacts.

That there were kids operating on Field Day. My companion spoke with a few of them while he was operating on the 80 Meter band, it was great to see some youngsters 9 and 10 years old participating in the hobby.

Yeah, I had fun. But boy was I happy to get to sleep, and even a day later on Monday I needed some strong coffee to wake myself up.

Using this mug, of course...

As you can see, it's sitting behind me right now.

*For reference, and it was news to me during the weekend, Winter Field Day is not put on by the ARRL but a different organization entirely, the Winter Field Day Association (WFDA). That explains why some digital modes are allowed in ARRL Field Day but not on Winter Field Day. 

**Yes, a non-ham can operate an amateur radio station under the supervision of a licensed amateur operator. The ham, known as the "control operator", is ultimately responsible for the non-ham's activity. Over the winter there was a Boy Scout Amateur Radio event at one of the local meet-ups on the east side of town, and the scouts lined up to talk to hams on a couple of different frequencies (including our club's 2 meter repeater frequency). 

***I'd brought gluten-free cookies. The brand of dough is Sweet Loren's, and while the "gluten free" moniker does nothing for me as Type 2 diabetes doesn't care about gluten, only about carbs, holy crap are they good. I usually get the dough on sale, because it is a bit pricey, but if you can find them at your local grocery store, GET THEM.

****I should write a post about so-called "mic shyness" as well as other quirks about the amateur radio hobby sometime.

State of The Redbeard, Summer Edition 2026

I spent this weekend at ARRL Field Day 2026, which is put on by the American Radio Relay League, the largest Amateur Radio organization in the US. I'll post more about it later this week, but the TL;DR is that it's a contest/activity that's intended to get hams and clubs out into the field and away from their home locations to try to make as many contacts as they can. Just like guilds in MMOs, some clubs are far more hardcore about this than others, but I'm grateful my club is NOT one of those.

Anyway, I wasn't playing MMOs much this weekend --only a couple of hours playing WoW this afternoon-- so I got the opportunity to take a step back and consider what I want to do with my MMO playing.

Well, the first thing I did was to admit that I haven't really been playing LOTRO much at all since the great 64-bit server migration. My oldest, who also had been playing LOTRO far more than me, hadn't been playing much either. We haven't set up a new Kinship house --and in my case I haven't even bothered with setting up a new personal house-- and all I've done the past few months was to login and wander around Bree for a few minutes at a time. 

This theme also follows what I've been doing in ESO, where I'm so out of practice that when I do go out and about and fight any sort of enemy I almost end up dying. That's kind of embarrassing, given that I really used to love ESO's and GW2's limited ability bars, but that's the reality of me not effectively playing either game over the past 6+ years. 

I'm the plain looking Dunmer to the side.
All sorts hang out around a bank vault, I guess.

That leads me to SWTOR, where I bowed to reality here and decided to cancel my in-game subscription. I've gone from logging in once a week and doing stuff in the Vanilla SWTOR zones to logging in more like once a quarter. I can trace my decline in interest with SWTOR directly to the change that impacted companions' pathing, but I also think that the success of Classic WoW lead to the realization I liked the pre-expansion Vanilla version of SWTOR more than its current iteration. If the dev team were to come out with a "SWTOR Classic" with a pre-Rise of the Hutt Cartel version of the game available to play, I'd be all for it. I still love the Vanilla storylines, and I'll miss them a lot,* but paying a subscription to a game I'm not playing is pretty silly.

Some of the other games I've played in the past, such as Neverwinter and Age of Conan, I've uninstalled from my PC. I'd login, look at my toon for a moment, and just logout. The former I couldn't get into after a certain level (I think it was mid-20s) and the latter is still a buggy mess that requires grouping up to finish the main storyline, and I honestly don't know anybody who plays it anymore. That the talent tree for AoC is so obnoxiously huge --it makes Rift's talent tree look really basic by comparison-- I have absolutely no idea what my options really are. If you've ever heard about analysis paralysis, I met that head-on in AoC.

Speaking of Rift, there's so few players --especially in the low level zones-- that you really can't do much. You can quest in a zone to an extent, but the grouping that is expected to happen in fighting Rifts or whatnot in the open world simply doesn't happen. You need a critical mass of players to do that, and that's just not happening anymore. I haven't tried their automated LFD tool, but given my experiences with automated tools in other MMOs I'm very reluctant to try it and group up for their equivalent of a dungeon.

Like most days when I poke my nose in Rift,
nary a person in sight.

I do login to Star Trek Online a bit, but like LOTRO, I just wander around and maybe take a trip from Earth to Vulcan. If I were subscribing to STO, it would have also been on the block for unsubscribing.

And now let's circle back to the elephant in the room, the various forms of WoW.

At this point in time, WoW is the only MMO I'm actively subscribed to. Well, kind of: I buy 60 days' worth of WoW at a time, which forces me to review whether I'm enjoying myself every couple of months. And so far, that has been the case.

Among the versions of WoW I've played, the Classic Anniversary servers are what I've played the most. I still poke my nose into the Retail and Era servers, but I've not touched the 2019 WoW Classic progression servers since 2023 or so. About the only thing I did do there was to occasionally login so I knew what my toons originally looked like when I recreated them on the Anniversary servers. 

***

So, that begs the question: what have I been doing?

The most obvious answer is that I've been doing non-gamer things: amateur radio, gardening, repairs around the house and cars. And eventually I'll get back to making more outdoor furniture since the weather has finally heated up.

But what about gamer stuff?

Oh, single player games: Civ IV, Stardew Valley, Stellaris, Age of Empires.

There's a few other games scattered in there, but I've stayed away from long games that require a lot of attention, such as any of the isometric RPGs (Baldur's Gate 1/2/3, Icewind Dale, Divinity Original Sin 1/2, Disco Elysium, etc.). I simply don't have the time to devote to those games, and I realized that when I came to the conclusion that my BG3 playthrough was long enough in the past that I can't even remember what I was trying to do at the time. Maybe I'll get a chance to play these longer form games another time --I'm looking at you, Planescape: Torment-- but that's not about to happen right now.

Yeah, buddy. I'm done with trying to figure it
out, so you'll just have to wait and I'll recreate you later.

That's the biggest drawback to video games made over the past 10-15 years or so: the hours to completion has become so large that you'd have to devote a significant amount of your free time to playing them, and that in the end works against my enjoyment of the game. While I no longer have kids around the house, that doesn't mean I'm swimming in spare time. And these 100+ hour video games demand enough of your spare time that it becomes increasingly difficult to justify devoting that much time to a single endeavor. If I read a book about an hour a night, for books not named Don Quixote** that'd take me about 40-50 hours to complete. So, somewhere between 1-2 months. But a game such as BG3 or The Witcher 3, with their playtimes of well over 100 hours each***, can take me a lot longer than that. I think that when I played the original Baldur's Gate back in 1999 it took me somewhere around 4 months, and that didn't include the expansion.**** 

There are other games I do want to play, such as Dispatch and Stray Gods, but I suspect that I'll get so invested in the story that when difficult choices come along (and from what I understand, you're given a very short period of time to make a choice in these Telltale-type games) I'll likely freeze and simply stop playing. The old line from the Rush song Freewill "If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice" looms large over me whenever I play one of these games. Maybe its my acknowledgement that there are no objectively good or bad solution in these games that causes me to freeze like that, but I do feel bad for all participants in a video game when push comes to shove and I have to let someone down.

I believe this is one of the "easier" choices
in Dispatch. I mean, you could be a selfish jerk
with the left option or have an overinflated ego
in the mid, or just propel the story forward on the right.
Screencap from Dispatch.

***

Does that mean my MMO playing days are winding down?

Not really. Just like everything else, it evolves around here. I expect that as Fall heads toward Winter my MMO playing will go up a bit as I'll be doing less and less outside. Still, you never quite know around here. Who knows what Microsoft might be up to this Fall? More cost cutting? Same thing goes for all of the other game companies, as the "good times" in the post-pandemic world come to an end.

I guess we'll see.

*You know, I still never finished the Agent's storyline. I got mid-way through Chapter 2 and... Just stopped. That's when the pathing issues kicked in, and I couldn't stand it.

**Unabridged version. The abridged version is significantly shorter.

***And I'm here to tell you I do NOT operate at the same speed as the "average" player; I spend way too much time enjoying everything and contemplating my choices before I move forward. What, you thought that I only did that in MMOs? 

****I was loaned the copy of BG1 that I played, so I returned it when I was finished. The guy who loaned it to me kept pestering me to finish it, but I was like "Dude, I have a newborn at home, I'm working 50 hours a week, and I'm wiped. I'm moving as fast as I can."

Meme Monday: Hot Memes

Before you ask, no, I don't mean this sort of hot:

I kid you not, this came from a Pinterest user
named... Nightelf. I suppose it could be worse.

 

I meant THIS sort of hot:

Yes, I brought this one out again.
From 9GAG.

This week is the first really hot week of Summer in our part of the Midwest, so I'm not exactly looking forward to it. Hence this Meme Monday.

I work in IT for a reason. Just sayin'.
From Becky Barnicoat.

You've got me. I have no idea, but then again
I'm not really good at fashion, either.
From Pinterest.

Huh. Huh huh huh huh.
From Pinterest (and Beavis and Butthead).

Well, just effing great. Now I've got an image
in my head I can't shake. Thanks a lot, Anchorman.
(And Imgflip.)

Uh, about that... From Imgflip.

He can have it. From spot.ph.

Time for Plan B

I wasn't expecting this to happen this quickly, but here we are.

June 13, 2026.

June 25, 2026.

I wasn't expecting both toons to hit L70 before the end of June, and I certainly didn't expect them to finish in Nagrand, either. But it's done, so now the question becomes what to do next.

Neve is still in the low-mid L40s, so I can work on her for a bit. That's not a difficult thing to do, because Mages are still in demand in the Old World; the only real drawback there is that she needs to generate gold to cover the cost of her training, and that won't be quite as easy given that demand for Vanilla items such as fish and cloth aren't that great right now.

What I decided to do in the interim is take my Warlock, Joanofdark, over to try her out for a bit last night.

"Mom! Marshal Isildor is IGNORING me again!"

She killed a few boars, got a couple of quests done, and got her first quest reward from Outland: a wand.

Yes, a wand.

Not exactly a real boost in gear, there. Although to be fair, the DPS boost if I'm actually using the wand is rather nice, but it still isn't quite what I was expecting. Oh well.

But hey, I've got probably until Winter to finish leveling her, so I've got time.

I'm Sure There was a Door Here

At the University of Cincinnati, among the often bizarre and quirky campus buildings, is the building that houses the College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning (DAAP).

This is a small portion of the overall building.
From the University of Cincinnati.

The old building that existed prior to this one was a nasty piece of work whose windows leaked, the colors were abhorrent, and the thing looked like a design nightmare out of the 1950s/1960s. This new building was completed in 1996, when my wife was still a graduate student at the university. Her office overlooked the new building, so one day she took an opportunity to go explore the place out of curiosity. She'd heard the gossip that the building had no right angles in the classrooms at all and that there were stairs that went nowhere, so here was her chance to see for herself. 

She was unable to confirm that first rumor, although the classrooms she did view certainly had non-standard corners in them,* but in a way she did confirm the second rumor. She followed a set of stairs down to where she thought it would lead her to another floor, but much to her surprise when she opened the door it led directly outside, locking behind her so she couldn't get back inside. I'm sure that someone will point out that technically speaking the door DID lead somewhere, I'd argue that a one-way ticket outside is not what most people have in mind when they mean "somewhere".**

I got to thinking about my wife's experience with that building when I began thinking about design goals for dungeons in World of Warcraft. This came out of previous post, when I pointed out the vendor just outside of the exit of The Deadmines' dungeon. That exit from The Deadmines is designed to be a one-way exit, as when you leave you're immediately dropped down a wall to where you simply can't re-enter that nice, swirly dungeon entrance. That's by design, of course, so that you don't skip all of the dungeon just to go to the end. 

Likewise, there's other dungeons that if you run right up and engage the final boss the entire area of trash mobs comes running and will beat you to a pulp. The most obvious examples are Scarlet Commander Mograine and High Inquisitor Whitemane in the Cathedral portion of Scarlet Monastery and Eranikus in Sunken Temple, although I believe it also happens with Emperor Thaurissan in Blackrock Depths. I have never "poked the bear" with Thaurissan, but I've been in the other two instances where someone pulled early either by accident or on purpose.

Yeah, this entry into SM: Cathedral ended
about as well as you'd expect.

When you think about it, those examples emphasize a dungeon design that reflects the dungeon as a "real place": when a boss is attacked, everybody comes running to defend the boss. Other parts of that design philosophy are evident in these Vanilla instances, such as:

• The tendency to not have a single pathway through a place.*** Sure, there's a single path through the various Scarlet Monastery wings and The Deadmines, but Scholomance is an actual house with multiple levels while Blackrock Depths and Stratholme are actual cities with no truly defined pathing.
• Dead ends with no real purpose other than to make a place feel "lived in". Think of the "living quarters" in Blackrock Depths, where there may be some mobs present but they really don't have anything there other than actual beds, dressers, etc.
• Instances buried deep in an external area. Deadmines, Razorfen Downs, and Maraudon are the most obvious examples.
• Instances that have a wide range of enemy levels, so they're designed to be returned to as you gain levels. Uldaman, Scarlet Monastery, and Maraudon are the most obvious examples, although Blackrock Depths and Blackrock Spire also qualify.

***

This also jogged my memory because of my running some of the TBC instances on the Anniversary server and how much the design philosophy had changed from Vanilla to TBC. Gone are the multipath instances; all of the instances have a single path through them (although it could be argued that The Steamvault has multiple paths to complete the first section that opens up the last portion) with the pathing itself cleverly disguised by twists and turns to hide the single path through the instance. While there are some dead ends to the instances, there are far fewer of them than in Vanilla****. The instances themselves are easily accessible via the main entrance, except for the few endgame instances that require a key to unlock, but even then if someone else has the key you can still enter because they can unlock it for you.***** Finally, the instances in TBC are designed with a specific level range in mind; there's no wide range of enemy levels to be found in a single instance of TBC.

Naga... Nazis... Same difference: I still hate them both.

The change in design philosophy not only highlights the change in instances being less of an immersive RPG experience and more of a stepping stone, but also a change that emphasizes the desire of players to rerun instances, looking for specific gear and drops (and in the case of TBC Classic and later expansions, reputation/renown). Even I'm not immune to rerunning instances, because if it's fun I'll do it again. That's why I still go visit Blackrock Depths so often; it has NOTHING to do with hunting for the Hand of Justice drop that has eluded some of my melee toons for years. 

(Lies! It's all lies, I tell you!)

But still, the shrinking of size and time spent in an instance is somewhat secondary from my perspective because there's less of an opportunity for exploration and immersion while inside an instance. Of course, you'd need a group conducive to such a thing, but even wandering around solo in an instance like I did in the Vanilla dungeons back when I first began playing in Wrath on my first max level toon was quite an experience. 

***

You know, back in 2014 when I was finishing up my original time with Retail, I spent some time in some of the Wrath instances, soloing them just to see what I missed when followed the group (which followed the meta). What surprised me the most were some of the intro areas in the ICC 5-mans that I never encountered, particularly in the Pit of Saron, because there was a specific path all groups took when running the instance so I never knew about other parts of that big open mining pit in the beginning. I didn't feel cheated, exactly, just disappointed. 

That being said, even I can get sick of a place. I remember doing the Loremaster achievement back in 2010, and to complete that it mean I had to go into some instances such as Stratholme and Sunken Temple so many times I got sick of them. Given that you had no in-game maps available, especially for Sunken Temple and the two Blackrock instances, it was an eye-opening experience getting lost to the point where my head hurt. It was at that point that I wished that those instances had modern LFD equivalents. But as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for...

*Fun fact: professors don't like it if you wander by the classroom they're lecturing in and peer through the door. I discovered that one the hard way, although the first time I found this out was in grade school, when I was picked up early by my dad to go to the doctor for an allergy test (the kind where they prick your back about 20-30 times and smear different allergens on the open cut to see which ones you're allergic to). Leaving my grade school, he made a wrong turn and instead of going toward the exit he went toward a 5th grade classroom. I tried to stop him but he ignored me and opened the door, only to find himself the target of the ire of one of the nuns. I wanted to melt into the floor.

**Apparently the architect of the building, Peter Eisenman, did have a stairwell that lead nowhere --as in it ended at a wall-- in the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. 

***Yes, the player base has created their own optimal pathing through a lot of these instances, but you're not locked in to a very specific path in the same way as The Deadmines or the Scarlet Monastery wings are. 

****And they're almost non-existent in Wrath and what I remember of Cataclysm instances.

*****I think this is even the case in Karazhan, the intro 10-person raid in TBC. At least my friends seem to think so, because they've made it plain that they want me to join them in a Karazhan run. But let's be honest, they'd essentially be carrying me because I have quest greens and a few low-mid level instance drops among my toons.

My Not-So-Secret Spot

The other day, when I mentioned that I'd found another fishing spot in Retail and posted this pic...

Shintar of Priest with a Cause (among other blogs) asked me where it was. Well, it was here:

See that circle in the bottom of the map of Westfall, slightly left of center? That's where.

That's the location where, if you come out of The Deadmines, you'll see a dock off to the left, and a vendor there who also sells some cooking recipes. That vendor has remained in place through the Cataclysm reworking of the zone, and he's a handy person to have around if you want to keep questing out here (or running DM again). I suppose you could consider him a vestige of the original Westfall, but since I knew you could stand on the dock and fish without being interrupted by any mobs, I figured it was a good place to try out.

When I went into the Lion's Pride Inn to park for the other night, I was greeted by a disco ball. 

Yes, really:

Told you so.

That's when I decided right then and there to go try my spot in Westfall.

The run there was pleasant enough, and I learned something about the leveling environment in Retail: while the mobs scale up to match you while you're out questing, they also scale DOWN.

Or at least I think they do.

You see, I expected the mobs out there to be in the mid-teens, like they are in Classic, but every mob I encountered on the run out there was L12, just like me. Especially the ones over by the Lighthouse, which in Vanilla Classic are L17-L18. But since they were L12, it was a piece of cake to run over and not be jumped by mobs coming from over the hills after me. 

The thing is, I'm not sure with the level squish if what the actual level is out here, but you know, it didn't matter in the end. I was able to get to my watering hole without incident. So I settled down to fish with nary a soul in sight, and Gen Chat was blessedly silent.

When I logged in yesterday to take a screenshot of the map, I was really surprised when I was logging out that I noted some telltale signs of Paladin activity. Sure enough, there was someone out on the edge of my vision, killing mobs:

Unlike some other servers, on Moon Guard it seems I can't have the entire zone to myself, but at the same time, at least they're not in my business or anything.

Meme Monday: Aging Memes for a Gamer

This past weekend I spent some hours ripping out weeds and weedy shrubs from our yard, then followed by trimming the shrubs that are still around back into a usable shape.* Not exactly the most fun thing in the world, but it had to be done. However, when I finished, I discovered that the muscles in my arms were having difficulty holding something steady, given that I was lifting and moving stuff for quite a long while. 

From Blazing Saddles via MakeAGIF.com.

I know that by tomorrow morning it'll be fine, but it's still an annoying reminder that I'm getting older.

So, I figured I'd soothe my annoyances with a few memes about aging.

Given that our local library branch has D&D afternoons
for teenagers, I can see this happening. I think we'll need
to wait for the Satanic Panic crowd to die off first, though.
From Reddit (and X, most likely).

I was having to explain something to Shintar
last week when I realized that it really made me
sound old in a way I never quite thought of before.
Yikes. From Imgur.

I at least know what Fortnite is, but ask me
to provide details about Roblox and you'll get
a blank stare. From Pinterest.

Kind of ironic they used Linus of Linus Tech Tips
for this meme. From programmerhumor.io.

If you think it's bad in your 30s, wait'll you hit
your 50s and 60s... From Facebook.

And yeah, it can feel like this at times...
From Facebook (and Coraline).

Yeah, this. From couldbeworsecomic from
Instagram via Reddit.

*In this case, "usable shape" meant trimming so that I can actually see out of the windows in the front of the house. Left to their own devices, the shrubs would have completely covered up the front windows within a couple of years. I personally would have preferred some boxwood bushes in front, but the evergreens were in place when the house was built and I have no reason to remove them unless I have to fix cracks in the basement. And yes, that's a project to eventually work on, but hopefully I can put that off as long as I can. (Because costs.)