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.
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.
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...
It's been a busy couple of weeks around the house. Family, guinea pigs, amateur radio club stuff, things like that. And not to mention cleaning and more doctors' visits.*
Oh yeah... And work, too.
From Tenor. (And Warcraft.)
Consequently, not a lot of game playing has been going on.
But I can tell you a lot about grounding and bonding antennas and radios!
There ought to be a lightning arrestor in that diagram, as well as bonding between the shack ground and service ground. From W8JI.
Anyway, I should mention a few things.
As of July 14, 2026.
Joan is at L64, and instead of spending money on other things I bit the bullet and bought a dual spec option for her so I could switch to Demonology and get the Felguard tank, who is much better at holding threat than the Voidwalker ever was. Although I do miss some aspects of Affliction, such as some instant casts and some extra Curses and whatnot, I kind of prefer not dying more.
I overall have had good interactions with people while playing Joan, but there are a few here and there.
You kind of get the idea. The person's guild was "Big Pull Energy", so I didn't encourage him.
There's getting licked by the occasional Troll or Forsaken, to which I respond by a "/flirt" which tends to make them stop in their tracks long enough for me to move along. Maybe they were expecting me to be grossed out or do a "/slap" but I wasn't about to ask them any detailed questions while I was getting away from them.
I still do forget just how tall Draenei are until I'm right next to one. They make Joan look like she's in 5th grade or just about to hit puberty.
Right now she's finished with Hellfire Peninsula and is about halfway through Zangarmarsh, which makes her pretty much on point for matching what the others have done. The only difference is that she's doing it faster, because I'm only leveling her.
As for Neve, she's still in the mid-L40s, and that's fine. I play her when I want to get on WoW but not do Outland, although I know she'll eventually get there. Whether that happens before TBC Anniversary ends is kind of up in the air.
Outside of these two, I've pretty much retired the other three toons that made it to L70.** There's no real reason to play them --I've already covered that before-- and despite that just the other day I turned down a spot in a Karazhan raid for Linnawyn because even though they wanted her for the Paladin buffs, she'd be next to useless in the raid itself. When you have gear mostly from Nagrand (mid-L60s gear) and a few mid-level instances, your ability to actually DPS is so bad compared to people who have run heroics and whatnot that it would be effectively a 9 person raid, not a 10 person raid. Since I didn't want to grind for gear just to "not suck", which is a sliding scale given that my friends who were asking had been getting pre-raid BiS (best in slot) gear for their toons prior to running Karazhan, by the time I got gear I'd consider "good enough" to raid with, they'd have all moved on to much better gear themselves, leaving me in a perpetual state of trying to play catch-up.
No thanks.
As for the future, I can see Joan finishing up sometime early-mid August, and then I'd likely move on to leveling one of my other toons to L70. If I play my cards right, I can actually get about 5 Alliance and 1 Horde toon to L70 in time for whatever happens next.
*My numbers are still good, thanks for asking.
**Except for working the guild bank I created. Card's the GM, so I've retained most guild bank capability strictly to her.
If you're like me, you have someone in the family who believes you need to be going and doing things on vacation.
I'd say more, but I'd rather not deal with a fight. From MemeGenerator.
For them, the concept of doing nothing is the antithesis of a vacation. Vacations are meant for personal enrichment and seeing places and things that you can't otherwise see, or the vacation days end up being used for appointments or lists of things to do that you can't simply delay for the weekend.
That ain't me.
Vacations to me are for doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. Slumming, in other words. Maybe read a little, maybe play games, maybe cook a bit, but otherwise just don't do a single thing.
And I really haven't had one of those in a long while. (Still haven't, if you're wondering whether I'm "on vacation" for posting this Meme Monday.)
So this is for all those people who are skeptical about taking vacation and you end up "working" more than at your regular job.
The family lore is littered with the times I have been called back into work on company holidays, such as Christmas or New Years Day, because... stuff. From Cheezburger.
This too. There have been so many times that I've come back to far more work than when I left, and somehow people seem to think this is normal. From Laurent Perrier via Thunder Dungeon.
Again, why do I go on vacation when I get up earlier thatn when I go to work? From inkl.
Yep. And usually the arguments are about going and doing all sorts of things when we should be relaxing. From Alamy.
And this is what you end up facing when you "go someplace invigorating" or "go someplace peaceful". Everybody else goes there too. From Readers Digest.
And then it's the dreaded "return from vacation" event, in which you realize you forgot the PIN to your password vault (or your passwords; take your pick). From Facebook.
Well, there you go. Jason Schreier reported yesterday that XBox is going to cut 3200 jobs and either sell or divest themselves of 5 studios.
An internal email from Asha Sharma, the current CEO of XBox, outlined everything. She also said that she wants 1 billion players per day for XBox overall (this starts at the 4:58 mark in the video above). She also mentions that they want to focus their investments in XBox, which pretty much means for these bigger studios to shed projects that won't generate as much profit and eyeballs on screens.
From what it sounds, XBox Game Studios and Zenimax will be hit hard by layoffs, and Activision Blizzard King less so but still impacted. The overall number of jobs being lost is 3200, but only 1600 right now. That translates into waves of layoffs going forward, including divestiture/sale from the studios already identified. (Apparently Arkane Studios is also targeted, but Microsoft has begun the divestiture process with the French Work Council, as they can't summarily be canned without due process.)
What does that mean for those who love the two big MMOs that these studios manage, Elder Scrolls Online and World of Warcraft? Probably job cuts and scaling back of the staffing for both teams.
For all those expecting Classic Plus, here's hoping that these cuts don't kill it off.
I would expect, however, far more monetization of both properties to try to boost profits. So, if you've been dismayed at some of Cash Shop options from World of Warcraft, hold onto your hat. You ain't seen nothing yet.
There will be a lot more integration of these various game studios with the Microsoft parent organization, so that Zenimax or Activision/Blizzard or King (it's marked separately from A-B in the email) will lose a lot of their independence and corporate culture. Will that impact the end product? Yes, it will; you don't change corporate culture without changing the product itself. Hell, this happens all the time in Corporate America: the old enshittification process writ large. The back office jobs, or those not labelled "critical" to a game studio are about to get cut.
Let's hope that these studios aren't saddled with having to use a single engine for all of their development in the same way that Bioware got trapped by EA into using Frostbite for their game engine for the past several games, despite it being NOT built for RPGs or ARPGs at all.
I noticed that Jason didn't mention Obsidian with the letter, but I have to think that it won't have escaped unscathed. Helluva time for Tim Cain to move back to California to rejoin Obsidian after being in semi-retirement.
Our oldest and her partner are visiting for the week, although part of the time here they'll be away at a conference. This means that we're babysitting our grandkids.
Or maybe I should say "Grand-piggies."
Yes, we've got the two* guinea pigs in the house right now. So, in honor of them eating us out of all of our lettuce and carrots (and apples), here's a few guinea pig memes.
This. This is true. From Merry About Town.
This is a lie. I mean, it's an XBox. Real piggies play Playstation. From Cheezburger via Instagram.
Again, this is true. I was serenaded yesterday when they decided it was mealtime. Didn't matter that it wasn't their real mealtime, they decided it was. From Merry About Town and Pic Collage.
Every time I read this, I hear my Questing Buddy's voice superimposed over this, as if she were a big ol' guinea pig. From Pinterest.
Again: can confirm. From Piinterest.
And they have. Holy cow, I'd forgotten how much they poop. From AnimalSpot.
And now, the best part of WoW's Shadowlands expansion. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. From Reddit.
*Alas, the third passed away a few months ago from old age.
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