Stars in the Firmament

This week the world of Star Trek and Science Fiction in general is a bit emptier, as both Walter Koenig and Sir Patrick Stewart passed away.

Koenig's Pavel Chekov, the so-called "Nutty Russian" on the original Star Trek, was both comic relief and provided a baseline for everybody to understand what might be going on in episodes he was featured in.

Kirk: All right, here we are, birds in a gilded cage. The question is, how do we get out of here?

Chekov: I don't know, sir, but it's a very nice gilded cage. 

--From Star Trek S2, E8: I, Mudd 

 

I suppose most average moviegoers saw Chekov in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, given it was by far the most popular Star Trek movie. His humor played well there, because the overall comedic tone of the film led to broad audience appeal.

It feels weird to see both Nichelle Nichols and
Walter Koenig in this still from Star Trek IV, because
both have passed away. From Screenrant.

Like many genre actors, Walter found himself typecast into SF roles throughout his career. One of his later roles was in a show I didn't watch yet has a cult following: Babylon 5. 

I can't talk about Walter without acknowledging the tragedy when his son, the actor Andrew Koenig, committed suicide in 2010. This is something I really have trouble wrapping my head around, because I don't think I would handle it well if I were in the same situation. Walter turned his tragedy into another mission, to educate people about mental health and suicide prevention, for the rest of his life.

***

It feels weird seeing the outpouring of emotion for Sir Patrick Stewart, given that I first encountered him in the David Lynch adaptation of Dune:

Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck.
From X.

Before that, my mom knew him as Lucius Aelius Sejanus in I, Claudius (courtesy of the PBS rebroadcast*):

From Reddit.

For a man who so embraced his roles in the Royal Shakespeare Company, pop culture had to have been a bit of a shock.

I remember when I heard that Star Trek: The Next Generation was coming out I was hopeful yet quite concerned it would be terrible. Anybody who watches the innumerable reboots of intellectual property these days probably understands my trepidation, but back then in the 80s this was kind of new territory. Who knew what we were going to get?

Apparently, that concern was shared by Patrick Stewart, who was hesitant at accepting the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Yet accept it he did, and we are all the better for it. 

In its own way, his later role of Professor X in the X-Men movies, acting opposite other stage actors Ian McKellen and Hugh Jackman, were closer in theme to his love of Shakespeare. Marvel's X-Men was originally conceived as shining a mirror on the two main reactions to the quest for Civil Rights in the 60s, with Charles Xavier embodying the side of Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent approach and Magneto's side embodying Malcolm X's Black Power movement, and both Stewart and McKellen embraced those opposing views in several iconic scenes.

Patrick and Ian developed a very close friendship over the years, where Ian officiated at Patrick's wedding and they shared the stage in Waiting for Godot:

***

I guess I'm at that age when more and more of the people who I grew up with or informed my earlier adulthood are passing away. I'll miss them both, but I can also rest easy knowing both Walter and Patrick lived a full life. 

*PBS rebroadcasts of British productions are how I was introduced to Roger Rees (The Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby), David Suchet (Poirot), Joan Hickson (Miss Marple), Peter Davison (All Creatures Great and Small), Jeremy Brett (Sherlock Holmes), Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man), and James Burke (Connections and The Day the Universe Changed). I guess you can tell that mysteries and documentaries were big in my past.

A Late October Overview

It's been a while since I actually posted about my own gaming.

To be honest, I'm not certain that the post from September 9th actually counts, as it was a complaint about a bizarre dungeon run that never happened. So, I guess it may have been since August 20th that I provided a real update on what I've been doing.*

***

The short answer is "not much". 

Okay, see you next Meme Monday.

You're still here? You actually want some info?

Okay, fine. 

I don't drink much, Balthan. Type 2 and all that, so shush.

I still play video games, and I still play on the WoW Anniversary Servers. I separate out MMOs versus the rest of video game playing because MMOs are a time sink unto themselves. It's just that I keep my video game playing down to bite-sized chunks, so I don't spend all of my spare time consumed by the hobby. That way I can actually work on other hobbies, housework, or family stuff. 

My single player games, Civ IV, Stellaris, Stardew Valley, Age of Empires, and Planetbase, do keep me busy. I can tinker around with them for a while, and I can get a game of Civ IV and Age of Empires done in an evening session. Yes, I would like to play some RPGs, but I also know it will suck up far more of my time than these old standbys will, so I'm very careful about that.

***

Now, about WoW.

As of October 28, 2026.

As you can see, Neve finally reached Outland, and my Hunter, Hoots, is about to reach max level in probably about a week. Like all my other toons, once a toon hits max level I effectively retire them and I switch to another toon on the same faction. In this case, it'll likely be Az, my old Rogue and the namesake of the first toon I made in WoW Classic in 2019.**

"Remind me again why Sindorei leadership calls this
a green paradise." 

Nothing says "strange land" as much as floating
islands does, I suppose.

And for the record, I still haven't named Hoots' owl. It just fits as-is, I suppose.

I don't see my WoW friends very much right now, as work and family activities (it's Fall, so football season for those with high school kids) keep them busy. My Questing Buddy does login, but she typically gets on after I've gone to bed, so I don't see her quite as much as I used to.

Also, I should mention that I do occasionally login to Retail to fish for a bit...

"Sittin' on the dock of the bay
Watching the tiiiiide roll away..."

There are times when I want to passively observe the crowd, whether it's in Stormwind...

Or during an event...

When did the devs add a Burning Man just outside
Stormwind? That's not there in Classic, and in fact it's
location near the Undercity is the object of both
Alliance and Horde quests.

Or, god forbid, Goldshire...

At least my lowbie Rogue can fit under that brontosaurus
there. Mmmm... brontosaurus burgers... I've been
watching too many old Flintstones episodes again...

I still haven't heard anything new about WoW Classic since the opening of Zul'Aman, but I intend to hang around there as long as possible and just let the crowd steamroll their way to max level in Forever. Once people begin to drop there, because that's what WoW players do, I'll actually consider going over.

Which reminds me: I expect the Blue Elves to make an appearance in Retail before the end of Midnight. Midnight is the Elf expansion, so why not? Forever might be a separate leg on the three-legged stool that is World of Warcraft, but that doesn't mean it will have different races from the Retail game.

*Apparently the bots that tend to far outnumber the actual readers of the blog don't mind, since I had that bubble of "views" that appeared in early September. It's still ironic in the extreme that Google and Gemini still don't recognize the blog exists, but I digress.

**Azshandra was also the name of the last main I played in Retail back in 2013-2014.

Meme Monday: Pre-YouTube Memes

I was watching this grooming video...

...and the goat's name is Dill.

If that name sounds familiar, and you suddenly want to break into song, this might be the source of your musical nostalgia:

Yep, good ol' Albino Blacksheep. They'd converted the old Flash video to YouTube.

So in honor of those old Flash videos that were everywhere before the rise of YouTube, here's a Meme Monday for you.

You can't have this sort of Meme Monday without
The Llama Song... From Cheezburger.

Yes, I know the story behind this legendary
Rainbow video, but it's still hilarious. From Facebook.

Ah yes, the duck who constantly asked
for grapes. From Reddit and Imgflip.

It ba-dee ba-dee ba-doo-doo....
One of the first big memes out there, The Hamster Dance.
From the late 90s, and from Reddit. (Which it predates too!)

The Family Guy impersonation of the old Flash meme.
From Facebook.

And while some Flash videos have
not aged as well (Elvis Lives in Flash with
an appearance by Bill Cosby, for example) 
the old chestnut All Your Base Belongs to Us
still is haning in there. From Reddit.

Oh, For Pete's Sake, Blogger...

I guess it's too much to hope for Google to stop mucking around with Blogger.

This is what greeted me this morning:

On October 23, 2026.

It takes a certain amount of skill to break everything, I suppose.

And then just like that, it was back to working properly.

EtA: Blogger is now personally messing with me. Just after posting this, it's baaaack....

Alas, BioWare

The news broke today that BioWare is being shut down. 

EA continues it's rather dubious streak of buying game companies, mismanaging them, and then shutting them down, although in this case it took a mountain of debt in the form of a leveraged buyout to do it. 

SWTOR, now being part of Broadsword, has now outlived BioWare. Wow.

***

I can't say I was surprised at the announcement...

From Reddit as of October 21, 2026.

If anything, I'm surprised that BioWare lasted as long as they did, because EA's insistence on trying to turn BioWare into a live services studio pretty much went against their DNA, and their biggest entry into the field, Anthem, became its biggest failure. 

At least you can still find BioWare games out there, such as Beamdog keeping Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 alive, but I also wonder just how much longer the "new" EA will keep the old BioWare games out there. 

Time to Re-engage a Bit

I received an email from The SWTOR team last Friday, and along with a new subscriber reward there was an announcement:

I received this on October 16, 2026.

Hmm. I was wondering when they were going to perform a character name cleanup. 

I'd never had to worry about that sort of thing before, because I'd been subscribed for such a long time, but now I actually had to consider which toons to save.

Luckily for me, there's a simple fix: login to each toon I want to save and that's that.

Yeah, about that "login" part...

I should have gotten a screencap of this, but when I logged into the launcher, it began to upgrade my SWTOR installation. Typically that's no problem these days, as my internet connection is around 600 mbps, far faster than I used to have when I regularly played SWTOR. This time, however, the download from the SWTOR servers slowed to a crawl, and no matter what I did I simply could not make it go any faster.

At that point I accepted my fate, uninstalled SWTOR that I'd downloaded from swtor.com, and signed up for the game on Steam.

THAT installation took all of 5 minutes.

I know these three, at least I think I do, but
the names of the two to either side of Darth Malgus
escape me. This is October 18, 2026.

I logged in and set about accessing all of my toons.

Since I'm now Preferred Status, I get all the "Hey, come back and subscribe!" screens that I simply ignore --Blizzard has trained me well to ignore "Come Back!!!!!" groveling in Retail WoW-- 

Except for the different color schemes and organization,
this feels remarkably like whenever I login to Retail after
what feels to me like a short absence.

Yeah, like this.

but since I'm Preferred, I only get 13 toons maximum per server. Well, let's see what I have to work with:

Oh.

I guess I'm not that alt crazy as I thought.

Sure, Satele Shan sounds like a good place to start...

This was obviously taken after I'd reenabled all of
my toons, but Sreeka was the closest thing I had
to a main back then.

The last time I'd logged in to SWTOR, I was grumbling about the companion pathing issues I had and had used Sreeka as an example at the Nar Shadda spaceport. I was curious if installing the game via Steam had any impact there, and... Kinda? Maybe? I mean, the companion doesn't dither around and do nothing for a while, so there's that. But when they run with you they are obviously slower than you and quickly begin to lag a bit. I'd have to look at Sreeka's gear, but that might be due to a trinket or something else she has, so I'm not about to discount this, but I guess we'll see how things go.

Anyway, I was reminded of something about not being subscribed when I got to my first Trooper:

It used to be that if you weren't a subscriber, you couldn't hide your head slot unless you purchased that ability (or you subscribed). I'm glad to see that I can hide Kiannala's helmet, because I'm not a big fan of helms in game overall. 

Much better.

It took me about 1/2 hour, but I logged into all of my toons and kept most of them. There were a few that I'd gotten to maybe L7 or L16 and stopped playing them, and given that I never got very far I was fine in deleting them. Their names weren't worth keeping around either, so that was fine. 

There was one thing that I found particularly funny, however. Since I'd been using the swtor.com installed version of the game since shortly after its launch, the Steam Achievements kicked into overdrive when I began logging in.

"I dunno, Boss. This guy logged in and it started going
crazy! Should I check his account for something suspicious?"

Not too shabby, logging in once and getting 72% of the achievements unlocked. Good thing I don't keep track of them any more, that's for sure.

So, I've protected my toons for the time being, and I've got some wiggle room as far as new toon creation is concerned. Now, if only SWTOR had "Vanilla" servers, just like they were back in the day, and I'd be set.

Meme Monday: Gamer Cleaning Memes

This past weekend my wife was visiting her parents and our youngest down in Louisville, so I had the place to myself for a couple of days. You'd expect that I'd use that time to play some games or get on the radio --and to be fair I helped working on the radio room and my club's antennas at the Red Cross building on Saturday morning-- but I really spent my time cleaning around the house.

Maybe some people think "seasonal cleaning" and immediately think of "Spring Cleaning", but for me I do a major cleaning weekend every season, so every 3 months or so. It helps to keep the worst of the dust at bay, and it also means that the curtains and whatnot get a good scrubbing so they look refreshed.

So, in honor of my past weekend, here's some cleaning memes with a gaming twist...

Fair point, but I also play Stardew Valley. So...
From Quickmeme.

I honestly don't get it. When I get in a cleaning mood,
I'm good for multiple hours. From Memedroid.

The best part is that chores are done.
From Thunder Dungeon.

You just kind of sigh and just try to reach
some inner peace. And you let it slide for a day
or two. From Bored Panda.

This is the reason why videogames
have soundtracks: to make the mundane
feel epic. From Bored Panda.

Of course there'd be a Thanos here. After all,
he performed the largest cleanup in history.
From Cheezburger.