How The Other Half Lives

I'm kind of grateful that my little corner of the internet isn't that popular. 

As I've said in the past, there's less than 100 people who regularly follow the channel (likely closer to 30 than 100), so I very rarely see much traffic beyond web crawlers out there. When you see traffic to the blog on blogger.com that says "5K" but when you go on Google Analytics and see "15", you know that you have a LOT of bot traffic.*

Truth, but I have it anyway. From StatsGlitch.

I realize I'm a bit of an outlier in that I'm perfectly happy not having much of an online presence. There's tons of people creating online content for various reasons, and here I am not really worried that I'm monetizing my blog that much.** 

Consequently, my normally shy self is served by not being recognizable out in public. Ever since I grew a beard in college, I've been able to be anonymous out in public despite being a redhead; people who knew me in grade or high school have a hard time recognizing me now. It's not perfect, since some people do recognize me every couple of years in this metro area of ~2.3 million people, but I can live with that. If I ever became a published author, my nightmare would be that I'd have to go out on a book tour, so maybe it's for the best that I'm not that good enough of a writer to have to worry about that sort of thing. 

But sometimes I do wonder how I'd handle that "being recognized" scenario.

Luckily for me, some YouTubers who are far more well known than I'll ever be have had to deal with that, and they made posts about their adventures.

This first one, from Rebecca Parham, stumbled into my feed a couple of weeks ago. Until that moment, I was blissfully unaware of who she was. While I'm happy that she's doing well, I'm also perfectly aware she exists in a completely different orbit than I inhabit.

Because I watched a few of Rebecca's videos, the algorithm started suggesting to me JaidenAnimations' videos, and as a consequence this one appeared as it dropped Saturday afternoon. If Rebecca's in an entirely different orbit than me, Jaiden is in another solar system. 

I think that it's a good thing that both of them are in the sort of fandom where they don't have to deal with creepers all that much, but I'm also quite aware that their part of the internet only has occasional interactions with mine at best. There was a bit of culture shock involved when I said to myself "Just who are these people?" and went down the rabbit hole for a while, the same sort of culture shock when I noted that the mini-Reds were watching videos some somebody named Pewdiepie and I felt obligated to find out what that was all about.***

Yeah, I think I'm happy being in my own lane. I'm not sure how I'd handle it if the spotlight of fame were to shine on me, even within such a limited topic as MMO video games.

*There's also the fact that apparently a lot of traffic suddenly began flowing from Brazil of all places, and you know that it's a bot of some sort.

**Because I use an ad blocker on all of my browsers, I don't even know if my blog has any ads visible to people. Since I've not allowed custom ads on the site...

Here's the proof.

there ought to not be any ads. If there are any ads, however, I get so little "real" traffic that I'd never see a dime anyway.

***It was a short-lived interest, which was fine with me.

2004 vs 2025

I keep up with YouTuber WillE's videos, because he does spend a lot of time on the Classic WoW side of the house. On Monday, he posted this video...

Which was filled with ways how people have turned the game into speedruns, leveling boosts, and whatnot compared to what it was like back in 2004. The game mechanics are the same, but how we play it is completely different than 20+ years ago.

All I could think of while watching this was "...and here I am, plodding along, eschewing most things that resemble a 'modern' approach to Classic, much less a Retail mentality."

It seems kind of strange that I'm now a rebel and a hipster for wanting to do things the old way. 

I'm not "that guy" who wants to RP as a Hobbit in Molten Core, not wearing boots; since I know that there are expectations placed on you if you raid, I'm eschewing raiding. I do work hard to acquit myself well in group content I do enter into, but I refuse to play the rush-rush-rush game. 

The people who do the behaviors that WillE highlighted in the video are having fun, or at least I hope they are, because I'm having fun playing my way. I'm enjoying playing classes I'd never touched before, and because of that I'm learning how to better play as a Mage. I'm learning how a Feral Druid rotation works, and because of that I know better when I can push as a Mage and when I can dial it back. I understand better the symbiotic relationship a Warlock and a Shadow Priest have, where one complements the other and enhances their overall damage output. 

***

Also this week had the Mists of Pandaria Classic pre-patch drop. One of my little group is all gung ho for it, and I wish her the best, but I'm not touching that place.

I remember three things about Mists: WoW Pokemon, Let's Blow Up Theramore Just Because, and Battlegrounds were horrible. Well, there's also the insane gear scaling, wherein a Mage player I knew had 4-5 TIMES the health my leveling Rogue had because she was wearing raid gear from the second(?) raid from Mists.* And now that I think about it, I stopped playing any instanced PvE content in Mists as well because I got into one instance after an insane multi-hour wait, the tank pulled everything, died, and dropped group, followed by everybody else.**

WoW had turned into a game where I saw nobody out in Pandaria, the guild I was in died due to people leaving WoW, and Blizzard thought it an absolutely banger of an idea to force PvE players to have to go win the Mine Cart BG to progress in the legendary questline. Oh yeah, there were also the tons of bots in BGs, the Alliance had almost no chance to win anything other than the 40 person BGs, and the gear treadmill on both PvP (and I presume PvE) meant that by the time I became barely relevant in BGs the goalposts got moved and I had to start all over again.

And that's not even counting all of the quality of life changes, the so-called*** talent tree rework, and the Scenario content that I already wrote off when I wrote off 5-person instanced content. I mean, if people are silent toxic assholes in 5-person content, why won't they do that in the 3-person variety?

I guess I realized that WoW had strayed too far from the version of the game I fell in love with in 2009, and if the horrible BG experience was just making me angry all the time, why should I keep playing?

So yeah, I'm not going there. I much prefer Vanilla Classic and the relaxed pace (well, my relaxed pace, that is). Speedrunners need not apply.

*Not sure what the second raid patch was, but I know it wasn't the third or the first.

**To this day I still don't know what I was supposed to do in that instance, and what exactly happened and whether it was my fault. There was absolutely no discussion, even after I mentioned this was my first instance in Mists.

***If they're trees, I'm a duck. ::quack::

Yet Another Debriefing

I've wanted to put together an origin story for Linna for quite a while now, so when I began Winter's Veil and the Light as a Christmas story things seemed to fit into place. Unlike the average Hallmark Christmas Movie (tm), I wanted a Christmas story that didn't have romance involved. Okay, yes, there's a few references here and there to romances, but it isn't the focus of the story at all.

It's also quite easy to forget that Linna's actually older than Card by about a year or so, because Card left home ahead of her. I felt that Card being the catalyst for Linna's departure is one thing, but there had to be more to it than that. I've done my share of volunteer work and I know people who chose professions that aren't very lucrative but serve a critical function in society* because they feel the call to serve. To me, the Paladin is an extension of that call to serve, despite in WoW lore the Silver Hand was seen as a path to the nobility. Obviously, people will join an organization for any number of reasons, yet I wanted Linna's desire to help out to manifest in a pretty obvious way. That doesn't mean that she's an overgrown Girl Scout or something, because I once described her as the least serious Paladin in the world. I can easily see her as being an annoyance in the side of Lord Shadowbreaker because she simply will not act with the gravitas as befits her status as a Knight.

The path of a Paladin in World of Warcraft is more than simply based on the historical military religious orders of the Crusades**, given that the members of the Knights of the Silver Hand could marry and have children. The AD&D version of the Paladin (the O.G. Paladin, to be honest) had a very restrictive set of ability requirements for the class, and in the old days of "what you roll on your ability score is what you get", Paladins were quite rare.*** Therefore, I made some extrapolations based on what I knew in-game of the WoW version of the Paladin and came up with the requirement for two sponsors for acceptance into the Order.

But how the initiation would progress kind of stumped me. 

Okay, I knew about Arthas' initiation in Arthas: Rise of the Lich King by Christie Golden, and I thought it might work with some heavy editing, but I cast about for information on how it was interpreted in a roleplaying scenario. It took some searching, but I came across this post on the Argent Archives website, which provides a full RP induction ceremony into the Knights of the Silver Hand.

From argentarchives.org as of July 1st, 2025.

As you can tell, I adapted it to use in the story in the same way that they adapted it from Christie Golden's work. I thought there was too much in the ceremony to simply copy it verbatim, so I trimmed here and there to speed up the story a bit, as well as to add the sponsorship portion. I also thought it appropriate to give the Priesthood more authority over the entire ceremony by cutting out the Silver Hand's direct participation in some of the initiation, reflecting the Catholic Church's authority over the military religious orders in the Middle Ages. Azeroth has too little population --compared to Medieval Europe prior to the Black Death-- to simply let whatever Priest happens to be around to administer the induction ceremony. Sure, one of the Bishops could have run the show, but since the High Priestess is actually there in the Cathedral in-game, it made sense to use her instead.

***

Okay, confession time: for the longest time I had absolutely no idea who Linna's second sponsor would be. Only now in retrospect it seems obvious, but I wrote up several basic outlines for various people who would be Linna's second sponsor, and at various times I tried them all out:

• Elsharin
• Evelyn
• Mona
• Sloan**** 
• Mathias
• Some Faction Lead/Bigwig

The last two I discarded very quickly, because Mathias wants to stay in the background as much as possible despite Mona's past ties to SI:7, and also because I wanted this to maintain more of a "common people" focus than fall into the same "faction lead-focused" trap that Blizzard has with their own Retail story. Still, I knew that in order for Linna to be inducted, there had to be some nobility or higher up involvement (the High Priestess, Lord Shadowbreaker, etc.) but I didn't want that to be the focus of the story. All of the others in the list I deliberately brought up and discarded in the story itself because the story actually provided the TL;DR of why I decided not to use any of them. I also really didn't want to choose Azshandra, because she'd never agree to that. I know her well enough --she lives rent-free in my head, you know-- and she'd have shut that down before I could even put her on the list.

I wanted the second sponsor to be someone that Linna has interacted with, and could potentially represent a larger organization that may or may not be well received by either the nobility or the clergy. To my mind, that meant either a semi-renegade (such as Balthan) or a member of an organization not based in Stormwind: the Cenarion Circle, the Argent Dawn, or the Explorer's League. Of those, the Cenarion Circle made the most sense since Linna has interacted with them before. And it was then that I went "Duh!!" and smacked my forehead. I contacted Ancient, who readily agreed to let me borrow Kitwynn again, and that was that.

***

There was one last loose end I had to clear up, and that was a technical matter. I didn't want to write about Honey Bread without actually having experience in how the damn thing tastes. Yes, I could have just rolled with it and come up with a description based on what I knew of the bread, but I wanted to ground my writing in my own impressions of what it tasted like. Of course, the problem here is that a fictional food isn't something you could readily taste.

Or could you?

Well, in the Before Times, I wrote a post about fandom cooking in July 2021. Among the books I referenced, there was this little gift set:

I still have the apron, btw.

And tucked within it's pages, there was this:

Sindorei this, Sindorei that. It's not like the Queldorei
didn't eat it before them, you know...
From World of Warcraft: The Official Cookbook
by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, Page 79.

So... I had a recipe to try.

I need not bore you with the details about my testing the recipe out*****, and I did have to make an adaptation to accommodate my low-salt diet, but this was the result:

That's after brushing it with melted butter
once it came out of the oven.

If you want to know how it tastes, well... 'absolutely awesome' kind of covers it. It reminds me a lot of challah bread, given that the ingredients are similar, but the recipes of challah I've used have granulated sugar instead of honey.

Before you ask, 1/12th of Chelsea's recipe comes out to about ~34 grams of carbs, so it's well within my carb budget on a per meal basis. Believe me, I kept an eye on my blood sugar after eating it, and I had no issues with a sudden spike in my numbers. 

My wife really likes the recipe, so I think I might have to put this into regular rotation. Next, I ought to try Chelsea's Mulgore Spiced Bread recipe, which apparently gets rave reviews on Reddit and other websites. 

***

So there you have it. A story that I originally thought I could belt out in a month or so took over seven months and had me bashing my head against a wall for a good while. I have other stories I'm working on in various states of completion, and I'm not sure which one will appear next. I ought to start posting on Azeroth After Dark rather than letting that blog sit there, unused, but we'll see. Based on my pageview data, I know that my fiction doesn't get a lot of eyeballs, but I wanted to get this out there instead of holding onto it.

*Aside from the military, there's teaching, firefighting, police, local journalism, libraries, community outreach (such as senior centers and support), park administration, and religious orders (no, televangelists don't count).

**The Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon (Templars) and The Knights of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem (The Hospitallers) are the most well known among the military religious orders, but there's also other Crusades througout Europe that generated military religious orders. Among them are the Teutonic Knights, the Order of Calatrava, the Order of Santiago, and the Order of Montesa. All of these military religious orders mixed a monastic life with military service. Unlike their non-religious chivalric counterparts, the adherents of the military religious orders eschewed worldly possessions and maintained celibacy in the name of service. While those requirements may have held up for individual members, some of the military religious orders became very rich from donations by the nobility throughout Europe (looking at you, Templars).

***Or you had to keep rolling until you got the right combination. I tried that once, and it took me hours before I finally got a Paladin on rolls alone. That minimum score of 17 out of 3d6 for your Charisma is a real bitch.

****You can find Sloan as an NPC vendor in SI:7, and I adapted her in another unfinished story into someone Card interacts with when she finally arrives at SI:7 with Mona's letter of warning to Mathias. That letter of warning is referenced in One Final Lesson, Part 5 and Part 6.

*****If people want to see the details, I can make another post about that later.

Winter's Veil and the Light -- Part 2/2

Previous Installment:
Winter's Veil and the Light -- Part 1

Several days later I paced restlessly in the foyer of the Cathedral of Light. I may not be the focal point of today’s events, but I was going to be in front of the High Priestess of the Church of the Light herself. The Cathedral may not be the Keep, but that didn’t mean the nobles of Stormwind weren’t paying attention.

I paused for a moment to rub at the ache on my shoulder.

“Stop playing with it, Apprentice,” Mistress Elsharin said in Thalassian, her voice thick with disapproval. “It will take longer to heal.”

Pulling my hand away, I rolled my shoulders to move my old purple robe around a bit. “It’s…” I frowned as my voice trailed off. Searching for the right word in her tongue and realizing I didn’t know it yet, I changed directions. “How long before the pain goes away?”

“About a week.”

“A week?” I was about halfway through.

“Surely you’ve been hurt from being out in the sun too long, it’s no worse than that.”

No, it wasn’t, but that burn usually faded after a couple of days, and this was still going strong. I frowned, realizing that this was likely Elsharin’s way of saying “don’t be such a baby,” only since she said it in remedial Thalassian it sounded worse.

While Mistress Elsharin had given me another present –a warm bathrobe—for Winter’s Veil, her primary gift was a tattoo of her family’s crest on my shoulder. The concept of bearing the Dawnweaver crest sounded exciting and sophisticated at first, but the moment the Queldorei tattoo artist began, all those emotions vanished in a puff of smoke. I’d been beaten and stabbed and shot with arrows, but this so-called “small thing” hurt more than it had any right to.

Still, it kept me from thinking about Linna’s acceptance into the Order for a while.

“Remember, Apprentice,” Elsharin said, interrupting my musings, “Give the Knights what is asked, but no more. You have a talent for talking too much.”

“Yes, Mistress Elsharin.” I opened my mouth to continue, but I realized I was about to demonstrate my Mistress’ rather apt critique and shut it instead.

The doors to the Cathedral opened and my family entered, with Linna in front. She was dressed all in white, as was the custom for a supplicant, and she’d even taken care to brush her tangled blonde hair and tie it back into a smart ponytail. Her easy, casual smile was nowhere to be seen.

Winter's Veil and the Light -- Part 1/2

Yes, you read that correctly. I suppose you could call this a "Christmas in July" surprise, given that I'd originally meant to have this ready for last year's actual Christmas season, but stuff happened and I got stuck finishing the story. I'll explain more in a follow-on post after this is complete.

This story is set after the events that culminated in The Deadmines and then The Stockades in Vanilla Classic WoW. When I write I tend to jump around the timeline when I find a compelling scene, which is why I have other works of fiction in the pipeline. I may eventually begin creating completely original works of fiction again, but that also assumes that Cardwyn won't kick my ass or something and demand more be written.

The full list of attributions will follow at the conclusion of the story, so I won't give anything away, but here's a standard disclaimer: 

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Any characters and locations created by Blizzard for WoW Classic remain their property. This work of fiction uses WoW Classic as the primary reference point. Copyright by Redbeard of Parallel Context, 2025.

Winter’s Veil and the Light

"Apprentice, your sister is here!"

I stuffed the last wrapped present into my pack and slung it over my shoulder. "Coming!" I called, flying out of my room and to the top of the stairs.

At the bottom stood Mistress Elsharin and Kira, chatting quietly. Considering she’d just arrived from Goldshire I expected my big sister to at least appear like she’d been traveling all day, but no, she looked like her typical perfect self. She wore her formal Journeywoman's outfit, complete with the badges signifying her rank in the Goldshire Bakers Guild stitched onto her breast jacket. The only indication she’d been on the road at all was her travelling basket by her side, which she used to carry baked goods throughout central Elwynn. I bounced down the stairs and into her arms, clapping her on the back. “Kira!” I cried.

"Card!" she exclaimed, squeezing me tight and holding me at arm’s length. "Look at you! You're wearing a new robe!"

"It took me quite a while to figure out how to stitch the material,” I grinned, “but I had some help from around the Quarter." 

That was quite an understatement. When Mistress Elsharin suggested that I should mark the ending of the Defias affair by making my own robe, I was a bit hesitant. After all, she'd made it rather plain to me that despite her Queldorei house name she was not a tailor and had no interest in becoming one. After my experience with a tailor accosting me to examine my robe when I first arrived in Stormwind, I wasn't so keen on asking for help, either. However, Elsharin recommended a different tailor, and Mistress Larson took me under her wing to show me the basics of dealing with bizarre items such as spider silk thread in the creation of this new white robe.

"I love your Journeywoman's outfit!" I added as took in my sister's uniform. "Isn't it different than last year’s?"

"Yes!" Kira pulled her sleeve over, exposing some new stitching. "The gold stripe along the shoulder and down the sleeves signify Senior status."

"That's wonderful! Does that mean you're the Senior Journeywoman in the Guild?"

My sister grinned from ear to ear and nodded.

I dropped my pack and embraced her in another tight hug. "Congratulations!"

"That is wonderful news!" Elsharin exclaimed, crossing over to our kitchen. "This calls for a toast before you leave." 

"You're not coming?" Kira called after her.

My sister released me, and I shook my head and sighed.

"I shouldn't intrude, as it is a family event, and a Dawnweaver always puts family first," Mistress Elsharin replied, returning with three glasses and a bottle of wine.

"I tried to convince her that she's family now," I added, "but..."

"No buts, Apprentice." The Elf handed out the glasses and poured some wine into each. "To Kira Songshine, Senior Journeywoman!" she exclaimed, raising her glass in a toast.

"To Kira!" I saluted my sister and drank. 

"To Card and Elsharin, my Stormwind family!" Kira added.

"And now," Elsharin said, setting down her glass, "I believe you two have a date to keep back at your farm." She walked over to the foyer and raised her arms to cast. "Apprentice, you have my presents with you?"

I grabbed my pack and slung it over my shoulder. "Yes, Mistress Elsharin."

"Very well, I'll open the portal." She focused and brought the arcane to bear before us, and a portal to the farm opened. "Tell everyone Happy Winter Veil for me!"

"I will!" 

We stepped through the portal and into our barn.

Meme Monday: Summer Heat Memes

Well, it took an extra month to arrive, but Summer has finally hit our corner of the Midwest with a gigantic sledgehammer. The past week we had what the meteorologists rather blandly call a "heat dome" over much of the US, so we here got kind of thwacked by the weather.

In an absolute sense, low to mid 90s (~34C) isn't really that bad, but given that we had a significantly colder Spring and early Summer so far, it was a bit of a rude awakening. So, while I'd typically put this sort of Meme Monday later in the Summer, I figured I'd post it now. After all, Cincinnati and Milwaukee were both warmer than Las Vegas for the majority of last week.

I should try this sometime. From Thunder Dungeon.

Okay, I chuckled at this. After all, I do live on
the northern edge of the Bible Belt.
From Memedroid.

My son's room is like this. It gets the afternoon
sun and not enough airflow from the HVAC system.
From 9GAG.

If it were hell, it'd be a lot closer to what
work feels like. From Thunder Dungeon.

And because I prefer winter....
From Facebook and Castillo.

A Bit Late to the Party

Mike Bell dropped a YouTube video today about his coworker and buddy Matt's experience with a new toon on a fresh Retail WoW account. 

The TL;DR is Matt found that approaching the game as a brand new player --without knowing the ins and outs of the game itself-- the leveling experience pretty quickly becomes unbearable due to the level scaling.

To which I say...

From The Ballad of Busker Skruggs and really
from all over the internet.

I know, I know, people may not internalize things if they don't experience it themselves, but this is not a new event. In fact, problems with the new Retail WoW experience have been around for quite a while. I tend to focus on the story problems, but when your gameplay starts to break down, then WoW finds itself in a precarious position. 

For all the problems with the story, WoW has always --always-- been able to lean on its gameplay as its strength.* But now, Matt found himself where he'd outleveled the content but didn't have commensurate gear to match with the content he was facing. Since your ability to kill mobs in Retail WoW is so dependent on gear**, he found himself having to pull off every trick in the book to kill mobs, something your average new player won't know. Returning players have certain advantages, with heirloom gear that automatically scales with you, and they can also have friends drop by to help them kill things in the same way that people are boosted in Classic WoW.

How to fix the problem? 

Matt eventually used his knowledge of crafting to craft some cloth gear (he played a Tauren Mage) and then he could keep playing, but again, that's something the average new player won't know. Among the suggestions he was given but rejected include the tip to simply logoff and not play for two months, then Blizz will automatically provide you with a set of catch-up gear. Given that buying the game then NOT playing it seemed nonsensical, Matt passed on that one.

I guess my reaction to this video is better late than never, but at least they did make an honest attempt at trying things out.

*I'm including raiding and other instanced content here.

**I'd argue even more so than in Classic WoW, where you can get away with being undergeared while being out in the wild for quite a while. Hell, I'm proof of that.