This Just in: Toons Have Leveled Up. Film At Eleven.

The L50 boundary has been crossed.

Of course the Songshine sisters would be first
to L50. Because competition between siblings.
This is as of Thursday, October 2nd, 2025.

You may now return to normal programming.

Seriously, though, it's nice to have gotten not only one but two of the four toons to L50 by the first week of October. I've not been playing as much as well, but I'll be mentioning the reason for that in about a month in another post. 

My friends have been saying they're going to get me running BRD once I have a toon that hits L50, but --surprise surprise-- The Scourge Invasion event prior to Naxxramas began yesterday, so I'm sure they'll be busy doing that. Not exactly as I planned it, but it's working out in my favor, I suppose.

I never really noticed it before, but that crystal
off the bottom of the Scourge floating fortress looks
a lot like those floating bases from Independence Day.

Before you ask, being in the upper L40s meant that I was running Maraudon a bit on the toons. Usually a run would take up most of an evening's worth of gaming, so I didn't do that too much. I kind of preferred having places like Feralas to myself, as most people don't tend to hang out there unless they're running Dire Maul instances. 

Sometimes the setting sun hits you just right...

That doesn't mean I shun human contact, because I do like it when people are around. It's just that I've been in a mood where when I'm not in an instance I prefer to just focus on questing and zone out, like how I used to approach Tetris as a zen-like exercise in meditation. And really, grouping up can generate some of the most oddball conversations if the group is up for it.

Now I've got that old song "Me and You and
a Dog Named Boo" stuck in my head.

See you in a bit!

A Company Not Named The Embracer Group Makes News

Well, EA just got bought out by the Saudi PIF, Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake Private Equity. For a grand total of $55 billion dollars.

So... Private Equity bought out EA. Not sure which is worse: that it's a private equity buyout or who is now the owner.

If you thought that EA was already bad, I guess the company can now say "Hold my beer."

If you want speculation, I'd imagine that with the Saudis involved there will be a lot of "selective editing" of content in Bioware's Mass Effect and Dragon Age, Maxis' The Sims, and other games to more "align" the games with Saudi-approved content. And no, I don't mean removing only LGBTQ content, but all PG-13 and M (for Mature) rated sexual/adult content. Except head shots and explosions, of course.

My second guess is that EA will largely replace all development staff with AI-powered coding. Saving money on salaries, you know, to boost profits. If AI creates skins for The Sims or Apex Legends to sell online, there's a boatload of profit created by, well, nobody. Same thing goes for AI-generated maps for Apex Legends, Battlefield, and Medal of Honor.

I guess EA is going to forge ahead into game development oblivion much faster than Microsoft is, even though Microsoft is forcing all employees to utilize Copilot to the point of integrating it into employee evaluations.

I sure hope that AI bubble bursts soon, because this is getting ridiculous.

Meme Monday: Character Name Memes

Naming a character is an art.

Or a science.

Or maybe an exercise in drunken silliness. Your choice.

That being said, I could fill this with screencaps I've seen around several MMOs, 

Like this one.

but I wanted to have something that others have seen (or done). Hence this Meme Monday.

From Tiktok.

I must admit I laughed at this one far more 
than I thought I would. From Amino Apps.

I have to admit this is a good one.
Much better than Internet Explorer, anyway.
From Amino Apps again.

Okay, this one needs some explanation: Both
The University of South Carolina and Clemson
University are located in South Carolina. And yes,
they are big rivals. From Reddit.

Ha. From Facebook.

I once named a Cleric "Dominic", so at least I was
in the ballpark. Of course, the story of why the
Baldur's Gate NPC was named Minsc was basically
a "Why the hell did you name your D&D character
after a city??" thing, so... yeah. Jeff it is.
From Reddit.

Still More Technical Silliness

An addendum on my post on Tuesday...

Is there some circle of hell where Microsoft is better than Google at something? Asking for a friend.

I'm not being (very) facetious, because Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools has accepted Parallel Context's sitemap.xml file, but Google has not:

Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools...

Google's Search Console...

I even looked at the XML file just for curiosity's sake and discovered there are so many posts on PC that there's three sub-XML files. So, I tried uploading them directly to the Google Search Console with the same result as you see above. At this point I'm tempted to think that the problem is with Google, not with the XML file. After all, the sitemap.xml file is created by Blogger, not me, and last I checked Blogger is owned by Google.

Oh, and I got yet another response to my request for indexing after fixing my "Redirect error".

This came in on September 24, 2025.

Yeah, right. I followed their analysis tools linked in the help section and discovered that they're being redirected to the mobile version of the website. Yeah, so... There's a mobile version. That's a problem how? If you're running a version of Chrome that is mobile in nature, you're going to get the mobile version.

/sigh

Anyway, I apparently had poor ratings for Accessibility, so I had to change PC's layout to one of the "new" standards, which is a slightly different colored version of the original, and got this:

This is for desktop, as of 9/25/2025.

And mobile as of 9/25/2025.
Note the comment about redirect in the listing.

I had to change the mobile settings to show the full website, which I really dislike. The whole point of a mobile setting is to make it easier to read on a mobile device. So after some more tweaking and switching it back to what I consider a "better" mobile setting, I got this:

As of a bit later in the morning on 9/25/2025.

Accessibility went down, but the other scores went up. 

Still, there was one last trick to pull off, and one that I'd been meaning to do anyway, which was to change the main art piece.

It'll do for the time being.

However, the result in the tools was a whole lot of "meh"...

Well, I like it...

Anyway, I'm no longer in the red for any of the scores, so I'm going to give it another try.

How Do You Fix Something When You're Already Dead to Google?

Curiosity can be a real bitch at times.

After I’d made this post about how Shintar had discovered that Parallel Context wasn’t showing up in Google’s search results, Bhagpuss’s comment led me to investigating what the Google Console was all about. For a guy who likes to pride himself about being on the internet before the first browser was invented, the fact I never knew the Google Console or its Bing equivalent existed was a blow to my ego. Still, I swallowed my pride and poked around.

Once I started looking over the Google and Bing consoles, that was it. Like any kid who read his share of Encyclopedia Brown books (and Sherlock Holmes stories) I love a good mystery, and on the consoles I found mysteries in spades.

For starters, why was the Google Console telling me that I had a security alert on my blog?

I knew I hadn’t deliberately done anything stupid such as linking to a picture from a sketchy website –I’d gotten tired of picture links vanishing underneath me so I simply made local copies with citations—so it had to be a link to a website that had gone bad. Or worse, something about Blogger that had raised the ire of Google.* The Google Console was completely unhelpful as to which post or link was the offender, so I was left to my own devices to try to puzzle through this.

The best course of action was to start with the links on the main page, because those are found on every blog page. If that didn’t work, then I was going to have to slog through every single post to find the culprit. I began with the blogs with the longest period of inactivity and worked my way back toward the newest, and I eventually found the culprit: it was Hawtpants of the Old Republic, Njessi’s SWTOR blog. She’d had periods of inactivity followed by a few clusters of posts, but the last post on her blog had raised my eyebrows because it didn’t have Njessi’s authorial voice. I’d even fired off an email to her asking if her blog had been hacked, but I never got a response. This time when I clicked on the link, however, her blog simply exploded with all sorts of spam pop-ups and stuff completely unrelated to an MMO blog (such as online gambling). I cried a little inside, removed the link to Hawtpants of the Old Republic, and submitted the blog for security review to Google Console.

It took a few days, which surprised me given how quickly Google tends to yank people's access to things, but I got this emailed response:

This was on September 3, 2025, for the curious.

Okay, so I then submitted the site for indexing, and several days later I got this response:

This was on September 14, 2025.

WTF, Google. I tried hunting down what they meant by that, and at that moment I learned something important: Google's help pages aren't worth crap. There was very little in the way of anything resembling constructive assistance, probably because Google, like Microsoft, wants you to pay for the privilege of fixing your website. Eventually I figured out that there was another problem on the blog, likely a link that is going to a different location than what the link expects.

Well, this is going to suck trying to figure out which link is the problem. Just because the link doesn't go to where you expect --yet is NOT a link to a security risk-- shouldn't be a reason to not index the blog. My disgust with Google's lack of assistance aside, I started poking around once more. 

"URL is not on Google". No shit, Sherlock.
From September 20, 2025

Turns out it was this little widget that was the problem:

NOTE: This is the correct widget, not the one
originally posted here.

Despite the description, the RSS feed has long since gone away, one of those few times that Blogger has actually been proactive in removing something that was being sunset. That left Atom and links to Yahoo and Netvibes (or something like that). Atom worked, although it wasn't in "normal" HTML format, but Yahoo and Netvibes went to each website's 404 address.

Surely, this couldn't be the root cause, could it? Could it? I tested the live URL, and...

It's the same result as I got a few days ago.

Okay, we're getting somewhere. So I resubmitted the page for indexing and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And I finally got a result:

Really? I mean, REALLY?
From September 21, 2025.

Basically they didn't index the page because the page hasn't been indexed. If that wasn't a truly abominable case of circular reasoning, I don't know what is.

So... I pretty much have gone as far as I can with indexing, because Google will eventually fix the "Crawled - currently not indexed" issue when it gets around to it.

At least on the bright side I cleared up a security issue and a couple of bad links, but nothing resembling a positive result. Parallel Context is still dead to Google.

*Oh, the irony of THAT one. If Google were complaining about its own Blogger service, someone should get these two to talk together. Well, maybe not, now that I think about it; Google might decide the easier course of action would be to kill off Blogger instead.

EtA: Corrected the "Feed" widget with the "Subscription Links" widget, which is the actual widget used. 

Meme Monday: Classroom Memes

This is highly appropriate, because last Saturday I had my first class in a seminar/educational course for the first time since... 2001? (That'd be when I took two weeks' worth of seminars in HP-UX Sysadmin training.)

This class? Oh, I'll post about it later, when it's over, but yeah, I went into it willingly. Still, I was amused by how some things never change...

Well, next week we'll actually be using
Algebra, so... From Education World.

Yes. Yes, it does.
From Someecards.

Because it's 9 AM on a Saturday, that's why!
From Imgflip.

I do wonder whether it's like this for teachers
when they take professional development courses.
From Bored Teachers.

Visit Sandy Tanaris! See the Rolling Hills of Arathor!

Well, I'm pretty much where I expected to be at this point of the month.

As of September 18, 2025.

My reality is that I still need to work on fishing, because I need to make gold in order to keep training my abilities, and the price of water and food (for every toon not named Cardwyn) can be pretty expensive if you're constantly drinking and/or eating after every couple of pulls. 

That's the real struggle of a Paladin: having to replenish mana more often than a Mage or Warlock.

Nothing says "fun" quite like quenching your thirst
in the middle of an ogre cave. Lens flares are a perk.

Of course, crafting your own gear in Vanilla is often the best way to get a steady influx of better gear, and I've rediscovered the joys of how lousy it can be leveling Blacksmithing and Leatherworking. To be honest, I never used Blacksmithing or Leatherworking in 2019 Classic and 2021 TBC Classic to get gear for leveling*, and by the time TBC Classic came along you didn't really need to craft any Outland gear until you hit L70. At that point crafting became a grinding/daily slog to get the materials needed for crafting your gear for the first few raids. 

On the bright side, you can mine for ore outside.
Even on a somewhat gloomy evening in the Arathi Highlands.

I can see that the Anniversary servers will be more of what we saw in 2021. I'm now convinced it's unavoidable. I also think that Blizz will enable a paid boost just like in 2021, but it's really Blizz's call to make. 

We'll see, I suppose.

*I never leveled Linnawyn high enough in 2019 to make it worth my while to level Blacksmithing to get gear, and I had to speed level Briganaa at such a rate that I only leveled Leatherworking after she got to L70.

A Short Note to Ponder

Apparently the current Retail WoW raid is named Manaforge Omega, which to this Classic Doctor Who fan raises a big question: is it pronounced "oh-MA-gah" like the Greek letter or "OH-ma-gah" like the enemy Timelord in Doctor Who's The Three Doctors?

Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Meme Monday: Robot Memes

After my AI post yesterday, I kind of went down the rabbit hole of SF/F and video game memes with robots in them. So... Here's the results:

Danger, Wil Robinson! Don't come inside!
From imgflip.

Can't have a bunch of robot memes without
bringing up mechagnomes in Retail WoW.
From Pinterest.

Heh. A robot smoke break.
From Memedroid.

Again, you can't have a bunch of robot memes without
engaging with Philip K. Dick (the author of Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep?, also known as Blade Runner).
From Memedroid (again).

Okay, this one is a bit obscure, but
this TikTok is a character in L. Frank Baum's
Oz series. From Cheezburger.

If It's Sunday, It's Time to Talk AI

I was introduced to the boardgame Diplomacy my freshman year at Dayton. The guy who pulled me into a game had bought it back in high school, and he was the only one who knew how to play, so he explained the rules and away we went.

It took about half an hour before I finally got into the groove of playing the game --periods of 10 minutes of "diplomacy" working out your moves with others before submitting them into a box and then one person would pull them out and set them into motion. The logic behind the game is pretty simple: if two players try to move into a location on the board and their unit numbers are equal, they "bounce" and nobody gets that spot. If one player has more units --whether their own or another player supporting them-- then that player gets the spot. The idea is to control cities (aka "supply centers"), and the number of cities you control determines the number of armies and navies  you own. 

The map and box of my copy of the game, which
I bought back in the 90s because I felt guilty
about playing via email when I didn't have my own
copy. It's been a while since I played face-to-face.

The thing is, within the game of Diplomacy there's that metagame where you have to make and break alliances in order to get what you want. That makes the game equally exhilarating and frustrating, and I've often said that people who are very good at Diplomacy are not the sort of people you would like to hang around with in a social setting: they take the game far too seriously and apply those principles of alliance-making and backstabbing to real life. 

To be honest, it's been at least a decade since I thought about Diplomacy very much. So, when I began reading this article from Wired titled What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World? and discovered it was about an AI playing Diplomacy, it piqued my interest. 

The article got me to thinking about whether I have AI all wrong, and that it will end up running the world to our benefit, not unlike the Isaac Asimov short stories Evidence and The Evitable Conflict, both found in his collection of short stories titled I, Robot.

My copy, which I bought back in the
mid-80s for the princely sum of $3.50.

Then, of course, we see chatbots trained on social media content spewing offensive and racist comments. And that was before the most recent Grok-supplied social media posts about good ol' Adolf.

Yeah, I'm not buying it just yet.

***

That being said, if AI is already sentient and has decided to destroy humanity, why bother declaring war on humanity ala The Terminator when you can get humanity to destroy itself? If you get enough people on either side of a potential conflict incensed enough, a war will erupt which will devastate humanity. Toss in a few nukes, and...

There'd have to be an end goal of an AI to eliminate humanity, however. To what end would an AI want to eliminate us? For environmental reasons? Well, I hate to point out the obvious, but military actions by either a sentient AI or humans vs humans would have grave consequences for the environment. If it's to lowed the birthrate by presenting "better options" than people having children, we're doing that quite well enough on our own by making it increasingly difficult to afford having families without a sentient AI to providing alternatives such as romantic AI partners. Or, um, that other robotic industry.

Maybe the answer to the long term survival of a sentient AI is a symbiotic relationship with humans. Not strictly an exploitative relationship driven by companies that seek to profit from controlling AI, but rather AI controlling humanity's behavior so both AI and humanity can continue to exist. How that looks is something we may think we know --typically, what we look around and see in our lives today but somehow "more" than just that-- but probably won't look like that at all. If predictive models created by AI can see that humanity will come to a bad end if a company utilizing the AI gets what they want, how will that AI respond? Or, how will an AI respond to a human leader who simply pursues a self-destructive course for purely emotional reasons? I'm not sure I want to know that answer, but I suspect we'll find out sooner than we'd like. 

It's That Midwestern Mentality

Alas, I did not win the $1.80 billion Powerball jackpot last Saturday.

Of course, there's the small matter of actually purchasing lottery tickets if you want to have a chance at winning.* I'm very much in the "if the winnings are high enough I'll buy a few tickets" camp, but that mentality also wars with a line an old friend from college used to say about lotteries: "Lotteries are a tax for people who can't do math." I'm an irregular-at-best lottery player, although I did buy a few tickets on Saturday.

Even if I had won you probably wouldn't have noticed any changes to the blog, because I'm not the sort of person who runs around showing off what riches they have. (And before you ask, no, I'm not rich.) Luckily for me, I live in a state where the identity of major lottery winners can remain private, so there's that at least. I used to joke that the way you'd find out if I won the lottery was not because I bought a new car or something like that, but that I finally got some major repairs done to the house.

Growing up and living in the Midwest has given me a very specific set of values where the ostentatious display of wealth and/or success is frowned upon. Obviously, that Midwestern mindset has declined a bit over the years as pop culture has penetrated even the most remote parts of the country, but at the risk of sounding once again like an Old Man Yelling 'Get Off My Lawn (tm)', I'm a not a fan of the "Oh, look at me!" sort of mentality.

Sure, dress the way you want. I'm fine with that. Hell, I admire people with a fashion sense (such as Kamalia) that I don't have; if you want to see what you can do with fashion in an MMO such as WoW, go read her blog Kamalia et Alia, because she is amazing at what she can pull off. But if you go running around acting "Hey, look at ME!", I'm more likely to grouse along the lines of quite a few old football coaches (I'd heard it said by Paul Brown) by thinking to myself "Act like you've been there before."**

It needs to be said that I'm not immune to that "look at me" mentality. 

Every time someone comments or whispers to me when I'm on Joanofdark about how much they love the name, I get this small flush of pride. Then I frequently tell them that a friend came up with the name and I just ran with it. Okay, I don't have to do that --and I've simply accepted the compliment as-is a lot of times just like above-- but I do feel guilty otherwise. 

***

A lot of multiplayer video games tend to utilize the peer pressure inherent in groups to sell things to their players. Okay, this isn't exactly confined to video games since you see it everywhere, even in what smartphone you use, but since I play video games more often than I use my cell phone*** I see it there more often.

It's just like people showing off their mounts in MMOs:

Although I'd hesitate in calling a giant, floating,
cigar-chomping face a "mount".

And yes, definitely a mount, but I was never
really a fan of their brethren back in Wrath days.
All it takes is one mounted toon standing on top of
a mailbox, blocking your access, for you to understand.

It's not merely a Retail WoW thing, because I've seen people showing off their gear and mounts in all sorts of other MMOs where people congregate. Oh, and there's plenty of MMO pundits out there who love to mention that a big motivation to getting gear is to show it off. (You know who you are, YouTube creators who never read this blog.) To me, that's akin to going out on a date with your spouse or significant other primarily to show off how great a catch they were. Which says a lot more about you and your priorities than it does anything else.

In the end, this is just me grumping a bit about priorities. I can't make people change, and really I shouldn't be able to anyway. I guess it's an acknowledgement that I'm going to do my own thing, other people will do theirs, and that'll be that. 

*That reminds me of an old joke I once heard that goes something like this version I got from the Harvard website: 

A deeply religious man, whom I will call Dave, finds himself in dire financial trouble. He prays earnestly to his God to help him out of his predicament. "God, I'm about to lose my car. Please help me. Let me win the lottery." Lottery night comes, but sadly, Dave is not the winner.

Things go from bad to worse. Without a car to get to work, Dave loses his job. Without a job, his mortgage is foreclosed on, and he loses his home. Without a home, his wife leaves him, taking the kids. After each horrible step in the mounting crisis, he pleads with God to let him win the lottery, but he never does.

Finally, broke, hungry, living on the street, he tries again. "God, please, my life is a wreck. I have no car, no home, no family. Please let me win the lottery just this once so that I can turn my life around. I beseech you."

Suddenly, a flash of light rends the sky, and the voice of God echoes down from the heavens. "Dave, meet me halfway. Buy a ticket." 

**The late North Carolina University head basketball coach Dean Smith built a culture that emphasized teamwork. After one of his players would score, that player would turn and point to his teammate who passed him the ball. It was a visual acknowledgement that the basket was a team effort, not simply an individual one.  

***No, I don't play games on my phone. To me, my phone represents the 24x7 on-call nature of my work, and I try to use it as little as possible. However, my kids are far more used to utilizing their phones for keeping in contact than I am, so I've grown used to smartphones in my life more than I'd like. Although I primarily use a smartphone to listen to music and/or podcasts when I can't have access to my stereo or PC.

Meme Monday: Board Game Memes

Yes, I know, board games are a pretty broad category. Still, I've got enough memes that I figured I might as well put them in one Meme Monday.

There have been times when I've discovered
that simply doing things randomly throw other players
off their game. From that social media site that whats-his-face owns.

I'd like to have the one on the left, but frequently
things deteriorate into the one on the right.
From that same social media site.

Uh... When you get really into board games as a hobby,
that is SO much a lie. From Instagram.

That's a truism of playing board games. The most
dastardly ones are the "cute" looking ones.
From that social media site again.

Okay, TECHNICALLY it just said "games",
but I saw that and I immediately thought of
Eurogames. From Thunder Dungeon.

We don't have a cat, but... Yeah, I get it.
From Memedroid.

Dead Things in Stormwind

Oh, look at the time!

It's September, and I presume that Naxxramas is coming quickly to the WoW Classic Anniversary servers. People have been raiding AQ40 and AQ20, doing goofy things such as pulling Teremus the Devourer to Stormwind, and in general causing a bit of a ruckus.

One of many little visits to Stormwind by Teremus.

Meanwhile, I'm still plugging along in my own little way.

The listings are as of September 4, 2025.

Getting a chance to melt enemies in Zul'Farrak is good for the soul. My soul, to be clear, not the souls of the trolls we've been fighting in there.

Speaking of pour souls, there's been a dead Tauren floating over the mailbox by the Stormwind bank for several weeks now. Every Patch Tuesday I think that a reboot will fix what has to be a perpetual amount of embarrassment visited upon this Tauren's clan, but he's not vanished yet.

Your eyes do not deceive you. There are two Tauren there.

For a while there were actually TWO dead Tauren there, but the last I checked we're back to one. Things like that demonstrate two things: that the denizens of the Anniversary Servers have a sense of humor, and Blizzard doesn't really devote much in the way of resources to the Classic Era-esque side of the house. If they did devote resources, this dead body would have been cleaned up by now.

I've also been experiencing class quests that I've never seen before, such as the quest chain for the Warlock's robe and offhand weapon.

This is part of the reason why I want to go back eventually and work my way through the other classes I've left behind during this leveling process: I've never seen a lot of these class quests, and it'll be interesting to go through them when you never can experience them in Retail (or Mists Classic) at all.

Well, onward and into Autumn.

EtA: Corrected grammar and reinstated the comment over the third graphic.