It's That Edgelord Thing

Something that's been bothering me about the "new" login screen for Retail are the faces that the Humans make when you select them. 

I honestly have no idea who approved those facial expressions, but compared to the "old" versions those facial expressions tend to be all angry for some reason or another.

For example, here's what Cardwyn looks like in Retail in the login screen:

But here's what she looks like when she's not selected:

Pretty much a normal facial expression.

And if you watch her cast in Retail, that "normal" expression is what you'll get:

Now Linna, on the other hand is not only angry in the selection screen, but also is angry when attacking:

But compared to Classic Era (I used Era because I wanted to quickly attack something near Stormwind without worrying about it dying instantly):

I simply don't get it. Why have your toons look all pissed off? Because Blizz wanted them to look edgy or something?

I mean, have they seen what Goldshire looks like on Moon Guard-US?

It's kind of hard to look edgy when you've got mounts and gear and whatnot like that around, and I'd bet that's what it's like (only 10x more so) at the endgame watering holes.

I just look at it as a pure miss on Blizzard's design part, changing how players look for no really good reason, especially when, say, the Blood Elves look much more pleasant:

It could be an Alliance vs. Horde thing, since Kaldorei look similar to Humans in the anger department:

As for me, I think I prefer the non-committal version found in Classic WoW. They're not as emotive as teenagers, and I prefer my MMO toons to look more adult and mature in nature. 

#Blaugust2025

When Life Hits you in the Head

Well, the news broke a couple of hours ago on Monday that one of my coworkers and acquaintances for a decade or more had passed away. I'd not heard much from him over the past decade or so, but he was always kind of private that way, so I never worried about him or anything.

But I wasn't expecting that I'd hear today that he'd passed away from advanced dementia at the age of 67. 

I never realized he was that much older than me; I always thought he was about 5 years or so older, but...

This is going to take some time to process. 

#Blaugust2025

Gen Con 2025: The Gamer Diaspora

When we first began attending Gen Con, some of the biggest booths were from companies such as Days of Wonder, Catan, Fantasy Flight, and Z-Man. Then, in the mid-2010s, that began to change as Asmodee went and bought up all of the companies listed above using investment firm money, and now all of said firms are but a subsidiary of the Embracer Group.

Yes, the same Embracer Group that has been taking a sledgehammer to the video game industry in its quest to make the quickest dollar. I've discussed this before, but one of the side effects of the Embracer Group ruining the quality of a bunch of popular board game companies is that all of those game designers dispersed into the gaming ecosphere and began putting out their own games under new companies. And other people looked at that vacuum created by Embracer and said "Hey, you know what, I bet I could design something new and cool!"

The net effect is that 2025's Gen Con looked far more diverse than what I'd seen in years.

Of course, you couldn't escape the gravitational pull of
Magic: the Gathering collectors, but that aside...

***

This was also the first Gen Con where most of the family got together to attend since 2015. Our youngest took a pass this year (she is also waist deep in her internship, so life, you know) but everybody else managed to make it to Indianapolis. Our oldest and her partner came down from Milwaukee on Saturday to meet up with friends, visit the Con, and go to Critical Role's live show, while the rest of us assembled early on Sunday and drove up from Cincinnati.

We got in early enough that we beat the crowds.

For the first time in forever, we got in early enough that we had no issues parking. If anything, the cars in front of us had more trouble navigating the digital parking lot system than actually fighting traffic itself. (Yes, we slew the Parking Lot Monster without much trouble.)

I realize that the Indianapolis Convention Center has big screens around by design, but I still am surprised by them when I see them in the main entrance:

Even if they're owned by Gen Con LLC, they're still quite impressive. They cycle with different games and other information every 10-15 seconds or so.

Once everybody arrived and the Exhibit Hall opened, we dispersed into the crowd. The idea was to loop back at noon and head out for lunch, so we had a bit less than 2 hours to wander the hall.

A few things stood out to me the moment I walked inside. The crowd was denser on this Sunday than they had been in the recent past --it felt more like a Saturday's crowd-- and that while some stalwarts still held court...

It was likely my son was in there somewhere.

There were a lot of newer booths in the crowd. Such as the invasion of the V-tubers:

And Brandon Sanderson made his presence felt:

One of the many displays around.

I've no idea if Brandon was here --and I just checked and it doesn't appear that he was-- but the Author Guest of Honor was Ohioan and frequenter of my local bookstore, John Scalzi, so if I'd have actually attended on Saturday I might have seen him out and about.

Okay, that's a very cagey "might" there, because I was aware of some RPG content creators who were there*, but damned if I ran into any of them while I fought my way through the crowds. Now, that's not quite fair, since Margaret Weis held court in her usual location in the middle of the Exhibit Hall, and I did briefly see Ed Greenwood at one of the booths over in the far left hand side of the Exhibit Hall --you can't miss that beard of his-- next to the... wait for it... MIT Press booth.

Yes, you read that right.

MIT Press had a booth there at the con, because they print Jon Peterson's Playing at the World 2E, a newer edition of Jon's original self-published work. My son and I got a chance to talk to the guy at the booth, and while they don't print games themselves, he was surprised to discover that there was a lot of interest in MIT Press' catalog of books at the con. (Oh, and Jon's book sold out.) He and I discussed another surprise con vendor, Central Michigan University, who actually do publish board games through their academic press. If you played the journaling RPG Five Hundred Year Old Vampire, then you ought to know that a multi-player version has been released as a CMU published game.

Anyway, we reconvened at noon with me texting out "Avengers Assemble" to the group chat when the time came, and we grabbed lunch at the nearby Old Spaghetti Factory. We didn't go to the nearby mall, because it appears the mall is being/has been sold to a development company and is shutting down. So... no more food court, I suppose. We got a chance to catch up over the hour plus we spent at OSF, and it was a pleasant way to geek out over things we saw at the Exhibit Hall.

There was someone selling "smelly dice" there at the con, for example.

"Want to smell my dice?" my oldest asked with a savage grin.

Uh, what?

She got the one named "Cemetery Soil", which smells like moss, although to me it smelled like allergies: pleasant but full of earthy overtones.

I tried to link to the pic from Studio Woe, but
it wouldn't take. So here it is.

My son has gone far enough down the rabbit hole of Warhammer 40K that he picked up an Eldar t-shirt. "Space Elves", I translated for my wife. 

Speaking of my wife, she discovered this game that is going up on Kickstarter soon, called Mystic Curling Club, which looks a bit like Sorry Sliders but with using dice:

I'd have gotten a pick of some people using it next to this
display, but I figured this photo would be enough.

My nephew is really into owls, and my wife also found a 100 piece puzzle this is about owl anatomy, or "owl-atomy"...

I mentioned the 4 person chess set that I discovered, and my son's partner just kind of gave me the "Okay, NOW I'm interested" look about it:

I looked and that and thought,
"My brain would hurt keeping track of that."

When we returned from lunch, I made sure to get a few extra photos...

The obligatory front view of the entrance.

For the record, not a Pandaren.

Gotta respect the classics...
Dungeon Crawl Classics, that is.

This was also the 50th anniversary of Chaosium, the creators of Call of Cthulhu, Runequest/Glorantha, and Pendragon. There were several glass displays out in the hallways celebrating the company's 50 years in business:

There was another display for Chaosium in general,
but it was taken down close to closing time on Sunday.
Given all of the rare items on display, I can totally 
understand why they made it a priority to make sure
the items were safe.

There's also the obligatory Dwarven Forge display pic:

That chimney in the bottom left was actually smoking.
And this year I actually signed up for their mailing list.

I told my wife the surest sign that we won the lottery is that I started buying Dwarven Forge items.

And oh yeah, here's the obligatory "gamer table" pic, although I could have chosen one of several companies to display:

Okay, they're two photos because I couldn't fit the entire thing into one pic, but you get the idea. The DM screen is wooden, like everything else, and it just screams luxury. And ambience. And "I'm an AI developer with money to spare."

At 3:30, we assembled, said our goodbyes to the family, and headed for home.

***

I really feel like what we're seeing in this Gen Con is the impact of Embracer's attempt to dominate the board game and RPG industry. As Princess Leia said in the original Star Wars...

From memegenerator and Reddit. (And Star Wars.)

That's what's happening in the industry right now. As people tried to dominate the industry by buying up all of the companies and intellectual property, developers have gone independent (by choice or layoff) and their separate companies are now bringing games to Gen Con. The ability of people to utilize better design and build techniques at home enable them to bring far more polished prototypes to places like Gen Con to generate interest. Crowdfunding enables small groups and companies to generate capital without relying upon venture capital firms who have proven to only have short term goals at heart.

There were a lot of people interested in supporting new designs and games, as well as a lot of people flocking to the Artists' Alley and Authors' Alley areas; it was so thick there I couldn't make it through and kind of gave up. Still, despite my disappointment, it shows that art in its various forms is still generating interest.

This atmosphere lent an air of a trade show to the con, something that you'd have seen in Origins in years past. 

And before you ask, there was an unsaid amount of concern about tariffs there, but given that nobody at the con had the least bit of control over said tariffs, it just kind of was just there as a dampening effect.

***

As for me, I didn't buy anything this year. A good part of that is due to finances: I'd already committed to Gen Con before some of our major car repair bills made their appearance, and I had a hard time buying anything with all of THAT hovering over my head like the Sword of Damocles. 

But even more than that, I wasn't feeling well. 

I believe I've mentioned before that on average of twice a month my digestive system reacts to my medications and kicks me in the ass for a day or two. Well, Sunday was one of those days. The moment I woke up I felt something was off, and sure enough before I could even eat and shower I began feeling like crap. Still, I soldiered on, hoping that the bout would pass and then I could get back on with enjoying things. That didn't exactly happen, but I concealed my issues as best I could** and tried to enjoy things at Gen Con. The crowd was energetic, people weren't assholes (not too much, anyway), and ordinarily I'd have had the time of my life. For this introvert, that's saying a lot. But I just couldn't get into the groove, and I decided to take some time off and stroll about the hallways to recharge my batteries.

There was still a large crowd out in the hallway
where the balloon sculpture was.

Here's a closeup of said sculpture, complete with
a sea monster attacking a ship.

The walk helped me feel a bit less stressed, but I just had to grit out my health issues for the rest of the day.

All in all, it was an okay Gen Con for 2025. On the plus side, most of the family was able to get together, and we enjoyed each other's company. On the minus side, health issues. But aside from that, it felt good to be away for a day. 

*Hi, Professor DM! Sorry I didn't run into you. I did keep an eye out, however.

**Apparently I did it well enough that when I finally got over this late Monday, my wife was surprised that I was feeling ill any part of Sunday.

#Blaugust2025

Meme Monday: Gen Con 2025 Memes

Again, I'm setting this up early because I'll be wiped out on Sunday and I'll be back to work early on Monday. Not a gigantic surprise, I suppose, but that doesn't stop the memes from coming.

It is Gen Con, after all...

People at BoardGameGeek got in on the act.
From bgg.com.

"How about wood for sheep?"
The Gen Con Instagram account was killing it
the past few weeks, although this originally came
from Imgflip.

If you've been to a convention of any sort
you've seen people not that into the con with
this expression. I could have used this
for the Dayton Hamvention or San Diego Comic Con
and nobody would have batted an eye.
From Gen Con's Instagram account (and The White Lotus).

I'm typically a very good boy, budget-wise.
I can still laugh at this one, however.
From Rollacrit's Instagram.

And finally, in case you never experienced it in your regular campaign before, you just might find this one in a one-shot RPG at a con such as Gen Con....

I've been there. Oh, I've SO been there.
From Gen Con's Facebook page.

#Blaugust2025

Dodging Potholes in Indiana (Again)

By the time you read this, we'll be on the road up I-74 toward Indianapolis and GenCon Indy 2025.

Yes, it was just announced that it's sold out.
From Gen Con's website.

Before you ask, no, my yellowjacket stings are not going to keep me from going. They're an itchy annoyance on Saturday, but still no swelling.

My oldest and her partner will already be there by the time we arrive, as they came down on Saturday. They were invited to go see Critical Role live during Gen Con, and that was a no brainer for them.

Even if you can't make it, celebrate gaming by just going and playing a game this weekend. It doesn't matter if it's a boardgame, a tabletop RPG, a card game, or a video game, just go play something and enjoy yourself.

Oh look! It's a little Genevieve!!
From Gen Con's Instagram account.

I'll provide a full report... probably Tuesday? Maybe Wednesday? Well, one of those two days...

#Blaugust2025

Well, This Stings

Well, my home life took a bit of a turn yesterday.

Friday is trash day in our neighborhood, and last morning I figured I'd gather some extra yard waste since the trash truck hadn't arrived yet. So, I marched over to where some weedy shrubs were trying to outcompete the evergreen shrubs that already were there, and I began using a saw to cut them down. 

About 5 minutes into this work, I felt a brief stab of pain on my ankle, like a sticker bush poked me.

I looked down, and no, it wasn't a sticker bush, but a bee.

I grumbled and shooed it away, then I got stung on my knee.

"What the hell is going on?" I groused as I looked around. It was then that I saw it: bees were flooding out of a small hole in the ground next to me, very upset that I'd decided to maintain my yard right there.

At that point, I did what any rational person would do: I fled.

(With saw in tow.)

I ended up getting stung a third time, on my freaking armpit, before I could evacuate to safety. I checked for bee stingers, but found none. Therefore, these were likely yellowjackets and not bees, but still the stings certainly hurt like hell at first.

Yeah, that's the culprit.
From The Pest Detective Ohio's FAQ on wasps.
as of August 2nd, 2025.

On the bright side, I'm apparently not allergic to these stings, because at the moment (some 15 hours later) I have some pain but almost no swelling at all. So I likely dodged the worst of it.

Still, I have to deal with a surprise hornets' nest right next to my house. Luckily they decided to not bother me while I cut the grass nearby over lunch, but I will have to do something about this in the long run. I kind of have to maintain that part of the yard, and simply waiting until winter to clear out weeds and whatnot isn't much of an option. Given also that they're pollinators and despite the attack on me pollinators are really needed, I'm going to have to figure out a solution in the long run. Maybe I'll talk to my barber, who is also a beekeeper among his other hobbies. (Such as being a drummer in a punk band.)

#Blaugust2025

Looking Across the Way

Something I've been increasingly curious about is a certain game that I was originally familiar with by the spam that Parallel Context would get when I checked the blog's email:

From Steam.

I'm not going to dissemble here, but all that spam initially turned me away from ever wanting to consider playing Old School RuneScape. So that I'm now actively considering checking out OSRS just to see what's up, I'm either deep down the rabbit hole of Stockholm Syndrome or maybe I've come around to wondering if the OSRS method of horizontal progression is what WoW Classic+ ought to be.

Knowing how I work, I never do things on impulse, so it's not like I'm going to drop everything and try out OSRS in the next month, but MadSeasonShow's video that dropped yesterday about the differences between WoW Classic/Season of Discovery and OSRS got me thinking about this very thing.

Don't get me wrong; the graphics are something I'd have written in the 1980s, and if you thought that Vanilla WoW had some clunkiness, OSRS makes Vanilla WoW look like the latest Call of Duty game. 

No naked elves dancing atop the Stormwind Fountain.
From Runescape.com.

The graphics don't bother me that much, but the gameplay might. We'll see, when I go try it out. (Probably 2026, knowing me.)

#Blaugust2025

EtA: It's 2025, not 2026.

Meme Monday: 80s Metal Memes

Yes, I was inspired by Ozzy's death.

And so were other people. Such as the
person who posted this to Facebook's 
Metal Memes group.

So it only makes sense that I'd have this Meme Monday for 80s metal memes. Which also means a lot of hair metal, but that's okay. I'm pretty sure I'll survive.

And for the record, what makes this so funny
is that Twisted Sister used to get dressed up in
lingerie for shows. From memes.com.

This is true. My first Iron Maiden album
was Somewhere in Time, which included
the song Alexander the Great. 
From Facebook's Heavy Metal Memes group.

At the crossroads of He-Man and Heavy Metal...
From Cheezburger.

One can only hope, but there's also going to be
people complaining that they're not playing Garth
Brooks and Alabama.
From Facebook's Classic Rock Videos group.

Ah yes, Cinderella. The music was good, but
the voice of the lead singer sounded like eating
ground glass. Very distinctive, tho. From funnywallphotos.com.

And finally, we have this weird juxtaposition
of Ronnie James Dio (lead singer of Rainbow)
and Rob Halford of Judas Priest (who is gay).
Unlike some other musicians, both Rob and
Ronnie got along and respected each other
(Rob sang on Dio's tribute album), so this was
just done for effect. From Pinterest.

Fading Away

This week, a significant portion of my youth passed away.

First, the news broke a couple of days ago that Ozzy Osbourne passed away, a few weeks after the Black Sabbath Farewell Concert. While it wouldn't shock me if he decided euthanasia was the best answer to his struggles, it could also have been due to complications from Parkinson's Disease. Ozzy's death reminds me a bit of Freddie Mercury's passing, who died a day after he publicly announced he had HIV. In both cases, I suspect they both knew it was time.

Unlike many of my contemporaries, I began listening to Ozzy midway through high school. Given that my parents were very strict about what music I could and couldn't listen to, I had to get around that by copying acquaintances' cassettes of heavy metal bands. That way, my parents couldn't really see what I was listening to, and once I got a car --and a cassette deck in said car-- I did most of my listening while driving or on my boom box while working after school or over the summer as a janitor. Bands such as Twisted Sister, Motley Crue, Scorpions, and Autograph found space on my Maxell and TDK blanks, but the second heavy metal album I copied* was Ozzy's Blizzard of Oz. It may have been a copy of a copy, since the sound quality wasn't very good, but at least I had it.

I couldn't find the cassette with Blizzard of Oz on it,
but I could find these.

It took my going away to college --and away from the prying eyes of my parents-- for me to more fully embrace music found on "Satanic" lists by Evangelical preachers.

The funny thing is that since I began listening to heavy metal midway through the 1980s, I came to Ozzy first through his solo career. To me, Black Sabbath was this band from the past that wasn't really relevant today. This was hammered home by my encounter with graffiti I had to clean off of a chair in my high school (I was a janitor, remember?) that said "Black Sabbath Rules The World". A couple of coworkers happened to wander by, snorted, and one of them said derisively, "They need to put an album out first!"

"First an album, next the world!" the other quipped.

It was only much later, in the 1990s, when I began listening to Black Sabbath and realizing that hey, they weren't half bad after all.

Still, Ozzy had penetrated into the national consciousness through the Satanic Panic. I didn't put any credence in all of the claims --I played RPGs and wasn't about to sacrifice small animals to Satan, after all-- but plenty of people did.** 

Ozzy even found himself in the then popular comic strip Bloom County:

From the 1987 compilation book "Billy and the
Boingers Bootleg", Page 80, by Berke Breathed.

From the 1987 compilation book "Billy and the
Boingers Bootleg", Page 81, by Berke Breathed.

Yes, I was a Bloom County fan, and yes, I had all of the compilation books.

Here's the proof. I still have the floppy
record that came with the book.

In case you wondered what the songs sound like, here's one of them (courtesy of YouTube):

Over the years, my interest in heavy metal waned, but I still have a soft spot for heavy metal from the 70s and 80s and what it meant to my own personal declaration of independence as an adult. While the Bloom County cartoons played up for amusement the concept that Ozzy was just a "regular guy" playing around with heavy metal, the reality that came out decades later was that he pretty much was just a regular guy after all and his Ozzy persona was just an act. 

***

Yesterday, the news broke that Hulk Hogan had also passed away, and with that another chunk of my youth vanished. 

I wasn't that much of a World Wrestling Federation fan, as I used to watch the rival organization World Championship Wrestling (the home of Dusty Rhodes and "Nature Boy" Ric Flair), but you couldn't not be aware of WWF and it's biggest star, Hulk Hogan. Among the WWF pantheon, I cheered more for Andre the Giant than Hulk, but Hulk was the face of the WWF. There's no denying that.

This was at the end of Andre's career,
when he "turned bad" and wrestled against
Hulk in 1987. From The Detroit News.

To be clear, I wasn't one of the pro wrestling fans around school who were so far down the rabbit hole that they subscribed to one of several wrestling magazines, but I was enough of a fan that I could at least hold my own with those hardcore fans. The fans fell into two camps: those who loved Hulk and those who hated him. Most people loved him, but there were a few contrarians who preferred Hulk's enemies (such as Rowdy Roddy Piper) instead. 

But that Golden Era of wrestling is fading from memory. Hulk is just the latest to pass away, as Dusty Rhodes, Andre the Giant, Randy Savage, Rowdy Roddy Piper, George "The Animal" Steele, and The Iron Sheik are all gone.

***

Finally, overshadowed by Hulk Hogan's passing, was also the passing of Chuck Mangione. You know, the "Feels So Good" guy.

This is the full version. The radio edit/singles

version can be found here.

If you're of the right age, you couldn't avoid Feels So Good. It was all over the radio, and it helped to drive the Soft Rock radio format to greater heights. The irony was that while I heard it on radio all the time --my parents listened to Soft Rock, after all-- my biggest memory of Feels So Good tied into our first color television set. 

That first Saturday we had the Sears color television around the house, I woke up and went downstairs to turn on the TV. It was pretty early in the day and before the Saturday Morning Cartoons came on, so I flipped to one of the independent or PBS stations (I can't remember which) and suddenly there was a video of the sun rising on my screen with Feels So Good playing as an accompaniment. Being one of the first color TV images I ever saw at home, that moment was etched indelibly in my mind. 

Over the years I grew to appreciate Chuck's jazz output and his loyalty to his hometown of Rochester and the Eastman School of Music, of whom he was an alum and an instructor. I learned much later that Chuck was also an alum of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, of whom he played alongside Keith Jarrett. 

***

All three of them had left an indelible imprint on my youth. Maybe it wasn't the three themselves that I remember most, but what they represented: rebellion, guilty pleasures, and the music my parents listened to. Still, it feels weird to be reminded of my past only when that past is permanently lost to us. 

In an ironic twist, at times like these I'm reminded of this little segment from George Carlin. George's stand-up comedy hasn't always aged very well, but in this case it actually has. The entire video is worth watching, but I highlighted this one specific bit at the 4:55 mark:

Note to self: Google doesn't like it if I try to embed

YouTube videos at a specific time marker.

*The first was Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry. Yes, really.

**And still do today, just to be clear about it. If people give them half a chance, these devout folks would attempt to eradicate "satanic" music and books once more. After all, look at all the attempts to ban books and media today. Cancel Culture is not simply a thing on the political left.