The other day I received a request via email to fill out a survey for Blizzard.
From the email I received.
I figured, sure, why not, so I logged into the survey website* and pulled up the survey to fill out.
The first question, about whether I played World of Warcraft, elicited a "does a duck like water?" response from me. I was in the process of clicking "yes" when the brief thought of "what if they meant Retail as opposed to Classic?" crossed my mind, but I ignored it and finished clicking. After all, I had actually logged into Retail on Tuesday or so to check out something from Neve**, so I could truthfully say that I had "played" Retail.
I should have listened to my inner voice, since the next question made it plain they were talking about Retail WoW: it was a query about what I thought of The War Within. (And going back later to take that screencap above confirmed that yes, it was about The War Within and I completely missed that.)
Well, I thought, I'd just select the "Does Not Apply" or "No Opinion", and...
There wasn't an option for either of those responses. Just a number scale.
I wasn't going to be one of those people who assign terrible responses just because I don't play the current expac, so I just selected the "Mediocre" responses and kept going.
More and more numerical rating questions came at me, all about aspects of The War Within. Although at one point the questions turned to the various types of activities I could participate with in-game and I truthfully answered "No" to all of them. Then, for some reason, the survey believed I was a PvP-er and gave me a bunch of those questions too.
It wasn't until questions finally surfaced about the latest patch (Undermined) --and what patches The War Within I have played before-- did I finally have the option to select "Did Not Play" or an equivalent.
Then I received an open ended question about repeat activities in Retail and what would encourage me to participate in those activities, and I finally got the chance to explain a few things. Yes, I wrote, I play WoW, but I'm primarily a WoW Classic player. If I play Retail, it's usually just to login and putz around a bit. I'm not interested in repeat activities because I hate it when a game becomes a job. I learned this in TBC Classic, when due to external pressure Dailies turned the game into job, and I play WoW to have fun, not because I don't have enough work in my life.
I also got an open ended question about what to change about the experience that could be improved, and I certainly had an answer to that one given that I did just run the gauntlet of crap you have to work though when you come back after being away for months (or years). I suggested a button you could click on the Warband login screen where you can prevent all of the login pop-ups from happening. If all you want to do is login and explore, having to get rid of "do this" and "do that" is annoying and makes me want to logout and do something else.
After submitting that last response, I got a "I'm sorry, it seems you're not the primary person for this survey."
"I could have told you that," I grumbled.
The survey then ended abruptly, and that was that.
***
If there's one thing that Blizzard seems to have trouble with, it's the concept that someone might play WoW but not the current Retail expansion.
That was pretty obvious by the lack of options to simply respond with "Did Not Play" or "Not Applicable" or "No Opinion". You'd also have thought that the option of saying "Do you mean Classic or Retail WoW?" at the beginning would have provided a proper clarification to the survey, but they didn't. So either they were lazy or they didn't consider it to be a real option. I'd like to think it's the former, but it's most likely the latter. People who design surveys ought to be able to provide sufficient clarifying questions to weed out people earlier than at the end of the survey.
This leads into another another issue that the survey highlighted is that Blizz isn't sure what to do with people who play Retail WoW in a non-standard way. Sure, those people play Retail WoW and likely even own the current expansion, but they don't actually "play the game". When people say that, what they really mean is "play the game properly" or "play the game as-intended".*** Blizz can't seem to break out of that trap themselves, despite them harping on how important the world itself is to the game. From what I saw, the focus of the survey wasn't what worked and what didn't (despite the email), but "How do we get you to try all of the things? Is it you don't know where to go? Do you need reminders? Do we need to make it easier to get to the repeatable activities? Can we improve the UI so that it's easier to do all the things?"
The final issue I see Blizzard having trouble with is that they're stuck in Diablo-style tunnel vision: quickly get to the end, then do repeatable things. Whether you call them "repeatable activities" or "dailies" or "world quests" doesn't change the result: all Blizz seems to know what to do is to create things you do in WoW over and over and over. And Raids/Mythic+. That's partly a player driven issue, because the player base expects it. Hell, I look at the number of times my Questing Buddy or I have gone into instances, hoping for that elusive gear drop --over the course of a single day-- and I realize that we are part of the problem too.
But could you imagine a World of Warcraft expac leveling experience that takes 100 hours to complete? Or more? I'm pretty sure the collective heads of the player base would explode, because as a whole they're not interested in a deep immersive experience, but different types of speed running to get to the various forms of endgame as quickly as possible.
Here's the thing: my first experience leveling in WoW took me well over 150 hours to go from L1 through L80 back in Wrath of the Lich King as (mostly) a Holy Paladin. And I loved it. That long journey shaped my opinions of MMOs, fair or not, and it impacts what I've done since. I've found I prefer the long game, with self-directed play exploring the nooks and crannies of the world, rather than playing optimally. It's kind of sad that even the development staff simply don't appreciate that aspect of their own game.
*After having had friends recently get hacked and one of my own cards end up on a dark web site, I've decided to be more cautious about email than I usually am and skipped clicking on links like this. I've found that if companies want me to fill out info, I can go to their website independently and find it there.
**I can't remember what it was, honestly. It wasn't anything she had in her bank or gear, that's for certain, but it might have been something like what quests she still had in her Quest Log. Whatever it was, the results weren't interesting enough for me to follow up with a post on it. (Yet.)
***What I've found over the years is that the quickest way to get a person to show their biases in WoW is that when they ask what I do, I tell them "Not much; I just goof off for the most part. Don't raid, don't PvP, don't RP, don't bother with the quests or story." There are people who say "Hey, good for you! Have fun!" But then there are a subset of people who simply can't fathom that and try to get me to do different things. "Hey, let's go do this! Let's do that! You HAVE to try this other thing!" And I've seen more than my share of YouTubers talk up the vast number of things to do in WoW, but when the rubber hits the road they're all about the Endgame in it's various forms (I include alts as an Endgame activity).
Okay, it's been a few months, so why not? My backlog pile won't go down without it...
I used to chuckle at this, remembering what it was like when someone disconnected in an instance run. Then I began playing hardcore mode, and the terror began... From iFunny.co.
I agree, there's a lot of truth here. From Mememonkey.
Speaking of truth... From ifunny.co.
Okay, I laughed at this one. From The Oatmeal, when he's not designing another Exploding Kittens game.
Back in my day, Paladins were Lawful Good, and they were damn impossible to get the stats for, too! From Memegenerator.
I occasionally go back through some of my old posts when one of them unexpectedly makes an appearance on my analytics, and inevitably those posts have some issues. Yes, I'm not very fond of my writing in old posts --if you ever have flashbacks to really stupid mistakes you did in the past, that's what it's like-- but for a change I'm not talking about that.
It's this:
Apparently the Snipping tool that replaced the old Snip and Sketch in Windows 11 kind of sucks. From a PC post on January 17, 2016.
What you're not seeing is a graphic that I linked to rather than made a local copy and uploaded.
I realize that the internet can be a fluid thing, and since storage space costs money, old graphics have a habit of getting deleted. Of course, that's only one issue with graphics or videos disappearing: there are people who die, people who try to hide past involvement, lawsuits, etc.
The point is that the internet is fluid, and you can't necessarily rely something to be there in the future.
That's why I began several years ago simply downloading graphics and then uploading them with a reference, rather that simply linking to them. It's kind of sad that I can't rely upon a link going forward and instead using low-key piracy for references, but when things are made to be temporary the concept of permanence is a foreign idea.
***
That does bring up the question as to what will happen to all of that digital data I've accumulated when I die.
I'd like this blog to remain in place as a record. That's not strictly an egotistical thing, but rather as a reference to the era PC was created. Over the years I've seen blogs die and get removed, such as Righteous Orbs, and I'd hate for PC to join them.
I discovered that they weren't getting any recent data out of PC because I'd moved us to HTTPS from HTTP, and it took a little bit of back and forth with the Web Collection Librarian for the Ivy Plus Confederation before the crawls began working once more.* It's nice to have an independent backup going on, but I'm always concerned that politics and whatnot will interfere with the storage of this data in the long term. I used to think we'd learned the lessons of the past regarding data storage, but apparently not.
I guess I ought to look into another solution going forward, one that won't vanish at the whim of someone I've never met.
*If your blog is listed in there --don't rely upon the blog name but instead search for a title-- you might want to see if the data is being accurately captured.
One of the nice things about going to a bookstore is that you might walk in on an event and be instantly enthralled.
That happened on Tuesday, as my wife went down to Louisville to visit with her aged parents* and to watch a concert our youngest played in. If I left after work I might have been able to make it if I didn't have traffic and I didn't get pulled over for speeding, but I figured I'd better not risk it.** Since my wife was spending the night down there I decided to visit the bookstore.
The moment I walked through the doors I knew something was up; a huge crowd had assembled to my right with a speaker at the podium.
"What's going on?" I asked one of the booksellers.
"It's an author signing."
Then I noticed the big poster next to the author:
From Joseph-Beth's Facebook page (and Hanif Abdurraqib).
I'd heard about that book before, but I couldn't exactly remember where. "Oh!" I exclaimed. "The basketball guy."
"Yeah, the basketball guy," the bookseller confirmed. "Go over and listen!"
If on the surface the book was about basketball, considering it was broken into sections about pre-game, the various quarters, time outs, and whatnot, the book was not strictly about basketball itself. It was more a set of essays about life and family and friendship, mixed in with poetry.
But hearing Hanif speak, and listening to him read sections of the book... Holy crap, can that man write.
It was an otherworldly experience when Hanif read, whether it was opining on when he thought Michael Jordan was at his coolest --the 1985 slam dunk contest-- or relating the story when a friend of his asked him to cut her hair off. However, what charmed me the most was when he was simply discussing things with the audience, about how the first line of this book came to him in a "Boogie Nights"-esque way, or how he'd read Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron in his youth.
"Wow, he's amazing," I said to another bookseller, who was standing nearby, also listening.
"Yeah, he's good," he replied.
"Yeah, if I had only a quarter of his talent... Just, wow."
The bookseller told me they were really pleased with the turnout, and given that Hanif's book tour was only to a handful of locations --Ann Arbor, Michigan, was next-- I think that Hanif knew his audience.
Hanif also had high praise for his editor, and he hammered home how vital he believed editors were to the creative process. I can't remember the last time I heard an author at a signing give so much praise to their editor in an unprompted manner, and it felt so refreshing for Hanif to give some love to that often overlooked person in publishing.
It was a ticketed event, so I'd have had to have bought a ticket --which included a copy of the book-- for him to sign, but that's fine. I can go back another time and grab a copy of the book. In the meantime, I picked up another one of his books, a collection of essays on music and pop culture, to tide me over.
***
Speaking of things to tide me over...
I asked my questing buddy, a voracious reader in her own right, what I ought to be looking out for.
"'When the Moon Hatched,' by Sarah Parker," she replied. She'd apparently had her eye on it for quite a while.
Although part of the store was taken up by the event with Hanif, I managed to find it in the SF&F section.
There were quite a few copies there, which is a pretty good sign.
"It's pretty thick," I told her later.
"How many pages is it?" she asked.
I thumbed through the book to the end. "690 pages."
"OOOO...."
*They're both in their 90s and are still kicking.
**I much prefer the weekend concerts, which I can make more easily. That being said, my time away from home the past couple of weeks kept me from taking the afternoon off to go on down as well. Even then, I would have had to come back that evening because my wife was intent on staying the night anyway. Luckily, my wife informed me that I'd already heard the music they played at a previous concert I attended.
It's been 4 months since the WoW Classic Anniversary servers opened, and here's where Operation Spread the Love stands right now:
The toon levels as of March 25, 2025. Shaluna was the name I assigned to my Druid on Classic Era. (Oops.) She's also the first toon to ever wear that Corsair's Overshirt (above) that drops from Edwin Van Cleef in The Deadmines.
I'm probably a week away from having at least one toon at L30, and that depends upon getting a toon or two into Blackfathom Deeps. Both the Paladin and Warlock have class quests that involve a visit to Blackfathom Deeps, so they're likely to go. Other toons I don't intend to take into instances much due to the expectations that they'll be healing (Shaluna) or tanking (Taldanifal). I can handle pugging dungeons as DPS, but healing and tanking bring along extra expectations that I would rather not meet.
As it is, I spend a lot of my time running back and forth between the Wetlands, Duskwood, and Ashenvale, with the occasional side trip to Stonetalon Mountains along the way.
People who played Classic back in 2019 will tell you that Stonetalon Mountains is typically one of the emptiest zones in the Old World. It takes a bit of time to get there, and the Alliance flight point is stuck at the top of Stonetalon Peak itself, so it's far out of the way for any questing in the zone itself. That zone also has some of the first "go see people on the other side of the world" quests to perform, and consequently a lot of people simply skip it entirely. Cardwyn used to visit Stonetalon because it was so empty, so she could farm Light Feathers off of the harpies there without bothering anybody.
Except the harpies.
Well, dip me in molasses, cover me in feathers, and call me a chicken, but on the Anniversary servers Stonetalon was incredibly busy every time I've set foot in the place.
I've never had to fight for mobs there in the past, not even in 2019, so this is a new experience for me. Here we are, 4 months into the 20th Anniversary servers, and new toons are still out there, questing in Stonetalon.
My questing buddy suggested they were part of the 4th or 5th wave of toons coming up, and she's likely not wrong. I put some of the toons I've encountered in Deadmines on my Friends List, and they're now at either max level or are in the L50s. So if those players go and make (another) alt, they'll likely lap me another time or two while I'm leveling.
***
I have begun going back to Classic Era a bit lately.
This past weekend was Alterac Valley weekend, and when the 20th Anniversary servers first opened you couldn't find a single AV battleground up and running on Classic Era, even on AV Weekend. This weekend I finally saw some good signs that players have returned, because about 3-4 AV battles were going the entire weekend.
It felt weird to be back in a battleground after months of being away, but after a day or so I got out of my awkwardness and settled into the organized chaos that is a WoW battleground. I suspect that some players, having gotten to max level on the 20th Anniversary servers, are now raid logging over there and are coming back to Classic Era to play in the interim. I don't have any evidence of that, of course, but given that the Blackwing Lair raid just opened on the 20th Anniversary servers I suspect people are focusing on raids there and then returning to Era for everything else.
I think I might stay on Classic Era more as my leveling slows down, because it provides me some variety over what I've got on the so-called Classic Fresh servers. I don't mean in terms of class breadth, because I've got 8 toons of various classes I'm leveling at once on those Anniversary servers, but in terms of being satisfied where I'm at. On Classic Era I have two max level Mages and one max level Rogue, and I just have no real desire to level another toon there. I've taken OG Cardwyn through Naxx and she has the full T3 set to prove it, so I don't really have any desire to go to a raid team and do regular raiding. I suppose if somebody offered me a shot at an Atiesh that'd be nice, but I have no desire to "jump the line" and bypass a bunch of people that have been raiding in an established raid team to get it. (Plus I think the staff looks ugly. Big turn-off, if you ask me.)
I still think it looks like a sulphur ball attached to a stick. Gandalf's staff, this ain't. From Wowhead.
***
As far as how other people are doing on the Classic Fresh/20th Anniversary servers, my questing buddy discovered AoE leveling in Zul'Farrak and got a second toon, a Mage, to max level last week. I knew she was going to get a second toon to max level, yet despite her insistence that she was not going to speed level a second toon after her experience with her Druid, she still did it anyway. She claims she's not going to do that again with a third toon, but stay tuned.
I told her I should start a betting pool on how quickly she levels a third toon.
Let's see...
One of our group stopped logging in, but that was to be expected as he got kicked from the guild he was in for being an asshat in chat even after he'd been warned. I should have had a betting pool going for that, because he was that sort of player who was guaranteed to get gkicked at some point.
Someone who shall remain nameless once asked me how I stood for that player's behavior.
"I don't," I replied shortly. "I don't encourage it and I don't defend him. Sometimes people need to feel the consequences of their actions."
Others in our group have made it to L60, and still others are far enough ahead of me that they'll get to max level soon.
***
With the roadmap for these Fresh servers having bumped the opening of the Dark Portal to early 2025, I've got even more time to get to max level than I thought. My suspicion is that a two month window for raiding Naxx is likely too short for most players --I know it would be for me-- so Blizz is likely extending that phase by a couple of months.
I've been starting to think what I intend to do when TBC drops and the Dark Portal opens.
While it'd be nice to actually experience the expansion without rushing through, as I'd originally intended, I'm not sure what everybody else is going to do. The optimal strategy for leveling in TBC Classic was to chain-run instances until you got to max level, then start questing, so it might be that the actual zones might not be crowded at all. If they are crowded, however, I could just default back to the Blood Elf toons I intend to create and roll with them for a while. And maybe a Draenei too.
That being said, do I want to raid?
Maybe? I do want to see Kael'Thas die so I can have some closure from my time as a raid lead in 2021-2022, but my entire TBC experience has been as an Enhancement Shaman, so doing this as a Mage would be somewhat different. Most raid teams will only take 2-3 Mages at most because that's the optimal configuration, so I might once again be faced with the choice of either playing a Shaman in a raid or simply not raiding beyond the occasional Karazhan run.
And I don't want to be part of a raid where I'm carried, either. I'd rather eat ground glass.
Yummy. From Budget Glass Nanaimo.
*Used when casting Slow Fall. I've since been told that Priests use Light Feathers too for a spell --Water Walking or something like that-- but I never saw Priests over in Stonetalon. Only the occasional Mage.
For someone who's been reading Science Fiction and Fantasy since the early 80s, the fact I've never read a novel by Terry Pratchett is kind of a surprise.
It's kind of hard to avoid Sir Terry's works, given that on top of his Discworld novels he has that collaboration with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens, that was turned into a mini-series on Amazon Prime. Back when I actually participated on Facebook there were days I saw quotes from Sir Terry's works every couple of hours.*
The strange thing is that I don't get people proselytizing me to read the Discworld novels like, oh, people reading Robert Jordan back in the day. Maybe that's an acknowledgement that Sir Terry's works aren't for everyone.
This feels rather uncomfortably like people proselytizing about FF XIV. From Reddit; the original poster got it from a Discworld FB group.
So I kind of drifted along, with the Sir Terry memes on the edges of my vision, and not really wanting to read the books. After all, reading over 40 books is a bit of a commitment, no matter what people say.
It looked interesting, but given that I'd never read the books there wasn't that much of a pull on me. However, the Kickstarter raked in over $3 million in USD, which caused me to sit up. Maybe I ought to go check out these books for myself.
Having read my share of Douglas Adams, when I read the descriptive term "British SF&F humor" I have a reference already in place. And that is the standard I compare others against. Is that fair? No, it's not, but since Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came first, that's what happens.
***
So, what did I think of the book?
It was a light read. Fun in spots, tedious in others, and I spent far more time recognizing the characters and situations Terry poked fun at than simply enjoying the book. I know this book was written for people like me because I recognized Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser**, Conan, Elric (okay, elements of Elric), the Dragonriders of Pern, D&D's quirks (the Luggage and spellcasting), and even any stereotypical fantasy city with lots of backstabbing this and that, so... Lankhmar, Sanctuary (from Thieves' World), Tarantia (Conan), and others.
Yes, I put this here for that quote at the beginning.
From The Scorpion King.
Every person that our two companions Rincewind and Twoflower came across, I kept trying to figure out what story Terry was poking fun at. Maybe that's not a fair thing to do, but after having run across so many classic Fantasy references, it came to me quite naturally. I'm pretty sure that the gothic horror elements of the novel were relating to both H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror as well as other touchstones of the 19th century, such as The Time Machine, Frankenstein, and Dracula.
The novel does end on a literal cliffhanger, so I presume Sir Terry had intended to write multiple novels when he started Discworld. What I've seen in some other authors is that they write, hoping to get a sale, and then once a book finally sells, they then have to scramble to write more in that world. Kristen Britain's Green Rider series comes to mind, because her first book Green Rider is pretty complete as it is. You can tell in the narration that the second novel came about after the first novel sold; that doesn't mean it was a poor book, but it's just that you spend so much effort to make that first sale that when you finally do and the publisher says "okay, what happens next?" you have to scramble a bit.
One thing that I do realize is that these books aren't very dense at all. This is good, because I could go for more light reads, and it kept me preoccupied on my 2 to 3 hour layovers at the airport in Charlotte last week.
I do have the next book published in the series, The Light Fantastic, and if it reads as quickly as this one then I can spend a few hours here and there, reading it while I take care of other things around the house.
Such as taxes.
*I guess you could tell that I hung around a lot of geeks. Shocking, I know.
**I always considered Fritz Leiber's creations --and the city of Lankhmar-- as a spoof of the sword and sorcery genre, so.... a spoof of a spoof?
I took a late lunch yesterday, and to blow off some steam I figured I'd get onto a WoW toon for an hour while eating. It's something I've done plenty of times in the past, and as long as I didn't commit to anything, I could finish up before the hour was out and I had to get back to meetings.
Az seemed the perfect toon to just do whatever for an hour, so I hopped onto her and, on a whim, I decided to see if I could get her a Stormwind Stockades run. She had a bunch of quests to complete in there, and the instance is usually completed in about a half an hour, so I just figured that with the early afternoon crowd it would be pretty easy to get into a run.
Things never end up the way as intended, you know.
I discovered that back in 2019 when I began to struggle getting Azshandra into instance runs. Part of it is that certain classes are preferred over others in instance running --such as Mages-- and part of it is that Rogues tend to have a certain... uh... reputation. When Linna got into a Deadmines run, the group that showed up on the LFG tool had the tagline "NO ROGUES". I figured that if anything, in the Deadmines no less, that a Rogue would be preferred over a Retribution Paladin, but when I joined the group the Warrior said, "Hell no. Rogues suck. They steal your gear."
When you prefer playing a Robin Hood type of Rogue, the struggle is real. From Reddit.
Ooo-kay.
Still, I figured I had an hour to play with, and as long as I got into a Stockades run by the half hour mark, I ought to be fine.
The time creeped away, and most of the groups that showed up in the LookingForGroup chat group were for Stocks boosts. The LFG tool was kinda-sorta active, but I was bypassed a couple of times via that tool as well. Finally, at the 20 minute mark I got an invite to a group.
"All we need is a tank, and we're good," the group leader said.
More time passed, and we were rapidly approaching my half hour cutoff when finally a fifth member of the group appeared.
"Thank goodness," I muttered, and made sure I had my poisons ready to apply to my weapons. Because Az is a Rogue, you know.
"Free run, guys!" the group leader declared, and only then did my brain go "Huh?" and I hovered over the last toon.
It was an L60 Druid.
Well, crap.
***
I had a choice: stick to my principles and pass, or accept the de-facto boost and just deal with it. The quests that involved the Stockades were taking up a quarter of my quest log, so there was a certain amount of pressure to get those quests completed to free up my quest log a bit. At the same time, there wasn't a lot of gear or whatnot that I needed out of the Stockades per se. Sure, there's the ring that is a random drop, but outside of that there isn't that much in there. Storywise, it does propel the Defias narrative along, but on the flip side was this tank expecting gold despite the group leader claiming it was a free run?
In the end, I decided to accept the boost and be done with it. After all, a boost ought to be quicker than a regular run.
I didn't bother with adding poisons to my blades, because I figured it'd be a waste.
The run began, and we were tasked with "clean up": the enemies that turned tail and ran had to be tracked down and killed. Part of me watched the run progress, thinking it would be a nice bit of schadenfreude to have the Druid overpull and die, but the other part of me that is basically a nice person was pissed that I'd ever consider this sort of thing.* I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that the Druid could handle the pulls without issue, but I've heard some of my WoW friends on the receiving end of boosts complain about the boosters not always knowing what they're doing. (Again, schadenfreude.)
We blitzed through the Stockades, a ring dropped that I won, and then once it ended I thanked people and dropped group as they were getting ready for another go at the instance. The run completed in 15 minutes, in plenty of time for me to make my next meeting.
And I felt like I needed a shower afterward to wash away the stink of shame.
***
The other day it struck me as to why I hated receiving boosts so much: they make me a passive recipient.
If the entire point of playing an MMO is to perform group activities together, then being a passive recipient of a boost is the antithesis of that. Boosts are transactional activities, but beyond that transaction there's nothing required of the boosted player. And that kind of galls me.
I want to be an active participant in whatever activity I'm doing in an MMO; I want my actions to matter. So while boosting is obviously a non-starter for me, my distaste for passivity includes carries where you're so over leveled by other participants, your actions don't even matter. I've written before about how I've unwittingly been the subject of carries, and how such a buzzkill it was to discover that I had so little impact on the actual group activity.
Yes, yes, I know, "friends wanting to do things and whatnot", but that knowledge doesn't change 55 year old me. If my actions don't matter, then why bother? We can just chat online or talk on Discord instead, and not engage in the pretense that we're playing together as equals. It feels less like friendship and more like receiving charity. And that old Midwestern pride kicks in that I don't need your charity. Or sympathy.
From Yarn. And Howard the Duck.
I suppose that viewed from the lens of the "poor but proud" people that I've known all my life, it kind of makes sense. Kind of like arguing with my mom whenever I take her someplace she wants to pay for my gasoline. "Mom," I always say, "I don't need it. Just accept it."
She always insists that I take the money. We're two people too proud to simply let things be.
*Yes, I have these long conversations with myself over this crap. I'd like to think I'm not the only person who wrestles with dark impulses, but this is something that people just don't talk about very much, so.... Maybe it's just me.
This past week I wasn’t at home. No, I wasn’t at the hospital again, and nobody that I knew was in the hospital either.* I also wasn’t on vacation.
I was traveling for work.
It poured in Charlotte on Monday and delayed my connecting flight by about 45-50 minutes.
If you know anything about me, I’m not a big fan of travel. A lot of that has to do with the cost, because we really couldn’t afford to take regular vacations while the mini-Reds were growing up, but there was also the proximity to other people and the overall lack of actual “relaxation” when on “vacation”. To me, vacation was a thing you do to just not be in any hurry. To unwind. If you want to do nothing, do nothing. To others --glances sidelong at wife-- vacation is more about going places, seeing things, and above all keeping to a schedule to see said things. When you’re waking up at 6 or 7 AM because [insert locale here] opens at 9 AM and “we’d better be ready to go ASAP!!!”, that’s not a vacation to me. That’s work in just another form.
(My dad insisted on that sort of vacation too, because he loved to golf and wanted to make his tee time when we were on vacation, so maybe that resistance to having a regimented vacation is deeply ingrained in me.)
I never really travelled for work in the past, either. For starters, I never had to. The closest I ever came to having to travel for work was when my old team over 20 years ago had a Disaster Recovery drill and we were going to have to travel to the East Coast to conduct it at a remote site. I was slated to go until I got bumped for another person, which was fine with me.** I was then slated to go on the next DR drill, until I got moved into another team (much to my surprise). And that team –and line of work—never required me to travel at all.
So, when I was told I was going to have to travel for work for this past week, it caught me by surprise.
I’m not here to talk about the work itself, because that’s a big no-no, but to muse about other things regarding travel from the perspective of someone who simply doesn’t travel that much. And maybe I’ll tie this into gaming or something.
***
The last time I flew on a plane, I was one of the first people to get patted down by the new rules regarding air travel in a post-9/11 world. That was to attend a friend’s wedding down in Houston, and we struggled to come up with the money to pay for the plane ticket and the hotel room. If I were at the software development job I held in the late 90s, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to go, but where I was employed at by then I could afford it --barely. Outside of the wedding itself, my traveling partner and I didn’t do that much. We saw the Fellowship of the Ring in the theater***, we went to the wedding, and we kind of just hung around the hotel room. And that was it. Beyond that, I had more memories about the new-fangled Garmin in the rental car than I did of Houston itself. The city was just so large and so spread out that I really had no memories of the place.
I had more memories of the airport, because at the time the Greater Cincinnati International Airport (CVG)**** had our flight at a separate terminal for a low cost carrier far away from the rest of the airport itself. You had to take a bus from the main terminal to get there.
And like I mentioned above, it was on the flight home from Houston that I got the detailed pat-down process.
So, with all those memories in my head, I got authorization from work to travel and booked a flight, a rental, and a hotel room.
***
Without further ado, here's my notes...
Tech Has Transformed Travel -- Much Like Everything Else
Well, duh. Tell me something I didn’t know.
I just didn’t realize just how much tech has transformed things. Even 23 years ago I was going online for air tickets --Orbitz, anyone?-- but now I can perform all the functions of a travel agent far easier than I ever could in the past. Travel agents still have their part to play, but they’re more of a niche market than they were before.
Still, tech has also transformed the travel experience in other ways. The number of people I saw using their phones or tablets during a flight was simply staggering. When I last flew smartphones and tablets didn’t even exist, and yet at the airport and in flight they were everywhere. People no longer had to be glued to the arrivals and departures screens at the airport, their phones could provide them an up to the minute status on their flights, and even if their flight was rerouted to another gate. With all this tech, the flying experience became very, well, ordinary. Everything was presented to you to allow you to operate in the most efficient manner possible, in much the same way that some addons such as Questie do in MMOs. Trying to avoid the “easy mode” version of doing things takes more effort now than simply just going with the flow.
I Now Know Why Noise Cancelling Headphones are a Thing
I had a connecting flight at Charlotte, North Carolina, to my final destination in Florida.***** That meant I had flights between Cincinnati and Charlotte on an Embraer/Bombardier CRJ900. I knew next to nothing about the CRJ900, so I discovered that some people disparagingly refer to the plane as a “flying trash can with wings”. This did not inspire any confidence in me, but at least there are tons of them flying, so… How bad could it be?
Not that bad, but that’s because I had really low expectations based off of reading the info I found online. The seats were not very good, but they didn’t make my butt ache, and I could at least relax a bit. One of the armrests wouldn’t go up to let me get out more easily, but at least it was in the correct position for flying. The person in the seat next to me said something about the lack of comfort, but I mentioned “it could be much worse” to which he heartily agreed. I was also able to fit easily into the seat without feeling squished, thanks no doubt to my overall weight loss. Like I said, not bad.
Except for the cabin noise. Holy crap was the noise bad.
The culprit.
I had my earbuds snuggly in place, but that cabin noise generated by the jet engines was pretty horrific. I could barely hear whatever I was playing –it was a podcast about the history of kissing, of all things—unless I turned the volume way up. It was then that I realized that noise like this was what led people to creating noise-cancelling headphones, not the press of crowds at malls and other enclosed places.
When we landed, I took note of the various shops in the concourse at Charlotte and just how many of them had headphones for sale. And not just headphones, but the expensive noise-cancelling variety. If nothing else, those shops do know their clientele.
My other flights were on newer Airbus jets, and while those jets were significantly quieter, my old Honda Accord is quieter than these jets were. (If you’ve ever driven a ‘90s era Honda, you know it is NOT quiet.) If I do this sort of thing again, I might have to get a pair of noise-cancelling headphones just to preserve my ears.
All These Lists and I Still Forget Things
I’m pretty sure this isn’t limited to me, but I’d made lists to check off prior to my departure to prevent the one thing I was most likely to do: forget something. While it was plenty obvious that I needed to have enough underwear or shirts packed, other items such as my mouse and my battery for my laptop might easily be missed if I hadn’t written them down, so I made a point to put them on the list. When I finally got settled in my hotel room for that first night I’d congratulated myself for a successful first part of the trip when I realized I’d forgotten my toothbrush.
Yes, I was able to easily obtain another toothbrush from the front desk, but since I actually HAD ‘toothbrush’ on my list, you’d have thought I’d have actually PACKED it away. But I didn’t. So I spent most of the rest of the trip wondering just what else I’d forgotten in spite of putting everything I needed down on the lists.
So far, I haven’t found that out yet, although I did forget to bring my laptop charger with me on my last day at the client office. That made things a bit dicey on making my laptop last for 5-6 hours on one charge, but I somehow pulled that off.
I Can Tolerate Being in a Sardine Can for a Little While
See my comments about the Embraer/Bombardier CRJ900 above.
What, you want more? Okay, right.
I’m not a germaphobe by any stretch of the imagination, but being shoehorned into a jet plane –no matter how luxurious or spacious—doesn’t endear me to my fellow man. Little eccentricities, such as an occasional tic-tic-tic sound made by one passenger who can’t sit still or that teenager hunched over, hoodie pulled up, playing a video game on their phone, can get under my skin. Putting on earbuds and losing myself in music or a podcast helps a lot, but that immersion is lost when you open your eyes and a woman in front of you starts watching one of the Puss-in-Boots movies.
The flight was just long enough, however, for that to not be a problem. If the flight were much longer… Maybe not so much. The seats were hard and had little padding, so my butt was falling asleep just as we descended to land (each way). If we had to wait in the air, it would have been kind of miserable. The two Airbuses were much more comfortable to sit in, although there were more seats from side to side, and because of the increased width there was greater overall headroom.
I’m Happiest with a Book
I knew I would likely get air sick if I tried to read on the flight, but I brought a couple of books with me to read. One was that Ham Radio License Manual I’ve been studying, and the other was The Color of Magic, Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld novel. I spent most of my down time before bed and at the gate waiting for my flight reading the latter, so expect a post out of that fairly soon. However, after my last work day, I discovered a bookstore near my hotel. So how did I spent that last evening?
Yeah, you knew that was coming.
I didn't buy anything, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent there.
You Can Find Inspiration in the Most Crowded Spaces
In the middle of Charlotte’s concourse there’s a food court. And in the middle of the food court, an airport employee played the piano.
He played some show tunes and popular hits, but I finally spoke to him after he played the Theme to Hill Street Blues. I’m old enough to remember when that show was on NBC back in the 1980s, and its theme music, by Mike Post#. I walked up and gave him a tip and thanked him for that piece. He told me that once in a while he gets some recognition by a passerby when he plays that tune, so he was glad he made my day.
I then asked him what he liked to play. Some James Bond among other movie themes, because people liked to hear it here.
“But what about at home? What do you play when nobody’s listening?”
“Oh! I mostly play religious pieces.”
“Yeah,” I mused, “I can see where that might be a bit obscure to be played here. Then again, Hill Street Blues is pretty obscure nowadays too.”
I thanked him and headed on to my gate with a bounce in my step.
I realize he was paid to play for the crowd, but it was nice to have a personal touch when walking through an impersonal (and under construction) transportation hub.
The TSA Lines aren’t that Bad
There, I said it.
I was thinking I was going to get held up in the same manner I did back in the day, but that didn’t happen. The TSA line went quickly, and I did what I should always do: just tell them the info that they want to know, and don’t do anything else. If they ask, THEN you can say something.
It only took me 50 odd years to figure this sort of thing out.
Still, I did have issues in that no two TSA lines at different airports are alike.
At one location, the TSA checkpoint didn't bother having laptops out of the bags, and they took your photo ID and ran it through their system. At the other location, the TSA chekpoint had you remove your laptop and you had to run your photo ID through their system yourself. Oh, and the place to put your photo ID in was different than the other location. I spent probably a good 20 seconds before the TSA guy explained exactly where to put your card in. And then I felt quintessentially stupid.
For a guy who actually works in IT, I have major blind spots with using tech.
The Airline People are Tired of Your Shit
Or maybe it was because they had to deal with some less-than-charitable people in front of me, but I took note of how they aggravated the AA employees as the desk and kept my conversation to a minimum.
Bing bang boom. Done.
I didn’t get a smile even once, but to be honest I was just happy to not get harangued.
I want to make perfectly clear that I was not picking on American Airlines employees here: I did note that other airlines’ employees had the same “we’re DONE with this” look on all their faces, so it wasn’t just American Airlines for certain. And it could have been that at 10:30 AM the morning rush was over, so they had just begun to unwind a bit after the stress of the morning. Still, I made a point to not piss off those in power.
And don't get me started on the airline employees who got (rightfully) pissed off by people dropping travelers off/picking them up in the "drive only" lane. Or other shenanigans that I watched while I had free time. When it was time for my wife to pick me up after I returned to CVG, I prayed hard that she would just pull in to the side and let me hop right on into the car, which she did.
I Am Not Familiar with Modern Cars
You may laugh, but our “new” car is a 2010 Honda CR-V. Backup cameras weren’t standard until 2017, and large giant infotainment screens weren’t standard on non-luxury or sport vehicles until around the mid-2010s. My own car wasn’t even built in this century, as that old 1997 Honda Accord just keeps right on chugging along and will not die.
So, what did the rental agency give me?
A brand new Toyota Prius.
This thing. From Fremont Toyota.
I got into that car, sat down, and couldn’t figure out the gear shift for a good 3 minutes. Once I got to the hotel, I spent a couple more minutes trying to figure out how to put the damn thing into Park.
Narrator: It was a button he had to push. Same with the parking brake.
Cardwyn: So, he was as clueless as I would have been! And I didn’t grow up around those things!
Me: SHUT UP, both of you!! I don’t want to have to tell my therapist that I’ve been hearing voices again!
Cardwyn: What voices?
Me: …
It took until mid-week before I felt comfortable driving the car. Luckily for me the thing sipped gasoline, so filling up the tank before I dropped it off was no big deal, but I really had a hard time dealing with the sloped windshield and rear window. You’d think I was driving a Lamborghini the way it was angled, but no, that was done for aerodynamics. The interior was both spacious and cramped due to the seat angles and the roof aerodynamics, and that also bothered the hell out of me. Still, given the number of hybrids and true sports cars on the road where I was at, driving a Prius kind of blended in.
The Bag Self Check-In System Defeated Me
You know how I said above that for a guy who works in tech I sure have problems with it? Yeah, this again.
I successfully avoided the self check-in system when I traveled out of CVG, but when I went to return home, there was no avoiding it. I was directed to it straight away, and once I received the tag, the instructions weren't exactly clear as to whether I would need to peel off all of the backing or only part of it. Thanks to the helpful airline employee hovering over me --she must have sensed a tremor in the Force-- it was only a partial removal. Then I had issues putting the damn suitcase on the scale at the right angle. Again, read the effing instructions, Red.
The airline employee admitted it was a new system and people were slow in adapting to it, but if I have to travel again I'd better get used to it.
***
In the end, I'm glad I got that experience out of my system, and outside of my inherent paranoia I think I managed.
But.
I really prefer driving by car. REALLY prefer it. While jets and trains can get me there quicker, cars allow me to be completely in control. And if speed isn't an issue, car travel allows me to feel the scope of the world a bit better than flying by jet ever would. If anything, flying by jet makes the world feel smaller; that's what it's supposed to do, but I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing. Having a feel for the true scale of the world means that you can understand how people may be the same but they are also far more different than we care to admit.
The easiest way to describe it is to look at MMOs: fast travel is more convenient and if you're under time pressure it's much better to utilize, but if you want a feel of the true scale of the game world, slower methods of travel give you that in spades.
*At least as of writing this post.
**My son was about 3 months old and his big sister not quite 3 years old, and I wasn’t about to leave my wife for a week when it took both of us to keep things going at the house. Plus we were having issues with our neighbors, and I wasn’t about to let that get out of hand while I was away.
***The second time for me; my wife and I saw it a few months before then.
****I still kind of refuse to call it by its official name –The Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky International Airport—because that was put in place by the airport board. As the airport is just across the Ohio River in Kentucky, the airport board is primarily stocked with individuals from Northern Kentucky. The city and Ohio in general have mere token representation on the board, so they have no real say in what’s going on. In a way, that’s a good thing, because the airport board is kind of infamous locally for being greedy and short-sighted when it comes to managing the interests of the airport and the region.
*****Astute and air travel-savvy fliers will note that means I flew American Airlines, since Charlotte is a major AA hub.
#Mike Post also wrote the theme music to Law and Order, Magnum P.I., The Rockford Files, Quantum Leap, The A-Team, L.A. Law, and The Greatest American Hero among others. My freshman roommate at college had a Mike Post CD which featured both his television work and his “regular” pieces. I really wish I knew what happened to my cassette copy of that CD.
Az is, well, Az, I suppose. She's the third longest still active toon in WoW, if you include Retail, and I was certain she'd be my main when Classic started up. Little did I know that raiding and some upstart kid from Eastern Elwynn would take her place.
The toons that are farthest along on the chart have gotten into Shadowfang Keep runs (save for Hoots, who just kills things and skins them) and the occasional Stormwind Stockade run, and due to the class quests some Blackfathom Deeps runs are in the near future for Linna and Joan.
In spite of the leveling, I've actually been doing a lot more travel than anything else. If I thought I was getting a bit tired of Westfall and Elwynn Forest, Ashenvale pretty much said "hold my beer". I'll admit that Ashenvale is a nice change of pace from the Human lands, but given that I keep my Human toons' Hearthstone located back at Stormwind* I have to make absolutely sure I want to hearth out of a place when it's half a world away from where I'll end up. And yes, on more than one occasion I've forgotten where my Hearth was set and only discovered after I reappeared.
Whoops.
Still, I've been enjoying this pace. Nothing crazy, mind you, but just moving ahead steadily. It does come in fits and spurts at times, but having done the Vanilla Classic leveling routine enough times before, I'm used to it.
I have been wondering when my next toon culling will happen, but nothing has been speaking to me yet. I suspect the Priests will be left behind next, but once I get used to their playstyle after having been away for a week or so I'm back to being comfortable once more.
One thing that I've found interesting is that a Paladin's attack style is fundamentally similar to that of a Shaman's. Or, more specifically, an Enhancement Shaman's. A Paladin leads with an attack that sets up a debuff of some sort (the type of lead in will change what the specific debuff is) and then the Pally waits, autoattacking, while other abilities become available. The Enhancement Shaman has a similar lead-in which will cause a buff to either yourself or a debuff to the enemy, and then it too will autoattack until special attacks come off of cooldown. I can see why it was done this way, since each class is specific to only one faction (Paladins => Alliance and Shamans => Horde) and that basic similarity is balanced out by the so-called "fine print". I'm not gonna argue that the Shaman or Paladin is a better class, because if you don't like playing it what I say won't change your mind one bit. I will say, however, that if I didn't have the mental baggage with me I'd be likely playing a lot more of that Shaman than some other classes. Both the Shaman and Paladin fit my melee playstyle.
Oh well.
*Or by accident in Westfall. That is a wee bit annoying.
I was at our local independent bookstore the other day, perusing the YA stacks, when a teenaged couple stopped by.* The girl marched right up to the staff picks on the left, grabbed a book, and presented it to the boy.
"That was fast," the boy said.
"I know this place like the back of my hand," the girl announced confidently.
I gave them some privacy and moved away with a little smile on my face. In the 1980s I would have said that about our local bookstore just a 5 minute bike ride away.
You know, I don't think reading is dead just yet.
I've experienced this same feeling lately, watching teenage gamers at my local game store, or even watching YouTube videos put out by younger people so obviously invested in reading or tabletop gaming. When you need every bit of positivity a lot of these days, I take some comfort in that the next generation of geeks is ready to shoulder the load and teach the generation after them to love these pastimes.
*I only got a cursory glance at them, so I couldn't tell if they were high school or college age for certain, but my guess was they were about 16 years old. Maybe 17.
We're in that weird "not quite spring but not really winter" part of the seasonal calendar. It's meteorogical Spring already --that started on March 1st-- but the Vernal Equinox is on March 20th. Hence, the weather bounces up and down a lot with cold weather and warm-ish weather duking it out.
So, have a Meme Monday...
Yeah yeah yeah... From justbeeblog.
I've had spring rolls for over 30 years. From Bored Panda.
