Now That Winter Hath Come

The past few weeks have been a whole lot of "not much" regarding posts. There's a reason for that, of course: the holidays and family getting back together. Our daughters (oldest and youngest, for those keeping track) came down from Milwaukee and up from Louisville respectively, and my son came over from the east side of town. This included my oldest's three guinea pigs* and my oldest's and son's partners. 

I've also been navigating the potential land mines of extended family gatherings, but thankfully no land mines have been stepped on yet. (A few guinea pig poops, sure, but that's not a big deal.)

My youngest is getting settled into her first post-university apartment, and she starts her first job on Monday. My son has been working his tail off as a seasonal worker and is hoping he gets picked up after the Holidays are over. My oldest completed her first semester of going back to uni for another degree, and is looking forward to next semester. 

So yeah, a lot going on, and that's without me talking about any of the gaming that's been going on. 

You know that I've been playing on the WoW Classic Anniversary servers, but I've also poked my nose into Retail to just watch. No real desire to level or do anything else, but just observing the chaos without getting hit on too much...

It's kind of like looking at the sun: you can't
really stare at it without it hurting your eyes.

This was in Ironforge on Boxing Day on
Moon Guard-US. This is easily the most
people I've seen in Retail Ironforge over the past
few months. COMBINED. On the Anniversary servers,
there's always a bit of a crowd here.

The more I think about it, I stand out in the
Lion's Pride crowd because I'm fully clothed.
And I look, well, normal.

Chaos, indeed.

But I've also been playing a bit of Stardew Valley here and there. I get the urge to do another playthrough every several months or so, and once I complete the basic 2 year portion of the game I'm good for another half a year or more.

Yes, for a farming game I made Cardwyn.
Who grew up on a farm.

Beyond that, I've not been doing terribly much, video game-wise. I've been delving into this other hobby a bit more often:

Yes, that's my hand. And my
Yaesu FT-70D, as well.

It keeps me busy and has gotten me to thinking ahead as to where I want to take this amateur radio hobby. I believe that Pallais has suggested that I continue writing about this new hobby, so I need to write a follow-up.

Anyway, catch you all on the flip side of the year.

*If you thought having a dog is like having a toddler around, guinea pigs will see you and raise you a few "wheeks!"

Meme Monday: End of 2025 Memes

It's the end of another year, so I figured I'd cover this year's end with another Meme Monday.

I know, right?
From Imgflip via dontgetserious.com.

Anyway, here's a few...

Har-de-har-har. At least it wasn't aliens.
From Imgflip.

This is me. To be fair, the last time I went out
to a New Year's Eve party, I was incredibly bored
after about 45 minutes as I wasn't friends with
most of the people at the party and didn't have any
real common ground with them either.
From lolalambchops.

You know this is what returning to work
after the New Year's will be like.
From Imgflip via Blizzard's Forums.

Boromir, I beg to differ. From Quickmeme.

Yeah, I think I agree with this one.
From Imgflip.

Another Hump I'd Forgotten About

You know how leveling slows down tremendously in Vanilla WoW in the mid 30s and the mid 40s? Well, there's apparently another speed bump in the mid-L50s too.

I have discovered this the past month while I've been leveling the four toons, but especially Joan and Hoots.

Listings as of December 26, 2025.

Going from L54 to L55 took an absurdly long time from my perspective, but once I got over that hump the leveling from L55 to L56 seemed to go more quickly. 

Of all the four toons, Hoots was actually the slowest in leveling from L54 to L55. Part of that I chalk up to bad luck, where respawning mobs caught me multiple times in various zones --apparently quick respawns can also be observed other places than Felwood's Shadow Hold-- but I also didn't have to grind nearly as much to get some of these quests completed. If the RNG rolls go your way when you're looking for XX items, you don't have to kill that many mobs. Which also means less grinding, resulting in less XP per quest overall. I don't know the ratio of XP garnered by killing mobs versus completing quests in Retail, but I've found that in Vanilla Classic you get a lot more XP if you're grinding a lot of mobs just to complete a quest. Sure, it's not "fun" from the standpoint of wanting to get from Point A to Point B quickly, but it is a low stress way to level. You don't have to engage while level at the same depth in Retail --although Retail fans probably would point out that leveling in Retail is so quick it's not deep either-- but Blizzard designed Retail leveling to progress multiple stories. Outside of a few overarching questlines, there are very few newer-style MMO stories in Classic WoW.*

So I can grind while listening to a podcast, chatting with friends, and not really paying too close attention to what I'm doing in-game. Which is good, since I play a game to have fun and relax, not be hyper-focused.

***

My questing buddy is logging on far less often these days. She completed her Atiesh --oh wait, I didn't mention that she got selected for one, didn't I?-- and I think she only really needs one or two more items and her gear will be good throughout most of TBC Classic leveling. Therefore she's been taking a bit of a break, playing games with her husband, and when she's on she's basically pre-loading stuff for when the Dark Portal opens. 

I'm thinking that once the pre-patch drops in mid-January, she'll be leveling a Draenei Priest (basically the same one she used to help me level my Shaman in 2021's TBC Classic and she mained in Wrath Classic), but we'll see how things go.

*Those long burning questlines that are there, however, do tend to be epic in their own way. Everybody knows the Defias questline, but there's also the Marshal Windsor questline and some of the Class Quests (Paladin and Warlock epic mount quests, for example). The biggest difference between Classic and Retail is that as quest design progressed, every single (non-gray) thing you see out in the game world can be traced back to a quest objective, whereas in Classic WoW there's a metric ton of items and mobs out there that have absolutely nothing to do with anything. (Black Diamonds, anybody?) And that's fine. Not everything has to mean anything at all --in real life that is frequently the case-- and a lot of game designers (and fiction editors) seem to have forgotten that simple fact. 

Meme Monday: Christmas Memes for 2025

Yes, it's four days early, but it's the Meme Monday on Christmas week. So here, have a few Christmas Memes for your holiday cheer!

I'll be doing that, but I don't mind. I could be
working on a printer. From EJAW.

Okay, it's a nerdy coder geek thing,
but it's legit. Octal 31 converts to Decimal 25.
From EJAW (again).

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that song of hers.
From Reddit (and Imgflip).

I SAID...
The irony is that Blood Elf has the same
hairstyle that Neve has. Neve's hair is brown,
however. From Instagram and Blazing Boost.

Truth. From Instagram.

I totally cackled at this one. From Instagram.

FWIW, there were quite a few of these together,
and some of them were really adult in nature.
So... You're welcome? From Instagram.

Uh, I'm not exactly sure I want to read
any fanfic where this is an illustration.
From Reddit.

It's All a Numbers Game

If anybody ever thought that Blizzard looks at Retail and Classic as two separate entities, we have a bit further proof.

Yesterday, Blizz announced that the Midnight Pre-Patch will drop on January 20th, 2026.

In case you were keeping track, the TBC Classic Pre-Patch for the Anniversary servers arrives on January 13, 2026.

It used to be that when a pre-patch event for any Blizzard product happened, Blizz made sure to clear the calendar of other games so they could maximize player activity. But now, we're seeing two distinct versions of World of Warcraft dropping their own separate pre-patches within a week of each other. 

Some, such as Wilhelm, believe this is a sign that Blizzard doesn't care about TBC Classic. To be honest, I also harbor thoughts along those lines, but I believe there's also something else afoot. Blizzard wouldn't deliberately sabotage subscriptions, so I suspect that what these dates ALSO say that WoW Classic Anniversary players simply don't play Retail. The Venn Diagram of WoW players probably looks something like this:

Pretty self-explanatory, if you ask me.

Even my occasional forays into Retail have centered upon merely observing others and sticking to the post-Cataclysm Old World starting zones. I'm the sort of Retail player that Micro-Blizzard doesn't like very much, because I only subscribe and don't buy expansions or Cash Shop items. They'll take my money, because they're a corporation and some money is better than none, but I'm not the focus of their interest.

Perhaps that's the root of the problem: because Classic Anniversary players are resistant to playing Retail, they won't buy things in a Cash Shop and have no WoW Token to purchase, so Blizzard doesn't care about them. If Blizz wants to hit that 30% profit target that Microsoft's C-Suite set for the XBox division, they simply can't afford to give any time to the Classic Anniversary crowd. 

It does make me wonder whether Blizzard is hoping the Classic crowd goes away, so they can cut that staff and be done with it. They won't sell WoW Classic at all, because they're not going to try to compete with another version of their game. Just ask Wizards of the Coast how THAT went over when they came out with D&D 4e and most of the D&D 3.x crowd instead migrated to Paizo's Pathfinder game (which was colloquially known as D&D 3.75). D&D became second banana in tabletop RPGs to another version of their own game.

Maybe that's the real Endgame for Classic WoW: kill it off due to a lack of support, but then sue any private servers to keep newer versions of Classic WoW from coming out. It's all a numbers game, which means that it's more cost effective to kill the game off than support it for a player base that won't buy any of the extra trinkets Blizzard is peddling.

"You think you do but you don't" indeed.

EtA: Added quotes at the end.

Meme Monday: Winter Camping Memes

This weekend we got a real blast of Winter: 5 in/12.5 cm of snow followed by icy temperatures of -1F/-18C. (And that was without adding in the Wind Chill, where it was -20F/-29C.) When you couple that with one of my WoW friend group going out camping with his son on a Boy Scout camping trip this past weekend, you end up with a Meme Monday that focuses on Winter Camping Memes.

Having camped with my wife back in 1996
when the temps were 15F/-9C (plus whatever the
wind chill was), I can confirm this.
From Peanuts or Pretzels.

Ha! From Facebook.

...made glorious summer by this sun of York.
Sorry, got Richard III on the brain.
From So Much Pun via Memebase.

From Beyondthetent via Pinterest.

...and then there's the video game version of camping.
From AOC Gaming and Pinterest.

Oh, Look at the Time!

It's been an interesting couple of weeks since I last posted an update on Operation Spread the Love:

As of December 12, 2025.

Although I haven't been playing that much --especially this week-- I have gotten some leveling done. Just not as much as I'd hoped.

The first thing you'll notice is that Card is now L57, which kind of goes against what I'd been doing the rest of this time: level all four toons a pair of levels at a time. The reason for that is simple: I was asked to come along for a couple of Scholomance runs, which resulted in that extra level. One thing is certain: Card did more damage as an L56 Mage than some of the other DPS who were all higher than her. Go figure.

I got Linna to L56, and when I have played this week I was working on Joan, but I haven't gotten her to L55 yet. While she is able to down some mobs by herself (such as the Drake in the initial quest for the Marshal Windsor questline), she's incredibly ill-suited toward other mobs. Linna has the reverse problem that Joan has, where she can take down other mobs, but that Drake hits way too hard for her to simply stand there and take it at the level she's at, compared to non-elite mobs of the same level.*

What have I been up to when I've not been playing? Holiday stuff, as well as, um, that other hobby I've mentioned a bit here and there. Pallais wants me to continue writing about my adventures there, and so I'm working on a post about that will likely drop in the early part of next week.

I guess I should be happy that Blizz decided to put the TBC pre-patch in January, which as things are going will be when I finally get all four toons to L60.

*At least in the gear she's at. That has quite a bit of impact on her ability to down some of these mobs as well.

Attack of the Murder Floofs

In case you aren't aware, Bhagpuss of Inventory Full has an annual Advent Calendar of music, culled from all ends of the Internet. I honestly don't know how he teases out all of the weird and obscure Christmas music he does, but I'm always grateful to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

So, in return, I'd like to provide him with a musical Holiday gift.

The origin of this particular piece of music lies in the Yule Cat of Iceland, discussed here on PBS' Monstrum:

As I watched the video, I noted that Björk had sang a cover of a poem about said Yule Cat, and set out to find it. There's a few copies out on YouTube, but I got this one from the "official" Björk channel:

Although I admitted expected something more modern and Pop-oriented --it is Björk, after all-- the song is most definitely neither Pop nor Rock, but a folk tune. And I found it really cool to listen to.

So, Happy Holidays, Bhagpuss!

***

Oh, you want another Christmas monster?

How about Krampus, then?

At Least I'm Recognized in China

Call me amused, but it seems that while Google can't figure out that Parallel Context exists, Chinese web crawlers can.

I was alerted to this little item when I received a Google Notification about the blog that there was a spike in activity on the 6th:

As of 12/8/2025.

Of which was primarily from China:

As of 12/8/2025.

And yet when I got onto the Google Search console, this greeted me:

As of 12/8/2025.

So you can see that Google still refuses/ignores the presence of Parallel Context, while the Chinese web crawlers seem to have found PC. Once again, I've found that Google's search engine isn't really as impressive as they like to think. They can't even blame it on Blogger, which is owned by Google itself, because Bhagpuss' blog Inventory Full is easily found via Google Search:

As of 12/8/2025.

This is starting to get to ridiculous levels of incompetence, because there's no apparent reason why the blog doesn't show up in Google's direct search results. After all, PC continues to show up in Microsoft's Bing Search console:

As of 12/8/2025.

And in true Microsoft fashion, they want me to pay to "improve" my visibility on search results, 

As of 12/8/2025.

But I think I'll pass. Just goes to show that Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in their quest to monetize everything so they can then pump that money into AI (and Satya Nadella's compensation package). But at least their own search engine, Bing, can actually find a 16 year old blog that has almost 1700 posts on it, whereas Google stumbles over itself in the dark, claiming that a Blogger-inserted mobile option "https://parallelcontext.blogspot.com/?m=1" causes a Redirect error...

Again, as of 12/8/2025.

...when you can click the link above and see that the link works perfectly fine in bringing up a mobile-friendly version of the blog. If Google wants to bitch about that, they should talk to their Blogger division. But then again, since Inventory Full is working fine and it's a Blogger blog, I'd say that the problem has less to do with anything Blogger does and more between the chair and keyboard on Google's search division.

At least I know that Google won't enact any retribution on PC, because they'd have to FIND IT FIRST, and they've already proven they can't do that.

Meme Monday: Miscellaneous Memes for December 2025

I've lost track of the number of miscellaneous meme posts I've made over the past few years, so I figured I'd just change my title a bit for this go around. As usual, these are memes that couldn't find a home from any other posting I had, but were too good to simply pass up.

This could work for WoW, even.
From X and dicetomeetyou.com.

Every time I see this, I think of the sweltering
heat in the movie Rear Window, and how
the residents in the apartment complex would
put their matresses outside. From Pinterest.

Sometimes I have a cheap laugh.
From imgflip.

Eh, it still is better than video games. And if
it isn't that's because I can't afford the video
card that makes it better. From gamedesigning.

Guilty, but in my defense I don't stare. Like was
once said on Seinfeld, "Looking at cleavage is
like looking at the sun. You don't stare at it.
Too risky. You get a sense of it and look away."

Hell if I know, man. Drives me crazy too.
From Digital Mom Blog.

All I Really Need is a Place for My Stuff

I have a confession to make: our house is not something that Marie Kondo would say sparks joy.

When you put two pack rats* together with three kids, you're going to have piles of stuff to move around on a regular basis. While I'd like to look at my home as a place to relax and enjoy myself, when you get right down to it, I look at a home as a place for my stuff.

You knew I was going to put this here, didn't you?
This is one of the George Carlin routines that aged well.

I don't really have a sense of decoration, either. I've seen what some people call "decoration" and I think that I can't see the walls from all of the pictures on them. On the flip side, I'm not a big fan of the minimalist look, either. I just want a place for everything, and enough furniture and decoration that don't look like they came out of the 60s/70s/80s to make it work. Despite my best intentions, I simply can't get things decorated well. Not for a lack of trying, mind you, but I also have to balance my mom and my in-laws dumping decorations and whatnot on us that we really don't need with my own distaste of the items themselves. 

My own home was built in the mid-80s, and it shows. The two story and bi-level/split-level homes built in that era all have the same general look about them; they tend to be boxy, but they get maximum use out of minimal space. The oversized great rooms and specialty areas of the houses that were built afterward simply don't exist, so my home office is set where the dining room was originally designed to reside.**

So you know where this is going, right?

This is what my homes in video games tend to look like, if I'm left to my own devices:

It's a bit blocky, but it works.

Penny would occasionally complain about
all those chests around; I ought to do something
about that one of these days. Note that most
of the furniture there came with the house.

So yeah, I'm decoratively challenged and I look at houses as a place to put things, rather than to live in them. (It's a failing.)

MMO housing doesn't make me squeal with delight as it does some people. I mean, it's great to look at when it's done well, and believe me, I've seen plenty of people who have done it well --some even read the blog!-- but that seems to be beyond my capacity. I don't have any screencaps of the home I had in LOTRO, but the front of it looked like a stereotypical backwoods shack with all sorts of broken down material scattered around in front.

In other words, I think I would give Marie Kondo a heart attack.

***

So when I saw that this dropped in Retail WoW yesterday...

From an email dated 12/3/2025.

I realized that I was not the target audience. 

That's fine. I don't need to be the target of MMO salesmanship; after all, I'm not a big spender when it comes to DLC and whatnot. If anything, that translates in-game to me not really pursuing monetary or bling-centric goals.***

To those who are reveling in the chance to play around with housing, I wish you the best of luck. I'll be reading your blog posts!

*Yes, I'm calling myself out. I may not have as much stuff as my wife does, and I do throw things out more than she does, but there are plenty of things that I know I'll keep until I die. 

**We never formally entertained people, and we've never used the fine china that we were obligated to request in our wedding lists. In fact, all those plates and utensils and whatnot are still in storage in the basement, having never been used once. I think the only thing we ever did use were the wine glasses, and those are also now in storage since a) we have a lot of "free" glasses given to us from the local wine festival over the years, and b) I can't really drink alcohol much any more.

***Despite what some people may think, I count Epic Riding and Epic Flying as bling-centric. If it becomes a requirement to do something, I'm going to push even harder against it. But that's just me.

Just Come On and Burst, Already

Okay, this is now getting ridiculous.

Multiple websites and YouTube channels --here's a link to Rock Paper Shotgun's article-- reported that RAM manufacturer Micron is shutting down their Crucial consumer division to essentially go chase AI and Datacenter work.

If you've been keeping track, Micron is the third largest manufacturer of RAM after Samsung and SK Hynix. The loss of Crucial means that there's going to be one fewer player in the RAM market, and more loss of choice among consumer PC buyers. Yes, that includes gamers, too, as we tend to push the envelope of PC performance than the average PC user, but given the spiking of RAM usage in "normal" software such as browsers, video streaming, and Office-esque applications, this is going to hurt us in the long run.

And for what? To try to get some of that AI bubble money?

Yeah, this isn't going to end well...

Meme Monday: December Hath Come Memes

Yes, it's December once more. We're 21-22 days from the Solstice, and cold temperatures have officially arrived in the Midwest.

And snow has arrived in Milwaukee, as my oldest provided a few helpful photos of the six inches of snow they got over the weekend...

I could use this as a Christmas card.

I was inspired. Hence, this Meme Monday.

Yes, I've known dogs who are like this.
From Thunder Dungeon.

Having put together some IKEA furniture before,
this tickled me to no end. From Instagram.

Ha! I should ask someone at work who lives in
Minnesota if this is accurate.
From Just Bee and Imgflip.

Yeah, I know people like this. Some days,
it's even me. From Becky Barnicoat.

Again, the lure of coffee is strong.
From 97.5 FM 'The Fanatic' in Philly.

Had to have a Fantasy influenced meme
in here. From Kyreann vis Cheezburger.