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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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