My reincarnation of Neve didn't even get out of Eversong Woods. She got caught by multiple respawns in the Scorched Grove at Level 8. Briganaa at least lasted into the second Draenei zone, Bloodmyst Isle, but one of her Fire Totems inadvertently pulled multiple nearby mobs and she died at Level 14.
This was, ironically enough, about 1/2 hour before the fatal blow.
The Blood Elf Paladin Quintalan still survives, but he's Level 7 right now. His long term future is in doubt, because he has a tendency to overpull even when I specifically don't want to.
He's also into being a therapist, for some strange reason.
***
While there are still around 20 or so layers' worth of players out there, the Old World (except for the Capital Cities) has emptied out. You can find gold farmers around and there are people leveling, of course, but the swarm has moved on to Outland.
I had to turn off the nameplates for NPCs to show just how few people are at Light's Hope Chapel. A week ago, this place was still packed.
My Questing Buddy has already reached L70 --I think she reached it two evenings ago-- and I'm sure she was just in the vanguard of that first wave of toons rushing to the end and now on their attunements. Most of the rest of our friends' group are around L62-63, although I do see a lot of people I've put on my Friends' List sitting in the mid-L60s at the moment. I guess that's overall not much of a surprise, as the raiding content opens on February 19th, less than a week from now. I guess we'll see how that goes and whether the player base continues to engage with the game, especially since the Tier 4 raids are launching in their post-nerf state. I can easily see this backfiring on Blizzard, because if the raids are too easy some people will get bored and lose interest, but more people overall might get a chance to raid from the get-go, so.... I guess we'll see.
I presume that the results of this experiment will influence the difficulty of subsequent raid tiers.
***
For me, what will be most interesting is how guilds handle the reduction from 40 people per raid to 25 (not counting the bench). If history is any guide, people are likely forming into cliques already, and that could prove disastrous to guilds and raid teams going forward. Hell, it could prove disastrous to even friends' groups. I guess we'll see how this all pans out.
He was the founding guitarist of the band Cake, who happened to have penned this little ditty:
He eventually left to found the band Deathray before Cake's third album was recorded. He was one of those musicians who had an outsized impact, even though there's not that much in the way of actual recorded content by him.
I wasn't planning on writing anything on Bob Weir until Greg Brown's passing, mainly because I came to listen to the Grateful Dead much later in life.
While a lot of people of Generation X (and later) became enamored of Pfish, of whom Trey Anastasio unabashedly had a bromance with the Dead, I didn't get into Pfish that much. My experiences with the Dead were kind of limited to what was played on Rock (and then Classic Rock) FM stations in the 80s. You know, this stuff:
I knew of Bob, kinda sorta through these pieces, but also through this other song off of In The Dark:
After Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995, Bob and the rest kept the legacy of The Grateful Dead alive by The Other Ones, The Dead, and finally Dead and Company.
It's kind of strange how John Mayer, who is a bit of a polarizing figure among my generation, was embraced by Deadheads as part of Dead and Company. But you know, the Dead and their fans have certainly been on a long, strange trip, so I guess it's rather fitting that John and Bob would somehow make this all work.
I never saw the Dead in person, because while they were a much better band to watch live (and high) it was never on my radar. And now, with Bob's passing back in January, that's never going to happen anyway.
For some strange reason, I didn't get an initial screencap. Oh well. Yes, this is a new Briganaa.
I decided that one way to combat the desire to rush to the end with four toons and do all the things was to start over with a toon that was most definitely blitzed through the process in 2021 and do it right this time in 2026.
After all, I have 9-12 months to go up 10 levels on 4 toons. So what's one or two more toons?
"Two. No more than two." --Gully Dwarf saying
As of Monday evening, my Questing Buddy was already at L68, so she basically went almost all the way to L70 in 4 days, most of that by spamming dungeon runs. By comparison, I'm happy to just be noodling around in the Old World, not rushing through anything. When I was asked when I was going to go over to Outland, I replied maybe in a couple of months. By then, everybody will be raid-logging, so I'll have the zones to myself.
That's not just hyperbole, as there's well over 20 Layers going in the evenings, which is kind of nuts.
This is what Nova World Buffs was able to identify as separate layers on February 9, 2026. The maximum number of layers they can observe is 20, but given that this toon didn't have a layer assigned meant there was ABOVE 20 layers active at this time.
***
If Blizzard wanted the WoW Classic community to put more money in their coffers, offering unlimited paid boosts was apparently the thing, as there were tons of L58 - L60 Blood Elves and Draenei out and about in the Old World prior to the opening of the Dark Portal. There were so many out there that I'm sure I was very much in the minority leveling a toon from scratch instead of simply boosting and heading out to Outland when the clock struck 6 PM EST on February 5th.
This was right on top of of the Battle.net shop. "Inspired by" my ass; they knew exactly what they were doing. This is as of February 9th, 2026.
Of course, Retail has Classic beat on the boost department, as unlimited paid boosts have been around for quite a while.
I actually had to hunt for it in the Cash Shop, as it was underneath the Pets, Transmog, and (in-game) toys.
However, the upcoming release doesn't have any new races or professions to power level or boost through paid services, so... I guess Classic's BE and Draenei invasion is "taking one for the team" in Q1 2026.
I'm kind of prepared for the first time someone asks me why I didn't boost either of my toons. While it would be completely accurate to state that my budget won't allow it --$60 per boost is waaaaay too expensive for my taste-- my stock answer will be "If I'm not going to raid, why should I pay money to not play the game?"
Q: "Why not run dungeons?"
A: "I don't run dungeons to power level. I run it to have fun, and my fun is not 'How fast can I make the thing go away', but to actually enjoy the scenery, the music, and the people while killing the baddies."
Q: "You'll be left behind if you don't."
A: "I was left behind the moment the Dark Portal opened and I didn't load up on a ton of quests to turn in like all the other min-maxxers. Unlike 2021, I was ready for the separation this time. I have accepted that."
***
You'd think --at least I did-- that my WoW friends wouldn't have prodded me about joining them in Outland like they did after the release of the Anniversary servers in November 2024, but nope. I had to have that conversation already once, and I expect I'll have to do it again once they reach max level and they start attunements for raiding. I expect them all to go and raid (my Questing Buddy will likely go all the way to Sunwell), but I've had my fill of raiding. In my experience, anybody who tells me they're a laid back and chill raid group are either self delusional, going to backslide into semi- to full-on hardcore raiding, or will get stripped for their best players by more hardcore raiding teams. I've played that game already and I'm not about to get emotionally invested only to get my heart ripped out again.
(Or worse, watch a guild get torn apart by drama because people can't treat each other like adults. Or maybe that is the default behavior for adults these days. I sure hope not.)
Hmm... I kind of hope there will be a TBC Classic Era server or two, so that people like me who will stick around after the mob moves on can actually do some end-game content without any external pressures.
EtA: Apparently I can't spell 'pressures' right. Corrected.
Yep, it's that time of year again. I'll try to provide links if I can find them to the creators' stores, so if you want some of these cards you can order them from them.
Yesterday, the WoW Anniversary Servers saw the Dark Portal open at 6 PM EST, heralding the start of TBC Classic, Anniversary Edition.
So... What did I do?
Stare at a Loading Screen for a while, because when you're playing around in the Blood Elf or Draenei Starting Zones, you're technically part of Outland.
And Outland was simply overwhelmed by people to the point where I was repeatedly kicked offline or had 10-20 second lag.
I don't even have a screencap of those (rather typical for Blizzard) moments because all of the screencaps I took didn't register. However, you'll have to understand that The Ghostlands were pretty empty compared to what Outland itself must have looked like.
Therefore, I shrugged and logged onto Azshandra for the first time in several months and screwed around a bit.
And gawked at some of the guild names people came up with:
Yes, that is a thing IRL. No, I'm not going to tell you how I know, but when fifty something years you reach, forbidden knowledge gained you have.
After roaming around for an hour or two and doing a few quests, I hung around in Stormwind to watch the substantially reduced crowd. Apparently nobody got the memo that world buffs were no longer quite as useful once you hit... L62? L63? because they were dropping like Halloween Candy. I joked that if you could simply stack world buff times on top of each other, at the rate the buffs were dropping I'd have well over 8-10 hours of a buff each.
My Questing Buddy was busy running dungeons*, and she claimed she was going to be doing it overnight, and others of my friends group were trying to pick up flight points in Outland and complete what quests they could. Only one other person was hanging around in the Old World, finally having the ability to level his Mining skill uninterrupted by swarms of bots and gold farmers.
But I was bored, and so I begged off after a while.
I've grown used to doing things my way, and I really don't like the crowds because all they do is get me agitated at the relentless pace. There really is no rush, but trying to tell MMO players that is an exercise in futility, so I don't.
At least not in Gen Chat or Trade Chat.
We've got some family activities planned for part of the weekend, so if I do get on the Anniversary Servers, it won't be for very long. I might even retreat to Classic Era for a while until the crazy dies down a bit and the lag is no longer so bad in the TBC zones, so I can go back to leveling a toon or two out of the Starting Areas and back into the Old World.
*She informed me that these dungeons were much easier now that she was in Naxxramas gear. Given that if my memory is correct that you don't replace Naxx gear until the very end of the leveling process (yes, it's that good), then she'll be able to store up a lot of gold simply by selling a ton of items to vendors.
If you're like me, you've recently had to have some "training" at work concerning AI.
I'm not talking about the training my son had when he first arrived at grad school, where he learned how to spot AI generated work that students would pass off as their own, but the basics of using AI to "improve workflows" and to "increase productivity".
Oh yes. I believe it's a sign of the apocalypse that when your employer wants you to learn something, said something is about to implode.*
Anyhoo, I was thinking about all of that training over the weekend when this YouTube video dropped in my lap:
Now, I'll be up front is that I find Brandon Sanderson likeable and engaging as a person, or at least how he presents himself online, but I'm not the biggest fan of his work. I liked Mistborn and The Well of Ascension well enough, but the concepts that he'd put forth in The Stormlight Archive really don't appeal to me. We also disagree on the genius behind Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, because he really thought those middle books --where I and a bunch of other readers finally had enough-- were much better than we gave it credit for.**
I'm not personally acquainted with Brandon either, but I have enjoyed his class on writing SF&F. There's actually two versions of the class on YouTube, last years and one about 3-4 years ago. To be honest, both are worth watching if you want to get a feel for the nuts and bolts (and the business) of writing in my favorite genre.
All that being said, I really found his keynote address from the Tailored Realities release event at Dragonsteel Nexus 2025*** quite interesting, and I found I did agree with it on a lot of points. I'm more of a Original Series Star Trek fan myself, but I do appreciate his comparisons of Data and his ongoing desire to become human in the series as a reference point to what separates current levels of pseudo AI from what most people would consider art. But more than anything else, what resonated with me was that art is a transformational process: the creation of art also changes us, and the more we remove ourselves from that process by the insertion of AI into the mix the less we are transformed as well.
That doesn't mean that we can't be transformed by creating AI art, but our isolation from the creative process makes it harder for us to be transformed. After my "training", I've compared what's known as vibe coding as basically what a non-technical boss thinks that coders do when they provide a design document. Instead of taking a framework created by your prompt and then coding in all of the details, vibe coder instructions are to instead "refine your prompts so that you get what you want that way". To me, that's equivalent of the old Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert trying to tell the engineers how to do their job.
Holy crap. This was in 1995? Yikes.
It also gives new engineers and coders a false impression of how to write code. You need to learn to fail before you can succeed, and vibe coding bypasses all of that knowledge by eliminating the skill development process. It's great if you're an experienced coder, you're in a rush, and you already know what you want, but to do regular work on an ongoing basis? You're reducing the code writing process to "just give it a few words and let it do the job".
I suppose I could boil down a lot of the "promise" of AI to this: it lets MBAs think they can be engineers or scientists, without them realizing that the their own job could be replaced as well.
*Back in 2000, my then employer's CEO called all of the development staff together for an all-hands meeting. The late 90s, if you'll recall, were the high-flying days of the OG Dot Com boom, and it was all "internet this" and "internet that". So, when we were brought together despite the push to get the current version of our software out the door, we joked half-heartedly that the CEO was going to announce we were going to be an internet company.
Lo and behold, he actually did just that. We were going to put our mid-range CAD/CAM/CAE software, which was so hefty that it could barely run on the best Windows XT servers at the time, on the internet as a browser-based product.
We were all stunned. The network throughput on the internet wasn't up to the task, and more importantly neither were the browsers themselves. It was an idea 20 years ahead of its time, perhaps, but it was also a harbinger that within the year the Dot Com bubble burst and the stock market imploded.
**I also thought that Robert Jordan could have used an editor who reined some of his worst impulses in, such as his tendency to overdo it on the language and description. I mean, I'm not the greatest writer of description in the world, but I really do think that RJ was really just padding his page count at times.
***In case you wondered where the Keynote part of the title is about; I know I sure did. Here's a blog post of the speech itself from Brandon's website.
The CurseForge graphics for World of Warcraft were updated more quickly this time around than in the War Within expansion:
Screencap from CurseForge as of Feb 2, 2026.
As I took in the graphic, I noticed something. Apparently someone at Blizzard is a fan of the metal band Disturbed, because there's some similarities between this graphic of a void monster and Disturbed's mascot, The Guy:
From Pinterest. Not sure if this is an official graphic or not.
You know, just add some blue or purple in there, remove the muscular hand and arms, and...
Yes, yes, I realize that there's also similarities between those two and Venom:
The cover of Venom: The Saga of Eddie Brock. Graphic Novel Volume 1. From ComicHub.
It's mainly in the teeth and the darkness, but I'm sticking with The Guy first because that's what popped into my head before Venom did. (Sorry, Marvel.)
Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go listen to Disturb's cover of Genesis' Land of Confusion, featuring The Guy...
