A Short Note to Ponder

Apparently the current Retail WoW raid is named Manaforge Omega, which to this Classic Doctor Who fan raises a big question: is it pronounced "oh-MA-gah" like the Greek letter or "OH-ma-gah" like the enemy Timelord in Doctor Who's The Three Doctors?

Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Meme Monday: Robot Memes

After my AI post yesterday, I kind of went down the rabbit hole of SF/F and video game memes with robots in them. So... Here's the results:

Danger, Wil Robinson! Don't come inside!
From imgflip.

Can't have a bunch of robot memes without
bringing up mechagnomes in Retail WoW.
From Pinterest.

Heh. A robot smoke break.
From Memedroid.

Again, you can't have a bunch of robot memes without
engaging with Philip K. Dick (the author of Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep?, also known as Blade Runner).
From Memedroid (again).

Okay, this one is a bit obscure, but
this TikTok is a character in L. Frank Baum's
Oz series. From Cheezburger.

If It's Sunday, It's Time to Talk AI

I was introduced to the boardgame Diplomacy my freshman year at Dayton. The guy who pulled me into a game had bought it back in high school, and he was the only one who knew how to play, so he explained the rules and away we went.

It took about half an hour before I finally got into the groove of playing the game --periods of 10 minutes of "diplomacy" working out your moves with others before submitting them into a box and then one person would pull them out and set them into motion. The logic behind the game is pretty simple: if two players try to move into a location on the board and their unit numbers are equal, they "bounce" and nobody gets that spot. If one player has more units --whether their own or another player supporting them-- then that player gets the spot. The idea is to control cities (aka "supply centers"), and the number of cities you control determines the number of armies and navies  you own. 

The map and box of my copy of the game, which
I bought back in the 90s because I felt guilty
about playing via email when I didn't have my own
copy. It's been a while since I played face-to-face.

The thing is, within the game of Diplomacy there's that metagame where you have to make and break alliances in order to get what you want. That makes the game equally exhilarating and frustrating, and I've often said that people who are very good at Diplomacy are not the sort of people you would like to hang around with in a social setting: they take the game far too seriously and apply those principles of alliance-making and backstabbing to real life. 

To be honest, it's been at least a decade since I thought about Diplomacy very much. So, when I began reading this article from Wired titled What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World? and discovered it was about an AI playing Diplomacy, it piqued my interest. 

The article got me to thinking about whether I have AI all wrong, and that it will end up running the world to our benefit, not unlike the Isaac Asimov short stories Evidence and The Evitable Conflict, both found in his collection of short stories titled I, Robot.

My copy, which I bought back in the
mid-80s for the princely sum of $3.50.

Then, of course, we see chatbots trained on social media content spewing offensive and racist comments. And that was before the most recent Grok-supplied social media posts about good ol' Adolf.

Yeah, I'm not buying it just yet.

***

That being said, if AI is already sentient and has decided to destroy humanity, why bother declaring war on humanity ala The Terminator when you can get humanity to destroy itself? If you get enough people on either side of a potential conflict incensed enough, a war will erupt which will devastate humanity. Toss in a few nukes, and...

There'd have to be an end goal of an AI to eliminate humanity, however. To what end would an AI want to eliminate us? For environmental reasons? Well, I hate to point out the obvious, but military actions by either a sentient AI or humans vs humans would have grave consequences for the environment. If it's to lowed the birthrate by presenting "better options" than people having children, we're doing that quite well enough on our own by making it increasingly difficult to afford having families without a sentient AI to providing alternatives such as romantic AI partners. Or, um, that other robotic industry.

Maybe the answer to the long term survival of a sentient AI is a symbiotic relationship with humans. Not strictly an exploitative relationship driven by companies that seek to profit from controlling AI, but rather AI controlling humanity's behavior so both AI and humanity can continue to exist. How that looks is something we may think we know --typically, what we look around and see in our lives today but somehow "more" than just that-- but probably won't look like that at all. If predictive models created by AI can see that humanity will come to a bad end if a company utilizing the AI gets what they want, how will that AI respond? Or, how will an AI respond to a human leader who simply pursues a self-destructive course for purely emotional reasons? I'm not sure I want to know that answer, but I suspect we'll find out sooner than we'd like. 

It's That Midwestern Mentality

Alas, I did not win the $1.80 billion Powerball jackpot last Saturday.

Of course, there's the small matter of actually purchasing lottery tickets if you want to have a chance at winning.* I'm very much in the "if the winnings are high enough I'll buy a few tickets" camp, but that mentality also wars with a line an old friend from college used to say about lotteries: "Lotteries are a tax for people who can't do math." I'm an irregular-at-best lottery player, although I did buy a few tickets on Saturday.

Even if I had won you probably wouldn't have noticed any changes to the blog, because I'm not the sort of person who runs around showing off what riches they have. (And before you ask, no, I'm not rich.) Luckily for me, I live in a state where the identity of major lottery winners can remain private, so there's that at least. I used to joke that the way you'd find out if I won the lottery was not because I bought a new car or something like that, but that I finally got some major repairs done to the house.

Growing up and living in the Midwest has given me a very specific set of values where the ostentatious display of wealth and/or success is frowned upon. Obviously, that Midwestern mindset has declined a bit over the years as pop culture has penetrated even the most remote parts of the country, but at the risk of sounding once again like an Old Man Yelling 'Get Off My Lawn (tm)', I'm a not a fan of the "Oh, look at me!" sort of mentality.

Sure, dress the way you want. I'm fine with that. Hell, I admire people with a fashion sense (such as Kamalia) that I don't have; if you want to see what you can do with fashion in an MMO such as WoW, go read her blog Kamalia et Alia, because she is amazing at what she can pull off. But if you go running around acting "Hey, look at ME!", I'm more likely to grouse along the lines of quite a few old football coaches (I'd heard it said by Paul Brown) by thinking to myself "Act like you've been there before."**

It needs to be said that I'm not immune to that "look at me" mentality. 

Every time someone comments or whispers to me when I'm on Joanofdark about how much they love the name, I get this small flush of pride. Then I frequently tell them that a friend came up with the name and I just ran with it. Okay, I don't have to do that --and I've simply accepted the compliment as-is a lot of times just like above-- but I do feel guilty otherwise. 

***

A lot of multiplayer video games tend to utilize the peer pressure inherent in groups to sell things to their players. Okay, this isn't exactly confined to video games since you see it everywhere, even in what smartphone you use, but since I play video games more often than I use my cell phone*** I see it there more often.

It's just like people showing off their mounts in MMOs:

Although I'd hesitate in calling a giant, floating,
cigar-chomping face a "mount".

And yes, definitely a mount, but I was never
really a fan of their brethren back in Wrath days.
All it takes is one mounted toon standing on top of
a mailbox, blocking your access, for you to understand.

It's not merely a Retail WoW thing, because I've seen people showing off their gear and mounts in all sorts of other MMOs where people congregate. Oh, and there's plenty of MMO pundits out there who love to mention that a big motivation to getting gear is to show it off. (You know who you are, YouTube creators who never read this blog.) To me, that's akin to going out on a date with your spouse or significant other primarily to show off how great a catch they were. Which says a lot more about you and your priorities than it does anything else.

In the end, this is just me grumping a bit about priorities. I can't make people change, and really I shouldn't be able to anyway. I guess it's an acknowledgement that I'm going to do my own thing, other people will do theirs, and that'll be that. 

*That reminds me of an old joke I once heard that goes something like this version I got from the Harvard website: 

A deeply religious man, whom I will call Dave, finds himself in dire financial trouble. He prays earnestly to his God to help him out of his predicament. "God, I'm about to lose my car. Please help me. Let me win the lottery." Lottery night comes, but sadly, Dave is not the winner.

Things go from bad to worse. Without a car to get to work, Dave loses his job. Without a job, his mortgage is foreclosed on, and he loses his home. Without a home, his wife leaves him, taking the kids. After each horrible step in the mounting crisis, he pleads with God to let him win the lottery, but he never does.

Finally, broke, hungry, living on the street, he tries again. "God, please, my life is a wreck. I have no car, no home, no family. Please let me win the lottery just this once so that I can turn my life around. I beseech you."

Suddenly, a flash of light rends the sky, and the voice of God echoes down from the heavens. "Dave, meet me halfway. Buy a ticket." 

**The late North Carolina University head basketball coach Dean Smith built a culture that emphasized teamwork. After one of his players would score, that player would turn and point to his teammate who passed him the ball. It was a visual acknowledgement that the basket was a team effort, not simply an individual one.  

***No, I don't play games on my phone. To me, my phone represents the 24x7 on-call nature of my work, and I try to use it as little as possible. However, my kids are far more used to utilizing their phones for keeping in contact than I am, so I've grown used to smartphones in my life more than I'd like. Although I primarily use a smartphone to listen to music and/or podcasts when I can't have access to my stereo or PC.

Meme Monday: Board Game Memes

Yes, I know, board games are a pretty broad category. Still, I've got enough memes that I figured I might as well put them in one Meme Monday.

There have been times when I've discovered
that simply doing things randomly throw other players
off their game. From that social media site that whats-his-face owns.

I'd like to have the one on the left, but frequently
things deteriorate into the one on the right.
From that same social media site.

Uh... When you get really into board games as a hobby,
that is SO much a lie. From Instagram.

That's a truism of playing board games. The most
dastardly ones are the "cute" looking ones.
From that social media site again.

Okay, TECHNICALLY it just said "games",
but I saw that and I immediately thought of
Eurogames. From Thunder Dungeon.

We don't have a cat, but... Yeah, I get it.
From Memedroid.

Dead Things in Stormwind

Oh, look at the time!

It's September, and I presume that Naxxramas is coming quickly to the WoW Classic Anniversary servers. People have been raiding AQ40 and AQ20, doing goofy things such as pulling Teremus the Devourer to Stormwind, and in general causing a bit of a ruckus.

One of many little visits to Stormwind by Teremus.

Meanwhile, I'm still plugging along in my own little way.

The listings are as of September 4, 2025.

Getting a chance to melt enemies in Zul'Farrak is good for the soul. My soul, to be clear, not the souls of the trolls we've been fighting in there.

Speaking of pour souls, there's been a dead Tauren floating over the mailbox by the Stormwind bank for several weeks now. Every Patch Tuesday I think that a reboot will fix what has to be a perpetual amount of embarrassment visited upon this Tauren's clan, but he's not vanished yet.

Your eyes do not deceive you. There are two Tauren there.

For a while there were actually TWO dead Tauren there, but the last I checked we're back to one. Things like that demonstrate two things: that the denizens of the Anniversary Servers have a sense of humor, and Blizzard doesn't really devote much in the way of resources to the Classic Era-esque side of the house. If they did devote resources, this dead body would have been cleaned up by now.

I've also been experiencing class quests that I've never seen before, such as the quest chain for the Warlock's robe and offhand weapon.

This is part of the reason why I want to go back eventually and work my way through the other classes I've left behind during this leveling process: I've never seen a lot of these class quests, and it'll be interesting to go through them when you never can experience them in Retail (or Mists Classic) at all.

Well, onward and into Autumn.

EtA: Corrected grammar and reinstated the comment over the third graphic.

How to Vanish in Plain Sight

I'd noticed that Google's search engine isn't as good as it used to be for quite a while now, but I wasn't expecting this. 

Okay, that's hyberbole*, but I'd not really thought about it that much until Shintar pointed out to me on Monday that Parallel Context doesn't show up in search in Google. 

Don't believe me?

I made a search using the "site" option and put it in Google and Bing.

Here's Google's result:

As of September 2, 2025.

And Bing's result:

As of September 2, 2025.

For curiosity, I reran the search on Google while removing the "site:" option, and...

As of September 2, 2025.

In case you're wondering whether it's my settings, I run Google with SafeSearch set to "Off", so my occasional usage of profanity shouldn't be caught by the search engine.

I also did verify that the blog is visible to search engines:

Again, as of September 2, 2025.

***

My first impression is that Bing doesn't do a very good job of searching PC either, since I deliberately chose the title of my most recent work of fiction which happens to be the title of two blog posts, but it couldn't even find those two as a top result. Still, that's better than absolutely nothing happening on Google's side.

I'm pretty sure that Google's search engine ought to have picked up entries on Google's own blogging platform, and they actually do. Just not my own blog.

Here's a quick search with the site command for Shintar's post on a farewell to the long running SWTOR podcast The Ootinicast:

As of September 2, 2025.

So... apparently Google's search doesn't believe Parallel Context exists as an actual destination site, despite the blog's age. If I were using this blog for income** I'd be appalled by this development, but since I kind of prefer to be out of the limelight I'm fine with that. Shintar knows me well, as she told me she figured that I'd not be too torn up about it. Still, as she pointed out to me, it's an annoyance when you want to search for something but you can't find it. 

Yes, that's Michael Richards before his role in
Seinfeld, playing someone who thinks he's invisible.
IIRC, Judge Harry Stone had issues with his eyes
in the episode so he was temporarily blind.

From Night Court's Season 2 Episode 11.

I personally think that it demonstrates that these gigantic tech companies aren't as all-seeing as they think they are. If there's one thing that life has taught me it's that karma is a bitch, and Big Tech has hubris in spades. 

*At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling to get off my lawn, Google's been going downhill for a while. It's no surprise that I've been using Bing more often than Google these days.

**I'm not. I have all monetization options turned off. Besides, I think that monetization would actually go to Souldat, since he was the blog's "creator".