Fellow blogger Kamalia, of Kamalia et Alia, posted yesterday about wanting friends to hang with her at her house for a weekly quest. Since she plays solo for the most part, she'd prefer it be Battle.net friends, but if that wasn't happening she'd be open to grouping.
Well... that intrigued me a bit, so I asked a few questions in the comments, and then one thing led to another, and...
Surprise!
Yes, I pulled out my first max-level toon from 2009, Quintalan, for the visit. It's been a while since he's been out and about, as he's wearing his Tier 9 armor and wielding Quel'delar, but I thought it appropriate that he be the first toon to visit.
Kam showed me around...
From the foyer...
To a parlor/reading area, complete with a floating book. That book tickled my funny bone.
Cardwyn: "Hey, me too!!"
And it wouldn't be Kamalia's house without several Tauren-themed rooms.
She even had a laundry area put together, which given I was actually finishing up a load of laundry at the time, this was perfect.
This is the kids' room, complete with bunk beds. And Ancient, if you're reading this...
All in all, she's done an amazing job of decorating. But if you've ever read of my admiration of her innate sense of decor and fashion, it's not a surprise.
We went to the edge of her property, complete with tallstriders. No hawkstriders around, alas.
I had to admit that I wasn't sure if Quintalan even had flying in the Old World, but at least the Community Center is reachable by ground mounts. From there I could take a portal to Orgrimmar.
I took a lot more screencaps than I posted here, but this should give you a feel for what it was like visiting Kamalia's house. I told her that if she just needed a body to hang around every so often, I was more than up to the task. After all, I'm not raiding or anything, and it'd feel good to reconnect with more of my blogger friends in-game.
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...
For all of my years puttering around computers and IT, I've never built a Raspberry Pi.
Until now.
I built one to power what's known as a Hamclock* that amateur radio hobbyists use to keep an eye on contact listings, what amateur radio bands are open (it's a shortwave/High Frequency thing, just roll with it) and what solar activity is.
Oh, and it has a nice graphic of the earth showing parts of the earth that are in daylight or night:
This is DL1GKK's Hamclock, which looks much more detailed that the graphic I have. From DL1GKK.
Geochron makes those as well, but the digital ones cost $500 and the physical machines cost much more than that. My Hamclock is basically the cost of the Raspberry Pi, parts to put it together, and a spare monitor and/or keyboard + mouse.
Anyway, I figured I'd put Raspberry Pi in this week's Meme Monday.
Okay, let's get the low-hanging fruit out of the way. See what I did there? From Instagram.
And yes, this is another popular meme type. From ifunny.co.
When the most current powerful version of the Raspberry Pi came out, the Raspberry Pi 5, it was a bit difficult to find one in stock at first. From Zuyun Zeng.
Again, unless you're in the know (and you are now) this would kind of make sense. From Memedroid.
Apparently Raspberry Pi enthusiasts are a bit excited about their hobby. From Memedroid.
But just like any other electronics project, you can go down the multi-week rabbit hole when you start on a new Raspberry Pi project. From imgflip via Medium.
Once in a while I'll hear a song I haven't heard in decades, and I'll suddenly realize that I'd missed a critical part of what the song meant.
Take for example, the Michael Martin Murphey song Wildfire...
This song came out in 1975, and it was one of those Folk songs that skirted the edge of the Country/Western genres and Folk Rock genres. I'd heard it on the radio in the 70s, but outside of the refrain it never resonated with me very much. Until I stumbled on it a few months ago, I probably hadn't heard it at all since the early-mid 80s, because the only person I knew who listened to Country on the radio was my dad's mom, and I tried my damnedest to avoid listening to it whenever I visited.*
It had popped up on my YouTube feed, and I stared at it for a good 5-10 minutes, trying to remember the song, but I finally gave in and clicked it.
The song sounded familiar, but the lyrics certainly weren't. It was only when the refrain came on that I realized I did remember the song after all.
Even more than that, after a few critical listens, I realized it wasn't a love song at all, but a ghost story. The first verse doesn't give anything away, but that the lyrics are in present tense imply something current. It's when the second verse kicks in and switches to past tense that you realize that the girl and horse mentioned in the first verse are actually ghosts. The third verse provides the grounding of a failed crop, and as the cold (and presumably hunger) has crept in, the owl heralds the ghost horse and rider coming for the singer as essentially a harbinger of death.
Pretty grim stuff wrapped up in a mellow sounding song.
***
Sometimes I'll hear a voice or an instrument in a song, and I'll say "I know I've heard that before, but I don't know where."
Again, I'm going to pull the 80s out of a hat and mention late Genesis guitarist Mike Rutherford's band, Mike + The Mechanics.
I could have picked out any of their songs, but I figured that The Living Years would do. Mike's guitar is pretty identifiable, but I want to focus on his vocalist, Paul Carrack.
Paul had a nice solo career, and I had recognized his voice from the song "Don't Shed a Tear" that was released a year earlier in 1987...
...and he's also known for his time in the band Squeeze, but I was completely unprepared for something over three decades later.
For some strange reason I'd fallen down the rabbit hole of listening to what was then called Soft Rock and is now called Yacht Rock when I stumbled across this song...
I knew that song by heart, because my parents would only play Soft Rock in the house when I was growing up.** However, when I listened to it a couple of years ago for the first time since the late 80s, I realized I knew that singer's voice. It took me a few months of rummaging through my CDs and songs on YouTube, but when I realized that it was the same Paul Carrack from Mike + The Mechanics, I was completely floored in the same way when I heard Bad English in the late 80s for the first time and I instantly recognized John "Missing You" Waite's voice.
Funny how that works.
*Because I was into all sorts of Rock, Heavy Metal, and New Wave at the time.
**Yes, it was Cincinnati's WARM 98, WRRM-FM 98.5.
EtA: Mike Rutherford is actually still alive. It was the manager for Genesis, Richard Macphail, who'd passed away in 2024. Whoops. I have since corrected the post.
Good thing I did, because the overall lack of WoW Classic information wasn't that great of a surprise. To me, anyway.
The 2019 Classic Train is still in Mists, and that was highlighted in the roadmap along with the Anniversary Servers currently on a somewhat watered-down TBC Classic that's designed to be blasted through in less than a year.
To see this better, click on it to see the full-sized version. From Blizzard.
Basically, the WoW Classic train got some vague promises of wanting to stay true to the community, and there will be surveys heading out over the year to gauge interest in various things and how you want to play.
Oh, and there's now a WoW Ambassador Program, that's supposed to be the community helping the community. Given how some people play, I'm not so sure this will work out very well --or maybe about as well as other community initiatives, which is damning by faint praise-- but at least they're trying.
***
Oh, and did you know that there's Player Housing in Retail WoW?
Oh yes, housing alone got about more of a mention in the recap than all of the Classic WoW versions combined, which also speaks to the fact that Blizzard devoted 2/3 of the recap (and likely the video itself) to Retail WoW. Bully to those who play Retail, but that also says to me that Classic WoW is definitely the red-headed stepchild of the WoW community. Which is honestly just fine for the Classic WoW players, who are going to do their own thing.
How do I know this? The Classic community is already reviving the community-driven Hardcore mode, this time for TBC Classic Anniversary Edition.
This is in direct response to Blizzard deciding to pull the plug on official Hardcore Anniversary servers when the TBC Classic pre-patch dropped. And I'd bet a couple of doughnuts** that TBC Hardcore will be far more popular than people expect. Even if Blizz didn't throw a bone at the Hardcore community by allowing for a buff/debuff identifying those Hardcore players, they'd be out there anyway.
***
One thing that people will point out is that there's still a gigantic black hole for what will happen to WoW Classic once both Mists Classic and TBC Anniversary Classic reach their conclusions at the end of the year. I presume any news there will happen at BlizzCon, which is smack in the middle of September, right around the time when the WoW Classic Anniversary servers were announced in 2024.
I guess that the reckoning will be put off a bit longer, but if I were a betting man this is what I'd expect:
Warlords Classic will be a thing as the Classic train will keep running towards an eventual merging with Retail WoW, likely sometime around 2029-2030.
TBC Anniversary Classic will progress to Wrath Anniversary Classic around mid-Q1 2027.
No Classic Plus will be announced, but Blizz will tinker with another Seasonal server along the lines of the Chinese Titan Reforged servers.
Yes, yes, I know, they teased "more" with this line:
Still, I don't expect Classic Plus at this point. Given everything that's "all Midnight all the time", and that the Classic team is really operating on a "balled string and a couple of tin cups"-sized budget*** it'd take them years to create a wholly-independent Classic Plus now. So, they'll do what they can by tweaking the Classic formula as much as they can safely dare without bringing the entire house down.
I guess my reaction to all this was: don't get your hopes up. After all, there's likely more layoffs in the XBox Games Division coming.
*I'm borrowing "whelming" from Josh Strife Hayes, who uses "it was whelming" in place of the more standard "it was meh".
**To me in my current state of health, that's a pretty serious bet.
***Didn't you ever play "telephone" using a couple of cups and a string connecting the two? Well, shit, I guess I really AM old.
It's a bit earlier than my usual updates, but this happened over the weekend:
On January 24, 2026.
So the four have crossed the finish line.
There was something else I was doing on Saturday afternoon, related to my other recent hobby:
From Icom America's Instagram feed. Uh, and apparently an AI generated pic with an Icom amateur radio. Who'd have thought?
Winter Field Day is one of the big contest days in the US Amateur Radio community. Typically, clubs will get together and go outside somewhere to make as many unique contacts as possible; some clubs really get into the competition of it, while others simply are there to enjoy their time together and do some radio stuff while they're there.
Luckily for my club, our facilities at the Red Cross building count as being away from your own home for purposes of the contest, so I got to experience Winter Field Day without freezing my ass off. (Or getting snowed in, which was also a possibility this weekend.) As the weather got progressively worse Saturday night, the club made the decision to go home and call it for Sunday, because the weather had just become too untenable.
So I dabbled in two of my hobbies on Saturday, which worked out well overall.
Before you ask "Hey, haven't you been putting out enough winter and snow related memes lately?" yes, I'm aware of that. And apparently Mother Nature has taken notice and said "Hold my beer!"
Beginning late in the afternoon on Saturday and until Sunday evening, we got about 9-9.5 in/ 22-24 cm of snow dumped on us.*
I took this pic when I was out shoveling.
Close to the street, the snow totals were over a foot deep (30+ cm). And now that the snow is here, the really cold temperatures have moved in. The Wind Chill for tomorrow night is expected to be -22F/-30C, so this snow isn't going anywhere any time soon.
Hence, more memes, this time of the Snowpocalypse.
The snow storm hit more than just the Midwest. It came up from Texas and hit a lot of the South, too. This was from the St. Louis Reddit page.
Yes, this was Kansas City's reaction to the impending snow, but I survived my regular trip to the grocers on Thursday night when most of the store was stripped bare by people afraid that they'd run out of food. From Twitter.
Of course, reading isn't a bad thing to do during the snowstorm. From Instagram and ournerdiestthing.
And not everybody believes the world is ending. From Reddit.
The storm has reached the Atlantic Coast and New England, who are more used to this sort of thing. From WAHUP.
As for me, I'll be fine. I've already shoveled the snow so that we can get out into the street and to the mailbox, so there's that. And whenever somebody complains about the cold, I like to bring up January 10, 1982, when the Cincinnati Bengals defeated the San Diego Chargers in the AFC Championship game commonly known as The Freezer Bowl, because the wind chills were -59F/-51C, making it the coldest NFL game on record.
This was a screencap from a recording of the NBC broadcast of the game. From Amazing Blaze Zine.
I remember that game quite well, because we all watched it that day. It was so cold in Cincinnati that day that our heat pump simply couldn't keep up with the cold, and we all wore heavy coats and wrapped ourselves in blankets inside the house while we watched the game on television. We actually had the curtains closed because the cold air seeping through into the house was so bad.
The Augusta Kentucky Historic District put this collage of photos from news reports of the game. From Facebook.
So yeah, it could be worse...
*This is just in my backyard; snow totals for the Cincinnati Metro area varied.
If there's one consistent piece of advice I've given to my kids as they've entered into the dating/relationship stage of their life, it's this simple dictum: don't try to change people as you'll end up disappointed.
Over my life I've seen people get into a relationship, and one of the pair says "they're perfect except for [INSERT ISSUE HERE], but I can work on that." And I've never ever seen someone get "fixed" the way their partner prefers. Even when it appears on the surface that they've been "trained" by their partner into the approved behavior, the reality is that it's an act. The other person just does it to preserve the peace, and it only comes out much later, in a quiet conversation with someone else under the condition to keep their confidence.
Inevitably, this doesn't end well. The couple either continue in a state of quiet dissatisfaction or there's an eventual blow-up and... that's that.
Not bad, but #3 on "Worth Fixing" is highly dependent upon what the issue is. And #1 on "Deal Breaker" can easily be manipulated into really silly stuff. From @drelizabethfrederick via Instagram.
What I've impressed upon my kids is that you have to either accept the other person for who they are or you have to eventually walk away. Obviously, some flaws are quite fatal to the relationship --justifiably so, in my opinion-- while others are minor and can be easily overlooked. Everybody has their own breaking point, and while it might be worthwhile to try to help someone get over their issues, don't expect to "fix" anyone who doesn't want to be fixed.
***
A corollary to this is something that still bugs me to this day. Back in my college days, there was this one girl I knew who dated a guy briefly, then after they broke up she schemed to try to get him back. On more than one occasion I got roped into her schemes, and after a while it really began to annoy me. Right before my (now) wife and I began dating, this girl and I were walking back to a group study session after we stopped to pick up some food for the gang, and once again she was contemplating some sort of plot when I finally decided to tell her that she needed to move on. I explained that she was really attractive and she was also quite smart, but chasing after one person while ignoring everybody else meant she was missing out on someone that would be better for her in the long run.* Unfortunately, she then began asking me about what I thought of her physical attributes and whether some of the various people we knew would be interested in her. I wasn't about to provide details on what our male friends thought of her, and I didn't want to find myself the object of her interest given that she spent too much time trying to play hard to get while simultaneously chasing someone.
Looking back on it, I wish I had the clarity to explain to her that she would have been much better off not playing games but rather just being honest and walking away if someone says 'no'. I don't know a single guy who enjoys these sort of games, and to be fair I wasn't even sure she did either. I suspect she was taught this behavior by either her friends from high school or her family, and if they did they did her a disservice. Of course, knowing my luck she might have interpreted my candid response as interest in her on my part, and I'd have gotten no peace. Still, some part of me kind of wishes I'd have said what needed to be said before we had a falling out later that year.
She blamed it on my now wife, but from my perspective I simply had to walk away because I grew tired of being part of her manipulative games. Even if she came clean and tried to turn over a new leaf, she'd spent so much time being manipulative and playing "love games" that I don't think I could ever have really trusted her. There was no way I wasn't going to have anything resembling a heart to heart conversation with her about my girlfriend, for example, because I felt she would have used it as leverage to make me do something for her.
No thanks.
***
In the end, I guess you could say that while the old "try it, you might like it" credo at the heart of Green Eggs and Ham is still valid, recognizing the futility of certain other interactions is also valid. Sure, there will be regrets, but I've come to recognize that regrets are a part of life.
*For the record, I did think she was really attractive and had the sort of physical qualities I liked, but she spent so much time being needy and chasing after this one person that there was no way I'd ever consider dating her. I didn't need that sort of drama in my life.
