Gen Con 2026 - Emptying the Backpack

When I mentioned in the previous video that there were things to unpack, I wasn't kidding.

I typically bring the backpack I use for work when I go to Gen Con.* It prevents me from going crazy and buying all sorts of stuff at Gen Con because it had all better fit in that backpack. I realize I could just carry around an extra bag, but come on. Have you SEEN the crowds at Gen Con? We're talking about ~74,000 attendees over four days, and the place was already crowded enough without me lugging around an extra bag. I also held some things for my son, so my parts of my backpack were already spoken for.

That means I didn't end up buying board games at Gen Con, but that's okay. If I wanted to buy a board game, I'd rather support my local game store.

Funny thing, that...

My Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS) held an "RPG Celebration Sale" on July 18th, where all RPGs and both Reaper and WizKids Minis were 20% off. Oh, and if you spent enough ($50) they had a bunch of goodie bags full of freebies to give away. 

So...

Yeah, I indulged there, knowing full well that it was coming out of my Gen Con budget. Therefore, I'm counting what I purchased there as part of my Gen Con haul. My blog, my rules.

...and that's it.

Yes, I bought a RuneQuest splatbook that fills in the gaps of some of the RuneQuest mythology, and what's ostensibly the Pendragon Gamemaster Screen but with several extras...

Yeah, just a few.

The map actually won awards at Gen Con last year, so I was happy to have that included in the bundle, but there was also a Gamemaster Gazetteer and some Gamemaster Resources tucked away in separate booklets.

(Hmm... I ought to do an RPG From the Past on Pendragon in general.)

Both of these items were printed by Chaosium, who were well represented at Gen Con, but I thought it better to purchase these at my local store so not only would Chaosium get paid but so would my local store.

***

Now, about Gen Con itself...

I gave serious consideration to picking up another Traveller book, and my oldest espied me perusing the volumes there in the Exhibit Hall and teased me a bit about that. However, in the end I decided to not purchase my typical annual Traveller book because I had other things in mind.

One item was a pure impulse buy:

Published by Goodman Games.

Yes, it doesn't look like much --more like a notebook that someone had doctored with stickers-- but I was quite surprised to find this at Goodman Games' booth because I hadn't heard anything about it. You see, several years ago I'd purchased this book from my FLGS:

I'm always up for a book of short pieces from experienced game designers and game masters to help me understand the process behind adventure design, and this proved to not only be a great read but full of great tips as well. So when I saw its sequel at Gen Con, I immediately snapped it up. The listing of authors on the back of the new volume didn't exactly hurt, either:

Even my wife, who looked over my purchases when I got back home, recognized some of the names: Luke Gygax (one of Gary's sons), Steve Jackson ("THE Steve Jackson??" she asked), and Sean K. Reynolds. I knew a lot more of the authors than she did, and that alone made it worthwhile to pick up.

A bit later I wandered by the MIT Press booth, and I pretty much geeked out a bit. Yes, I am a real geek if I get excited about a university press being represented at a con such as Gen Con, and unlike last year they brought enough books that they still had products to sell on Sunday. And being the history nerd that I am, I bought two books about the history of Role Playing Games:

Both of these books are THICK, each at least an inch thick, and I've listened to Jon's podcasts off and on over the course of the past year so I knew what I was getting when I bought these: well researched and well written. I mean, MIT wouldn't have published them if that wasn't the case.

I did pick up a short and sweet game about cat cuddles for my youngest --no, she's not going to play it with Mooch-- and I stopped by Many Worlds Tavern because I saw something that spoke to me: coffee. I remembered that Many Worlds sells coffee and tea, and while the only ground or whole bean coffee they had left on Sunday afternoon was decaf, I picked up some loose leaf black tea to drink when I'm not in a coffee mood:

Morning Mists Breakfast Black Tea

It'll go well with a present my oldest gave me at Gen Con which she'd gotten from a local coffee shop in Milwaukee:

From Stone Creek Coffee. I've discovered that
Milwaukee has quite a few good coffee shops.

Oh, I guess I ought to mention a few freebies I got as part of attending Gen Con:

The little die in the pouch came from Many Worlds Tavern for purchasing the tea, the poster of the Daggerheart expansion that came out was being just handed out at the end of the con, and I figured "why not" and picked it up. That last one, the Knights of the Dinner Table comic, came from Kenzer and Co., and for me was a blast from the past. I have several KotD comics around (somewhere) that I'd picked up a couple of decades ago, so seeing a freebie just being handed out like that made me happy. I got to see an old friend again.

***

So, that's it. Not all that much, but enough for me. The books alone will keep me busy when I'm not working on radio or writing or gaming.

The crowds aside, I'm looking forward to next year's Gen Con!

*Minus my laptop, of course.

#Blaugust2026

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Okay, the reference to both Queen and the movie Highlander aside, nobody lives for that long. Even with today's medicine, the oldest verified* living person was (according to Wikipedia) a touch over 122 years old. Life and death are a natural cycle, and while that has been long known we also have a long history of wishing for immortality. (Or at least a much longer lifespan.)

I'm not going to get into the weeds as to why we as a species tend to collectively want that --whether here or in an afterlife-- but instead I want to look at how we write about species/races with vastly different lifespans than ours.

Let's get the big one out of the way, shall we?

This was the version I had as a kid.
I have no idea whatever became of it.
From Ebay.

We write what we know, so we project our lives, our understanding, and our emotions onto anything we create. Frequently that includes animals that don't live as long as us. Anthropomorphizing dogs and cats and other animals that we know and love is pretty typical for us as a species --101 Dalmatians, anyone?-- and in terms of aging we basically compress our own human experience into the lifespan of said animals assuming it's a direct 1:1 correspondence.** 

Of course, that's not exactly the case. Other animals are not us, and while they may have individual personalities, they don't have the sense of impending death that we have. That means our understanding of the eventual end of life doesn't impact what other animals experience; while we may not know exactly what your doggo is thinking about things, it's pretty likely that they don't have any real thoughts of the Rainbow Bridge like we do.***

***

Okay, that's us looking at the lifespan of animals, but what about our examination of other races/species that are much older than us?

There's a quote by the Science Fiction writer/editor John W. Campbell****  about approaching alien intelligence that applies here: “Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man or better than a man, but not like a man.”

The "other" big one that we might as well talk about are the Elves and Dwarves of Middle-earth.

Alan Lee's cover of The Tale of Beren
and Lúthien by JRR Tolkien. Star-crossed
lovers from two separate races, Beren
and Lúthien represented Tolkien and his wife, Edith,
as they came from two separate worlds.

Elves are immortal, assuming they don't die due to violence or merely wasting away,***** and while Dwarves are mortal their lifespan is much greater than that of normal humans. Even the Númenóreans, descendants of Men who fought alongside Elves in the Elder Days, have a much longer lifespan than that of the "regular" folk. 

Our experiences of Elves in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings really was that of wise counselors and background commentators for the main characters. They provide the world's exposition and a sense of the weight of tasks ahead; think of Dumbledore's "here's what happened" part at the end of the first few Harry Potter books and you get the idea. 

I've mentioned this before --unfortunately since Google doesn't have this blog indexed I can't easily find it-- but when Fantasy authors put together timelines stretching thousands of years as if it's not a big deal, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Think of it this way: the entirety of Middle-earth's Third Age was over 3000 years, which puts the equivalent in our time to be ~975 BCE. The Zhou Dynasty in China, divided rulership in Egypt, splitting of the Kingdom of Israel into two, the gradual rise of the Assyrian Empire and decline in the old Babylonian Empire, and the rise of the Olmecs. So, looking at all the upheaval that's happened from that time to today, the timeline presented by Tolkien in the LotR appendices is incredibly simplistic. No country/nation has lasted 3000 years in our world (the current nation of Egypt bears no resemblance to the Medieval Mamluks, much less the Hellenistic Ptolemaic or the New Kingdom), yet Gondor and the Elven kingdoms remained (relatively) intact and with a similar political structure over that time. Sure, some empires have come and gone, but nothing even close to what we've seen in the real world.

However, as time in Middle-earth has progressed, the Elves gradually retreated from view and the political stage as they left Middle-earth for the Undying Lands. Even the threat of Sauron didn't mean armies of Elves marching against him in the War of the Ring --Peter Jackson's movies notwithstanding-- and the Battle of the Five Armies from The Hobbit was the Largest military action the Elder Race performed in the latter half of the Third Age.

In one sense, the gradual retreat of the Elves from view, leaving the world to the mortal races, is rather natural. If you're an Elf you don't change, but everything else around you does. Men, Dwarves, Hobbits, and woodland creatures all grow old and die, and you don't. In the Elves, that manifests in terms of grief and weariness#, which is why they're drawn to the Undying Lands where they'll find a respite from the world's mortality. 

"My son, years come when hope will fade, and beyond them little is clear to me. And now a shadow lies between us. Maybe, it has been appointed so, that by my loss the kingship of Men may be restored. Therefore, though I love you, I say to you: Arwen Undomiel shall not diminish her life's grace for less cause. She shall not be the bride of any Man less than the King of both Gondor and Arnor. To me even then our victory can bring only sorrow and parting - but to you hope of joy for a while. Alas, my son! I fear that to Arwen the Doom of Men may seem hard at the ending."

--From The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, The Return of the King, Appendix A

Tolkien obviously put in a lot of thought to the immortality of the Elves on a racial and personal level, particularly in regards to the personal cost of what immortality (and the rejection thereof) brings to a person and their family. However, I think he missed the mark on the resulting societal impact of immortality. In the end, the Elves' society didn't really grow or change over time, but rather tended toward stagnation and calcification. 

***

Now that I think about it, if there's one common thread among immortal or extraordinarily long-lived people in fiction or gaming, it's that we really don't know what it would be like from a social or societal aspect to have a race of extremely long lived or immortal people around. Or even a couple of people, for that matter. Would they calcify and be gradually consumed by grief and weariness, such as Tolkien's Elves? Would they dominate society like the Emperor of Mankind in Warhammer 40k? Would they become more rigid and black/white in their worldview?

Would they lose what makes us human: the ability to connect on a personal level to someone, to feel intense emotion, to love and grieve, to emphasize, to be willing to sacrifice for the betterment of others?

While there's a lot of Fantasy and Science Fiction that does grapple with what it means to be immortal, in pop culture there's frequently a lot of hand waving about immortality as this weighty topic gets in the way of the story, but I think this is something that can't be avoided forever. Merely hand-waving a character as immortal and yet having them act like, well, a regular person is missing the boat. 

Yes, I pulled this out from my Meme Monday
on Age Disparity Memes. From Imgflip.

Obviously, the physical part of being immortal is one thing, and the impact of immortality is most often presented that way in stories and video games. 

The elves parted, and out of their midst came an elfmaiden who walked forward to stand beside the Speaker. At sight of her, Caramon's mouth sagged open. Riverwind's eyes widened. Even Raistlin stared, his eyes seeing true beauty at last, for no hint of decay touched the young elfmaiden.

--From Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, pg. 323.

That impression by Raistlin, where his eyes could only see the gradual decay of all living things, really hit home the concept that Elves had such a long lifespan in AD&D 1e that Laurana appeared to have no decay at all. Back in those days, the lifespan of AD&D 1e Elves were about 4000 years, so yea, point taken.

"The more you know...." From 9GAG.

And given that the average video game player doesn't really think too much beyond stats and physical attributes when creating a character, I guess it's not a very great surprise that pop culture focuses on that the most. 

If you're one of those in the back raising their hand and saying "Yeah, but I do!! I care!!" I'm right there with you. After all, I played tabletop RPGs, and I've read a metric ton of SF&F, so yeah, I've got opinions about excessively long life or immortality.

Another way of looking at intra-species
romances. From the Pathfinder comic Hollow
Mountain, posted on Reddit.

The problem is, we look at it purely from the angle of physical lifespan and who will outlive who, but a larger question is how does the longer-lived person behave toward others? Do they look at their short-lived brethren as merely cattle? As playthings? As children to be parented (either strictly or gently)? As the Great Unwashed, who need religious and social purity imposed upon them? As agents of chaos, to be destroyed? Or an annoyance, to be either disposed with or ignored at your whim?

For me, one thing is certain: people who have abnormally long or immortal lifespans behave significantly different than everybody else. 

Garion looked at the old man whose white hair and beard seemed somehow luminous in the morning sun. "What's it like to live forever, Grandfather?" he asked.

"I don't know," Wolf said. "I haven't lived forever."

"You know what I mean."

"The quality of life isn't much different," Wolf said. "We all live as long as we need to. It just happened that I have something to do that's taken a very long time." He stood up abruptly. "This conversation's taken a gloomy turn," he said.

--From Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings, pg. 258.

As you could probably figure out, I disagree with David Eddings' presentation of Belgarath in The Belgariad. From a story standpoint it works fine, but I'm under no illusions that The Belgariad is anything other than a fun romp of a story. If a person is 7000 years old, I have a very hard time believing that they would behave no different than any other human. If we are the sum of our experiences, hundreds or thousands of years are a LOT of extra experiences that literally nobody living (or dead) could possibly comprehend. Plus, memory is a bitch and that's when people live our current lifespan. Can you imagine trying to remember something that happened 500 years ago, or 1000? We don't even remember what we had for breakfast a couple of months ago, much less things far longer ago than a human has ever been alive. 

There's also something to be said about how our experiences shape us as people, and if we've done one thing for a long time we tend to look at everything through that restrictive lens. That's just for those of us with a normal lifespan, so extend that out several centuries and what have you got? Someone who strictly adheres to one singular viewpoint to the exclusion of all else. If you think it's hard for a normal human to break out from their prejudices and perceive other points of view, just try to do that if you're 1000 or 5000 or 10000 years old and have had centuries or millennia to build up your worldview. 

At least he admits it. From Reddit.

***

I was thinking about this when I realized that the freakiest thing that any NPC ever said to me in WoW was this:

Yeek.

Think about the implications of power and vision that statement had. In the hands of anybody else short of a god it would be hubris at best and insanity at worst. But only someone with the age and prestige and power of the Dragon Queen could pull that off. Even then, becoming all chummy with you later on just kind of lost the plot as far as the immortality of Alexstrasza is concerned. In terms of age and power imbalance, it's a lot closer to one of us befriending a dog.

Which reminds me...

From Reddit.

Yeah, sounds about right.

*There's plenty of unverified ages over 122 in history, but given what we know about physiology that's likely inaccurate, to put it politely.

**Stick a pin in that; we'll see that again later.

***Given that the so-called cognitive revolution (roughly 50k-60k years ago) gave us the capacity to perform imaginative thoughts, we'd have been in the same boat as our canine friends were it not for that. I realize it can be a bit dense and a harsh authorial voice at times, but Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari covers this cognitive revolution fairly well in the initial part of the book. 

****Most well known for his decades of running Astounding Science Fiction/Analog Science Fiction during the Golden Era of SF, Campbell can be a bit of a controversial figure. I was first introduced to him throughout the essays in Isaac Asimov's Asimov on Science Fiction. If you can find a used copy around, it's very much worth a read.

*****It feels weird reading in stories and in biographies about "wasting sickness" and only later realizing that the author or biographer likely was referring to what we now call cancer.

#I've read a ton of Tolkien over the years, and so the only book I can definitively point to for some of this is The Silmarillion, although Unfinished Tales might have parts of it.

Less Brooding and More Examining

My wife and I took advantage of being near to our closest Barnes and Nobles bookstore on Saturday that we decided to drop in for a little while. The last time I was at this Barnes and Nobles was several months ago, and after putting up my post at the end of last week, I thought it a good idea to follow up on whether or not I could find some of those authors I mentioned on the SF&F bookshelves.

At least this particular Barnes and Noble separates Science Fiction and Fantasy into two separate sections --they did this about 3-4 years ago I believe-- and as Bhagpuss observed Fantasy outstrips Science Fiction in shelf space. But you know what outstrips both combined? Manga. 

Here's a crude representation of the SF&F / Comics section at our B&N:

This is as of November 1, 2025.

It's an approximate design, as I was using Paint and it isn't exactly a precise tool. However, as you can see, Fantasy and Science Fiction took up about 5/6 of the interior section of three bookcases, with Fantasy getting 3/6 and SF getting 2/6, with the last 1/6 a depository for SFF-related oversized books as well as some RPGs. The RPGs shared space with other Western-style comics in the smaller shelf in the center, whereas Manga had the entire outer portion of the bookshelf to themselves. And to be honest, I might not be quite representing this accurately, as there might be even more manga shelves that I missed.

Anyway, all that's past is prologue, so let's get to the interesting part: the books.

For starters on the Fantasy side of things, no David Eddings. There was plenty of Terry Brooks, which I'd seen numerous times before, but Terry is still actively writing so that gives him a boost over the deceased Eddings. There was also no Katherine Kurtz, Katherine Kerr, or Janny Wurtz, which again tracks with what I'd seen before. There was also no Fritz Leiber, but guess where I did find a book of his? In the Science Fiction section:

As of November 1, 2025.

That was surprising, given that his arguably most well-known works are the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser collections. 

I'll use that as an excuse to flip over to the SF section, which when I was last at B&N was indeed very thin. However, in the intervening months, it seems that either the corporate leadership or the local ownership* decided to beef up the SF section quite a bit. There was always quite a few Isaac Asimov books around, although they apparently have yet another cover design, but given that Foundation was (relatively) recently loosely adapted into a television series, I guess that's no surprise.

Ray Bradbury, however, is having a bit of a moment.

As of November 1, 2025.

Because of the video adaptation, classroom requirements, and the political climate, Fahrenheit 451 is present in large numbers. However, it was rather nice to see The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes as well.

Arthur C. Clarke, while not being given even close to the amount of shelf space as Asimov or Bradbury, still has at least a few books present:

As of November 1, 2025.

If you were going to pick 3-4 books of Clarke's to be there, I'd expect Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama, and 2001, all of which are present. There's also 2010: Odyssey Two, which is an okay sequel, but I guess it's there because 2001 is there. 

And yeah, I suppose I ought to mention Bob Heinlein:

As of November 1, 2025.

At least the back of Starship Troopers mentions that it is a controversial novel, something which my old Berkley Books edition never did. Speaking of which, it's interesting that Heinlein's novels are being reprinted by Ace, as opposed to Berkley and Baen**, which were you'd find his novels back in the 80s. Given that Ace is now a subsidiary of Berkley, I guess that makes sense, but while investigating who owns what imprint for this post holy crap is the publishing industry consolidated these days. I can easily see why some people go and self-publish if the consolidation of the publishing industry is any clue.

So there you have it. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself incorrect with regards to the SF authors, and maybe that's an indicator that some other novels I read back in the day may have a chance in the sun as well.

*I'm betting on the local ownership, because while the corporate overlords have some say in the overall layout and the big displays around the store, the composition of individual areas will reflect local tastes and what sells.

*Given Baen's current publishing focus in Military SF, it's no surprise that Heinlein's old 40s-60 short stories ended up being published by them in the 80s/90s. As I'd mentioned before, Heinlein's works --particularly his older short stories, have aged really badly, and I suppose you could see his imprint on Baen's authorial focus, particularly some of the right wing aspects of Baen's output.

Wherever I Go, There's a Bookstore

I think it says something about me and my family that my wife and I visited out oldest up in Milwaukee this past weekend* and we spent part of our time in the bookstore that is below her and her partner's apartment.

Oh, we did go to a museum --The Milwaukee Public Museum, and yes, it's totally worth the trip-- and we also attended a concert by one of the local community orchestras that my oldest's partner plays bassoon in, but we can't have a trip anywhere without visiting a bookstore. 

Here's the proof. I sat down on a bench
in the store, looked to my right, and there
it was. I'd been thinking about buying this
classic, and I took this serendipity as a sign.

Some of my fondest vacation memories as a kid involved bookstores. Such as the time when we went down to Jekyll Island, Georgia (my parents rented a house for the week). I wasn't interested in hanging around the beach**, so I read the books I brought. We managed to find a small bookstore in a strip mall nearby when we made an excursion to check out the area, and I found these books:

Yes, I was on an Isaac Asimov kick at the time.
Then again, he wrote a metric ton of books of all types,
so it was kind of hard to avoid his works back in the day.

Asimov on Physics was right up my alley because that's what I eventually majored in at university, but I'd argue that Asimov on Science Fiction fueled my interest in writing far more than any other book at that time.

To be clear, both books were compilations of articles that Isaac had written for various magazines, from his own Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine to Galaxy Science Fiction to Astounding Science Fiction/Analog Science Fiction.***

I devoured that book (from Isaac's perspective) on the history and writing of Science Fiction, and it inspired me to try my hand at writing. 'Try' being the operative word here, because if you thought some of the stuff I put here on the blog is pretty bad, my first attempts at writing articles and fiction in high school were abjectly terrible. I still don't know how I got good grades in English back then, because I occasionally come across an old piece I wrote for class and shudder.

Still, I can also see Asimov's influence on my writer's voice when I occasionally return to this and other essay compilations of his. Unlike Stephen King, whose book On Writing I used as a springboard to learn how to edit better, Asimov provided me positive reinforcement that yes, I could write and I really ought to try my hand at it. The book also taught me that short story magazines were still alive and well (okay, at least 'alive'**** these days) and were worthwhile to read. If it weren't for that, I'd never have gotten to enjoy some really good stories. 

***

There is something oddly comforting about visiting a bookstore, especially for the first time. Sure, with the big stores (such as Barnes and Noble) there's likely to be a bunch of people there who are not readers but are with someone who is*****, but the independent bookstores tend to be packed with readers who genuinely love books. If you ask them and given them a blank slate, they are happy to provide a pile of books to read.

That actually happened to me over a decade ago, when I went to our local bookstore and when someone there asked if I needed any assistance, I admitted that I'd fallen off the wagon as far as reading SF&F goes, and I asked what books I ought to try out. The employee was almost giddy in that he instantly provided me with six books to read and pointed out about another half dozen or more to pick up after I was finished with those. Not all of his recommendations stuck with me --the John Ringo book I only got about 30 pages in before I decided he was far too overtly political for my tastes-- but I did find subgenres I'd have never tried were it not for his encouragement. 

Maybe I need to get out of my comfort zone again and try some specialist independent bookstores, such as Mystery or Romance bookstores. 

*Yes, the Meme Monday was written and scheduled beforehand.

**It stunk of dead fish. And before you say "Hey, what about that endless teen boy pastime of checking out girls?" yes, I can say that I did check out girls. I just made a point of doing that when my parents weren't around, and if I'd have walked over to the beach they would have been there. All. The. Time.

***Galaxy may --may-- have had a relaunch in 2024, but I haven't seen it at a bookstore yet. IASFM is now currently known as Asimov's Science Fiction as you'll see on the website, and Astounding became Analog and is now formally known as Analog Science Fiction Science Fact. Analog and Asimov's are published by Must Read Magazines, the same imprint that also publishes Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Where's The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, you may ask? Well, they began having printing issues, and I've only seen an issue or two since 2023. I did see this thread on Reddit indicating that a fan purchased the magazine with the attempt to save it, but I have no idea if that'll come to fruition. F&SF had a long history in print, and it was one of the last Fantasy fiction magazines out there. If I won the lottery, this would have been one of the things I would try to save from oblivion.

****Aaaand the deeper I've delved into this, the Must Read Magazines imprint also includes F&SF magazine, and the so-called fan (plus the intentionally vague 'group of investors') have been putting out contracts with 'morals clauses' and some pretty onerous ceding of rights in them. This does not bode well for the future of all five magazines, because I've this feeling that there's a private investment firm trying to squeeze every last dollar behind the magazines' intellectual property for their personal benefit. I'll keep an eye on Writer Beware articles for this going forward.

*****Or are buying a book for someone who is a reader.

Time Marches On

My wife and I met our son and his partner for lunch today at our local bookstore, and afterward we wandered the stacks. I espied a few boardgames that the store had for sale, and I immediately felt a bit wistful. It reminded me that the first boardgame store I visited here, Boardwalk Hobby Shop, had closed during the pandemic. The owners had decided to retire, and like I said in a previous post, I couldn't begrudge them that. 

The day before I was out as an advanced scouting party for getting my youngest a new laptop, as her current one is far too old and slow to handle Windows 11, and I needed to reacquaint myself with how the various brands and models handled.* Naturally, I went to Microcenter, and afterward I stopped by my nearby Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS), YottaQuest.

I wasn't there to buy anything --because laptop, you know-- but it was good to simply roam the store and watch the steady flow of customers into the place. Those included a couple easily old enough to be my parents, and they weren't there just because their grandkids wanted to visit,** but to actually buy something themselves. 

I took this pic last Fall, when there were
leaves everywhere. Even on a nose or two.

Time marches on, but I hope that some things continue. Such as good bookstores and game stores.

*Having spent the last 12+ years buying laptops for the kids, I've seen a lot of trends. Such as the decline of HP in terms of quality --holy hell are those laptops flimsy-- and the rise of Acer as a viable brand. I remember when Acer's Aspire line used to be nicknamed "Expire" because of how poorly powered and built they were, but HP has certainly passed them on the way to the bottom in terms of consumer grade stuff. I still refuse to touch Dell because of my own personal experience with the brand courtesy of a work laptop that refused to have it's fan spin unless it sat perfectly flat. Tilt it just a hair and the fan would simply stop working. And I won't get into the overheating problems with that laptop, either.

**That was my experience as a kid when I'd drag my grandparents to a video game arcade or a bookstore.

#Blaugust2025

Time for a Bit of Scrabble

If you ever wondered if you could just go off script and do your own thing in Retail WoW, yes you can.

However, it's not easy.

If you do what I did and deleted the Dragon expansion seed quest because I decided I was going to ignore what Blizzard threw at me and just go my own way...

Guess what happens when you log back in?

Note the lack of a "Close" button or an X in the top right corner.

Yep. You're forced into accepting the quest again. Even if you hit the Escape key, you get this:

I'm really starting to dislike the sound of his voice.

So you have to either accept the quest and then simply ignore it, or you are in a constant state of having to abandon the quest only to have it automatically reappear. Apparently this has been a thing for quite a while, judging by the Blizzard forums:

As of June 2, 2025, although this was posted in 2023.

The best I can do is accept the quest and then untrack it, and that's that. 

When you think about it, simply going off script appears to be an option that Retail WoW doesn't know how to handle. Player driven fun, such as what I described at the end of this post here, is something that Retail WoW isn't really built for. And I'll be honest, I doubt it's very much on Blizzard's mind at all.*

It certainly seems that there's a dual problem in Retail at this juncture with regards to unscripted play: the player base is simply not interested in that, and Blizzard takes the lead in providing things for players to do. There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue here as to which came first, but it certainly seems that players are fine with following whatever tasks or events that Blizzard sets out. This puts the onus on Blizzard to provide "fun" for the players, rather than the players taking the initiative to work out fun for themselves. 

I get it: that pendulum toward player directed fun can swing so far that it could be a disaster. Just look at Fallout 76 and how Bethesda was so sure that players would come up with their own content that it simply fell flat on its face when that didn't happen. You need to provide some structure to a game world, and I think Bethesda finally realized much too late that they'd better get some NPCs and traditional quests in there right pronto. Still I wonder if the pendulum has swung so far toward doing whatever Blizzard hands out without questioning whether we, the players, could make up something better to do.

But judging by all the hoops I have to jump through to just go off in my own direction, I don't think Blizzard really wants me to do that either. It's almost as if people who decide to go investigate what's over the next hill are relegated to the Classic side of the fence, where all the malcontents who won't do as their told reside.**

***

As for Livona, I did take a flightpath through Kalimdor just to see another place that no longer exists in the current state of Retail:

Yeah, I think I'm going to not do any more recent expansions. I might be living in the past, but at least there's a damn World Tree here. I can guarantee that Cardwyn would have said "fuck it" years ago and given the middle finger to any starter quests, echoing a certain parody novel...

Just then a soft knocking came at the door.

"Dammit," muttered Frito, roused from his reveries. "Who's there?"

There was no reply save another, more insistent knock.

"Okay, okay, I'm coming," Frito went to the door and opened it.

There on the stoop were twenty-three lyre-strumming nymphs in gauzy pant-suits couched in a golden canoe borne on the cool mists of a hundred fire extinguishers and crewed by a dozen tipsy leprechauns uniformed in shimmering middy-blouses and fringed toreador pants. Facing Frito was a twelve-foot specter shrouded in red sateen, shod in bejeweled riding boots, and mounted on an obese, pale-blue unicorn. Around him fluttered winged frogs, miniature Valkyries, and an airborne caduceus. The tall figure offered Frito a six-fingered hand which held a curiously inscribed identification bracelet simply crawling with mysterious portents.

"I understand," said the stranger solemnly, "that you undertake quests."

Frito banged the door shut in the specter's surprised face, bolted, barred, and locked it, swallowing the key for good measure. Then he walked directly to his cozy fire and slumped in the chair. He began to muse upon the years of delicious boredom that lay ahead. Perhaps he would take up Scrabble.

--From Bored of the Rings by The Harvard Lampoon, page 149.

*I actually do know something about what's on Blizzard's mind, but I'm not allowed to divulge that information right now.

**That's not necessarily a surprise, as were it not for the malcontents there wouldn't be a WoW Classic in the first place. And to be perfectly blunt, if WoW Classic didn't exist, there wouldn't likely be a Dragonflight or War Within, because Retail WoW would have died when BfA and then Shadowlands' poor design and execution caused subscriptions to plummet. It was Classic WoW that kept Retail afloat during those days.

Putting Words to Passion

One of the nice things about going to a bookstore is that you might walk in on an event and be instantly enthralled.

That happened on Tuesday, as my wife went down to Louisville to visit with her aged parents* and to watch a concert our youngest played in. If I left after work I might have been able to make it if I didn't have traffic and I didn't get pulled over for speeding, but I figured I'd better not risk it.** Since my wife was spending the night down there I decided to visit the bookstore. 

The moment I walked through the doors I knew something was up; a huge crowd had assembled to my right with a speaker at the podium.

"What's going on?" I asked one of the booksellers.

"It's an author signing."

Then I noticed the big poster next to the author:

From Joseph-Beth's Facebook page (and Hanif Abdurraqib).

I'd heard about that book before, but I couldn't exactly remember where. "Oh!" I exclaimed. "The basketball guy."

"Yeah, the basketball guy," the bookseller confirmed. "Go over and listen!"

If on the surface the book was about basketball, considering it was broken into sections about pre-game, the various quarters, time outs, and whatnot, the book was not strictly about basketball itself. It was more a set of essays about life and family and friendship, mixed in with poetry.

But hearing Hanif speak, and listening to him read sections of the book... Holy crap, can that man write. 

It was an otherworldly experience when Hanif read, whether it was opining on when he thought Michael Jordan was at his coolest --the 1985 slam dunk contest-- or relating the story when a friend of his asked him to cut her hair off. However, what charmed me the most was when he was simply discussing things with the audience, about how the first line of this book came to him in a "Boogie Nights"-esque way, or how he'd read Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron in his youth.

"Wow, he's amazing," I said to another bookseller, who was standing nearby, also listening.

"Yeah, he's good," he replied.

"Yeah, if I had only a quarter of his talent... Just, wow."

The bookseller told me they were really pleased with the turnout, and given that Hanif's book tour was only to a handful of locations --Ann Arbor, Michigan, was next-- I think that Hanif knew his audience. 

Hanif also had high praise for his editor, and he hammered home how vital he believed editors were to the creative process. I can't remember the last time I heard an author at a signing give so much praise to their editor in an unprompted manner, and it felt so refreshing for Hanif to give some love to that often overlooked person in publishing.

It was a ticketed event, so I'd have had to have bought a ticket --which included a copy of the book-- for him to sign, but that's fine. I can go back another time and grab a copy of the book. In the meantime, I picked up another one of his books, a collection of essays on music and pop culture, to tide me over.

***

Speaking of things to tide me over...

I asked my questing buddy, a voracious reader in her own right, what I ought to be looking out for. 

"'When the Moon Hatched,' by Sarah Parker," she replied. She'd apparently had her eye on it for quite a while.

Although part of the store was taken up by the event with Hanif, I managed to find it in the SF&F section.

There were quite a few copies there,
which is a pretty good sign.

"It's pretty thick," I told her later.

"How many pages is it?" she asked.

I thumbed through the book to the end. "690 pages."

"OOOO...."

*They're both in their 90s and are still kicking.

**I much prefer the weekend concerts, which I can make more easily. That being said, my time away from home the past couple of weeks kept me from taking the afternoon off to go on down as well. Even then, I would have had to come back that evening because my wife was intent on staying the night anyway. Luckily, my wife informed me that I'd already heard the music they played at a previous concert I attended.

A Short Interlude

I was at our local independent bookstore the other day, perusing the YA stacks, when a teenaged couple stopped by.* The girl marched right up to the staff picks on the left, grabbed a book, and presented it to the boy. 

"That was fast," the boy said. 

"I know this place like the back of my hand," the girl announced confidently. 

I gave them some privacy and moved away with a little smile on my face. In the 1980s I would have said that about our local bookstore just a 5 minute bike ride away.

You know, I don't think reading is dead just yet. 

I've experienced this same feeling lately, watching teenage gamers at my local game store, or even watching YouTube videos put out by younger people so obviously invested in reading or tabletop gaming. When you need every bit of positivity a lot of these days, I take some comfort in that the next generation of geeks is ready to shoulder the load and teach the generation after them to love these pastimes. 

*I only got a cursory glance at them, so I couldn't tell if they were high school or college age for certain, but my guess was they were about 16 years old. Maybe 17.

Vacation's Over

Well, after a week off, I bought 60 days of WoW game time from Microsoft.

That week away felt good, actually. After a good 48 hours of FOMO, I guess I detoxed enough that it wasn't a big issue any more.

Relaxing while killing things works in my book.
And yes, the guild advertisement and the commentary
amused me to no end.

Playing some other games for a while, such as SWTOR, LOTRO, Rome: Total War, and Stardew Valley were good for the soul as well. I didn't have to read about any raid drama, PvP issues, boosts, or any other shenanigans, so I simply got a chance to relax and do whatever.

Oh, and I read a bit too. 

Here's some proof of that.

But one thing I continued reading was this:

Nowadays, there are three levels:
Technician, General, and Extra.
This is the study manual for the Technician exam.

Yes, after 30+ years of being a shortwave radio listener, I'm studying for my amateur radio license. It's something to do, and to be honest I've forgotten more in the study guide than I care to admit. Until this past year I've never had any desire to get on the air, but some of the more recent natural disasters have gotten me to thinking that I can do some good in a small way by providing communications in this age of extreme climate-change driven weather. Plus, tinkering around with electronics is one of my hobbies. And it gives me an excuse to go about 60 miles north to the annual Dayton Hamvention, the largest amateur radio convention in the US. Whether I'll actually have a ham license before I visit is an open question, but you don't need one to attend anyway. I've gone several times over the past few decades, and I always find something interesting there.

Keeping that Sense of Mystery

I make a point to watch long standing developer Tim Cain's Cain on Games YouTube channel. He has decades of experience creating video games, and as a long time player/coder myself*, I really enjoy his insight into designing and creating games. Today, his post was a quick world building tip:

For those unwilling to watch a less than 10 minute video, the TL;DR is to give just enough worldbuilding to complete the game, but no more than that. In other words, leave a lot of mystery in your creation. 

This is something that it seems a lot of MMOs have issues with in their storytelling. 

Maybe it arises out of a realization that min/maxers will distill everything into a mathematical analysis and they have issues with anything resembling a sense of mystery, or that a subset of people have to know exactly everything about a game/world or they're not satisfied, but it certainly seems to be a trap that game developers fall into. It's not something about video games specifically, because tabletop games have this problem too, but I do tend to see it a lot in video games these days. Look at how the storytelling in games such as WoW or even in the average D&D or Pathfinder campaign books have progressed over time, and you'll find more and more that everything is spelled out for the player/DM. Everything is knowable.

You'll see this in book series too, where more of the world the protagonists inhabit is revealed with more mystery stripped away. 

That's not to say the reveal of a game world is bad, since you have to reveal a world as you progress in a story or game, but there's a fine line between revealing and oversharing.

Tim's point is to reveal just enough to tell the story, but no more than that. Maybe you, the author/developer, know more than the player ever will, but leaving a lot of mystery out there will not only fuel more stories in the future but allow player speculation to direct further development as well. 

One thing I've complained about with stories over the years, both in video games and in fiction, is the constant raising of stakes. It seems that many games/books/comics are engaged in a constant level of one-upmanship where the stakes in the current iteration absolutely have to be higher than the last iteration. The thing is, you can only dip into this well so often before it starts to become ridiculous. By leaving mystery in place in your work, you can avoid that one-upmanship trap by leaving a lot of mystery in your game so you have plenty to mine without constantly raising the stakes.

And maybe, just maybe, knowing when to walk away and say the game or story is complete --despite all that's left unsaid-- is good enough. (If only the suits knew this as well.)

*Okay, my coding this past several years has been limited to the occasional shell script, but once a coder always a coder.

Fighting the Demons

The other week, my son asked me how Baldur's Gate 3 was going. 

"I haven't really touched it since we last talked about it a month ago," I replied. He is quite aware that I try not to go bananas when playing a video game, and for me that means playing a game in fits and starts.

Yes, I'm aware that I play MMOs --and WoW Classic Era-- very regularly. The thing is, in those games I'm not very goal oriented these days, so it's more to play just so I can hang out with other people. Or people watch wherever I'm at.

There's always something going on in Vivec City.
Even at the bank.

Still, I worry about my ability to control myself, as I have the tendency is to go "all-in" on playing a game I like that I'm progressing through. So I play a bit, then I force myself to back off. Once I create a bit of separation, that magical pull that a game or a book or a piece of music has on me lessens, and I feel better able to balance my desires with my needs. 

BG3 is definitely a game that I enjoy playing. It has some moments that make me go WTF, such as your companions' backstories*, but overall I enjoy it a lot. It scratches that RPG itch that I don't get often enough these days, just as Age of Wonders 4 scratches that Fantasy building game itch that Master of Magic first gave me.**

Hey Sundren, how are you doing?
I remember you from Age of Wonders III.

So when I told my son that I hadn't played in what was effectively a month, he wasn't surprised. One of his friends had begun playing BG3 recently, and he was having to balance the video game with all of his grad school work that needed to be finished before the end of the semester. I didn't envy that friend of his one damn bit.

***

I suppose I've always known to a certain extent that I am prone to addiction. 

If I find something I like, I tend to do it over and over to an almost unhealthy extent. Even before the Satanic Panic derailed my D&D youth, I used to read and re-read The Lord of the Rings. And before that, The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald.

This was the version of the books that I had.
From Amazon.

I clearly remember my dad coming into my room when I was in 8th Grade and sick with a cold, and he informed me I had better start reading something else than "those darn Tolkien books". Of course, that made me want to re-read them even more often just to spite him, but I instead turned my mind toward other Fantasy and Science Fiction***.

During my freshman year at college, I had problems transitioning to college level work because I got distracted by Star Trek, of all things.**** That Fall of 1987 was when Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted, and the friends at college and I would watch the show religiously and talk about it after. The internet was still in its protracted infancy and email access was restricted at UD, so those of us who liked geeky pastimes could only rely upon face-to-face contact for such discussion. So there I was, struggling to keep up with my studies, but all I could think about was Star Trek. 

Yes, I was a nerd. You had to ask?

When my grades began slipping to the point where my scholarship was in danger --and my dad made sure I knew about it-- I had to take drastic action. So I began dialing it back on Captain Picard and crew.

I wasn't as self-destructive as some people I knew in college, such as the person who lived in the dorm next to me. He didn't last a semester at college, as about 6-8 weeks in he discovered the pleasures of partying and simply stopped caring about his classes.***** His girlfriend (who was attending Notre Dame) contacted us because he had even gone silent with her, and she was worried. My roommate and a couple of other people on our dorm floor, including our Resident Assistant, basically held an intervention and convinced him it was smarter to drop out to get his life back together before he ruined it completely.#

Still, watching that happen was a sobering experience. There were several instances of people on my dorm floor imploding and getting themselves on academic probation, enough so that the joke was that our floor had the lowest GPA in the entire building, and that was despite several people with excellent grades calling our floor home.

***

Even today I have to be careful lest I get sucked into some distraction to the point where I haven't gotten any of the normal activities of home life completed. This goes for work as well, because I've had to be told more than once over the course of my career to basically "stay in my lane" and not do other work I found interesting but wasn't part of my job description. 

So while I'd love to be farther along in playing some of these video games, I know that I have to be on my guard. Writing down lists of things to do, much like how you'd write out a grocery list, help to keep me on track from being distracted too much, but even then my sense of time can get all thrown off when I'm absorbed in something. Maybe I ought to set a timer.

You and me both, Jodi.

*I have a post I'm working on about that.

**I should clarify that the original Sim City, Sim Earth, and hell, even Santa Paravia for those old farts like me were the video games that inspired my love of building and development games. 

I actually have a printout of the source code
of the game in TRS-80 BASIC. I'd meant to convert
it to TI-99 4/A BASIC, but I never got around to
it. Something something hormones something something.
From datadrivengamer.blogspot.com.

***Likely to his displeasure. He never read fiction, much less F&SF.

****Given that I went to an all-boys high school, you'd think that I'd have said "girls" instead of Star Trek. And you're not wrong in that having girls in classes were a distraction after years of not having them around, but you have to understand I dealt with that already in high school. My junior year of high school I took Spanish III, and since only two of us signed up for the class they sent us over to the "sister" all-girls high school next door. I should have known that something was up when my classmate and I discovered we were in two separate classes, but even I was surprised on that first day of school I walked to the classroom and knocked, only to see thirty pairs of eyes turn and look at me. 

"Spanish III?" I asked.

The teacher smiled. "Sí sí," she replied. "Red?"

"Uh, yeah," I said, my face likely showing my mind turning to mush, as a wave of laughter swept the the class. It wasn't enough that I was outnumbered 30:1, but that they were all really attractive as well meant that I was in for a very long year.

"Do you want to sit somewhere up here?" the teacher asked, motioning to a desk in front. 

"No, I'll take this one right. back. here." I replied, sliding into the desk in the back by the door to another round of light laughter.

TL;DR: I survived the year, but that's because I made myself as invisible as possible. I'd say about 5-6 of the girls knew me from grade school, so most of them were a total unknown to me. My biggest takeaway from that year was that if you kept quiet you got to hear all sorts of interesting things about people's lives, particularly their love life. I also (now) realized that I missed a few obvious hints that some of the girls dropped that they were interested in me. This period of my life will come back from time to time, so don't be surprised if this reappears in a subsequent post.

*****I was there when it happened; we'd gone out on a Saturday night to the university village, nicknamed The Ghetto at the time, and we came across a student house that had kegs there but very few people in attendance. At the time I didn't drink so I passed (they got me a Mt. Dew, I think), but about halfway through his first beer our floormate decided he really really liked that stuff and he just started plowing through the beer like there was no tomorrow. He and another guy we were with got totally plastered and it took us the better part of an hour to walk them back to the dorm.

#As far as I know, it didn't help. Someone who was a mutual acquaintance ran into him at a concert back in their hometown a year or two later, and he was well down the "throwing your life away" path.

EtA: I corrected the time from 3-4 weeks to 6-8 weeks, as it was late October when this began.