Reminiscing

It's kind of funny how life works out.

When I went away to college, I was a kid who listened to Rock and Metal, but also enjoyed Classical music. I had a thing for Canadian power rock trios, as my collection of Rush and Triumph cassettes proved, but I also would listen to the Classical LPs that my parents had in the basement*.

As far as I know, they're still down there.
This pic is from Etsy, but this was
the first album in the set.

I knew that Alternative --aka Modern Rock-- was out there, as was New Wave, but when I was in high school I wasn't really exposed to it at all. The legendary WOXY, 97.7 FM, was up in Oxford, Ohio, and while we could (barely) pick it up back home, it was more well known locally as the station used in the movie Rain Man.

The tagline was created for the movie, and

the station loved it so much they adopted it.

I knew of punk, and what I heard I liked, but it never got on the radio back home. Top 40 dominated the airwaves, and big corporate radio companies (Jaycor, a predecessor to IHeartRadio, began in the late 80s in Cincinnati) were just starting to make inroads on homogenizing what you could hear over the air, so I expected that going away to college would expose me to far more of what I liked than what I could hear locally.

But of all the things I expected to be exposed to, this certainly wasn't on the menu:

My new roommate was from Chicago, and I quickly learned a few things when we moved in together: we both shared a love of D&D and Doctor Who**, he certainly loved his Chicago Cubs and Chicago Bears, no city in the US was as good as Chicago, and that he was fine with putting up posters that would have given my parents a heart attack.

We both contributed to the decor in our dorm room. My posters were more along these lines:

Mine was a 5 foot version of this, which
I still have stored away in the basement.
(From Ebay.)

But these were more of my roommate's taste:

I had no idea who Samantha Fox
was until he put this 5 foot tall poster up on
the back of our door. This caused... drama...
when my parents picked me up for
Thanksgiving. (From Worthpoint.)

Oh, and he had eclectic taste in music.

He had an actual CD player --a portable model, and the first one I'd ever seen-- and about a dozen CDs. Sure, I'd seen a few CDs at stores, but compared to albums and cassettes there were very few of them. But I was surprised at what he had on his collection. Amy Grant? Stryper? He didn't seem like the sort for Christian music. He also had Genesis' Invisible Touch, a greatest hits compilation of The Young Rascals, and...

It might have been Fresh Aire III, but
This was a better quality photo. From Discogs.

Fresh Aire? What the hell is this? And...

From Discogs.

"Windham Hill?" I asked.

"Yeah, it's pretty nice music. I'll put it on later."

Given his other geeky pastimes, I was willing to give it a try. And I surprised myself by actually liking both CDs, although I'll freely admit the sound quality of the CDs alone probably had an impact. By October, I'd heard enough to know two things: I actually liked this "New Age" type of music, and I wanted a CD player for Christmas. Given that I didn't have a receiver but I did have a boom box with AUX inputs, that's saying something. 

***

Fast forward to today, and the past couple of months I've been spending time re-ripping my old CDs at a better bit rate than before***, so I've reacquainted myself with my old Windham Hill and Mannheim Steamroller CDs. I mean, I still play them from time to time, but one thing about re-ripping means I'm hearing everything again, listening critically, to make sure that the CD was ripped properly.****

Because of this exercise, I've been struck by how greatly my roommate from 37 years ago influenced my musical tastes of today. 

And now, I've got online friends to thank for influencing my musical tastes again.

Found this at a bookstore. This one's
for you, Bhagpuss.

*My dad did NOT listen to Classical music; my mom got the Funk and Wagnalls collection --one week at a time as they were released-- from our local discount store down the street. 

**When he was moving his stuff into our dorm, I noticed this magazine on the top of one of his boxes:

Took me a while to find this out of the Parallel
Context archive, but here it is.

I immediately recognized it as TSR's Dragon magazine, so I pretended I didn't see anything so as not to attract my parents' attention, but if I had any doubt that I had found another one of my people, this dispelled it. He also had a signed black and white photo of Tom "The Fourth Doctor" Baker on his desk, next to the prom photos with his (then) girlfriend. So yeah, a nerd through and through.

***Yes, it's still MP3s, because I don't have that much in terms of disk space for storage to handle FLAC. Besides, being in my mid-50s means that my ears aren't as good as they once were, but they're good enough to hear the difference in some pieces of music in a 192-bitrate versus a 320-bitrate MP3. You just have to know where to listen --and have the right sort of music-- to make it noticeable. Sure, FLAC or WAV files are better than MP3s, but MP3s are pretty universal, so I don't have to worry about not having a format that won't play (I'm looking at you, Samsung Music).

****Alas, after 35+ years, a handful of my CDs no longer play. It's not because they're scratched, but it looks like it's a failure of the metallic material comprising the CDs. Among those CDs were The Eagles' Hotel California, The Cult's Sonic Temple, a Greatest Hits compilation from Golden Earring, and Alice in Chains' Dirt.

I Blame the Holidays

Well, the US Thanksgiving season has come and gone, and with that a visit from the oldest Mini-Red for 9 days.* I provided the transportation, as her university is 130 mi/209 km away, and as is the grand American tradition for college students returning home for holidays, she brought her laundry along.

And her laptop. And a desire to get back into playing LOTRO and SWTOR.

She tried playing in some spare time while she was away, but she discovered that the dorm's network is really bad because it's simply overwhelmed with connections.** When she needs a stable connection for her classwork, she retreats to the music building to work; but she doesn't goof off when she's there.

Not that I consider MMOs goofing off per se, since I do write about them, but I understand and admire her dedication to her classwork. When I was in college *mumbledy mumble* years ago, I played the original Bards Tale, Ultima IV and V, the original Sim City/Sim Earth, and various Infocom games in my spare time. Not to mention games designed for the VAX system, such as Angband or Star Trader, or our Saturday afternoon D&D game.

Still, her ability to login to SWTOR at home (after it updated, naturally) was a nice bonus to her visit. We didn't team up for anything, but she spent a lot of time puttering around an old Assassin of hers, and reacquainting herself with the game.

Perhaps it was her class selection that provided me with inspiration, but I started playing an old Jedi Shadow that I'd created on The Red Eclipse but allowed to languish once I got to Coruscant. She was one of two toons I had that I was forced to make a name change --I think I got really lucky-- and I made a minimal tweak and logged into a zone surrounded by Black Sun thugs.

I'd forgotten how much fun having a Trandoshian around as a companion can be.

Due to this toon being in a rest area for a couple of years as well as the XP bonus that was going on, I was outleveling planets a chapter away. That felt really odd, but on the flip side I wasn't getting gear for my actual level from questing, so between that and the artificial level suppression it kept my toon in line (sort of).

But I think that this time I'm going to keep Qyzen around as my companion, since a) I've never followed his story all the way through, and b) companions aren't limited in their role anymore. (I didn't need a tank when playing as a Shadow, I needed a healer. And now Qyzen can do that too.)

Still, it felt good to kick off the rust and go questing in SWTOR and get a Hammer Station random instance in. Now, over the Mini-Reds' Winter Break, I'm looking forward to getting back into some MMO playing I've not done in months.





*So if you're wondering where the blog vanished to, now you know.

**Being a geek, I noted a network connector in her common room and brought up a relatively inexpensive hub for her to use, because I knew that cinder block walls and WiFi don't mix well. Even then, the network connection is poor, simply due to the overwhelming use. The night before I picked her up, most of her fellow students had already left for home, and the network finally became usable. (Surprise!)

Time for the Lottery Drawing

Things have changed a bit in 30 years, but dorm life apparently isn't one of them.

Sure, there's wifi (and network access in general), newer washing machines, smartphones*, and air conditioning**, but the dorms are filled with students, and students haven't exactly changed much over the years.

Our oldest mini-Red is now at university, living in a dorm with three other women. I've heard the common complaints ("classes are overwhelming at times") and emergency requests that comes with life from someone in music/band ("I need my flip folder sent to me so that I'm ready by Saturday's game"), but I've also heard items that are closer to a modern sensibility ("wifi sucks" and "I need to get this program loaded but the instructions for installing it are all screwed up").

"Hey Lazlo! Wanna see a demonstration of gravity?"
The dorm wasn't too far off this, but with a LOT
more cinder block and a lot less graffiti.
From Real Genius (1985) and getyarn.io.

By comparison, when I attended college you couldn't connect to the university owned network from your dorm or rented house until my junior year. And even then, you needed a modem to handle the dial-up connection.*** The internet? Ha! Good luck with that, because it was the province of only the professors and a few lucky students who could use the net for research purposes. (Remember, the web itself was about 7-8 years away.) The concept of using a word processor to write up a paper was still pretty alien, as very few students had computers that could even handle a word processor. I was lucky that my Freshman roommate had a Commodore 64 and a printer, but until I reached my Junior year I frequently relied upon my old Smith Corona electronic typewriter to write my reports.****

We still have my wife's old Smith Corona around.
I haven't seen mine in decades. From ebay.com.

The Commodore 64 --and, to a lesser extent, the Apple IIe-- were what my fellow students frequently had if they had any computer or game console at all in their dorms. The NES was still a rare find on campus as most students couldn't afford to have one in their dorm --you more often found a hand-me-down Atari 2600 than an NES-- so the C64 was also the primary games machine for a lot of students.*****

There are times when I really do miss this
machine. Considering they were built like
tanks, I suppose I could find one
if I really wanted it. From Pinterest.

While I have very fond memories of my roommate's C64 --it introduced me to Ultima IV and Infocom games such as Planetfall-- the gaming landscape today is a wee bit different than thirty years ago. Among other things, tech's integration with society has had a huge impact on the public's perception of gamers. The very concept of being a gamer has much more acceptance today than it did in the 1980s, when "gamer" as a slang or descriptive term really didn't exist.

What we call gamers today were basically lumped into generic bucket of "nerd" activities. Played D&D? Nerd. Played video games? Nerd. Owned an actual game console? Nerd. Was into science? Nerd. Was into computer science? Nerd. Watched cartoons? Nerd. Read comics? Nerd. Was into science fiction and fantasy? Nerd.

Life is hell when the Alpha Betas are in charge
of the frat council. From Revenge of the Nerds (1984).
From giphy.

Sure, those activities are still nerdy, but the term "nerd" was much more pejorative back then. Today, video games are big business. So are boardgames and pencil-and-paper RPGs. The list of top grossing movies dating back to (roughly) 2000 has been an 80's nerd's paradise. Hell, even MTV, that purveyor of hipster teen/twentysomething coolness, has had SF/F shows on their lineup.

All this has translated into today, where having a dorm roommate who plays video games or D&D isn't so out of the ordinary.

***

When I arrived at my dorm my freshman year, I walked past the hallways of people carrying boxes into their own rooms. Some had begun putting up posters of rock bands, hot bikini babes, and odes to greed.

Yeah, like this. This and the posters of Budweiser
swimsuit models pretty much scream '80s.
From Yahoo.

I walked into my dorm room, and there were a few boxes set neatly to one side. A signed photo of Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, sat on the two person desk next to a pair of prom photos. My roommate came through the doorway carrying a milk crate of stuff that had a copy of Dragon magazine on top, and I grinned. I was with another member of my tribe.******

This cover, actually. I remember the Mystic
College article very well. From rpg.net.

Fast forward to the other week when the oldest mini-Red was getting settled into her dorm, she put up a few posters --Rogue One among them-- and her roommate began talking about the copy of Smash Up that the mini-Red had tossed onto her bed. Thirty minutes later they were discussing D&D 5e and maybe getting a campaign together.

I wore a silly grin for the next five minutes.

As I later texted my brother-in-law, "Sometimes, you just win the roommate lottery."




*The dorm that the oldest mini-Red lives in was built in the 50s/60s and had places for telephones hung on the wall. But --surprise surprise-- those phones are now gone. If your kid doesn't have a cell at this point then they can't call anybody without a laptop or tablet using Skype. Of course, some teenagers might read this and think "Who CALLS anybody anymore?" I guess I'm getting old...

**One of the universities we visited during the selection process was my and my wife's alma mater. During the group tour it came out that yes, we were alumni, and one of my fellow parents asked me what I thought of the dorms that they were presenting. "I'm amazed that they have air conditioning," I replied. "All of the main dorms didn't have A/C when I was here."

"What do you remember the most?"

"The smell. Imagine 40-50 guys on one floor, with no A/C, and the smell of sweat and dirty clothes. It got really fragrant at times."

***My housemates and I my senior year pooled our money and splurged on a second phone line so we wouldn't tie up the main phone by connecting to the university.

****Remember Wordstar? It was a competitor to Wordperfect at the time, and it's software could fit onto one 5.25" floppy disk with enough space for your papers. That meant if I had access to a PC around campus, I could pop in the floppy, start Wordstar, and work on a paper. It did have one major flaw in that if you got too eager and began to pull the floppy before it completely stopped spinning, your data file would get corrupted. I sadly discovered this the night before my final in my Advanced Lab class, where I lost 3 lab reports at 11 PM. The data was there, but unrecoverable. I had to rewrite those 3 reports --each report 20-25 pages long-- plus the one that was unwritten by 8 AM. I still don't know how I managed to write about 80 pages in one night, but I was so hyped up on coffee, adrenaline, and sheer terror that after I turned in all the papers I simply couldn't get myself to calm down and sleep for another 4 hours.

*****The NES back in 1987 ran typically from $100-150, with the deluxe set $179. In 2017 dollars, that's $220-330 for the commonly found versions of the NES and $400 for the deluxe set (courtesy of the inflation calculator at saving.org). These numbers are pretty much in line with what a new PS4/XBox One/Switch costs in 2017.

******You can buy those milk crates --even though they don't hold milk anymore-- at all of the discount stores such as Target and Walmart. Another nod to things that never change.

And for the record, yes, we did have some non-geeky posters on the wall too. Like the obligatory 6 foot tall poster of Samantha Fox. Yes, THAT poster. And yes, when my parents visited my dorm room later that year, I thought my mom was going to have a heart attack. (They never even noticed the D&D stuff tucked in a corner.)

Hey, at least I didn't die of dysentery

I haz returned.

The Great College Tour is complete. Universities and colleges were visited, food was consumed, and nary a video game was played.

Hell, I didn't even THINK of MMOs or video games until our last visit of the Tour. The guide for the last university tour paused in front of a room at the Student Center and asked if anyone here played video games.

Three mini-Reds' hands shot up, along with those of a couple of other people.

Well, the guide said, this is the video game room. There are consoles and oversized screens there for people to play, and it's all free of charge.

I swear I thought I saw the mini-Reds' levitate.

***

Not all was serious business, certainly. We did sample the local cuisine (which, in Chicago, means Chicago style hot dogs and Chicago style pan pizza), and we took a day off and visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Here, have a picture of the Pioneer Zephyr --the first US streamliner-- which was donated to the Museum of Science and Industry in 1960:

Have a Nice Trip

I spent most of the past week visiting different colleges and universities with the Redbeard clan, and while that also meant not a whole lot of gaming, I also got a lot of exercise walking around several campuses.

Sort of.

You see, I'd busted my foot back in early June the day of a college visit to Bowling Green State University. I was walking across our hotel's open area, where their attempt to invoke the images of New Orleans' French Quarter included masks such as these:

The photo doesn't do it justice.
The thing is close to 2 meters tall.

As I was staring at these masks that my wife compared to American Horror Story's Freak Show, I tripped over my feet and I felt intense pain in the heel of my foot. To my later regret, I convinced myself that I'd be fine and went on the visit anyway, which included a 90 minute walking tour of the campus.

I discovered just how much of a mistake that was when we left for home after the visit and stopped for lunch along the way. I simply could not put any weight on my foot without pain shooting through my heel.

After a week, I decided to visit the doctor's office since the pain wasn't going away much at all in spite of rest, ice, and elevation. The doctor took an x-ray and discovered that my foot was not in fact broken, but merely sprained. More rest and ice was the prescription.

Fast forward to a month and a half later, I can walk fairly well, but the foot is around 85-90%.

But it still isn't fun walking around college campuses, particularly those with lots of hills.

***

Anyway, after one of the campus tours we stopped for lunch at a hole-in-the-wall Latin restaurant. We placed our order, and while we were waiting, I noticed a couple of construction workers eating nearby. Normally, that's not a surprise, but what attracted my eye was the "Blizzard" logo on the back of one of the workers' shirt.

Sure enough, when he went to get a drink, he had a giant Horde symbol on the front.

"For the Horde," I whispered. And smiled.

As Memes Go.....

I'm not exactly a great fan of memes.

The ones you find floating around Facebook and other social media outlets often tend to reduce a complex topic down to a few partially correct zingers. Or they misassign quotes* while passing them off as correct.

That said, there is a place for memes of the sort that are making the blogging rounds again, such as the Creative Blogger Award. They provide a means of peeling back the facade and revealing a bit about the blogger behind the site without forcing the blogger to shout "Look at MEEEEE!" any more than they have to.**

Before you smirk and say "what are blogs for, anyway, if not for expressing your narcissism?", consider that most of the bloggers I know aren't the classic extrovert personalities. They do all love something, whether it is gaming, writing, or something else, and they use blogging to share their love with the world in a (relatively) passive way.

Pewdiepie, we're not.

As much as I groaned about it when I received the Creative Blogger Award nomination from Ravanel Griffon of Ravalation last week, I didn't mind quite as much as I let on. It's not a series of Truth or Dare questions, or even Twenty Questions, but rather 5 facts about yourself.

That, I can do.

***

In no particular order, here are five facts about me that I'm pretty sure nobody in the blogosphere knows:

• I once had a letter to Radio Austria International read on the air.
  
  I believe I may have mentioned once or twice that I do listen to shortwave radio, but my habits today aren't what they were back in the 90's and the 00's. Before the Web, I would get my international news from shortwave heavyweights such as the BBC World Service, Radio Deutche Welle, and Radio Nederland. Among the smaller players that beamed to North America, such as Radio Japan or Swiss Radio International, was Radio Austria International (or Radio Österreich International, ORF for short). Due to my work schedule, ORF's English Service was often the last program I'd listen to before bedtime, and they managed to pack in the news from Vienna as well as the program Report from Austria. One day, after listening to the news, I decided to send ORF a reception report as well as a comment on a story in the news --something I rarely did-- and a few weeks later I received a letter saying my letter was going to be read on the air. Sure enough, at the date specified, my letter was read on the air with a short comment from the presenter.





The letter suffered from water damage dating from
the move into our current house, but here it is after some cleaning up.






Sadly, Radio Austria International is now defunct, a victim of budget cuts and the changing methods of broadcasting news for nations worldwide.



• I once had to type three lab reports in one night.
  
  This might not sound so bad until you realize that each lab report was 20 - 30 pages long. And that the only reason why I did it was because my save disk became corrupted, ruining my copies of my reports.
  
  I'm dating myself here, but I'd been using old word processor program WordStar to work on my lab reports, and saving the data on 5.25" floppy disks. (Kids, if don't know what 5.25" floppy disks are, Google it.) Anyway, I was working on cleaning up the reports before a presentation at my lab final exam when I tried saving, and I heard the familiar ka-chung of the floppy drive's gears screwing up. Sure enough, my data was corrupted.
  
  In a panic, I realized I had about seven hours to rewrite about 80 or so pages to turn in for a grade.
  
  To make a long story short, with a lot of effort, a lot of tea, and a lot of semi-insane muttering to myself, I finished the reports in time. And I even survived the presentation during the final, which I believe was due to my being so tired I really didn't care how I sounded, so I wasn't scared at all.
  
• I am scared to death of needles.
  
  This isn't that much of a surprise, I suppose, since a lot of people don't like shots, but my personal reason why I could never do heroin centers around two specific incidents.
  
  The first one was a shot I received when I was 13 and I'd broken my collarbone at school. The needle that the doctor used to give me a shot of morphine prior to setting the bone was so large --about 0.25" diameter-- that I could see the hole at the end of the needle clearly. That terrified me, but because I was in such pain and was shoved down onto the table, I couldn't move as the glorified Morgul blade slowly moved in and punctured my shoulder.

  

  I feel for you, Frodo.
  From lotro.wikia.com.

  
  The second incident happened when I was much older, and as part of a life insurance application a nurse was dispatched to my house to draw a blood sample. The process was supposed to be simple: draw some blood from a vein in my right arm. While the nurse prepped my arm, I looked away, gritted my teeth and waited for the needle. I felt the needle prick, and then a whole lot of extra, well, movement in my arm. "Does that hurt?" the nurse asked. I glanced over and saw her wiggling the needle in a wide arc while it was still puncturing my arm.
  
  "Uh....." I began, my brain not really registering what I was seeing.
  
  "Ah, dammit, I went right through your vein. I'm going to have to use the other arm." She yanked the needle out, put it away, and grabbed a new needle and my left arm.
  
  After she was finished, my wife said something to the effect of "If you weren't scared of needles before, you definitely are now!"
  
  Gee, thanks.



• I once owned a car that had a hole in the floor.
  
  Seriously.
  
  The car was a 70s era Plymouth that had more rust on the body than actual metal, and one day I realized the the place where I'd been putting my left foot while driving felt, well, breezy. I checked out the place after I parked, and sure enough there was a heel-sized hole in the floor, with rust flakes all around. All that kept my foot from plunging through the floor and striking the pavement was the carpeting.
  
  And for the record, I just kind of kept driving the car, but just made sure that I put my left foot someplace else.
  
• When I was a teen, my D&D collection was thrown out to save me from the fires of Hell.
  
  Yes, I'm a refugee of the Satanic Panic that gripped the U.S. back in the 80s. In those days, many parents blamed societal ills affecting their kids on heavy metal music and D&D. This belief was whipped up by the story of James Dallas Egbert III, who allegedly vanished into the steam tunnels underneath Michigan State University in 1979. The reality is more than a bit mundane, but the ordeal and others such as Patty Pulliam's Bothered about Dungeons and Dragons organization pushed D&D into that "SATAN IS COMING FOR YOUR KIDS!!!" mini-hysteria that gripped a lot of parents of that era.
  
  My parents were no exception.
  
  I trace my own problems with it to the time my family visited some in-laws of my aunts, who happened to be very much in the Pat Robertson fan club.*** Robertson was one of many televangelists who rode the Satanic Panic bandwagon, constantly warning about Satan's minions trying to get their claws on the American youth.
  
  While I was at the in-laws place, my brother and I were both separately brought before what I'd call a tribunal of my mom, the in-laws, and my aunt. And we were grilled over D&D for about 5 minutes. I don't recall anything particularly strange about it, but that afternoon it was declared in a family meeting that D&D was now forbidden as tools of the Devil, and the stuff was all collected and thrown out.
  
  

  

  Yes, this was from an actual Jack Chick comic called Dark
  Dungeons. And this was one of the milder forms of anti-D&D propaganda.
  From Geek and Sundry's How D&D Writers Fought the Satanic Panic of the 1980s

  
  No protests could sway them. Not even the obvious parallels with role playing games and acting helped, because my parents believed**** that acting, playing a role, is fine, but role playing is something else.
  
  Perhaps more than anything else, those years in the wilderness as far as RPGs are concerned shaped my viewpoint on what RPGs are and how they are played, as well as my views on how religion and power can be misused when people are afraid of something new.
  
  I had to wait until later --college-- before I really was able to embrace RPGs once more, and I've never looked back.

At this point, I'm supposed to nominate people for this award, but no fear to my reading list, I don't intend to do so. Many of them were nominated already, so there's no reason to re-nominate them. And besides, all good memes have to come to an end anyway.

*Or worse, simply make them up. John Oliver had a great piece on this.

**Admittedly, a running blog is one of the worst things for someone who is a) shy, b) an introvert or c) both to work on.

***If you don't know who Pat Robertson is, count yourself lucky. He's a televangelist who loves to appear during disasters --natural or man-made-- and claim that it is God's wrath that brought about the tragedy. If you Google "Pat Robertson nutty statements" you'll get an idea of what I mean.

****And they still believe it. They also think Harry Potter and the Rick Riordan books lure kids into Satanism, and I've chosen to ignore their disapproval when they see my kids reading Science Fiction and Fantasy novels. The irony is that my parents were the ones who got me into SF&F in the first place with television shows such as Lost in Space and Star Trek, and books such as Lord of the Rings and The Sword of Shannara.


EtA: Added a few links that I'd missed.

How To Feel Old, Part Whatever...

It's been a slow week or so here at Red Central.

Sure, I've played a bit of SWTOR and Jade Empire, but I've been both busy with work and making the first of what is sure to be many university visits.*

Our first campus visit was similar only in the sense that it
was ON a university campus. The temps were below freezing,
and it was only an hour or two after sunrise. I also managed to
embarrass myself by missing a step and falling down.
The oldest mini-Red was mortified. (from alamy.com.)

I did ask about internet connectivity --because it's important to be able to access your online gaming school work-- and it seems that for universities with lots of older dormitories, wifi has been a godsend. Not so sure about speeds, given than you've got potentially the entire student body using the same pipe at the same time, but at least there is internet.

***

There is a gaming angle to this, as on the ride back home the mini-Reds pestered me to create a character on their new LOTRO server, just so that we could hang out.

So I did.

Not surprisingly, I created another Elf Champion with the exact same name as my old main on LOTRO, because I can still do a Paladin-esque melee figher. Alas, the graphics for the buttons on the UI are still red and green and are as hard to read as ever.

It's kind of like this, only a lot fewer attacks (obviously), as I've only an L3 toon:

From lotro.com forums. A whole lot of red and green.

If you're red/green colorblind, this can be really bad.

Or, if you're just like me and have a hard time reading all the details, it can drive you nuts.

Still, the scenery is as beautiful as ever. Alas that the toon graphics don't match the scenery quite as well.

But for sheer immersion, LOTRO is hard to beat.

Now, to actually find the time to, you know, play the game. But with the mini-Reds around, I get the feeling time will magically appear...





*Where did the time go? Oh, right. Anyway, two years for mini-Red #1, then we go right into two years for mini-Red #2, and #3 is right after that. Six years of the college application process. Oh yay.

The Future looks a lot like crowds and long lines

Last Sunday was my first attendance at a college fair since I was a high school senior, close to 30 years ago.*

To say it was chaos was likely an insult to chaos' dignity.

Take this college fair and double it in size
(due to the size of the convention center) and you've got the idea.
I saw buses from school districts about 60 miles (96 km) away parked outside.
From clubflightlevel.com

While the oldest mini-Red and I were dodging crowds that surrounded the popular schools that she had no interest in**, I couldn't help but notice the number of booths devoted to universities and schools that specialized in graphics, media, and gaming.

My first thought on seeing those booths was that they're going to be not having a lot of students interested in them, particularly given the number of students who were interested in engineering, medical, or business degrees. However, every time we passed one of their booths by there were always two or three families there, talking to the representatives.

Perhaps there's room for graphics and media schools alongside the more traditional art schools after all.

***

Speaking of room for things, I've been spending the past few days checking this particular game out:

Yes, the exact same name I used for my first Gunslinger in SWTOR.
Makes it easier to remember, you know.

Yes, Wildstar still has the same storyline as I remembered it.

Yes, Wildstar still has the classic "women in refrigerators" trope on the Exiles side as motivation for a major NPC.

That said, I'm more curious about Wildstar now that we are rapidly approaching the end of the month and the F2P release.

I think they've got some work to do as far as working the bugs out (given that I've had a crash or two when playing via the PTR), but I think they'll be ready come release time.

The story is still (relatively) appealing to me, and I think I can swallow the heavy dose of Texas-influenced Hollywood Western on the Exiles side without it getting too annoying. The things that had me scratching my head in my previous exposure to Wildstar haven't changed, but because I'd not have to pay a subscription for the privilege of being mildly inconvenienced I'm much more interested in the game now.

Does that make me one of the "I won't play it if it isn't for free!!!" crowd? Not really, because I would subscribe --and presently do-- to games that I really do enjoy. However, I don't want to plunk down money without knowing that I'm really going to enjoy the game. There were enough reservations about Wildstar that made me reluctant to pull that trigger and subscribe, and I'm fine with that assessment. Now that it's F2P, I'm revisiting the game under a different set of criteria with a lower bar, and I've found that the game does merit an extended revisit.

Maybe I still won't subscribe, but I'll be more likely to consider it now that I can immerse myself more into Wildstar without worrying about whether the game was worth subscribing for.





*I said "CLOSE TO", not "exactly". NOTE THAT. (And no, I don't know why I used all caps there.)

**Some universities, such as Bowling Green State University, University of Cincinnati, and others made a deliberate attempt to spread their prospective crowds out by renting multiple booth spaces. But others --and I'm looking at you, Ohio State, Alabama, and Rose Hulman Institute of Technology-- did not follow suit, causing huge knots to form in the crowd.