This coming Sunday is Father's Day in the US, so I figured that sharing a few memes for Gamer Dads would be a good idea. (Maybe.)
Well, I'd like to think so. From Pinterest.
True story: I was supposed to watch my oldest when she was a few months old and napping in her car seat. So I took the car seat upstairs and began a game of Sid Meier's Colonization (the original one). I ended up with a stiff neck because I kept twisting it around every few seconds to see if she'd woken up. From Meta PCs on X.
Sheesh. It's not that bad. After all, we're all gamers here. From Bored Panda.
/snicker. From Reddit and Breaking Bad.
Okay, I laughed. From Reddit.
Then, of course, there's World of Warcraft. From Reddit.
Well, I'm not about to go on vacation, because I can now state what I've (not) been up to the past couple of weeks: Jury Duty.
I was selected as an alternate juror for our local county's Grand Jury. For those not familiar with the US Judicial System, Grand Jury is a jury composed of people who review evidence on felony cases presented by the Prosecutor's Office to determine if there's enough evidence to charge a person with a crime. This is not the actual criminal trial, that's held separately and with a separate jury; this is just a review process designed to make sure that there's enough evidence to even get to the trial part.
As an alternate, after the swearing in, judicial instructions, and training (yes, there's training involved so we understand the process) I only had to show up if someone from the two seated Grand Juries was unable to attend due to illness or whatnot. As the person representing the Prosecutor's Office indicated, I or the other two alternates weren't likely to be called, but we were there in reserve. It could be worse, as I was already prepared to spend two weeks away from work and doing this instead, but that never materialized.
So, not a vacation, but because I had to set aside that time as a "just in case", that does affect my ability to take a vacation for the next month. (I love corporate policies. Yay me.)
What I can do, however, is post about some vacation memes.
"Hail to the night!" my ass. Actually, that does bring up a question: if Night Elves prefer the night, wouldn't they be more susceptible to sunburn on the beach? For example, my son and I are really pale and prone to sunburn, while my wife and the girls aren't (relatively speaking). From X and Nicarao Gaming.
And what people do on vacation, because even your toons need a break from time to time.
Like fishing. From Muse Sings.
Again, lying around at the "beach". From swordscomic.com.
Or maybe go camping. From Peanuts or Pretzels.
Then again, some people love to go visit the casino and gamble their vacation away. From Gamblingnews.
But for a gamer, ganking is the real vacation. From Ranker.
Well, okay. I'll grant you THIS is the real gamer vacation. MMO players know this one pretty well, judging by enough comments and posts on forums and other social media. From Gamerant's Instagram via mematic.
In the MMO world where it seems that speed (and loot) is king, my fondest memories of dungeons/instances are those that simply feel alive.
I've made my feelings pretty clear on how game developers simply don't make instances on the size and scale of a Blackrock Depths (Classic WoW) or Garth Agarwen (LOTRO) anymore. Instances are now designed as bite-sized chunks for a quick dopamine rush, where the fun is less an experience of an epic place but more of a test of skill in your speed at completing the instance.
I was thinking about this last night when I responded to Kurn's blog post from Sunday, in which she asked what was people's favorite Classic WoW instance. While I ultimately chose Deadmines as my favorite because of its status as a gateway drug (and the conclusion of the main Defias story throughout the Stormwind territory), I have to give plenty of props to the "big guns" of Classic WoW instances: Stratholme, Blackrock Depths, and Blackrock Spire.
By comparison, Scholomance is a short instance.
Compared to modern instance design, those Classic WoW instances --well, most of them save for Dire Maul and Scarlet Monastery-- are gigantic places that were meant to be living, breathing locales. The devs took their cue from RPGs and the big dungeons found in tabletop games, such as Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and created expansive places to explore. Yes, you had to make multiple forays into a lot of the instances to complete quests --not just for loot-- and more than one of them were informally gated by level difficulty, such as Uldaman, where if you did the early portion at-level you'd find yourself vastly underpowered at the end of the instance.
Over time, however, these strengths of the older instances grew to be looked at as less than a key feature and more of a bug, and were consequently smoothed out of dungeon design. I suppose you could say that as MMO design focus changed from the leveling journey to endgame raiding, instances grew to be looked at as a stepping stone for the player. With the introduction of timed challenges (Retail WoW's Mythic Plus) and perpetually increasing difficulty modes, instance design is now far more about the mathematical and skill-based exercise of speed and precision rather than the integration into a game world. At that point, instances have grown to be looked at as an endgame in itself, complete with a story-mode (with or without AI-assisted NPCs) all the way to a perpetually increasing challenge mode (Mythic+).
***
For all the speculation of a Classic Plus to Vanilla Classic WoW, and for the record I am still highly skeptical that a true Classic Plus is coming*, one of the hallmarks of anything that would classify as Classic Plus would have to be a return to grand, sprawling instances. If Blizzard were to put all of the Classic Plus content after the Naxxramas raid, then the vertical progression would kill off any real sense of a Classic Plus. It would just be an alternative to the official WoW timeline but keeping all of the problems contained therein.
Of course, I am in a pretty small minority here, because the popularity of the modern instance design speaks volumes. When most people talk about Classic Plus, they speak of "NOT the official timeline" rather than "more stuff for the leveling journey" in Vanilla. It's a reaction to how things are now and deciding that taking another fork in the road is a better idea.
From the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics". (via Tenor).
Answering the question "What does Classic Plus mean" will go a long way toward understanding what Classic Plus we might get, and knowing the Blizzard of today I'm not sure I trust them to answer it in a way I'd like.
*I believe that it's equally likely that Blizzard would announce the ability for people to purchase their own private server software so they can host "official" Vanilla WoW versions. Blizz might even allow those purchasers the ability to manipulate some things, such as difficulty levels and buffs/debuffs to players and mobs to make the experience easier or harder. If there's one way to kill off the private server market, it's that.
I wasn't exactly expecting to post anything today, but this dropped in my Inbox...
From an email from May 7, 2026.
Okay, I get it: Blizz wants to sell you a statue of Dalaran, the floating city version. (Old time Warcraft RTS players would argue that's not the "real" Dalaran, but I digress.)
But. "Azeroth's Greatest City"?
From Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan. (Meme from Yarn.)
I believe it WAS Azeroth's Greatest City, but not anymore...
Fantasy RPGs and MMOs have a problem with clothing.
No, I don't mean overtly sexy clothing, although there's plenty of arguments around for armor that makes you wonder what the artists were thinking, but rather the design aesthetic itself.
I look at clothing found in games and I wonder how to properly describe them. Part of that is trying to properly describe them in writing, but also just trying to understand what the inspiration was and what time period was the clothing designed to evoke.
For example, LOTRO zooms in on what I'd call your standard Fantasy aesthetic, shooting for a Medieval look in spots and a Renaissance look in others. Think of the differences in clothing in the Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy with the Rohirrim and Gondor, never mind the differences in The Shire and Bree-land.* Even The Elder Scrolls kind of subscribes to a traditional Fantasy look.
It's in games such as WoW, with heavy Steampunk and SF influences mixed in with Fantasy, where I have issues trying to understand the aesthetic.
(I'm not going to throw in mounts and whatnot here, because this is about clothing. Just sayin'.)
Video games often tend to hew to what Blizzard has defined as the "Rule of Cool": cool people doing cool things. As a corollary, you have to look cool while doing those cool things. So, if there was a design decision on gear/clothing, Blizzard would go with what looked coolest.
But.
How the hell do you describe the clothing? How would it work?
To be honest, I never really considered such things until I realized just how many layers people wore in prior centuries. A modern person would consider "layers" as throwing on a sweater before adding a jacket when going outside, but to someone from, say, the 1700s, that's just a start.
Thanks a lot, Shrek; onions and people are the same. From Yarn (and the movie Shrek).
Part of my interest in Renaissance Fairs, living history locales, and Medieval re-enactment organizations (such as the SCA) are how people lived back then. Any student of history could tell you that a lot of literature and art depicts how the upper classes (nobility, religious, and even rich merchants) lived; by comparison, there's scant space devoted to how the vast majority of people in any given time period lived.
Still, I get it. People who play MMOs end up playing characters that rise to the ranks of the great and powerful. At the same time, very rarely do people who begin a tabletop RPG or an MMO start at such lofty heights. Your gear changes as you rise in the ranks, but not always. The leader of a Thieves' Guild, for instance, would not want to attract attention to themselves by living it up and wearing extravagant clothing. The same would go for a spy; their job is to inhabit the role they've been chosen for, whether servant or concubine, courtier or merchant. If there's one thing that RPGs and MMOs kind of miss out on, it's that you're not going to be wearing the same clothing all the time. For ease of plot (and to be honest, the ease of the Art and Graphics Departments) you just tend to keep the gear you're wearing all the time. But if you're entering into hostile territory, odds are good that unless you've got an army at your back you're not going to be wearing a uniform or gear that screams "Hey, kill me first!"**
Anyway, back to clothing in general.
When you delve into clothing as, say, a member of the SCA, when you have about 1000 years of history to choose from to make your character and then clothe them, there's going to be a bit of chaos involved. The similar thing happens in RPGs and MMOs, where artists draw what looks cool but isn't typically confined to a specific period or aesthetic. Even then, you have to make design choices.
For example, in some of the fiction I've played with I decided that it was a good idea for Squires among the Knights of the Silver Hand to embrace a monastic look, evoking the inspiration for the Paladin, the Military Religious Orders...
If you stop at the 14th century version of the kirtle --and potentially the surcoat as if it were a tabard-- you have a suitably monastic look which is quite distinct from others you might encounter around a city such as Stormwind or even Silvermoon City. It is also quite practical and essentially a unisex look, so it would work for all Squires.
Once you start getting later than the 14th century, the unisex look gave way toward tailored clothing toward both sexes, so sticking with the version above makes sense for your average RPG or MMO.
Leaping forward several WoW expansions, you have the Neo-Victorian look of Gilneas, where Victorians and late-Medieval to Early Modern looks are found in Stormwind and elsewhere.*** Trying to make sense of a world where the Victorian and the Late Middle Ages' clothing coexisted would make your head hurt --I know it does mine-- but I think the reason why I have issues with this is because I look the two styles as points in time from the same culture. In a fantasy world, there can be no assumptions that the two styles are part of the same culture, because they can co-exist without much of an issue. After all, just look at the clothing styles for various cultures even today; there's absolutely no requirement that all cultures maintain the same clothing designs, and to assume such is to be pretty myopic.
I guess with the mish-mash of clothing aesthetics I ought to just give up trying to define everything and just learn to enjoy the ride. Still, I know my desire to define everything will just annoy me to no end.
Here's the Patreon link. Seriously, the webseries is really well written.
*I'm leaving Dwarves and Elves out of this because they're purely fantasy races. Since Tolkien modeled Hobbits off of the country folk he knew, I'm lumping them in with Men for this exercise. If I were using David Eddings' Belgariad, for example, things would be a wee bit different as the various nations have distinct dress and stereotypical attitudes. Nobody ever confused Eddings' works with deep philosophical and historical themes, however.
**Mages know all about that; even Nefarian can be heard yelling to his underlings in a fight in Blackrock Spire: "Foolsss...Kill the one in the dress!"
***And you thought David Eddings' nations from The Belgariad were a hodge-podge of various tropes. Chereks were Vikings, Tolnedrans were Romans, Asturians were Robin Hood and the Merry Men, while Mandorians were Arthur and his Knights, etc.
You knew this was coming, didn't you? Meme Monday falling on May 4th is just serving up an easy score...
Catholics would have as well until the early 2010s, when they changed it for something like "and your spirit" or something like that. From Lutheran Memes on Facebook.
And yes, I chose this one specifically because it calls back to that old GEICO insurance commercial. "Mike Mike Mike Mike... Guess what DAY it IS??" Hope you enjoy the earworm. From No Guilt Disney.
Yes, yes it does. Alas, the original on Facebook Star Wars Memes is gone.
Only thing missing is Harry Potter. Or maybe Red Dwarf. From Bertmanderson.
I guess "Cinnabons" was trademarked. From Bertmanderson again.
As long as that chocolate milk isn't the full sugar variety, thanks. From LinkedIn (of all places).
