The Joy of Random Encounters

It's kind of strange how fast I'm leveling on the Anniversary servers given that I'm not actively trying to slow it down. I'm not trying to affect how I play, either, it's just happening on its own.

"If I could walk on water..."
I'm sure Eddie Money never thought of this...

Of course, this is all relative. Being at L51 right now in late March, about 1.5 months after the Dark Portal opened on the Anniversary servers would be considered frightfully slow if this were Retail WoW or even among those who wanted to raid on the Anniversary servers, but compared to how I've leveled in the past* it seems extremely fast.

I'm doing this while still finding the time to just do stuff I find interesting.

The other day I was heading south from Desolace to the primordial forests of Feralas when I came across a Blood Elf Hunter well under the average level for the zone. She appeared to be heading toward Camp Mojache, the Horde base in the center of the zone, which I can completely understand. I personally would have approached this from the east, where the lower level mobs for the zone were, but I can't assume that this player would have known that. 

So anyway, she was riding south and I passed her not too far away from the Ruins of Ravenwind when she'd paused for a moment. For some reason my Spidey-sense went off and I swung the camera around just in time to see her get attacked by a bear out of the brush. She was Horde, but she was also about 8 levels under that bear that jumped her. 

I quickly realized she was in deep trouble, so I went back and attacked the bear, ripping threat away from her and dispatching the bear in short order. 

What to do now? 

Well, I switched back to ghost wolf and escorted the Hunter all the way to Mojache.

I love the name Callindaria. It feels like
a fantastic name for a Sindorei.

At first I think she believed I was waiting for an opportunity to attack her, but eventually she just kept going once she realized I wasn't turning off to go to either Feathermoon Stronghold or Dire Maul. The ghost wolf form isn't as fast as even a basic mount, so when she'd get decently far in front of me she'd pause to let me catch up. When we were close to Ogre camps along the way, she let me take the lead until the danger was behind us.

We passed several other Horde players heading the other way, but nobody turned around to help her along the road. 

Once we got close enough to Camp Mojache where I could see the pair of Tauren guards at the entrance, I stopped and waved goodbye. I think she was confused, as she turned back and looked at me for a few moments, but I sat down and waited until she swung around and rode off toward the base.

"Go on, kid. It wouldn't end well if I got any closer."

It's just little encounters like that, which only take about 5-10 minutes tops, that make my day. I get far more out of a random encounter than any other aspect of an MMO.

***

In other news, I've been a baaad WoW player. 

I have had the music turned off for the longest time; not because I don't like it, but because I listen to other things while playing. Sometimes I'm in Discord, and others I'm just listening to a podcast or other music. 

To be fair, sometimes your encounters in-game don't really mesh with the game music, such as the music for The Lion's Pride Inn not exactly meshing with the reality of Goldshire in Moon Guard.

I sure hope that the pink glow is accompanied
by a healthy dose of Lysol to clean the place.

And there are times when music I find online actually fits much better for my mood. 

Leyna Robinson-Stone is a tin whistle musician on YouTube who has plenty of music videos for the tin whistle. When I became re-acquainted with the whistle a couple of years ago I discovered her work and subscribed to her channel. 

This particular short is a duet with another whistle player,

CutiePie, who also has a a LOT of instructional videos.

One of her posts from over a year ago recently appeared in my feed, and I found her original piece fit the wilds of Feralas incredibly well. 

Going from Eddie Money to atmospheric tin whistle in one post. Go figure.

*Even back in my time on Retail in 2009 - 2014. My first experience on WoW, I literally didn't know any better (and I was leveling a Holy Paladin, so a big strike against me), but my later experiences were leveling to pursue different goals that were most definitely NOT optimal. Nobody goes leveling via Battlegrounds thinking it was going to be quick and easy.

Early Saturday Musings

I was at our local indie bookstore last night, and I came across this magazine:

Bhagpuss, this one's for you.

That --and the other magazine I found below-- got me to thinking about how different we looked in our youth.

I can't get over how young Sammy
Hagar and the late Eddie Van Halen looked.

I was at the car dealer the other day to get one of our cars worked on* when a woman sat down in the cubby next to mine. I was focusing on a conference call at the time, so I didn't really pay attention at first, but then I realized I was looking at a blast from the past. Her hairdo looked exactly like Suzanna Hoffs in The Bangles...

Circa mid-1980s.

I hadn't seen that sort of hairstyle in person in at least a few decades, but there this woman was, working away on her laptop while also examining her phone for data. I made a point not to stare, because that's just creepy, but I took enough in to know she was likely half my age.

Did I just miss something and that 40 year old fashion and music are coming back?

Nah, not likely. I'm just imagining things. 

What I'm not imagining is that 50 years ago, this album was released:

Had to chase down a good looking cover from
Amazon of all places.

Or this album:

And this one came from Facebook.

I've known this was coming for a long time, because I'm in my upper 50s, and I've been watching albums that formed my youth reach these major milestones. There's also Hotel California --of which my freshman college roommate went to hear a preacher "deconstruct" that album to prove it was Satanic-- Bob Seger's Night Moves, KISS's Destroyer, The Ramones' self-titled First Album, Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive, and Queen's A Night at the Opera. 

We are now 50 years away from 1976, which is farther away than 1976 was from the Big Band Era of the mid-1930s through the late 1940s. It's amazing to me just how far we've come, from music, fashion, and other things. (Just remember, kids, next year is the 50th anniversary of the Atari 2600, which got a lot of your parents interested in video games.)

My own hair has receded and thinned a bit --the kids poke fun at me for that-- and my beard is now mostly grey rather than red, but I don't feel massively different than I did 20 or 30 years ago. Obviously, that has more to do with gradual changes over time, just like how I never noticed that I lost my ability to hear 15,000 Hertz until a couple of years ago when I was running a sound check on the speakers I'd built. 

Just a few thoughts about how things have changed. One thing that hasn't changed, however, is that I'm still listening to music from 1976. Not exclusively --Bhagpuss sees to that with his regular music posts-- but those albums are still in regular rotation.

*Just an oil change and tire rotation. No new issues were discovered this time around.

Some More Exploration

I suspect that I'm the sort of player that Blizzard likes to pretend doesn't exist. Or, if we do exist, my sort of player is in such few numbers that they don't pop up on their activity data in a meaningful way.

I mean, I prefer visiting this place in Retail:

I think there might have been a toon or two around here,
but I didn't poke my nose into the bank area so wasn't certain.

Or this place:

Running around on March 8, 2026, I was literally
the only player here.

Or this place:

Nobody here either.

Here's the screenshot that shows I was in the
Cataclysm version of Theramore, not the Mists
or later version. Those tanks only appeared in Cata,
and if you got through Mists and the Event, there's
just rubble here. (I think; I never did it.)

There were some new toons I saw at the place shown below, however...

Which is to be expected given that Blood Elves
got an, uh, extreme makeover for this expac. But
this version of Falcon Watch is one of my favorite
spots in Eversong, right next to Fairbreeze Village.

If you're like me, you can still visit the old BE areas all you want without ever having to think about anything post-2007:

I had to manually accept the "catch up" Dragonflight quest so I could hide it from my screen --you simply can't hide it any other way-- and I finally figured out how to turn off the "You HAVE to select a combat specialization" persistent pop-up (HINT: It's buried in the tutorial settings). Now I can sightsee without the constant prodding to go and progress, level up, or just do something other than what I'm currently doing. 

If there's a reason why I'm reluctant to go to Outland in the Anniversary Edition of TBC Classic, it's the constant prodding to "Do your dailies!" once you reach max level. Not by the game itself per se, but by everybody else in the game. And once Quel'Danas opens up in probably September or October, there will likely be people loudly banging a drum to do the Quel'Danas dailies (to unlock more content) wherever you go. It's as if in the carrot vs. stick argument on how to get people to do things, Blizzard prefers using the carrot while the player base uses the stick.

***

This expac-sized phasing in various locales, which is what it really is when you break it down, demonstrates that Blizzard could bring back the pre-Cataclysm Old World into Retail if they decided to make an effort at it. They wouldn't get the Classic crowd to return to Retail, because the elephant in the room is that the Classic crowd prefers the gameplay of pre-Cataclysm WoW, so the only people a pre-Cata restoration would service are those Retail players who want to go back to see the early days without losing all of the conveniences and gameplay of Retail WoW. And as my explorations demonstrate, there's almost nobody in Retail who's interested in the Old World anyway.

This does make me wonder just how much longer some of these old zones will remain active and visitable. All the processing power and storage involved in these areas that nobody visits do cost the Blizzard Division of Microsoft a certain amount of money, and if push came to shove I could see Blizzard deciding as a cost-cutting measure just going ahead and archiving these old zones to be spun up when they put on a special limited-time event. 

I can't keep these areas alive just by visiting, so I'm going to enjoy them while I can. 

***

Oh, and this is just a non-gaming related bonus.

Last week on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, the in-house band (Louis Cato and the Great Big Joy Machine) played with Hozier and Lake Street Dive in a rendition of A Little Help From My Friends...

Farewell, Greg Brown and Bob Weir

Who is Greg Brown, you might ask? (I know I did.)

He was the founding guitarist of the band Cake, who happened to have penned this little ditty:

He eventually left to found the band Deathray before Cake's third album was recorded. He was one of those musicians who had an outsized impact, even though there's not that much in the way of actual recorded content by him. 

It was announced on Monday that he'd passed away after a brief illness.

***

I wasn't planning on writing anything on Bob Weir until Greg Brown's passing, mainly because I came to listen to the Grateful Dead much later in life.

While a lot of people of Generation X (and later) became enamored of Pfish, of whom Trey Anastasio unabashedly had a bromance with the Dead, I didn't get into Pfish that much. My experiences with the Dead were kind of limited to what was played on Rock (and then Classic Rock) FM stations in the 80s. You know, this stuff:

I knew of Bob, kinda sorta through these pieces, but also through this other song off of In The Dark:

After Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995, Bob and the rest kept the legacy of The Grateful Dead alive by The Other Ones, The Dead, and finally Dead and Company.

It's kind of strange how John Mayer, who is a bit of a polarizing figure among my generation, was embraced by Deadheads as part of Dead and Company. But you know, the Dead and their fans have certainly been on a long, strange trip, so I guess it's rather fitting that John and Bob would somehow make this all work. 

I never saw the Dead in person, because while they were a much better band to watch live (and high) it was never on my radar. And now, with Bob's passing back in January, that's never going to happen anyway.

Metalheads and WoW Fans, Arise

The CurseForge graphics for World of Warcraft were updated more quickly this time around than in the War Within expansion:

Screencap from CurseForge as of Feb 2, 2026.

As I took in the graphic, I noticed something. Apparently someone at Blizzard is a fan of the metal band Disturbed, because there's some similarities between this graphic of a void monster and Disturbed's mascot, The Guy:

From Pinterest. Not sure if this is
an official graphic or not.

You know, just add some blue or purple in there, remove the muscular hand and arms, and...

Yes, yes, I realize that there's also similarities between those two and Venom:

The cover of Venom: The Saga of Eddie Brock.
Graphic Novel Volume 1. From ComicHub.

It's mainly in the teeth and the darkness, but I'm sticking with The Guy first because that's what popped into my head before Venom did. (Sorry, Marvel.)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go listen to Disturb's cover of Genesis' Land of Confusion, featuring The Guy...

Gaining Perspective Years Later

Once in a while I'll hear a song I haven't heard in decades, and I'll suddenly realize that I'd missed a critical part of what the song meant. 

Take for example, the Michael Martin Murphey song Wildfire...

This song came out in 1975, and it was one of those Folk songs that skirted the edge of the Country/Western genres and Folk Rock genres. I'd heard it on the radio in the 70s, but outside of the refrain it never resonated with me very much. Until I stumbled on it a few months ago, I probably hadn't heard it at all since the early-mid 80s, because the only person I knew who listened to Country on the radio was my dad's mom, and I tried my damnedest to avoid listening to it whenever I visited.*

It had popped up on my YouTube feed, and I stared at it for a good 5-10 minutes, trying to remember the song, but I finally gave in and clicked it. 

The song sounded familiar, but the lyrics certainly weren't. It was only when the refrain came on that I realized I did remember the song after all.

Even more than that, after a few critical listens, I realized it wasn't a love song at all, but a ghost story. The first verse doesn't give anything away, but that the lyrics are in present tense imply something current. It's when the second verse kicks in and switches to past tense that you realize that the girl and horse mentioned in the first verse are actually ghosts. The third verse provides the grounding of a failed crop, and as the cold (and presumably hunger) has crept in, the owl heralds the ghost horse and rider coming for the singer as essentially a harbinger of death.

Pretty grim stuff wrapped up in a mellow sounding song.

***

Sometimes I'll hear a voice or an instrument in a song, and I'll say "I know I've heard that before, but I don't know where."

Again, I'm going to pull the 80s out of a hat and mention late Genesis guitarist Mike Rutherford's band, Mike + The Mechanics. 

I could have picked out any of their songs, but I figured that The Living Years would do. Mike's guitar is pretty identifiable, but I want to focus on his vocalist, Paul Carrack. 

Paul had a nice solo career, and I had recognized his voice from the song "Don't Shed a Tear" that was released a year earlier in 1987...

...and he's also known for his time in the band Squeeze, but I was completely unprepared for something over three decades later.

For some strange reason I'd fallen down the rabbit hole of listening to what was then called Soft Rock and is now called Yacht Rock when I stumbled across this song...

I knew that song by heart, because my parents would only play Soft Rock in the house when I was growing up.** However, when I listened to it a couple of years ago for the first time since the late 80s, I realized I knew that singer's voice. It took me a few months of rummaging through my CDs and songs on YouTube, but when I realized that it was the same Paul Carrack from Mike + The Mechanics, I was completely floored in the same way when I heard Bad English in the late 80s for the first time and I instantly recognized John "Missing You" Waite's voice.

Funny how that works.

*Because I was into all sorts of Rock, Heavy Metal, and New Wave at the time. 

**Yes, it was Cincinnati's WARM 98, WRRM-FM 98.5.

EtA: Mike Rutherford is actually still alive. It was the manager for Genesis, Richard Macphail, who'd passed away in 2024. Whoops. I have since corrected the post.

Something to be Thankful For: That Time a Local Band Taught Me About Fear

Back in my tween years in the early 80s, my listening habits straddled the New Wave Pop sound with Rock. If the music you listen to when you're growing up sticks with you throughout your life, then my life was infused with Soft Cell and Duran Duran, Asia and The Police, AC/DC and Yes.

Oh, and a little local band called The Raisins.

The Raisins had been around for several years by the beginning of the 80s and had built a fanatical local following. They'd played dozens of venues throughout the region, and were always a good bet to get a packed house.

If you'd have told someone today that corporate

rock station WEBN and PBS TV affiliate WCET

would join forces to create live shows in the early

80s, they wouldn't have believed you. But here's the proof.

I was a bit young to be allowed into the bars to see bands play, so The Raisins skated under my radar for a long while. But when I started hearing a song called Fear is Never Boring on the radio, I immediately fell in love.

Now, before you click on the music video below, you have to realize something: the video's quality is very homemade: something you'd see out of a bunch of guys throwing a "music video" together after having had a few beers. The "homage" to Jason's hockey mask (not sure where they got the thing they used), Jaws, people dressed as undertakers, the POV of a slasher movie, and the band "playing" their instruments are some of the finest amateur hour stuff. Throw in the 80s era movie projector you'd find at a local school, toss in the band's hair and short shorts, and you get the idea that this isn't something you should take at all seriously.

As for the song, it's got everything --and I do mean everything-- that identifies it as early 80s Power Pop: backward lyrics*, a nice groove, a good guitar solo, and song lyrics that have sexual innuendos/references you'd never have believed would have come out of socially conservative Cincinnati. One of the band members, Bob Nyswonger, mentioned that this song was used for a while at Cincinnati Reds baseball games, until the Reds management actually listened to the lyrics and yanked it from being played over the sound system.

Fear is Never Boring became a bit regional hit, and I thought it meant that they were big nationally (because I heard it on the radio all the time!), but the breaks never came their way. A couple of years after this song, the band broke up. Rob Fetters, the songwriter of Fear is Never Boring, took the song with him to his later bands, The Bears and psychodots**, so the song never truly went away from the area. All of the band members themselves kept busy in the local music scene, but they did reunite in 2024 for some sold out shows at the Woodward Theater downtown.

So I'm thankful for The Raisins and their quirky take on fear.

***

Oh, and I'm also thankful that the FCC finally issued my amateur radio license yesterday. One thing about those licenses is that they're public, so you can go to the FCC's database search engine and plug in my callsign to get my real name and address. That's actually a requirement that I have an active email address (and a physical address) on file that I can be reached at, or the FCC can yank my license. Ergo, you're going to have to trust me that I have an official callsign, because I'm not mentioning it here.

The FCC stopped providing paper licenses a long
time ago; I downloaded a PDF instead that I can print
out and keep in my records.

That being said, I was amused at what the callsign gods provided to me. You'd think I was a member of a federal agency or something. (And no, it's not the FBI. It wouldn't surprise me if callsigns with those letters in them are banned.)

*You can actually find someone had reversed the video so you can hear the backward lyrics. What was said at the start of the song was "My whole life flashed before I crashed".

**Yes, 'psychodots' has a lower case name. That's by design.

Codas and Retrospectives

Every so often, the YouTube algorithm pops up something that I really love.

This time, it's the kinda-sorta Beatles song, Now and Then.

Yes, it's the last of the pieces that Yoko Ono had found on a cassette that John Lennon had been recording prior to his murder. The other two songs were in better condition and could easily be filled out by the three remaining Beatles at the time into released songs, but this last one proved to be beyond the reach of the technology of the mid-90s. Apparently George Harrison also thought the song was rubbish when they were working on it in the mid-90s; whether it was the low quality recording or the song itself was up for interpretation. Still, with new tech brought to Paul and Ringo by Peter Jackson, they were able to get a usable extraction of John's voice and finish the song.

It's by no means the best Beatles song out there, but at this stage in my life I find it wistful, a longing for people in the past that you had a friendship with and are no longer around. In its own way, it's a perfect coda for the band.

The music video for Now and Then does highlight the irreverent and funny personalities of the band, which reminded me a lot of something my Questing Buddy and I were chatting about earlier this past evening. 

We were talking about our experience raiding in TBC Classic, and before that our Vanilla Classic experiences. Her journey ended up being much better this time around on the Anniversary servers, because her guild doesn't take themselves entirely seriously. They do want to raid well, and they do push themselves, but that's more on the individual members to basically have their stuff ready to go rather than some Raid Lead wielding a clue stick to get everybody on the page*. What I highlighted was the espirit de corps of the Mage team, and how we were all a tight knit bunch and truly enjoyed each other's company. Raike would talk about her music playlists for the raid, Zwak would crack his sarcastic Dad jokes, and Haldol would somehow make it to the raid despite keeping a crazy work schedule. Raike and I would create fake music lyrics to commemorate our Mage Misadventures, and Iceboom would talk about his watercolor painting and encourage me to give it a try.** We all kept track of who died, egged each other on if they had a chance of ripping threat from the tank, and we'd talk about the most inane topics that we could come up with. Given that the three Mages ahead of me were three of the best Mages on the server, I didn't mind that I was in fourth place on the overall DPS meters. What mattered to me was the amount of sheer, unadulterated fun we were all having, and that's something I do truly miss.

I don't think that sort of connection will ever come again in an MMO for me, because it was my first time truly being part of a progression raid team and the stars aligned to provide me the best possible time in a multiplayer game. Like John sings in Now and Then, I do miss you, old friends.

*Or, as in the case of the franken guild I left, having weekly "performance reviews" of your parsing that they instituted in Wrath Classic.

**If you're reading this, Iceboom, I still have to buy some paints and get to work. Your biggest piece of advice, to keep painting no matter how lousy it looks, is advice that I've taken to heart on all sorts of endeavors.

Farewell, John Lodge

I first heard The Moody Blues on the radio in 1981, as their Long Distance Voyager album came out in early Summer. It got heavy airplay on Top 40 radio stations in the US, courtesy of The Voice and the disco-influenced Gemini Dream. You'd think that with my love of Rock music I'd have been exposed to The Moodies earlier, but I switched radio station loyalties a few years later, and only then became exposed to their extensive back catalog. 

A neighbor* pointed me in the direction of one of their early "Greatest Hits" compilations, This Is The Moody Blues, and two of the songs from that album that I really loved were (I'm Just a) Singer in a Rock and Roll Band and Ride My See-Saw. It's with sadness that I saw that the composer of those two songs (plus the aforementioned Gemini Dream), John Lodge, died yesterday.

If Justin Hayward is the voice of The Moody Blues, John Lodge held down the bass lines. Sure, there are other characteristics of what makes up a classic Moody Blues song --strings, anyone?-- but they'd be nowhere without John Lodge's bass. That he wrote some of my favorite Moody Blues pieces was just a cherry on top of the sundae. 

They finally got a "golf clap" award by being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, and although their voices and sound had faded quite a bit by then (as evidenced by their rendition of Ride My See-Saw above), you could tell that they still enjoyed playing together.

I'll miss you, John. Thanks for all the years of playing and recording.

*This is the same neighbor who fed my interest in what is now Classic Rock by providing me album suggestions for bands such as Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, and Cream. He strongly emphasized listening to albums because you got to hear the entire context of songs together, something I put to good use with bands who released concept albums such as The Who, Pink Floyd, and Rush.

This Just in: Toons Have Leveled Up. Film At Eleven.

The L50 boundary has been crossed.

Of course the Songshine sisters would be first
to L50. Because competition between siblings.
This is as of Thursday, October 2nd, 2025.

You may now return to normal programming.

Seriously, though, it's nice to have gotten not only one but two of the four toons to L50 by the first week of October. I've not been playing as much as well, but I'll be mentioning the reason for that in about a month in another post. 

My friends have been saying they're going to get me running BRD once I have a toon that hits L50, but --surprise surprise-- The Scourge Invasion event prior to Naxxramas began yesterday, so I'm sure they'll be busy doing that. Not exactly as I planned it, but it's working out in my favor, I suppose.

I never really noticed it before, but that crystal
off the bottom of the Scourge floating fortress looks
a lot like those floating bases from Independence Day.

Before you ask, being in the upper L40s meant that I was running Maraudon a bit on the toons. Usually a run would take up most of an evening's worth of gaming, so I didn't do that too much. I kind of preferred having places like Feralas to myself, as most people don't tend to hang out there unless they're running Dire Maul instances. 

Sometimes the setting sun hits you just right...

That doesn't mean I shun human contact, because I do like it when people are around. It's just that I've been in a mood where when I'm not in an instance I prefer to just focus on questing and zone out, like how I used to approach Tetris as a zen-like exercise in meditation. And really, grouping up can generate some of the most oddball conversations if the group is up for it.

Now I've got that old song "Me and You and
a Dog Named Boo" stuck in my head.

See you in a bit!

A Short Post Mortem

Well, I pulled off another "Not Quite a Blaugust" Blaugust.

No signups, no fanfare, no topics. Just writing for 31 days.

Things turned out better than I expected. I didn't have any real annoyances that kept me posting multiple times a month --nothing earth (or Azeroth) shattering, really, just the usual stuff-- so I just kind of leaned into my various interests to keep the posts coming.

Oh, and I got some fiction written along the way, too. Nothing ready for posting yet, but stuff that's been needing to get done and I'll be sending drafts along to my beta readers for feedback soon.

It felt good to get this past month's posts done, especially getting the radio stuff off of my back. I'd been thinking about it for a while, but Shintar gave me the impetus to finally write it up and post that part of my past. I've got other topics that I can write about that are geeky in nature but not strictly gaming related, so those might begin to make an appearance here as well. Nothing quite as fascinating as Wilhelm Arcturus' posts about his employment history with telecom, that's for sure, but they're something to get off my chest.

Speaking of things to get off of my chest...

From eBay. Of course.

My old 1989 Who concert t-shirt has likely bit the dust. I no longer fit into it anyway (it was an XL and I now wear a 2XL size), but I'd been using it as a shirt I wore when I painted rooms in my great-aunt's house back in the early 90s, so it had splatters of paint all over it. I recently became curious whether some enterprising soul (likely The Who's management) had decided to reprint old concert t-shirts, and I came across this entry in eBay.

I suspect that they're knock-offs of the originals, but the shirts do look correct at first glance.* I mean, it'd be nice to have a reprint to wear around the house again --no, I'm not wearing it to paint or work on the car or something-- but I won't be torn up about it if I don't manage to find one.

Now, I need to find some old D&D t-shirts from the 80s...

*I saw them in Cleveland on July 19th, and the story behind that road trip is worthy of a post.

#Blaugust2025

My Adventures Over the Airwaves Part 3: "This is 64 WDCR, Broadcasting from Kennedy Union..."

One of the goals I had when I went to college was to experience some things that I knew I wasn't going to have a chance to do again. That explains why I decided to minor in History and Philosophy despite being a Physics Major*, and also why I took a class in Fencing my Senior year.** I also participated in Model UN for a few years as part of the delegation that UD sent to New York for the National Model UN Conference.

It also explains why I became a radio DJ for my Senior year.

No, this is not me, it's the late Howard Hesseman
in his role as Dr. Johnny Fever on the late 70s-early 80s
television show WKRP in Cincinnati.
From the New York Times' obituary on Howard,
who died in 2022 at the age of 81.

Although it's long since been replaced by WUDR "Flyer Radio" 99.5/98.1 FM, UD had a student run radio station on AM radio when I attended. The university actually owned a commercial radio station at the time, WVUD 99.9 FM, which broadcast from Kennedy Union, but by the time I attended the university the student-run Rock format had become a purely commercial enterprise with a Soft Rock format, which very few students actually listened to.*** 

But there was another radio station nestled in the student union, and that was WDCR, AM 640.

It was designed as a completely student run station, inheriting WVUD's old student-run design, and although it was on AM --and was only broadcast via carrier signal on the power lines to the Union and the university's dorm buildings-- you could sign up for a DJ slot and spin the LPs. The only drawback was that by the time I did decide to sign up for a DJ shift my senior year, the format had changed from "you can grab an hour or two and play what you want" to "we're playing a primarily Rock and Alternative format just like a professional radio station". 

Alas, I couldn't imitate this scene from WKRP. I did
look into my yearbooks to see if there was anything
worthy of a scan, but nope. One yearbook had WDCR
as "FM 64", not "AM 64". /sigh

Since I didn't really have any ideas about what to play, only that I wanted to be on the radio, I was fine with that. My freshman year roommate (and current housemate) and I secured a slot for a couple of hours in the mid-morning once or twice a week, and away we went.

Two of my other housemates had been DJs on the station already, so that helped to ease me into the job. The knowledge that people mostly heard us when they crossed through the lobby area of Kennedy Union meant that I didn't really have to worry about putting myself on the spot.**** I did come up with a name --'Mister Physics', which was actually one of the nicknames given me by my friends at UD-- but really, nobody cared what I was called as long as I worked the playlist and had a bit of banter here and there with my housemate as co-host. 

Although I knew about 2/3 of the songs on the playlist, that other 1/3 were a real eye opener. You'd think that Album Oriented Rock stations were all alike, and maybe they are now in the era of corporate sameness and station centralization, but radio stations even within the same format all had their own little quirks. For example, WTUE-FM in Dayton had a different enough playlist than WEBN-FM in Cincinnati that I enjoyed WTUE much more than WEBN when I visited home. 

This was the first song I ever played as a DJ;

I'd never heard it until that moment.

By the time I had a DJ shift, radio had been changing. While albums did exist, and I queued up enough records over my DJ tenure, the music had already been migrating to tape machines. I knew CDs weren't too far behind, given that WVUD did have a CD system in place --we got VUD's hand-me-downs for equipment-- and when I was given a tour of the WVUD studios I got to see the new systems in action. 

***

You know, having that one shift wasn't a big time commitment, but having it that last year of college meant everything to me. It was fun, it was relaxing, and I got to enjoy the illusion of being in control of what people listened to on the radio. 

We did have a cast of characters there at the station. There was the conservative commentator who couldn't crack a joke if his life depended on it, the one station higher-up who absolutely loved Duran Duran to the point of her following them when they went on tour over the summer, the news reader who read the news impeccably and was always dressed to the nines but had such a conceited attitude I still remember her to this day, and the fellow DJ who --if given the chance-- would queue up only Van Halen.

"How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?"
From WKRP in Cincinnati.

Being a DJ meant I did have to do some work at the station other than just my shift. I was supposed to come up with a "promo" for my spot as well has do a couple of other odds and ends, but that never really happened. My mind kind of works in weird ways, and creative endeavors can take a while to finish. A common complaint about my projects over the years is that my projects look really disjointed and have huge gaps until I manage to pull it all together at the last moment. Yes, I know, it's crunch (to borrow the software development term), but it does work for me. However, I never got to finish up those other things as a DJ because I just never got a real deadline to work against. As for my promo, I had the idea of using Monty Python-esque voices over Sousa's The Liberty Bell March, but I never really sat down to work out how it ought to flow. The Station Manager wasn't pleased that I kind of half-assed it, but I had other priorities at the time and doing a promo wasn't one of them.

When I graduated, I explored working a shift at Dayton's local Fine Arts station, WDPR 89.5 FM (that was the frequency back then, I think it's 89.9 now), but I never got a callback. That was fine with me, since I had moved back to Cincinnati that summer and really never left. But still, I do have the radio bug in me, and it hasn't quite gone away.

In a quirk of fate, when my son went away to college, he decided to pick up a DJ shift at his university's radio station.***** Due to simulcasting over the internet, I got to hear his shift on Tuesday afternoons quite a bit while I worked. He kept that up for a couple of years until he spent a semester abroad at Lancaster University in England, but that my son walked the same path I did still makes me smile to this day.

*Yes, I minored in Math, because that was expected of a Physics Major. After all, you were going to take most of the classes to qualify for it anyway. As for Philosophy, the University of Dayton had a requirement of 12 hours (4 classes' worth) of either Religion or Philosophy, so it only took me two more classes to have enough to minor in it. History, however, was something I geeked out over and so I took as many classes as I could.

**I was told that if I wanted to meet girls I should take Ballroom Dancing, because the girls outnumbered the boys in that class by something like 2:1. As it turned out, I was already dating by then, so I didn't need that encouragement.

***Again, another acquaintance told me that girls really really loved listening to Air Supply as 'make-out' music, which... let's just say I was really skeptical of that one. But yes, he did have a cassette of Air Supply's hits, and yes there were times when I heard it coming from the door to his dorm room.

****Yes, you'd think that me being a shy introvert would mean that I couldn't do a DJ shift, but I found that being merely a voice behind a microphone made it much easier to deal with. I also got to hone my Kermit the Frog impression, although it does make my throat hurt when I do it for more than a few minutes.

*****The lucky bastard got to play whatever he wanted; I'm jealous. Here's a link to the station. Yes, you can listen live during the school year.

#Blaugust2025

What Goes Around

1982 was a bit of a seminal year for me.

The 1981-1982 school year was my 7th Grade. I was knee deep in puberty, I'd been playing D&D since the Fall of 1981, and I'd dove headfirst into reading Science Fiction and Fantasy beyond just Lord of the Rings. Movies from 1982 still rank among my favorites: Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Mad Max: The Road Warrior, Rocky 3, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High.* I was a year away from discovering Metal, but the popular songs of 1982 are still lodged in my head all these years later.

Among some of the big hits of the year, such as I Love Rock and Roll** and Eye of the Tiger, was a song from a studio band called The Alan Parsons Project:

It got up to #3 on the charts in the US (higher than I thought it did, to be honest) but after that it kind of faded from view except for the fans of the band and their concept albums. I always liked the song, as I could tell it was a bit deeper lyrically than the average pop song of the era, but I never got the album to find out how it fit into the larger sonic picture. 

A couple of years later, the intro piece to Eye in the Sky, Sirius, began being used as the introduction music to the NBA's Chicago Bulls games. Sirius became synonymous with the Michael Jordan era of the Chicago Bulls, so that when they hear that synthesizer intro basketball fans immediately think of #23. 

I find it surprising that, decades later, people have rediscovered The Alan Parsons Project through reaction videos and, much to their surprise, that Alan Parsons is "that guy who wrote the Chicago Bulls Theme".

For some reason, the official channel never

put these two songs together as they ought.

It's been 43 years since this song came out, so I guess that it's time for newer generations to rediscover the music of the past, just like how my generation rediscovered the Big Bands of the 30s and 40s.

*Sorry, I don't like E.T. (more of a reaction to how popular it was than anything else) and I didn't really care for Tron. The Thing wasn't my type of movie so I never watched it, and I didn't really watch Blade Runner all the way through.  

**Yes, I know, the album was released in 1981, but the song was released in 1982, so it counts in my book. I could just as easily have chosen Rock the Casbah or Jack and Diane to fill in this spot, but some 8th Grade girls used to play I Love Rock and Roll ALL THE TIME during lunch and recess. Looking back on it, I'm still amazed the nuns let them get away with it.

EtA: Corrected some grammar.

#Blaugust2025

Fading Away

This week, a significant portion of my youth passed away.

First, the news broke a couple of days ago that Ozzy Osbourne passed away, a few weeks after the Black Sabbath Farewell Concert. While it wouldn't shock me if he decided euthanasia was the best answer to his struggles, it could also have been due to complications from Parkinson's Disease. Ozzy's death reminds me a bit of Freddie Mercury's passing, who died a day after he publicly announced he had HIV. In both cases, I suspect they both knew it was time.

Unlike many of my contemporaries, I began listening to Ozzy midway through high school. Given that my parents were very strict about what music I could and couldn't listen to, I had to get around that by copying acquaintances' cassettes of heavy metal bands. That way, my parents couldn't really see what I was listening to, and once I got a car --and a cassette deck in said car-- I did most of my listening while driving or on my boom box while working after school or over the summer as a janitor. Bands such as Twisted Sister, Motley Crue, Scorpions, and Autograph found space on my Maxell and TDK blanks, but the second heavy metal album I copied* was Ozzy's Blizzard of Oz. It may have been a copy of a copy, since the sound quality wasn't very good, but at least I had it.

I couldn't find the cassette with Blizzard of Oz on it,
but I could find these.

It took my going away to college --and away from the prying eyes of my parents-- for me to more fully embrace music found on "Satanic" lists by Evangelical preachers.

The funny thing is that since I began listening to heavy metal midway through the 1980s, I came to Ozzy first through his solo career. To me, Black Sabbath was this band from the past that wasn't really relevant today. This was hammered home by my encounter with graffiti I had to clean off of a chair in my high school (I was a janitor, remember?) that said "Black Sabbath Rules The World". A couple of coworkers happened to wander by, snorted, and one of them said derisively, "They need to put an album out first!"

"First an album, next the world!" the other quipped.

It was only much later, in the 1990s, when I began listening to Black Sabbath and realizing that hey, they weren't half bad after all.

Still, Ozzy had penetrated into the national consciousness through the Satanic Panic. I didn't put any credence in all of the claims --I played RPGs and wasn't about to sacrifice small animals to Satan, after all-- but plenty of people did.** 

Ozzy even found himself in the then popular comic strip Bloom County:

From the 1987 compilation book "Billy and the
Boingers Bootleg", Page 80, by Berke Breathed.

From the 1987 compilation book "Billy and the
Boingers Bootleg", Page 81, by Berke Breathed.

Yes, I was a Bloom County fan, and yes, I had all of the compilation books.

Here's the proof. I still have the floppy
record that came with the book.

In case you wondered what the songs sound like, here's one of them (courtesy of YouTube):

Over the years, my interest in heavy metal waned, but I still have a soft spot for heavy metal from the 70s and 80s and what it meant to my own personal declaration of independence as an adult. While the Bloom County cartoons played up for amusement the concept that Ozzy was just a "regular guy" playing around with heavy metal, the reality that came out decades later was that he pretty much was just a regular guy after all and his Ozzy persona was just an act. 

***

Yesterday, the news broke that Hulk Hogan had also passed away, and with that another chunk of my youth vanished. 

I wasn't that much of a World Wrestling Federation fan, as I used to watch the rival organization World Championship Wrestling (the home of Dusty Rhodes and "Nature Boy" Ric Flair), but you couldn't not be aware of WWF and it's biggest star, Hulk Hogan. Among the WWF pantheon, I cheered more for Andre the Giant than Hulk, but Hulk was the face of the WWF. There's no denying that.

This was at the end of Andre's career,
when he "turned bad" and wrestled against
Hulk in 1987. From The Detroit News.

To be clear, I wasn't one of the pro wrestling fans around school who were so far down the rabbit hole that they subscribed to one of several wrestling magazines, but I was enough of a fan that I could at least hold my own with those hardcore fans. The fans fell into two camps: those who loved Hulk and those who hated him. Most people loved him, but there were a few contrarians who preferred Hulk's enemies (such as Rowdy Roddy Piper) instead. 

But that Golden Era of wrestling is fading from memory. Hulk is just the latest to pass away, as Dusty Rhodes, Andre the Giant, Randy Savage, Rowdy Roddy Piper, George "The Animal" Steele, and The Iron Sheik are all gone.

***

Finally, overshadowed by Hulk Hogan's passing, was also the passing of Chuck Mangione. You know, the "Feels So Good" guy.

This is the full version. The radio edit/singles

version can be found here.

If you're of the right age, you couldn't avoid Feels So Good. It was all over the radio, and it helped to drive the Soft Rock radio format to greater heights. The irony was that while I heard it on radio all the time --my parents listened to Soft Rock, after all-- my biggest memory of Feels So Good tied into our first color television set. 

That first Saturday we had the Sears color television around the house, I woke up and went downstairs to turn on the TV. It was pretty early in the day and before the Saturday Morning Cartoons came on, so I flipped to one of the independent or PBS stations (I can't remember which) and suddenly there was a video of the sun rising on my screen with Feels So Good playing as an accompaniment. Being one of the first color TV images I ever saw at home, that moment was etched indelibly in my mind. 

Over the years I grew to appreciate Chuck's jazz output and his loyalty to his hometown of Rochester and the Eastman School of Music, of whom he was an alum and an instructor. I learned much later that Chuck was also an alum of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, of whom he played alongside Keith Jarrett. 

***

All three of them had left an indelible imprint on my youth. Maybe it wasn't the three themselves that I remember most, but what they represented: rebellion, guilty pleasures, and the music my parents listened to. Still, it feels weird to be reminded of my past only when that past is permanently lost to us. 

In an ironic twist, at times like these I'm reminded of this little segment from George Carlin. George's stand-up comedy hasn't always aged very well, but in this case it actually has. The entire video is worth watching, but I highlighted this one specific bit at the 4:55 mark:

Note to self: Google doesn't like it if I try to embed

YouTube videos at a specific time marker.

*The first was Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry. Yes, really.

**And still do today, just to be clear about it. If people give them half a chance, these devout folks would attempt to eradicate "satanic" music and books once more. After all, look at all the attempts to ban books and media today. Cancel Culture is not simply a thing on the political left.

Does Romance Give you the Squick?

Well, it does for me.

Oh, not in real life. IRL, I'm a softie who enjoys romance. Not necessarily Romance novels, mind you,* but I meant the concept itself. Yes, yes, I know, somebody alert my wife.**

I also don't mind having romance in video games, because for me that's a personal choice. If you want to romance an NPC, go ahead. If you don't, you don't.

What I meant was romance in pencil-and-paper RPGs, although to a lesser extent romance between two players in an MMO as well.*** 

This was sparked by a video that popped up the other day concerning D&D and romance:

Yes, I follow Ginny Di's YouTube videos. No, I didn't get into her videos from Critical Role, but rather I stumbled on her channel when she progressed to other RPG topics. The algorithm looked at my viewing history and thought "You know, there's this woman who dyes her hair that you might find insightful..." and here I am. She does have some great and insightful comments on a variety of RPG topics, and between her, Pointy Hat, Stephanie Plays Games, Kelsey Dionne, Bob World Builder, and several other 20s and 30s content creators, I feel that our TTRPG hobby is in good hands for the future.****

***

I guess the reason why I watched Ginny's video was due to my own "experience" with romance in a D&D game.

If you've been around this blog for a while, you might recall I was part of a long-running D&D 3.0 campaign. As in a 20+ year old campaign. When our DM got together with us to hash out what the campaign would be about, there were a few ground rules we decided upon: low to mid level magic, use the Greek and Egyptian Pantheons for the campaign and world building, some roleplaying in character but not pure amateur thespian hour, and absolutely no romance. That last one was a hard no from us players, as we were all dating and/or married*****, and we really just wanted to focus on a campaign with no romantic escapades involved. We've had romantic subplots in our campaign back in college, and when it's involving people who are actually dating IRL who then break up, it gets really ugly really fast. Therefore, just keeping things platonic would make it easier for everybody.

We players figured that with the ground rules set, we were ready to play.

Things worked out okay for a while, and outside of us using IM to play (this was 2001-2 after all) things seemed to progress decently well. After a couple of years, however, our DM began trying to slip in romantic subplots. And the occasional Conan-esque nudity into the game. We all knew our DM, who was a bit of a horndog back in college, so we just figured it was him being him and we didn't take the rather obvious bait. 

We kind of kept things at bay until a new player joined the group for a few years. He was a coworker of the DM, and he wanted to play a Bard. 

You can see where this is going, right? 

Yeah, they both went there. The Bard started wanting to screw every woman he met, and this began to wear on us. This isn't what we wanted, and we definitely didn't ask for it, and it kept diverting us from the actual campaign. Then the DM started having NPCs hit on my character, and I began having to be more forceful in my nipping of those subplots in the bud. 

The rest of us began talking among ourselves about whether we need to take a stand with the DM, and then the problem solved itself: the new player had to stop playing, and just like that the division mostly evaporated.

Mostly.

The DM still would try to sneak in some opportunities for romance here and there, but we ignored them and kept the game focused on the campaign. In the last few months of our campaign before it ended, however, the DM began to ratchet up the opportunities and the PG-13 nature of those "encounters". I won't lie and say otherwise, but after 20 years we players had had enough. There were several other things that contributed to our decision to want to end the campaign, but one of the top complaints on our list was that the DM kept pushing the romance and sexual angles on us. 

I think it needs to be said that we're all adults, and we can handle adult themes.****** However, people have to buy into the concept of romance and shenanigans or you're risking a lot by trying to push it on people when they don't want it. I personally would have to be in the right frame of mind to accommodate an RPG campaign with romance, and I'll also freely admit that I am not an actor in that I would have issues separating the character(s) from the player(s). I probably could do it if I were in, say, a play or musical or something, but in a TTRPG? That'd be harder.

***

Okay, that's tabletop RPGs, but MMOs? 

Hoo boy. That's an entirely different kettle of fish.

If Asmongold's your dad, Nixxiom,

I'm a Jelly Doughnut.

Outside of occasionally being hit on by some oversexed player, I've never been in a romantic situation with another MMO player before. And you can't not realize that there's another player on the other end, which separates it from NPC romances, such as the companion romances in SWTOR. MMO RP romances are going to be with another character, and the specter of ERP (and Goldshire's Lion's Pride Inn) hovers over everything. 

There's this too. And yes, I've kept this from
an old Meme Monday just because.

 

Some people can make it work, but I'm almost completely certain that I can't. 

But if you (not me, for certain) want more detail about doing Romance RP in MMOs (yes, it's WoW but applicable in all of them), there's this:

I guess knowing my limitations is a good thing, and that I'm not planning on putting myself into a situation where they would get tested. If you can handle it, more power to you. I think I'll just go do my own thing instead and leave the romance in MMOs to y'all. 

Oh, and because I couldn't resist, here:

Now you'll never hear that old Sonny

and Cher song the same way.

*Although I have made some attempts to check out the genre, because the only way to know if you'll like it is to try it.

**Ironically enough, I think that between the two of us I'm the romantic one. That doesn't mean that I'm not as clueless as the next guy in trying to figure out if someone is hitting on me; actually my son --nicknamed "Mr. Oblivious" or "Captain Oblivious" due to his cluelessness about such things-- is a chip off the old block.

***Spouses and significant others who are playing the other toon you're romancing kind of get a pass on this, since you're obviously thinking of the other person who you're already romantically involved with.

****They don't need me to tell them that, but consider it just an observation that I'm happy the next generation has taken the reins from us older folks and run with it, in the same way that I'm proud my kids have engaged with the hobby over the years. For all of the "get offa my lawn!" sort of behavior from the old guard (who are as old or older than me), I just wanted to get it out there that I'm happy they're showing their love for the hobby and contributing to its overall success. And maybe this year I'll get a chance to run into one of them at Gen Con.

It also goes without saying that some of the Old Guard have opened their arms to the new generation of content creators. People like Matt Colville, Professor DM, and Baron de Ropp could have circled their collective wagons and been assholes toward the new blood, but they haven't. And our hobby is all the better for it.

*****The DM was married to one of the players, in fact.

******If you're NOT an adult, it goes without saying that parental guidance is strongly suggested. My oldest once attended an RPG game session in high school with some acquaintances, and ALL of the guys there tried to hit on her character (and by extension, her). She got really creeped out, and that was the end of THAT.