It's kind of funny that after I posted about walkthroughs and whatnot last Wednesday and Thursday, Tim Cain's YouTube video today was about a question he received about how the Internet changed game design and game dissemination to players.
This isn't the first time he's tackled a similar query, and he has those answers in links in the Description*, but one thing that stuck out in my mind was how the rise of Influencers and Influencer Culture has shaped people's opinions about games. The longer his video went on, the more I thought of that line from Citizen Kane...
From Citizen Kane via Yarn.
That reminds me that we've come full circle in what Influencer Culture really means: there have always been people who tell us what to think and what to buy, it's just that the nature of that delivery has changed over the decades** to being more immediate, requiring a more immediate response.
Well, we can control our response, and that's where hitting the pause button isn't a bad idea.
*Tim is awfully good at providing links such as that.
Bhagpuss commented on yesterday's post about walkthroughs and solved games that "following guides are just more fun", to which I snarkily replied that "are you really playing the game, though?"
That little exchange kept rolling around in my head all night, and I decided to delve deeper into it, because I don't think I was right to simply dismiss Bhagpuss' point.*
In my response, I likened following a walkthrough or merely utilizing the optimized meta to playing connect-the-dots or watching a movie or television series, but upon reflection I don't believe it's just that.
A game is active entertainment. No matter anything else, if you're playing a game of any sort, you're choosing to engage with it. While we can also choose to engage in more passive forms of entertainment, such as watching television, you still have to interact with the game. AI hasn't progressed to the point where it plays the game for you**, so that mere act of physical interaction raises it above the level of watching reruns of MASH.***
However, the operative word isn't 'active' per se, it's 'entertainment'.
Yes, I went there. From the movie Gladiator (via Tenor).
I forgot to ask that basic question: "Are you having fun?" Or maybe a better one is "What is your goal?"
While the former question is the one most people ask, maybe your goal isn't to have fun at all. Let me explain.
***
Walkthroughs are very common in teaching. They provide students with a process to understand a concept with known starting and ending points, and if you get stuck during homework or a test you can fall back to that walkthrough as a guide to help you work through your issues. For example, my Advanced Lab 1 and 2 classes in Physics at UD relied heavily upon you as a student to study and reproduce journal articles, then write up the results as a formal 10-20 page lab report.**** My third lab experiment was provided to me by the professor showing me the lab equipment and the basic design, handing me the requisite journal article, and then said "Now, go and reproduce The Photoelectric Effect."
While some lab experiments are more simplistic than others, they are all walkthroughs. However, I would argue that "entertainment" isn't the typical reason why people utilize them. Yes, there are those who find it fun --and I'm one of them-- but the primary reason why they exist is for instruction and understanding.
Likewise, walkthroughs are found in various other sporting and hobbies. They provide a basis for understanding, a learn-by-doing methodology, and a foundation to build upon. I'm thinking of the karate-do kata that the kids (and my wife) used to perform for their karate class, and you get the idea.
I recognize this kata from their classes.
From the standpoint of games, for some people walkthroughs are the best way to learn to play the game. They provide you with the understanding of the logic behind the game, where the pain points are, and how to solve the problems presented.
***
So, assuming that the answer to "What is your goal?" is to have fun or be entertained, then we can proceed to "Are you having fun?"
That answer is completely on you. If by "having fun" you go do your own thing, then go do it. If to have fun you follow a walkthrough or the meta, then do that too.
However, that doesn't mean that people won't judge you because of what you do. People are people, and I've found over the years that the people who love to say "I won't judge you" often are judging you, just not out loud. And yes, I'm guilty of that too. I'm not going to deny that.
If people react negatively to you for not following what they perceive is the "correct" way of playing, don't be surprised. But it also needs to be said that you don't have to yield to their pressure. If they want you to play a specific way and if it's a requirement for your participation with them, then you have to decide whether it's more important to play your way or play with those other people. If others can't respect you for the way you want to play a game, I think there's your answer.
So for me, "having fun" means doing my own thing, trying to puzzle out answers on my own, and not utilizing walkthroughs or a published "best method". To those who use those because they've got other things to do, such as raiding, then that's fine. You do you.
*Yes, I realize it's my blog and I can do what I want with it, but I try to avoid being an asshole.
**It could be argued that botting software for MMOs is rapidly approaching this tipping point.
***Even then, it must be said there are greater and lesser degrees of engagement while watching television or a movie. If you're in a movie theater watching a movie, the crowd can be more engaged than if you're watching alone at home. The same thing goes for the shared experience of watching a sporting event in a bar or a stadium; you may not be playing the sport itself, but you're engaged with the shared experience of watching and cheering on the participating teams.
****I've told this story before, but I'll mention it again. The night before all of our Advanced Lab 1 lab reports were due, I was working on one of my last lab reports when I somehow nuked the floppy disk my lab reports were on. I had to scramble and rewrite 4 lab reports, a total of 80 pages worth, over the course of 8 hours. I somehow managed to finish it in time, my memories of that caffeine and terror fueled night are pretty hazy.
Thankfully, I've not run into my griefer the past several days.
That doesn't mean I've not been in instances over that time --I have been in two-- but my little friend was not a participant.
However, Briganaa 2.0 has made it to L60*, and after working on getting a few skills up to snuff, this happened early on April 1st:
Some things never change.
Given that the date was April 1st --aka April Fools Day-- I avoided posting anything yesterday lest people think I was pulling their leg.
I've noodled around Hellfire Peninsula a bit...
It almost got me, but here's proof that it didn't.
Killed a few things...
Sorry I didn't get a more dynamic screencap, but I was a bit busy actually killing him. That green thingie is an moustache-twirling Villain saying "You killed my minion! I'll get you next!"
And I have a few thoughts.
Outland is easier in 2026 than in 2021.
That's not just a generic impression left to the nerfing of the Heroic 5-person instances and the raids, but fighting out in the field. As I explained to my Questing Buddy, whereas she had PvP gear when she crossed over (her Tier 3 gear was all healing stuff so it wasn't useful for questing) I had pretty much the same gear when I crossed over in 2021: a mix of quest greens with a decent amount of dungeon gear from Zul'Farrak, Maraudon, Sunken Temple, and Blackrock Depths. And about half of those items have already been replaced by quest greens from Hellfire Peninsula, so I'm definitely on similar footing with what I had back then. I even have the same Class (Shaman) and Spec (Enhancement) that I had in 2021.
And to me, it's pretty obvious that the mobs aren't as difficult as they were in 2021.
The Expedition Armory, the ghost area directly south of Honor Hold, was a place that bedeviled me back then. This time around, I have no issues single pulling an enemy at a time, and even holding my own with two of them at once. The road toward Shattrath City, which is crawling with Ravagers, were also no problem at all.
Could this be simply due to experience? Perhaps, but I doubt it. It's been 5 years since I last was in Hellfire Peninsula, and I have forgotten a few things in the intervening time.** I have been playing as if I were in 2021, taking my time and being cautious, but I certainly feel like I can move faster if I chose to. I also suspect the XP rewards are higher than in 2021, because the leveling seems quicker as well. I'm almost to L61 and I'm not even halfway through the zone itself.
There are people here, but not even close to what you'd expect in the early part of an expac.
Seriously.
The only place where I was constantly running into too many people were in the initial quests just outside of Honor Hold, where I found an L70 killing mobs for an L58-L60 toon --who said boosting was dead?-- and over on the path toward Hellfire Citadel. Aside from that there was plenty of space to spread out. I also noted plenty of queries for group quests in Gen Chat, but not so many that it was overwhelming.
There was also ample evidence that during the day the crowd was not very large, as the layers were about 6 deep:
But did balloon back to 10 deep at night:
There were some people who were hanging around, showing off their flying mounts (no, I didn't get a screencap of them), and there was a steady flow of activity around the PvP locations in Hellfire Peninsula***, so when you add that activity and the L70s going to raid or run instances at Hellfire Citadel, it seems more active than it is. Most L70s are likely raid logging at this point, although once I reach Shattrath City I'll get a chance to test that theory.
Finding some gathering nodes are easier than others.
Brig 2.0 is a Skinner/Leatherworker --and, uh, I need to work on the Leatherworking side of things-- so she doesn't have any issues killing beasts and then skinning them as part of her questing activities. I've also seen plenty of herbs around, just waiting for people to pick them.
But mining nodes? Good luck with that.
Every time I've been close to a mining node, someone comes swooping down from above and farms it within a few minutes. That's kind of crazy, given that Hellfire Peninsula isn't exactly where you'd expect the Miners to be congregating at right now; they're probably at Blade's Edge Mountains or Shadowmoon Valley if I'd a guess.
I'm also aware on an existential level that the bot farms are fighting back against the current state of anti-bot behavior with the WoW Classic team by mass reporting so-called "legitimate" farmers as bots, and letting the (presumably) Copilot-driven AI automatically ban them. At least one member of my Questing Buddy's guild has been banned (and then unbanned when he complained) by a bot farm for farming the same area the bot farm wanted for themselves.
The more I read Gen Chat in Outland, the happier I am not joining the Rat Race.
If there's one thing I've learned over my raiding experience from 2020-2024, it's that raid teams and raiding philosophies are always in flux. No matter your stated goals for a raid, they never remain static. There is always a trend toward either more hardcore raiding or being a "farm team" for another raid. If you're a good raider, you'll get contacted by someone from another raid to snap you up and join their raid team as that raid team loses people to other raids.
That's the lie that nobody talks about: you can play with friends, but how long will those friends play with you if they hear the siren song of faster progression or a better raid team? I've watched my raid team fall apart due to regular defections from the best players, who even though they knew the pace we were going to run at decided to push for changes almost immediately after joining the raid. I've also seen friends leave because they were also members of another raid team and that raid team demanded faster progression out of them. So, when push came to shove, friendship wasn't quite as important as that other raid team.
Maybe after a decade of raiding with the same people (as in well-established raid teams in EQ/Retail WoW/etc.) you have had all of those issues shaken out, but I've yet to see that happen.
As much as I hear my Questing Buddy downplay how hardcore her raid team is, I can speak as someone looking in from the outside that they are very hardcore. While they may not have explicit raid materials requirements that other raid teams do, the expectation is implicit because they utilize Loot Council to distribute gear: If you're not pulling your weight, you won't get gear. It's quite amazing how that tends to focus the mind if you want to progress.
Are they a top guild on the server? No, absolutely not.
Are they hardcore enough that the only places that people can go to are either sideways (skill-wise) or to a top guild? Yes. There's not very many levels between them and the top guilds, so if you want to leave their raid team to go to a "better" one, you're going to end up on one of the top guilds' raid teams. They also have an advantage in that they're one of the few raid teams that raid on Pacific Time as opposed to Eastern Time (or China Standard Time), so they will attract the top players for their time slot.
Now, the $100,000 question: would I like to raid again?
Yes, but only on my terms.
I know what the pressure of expectations are, and I'm sick of it.**** I don't play video games to get all the best gear, I play for the satisfaction of having done a good job my way. (Or, given the circumstances, a good story.) I'm not interested in speed runs or what the meta is, because both of those assume you can not only understand what needs to be done (yeah, I can do that) but have the physical skills to accomplish that (I'm in my upper 50s; I know my limitations). I was one of the oldest raiders on the Valhalla raid teams, and despite my Mage Class Lead being happy with my performance, I used to get harassed by people who wanted to "help" me play better because I was always a step or cast slower than the others.***** And my experiences in Wrath Classic with our little 10s social raid taught me that --no matter what-- I was always going to be a step slower than everybody else. Therefore, I'm not going to force myself past my limits just so I can raid and make my friends uncomfortable with my inability to keep up with them.
But would I like to put my ghosts to rest? Absolutely.
I've successfully navigated things this far, and once I crossed the Dark Portal and settled in, I began to relax. Another ghost vanquished.
This encounter was even closer, as I had to transform into a Ghost Wolf and run away from a fight, but the Reaper er, Reaver never got me.
And it needs to be said, I'm glad I haven't ended up on a Fel Reaver's specimen listing...
*I didn't get the "Ding!" screencap because I forgot.
**I don't use Questie or any other quest aids, so I'm utilizing only the game's default settings.
***There were pretty regular complaints in Gen Chat about "The Horde is not playing by the rules", to which I laughed. I've seen the same complaints on the Horde side in the past, so I think it's safe to say that both sides are violating The Shattrath Convention, as I tongue-in-cheek call it.
****I get that IRL at work, so why should I want that at home?
*****This continued into my progression raiding in 2021 TBC Classic. I was always middle of the pack in DPS, and always a cast or physical attack slower than the other Shamans on the raid team. The only one who was comparable to me quit pretty early on in the Phase 1 raids in 2021, because TBC Classic didn't turn out what she hoped it would be. And she was one of the few people in my age range (she was a few years older).
EtA: Corrected a couple of misspellings and some grammatical errors.
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.
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.
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...
I guess I should be happy that Google can't really figure out if this blog exists, because AI bots are starting to become a real problem.
(As if they're not one already.)
Yes, the number of indexed pages on this blog actually went down over the course of the past month. I guess Google kind of lost the plot. Graph as of February 17, 2026.
Tech engineer and Raspberry Pi enthusiast Jeff Geerling experienced problems due to AI swamping his GitHub and AI agents causing disruption in the open source community:
And the popular LINUX distro, LINUX Mint,* had their forums swamped with AI bots back in January, nearly bringing down the entire system:
These are just two that I'm aware of; I'm almost certain there's more out there that I haven't observed yet.
This bubble can't pop quickly enough.
*I found out about LINUX Mint while researching a LINUX OS to install on my mom's old laptop that doesn't support Windows 11 yet is perfectly fine for use.
He was the founding guitarist of the band Cake, who happened to have penned this little ditty:
He eventually left to found the band Deathray before Cake's third album was recorded. He was one of those musicians who had an outsized impact, even though there's not that much in the way of actual recorded content by him.
I wasn't planning on writing anything on Bob Weir until Greg Brown's passing, mainly because I came to listen to the Grateful Dead much later in life.
While a lot of people of Generation X (and later) became enamored of Pfish, of whom Trey Anastasio unabashedly had a bromance with the Dead, I didn't get into Pfish that much. My experiences with the Dead were kind of limited to what was played on Rock (and then Classic Rock) FM stations in the 80s. You know, this stuff:
I knew of Bob, kinda sorta through these pieces, but also through this other song off of In The Dark:
After Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995, Bob and the rest kept the legacy of The Grateful Dead alive by The Other Ones, The Dead, and finally Dead and Company.
It's kind of strange how John Mayer, who is a bit of a polarizing figure among my generation, was embraced by Deadheads as part of Dead and Company. But you know, the Dead and their fans have certainly been on a long, strange trip, so I guess it's rather fitting that John and Bob would somehow make this all work.
I never saw the Dead in person, because while they were a much better band to watch live (and high) it was never on my radar. And now, with Bob's passing back in January, that's never going to happen anyway.
If you're like me, you've recently had to have some "training" at work concerning AI.
I'm not talking about the training my son had when he first arrived at grad school, where he learned how to spot AI generated work that students would pass off as their own, but the basics of using AI to "improve workflows" and to "increase productivity".
Oh yes. I believe it's a sign of the apocalypse that when your employer wants you to learn something, said something is about to implode.*
Anyhoo, I was thinking about all of that training over the weekend when this YouTube video dropped in my lap:
Now, I'll be up front is that I find Brandon Sanderson likeable and engaging as a person, or at least how he presents himself online, but I'm not the biggest fan of his work. I liked Mistborn and The Well of Ascension well enough, but the concepts that he'd put forth in The Stormlight Archive really don't appeal to me. We also disagree on the genius behind Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, because he really thought those middle books --where I and a bunch of other readers finally had enough-- were much better than we gave it credit for.**
I'm not personally acquainted with Brandon either, but I have enjoyed his class on writing SF&F. There's actually two versions of the class on YouTube, last years and one about 3-4 years ago. To be honest, both are worth watching if you want to get a feel for the nuts and bolts (and the business) of writing in my favorite genre.
All that being said, I really found his keynote address from the Tailored Realities release event at Dragonsteel Nexus 2025*** quite interesting, and I found I did agree with it on a lot of points. I'm more of a Original Series Star Trek fan myself, but I do appreciate his comparisons of Data and his ongoing desire to become human in the series as a reference point to what separates current levels of pseudo AI from what most people would consider art. But more than anything else, what resonated with me was that art is a transformational process: the creation of art also changes us, and the more we remove ourselves from that process by the insertion of AI into the mix the less we are transformed as well.
That doesn't mean that we can't be transformed by creating AI art, but our isolation from the creative process makes it harder for us to be transformed. After my "training", I've compared what's known as vibe coding as basically what a non-technical boss thinks that coders do when they provide a design document. Instead of taking a framework created by your prompt and then coding in all of the details, vibe coder instructions are to instead "refine your prompts so that you get what you want that way". To me, that's equivalent of the old Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert trying to tell the engineers how to do their job.
Holy crap. This was in 1995? Yikes.
It also gives new engineers and coders a false impression of how to write code. You need to learn to fail before you can succeed, and vibe coding bypasses all of that knowledge by eliminating the skill development process. It's great if you're an experienced coder, you're in a rush, and you already know what you want, but to do regular work on an ongoing basis? You're reducing the code writing process to "just give it a few words and let it do the job".
I suppose I could boil down a lot of the "promise" of AI to this: it lets MBAs think they can be engineers or scientists, without them realizing that the their own job could be replaced as well.
*Back in 2000, my then employer's CEO called all of the development staff together for an all-hands meeting. The late 90s, if you'll recall, were the high-flying days of the OG Dot Com boom, and it was all "internet this" and "internet that". So, when we were brought together despite the push to get the current version of our software out the door, we joked half-heartedly that the CEO was going to announce we were going to be an internet company.
Lo and behold, he actually did just that. We were going to put our mid-range CAD/CAM/CAE software, which was so hefty that it could barely run on the best Windows XT servers at the time, on the internet as a browser-based product.
We were all stunned. The network throughput on the internet wasn't up to the task, and more importantly neither were the browsers themselves. It was an idea 20 years ahead of its time, perhaps, but it was also a harbinger that within the year the Dot Com bubble burst and the stock market imploded.
**I also thought that Robert Jordan could have used an editor who reined some of his worst impulses in, such as his tendency to overdo it on the language and description. I mean, I'm not the greatest writer of description in the world, but I really do think that RJ was really just padding his page count at times.
***In case you wondered where the Keynote part of the title is about; I know I sure did. Here's a blog post of the speech itself from Brandon's website.
The CurseForge graphics for World of Warcraft were updated more quickly this time around than in the War Within expansion:
Screencap from CurseForge as of Feb 2, 2026.
As I took in the graphic, I noticed something. Apparently someone at Blizzard is a fan of the metal band Disturbed, because there's some similarities between this graphic of a void monster and Disturbed's mascot, The Guy:
From Pinterest. Not sure if this is an official graphic or not.
You know, just add some blue or purple in there, remove the muscular hand and arms, and...
Yes, yes, I realize that there's also similarities between those two and Venom:
The cover of Venom: The Saga of Eddie Brock. Graphic Novel Volume 1. From ComicHub.
It's mainly in the teeth and the darkness, but I'm sticking with The Guy first because that's what popped into my head before Venom did. (Sorry, Marvel.)
Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go listen to Disturb's cover of Genesis' Land of Confusion, featuring The Guy...
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.
The irony about my posting a good old fashioned rant on Tuesday is that I found an inadvertent response from YouTube.
Oh, not an actual response, but one that did mention seasonal content in passing as part of a larger video about whether MMOs were fun.
Yes, this is from Pint. You may know them from their YouTube video about WoW Classic Mages*...
Or maybe their video about attempting to beat all of the Elden Ring bosses in alphabetical order**...
Anyway, the video they posted yesterday was about their experiences with playing MMOs, and how they lost the fun in them, only to slowly regain the fun later.
I thought it a fitting counterpoint to my dislike of seasonal content in that this is what MMOs have become, and Pint's just coming in here and there in MMOs for bite sized content to avoid burnout is actually a pretty good thing.
I can respect that. And it's good to see you're still kicking around, Pint.
*I'll be completely honest in that I recognized all of the stereotypes in this video, and there were points where I laughed my head off, especially their escape from the max level Rogue in Un'Goro Crater. I've SO been there when I was first starting out playing on Stormscale-US back in 2009, and I counted myself incredibly lucky to merely escape with my life from certain encounters.
**I know I'd be abjectly terrible at 'souls' games, but I can appreciate their determination to prove their worth by setting off on a relatively insane quest to do all the bosses in order like that. It got even weirder when they made it harder on themselves by... You know what? Go watch the video, and you'll understand.
In case you aren't aware, Bhagpuss of Inventory Full has an annual Advent Calendar of music, culled from all ends of the Internet. I honestly don't know how he teases out all of the weird and obscure Christmas music he does, but I'm always grateful to enjoy the fruits of his labor.
So, in return, I'd like to provide him with a musical Holiday gift.
The origin of this particular piece of music lies in the Yule Cat of Iceland, discussed here on PBS' Monstrum:
As I watched the video, I noted that Björk had sang a cover of a poem about said Yule Cat, and set out to find it. There's a few copies out on YouTube, but I got this one from the "official" Björk channel:
Although I admitted expected something more modern and Pop-oriented --it is Björk, after all-- the song is most definitely neither Pop nor Rock, but a folk tune. And I found it really cool to listen to.
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.
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.
And yes, there's a paid boost involved because of course there is:
This was captured on 11/19/2025.
The Outland Epic Pack --including the Boost and 30 days game time-- is $80 US, while the Outland Heroic Pack* is $40 US. Back in 2021, the paid boost to L58 was $40 US, and most of the commentary in the Blizz Forums centered on the "value for the money" for the two packs. More than one person thought you had to buy a pack to even play TBC Classic on the Anniversary servers, so they didn't read the post thoroughly. One person did request the "/spit" emote be restored to the game, indicating that they were not happy with these boosts existing at all.
Captured on 11/19/2025.
However, almost nobody mentioned the real issue here: the bots.
I sincerely doubt that the bot brigades will care about throwing $80 at Microsoft to have a legion of L58 boosts for farming Outland. They're just a higher class of locust, I suppose.
Another other notable item that I've seen out and about is that the Hardcore servers will not progress into TBC Classic, as per this YouTube video by WillE:
However, the biggest change aside from the $80 paid boost is that the TBC raids will all be in their post-nerf settings. I presume that's because they want everybody to blitz through TBC Classic in one year, and the difficulty of some of the raids were simply too much to be able to pull that off. Still, Karazhan especially turned into a cakewalk by the end of TBC Classic back in 2022, because we frequently had very few toons (yes, they were alts) more well geared than my Shaman back then, and she was (at best) partially Tier 5 geared.
This doesn't entirely shock me, but I figured they'd wait until the next Phase's raids became available before they nerfed the lower Tiers of raids. Silly me, I suppose.
WillE highlighted some other things, such as Guild Banks being available at launch instead of when they were first released into WoW back in the day, and that the UI changes found in Retail will make their way to the Anniversary servers. There's also that Dual Spec and the Dungeon Finder will appear in Classic Era as well, so butter my butt and call me a biscuit.
At this rate, we'll be seeing the WoW Token on Classic Era sooner than I'd have thought.
Around 5:45 PM last night we got a call from my youngest who lives in Louisville. She was stuck on the interstate close to the airport and smoke was everywhere, and she called us to see if we knew what was going on.
While she talked to my wife, the Louisville native, I quickly got onto one of the Louisville news sites and found this:
From WAVE 3 News. The original news link is gone.
At first it was unclear whether it was a passenger jet or a cargo jet, as one of UPS' primary hubs is based in Louisville, but it shortly confirmed that it was a UPS cargo jet bound for Honolulu that crashed on takeoff.
From CBS News.
From NBC's Today Show.
For those who don't know exactly where Muhammad Ali Airport is located, it's immediately south and west of the Kentucky State Fairgrounds, Churchill Downs, and the University of Louisville (which is located in what is known as "Old Louisville"). South of the airport is an industrial area, which included an auto parts place and a petroleum recycling facility, both of which took a direct hit from the crash.
The city was under a shelter-in-place order, that has gradually shrunk overnight to encompass the immediate crash area. As of this morning, the airport has reopened. No
It's the sort of nightmare you really just push into the dark recesses of your mind and try not to think about, especially when you realize that once the crew had committed to takeoff there was absolutely nothing they could have done once they discovered the plane was on fire. There's simply not enough runway to stop a fully loaded jet going 200+ miles per hour.
As for my youngest, she made it back home safely and sheltered in place as requested. She's back at work today as the shelter-in-place is now down to a 1/2 mile radius around the crash.
At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon*, I'm not a fan of "assistance" by AI when writing.
There's a big difference in providing flags for grammatical errors and AI frequently "helping" by suggesting words and/or complete sentences to assist me when writing. Oh, I can see where it'd be a useful tool to have around if you're trying to write an email for work and you're stuck on how to present it properly, but most of the time I can muddle through without much of an issue. After all, there's a certain value to experience at work. (I think.)
But when you're writing a blog post or fiction, where you want a specific voice, having Copilot or another pseudo AI pop up word or sentence structure suggestions isn't very helpful at all.
Believe it or not, this post wasn't caused by Emma's gripe about AI on The Late Show a few days ago, but this article on The Register about roughly half of the people laid off due to AI are predicted to be rehired at a lower payscale. That didn't exactly surprise me, given the shoddy quality of work I've seen out of people who think using AI to do their job and not bothering to check the results has risen quite sharply over the last year. Remember the line "trust but verify" that I mentioned in the post on Wednesday? Yeah, kind of like that.
But her complaint as an author pretty much hits home for me. If you don't know what you're doing and you're trying to write something (such as a support document) for your job, then fine. Let Open AI have a crack at it. But if you're trying to write fiction and you just rely upon Copilot or another Open AI to do your work, people WILL notice. You (yes, you) have a specific authorial voice, and even if you're writhing as Anonymous, people will know it's you who wrote the piece because of that voice. But if you let AI create the word salad, you'll discover that your authorial voice vanishes. And people won't like it.
So my advice is to do the hard work of learning your voice and keep writing to learn how to use it. Your voice is your own; don't abdicate your uniqueness to some Generative AI.
Oh, and after writing this but before I published it, this little ditty dropped from Jared Henderson:
Hucksters and swindlers using AI to try to make a quick buck by flooding Amazon with "ebooks" close enough to the original human-written work to fool customers? Who'd a thunk it? Maybe if some swindlers start using AI to create ebooks "exposing" some of these leading AI CEOs, something will get done. There are enough tech CEOs with fragile egos that maybe they'll get something done about this slop. Or, unfortunately, they'll probably just create their own slop to counter the original.
*The late Andy Rooney comes to mind. I can only imagine what his commentary about the rise of Generative AI would be like. I think that Wilhelm would have met his match, never mind me.
