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.
I wasn't sure what I was going to write for today --all I knew is that I wanted to write something to get out of the funk I've found myself in writing fiction-- when this video dropped from Bookborn:
Now, to be fair, I've found Bookborn's videos engaging, and I don't agree with all of her takes on things, but I found that her videos do make me think, which is a good thing. This one is about fandoms, and how fandoms have gotten more strident and whatnot in the past several years with the rise of the algorithm controlling what is on your feed in social media.
As an example, she mentioned that she's a Taylor Swift fan, and with the new album release she went ahead and listened to it by herself first before she got online. When she got there, she discovered that all hell had broken out about the album. This is but one example she had about how toxic fandoms had become these days.
To my mind, my first comment would have been
Since I've referenced it once, you bet I'm gonna bring it out from time to time.
It's not as if the Internet created Gatekeepers and assholes and purists in fandoms. Like any item of technology, it is an accelerant. I'm not going to say that we were all one big happy family in Ye Olde Days of SF&F (and music and whatever) fandom, because everybody had opinions and frequently there were assholes you had to deal with. Typically, however, the reach of said assholes wasn't very far, typically the local area you lived in. It was only with the advent of the Internet and various forms of social media did people become louder and more obnoxious over a much more distant area.
Just remember, kids, that whenever you're seeing someone espousing something on the internet that's just one person's opinion. Go and form your own. And remember, when someone says "EVERYONE BELIEVES THIS", don't believe them. Just don't. That could be the social media algorithm's fault that you're not seeing the other opinions. Examine sources, and trust but verify.
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.
I'd noticed that Google's search engine isn't as good as it used to be for quite a while now, but I wasn't expecting this.
Okay, that's hyberbole*, but I'd not really thought about it that much until Shintar pointed out to me on Monday that Parallel Context doesn't show up in search in Google.
Don't believe me?
I made a search using the "site" option and put it in Google and Bing.
Here's Google's result:
As of September 2, 2025.
And Bing's result:
As of September 2, 2025.
For curiosity, I reran the search on Google while removing the "site:" option, and...
As of September 2, 2025.
In case you're wondering whether it's my settings, I run Google with SafeSearch set to "Off", so my occasional usage of profanity shouldn't be caught by the search engine.
I also did verify that the blog is visible to search engines:
Again, as of September 2, 2025.
***
My first impression is that Bing doesn't do a very good job of searching PC either, since I deliberately chose the title of my most recent work of fiction which happens to be the title of two blog posts, but it couldn't even find those two as a top result. Still, that's better than absolutely nothing happening on Google's side.
I'm pretty sure that Google's search engine ought to have picked up entries on Google's own blogging platform, and they actually do. Just not my own blog.
Here's a quick search with the site command for Shintar's post on a farewell to the long running SWTOR podcast The Ootinicast:
As of September 2, 2025.
So... apparently Google's search doesn't believe Parallel Context exists as an actual destination site, despite the blog's age. If I were using this blog for income** I'd be appalled by this development, but since I kind of prefer to be out of the limelight I'm fine with that. Shintar knows me well, as she told me she figured that I'd not be too torn up about it. Still, as she pointed out to me, it's an annoyance when you want to search for something but you can't find it.
Yes, that's Michael Richards before his role in Seinfeld, playing someone who thinks he's invisible. IIRC, Judge Harry Stone had issues with his eyes in the episode so he was temporarily blind.
From Night Court's Season 2 Episode 11.
I personally think that it demonstrates that these gigantic tech companies aren't as all-seeing as they think they are. If there's one thing that life has taught me it's that karma is a bitch, and Big Tech has hubris in spades.
*At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling to get off my lawn, Google's been going downhill for a while. It's no surprise that I've been using Bing more often than Google these days.
**I'm not. I have all monetization options turned off. Besides, I think that monetization would actually go to Souldat, since he was the blog's "creator".
A side effect of that 70's kick I've been on this past year is that I came across this, from the second highest grossing movie of 1977 (pretty sure you can figure out what was #1 that year):
No, not the part of the scene with the cat house*, but all the usage of CB radio to communicate between truckers, the Bandit, Foxy Lady, and Cledus (and Fred the Basset Hound). While Citizens' Band radio --CB radio for short-- had a spike in use in the early 70s due to the speed limits created to fight the gas crisis, songs such as Convoy and movies such as Smokey and the Bandit and Convoy** caused CB radio to explode in popularity.
You know it's big when the President gets on a CB. From Ridiculous 70s memes.
Even I, who wasn't allowed to watch Smokey and the Bandit (something about bad words and women doing "unladylike things"), knew of CB radio. I remember as a kid getting a brochure from a shoe store of all places*** that contained a conversion list of what all the CB "Ten Codes" were. At some point I also obtained a picture story about a kid who learns about CB radio and gets a base station as a gift, and when he hears a family friend (a trucker) call for help on the CB he gets his parents to call for help from the Fire Department. While both the book and brochure are long gone, they obviously left a lasting impression.
I, like many kids of that era, had a pair of walkie talkies that were basically crap. The concept of having true portable communication was simply out of reach unless you owned a CB.
And no, we never owned a CB radio.
From the 1978 Radio Shack catalog, page 160. From radioshackcatalogs.com.
Although they were all over the place.
From the Amazon of 1978, the Sears catalog. From the Fall/Winter 1978 Sears catalog, page 1174. Yes, that was PAGE 1174. From christmas.musetechnical.com.
Even at Kmart...
This was back when Kmart had a good reputation. This is a 1976 Kmart at for CB Radios. From 42444189@N04 on Flickr.
For starters, my parents weren't well off, and they considered items such as a CB radio an extravagance. I mean, we didn't get a color television until 1980, or a "nice" stereo system of any sort until ~1978. Our Christmas budget was $20, so my brother and I would comb through the Sears catalogs trying to find enough bang for the buck to stretch that $20 as far as it could go. Even then, my parents would nix certain presents, such as some of those Battlestar Galactica toys because they shot small projectiles. Later, when I had a job --and a car-- and I was told I could buy a car stereo once I saved up enough money, my dad flat out refused to let me get the stereo I'd saved for because "it was a waste of money".****
So you can imagine that my parents didn't want to buy a CB radio.
However, some family friends did have CB radios, and one year when we went on an extended weekend's vacation with them they offered to loan us one of their CBs as well as an antenna with a magnet mount and a felt bottom so as to not scratch the paint job on the car. The idea was that we would be able to coordinate on things such as stopping for lunch. Well, there was also just chatting while driving as well, the sort of thing that CB radio is really good at. The family friends talked up how great it was to chat like that and make the multi-hour drive that much easier.
Still, my parents refused to borrow a CB radio for the trip.
I suspect that my dad didn't want to risk scratching the paint on his then new station wagon, but he probably also thought that using a CB radio was "beneath" him for some reason. Or maybe he was concerned that I might hear some profanity, but given that I heard plenty of profanity all over the place (especially from my fellow Catholic students) I thought that possibility rather silly. But my parents kind of lived in an alternate universe where PG films were considered risqué.*****
As time went on, my interest in CB radio waned as my teen years went on and I gained access to a car and (more importantly) a car stereo. Well, there was also that thing about girls, I suppose, but to a geeky teen that was more hypothetical until I went to college.
***
When I worked at Radio Shack after college, I was less concerned about CB radio than shortwave radio and the burgeoning PC market, but we did sell our share of CB equipment. I used to get copies of Popular Communications magazine from bookstores, and I'd occasionally skim the CB Radio column, but it didn't have that much interest for me.
Yes, even with CB Radio, sex sells. From CB Action magazine out of Australia.
And in the UK, too. From CB World magazine out of the UK.
Somebody alert the French that sex sells CB magazines! From France CB magazine, from... well, you know where.
Despite my history with radio as a hobby, I hadn't been that interested in trying out CB radio much over the years. I mean, I did own one for a while when I was "given" a cheap model as part of a yard sale purchase of a scanner radio, but I believe I gave it away to an electronics recycling event years ago.# It's just that CB radio does have its share of cranks and misfits and racists on the air, and despite that there's the perception that CB is an "old" technology and "nobody uses it" anymore.
Uh, yeah, about that latter part...
From a Loves Truck Stop in Indiana in September 2024.
Loves is one of the places that I stop at while driving on the highway because I know I can usually find a clean restroom and a decent cup of coffee. So when I was inside, grabbing a drink, I saw some Cobra CB radios for sale and I quickly snapped that pic you see above.
So if Loves considered CB radios important enough to truck drivers that they continue to stock them at their numerous stores throughout the country, then it's not so obsolete as I thought.
Another thing happened over the past year that caught my attention was Hurricane Helene in the Fall of 2024. When the remnants of Helene hit the interior of the US, parts of the Appalachian Mountains centering around western North Carolina found themselves without power for well over a couple of weeks. In those situations, cell phones are useless without an active tower network, so it fell to CB radio and amateur radio to provide communications. I kept up with how things were progressing over that month, and I have to admit I was impressed by the response provided by both groups of radio operators (with some overlap between the two, to be honest).
With that knowledge out there, I began keeping an eye on YouTube for people promoting CB radio as a hobby. Again, there are the cranks and misfits out there, but there are plenty of people who keep the hobby alive. A lot of them are amateur radio operators (colloquially known as 'hams') who originally came from CB radio and still keep up with what's going on in CB.
I also found a recording of an actual LP made to explain how CB Radio worked:
Because that's what you did in the 70s to explain things
to people: you made a record of it.
While I'm not going to go out of my way to acquire a CB radio (at least not at the moment), I'll be keeping my eyes open if a used one comes my way. There's plenty of old radios around, so you never know what might appear at a local yard sale. And besides, an older radio could be yet another project for me to work on in my retirement years.
So no, I don't have a CB radio at the moment, but I think that'll change in the next year or two.
*True story: I was assigned in high school to read John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and the references of "cat houses" in the novel left me all confused. I finally asked in class just what the hell a cat house was, and boy did the class laugh at that one. (It's slang for a house of prostitution, if you don't know.) In my defense I knew I could never ask my parents, because they'd just get all offended or something. And yes, I have asked innocent questions about that sort of thing before and had it all blow up out of proportion, so I learned to simply not bring it up.
**Yes, the movie was based on the song and came out a couple of years after the song.
***The shoes I was forced to wear for school were Buster Browns. Damn, I hated those things. Sure, gym shoes weren't allowed, but surely my parents could have chosen something less dorky looking that those things.
****I had to get a Sears branded stereo that wasn't very good, but at least it did play cassettes. For a while I don't think they wanted me to get even a cassette player. Given that I played a TON of Heavy Metal in the car that I knew they wouldn't have approved of, they probably didn't want that cassette player.
*****I wasn't allowed to see R-rated movies, despite my ability to watch them on cable television all the time, until I went and saw Platoon with some friends (and yes, I was 17 at the time, so I was "legal"). As a college classmate once said, "Red needs to get out from under his parents' thumb."
#I tried hunting for it for this post, but no dice, so I figured it's long gone. If I stumble on it later, I'll provide an update.
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.
Okay, I'll admit that I wasn't expecting to be writing this post when I sat down on Friday morning before work, but things happen.
Well, this happened:
I've been watching Angelika's videos for over a year now, and her focus on items such as clothing, art, style, and other things in MMOs and RPGs (mainly Elder Scrolls and WoW) are interesting to me. So, when she decided to focus on the standards of beauty in WoW (primarily WoW Classic), I was interested in her take on it.
The biggest takeaway for me was how she viewed Vanilla WoW through the lens of what was considered attractive and stylish in 2004, which was when the game released. I'll be honest in that I couldn't tell you much of what was considered "in" at the time, because our youngest was a year old and overall the years 1998 - 2005 were a bit of a sleep deprived blur.
Then, this morning, this dropped:
I haven't watched the trailer either (I haven't watched a Retail WoW trailer except for Dragonflight since Mists back in 2012), so I can't speak to it myself, but I found her critique very interesting in that Blizzard is basically "going generic" as far as the Blood Elf look. If you looked at Liadrin, you'd not know it was a Blood Elf from WoW. She just looks like an elf, not a Warcraft elf.
Of course, that's not enough, because apparently there's a big divide on the reaction to the trailer. People either adore or despise it, with not that many opinions in the "meh" middle. Which is pretty much standard for anything in Retail, but a lot of the hate is focused on Liadrin's look and how "masculine" she looks. The pictures I've seen of her simply don't look like her, masculine or not. Liadrin has a specific look to her that dates back to TBC, like Angelika pointed out, and Blizz moved away from that.
Oh well. Nothing I can do about that, but yes, the videos are worth a watch.
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.
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.
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.
