The Girl from Sevier County

Everyone I know goes away in the end.

--from Hurt by Nine Inch Nails (and Johnny Cash)

I knew this day would come, but it still was a bit of a shock.

Dolly Parton died yesterday at the age of 80.

Here's a message from the family:

I will not say I'm a fan of Country Music; to the contrary, if there's one music I tend to dislike in general, it's Country. Of course there are exceptions, such as some Kenny Rogers songs, but by and large the biggest exception was for Dolly Parton. 

She was something else. I'd call her a force of nature, but when people typically think of that they think of people who went through life like a tornado, wreaking chaos and destruction in their wake. Dolly was most definitely not that. Born into poverty, she rose up to be the person she became, and yet she never forgot where she came from. 

People born outside the US may have absolutely no idea of the impact Dolly had on reading. Through her Dolly Parton's Imagination Library* that she founded in 1995, she put books in the hands of millions of children. The Imagination Library was a book gifting program that mailed a book per month to children from birth through age 5 completely free of charge. Dolly initially focused on her home of Sevier County, Tennessee, but the program quickly expanded beyond that nationally, and then later internationally to include Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia. 

The thing that made this endeavor work was that the gifting was completely unconditional: it was open to all children regardless of family income. Dolly just wanted children to read, to have the chance to succeed in life. 

***

I grew up in the late 70s to early 80s, which coincided with Dolly Parton's rise to superstardom on the pop charts. So yes, I was quite familiar with Dolly. And yes, hitting puberty in the early 80s meant that of course I knew all about Dolly's most famous assets. If you were a boy of that age at that time, there was no way to not know about them.

From Know Your Meme.

Dolly, of course, played up on that quite a bit. 

From The Chive.

Still, she had undeniable talent beyond her physical assets. She was a great songwriter and singer, and on one fateful day back in 1972, she wrote both Jolene and I Will Always Love You. The former is always tied to Dolly, and the latter was re-recorded by Whitney Houston and became a complete smash in 1992.

From iFunny.co.

And that's not even counting Nine to Five or her duet with Kenny Rogers, Islands in the Stream.

***

Dolly was one of those people who was beloved by everybody. I don't think I've ever heard someone say a bad thing about Dolly Parton, and that's saying something. 

Farewell, Dolly. You had a much greater impact than you may have ever realized.

*The website is understandably swamped right now, so don't be surprised if you have issues accessing it.

#Blaugust2026

Writing and Re-Writing

There are times when I sit here, writing away, and I have trouble making things click. It's more prevalent when I'm writing fiction, but I've had it happen during regular blog posts too. There's no way around the reality that it really sucks when it happens. 

What drives me bonkers is that I'd write something, decide it really isn't going in a way I want it to, and start over. When I do push through all the way to the end and then go back to edit it, I still end up tossing all that writing for something else. 

I really blame the writing of some 80s era cartoons for some of this. Some of the writing for Voltron, a show my brother really watched but I was kind of peripherally involved with, has shown up in earlier drafts of some of my stories. When I go back and edit and I say "Holy crap does this sound bad! Where did this come from?" I find out weeks later watching some random YouTube video a clip from Voltron or Star Blazers and realize the origin of that dialogue.

For an example, this particular snippet of dialogue took me about 3 weeks to write to where it's in this form. Obviously it's still a work in progress, so it'll likely look different than at this point, but at least I like the flow and the direction of the dialogue.

“Hmmph.” My sister sat down next to me and stared out over the pond. 

 

If she thought I was going to overshare, which was the sure sign of a guilty conscience, she was going to be waiting for quite a while. Still, I figured I’d lay out the one thing that Linna likely most feared. “I’m going to have Zarg do it.”

 “Do what?” She tore her eyes off the far end of the pond to look me over.

“The investigation that needs to happen. I’m not an idiot, you know, and I’m quite aware I’m not healthy enough to do it myself.”

 Linna’s face twisted; not quite disgust, and not quite disapproval. “And you’re going to let her do it.”

“Yes. She knows a lot about the Cult, after all, and people always underestimate her.”

My sister involuntarily glanced over at the slumbering Neve.

“I already cleared her,” I supplied. “What about your Draenei friend?”

“She’s safe as well.” Linna had a long pause as her face went through a myriad of emotions.

“You’re thinking of that place, aren’t you.”

Her expression settled on anguish. “Card…”

“They don’t know her like they do me, so it’s safer for her to do it.” I felt strangely at peace with that admission. I’d always done things myself, and relinquishing the responsibility for investigating my curse was a difficult step to take. It was also going to be quite dangerous, dealing with the Cult of the Damned, but if there was one thing I was confident about it was that Zargala could handle herself. “If you get a chance, can you carry a note from me to Mathias? He deserves to know about what happened here.”

“Yes.” Another pause. “I don’t want to lose you.”

I nodded. “Nor I you. But you have to trust me.”

“You don’t make it easy.”

“My name wouldn’t be Cardwyn if it was.” I looked around. “Carys should be back soon.”

“I told her she could come back when I was done talking to you.”

“I bet you didn’t make sure the other two weren’t snooping.”

Linna stared at me for a moment. “Shit,” she blurted and split.

I heard her footfalls fade, then I turned my focus back to the pond. “Okay, Lewys, I know you’re out there. Come on out.”

There was a rustle in the brush, and a very guilty-looking nephew emerged.

I raised an eyebrow as a smirk crept across my lips. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not going to explain what we were talking about.”

“But…”

“Sometime later, but not now.” I patted the ground next to me. “Sit.”

He dragged his feet a bit, but Lewys eventually sat down. “Take my other rod,” I told him. “I loaned it to Briganaa, but she’s not here right now.”

Lewys picked up the fishing rod and began casting with me. “Aunt Linna was really mad at you,” he finally offered.

“Yeah, I know.”

“How come?”

“Why does everybody think I’m going to tell them that?” I sighed. “Okay, I’ll give you this much: she was scared.”

“Scared? Aunt Linna?”

“Yes, she was. She was scared of what I might do, because I sometimes do things without thinking. And in our little talk that you so conveniently eavesdropped on, I assured her I wasn’t going to do anything like that.”

“Oh.” He made a face. “This is all hard.”

“Yeah, life is hard. Even when you’re all grown up.”

"That doesn't seem fair."

"It isn't. But I'll let you know if it ever does turn out fair; I think I'd like that every once in a while." 

 

I suppose I ought to have saved an earlier draft to show you what I wasn't keeping, but still I wanted to share a bit about the difficulty I face in writing. It can be a lonely and humbling process, and agonizing over something as simple as this is a guaranteed way to drive me nuts. 

But the thing is, I derived some inspiration from the fact that many famous people --geniuses, really-- agonize over their craft in their own way.

Here's a short clip of Maximillian Schell and Leonard Bernstein discussing Beethoven and what made him a genius. 

Speaking of geniuses...

The fact that Beethoven struggled and agonized over the creation process makes me feel better about my own struggles. Not because I think I'm a genius, but because people of Beethoven's stature struggled to come up with their works of art. And here I am, just struggling to put words on a page that made even a smidgen of sense. 

So many other modern creators, particularly those who loudly proclaim their own genius, loudly trumpet the ease at which they make their creations. Yet I think it is more humbling to see the real struggles people have --and what they have overcome-- that inspires me to try harder. In that case the real genius is perseverance. 

#Blaugust2026

Not Exactly a Gaming Evening

Yesterday was pretty wild here for non-gaming reasons.

From the livestormchasers.com Instagram feed
for August 11, 2026.

There were a about 3 or 4 of what I'll charitably call F0 or F1 tornadoes in that line of storms that hit us last afternoon --including one just across the Ohio River in Northern Kentucky-- but my neighborhood was missed. One tornado was a couple of miles south of us, another a couple of miles north of us. 

And really, you don't need a tornado to do some massive damage. This is what happened to a gas station in Brown County, Ohio, a couple of counties to the east of Hamilton County (where I live):

We lost some vinyl siding on our house, but luckily for us it landed across the street completely intact. That's relatively so, because it slammed into their front door before flopping to the ground. (I'm still not sure how it stayed intact.) I ought to be able to put it back into place when the roof over the garage dries out and I can safely get up there to put it back. We got extremely lucky overall, with only that damage, whereas our neighbors had chimney caps torn off, trees toppled, and debris crashing into the side of their houses, damaging the siding. There has also been downed trees, power lines, and even in the Columbus area (the central part of the state) a car driving on the I-71 interstate was flipped over by the winds that hit them in the late morning. 

As for us, a tree toppled across I-71 here in Cincinnati and crashed into a truck that had the bad luck to be driving by.

Before you ask, yes the two of us are both fine, and my son who lives on the east side of Cincinnati was fine as well. My wife was at work, and they closed up the store and ushered everybody --employees and customers-- into the fire safety corridor, which was the safest part of the building. They were there for 45 minutes, but outside of hearing the noise from the storms they had no idea what was going on. 

As for me, I had a doctor's appointment earlier in the afternoon and got home in time before the storms hit. When the sirens went off I turned on the news, and when WLWT's Meteorologist Kevin Robinson said for my immediate area to head for shelter something slammed into our back door, picked up by the wind, and I scampered to the basement and stayed there until the worst of it passed.

So yeah, gaming hasn't exactly been on my mind this evening.

This intersection is 2 miles from my home as
the crow flies. And no, that's not mountains;
That's clouds and rain. From Steve Bowling via WCPO.

#Blaugust2026

Talk About Your Perfect Storms

I was watching this video from Gameranx about the potential Sony PS6 launch being in a perfect storm of problems, and it got me to thinking.

This video was focusing on the console itself, but the shortages affecting all parts of the computer industry will not only affect the next generation of consoles (and PCs), but the peripherals and monitors/televisions as well. When you get down to it, all electronic devices utilize memory and storage and processors to a greater or lesser degree, and the shortages across the industry will also impact the price of those devices too. 

Looking to upgrade your television to a 4K or 8K version to take advantage of the new capabilities of the PS6? It'll cost more.* Need a decent sound bar? That'll cost more too. How about a new headset or controller? Yep, those will be hit by price increases as well.

Sure, RAM prices get all of the attention, and justifiably so, but it's not like they're alone in price increases. The data center boom is sucking up all available manufacturing capability to the point where components earmarked for the consumer market (or even the traditional business market) are put on the back burner. Don't be surprised if the lack of priority extends to manufacturing such as automobiles, commercial jets, and even items such as those damn Flock cameras.**

I do wonder whether the conspicuous consumption of electronics in general will grind to a halt given all the headwinds we're facing. Job losses, hardware shortages, software price hikes, economic uncertainty, and tariffs all combine to create a potential perfect storm to nuke consumer spending. Of course, a lot of these companies aren't interested in consumers, but the B2B market space that LLMs live in. The thing is, if people can't afford things, that will create a ripple effect backward through the economy, and the push to adopt LLMs will suddenly dry up when companies' bottom line becomes affected.

Gloomy thoughts for a Saturday, I suppose, but still I look at the short-sightedness of all of this behavior and think that there's going to be a lot of upset people in a couple of years.

*Or manufacturers like Samsung and others will put ads directly into their software, like Stellantis is doing with putting ads on the screens in their cars.

**Just remember, when you buy a smart doorbell such as one made by Ring or Google (the Nest) and use a subscription to save "your data", it's really going to be deposited in one of these data centers. It may not be one utilized exclusively for AI usage, but it will be put in a data center. It's more a matter of "pick your poison". I'd personally consider a doorbell camera if it meant I could keep the data locally on a hard drive, but those that do (such as TP-Link) don't exactly give me warm fuzzies in terms of security.

***Well, a Friday as I was writing the bulk of this while sitting in yet another presentation about using LLMs to improve my output.

#Blaugust2026

Gen Con 2026 - Under Construction

This year's Gen Con began with rain on Saturday.

I'd reserved a car at one of our local rental agencies for Saturday, and I figured that I'd drop my wife off for work in the morning, then when it was time to pick up the rental I'd leave her car at her employer and walk to the rental agency. It's about a 10 minute walk, and I didn't mind getting in some exercise. 

But I hadn't counted on it being a very rainy walk. It absolutely poured (and thundered) for all save for the last minute of my little jaunt, so even though I wore a rain jacket I looked very much like a drowned rat when I got to the rental agency. I waited in line for about 20 minutes, because they were absolutely swamped with people showing up looking for a rental*, and when my turn came they asked me if I was flexible with what rental I got. 

"Sure," I replied. I mean, I wasn't going to be an ass about it; the compact SUV I'd reserved was just cost effective and decent in gas mileage enough that I could work with it.

They ended up giving me an upgrade, a Toyota Camry SE Hybrid.

This is it, parked at Lucas Oil Stadium.

While I've driven a hybrid before (a Toyota Prius as a rental for a work trip last year), I've never driven a car that had over 200 hp under the hood. My '97 Accord gets something around 125 hp, so while it's peppy enough I know it takes a few moments to get going. The moment I mashed the pedal on this car on the drive home, however, it absolutely took off. That took some getting used to.

What also took some getting used to was the mileage, where (in US terms) I got 45 miles per gallon for the entire trip. With the exception of that Prius, the best gas mileage I've ever gotten out of a car on a long distance trip was about 30 MPG in my wife's old 1990 Pontiac 6000 back in the day.**

Anyway, the trip up to Indianapolis was somewhat uneventful, outside of the fact that it started raining the moment I crossed over from Ohio into Indiana, and only let up when we got to the Indianapolis city limits. 

The walk from Lucas Oil Stadium to the Convention Center showed me two things: that Ravensburger was heavily promoting their Disney Lorcana collectible card game...

Yep, Pooh Bear in a wizard's hat.

And that Indy is under a LOT of construction.

Here's a view of some of it from the inside
of the Convention Center.

It was as if Indianapolis looked at all the construction around Columbus and Cincinnati and said "Hold my beer." There was a new hotel going in across the street that was also going to be connected to the Convention Center via a Skywalk; they were reworking the entire walkway (shown above) leading to what used to be the mall; the old mall itself is being rebuilt into a mixed-use open air space called the Traction Yards (first phase to open in 2030); and the street north of the convention center toward the Statehouse is being rebuilt with cobblestones. 

Part of the gravel base. There might have been sewer line
work going on too, but there was so much gravel and brick
around that I couldn't tell for sure.

All this construction didn't deter any Gen Con attendees, as the place was completely sold out.

Inside the Convention Center the place looked blessedly free of construction as the foyer near the Exhibit Hall had the three video screens recycling ads for games...

This was just a brief view of what was up there.
It's amazing just how much space these GIFs take up.

Including one unexpected advertisement...

Yes, that's a realtor.

I can understand why people might be interested in moving to a place with a lower cost of living and a central location to a lot of the Midwest (Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, and St. Louis) and the South (Louisville, Memphis, Nashville), but as my son pointed out, you'd have to live in Indiana. So... 50:50, I suppose.

We met up with my oldest and her partner (who'd come down from Milwaukee) under the video screens, I distributed badges, and we had a good chat with my brother-in-law before heading into the Exhibit Hall. 

I tried getting a nice panorama shot of the hall, but
it didn't work out. There were artifacts I couldn't remove.

So, we split up and wandered the Hall for a while before reconnecting for lunch and then a second round of divide and conquer.

Some of the displays were for games that began as video games but then went "retro" into card and board games:

Yes, a Palword card game.
Somewhere, Nintendo is fuming.

Supposedly the Stellaris board game will be
out this fall. Given that this is about 4+ years
in the making, the crowdfunding backers are
a bit annoyed by now.

Okay, it's not a video game to board game 
transcription, but come on. Were it not for Link
and The Legend of Zelda, they wouldn't be selling
ocarinas at Gen Con. And boy could she play!

I'd mentioned this card game last year,
and boy howdy was there a crowd at the booth
this year. No idea if any VTubers were actually
there, but I'd bet that at least a few were.

Now, another part of going to Gen Con is viewing the art...

Sadly this is one of two booths in my pics that qualifies.
But also, rugs/tapestries!

This is the other one, but I'm not sure if it's for sale or
whether it was to attract people to their booth.

or the authors (who I sadly did not take any pics of), but there were other creators present that caught my eye. Maybe it's because it's about time for the Ohio Renaissance Festival***, but I checked out a lot of clothing and leatherworking booths...

Geek Orthodox had tees and other shirts
that made me chuckle.

And they also had "stained glass" designs
as well. Really impressive.

Is anyone in need of a corset or a puffy shirt (tm)?

And more outfits. The prices were pretty
high, but given the quality involved, 
I think it'd be worth it.

There were even jerseys for the
Catan World Cup. Yes, it's a thing.

Given that yesterday afternoon's weather-related events made some of Saturday's Gen Con a bit of a wash (pun intended) I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at just how crowded the Exhibit Hall was. Even by 2 PM, when there's only 2 hours left and the crowd normally thins out quite a bit, it was still incredibly packed. So, I did what I normally do when things are far more crowded than I like: I escaped into the larger Convention Hall and wandered around.

As I took in the hallways of the Convention Center, I found crowds and all sorts of other interesting things going on...

The game put out by Critical Role and Darrington Press,
Daggerheart, was very much in evidence.

Speaking of Critical Role...

Given that Brandon Sanderson's
Cosmere was everywhere last year,
it'd make sense that there's a Mistborn
game out this year.

Oh yeah, League of Legends has
a Trading Card Game. No, I didn't go
check it out.

And I couldn't resist, given that
I've been keeping up with Aywren
Sojourner's blog and YouTube videos.

After some of these breaks, I went back inside the Exhibit Hall and found more interesting things over the course of the day. My Questing Buddy's son is heavily into Star Wars Legion, the minis game that you could look at as a gateway drug into Warhammer 40k, and I passed along this pic for her to show her son that his favorite game is well represented:

There were a lot of people playtesting Legion and some other Star Wars properties, such as the Trading Card Game and Shatterpoint.

But this is a Legion terrain setting that you can play with:

As for other games, here's some other highlights:

The name alone got me intrigued.

I could get behind a game called Charmed and Dangerous.

Paizo brought out their iconic goblins,
because you can't have a Gen Con without
a goblin or three around.

Pink Hawk Games had stuff that would be right
up my youngest's alley, given the cat themes.

And speaking of cats...

I did stop by the Dwarven Forge booth again this year, but I didn't take any photos of their displays. They are just too good looking (and expensive) for me to justify checking them over, so I decided to not linger. There were at least 3 vendors who specialized in making gaming tables (yes, Wyrmwood was there again), but every time I look at them I think "I can make that myself", or rather "I can try to make that myself", but I don't really have a place to put a gaming table right now.

The end of the day rolled around far too quickly for my taste, but that's what happens. We said our goodbyes and headed back home to Cincinnati. It didn't rain until we crossed over into Ohio, and then we got some downpours. 

I swear...

As for what I snagged at Gen Con, given the size of this post I'm going to bump that for another day. After all, I've got some explainin' to do...

Here, have a video of Mooch in the meantime...

*Which also included people making video calls on their phones while they were talking to the rental people. I mean, why do people do this? Everybody can hear whatever private conversation they're having.

**That was when the 65 MPH speed limits were just starting to appear back in the early 90s, so a completely different era. The 6000 also had a 4-cylinder engine that got maybe 100 hp, and boy did it struggle going up a hill with a full load of people inside. So if you doing purely highway miles and on flat land, it could hit 30 mpg, but otherwise it was in the low 20s.

***I don't think we're going to the Ohio Ren Fest this year; maybe next year.

EtA: Updated links.

#Blaugust2026

Gen Con 2026 - A Brief Appetizer

I'm working on a full Gen Con report, and that'll come tomorrow. (I think.)

Still, I did want to mention something that happened this year at Gen Con that was something now.

Tornadoes.

Yes, that wonderful scourge of the Midwest and the Plains decided to pay Indianapolis a visit on Saturday. There were thunderstorms, yes, but we've seen t-storms at Gen Con before. I mean, it's Summer out here, and t-storms are pretty much what you get in a Midwestern Summer.

But tornadoes actually happening on Gen Con weekend? Well, that's new.

As you can see, people weren't exactly that concerned, but the Block Party scheduled to happen when storms rolled in was cancelled. And for good reason.

From WTHR on 8/1/2026.

Oh, and in a massive case of irony, the rain was invited into the Indianapolis Convention Center.

From WISH-TV.

According to Convention officials, the thunderstorms damaged the pipes that drain the roof, and, well, this was the result.

Where it was raining was where people play card games such as Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon. My brother-in-law was laughing about it later, because while a lot of people scattered, some people just stayed around, playing their games.

The rain inside the Convention Center spawned jokes in social media, such as the Gen Con "Body Odor" detectors went off due to people not showering and, uh, they got a shower after all.

Since this was Saturday, I wasn't affected, and neither was my brother-in-law. The place he was in at the time was central to the building and not close to any outside doors or windows, and when he looked at the radar track of the tornado he saw it was southeast of the Convention Center and was tracking away from Downtown Indy, so he figured they were going to be fine.

The storm --and its aftermath-- is what likely lead to a heavier than usual Sunday crowd in the Exhibit Hall. I'll mention that more tomorrow.

#Blaugust2026

What If We're Wrong?

The Classic Plus hype train is going bonkers right about now. 

WillE is but one of the creators that's really on board with Classic Plus, but I keep wondering if we're misreading the tea leaves.

Here's the biggest clue that we might get Classic Plus, which was leaked back in 2025 and got a lot more scrutiny once more in 2026:

From Reddit and Icy Veins and all over.

Here's the thing. This looks interesting on the face of it, but until the collaboration between WotC and Blizzard was announced (it was leaked last week), nobody had a clue that D&D and WoW were going to join forces in the first of a series of crossovers. 

Here's what the alternate cover looks like, complete
with a book sleeve. (Alliance is on the back cover.)
From Reddit.

And oh look, that D&D World of Warcraft splatbook is coming out on November 17, 2026, which closely aligns with that Project Camelot release date up there as well.

So.

Was this what Project Camelot was all along? 

Hell if I know, but it wouldn't shock me if we were all wrong and it wasn't Classic Plus but a tabletop version of WoW that we got instead. I mean, it wouldn't be so bad from my perspective as a tabletop gamer, but I'm sure that it wouldn't go over well with others in the online community.

I guess we'll find out.

And for the record, I think I like the "regular" splatbook's look over the fancy version:

From ENWorld.

From ENWorld.

Why is it called ENWorld, you might ask?
When D&D 3.0 was getting ready to be released,
a guy named Eric Noah created a website to keep track
of all of the info of the upcoming version. Hence "EN"
refers to Eric Noah and World is, well, you get the idea.

#Blaugust2026

When You're Not Sure If It's Real or Not

You know, the saying about how the hero lives long enough to become the villain is pretty accurate in its own way, but I wonder about a corollary that if you live long enough you see movies about the creation of the original movie.

Or in this case, about Sylvester Stallone getting the original Rocky movie made.

It feels somewhat surreal seeing this trailer, because I've seen "remakes" and "resets" that were basically comedies masquerading as a movie or television show reboot but were there to poke fun at the original piece. 21 Jump Street comes to mind, where the original television show was on FOX back in the 80s as one of the few shows that actually survived a few seasons and was anything but a buddy cop comedy, which the 2012 "remake" was. Starsky and Hutch is another, where the 2004 film made fun of the (admittedly not that great) 1970s television cop show. 

So when I saw the trailer for "I Play Rocky" in my YouTube feed in between amateur radio and gamer videos, I figured someone was going to spend the entire movie mocking Sylvester Stallone. After all, he is the guy whose acting prowess was once described by Dennis Miller as "having the range of a Daisy Air Rifle". 

I was quite shocked that this was a serious take on the story behind the original Rocky movie.

I'm not here to throw shade on the attempt, but I'd bet money that Sly was behind this film, and I have to wonder whether anything --ANYTHING-- was mentioned about his acting career prior to Rocky coming out. There's Death Race 2000 and Capone, for two examples, as well as bit parts in other films. Yes, that includes at least one adult film. You can even check Snopes, which confirmed the accuracy of the oft-repeated story about Stallone acting in a film they can't show clips of on regular television.

Still, who knows? There's a lot of other celebrities who got the biopic treatment, so I guess it was Sly's time. And it's not like Stallone will have been the first celebrity to have their biopic conveniently ignore certain parts of their lives.

Hmm... I wonder if they got Bill Conti to write the soundtrack for this movie too, or whether they'd only refer to the iconic bars of Gonna Fly Now in the same way that John Williams' themes are used in later movies (such as Superman). 

And Now For Some Ethics in Gaming

I came back from spending several hours being part of a club activity clearing away brush and mowing the lawn at my amateur radio club's remote site, propped up my aching feet and ate some lunch, and discovered this awaiting me:

I watched it and the first thing that popped into my head was "I guess Blizzard still has some real people as GMs". Kind of sad, I know, but given how Microsoft is pushing all of their employees to adopt AI in everything*, it's pretty much expected that Blizzard would cut costs by eliminating personnel in "customer facing" roles such as GMs in favor of bots. So to discover that an actual GM did what they did...

Wow. Just... wow.

Okay, I should back up and provide a short summary:

In Retail WoW there was a Mythic+ dungeon run that included a WoW streamer and a pug tank. During the run the group wasn't doing so well, so the GM "assisted" the group by insta-killing mobs. They got caught and the GM was fired and the players involved were banned. What made this even a bit juicier than your average MMO-related drama is that the GM was friends with some of the group participants and the GM was also interfering in the run to impress the WoW streamer.** 

Here's the Reddit thread that kicked this off for reference.

The group would have likely not been found out by a Redditor if it weren't that the pug tank had logged the Mythic+ run and therefore it showed up in Warcraftlogs. I'm not sure how they thought they were going to get away with it, since the info is in the logs and there's always someone obsessive enough in the WoW community to go digging for group content data and discovering the pretty obvious outliers in the data pool. And I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that since Blizzard crunches data all the freaking time, those outliers would have showed up in their own internal data.

I guess there's also the aspect of this being a Mythic+ dungeon run, which gets into the competitive/hardcore nature of WoW, that has people so up in arms about it. This was a Mythic+ 23 run, which according to Ye Olde Internet is a very high end run, so the specter of cheating on a run such as that is like direct interference from FIFA in the recently concluded World Cup. 

The one thing that I hope that comes out of this little brouhaha is that Blizzard doesn't to all-in and simply replace any remaining GMs with bots, which would make an already poor situation (where GMs need to be out to enforce the rules) worse.

*And the subsequent decline in quality across all of their products, including gaming. I fully expected that there's a direct connection between the increase in usage of Copilot and other AI tools with the decline in QA testing in Retail WoW, let alone Windows 11.

**OF COURSE the streamer just has to be a girl. Why can't these GMs try to impress male streamers to eliminate the obvious sexism-loaded commentary?

How About Some Deep Cuts?

I've occasionally mentioned the local music scene here in Cincinnati, even though I didn't spend my college years here in town. Still, they did have an impact on me, demonstrating that once in a while a bunch of local folks can hit it big. 

Or at least big in my own mind.

The Raisins not withstanding, there have been some big acts that originated here in Cincinnati and the local region. Bands and acts such as The Isley Brothers, Bootsy Collins, Pure Prairie League, Blessid Union of Souls, 90 Degrees, The Afghan Whigs, Walk The Moon, The National, Adrian Belew (King Crimson) and even older icons such as Doris Day and Rosemary Clooney have called Cincinnati Home.

My mom still has the '45 for this.

But for every band that has made it, there are the corpses of thousands that never even got a shot. Still, there's a lot of bands that did generate a local following, and a few of them found themselves with local airplay. 

Or, say, an actual album or eleven.

This was about 6 of them. From Reddit, and
the redditor who found these is incredibly lucky.

Back before WEBN became their current soulless corporate self today, they put together a series of album projects, all featuring local acts, that were local cult classics. Even though you'd expect them to at least be album oriented rock, since that's the format WEBN played under, the albums were a very eclectic mix. Folk, Pop, Funk, and even the occasional Classical piece were mixed in with the Rock music. But there were also some real Comedy/Novelty gems in there too, which is what I remember the most about them.

A lot of those novelty songs got airplay on WEBN, because they wanted to sell the albums, but they have since entered the local lexicon as touchstones for my generation.

Such as Dan Barr's Bus Full of Nuns from the 8th Album Project:

What made the video more hilarious to locals was that it also featured longtime Channel 9 news anchor Al Schottelkotte and 70s/early 80s Channel 5 news anchor Tom Atkins. Al, in particular, was very straight-laced, and seeing him lip-synching to the song was had us laughing our heads off as kids.

There's also the Doctor Demento favorite by George Uetz, a professor at the University of Cincinnati:

Obviously given its refrain, my high school classmates and I would occasionally sing this song at football games and other events. From the 3rd Album Project (1978), it still received occasional airplay up until the early 90s.

Speaking of sex, there's also this quirky song by The Modulators from the 9th Album Project (1986):

Yes, the song predates the WEBN album project by a few years, but as you can imagine the lyrics got sung a LOT by my classmates.

Of the three listed above, I think The Modulators are still active locally, while George Uetz is now a Professor Emeritus at UC and The Dan Barr Band at least had a video uploaded to YouTube in 2011.

I'd completely forgotten about the song "Just Chili" (which Dan Barr created as "Dave and the One Ways" for Album Project 9), but yeah, that song got a lot of airplay too.

None of these bands ever struck it big, but they remain a part of the local landscape for people who grew up in the 70s and 80s. 

EtA: Corrected a formatting issue.

What If Everybody Else Was a Bot?

I spent another hour last night fishing in Elwynn Forest. Not a lot going on last night, for the most part...

Except for that guy who literally flopped in the
water there, stayed for about a minute, and then
flew up and away.

And that one Hordie trying to pretend he's not
really there.

Oh, and there were people griping about duels and doing the same old "anything you can do I can do better" refrain, although here it's female toons beating up on male toons.

I was only partially fishing, as I was watching a few videos with interest, such as Pointy Hat's discussion of the D&D setting Ravenloft, its history, and the new D&D splatbook Ravenloft: The Horrors Within.*

Antonio Demico does a great job with his videos, and even this old D&D player learned a thing or two about the most well known Horror implementation in D&D.

But really what captured my attention was this video by Angelikatosh:

I have advocated for more NPCs in-game in the dead areas of Azeroth, but the concept of a WoW private server populated by ONE real person and over a thousand bots generated using Deepseek is taking things to a completely other level. 

And while I share Angelika's concerns about how this will impact our ability as humans to interact with each other, I do wonder whether we're already at that point. I mean, we're seeing the loss of attention spans and issues interacting with people of the opposite sex already**, so this is just a natural extension of those initial problems. 

It does remind me of my parents demanding that I turn off the television and go outside to, you know, go play. Sure, it could also mean interact with people, but I also spent significant amounts of time roaming the woods near our house by myself, riding my bike to play video games down at the local Kmart, or going to the library or the bookstore down the street. All of these activities were solo, but a few of them were at least out in the world where while I wasn't interacting with them directly, other people were present in the background. 

So, I'm not sure what to make of these private servers that people have cooked up. On the one hand, it could be fun having a thriving game world with more realistic NPCs, but on the other it could also be a prelude to a real life Westworld.

Oh, and for the record, I think I've found my new favorite spot to fish in Retail's Old World:

*I kept wanting to correct him that it's THE WAR WITHIN, but that's a "me" problem.

**Although to be fair, part of that stunted development could be laid at the feet of the pandemic.

How to Find Yourself in a Video

Well, I guess Nixxiom has been paying attention to my WoW playing habits.

Hoo boy.

I think I'm an amalgam of a few of the types listed, but I am not the "Blizzard Hater". If anything, I'm more of a Bobby Kotick hater than a Blizzard hater. 

Still, that did get me to thinking. How much is my current playstyle influenced by my health concerns, and how much was a reaction to my MMO experiences over the past 16+ years? I think that it's a mix of both, but as time has gone on and my health scare recedes into the past, that has less of an impact than the weight of experience. I don't think I'll go completely solo in MMOs anymore, because I apparently like casual conversation too much*, but I can see myself trending more and more in that direction. I did find my solo experiences throughout many MMOs immensely satisfying, and there's no shaking that. Casual conversation aside, dealing with the unknowns of grouping up has shown to be more problematic than I care to admit. I still try to do group content, but I know there will eventually come a day when I'll simply give up and go solo on everything. 

But I'm not there yet. 

*Which is really weird given that I'm an introvert, but that's what it is.