The Lessons You Learn Along The Way

It's funny just how much our perceptions and playstyles are influenced by those first early hours playing a game.

For example, when I first started playing a Cleric on my recently concluded 20+ year D&D campaign, we faced an enemy that decidedly had the upper hand on us. Our Fighters and Rogue had whiffed repeatedly, and the enemy we were engaged with was getting ready for a killing blow against one of us. My Cleric was all out of spells, and the only thing he could do was make an attack with his spear (he was a Cleric of Zeus, hence the spear as the chosen weapon). My Cleric charged in, hoping just to get a hit in and distract the enemy, but I rolled a natural 20. Then I hit on the critical roll, and, well, the enemy dropped.

Out of that little fiasco, my Cleric learned that charging into battle with spear out was a good thing, so he began to use that early and often. Not exactly the smartest thing for your Cleric to do, but hey, it worked that first time and he just kind of ran with it.

This happened four years before
Leeroy Jenkins! From ifunny.co.

Fast forward to my first year of playing World of Warcraft, and I was in Souldat's small friends and family guild that was a holdover from Burning Crusade. Sometime when my Paladin was in his mid....20s (maybe?)... we had someone new join the guild. Seems the guy was originally Alliance and decided to switch to Horde, so Soul offered him a spot. No big deal, I thought.

A day or two later, Soul and I were on and the guy logged in. After a minute or two of pleasantries, the guy asked if we had any spare bags he could have. Quintalan wasn't a Tailor*, and I said as much, and Soul didn't have any spare bags either.

"Oh," the guy said, and faded into the background.

Soul whispered me a short time later saying he couldn't believe that this guy would want to mooch off of us like that. "We're Horde," he said, "not doing it yourself is an Alliance thing to do."

"I didn't know that," I replied.

"Yeah. Back when WoW started, most people played Alliance, and those of us who played Horde had to stick together because if we didn't we were going to get overwhelmed. It made us strong and self-reliant."

I had no reason to doubt the truth of it, so quietly I acknowledged his side of things.

While I still have no idea whether Soul's comment about how outnumbered the Horde were back in the day really was true or not, what I do know is that little exchange did impact the way I played MMOs for a long time. Namely it was to never depend on other people for help in game, and to do things yourself instead of asking for help.

Who knew Blanche Dubois was Alliance?
From UtterDigital.com and QuoteMaster.

The strange thing is that I've no qualms at all as far as giving assistance to someone in need --I mean, I've been known to assist members of the opposing faction if it looks like they're going to lose to a mob-- so the fact that I'm happy to give help but not receive it is kind of... odd. So if my questing buddy ever has wondered about the origin story of my reluctance to ask for help, now you know. 

***

Of course, I now play on the Alliance side, and outside of some quests from the Forsaken there's not much difference playing either faction in the various forms of Classic WoW.** But you know, that didn't matter. My mind was already biased.

In the almost 14 years since I've started playing MMOs, I've found those few offhand comments have had a huge impact on how I approach this genre. I still prefer to do as many things on my own as possible, and I've even taken that to an extreme by not using any assists from Wowhead or other third party player aids for quests. Well, within reason; I do set a mental timer for trying to figure out a quest, and if I exceed that timer I pull out Wowhead and bitch a little bit while I research. 

But that's me, and I think it's important to note that these internal biases are simply that --a bias toward a certain viewpoint-- that might not be, well, correct. I'm not talking about "politically correct", but rather "actually correct". Since I don't know what the status of Horde vs Alliance population was back in the day, I can't really say whether Horde was significantly outnumbered to any degree. I also can't make the assumption that the "do it all yourself" mentality would arise from being outnumbered; on the face of it, you'd expect any group that was outnumbered to share resources and information more than normal, because communication would be key (especially on a PvP server, like Stormscale-US is).

I have this gut feeling that the underlying event that influenced my playing behavior wasn't a real one. Oh, I'm sure that Soul probably believed what he was telling me, but I've a suspicion that he played that way and used circumstances as justification for that playstyle when it's entirely possible that the playstyle actually encouraged the opposite behavior among the Horde in those early days. 

Still, without any real data, it's all conjecture.  

Not this Data, but the data. /sigh
From memegenerator.net.

***

So what does this all mean?

Well, that our internal biases can be based on unreliable information, for starters.

That's a polite way of saying "what we believe in is frequently based on bullshit." Doesn't matter where the bullshit originated or who said/repeated it, bullshit is still bullshit.

Another point to consider is that everybody is susceptible to this problem. Again, it doesn't matter who you are, you can spew bad information quite easily if you believe in it.

The question then becomes how do you fix the problem with biases?

That, I don't know. I wish I did, but I've discovered that people don't like it when you point out the flaw in their own beliefs. Nobody likes to be told they are an idiot; no matter how nicely you polish it, it's still a turd that people will refuse to accept. And if you bring in religion or politics or race into the mix, you might as well drop some TNT onto the mess.

Maybe some compassion all around would be helpful, but there are always assholes who look to exploit any compassion for personal benefit. (Again, look at religion, politics, and race for numerous examples.) But maybe, just maybe, getting people to figure out the mistakes on their own would be most helpful, because the realization comes from within rather than being told what to do by someone else, which can make people resentful.

Why do I say that might work? Because it does for me. 

I haven't changed my self-reliant playstyle (much), but I am more open to reaching out for and accepting help than I have in a long time. I'm sure that my questing buddy is having a good laugh about this right now, because it sure doesn't seem like I've changed very much, but when I figured out what I know now the ego that fueled my playstyle kind of deflated and went, "Oh...." Which isn't a bad thing, because egos do deserve to be deflated from time to time.

So... baby steps, I guess.

*He was a Miner and Jewelcrafter, for the record. Originally Inscription, but Jewelcrafting was much more lucrative.

**Cataclysm, naturally, changed all that. Those changes to the story in the Old World are big part of the reason why I don't play Retail, but you knew all of that.

Meme Monday: Rogue Memes

Despite my love of Mages and Clerics, I do like playing Rogues.

My last Retail WoW main was a Rogue, Azshandra, who made a reappearance as both my first WoW Classic toon and my first new WoW Classic Era toon. I've also played Rogues --or their equivalent-- in Rift, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Guild Wars 2, and Elder Scrolls Online.

I may take playing Rogues seriously, but not so seriously that I can't laugh at them. Or their memes.

Okay, this is the Dad Joke of memes, right here.
It's from several places on the net.

I do love the scouting capabilities
of Rogues, but I truly do appreciate
their innate ability to resist backstabbing
their teammates.
From Pinterest.

Rogues in WoW and other games
do have that ability to sap someone,
which can drive enemy players absolutely
bonkers. I know, because it used to do that
to me! From memesboy.com.

But far and away the calling card
of a Rogue is being able to move in
the shadows and stab people
to death when they least expect it.
From fakeposters.com

And one bonus meme:

Oh yes, this. Except when you leveled straight
back in Mists and went from Cata at L85 to
the first Mists of Pandaria zone in quest greens.
Oh boy, was that one ugly. From the
Otherworldly Incantations FB group.

The Wheel of Time Moves On...

...and ages pass.

When Souldat and I began this blog in 2009, the mini-Reds were 6, 8, and 11. 

They are now 19, 22, and 24.

This past weekend my son graduated from college, and armed with his Bachelor's degree in History, will be attending graduate school in the fall to work on his Master's degree.

In his time away at college, 
he got into paining minis.
(From John Kovalic's Dork Tower.)

And he plays FFXIV. When he asked if I was going to attend Gen Con this year, he mentioned that at least one of his guildies was planning on attending. (Heh.)

He put a version of this, from
Final Fantasy XIV, on his cap.

Congrats, kid. Onward and upward.

What the F is Filk?

If you're not familiar with the term "filk", it's a specific subgenre of music that references SF&F media, placing the SF&F topic into a musical framework. We're not talking about a soundtrack, or even something like Toss a Coin to Your Witcher...

...but typically a replacement of lyrics of an already existing piece of music.* Like oh, say, replacing the lyrics in the Beatles' song Penny Lane with an ode to Middle-earth:

From my copy of The Tolkien Scrapbook,
Page 144. Apparently a lot of people
on Goodreads don't understand that
The Tolkien Scrapbook's origins
are long before Tolkien himself was
ever taken seriously by academia,
much less the Peter Jackson films.

Filk appeared with the rise of the SF&F convention scene, and I suppose you could argue that the bastardization of the words "folk music" is where "filk" got it's name. My guess is that we're talking about, oh, the 1960s or so given the rise of folk music in the popular consciousness at the time. 

Despite it's age, some people have issues wrapping their heads around filk; even if they are inclined to accept cosplay there tend to be raised eyebrows at filk songs and performers. My suspicion is that because cosplay is primarily a visual medium --and let's be honest, there are a lot of attractive cosplayers out there-- it's easier to accept cosplay than filk. 

You get the idea.
From BlizzardTerrak
via Pinterest.

Now, if you like your football/soccer, you're probably familiar with the replacement --or insertion-- of lyrics specific to your team, such as that found with such creative editing of Classical Music or Hymns, so the basic concept isn't completely unfamiliar to people. This isn't the adoption of an existing song as your club's theme song, such as Cincinnati Bengals' Welcome to the Jungle, Liverpool FC's You'll Never Walk Alone, or Crystal Palace's Glad all Over by The Dave Clark Five,

but something like a full version of this sort of thing, taking the melody from Land of Hope and Glory to tell Nottingham Forest (among others) to go piss off:

***

You're probably wondering where the hell this post came from, and I'll be honest this wasn't what I had in mind when I sat down to write on Tuesday. (That post will come later.) In this case, I pulled up YouTube to listen to something --I was originally thinking of something mellow to get through my morning workload, such as French Impressionistic pieces, but instead this old chestnut appeared on my feed:

And so I went down that rabbit hole for the next half hour, listening to piece after piece, because when you start YouTube just starts throwing everything vaguely similar at you.

A lot of those pieces are listed as "WoW Parody" or "[insert franchise here] Parody", which I guess filk could fall under,

but I also would argue that the term parody makes light of what is clearly a labor of love. It's fine for the music to be self-aware and not take itself seriously, but I typically think of a parody as something that can be easily dismissed when people want to discuss "real music". Sometimes, however, the "real music" gets overshadowed by the parody to the point where the parody is more well known than the original piece it was based on, such as Weird Al's I Lost on Jeopardy eclipsing The Greg Kihn Band's (Our Love's in) Jeopardy. 

This isn't a plea for filk to be taken seriously --after all, it already has its own website at Bowling Green State University in northwest Ohio-- but more a celebration of the form. Or raising some visibility to it.

Locally we have a true community radio station, WAIF-FM 88.3 MHz. There are only a handful of community radio stations in the US these days where you can donate money, become a member, and actually get air time for your show/program. These are distinctly different than public radio stations, which are far more organized and tend to be affiliated with colleges/universities or other non-profit organizations. Community radio stations are just that; they take their mission very seriously, even if the programs themselves can skew very oddball at times. (I personally recommend listening to the Rockin' and Surfin' Show on Saturday nights; if you like your surf music, you'll love that show.)

From WAIF-FM.

And when I said anybody could put on a program, I meant anybody. Back when I first started working in IT in the mid-late 90s, I knew a guy from work who had a radio show on WAIF that was strictly filk music. You might think that a once a week hour long show might run out of filk music to play after a short time, but he was able to come up with new filk pieces on a regular basis. I've no idea when he stopped producing the show as it's no longer on their lineup, but it's still a nice reminder that there have been people out there, raising filk music's visibility.

So have a couple of pieces of filk music for your day...

It wouldn't be Christmas without

HP Lovecraft, I suppose...

For those Honor Harrington fans...

And it wouldn't be a filk session

without a Star Trek song, by way

of Kermit the Frog...

*That's not to say that some people don't expand the definition of "filk" to cover new pieces of music based on SF&F topics. Or RPG topics. Or video game topics. I mean, there is the band Harry and the Potters, after all.

Meme Monday: Video Game RPG Memes

If you're like me you have played your share of RPG video games. I'm old enough that I played Colossal Cave Adventure back in 1981 on a remote teletype machine at a neighbor's house, Tunnels of Doom on the TI-99 4/A Home Computer, and even programmed in video game adventures for said TI Home Computer in BASIC and Extended BASIC to play.* 

Ah, Tunnels of Doom. My old friend.
Now the question is whether I have a
working cassette tape player to save
my progress. From Necropraxis.

So there are memes out there. 

Lots and lots of memes. 

Here are just a few of them.

I am most definitely NOT a
speedrunner. I realize some people
derive enjoyment from blasting
through a game, but that is most
definitely NOT me. From imgflip.

And this is why I don't have my
"Show Helm" option selected if
at all possible. Well, also because
a lot of helm artwork is pretty crappy.
From Cheezburger.

This is one of the reasons why I'm
not a fan of this staple of the RPG
genre (and MMOs in particular).
From Reddit.

And speaking of staples, why is it that
the best item(s) in a video game tend
to drop at the end? You'd think that you'd
want to find the best weapon in the game to
then go and defeat the Big Bad.
From imgur.

*Thus starting my interest and eventual career in IT.

Musings on God Mode and Other Pay-to-Win Items

(Congrats to Mage for winning the 149th Kentucky Derby. Sometimes you can't make these names up, and as I teased my questing buddy, "Alas there isn't a horse named Druid." "I would totally name a horse Warlock though," was her reply.)

Although I'm sure that some of my fellow bloggers --you know who you are-- would disagree, the original Nintendo Entertainment System came too late to draw my (or my friends') interest. It released in the US the Winter of my junior year of high school, and I was far more interested in what video games were at the local arcade girls, music, and cars than a new game console imported from Japan.* Still, my brother --who is 2.5 years younger than me-- was more in the NES' orbit. He managed to scrounge enough money together while he was in college to purchase one (~1990), and amassed quite a few games. Alas, my brother had issues finishing some of the games he had, so he eventually bit the bullet and bought a Game Genie to assist him in finishing those games.

You know, this.
From Wikipedia.

He once described what to me was a hilarious encounter with Nintendo customer support about a game he was playing (using said Game Genie) and was experiencing a technical issue in the game. "We don't support those devices," he was rather frostily told and then the customer support person hung up.

"What the hell did you expect?" I told him.

"I thought it was worth a try."

"Come on, it's a device designed to cheat at the games by providing you with god mode; why would they want to support anything like that?"

"I SAID it was worth a try."

I dropped my next bit of needling, because I could see I was getting under his skin. I was the more physically active of the two of us, and while my dad rode me hard on improving at the sports I played, he rode my brother even more for most definitely NOT being any good at sports.** So I'm sure that insecurity fed into the purchase of a Game Genie, and the more athletically inclined older brother teasing him about it didn't help.

***

I've been thinking about the humble Game Genie lately because of all of the so-called Pay to Win systems inherent in a lot of video games these days. I'm not talking about difficulty settings, because those were designed with varying skill and coordination abilities in mind, but paid systems that give a player a boost over their competitors (in a multiplayer game) or the environment  (in a single player game). The Game Genie proved that people were willing to pay for an "unfair" advantage over many NES games in the same fashion as that cheat code you could input into Sim City 2000 to get a ton of free money.***

Or, even older than that, people who used juiced dice or marked decks of cards to cheat at so-called games of chance. The difference here is that you're paying someone --whether a third party or the game company itself-- to provide the advantage.

Yes, this is a video designed with magic and

in mind, but cards such as this have been

used in the past by swindlers working

a crowd of people for easy money.

No, this sort of behavior didn't magically appear with mobile games or MMOs, and I think it's good to remember that apparently it is part of human nature to attempt to find advantages like that. And if it's not a part of human nature, then why is it so prevalent? Because it's learned behavior and somehow okay to seek every advantage possible, whether or not it is considered an unfair advantage?

And really, if it's considered okay to seek every advantage, is there really such a thing as an unfair advantage in any competition at all?

From imgflip.

I do have my own spirit of what I consider to be fair play,**** so I'm not speaking for myself, but I am playing devil's advocate here. Is it really an unfair advantage if the game company itself sells the advantage? That lack of morality and/or ethics surrounding cash shop items that impact a video game --whether mobile, single player, or multiplayer/MMO-- is what gives me a sick feeling in my stomach. If you are poor and you can't afford to pay for the extra items in a cash shop but your richer opponent can, how is that not a form of class privilege? When your inability to pay extra leaves you at a disadvantage against wealthier opponents, that certainly does imply that your social class affects your ability to win. The game company obviously has no ethical issues selling the products, given that they run the cash shop, and given the way companies are currently run it certainly seems like anything is ethical if it makes the investors happy. 

Still, in the end it falls on the players as the ultimate arbiter as to whether something is ethical or not. Whales notwithstanding, if nobody plays your game and nobody buys anything, a game company can't remain afloat for long. 

*To be perfectly honest, I struck out on the girls part. And my car, well... A 1976 Plymouth Volaré is not the definition of a cool car. More like the opposite, in fact.

The 1976 version of the Plymouth
Volaré and Dodge Aspen twins.
The Volaré is on top, and ours was
silver that was so faded that it was
repainted. And that repaint was faded!
From this article by Curbside Classics.

**Yes, Shintar, you can insert the "Gee Red, your parents were kind of shitty" comment right here. I totally and completely agree with you on this. That being said, my brother was on the chess team at his high school and holy crap could he wipe the floor with me. I spent hours unsuccessfully trying to beat him (and my dad), and I was understandably jealous of that sheer skill that seemed to have skipped me entirely.

***Hold down the SHIFT key and type "FUND", and you'll get something like $100,000. Maybe more, as I can't recall the exact amount. Or, if you wanted to be naughty, holding down the SHIFT key and typing "PORN" will cause the game to play a voice saying "Makin' looove!!" My wife was not pleased when I discovered THAT little easter egg, although she has since mellowed out on that point.

****And yes, I realize I'm a bit more hardcore about what I consider to be fair play than most. I mean, I'm the guy who said I would have passed on receiving a legendary item when I was a raid lead because I felt the optics behind a raid lead getting a legendary item were quite poor. You already know about why I volunteered to switch to a Shaman in TBC Classic so I don't need to rehash that, but you probably don't know about the amount of pushback that I got from people (especially those in positions of authority) who told me point blank that they had no qualms about making other people in the raid level toons instead of them. The attitude I got was more akin to something you'd hear Leona "Taxes are for the little people" Helmsley say than anything else.

Meme Monday: Evony Memes

I was perusing memes that I'd saved for the ::Wink Wink:: Meme Monday, and I stumbled across a meme about Evony. 

You remember Evony, don't you? The "Play Me, My Lord" graphic that basically showed a pair of breasts? FOR A CITY BUILDING AND BATTLE GAME??!!

This is one of the milder ads.
From arhg.net.

Well, although there's actually a website detailing the evolution of the Evony ads, there's also quite a few Evony memes floating around. Even today.

From knowyourmeme.com.

What you'd have expected if the ads were real!
From knowyourmeme.com (Again!).

Thank you, Kojiro, for this parody.
From Kojiro from DeviantArt.

And Nerfnow.com provides a funny
Reverse Evony...

Forward to the Past

Last week things kind of came to a head.

My questing buddy suggested that we run a few Heroic Wrath Classic dungeons on her Warlock, and I agreed. I had hardly played a Mage in a couple of months*, so I grouped up with Linnawyn instead.

Then the fun began.

My questing buddy began fielding queries, complete with GearScore, and ALL of them asking "H+?"

"No, just Heroic."

"Oh."

This went on for quite a few minutes, and finally my questing buddy got disgusted and grumbled "At times like this I really hate this game."

I figured the grouping was going to be a lost cause, because H+ was all anybody ever seemed to care about --and don't give me any bullshit about how "there's plenty of people who will want to run normal heroics" because my experience has been exactly what we found that night**-- so I made a radical suggestion.

"How about we roll up some characters on WoW Classic instead?"

"You mean Classic Era?"

"Yes."

There wasn't even a moment's hesitation. "Sure!"

She delisted us and we immediately began discussing what server to try. I was the only one of the two of us to have copied our toons from original Classic, and I knew that the cluster of servers those toons were on were fairly dead, so I was open to trying other locales. That night we initially tried Bloodsail Buccaneers-US, which had a listing of "Full", but we quickly discovered that the RP server is the current home of the Hardcore Challenge for the Alliance side. When you have a line of 6+ people deep to kill the boss in Northshire Abbey starting zone at lunchtime, you've got a population problem. 

So the next evening we abandoned Bloodsail Buccaneers and tried the server cluster that Pagle-US is part of. 

We quickly discovered that this server cluster was more to our liking. The crowds weren't overwhelming, people weren't stealing each other's mobs, and we relaxed.

"We're off on the road to Darnassus..."
(Please tell me someone recognizes that line.)

The Gen Chat was relaxed in both the Night Elf starting area as well as the Human starting area, and it also had a dearth of people selling boosts and other assorted meta behaviors.

The second night on the Pagle cluster, we got into a group to run the Ban'ethil Barrow Den in Teldrassil, which is notorious for being hard to handle due to the respawn rates of the mobs inside the packed area. 

This is like the beginning of a joke:
"Three Hunters and a Rogue walk into a bar..."

Much hilarity and fun was had.

The next day, my questing buddy had a proposition for me: would I like to run to Mulgore with her? She wanted to get a chance for her Hunter to tame a lion there named The Rake, and she figured I'd like to tag along. I quickly calculated the path we were likely to take, as low level toons (around L10 or so), and replied, "We're going to die a lot."

"It'll be fun!"

"Then count me in!" I never let a little thing like death get in the way of seeing the wide world of Azeroth.

So we took the ship from Teldrassil to Darkshore, 

You know, I think we can do that.
Blizz got rid of that quirk in Wrath Classic.

ran the length of Darkshore to Ashenvale,

took the Talondeep Path through to the Stonetalon Mountains,

We died almost immediately after
this screenshot.

died a bit on the way, but we finally escaped Stonetalon and into the Barrens.

Who knew the landscape could be this beautiful?
All that's missing is a voiceover saying
"Welcome to Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom!"

"I hate what they did to the Barrens in Cataclysm," my questing buddy said.

We eventually did make it to Mulgore after dying a lot more, but alas I missed taking screenshots as proof. Still, it was an adventure made more real because we had to put in real effort to make it there. I mean, if this were Wrath Classic we'd likely have waited until we got to L20 and got riding, which would have made this jaunt a lot easier. Indeed, in Wrath Classic everything at the lower levels comes easier, but we'd have not likely gotten the satisfaction of making it through to Mulgore if it would have been so easy.

I will say that Shintar is correct in her assertion that the leveling cadence in Classic Era just feels right; you're not leveling so fast that you're choked by the lack of coin on you (Season of Mastery), or that you're plowing through content so quickly courtesy of heirloom gear and whatnot that you lose sight of all of the world around you (Wrath Classic). You're also not getting major rewards so early --such as riding-- that you forget how important of a step it is. 

"OMGosh! Bloodvine is important again!" my questing buddy gushed.

"And I can make my own poisons once more," I added, which earned a laugh. "Hey now, I missed that connection to being a Rogue. It's part of why I chose Alchemy on Az!"

"When was the last time we saw both Onyxia and Nefarian heads hanging in Stormwind?" My questing buddy mused.

And then I went and just had to do this:

"Lady Prestor is back!"

"What did you do??"

"I, uh, hugged Lady Prestor."

(Do you know how long it took for me
to wait for the throne room to clear
out for this screenshot? Better you not know...)

"Oh, the Windsor questline is back too!!"

"And no more Varian!"

***

The past few days, even the Pagle cluster has been so busy in these lower level zones that we've resorted to heading off and doing other things while we waited for people to split so we could quest a bit longer. Travelling to Darkshire for the flight point there or cutting across a zone that have enemies that will still aggro on you to gather mining nodes ("I'm NOT addicted!" my questing buddy insisted) are just a few of the things we got into trouble with in Classic Era.

It's a very weird feeling, seeing these zones so active when they were so totally dead from, say, mid-2020 onward, but this is a level of activity that is entirely organic. Blizzard did not directly create this demand by doing anything, this has been players coming back to Era on their own. I suppose you could argue that Blizzard did this by providing the greater Classic community what they wanted in Wrath Classic, but I'm not quite sure. After all, people did leave WoW entirely for other MMOs (such as Final Fantasy XIV) during Shadowlands' run in Retail, and the WoW Classic community has been embracing the meta for so long that people have simply just stopped playing. I know of a dozen people who stopped because they didn't like what TBC and Wrath Classic became; they never even bothered with Classic Era. But here we are, and Era is experiencing this renaissance in activity.

Will it last? I don't know. I don't even know if my questing buddy and I will continue to play Era in the long run, but there is hope that we will. We've already begun talking about potentially joining a guild that is going to experience leveling and raiding content as if we were all new to the game, and there is no shortage of guilds that are advertising exactly that. We can afford to be choosy, because we've been there before, and we know what we're getting into.

*I'd prepped Neve for a transfer off of Myzrael-US to Old Blanchy-US, and I wasn't inclined to do anything with her in the interim. Cardwyn... Well, Cardwyn I've hardly touched at all since the raid team broke up except to tailor a few bags here and there. And those few times I did get on I got whispered by some people in the now defunct raid team, asking how I've been and what raids I've been on. I'm polite enough, but I'm really not interested in hearing about all the raiding they've been on and all the loot they've gotten. In that respect I'm like our Bear tank on the raid team, who left WoW entirely when the raid fell apart. He'd committed a lot of effort to making that raid work, and then.... pffft.

**And if you listen to Trade/LFG chat or the Blizzard forums you'll hear people say "Oh, there's plenty of people who will run normal Heroics," but if that's the case, where the hell are they? I simply am not buying what people are selling, because as Folding Ideas put it, "We brought the bug back with us."

What on Earth is Red Reading This Time: Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

There are times when your past catches up to you in unexpected ways. 

A few years ago* my wife and I were perusing our local bookstore when I came across a title that stopped me dead in my tracks. I pulled out the book from the shelf and stared at the cover for a hot minute. 

"It couldn't be."

I flipped the pages until I found the "About the Author", read it, and sucked in my breath.

"Wow. It IS him."

My wife saw the look on my face and came over. "What is it?"

I held up the book and pointed at the author.

"Holy shit."

"Yeah."

It was her ex-boyfriend. The boyfriend immediately before me.

"Do you want to buy it?" I asked with a mischievous grin.

The look she gave me could have curdled milk.

I was reminded of that story when I read Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, by K.J. Parker. It's not because I knew the author or anything, but I certainly did know the protagonist. Or rather, I knew of him.

It was sunny outside, but clouds
and gloom rolled in this afternoon.
Hence the off color to the photo.

The protagonist of the story, Orhan, is an outsider who had risen through the ranks of the army to reach the title of Colonel of Engineers of an Empire which was heavily based on the Roman and/or Byzantium Empire. Orhan was a member of a tribe that have been uncharitably called "milkfaces", which pretty much loosely identifies him with the Germanic tribes. And he kind of gets roped into leading the defense of, well, Constantinople. I say Constantinople rather than an equivalent to Rome because the two main factions within the city are Blues and Greens, which do have a historical precedent in the Byzantine Empire itself. (Seriously. And no, I'm not channeling old episodes of The Tomorrow People.) 

Orhan himself, however... Well, I have met people exactly like him in the past. In college.

It's not that he's snarky or has an issue with authority, because a lot of people I knew in college were both. In fact, that was part of the appeal from the back blurb, that Orhan has those traits. But Orhan also has one thing in spades, that when combined with the others, just really give me flashbacks to a couple of people I knew in college: arrogance.

***

I suppose you could argue that a person has to be confident in their abilities if they rise to being a Colonel of Engineers, particularly if they are an outsider. But I will counter that there's a big difference between confidence and arrogance, and Orhan may profess the former but adheres to the latter. 

The novel reads like a "how I did it" story, in which Orhan either did something himself, directed people in how to do something, or he happened to know the exact perfect person to do something he wanted done. 

A screencap from Young Frankenstein;
no idea who did the initial screencap.

The first couple of times I kind of ran with it, but as the coincidences kept piling up I began to question the story itself. I mean, I know that it's possible that in a large city the right people might be out there, but that Orhan happened to know exactly the right person for each conundrum became less and less likely as the novel progressed. Likewise, that Orhan happened to have exactly the correct amount of foresight and the corresponding strategy ready to defeat what was thrown against him became more and more eyebrow raising the deeper into the novel I went. 

It was then when I began to wonder whether I was missing the point of the novel, and if this was actually a commentary on Fantasy novels that seem to have the protagonist pull everything out of a hat by the end. Well, that's all fine, but those sort of Fantasy novels aren't in that much demand these days compared to the grimdark aspect of Fantasy, so I kind of set that analysis aside. Then I began to wonder if the author was using Fantasy as a commentary about real history, given the obvious parallels with the Roman/Byzantine Empire and the Germanic invasions that brought about its fall. I couldn't quite disprove this angle, as I couldn't disprove the concept of the novel being satire --ala Gulliver's Travels-- but for some reason I didn't really get satire vibes that much. 

One thing is certain: the novel is certainly well written, and the author did keep the pages turning. The story itself is quite good, and outside of some issues with the plot --such as how Orhan kind of falls into "relationships" with women, which kind of oozes "privileged" and Marty Stu-- and the characterizations of the various races Robur (Romans/Byzantines) are darker skinned, and the oppressed barbarians are all light skinned (aka "milkfaces"), I wanted to see how the story ended. So kudos to K.J. Parker for that.

But K.J. Parker is not K.J. Parker.

K.J. Parker is a pseudonym for novelist Tom Holt. 

"Well," I mused, "that explains a lot."

A listing of Tom's quotes from Goodreads establishes the humor behind his pen, and through those I could see exactly where Orhan got his voice. 

Orhan has the voice of someone who is so confident in their intelligence and wit that they can't help but share it with you all the freaking time. It's fine to have that wit and to make occasional commentary with it, but when you spend all of your time trying to prove how witty you are, you tend to turn people off. And with those people I knew in college, they are interesting to talk to in small bites, but if you lived with them or were in a class with them, all we got was a steady stream of said witticisms.** After a while you just want them to give it a rest, already. I mean, I'm not a killjoy, and I do have my own snark (I mean, have you read this blog?), but there comes a point where the overall effect of the steady stream of witticisms is diminished by their sheer volume. 

Then again, this might be a question of pacing for Fantasy versus some other genres. I didn't have much of a problem with Robert Lynn Asprin's Myth Adventure series, but after about Book 5 or so the humor started to wear a bit thin.***

So if you don't mind the steady stream of snark and witticisms, and that Orhan's inner voice has an answer for just about everything, this book might be for you. For me, it was uncomfortably close to a few people I knew in college so I couldn't disassociate the novel from my experiences with them, which were not uniformly happy ones.

***

But oh, there is one thing of note: this is a Fantasy novel without, well, Fantasy.

It's a work of fiction to be certain, and the countries and personnel are completely made up, but there is absolutely no magic or fantastical dealings of any kind. This leads me to one big question: why is this book a Fantasy if the only thing "fantastical" about it is that the countries and people are made up? People don't stick the aforementioned Gulliver's Travels in Fantasy, and neither do they put 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, or The DaVinci Code in Fantasy either. But for some reason, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is shoehorned into the Fantasy genre.

So... What makes a Fantasy novel a Fantasy?

Now THAT is a question that begs a good discussion. Preferably over a drink (your choice) with some food. At a bar or a coffee shop (again, your choice).

I'm open to suggestions, given that someone had to have had an idea that this story belonged in the Fantasy genre, so let's hear them. Obviously a fictional city or society wouldn't count, or a lot of "General Fiction" suddenly lumped into Fantasy, and the tension in the novel doesn't mean that it suddenly has turned into a Thriller, so why Fantasy? Anybody got any ideas?

Regardless, I think I'm going to take a pass on the other two novels in the "series". I put the "series" in quotes because I've discovered that each successive novel isn't built upon the others in the same way that you'd expect a series to be, and from what I've read the tone of each novel is pretty much the same as the others: if you've read the first one you know what to expect with the next two. In that respect, they're a lot like a David Eddings series: if you read The Belgariad, you already know the plot (and to a lesser extent the characters) of The Malloreon, or The Elenium, etc. That doesn't make the story bad by any stretch, it's just that you pretty much know what you're getting. And for the personal flashbacks that this story gave me, I think I'll pass this time around. Maybe with some time and distance I'll come back to the second novel in the series, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It.

*Pre-pandemic.

**I had an English seminar with a professor who basically lived by spouting off all sorts of quotes and observations from a variety of upper class and/or noble people to the point where I often wondered if he were a Royalist at heart. I remember once making a comment about Tolkien in his class, and I discovered very quickly that said professor did NOT like J.R.R. Tolkien or his works. I believe the words "juvenile trash" were thrown around more than once in his acerbic reply to my brief comment. And this was coming from a guy who --while he adored the modern novel (Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway and others of that ilk)-- binged on Romance novels whenever he could. "The trashier the better," he frequently said.

***Ye gods, that series went on for how long? Yikes.

Meme Monday: Spring Memes

Spring has sprung! Well, on the northern hemisphere at any rate it has, the frost warnings and surprise snowfalls notwithstanding.

So in honor of Spring, here's some Spring-y memes....

Oh yes, I can agree with this.
From someecards.

I have had teachers do this to me when
I was a kid. This hurts, like pouring salt
in a wound. From Reddit.

That's just like today!
From kristrimmer.com.

And for those who have a bone to pick with the ol' Groundhog who predicted an early Spring...

From all over the net. Really.

Upon Further Review

I suppose I ought to explain a few things concerning my sudden interest in posting about books, and no, it has nothing directly to do with my own attempts at fiction.* 

Several months ago, a long-time blogger friend of mine put out a request for beta readers of a novel she was completing. Given that I’d long been an admirer of her artistic endeavors, I raised my hand and volunteered. “Why not,” I figured, since I was very curious about how her writing had been progressing.

A month or two later a PDF file was sent to me, and that meant I had to buckle down and get to work. Still, it was the holidays, and I’d already committed to installing some office furniture in the dining room of the house, effectively turning it into the home office we’d been using it as for over a decade.** So when I finally sat down to begin reading, I wasn’t sure if I had the time commitment to finish reading the novel to make any review useful. 

I guess I need not have worried, because once I got into the groove of reading, my usual issues with being sucked into a story reared their head and I found myself staying up far past 3 AM multiple nights. It got so bad that I would start reading during some particularly boring meetings at work. I have read books that I’ve simply had to give up because there was no drive to continue with the story, so kudos to my friend for writing an engaging novel. 

Oh crap, I hope I didn't look like
THAT. From Ranker.

When I finished, I sat back and said to myself “What now?”

I knew I should write up my thoughts and send them off to her, but I did ask several questions during a chat session we had after I reached the ending. I think I can count the number of romance novels I’ve read on one hand (two hands if you count Sharon Shinn, whose novels straddle the line between Fantasy and Romance), so I had questions about the genre, the word choices, some of the tropes I noticed, and how some parts of the novel fit together. She is currently well on her way toward finishing the second novel featuring the same characters, so I’m glad she’s continuing to write in the same world.***

Still, there was the nagging hole in my free time that only fiction could fill. 

Alcohol and reading books generally
don't mix well. Don't ask how I know
that one. From Imgflip.

I glanced over my long standing “to be read” pile, which had grown into a fairly large collection over the past decade, and poked at it for a while, wondering what to do. I eventually settled on The Chronicles of the Black Company rather than finish a series or two I’d started years ago as I would likely have to start over for those, and that can be a bit daunting. 

I’ve since reread my post on The Black Company, and one thing I noted was that while I tried to explain away my liking of the omnibus trilogy, the post itself was rather bland. I don’t think that I was intentionally avoiding taking a hard stand in either direction, because I realize that different people like different things about a book review, but watching the brouhaha over the Wired profile of Brandon Sanderson I realized that I was being the anti-rabble rouser. It’s not as if I have any grand, incisive commentary on the prose or the story, but even if I did I would have never have written my review in the same fashion that the author of the Wired article did. 

TL;DR: I don’t believe in being a dick.

***

"Card, you're too nice," is what a guildie once told me when I passed on gear I needed but that other people could use in the raid. He wasn’t wrong, because I don’t believe that being an asshole helps much in the long run. That doesn’t mean I don’t get angry or inveigh against the gods from time to time –and I am a tower of fury when that happens—but I recognize that being in a constant state of anger is unhelpful. 

Which is also why I dislike certain aspects of the media –and social media—that rely upon raw emotional reactions to drive popularity. 

I have caught myself being angry at something I’ve seen on television or social media and only a while later I’ve gone back and discovered that the news article (or whatever) was carefully crafted to generate such a reaction out of me, or more importantly, people with my background. And that in turn has generated even more anger, but this time against those who performed the manipulation. Because of that, I’ve oriented my posts in PC to be less confrontational than they could be. There’s always a little devil sitting on my shoulder, telling me that if I was a bit louder, more arrogant, or more combative I’d see more traffic on the blog. And perched on the other shoulder is a little angel musing “You know, you could be a bit more assertive…”

“You’re not helping,” I tell her quite frequently.

“Still, in the end it’s who you want to associate with,” she presses on, ignoring my commentary. “Do you want to be with assholes, or with people you like?”

And I know the answer to that one. 

Yes, they are modeled after
The Devil's Panties. If you haven't
read this webcomic yet, GO!

So in the end, I'm going to stick to my guns and not be an asshole about these reviews. That doesn't mean I'm not going to be critical when I feel the need for it, but I can separate being critical from being a jerk.

And maybe after some months of reading I'll be able to slow down a bit and not read so voraciously. (I hope.)

*Back in high school, my guidance counselor would constantly hound me to read as much as I could, because he believed strongly that reading –any reading—would prepare me for college. He wasn’t picky about what I read, unlike my dad; he only cared that I was reading. My AP English teacher encouraged reading as well because he felt it would improve my writing. So, while I do realize that reading would improve my writing, that was only of secondary concern to why I’m reading more fiction than I have before. And stumbling on my high school journal entries a few months ago while cleaning, I can only say that my writing certainly needed all the help it could get. I was not a wunderkind like Christopher Paolini, for certain.

**It also meant my wife wasn’t spreading her papers all over the house and she finally had a space of her own. We had been using a dining room table we received as a hand-me-down from her sister for my desk, and a hodge-podge of 25-year-old pre-fab desks and microwave carts to hold everything.

***I even borrowed the name of something in the story for a baby Tauren Hunter I have on a Wrath Classic server, so I hope that imitation is surely the most sincere form of flattery.

Meme Monday: Dragon Memes

...or is that draggin' memes? It is a Monday after all...

But I digress. That rather famous "other half" of D&D is here to represent!

If only I didn't work from home...
From imgflip.

I always wondered...
From joshuawright.net.

I'm glad I'm not Carl.
From a lot of Pinterest pages.
I'd really like to know who
made this so I can give credit.

Heh.
From lotromemes.