I don't typically care that much about award shows.
There was a time when I did, back when I used to think of myself as a film connoisseur of sorts.
(Yes, I was a snobby asshole at times.)
It was one of those things where I felt that film had the capacity to provide art on a high level --okay, it does, actually-- and that I used to watch movies for cinematography as much as the plot or the acting.*
I also kept a close eye on the SF&F awards out of WorldCon and the SFWA Con, not to mention the World Fantasy Con, because I thought that raising the bar of what SF&F could be was the way to get those genres more accepted by society at large.
So, what changed? Why did I stop caring about awards? And why bring this up at all, anyway?
***
It took my employers for me to stop caring about awards.
Or rather, what my employers did with their own awards.
Back when I worked in a small materials lab, the owner of the place during the quarterly meeting would "distribute" some awards. Since he was the arbiter of the whole thing, these so-called awards (which meant nothing) were all based on his whims. However, once I moved onto larger corporations, I thought that the awards given out on an annual basis meant a lot more, because... Well, I'm not sure why I thought that, but I felt it was going to be less personality driven and more impartial.
That first year I attended the annual all hands meeting for the software company I joined in the mid-90s I had no real opinions on, because I was still new. The next year when I attended, however, I had opinions on who had worked their asses off and who "deserved" awards. Part of the joy of working on the QA side of things was that I was exposed to most of the development teams, so I knew who was loafing it when they made code changes and who was putting in heroic levels of effort. Surely, I thought, that the people who were given awards were those that truly earned them.
Boy, was I wrong.
I discovered during that annual meeting I rarely agreed with the award recipients. In fact, about 2/3 of them came from a project that frequently broke the environment and was in such sad shape when we shipped our software that a separate Tiger Team was created to fix their buggy application.** When it worked it was great, but the critical issue was the "when it worked" part. But because it was a highly visible project, the lion's share of awards went to people who worked on that project.
As a result, over that next calendar year several people who I thought were more deserving of those awards left the company for greener pastures.
This cycle continued over the next few years, culminating in my team winning an award in my final year with the company, and both myself and my closest co-worker left within six months for other jobs.
I then made a quantum leap in company size to the job that directly lead to what I do today, but I discovered that pettiness and other associated bullshit for company created awards just got larger as well.
That provided me the realization that awards are like certifications: they're there to make people feel good, but have no bearing upon whether you can actually do the job or not.*** I mean, does anybody remember the controversy surrounding that the first Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance when it was given to Jethro Tull for Crest of a Knave?****
From the Heavy Metal masters themselves...
***
That's not to say that people won't try to use awards and award shows for their own political ends.
There was the incident at the Academy Awards back in 1973 where Sacheen Littlefeather went on stage to explain why Marlon Brando was rejecting his award.
And, of course, if you're familiar with SF&F, there was the Sad Puppies right wing campaign to take over the Hugo Awards from roughly 2013 through 2016. Given that the Hugo awards are popularly voted on by those with memberships to Worldcon (at the time it was something like $50) a voting bloc could buy a bunch of memberships and attempt to take over the awards in the same fashion that people in the past have voted on for All-Star teams for various sports.
Now we have the latest controversies surrounding The Game Awards.
It has also proved that The Game Awards' relevance as awards is pretty much corporate in nature.
When your awards show is more concerned about providing advertisements for upcoming video games rather than celebrating the games from the past year, it shows your awards show only cares about corporate sponsorship. That is reinforced by the desire to not rock the boat politically; you could make the argument that making any political statement at all is a losing proposition as people of all stripes play video games, and wading into political waters is likely to piss off a certain group of consumers. Of course, making no political statement at all is also making a political statement, so good luck with that.
In the end, The Game Awards is corporate driven and shouldn't impact your enjoyment of what games you like, because awards and award shows aren't made for you. Even popularity contests such as the Hugos or the American Music Awards (or the MAMAs, which is the K-Pop equivalent) can't tell you what you like, because you're you.
And you shouldn't expect your award shows to align with what you believe or advocate for, because the goal of awards and award shows are different than yours.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go play Crest of a Knave and ...And Justice For All, since I'm in the mood to hear both today. And yes, I do have both albums, thankyouverymuch.
*That was how I was introduced to Martin Scorsese, via film study class in high school. We had an assignment to break down the cinematography of a film --any film, our choice-- and I happened to catch After Hours on cable. I had no idea who the film's director was because I missed the first few minutes of the film, and the plot was so surreal that it was like a Terry Gilliam fever dream, but I absolutely loved the cinematography. I had to confess I didn't catch the director's name in my paper, but the teacher loved it anyway.
**It took them the better part of a year to stabilize things to where it was usable by our clients without crashing.
***True story: a person who literally just passed their UNIX Sysadmin certification exam came to me later in the day and asked me the following question about accessing the root user:
Him: When we su to root, what do we use?
Me: ::puzzled:: We use 'su -'.
Him: No, I mean that when other people switch to root, they use 'su -'. When we switch to root, we use....
Me: We use 'su -' too. The OS security software knows what access you have based on your group membership.
Him: ::wanders away and goes to another cubicle, where I could hear him asking the same question of someone else::
Me: ...
Before you ask, despite me being on the team for six months longer than he was, I hadn't gotten a chance to take the certification exam. And to this day, I never have.
****Even Ian Anderson used to make fun of that award, as reported to me by a college friend who went to see them in concert when Tull was touring in support of their Rock Island album.
*****That was sarcasm for those who might have missed that.
I've poked around on the Season of Discovery WoW Classic Era servers off and on for the better part of a month, but I'm still somewhere around L13 at the moment. Part of that is because I'm just not giving it much priority, as I spend most of my WoW time on "regular" Classic Era servers, but it's also that I'm just kind of slowly leveling while everybody else is swarming all over Elwynn Forest and Westfall.
I suppose I ought to work on obtaining more runes, but I'm just not prioritizing it very much.
Part of the reason why I'm not prioritizing runes and whatnot is, well, I'm poor.*
And those items you can buy from vendors that allow you to read a scroll cost silver. When you don't have any silver at all, that can hurt.
I mean, I have to prioritize my training --or rather, the minimal training needed-- and then just build up as much coinage as I can. Once I can get to the point of making or gathering items to sell, then I can actually make some headway, but I'm not there yet.
The other big reason why I've not given a lot of priority to leveling in Season of Discovery is that I've been fascinated by the roleplaying that goes on.
Yes, I know, Lava Lash is a RP server, so I shouldn't be surprised that actual roleplaying goes on there. The thing is, however, when I tried out Bloodsail Buccaneers --both in Era and on Wrath Classic-- I found hardly anybody actually roleplaying.
How do I know this?
This was at noon today on Layer 1.
See those dots? Those are people who use the addons that can communicate via MSP (the Mary Sue Protocol) such as Total RP3 and marked themselves visible to others. There were actually 13 there --a couple were overlapping on the map-- and there were even more people who were obviously role playing without using the addon. The scanning range is the range that I can target a player with, so there are likely more people in other parts of Stormwind that I couldn't see at that point in time.
How did I scan? Well, I've downloaded Total RP3 and when you bring up the regular ol' map (the M key) there's a button in the bottom left that you can click to scan for roleplayers nearby.
I've had the add-on installed for the past several months, so I have a feel for how active the roleplaying community is on servers. If you actually see this many people roleplaying on Bloodsail Buccaneers in either Wrath Classic or Classic Era, let me know, because I've not seen it yet.
But here in Season of Discovery, the RPers have come out of the woodwork.
Yes, I filled in some basic info on Card. Obviously, this is the "just starting out" version of her, not the "I've seen some shit out there in Naxx" version of her, which is some years later.
You can adjust what is visible in the profile, as well as tweak what the player's personality is so that people know what they're getting into when RPing with her:
You can select the standard traits as well as add your own. And some of those "add your own" can be... quite adult.
Have I actually engaged in roleplay? Nope. If someone were to approach me, that's one thing, but I'm not one to actively engage in RP with others first. Regardless, I've had a few basic interactions out there with a few people, but nothing worthy of "Goldshire on the Moon Guard server".
Sorry to disappoint, but even if I had, I'd not mention it.
That's not to say that the RP community isn't active, because it is. It's active enough that a few players have complained about it, which causes me to raise an eyebrow. I mean, you're complaining that there's RP-ing happening on an RP server? Sheesh.
And really, there's not that much RP going on, either.
But there are guilds popping up for people to hang out in and RP with. Some sound rather tame:
And some seem far more, um, adult in nature:
At least they're up front about this.
Some other guild advertisements are that they're RP friendly but not necessarily RP focused. Still, it's far more active than I'd seen on regular Era or Classic RP servers.
Do I feel kind of, well, icky about this? Not really. I mean, I've played D&D for decades, but naturally I've not played it to this sort of level of inhabiting a character as this sort of RP-ing would demand. This is a lot closer to what you'd find in the Society for Creative Anachronism or your average American Renaissance Festival. And yes, I realize my reticence to actively participate is partially driven by my reaction to the Satanic Panic back in the 80s, so old lies about what RPGs are do die hard.
*Sir Terry Pratchett had a great quote from one of his Discworld books about being poor that really hit the nail on the head. Ah, here it is:
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play
The thing is, I've been there. I've only been able to afford cheap jeans or shoes that fall apart after a year of steady use, so I end up spending more money in the long run just keeping myself in clothing than if I'd have spent more up front. But you need money to be able to spend a bit more for quality, and if you don't have that, that's the conundrum.
We're in the home stretch before Christmas, and in years past the mini-Reds would be bouncing off the walls at this point. (I guess the mini-Zargs are doing that right now, right Zarg? Or maybe the mini-Kamalias?)
From quickmeme.
Who knew that The Nightmare Before Christmas had memes? From imgflip.
Part of the reason why I'm not inclined to go back to Wrath Classic is that I'm too far behind those people who are still there and I'd like to play with.* Well, that and the fact that I was turned off by the meta-driven mentality of the average random player there, but I can't do anything about that.
However, in Retail Blizzard has a fix for you about that first part (which I saw last morning and did a double take):
Yep. Want to play with friends and skip all that unnecessary leveling content? Instead of paying a third party to Boost you or run you through raids, pay Blizzard $60 and you're all ready to go. You don't even need to understand a thing about what's going on, story-wise or raid-wise, just go out there and kill some bosses.
*And yes, I'm aware of the "we just want to play with you" aspect of things, but as I've mentioned before, if I'm not pulling my weight I'm not having fun. Yes, I could simply go full luddite and remove most add-ons in a ploy to remain ignorant, but the thing is I'd know that everybody else would know how I'm doing.
In what comes as a shock to absolutely nobody, the purely Hardcore WoW Classic Era servers have been abandoned in favor of the Season of Discovery servers.
Wow. They were High and Full only two months ago.
I got on the HC server I've used in the past only to find almost nobody there. I knew that the "regular" WoW Classic Era servers had taken a bit of a hit, but I thought the HC servers would be more immune than this because, well, I figured HC would have it's own separate appeal.
Silly me, I know.
This is the current population for "regular" Classic Era. There's another PvP cluster off screen that's "Medium".
It does seem to me that the current population of Classic Era is pretty much one cohesive unit, and that population is distributed among the three types of servers. Right now the bulk of the population is in the Season of Discovery servers, as that's the new hotness, but when people tire of that they'll likely come back to the regular Era servers (and to a lesser extent the HC servers).
One thing I don't see much of is people splitting time between Era servers and Wrath Classic or Retail servers. I'm sure that exists, just not to the extent that you see evidence of it a lot.
Looking at my own server logins, I'd say that once my 10 person raid team for Wrath Classic fell apart at the beginning of 2023, about 90% of my time has been spent in a Classic Era server of one form or another. The rest of the time is probably 8% Wrath Classic and 2% Retail: most of that 8% happened before I created Era characters, and that 2% worth of Retail logins is due to me getting screenshots for the blog.
I most definitely spent a lot more time in SWTOR and LOTRO than Wrath Classic and Retail WoW this past year.
***
Going forward, I'm most interested in what will happen to the Wrath Classic crowd once Cataclysm Classic releases. What will the majority of players do?
Move on to Cata Classic
Go back to an Era realm
Migrate to Retail WoW
Leave WoW altogether
I don't really have an answer here, but my first guess is not #1. Maybe inertia will mean that #1 will win out, but my gut says no. The snark in me wants to say #4 given that it certainly seems that killing Arthas has been a goal of a lot of people, but I think we'll have a better feel for what might happen in the Spring when Wrath Classic has just about finished. The ramp up to Wrath Classic itself began organically months before the release date, and if we don't see a similar wave of interest in the months prior to release of Cata Classic, it's more likely that Cata Classic will be a dud.
Unlike the other times I hit an anniversary (or half-anniversary) of this little incident, I delayed my post about how things are going.
Why?
Well, let me explain.
I went into my annual physical in mid-November feeling good about the direction I'd been trending. I'd finally broken through the plateau my weight had been at for a year and was trending downward, and my daily tests I run* haven't shown any weird spikes or other odd behaviors. Considering that with my physician's encouragement I'd slowly weaned myself off of insulin and was going with only the Metformin as the primary method of controlling my blood sugar, that's a good thing.**
The physical itself went pretty well, with my blood pressure being pretty much "normal" for someone being treated for my condition, and I passed my diabetic foot exam with flying colors. They took my blood for the standard battery of tests, and my doctor told me that I should go take some time off and go on vacation.
"What do you mean when you say you're on-call 24x7?" he asked.
"Well," I replied, "it means that if there's a problem in the middle of the night and it's bad enough, they call me up and I have to go fix it." If you've been in IT, you know what I mean. It's part of the job.
"Can't you just leave it all at work and just turn your phone off at home?"
"Can you do that?" I countered.
"That's different."
No, I'm not tech support per se, but this is one of my two positions I assume during 'emergency escalations'. The other involves rubbing my temples. From imgur.
Sure, there's the difference where a life might be in the balance, but if you've ever worked a 24x7 on-call job before, you don't have that option. Luckily for me, my job has gotten better at the 'woken up at 3 AM' scenario, but that doesn't mean that my work doesn't follow me around or keep me busy in the evenings/weekends.
What about vacation?
Well, I'm not a homebody per se, but I don't have a burning desire to go out and travel any more. I'm not a fan of crowds, so when we do visit someplace I'm just not interested in doing much.*** And when I take the day off and stay at home, I usually have to visit the doctor or work on a project around the house.
Yeah, the girl is me. From imgflip.
So all in all, outside of the needling by the doctor, the physical went well.
***
A few days later I got a call from the doctor's office.
My blood work came in, and one of my numbers had shot up past the normal range.
Yes, if you use Mychart, you've seen this sort of thing before.
Considering I hadn't really changed my diet, and given that the only tweak to my medications was the weaning off of insulin --which shouldn't have had such an impact-- this was cause for concern. (That low marker on the left was during my hospital stay, and the number after that was due to receiving an injection at the hospital.)
The nurse told me that I was to stop one of my medications immediately, wait a few weeks, and come back in for a retest. The unspoken part was that if that didn't work, then I might be in real trouble.
So, early this week I went in to get my blood drawn once more, which meant fasting since midnight. Again. This part of my new lifestyle I really don't like --outside of the fact that I still don't like needles-- because it takes several days for my digestive system to return to a semblance of normal.
Then I settled in at work and was kept on pins and needles while I waited.
Yeah, kind of like this, right Milton? (We even have the red stapler!) From makeameme.
At the end of the week I got a phone call from the nurse once more.
Unfortunately for me, I was preoccupied at the time so I couldn't take the call, but I listened to her message and breathed a sigh of relief.
So it returned to where it had been, on the lower end of 'normal'. Kind of unnerving as to why the medication simply started going haywire.
I sent a follow up email as to whether I should stop that medication on an ongoing basis, and the reply I got was yes, but because of that I was told I needed to adjust my diet a bit to compensate for the changes. I'm also scheduled to have another blood test in January to make sure that everything is behaving as it should.
So... I'll count this as a small victory: my medications decreased by one, my critical numbers have either remained at normal-ish or returned to normal, and the doctor was okay with this overall trend.
Still, this was a reminder that my projected overall lifespan isn't what I'd call 'good' by any stretch.
Given that my genealogy research has provided me with info that a lot of my relatives in the past died in their 50s and 60s**** I guess I shouldn't be too surprised by this, but one of my relatives died in the early 20th century from a "diabetic coma", which caused me to sit up and take notice. For some people that'd be an interesting little quirk of my family tree, but for me, knowing what I know now about my health issues, that was both a reminder to be vigilant and a warning that I'd better get my shit together because I can't count on dumb luck to carry me through.
*Oh yes, when you've both Type-2 Diabetes and Hypertension (aka high blood pressure) you have to keep a close eye on your blood glucose levels and blood pressure. I guess you don't have to do that if you don't want to, but kind of winging it isn't conducive to a long lifespan. Or to put it more bluntly, if I don't keep track of how my body is doing I should start picking out a gravesite now and save my surviving family the trouble.
**Metformin still can mess with my digestion from time to time. Of all the medications I've ever taken that say "take with food", this one you absolutely have to. Even so, about twice a month my digestive system kicks me in the ass so bad that I have to lie down for several hours, and if I'm not there I'm on the toilet. Still, it's a small price to pay for keeping my body (relatively) healthy.
***Like back in 1996 when we went to Denver for the 1996 Geological Society of America conference. My wife had a presentation, and she kept encouraging me to go visit museums or look around at various places. Or attend the 'Spouses Events' that were lined up. Or... you get the idea.
What did I do?
I brought a book and drove east out of Denver to a rest stop on the highway, and read for some hours. I did this for a couple of days. Sure, after the conference we went to Rocky Mountain National Park and camped in the cold early November weather that was 15F/-9.4C before you add in the 20 MPH wind chill, but I had absolutely no desire to get involved with the crowds or things to do around Denver. Like a true introvert, I wanted to unplug and curl up with a book.
****Unless there's a traumatic event, that is. I do have a few of those in my ancestors' past. One I knew beforehand, but others not so much. Maybe I ought to do a follow up post on some of that.
You know, I could have meant this as a 'medical exam', but nope. Two of my kids have exams in the next week or two, so I figured that they'd appreciate these...
From Pinterest.
Thank you for your service, Mr. Bean. From Massey University.
Yeah, I'm quite familiar with that look. From universitystudent.org.
Hey, just like in my Quantum Mechanics final! From memecenter.
It may surprise you, but I don't actually subscribe to WoW.
Yes, I'm aware that I could save a few dollars by subscribing for 3 or 6 month intervals, but because I buy 60 days' worth of game time every couple of months, it forces me to evaluate as to whether I'm having enough fun in-game to continue paying for it. In my experience, when I subscribe it takes more effort to actually decide to discontinue a subscription than actually keep subscribing, so by reversing the process and making it more effort to continue playing the onus is put on Blizzard to create a better experience.
It also means that I actually engage with the cash shop on a regular basis, so I can see exactly just what Blizz is up to.
Such as this little surprise when I bought 60 days' worth of game time yesterday:
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...
Do you see it?
In addition to the Retail character boost and the Cataclysm Classic Blazing Heroic Pack, there another little addition to the cash shop: a Level 80 Character Boost for Wrath Classic.
You can now bypass the entire leveling process in Wrath Classic and go straight to Endgame.
Of course, that also means you're effectively paying for gold as well, given that you can go back and do all of the Northrend quests and just get gold as a reward instead.
Yeah, right. Graphic from The Simpsons, and the Comic Sans courtesy of MS Paint.
I wasn't planning on getting into the Season of Discovery servers when they opened.
If nothing else, I learned that my favorite Mage names --Cardwyn and Nevelanthana-- are never taken by someone else, so I shouldn't have to rush to get a toon created. I could create something different, I suppose, but for me playing a Mage is second nature*, so I knew I was going to go in that direction.
But the lure of playing is strong**, so...
Oh.
Okay, that's not too bad. I mean, I did choose the RP server, which was "High" and not "Full" like most of the other servers...
???
What is this, Gorak's Guide come to life?
This went on for over 1/2 hour, where I lost track of time. (I told my questing buddy last night it was 1/2 hour, but honestly that's the absolute minimum time I could think of. It might have been closer to an hour for all I know.)
It looked worse when I started running around.
I see that people go naked even in the starting area. Oh well.
I quickly realized I wasn't getting anything done in the starting zones, so I decided to go collect a few flight points.
I did make a short stop in Goldshire, since Lava Lash is an RP server, and I was curious as to whether there was a crowd at the Lion's Pride Inn already. (Narrator: There wasn't.) So I set my Hearthstone to the Inn and took off for Stormwind.
While I don't have any screenshots of Stormwind, it was as you expect it would be: empty.
It was then that I got it into my head to go to Ironforge and from there....
Well, it isn't a Hardcore server, so why not see how far I could get to Menethil Harbor?
While I ran through Dun Morogh, people were discussing the merits of leveling in Teldrassil versus Elwynn Forest.
"Northshire is an absolute nuthouse," I commented. "I figured I'd rather visit Darnassus right now."
"Yeah," a Gnome added. "At our size, all those Night Elves look hawt."
Oookay...
I mean, I'm not going to dispute that, since I've not played a Gnome before, but it's not like we've not seen Night Elves before.
My major contribution to the Gen Chat discussion was something much more mundane:
"LFM Ulduar"
"Ha"
"lol"
"wrong server"
***
I made a wrong turn in Dun Morogh and ended up taking the North Pass by mistake, so when I left the Pass I had to turn south to reach Thelsamar.
"Ding!" Okay, that was a bit late, but you get the idea.
I was chased by spiders part of the way to the town, but I made it there before I died.
As you can see by the screenshot, there were far fewer people in Loch Modan than anywhere else that I'd been. That was not the same I could say about the Wetlands, which contained my goal of reaching Menethil Harbor:
Druids. LOTS of Druids.
Alas, the pass through Dun Algaz was not very safe for lone travelers.
Shortly after I took that screenshot, I left another stretch of the pass only to get killed by Dragonmaw Orcs, who were camping in the hills above the path I was on.
It was then that I discovered that my graveyard I released to was waaaay back at Thelsamar, in Loch Modan.
I thought of having to run all the way back just to respawn and decided that discretion was the better part of valor, so I just hearthed back to Goldshire and logged from the Season of Discovery servers for the day.
Maybe I'll give it a try sometime later, when I put a few levels on me and have some silver to cover my repair bills.
*I want to give a shout-out to Vidyala, of the late blogs Pugging Pally and Manalicious, and the webcomic From Draenor with Love for being the person who taught me how to play a Mage in WoW. I don't think she even realized she did that until I mentioned it to her years later.
**I know: "If if's and but's were candy and nuts we'd all have a happy birthday." That's the G rated version of that saying, and no, I'm not going to put up the PG-13 version.
It's kind of weird, really, that the Steam Autumn Sale came and went and... I just kind of shrugged.
Oh, plenty of games were on sale, and quite a few in my wishlist, but I just wasn't interested in buying anything. I mean, that's good for my bottom line (particularly given just how many car repairs I've had to make this past year), but when push came to shove, I just didn't want to buy anything.
Yes, I did have Baldur's Gate 3 on my wishlist, but a) it wasn't on sale, and b) I just don't have the time to devote to playing it. Even if I gave up playing MMOs and all other video games to play BG3, I just don't have the hours in a day to play the game to the extent I want to.
There's also the matter of me wanting to go back and finish BG1 and BG2 once more before delving into BG3, just for continuity's sake.
Yes, I am that sort of player. I mean, you do read the blog, don't you?
***
Some months ago I stumbled on an old Blizzard gift card the kids gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago, and given that Blizz was running one of their sales at the time, I used said gift card to buy Diablo II Remastered. I figured why not? I was essentially getting the game for free, so it made sense to try the game that people still say was the best in the Diablo series out before delving into Diablo 3 and Diablo 4.
So.... Does that count as a new game purchase, despite the gift card itself being at least 2 years old?
Eh, whatever.
Now that I think about it, that's the exact same reaction I had when I played it for 4 hours some weeks ago.
Your character is your character, just like if you were playing Gauntlet back at the video game arcade*
"Warrior needs food badly!" From the WMS Gaming channel on YouTube.
And if you don't like your character's appearance, well... That's tough luck.
Believe it or not, there's a screenshot there.
Hmm... Now that I think about it, from what I can tell there's not much more story here than what was in that old Gauntlet game back in the day.
Or The Bard's Tale, for that matter.
Back when the name Electronic Arts meant something good. Yes, kids, that actually was a thing: EA being a good company.
I did discover that if you died in D2, you lost all your gear and you have to run back to get it. Which can suck.
But in the end, there's really not a lot of "there" there. Run around, kill things, take their loot, use it. Rinse and repeat.
So.... Gauntlet, anybody?
*Boy do those two things take a body back to the 1980s!
For those not in the know, the term Black Friday doesn't have anything to do with a stock market crash or even a reference to the Supernatural, but rather is about finance.
(Really!)
Black Friday refers to the first shopping day in of the US Christmas season --between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays-- as the day when a lot of retail stores sell enough that they turned their balance sheets from losing money (aka "being in the red") to making money (aka "being in the black"). No more, and no less.
Of course, the chaos that tends to show up on social media regarding customers behaving badly is, sadly, not too far off the truth of things. Having a spouse who works in retail, I'm familiar with stories of people who are assholes during Black Friday.
That being said, I can't help but post a few memes on this somewhat bizarre shopping holiday...
Leave it to the Star Wars prequels to put a bow on this. From Imgflip.
Warhammer being in the thick of Black Friday is oddly appropriate. From Reddit.
A WoW friend works at Walmart. I might want to share this with her for her thoughts. From Pinterest.
I had a good laugh at this with some of my WoW friends last night, until one of them pointed out that this wouldn't work in the South, as they'd just shoot the "bear" and stick their head on a wall. From Pinterest.
