The other day, we had a visitor outside the window where I work:
The deer was standing when we first noticed her, but she decided to rest in the sun for a while.
She's a young deer, but she doesn't have spots anymore, so she's no longer a fawn.
That got me to thinking about how during the pandemic the wilderness crept back into "human" areas as people retreated to inside homes and apartments.
From the Covid19 archive, cfa.cats Instagram, and The New Yorker magazine.
So, I thought of posting a few wilderness inspired memes today...
This was the first thing I thought of when I came up with this post. I'm as guilty of this as any other RPG player. From Reddit's r/dndmemes.
Ever been in one of those RPG campaigns where you roll poorly and then the DM starts rolling all sorts of dice? Yeah, the poster of this meme on Reddit felt the same way. From Reddit's r/dndmemes.
You can tell this is NOT Elden Ring because everything is so bright and cheery. It's from The Witcher 3, actually. From Reddit's r/gaming.
There are survivalists out there, and then there's Bear Grylls. From MMO-Champion, of all places.
And if you've ever seen Pixar films, you knew this was coming. I've never seen Up and even I knew it was going to be here. From Yarn and Pixar (naturally).
I'd come across Pivotal's YouTube page a while back, and there was a recent release of a third installment in their Lessons in Magic series: Portology.
All three videos are about a minute long, but they pack in a LOT in that one minute. Here's the first two for reference:
Oh, and here's one that I found really amusing, called The Final Touch...
Why is it that it's the fans that create videos about WoW that I want to watch? I'm not interested in faction leads or the other "main characters"*, but I am interested in the "regular people" of Azeroth.
Take Bombowy's Little Tales, such as White Petals...
Or this one, titled Spooky Brew...
Maybe these little shorts aren't for everyone, but for me, they're fantastic. Blizzard should take note.
For me, however, I'll have another chuckle at Green Eyes...
*"What am I, chopped liver?" Cardwyn snorted.
"Who'd want to chop up livers anyway?" Linna mused. "I always hated the stuff whenever Dad cooked it."
"That's not the point; we're not the centerpiece of this game! How can you remain interested when the story doesn't revolve around you?"
The past couple of weeks on Operation Spread the Love have seen slow but consistent progress.
Longtime SF&F novel fans may recognize the name Ctuchik from David Eddings' The Belgariad. The so-called "Magician of the Murgos" is the perfect name for a Shadow Priest or a Warlock. In this case, a Shadow Priest.
I haven't jumped into any instances and I've kept mostly to myself while questing. Well, there's also the fact that I've not played altogether that much over the past two weeks either. An hour or two per day an average of 5 days per week doesn't exactly add up to much in MMO terms. Right now, however, that's good enough for me.
The way I play means I don't really exit Rested XP*, so that's why my levels are as high as they are.
Of course, something big did happen to one of my toons...
I'm going on an adventure!
And oh yeah, this happened too...
Uh oh. I think I must taste good with ketchup...
Yes, some Hunter thought it'd be a good idea to kite Teremus the Devourer to Stormwind, and a lot of lowbies (and higher level toons) got burnt to a crisp. And a bunch of bots around the Auction House and mailbox, but that goes without saying.
So, things are progressing. Sorta. Kinda. Maybe.
*Except for Hoots, who left Rested XP close to leveling to L25, so I figured I might as well finish that up before moving to other toons to play.
I was, well, a bit perturbed while driving this weekend by some of my fellow drivers. When you combine that with some grumpy old man memes that I'd been saving, we have a recipe for a Meme Monday.
Ha. There have been days like that at work. From Imgflip.
Or if you go by the SWTOR method, you head to the fleet and you start there at a shuttle bay. From Pinterest.
Good ol' Dana Carvey from his Saturday Night Live days. That this rant was about redheads made it even better. From Imgflip and SNL.
Ah, Burgess Meredith from one of the Grumpy Old Men movies. Of course, I know him as curmudgeonly Mick from the first three Rocky movies. From Imgflip.
I know it's from Space Battleship Yamoto 2199, not the original, but to me I saw the English version, called Star Blazers. The captain of the Argo (seen above) was named... Captain Avatar. From Imgflip.
It's not a grumpy old man per se, but you becoming enough of a grumpy old DM that you pull out one of the iconic encounters, dating back to AD&D 1st edition. From imgflip (again).
Yesterday I was sitting at an intersection, waiting for the light to change, when I espied this little quip on the sign in front of a local salon:
Yes, I was amused.
That inspired this weeks' Meme Monday. It's not that cold right now, in the 20F/-7C range, but compared to two weeks ago it's pretty cold. This winter in general has been much colder and wetter than usual --hello, extreme weather-- and so it was simply low hanging fruit for me to harvest.
Thank you, Ron Swanson. From Thunder Dungeon (and Parks and Rec).
That's not spooky, that's just sad. From Cheezburger.
Well, that doesn't make me feel any better. From Funny-as-fuck via Cheezburger.
I can sympathize, Wyoming Police Department. From the Wyoming (MN) Police via Cheezburger.
Again, I can sympathize. From Imgflip.
This is the most accurate statement here, but... thanks a lot, Einstein. From Dailymeme-noah via Cheezburger.
Last night I spent some time doing something I've not done since November: actually playing in-game with friends.
Oh, I've been online at the same time they are, and even been in a group together, but either they were doing their own thing, doing boosting/getting boosts, or doing group content of some sort. Since they mostly were rushing on ahead in the Anniversary servers, there really wasn't much in common for us to work on at the same time. Even when they had gotten toons to L60 and were working on alts*, I'd kept a distance because they were frequently doing boosting of some sort.
However, last night was a respite from that because my Questing Buddy was playing with one of her kids**, and I noted that her kid had died.
"Need a healer?" I asked.
"Not a bad idea," my Questing Buddy replied, so I switched to a Priest who was close to Darnassus and went up to Teldrassil to help out.
I spent the next hour or more following them around, healing and shielding them, while they quested inside the Ban'ethil Barrow Den and against the Furbolg encampments nearby. Once in a while I would pull threat due to the heals, so I had to use wands and the occasional attack spell, but I was perfectly fine providing a minimal amount of support to keep them upright. I had no skin in the game, since I wasn't trying to keep up with quests or catch up with leveling. It was simply something that I could do without disrupting their enjoyment of the game --or making it all about me-- so I could enjoy the ride for a while.
*At least one has an alt closing in on L60 as well. Go figure.
**The kids play on a free account, which works well since they only tend to play in the starter and adjacent leveling zones.
Having a week off was good for the soul, and as a consequence I've decided to make a few changes in my current stable of toons for Operation Spread the Love.
Hoots was named after Hoots the Owl from the children's television show Sesame Street. Here's a link to a clip of Hoots with John Legend. I think I ought to work on a backstory for a bit, just to make Hoots' name a nickname due to her obsession with owls. This listing was as of February 2, 2025.
I'd originally intended to get all of the toons to at least L30 before I would begin to put in some separation, but I've decided to leave two toons behind at L20: the Shaman and the Warrior.
The decision to leave the Shaman is kind of self-explanatory: there was just too much mental baggage dealing with a Shaman, even 3.5 years after TBC Classic. I'm still going to keep that Shaman around in case I want to revisit it sometime in the future, and I'll hold onto the name Briganaa as well, but I doubt I'll be leveling a Shaman anytime soon.
As for the Warrior, it was a struggle for me to actually want to play one. I'm used to having a full mana bar or energy bar to work with and have it gradually get depleted, but the Warrior plays in exactly the opposite manner: you have to build up rage before you can expend it on various abilities. I've frequently found myself struggling to get enough rage going for me to actually, you know, DO something interesting. And if I can't get that rage up, the Warrior doesn't really feel fun to play.
Maybe it's a matter of not getting high enough in levels to make a Warrior fun, but to me it certainly doesn't check any of those "fun" boxes on my "things to do" checklist. Warriors may be extremely popular to play because they're so overpowered in Vanilla Classic's raid scene, but I wasn't ever planning on taking this toon into any group content. There's too much pressure to tank in that scenario, and I wasn't going to deal with that.
So going forward I'm focusing on 8 toons instead of 10. I don't expect my leveling to speed up very much, given that the leveling curve itself is flattening out significantly, and I'm also planning on leveling professions along the way. I've never really leveled Leatherworking as part of my actual leveling process itself, because Briganaa was my Leatherworker and I only began working on that after she got to L70. I simply couldn't focus on professions until after I got to max level for the raid. Same thing goes for Blacksmithing; I've leveled it typically after a toon got to max level (in both Retail and Classic), so any bonuses from making my own armor kind of went out the window.
Tailoring, on the other hand, I've done numerous times, so I know how to fit that into my leveling process and take advantage of inherent bonuses available to a cloth wearing profession. Leveling a profession along the way also has the advantage of slowing down my own leveling process, because I have to divert attention to collecting materials necessary to keep my gear up to date, in as much the same way that a Rogue will work on opening lockboxes to level their Lockpicking skill.
***
Okay, that's out of the way. How's everybody else doing?
Uh... Well... I think my Questing Buddy's raid issues got straightened out, because she's had a few weeks' worth of pleasant raiding in Molten Core. Now, her issue is getting a Healing weapon that she doesn't have to fight all the other healers for in raid, so she's set her sights on PvP gear by getting to a high enough PvP ranking. I can only shake my head, because if it's not one goal, it's another. In her defense, she is significantly younger than me (still technically under 40!) so I salute her drive and focus. Me, I couldn't do that anymore, but she apparently can. I think she's also been listening to the audiobook version of Onyx Storm, the new Rebecca Yarros book, which apparently has yet ANOTHER cliff hanger ending. I guess for my sanity's sake, I'm going to hold off reading the series until it's finished, something I learned the hard way by reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time back in the 90s.*
As for the rest of the gang, all except for two have a toon at max level. Of the two, one still raids regularly on the Classic Era servers (hence the reason why she doesn't have a max level toon) and the other is busy with other non-WoW things, so she doesn't have a lot of time to get on and play.
Of the players in my friend group, I am the farthest behind, which suits me fine. I think they've finally given up trying to talk me into accepting boosts, but even if they haven't, having 8 toons means I can let them run me through a dungeon and then I can park that toon for a week or more while I level something else.
***
For a Sid Meier's Civilization fan, I'm simply not interested in Civ VII that is coming out right now. I'm happy that Christopher Tin came back to compose more music for the soundtrack, but I play Civ IV almost every other day, and I really don't have any interest in moving on to something new at this time. What I have seen of Civ 7 is that it is a lot more tactical and wargamer-ish than previous installations of the game; fine for some people, but for a grand strategy type of game that Civ once was, it isn't for me. If I want more wargame in my Civ style game, there's Rome: Total War or Medieval: Total War 2 to whet my appetite.
Anyway, that's where Redbeard's WoW Classic Anniversary is currently at.
*I never finished reading The Wheel of Time, as I threw up my hands and gave up on the series after A Crown of Swords. I bought The Path of Daggers, but when I sat down to read it, I just couldn't. I was tired of Robert Jordan never really moving the plot along and simply adding more and more complexity without getting anywhere. Apparently I wasn't the only RJ fan who jumped off the bandwagon during this time, but we were more than offset by an influx of new fans.
Yes, there's a bunch more after this part, but I didn't screencap it.
Somewhere, I can hear John Ratzenberger's voice as The Underminer from The Incredibles:
I'm just going to assume that Micro-Blizz intentionally named this Undermined just for that association. Well, that and The Underdark from D&D's Forgotten Realms setting.
All I can say is that I hope that Micro-Blizz vetted this properly with their lawyers, because Disney's own legal team is no slouch.
Yes, I know, Valentine's Day is on Friday, but I'd rather be early than late. Therefore, here's several Valentine's Day memes for gamers, both tabletop and video game variants.
The top right one cracked me up, because our D&D group is in the middle of the classic AD&D Drow modules. From the Facebook D&DMemes Group.
Technically this is from Final Fantasy XIV, but the "twink" moniker works for any MMO, really. From Reddit.
Given how often I watched my kids play Breath of the Wild, I thought this highly appropriate. From Reddit.
A Friday night? Probably just staying in. The weather is predicted to be bad, and my wife will be returning from a visit that evening, so likely not much going on. From Reddit.
Under the header of "that was unexpected", I found yet another Brandon Sanderson video (released yesterday) in my YouTube feed. This one, however, was more related to gaming.
If you want to skip the first half of the video/podcast where Brandon and Dan Wells discuss Magic: the Gathering (I don't play M:tG, so I can't comment here) and a sandwich food heist in Norway, the multiplayer video game portion begins here, at the 11:40 mark.
The TL;DR is that since there are adults/parents who no longer have the reaction skills, but they do have disposable income, is to provide a subscription service to pay for moderators to come in and monitor the chat/voice discussions to remove obnoxious behavior from the game or the lobbies.
When I first heard the word "pay" I thought "Oh crap, he's going to ask for whale-ish items in a cash shop," but then when Brandon fully described his idea I then thought "Oh, you mean like what we're paying Blizzard to (theoretically) do in World of Warcraft?"
I do have to wonder just how much it would cost to actually have real enforcement of Terms of Service of multiplayer games such as Marvel Rivals or League of Legends, not just lip service. Obviously too much, if you see all of the bad behavior in multiplayer games and MMOs that I've seen over the years, because I'm at the point where bad behavior is pretty much expected unless proven otherwise.*
Among other suggestions that Brandon and Dan floated were a "little brother/little sister" mode for multiplayer games (beyond the games that already have it) so that the little kids could play along too. I personally had no issues grouping up with either the mini-Reds or even my Questing Buddy's kids to just goof around, but if you're playing a game such as a Zelda title** and the wee set needs help, having that sort of mode would be a godsend to both the kid and the parent/older sibling.
Or maybe the parent needs help on Elden Ring, having their teenaged kid zone in and help them out would be a decent solution rather than trying to use third party addons (or simply giving the controller to the teen) to bypass the game.
Anyway, I expected explicit "god mode" pay to win type of suggestions, but got something that should have been taken care of by a game's ToS. Anyway, it was interesting enough of a suggestion that I decided to post about it.
*Yes, I've been told via whispers in the past that they expected me to be an asshole of some sort when I joined a group event but the people whispering me were pleasantly surprised to be found wrong. And no, I don't understand why people would look at my toons or how I was acting and think that I was going to ruin their fun.
**I almost said Elden Ring or Mass Effect, but I immediately shut that one down. Why on earth would you let a 5 year old play Elden Ring? Or the cutscenes in Mass Effect or Baldur's Gate 3?
Well, after a week off, I bought 60 days of WoW game time from Microsoft.
That week away felt good, actually. After a good 48 hours of FOMO, I guess I detoxed enough that it wasn't a big issue any more.
Relaxing while killing things works in my book. And yes, the guild advertisement and the commentary amused me to no end.
Playing some other games for a while, such as SWTOR, LOTRO, Rome: Total War, and Stardew Valley were good for the soul as well. I didn't have to read about any raid drama, PvP issues, boosts, or any other shenanigans, so I simply got a chance to relax and do whatever.
Oh, and I read a bit too.
Here's some proof of that.
But one thing I continued reading was this:
Nowadays, there are three levels: Technician, General, and Extra. This is the study manual for the Technician exam.
Yes, after 30+ years of being a shortwave radio listener, I'm studying for my amateur radio license. It's something to do, and to be honest I've forgotten more in the study guide than I care to admit. Until this past year I've never had any desire to get on the air, but some of the more recent natural disasters have gotten me to thinking that I can do some good in a small way by providing communications in this age of extreme climate-change driven weather. Plus, tinkering around with electronics is one of my hobbies. And it gives me an excuse to go about 60 miles north to the annual Dayton Hamvention, the largest amateur radio convention in the US. Whether I'll actually have a ham license before I visit is an open question, but you don't need one to attend anyway. I've gone several times over the past few decades, and I always find something interesting there.
Well, as of today it's been a week since I let my WoW game time run out. So, I spent a couple of hours last night going through some old memes I saved about taking a break from WoW, and...
Let's just say that some of them are a bit dated, and the memes to choose from were a bit sparse too.
I did mention the "dated" part, right? This is right out of 2021 or so. From Imgur and the Blizzard Forums.
For the record, this was NOT me. From Memedroid.
I'm pretty sure that when I come back after this break I'm gonna be rusty. From Know Your Meme.
Okay, this wasn't about gaming per se, but about how WoW players don't sleep (much). I can appreciate this one, even though it's not about the "taking a break" part directly. From Reddit.
One nice thing about this short break from WoW is that I got a chance to play my favorite class in SWTOR for a bit: The Smuggler.
Oh, I've played SWTOR off and on the past several years, but for some reason I've ended up creating force users instead of a Bounty Hunter or a Smuggler.* My first toon was a Smuggler, and here I am playing a Smuggler once again.
Ah, Coruscant. Don't ever change. Same goes for the Migrant Merchants Guild.
If you stick with the type of Smuggler I tend to play --the Gunslinger-- it's a pretty standard build. And in keeping with modern MMOs, new abilities simply appear on my bar without me having to go train somewhere. It's a bit disconcerting, but it is what it is.
Having returned to the Republic side for the first time in a while, I can see the bugs and roughness out there that haven't really been cleaned up over the years --or in the case of the companion pathing, bugs added over the years-- but the visuals and the sound are still fantastic. The sound alone makes you feel like you're outside in a city where the skyscrapers create canyons, and there's just that urban sound that you hear when you're walking around a downtown area. The sound at Ord Mantell is also excellent, and really immerses you in the game.
And those cutscenes. Can't forget the cutscenes. This one starring Senator Kayl.
The more I've gone into leveling this Smuggler, the more I realize that there's issues where a new player would get confused, such as getting a Training and Skills quest only to find yourself on the Republic Fleet long before you're supposed to arrive there. At least I knew how to get back to Ord Mantell, but if I'd been a new player, I'd have been screwed.
Oh, and as you can tell from my top screencap above, I turned off that new map overlay and went with the traditional minimap, just like how I turned Corso into the Tank he always was meant to be.
It was kind of like seeing old friends again, such as talking to Pat-aK once more:
And Senator Whats-her-name. Yes, I'm ready to be your Black Bisector, Pat-aK.
Even when I return to WoW Classic, I have to keep this player going. Not sure how, but I've developed a better tolerance for the pathing issue this time around, but we'll see how long I tolerate it. If I get to Balmorra, that'll be farther than I've gotten in a long time.
*Creating that one Smuggler for the screencaps of the intro quest a year or two ago for a post here doesn't count. I went back and played a Jedi Sentinel instead and got as far as Taris for I grew tired of the pathing issues.
I realize that I don't point out videos the way some other bloggers do --gaming blogs or not-- but it's not that I don't watch YouTube videos. Yes, I watch my share of music and sports and gamer videos, but I delve into whatever piques my interest. You know, topics such as solar power, blacksmithing, cooking, and other stuff.* Right now, I've been going down the rabbit hole of pellet smoker grills**, but something I also have been keeping an eye on is written SF&F, because I'm a nerd who grew up reading Tolkien, Eddings, Moorcock, Asimov, James Blish, and Fred Saberhagen.
So when a video from Brandon Sanderson's YouTube channel popped up in my feed, I was curious:
I'd never actually heard Brandon Sanderson speak until now***, but yes, he is planning on recording his entire series of lectures in 2025 for the Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy class he teaches at BYU. Apparently he's done this before, but since the first entry in the series is only 14 days old or so, I'm catching this right at the beginning.
I found his lecture to be engaging and honestly a lot of fun, which bodes well for the rest of the lectures.
Me, I just want to know how he cranks out these mammoth novels as if it were effortless. I know it's not that easy --I do write, after all-- but I also know he's been doing this for quite a while now and so he's got a good cadence down. One thing he did mention in that first lecture about outliners versus discoverers**** was that he mentioned that discoverers have issues with over-editing, where you are constantly going back and editing what you've written. And, dammit, he has me pegged right there. I am a discoverer, and I have issues constantly going back and tweaking my written work before I've actually finished the damn thing.
(If you ever wondered if there's more fiction in the pipeline, yes, there is. And now you know my Achilles' Heel.)
Maybe I ought to create a Friday lecture post as a recurring item, pointing to an online lecture that I found interesting. I can't really take "Friday Fun Day", since that's the informal title Tim Cain uses for his Friday YouTube posts. So, watch this space to see if I do anything with it, and if you write or are interested in the craft of writing, go watch the video. It is definitely worth the hour's lecture.
*No, not so much on makeup (sorry), but I do watch videos about sewing and cosplay and historical/fantastical clothing. Hey, it's engineering with cloth and thread!
**I'm sure my Questing Buddy can give you an earful about how I've been pestering one of our friend group about his Pit Boss smoker since I've been thinking about having a proper smoker to use on the deck once I'm finished rebuilding it. Right now I have plenty of time to narrow models down, since it's not even late Winter yet and there's snow covering the deck at the moment.
***John Scalzi is from Ohio, and he periodically makes visits to our local independent bookstore for readings and signings, so I have heard him before. I've also heard Kim Harrison at the same bookstore quite by accident when I didn't know she was doing a signing; her Hallows books are set in a Fantastical version of Cincinnati. Yes, before you ask, she does have quite the following here locally, even though she's not a local herself. She's from Michigan, which amuses me to no end. Why, you may ask? Because of the rivalry between The Ohio State University and the University of Michigan.
I've also attended signings by Anne McCaffrey, Terry Brooks, and Robert Jordan, among others.
****In terms of writing style: do you have an outline you follow or you just wing it?
Yesterday I spent the afternoon getting my eyes checked out. I'm nearsighted and have been wearing bifocals for about a decade or more now, so I make a point to have my eyes checked regularly anyway, but ever since my Type 2 diagnosis these visits have taken on a greater amount of importance.
The TL;DR is that my eyes are fine, and no evidence of deterioration due to diabetes. Thanks for asking.
That being said, being "normal" in your mid-50s means your response times aren't what they once were. One of the eye tests involves me looking through an eyehole at a square dot on a screen, and when squiggles become visible around my peripheral vision I'm to use a clicker in my hand. I don't believe I missed any of the squiggles, but I did notice that my response wasn't what it had been in the past. I was assured I was well in the normal range for my age, but if you're a gamer or an athlete you're used to comparing yourself against people who are decidedly NOT normal for their age.
From Reddit.
I came out of the appointment with a serious case of mixed emotions. Yes, it's good to have eyes that aren't showing signs of diabetic deterioration, glaucoma, and anything of that ilk, and my prescription didn't change enough that I didn't have to get a new pair of glasses this year. (Yay!)
But.
It's also depressing to know that what is "normal" for my age is the equivalent of "git gud scrub" in gamer terms.
Remember how I'm not a fan of Heroic or Mythic/Mythic Plus modes of group content in MMOs? The knowledge that I simply no longer have the physical skill to perform at a level necessary to be competent at them is the depressing part. When I read or watch videos online about Mythic+ this and Mythic+ that and the people are all about "this is too easy" or "this needs to be tweaked" or "I got [fill in the blank] achievement" or "we downed XXX on Mythic", all I can think of is that they're talking about a part of MMOs I simply can't play. It's not a matter of choosing not to play that, but that I simply can't do it at all.*
This was me at times in progression raiding during TBC Classic. Sometimes, The Simpsons hits the nail on the head. From Pinterest (and The Simpsons).
It's akin to the time I was attempting to repair my wife's old Kindle and I discovered to my horror that my eyes could no longer focus close in for me to do the job; I had to give up and get a magnifying glass to attempt to complete the repair.** For a guy who prided himself on his ability to tinker with electronics, it was a real blow to have to rely on magnifying glasses to see details properly. What's next, needing one of those light up magnifiers to read a menu?
The Light Up Menu Magnifier does exist. "AS SEEN ON TV!" From Amazon.
Or worse, using The Clapper to play video games?
I guess this is a reality about aging that people have to come to grips with, not just gamers. It's easy to forget this when you're in the middle of something, and you don't notice the long term gradual deterioration of skills. It's only when you go away from something and come back some time later that you realize just what had happened. Or if you're a data nerd and have kept track of details for so long that you can see the gradual deterioration in your own data. (Seriously, that'll take years, and good luck with keeping that data collection going for that long.)
An ex-coworker of mine is the father of a famous League of Legends player, and he once told me that his son realized that he has maybe 4-5 years at best of being in the position he's in, so he was saving all of his salary so that he can do what he wants (such as go to university) when his skills deteriorate. At age thirty at latest, or most likely in the mid-late 20s.
I'll get over this, but it was still a nice kick in the nuts for a Wednesday and I needed to vent a bit.
*This also begs the question just how much of MMO game design is for people both skilled enough and young enough to perform well enough in that high end aspect of the game? If you watch YouTube videos you'd get the impression that this subset of the game is all that's important about World of Warcraft. Those content creators --and the high end guilds-- are the loudest voices in the room, and they undoubtedly have an influence over WoW's game design. It also becomes a feedback loop where the game is tailored toward people who play in that niche so they attract people who only play in that niche and demand more content for that niche, and so on and so forth.
**I did not succeed in repairing said Kindle. That was also a blow to my ego.
I sat down for lunch yesterday, opened my personal mail, and....
"Oh, this ought to be good," I thought, and opened it.
It kept going after this part...
I mean, I know it's an automated system to detect when a certain amount of time had passed since a subscription ended, but I was still surprised they didn't give me a full day. My game time ended at 7:30-ish in the morning yesterday, yet I kept noticing the "Time Left" marker bouncing around with "XX Hours Left" growing and shrinking at-will, which I thought considerably odd. At one point I did login just to see if I got to the loading screen, and yeah, it actually worked about six hours past when it should have stopped.
At that point I just shrugged and let it be, and several hours later Battle.Net finally admitted my time had logged out. I did note there was some maintenance going on Monday, so that might have been it. However, it also wouldn't have surprised me if Blizzard had configured people's accounts to actually grant a few extra hours just on the off chance that someone had messed up and wasn't paying attention to their looming ending time.
Well, you can't say that Blizzard doesn't try to keep people subscribed, because they started throwing mounts and pets at me in the latter half of the email:
Apparently Era and the Anniversary Servers are known as "World of Warcraft Classic games", and the version currently on Cata Classic is called "World of Warcraft Classic Progression realms".
If they only knew I really don't care much about mounts or pets, but since that takes an absolute minimum amount of effort to hand out to people, that's why they're acting like it's Halloween candy.
I wonder what Blizzard would think if they knew that when I play SWTOR I use a speeder I've had since 2011 or a regular horse in LOTRO and ESO in the same way that I use a basic mount in various versions of WoW since 2010? I'm the sort of player who if I played a Battle Royale game I'd use the default skin because, if nothing else, it means that other players would underestimate me.
Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York --Richard, Duke of Gloucester, from Richard III by William Shakespeare
My Questing Buddy has had a bit of a rough time on the WoW Classic Anniversary server lately. She wanted to raid but she lives in the Pacific Time Zone, so she wanted to join a guild that raids on PST evening hours. Luckily for her, she found one, so she joined the guild and pushed to get raid ready by their start date.* Despite my reservations at how she was pushing herself --and believe me, I'm kind of sensitive to that sort of thing now-- she managed to pull it off and also get most of her pre-raid BiS gear** prior to going to her first Molten Core and Onyxia raids.
She's a very experienced Classic raider, so other than the "herding cats" portion of 40 person raids, she knew what she needed to do. Oh, and she's a damn good healer too,*** so no issues there. Given that the guild wanted to operate in a semi-hardcore manner, I figured that everybody going in was experienced in the early Vanilla raids.
Oh, how wrong I was.
The day after her first raid with them, I asked her how it went. "It was a shitshow," she replied, and then proceeded to discuss in detail some pretty standard rookie problems in Molten Core, such as line of sight issues and whatnot, but to top it off there were some questionable raid team decisions, such as taking your world buffs out of the Chronoboon**** before Garr, a boss well known to wipe undergeared MC raids. As you can guess, that exact thing happened, so everybody lost their raid buffs in one fell swoop. Well, except for my Questing Buddy, who sensed disaster looming and refused unboon her buffs as asked.
This is actually Baron Geddon, not Garr, but you get the idea. I think they wiped on Geddon too. From The Lurker Lounge.
There were also petty issues with loot, because instead of using DKP or Loot Reserve or even Main Spec rolls they went with a variety of Loot Council called "That's My BiS". Knowing that Loot Council was involved was bad enough, but the raid itself not going well kind of exacerbated loot issues.
After unburdening everything about that first raid night, she told me she'd give them two weeks to clean up their shit or she was leaving.
The next week, I was surprised to hear from her that the raid went really smoothly. I chalked up the first raid night to just getting people on the same page, and figured things would continue to get better.
(I did mention about being wrong, correct? Yep, I did.)
This past week was another shitshow, with similar line of sight issues, tanks yelling at healers (and vice versa), and DPS pulling bosses or not knowing where to stand, and then to top it off there was even MORE loot drama, but this time with the That's My BiS system itself and how the Guild Master let friends change their loot lists after certain loot had already dropped. It's more complicated than that, but the gist of it is that a lot of people were really upset that some people were allowed to change things after they saw what other people had wanted for their loot lists.
Yes, I know, it's petty, but that's MMOs for you.
So, over the weekend, there was a guild meeting to see if they were going to disband or not, and the net result was that the worst offenders were given the boot and a new guild created with most of everybody else --my Questing Buddy included-- joining. I guess we'll see how that goes.
***
As for me, things have been slow.
Unlike some other versions of Linna, she's got a serious look. That was a mistake as I was in a hurry to make sure nobody took the name, but I do kind of like it. When Paladins are "working", they tend to be pretty serious. This is a listing as of January 27, 2025.
Not slow as in "not leveling fast" --okay, there's that too-- but slow as in "not doing much".
I spend a bit of my time moving from place to place, doing this and that, but just am not really feeling into playing the Anniversary servers very much. Or truth be told, WoW in general. I had 1.5 days off last week, and you'd think that I'd have gotten online and played a bit, but... nah, I didn't. I did other things, such as cleaning. Or napping.
Or, worse, upgrading my PC to Windows 11.
No, I'm not thrilled about that, but if we were going to be forced into it by Microsoft, I was going to be the one to go first and upgrade my kids' laptops later.*****
When I am online, I've discovered I've leveled so slowly that even people I've had conversations in Westfall about taking their time while leveling are in their upper L30s and lower L40s now. As you can tell from the loading screen above, my highest toon is L22. I can now spend an entire evening on a single toon and not get that toon to go up a level once. I don't mind the lack of progress, but I do mind when people want to help me out. I get where they think they're helping or they just want to play with me, and there are times when I wonder if I'd still be kind of meh about WoW if I were closer to max level.
You apparently get a mustache too.
This old chestnut came out in March 2014.
The in-game boosters do play on this FOMO, but I don't think that's it. I've even begun avoiding my friends' alts when I play, because I'm just not really feeling it and I don't want to be a Debbie Downer.
Well, there's also the likelihood that my friends will want their alts to be boosted, but I have enough toons I'm working on that if I did get a boost run somewhere on one of them I simply won't play that toon until my other toons catch up. Given the slowness of the leveling pace, it may be a couple of weeks between playing on the various toons.
***
Just when I wasn't really feeling it, my game time expired on Monday.
This was the first time in about a decade --and the first time since August 2019 when WoW Classic launched-- where I sat there and gave serious thought whether I should purchase another 60 days' worth of game time or not. I've toyed with it in the past, but I don't think I ever really thought about it that seriously until now. In the end, I decided I was going to just let it lapse for a few days. I imagine that there's going to be a rush of FOMO at first --it happened when I unsubbed in 2014 before Warlords of Draenor came out-- but after that dies down in a few days if I still kind of feel like I want to play, I'll go buy another 60 days' worth.
We'll see how it goes.
*Obviously, it was going to be much faster than I wanted to get to level cap.
**"You lucky bastard!" was how I put it when she described how many attempts it took to get her "blue dress" from UBRS. Something along the lines of 2 or 3 tries. And yeah, our other friends have been getting drops like the Hand of Justice out of Blackrock Depths or the Recipe for the Crusader Enchantment with such ease that it makes a mockery of the incredibly bad luck I have in getting gear and/or drops.
***Which is kind of funny, given that we met when she was tanking on her Druid, and she also raided on her Warlock in TBC Classic.
****Blizzard created a Chronoboon, a device used to store world buffs, as a single use item sold by a vendor in the Western Plaguelands. While not found in original Vanilla WoW, it was created to combat the problem generated by people who would accumulate all of their world buffs prior to raiding and then simply log out for several days until raid night. This way, a player could store the world buffs until they were ready to use them in the raid.
*****Things went very smoothly, to my surprise. There's a bad driver here and there, but nothing I can't fix.
