Meme Monday: Groundhog Memes

I'm old enough to remember a time before the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. 

Okay, it was only 1993, but it's still a year older than my marriage.

Back in the Before Times, Groundhog Day was a kind of cute but meaningless holiday in the same vein as "National Cheesecake Day" (July 30th) or "National Bratwurst Day" (August 16)*.

Then that movie came along, and... Well... It's now a meme all on its own about reliving the same day over and over and over...

Being from Ohio, I kind of like this.
From Pinterest.

From imgflip.

From Redbubble.

From keenanraynor.blogspot.com.

*I was actually surprised that National Bratwurst Day wasn't every weekend during football tailgate season. Maybe that's because I live in the Midwest, but brats are a staple of tailgating here.

In Case You Ever Wondered Whether Game Companies are Soulless Corporations...

...I give you the latest little brouhaha from Blizzard.

I give major props to Brian Birmingham, the now ex-Activision-Blizzard manager, for his principled stand against the stacked ranking corporate policy at A-B, but as soon as I read the words "stacked ranking" I knew he was swimming against the tide.

For the life of me, I have no idea why executive corporate management loves stacked ranking among those other "corporate trends" --I'm looking at you, open office floor designs*-- but that it was popularized by GE's Jack Welch says a lot. 

I've been in the work force full time since 1991, and yes, I've encountered stacked ranking before. Numerous times. And its basic principle, that teams should be shoehorned into a bell curve and that the bottom 10% are poor performers, is something I despise. There is very little nuance to the stacked ranking system, where the best performer on a crappy team is given a higher ranking than an average to poor performer on a fantastic team. The stacked ranking system also encourages cutthroat behavior among peers, which includes such items as coworkers sabotaging projects to make their own work look better. Again, I've seen such behavior in the past among coworkers. The focus isn't on putting out good work, but playing the system to maximum advantage. 

From AD&D Dungeon Masters
Guide (1e), Page 111.

So yeah, I have a history with stacked ranking. 

And if you're playing politics with the system, you're not spending time putting out a good product. And in the case of Blizzard, you're not developing bug free, well designed games.

*I'm incredibly grateful I work from home, because if I had to work at the office, it would have been in an open office design. Even in a post-pandemic world, corporations still love the open office design for some strange ungodly reason. I work in IT Security, so by nature I tend to have sensitive material up on screen a lot of the time. If you're thinking "Hey, wait a minute, if it's up on screen and you're in an open office, anybody can walk by and see that!" then you'd be absolutely correct. Without any privacy whatsoever, there's little ability to securely handle sensitive data. I didn't say there's no ability, because you still can, but proper handling of sensitive data out in the open also involves additional cost, and cost is the antithesis of corporate life.

Must Be Something about Changing the Title Pic

I haven't been talking much about raiding in Wrath Classic, mainly because there wasn't much to report.

After all, I was part of a rather casual 10 person raid team, and we'd been clearing Wrath's version of Naxxramas, the Eye of Eternity (aka "The Malygos raid"), and Obsidian Sanctum (aka "The Sarth + Drakes raid"). We'd hit a wall trying to down Sartharion with all three Drakes alive, but given that apparently the 10s version of Sarth + 3 Drakes is much harder than the 25s version, I wasn't too concerned about it. I mean, I felt bad that we weren't downing the 3 Drakes on 10s when 25s teams were doing it with aplomb, but apparently teams with full 25 BiS Phase One gear were failing to down the 10s version, which made me feel much better about the supposed "EZ Mode" that 10 person raids are in Wrath Classic.

With Ulduar opening up, all this was destined to change.

Oh, so THERE it is!

As I'd never raided in the original Wrath, I never knew where the entrance to Ulduar actually was. After all, it's not something you can ride to from the flight point, unlike the Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightning 5-person instances. And yes, I got lost trying to figure out where the entrance to Ulduar was on that first night's worth of raiding. I guess that is the same sort of thing that would have happened if I actually was able to raid Black Temple in TBC Classic, because I once spent a half an hour flying around, trying to figure out the entrance to Black Temple, and I still don't know where the entrance is.* I think I used to know, because I have a hazy memory of soloing BT back in 2014 or so, but burn me if I can't find it now.

And I thought the entrance to the original Naxxramas was a puzzle.

Ulduar is the instance where Steampunk and World of Warcraft collide in a big way. While there's a ramp up in TBC Classic --such as Netherstorm or my questing buddy's 'copter, which she absolutely loves-- it was Wrath of the Lich King where Blizzard went all in on a steampunk setting for World of Warcraft. From the design of Warsong Hold --my oldest explicitly mentioned to me the Steampunk elements to the complex the first time she saw it-- to the vehicle oriented World PvP in Wintergrasp** you can't avoid the overt Steampunk to the game. But really, once a player reaches The Storm Peaks with its Marvel-esque Nordic vision of the Titan Keepers, down to names such as Freya, Loken, Mimrir, and Thorim, you realize that the Steampunk in Azeroth wasn't just a "flavor of the month" design but rather Blizzard consciously deciding that Azeroth was created by tech beyond what the current inhabitants could achieve.

Kind of like an MMO version of Anne McCaffrey's Pern, complete with dragons.

The cover art for Dragonwriter, a tribute
to Anne McCaffrey. Art by Michael Whelan,
who painted almost all of the Pern cover art.

The centerpiece of The Storm Peaks is Ulduar, what appears to be a titan city, but is in fact something else... 

Oh come on, I'm not gonna spoil it for you, despite Ulduar having been out in Retail WoW for over a decade now. 

But that time interval also means that Ulduar is --like almost all of WoW once something is released into the wild-- a solved raid. There are already tons of articles and videos on how to optimally raid Ulduar, from the raid composition to the Best in Slot (BiS) lists to even the boss order you should take to blitz through the content.

Due to that, and since I wasn't doing as much DPS as Fire Spec compared to Arcane Mage in the raid, I was asked to switch to Arcane in early January. 

I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as to where this might be going. I knew that my Fire Spec for a single target boss isn't as good as Arcane Spec, although AOE damage for a Fire Mage is superior to that of an Arcane Mage, but I liked playing as a Fire Mage. The way a Fire Mage has to run into melee range, drop some casts in the scrum, then blink away so I can then rain fiery damage from distance just suits my playing style. But even the difference between Arcane and Fire aside, my fellow Mage had been running 25 person raids and whose gear was decently superior to my own, so it was only natural that her damage was also greater.*** 

But like a good teammate, I set aside my internal concerns about the raid creeping toward the hardcore, saluted, and switched to an Arcane spec.

We were then dealt a blow when we lost our Warlock, who decided to play fewer characters in Wrath Classic, and our raid got the short end of the stick.  Still, we had 11 players on the team, so despite missing a Lock we could still field a full raid. That was good for us, since the raid leads had personally reached out to people that they liked to raid with and had agreed with our focus for this particular raid team. While most people raided with other toons, 25 person raids, or both, a few of us --myself included-- kept to only this particular raid team. After what I dealt with in TBC Classic, I was happy to have low expectations and a casual attitude toward raiding. This time around, I was not going to get sucked into the Meta and hardcore progression grind.

And I thought our little raid team was insulated from that grind.

We got into Ulduar last week and... It felt weird. I'll have to go into it more on another post, but unlike Karazhan --whom I have issues with the internal logic of the entire place-- Ulduar just feels like an inflection point in WoW's history. 

***

I was online, doing something on Neve, when the post appeared in the raid's Discord on Saturday night. 

The Pally Healer and the Hunter were leaving the raid team.

They were running 25 person raids together, and they wanted to also push into 10 person hard modes**** much faster than we were. For our raid team, hard modes were something we'd like to eventually do, but it wasn't a priority; we had people in raid with young families, and people like me who burned out on the hardcore progression, so getting all sweaty in pursuit of the hardcore wasn't something we were interested in doing.

Since our raid team wasn't going to progress into hard modes fast enough, the two decided to leave our raid and join an "in house" raid team composed of members of their 25 person raid. Several classes have BiS items that are found in Ulduar's hard mode 10 person raids, so if your 25 person raid demands you get your BiS gear you have to get as quickly into 10 person hard modes as possible.*****

The Meta caught up to our little raid team after all.

Monday evening before the raid we had a meeting with the raid leads. The Pally healer was there for one last time, but we were still a person short: our Shaman.

It was then that the raid leads had announced that our Shaman had begun ghosting them over the week, and didn't bother signing up for tonight's raid. My heart sank.

Based on all that and that neither raid lead wanted to spend time recruiting, vetting, and bringing new raiders into a raid that was designed to be pretty laid back and a friends' raid, they decided to shut down the raid instead. Given that we only had 9 people we went into Naxx, Eye of Eternity, and Obsidian Sanctum one last time, but that was the end.

***

And so ends my Wrath Classic raiding.

I have not much desire to go raid any further, as it seems that even casual raids have to work hard to keep from backsliding into a more hardcore stance. I do know that my old friend Jes has been running 25 person pug raids of her own, and I know she'd be happy to have me sign up, but I really have no desire to join a raid that is nominally hosted by the franken guild, pug or not. Even if I was so inclined, I noticed who was signing up for the raid and some of those are people I don't care to ever raid with again.

It's not as if I'm giving up on Wrath Classic. The new Heroic Plus 5-person instances --what I've dubbed the "Mythic Plus of Wrath Classic"-- are sufficiently difficult enough that I'm happy to run some of those and scratch that group content itch. Beyond that, there's plenty of things that I can do that have nothing to do with raiding, so I'll be fine. In spite of what the majority of the Classic playerbase seems to think, endgame raiding isn't why I play Wrath Classic. It never was.

*No, I didn't break down and look up where the Black Temple entrance was on Wowhead, either.

**For Wrath Classic, Wintergrasp became an instanced battleground, but originally it was designed as a World PvP event where the winning faction gained access to the Vault of Archavon mini-raid. If you were on an imbalanced server --and most people were-- if you were on the wrong faction you never got into Vault of Archavon. Of course, now everybody can get access to VoA, because all it takes to gain access to Vault of Archavon is having exactly one person on your faction on the server having won Wintergrasp to gain access to VoA for your faction.

***In Wrath Classic, both sets of raids --10 person and 25 person-- drop their own gear. Due to the supposed increased difficulty of 25 person raids --and more people to gear for-- the 25 person raids drop gear with supposedly superior stats. That doesn't mean that an item from a 10 person raid might not be BiS for your toon and your spec, but a 25 person raider going down to a 10 person raid is going to have better gear than someone (like me) who kept to 10 person raids. The two types of raids don't share the same lockout, so Cardwyn could theoretically join both a 10 person raid and a 25 person raid of Ulduar that same week without issue.

****Wrath of the Lich King saw the beginning of hard modes for raid content. You could flip a switch in the raid and suddenly the raid entered an increased level of difficulty with the promise of better loot overall for each class of raiding. 

*****Okay, one thing needs to be said: if you want to go all in on hardcore, and apparently a ton of people do, that means you're running full Ulduar raids --one 10 person raid and one 25 person raid-- twice a week on your main toon. And if you've got multiple toons, you can easily see where you spend every night of the week raiding in some form or another. I was listening to a YouTube video when it was mentioned that Warcraftlogs had announced that the first week of Ulduar had the most registered parses of any raid, my first thought was "Duh." Alas, I've not been able to confirm that mention independently, so I'd place this as "not surprising but unconfirmed".

EtA: Fixed a formatting issue.

Meme Monday: Monday Memes

This is kind of an obvious theme for Meme Mondays, and I've been remiss in presenting it. So, while you're waiting for your coffee or tea to finish brewing, here you go:

Yep. Yep yep yep.
From Pinterest.

Sometimes Hoth is the perfect
metaphor for Mondays.
From Tumblr.

I vote for the former.
From memegenerator.net.

Every freaking weekend.
From Cheezburger's Memebase.

A Winter's Day in a Deep and Dark... Uh... January...

(I've been under a bit of a writers block lately, so this post is mainly out there to force myself to write something to completion. You have been warned.)

Something I've been puzzling over the past couple of months has been my lack of interest in movies and television the past decade or so. Okay, to be fair, my declining interest in movies started long before that; I think the last movie I saw in the theater or on television was The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. And before that, uh... Wall-e, maybe? 

Now, I get where my lack of reading fiction has come from: I know that once I get started on a book, I'll keep going until I look up and it's 5 AM and I should have gone to sleep hours ago.* There's also my experiences with authors who don't know how to get their stories to end, such as the time I threw my hands up in the air and decided that Robert Jordan was never going to finish The Wheel of Time (this was when Path of Daggers came out) and gave up on that series, so no, that didn't start with George R.R. Martin. Then there's also the grimdark nature of "modern and sophisticated" F&SF, which seems to have a requirement that the primary characters need to suffer in order to move the plot forward, as if authors and their audience are all Friedrich Nietzsche fans.

Ah yes, Kevin Kline from
A Fish Called Wanda.

This doesn't explain my lack of interest in movies or television shows, because I used to like watching series. I mean, I wasn't a movie buff in the classic sense, nor was I someone who'd spend every evening watching television, but I watched enough shows and saw enough movies that I was at least reasonably acquainted with the moviegoing experience.

I mean, hell, I even watched a daytime soap opera for several months while I was attending college**, so I even have that bona fide.

But... I guess I don't know for sure why fictional television series and movies don't hold much interest for me. 

Actually, maybe I do. And it has to do with my psyche.

And The Big Bang Theory.

In real life, I'm not a big fan of crowds or interacting with people I don't know. Going to parties is not on my social agenda***, and I avoid situations that put me out on a limb in public. And those (to me) awkward social interactions that involve risk such as asking someone out/going on a date, dealing with problems at work, or even interacting with people at an otherwise fun event such as a Renaissance Fair raise my anxiety level. I mean, I can do them, but I don't relish them and based on failed past experiences I try to avoid them if at all possible.

So where does The Big Bang Theory fit into all this? Because about midway through the run of TBBT on network television, episodes that made me entirely uncomfortable watching began showing up. Not for any sex or violence or language, but the cringe of watching awkward social interactions play out on television in a way that made me get up and leave the room. 

Other people could potentially watch The Closet Reconfiguration without a problem, but the gang not respecting Howard's wishes and reading the letter from his estranged father without his consent --and passing it around-- would have been a deal breaker for me. There are certain lines you don't cross, and that blatant disrespect for Howard's wishes in a topic as sensitive as his dad would have been enough for me to cut them out. I don't care that the gang felt bad about it afterward, that they did it in the first place meant I would never trust any one of them again.****

Or in The Speckerman Recurrence, where Leonard is contacted via Facebook by someone who bullied him all through high school, I simply can't watch because I would never have accepted the meeting request in the first place. When I left high school, I left that part of my life behind and simply cut off pretty much all ties with my classmates. I'd have a hard time finding a smaller violin to play a sad tune on if someone from that period in my life --particularly more so if it were one of the bullies-- were to reach out to me. And watching that train wreck of an episode (from my perspective) was too much, especially when Leonard accepted the invitation to meet for drinks. 

Thank you, Mr. Bucemi.
From giphy.com.

After about that episode, I dropped The Big Bang Theory from my watch list, and... well... I haven't picked up anything since. Maybe it's because I'm happier playing it safe, but I don't find any amount of catharsis from watching shows that make me cringe. Or watching characters I like suffer and/or die.***** Yeah, I know what happens to Hedwig. And Sirius Black. And Dumbledore. And in Avengers: Infinity War. And in the World of Warcraft Legion expansion. And in Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood. And, well, you get the idea. If you want to avoid spoilers to anything and everything, probably Rule #1 is to throw out your internet connection. 

Maybe that's why I like open world games and RPG settings and whatnot: you are free to imagine the possibilities --what might be, and not what is-- so that you can forget all of the cringe inducing aspects of work and life. While other people might enjoy movies and television, I no longer can. I've seen enough parts of my life that I've desperately tried to bury dug up and put on screen much too frequently over the years to relax and enjoy the ride.

*There's more to it than just that. I do have issues with series fiction, where I get to a point where I just like where the characters are and... I'm just reluctant to move past that. I guess I know that bad things will happen --that's the entire point of fiction, it seems, to provide conflict-- and I look at that next book in the series and go "I'm perfectly fine where the characters are right now, thanks." That's why I've not continued series such as Kristen Britain's Green Rider novels past The High King's Tomb, finished off the Mistborn trilogy, or gotten much deeper than a book or two into the two Jim Butcher series of novels. Or, yes, even Harry Potter; I stopped after Goblet of Fire, and never had much of an inclination to pick up the rest of the books in the series. It's not that I think the stories above were bad or anything, I was just fine where I was at, and didn't feel the need to move beyond that point.

**Days of our Lives, circa late 1988 to early 1989. Beware, there's waaaay too much 80's hair in that YouTube video.

***And yes, this has caused heated arguments with my wife on numerous occasions. My wife is an extrovert and much more outgoing than I am, and in the early years of our marriage we frequently fought over her desire to go out to bars and listen to bands, whereas I just wanted to relax at home and do homebody stuff. I don't know when we stopped fighting over this, but I think we eventually settled into an uneasy truce. There are still flare ups over my avoidance of these things, but not so often as before. It's not that she understands me so much as whether she wants to spend time arguing with me over it.

****As a kid I dealt with betrayals like that, and if there's one thing I've learned from sad experience is that if someone does something like this once, they won't stop at just the one thing. Even if they feel remorse for having done that first thing. The old "fool me once, shame on you; fool be twice, shame on me" adage in full display for everyone to see.

*****With George R.R. Martin, you get both for the price of one!

EtA: Corrected grammar.

Meme Monday: Winter Blahs Memes

You know you're in the depths of Winter when you kind of start wishing it were warm outside.

Okay, for a person --like me-- who prefers Fall and Winter, you can reach your breaking point sometime after mid-January when the unceasingly gray landscape starts to get to you. So, here's some memes to break up the monotony:

"Always look on the bright side of life..."
From makeameme.org

Ya gotta believe.
From winkgo.com.

That's pretty accurate, but in my
case my wife would use that as a prelude
to shoving me off the bed in her sleep.
Yes, I've woken up on the floor before.
From thefunnyplace.net.

Uh... That's gonna be a while, Snoopy.
From lovethispic.com.

Meme Monday: Miscellaneous Memes (again)

I suppose that most Meme Mondays are "miscellaneous" in one form or another, but here's yet another collection of various and sundry memes:

I've, uh, done this before.
From rpg.net.

I'm not saying that some MMO players
are assholes... Okay, yeah, I kind of am.
From Vance Whitmer.

When my questing buddy asks
me to be a murder hobo for her,
I pull out this handy chart.
From FB's dndmemes.

Yeah, it's kind of like that.
From Reddit.