I Ain't Blind and I Don't Like What I Think I See...

I've been on a bit of a 70s kick lately, and that doesn't mean I've been wearing loud clothing* or considering putting in wooden paneling in the house.

Sorry, that's not Boston, but The Doobie Brothers. (True story: my dad had absolutely no clue what a "doobie" was, so when I made a joke back in the 90s about the Doobies' concerts probably smelling pretty dank, he looked at me like I'd grown another arm. "Dad," I said, "A 'doobie' is another name for a joint. So the band's name is a bunch of friends smoking marijuana.")

Anyway, as I've been cleaning since my oldest left home, I've stumbled on the old Intellivision console that we now have in a plastic storage container, and I've begun some investigations as to how to get that and our Atari to connect to a modern television. Ironically enough, the easiest "solution" out there --outside of finding an old CRT television-- is to pull out a VCR and use it to convert the RF signal to a composite signal. Still, I'm not entirely convinced of this method, so I'm poking around at solutions that actually work that don't involve another large piece of electronic equipment.

It may not look like much, but given a 4KB
game limitation, it's really quite impressive.
From YouTube.

I periodically check out the prices of old 70s-era receivers and other audio equipment, and the asking prices make me cringe. Knowing that a lot of that equipment would likely need the electrolytic capacitors replaced as well as the belts for the cassettes, it's rather sad just how insane the used market has gotten. 

Instead of that, at least I could listen to music from the 70s. Hence that Doobie Brothers' line from Takin' It To The Streets in the title.

***

I suppose with a title like that you'd be forgiven if I was referencing the shenanigans happening in Retail WoW's latest expansion, The War Within.

From a blue post on Blizzard forums.
Thank you, Snip-and-sketch.

I'm not surprised, and my natural inclination is to look at this as a way to convince more people to spring for Early Access for the next expansion. After all, the beta test ought to have shaken this sort of issue out, but maybe that's an indicator that the beta wasn't as useful as it could have been.

But in general, I'm not shocked by this sort of behavior. 

Does anybody else remember the Quel'Delar questline that began with the Battered Hilt drop in the Icecrown Citadel 5-person dungeons in Wrath? When those dungeons were first released, the Battered Hilt dropped far more frequently than intended, so those first several days a ton of people got to work on their Quel'Delar quests before the drop rate was nerfed down to intended levels. Those of us who followed behind those who rushed ahead were left scraping for the occasional drop if you didn't want to spring for 5000 or more gold for one on the Auction House.** Of course, that was a drop for a specific questline, not a general nerf to the actual leveling experience in the game.

Again, given that Microsoft plopped a ton of money on purchasing Activision Blizzard, they want a maximum return on their investment. So, while this ain't loot boxes, this is a way of using FOMO and other psychological tactics to convince people to hand over their money. I expect more of this sort of behavior in the future from Blizzard. Even if the entire issue is an innocent one it will always be viewed from the lens of profits first, players second, because once the trust between developer and player has been broken, it can't easily be restored.

And that's all I'll say about that. 

*With or without Garanimals tags. You don't know about Garanimals? Hoo boy... Where do I begin?

From Pinterest.

Whomever came up with Garanimals basically made pattern matching easy for parents. Clothing came with animal tags on them; match the animals up for the different pieces (shirts, pants, skirts, etc.) and you have matching clothing. Sounds great in theory, but the joke among my peers as we became teenagers was that the clothing was so loud you needed help just trying to figure out what was supposed to go with what. Garanimals were all the rage in the late 70s and early 80s, but they've recently made a comeback aimed at clothing for babies and toddlers.

**Even back then I was pretty poor, gold-wise.

#Blaugust2024

Rawr, She Said

My Questing Buddy has been going into Alterac Valley with me the past week, as she has her eye on some gear that you can buy once you become Exalted with the Stormpike Guard. I know she'd had a rough time in Warsong Gulch in TBC Classic when one of her BiS pieces was available from the Silverwing Sentinels, but I think I might have miscalculated how her competitiveness was going to surface in AV.

#Blaugust2024

Just an Ambulance Chaser, Working Away

One of the things that I've been doing since my oldest moved out is clean. 

Part of it is simply cleaning the areas where the guinea pigs once had their cages, but beyond that I've begun moving stuff around as I clean so that I can finally give the house a thorough cleaning it's not had in at least a decade. 

Normally this is a Spring Cleaning sort of thing, but since I'm taking a short break from working on the deck --and given the heat this week, that's very much a good thing-- I've channeled my energies toward making my space that much cleaner instead.*

Alas for me, that means I've been hit with nostalgia of a different sort.

Right now, I've got this out of the basement, cleaned up --thank you, isopropyl alcohol-- and currently scanning away:

It's a Radio Shack Pro-2035.

I acquired that from a yard sale before I began playing WoW, so probably sometime around 2006 - 2008, for the grand total of $35. Considering the original list price of $449.99 in 1995, that was a pretty damn good deal. 

For a while I wondered why the person was selling it so cheaply, but a few years afterward I discovered why he sold what was at one time the top of the line scanner that Radio Shack had: Cincinnati Police and Fire were moving toward a trunked system, which this scanner could not receive. 

Still, there are quite a few broadcasts in my local area that can be received by this scanner, so this afternoon I've been hearing about all of the paramedic and fire department activity within several miles of my house.**

***

I was never really a scanner listener, although when I did that 8 month stint at Radio Shack we did have our (then) top of the line scanner up and running, which made for very interesting listening when there was nobody in the store. There was a McDonalds about a football field away, and the things people said into the hot mic while waiting to order at the drive thru made me realize I should keep my mouth shut while in a drive-thru lane. 

For a while, these scanners used to be able to listen in on old style cellular phone calls; that became a bit of a political problem early in the 90s when a scanner listener happened to listen in on a conversation between top level Republican Congressmen discussing strategy via cell phone, and as a consequence of that leaked conversation a law was quickly passed banning the cell frequencies from these scanners. That's not an issue now, given that digital communications have advanced significantly since those days, but it did highlight digital privacy issues even way back when. 

***

I don't really have a listening station in the house these days, since I no longer work out of the basement, but I ought to consider making one somewhere. Right now, if I want to listen to shortwave I bring the radio upstairs with me and place it in a room away from my home office, as the computers there interfere with reception. 

No, this is not me. I only have a couple of radios.
From Wikipedia, and this is the attribution:
By Mw0rkb - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24682534

I guess I ought to add an outside antenna (or two) to the project list...

*This was all part of my project plan I had been working on while I was figuring out costs associated with the deck, as mentioned here.

**That's interesting, but it can be morbidly so. I had to get up and go do something else away from my work desk when a call for paramedics for a suicide attempt came over the air. 

EtA: Corrected some grammar.

#Blaugust2024

Meme Monday: Growing Up in the 70s Memes

Yes, I grew up in the 70s.

While my teenage years were in the early to late 80s, my formative childhood years as a kid born at the end of the 1960s were in the Era of Plaid.

The 1970s were so damn long ago... 

How long, you ask?

In two years it'll be the 50th anniversary of the release of the first Boston album.

My first copy was a cassette from
the mid-80s, long enough for the album
to be classified as Classic Rock by some
stations. From Spotify.

How long?

The US Bicentennial fell in the summer between my First and Second Grade.

(Yeah, I'm old.)

So, in honor of that dubious distinction, here's some 70s memes. And no, none of those "The 70s were better!" memes, either.

I disagree, btw. And to be fair, most of these
all-in-one cabinet systems were purchased in the
60s but we all grew up with them in the 70s.
Except me. My parents didn't have one. We had a
Centrex by Pioneer* that they bought in 1978.
From EdnSarna.

Yes, my parents' house, built in 1976,
still has the paneling in the basement,
despite my arguments with my mom
to finally get something brighter in there.
From Sheila Creamer Bidon.

Remember, these were the people who
looked at the punks and new wave
crowd and said their fashion sense
was terrible. From EdnSarna.

Let's kill three birds with one stone:
Bad clothing, WKRP in Cincinnati, and
the Cincinnati Reds (aka The Big Red Machine).
From Ridiculous 70s Memes.

Oh, and there were blockbuster movies,
movies that people watched all summer and
stayed in theaters for more than three months.
From YouTube.

Again, another item my family never had. I really
need to create a Meme Monday on memes about things
my parents never owned. From The Gamer.

And finally, one more meme:

It might be cheating, combining CB Radio
and Star Wars like this, but if loving this is wrong,
I don't wanna be right... From Imgur.

*For clarity's sake, Centrex was a sub-brand of Pioneer Electronics for their all-in-one stereo systems. If you ask an audiophile, they're not as good as the "Receiver Wars" receivers of the 70s, but if you had a good pair of speakers they punched above their weight class.

This is the model my parents had, the KH-5511.
It had a cassette, not an 8-Track, and they
got it in 1978, so cassettes were hard to come
by for a few years since the 8-Track market 
dominated so thoroughly. From EBay.

#Blaugust2024

Wicked Mortals!

I have been enjoying the opportunity to play Alterac Valley this past week, and Friday night my Questing Buddy and I participated in something I haven't in quite a while...

The summoning of Ivus, the Forest Lord:

Needless to say, we won this one.

Yeah, I didn't make the leaderboard, but I also was holding down Iceblood Graveyard so that we could keep our side in the fight. Sometimes, the smarter thing to do is do the small things so that the team can win.

#Blaugust2024

Grooving to Those Elven Beats

Thursday night I was visiting my local game store, perusing the shelves,

The silver dragon has a few friends now!

when the Lofi music played over the speakers by the dragon began playing a familiar tune. "Hey, that sounds like Silvermoon City!" I thought. As I'd played Blood Elves the 3-4 years of my WoW career, I became quite familiar with that seven note theme.

Here's the original...

The music quickly moved on to something else, but when I got home afterward I hopped online to see if I could find the Lofi version that I just heard.

I think this is it.

My first thought was that Blizz had released more lofi beats in advance of their next Retail expansion, TWW*, but it was released by a third party instead. Lofi isn't the most difficult music style to emulate, but it does take skill (technical or whatever) to transcribe the score into something else. Yes yes, I know that generative AI and other software programs can assist in this, but it does also take critical listening to get the sound "just right", in the same way that writing fiction using generative AI doesn't really have a good voice (yet).

Anyhoo, I'm typically in my happy place when I'm perusing a game store, so hearing the strains of Silvermoon City just kind of made my evening.

***

Oh, and while I was there to peruse RPG materials, such as this:

I could not find this at Gen Con, as
the Kobold Press area looked like it was
completely wiped out by the end of Sunday.

I did discover that a game discontinued back in 2010 was making a comeback:

You can get the unpainted ones too if you want
to paint the minis yourself.
From Boardgamegeek.

Yes, Heroscape is hitting the stores after a 14 year hiatus. Well, I am surprised.

*The World Wound? No, that's a Pathfinder thing. The World Within? Sounds like a description of The Underdark from D&D. The War Within? Yeah, that's it, but everybody types TWW as if they were repeating corporate jargon: "Okay, we need to complete the prework for the CAB and then once that's done we need to focus on the RDT and weekly SDT, then on Monday we handle the DR issues in the DSR." (And yes, those are all real corporate acronyms.)

#Blaugust2024

Be Careful What You Wish For

I realize that the title of this post isn't exactly a new sentiment, but I was thinking about it while I was watching a YouTube video over lunch.

Yes, Megan's posts on social media had started popping up in my YouTube feed, and the "Life of an English Teacher in Japan" shorts were incredibly quirky and fun to watch. That Megan was another member of Team Red ("Go Team Red!") also endeared me to her.

Well, today she dropped the video you see above, and it's a ~21 minute video about why she left what seemed to be her dream job.

The TL;DR is that yes, it was her dream job, but it wasn't what she hoped it would be.

From housing issues --and issues left by her predecessor-- to dealing with the loneliness and the bureaucracy (not to mention the language barrier), there was a lot to work through.

I always had a lot of respect for people who left what they'd known to come to a foreign land and make a new life for themselves, but for every success story there are a lot more stories that are like Megan and Ben's. When you couple that to the knowledge that no matter what you do and how much you succeed you are still considered "the other"... Yeah, that is something that can be hard to accept. 

***

To bring this around to gaming, these are themes that can be explored in any rich game world. Now that I think about it, they have been explored in the Dragon's Age and Mass Effect games, but in MMOs not quite so much. 

The thing is, I'm not quite sure whether it would be better to be explored in fiction or in an MMO itself. If you put in quest chains in an MMO, you run the risk of simply telling rather than showing the problems that are faced by people who are The Other. And MMOs aren't typically well known for showing rather than telling, because they do often seem to subscribe to "The School of Massive Info Dumps" when presenting quests.

I honestly don't know the answer to this conundrum.

#Blaugust2024