Wake Me Up When September Ends*

We are now into September, but as far as weather goes that doesn't mean much.

What it does mean is that Blaugust is over, and I participated without ever signing up or mentioning it directly in a post.

Yeah, it's kind of hipster-ish to participate by not participating, but I've found that when I do explicitly participate in something by signing up for it --I'm looking at you, NaNoWriMo-- I never actually get close to actually doing much. Therefore, I decided if I was going to try to post once per day for an entire month, I was going to do it my way and without drawing any sort of attention to myself.

When you throw in the several trips that I've had this month, including the Big One up to Milwaukee, I'm surprised that I pulled it off. Another funny thing is that since I don't play Retail WoW, I didn't rely upon the new expansion's release to fill my content. Based on the tags I put out, I only had four posts that referenced Retail WoW, the second one being the only one that addressed my dislike of the direction the Modern game has taken.**

I kind of wrote about things that were of interest to me, such as re-discovering some of the radio material in storage and some of the adventures I had as people returned to Classic Era and began playing Alterac Valley once more. 

What you don't see very much of are adventures pertaining to more "traditional" MMO activity, such as leveling, questing, raiding, dungeon running, etc. I don't level alts much at all, which I already covered, and I don't really want to bother with a regular raiding schedule either. I'm fine with simply hanging around and not doing much; this is a form of social media that I'm fine with. If I did play Retail WoW right now, I'd probably be one of those people who would just level a toon by fishing, because I really don't need to rush out and do all the things (or see the content).

I mean, I am that guy who leveled a toon to max level in TBC Classic by not setting foot in Outland.

I still have the proof of that.

Actually, that does bring up the question as to how slow can you intentionally level in Retail WoW and still be considered to be "leveling"? I know of DoubleAgent and their factionless Pandaren who has leveled to max level by just gathering herbs and ore in the Pandaren starting zone, but is that really the slowest way to level? Can you go even slower? If you go even slower, you could probably level so slowly that by the time you get to the starting point for the current expansion the price of The War Within would be 75% off or more. When I last was in Retail, I leveled the original Azshandra from scratch at the beginning of Mists, and by the time I was ready to head out to Pandaria it was nine months or more after release. Actually, if you level slow enough, you could level so slowly that you don't even have to pay for The War Within, because the pre-patch for the next expac would be released.

Hmm... I wonder...

Of course, I could just fish in Classic Era and do effectively the same thing.

***

Still, looking ahead, September is going to be busy all by its lonesome. I'll be working on the deck some more, probably going to at least one of my youngest's concerts down at UofL, and my wife is already getting itchy to visit our oldest up in Milwaukee.

And somewhere in the middle of all that I'd like to actually relax a bit.

*Holy crap. That Green Day song is 20 years old.

**As for the 'Green Eggs and Ham' crowd of 'try it and you might like it', I've seen enough cutscenes to know that I don't like it without playing the game at all. (In fact, I didn't 'play' the game much from early Cataclysm until I officially stopped playing in 2014, but I instead only played Battlegrounds.) My dislike of the PvE game has nothing to do with how a class feels or the quest design or systems or anything like that; I'm sure if you play that you'll like it. I simply don't like playing a godlike character. Well, that and after 20 years I begin to ask the "doesn't this seem like an awful lot of world-ending events to happen to one world over the course of 20 years?" type of questions. I'm sure there's some in-game handwaving there too, like "well, all the other titans are dead so Azeroth is this one special place where they can be birthed once more." (I'm going off of The Last Titan as the name of the last of the trilogy of expansions; I have no understanding of anything regarding the story since... probably late Cataclysm?)

EtA: Grabbed the wrong screencap. The original screencap was for me hitting L68, as proof that I could go to Outland. I replaced it with the one for L70 itself.

#Blaugust2024

Nothing Lasts Forever

I don't know what life is like where you live, but we've been in the middle of a drought that's gone on for about two months. We did have several days' worth of rain right in the middle of the drought, but it wasn't enough to actually break it. The occasional thunderstorm hasn't exactly helped much either, since the rain simply rolls off of the hardened earth and down the storm drains.

The heat hasn't been unbearable --save for this week-- it's just been dry. 

So with that in mind, there haven't been a lot of reasons for me to work outside much.

I've been taking a couple weeks' worth of break from working on the deck because I needed to recover from helping my oldest move, and I wasn't planning on baking outside in that heat this week.

So, what have I been up to?

Cleaning. And organizing.

Not exactly fun work per se, but it is satisfying to see some of my stuff finally get organized. 

We also have an electronics recycling coming up in a couple of months, so I finally decided that it was time to clear out some spare parts and whatnot that I won't be using ever again. Such as 15 year old graphics cards from our old Microsoft Vista machine that is also going away. That PC missed the last recycling day because I hadn't properly wiped the hard drive, so I'm not going to take any chances and will do that work sometime in late September. 

That cleaning was how I rediscovered my old scanner, and I've also found some of the doodads you need to set up a shortwave antenna outside. As I organized the parts, I noticed I was missing a few items so I hopped on to my go-to site for all things shortwave, Universal Radio, to see what the prices were to fill in the gaps on my supplies. Universal is in the suburbs of Columbus, a couple of hours' drive away, so I always felt good about supporting the semi-local economy when I bought items from them.

Alas, this is what I found when I went to their online catalog.

You have to expand it to read it properly.

I knew that this day might come, but November 2020? How did I not know this before now?

***

This isn't the first store that I've supported that has closed its doors for the owners' retirement. Boardwalk Hobby Shop on the east side of town shut down in 2020-2021, and if I had the money I would have loved to have bought the place to keep it running. Since I knew I didn't know beans about actually running a business, let alone a game store, I had to pass.

I first walked through that door in 1991,
not knowing what to expect.
From Davion M. via Yelp.

It hurts seeing this.
From the Mt. Lookout Business Association.

But still, I spent a lot of time in that store. My kids grew up going there with me, and Marilyn --one of the owners-- used to hold the kids when they were infants. 

Myra's Dionysus, a small Mediterranean inspired restaurant near the University of Cincinnati, was a fun place to eat at. 

From this article by CityBeat that came
out a year before Myra's closed in 2014.

It was in the storefront of a century old building, a hole-in-the-wall place, really, but it was one of the first places I'd ever eaten at that had a heavily vegetarian menu. When my youngest decided to become a vegetarian, Myra's became more than just a place to eat at, but an inspiration. When Myra's closed because she was in her 80s and wanted to retire, that hurt. I couldn't begrudge her retirement years, but I really miss that place. At least Myra's daughter has begun posting some of Myra's old recipes at Myra's Kitchen Legacy. I've made the hummus, and it is dead on for what we used to eat at Myra's.

***

These are all memories now.

I never quite understood when people my grandparents' age used to talk about places that don't exist, such as some of the theaters downtown, but I do now. It's both a blessing and a curse of aging, I suppose, to see things change and long for what once was. But time does move on, and new memories are always made. We don't live forever, so we shouldn't expect our world to remain constant either.

#Blaugust2024

A Short Ponderable For a Friday

One of the things I've just gotten into the habit of doing is logging into CurseForge before I enter into WoW. Considering that it only takes a few seconds to make sure my addons are updated, it's not a big deal.

But yesterday, I just realized that something is a bit out of date:

No, not my Addons.

She's nice and all, but why hasn't Alexstrasza been replaced by that elf that looks like a purple female version of Kael'thas?

Either someone at CurseForge is lying down on the job or Blizz hasn't provided a new graphic for use. I remember that when Dragonflight released, this graphic was already set at about a month before the Dragon Isles opened up.

#Blaugust2024

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