Permanence in a Fluid Environment

I occasionally go back through some of my old posts when one of them unexpectedly makes an appearance on my analytics, and inevitably those posts have some issues. Yes, I'm not very fond of my writing in old posts --if you ever have flashbacks to really stupid mistakes you did in the past, that's what it's like-- but for a change I'm not talking about that. 

It's this:

Apparently the Snipping tool that replaced the old
Snip and Sketch in Windows 11 kind of sucks.
From a PC post on January 17, 2016.

What you're not seeing is a graphic that I linked to rather than made a local copy and uploaded. 

I realize that the internet can be a fluid thing, and since storage space costs money, old graphics have a habit of getting deleted. Of course, that's only one issue with graphics or videos disappearing: there are people who die, people who try to hide past involvement, lawsuits, etc.

The point is that the internet is fluid, and you can't necessarily rely something to be there in the future.

That's why I began several years ago simply downloading graphics and then uploading them with a reference, rather that simply linking to them. It's kind of sad that I can't rely upon a link going forward and instead using low-key piracy for references, but when things are made to be temporary the concept of permanence is a foreign idea.

***

That does bring up the question as to what will happen to all of that digital data I've accumulated when I die. 

I'd like this blog to remain in place as a record. That's not strictly an egotistical thing, but rather as a reference to the era PC was created. Over the years I've seen blogs die and get removed, such as Righteous Orbs, and I'd hate for PC to join them.

At least The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation years ago has been pulling data from blogs such as this one into a central location for recordkeeping, but even then that's an inexact science. 

I discovered that they weren't getting any recent data out of PC because I'd moved us to HTTPS from HTTP, and it took a little bit of back and forth with the Web Collection Librarian for the Ivy Plus Confederation before the crawls began working once more.* It's nice to have an independent backup going on, but I'm always concerned that politics and whatnot will interfere with the storage of this data in the long term. I used to think we'd learned the lessons of the past regarding data storage, but apparently not.

I guess I ought to look into another solution going forward, one that won't vanish at the whim of someone I've never met.

*If your blog is listed in there --don't rely upon the blog name but instead search for a title-- you might want to see if the data is being accurately captured.

Putting Words to Passion

One of the nice things about going to a bookstore is that you might walk in on an event and be instantly enthralled.

That happened on Tuesday, as my wife went down to Louisville to visit with her aged parents* and to watch a concert our youngest played in. If I left after work I might have been able to make it if I didn't have traffic and I didn't get pulled over for speeding, but I figured I'd better not risk it.** Since my wife was spending the night down there I decided to visit the bookstore. 

The moment I walked through the doors I knew something was up; a huge crowd had assembled to my right with a speaker at the podium.

"What's going on?" I asked one of the booksellers.

"It's an author signing."

Then I noticed the big poster next to the author:

From Joseph-Beth's Facebook page (and Hanif Abdurraqib).

I'd heard about that book before, but I couldn't exactly remember where. "Oh!" I exclaimed. "The basketball guy."

"Yeah, the basketball guy," the bookseller confirmed. "Go over and listen!"

If on the surface the book was about basketball, considering it was broken into sections about pre-game, the various quarters, time outs, and whatnot, the book was not strictly about basketball itself. It was more a set of essays about life and family and friendship, mixed in with poetry.

But hearing Hanif speak, and listening to him read sections of the book... Holy crap, can that man write. 

It was an otherworldly experience when Hanif read, whether it was opining on when he thought Michael Jordan was at his coolest --the 1985 slam dunk contest-- or relating the story when a friend of his asked him to cut her hair off. However, what charmed me the most was when he was simply discussing things with the audience, about how the first line of this book came to him in a "Boogie Nights"-esque way, or how he'd read Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron in his youth.

"Wow, he's amazing," I said to another bookseller, who was standing nearby, also listening.

"Yeah, he's good," he replied.

"Yeah, if I had only a quarter of his talent... Just, wow."

The bookseller told me they were really pleased with the turnout, and given that Hanif's book tour was only to a handful of locations --Ann Arbor, Michigan, was next-- I think that Hanif knew his audience. 

Hanif also had high praise for his editor, and he hammered home how vital he believed editors were to the creative process. I can't remember the last time I heard an author at a signing give so much praise to their editor in an unprompted manner, and it felt so refreshing for Hanif to give some love to that often overlooked person in publishing.

It was a ticketed event, so I'd have had to have bought a ticket --which included a copy of the book-- for him to sign, but that's fine. I can go back another time and grab a copy of the book. In the meantime, I picked up another one of his books, a collection of essays on music and pop culture, to tide me over.

***

Speaking of things to tide me over...

I asked my questing buddy, a voracious reader in her own right, what I ought to be looking out for. 

"'When the Moon Hatched,' by Sarah Parker," she replied. She'd apparently had her eye on it for quite a while.

Although part of the store was taken up by the event with Hanif, I managed to find it in the SF&F section.

There were quite a few copies there,
which is a pretty good sign.

"It's pretty thick," I told her later.

"How many pages is it?" she asked.

I thumbed through the book to the end. "690 pages."

"OOOO...."

*They're both in their 90s and are still kicking.

**I much prefer the weekend concerts, which I can make more easily. That being said, my time away from home the past couple of weeks kept me from taking the afternoon off to go on down as well. Even then, I would have had to come back that evening because my wife was intent on staying the night anyway. Luckily, my wife informed me that I'd already heard the music they played at a previous concert I attended.

Closing in on the Halfway Point

It's been 4 months since the WoW Classic Anniversary servers opened, and here's where Operation Spread the Love stands right now:

The toon levels as of March 25, 2025.
Shaluna was the name I assigned to my Druid on
Classic Era. (Oops.) She's also the first toon
to ever wear that Corsair's Overshirt (above)
that drops from Edwin Van Cleef in The Deadmines.

I'm probably a week away from having at least one toon at L30, and that depends upon getting a toon or two into Blackfathom Deeps. Both the Paladin and Warlock have class quests that involve a visit to Blackfathom Deeps, so they're likely to go. Other toons I don't intend to take into instances much due to the expectations that they'll be healing (Shaluna) or tanking (Taldanifal). I can handle pugging dungeons as DPS, but healing and tanking bring along extra expectations that I would rather not meet. 

As it is, I spend a lot of my time running back and forth between the Wetlands, Duskwood, and Ashenvale, with the occasional side trip to Stonetalon Mountains along the way. 

People who played Classic back in 2019 will tell you that Stonetalon Mountains is typically one of the emptiest zones in the Old World. It takes a bit of time to get there, and the Alliance flight point is stuck at the top of Stonetalon Peak itself, so it's far out of the way for any questing in the zone itself. That zone also has some of the first "go see people on the other side of the world" quests to perform, and consequently a lot of people simply skip it entirely. Cardwyn used to visit Stonetalon because it was so empty, so she could farm Light Feathers off of the harpies there without bothering anybody. 

Except the harpies.

Well, dip me in molasses, cover me in feathers, and call me a chicken, but on the Anniversary servers Stonetalon was incredibly busy every time I've set foot in the place. 

I've never had to fight for mobs there in the past, not even in 2019, so this is a new experience for me. Here we are, 4 months into the 20th Anniversary servers, and new toons are still out there, questing in Stonetalon. 

My questing buddy suggested they were part of the 4th or 5th wave of toons coming up, and she's likely not wrong. I put some of the toons I've encountered in Deadmines on my Friends List, and they're now at either max level or are in the L50s. So if those players go and make (another) alt, they'll likely lap me another time or two while I'm leveling.

***

I have begun going back to Classic Era a bit lately.

This past weekend was Alterac Valley weekend, and when the 20th Anniversary servers first opened you couldn't find a single AV battleground up and running on Classic Era, even on AV Weekend. This weekend I finally saw some good signs that players have returned, because about 3-4 AV battles were going the entire weekend. 

It felt weird to be back in a battleground after months of being away, but after a day or so I got out of my awkwardness and settled into the organized chaos that is a WoW battleground. I suspect that some players, having gotten to max level on the 20th Anniversary servers, are now raid logging over there and are coming back to Classic Era to play in the interim. I don't have any evidence of that, of course, but given that the Blackwing Lair raid just opened on the 20th Anniversary servers I suspect people are focusing on raids there and then returning to Era for everything else. 

I think I might stay on Classic Era more as my leveling slows down, because it provides me some variety over what I've got on the so-called Classic Fresh servers. I don't mean in terms of class breadth, because I've got 8 toons of various classes I'm leveling at once on those Anniversary servers, but in terms of being satisfied where I'm at. On Classic Era I have two max level Mages and one max level Rogue, and I just have no real desire to level another toon there. I've taken OG Cardwyn through Naxx and she has the full T3 set to prove it, so I don't really have any desire to go to a raid team and do regular raiding. I suppose if somebody offered me a shot at an Atiesh that'd be nice, but I have no desire to "jump the line" and bypass a bunch of people that have been raiding in an established raid team to get it. (Plus I think the staff looks ugly. Big turn-off, if you ask me.)

I still think it looks like a sulphur ball
attached to a stick. Gandalf's staff, this ain't.
From Wowhead.

***

As far as how other people are doing on the Classic Fresh/20th Anniversary servers, my questing buddy discovered AoE leveling in Zul'Farrak and got a second toon, a Mage, to max level last week. I knew she was going to get a second toon to max level, yet despite her insistence that she was not going to speed level a second toon after her experience with her Druid, she still did it anyway. She claims she's not going to do that again with a third toon, but stay tuned.

I told her I should start a betting pool on how quickly she levels a third toon.

Let's see...

One of our group stopped logging in, but that was to be expected as he got kicked from the guild he was in for being an asshat in chat even after he'd been warned. I should have had a betting pool going for that, because he was that sort of player who was guaranteed to get gkicked at some point. 

Someone who shall remain nameless once asked me how I stood for that player's behavior. 

"I don't," I replied shortly. "I don't encourage it and I don't defend him. Sometimes people need to feel the consequences of their actions."

Others in our group have made it to L60, and still others are far enough ahead of me that they'll get to max level soon.

***

With the roadmap for these Fresh servers having bumped the opening of the Dark Portal to early 2025, I've got even more time to get to max level than I thought. My suspicion is that a two month window for raiding Naxx is likely too short for most players --I know it would be for me-- so Blizz is likely extending that phase by a couple of months. 

I've been starting to think what I intend to do when TBC drops and the Dark Portal opens. 

While it'd be nice to actually experience the expansion without rushing through, as I'd originally intended, I'm not sure what everybody else is going to do. The optimal strategy for leveling in TBC Classic was to chain-run instances until you got to max level, then start questing, so it might be that the actual zones might not be crowded at all. If they are crowded, however, I could just default back to the Blood Elf toons I intend to create and roll with them for a while. And maybe a Draenei too.

That being said, do I want to raid? 

Maybe? I do want to see Kael'Thas die so I can have some closure from my time as a raid lead in 2021-2022, but my entire TBC experience has been as an Enhancement Shaman, so doing this as a Mage would be somewhat different. Most raid teams will only take 2-3 Mages at most because that's the optimal configuration, so I might once again be faced with the choice of either playing a Shaman in a raid or simply not raiding beyond the occasional Karazhan run. 

And I don't want to be part of a raid where I'm carried, either. I'd rather eat ground glass.

Yummy.
From Budget Glass Nanaimo.

*Used when casting Slow Fall. I've since been told that Priests use Light Feathers too for a spell --Water Walking or something like that-- but I never saw Priests over in Stonetalon. Only the occasional Mage.

Meme Monday: Rainy Day Memes

Because it's Spring (ish) in my hometown right now, and that means rain.

And since this is PC, that means gamer related rainy memes...

If there's one thing that the revival of Toto's
Africa has done, it's brought back the misheard
lyric for a new generation. From Reddit and Twitter.

It's abbie-normal. From Imgflip.

That's so bad it's good...
From the WoW Twitter account.

This past week I learned what the term
"mud rain" means. Thanks for all the dirt
on my car, New Mexico! From The free press journal.

Yeah. That too. From Pinterest.

What on Earth is Red Reading This Time: The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett

For someone who's been reading Science Fiction and Fantasy since the early 80s, the fact I've never read a novel by Terry Pratchett is kind of a surprise.

It's kind of hard to avoid Sir Terry's works, given that on top of his Discworld novels he has that collaboration with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens, that was turned into a mini-series on Amazon Prime. Back when I actually participated on Facebook there were days I saw quotes from Sir Terry's works every couple of hours.*

The strange thing is that I don't get people proselytizing me to read the Discworld novels like, oh, people reading Robert Jordan back in the day. Maybe that's an acknowledgement that Sir Terry's works aren't for everyone. 

This feels rather uncomfortably like people
proselytizing about FF XIV. From Reddit; the
original poster got it from a Discworld FB group. 

So I kind of drifted along, with the Sir Terry memes on the edges of my vision, and not really wanting to read the books. After all, reading over 40 books is a bit of a commitment, no matter what people say.

Then Modiphius released the Kickstarter for the Discworld TT RPG.

It looked interesting, but given that I'd never read the books there wasn't that much of a pull on me. However, the Kickstarter raked in over $3 million in USD, which caused me to sit up. Maybe I ought to go check out these books for myself.

Having read my share of Douglas Adams, when I read the descriptive term "British SF&F humor" I have a reference already in place. And that is the standard I compare others against. Is that fair? No, it's not, but since Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came first, that's what happens.

***

So, what did I think of the book?

It was a light read. Fun in spots, tedious in others, and I spent far more time recognizing the characters and situations Terry poked fun at than simply enjoying the book. I know this book was written for people like me because I recognized Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser**, Conan, Elric (okay, elements of Elric), the Dragonriders of Pern, D&D's quirks (the Luggage and spellcasting), and even any stereotypical fantasy city with lots of backstabbing this and that, so... Lankhmar, Sanctuary (from Thieves' World), Tarantia (Conan), and others. 

Yes, I put this here for that quote at the beginning.

From The Scorpion King.

Every person that our two companions Rincewind and Twoflower came across, I kept trying to figure out what story Terry was poking fun at. Maybe that's not a fair thing to do, but after having run across so many classic Fantasy references, it came to me quite naturally. I'm pretty sure that the gothic horror elements of the novel were relating to both H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror as well as other touchstones of the 19th century, such as The Time Machine, Frankenstein, and Dracula. 

The novel does end on a literal cliffhanger, so I presume Sir Terry had intended to write multiple novels when he started Discworld. What I've seen in some other authors is that they write, hoping to get a sale, and then once a book finally sells, they then have to scramble to write more in that world. Kristen Britain's Green Rider series comes to mind, because her first book Green Rider is pretty complete as it is. You can tell in the narration that the second novel came about after the first novel sold; that doesn't mean it was a poor book, but it's just that you spend so much effort to make that first sale that when you finally do and the publisher says "okay, what happens next?" you have to scramble a bit. 

One thing that I do realize is that these books aren't very dense at all. This is good, because I could go for more light reads, and it kept me preoccupied on my 2 to 3 hour layovers at the airport in Charlotte last week. 

I do have the next book published in the series, The Light Fantastic, and if it reads as quickly as this one then I can spend a few hours here and there, reading it while I take care of other things around the house.

Such as taxes.

*I guess you could tell that I hung around a lot of geeks. Shocking, I know.

**I always considered Fritz Leiber's creations --and the city of Lankhmar-- as a spoof of the sword and sorcery genre, so.... a spoof of a spoof?

Washing Away the Smell

I took a late lunch yesterday, and to blow off some steam I figured I'd get onto a WoW toon for an hour while eating. It's something I've done plenty of times in the past, and as long as I didn't commit to anything, I could finish up before the hour was out and I had to get back to meetings.

Az seemed the perfect toon to just do whatever for an hour, so I hopped onto her and, on a whim, I decided to see if I could get her a Stormwind Stockades run. She had a bunch of quests to complete in there, and the instance is usually completed in about a half an hour, so I just figured that with the early afternoon crowd it would be pretty easy to get into a run.

Things never end up the way as intended, you know.

I discovered that back in 2019 when I began to struggle getting Azshandra into instance runs. Part of it is that certain classes are preferred over others in instance running --such as Mages-- and part of it is that Rogues tend to have a certain... uh... reputation. When Linna got into a Deadmines run, the group that showed up on the LFG tool had the tagline "NO ROGUES". I figured that if anything, in the Deadmines no less, that a Rogue would be preferred over a Retribution Paladin, but when I joined the group the Warrior said, "Hell no. Rogues suck. They steal your gear." 

When you prefer playing a Robin Hood
type of Rogue, the struggle is real. From Reddit.

Ooo-kay.

Still, I figured I had an hour to play with, and as long as I got into a Stockades run by the half hour mark, I ought to be fine. 

The time creeped away, and most of the groups that showed up in the LookingForGroup chat group were for Stocks boosts. The LFG tool was kinda-sorta active, but I was bypassed a couple of times via that tool as well. Finally, at the 20 minute mark I got an invite to a group.

"All we need is a tank, and we're good," the group leader said.

More time passed, and we were rapidly approaching my half hour cutoff when finally a fifth member of the group appeared.

"Thank goodness," I muttered, and made sure I had my poisons ready to apply to my weapons. Because Az is a Rogue, you know. 

"Free run, guys!" the group leader declared, and only then did my brain go "Huh?" and I hovered over the last toon.

It was an L60 Druid.

Well, crap.

***

I had a choice: stick to my principles and pass, or accept the de-facto boost and just deal with it. The quests that involved the Stockades were taking up a quarter of my quest log, so there was a certain amount of pressure to get those quests completed to free up my quest log a bit. At the same time, there wasn't a lot of gear or whatnot that I needed out of the Stockades per se. Sure, there's the ring that is a random drop, but outside of that there isn't that much in there. Storywise, it does propel the Defias narrative along, but on the flip side was this tank expecting gold despite the group leader claiming it was a free run? 

In the end, I decided to accept the boost and be done with it. After all, a boost ought to be quicker than a regular run.

I didn't bother with adding poisons to my blades, because I figured it'd be a waste. 

The run began, and we were tasked with "clean up": the enemies that turned tail and ran had to be tracked down and killed. Part of me watched the run progress, thinking it would be a nice bit of schadenfreude to have the Druid overpull and die, but the other part of me that is basically a nice person was pissed that I'd ever consider this sort of thing.* I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that the Druid could handle the pulls without issue, but I've heard some of my WoW friends on the receiving end of boosts complain about the boosters not always knowing what they're doing. (Again, schadenfreude.)

We blitzed through the Stockades, a ring dropped that I won, and then once it ended I thanked people and dropped group as they were getting ready for another go at the instance. The run completed in 15 minutes, in plenty of time for me to make my next meeting.

And I felt like I needed a shower afterward to wash away the stink of shame.

***

The other day it struck me as to why I hated receiving boosts so much: they make me a passive recipient.

If the entire point of playing an MMO is to perform group activities together, then being a passive recipient of a boost is the antithesis of that. Boosts are transactional activities, but beyond that transaction there's nothing required of the boosted player. And that kind of galls me. 

I want to be an active participant in whatever activity I'm doing in an MMO; I want my actions to matter. So while boosting is obviously a non-starter for me, my distaste for passivity includes carries where you're so over leveled by other participants, your actions don't even matter. I've written before about how I've unwittingly been the subject of carries, and how such a buzzkill it was to discover that I had so little impact on the actual group activity.

Yes, yes, I know, "friends wanting to do things and whatnot", but that knowledge doesn't change 55 year old me. If my actions don't matter, then why bother? We can just chat online or talk on Discord instead, and not engage in the pretense that we're playing together as equals. It feels less like friendship and more like receiving charity. And that old Midwestern pride kicks in that I don't need your charity. Or sympathy. 

From Yarn. And Howard the Duck.

I suppose that viewed from the lens of the "poor but proud" people that I've known all my life, it kind of makes sense. Kind of like arguing with my mom whenever I take her someplace she wants to pay for my gasoline. "Mom," I always say, "I don't need it. Just accept it."

She always insists that I take the money. We're two people too proud to simply let things be. 

*Yes, I have these long conversations with myself over this crap. I'd like to think I'm not the only person who wrestles with dark impulses, but this is something that people just don't talk about very much, so.... Maybe it's just me.

Meme Monday: Sleepy RPG Memes

Because I'm still catching up on sleep from last week, I thought this appropriate.

The curse of Dailies.
From Instagram.

This is why I rebelled when Classic Fresh dropped;
I like my sleep too much. From owlturd.com.

Urg. Pretty sure it's not the bard who says
that, but the Dad. From Farstride and Thunder Dungeon.

Oh, Freddie, my old buddy...
From Facebook's DNDMemes.