Okay, it technically isn't safe to plant outside yet where I live --that date is May 15 in Cincinnati*-- but everything has greened up and that's when your mind turns to gardening. Even if you play RPGs/MMOs too...
Pretty sure this is the house up the street. From Facebook's IFLRoleplaying and Cheezburger.
Because this is what a DM does when they garden. From Memedroid.
This is the fun part about playing a Rogue in WoW Classic: you can make your own poisons. From Reddit.
Reddit can be crazy at times. "At times?" "Oh, shut up." From Reddit.
With gardens, there are Garden Gnomes. And with Garden Gnomes, there are passive-aggressive ways of waging what has become known as "The Gnome Wars". From Reddit.
*I used to think that date was a bit overblown, but several years ago we got a hard frost on May 5, and all of my neighbors lost a lot of their plants, so...
One of the things I've had to adjust over these past several months is to embrace the slow and steady pace of things. Not in World of Warcraft, per se, but in life as well.
For a guy who has been tinkering around with electronics since the late 80s*, I've had a reckoning while studying for my Technician's license. While I realize that for some people memorizing the questions in the potential question pool for the test is the way to go, that's not me. I prefer to learn how to do something so I can then figure it out every time. Sure, it'll slow me down on my test completion, but it's not like this is a timed test in the same vein as the SAT or GRE.
But still... Holy crap have I forgotten a ton of stuff over the years.
Yeah, that. Wait, what was I talking about? from Cheezburger.
This has been an exercise in humiliation. I can't tell you the number of times when a concept was presented in the study guide and my initial reaction was "Oh yeah, I remember this! It's... uh... It's..."
What's sad is that I've built a power supply and antenna tuner before, so you'd think I'd remember this. From The ARRL Ham Radio License Manual (5th Edition), page 3-16.
I then have two directions I could take: tell myself that I know this and I'll be fine on the test, or admit that I don't really know it and that I have to study and review and practice more.
While I really really want to take the former route -my ego wants me to go that way too- I've been forced into the realization that the latter is the better choice in the long run. Yeah, my ego drives me just like it drives everybody else, but even more than my ego is my fear of looking like an idiot in front of everybody else.**
Speaking of idiots, having this photo of Richard Garriott in the book did not age well. And no, I'm not putting this here to try to get a response from Wilhelm Arcturus, either. From The ARRL Ham Radio License Manual (5th Edition), Page 1-7.
So I've been proceeding a lot slower than I hoped.
***
If you play video games or are a fan of logic puzzles, you know that typically the best solution is to perform actions in a specific order. This kind of goes without saying for anything in life, from putting together IKEA furniture to cleaning out the garage to engaging in relationships.***
This includes figuring out my outside projects for this coming year.
The most critical part, replace the deck boards, was completed last year. Now I have to stain the deck once the overnight temperatures reach over 50 F (10 C) as according to the stain instructions. There's also the consideration that if I'm not careful, the stain will have a ton of pollen embedded in it as well.
But there's the next phases to consider, and they involve replacing the stairs and the railings. And the skirting around the deck.
That's just the deck. I also want to paint the exterior of the porch, which involves me getting up on a ladder to paint the top portions of the porch. And that involves me clearing out enough of the garage so I can get to the ladder...
You get the idea.
I have to figure out the order to attack all of these projects in the same way my Questing Buddy attacks her goals in WoW Classic, but I have to temper this with the knowledge that I don't have all the time in the world to do this, either. Some of these will get bumped to next year (or the year after), and I have to be willing to accept that.
(Yeah, right.)
***
Speaking of next year...
I reviewed the vacation days I've taken for this year so far, and all but two of them involved doctor's visits. And those two vacation days involved my travel for work, so they technically don't count.****
Admittedly, 3 of those doctors' visits involved me getting vaccines, so they're a once every several years event, but even then I'm starting to feel a bit run down by the constant drip of doctor visits, along with the knowledge that this is going to be my life going forward.
All of these visits are starting to impact other things as well. For example, I'd like to take some time off to just rest and recharge, but the more time I take off for a doctor's visit means there's less time for other things. (See my projects above.)
The irony that I kind of need some time off to recharge but that my time off is already being taken up by health issues hasn't been lost on me. I've also had a nagging concern that the longer my life has gone on I've lost the ability to relax. Consider it an unfortunate byproduct of being on-call 24x7 for close to 30 years, but even when I have a couple of days off it takes an effort to not check work email. Or join a daily review session. Or... Well, you get the idea.
I began to realize I might have a problem with relaxing when I sat down in a chair on the newly replaced deck surface and no more than five minutes later I got the urge to go work on another project.
This is not good, I thought, and got up and went back inside after trying to push those feelings away.
So yeah, I need to relearn how to relax. Be present in the moment. Maybe that's why I've been enjoying fishing this much lately.
Good luck with that one. From Tumblr and Star Wars.
*Not to mention my bachelor's degree.
**I'm not talking about 'an idiot versus a know-it-all', but 'an idiot versus being actually competent'. If there's one thing I have learned over the years, being a know-it-all serves as a lightning rod for everybody who hates/bullies smart people, so blending into the background by not being a know-it-all is typically the smarter move.
***Figuring out what that order is in a relationship frequently is the hard part. Everybody is different and responds to things differently, although some general concepts are pretty universal. Otherwise, Psychology would be a crap shoot.
****And I ended up working while traveling anyway, because of course that's what happened.
In honor of the fact that I completely forgot to put a title on last week's Meme Monday, I figured I ought to make that a highlight of this week's entry.
It's not a screw-up per se, but if you see my damage meters... Yeah. From Cheezburger.
I've been both the DM and a player in this situation. Makes you want to bang your head on the wall. From Thunder Dungeon.
That happened in the second MERP campaign I ran. Had an NPC in Bree to provide the players with a hook to investigate the Barrow Downs, and they got that NPC killed. From Pinterest.
Did you have to ask? This is SO me. My very first character in D&D missed their attack rolls and died. Okay, so my Level 1 Cleric died to a RED DRAGON, but... Yeah. From Cheezburger.
"It's one of the classic blunders, such as never get involved in a land war in Asia!" --Vizzini, probably From The Gamer Image.
In case you ever wondered how long it would take for games from other Microsoft game studios to appear on Battle.net, here you go:
The Doom prequel appeared first, and given that it's a Bethesda game I guess it's a no-brainer. But this one just appeared a day or three ago, which did cause me to sit up and take notice:
Given that I watch Tim Cain's YouTube videos, I was surprised to see The Outer Worlds 2 show up on the Battle.net front page.
That immediately got me to hop over to Steam just to check to see if both games were able to be purchased over there --they were-- and then I began wondering just where this will end. You don't see any non-Call of Duty Activision games on Battle.net, but if these two end up on BNet, does that mean more will follow? And what about the backlog of titles from these and other Microsoft studios? Will we see Minecraft show up soon? Or will we actually see a purchasable skin for Minecraft of various Blizzard properties?
Maybe there are some things that man was not meant to know...
Do you think I'm being snarky? Well, here's what the login screen looks like after Tuesday's patch cycle in WoW:
Yeah, Hoots again. No biggie. This is what the stable of toons looks like on April 8th, 2025.
See that bar on the top? If you select the Mode button, you get this:
Five separate "Classic WoW" modes.
The Shop (thankfully) doesn't have anything for the non-progression WoW Classic modes:
Soon.... Right?
Well, given that the Cash Shop button used to be inconspicuously in the bottom left of the loading screen, such as what you can still find in Cataclysm Classic...
Ta da!
That tells me they're aiming to utilize the Cash Shop in WoW Classic Era and its clones.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Operation Spread the Love update...
***
As you can see, I did not reach the so-called midway point in leveling any of my toons this past couple of weeks. Part of that is due to the slowdown in leveling itself, but another part of it was due to my interest in fishing.
I guess I should be happy that Card took advantage of that free port to Moonglade during the Lunar Festival.
Since my toons were all over L25, they could spend a gold --not a cheap endeavor in a Vanilla Classic environment like the Anniversary servers are-- and get a book you can read to gain access to the next level of a lot of secondary professions: Cooking, Fishing, First Aid, etc. So Card picked up the Fishing and Cooking upgrades and then set about leveling both.
If you've never played Old World style of WoW, the process of leveling Fishing and Cooking is pretty much symbiotic: you fish to raise your Fishing skill, but also for the raw fish you can then cook to raise your Cooking skill. Once I got my Fishing skill high enough, it was late enough at night for me to go ahead and see if I could fish in Moonglade for that classic catch, the Nightfin Snapper.
Nightfin can only be caught at night in certain places around Azeroth, but as long as you have access to Moonglade, it's at least safe to be fished for there. Most other places are in high level zones, the lowest being Feralas with the upper L40s / lower L50s mobs, so that's definitely not safe for a lowbie toon like my stable. Nightfin can also be cooked to create a food beneficial for casters, so they tend to be in high demand by the raiding community and min/maxers.
How high? Right now 5 raw Nightfin sell for about 2 gold 50 silver to 3 gold, which is an enormous sum to someone still leveling.
I discovered that as long as Card added a bobber to her fishing pole, she could fish for a stack of 20 Nightfin over the course of about 45 minutes. Therefore, she spent several evenings fishing up a stack or two so I could build up a bit of a war chest for when these toons need a huge influx of cash.
The funny thing is, I enjoyed the fishing a lot more that I thought I would.
Usually, I fish because I need mats for a raid --well, not anymore-- or I'm waiting around before I go and do something else. This past week, however, has re-exposed me to the joys of in-game fishing once more. It also calms me down, because I don't have to spend time thinking about where to go next or what to do (or what a particular toon has already done); I can just relax and chill for a while. It may slow down my leveling, but given that Blizzard is now expecting TBC Classic to release in Q1 2026, I'm still in no hurry to get to L60.
Okay, that's not quite true, there are days when I want to get a toon to L60 so I can get into some of the L60 instances or run a Battleground. Then again, I see the stress that my Questing Buddy is under* to try to find more inventive ways to get gear, and I just shake my head.
I do fish a lot in Stardew Valley, though! From IGN. Alas that I have no screencaps of my variations on Red fishing.
On those days, fishing sounds like a good idea.
*I should clarify this. She puts herself willingly under that stress, because that's the sort of person she is. I think that's the difference that the 15-16 years of age between us makes: I no longer care to chase after that sort of hardcore play (if I ever did, honestly) because I realize that it will only fuel my Imposter Syndrome. And I really don't need any extra help from that angle.
EtA: Corrected some grammar and reinserted another half of a sentence that I mistakenly deleted.
Like it or not, the main driver of play in World of Warcraft is group activity. Whether you raid, run 5-person instances, or PvP in various forms, WoW revolves around the "multiplayer" in the MMO acronym. Easing the access for multiplayer activity has been a driver of the more controversial changes to WoW over the years, from the automated group finder to LFR (LFD's raid level equivalent).
Given that Blizzard has stoked the FOMO furnace over the years, it's no surprise that raid and dungeon teams have spent a lot of time trying to find the "right" player to help them clear content. We're not talking about friends and family raid teams who raid in a more social manner, but raiders who have aspirations of Heroic and maybe even Mythic clears of content.
Oh, and then there's puggers, who don't belong to a regular raid team for various reasons, yet still want to experience group content. It goes without saying that pugging is a bit of a hit-or-miss activity in MMOs in general without even taking into consideration any "requirements" placed on the prospective raid leads.
The WoW community has responded to those needs --and the FOMO driver-- by creating addons and websites to "assist" people in finding the best players for their needs. To say that these have been controversial has been a bit of an understatement.
Anybody remember the initial release of GearScore back in Wrath?
There it is, in all its glory. I had this from another post; I can't remember which one now.
The GearScore addon caused a huge row in the WoW community by attempting to reduce a player's raid usefulness to a single number --the GearScore itself-- which led to entries such as this in Trade Chat:
"Need 2 DPS for ICC 25 GS 5000+ req"
The irony about gatekeepers using GearScore as a barrier to entry is that all it provided was a compilation of the iLevels of your gear, not whether you were any good in a raid. I mean, by the end of Wrath of the Lich King my Ret Paladin, Quintalan, had a GearScore of something like ~5200 and he never set a single foot in a raid instance. All that gear he got by grinding badges by running random Heroic Instances.
Could I get into some of these raids with these GS requirements? Certainly.
Did it mean I was a good raider? Certainly not.
***
Why dredge up GearScore again? Didn't we have a repeat of GS in Wrath Classic? Oh yes, Wrath Classic, where people swore right and left that they weren't going to use it... Until it came out and people used it like crazy once more.
The thing is, GearScore is just one incremental step along the way to the current status of pugging in WoW. Parse Culture has always been around to an extent, but ever since GearScore and the rise of FOMO, Parse Culture has been pushing the envelope of what it means to be a "good player". Notice I didn't say good raider, but good player. If you raid or run instances and you pug, you have to deal with people who think all of your qualities as a WoW player can be reduced to a single number, a color, or a summary chart.
Archon is brought to you by the same team that created the Warcraftlogs app and website, and the TL;DR is that it takes all of the searching through Warcraftlogs and places it into a tooltip addon, so you can perform real time analysis of who to take as a pug in your raid.
GearScore on steroids, basically.
***
This addon has been the subject of quite a bit of discussion on MMO Champion and has seen its share of YouTube videos:
Of course, Archon has been around in Early Access for months now, but a wider release apparently happened last week (ish). The current version everybody can use, but if you subscribe (as in pay real money) you can get more info than what the free users get.
It's not as if gatekeeping is new, but this is making gatekeeping easier than ever before. Just rolling up and hovering over players allows you to see at a glance what it would have taken people a lot longer to review manually on Warcraftlogs.
Even then, it still doesn't tell you everything. Archon can't tell you if you do the mechanics right in a raid, and if you perform a critical job --which typically also means having a lower parse-- you're punished for it. Look at Vanilla Naxx as an example: I was on Wall Duty on Maexxna and would be tasked with calling out and freezing the scarabs on Anub'Rekhan, both of which are critical tasks for success on those bosses. Both of them also required me to be basically giving up on my parses for the good of the raid. With Archon, however, I'd be punished for such behavior, with a lesson to be learned is that I need to play less as a teammate and more of an asshole. And who wants to play with someone like that?
Needless to say, there have been some interesting takes on this...
From the comments from Bellular's video above.
From the MMO Champion thread linked to above.
I tried to avoid some of the more toxic responses in those threads, especially when you see people pooh-poohing the whole thing as "it's easy to to get XXX parses", basically trolling everybody. And it kind of spiraled out of control in spots from there.
Still, if the best advice to give people is "join a guild and raid with them", well, I have some experience there.
No, this was not me. From the comments from Bellular's video above.
My own experience with guilds over the past 15+ years of playing MMOs hasn't been that inspiring. The guilds I've been in the longest over this time have been --by quite a wide margin-- the guild the kids and I have in LOTRO (Heroes of the Old Forest on the Gladden server) and Rades' old blogger guild Puggers Anonymous on Moonrunner-US.* The Retail guilds from back in the day either imploded with the the force of a thousand suns or faded away to nothing. The guilds I've been a part of in Classic WoW either faded away or swung heavily toward hardcore to the point where it was unbearable to remain.
'We want to raid with friends', indeed.
After years of those shenanigans, I fail to see why I'd want to sign up for it all over again just to raid or run dungeons. And let's be honest for a minute: if my experience is pretty typical, I'd say that joining any guild will have issues because of the cliques that have developed over the time the guild has been around. Unless guild leadership makes an actual effort to include new people in group activities, any new guildie will find themselves it a double bind, where they can't get into guild runs and they can't get into pugs.
And really, if the solution is continuously guild hop until you find one that you like, at what point to you decide to go and do something else?
That aside, I think this is just more of the same as far as WoW goes. For the people who seek out drama, they'll find it in spades with this addon. For the people who are part of a guild of any real cohesion, then this is a non-issue for them. For people who stick to LFR and normal/heroic mode instances (and Delves), this won't affect them at all. It's only the people who want to try something different, to push themselves beyond the basics, that will find issues exacerbated by this addon. If Blizzard wants to turn the casual crowd into something more, then this addon --and the community culture-- will torpedo that.
But maybe Blizzard doesn't want to bother trying any more, because that's not what they measure success at in Microsoft. There, it's all about whether you met your profit numbers, and if another mount or two in the cash shop will get them there, that's what we should expect.
*I had to go login to Retail to make sure I had the server right.
After this past week, I was regretting having a Rainy Day Memes a couple of weeks ago. I'm actually quite surprised I haven't seen an ark float by yet, but there's more rain in the forecast, so you never know.
Hey, did you remember to add the dragons??!! From imgflip.
Regardless, I'm going to provide some positivity for the Meme Monday this week.
I've been skiing a few times. Yeah, this fits. From Tessera Guild.
Again, true. Also means you're alive at the same time as Warsong Gulch, but diff'rent strokes. From Pinterest.
Even if it's a pair of crappy gray quality ones, they're SOMETHING. From Cheezburger.
