Because I Don't Have Enough Irons in the Fire

So.... I did a thing...

Her looks aren't exactly right, but close enough.

Yes, after a purchase on sale from what seems like an age ago, I finally got around to creating a toon or two for Hogwarts Legacy.

This is... actually pretty close to what I'd look like back
then. The hair would have been not quite so wavy, but
the coloring and shape of the face are about right. Can't turn
those glasses into 80s style metal frames, however.
(I went with Miller because it's a pretty generic name.)

The irony is that while I first created a toon that looked like me --not out of vanity, but just something I do because I can't not make decisions as if I were doing them-- I went full Mage and created Cardwyn, as if she were plucked out of Azeroth and dropped straight into the Wizarding World.

See? I got her hair right!

If she were 15 or 16 years old, that is.* The story begins with you as a new student going to Hogwarts, but with the specific tweak that you're a Fifth Year student, something almost never done before. I suspect this plot device was conceived to not spread out the plot too much. If you're a First Year student, your abilities are a bit limited, and Portkey Games doesn't really have the time to play the long game, plot wise. There's also the additional bonus of being able to insert into the game themes better handled by a mid-late teenager than a tween of 11 or 12.

Although I played through only the Intro Zone (as it were) of the story, I couldn't exactly tell what the time frame for the story was. Given that the visual cues I've seen so far it very much fits within the Steampunk-ish vibe that the original series had, it seems that the Wizarding World doesn't exactly change that much in aesthetic. Meeting M. Weasley at Hogwarts made me think that this was a continuation of the original story, set some years later, but the more I think about it (and the hair design of the students) I think it might be earlier, from anywhere between the late 19th Century to the early 20th Century. 

Geez, Card, you ought to be able to see the Arcane flows.

Okay, confession time: I've only read the first four books in the original Harry Potter series. The fifth book had come out when I originally read the first four, but I held off in case there was a cliffhanger at the end of the fifth book. Given that the sixth book was a year away from publication at the time, by the time the sixth book was released I just never got back into reading the series. Given that there apparently was a cliffhanger at the end of the sixth book, it's probably for the best that I stopped reading the series when I did. I don't take cliffhangers well.

Still, I was interested enough in the worldbuilding behind the series --whether it was created by the seat of her pants or not-- to see what Portkey did with the world. 

That's not a really good excuse to buy a game, especially one with a premium cost such as this one. I'll readily admit that. However, it's also a third person single player RPG in a development paradigm where more and more RPGs are either isometric or first person. Looking at all of the RPGs that I'd love to play that I simply can't --Cyberpunk 2077 and The Outer Worlds to name two-- it's nice to actually have a game that I can play. That it was massively on sale when I bought it (something like 50% or more off) doesn't hurt either.

So we'll see where this leads me. I have no idea when I'll finish it, given that I've not progressed in Baldur's Gate 3 since March 2024 or so, but at least it's an option on the table.

*Having raised three kids, I can tell you those 2-3 years can be quite huge for a person's physical and mental development. 

Yeah, I'm Back

No I'm not.

Husky is not amused, either.
What, you expected John Wick? From YouTube.

But I am close to the so-called halfway point overall on Operation Spread the Love.

Shaluna was first created in Classic Era so I could see if
someone could dance on top of the Stormwind fountain
in skimpy attire and get tips, but I chickened out before I put my
plan into action. Ironically enough, Shaluna's Corsair Overshirt 
has generated... commentary... from passersby. (But no tips.)

As you can see, 4 of the toons are at L30 and 4 are at L29. 

In Vanilla WoW, when you hit the low L30s the leveling speed slows down a lot, and there's a 3-4 level gap before you can really keep questing going. When TBC came around, Blizzard fixed that by adding more quests --and a neutral quest hub-- in Dustwallow Marsh, but this is Vanilla and so you have to get creative if you want to level in the low-30s until Arathi and Desolace become viable questing areas. 

Oh, I suppose you could just run instances such as Blackfathom Deeps or the first Scarlet Monastery wing on repeat, but I was swept up in that one evening when I was leveling the original Cardwyn in 2019, and doing Scarlet Monastery's Cathedral wing 3-4 times in a row wasn't the most fun I ever had in game.* Sure, I went up a level and a half over the course of a couple of hours, but I was on my toes and struggling to keep up the entire time. 

At times like this, you create your own fun. Such as what I posted about the other day when I crept through a zone filled with enemies about 20+ levels higher than me. 

If you're expecting me to go off on a screed about how Retail doesn't allow you to just go and do your own thing, you're sadly mistaken. Retail may not want you to go and simply do some unstructured play --and the majority of Retail player-focused content certainly emphasizes that fact-- but you can just screw around on Retail. You just have to put in more effort to disconnect from everything there.

Unstructured play is not what Blizzard or folks such 

as Mike Bell are selling, that's for sure.

One of the things I used to do during my last year of playing Retail in Mists was to sneak through the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor on the original Azshandra, creeping up into Eversong Forest or Durotan, just to look around. On a PvE server it wasn't that dangerous per se, but it still was a bit of a thrill just stealthing my way across multiple zones while lowbies did their thing, blissfully unaware I was there. 

I used to also return to Hellfire Peninsula in Outland, because it remained untouched by the changes wrought by Cataclysm, and it had more of a Vanilla-esque feel than Northrend did. I wasn't the only person to feel that pull, as we had periodic incursions of max level Horde into Honor Hold, and I was more than happy to help defend the keep from them. 

***

Under the header of "unstructured play", I decided last week to start pushing my toons to run through the Feralas wilderness to get to Feathermoon Stronghold out on the western islands. Running south from Desolace isn't difficult in theory, but trying to make that run when you're in your L20s can be similar to Azshandra's little adventure to Dire Maul. 

But you do get to say hello to Rexxar.
Yes, I still have a certain fondness for him.

While I'm happy to report there were no untimely deaths on the three toons who made the run --thankfully Frost Nova actually worked on the skull level toon that was chasing Cardwyn-- there were a collection of bodies along the road, indicating that something had been killing players out there.

But going forward I intend to lean more into unstructured play in Vanilla WoW so I can keep all 8 toons going. The decentralized nature of Vanilla WoW is ideal for that sort of thing.

*Even if --as I found out later-- I was in a guild group from the best guild on the Myzrael-US server. I was merely happy to just keep up, given that they were in Discord and obviously coordinating while I wasn't. I just had to watch for cues based on what they were doing so I didn't do anything too stupid. 

Sometimes You Just Want to do Something Stupid

Really.

As in, let's go visit a high level area as a low level toon and try to sneak into an endgame instance zone.

Such as sneaking through the Feralas wilderness and arriving at the entrance to Dire Maul.

Dare I go in?

It doesn't always go so well...

Just one of many deaths. But I persisted.

The thing is, the more times I died at the hands of max level ogres, the more it pushed me to get into the entrance area...

"What, you again?"

And I persisted...

There were a lot of people running the various wings
of Dire Maul. Enough so that I saw a lot of dead people
running back to the instances.

And I finally made it through.

Really, the stealth was just for show. If I got even
vaguely close to an Ogre they were going to attack me.

I think I'd need another 10-15 levels before I could stealth into the area without aggroing any of the baddies, but that's just a guess on my part. Still, it was a fun little excursion just to see how it would work out.

Meme Monday: Gardening Memes

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...

Being Present in the Moment

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.

Meme Monday: Screwing Up Memes

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.

Changes Afoot

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...