Meme Monday: Anachronism Memes

I've been thinking a bit about anachronisms lately, so I figured I might as well lean into it and provide a few memes about anachronisms from all over.

Some anachronisms are out in plain
sight. Such as that the Trojan Horse
was actually a jet. From Memedroid.

Oh, and speaking of The Iliad...
From Imgflip.

/snicker. From the Triablogue Wordpress blog.

Anachronistic memes can be found even in the Bayeaux Tapestry.
From Pinterest.

Okay, I laughed. Although to be fair,
I could see this in an episode of Doctor Who.
From Memedroid.

Aye, thou mayest be a star.
From Imgflip and timfall,wordpress.com.

Adventures in Righteousness

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention something on my last Operation Spread the Love update: two weeks ago, Linna did complete one Paladin quest chain.

I'd forgotten how long of a grind it was to complete this questline. It's probably half as long as the Paladin mount questline is, but it still takes you far afield for a low level Paladin. The initial portion of the questline, defending Daphne Stilwell from the Defias, does take a minimum level to complete in the same way that a Mage's wand questline does**, but as long as you don't do anything stupid such as hit the wrong button you can complete it quickly enough.

This was before I hit said "wrong button".
It wasn't until I was reviewing screencaps for this post that
I realized that Daphne's hairstyle is the same as Cardwyn's. Go figure.

::ONE DEATH AND SEVERAL DAYS LATER::

At least she doesn't have the same hair color as Cardwyn.

If you've not done the quest chain before**, you'll be pleased to know that Daphne is not some helpless "damsel in distress". She has already been defending her and her husband's farm from the Defias Brotherhood for a while, and during the fight she is alongside you, taking potshots at the Defias with her gun. Given how cut off their farm is from the main rallying point at Sentinel Hill, she has to be tough enough to stand her ground. 

Anyway, once that quest is complete you might be tempted to believe that's the end of that, but your superior, Lord Shadowbreaker, sends you up to Ironforge where Daphne's husband is stationed to inform him of the events back home. In gratitude for helping to defend his farm and Daphne***, Jordan offers to forge you a weapon worthy of a wielder of the Light such as yourself. 

There's only one little problem: Jordan doesn't have what he needs to finish the job.

The solution? Well, you can handle a little shopping trip, right?

Apparently Linna could, because Jordan provided Linna with said shopping list, and she then went all over tarnation, from familiar places such as Dun Morogh and The Deadmines to farther away locales such as Darkshore and the Silverpine Forest.

There's a bit of a crowd at the gates of Shadowfang Keep.
And yes, I took this screencap originally for that
guild name, which reminded me of an ongoing joke
in The Elder Scrolls Online, The Lusty Argonian Maid.

The labors weren't exactly the Labors of Hercules by any stretch, but it did involve some patience. While the Kor Gem you seek can drop off of the naga that roam the underground tunnels before you reach the instance itself, they're all elites and it takes some patience to kill them. To be honest, it's more effective to simply get a group for Blackfathom Deeps and just go run the instance.

Shirtless Kaldorei looks better than
Shirtless Kirk, that's for certain.

Once you've obtained a corrupted Kor Gem and Thundris helpfully purifies it, you can then make the trek back to Ironforge**** and provide Jordan with the entire contents of his grocery list. In Vanilla Classic, there was no option to turn in parts of the list beforehand, you had to get the entire list first and then turn it all in. When your bag space is kind of limited, that's a bit of a commitment.

Still, Jordan is grateful and you do get the satisfaction of watching him work:

Completing an involved class quest is far more satisfying than, say, some of the one-off Mage class quests. I'm looking at you, Jennea, and your insistence on collecting water from Mirror Lake for a reason you refuse to tell me about. (Cardwyn still believes it was a test to see if you'll do whatever you're told to do without question, which irks her to no end.) Yes, you might get a good weapon at the end of it, but the journey is also very much worth it as well.

Now, about some of those Druid and Warlock quests...

*Trudging through the swamp to where Tabetha lives is pretty much a death sentence to any Mage attempting to do it the moment you get the initial quest. In Vanilla WoW, Mages don't have the ability to turn themselves temporarily invisible, so any critter within a mile of you in southern Dustwallow will be coming for you. (Don't ask me how I know that one.)

**I can't recall if it was removed from the post-Cataclysm Old World, but while there are entries in Wowhead it appears that if you bring up Verigan's Fist there's a line that says "This item's source is no longer available/removed."

***More like 'assist Daphne in her slaughter of the Defias', but I digress. If I ever get in a fight in a back alley, I want her on my side.

****I like to take a long trip back rather than use the Hearthstone to return to Stormwind and take the tram. So sue me. 

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.