Wherever I Go, There's a Bookstore

I think it says something about me and my family that my wife and I visited out oldest up in Milwaukee this past weekend* and we spent part of our time in the bookstore that is below her and her partner's apartment.

Oh, we did go to a museum --The Milwaukee Public Museum, and yes, it's totally worth the trip-- and we also attended a concert by one of the local community orchestras that my oldest's partner plays bassoon in, but we can't have a trip anywhere without visiting a bookstore. 

Here's the proof. I sat down on a bench
in the store, looked to my right, and there
it was. I'd been thinking about buying this
classic, and I took this serendipity as a sign.

Some of my fondest vacation memories as a kid involved bookstores. Such as the time when we went down to Jekyll Island, Georgia (my parents rented a house for the week). I wasn't interested in hanging around the beach**, so I read the books I brought. We managed to find a small bookstore in a strip mall nearby when we made an excursion to check out the area, and I found these books:

Yes, I was on an Isaac Asimov kick at the time.
Then again, he wrote a metric ton of books of all types,
so it was kind of hard to avoid his works back in the day.

Asimov on Physics was right up my alley because that's what I eventually majored in at university, but I'd argue that Asimov on Science Fiction fueled my interest in writing far more than any other book at that time.

To be clear, both books were compilations of articles that Isaac had written for various magazines, from his own Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine to Galaxy Science Fiction to Astounding Science Fiction/Analog Science Fiction.***

I devoured that book (from Isaac's perspective) on the history and writing of Science Fiction, and it inspired me to try my hand at writing. 'Try' being the operative word here, because if you thought some of the stuff I put here on the blog is pretty bad, my first attempts at writing articles and fiction in high school were abjectly terrible. I still don't know how I got good grades in English back then, because I occasionally come across an old piece I wrote for class and shudder.

Still, I can also see Asimov's influence on my writer's voice when I occasionally return to this and other essay compilations of his. Unlike Stephen King, whose book On Writing I used as a springboard to learn how to edit better, Asimov provided me positive reinforcement that yes, I could write and I really ought to try my hand at it. The book also taught me that short story magazines were still alive and well (okay, at least 'alive'**** these days) and were worthwhile to read. If it weren't for that, I'd never have gotten to enjoy some really good stories. 

***

There is something oddly comforting about visiting a bookstore, especially for the first time. Sure, with the big stores (such as Barnes and Noble) there's likely to be a bunch of people there who are not readers but are with someone who is*****, but the independent bookstores tend to be packed with readers who genuinely love books. If you ask them and given them a blank slate, they are happy to provide a pile of books to read.

That actually happened to me over a decade ago, when I went to our local bookstore and when someone there asked if I needed any assistance, I admitted that I'd fallen off the wagon as far as reading SF&F goes, and I asked what books I ought to try out. The employee was almost giddy in that he instantly provided me with six books to read and pointed out about another half dozen or more to pick up after I was finished with those. Not all of his recommendations stuck with me --the John Ringo book I only got about 30 pages in before I decided he was far too overtly political for my tastes-- but I did find subgenres I'd have never tried were it not for his encouragement. 

Maybe I need to get out of my comfort zone again and try some specialist independent bookstores, such as Mystery or Romance bookstores. 

*Yes, the Meme Monday was written and scheduled beforehand.

**It stunk of dead fish. And before you say "Hey, what about that endless teen boy pastime of checking out girls?" yes, I can say that I did check out girls. I just made a point of doing that when my parents weren't around, and if I'd have walked over to the beach they would have been there. All. The. Time.

***Galaxy may --may-- have had a relaunch in 2024, but I haven't seen it at a bookstore yet. IASFM is now currently known as Asimov's Science Fiction as you'll see on the website, and Astounding became Analog and is now formally known as Analog Science Fiction Science Fact. Analog and Asimov's are published by Must Read Magazines, the same imprint that also publishes Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Where's The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, you may ask? Well, they began having printing issues, and I've only seen an issue or two since 2023. I did see this thread on Reddit indicating that a fan purchased the magazine with the attempt to save it, but I have no idea if that'll come to fruition. F&SF had a long history in print, and it was one of the last Fantasy fiction magazines out there. If I won the lottery, this would have been one of the things I would try to save from oblivion.

****Aaaand the deeper I've delved into this, the Must Read Magazines imprint also includes F&SF magazine, and the so-called fan (plus the intentionally vague 'group of investors') have been putting out contracts with 'morals clauses' and some pretty onerous ceding of rights in them. This does not bode well for the future of all five magazines, because I've this feeling that there's a private investment firm trying to squeeze every last dollar behind the magazines' intellectual property for their personal benefit. I'll keep an eye on Writer Beware articles for this going forward.

*****Or are buying a book for someone who is a reader.

Meme Monday: Expansion Related Memes

All MMOs have them, and people expect them.

Expansions.

Without expansions, people would merely sit around wherever, saying "I'm bored" into General Chat. Or, worse for the game publisher, people would stop paying to keep the MMO afloat.

Of course, expansions also mean memes. Lots of memes.

I had to look this up to find out what movie
this was referencing. It's the end scene of
The Dark Knight Rises. From the Blizzard Forums.

The irony was that this didn't exactly age like milk,
but it's entirely feasible that they were channeling
the entire Worldsoul Expansion Set instead.
From Reddit.

Sorry about the size on this one, but it's amusing
in its own way. From Reddit.

Yes, I'm aware that Legion has been out for so long
that it now is "out" again  as a "Remix" version. But hey,
Legion Classic will likely be out by 2027.
And before you ask, no, I've never played it and
I have no desire to ever play it, so don't try to
tell me about it at all. From Imgflip (original) and ifunny.co.

Say Hello to Sunken Temple for Me

When a toon reaches L50 in the Vanilla portion of WoW Classic, you get a quest for your class. (Okay, most classes; I haven't gotten all classes to L50, so there might be an outlier.) That quest chain inevitably sends you to the Sunken Temple dungeon, where you go get a McGuffin to bring back and get a (relatively) decent item as a reward. Sure, it's not world beating or anything, but I'll take it.

Hey, Joan. Don't worry, your turn is coming soon.
Just try not to think about farming Felcloth too much.
The listings are as October 16, 2025.

Typically there's a bit of a wait to find a group for a Sunken Temple run; nothing too terribly bad, but waiting on a Tank is pretty much a time-honored tradition these days. 

Except that this past week has been really bad for groups for ST.

At first I couldn't figure out why, since Sunken Temple does have enough people interested in running it, but then I remembered two things:

• Naxxramas opened up on the Anniversary Servers
• Legion Remix opened on October 7th

Yeah, those two things will do it.

In the meantime, I've been kind of doing other things than leveling my toons. Such as Linna spending time leveling Blacksmithing instead, which led me down the gold sink of working on Blacksmithing quests. (Yes, this was a thing in Vanilla Classic.)

I won't tell you how many times I farmed Mithril Ore
for this. Let's just say that I got to know all of the mobs
around Tanaris. ALL OF THEM.

Even after farming for ore for what seemed like forever, I still decided to buy some extra ore off of the Auction House because I was constantly fighting with other Paladins out there for those Mithril and Truesilver ores.* The net result was not only that I completed those Mithril Order quests, but I now have to go fish a bit to get my gold supply back up. 

Ah well. Not like I'm going to have to worry about an fast mount anytime soon. Or even in TBC, where I didn't get an fast ground mount on Briganaa at all until she hit max level L70.** And throughout all of my playing WoW Classic I never had enough gold to get an Epic flying mount because constantly farming gold and "playing the gold game" didn't interest me.

Remember, kids, when you talk about rushing out and getting your epic flying mounts and whatnot that there are people who didn't want to (or couldn't) spend tons of time min/maxing their gold farming to get their own epic mount. (And didn't want to buy gold illicitly or from Blizzard.)

If you say his name three times really fast,
@madseasonshow will appear and say "Told you so."

Given that I've been slowed down by external factors, I'm actually quite surprised that I've gotten to L52 on two toons by mid-October. With some luck I'll get all four to L52 by Halloween, and just continue onward. I'm expecting TBC Prepatch to hit in January 2026, but we'll see how it goes.

*Before you ask, yes, I'm aware that in Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien used Truesilver and Mithril interchangeably. The first time I saw a Truesilver Ore out in the field in 2009 my brain went "Wait, didn't they know that they're the same damn thing?"

**A little side effect of that Bataan Death March of speed leveling. Another side effect of that experience was that I had to go back and level Leatherworking and Skinning after I leveled to L70, and by then there was almost no reason to do it because by the time I'd have gotten Leatherworking high enough my gear would have been better coming from raid and dungeon drops (theoretically speaking) than anything I could make. 

Pendragon Classic Returns

The RPG nostalgia tour continues with Chaosium bringing back another 1980s classic of the RPG genre, Pendragon Classic. 

I'd read through the original version once before, and yes, I'm a product of those old classic movies such as The Adventures of Robin Hood and Prince Valiant.* Hell, I am still fond of the 1982 mini-series adaptation of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe on television.

The more I've delved into Pendragon the past few years, the more I've been impressed by Greg Stafford's adaptation of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur into an RPG that's designed to last 50+ years in a campaign setting. That concept alone is something that people who play D&D and its ilk would have trouble wrapping their heads around. 

For those people interested in old editions of RPGs, or for those interested in how the concept of the RPG was stretched far beyond what was originally envisioned by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, this might be something you'd be interested in.

I think I ought to finish up my RPG from the Past on Pendragon soon. Maybe in time once this is released...

*Independent television stations used to broadcast those movies --and many others-- on Saturday afternoon matinees. 

Meme Monday: Apple Picking Memes

My oldest went apple picking up in rural Wisconsin this weekend, and so I was inspired for today's Meme Monday.

Besides, it's that time of the year, and part of the Autumn rituals in our part of the country.

From Someecards.

They honeycrisp variety of apples may be sweet,
but not THAT sweet. From Legends of Windemere.

Honestly, I expected this meme to appear
sooner this year in my perusings, but...
From Imgflip.

I can get behind this. Well, without the medical
issues, that is. From Someecards.

Ha! Yeah, been there. From Memedroid.

Found the original apple picker fan. From Reddit.

Farewell, John Lodge

I first heard The Moody Blues on the radio in 1981, as their Long Distance Voyager album came out in early Summer. It got heavy airplay on Top 40 radio stations in the US, courtesy of The Voice and the disco-influenced Gemini Dream. You'd think that with my love of Rock music I'd have been exposed to The Moodies earlier, but I switched radio station loyalties a few years later, and only then became exposed to their extensive back catalog. 

A neighbor* pointed me in the direction of one of their early "Greatest Hits" compilations, This Is The Moody Blues, and two of the songs from that album that I really loved were (I'm Just a) Singer in a Rock and Roll Band and Ride My See-Saw. It's with sadness that I saw that the composer of those two songs (plus the aforementioned Gemini Dream), John Lodge, died yesterday.

If Justin Hayward is the voice of The Moody Blues, John Lodge held down the bass lines. Sure, there are other characteristics of what makes up a classic Moody Blues song --strings, anyone?-- but they'd be nowhere without John Lodge's bass. That he wrote some of my favorite Moody Blues pieces was just a cherry on top of the sundae. 

They finally got a "golf clap" award by being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, and although their voices and sound had faded quite a bit by then (as evidenced by their rendition of Ride My See-Saw above), you could tell that they still enjoyed playing together.

I'll miss you, John. Thanks for all the years of playing and recording.

*This is the same neighbor who fed my interest in what is now Classic Rock by providing me album suggestions for bands such as Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, and Cream. He strongly emphasized listening to albums because you got to hear the entire context of songs together, something I put to good use with bands who released concept albums such as The Who, Pink Floyd, and Rush.

Under the Heading of "Things I Didn't Ask For"

There's an AI "Google Search" button right next to this post as I'm typing, and it floored me so much I took a screencap just to prove that it's there:

I even stopped typing to do this, and I realized
my writing made no sense because I was so discombobulated
by it all. (This was observed on October 7, 2025.)

I kid you not.

Anyhoo, here's the original thing I noticed when I popped up Blogger today this afternoon*

On October 7, 2025.

Under the header of "Who asked for this crap?", I was almost instantly annoyed by this new Blogger "feature". 

How about Widgets that are kept up to date, or you can put YouTube Channels (or other social media (tm) channels) into your blog without having to figure out the arcane systems on your own?

Or, in my case, how about bringing my freaking blog into Google Search itself? You know, the thing you tout as the best search engine on the internet?

But noooo... We get an option to add Google Search and Google Search links and previews to our blogs, thus creating "a more engaging reading experience with the help of Google".

Right. Because long form writing needs to be turned into something more "engaging". (As in... "shorter".)

/sigh

*I was not home for part of the day, taking my mom's car in for maintenance.