Meme Monday: How About More Miscellaneous Memes?

Yeah, I've got a lot of excess memes that I ought to unload, so no time like the present.

There's always one meme that screams "pick me" that I don't end up using...

Alas, poor Horshack...
From Welcome Back, Kotter, via MakeAGIF.com.

So these are from all over the internet that somehow just didn't make the cut on other Meme Mondays.

Obviously an IKEA spoof, but it came from a Discord
channel, so I don't know who actually created this.

That's.... a very 80s trap, I must say.
And yes, I'd probably roll a one on this one.
From Demotivational (I think).

I remember Sabrina from the 60s version
of The Archies, so I'm still kind of having
trouble squaring away this version of her.
From d20dndmemes.

Yes, this is me. I hang onto old weapons because they've
been well-loved.From Travis Hanson's
Life of the Party: Realities of an RPG'er.

Friday Musings: The Missing 90's

The 90s were, for me, kind of a lost decade.

I graduated from college, got married, and we began having children all during the 90s. I had a series of jobs, which included a stint as a Salesmaker at Radio Shack*, and only settled into a relatively stable position midway through the decade. We bought a house right at the time we became a family, and the last two years of the decade were spent learning both how to be both a father and a homeowner.

Because I was so preoccupied, I kind of missed out on a lot of touchstones for people who were in their 20s back then. While I kept my interest in Metal and Alternative, I developed an interest in Celtic, Folk, and Jazz, so I missed out on the major musical trends of the decade.** 

Alice In Chains' Dirt was released 32 years ago. Yikes.

As was this version of the song Kilkelly, from the

album Music at Matt Molloy's.

Gaming kind of followed in its wake, with me becoming interested in Euro-style board games when they first began appearing here in the US in the mid-90s. 

We still have our copy of Settlers of Catan
that we purchased in 1996. It's certainly
seen better days, but it's been well loved.

Their appeal, promising short game times yet with just as much deep gameplay as longer titles such as Avalon Hill's Civilization and Games Workshop's Talisman drew me in. That my wife was also willing to play the games was a bonus, because she simply wasn't interested in RPGs.*** And to be honest, neither was I at the time.

***

It wasn't that I was over pencil and paper RPGs, it was more that I'd left my old game group behind when I graduated from college and I had no real group to replace it. RPGs no longer had the boom of the late 70s-early 80s --or even the "bad boy" image from the Satanic Panic-- to fuel interest in them. The game store I frequented had a bulletin board for game groups, but they were all (or mostly) out of the University of Cincinnati or Xavier University, comprised of college kids looking for groups. And I, being a grad in my 20s, wasn't really the target audience.

I'd largely moved on from D&D and spent a few years DMing a Middle-earth Role Playing campaign, but that fizzled out by the mid-90s. D&D itself was slowly being weighted down by the tons of settings that TSR was cranking out, and they'd even lost their position as the flagship RPG to some edgy upstart published by White Wolf named Vampire: the Masquerade. V:tM captured all of the vibes that had previously been AD&D's until the Columbine school shooting in 1999 brought goth subculture (including V:tM) under the harsh glare of the media spotlight. 

While AD&D 2e moved away from controversy,
even renaming Demons and Devils to something
tamer, Vampire: the Masquerade reveled in its
association with horror. This even rubbed off on
it's predecessor, Ars Magica, in it's 3rd Edition
incarnation. From Wikipedia.

So for me, pencil and paper RPGs were not really on my radar.

***

What about video games, you may ask?

Well, we puttered along with an old 486DX66 machine (originally a 386SX25 that I scrounged for replacement parts for incremental upgrades) that I kept running throughout most of the decade, but most of my games were used. There were a couple of used PC games stores around town, and for a few dollars I could own games that were 4-5 years old. Given that I'd fallen in love with GEnie and then USENET, I was fine that my games were aging relics of the early 90s while consoles such as Nintendo's N64 and the original Sony Playstation were running rings around my own PC. 

Ah, the original Master of Magic.
Not only was it a Fantasy version of the
Master of Orion gameplay found later in Age of
Wonders, but the artwork in the game manual
had a lot of BDSM in it. If my parents had
ever seen that manual, they would have had
a heart attack. From Wikipedia.

***

I guess it's only natural that I've become interested in games from the 90's, given that 1994 was 30 years ago and I feel there are huge gaps in my geek cultural knowledge that I need to fill. 

Why bother? After all, I'm only vaguely involved with pop culture these days; if the hottest artists of today (and no, not the Rolling Stones) were to pass me on the sidewalk, I'd have no idea who they were.**** 

I don't think that it's because I miss the culture of the 90's, but rather it's because I want to keep myself from sounding like my mom when she starts waxing about how much better things were in the 50s. The pull of myopia is strong, and I know that despite it being a pre-9/11 and pre-Vladimir Putin world, the 90's weren't all that. Although the 90s were supposedly an economic boom time in the US, we personally struggled to get by. I'm still not entirely sure how we managed to afford a house, much less three kids. There was also dealing with what felt like the perpetual disappointment of my parents, who expected better of their own children.

Maybe it's about putting some ghosts to rest. The 'what if' that can haunt you at night, wondering if the decisions you'd made 30 or 40 years ago were the right ones. I don't know if that's something you can ever be at peace about, and it's not like my own parents have ever confided in me about these sort of doubts, so I guess the best I can do is simply muddle through and hope for the best.

*Yes, that was the official name. Oh, I could write lots of posts about Rat Shack. I was fond of some parts of the job, especially when one of the local amateur radio enthusiasts or the electronics hobbyists came in, but far too many of my hours were spent dealing with people who didn't understand what a CD was or what a home computer was. Or they simply wanted the monthly free battery.

**To be fair, when I heard the boy bands at the end of the decade, I certainly didn't feel like I missed anything.

***I still blame her ex, the boyfriend before me, and a game group who introduced her to D&D immediately before that. I've made a couple of attempts to reintroduce her to the genre without success.

****I'm not sure what those celebrities would think of that, but I'd like to think that they'd at least be somewhat grateful that they don't have someone staring at them or otherwise bugging them.

Meme Monday: RPG/MMO Cat Memes

It was inevitable that I'd create a cat version of Meme Monday, but that's simply because at least I can enjoy the memes without worrying about allergies.

Yes, I'm allergic to cats, so when I visit friends who have cats I make sure to take some meds. Frequently Benadryl, which also means there's those famous Benadryl side effects:

From Someecards.

That doesn't mean I dislike cats, I just have to be medicated around them. So, here's a few RPG and MMO related cat memes:

Cats can be damn cute. From Imgur.

They also have a habit of knocking things over.
From Cheezburger.

Like my sister-in-law, they have a tendency
toward naps. In the sun.
From Cheezburger.

Truth. From @strikestory on that Elon Musk app.

Uh... Yeah.
From quickmeme.

And one bonus cat meme:

I feel ya, kitty. I'm the same way, and nobody
can tell me otherwise. From Pinterest.

Video Game Art: World of Warcraft

I was perusing Batttle.net's launcher the other day because the launcher is heavily promoting the somewhat controversial Plunderstorm event in Retail* when I was struck by the artwork:

The presence of a Draenei in pirate regalia makes
this event seem flirty and fun. Screencap from Battle.net.

While I have no real opinion on Plunderstorm itself, as it's a Retail only thing and I don't play Retail, I had to admit that Blizzard's art team does a fantastic job of selling the event. 

That was when I got the idea for this series of posts, which is intended to be an occasional event meant to highlight the artwork in and about video games. 

My sister-in-law's husband received a coffee table book as a present some years back of the artwork for the games for the original Atari 2600, such as this box cover for Atari's Haunted House:

We have this in a box somewhere, but
this graphic from Giant Bomb is much better
than I'd ever be able to scan.

Whether or not the game matched the artwork is kind of irrelevant, since the artwork is meant to evoke a specific emotion and intice you to purchase the game. Beyond that, it's really damn good all by itself.

So, I thought, why not highlight a slice of some video game art that I've found that I really do enjoy? I'm not an art museum or gallery, but it's something I want to present here to demonstrate that, well, video game art is just as much art as that found in any physical gallery.

This first installment of artwork comes from screencaps I made from of Battle.net's launcher --which is why there's the 'X' and the 'Back' buttons visible on them-- and show that the Blizzard art team is still at the top of their game. Alas that these aren't the full artwork, because the news entries only show part of the full piece, and if there's an attribution other than 'Blizzard' I can't find it on Battle.net's launcher. I realize that Blizzard likely did that on purpose so that their art team wouldn't be poached by other game developers or graphic art teams, but the artists who worked on these pieces deserve the recognition.

When the sky is shattered and looks like it's on fire,
that's not a good thing. Yes, this is from Shadowlands,
which is to show that no matter what you thought
of the expansion itself, the art does a great job
of showing a shattered world.

Yes, I used a cropped version of these two clowns
as a header for this blog for a while. I still have
mixed emotions about this graphic, because the art
is great but the memory of my progression raiding
ending without ever finishing Tempest Keep
still hurts over two years later.

Yeah, don't remind me that I only set foot in
Ulduar once. The artwork is still great,
because I can appreciate the Lovecraftian nature
of the Old Gods.

I'm still of the opinion that dragons --even in
WoW-- are not to be trifled with. They have
their own agendas, and woe to that person
who crosses them. That said, if you've got
one in your corner, you can sleep well at night.

Yeah, the fight at the Gates of Ahn'Qiraq was
kind of like this. Cardwyn took a bit of a beating
there in the fight --I seem to recall her getting
stomped and kicked into the next county--
but I'm glad I was there for the battle.

I believe this is inside the Icecrown Citadel
raid itself, because it doesn't look like
the entrance to the 5-person instances plus
the raid. Unlike Ulduar and the TBC raids,
I'm actually okay that I never made it here.

Sunrise over Thousand Needles.

Remember what I said about not quite
trusting dragons? How about dragons disguised
as gnomes? That's about as close as you can get
to someone holding up a sign that says
"Danger, Will Robinson!"

As much as I ended up disliking the Cataclysm
expansion, I can't deny the power of the artwork.

It's that "We are not amused" look that gets me.

Oh, look; the demon found himself a new
pet. While seeing the artwork for Serpentshrine
Cavern and Tempest keep hurts for me,
this likely would hurt my questing buddy, as
our raid team in TBC Classic fell apart
when they pushed to Sunwell Plateau right
before the guild transferred servers.

And finally, this stirs a lot of emotions in me.
Not bad ones, to be certain, but old memories
of my first Paladin in AD&D in the early 80s
taking on evil in all its forms. There's also more
than a bit of Arthur vs. Mordred at the Battle
of Camlann here as well.

*I know that Blizz wants to call it Modern WoW, but I prefer Retail since it also implies that you have to have bought the current expansion to be current with the present version of WoW. Modern WoW sounds like it covers everything from Legion onward, and at the rate Classic WoW is being released it'll reach Legion in a few years.

It All Comes Back to Balance

With a few notable exceptions, tabletop RPGs are a cottage industry of sorts.

Sure, there's the 500 lb. gorillas known as Wizards of the Coast and Paizo*, but beyond that there's a lot of small operations out there. About the only "large" gaming operation not under Hasbro is the Embracer Group, which owns Asmodee, the French company that had been using Embracer's money to gobble up a lot of other gaming companies, such as Fantasy Flight, Z-Man, Catan Studio, and Exploding Kittens. Still, in tabletop RPGs Embracer really only owns the Star Wars RPG license (courtesy of buying Fantasy Flight) and hasn't exactly done a lot with it other than moving the property to Edge Studio.

Yes, the same (hated) holding company owns both Catan...

and Tomb Raider...

Yikes!!

This never gets old...

However, like I said, you're not going to find many rich tabletop RPG developers around**, so these companies are very often a passion project.

I was thinking about that when I noted that the latest Kickstarter for a Savage Worlds addition, the Science Fiction Companion, just ended.

From Kickstarter.com.

Savage Worlds is one of those universal roleplaying products that I ought to do an RPG From the Past on, but I was considering this Kickstarter as just one way that a small company can fund product releases that they're assured of people buying. If you set up your Kickstarter right --and also make sure you have your budget properly figured out-- you know you ought to at least break even on your product. 

GMT Games with their P500 program, which predates Kickstarter by at least a decade, is another game company that uses the crowdfunding model to create games that they know will have an audience and will break even when they release the game to the public.

***

For me, however, all of these small companies creating fantastic games and gaming products have one major drawback: I can't afford to buy all of them.

I'd love to, but I can't. I'm not made of money.

Additionally, I want to make sure that not only do the game companies get my money, but that I support the local game stores as well. 

This 20+' length silver dragon, named
Strategios Yottazar, takes up a good portion
of the wall at my FLGS.

Local game stores are kind of the forgotten person in this era of instant delivery. Sure, you may not technically need a Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS) to obtain games or even find out about them, but they are a watering hole for the community. Some stores have places for organized play, and others --such as mine-- help to organize game nights at outside locations.

So how can I reconcile all of these conflicting desires? 

Pick and choose, I guess. 

I can't be there for everybody, and I can't afford to give everything to everybody either. Control what I can, and accept what I can't. 

***

Basically, that's what I've been doing when I've been playing video games lately. 

If I subscribed to all of the MMOs that I like and play, I'd have no money left. Therefore, I limit my subscriptions to two at maximum, keeping my subs within my budget. For the longest time, those two were World of Warcraft (the MMO that got me into the genre) and Star Wars: The Old Republic. When I stopped subscribing to WoW after Mists of Pandaria, I didn't pick up another MMO to replace it. I was seriously considering adding The Elder Scrolls Online in 2018, but Blizzard announced WoW Classic and I resubbed in 2019. 

While I'd love to give other MMOs such as LOTRO some love, I simply can't without giving up something else. And given that I spend most of my MMO time in WoW and SWTOR, it makes sense that I'd keep a subscription for each.

So when I see blog posts in multiple locations that subscription numbers for World of Warcraft that show volumes that just feel higher than I expect from game traffic I observe, I have to remember that people will hang onto subscriptions even when they're not actively playing because that's where their social network is. 

One thing that I do wonder about is whether Blizzard counts people purchasing Game Time*** as subscriptions. If they go based on the strict understanding that only recurring subs count in their numbers, I do not count as a subscriber and haven't since, oh, 2011 or so. My guess is that they do count me as a subscriber, even though I would argue otherwise. 

In an automatically recurring subscription such as that found in a wireless or streaming service, it's actually harder to unsubscribe as you have to be the initiator, whereas if you purchase Game Time on a month-to-month basis it's actually harder to remain subscribed since you have to initiate the purchase each time. Obviously Blizzard would prefer me to set up a recurring service since they know this, but I've resisted over the years since it has forced me to ask every couple of months "Am I having fun?" and "Is it worth it to keep playing?" 

At any rate, the conjectures about subscriber numbers are believable, although I am surprised they are not lower. I would have figured that Blizzard would have been happy to maintain these subscriber numbers and announce them at quarterly intervals, but perhaps the reason why they don't post sub numbers has less to do with saying just how many people play WoW but rather they don't want people to know just how much money they're getting from the Cash Shop.  

I guess we'll never know now, since Activision-Blizzard is but a small line item on the overall Microsoft balance sheet.

*Yes, WotC is by far the larger of the two, but Paizo wields a LOT of outsized influence in the gaming world because Pathfinder is still incredibly popular among people who prefer the D&D 3.x style of play. They've also led the way in moving away from the Wizards' led Open Gaming License that Wizards and Hasbro attempted to modify last year to make it much harder for anybody third party in D&D space to make any profit at all. You'd think that Corporate America would understand and learn from previous mistakes, but apparently institutional memory is very very short.

**I presume the truism about wine, that if you want to make a small fortune in wine begin with a large fortune, holds for game companies as well.

***I'm keeping this capitalized in the post as Blizzard does, not for any other reason.

Meme Monday: Tired of Movie Memes

I suppose it comes as no surprise that I'm kind of tired of the steady stream of genre movies. By that, I don't mean Science Fiction or Fantasy or Rom Com in general, but rather Marvel movies. Star Wars movies. DC movies. A steady stream of sequels upon sequels.

It has nothing to do with quality, per se, but everything to do with quantity. As I remarked to one of my kids a couple of months ago, I jumped off the Star Wars bandwagon a while ago because there was simply too much stuff being pumped out for me to really care all that much about it. 

Remember this joke from Airplane 2?
If they changed it from Rocky to a Marvel movie, it
might actually be accurate.

I've not been one of those toxic haters out there for all these movies and streaming series, because obviously people are watching and enjoying them, but given that I've not really had an enjoyable time watching movies in the theater at all for a couple of decades now* I guess it comes as no surprise that I'm just not that into sequels upon sequels.

Definitely Empire Strikes Back.

Still, there's no shortage of memes for those who are tired of Star Wars or superhero movies. (Or if you remember Disney and their direct-to-video avalanche back in the 90s and 00s, all the Princess stuff they were pumping out.) Alas that I don't agree with a lot of those memes very much, but if life gives you lemons you have to cherry pick the best ones to make some lemonade.

Need I point out that the first two
Christopher Reeve Superman movies were
in 1978 and 1980, and the Keaton Batman movie
was 1989? Or the first Tobey Maguire Spider-man
movie was in 2002? Three decades indeed.
From Imgflip.

Sheesh. Missing the point, Mr. Redditor
who created this on Imgflip. You don't have to
be a film connoisseur to be tired of superhero films.

Die Hard wasn't available?

Yeah, it's not an empty declaration to me
either. And I'm not being contrarian about it,
because I saw the big Marvel schedule back
in the late 2000s and thought "that's way too much".
From Max Weiss on Elon Musk's plaything.

*Mainly due to the other people in the audience being assholes. Kind of hard to enjoy a movie when the person next to you is on their phone, having a loud conversation with the person next to them, or letting their kids run amok in the theater. I kind of miss the days when the worst thing you had to deal with in a theater is the people near you making out or otherwise fooling around.

We've Been Through Death and Life Together

Oh, we won't give in

Let's go living in the past

--Living in the Past, Jethro Tull

The longer I've delved into the past, the more I've come to the conclusion that the present day is the best place for me. 

That's not how I expected a medieval
prostate exam to look like.
From Memebase.

That's not to say that I don't find the study of history and archaeology fascinating, but rather an acknowledgement that if I were born at most other periods in the past I would have likely not lived to adulthood.

That doesn't take into account all the times that I developed bronchitis or strep throat, but the earliest major illness I had was scarlet fever when I was about 4 or so. Were it not for antibiotics, I would have likely died from it. That's just the most obvious instance of an illness that required a dosage of antibiotics to survive, and really, any of the dozens of illnesses requiring amoxicillin or an actual shot of penicillin* could have killed me, but Scarlet Fever was the earliest (and likely worst) illness of the lot.

I was also a curious kid, and I broke my collarbone when I was 2 when I fell down the stairs. I was one of those kids who was able to unlock multiple locks --driving my parents crazy-- and I did so on that fateful day when I slipped and rolled down the steps, landing on the concrete basement floor. If you took those antics and transported them into, oh, 16th century English farmland, I would have been the sort to provoke a horse and get kicked in the head.** Or fall in a pond and drown.

Even if I didn't actually die from doing anything stupid, if I had merely broken my collarbone it would have potentially maimed me for life. After all, a physician would have had to set it properly and restrain it so that it would heal, and without an x-ray people might not even believe that I had a broken bone, since it wasn't something obvious such as an arm or a leg. And being two years old, it's not like I was able to sufficiently articulate what was wrong with me aside from "it hurts".

Myself aside, my wife would have likely died during the birth of our first child due to a medical condition that was easily solvable today, but would have likely proven fatal only 140 years ago. And that's not even counting issues with infection and disease that accompanied childbirth because doctors couldn't be bothered to wash their fucking hands.

***

Why those gloomy thoughts? Well, I was thinking about long term survivability in the past and how it fed into people's religious beliefs. 

"A Furore Normannorum libera nos Domine."

--An 8th Century Prayer***

I think it is difficult to understand just how much terror the Vikings struck in the populace of Europe, because we have no modern equivalent in the US and Western Europe.

In a similar fashion, the recent global pandemic is but a faint echo of the Black Death of the 14th Century. In terms of death, it wasn't even as bad as the 1918-1920 Flu, and we have modern medicine to thank for that. 

But when death is omnipresent, it can affect your view toward the world. 

With so many people dying around you, what do the survivors cling to? Do they adhere to the straight and narrow of their religious practices? Do they change their worship because their god(s) obviously abandoned them? Or does their old societal structure break down due to so few survivors?  

***

I don't have the answers here, because I don't have enough exposure to psychology to speculate properly. What I do know is that in the past the fear of hunger, especially during the Winter months, was very much in the forefront people's minds. When you're laser focused on one thing, it can be difficult to appreciate the beauty of small things. 

A couple of months ago I was up earlier than usual for some reason or another, so I made some coffee and sat in the kitchen, looking outside as the sunlight kissed the frosty yard. I was struck then at how beautiful the morning was, but if you had other things on your mind you would have missed it. 

And worrying about such things as the amount of grain you have left in your stores or whether that smoke you see in the distance are Viking raiders would probably qualify as "other things on your mind".

'Nuff said.

***

But let's turn this thought exercise on its head and focus on life instead. What would be the impact on a society where people could be brought back from the dead? 

That core mechanic of RPGs --both pencil-and-paper and video games-- is used primarily to keep a game going forward without having to create new characters on a regular basis. But how would society change if death wasn't something to be truly feared, since you could be brought back? Or maybe more precisely, you could be brought back if you had enough money?

Think about the implications of that little chestnut, where the rich and powerful could pay to be resurrected on an ongoing basis. Does that mean they could live forever? And what does that mean to the mass of people who couldn't afford to be raised from the dead? 

How does religion respond to that? Religions today have enough trouble explaining why some good people are "saved" when others who are just as good aren't, so it's not a big leap imagining priests struggling to explain that while "some" people are worthy of being raised from the dead, the rest of you heathens aren't. Religion as the opiate of the people indeed.

Monty Python poked fun at the unexpected
side effects of being healed in the movie
Monty Python's Life of Brian.

Then again, in most RPGs deities and pantheons are not only present, but actively so in the world. They grant their priests the ability to cure and smite in return for following their teachings. But what do those deities think of the grifting performed by their priests in their name?

Or, in the case of World of Warcraft, why does the Holy Light allow such fanatics as the Scarlet Crusade to wield the power of the Light against obviously good people who merely disagree with them? 

I guess those are questions that can't be answered without going deep down the rabbit hole. And to be fair, trying to retrofit these obvious gaps into an already extant game is the path to madness anyway. 

*And let's be honest here: if you've ever had an actual shot of penicillin in the ass, you know it hurts. My pediatrician said the shot needed to be done where there's "a lot of meat on you", and I guess my ass qualified, but damn I dreaded those shots. The sharp smell of alcohol, the harsh rubbing of soaked cotton on skin, and I knew what was coming. If I could have ran, I would have, but in those times I was too sick to squirm away, but those shots hurt like hell. And when I heard what the cure for rabies was, 20 shots in the stomach or 5 in the arm, that encouraged me to avoid all wild animals as much as possible.

**Assuming my ancestors could even afford a horse, since the peasantry could rarely afford to do so themselves. I'm not so foolish as to think that my ancestors were merchants or nobles; given that there were far fewer of those two groups than there were of the peasantry. I've seen enough census records of my ancestors to know that most of them fell under the broad job description of "laborer", which is not the sort of thing you put down for someone whose family came from a higher social status.

***Translated from Latin, it means "From the wrath of the Northmen, save us, O God."