Gaining Perspective Years Later

Once in a while I'll hear a song I haven't heard in decades, and I'll suddenly realize that I'd missed a critical part of what the song meant. 

Take for example, the Michael Martin Murphey song Wildfire...

This song came out in 1975, and it was one of those Folk songs that skirted the edge of the Country/Western genres and Folk Rock genres. I'd heard it on the radio in the 70s, but outside of the refrain it never resonated with me very much. Until I stumbled on it a few months ago, I probably hadn't heard it at all since the early-mid 80s, because the only person I knew who listened to Country on the radio was my dad's mom, and I tried my damnedest to avoid listening to it whenever I visited.*

It had popped up on my YouTube feed, and I stared at it for a good 5-10 minutes, trying to remember the song, but I finally gave in and clicked it. 

The song sounded familiar, but the lyrics certainly weren't. It was only when the refrain came on that I realized I did remember the song after all.

Even more than that, after a few critical listens, I realized it wasn't a love song at all, but a ghost story. The first verse doesn't give anything away, but that the lyrics are in present tense imply something current. It's when the second verse kicks in and switches to past tense that you realize that the girl and horse mentioned in the first verse are actually ghosts. The third verse provides the grounding of a failed crop, and as the cold (and presumably hunger) has crept in, the owl heralds the ghost horse and rider coming for the singer as essentially a harbinger of death.

Pretty grim stuff wrapped up in a mellow sounding song.

***

Sometimes I'll hear a voice or an instrument in a song, and I'll say "I know I've heard that before, but I don't know where."

Again, I'm going to pull the 80s out of a hat and mention late Genesis guitarist Mike Rutherford's band, Mike + The Mechanics. 

I could have picked out any of their songs, but I figured that The Living Years would do. Mike's guitar is pretty identifiable, but I want to focus on his vocalist, Paul Carrack. 

Paul had a nice solo career, and I had recognized his voice from the song "Don't Shed a Tear" that was released a year earlier in 1987...

...and he's also known for his time in the band Squeeze, but I was completely unprepared for something over three decades later.

For some strange reason I'd fallen down the rabbit hole of listening to what was then called Soft Rock and is now called Yacht Rock when I stumbled across this song...

I knew that song by heart, because my parents would only play Soft Rock in the house when I was growing up.** However, when I listened to it a couple of years ago for the first time since the late 80s, I realized I knew that singer's voice. It took me a few months of rummaging through my CDs and songs on YouTube, but when I realized that it was the same Paul Carrack from Mike + The Mechanics, I was completely floored in the same way when I heard Bad English in the late 80s for the first time and I instantly recognized John "Missing You" Waite's voice.

Funny how that works.

*Because I was into all sorts of Rock, Heavy Metal, and New Wave at the time. 

**Yes, it was Cincinnati's WARM 98, WRRM-FM 98.5.

EtA: Mike Rutherford is actually still alive. It was the manager for Genesis, Richard Macphail, who'd passed away in 2024. Whoops. I have since corrected the post.

Wall-to-Wall Whelming*

I did not watch the Blizzard update today; I only read the highlights, officially known as "Catch Up on the State of Azeroth in our Recap".

You know, this thing.

Good thing I did, because the overall lack of WoW Classic information wasn't that great of a surprise. To me, anyway.

The 2019 Classic Train is still in Mists, and that was highlighted in the roadmap along with the Anniversary Servers currently on a somewhat watered-down TBC Classic that's designed to be blasted through in less than a year.

To see this better, click on it to see the full-sized version.
From Blizzard.

Basically, the WoW Classic train got some vague promises of wanting to stay true to the community, and there will be surveys heading out over the year to gauge interest in various things and how you want to play.

Oh, and there's now a WoW Ambassador Program, that's supposed to be the community helping the community. Given how some people play, I'm not so sure this will work out very well --or maybe about as well as other community initiatives, which is damning by faint praise-- but at least they're trying.

***

Oh, and did you know that there's Player Housing in Retail WoW?

Oh yes, housing alone got about more of a mention in the recap than all of the Classic WoW versions combined, which also speaks to the fact that Blizzard devoted 2/3 of the recap (and likely the video itself) to Retail WoW. Bully to those who play Retail, but that also says to me that Classic WoW is definitely the red-headed stepchild of the WoW community. Which is honestly just fine for the Classic WoW players, who are going to do their own thing.

How do I know this? The Classic community is already reviving the community-driven Hardcore mode, this time for TBC Classic Anniversary Edition.

This is in direct response to Blizzard deciding to pull the plug on official Hardcore Anniversary servers when the TBC Classic pre-patch dropped. And I'd bet a couple of doughnuts** that TBC Hardcore will be far more popular than people expect. Even if Blizz didn't throw a bone at the Hardcore community by allowing for a buff/debuff identifying those Hardcore players, they'd be out there anyway. 

***

One thing that people will point out is that there's still a gigantic black hole for what will happen to WoW Classic once both Mists Classic and TBC Anniversary Classic reach their conclusions at the end of the year. I presume any news there will happen at BlizzCon, which is smack in the middle of September, right around the time when the WoW Classic Anniversary servers were announced in 2024.

I guess that the reckoning will be put off a bit longer, but if I were a betting man this is what I'd expect:

• Warlords Classic will be a thing as the Classic train will keep running towards an eventual merging with Retail WoW, likely sometime around 2029-2030.
• TBC Anniversary Classic will progress to Wrath Anniversary Classic around mid-Q1 2027.
• No Classic Plus will be announced, but Blizz will tinker with another Seasonal server along the lines of the Chinese Titan Reforged servers.

Yes, yes, I know, they teased "more" with this line:

Still, I don't expect Classic Plus at this point. Given everything that's "all Midnight all the time", and that the Classic team is really operating on a "balled string and a couple of tin cups"-sized budget*** it'd take them years to create a wholly-independent Classic Plus now. So, they'll do what they can by tweaking the Classic formula as much as they can safely dare without bringing the entire house down. 

I guess my reaction to all this was: don't get your hopes up. After all, there's likely more layoffs in the XBox Games Division coming.

*I'm borrowing "whelming" from Josh Strife Hayes, who uses "it was whelming" in place of the more standard "it was meh".

**To me in my current state of health, that's a pretty serious bet.

***Didn't you ever play "telephone" using a couple of cups and a string connecting the two? Well, shit, I guess I really AM old.

A Short Addendum

It's a bit earlier than my usual updates, but this happened over the weekend:

On January 24, 2026.

So the four have crossed the finish line.

There was something else I was doing on Saturday afternoon, related to my other recent hobby:

From Icom America's Instagram feed.
Uh, and apparently an AI generated pic
with an Icom amateur radio. Who'd have thought?

Winter Field Day is one of the big contest days in the US Amateur Radio community. Typically, clubs will get together and go outside somewhere to make as many unique contacts as possible; some clubs really get into the competition of it, while others simply are there to enjoy their time together and do some radio stuff while they're there. 

Luckily for my club, our facilities at the Red Cross building count as being away from your own home for purposes of the contest, so I got to experience Winter Field Day without freezing my ass off. (Or getting snowed in, which was also a possibility this weekend.) As the weather got progressively worse Saturday night, the club made the decision to go home and call it for Sunday, because the weather had just become too untenable.

So I dabbled in two of my hobbies on Saturday, which worked out well overall.

Meme Monday: Snowpocalypse 2026 Memes

Before you ask "Hey, haven't you been putting out enough winter and snow related memes lately?" yes, I'm aware of that. And apparently Mother Nature has taken notice and said "Hold my beer!"

Beginning late in the afternoon on Saturday and until Sunday evening, we got about 9-9.5 in/ 22-24 cm  of snow dumped on us.*

I took this pic when I was out shoveling.

Close to the street, the snow totals were over a foot deep (30+ cm). And now that the snow is here, the really cold temperatures have moved in. The Wind Chill for tomorrow night is expected to be -22F/-30C, so this snow isn't going anywhere any time soon.

Hence, more memes, this time of the Snowpocalypse.

The snow storm hit more than just the Midwest.
It came up from Texas and hit a lot of
the South, too. This was from the
St. Louis Reddit page.

Yes, this was Kansas City's reaction to the impending
snow, but I survived my regular trip to the grocers on
Thursday night when most of the store was stripped
bare by people afraid that they'd run out of food.
From Twitter.

Of course, reading isn't a bad thing to do during
the snowstorm. From Instagram and ournerdiestthing.

And not everybody believes the world is ending.
From Reddit.

The storm has reached the Atlantic Coast
and New England, who are more used
to this sort of thing. From WAHUP.

As for me, I'll be fine. I've already shoveled the snow so that we can get out into the street and to the mailbox, so there's that. And whenever somebody complains about the cold, I like to bring up January 10, 1982, when the Cincinnati Bengals defeated the San Diego Chargers in the AFC Championship game commonly known as The Freezer Bowl, because the wind chills were -59F/-51C, making it the coldest NFL game on record. 

This was a screencap from a recording of the NBC
broadcast of the game. From Amazing Blaze Zine.

I remember that game quite well, because we all watched it that day. It was so cold in Cincinnati that day that our heat pump simply couldn't keep up with the cold, and we all wore heavy coats and wrapped ourselves in blankets inside the house while we watched the game on television. We actually had the curtains closed because the cold air seeping through into the house was so bad.

The Augusta Kentucky Historic District
put this collage of photos from news reports
of the game. From Facebook.

So yeah, it could be worse...

*This is just in my backyard; snow totals for the Cincinnati Metro area varied.

It's Not About Green Eggs and Ham

If there's one consistent piece of advice I've given to my kids as they've entered into the dating/relationship stage of their life, it's this simple dictum: don't try to change people as you'll end up disappointed.

Over my life I've seen people get into a relationship, and one of the pair says "they're perfect except for [INSERT ISSUE HERE], but I can work on that." And I've never ever seen someone get "fixed" the way their partner prefers. Even when it appears on the surface that they've been "trained" by their partner into the approved behavior, the reality is that it's an act. The other person just does it to preserve the peace, and it only comes out much later, in a quiet conversation with someone else under the condition to keep their confidence.

Inevitably, this doesn't end well. The couple either continue in a state of quiet dissatisfaction or there's an eventual blow-up and... that's that.

Not bad, but #3 on "Worth Fixing" is highly
dependent upon what the issue is. And #1 on "Deal
Breaker" can easily be manipulated into really silly stuff.
From @drelizabethfrederick via Instagram.

What I've impressed upon my kids is that you have to either accept the other person for who they are or you have to eventually walk away. Obviously, some flaws are quite fatal to the relationship --justifiably so, in my opinion-- while others are minor and can be easily overlooked. Everybody has their own breaking point, and while it might be worthwhile to try to help someone get over their issues, don't expect to "fix" anyone who doesn't want to be fixed.

***

A corollary to this is something that still bugs me to this day. Back in my college days, there was this one girl I knew who dated a guy briefly, then after they broke up she schemed to try to get him back. On more than one occasion I got roped into her schemes, and after a while it really began to annoy me. Right before my (now) wife and I began dating, this girl and I were walking back to a group study session after we stopped to pick up some food for the gang, and once again she was contemplating some sort of plot when I finally decided to tell her that she needed to move on. I explained that she was really attractive and she was also quite smart, but chasing after one person while ignoring everybody else meant she was missing out on someone that would be better for her in the long run.* Unfortunately, she then began asking me about what I thought of her physical attributes and whether some of the various people we knew would be interested in her. I wasn't about to provide details on what our male friends thought of her, and I didn't want to find myself the object of her interest given that she spent too much time trying to play hard to get while simultaneously chasing someone. 

Looking back on it, I wish I had the clarity to explain to her that she would have been much better off not playing games but rather just being honest and walking away if someone says 'no'. I don't know a single guy who enjoys these sort of games, and to be fair I wasn't even sure she did either. I suspect she was taught this behavior by either her friends from high school or her family, and if they did they did her a disservice. Of course, knowing my luck she might have interpreted my candid response as interest in her on my part, and I'd have gotten no peace. Still, some part of me kind of wishes I'd have said what needed to be said before we had a falling out later that year. 

She blamed it on my now wife, but from my perspective I simply had to walk away because I grew tired of being part of her manipulative games. Even if she came clean and tried to turn over a new leaf, she'd spent so much time being manipulative and playing "love games" that I don't think I could ever have really trusted her. There was no way I wasn't going to have anything resembling a heart to heart conversation with her about my girlfriend, for example, because I felt she would have used it as leverage to make me do something for her. 

No thanks.

***

In the end, I guess you could say that while the old "try it, you might like it" credo at the heart of Green Eggs and Ham is still valid, recognizing the futility of certain other interactions is also valid. Sure, there will be regrets, but I've come to recognize that regrets are a part of life. 

*For the record, I did think she was really attractive and had the sort of physical qualities I liked, but she spent so much time being needy and chasing after this one person that there was no way I'd ever consider dating her. I didn't need that sort of drama in my life.

Almost At The End

Well, right on time for the TBC Classic v2.0 pre-patch, toons have crossed the finish line.

The listings as of January 22, 2026.

One got there shortly after the pre-patch...

Boom.

And the other two this past week.

(Sorry, no pics of the leveling graphic for the other two; I was busy killing mobs at the time.)

While I don't think the reworking of things in the pre-patch helped with Card --the Frost Mage was relatively unaffected by the pre-patch changes-- it did help a bit with Linna and Joan. Paladins got some extensive talent tree reworks in the pre-patch, and the net result was that Retribution Paladins have a bit more damage output than before. Same survivability, but with more oomph when swinging a sword. Joan's biggest change wasn't with her talents at all, but that her Voidwalker (aka "the Blueberry") could hold more threat, so she was able to deal more damage on mobs. So, for the latter two, they were able to kill more mobs before stopping to recoup mana and health, which to my mind was a good thing.

I look at it this way: even without the pre-patch changes, Card and Linna would have made it to L60 in the past two weeks regardless, but Joan would have been somewhere at either L58 or L59. 

In the end, I'm sure that Hoots will make it in the next week or so, and my goal of getting all four toons to L60 before the Dark Portal opened will have been accomplished. 

So... what now?

I'm not sure, exactly. I could start all over with a Blood Elf Mage or a Draenei Shaman, or I could keep going with these four to L70 before shelving them. I already know that my friends' group is going all in on raiding, and as I've already indicated I don't intend to raid in TBC Classic v2.0* I'm free to go and do my own thing. Luckily, L60 -> L70 doesn't take that long in general, so I'll have plenty of time to just goof around and do things at my own pace. I could even start this version by leveling a new toon from scratch just until I'm sure the insane wave of try-hards rushes through to the end, and THEN I'll switch back to level in Outland. 

I've got a year, right?

*The irony is that I got more whispers on Joan this past week than I did on the other two toons. I realize that Warlocks are more in demand in TBC Classic than Mages, but this was getting ridiculous.

And Now a Counterpoint

The irony about my posting a good old fashioned rant on Tuesday is that I found an inadvertent response from YouTube. 

Oh, not an actual response, but one that did mention seasonal content in passing as part of a larger video about whether MMOs were fun. 

Yes, this is from Pint. You may know them from their YouTube video about WoW Classic Mages*...

Or maybe their video about attempting to beat all of the Elden Ring bosses in alphabetical order**...

Anyway, the video they posted yesterday was about their experiences with playing MMOs, and how they lost the fun in them, only to slowly regain the fun later.

I thought it a fitting counterpoint to my dislike of seasonal content in that this is what MMOs have become, and Pint's just coming in here and there in MMOs for bite sized content to avoid burnout is actually a pretty good thing. 

I can respect that. And it's good to see you're still kicking around, Pint. 

*I'll be completely honest in that I recognized all of the stereotypes in this video, and there were points where I laughed my head off, especially their escape from the max level Rogue in Un'Goro Crater. I've SO been there when I was first starting out playing on Stormscale-US back in 2009, and I counted myself incredibly lucky to merely escape with my life from certain encounters.

**I know I'd be abjectly terrible at 'souls' games, but I can appreciate their determination to prove their worth by setting off on a relatively insane quest to do all the bosses in order like that. It got even weirder when they made it harder on themselves by... You know what? Go watch the video, and you'll understand.