Well, it’s been nearly a year and a half since I last posted here. <brushes dust off of things> Pardon the mess, and the length of my absence.<\/p>\n
I stopped playing WoW for about a year. About the guild bank stuff.<\/p>\n
And then, after enough time had passed, I realized that I had unconsciously made some major changes to my views on WoW. (And yes, these are just my views<\/em>.)<\/p>\n First<\/strong>, subscribing to the World of Warcraft, if it gives me enjoyment<\/em>, is fine. This is especially<\/em> true if I don’t give them any of my own money. I liken it to how I deal with Netflix. For years and years, Netflix was the one subscription I never went without. And then, they started making decisions that I didn’t like. They started cancelling shows I loved. As a direct result of that, I can (and do) go months and months without being subscribed. Then I resub for a month, maybe two, then I unsub again. I can absolutely treat WoW like that. And I have. When my game time ran out in late 2024, I let it go. At the time, I was fairly certain I never wanted to play the game again. (Do not get me started about the data loss; I am still<\/em> very angry about it.) However, I found myself drawn back to content about WoW, particularly the Goldbound series by Pathalerix on YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>\n The sheer joy that Pathalerix seems to have for playing the game was, well, infectious. I’m still mad. I’m still not going to trust Blizzard worth a damn. Microsoft can eat shit. (Or is that Microslop? hahaha) But why deprive myself of something I want to do<\/em> when I don’t have to directly give them money and I can sustain myself on gold? And if I don’t want to do it any longer, I don’t have to. The fact that I no longer run a guild, no longer raid, etc, means that a WoW sub is no longer vital to me. It hasn’t been for a very long time. And so, I resubbed. I even started my own “locked” challenge. (I have exactly one episode up<\/a> and then I have hours and hours and hours of footage that I have to edit and I hate editing sooooooo… Anyway. I’m sure I’ll get back to it eventually.)<\/p>\n Since resubbing, I’ve let the subscription lapse already. \ud83d\ude02 I wasn’t playing actively, so I just let the sub go. And then I resubbed a week or maybe two ago. Again, using gold\/WoW tokens.<\/p>\n Second<\/strong>, I will admit I changed my mind and bought the base version of Midnight — again, with gold. I’m actually planning to upgrade to the top version with gold at some point over the next couple of weeks. It comes with 3-day early access to Midnight and a month of gametime, so I’ll probably do that to try to make tons of gold at the start of the expansion. After all, the more gold I make, the more I can do with it. I need about<\/em> three tokens to purchase the upgrade. I would only need two tokens, but there’s that pesky sales tax in Canada and Quebec, so I do actually need three. And tokens are about 300k gold at the moment, so we’re looking at about 900,000 gold. I\u00a0have<\/em> that much, I just want to build up a bit more of a reserve before I blow that much cash.<\/p>\n Basically<\/strong>, as long as I can pay for things in gold, whatever. I will play if I want to. I will not play (and let my sub expire) if I don’t want to play or if I’m not having fun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n However, I\u00a0will not trust<\/em> these bastards. Nothing is forever. They clearly do not care about data integrity. So long as I accept that risk, so long as I understand that a failure can wipe out my whole account, so long as I don’t count on things remaning the same (in terms of my account and characters), I will enjoy what I do in the moment. Why? In part\u00a0because<\/em> I’m going to pay with gold. I won’t spend my own real money on this company. Or others in the Microsoft family. I don’t respect them, I don’t trust them, and they don’t respect me or the time and money I’ve given them over the years. So that’s it. It’s a transactional relationship we’ll have, with fake money (gold) paying the way for those transactions.<\/p>\n Oh, man, I am done<\/em><\/strong> with Microsoft products. Barring what I have to use for work \ud83e\udd2e (and Minecraft, which I bought over a decade ago), I’m just SO done with that company’s products. And I stayed true to my word (no pun intended!) — last summer, I swapped over to Linux on my main desktop. (I have a MacBook laptop that’s mine and a work MacBook as well.) So to hell with Windows. I won’t ever own a Windows machine again. I’m enjoying Ubuntu (it’s actually Kubuntu, so Ubuntu with KDE) and I’m very comfortable with it as my main personal computer.<\/p>\n The only thing I miss about Windows is Adobe products. I love Photoshop. (I know, GIMP is available and an option.) And in order to actually edit things I need some kind of video editor like, you know Adobe Premiere. So editing is made more difficult by virtue of having to use my 4-year-old MacBook Pro to edit videos on my work setup versus doing it on my desktop. It doesn’t make it any easier to do a task I dislike in the first place.<\/p>\n Still, everything else is fine. Just about everything else I use works beautifully. Steam games run wonderfully. I truly can’t complain about switching to Linux. And it feels particularly good to have swapped away from Windows after decades (decades!) of being a Microsoft operating system user. I started out with like, DOS 5.0 in like 1990? 1991? I remember DOS 6.0 being a Big Deal. Here’s what my first PC looked like — 286, 1 meg of RAM, 40 meg hard drive<\/a>. And a 2400 baud modem. \ud83d\ude02<\/p>\n So way to go, Microsoft. You drove away a user who had spent thirty-five years<\/em> on your operating systems. Not just because of the Great Blizzard Bank Heist, but also because Windows 11 is a piece of AI slop, plus all the ads, plus the fact I can’t trust you, particularly after the Recall announcement.<\/p>\n Well, I’m planning to play Midnight until I get bored. I was overly ambitious with The War Within when it came to professions. I did not do even 75% of what I had planned with my toons. So what I’m hoping to do.<\/p>\n Before the launch:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n After the launch:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So yeah, I think that’s what I’m aiming for. Oh, and like, juggling life and work and stuff too, of course. ;)<\/p>\n What about you? What are you up to?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, it’s been nearly a year and a half since I last posted here. <brushes dust off of things> Pardon the mess, and the length of my absence. I stopped playing WoW for about a year. About the guild bank stuff. My views on playing WoW… And then, after enough time had passed, I realized […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,135,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facepalm","category-midnight","category-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3195"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3199,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3195\/revisions\/3199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Speaking of Microsoft…<\/h3>\n
So what now?<\/h3>\n
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