Somber and Sober

Legendary Drunk's guild chat was been quiet for several days, with the GM offline for three. Checking into Discord, I found that she along with the former GM had cancelled their accounts in a show of solidarity with Hong Kong's current situation and as an act of protest against Activision/Blizzard's recent pandering to the Chinese government.

I don't intend to use this platform as political soapbox now or ever, but I find it more than a little sad and depressing that fellow players are feeling betrayed by a company that has brought them such joy. I suppose this decade "everything is political" and I should just suck it up and deal.

A call was made for another to step up and take the Guild's reins. Yeah-- thanks, but no thanks. I've led guilds and served in countless officer roles over the years. Absolutely done with it, but I respect those who are selfless enough to take on the mostly thankless tasks of endless mediation, recruitment, and event coordination.

Instead I said my goodbyes and gquit. I may make an effort over the weekend to find a new home, but for now there's things to do.

With less than an hour's play time, about half of it was spent in flight. Very short and simple goals:

- kill the last few evil furbolgs in Felwood to close out a quest
- follow up by crossing over into Winterspring for the first time and pick up the final Eastern Kingdoms flight path.
- grab whatever quests are offered there... two of which were breadcrumbs to Western and Eastern Plaguelands.

Heh. I decided to go ahead and just run those then return to Ironforge and call it a very short night.

The EPL quest was "Deliver this thing to a dude" and it didn't even register that it was a BOOK until I glanced at the quest text to complete. I stopped short of clicking complete and hastily pulled up my inventory. Sure enough, it was a book-book you could read!

"Studies in Spirit Speaking". Cool! Let's see what it says...




I laughed. It's a blatant reference to Ultima Online, one of Warcraft's then-competitors. Dead players could only say "OOOoooOOooo..." and such. The Argent Crusader I was passing it off to mentioned he'd get to work at translating it and I looked again.

Sonofabitch. It's binary. Those cheeky bastards!

Knowing I couldn't possibly have been the first to notice that, I saved myself time and just looked up the translation. It reads "Ultima Online Napa Valley Knights of Chaos". A shout out to his old guild hidden in plain sight. Very clever, unknown quest author.