Earlier this year I found myself looking for a new keyboard, and the difficulties I had at the time finding a keyboard that met my needs lead me to start thinking about language. The problem with finding a keyboard arose from language, since I had some rather particular wants in the new keyboard and those were in general rather hard to find, but even more so when looking at ISO keyboards, since the vast majority of the more custom market seems to focus on ANSI.

This phenomena of American and English being default and standard isn’t exactly new, especially not in computing and programming—basically every programming language uses English as the base language as it were, with some rare exceptions none of which are widespread—but my problems finding a keyboard merely threw it more sharply into focus for me once more.

It frustrates me a rather great deal, because as someone for whom multiple languages have always been rather present and having been raised bilingual with English following at a rather young age, I can see the importance of language to myself rather clearly. Learning and knowing several languages has enriched my life to such an incredible degree, allowing me to express myself in new ways as well as learn to know different people and cultures to a completely different degree. Even writing this very post I find myself resorting to translating my thoughts from other languages to English—not necessarily my mothertongue, mind you—because I can simply find the perfect word for what I want to express in that language even if it might not come to me in English, allowing me that much better to express myself. I could probably achieve a similar thing by perusing a dictionary, but that would end up being so inefficient as for me to give up and not express myself fully instead of taking the time to find the exact right words for what I want to say.

Thus I find myself becoming rather frustrated at this pressure put upon us both culturally from the behemoth that is the American entertainment industry as well as well as technologically from the very machines we use to express ourselves being created in this way that is so very centered on the experience of being American and using English. The most recent frustration I had with this was Nextcloud, which even though I set my settings to use European English for the locale, defaulted to displaying dates the American way which is just yet another one of these small ways that inconvenience everybody else. Another example is the insistence of the Ghost—the software I am using to write this very post—to show the week beginning on Sunday instead of Monday, another from what I can tell American custom, with no obvious way to change that.

At the same time, I can so very well understand the appeal of being to communicate with what feels like the whole world in English, and the self-perpetuating circle this leads to—everyone knows English, so things are made in English first, which means everyone knows or learns English to use those things and so on. Even I, despite these feelings at this point in time, chose to start this blog in English instead of my mothertongue because it does allow me to communicate with so many more people and to be part of the global discussion to a completely different degree—even if what I write here mostly goes unseen by the world at large. English is, despite its silly rules around spelling at times and confusing idioms, such a very convenient language to use for pretty much everything in the digital world that I find it difficult to blame anyone for doing so—I did it myself for a long time, thinking anyone who used one of our local tongues on their machines as either cringe or old—and as my proficiency with German comes to a point where I feel there might be more harm than good done in using it as the system language due to poor or incomplete translations am considering ending my personal one woman crusade against using English everywhere, I can’t help but wonder if the gains in the end outweigh the losses and how cognizant people are of the decision they are making, or if they are merely acting out of convenience.

Every single person probably has their own answer to this question, and while I might decide in the near future to give in to convenience a bit more, I think I would be very sad should the future do away with the beautiful plethora of languages we as a species have developed over time and merely defaulted to a single one out of an overwhelming need for convenience. If that day were to come, I think we would have lost more than we had gained.

Last week I decided to take the plunge and install the Insider Preview version of Windows 11 from the Dev Channel, making it something akin to an alpha version of the operating system. I had been considering doing this for a while, shortly after it was announced I think, but I’m not really sure why. Maybe I just needed the change after so many years of Windows 10.

Nevertheless, before installing Windows 11 I had also considered to once I had done so just do a refresh of the computer, removing all software and files since there is a strong tendency for cruft to accumulate with time as the installations age which usually means a fresh install runs better than an aging one. However, one of the things that ended up with me deciding against this—aside from the annoyance of having to set up all of the things I actually want to keep once more—was how poorly a lot of software is written when it comes to where it stores data and the consequent pollution of user files. When looking into my documents folder, the majority of folders therein do not at all contain any documents of mine but rather different configuration or temporary files for software that I have had installed over the years, much of which I in no way use regularily. This means that if I wanted to do a clean install only keeping documents that are actually important I would have to manually go through all of those folders hunting through my actual documents and discarding all of the random junk software insists on throwing in there, instead of simply copying over my documents as it should be.

All of this is doubly frustrating, since there exists a predefined place for all of this cruft, AppData, since Windows Vista, meaning it has been available for almost 15 years at this point! Why all of this software still to this day contains such an unimaginable amount of legacy cruft that they feel the need to regularily frustrate their users with to this day I do not know, but what makes it triply frustrating is the seeming unability for me as a user to defend myself against this. The software is unsurprisingly running with user rights so it’s going to have write access to the documents folder, and even if there are ways to prevent that it would then mean the broken software ends up not running at all since the odds are if it is broken enough to try to write its files there it’s not going to handle write errors gracefully.

The most egregious example of this that I have encountered in recent memory is the launcher for Final Fantasy XIV, which stores the files for patching the game in the documents folder, which I only know because of another piece of broken software, namely the Nextcloud desktop client, that refuses to respect the ignore lists for syncing that I define. That, of course, is another reason why this behaviour from software is so bad: the cloud. Or more accurately, using things like Dropbox or Google Drive or OneDrive to backup important documents, that of course have quotas on how much can be store there. A sane expectation from any user is to be able to want to back up their documents folder—since it is kind of the obvious place to store their documents in—yet when other broken software chooses to store something like their multi-gigabyte downloads alongside the users documents in that very same folder it can get rather easy to start bumping against those quotas, and then because it is all synchronized between several machines ends up being downloaded to machines that might not even have the software in question installed in the first place or even the possibility of installing it.

It is just such a frustrating state of affairs against which one as a user feels completely helpless, and that makes me angry and sad.

This past Wednesday saw the release of the new raid on heroic and normal, along with some slight progress along the campaign and the availability of flying in the Shadowlands—with the big caveat of it only being available in the four Covenant-Zones, and not in the rest of the world, not even Oribos, making it a somewhat useless thing. It’s still nice to have of course, but still feels like one of those situations where Blizzard begrudgingly allows us to fly for a bit when it is completely irrelevant for the content. It remains, as ever, frustrating.

The campaign itself was rather usual, with possibly the most obvious and clearly telegraphed reveal of all time at the end, but it was still a welcome change of pace from the daily grind content the rest of the patch has been. Though there is of course the frustration of having to repeat it on several characters for those who play several, which is unfortunate.

The raid itself has been something of a wild ride so far, and we actually haven’t managed to clear it on heroic yet though we did have some rather quick progress on the earlier bosses and are working on Sylvanas and had several good tries there. Kel’thuzad probably cost us more time than he should have, but at least it works as practice for mythic so it isn’t wasted time. I think I have actually ended up enjoying most of the bosses in the raid at least to some degree, there are a couple in there where the tuning is a bit strange and several where the mechanics are buggy but I think my enjoyment of the raid is a lot higher than it was in Nathria. Of course, early times and not mythic yet, but bodes well for the future.

Speaking of buggy, Sylvanas. On the last platform there is a rather infuriating bug which makes targeting AoE ground effect abilities impossible—the cursor just permanently stays grayed out—and it just makes the whole fight so much more annyoing to play because the only workaround we have found so far is creating macros casting the spell on oneself, which of course means running in to melee so that it actually hits a sensible amount of people. It also seems to pop up rather randomly, making it more annoying. Hopefully that is one of the things that ends up being fixed before we are progressing the boss on mythic, otherwise I’m not sure what I’ll do there. To be fair, it won’t be as bad since by then I will have specced away from holy and back to discipline, so I’ll be less reliant on such spells.

That has actually been another interesting thing, playing holy again. The spec feels fine to me still, if somehow very weak. I’m not sure why, but it just feels like all of my spells do almost no healing—well, with the exception Holy Word: Salvation which has a hefty cooldown. Still, the change of pace is welcome, especially since it is a much easier spec to handle in heroic with new and to me unkown mechanics and timings, but there is still a certain sadness to it all, remembering how it was and seeing what it has become. To be fair, I am also putting a rather heavy focus on damage since that was pretty much always my speciality, so maybe that is coloring my impression, but it still feels odd.

Anyway, new content is fun, look forward to progressing the raid!

This past week saw the release of World of Warcraft patch 9.1, and with it—I think, because I can’t see the future and know what’s coming—the culmination of my frustration with the game.

For those who follow the game a bit more this will be old news, but with the patch came some rather drastic balancing changes to discipline priests, the class and spec I primarily play, which all but forced me to change covenant as well. This means farming renown once more, which while a great deal easier since the patch, is still a very luck-based activity and the amount of content one needs to do to get back to where one started varies greatly.

Early on in the week, I was unfortunately not so blessed by Lady Luck, and staring down the prospect of potentially having to farm a rather extensive amount of renown through less than reliable sources doing content that I don’t find overly enjoyable. This, unsurprisingly for someone who was already rather on the fence as to my motivation to keep playing, was a rather crushing feeling. This was exacerbated by flying being locked behind renown and becoming available next week, which regardless of how useless it is looking to be this expansion is something I’ve always looked forward to unlocking and having as soon as possible since I really don’t agree with Blizzard’s design direction in this regard, and thus there was a creeping fear of being “cheated” out of the opportunity to unlock it quickly. A rather irrational feeling when evaluating the utility of actually unlocking it, but a strong feeling nonetheless.

Fortunately for me, the guildies I have are rather excellent, and with the help and motivation of a friend (💜) and without almost completely participating in said unmotivating content I already on Saturday ended up being able to fill up my renown once more.

This puts me in a somewhat unexpected position, since I find myself at the moment actually enjoying World of Warcraft—even the more menial things—a lot again, and am rather motivated to keep playing. I am curious to see how long this will last, since it may well be that I am merely still riding on the high of a new patch being released and the content being somewhat fresh, but I am happy for the change.

Another benefit of the current situation is that having been forced to change covenants actually ended up as a positive for me, since now at least as far as theme and looks go I ended up with the covenant I wanted the most when they were unveiled, even if the abilities associated with the covenant aren’t necessarily the ones I would choose.

The biggest takeaway from this experience for me has really been the reminder of the value of friends and a good guild in a game like this, since at the end of the day they are the true reason I keep playing, with the game merely serving as the backdrop for those connections.

Last week I talked about my feelings regarding World of Warcraft, and specifically how I was unsure if I wanted to continue playing since it seemed the stress was outweighing the joy. In the week since, we’ve had our first retail raid after having taken a break, as well as a boost raid, and while it wasn’t all positive all the time my outlook on the situation is definitely a lot more positive than it was before that—it really served as a reminder of what the game can be at its best.

What I also briefly mentioned but didn’t go deeper in on was that it felt like being someone who plays and is somewhat decent at World of Warcraft seems to be a somewhat large part of my identity which made even considering stopping somewhat agonizing. Now, it wouldn’t have been the first time I stopped playing but it would be the first time I think where the decision to do so would be such a conscious one as opposed to merely logging in less and over time stopping since I didn’t feel like I had anything to do in game. That then is what I would like to write about: identity.

The question of who I am seems like such a huge topic, a vast sea of uncertainty that I have so far in my life rather successfully avoided sailing. Now, sure, there are aspects of my identity that I have spent a lot of time examining and questioning and consequently have a fairly good understanding of what they are at the moment and what they mean for me like gender and womanhood—especially as someone who won’t experience motherhood, as those things seem to be so deeply linked on the societal level—but simultaneously there are also huge gaping holes in my knowledge like what do I want to do and be and what do I like doing.

One of the confounding factors I often encounter when trying to do this sort of exploration, is the disconnect I often have between desired and actual desires. There are so many things of which I think “that would be cool!” only to discover that what I liked about it wasn’t necessarily the activity itself but the idea of it or the image of being a person who likes the thing. This, of course, is part of the process of discovery and in and of itself not necessarily a bad thing.

The problem is by the point I often actually end up trying things I am already either so emotionally invested in wanting it to happen or socially invested through involving other people in the activity that it becomes difficult for me to admit that is the case and I end up continuing through a feeling of obligation rather than enjoyment; this then leads to a certain degree of resentment of new things since the process of discovery becomes tainted by negative feelings and the whole thing ends up reinforcing itself.

Last week it feels like was actually a perfect example of this manifesting, since it to such a great degree felt like my fear of stopping was primarily driven not by a want to continue but by a fear of the unknown and doing things which I wasn’t used to; stepping out of my comfort zone. It feels like there are so many things in which I continue to engage through either habit or a feeling of obligation rather than enjoyment. I am aware there are going to be high and low points to anything one does in life, and like the past week shows there it is often worth it to hold tight through the bad times to experience the good times once more, but it just feels like that stubbornness can at times also sabotage my attempts at finding my way to better times and greater knowledge of who I am.

So who am I? Am I my actions? Or are they merely a manifestation of my desires made real by my fears, a distorted reflection of the real self? That, unfortunately, I do not know, though writing this is a step on that path, hopefully one day leading to enlightenment.