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.

The somewhat recent release of Burning Crusade Classic has thrown all kinds of new flavors into the mix of feelings I am feeling towards World of Warcraft at the moment, some good, some bad.

For the good part, it has oddly really reminded me why I like the game and why I kind of still want to keep playing it, despite all of its flaws. Being somewhat more casual in classic than I am in retail, has meant that there is a greater feeling of freedom to doing things since the only real motivation is what I personally want to achieve and not what is required for some external reason, and also a lot less pressure to actually do things I might not want to do but feel in one way or another required to do the things I do want to do. Classic still has a lot of flaws, especially when it comes to things like consumables, but the fact that I am playing it in a way that doesn’t necessitate those things to the same degree as retail makes it much easier for me to ignore those flaws if I want to.

Further, having the goals be that much more personal and also usually concrete things makes working towards them a lot more engaging, since it’s a lot easier to feel the progress as it comes along.

For the bad part, it feels like the biggest ill that has come from it isn’t even necessarily something bad in and of itself, but it feels like I am questioning a lot more why I am continuing to play retail at this point. It at this point feels like the game might be giving me more stress than it is bringing in joy and that seems like a obviously lopsided equation for what it is supposed to be, and while I would very much like to experience the new raid once more and progress it, I am simultaneously dreading all of the things that might be required to be done around that progress, not the progress itself

These aren’t exactly new thoughts, but merely things that having a point of comparison has once again brought to the fore, and I unforunately can’t really see any easy answers. There are reasons I’ve continued playing retail for as long as I have, and those are my guildies, and it feels very wrong to leave them high and dry so shortly before progress so quitting at the very least at this time is not an option, but it feels like continuing as is might be taking an unkown toll on me. At the same time, I fear that not continuing might be the even worse option, since it would provide me with an opportunity to retreat more completely into myself since there would be a certain lack of routine keeping me together, and while that routine can at times feeling frustrating in its limiting of what I have the freedom to do, it also helps ground me and keeps me doing the things I enjoy.

Another thing I fear, is that it feels like playing might have become a too big part of my identity, or at least how I self-identify, and changing who one is is a scary thing indeed.

For a rather long while now, I’ve been running with a virtual machine as a router, first for a decent while running pfSense and then at some point switching to a simple Debian installation due to some irritation with how poorly pfSense handled IPv6. It all ran rather well, and setting up a router using systemd was actually a rather decent experience since there is actually a decent amount of flexibility built into it assuming one is using a recent enough version.

However, having recently started tinkering with other virtual machines on the same host more, and specifically things like PCIe passthrough, it became apparent that there was a decent amount of value in having the router actually be a separate physical box. Since I had been curious about trying VyOS anyway, the EdgeRouter X seemed like a good fit for the task, while still being a rather small, cheap and silent device.

Configuration of the device has been rather easy for the most part, though I have had to do a lot of it through the CLI—which to be fair is my preferred method anyway—since the WebUI has a woefully terrible support for IPv6; it’s strange that manufacturers think that’s acceptable in this day and age, but I guess I paid for the device too so maybe they’re correct? I have also ended up simplifying my network somewhat from the time I was using pfSense which is fortunate, since looking at how the router seems to set up things like router advertisements seems to be handled the same way in VyOS which means I would be encountering the same problems as I had with pfSense again.

Another change I ended up making from my previous setup due to besser hardware support was changing my VPN tunnels from OpenVPN to IPsec, since the EdgeRouter only has hardware offloading for IPsec meaning the performance of those tunnels is going to be better. This was a nice opportunity for me, since I had actually been curious about playing around with IPsec anyway but due to the increased complexity in comparison to OpenVPN had never really had the motivation to actually properly get started with it, which was compounded by the previous other endpoint of the tunnel being on an OpenVZ VPS, which introduced some additional difficulties in configuring IPsec since it’s a kernel module and OpenVZ is paravirtualization. The changeover was probably unecessary since I believe the true bottleneck will end up being our Internet upink anyway, but it did prove to be a fun learning experience—even the extra effort of switching from PSK to public key authentication for the tunnel, even if I was rather frustrated at times at the somewhat unclear documentation when one wanted public key without a certificate authority. Another thing that required some figuring out was allowing IPv6 traffic over the IPsec tunnel as well, since while the EdgeRouter does support configuring an IPsec tunnel with a DHCP interface instead of a fixed address which is necessary for my setup, this option is unexplicably disabled when using IPv6 addresses which means there was no straightforward way to configure it. What I ended up doing was running a GRE tunnel over the IPsec tunnel and using that to pass the IPv6 traffic, meaning a bit of extra overhead but it is at least a functional solution and the overhead should be negligible for my use-case anyway.

The final piece of the changeover puzzle was figuring out DNS-level adblocking, to protect devices that don’t allow installing an adblocker on the device or software itself. This was luckily enough solved easily by a package by britannic that even ended up having the usual filter list that I use included meaning it was zero configuration needed for me, I only needed to actually install the package itself. I has worked nicely so far, and I’m happy to see such simple solutions be available and tailored for these devices, especially since any custom hacks that I might build myself while certainly functional would mean an increased maintenance burden.

Overall, I’ve been happy with the switch so far, and everything seems to be functioning rather nicely, and getting to finally properly use VyOS was a nice bonus on top. It does feel a bit unfortunate to lose the “magic box” cool factor of having the router run in a virtual machine, but the separation of concerns makes up for that. Also, it’s still a tiny highly configurable “magic box” that makes the Internet work, so there is still a certain cool factor in that as well.

As a astute reader may note, it is Wednesday and not Monday on the day this post comes out, and that is for a somewhat good reason: I’ve been too busy playing Burning Crusade Classic to make time for writing a proper post. Well, to be more accurate, I was too tired after finally getting to 70 Sunday evening/Monday morning to actually sit down and write a post—I still have the habit of leaving it to the last minute most of the time.

The journey of leveling itself, along with our first run of Karazhan on Monday, has been a fun one so far, even if towards the end of the leveling I was getting rather frustrated partially with my own unfounded fears of abandonment along with worries that I wouldn’t be able to level up in time to complete the attunement to participate in the Karazhan run.

I ended up mostly, or rather exclusively, leveling in a group, for the most part through dungeons, which suited me rather nicely since I once more picked up my priest and played her as a healer, so solo content wouldn’t exactly have been the most enjoyable to do. It actually felt rather nice being back on my priest in Classic after having recently spent a rather significant amount of time levelig a hunter there—which while enjoyable just doesn’t feel like home quite like playing a priest does.

Leveling in a group it turns out, is also a rather efficient way of leveling due to giving a rather decent chunk of reputation with the different factions in Outland, meaning I could simply buy at least two of the keys needed to enter heroic dungeons—I say at least, because I’m actually not sure where my reputation ended up on with Lower City, so I’m not sure if I could simply buy the key there, but I shouldn’t be missing much at the very least.

The heroics themselves, though I have only had time to complete two so far, have also proven fun, at least with the right people and mentality. It is definitely slower going when comparing it to current high-end content, but it feels somewhat difficult actually classifying it as distinctly hard content, more perhaps simply unforgiving. To be fair, I’ve been in there with relatively experienced players who know the dungeons fairly well, so there haven’t been too many surprises along the way, which is probably contributing a lot to that feeling. Still, so far I’ve actually rather enjoyed the difficulty level of the content, making use of my familiarity with it to actually enjoy it more than I think back in the day where the insecurities due to my lack of knowledge would’ve prevented me from actually enjoying what I’m doing even if my youthful arrogance at the time may have masked it.

Entering Karazhan again was something of a swell of nostalgia, and I think once again I ended up enjoying the raid more than I ever did at the time due to the knowledge I’ve acquired in the years between, especially of the layout of the tower itself. Not being afraid of going the wrong way and actually to a degree knowing my way around the place really helped me both with figuring out where in the raid we were and what was coming up next, but also in actually soaking up the atmosphere since I wasn’t as focused on not making some sort of mistake that while in the grand scheme of things minute would have probably ruined at the very least my evening back in the day.

Overall, in both gameplay and nostalgia, Burning Crusade definitely scores higher for me than Classic itself, and it has been really fun to go back and see the old things with more experienced eyes even if the whole experience of playing is rather different due to the way the landscape has shifted in the intervening years as well as how I’ve changed with time. Still, the game does to me stand the test of time of still being enjoyable, and I’m happy to share the experience once more with a group of friends.

Something rather strange happened last week, or I found it amusing at least: I completely forgot to write the blogpost. Well, not completely, but Monday evening in bed I had the sudden realisation I hadn’t written it yet, and did so, and only after submitting the post did I realize that it was indeed already Monday evening and not Sunday evening as I had thought, and that I had missed my self-imposed deadline. The strange part was, I didn’t end up being mad or frustrated with myself, as I might have come to expect, but simply amused at being so completely, oblivious I suppose to the passing of time or the weekday.

I could probably try to attribute this to some sort of growth that has been going on lately with me trying to deal with things like failure and making mistakes better, and in this instance I think it was the only appropriate reaction since there was nothing I could do to change what had happened and the corrective action as it were—writing the post—was already done so the only thing remaining was being amused at my mistake.