Because I stayed in downtown for a good chunk of my Denver trip, I was in convenient walking distance to many tourist attractions, one of which was the Colorado State Capitol. I’ve come to enjoy looking at restored historical architecture, and I like seeing the different ways that different cities and states run their governments, so I squeezed in a quick visit to the Capitol shortly before they closed. I was too late for a guided tour, but I was able to wander around on my own for a self-guided tour, and it seems like the only thing I missed out on was access to the dome (apart from the docent’s commentary, obviously).
Here are some photographs I took in and around the building:
I considered slotting in a visit to the Denver Art Museum while I was in town, but because of timing constraints, I opted to go to the smaller Clyfford Still Museum next door instead. As you probably already concluded from the name, the Clyfford Still Museum is dedicated to showcasing the works of artist Clyfford Still.
I’ve been to a decent number of art museums before, and I imagine that my impressions might be derived from the fact that I don’t particularly have a creative or artistic eye, but I always found abstract art to be a bit funny, in that I’m never really able to distinguish what was drawn by a famous artist and what was drawn by a kindergartner.
What I found amusing about this artist was that he seemed to have the same opinions. According to some of the plaques describing his art, Still also challenged where the line is between art and a canvas merely being dunked in paint, i.e., at what point art becomes art. What I found especially interesting was the fact that Still seemed to have started with drawing distinguishable art, but as he grew older, his art got more and more abstract to the point where some of his latest works are just a single solid color.
Here are some photographs of the exhibits:
The museum also had some displays that gave background on Clyfford Still. Because the entire building was dedicated to showcasting Still’s work, I think these informative, text-heavy sections actually served a good purpose tying everything together and telling a cohesive story of his life.
Although I wasn’t able to see it directly, I snapped a picture through some glass of a storage area where they keep Still’s work that is not in the current public rotation.
Conforming to the theme of challenging what makes art art, there was a small section on the upper floor where museum guests could create their own art using any of the tools and materials provided. I liked this because this encouraged people to have a more hands-on exploratory experience and immediately apply into practice what they observed on the exhibition floor.
Some people left behind their creations to share with future museum attendees. My favorite was this kid’s poem: A very fat chicken that has ate to much corn. necklace
The museum had two outdoor sections that, if I remember correctly, were designed by the architect of the actual building. The gardens on display were a bit dead, which is reasonable, considering that it is winter in Denver.
Here is a view of the outside of the museum. There were some nice lights strewn across the trees as holiday decorations.
I enjoyed my time visiting this museum. It felt small enough that it was easily digestible by someone who might not be an art enthusiast. I usually leave art museums feeling like I just looked at a ton of different paintings and sculptures of all different kinds, but I left the Clyfford Still Museum feeling like I got told a complete and thorough story about an artist.
I’ve had a good time checking out aviation museums in the past, so when I found out that there was one in Denver, Colorado called the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum, I figured I would visit it while I was in town. I’m still not too knowledgeable about aircraft, but it was nice reading the plaques in front of each display—some were new to me, while others I recognized seeing variants of at other aviation museums.
Wings Over the Rockies was a good mixture between displaying aircraft and having sections that resembled traditional museums. It also had a wider breadth of material covered, which makes sense considering that it is called the Air and Space Museum—there was a lot of information about space travel and the future of space exploration, in addition to information about historical aircraft like you’d expect at a museum.
I arrived only a couple hours before closing time because I saw that the museum was contained in what appeared to be a single hangar, but I underestimated just how large the hangar actually was. I didn’t have to leave immediately at closing time because there seemed to be a private event taking place at the museum after regular business hours, so I got to stick around for a bit of extra time to finish checking out all the exhibits, but I still definitely should’ve arrived sooner.
General admission was US$19.95, which I thought was a good deal considering how much stuff there was to see. Enthusiasts who patiently go through to read everything and try out all the interactive experiences in the space section of the museum could easily spend 4+ hours here.
When I was younger, and before I got involved with the esports and video gaming work that led to and evolved into what I do today, I used to work in law enforcement. My Bachelor’s degree from university is in a field adjacent to the investigative aspect of law enforcement, and I was originally planning on becoming a prosecutor before deciding that becoming a lawyer would be too boring. More specifically, I worked at my local police department in the Chicagoland suburbs while I was still living with my parents.
It’s always a running joke that police and firefighters are rivals. This existed in my department as well—the police would always tease the firefighters about how we would always have to actively be running around on patrol, while the firefighters just relax at the fire station until they get called. Of course, this doesn’t account for the fact that the nature of the work of both professions is different, but we conveniently ignored that part.
Although there is the occasional memorial for fallen first responders, there aren’t too many full-blown museums dedicated to police officers and firefighters, so when I saw that there was one in Denver, Colorado—the Denver Firefighters Museum—I decided to check it out while I was in town.
Here are some photographs from my visit:
They had a collection of framed patches from each state, so of course, I had to scroll to Nevada. I was happy to find that they had patches from my fire departments back at home, Las Vegas Fire & Rescue and the Clark County Fire Department.
I thought this was a display of what the bathroom looked like at the old Denver Fire Department, but upon closer inspection, I found out that this was actually a functional bathroom, and the bathroom that was intended to be used by museum guests.
It seemed like a good chunk of the Denver Firefighters Museum was dedicated to teaching children about fire safety, which obviously wasn’t of particular interest to me, but was still a good use of resources to help educate the youth. Beyond that, there was also plenty of firefighting-related artifacts and relics on display that were interesting to look at. General admission was only US$9.00, which I think was a good deal for an hour and a half of exploration.
I don’t play video games that much anymore, but once in a while, I’ll still sign back on if a friend invites me to play.
Last year, my friend Doug Wreden and I played World of Warcraft: Classic hardcore on and off for about a month and had a pretty good time. It was a nostalgic experience for Doug; and for me, I enjoyed trying Classic for the first time and seeing from what the modern-day World of Warcraft evolved. I’m usually not a big fan of hardcore or permadeath game modes because I have very limited time to play games and I don’t want to constantly lose my progress and just do the starting area over and over again, but Doug finds softcore modes to be boring, and hardcore did technically add a lot more suspense and tension to the gameplay.
This year, Doug and I decided to join a guild called <OnlyFangs> and do another run of World of Warcraft: Classic in hardcore mode on the new realms released as part of the 20th Anniversary celebration. <OnlyFangs> is a guild generally reserved for Twitch streamers and other online content creators, and although I wouldn’t really consider myself to be a content creator, they were adding some additional twists to the gameplay to make it more interesting, so I still joined.
The guild has competitions among the different races, so naturally, as initiation for joining the guild, you have to take a sorting quiz to determine the race you’re allowed to play. I answered all the questions and ended up with Orc.
On the day of launch, I created an Orc Hunter and spawned into the Valley of Trials alongside hundreds of other players who had gotten in right as the servers opened.
Doug also created his character—a Troll Shaman named “TrugTrug,” a hybrid of “troll” and “DougDoug.” I just named myself “Parkzer,” but after seeing Doug’s character’s name, I regretted not naming myself “Orkzer” instead.
My first near-death experience promptly came at level 7 when Doug and I were on the Echo Isles questing. I wasn’t paying close-enough attention to World of Warcraft because I was distracted answering questions from my Twitch chat and I didn’t notice that my health was getting extremely low. I quickly ran away and dragged a Durotar Tiger into a group of other players in hopes that they would save me. Luckily, a fellow Orc named Orcadontis (who I imagine is a professional orthodontist) was nearby and finished off the tiger, saving my life.
And if you’re curious, the reason it says “YOU ARE LITERALLY TROLLING” and “RUN AWAY” in big letters on the center of my screen is because I use an add-on called WeakAuras, which allows you to make custom graphics that trigger based on conditions you specify. I set up an alert that blares an air horn and shows that bouncing text in the center of my screen in case I get low of health and don’t realize that I have to run away.
At level 10, Hunters gain the ability to tame a pet. Doug wanted his Twitch chat to be able to have agency over our gameplay, so he did a series of polls that determined that my first pet would be a crab named “Crabzer.”
… Crabzer promptly died because I sent him into a group of level 10 enemies when he was only level 6. Usually you can just revive your pet, but to add to the intensity of hardcore more, Doug wanted my pet to be hardcore as well. This meant Crabzer was dead forever. Doug required me to participate in a memorial ritual by removing all my armor and laying down (almost) naked next to Crabzer’s corpse.
My next pet was a crocodile named Croczer. Unsurprisingly, Croczer faced the same fate as Crabzer when we were in a cave and a random Mage pulled a ton of enemies, so I sent Croczer in to tank and he succumbed to overwhelming damage. … Yes, we did the same ritual for Croczer too.
It’s a running joke that I love to stop playing the main content and go off to fish in video games, specifically in MMORPGs where fishing is almost never the primary objective and is no more than a side task. World of Warcraft is no exception to this, so after Doug signed off for the night, I joined some of my Twitch viewers on a journey to Mulgore and Thunder Bluff because they said there were some nice, scenic fishing spots there.
The next day, Doug and I found a party of guildmates and cleared Ragefire Chasm, our first dungeon.
Later that night off-stream, I finally got a chance to level up my fishing. While in Orgrimmar, I was joined by Thor Hall from Pirate Software, with whom I had a pleasant chat using the Proximity Voice add-on. After reaching level 150 fishing, we took a ship and ventured to Booty Bay to purchase a special item—a book that would unlock the next tier of fishing. There is an overall level 20 requirement for that though in addition to the fishing level requirement, so I wasn’t yet able to read the book I had just bought.
On the fourth day of our adventure, we ran into an escort quest where the escortee has a very long respawn timer. In order to try and get as many people in on the quest as possible as to minimize the wait time, we partied up and invited someone from our guild as well. Hilariously, our guildmate had an add-on that automatically accepts, turns in, and advances all quests, so he managed to initiate the escort before Doug and I managed to turn in our quests and pick up the next one in the chain for the escort.
We stuck around for the respawn and waited for the next cycle. Being the brilliant, attentive, responsive gamer I am, I proceeded to miss turning in my quest for a second cycle in a row. Here I am eating a protein bar and realizing that the escortee was departing without me.
Back in town, I was reunited with Orcadontis, the guy who had saved me from the Durotar Tiger over ten levels ago.
He was roleplaying being ill and giving me dental advice with his dying breath, but my absolute favorite thing to do in roleplay scenarios is to pretend like I don’t understand what’s going on and breaking the fourth wall. As Orcadontis gasped that his death was approaching, I replied “no you’re fine, you’re at 100% health,” then walked away.
On day 5, we reached level 20 and learned our next set of important skills. For Doug’s Shaman, this was Ghost Wolf, a spell that turns him into wolf form and increases movement speed by 40%. For my Hunter, it was Aspect of the Cheetah, a spell that grants me 30% increased movement speed at the cost of being dazed for four seconds if I take damage while in cheetah form. Note that Ghost Wolf is materially and substantially better than Aspect of the Cheetah.
After doing a round of quests, Doug and I were returning to town. I had my character set to auto-follow Doug while I was answering questions from my Twitch chat. Doug said that he was going to run through a group of enemies, so I mindlessly said “ok” and continued talking with Twitch chat.
Remember how I mentioned that, not only is my movement speed buff weaker than Doug’s, but I also get dazed when I get hit? Doug was able to run through the enemies fine, but when I ran in after him, I got hit once and got slowed to a fraction of my movement speed.
From here, I had a truly next-level reaction to what was happening, composed of the following series of events:
Spend five seconds looking around in confusion, trying to gauge how much trouble I am actually in.
Spend an additional three seconds tabbing over to Discord to unmute myself so I can tell Doug I am in trouble.
Try to kill the thing that is attacking me, then give up after two seconds.
Try to turn off Aspect of the Cheetah so enemy attacks stop refreshing my daze, but realize that the hotkey I assigned to that was Alt+0, which is impossible for me to hit without either taking my left fingers off the movement keys or taking my right hand off my mouse.
Bring my mouse pointer down to click the Aspect of the Cheetah button to turn it off, but misclick and start channeling Mend Pet instead.
Finally click the correct button to turn off Aspect of the Cheetah, though not before having my daze reset for another 4 seconds.
Try to run away, then realize that the retreat path I was taking was directly towards another camp filled with five more enemies.
Use a health potion, but then forget to use the two other items on my hotbar that would have rooted an enemy and healed me more, thus potentially increasing my chances of survival.
Run off a cliff to try and de-aggro the now four enemies carving line art into my back.
Try to land on a small platform not too far down, miss, slide down the whole face of the entire cliff, then die of fall damage.
And the best part? Doug would have been perfectly fine, but after I unmuted and let him know that I had aggro, he turned around and ran back into the gargantuan group of enemies to try and help me. Even better, note that I had already wasted eight seconds at that point, so he was very far away and it’s not like there was anything he could’ve done anymore anyway.
He also died.
From what I gathered during my post-death debriefing session with Doug, when he announced that he was going to run through a group of enemies, what I was supposed to do was stop following him, split off from him, go all the way around the group of enemies via a different path by myself, and meet back up with him in town afterwards.
This was a pretty ridiculous way to die, and I’m going to be traveling soon anyway, so I’m not too disappointed at our demises. Many hardcore deaths are fairly anti-climactic (e.g., you’re fighting something and just end up taking too much damage too quickly and suddenly die out of nowhere), so I feel like this was definitely one of the more interesting ways for our run to end.
We’re not going to be creating new characters right away, though I guess there’s nothing stopping us from trying again at some point in the future…
I recently realized that, for some reason, I never posted photographs from my tour. Considering that I haven’t been doing much for the past few weeks and haven’t had anything particularly notable to blog about, I figured now would be a good time to share these pictures to fill in the lull.
The only sports I ever really watch are combat sports, so it was nice being able to get a behind-the-scenes look at a traditional ball sport stadium.
My main takeaway from the tour was that sports stadiums like this basically have the same premise as commercial planes, in that there a lot of “economy” seats where people are crammed together in a small space, but then there are extremely expensive, luxurious, over-the-top “first class” sections for people who are superfans and want to spend a ton of money. I got to check out the private viewing rooms, lounges, and clubs, and they seemed like pretty nice environments from which to enjoy some American football.
This tour didn’t convert me into a football fan, but it did make me realize that, as long as I’m not squished in a regular seat, I wouldn’t mind checking out a game sometime.
