The interesting photos — Behind the Wizards

Here I'll be detailing the wizard pictures that are based on video games, I took myself, or that might be under copyright but don't tell anyone.

See also:

• The free photos
• Behind the Wizards (full blogpost)

1) Thingummywut

This picture is based on a screenshot of the popular MMORPG Old School RuneScape. It’s been edited to remove Wizard Trailborn using the Heal Selection GIMP plugin and expand the chatbox whatsit.

For those familiar with the game, it’s quite interesting to look at the original, uncropped screenshot and compare it with how the game is today.

Changes include:

• The renaming of “Clan” to “Channel” and the addition of “Clan”, since clans as we know them today launched in 2021.
• The addition of the special attack orb. This was added in 2018.
  • I have the Store and Activity Adviser buttons disabled in the settings — they’re just clutter.
  • World Map orb has also been moved to overlap the minimap a little, like the other orbs do.
• The grouping of the Friends and Ignore List buttons into one to make way for the Account Management button.
• RuneLite has replaced OSBuddy as the third-party client of choice for most players for reasons I won’t get into.
  • For sake of comparison, I disabled the “Report Button”, “Wiki”, “FPS Control” and “Daily Task Indicator” plugins to take this screenshot. “GPU” was already disabled because it helps with the Prifddinas lag.
    • Which reminds me, I had the third-party (to RuneLite, so sixth-party to Jagex?) “Prifddinas” plugin enabled, which hides some scenery. But my character wouldn’t even be visible without it, so too bad.
• I remembered to hide my mouse cursor. This wasn’t an issue for Just Wizards since OSRS’ colour banding makes it trivial to erase the cursor in this case.

3) Bus

I took this photo on a Stagecoach bus. This will have been at the back of the bus on the top deck. Notice how those seats have a plastic sheen about them while the others don’t — that’ll be because people keep putting their feet up on the seats at the back of the bus, so those seats need more protection!

Back then, there were conductors on the bus who would take your money after you had a seat. It was good — there was time to chat with them, some dressed up at Christmas time, and there was always the chance of going unnoticed (or maybe they just couldn’t be bothered) and not having to pay.

When the pandemic hit, the conductors got the cut, so now everyone has to queue up to pay the driver instead. Not ideal. The Wi-Fi also got the axe and the buses are less frequent.

This photo hasn’t aged a day, really. The buses in this area still look like that, with their blue and orange. And they probably still will for a long time — don’t expect Stagecoach to start spending money on upgrading or replacing their fleet anytime soon.

5) Top 10 facts about wizards

This one seems almost archaic. So we have Windows 7, first and foremost. Internet Explorer, which isn’t even user-accessible in Windows anymore, and an ad for the Google Pixel 2. Plus a share button for Google+, which is sadly no longer with us.

The article wasn’t new to begin with — it’s just what I found from searching for something along the lines of the headline. It mentioning J.K. Rowling isn’t of any particular relevance — she only became a controversial figure in June 2020, as far as I can gather.

And yes, there’s RuneScape on the taskbar. RuneScape 3, that’ll be! Which is still the main version I play, as much as I dislike the money-driven direction they’ve taken it in — I may give more thoughts on this in a later post. Ideally I’d progress in both, but I just don’t have time to do so.

6) Presidential assassination

The original rendition of this had the caption “The wizard has assassinated Trump”. I changed this to “The wizard has assassinated the President” and replaced the podium text to remove reference to Donald Trump.

I’m hoping that if he isn’t portrayed in anything, he’ll just seep into irrelevance and not become president again. And if it’s just “the President”, it’ll always be relevant and doesn’t pick any particular political side.

I don’t think a president in office would even have that sort of podium. It’s from this March 2016 Daily Mail article, if you’re interested.

10) F to pay respects

This is a bit of an old meme, from the 2014 video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Lord Farquaad is of course from the 2001 animated film Shrek.

The original version of this wizard picture wasn’t very good quality, just using the picture I was able to find on Know Your Meme. I couldn’t find a good replacement image online, so I what I ended up doing was using a still from this YouTube video, which turned out very well.

?) Road

I remember I was going to have a picture where the wizard was standing on a road, with a vehicle barrelling towards him from behind. I think I even took some photos for it while waiting at the bus stop, but ultimately wasn’t very satisfied with them.

If I happen to come across a good photo for this, it can become the twelfth photo. I like the idea of the gallery ending with the wizard’s untimely demise.