You're listening to the starting to the podcast about World of Warcraft and the people who play it.

And now, here are your hosts.

Well, hello and welcome to the starting zone, the podcast about World of Warcraft,

the people who play it today is May 15, 2026, and my name is Spencer Downey.

Thank you so much for listening and subscribing to the podcast.

I'm joined as always by my co-host, Jason Lucas. Jason, how are you doing on this fine Friday afternoon or evening? Spencer, hello. Yes, it's early evening, I would say. I'm doing, I'm doing well. Glad to be back with you talking some wow. I do want to I don't want to bring the room down too much as the beginning of the show, but it would, it would behoove me to mention. I would, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I became aware of some news yesterday that I just wanted to mention here. It's about a member of our community, of our

wow podcasting family. Somebody you might know by the name of Bricko. I found out that last

month he passed away, a pretty untimely age of 52. And that's a real bummer. I didn't know

Bricko personally or anything, but I mean, he was a mutual on Twitter for many, many years. I mean,

he was ride or die with TSI for a long time, big supporter of the show, big booster for us

on social media and stuff. And he always had real positive energy and everything. He was,

he was always fun to interact with. And he was in our orbit for many years. And, you know,

he started a show of his own back in like 2020, I want to say, third faction,

which he co-hosted for a long time and is still going.

And yeah, it's just I found out last night and this happened a few weeks ago.

And it's a real bummer.

The guy seemed like a real positive, you know, force in the community.

And I have since, you know, I spent some time last night just kind of reading people, like,

eulogizing him and stuff and just to get a sense of, you know, who he was as a person.

And people had a lot of really nice things to say about him. And so just some sad news.

And I felt like I wouldn't be doing my duty if I didn't mention it on the show tonight. So also I want to mention Dave Gagnet over at Solo Q podcast. It did a real nice segment on him on the latest episode 39. So if you want to check that out to hear some more about Bricko, I would recommend giving that a listen. But yeah, Bricko, you know, he was, like I said, he was, he was a huge booster for us,

a big part of our social media orbit and a big listener and support of the show for many, many years. And so really sad news. So just condolences to anybody that knew him to his family and all that. It's just terrible, man. when we hear news like that, you know, it's, you never, we never want to lose one of our own, you know, it's just, it doesn't feel good. So just anybody who's hurting over this news, you know, we're, we're right there with you. Yeah. It, it's, it happens so out of the blue. I mean, Jason told me literally minutes ago before the show started that he'd heard about this. So like I, I'm still processing. But yeah, I mean, we were tweeting with him back in 23 when we were heading down to Bliscon and we're going to be chatting with him. And he was, he'd initially hoped he was going to go back in 2021 before COVID hit and he couldn't. And then he couldn't in 2023. And so we didn't get to connect in person, but there was certainly a lot of chat that we've had around the community and support around the community with him. So yeah, I mean, it's always surprising when this stuff happens. I was also mentioning this always brings up other, you know, stuff that you're still kind of handling and that surfaces every year for me around

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