Okay, I must admit that I'm a little disappointed to finally reach level 50 and find that they've removed the Airwolf pilot helmet in favor of a generic "50" emblem. That said, I'm tickled that they at least kept the name.

See, a group of acquaintances of mine (including the amazingly talented Mur Lafferty and her friend Jason Adams) had a conversation a couple years ago about cool old TV shows. After going through a lot of them, they decided that Airwolf was easily the coolest of the lot. You may find people who didn't like the show, but even most of them will admit that it is pretty cool, at least. This became a frequent reference with them, as they started using the word "Airwolf" as a synonym for the word "cool". And when Mur and Jason discussed this on their podcasts (the now defunct Geek Fu Action Grip and the not-quite-as-defunct Random Signal respectively) it spread to the entire Podosphere.

So it goes without saying that I've been wanting to become "Airwolf" for a long time. Unfortunately, moderation duties, editing, family, and other RL emergencies kept my points gain to a very modest pace, so it took years to get here. And now, of course, I've suddenly been finding pages that are in desperate need of attention. As a result, I am already 60% through the level and it looks like I'll be on to the next thing pretty soon.

Now, don't get me wrong. I really look forward to some of the other levels as well (especially the Buffy, Firefly, and Twin Peaks themed levels) but I'll still be sad to see Airwolf go.

Actually, it makes me wish that the levels were more like the badges in the massively multiplayer online game City of Heroes. In that game, once you earn a new badge you don't need to switch to it. You just add it to your collection. Every level you get a new badge, and you also get them for accomplishing certain tasks, exploring certain areas of the game, etc. But at any time you can choose to "wear" any of the badges that you've ever earned. Theoretically, you can be a level 50 character (the highest level in the game, I believe) and still be wearing the badge you get for clearing 100 bad guys from the tutorial level.

And that's what I'd like to be able to do here. Certain level just don't appeal to me all that much, so it would be nice to keep my old level titles. Maybe I could be a level 53 "Bewitched" at Halloween (or Beltane, or whatever).

That's way too much work, however, for way too frivolous a wish, so I'll just keep myself happy looking forward to the shiny new levels.

Even if most of them aren't nearly as Airwolf as this one.

Hurdy gur,

-Marc