Hiking » Fantasy

This weekend, my wife and I restarted our hikes in the Midwest. Last year we did a number of them, exploring northern Midwestern areas from the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern (lower peninsula) Michigan to the Hocking Hills State Park in southern Ohio, nearly on the Kentucky border. Most of the hikes were, of course, fairly tame. We're in our early 50s, not in great shape, and my wife has an old knee injury and hates being outside after dark in case there's any kind of animal about, or someone suggests that maybe she should camp or build a campfire. She's strictly a day-hiker.

We drove a fair bit up to the so-called "tip of the thumb" of Michigan, near Port Austin. I've been around a fair bit of Michigan and Ohio in particular the last years since living in the northern Midwest, but my exposure to "the thumb" has been nonexistant. I've spent more time in the upper peninsula than in the thumb, in spite of the fact that it's considerably harder to reach. On the way, we also did some listed hikes near Bay City, which is I guess at the point where the thumb and the rest of the "mitten" come together at the bottom of Saginaw Bay. There we hiked the Pinnebog Trail at the Bay City State Park, and up near Port Austin we also did the Port Crescent State Park trail.

Maybe I have a problem psychologically with being satisfied with things as they are, but whenever I drive around in these rural areas, seeing the interesting names of little rivers, tiny little towns, and then walk around in the woods, forests, hills, dunes, cliffs, mountains, or whatever other feature I'm hiking through, it inspires my imagination for fantasy versions of the same. I've spent a lot of the last few months with my imagination in space opera mode, but if there's anything that may tend to bring it back to fantasy, going on hikes out in the natural (naturalish, anyway. I don't really go very deep in the wilderness) world and poking around through sleepy little farming towns will do it. I've always said that if I had to choose, I'd pick fantasy over space opera, but I'm also glad that I don't have to choose.

To be fair, my love of space opera has less to do with the attitude that it originally engendered of futuristic excitement. I like space opera in particular because it's a retro genre, and it reminds me of the 30s-50s and what people thought the future would be like back then. I like the old pulps where people were in the future, but still acted like they were people from our own cultural past. A sense of nostalgia for what has been lost is a part of my love of both fantasy and space opera; sure—they're both genres that are exotic and fantastic, but they are also both genres that are rooted in the past and my sense of nostalgia for a time when things were better than they are now.

As an aside, this nostalgia baiting is big business, it seems. When I was a kid in the 80s, nostalgia baiting for the 50s was big business, and lots of movies and TV shows were set in that era, perhaps most famously Back to the Future... although it was hardly the only one. 50s songs were even released; I bought 7" records of "Yakety-Yak", "Runaway" and a few others. Nowadays, it seems like 80s nostalgia bait is pretty keen; the whole synthwave musical genre is based around it, and stuff like the popularity of Stranger Things and the music used in the show is just one example of it. Nostalgia, even for things that you never actually had (like me having 50s nostalgia, to the extent that I did) is a powerful thing, and Americans in particular, being a new nation split off from an older one but in a new land, seem like we've always been in the search for roots and a past so we don't feel unmoored in the world, tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, as James says.

Curiously, we seem to have turned our back on formative eras of our own American history; the Old West and the Colonial and Revolutionary period. This is largely because our public square has been taken over by self-hating liberals and foreigners, especially Jews, who have no understanding or appreciation of our founding or what it means... because to them it means very little if anything.

Anyway, what does all of this mean? Am I finally ready to talk about Dark Fantasy X again? I'm not sure. Maybe.

Johhn as the Droidmaster

I've mostly moved my SWTOR discussions to Space Opera X, but here's an interesting screenshot of Johhn using elements that give him lots of floating droids. A Droidmaster, if you will. There's five floating droids here.

New X-files

https://www.cbr.com/x-files-creator-looking-forward-reboot/

Coogler has actually done a decent job with breathing new life into the Rocky franchise via the Creed movies, so there's that. Disney/Fox have been teasing how this will be woke, though, and Coogler is so incredibly pro-black (he's also the director of the Black Panther movies in addition to the Creed movies) that it's hard to see how this isn't Moldy and Scolder haranguing the audience in typical woke fashion. I know that the first Black Panther movie was financially very successful, but I haven't heard anyone other than some black young men who really thought it was all that memorable or was a cultural touchstone; rather it was kind of a perfect storm of a specific kind of demand at exactly the right time to peak. Once it was over, the reaction from most that I've seen was—the movie was actually kind of mediocre and forgettable, and the blackness of it was in the long-run a turnoff, because it wasn't really made to be universal, but to be a black story.

The second Black Panther, of course, was much less successful and was received even more poorly. It wasn't exactly a flop, but it was a financial disappointment vs expectations and hopes, I believe, and I also believe that it killed any interest in another iteration of the franchise. It proved that the Black Panther franchise had nowhere to go, in my opinion. 

Anyway, I was a fan of the X-files in the 90s. The last two revival seasons were pretty pointless, and it's also clear that Chris Carter never had a plan to end the show; he thought he'd just keep going with it forever. But when we thought that maybe it would actually end on a reasonable time and in a satisfying manner; up to and maybe a bit beyond the theatrical movie that came after the 5th season or so, the X-files was amazing, innovative, and fascinating. 

It is, however, a great example of a TV show that's a victim of its own success. Because it was so successful, rather than wrap it up, the producers and the network and even the creator got the idea that they could just keep treading water and making money indefinitely. Carter even specifically thought that he had many more seasons left to go, when the series was already getting tired, the main actors were getting done with the series, and he seemed unwilling to understand that the chemistry and relationship between Scully and Moulder were among the couple of keys to the show's success. Not that the new replacement characters were bad, but people just didn't care about them as much and they didn't grab the audience's attention the same was as Duchovny and Anderson did. 

I've seen both Duchovny and Anderson in various interviews and talk shows, etc. Duchovny actually seems like a reasonably sharp guy for an actor, who got more and more involved in the show as not just its star, but someone really invested in it behind the scenes over time. Kind of the like the Alan Wilder of the X-files, if you will, to make a Depeche Mode reference. Anderson, on the other hand, doesn't strike me as too bright, and most of her interview "performances" make her come across as a bubble-headed bimbo. Kind of the opposite of the character that she most famously played, I suppose.

Not that that's super shocking. The myth of the absolute brilliant STEM woman is largely a myth. They do exist here and there, but in such statistically low numbers as to not really be something worth expecting ever. Most of the so-called "STEM" women I've ever met didn't actually do much science or engineering, or whatever, but gravitated to "soft" elements within a science or engineering organization, related to OB or social stuff or whatever. And the more strident a woman is about trumpeting her STEM credentials, the less likely I am to believe that they really mean much. 

Anyway, all this to say that my expectations for a rebooted X-files show by a pro-black icon (albeit one that's had some success in rebooting franchises to be all black but still being pretty good; I really like the first Creed movie, for instance) and handled by Disney are pretty low. I couldn't get behind the attempts to revive the series with the original cast. I also think the climate is different. What people in Hollywood think are conspiracies among the plebs to be made fun of are actually spoiler alerts, while they have their own bizarre conspiracy theories of their own that they believe whole-heartedly. Nobody trusts the government anymore, but for the exact opposite reasons that liberals don't trust the government, and unless they're talking about government conspiracies to displace, jail or persecute normal Americans and Christians, instead of hiding aliens, it's going to feel like a bizarre artifact of the past rather than a timely social show, like the original X-files was.

Scolds

Edited and shortened from: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=31806 

[T]he last half century of the internet demonstrates the reality of large societies, whether they are digital or analog. Once a society gets to a certain size factionalism is inevitable. The message board experience is the best example, as these platforms created lots of tools to allow people to exist on the same platform but ignore the people from factions they did not like. It never worked. The only solution was peaceful separation in the form of separate private platforms.

This makes perfect sense when you learn about the Dunbar number. This is the number of stable relationships people are cognitively able to maintain at once. The generally agreed upon number is one-hundred-and-fifty. For many people, the number is much lower, so this means in any large group, the typical person will have a sense of belonging with a minority of the people. Consequently, they will be alienated from the rest and there is a short trip from alienation to hostility.

This explains the general sense of unhappiness in modern America. The mass media age has not brought people together as our politicians endless[ly] blather on about all the time, but rather increased the sense of alienation. The normal person is now bombarded with the presence of alien, perhaps hostile strangers. Every online experience comes with someone trying to scold you, lecture you, harass you or they are simply outside what you consider to be normal and acceptable.

Digital life is making analog life less tolerable. [...] [W]e see the horrors of the virtual world jumping into the analog world, as these people now do to our institutions what they did to the internet. For example, spiteful mutants have taken over the court system in New York. Just as we saw with social media, they are using their power to harass normal people. They have litigated VDare into closure simply because they can. This is not much different from what the scolds did to social media platforms with moderation.

New York is like Twitter before Musk. They have law-fared the NRA into bankruptcy, charged Trump with various invented crimes, levied a fine on Trump for denying he committed a crime that has never been demonstrated, litigated VDare out of existence despite never alleging any wrongdoing and sent a growing number of innocent white men to prison for the crime of being white men. Douglas Mackey is the most famous, but there are others like Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman.

There is another important lesson here, a scary one too. The internet has proven too big to control in this way. The scolds got the upper hand for a while, but the cost of endless policing exceeded the carrying capacity. People forget, but the reason Musk was able to buy Twitter is they were in serious financial trouble. He fired over two-thirds of the staff, the scolds, and harpies, because these people did nothing but immiserate the people who kept the site running.

This will apply even more to a continent sized country. New York can make itself hostile to normal people, but normal people can leave. After what New York has done to VDare, every reformer now knows they have to shop for safe jurisdictions to avoid this sort of problem. The same will be true for industries that know they are threatened by the kook squads. The gun makers are fleeing the Northeast because they know better than anyone that there is no reasoning with fanatics.

The point here is that we will see in the analog world what we have seen in the digital world for the last decades. A great disaggregation is unfolding in which normal people seek refuge from the areas now controlled by the fanatics. Further, the social media experience has shown that you cannot last long when you are overrun by fanatics, even when you are systematically robbing them. Even if peaceful separation is not possible, people will seek it anyway.

In the end, this is the reason to be optimistic. A society in which people like Fani Willis and Letitia James are doing anything more than pulling a cart is a society that will eventually destroy itself. For any human organization to survive it must be run for the interest of [the] normal by the sober minded and talented. This is true for a social media platform, and it is true for a country. Nature cannot long tolerate the unfit and human nature will be compelled to do the same eventually.

This is the only reason we had peace throughout the late 19th and 20th century. Following the scolds declaring war against the South, the men of the South mostly sought peace afterwards by migrating West to the empty frontier, to escape the predatory existence of the scolds. It's only been (relatively) recently that that is no longer possible; that the frontier, and separation by distance and local culture has failed to protect people from their toxic presence. I still remember in the 80s when I was young that different places had different culture, and everyone pretty much understood and accepted that, except for a handful of spiteful busybodies who felt it was their purpose in life to hall monitor the entire world. This has always been the Yankee burden, and the critical flaw in their national? regional? cultural? character. Not sure exactly what a Yankee is in this regard. Are they a nation unto themselves; separate and distinct from the Tidewater gentility or the backwoods borderers, like my own people? Or, to use David Hackett Fisher's term, maybe they're a "folkway", although I'd argue that few people understand what it meant by that word exactly.

The Z-man seems to be pointing towards separation, however, which indicates the eventual disaggregation of what was once "One Nation Under God" into more than one nation, and likely few of them having anything to do with God. Of course, what "nation" is the scold? Sure, they tend to congregate and have a high preponderance amongst the original Yankee population, which is why the Northeast is so toxic. But they have spread all over the country, intermarried and intermingled everywhere. The Left Coast is essentially a Yankee colony, and most large urban areas have their stink on them, even in Red States. Their admission of tens of millions of hostile and culturally incompatible aliens into our country was a deliberate design to weaken the ability of normal people everywhere to easily withstand or separate from them, because the hostile aliens tend to get favored treatment from the scolds. 

But he makes a good point. There's no living with these people, and eventually people will completely run out of options in trying to avoid them. What happens then?

Once again on the road

Traveling for a long weekend for a wedding out of state. I wish that I could spend some time while out West in the Rockies hiking or sightseeing with outdoor sites, but I won't have any time. Friday and Monday will be mostly traveling, Saturday will be the wedding, and Sunday will be Easter Sunday. That's all she wrote. Not exactly the most relaxing long weekend, and as I'm coming off of a several weeks, if not even several months, of absolutely exhausting, tedious, difficult and toxic stuff going on at work, I really need a break... that I seem to never be able to actually get. It's catching up to me, and I'm starting to really be unhappy with work, and to a certain degree, because work takes up so much of my time, with life in general. I need a break pretty desperately, but it's hard to get one at my current job. I'm also interviewing with someone else right now, but because it will require relocation to a place that's more expensive, because I'll lose my employee car lease, and because if I relocate that'll leave my other son and his family who are living with us temporarily (but realistically, for quite a while longer) high and dry, I have to honestly assess that it will be difficult for them to make me an offer that will make the math work out favorably for me. Even if I would love the job—honestly, I doubt that I'd love it. But I hope not to hate it and be constantly frustrated by it like I kind of am lately with my current job. 

The good news for me is that although I'm not actively looking for a job, I pretty routinely get tapped to interview. This hasn't worked out yet, but it takes time to find a really good job, and when I have a job which I don't like, but which does a pretty fair job of paying the bills, I've got time to get it right. I really hope I don't end up retiring from my current job in 15-20 years, because I really don't want to be stuck doing it that long, but we'll see, I suppose. There are worse things than that, if it comes down to it.

Anyway, my fleeting hobby time has been spent lately with SWTOR, as any readers have no doubt noticed, if there were any readers, not Dark Fantasy X, but I'm always keeping both Dark Fantasy X and Space Opera X in the back of my mind, just in case. One thing that I will do on this trip is take my journal with me where I keep notes for potential games and stories. I'm actually kind of excited about this, although it's not something that I spend much time on. But I'd like to, and being away from my computer for four days is a good opportunity to spend some time with my earbuds in, thinking about Dark Fantasy X and Space Opera X and where, if anywhere, I'm going with them.

Anyway, this isn't exactly where I'm going to be out West, but it's close enough, and if I somehow, I dunno, won the lottery or whatever, here's one contender for where I'd end up.

Once again; leftism = mental illness

https://www.psypost.org/study-woke-attitudes-linked-to-anxiety-depression-and-a-lack-of-happiness/

This one was research performed in Finland on Finns, but there's no reason not to believe that it is a similar condition across the West. (To the degree that Finland is part of "the West." Like Ireland and southern "Mediterranean" Europe and western Slavic peoples, a case could be made that they're an outgroup, or other group within Western civilization, or a para-Western civilizational grouping that isn't part of Western Civilization per se, but is closely related to and still travels with Western civilization.)

The curious part is that women are so much more favorable towards wokeness compared to men. Sadly, and I was offended when this was first presented to me but the data is pretty incontrovertible now; the anti-suffragettes seem to be completely and totally vindicated by the data. 

As an aside, remember when Miss Helsinki 2017 went viral on the Right, where an African girl who looked like a somewhat prettier version of Flavor Flav won Miss Helsinki over about a dozen very pretty European women? Yeah. Finnish men weren't in favor of that, I'm sure, even if virtue-signaling Finnish women reluctantly refused to take a stand against it.

Here's the older link to a Danish study that reached similar conclusions; the most mentally ill group is white, woke women, the least mentally ill is based conservative Christian men.

https://vdare.com/articles/it-s-official-again-leftists-particularly-leftist-women-are-nuts

Of course, this doesn't really need to be "proven", although it's nice that it is. But it's pretty obvious and self-evident. Even SNL made a joke about it on the weekend following Donald Trump's election; all of the liberal white folks in the apartment were chewing Xanax like they were Tic-Tacs.

And don't think that this is unique to Scandinavians, of course. All of the West fits this. And Denmark is about as firmly within Western civilization as you can get anyway.

Where Eagles Dare and Star Wars

I've said before that the middle section of Star Wars is very similar, probably on purpose, to the plot and situation of the popular 1968 WW2-spy movie Where Eagles Dare. I've always liked Eagles, but I hadn't watched it in a while. I own it on DVD, so it was just a question of making some time and doing it. My youngest son likes to watch movies with me, and this was one where we were both in alignment that we wanted to see it, so we watched it this weekend. Because the movie is long and we started it late, we actually watched half of it on Saturday (up to the end of the interrogation scene in the Great Hall of the Schloss Adler. Then we watched the second part last night, which is the escape from the castle, and by far the best part of the movie, with the thrilling murder of a gazillion Nazis, as well as the iconic cable car fight scene. This is the part that especially reminds one of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and the rest of the bunch being stuck on the Death Star. I'm not the only person to have noted this similarity over time; I did a quick search, and found that many other people had remarked on it (some of them also remarked that the part that followed the escape from the castle; the flight to the airport, etc. could easily be a prototype for the truck chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think it's fair to say that Lucas liked Where Eagles Dare. The biggest tell, which I hadn't recognized until now, was the Clint Eastwood's character says to Richard Burton's character, more than once in fact, that "we've got company", a line which Lucas adopts pretty closely when Han shouts to Luke that "we're gonna have company."

He used some other WWII action movies from the 60s; 633 Squadron and The Dam Busters (actually, that one's a little older; from 1955); this is even less secret; he showed this films to his special effects guys saying specifically that that's what he wanted the X-wing fight scene to look like. Of course, the plot and situation is lifted right from those movies, both of which had a very similar scenario.

Dumb virtue-signaling people like to say that Star Wars was a reworking or even a remake of The Hidden Fortress, but in reality, the movie bears very little resemblance to it, in favor of the movies listed above, except for maybe the opening act, and the concept of the bickering droids mirroring the bickering peasants, and some of the other set-up. Where Eagles Dare also doesn't feature the rescue of a princess, which The Hidden Fortress does, but it does feature the rescue of a downed American general who has access to secret plans. Given that princess-rescuing is a pretty time-honored scène à faire, pegging that to A Hidden Fortress is dubious. Certainly, however, the earliest drafts of Star Wars more closely resembled The Hidden Fortress but by the time we get to the movie as filmed, it's at best the source of the first act only, if even that. 

Of course, by saying that Star Wars used these elements, I don't mean to say that they were the Tragedy of Darth Plagiarism the Wise or anything, just that they clearly form the inspiration core that was adapted and adopted to fit into the screenplay as it emerged. There's nothing wrong with doing that, and hardy any writer, even one much better than George Lucas, will fail to honestly admit that writers to that all the time; take an element from some other work, and then adopt and adapt it to fit into their narrative. Assuming that they also adopt and adapt other elements too and mingle them, and twist what's left to be unique somewhat so that it's not an obvious copy-paste routine, then why not?

I always say that writers and game-masters too, for that matter, should be familiar with lots of different fiction traditions and genres, and what makes them work and not work. I've heard of D&D players that not only only read fantasy, but they even only read D&D fiction! I doubt that's true anymore for this guy, since he said that years ago, and I don't think WotC publishes many novels anymore. And even if it was literally true and not some weird exaggerated claim, then that suggests that he probably just doesn't read much at all; I doubt that he doesn't watch TV, movies or play video games of various genres, at the very least.

As Lucas himself proved, his greatest inspiration for the setting of Star Wars was almost certainly stuff like Dune and the Lensman series, and the old Flash Gordon Republic serials, but when it came to plot, his greatest inspiration wasn't science fiction at all, but a Japanese historical swasbuckling film, a WWII spy-thriller, and some WWII war movies.

Switching gears, I watched a YouTube video recently about Star Wars and Dune, and it claims that Brian Herbert called his dad in late May of 1977 telling him that he needed to see Star Wars because it copied so many elements of Dune that it was scary. Then he specifically mentioned the desert planet and the evil empire. If that's really all he could think of, he was really reaching. Evil empires are a stock plot element from all kinds of fiction, and in any case, the most obvious proximal source for the Empire was the caricature of the Nazis that our propagandists have foisted on us to justify our involvement in WW2, not anything out of Dune. It's not clear that the Empire is even necessarily evil in Dune, or if it is, that Paul Atreides and his Fremen jihad aren't even more evil. And a desert planet? That's a little easier sell, but then again, desert planets are hardly unique to Dune, especially given the prolific subgenre of science fiction set on Mars. In fact, Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark double book The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman offers a more Tatooine-like experience, I think, than Dune does. Dune isn't anything all that interesting or unique without the context of spice, the worms and the Fremen, all of which Tatooine lacks. Although the offhand shot of C-3PO walking by a long giant skeleton is maybe supposed to be a veiled Dune reference, and certainly his fear of being shipped to the spice mines of Kessel is a veiled Dune reference. It's a little unfortunate that Star Wars used the word spice at all in any context other than something you put on your food to make it taste more interesting, although it was just an off-hand reference in the one movie until the EU and then the Disney movies (Solo in particular) made it more mainstream again. Of course, Star Wars spice has developed in ways that bear little resemblance at all to Dune spice.

I don't actually like Dune that much as a novel, which I think I mentioned recently in reference to the new movies. I think the movies are better then the book, but they still aren't great. A lot of people think that Dune is to sci-fi what Lord of the Rings is to fantasy. I completely disagree. It's epic in scope, but lacks epic themes. Dune is A Song of Ice & Fire, a disappointing and nihilistic critique of humanity and Western civilization in particular, a dark and cynical downer where there are no heroes, no good guys even, and no good even at all. Everything is dark, tawdry and cynical. 

Also, Dune hasn't had the effect on the genre that Lord of the Rings has, although there it at least comes closer. Rather, I suspect Star Wars is itself the Lord of the Rings of science fiction, or at least it was when we only had the original trilogy. It's the work that's the most imitated and has done the most to make the genre mainstream. Like Lord of the Rings, it also synthesizes older, familiar tropes and puts them in a new context; in Lord of the Rings case, it hangs mythology and old Germanic sagas on an epic good vs evil struggle, where Star Wars takes an even broader selection of genre tropes and also hangs them on an epic struggle of good vs evil, even going so far as trying to justify its seriousness by appeal to Joseph Campbell's debunked and out of favor "monomyth" theories.

Yes, that's another tell of someone who isn't very educated but is trying to appear so; if you refer to Joseph Campbell without even knowing that his work is largely discounted, discredited and not taken seriously at all by academics, then you're just a parrot trying to appear intelligent by referring to an academic thesis that you've heard about vaguely but don't understand at all. Please just stop. Nobody is impressed by the fact that you've heard the name Joseph Campbell and might even know the name of his most famous book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The more you try to summarize the Wikipedia summary of it, the deeper the hole you're digging for yourself for anyone who actually knows the status of Joseph Campbell's credibility to see.

Anyway, here's Johnn and his common law wife Raina Temple on Tatooine, which isn't really very much like Arrakis. In fact, here it specifically has a Lovecraftian vibe to it, although I think that was mostly made up for the Old Republic material, rather than something that is otherwise very present in the Star Wars franchise overall.

Here's a better view of the outfit. It's based on the Intelligence Agent's Armor, with a secondary black (IIRC) dye module, and the Crimson Raider helmet. 

Season 6

It’s now Thursday morning and I’ve had two days to play around with 7.4.1. Some people on Youtube and elsewhere have made a big deal about the addition of the "Date Night" events. This makes me wonder who the devs are targeting with this update, and who the player base is, or who they think that it is. Maybe I'm the one who's mistaken, and the romance options and stuff is drawing more women to the game than I imagined. I like a good romance as much as the next guy, but if that becomes the main focus of a swashbuckling space adventure game, then something is out of whack, by my account. The perfect amount is John Carter and Dejah Thoris from A Princess of Mars. Sometimes the originals got it so right that nobody else can top them.

That said, I don't really care very much about the expansions. Most of my characters go into semi-retirement after finishing the class story and then very leisurely wander over to Ilum, Section X and The Black Hole… if they actually make it there at all. By semi-retirement, I usually mean that I use them for seasons, events, outfit design for concept art for SOX, and other things like that, rather than that I'm actually playing the story with them. I think it's worth taking a moment to take stock of where my semi-retired characters actually are.

• Maark—the most far along; just finished Ruhnuk with him. Not super motivated to go to whatever is next; the new Voss area, or whatever, so when I play him, I'm very slowly grinding for Ruhnuk reputation. Not that I've done much if anything on that the last two weeks.
• Mat Thew—the second most far along; just finished Yavin IV and the Shadow of Revan stuff; haven’t yet gone to  Ziost, but that would be the next step. Not sure that I want to go on past Ziost and change all of the functional nature of his companions.
• Luukke—somewhere on Makeb. Haven’t gone back to see what’s still to be done, but I think I’m almost finished with it.
• Johhn—still on Ilum; I think I’ve done the Black Hole with him too. Or maybe Section X. I’m not really considering using him for any additional story stuff, though.
• Phillippion—haven’t started any post story stuff with him; I’ve only taken him to Ilum to grind Gree reputation (which is now complete.) Might have grinded some other reputation with him over time, like Oricon or Section X—certainly I did THORN and the BBA, but I’m not doing anything else story-wise with him at all. Don’t care to either.
• Graggory—I might have finished Ilum with him, maybe not. I think I’ve got Makeb on his next mission, but that’s been true for a long time.
• Hutran Thanatos—because he’s the most recent to finish, he’s the only one who I’m actually approaching the post story stuff systematically anymore. He’s finished Ilum (except the two flashpoints) at which point I’ll eventually do The Black Hole and Section X with him, and presumably after that, Makeb.

In general, I don’t much care for the post main story expansion stuff. Some of it is visually pretty, like Odessen or Ossus or Makeb or Onderon, etc. but I only go there for aesthetic reasons or to grind some special event or something like that. I don’t really care what happens to the characters after the main story when there no longer is a unique story for each class, and there’s barely a unique story for each faction. Sorta. None of these characters are advancing very fast, and for the majority of them, I really don’t expect that I’ll ever play past Ziost at the absolute most. I’m especially reluctant to use my crafting characters post Ziost, because they’ll lose access to their companions. Ironically, some of my newer characters might be better positioned to move forward past that, because their companions are just sidekicks along for the ride and the combat support.

The crafting characters, if they do advanced story content, it will probably be because I popped into a flashpoint for some reason. I am still trying to grind for a group achievement, after all, although I haven’t done anything with that since coming back to the game a couple of months ago. Too many other things to do!

So, date night and story advancement; I don’t care. Why do I care about game updates at all, then? Honestly, I don’t really. I find them inconvenient mostly, although I’m glad that they add some new elements, some new environments to visit and go do daily areas on (although lately, you can’t do the dailies without first doing the story, which sucks) and stuff like that. And I like Seasons well enough.  I’m doing season 6, and it’ll be third that I’ve done; the other three taking place while I was away from the game.  I’m not sure that the seasonal armors and weapons are all that cool this time around, but the mounts are nice, and I get extra cartel coins, plus season tokens that I can spend on older season stuff that I missed here and there. (Just added the Rapid Recon Walker to my collections in mounts a day or two ago, for instance.) Two evenings of seasons, and I’ve done all of the weekly stuff that I can. Just the log-on bonus and the dailies will get me another two or three reward track elements before next Tuesday. 

I’ve said before that SWTOR always leads me mentally to Space Opera X, and I’ve had some thoughts on the SOX setting, and how to make it potentially much more useful and fun for me by getting rid of the political alignment of most of the systems, and instead having all major political groups potentially operating on any planet. There’s a reason most planets in SWTOR have both Republic and Imperial stuff going on. Even Ord Mantell and Hutta are notable for their neutrality, and its telling that Ord Mantell for both factions was added to the latest update, and Hutta is coming yet this year too. Voss is maybe the poster-child of the neutral planet where both Empire and Republic have to operate discretely, but that’s just a case of mediocre execution of what is otherwise actually a good idea.

And here's Johhn on Oricon in his Daft Punk outfit.

New outfit video for SWTOR characters

SWTOR characters, and what they can represent in Space Opera X, since I like to use SWTOR outfit designer as concept art for SOX.

SWTOR end game

Well, I had mentioned that the lag seemed to be improved. I still had a lot of it playing Taul Kajak on Voss yesterday. I did finish Voss, including the bonus series. There were two major problems: 1) if playing Jedi Knight, then you actually defeat Sel-Makor as part of your class story before you face his minion in the faction story and have a lot of dialogue that doesn’t make any sense anymore, and 2) the bonus series is super long and tedious. I did it specifically because I hadn’t in a while and wanted to see it again, but I doubt I’ll do it with any of my next wave of characters (I guess I’ll do one Imperial character too, just to see how its different.) I also switched to my second combat style to sneak past a bunch of tedious trash mobs, and it completely screwed up my buttons when I switched back. Overall, my Voss experience was pretty frustrating. Too bad, as I think that it’s a pretty planet, at least, but that’s not sufficient to account for all of the other frustrating or dumb things that Voss offers. It hasn’t been one of my favorite planets to actually play. Of course, if I can get rid of the lag by getting a new graphics card and/or motherboard, that’ll be a major improvement, at least.

 I’ve been waffling a bit on whether or not I want to do the faction story on Corellia with this character, or wait for the next one to come around, but I’m thinking I’ll do it with Taul after all. For all subsequent Republic characters, I’ll just completely drop all exploration, heroic, extraneous flashpoints or faction story missions as soon as I hit max level. I mean, like a hot potato. I’ll abandon the missions in my mission log and ignore all of them from that point forward.

Unfortunately, I’ve never much liked the end game planets as much as I wish that I did. Hoth is the last planet that I really like. Belsavis and Voss and even Corellia have elements to them that are cool, but others that are not. I kind of like planets like Ilum and Rishi or even Yavin IV that come later more than I like these three. Part of my dislike of Voss is the “anthropology lesson” that the writers want to subject you to. They are proud of their setting development on Voss, and spend way too much time going over it with you as opposed to just letting you go adventure out on the planet. You’re constantly having to navigate the supposed tricky diplomatic situation because  of the Voss and their weird culture, and the impact of the Mystics, etc. The writers indulged in that way too often with many of the companions in the game, but Voss is where they really let it hang out there for the whole planetary experience.

In any case, with Taul Kajak now ready to go to Corellia, which is the last normal planet, I’ll almost certainly make that my priority, and just do Corellia and have done with it. Then I can check one more character off as “finished”, or moved into semi-retirement is perhaps more accurate, and decide what to do next. I’d kind of like to finish the two Ilum flashpoints with Hutran Thanatos, actually, and then have him do The Black Hole and Section X, etc. And I’d like to grind reputation on Ruhnuk with Maark. And, I’ve got Anstal Tane and Vant Galaide to move forward with, not to mention Mirabeau Tane. Plenty to work on; I mostly just have to decide what of all of those options I’m more in the mood for. And as I get Taul into semi-retirement, I’d like to make some outfit videos with him and Hutran, my two green guys, at which point I’ll feel like their semi-retirement is more legit. I somehow feel like there’s something still to do with them, and I think that that’s really it.

And then last night, I deferred some of my real life responsibilities to "veg". I listened to some music. I watched YouTube videos about the philosophy and text of the Dune books (the more I learn of them, the less I like them. I'm glad that I only read the first one, didn't even finish it, and instead just watched the sci-fi channel miniseries and now the new movies. They were better than the books, in most respects.) And, of course, I played around in SWTOR. I went to Corellia, although not with Taul Kajak; rather I took my old bounty hunter Graggory, my old agents Johhn and Hutran Thanatos, my old commando Philippion and my old gunslinger Luukke to the Spike and spent some time in the rakghoul tunnels. I had earlier reported that I might delete Philippion, but I'm now thinking that I probably won't; he's my only commando, and I won't be able to showcase any outfit videos or anything else using a cannon if I don't have any commandos. Since I don't really need or want a second commando, I might as well just keep him. Too bad he has a dumb name, but the same is true for Mat Thew, Maark Luukke and Johhn in most respects, and yet I'm not getting rid of any of them. Oh, well

I took some video in the rakghoul tunnels and on the surface of Corellia with another low cost outfit on Thanatos, but I haven't edited the video file or otherwise done anything with it, so here's some other screenshots taken earlier of the outfit that I had Graggory running around in. I'll get some rakghoul stuff later. Because there are two daily challenges that give you rakghoul cannisters, and you can do them pretty quickly, I did them both with all five of the characters mentioned, netting me ten new rakghoul cannisters. If I do that a couple more times this week, I'll be sitting pretty with regards to rakghoul cannisters. I'm a little short on bounty contracts, though—next time that event comes around, I'll need to grind a good twenty new contracts or so.

As noted, this Graggory outfit is very "smuggler-like" rather than hunter-like, but I tend to like my hunters to dress in normal gunfighter clothes quite often. Here he is showing off his stuff on Dantooine, Korriban, Balmorra and Nar Shaddaa respectively.

UPDATE: Actually, maybe I'll go back and do the Voss planetary and bonus series Imperial side with Hutran Thanatos, as well as Corellia planetary. And for Republic, I can do the Corellia stuff with Anstal. Because they belong to Operative and Scoundrel. I can sneak past the trash mobs easily. There's no point anymore in worrying about XP or bonus missions, etc (well, there won't be by the time Anstal is on those planets) so the whole thing will be faster and less tedious than with anyone else. And once I've said that I've done it again relatively recently, I won't feel obligated in any sense whatsoever to try it again for quite a long time.

This is part of what I mean by "semi-retirement." Hutran Thanatos finished the main story, he's max level—but there's still plenty that I can do with him, I find, so there's no reason to delete him, and plenty of reasons to still keep him around for certain things and do things with him. I'd actually like to play the next part of the expansions, probably up through Ziost at least with him too... but I feel no urgency to get that done.

UPDATE II: Good and bad news on the rakghoul tunnels. I didn't realize this before, but if you fast travel straight from the tunnels to your spaceship, it still shows your location as in the tunnels, which are treated as a separate world from the world that you're actually on. This means that if you exit your ship, you go straight to the tunnels too. Nice shortcut! Also, and I think this seems to have been changed, it seems almost impossible to draw aggro now in the tunnels unless you literally attack one of the monsters. You can literally walk through them and not draw aggro. This is very convenient too. The bad news: I forgot that you can only do the Jeelvic mission once per character per week. If my goal was to get 30 rakghoul cannisters, I'll now need to do it at least two more days than I thought, or with more characters than I thought. Or, I can settle and get less. We'll see how it goes. Taking five characters just to ride around and binocular the ceiling in a few places each isn't the most exciting thing, but it's pretty quick and harmless and gives me the currency I need. Sadly, all of the other missions just give reputation, and I'm all done with reputation.

I guess I could do the Heroic 4 and group up with somebody or other, maybe... Might be nice to try something different, and maybe I'll even get grouping credit for it on the social achievements.

Graggory on Dantooine

Hutran Thanatos' rakghoul hunting "discount" outfit

Graggory on Korriban

Graggory on Balmorra

Hutran and Raina about to enter the rakghoul tunnels...

Graggory on Nar Shaddaa