1131 Pentase

System: Pentase
Hex Location: 1131
Star Type:  G7 V
Number of Worlds: 14
Gas Giants: 2
Planetoid Belt: None

Starport Type: A
World Size: Earth sized
Atmosphere Type: Earth like
Surface Water: 60%
Population: Large ~4 billion
Political Affiliation: Cilindarean Arm
Tags: Civil War, Eugenic Mania, Mining World
Notes: Pentase is one of the more "southerly" worlds of the Cilindarean Arm.  It is a beautiful, very Earth-like planet, with multiple ecosystems and a reasonably large population, made up mostly of ethnic Cilindareans.  It is also one of the few sources of pentase steel, a metal harder and yet less brittle than most, and highly valued by the Cilindareans, especially in the construction of their ships and armor and weapons.  It isn't the only source of this type of metal, but it is such an important source of it that the metal is named after the system.  Large deposits are found on the surface of the main planet, but they seem to be meteorite in origin, and asteroids and centaurs and other irregular bodies throughout the solar system, including some of the smaller rocky/metal worlds and their moons, are also good sources of the metal.  For this reason, the world is very important to the Anaxaster.  That said, it is not connected via Cilindarean controlled space lanes, and is somewhat geographically isolated from the rest of the polity.  This has made the political scenario somewhat tense for the neighbors of Pentase, because they know that the Cilindareans would greatly prefer to have unimpeded space lanes to Pentase, and have no problem conquering other planets and exterminating or banishing the population already there if they do not accept their military occupation, but for now, the Cilindareans have treaties with a number of systems that allow them space lane access, and the peace—if uneasy—still remains.

Pentase is also home to internal conflict rooted in the Cilindarean culture.  Ethnic Cilindareans are very socially stratified.  Only full citizens enjoy all of the perks of society, although they have lots of skin in the game and are expected to render a number of duties to the state in return.  The mothakes (singular mothax) are another level in society that, while free, does not qualify for full citizenship.  There is a great deal of envy among many mothakes for the status bestowed upon full citizens by right of birth, although curiously, there is a growing sense of envy among many citizens of the mothax for his freedom from certain responsibilities as well.  A very prominent, wealthy and popular mothax, Harmost Lysander, has rebelled against the citizen planetary governor in Pentase, sparking a civil war in the system that, while sometimes quiet, still lingers.  The anaxaster and the rest of the central government has resisted getting involved; while in theory, the planetary governor has the right of rule and Lysander is a traitor, it's a well-known fact that the planetary governor is both ineffective, petty and a tyrant.  The anaxaster has decided that whomever wins this conflict will be granted legitimacy, as long as the conflict doesn't spill out of the system, or affect the greater Cilindarean Arm overall.  This is a very Cilindarean attitude, where trial by combat is still considered a legitimate legal remedy for the settlement of disputes.

Part of this dispute is the eugenics mania among the citizens of Pentase.  Both genetic engineering and cybernetic augmentation are extremely popular among them, as is a obsessive-compulsive focus on heritage.  Lysander, and many of the rest of the Cilindareans, for that matter, see this as heretical or even abominatus.  Because of this, Lysander has been receiving covert aid from a number of Cilindarean factions who think he should be promoted to full citizen status, or at least given the planetary governorship even though he's only a mothax based on his obvious merit.  The Bernese colony of the Machesk Frontier, which borders the Pentase system, is also not so subtly in favor of his rise at the expense of the current governor, Alcibiades.  This is one of the few times in which the nearby Revanchist colony of the Calder Settlements sees eye to eye with their Bernese rivals.  However, the nearby Seraeans from Outremer are backing Alcibiades, and with less discretion than the others.  This is threatening to become a full-blown diplomatic incident between the Cilindareans ad the three Great Powers if it continues unabated much longer.

2328 Kribblu VII

System: Kribblu VII
Hex Location: 2328
Star Type:  G3 III
Number of Worlds: 8
Gas Giants: 4
Planetoid Belt: Kuiper and asteroid belt

Starport Type: A
World Size: Mars sized
Atmosphere Type: Thin
Surface Water: 23%
Population: Small settlements; ~800,000
Political Affiliation: Dhangetan Cartel
Tags: Thaumatophobia, Balkanization, Secret Cabal
Notes: Kribblu VII is a manufacturing haven, but it is not manufacturing that benefits most of the people in the region.  On paper, the Dhangetan Yith Vhadrath rules the system, but the various cartel heads see him as aloof and uninvolved in cartel business sufficiently to please them.  The excuse that justifies this behavior is his struggle to control various factions on his planet; while he oversees the space port and ship foundries (as well as much of the raw material harvesting both on world and from other sources within the system) with his personnel resources (a great number of Earth-human and skiffer and cepheid bravos and militia, stiffened by mercenary companies of Cilindareans and Arcturans.)  Most visitors see this as the society on Kribblu VII, but in reality, he's at constant war with two other factions who vie for dominance on the surface of the planet; a leftover death-sage known merely as the Arch-Tyrant and his forces of cyber-undead and Neferran dog-soldiers, and a third faction that is a curious mix of Bernese exiles, and Kusans, one of the most unlikely of races to be part of a spunky rebellion against a Dhangetan status quo.

What few know, although some of the clever Dhangetans on other worlds are starting to suspect, is that Vhadrath himself is merely the junior partner of a silent power behind the "throne"; a small triumvirate of Seraean and Idacharian shadow-knights in this case, who are funneling the lion's share of the production to some other source.  It doesn't seem to be the Empire, or if it is, these shadow knights are extraordinarily discrete; most likely it is an independent power play of some kind by them themselves.  These three have also managed to spend an inordinate amount of time creating propaganda about warlocks and space wizards and psionic knights, so that all such, if they're recognized, are seen with a great deal of distrust and hatred by the populace, unless of course, they are relatively recent arrivals from off-world.  They tend to see the Arch-Tyrant as the inevitable end-state of those who meddle with things that man was not meant to know.

Although Kribblu VII is viewed by those from outside as a bizarre powder keg of a world, with all kinds of tensions, conflict and weirdness going on in the system, for the most part, its neighbors are content to let it stay that way.  The very productive shipyards of Suly look with a little bit of anxiety at the manufacturing potential of Kribblu VII as a significant economic threat (as do the smaller and more "boutique" shipyards of Lyrae VI, Jhantor and Miroon, for that matter), but since its production somehow doesn't seem to make it to the general market, and nobody knows for sure where it goes, it's a worry that they can put on the back burner.  Although in the long run, what's happening here is eve more worrisome than what isn't happening in the short run, and the world is starting to get a lot of attention from its neighbors in the Carrick Grand Marches and from the rest of the Dhangetan Cartel, who are both starting to want answers about what mysteries are happening on this planet.

Ad Astra next steps...

Looking over my map and some of the other work on my actual site for AD ASTRA, let's look at what I've got and what I'd like to have before I'm done.

I've said many times before, that I generally consider my "protagonist" peoples to be the Bernese Colonial Worlds, and I see them very vaguely as similar in some ways to the American colonies during the 1600s and 1700s.  This is somewhat vague, but close enough as a space surrogate, I suppose.  But the Bernese colonies are surrounded by a number of other nations and colonies from other nations; if you see the colonies as specifically the British colonies at a time when there were still Spanish, French, Dutch, etc. colonies in America too, if some of those nations were nations of SJW hordes, Sith lords, and worse.  Anyway, I've done the following Bernese colonies so far:

• the Bechtel Marches (3 systems)
• the Carrick Grand Marches (7 systems)

with the following still to be done.

• the Emerus Marches (5 systems)
• the Machesk Frontier (3 systems)
• the Viomium Marches (3 systems)
• Tossa (1 system)

Allied with the Bernese, but not part of them culturally or politically are the Voormellei Federation (4 systems) which has been done already, and the Tantych Kingdom (3 systems) and 3 solo systems, all of which need still to be done.

The Revanchist Colonies are more modern post-American America; the SJW hordes, basically.  They're kind of like kooky and creepy Bolsheviks, just like they actually are in real life, and there's some admittedly not so subtle metaphoring on my part in including these.  Some of the citizens are groaning in globalist slavery under these villains, which should hopefully make them more sympathetic.  Especially if they are ethnic Bernese, which some of them are.  While not the melodramatic villains of your typical space opera, in reality, these are probably actually more villainous in their intentions than even the Seraeans, who are loosely based on the Sith Lords.  I've so far only detailed the 6 worlds of the Carthen Colony, but I have three additional colonies to do still:

• the Calder Settlements (4 systems)
• the Rhyne Colony (3 systems)
• 3 1 system colonies: Liara V, Hewood and Esbrook.

The Revanchists also have their allies.  I've detailed two one-system such allies so far: Bersefels and Shoa-Shanian, but still need to detail:

• the Nhindua Equalocracy (3 systems)
• the Broone Democracy (2 systems)
• and the Gallia Confederation (4 systems)

The Seraean Imperial Colonies are the much more aggressive, "traditional" villains of the setting, and I've done a handful of their worlds so far, including the Principality of Tan Kajak (4 systems) and the Vorgan Than Viceroyalty (4 systems)  The following Imperial colonies still need work:

• the Civitas Ordenis Umraci (8 worlds; one already detailed, but it's a holdover/conversion from back when this was Star Wars + 1,000 years)
• the Kingdom of Phatoru Shdor (3 worlds)
• Moaktor Phok (5 worlds)
• the Sarkmina Duchy (2 worlds)
• 9 independent allies, most of which would be Idacharian rather than Seraean. I've detailed one of these so far, but it's also a holdover from the earlier setting.

The Cilindarean Arm is an actual polity, not a colony of another polity, and while it's not as big as the Bernese Monarch, the Revanchist Republic, or the Seraean Empire, it's bigger than most of the colonies of such in the sector combined, and half of the Arm is outside of the sector anyway.  I've identified 11 systems from this to detail, and two of them are legacy (from Star Wars originally) and therefore already done.  The Cilindareans also have a number of allies and/or clients, many of whom are worlds settled by janissaries in years past.  There are 7 single world groups of these, as well as the 4 system Takach Kingdom, all of which have not been detailed yet.

I have 16 worlds of the Dhangetan Cartel selected to detail, but 11 of them are already done.The Dhangetans are less of a normal polity and more like loosely allied city-states; united more by culture than by politics necessarily.  However, 4 of the worlds already done belong to a subset called the Galaide Worlds.

And finally, I have True Independent Systems.  I have 9 identified, and 4 are already detailed (only one of which is a legacy system, curiously.)

I've got 92 worlds to detail, which is a fairly tall order, given that I've only done so far I think 52, if I counted correctly (although 3 of those are off map and I can't really use them for anything.)

Revised Ad Astra sector map

I've made a new Ad Astra sector map.  It isn't actually different from the one I had before in terms of the data, really, but it certainly is more more attractive and aesthetically appealing, as well as hopefully at least marginally easier to use.  Maybe you remember, if you have followed at all my Ad Astra project (or likely you do not because you have not so followed), the Ad Astra system was originally devised for what was meant to be a Star Wars setting, customized by being set far in the future (kind of a reverse Old Republic.)  However, the mapping and space travel rules were much more similar to the rules from Traveller.  Therefore, my sector map is very similar to what you'd get from using Traveller.  My setting represents a swashbuckling Star Wars like space fantasy set in a pony express colonialism paradigm of Traveller, therefore.

How did I do the mapping?  Traveller assumes some randomization of star system generation, and while I modified the Traveller system significantly to have both different randomization parameters as well as considerably less jargon and technical detail that isn't very helpful for a swashbuckling space opera.  Traveller assumes a 50% density, so on average, half of all hexes on the big 1,280 hex map would have a star system in them.  I generated data on a 33.3% density, so I would have expected an average of 425 systems (I actually got 421.)  (Because of slight differences with regard to hyperdrive assumptions between Ad Astra and Traveller, that actually makes navigation potentially a bit more interesting to have slightly less dense population of stars.)  BUT!  Just because I generated a system and marked the hex as having a system doesn't mean a lot.  I did assign a political color code to each system that got a planet, but for about half of the systems, that's all that they will ever have; a hex number indicating their location, and a color code indicating their broad political affiliation or alignment.

The other half got names assigned too, mostly from a name generator for star systems.  Of this half, about another third—maybe, at most—will get an additional level of detail.  That's about 65-70 systems; I've so far done generation of details for forty-three systems.  One may ask; if that's all I'm really interested in detailing, why did I bother generating systems for the entire sector?  For context, mostly.  I was able to use clusters of same colored systems to create "nations" in the sector, but all I really need for these nations is their name and a paragraph or two of summary, and that way I can refer to them obliquely, i.e., characters can be from them, without me having to detail anything about the systems which comprise them.  As we get closer to my "protagonist" areas, I have a little bit more detail, including the names of the systems, but even then, about a third of the named systems—at the absolute most—would I ever envision having detailed system write-ups.  And detailed is a matter of some relativity, of course.  Detailed enough to be used, I suppose, but if you're really setting anything on one of these planets, you'll still have to do a lot of work on details which I won't be providing as part of this write up.

Anyway, here's the revised map.

Revisiting

I found an older post of mine about what I considered the top five songs of the 80s recently.  I don't normally like making lists, but five years or so ago when I made that, I had younger kids who always liked to see how I ranked things, so it made sense at the time.

Honestly, I'm not quite sure what I was thinking when I made it, though.  Most of what I picked, being new wave synthesizer pop music (because that was my favorite kind of music from that era) will still be OK.  Not ranked, but all in the top five then will remain: "If You Leave" by OMD, "Bizarre Love Triangle" by New Order, and "A Little Respect" by Erasure.  I think picking "Behind the Wheel" from Depeche Mode wasn't really the best choice; I'd swap out "Never Let Me Down Again."  And including "Animal" by Def Leppard because I wanted some hair rock band work was nothing more than tokenism.  Clearly, I think a-ha's "Take On Me" is a much more iconic song of the decade and deserves that slot more.  Besides, if I did have a hair band rock song on it, I wouldn't even pick that one, I don't think.  One hit wonder Autograph with "Turn Up the Radio" would be a better choice, or "Bang Your Head" by Quiet Riot.  "Livin' On a Prayer" by Bon Jovi is probably even more iconic than either, though.

I also rewatched the two episodes that are so far available for The Mandalorian again the other day, and I saw Overlord DVD's review of the first episode.  I do kind of agree with Overlord, but also kind of disagree with him.  I disagree with Overlord that hitting predictable beats of a spaghetti Western is necessarily a bad thing. I actually kinda like that they did that, actually, and while maybe it's not quintessentially heroic space opera, it's still very much one of the elements that was integral to Star Wars. I think part of Overlord DVD's complaints are that he doesn't think the spaghetti western vibe (including the music) is really appropriate for Star Wars, which I very strongly disagree with.  I do agree with him, though, that as far as spaghetti westerns go, this isn't the most exciting plot or characterization that we've seen.  If the show doesn't improve, it'll be seen as ultimately pretty forgettable.  As ODVD says, part of the context is that we're so jaded by having had bad Star Wars thrust at us that we are so happy to have something that isn't insulting and sucks that we think things that are mediocre are incredible.  But that won't last.  I liked all of the prequels and even The Force Awakens the first time I saw them too, although I was aware of the worst of their flaws.  As I saw them again, the flaws become much more obvious, and I wondered that I was even able to have the gilded view that I did watching it once.  I blame my nearly life-long love of the franchise and my desperate desire to see good space opera and fantasy which gilds my view and makes me only see the good parts the first time through.

After a while, the flaws become impossible to ignore, though.  And "after a while" usually means, "the second time I see it" if not even earlier, as I think about watching it the first time.  The prequel trilogy I now see as badly paced, badly scripted, badly cast and in some cases, badly conceived, with way too much deus ex machina and chumping of cool villains that you actually find interesting, but which Lucas then ruined.  Not a complete loss, but mostly badly crafted.  The Force Awakens is a highly derivative plot with unlikable characters who have no chemistry or charisma, a blatant Mary Sue in the form of Rey, and the pointless and needless humiliation of Han Solo just to screw with the fans.  It's actually better crafted, at least in some ways, but much more badly conceived and it much worse than the prequels because of it.

Likewise, the Clone Wars TV show isn't quite as good as I remember.  When it is good, it is, but it's really only good about half of the time.  Granted, the rest of the time it's more likely to be mediocre than actively bad, but still; it's not the franchise saver that I initially thought it was either.  Same thing for the Old Republic games: Knights of the Old Republic and Old Republic itself, of course.  While there are some elements of pure genius in them, there are also loads of really tedious, idiotic and banal crap all through them as well.

The Last Jedi I never thought was any good, even the first time I saw it.  Although I do recognize at least one or two action sequences and some visual design as not bad.  And I never thought Solo or Rogue One were anything better than OK.

Anyway, here's some comments given on the Overlord DVD video that're pretty pertinent, I think.  I liked them and agree with them, at least.

Joshua Crane
Star Wars feels like reconciliation with a cheating spouse. The suspicion will always be there.  Even when Kennedy leaves, I'll always have my shields up. 

sinistavoicez
Yes, you're jaded. I'm jaded. And it is justified. The end.

Angus Podgorny
The plan here is to lure you in with zero SJW content, and then start blasting you with woke SJW scripts toward the end of Season 1. 

Angello Hector
SafeWars: The Mandalorian
When we yearn for something new, but what we get is not too risky, but is better than most of the stuff we've been getting 

kerrick001
I think you hit the nail on the head when you say that Star Wars fans have been so abused at this point, we are just happy to see something that doesn't blatantly suck. I'm a grouchy old man. I liked it better when there was only ONE Boba Fett who was a badass bounty hunter.....not a whole race of them. I liked it when there was ONE IG-88 who was a psychopath droid.... not a whole line of "Bounty Hunter" droids. I liked it when freezing someone in carbonite took a whole room full of equipment and they didn't even know if it would work. Now Boby Fett 2.0 has the Carbonite3000 in the back of his ship......meh.. 

Editor note: there were always a whole race of supercommandos, of which Boba Fett was merely the only representative to appear on screen.  Although that's been kinda weirded out too; Lucas has clearly said it, in dialogue even, that Jango and Boba Fett were not actually Mandalorians, even though they had Mandalorian armor.  Sorry; fanboy nitpick...

Joel Gawne
"The Mandalorian" is the Star Wars equivalent of Imperial Rations.  Your overlords recommend that you take it, because its all you're getting this year. 

Intel Kore
A young, innocent boy was separated from his family at the US-Mexico border. He went on to become The Mandalorian. If there was a wall we'd never see this show! 

RobotShlomo
I can't help but think we're being set up for a bait and switch.

The Mandalorian

Although I wasn't a seriously early adopter, i.e., right away, I did download the Disney+ app to our PS4 (I don't have a Roku, and my Smart TV isn't that smart; if I can add new apps to it, I don't know how to yet.)  Yesterday, my oldest son prevailed on my wife to sign up for an account too (I personally would have been happy waiting until the Christmas holiday, or more around there).  Because he's going through some headwinds which makes my wife feel bad, she sprung for the account (the free trial is only a week long.)

Disney+ is not releasing stuff the same way that, say, Netflix or Amazon Prime is releasing their material.  You can't binge watch the Mandalorian (at least not yet) because they're releasing one episode a week from now to the end of the year. (Why I was OK with waiting until the Christmas holiday to sign up, where I could binge watch the show while off of work.)  But, we got our account on Sunday afternoon, so my youngest son and I watched the first two episodes, which are the only available so far.  So, what's the good, the bad and the ugly on this show so far?

The Good
Luckily, for the most part, the show really embraces the good.  It eschews most of the nonsense that has suffused Star Wars for quite some time, and just attempts to be a fringer story; basically, a spaghetti western set in space.  The title character, who's name and face is not revealed (although he's played by Pedro Pascal and we know what he looks like, and Pedro slipped he name of Din Jaron (sic?) out in an interview at one point.  This is kind of on purpose, I'm sure—to make him like the Clint Eastwood character of the spaghetti westerns, except even one further, because he's wearing a helmet that looks like a cross between a Spartan style Corinthian helmet and a crusader's great helm with a mirrored shade covering the entire t-visor.  The plot is quite straitforward (so far), much like a spaghetti western dragged out into a 10 or so episode miniseries would be.  The character says very little, as expected given the archetype that he's emulating, but there's more subtle characterization going on than you'd expect.  The plot is also quite straightforward so far, and heavily features action that's well conceived and choreographed.  While the main character is an iconic tough guy, he hardly seems to be invincible; he's no Mary Sue, and he is quite frankly, in over his head at some points, much as Clint Eastwood seems to be in A Fistful of Dollars.

Some of this characterization is going on with the supporting cast, though—IG-11, the bounty droid who constantly wants to initiate his self-destruct sequence, or the Nick Nolte voiced ugnaught character Kuiil (I have spoken!)

The show does not (as yet) focus on the big and the bad in Star Wars.  There are a few stormtroopers featured very early on in the first chapter, but they are obviously a remnant of the Imperial defeat; their armor is battered and dirty, and they hang around as a small squad with some kind of officer or nobleman or some such.  There aren't any space-battles at all, yet.  What there is is desolate wilderness frontier planets, much like Tatooine, that are sparsely inhabited by a rather rough lot of mostly aliens and tough guys.  I'd like to see this expand a bit more, but I honestly have little idea where the storyline is going so far, which is kind of interesting.

There is some CGI, of course, but the show features relatively low budget practical effects.  This was deliberate, both to keep the budget manageable, and to get that original Star Wars movie feel to it, and it looks and works absolutely great.  High praise indeed for the look of the show so far.  The music is also unusual; it doesn't sound anything like Star Wars.  It has a similar kind of vibe as the Morricone spaghetti western soundtracks without actually sounding like them, if that makes any sense (if not, go check out the soundtracks on Youtube and listen to them.)

Despite the very early phase that we are in, and the fact that I don't really know much about what the setting is trying to show me, or where the plot is going, I'm so far very impressed with the show.  It's much more personal than I'd have thought, but if it remains that way, I won't complain, and if it (as is much more likely) starts to broaden the scope a bit, introduce more characters and tell us more about the setting and how this ties (assuming that it does, and hints from some of the creators suggest that it will at least give us some Easter eggs to this effect) the fall of the Empire to the rise of the First Order.  While I don't really care much about the First Order or anything else going on in the sequel trilogy, nor am I likely to, some hints at the larger setting would not at all be unwelcome here.  Considering that Mandalorians featured not insignificantly in the Clone Wars and Rebels shows that took place between the prequels and the original trilogy, telling us more about what's going on with the Mandalorians themselves wouldn't be unwelcome at all either.

Is it so good that it makes up for the spit in the eye that is the sequel trilogy?  No, of course not, which is also why I think tying it too closely to that dumpster fire is a bad idea.  It would be theoretically possible, although probably quite beyond the abilities of the morons in charge at LucasFilm and Disney, to have separate Star Wars brands within the greater Star Wars umbrella, and keeping the Mandalorian somewhat separate would be a good idea, though.

The Bad
As I said, so far, the series is a bit sparse.  We don't know a lot about the characters.  We don't know much about the setting.  We don't know much about even the plot.  There's a series of action sequences loosely tied together so far, and that's about as far as it goes.  To be fair, it suggests and maybe implies what's to come, but so far, it hasn't come, and it may not.  This isn't so much a complaint as an observation that the series needs to grow, I think, from the adventures of one guy wandering around in a mostly depopulated frontier fighting jawas, a handful of random outlaws, and dangerous wildlife.  That can only be interesting for so long before it gets tired.  Although, it is a great way to start a saga.  And the more this keeps itself somewhat separated from the comings and goings of the "great saga" of the entire galaxy, the better it will be.

The Ugly
I remain very guarded about the appearance of social justice nonsense in this show.  Even writer and creator Jon Favreau has hinted at coming political/social nonsense in the show.  Luckily, what we do have so far is fairly muted, and something so ingrained in us by Hollywood that we hardly notice it anymore, even though it is both nonsensical and in fact quite hateful.  The first is the presence of the lady Mandalorian blacksmith.  We have been taught for so long that women can be just as tough as men that many of us, especially if you've never actually played any co-ed sports, might actually think that the notion of a woman blacksmith, or a woman in a traditionally male role in general, is not weird and anti-science and anti-biological, so it goes unnoticed.

It might also not be something that most people notice that there aren't any truly American characters of any note yet in the show.  Pedro Pascal is a Chilean, who's family were Allende communists who fled Chile just in case they got a helicopter tour from Pinochet's regime, which suggests that they were thick in the corruption of the Chilean government of the mid-70s.  The Imperials who give him his assignment are played by an Iranian (who's character is named Pershing!) and a German with a very distinctive accent, Werner Herzog.

The exception is Carl Weathers making what is almost (so far) a cameo as the connection between the bounty hunters guild and the Imperial remnants.  Although "American" is a label that is worn somewhat uncomfortably at best, and rejected outright at worst by the African population within America.  They are very clear that they are a nation unto themselves with their own culture, society, values and everything else that makes a nation what it is that are completely separate from that of the Americans who founded, for example, the Constitution, or who conquered the West, which is more relevant to this show.  I'm inclined to take them at their word and not count them as Americans proper, but as African-Americans; a completely different nation that is only called American by virtue of geography, not by any relationship of note with the American nation.  So I don't count Carl Weathers as an American in this context.  This is particularly ironic; not only is the Western—which this show clearly is—such an American genre, but also the ironic fact that the Mandalorians are Nordic blond people according to the Clone Wars, who even have Finnish names of one of their planets (Kalevala).  (Of course, they do also refer to the title character here as a Foundling, which suggests that he was an adopted member of a clan rather than an ethnic Mandalorian.)  The Rebels show seemed to try really hard to undo this with Sabine's obviously Asian character, but honestly, I haven't watched that in its entirety, and don't know much about what it says about the culture, other than that the "bad guy" Mandalorians seem to be all white men.  In my opinion, it's clearly LucasFilm trying to go a different way than George Lucas outlined anyway, probably to restore as much as possible of EU traditions.

The cultural appropriation of what is so iconically and irrevocably American as the Western and refusing to cast it with Americans is an insult that, sadly, we have become very used to, but that doesn't make it any less insulting or ridiculous.  Keep in mind that Hollywood is almost completely controlled by Fake Americans who in fact hate America, its culture, its society, etc..  They desire only its money, and they want to get it by trying to teach Americans to hate their own identity and see themselves as globalist slaves.  But that is a very behind the scenes kind of hatred that can only be somewhat shown given the fact that the show is what it is.  However, knowing that this is lurking behind the scenes has me waiting for the other shoe to drop on this show.  I hope that it doesn't, but I have a very hard time believing that it won't.  Disney is too fundamentally evil of an entity to long tolerate something that Americans actually enjoy.

The Great Star Wars mistake

I suspect that this theory is likely.  Rian Johnson is a major tool, but it's too much to give him credit for ruining Star Wars.  He did so with the full blessing and collusion of Jar Jar Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy, and even Bob Iger, for that matter.

The Force is female, indeed.  No place for white men anymore a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.



Despite misgivings, I went with my wife to see Last Christmas the other day.  It's not a good movie, and I don't recommend it, but it does manage to settle on a good message after farting around for more than half the movie.  That's not worth watching it, though—the main character is completely unlikable, and the movie is insulting in most respects to its audience.  The worst part, the part that stood out to me the most, was a scene where the movie made it clear that there is no place for British men in Britain; the future belongs to interracial lesbian immigrants.

Unreal.  The evil of the SJWs knows no bounds.

(Off schedule) Friday Art Attack

A Superman redesign concept; darker and more futuristic and alien.

A Styracosaurian ceratopsian.  I can't keep track of every described new dinosaur, but I can't find that this is a real one at all.

The murder of Julius Caesar.

Fantasy landscape.

Rome landscape.

Ken Kelly and Conan on a book cover.

Another great fantasy landscape.

The King in Yellow.

Some Star Wars fan art.

A great digital model of a space ship.

Depeche Mode Rankings Podcast Episode: 0 — Establishing Context

https://anchor.fm/joshua-dyal/episodes/Episode-0-Giving-the-Depeche-Mode-reviews-context-e8rj6g

An hour and a half of me talking into my phone while sitting in my car about Depeche Mode in preparation for the detailed, annotated album rankings.  This episode is all about establishing some context before I rank them, about me, about the band, about its history, about my musical tastes, etc.

If you have any interest at all in listening to the rankings (I've recorded two, and they are both over half an hour each.  Sigh.  I'll get those annotated review podcasts out soon, but first; the context...

I've also added the first two reviews; album 14 of 14 and 13 of 14, by my ranking.  I'm not going to continue to post on the blog everytime I add an episode of the podcast review, but I did put a page link to the Depeche Mode reviews over there along the top row, and I'll make sure and update there when new episodes are available.  This way, it'll keep my gaming blog from getting too gummed upw with talk about Depeche Mode (too late!) although that's where I'm working right now, so the blog posts will probably just happen a little less frequently until this project is complete.

Depeche Mode Five Questions: Spirit

I'll do a belated Friday Art Attack on Monday, I think (my schedule looks hopefully light, but today's has not been.)  But first, let me get a bit closer to my wrap-up review of Depeche Mode and their career.  I'm also reading the book Stripped by Jonathan Miller.  It was published a while ago, so it came out about in time to coincide with the release of Exciter nearly twenty years ago now, and obviously there's more to say about them in the years since, but it also gives some behind the scenes information that as far as I know can't be had anywhere else.  Between reading Stripped and watching the documentaries that came out with the deluxe edition remastered re-releases, that's probably the best way to get the "Depeche Mode story", as much as can be gotten without actually sitting down with the band members yourself, getting them drunk, and getting them to talk about the good old days.  Going through this process has had me fine-tuning the scores and rankings just a bit as I've done this; I've found that some albums that I'd kinda slagged off as uninteresting were perhaps a tad unappreciated, and at least once or twice I had the opposite reaction too.

Now that I'm reviewing and rating the last album by the band, I'll be ready go post the finalized rankings soon, as well as give a bigger, broader, retrospective.  I'm actually thinking about recording rather than writing this, though—probably with my voice recorder app on my phone, and then loading it up to YouTube or something and talking about DM there.  That will be a lengthy (because I missed my calling in life; I should have been a lecturing professor.  Plus, I love the sound of my own voice) summary, and I rather like the idea of rambling about it in vocal form rather than typing.  It'll be different, but what can I say?  I've had a lot of podcasts and youtube casts on Depeche Mode going on in the background these last few weeks; in fact, it's specifically a review series by Vaughn George on his channel that got me started on this as well.

I said earlier at one point that one of the things Depeche Mode was like to me personally could be encapsulated by the metaphor of some old girlfriend that you had and you were crazy in love with, but whom you grew apart from, eventually having to break up, and because of nostalgia or whatever, you still occasionally check in on Facebook or whatever to see what she's up to only to be amazed at how different you've become in the years since.  Of course, the reality is that those differences were likely always there, and you just didn't see them because you focused on the things that you did have in common when you were living high and loving life with each other.

Depeche Mode is very different from my ideal in a number of key elements: 1) they're often very insulting to my identity, contemptuous of religion and Christianity, and resentful of some supposed "oppression" that they've suffered at their hands comes through between the lines.  It sounds like, after reading Stripped as far as I have, that a big part of this was Martin Gore being a hopeless and hapless beta all his life, who had a ball-buster girlfriend early on in high school and the first couple of years of his career.  Once he left her and ran off with some skanky German girl, he did a complete about face, declared himself an atheist, cross-dressing, and dressing like he was in the S&M scene (although whether he really truly was in that scene or not is, I suppose, not really confirmed.)  For whatever reason, this hasn't bothered me too much in the past, both because the band themselves hinted at a somewhat allegorical use of the sex and religion metaphors in their music, and I was only too eager to accept that apologia. But that's the definition of passive-aggressive, isn't it?  They insult you and then when you call them out, pretend like that's not really what they meant, and you're misinterpreting them, and somehow they're the victim after all.  I think this is probably hard-coded with Gore's personality, at least.  Maybe some of the others too, but who really knows, because Gore does almost all of the song-writing.  Gahan's foray into the task hasn't given us nearly as much to work with, plus it's less personally revealing in most respects. 2) I don't like Depeche Mode because I cultishly follow them personally; I'm a huge fan of electronic music and a bit of pessimistic, sarcastic personality who naturally gravitated to the darker and more bleak and melancholy, and at exactly the right time for me to get into music, Depeche Mode was carving out their own niche that was perfectly suited to me.  They've, however, moved in different directions with both their sound and even some of their themes over the years.  This has had me feeling a bit left behind, and I've turned to other types of music, or looked at the better Depeche Mode imitators over the years.  As an aside, none of them are as good as Depeche Mode during their peak, but some—De/Vision, Camouflage, Red Flag, and Mesh in particular—are still very credible, and certainly they're putting out stuff that I like better than what DM themselves are doing lately.  The worst part of this is the addition of all kinds of new elements that take them away from their slick, dark, European electronic pop music roots; lots of really noisy rock, gospel, jazz or whatever influences dilute what Depeche Mode so unique and amazing in the first place.  3) Depeche Mode feels tired and old lately.  When they veer too far from their sound, their fans lose interest.  But when they stay too close to it, they seem to get tired and bored themselves, I suspect.  Certainly that's the sound, I think.

In that light, Spirit is very much a part of the four album trajectory that started after Exciter; Playing the Angel was a deliberate "back to roots" sounding album, but they've gotten more tired and filler-sounding every album since then.  Most of what I said for Sounds of the Universe or Delta Machine applies to Spirit as well; there's no moments of stand-out brilliance, such as Wrong or Oh Well.

A lot of people have talked about liking Cover Me, but I think it's tired sounding myself and doesn't do much for me.  It's not bad, but if that's the stand-out track, that's not saying much.  So Much Love is the one that tries to be accessible in a more traditional way, as do the first two tracks, Going Backwards and Where's the Revolution.  Eternal is the obligatory terrible Martin Gore ballad that nobody ever likes, but which he keeps doing.  And for an unusual reason, he did another one and ended the album with it on Fail.

So, it's about the same level as Delta Machine, really.  If I didn't speak English and it were just about the music, I'd probably rank it just a tad higher; maybe about the same level as Sounds of the Universe (although noting that lacking anything as good as Wrong would put it behind it still.)  In fact, I initially had done so, because I had listened to it in the background without really paying attention to the songs that closely, and certainly not to the lyrics.  However, of course, I do speak English.  This is the album where Depeche Mode tried to apply the "get woke go broke" mantra and stepped up their low grade passive-aggressive attacks on Western civilization in favor of hitting you over the head with it.  Appalled that the people of the Anglosphere would actually attempt, even as weakly and half-heartedly as they did, to assert their self-interest in their own countries by voting for Brexit and electing Trump, the themes in the songs are about as subtle as they were in The Last Jedi and just as welcome.  This was a step too far, and I am genuinely kinda pissed off about it.  Shut up, Martin.  Nobody cares what you think about politics.  All of you entertainment types are too stupid and uneducated about anything substantial to be able to say anything about social or political topics without sounding like morons, as well as being too psychologically, emotionally and mentally broken to have any reason to think that any serious person should listen to you anyway.  Seriously; knock it off.  Your job is the entertainer.  You're the court jester.  The musician.  Nobody wants to have their entertainment turn into a smug, holier-than-thou lecture about lunatic left-wing politics by people who are too lacking in self-awareness to realize their own projection and emotional and mental crippling flaws anyway—which I'll point out that by watching the documentaries and reading the Stripped book are now kinda public knowledge after all (not to spoil anything.)

In any case, this get woke go broke attitude drops Spirit below Delta Machine in my estimation; it's the second worst DM album, with only Exciter standing behind it.  I just got it recently; after the last two albums before this had disappointed me I wasn't in a big hurry to rush out and get more of the same, and the Where's the Revolution track on youtube didn't exactly thrill me either or cause me to reevaluate that approach.  So I've heard it the very least of all of the Depeche Mode albums so far.  As more time goes by, will I like it better and get over the stupid political posturing and virtue-signaling, or will more time only cause that to piss me off even more to the point where I like this album the least?  I suspect the latter, but we'll see.

As noted; the best songs are probably... I dunno.  Going Backwards, if you can ignore the words, and Cover Me is OK.  I'm not sure if Fail or Eternal is worse, but they're both terrible.  Three out of ten.