More SWTOR Barbie Dolling

I rewatched Vitnir's costume videos for SWTOR. He does tend to use a lot of the same elements, including a way too often reliance on the black/gray dye module. That said, that one is cheap; I don't blame him. I can make my own pretty easily, after all. One of the sets that he also uses pretty extensively is the Infamous Bounty Hunter set. This isn't surprising, I suppose. The Infamous Bounty Hunter set was released near the launch of The Mandalorian show's first season on Disney+, and it was obviously meant to capitalize on the popularity of that character. People had been wanting to make Mandalorian looking characters for years in SWTOR, and none of the options were really quite right. Of course, this made some sense. SWTOR takes place thousands of years apart from the Mandalorian look that we know from the movies and TV show. To expect fashions to be the same would be equivalent to expecting that we today still dressed like people did in the early Bronze Age, or even the Neolithic. Debate among gamers of SWTOR about which of the pseudo-Mandalorian helmets offered the best analog if you were trying to "cosplay" a Mandalorian or Boba Fett or whatever in game drove tons of reddit posts with screenshots, YouTube videos and more. 

Of course, then the Infamous Bounty Hunter armor set was released to coincide with the show, and it gave us pretty much exactly a standard-looking Mandalorian helmet. And although this has been out for some time how, as near as I can tell, it's probably one of the best sellers on the cartel market. I still see people wearing this armor set all over the place while playing. Of course, this is exactly one of the main reasons that I haven't been interested in doing so. There are actually three reasons, all of them probably just a demonstration of my general orneriness. (Which in a further display of orneriness, I demand that it be pronounced awnriness. Because that's how I grew up hearing it.)

—I don't like wearing anything in game that I feel is too popular. I want to be different than the crowd, not feel like I'm sheepishly following along with everyone else.

—I don't like too similar cosplays of characters. I actually kind of like some of the Mandalorian alternates better than one that looks exactly like it was lifted from the show. My favorite alt.Mandalorian helmet is actually the Relic Plunderer's.

—I also don't like stock "outfits." If you're not mixing and matching, you're not doing it right.

In addition, I thought some of the other elements beside the helmet for the Infamous Bounty Hunter were odd and unexpected, and I wasn't sure that I liked most of them. This has, however, changed for me recently, in part due to Vitnir's videos, which I linked in my last post. While the rest of the armor isn't really the heavier armor that you expect from a "supercommando" (an esoteric reference to some very early concept art for the character that became Boba Fett, done in the late 70s), if you divorce it from the helmet and do something else with it, I find that I like it more and more. Even the odd padded jacket and the boots start to grow on me after seeing them in other uses. Look at their use in this "The Professional" outfit, for instance.

My agent has bought another half dozen armor sets, which I found a decent deal on and which have elements that I'd like to use in my mixing and matching. This puts me even further behind on unlocking them in collections, especially given that two of them cost the outlandish amount of 400 credits each to unlock (seriously; what? Most of the rest of them are only 60. Gold vs bronze, but still. The gold ones aren't qualitatively better.)

For these, however, I refuse to actually spend money on them. I'll have to wait until the cartel coin grants come in, and then I'll use them then. Of course, with 800 needed just to unlock two of the outfits (not to mention 240 each for two weapons I still have, and more than half a dozen 60 items) it'll take three or four months until everything is unlocked. And by then, I'll probably have picked up something else too. Sigh.

And there are a good half dozen sets that I'd really like to get which are insanely expense on the GTN; hundreds of millions of credits. Realistically, they need to be bought on the cartel market, but it takes a good three months or so of accumulated cartel coins to buy those too.

This is why the game has been going as long as it has. The cosmetic microtransaction market is probably doing fairly well and requires very little expenditure or upkeep.

UPDATE: Seriously, Knights of the Old Republic takes place 4,000 years before the Rise of the Empire, which I guess would be the same year Revenge of the Sith takes place. According to the official timeline, there's 19 years between Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars, and then within five years, we have Return of the Jedi and the death of the Emperor. 4,000 in Western Civilization was so long ago that we know very little about it; it was 2,000 BC, and it was smack dab in the Bell Beaker culture period of Europe. Even speaking generously, Western Civilization as we knew it didn't even start to form until 2,000 years ago. This was twice as far back as that. The Bell Beakers were an early Bronze Age or possibly Chalcolithic (in its initial formation) culture that spread out of the Single Grave variant of the Corded Ware culture. It would be so incredibly foreign to us that we wouldn't recognize much of anything.

Why do fantasy fans (and I include Star Wars in this) think that these thousands of years long timeline are so impressive? Do you know how many polities lasted even a thousand years, much less thousands? It's overkill. If the Republic had been around for centuries instead of 10,000 years, as Obiwan alludes to when we first meet him back in 1977, the effect would have been exactly the same. If the Old Republic took place a couple of hundred years before the prequels instead of thousands of years; again, what difference would it have made? Other than it would have been more realistic and less absurd?

Star Wars Barbie Dolls

Sometimes people who are into trying to create the perfect look for their SWTOR characters are accused of playing Star Wars Barbie Dolls. That's not... entirely without merit, even if I am one of the aforementioned.

For those who like it, here's some Scandinavian or German nerdy dude's video series about creating iconic archetypal Star Wars looks in SWTOR.

Admittedly; maybe some of the looks are a bit more iconic and archetypal than others. But it's the thought that counts.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVHe_wcOIXuMyABNS_cKckt1nzWHxSvs9

By the way, I finished my Tython playthrough with my "Darth Maul's teenaged younger brother" looking Jedi Sentinel. I'm going to step aside from him for a little bit and do some of the other characters' starting planets now.

Be sure and read the commentary for each video too. It's brief.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLCtWhv3V1bEYRqttbYCWgDa0MGyufP3e

SWTOR videos going forward

I finally decided that I'm going to do Elemer Kell, the Jedi Sentinel who looks like Darth Maul's teenaged nephew or something, at least at first. I'm going to record the entirety of Tython and the Republic Fleet with him (including the Esseles Flashpoint) and present edited versions on Youtube, as well as create a disc offline that I can have as an archive. 

I actually wanted to know what my oldest son thought, because I was doing it mostly for myself, but partly for him, because he's a big fan of the older Old Republic games, but hasn't ever played this one. I thought he'd enjoy watching it. But I haven't heard, and I made an executive decision anyway. But it's not a huge deal which one I start with, because I'm only going to do the starting planet and then jump to a different character to do their starting planet. I'd kind of like to do a very different character than the Jedi Knight after doing it, so I'm leaning towards maybe the Imperial Operative or Mercenary for my second one.

In any case, here's the list of playlists on the channel that I'm using specifically for this project. Updates will appear there. Each small section will (hopefully) be fairly short; around 7-10 minutes or so long each. The total time value of each planet is going to be—again hopefully; once it's edited down—about equivalent to a full-length movie, i.e., ~2 hours.

As an aside, I've finally found a way that seems to be generating a modest, yet significant way to earn some money, and it's with the Cybertech crafting. I'd previously ignored that, mostly, because I wasn't interested in the products themselves. But I've now got speeder schematics, and they're among my favorite speeders, so I've been making them for all of my characters. But more to the point, the Advanced V-9 Seismic grenades sell for a decent amount of money. I can craft 25 of them in the background in a couple of hours, and then sell them for about 5 million credits. Mostly, these sales go through pretty quick; within a few hours. On a really productive day, I can sell three or four of these a day, although that means spending more time doing that then other things that I'd probably actually rather be doing.

Because I've made a decent amount of money (although it would have been good money a year ago; now it's fairly modest) I've bought a number of relatively cheap yet attractive cosmetic things. Not so much armors, although I have bought some of those too; mostly pets and weapons. However, to unlock these in my collections, I need cartel coins, and I'm pretty much out of those. Every month I get about 650 if I'm subscribed, because of my subscription and my security key. I need 1200, and that assumes that I don't buy anything else. I don't know how much of this I'll want to use with my current crop of characters, but the pets can be adopted at any time, just like mounts can.

UPDATE: And here's the playlist for Elemer Kell, my "Darth Maul's teenaged nephew" Jedi Sentinel. So far, I've added 8 videos of running around on Tython, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through that planet. It'll end up being twelve or so total videos, depending on how many times I cut my playthrough up. The last two videos were a bit on the longer side, because I was doing a bunch of little rinky-dink missions. I'd actually prefer to be on the shorter side, but it's kind of an issue of which missions are available and when.

And as an aside, I've really got, I hope, all of the cosmetics that I "need" and then some. I do need to unlock two more guns in Collections, which I can do when my next round of cartel coins grant shows up. But neither of those are going to be used anytime too soon.

I had had a discussion on the SWTOR boards briefly, where someone asked what combination of class story and mechanical suite we were excited to play. I said that this was just taking old content and giving it the appearance of freshness; we aren't actually getting anything new, and the ability to use sniper (or whatever) mechanics with the bounty hunter story doesn't really make it exciting per se. However, part of that is just me being crotchety. I actually think it'd be pretty cool to play a sniper or maybe better yet, a vanguard, with the bounty hunter, and use the legacy bound elite bowcaster as his signature weapon. Sure, he can't equip it until 10th level, but you'll tend to hit that about two thirds of the way through your starter planet.

One more minor update; I've been playing the rakghoul event a bit this week, which started yesterday. I think I'm about done with it, though, to be honest. I've already maxed out the reputation for T.H.O.R.N., so I don't care about doing it for reputation anymore. I've also got thirty six rakghoul cannisters right now, and nothing in particular that I'm planning on spending them on (I already bought a third lightsaber and several more rakghoul crystals) so my urgency to grind through it just to hoard rakghoul crystals for some future use is low. Maybe if I do the bowcaster bounty hunter in the future, I'd use the very expensive outer rim hunter's helmet as part of his outfit, but even that only costs 30 rakghoul cannisters (plus the Gree helixes and bounty contracts.)

SWTOR Playthroughs - all character intros

I've now recorded the character introduction to all of my characters.

Because I had previously played all of the class stories with white male characters, I decided that this time I wouldn't have any white male humans (with the exception of the cyborg. Because they count cyborg as a different race than human.) Six aliens, one cyborg, and one girl—I figure that's alien enough to count as a seventh.

I haven't yet decided which one I'm going to prioritize and start doing their opening planet missions first, though, but I do intend to leapfrog between all of these characters so nobody gets too far ahead of the pack, and nobody falls too far behind it either. Obviously, this means that the long-promised update will happen in the middle of this series... but that's OK. I actually very much wanted to start all characters before the update hits. Among other things that are changing is the character generator interface.

Anyway, in no particular order:

Our Jedi Sentinel Elemer Kell, who looks a bit like a teenager cousin of Darth Maul. He'll have red lightsabers too, when he gets his lightsabers, and dresses like a Sith Lord. That doesn't mean that I'll be playing him dark or anything. I just thought it would look incongruous and kind of cool.

Anstal Tane is a Sith Pureblood for his race, but he's on the Republic side (kind of) as a Scoundrel. I always thought that the fun of the smuggler and bounty hunter classes were that they weren't conceptually tied to the factions, really. Sadly, you still have all of the faction missions on each planet. You can skip them, but if you do, you probably won't level up fast enough unless you grind Heroics, or do it during a double XP event.

Hutran Thanatos is our Operative, and I decided to make him a blond Mirialan.

The Sith Juggernaut is a Republic-style zabrak, but you'll probably often forget that because he wears a face-hiding helmet. It'll automatically come off when he's doing companion dialogues and stuff, but otherwise, that's his look.

Codon Veile is a rattataki Jedi Sage, who also wears a stealthy, colorless suit that matches his skin tone. I tried to get as little of the Rattataki face tattoos as I could, but the option with the least tattoos does have "tattoo eyeliner", so my character will look much more emo than I intended, I've noticed. His face is mostly hidden except the eyes normally too.

Osan Galaide is my Big Boy chiss vanguard. I actually deliberately, if you haven't noticed, tried to use Imperial races on Republic classes and vice versa. Of course, you won't really notice him either, because he wears armor head to toe. But not only is he an Imperial race, but he wears Mandalorian style armor, which isn't standard Republic issue by any means. But screw that; the Havoc Squad standard issue white with orange markings that look like Stormtroopers is not for me.

Only the second Big Boy character I've ever created (I didn't make Fatso the Hutt characters, just the big brawny guys) is my cyborg mercenary. This one is a little bit of a cheat; cyborgs aren't counted humans, but I'm sure that I'll almost always forget that.

And finally, Revecca Arden, the Sith Sorcerer. Or witch, if you prefer, although I figured that if I'm going to make a girl character, I'm going to make her a good looking one, at least. I was initially going to make her a Mirialan too, but I didn't really want two of them. I thought about a Miraluka or twi'lek, but let's be honest. I don't like those races at all, and neither of them are very pretty either. And, to paraphrase one of my sons, if a girl can't be pretty, what is she good for?

He actually said that it doesn't matter how hot a girl is, if she can't be pleasant to be around, what is she good for, in regards to a very pretty girl that had an obvious crush on him, but who got so awkward and nervous around him that she was impossible to talk to. I think he should have given her another chance, personally, but he seems to have moved on. You can eventually overcome that shyness, and then you're left with a very pretty girl, after all.

Anyway, the look of the characters will probably be the same, more or less, the entirety of the run. I tried to create some costumes for them that are iconic enough that they require little updating. A few of them were built with some Remnant armor pieces in mind, and you can't wear those until Level 10, though. In particular, you may notice that a lot of characters are wearing the same gloves. However, for many of them, these gloves are surrogates, and once they hit level 10, they'll replace them. 

Here's a brief list of what will change, once I can do so:

• Hutran Thanatos is wearing surrogate goggles. He'll have different ones, which are actually agent drops on Hutta, as soon as I can find them. He also has a second outfit, because as the intro suggested, he's going to go undercover as a different character shortly, and I thought it appropriate for him to have a disguise for that effort.
• Phovos Mal will replace his gloves, and maybe his boots and leggings too.
• Osan Galaide is waiting on gloves, boots and leggings/greaves, so what he's wearing now are surrogates.
• Embric Stane will replace his gloves and his boots.

In addition, all of the Jedi and Sith characters both don't have their lightsabers yet. I could, actually, equip lightsabers, but since in story they don't have them, I thought that that would look a little silly. Some of the characters will, in fact, go through a series of crafted weapons—rifles this time for Hutran and Osan. I did the same thing with double-bladed lightsabers on two characters in the past, as well as blaster pistols, assault cannons and sniper rifles. Five characters went through this routine, and I liked it. One of the things that will happen with the update when it comes is that weapons will be cosmetic like armor is, so you can have the look of any weapon of your type that you want, regardless of what you're actually wielding. I'll probably settle on a single look rather than an ever advancing one once that feature goes live, but I don't know for sure what weapons I'll be using for that yet. Some of the craftable weapons are butt-ugly, but some of them are quite attractive, and I might seriously consider using them. And finally, my smuggler will pick up a pistol from a vendor on the Fleet when I get there. It's Bind on Pickup, so nobody else can buy it and send it to him; he'll have to buy it himself. That'll be the last piece of gear that I'll be waiting on to get all of them "properly" "cosmetically" geared.

A final note; the graphic quality still isn't as good as when I'm actually playing the game. I suspect that my computer just can't handle the graphical oomph required to export these videos as well as I'd like. I did mention many posts ago that due to incompatibility issues that we didn't figure out, when my brother and I were building my computer, we ended up leaving the graphics card out. Curiously, it's still got a fast enough processer and enough CPU RAM that it does most things I want it to quite well. This is one of the few times that I've had an issue with the hardware. 

Too bad. I bought a really hot graphics card, but we couldn't get it to work with the build without causing problems. If I'd been able to install that, it'd really be screaming.

Star Wars and Planetary Romance

Planetary romance, or sword & planet as it was also called in the 60s, is—arguably—the original subgenre of science fiction. The trail was blazed in terms of what planetary romance was by the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the original "pulp era" there were a number of successful series here; ERB also wrote a Carson Napier of Venus series, for instance, and later one that took place on the Moon. Otis Adelbert Kline wrote a number of series taking place on the Moon, one on Venus and one on Mars. Other writers dabbled here too, but those are the ones that seem most remembered from the original run. Curiously, probably the best known of these types of stories comes from another medium; when King Features Syndicates wanted to do a John Carter comic strip, they weren't able to get the rights, so they just "pastiched" it; wrote one of their own that is in the exact same genre and features similar scenes a faire. This is Flash Gordon. 

You'll also notice that the genre fades imperceptibly into traditional space opera. John Carter is transferred to Mars by some kind of mystic process that is never explained. In the Kline Mars and Venus stories, there's some handwavy pseudo-science about telepathic transference of consciousness, or some such. But Carson Napier and Flash Gordon (and later other characters in ERB's Mars books) travel by normal space ship to an exotic planet. They usually then get stuck there, and adventure on the planet, rather than zipping around in space ships between planets—which seems to be the only significant difference between this genre and early space opera, such as the Leigh Brackett or C. L. Moore stories featuring Eric John Stark and Northwest Smith, respectively. There are a lot of other forgotten authors who wrote in this genre; in fact, Brackett and Moore (and early Ray Bradbury) famously were among the frequent contributors to Planet Stories; a pulp magazine that ran from 1939 to 1955 and which specialized in this kind of early space opera that was only a tiny bit removed from planetary romance.

After old fashioned space opera had itself started fading, curiously planetary romance came back into style for a while, and people like Lin Carter and others wrote planetary romance stories in the 60s, immediately preceding George Lucas' own Star Wars early drafts. By this time, the genre was often called sword & planet, but it was deliberately—even almost slavishly—imitative of the earlier wave.

Anyway, while I was running around doing one of the grind chores for tauntaun mounts in SWTOR last night, while my character was traveling across the landscape of Hoth on a speeder to get to the various tauntaun nests and feed fruits to the taunlings in hopes of luring a tauntaun parent to the nest—which isn't a disagreeable task, but which is a bit time-consuming and repetitive—I was considering one of the funniest aspects of Star Wars; the single environment planet. Tatooine is the desert planet, Endor is the forest planet, Hoth is the snow planet, Dagobah is the swamp planet, Alderaan is the mountain planet, Coruscant is the city planet... and so on and so forth. Of course, Star Wars wouldn't really be all that different if instead of being based on early space opera it was based on planetary romance. What if instead of planets, those environments were just regions on a single planet? What if instead of space ships, they had speeders. Han Solo could still have been a smuggler hotshot pilot if the Millennium Falcon was an airship instead of a spaceship. The Death Star could have been a gigantic floating fortress, like a supersized helicarrier from the Winter Soldier movie instead of a space station. There could still have been dogfights and a trench run to destroy it, without them having to go into space.

Now, going into space allows for more varied, exotic and strange landscapes. Or, at least, you can have weird things like the gigantic red disk of Yavin in the sky, and the asteroid dogfight between Jango Fett and Obiwan is unlikely to play out well on a single planet. But other than a few scenes, which could be easily reworked if needs be, Star Wars is really not much different as a planetary romance than as a space opera.

Although, I will own to the fact that it would seem odd for there to be all kinds of weird aliens all over the place on a single planet. But planetary romance is certainly famous for having exotic races of humans with blue skin or red skin or green skin or whatever. Barsoom has the thoroughly alien "green men" of Mars, the mostly human red men of Mars, the white-guys yet bald Holy Therns, the jet-black alien First Born, the lemon-yellow polar men, and of course, there are lost valleys, cities and whatnot with all kinds of weird aliens scattered here and there. It starts to get silly after a while. But Star Wars only throws a handful of aliens in important roles; most of the aliens are just background color. As I'm fond of pointing out, Star Wars as a menagerie of weird aliens is an artifact of later Star Wars; the original Star Wars (the entire original trilogy) is largely the story of people in space. Not just any people, but people who are recognizably normal Americans and British people, in fact. In SWTOR, most of the aliens are just funny colored people, with some contact lenses and a few minor make-up attachments, that an amateur could come up with using supplies from your local Halloween store. Like my most recent alien SWTOR characters, for example.

Kinda emo-looking space biker red-skinned dude

I don't know if it really makes any difference if Star Wars is space opera or planetary romance other than the bigger potential scope of space opera kind of captures the imagination. However, in terms of actual execution, that bigger potential scope is hardly ever actually used. Like I said, the entire Star Wars original trilogy could easily take place on a single planet, or even in a single large country the size of the US. The same is (mostly) true of the prequel trilogy with the exception of the asteroid, as mentioned above. The same is pretty much true of the sequel trilogy too, I think—not that anyone cares one way or another about that. And the same is true of the Mandalorian. The Book of Boba Fett not only could take place on a single planet, but it actually does. (So far. With the caveat that I haven't seen yesterday's episode yet.) This opens up some interesting possibilities when it comes to treating these stories slightly differently, and giving them a more grounded, down-to-earth (literally, in this case) feel that space opera doesn't always have.

Anyway, just some musing while I've been going about a relatively relaxed set of crafting and selling and gathering and stuff; all less stressful and low-key stuff that I've been spending a fair bit of my SWTOR time engaged in lately. (I've also been attempting to level up my reputation on a few factions. And next week, I'll need to be at least a little bit engaged in gathering rakghoul cannisters so I can spend them on new crystals.) Other than that, I'll be slowly creating my new characters over the next couple of weeks or so, for my recordings, but I'll also be slowly moving them forward. Including a replacement Jedi Sentinel that will replace the terrible quality videos that I have for Taul Kajak. Ugh. I'm frustrated that that didn't work out very well, and it sucks to have to do it again. But there's worse things.

As an aside, I'm considering switching two of my characters' races. I think maybe a Darth Maul style zabrak as a Jedi Knight and an Imperial Agent as a Mirialan might sound more compelling than the other way around. In fact, I'm thinking of not only making him look like Darth Maul, but dressing like a Sith Lord and using red lightsabers. I think it'd be a little amusing to have a visual Sith playing as a Jedi. 

Tython done

Well, last night, I finished recording and editing the last of my Tython missions for my Jedi Knight recorded playthrough. A few thoughts:

-- First off, it took me a few "sessions" to get the equipment right. However, since you can't redo missions in SWTOR, with the exception of the Heroics and a few other repeatables, I had to live with a few minutes worth of video with crappy audio, including one small section with no audio at all. Egh. Anyway, it's over with soon enough, and then I move on to where I figured it out better. But the initial start is a little bit rough from an audio standpoint, I have to admit.

-- I had considered doing some really "fancy" editing, but I didn't end up going for it. I just have cuts—sometimes, admittedly slightly awkward ones because I didn't think to record with slight pauses where I thought I'd later want to cut it. Mostly what I was thinking about doing was turning down the music volume and adding music in later manually. I ended up not doing this, and the cuts, obviously, will be pretty apparent in the music breaks. But this is less distracting and clunky than I feared, so I don't think I'm going to change it going forward.

-- I tried to eliminate most of the running around and fighting "trash mobs", although I did leave a few mob fights in to be "representational" rather than anything else. I also left just enough running around to be able to get a decent sense of what the planet looks like.

-- Rather than the audio commentary that I thought I might do, I added much more minimalist text commentary. Trying to leave the mic open for audio commentary was exactly why I was having sound issues early on and the text commentary forces me to be much more brief anyway. I think I'll stick with this for the time being. Probably, actually, for good.

-- The video quality drops dramatically when my character is moving. I don't know why this is. My experience playing the game doesn't look like this. It's either an artifact of the OBS recording, or the Microsoft Photos editing and exporting or the YouTube uploads. Don't know what (if anything) I could do about it other than have a better computer with a sick graphics card. Curiously, during cut scenes, and any scene where my character isn't running or moving, the quality quickly improves to regular HD.

-- A bit more fiddling, including the recording of a relatively shorter video on the Republic Fleet now that I'm done with Tython. The "raw" video was about half an hour, but after editing all kinds of shopping, moving of items from my character inventory to my storage locker, etc. it came down to about 5-6 minutes. I had no problem with video quality on this smaller video. I think the problem is exporting longer video files out of Microsoft Photos to mp4. This means that I basically screwed up my source files when I combined them into two hour long videos. Sigh. More experimentation gone wrong with my first run at this. Sadly, I already deleted the original shorter videos after I made the longer ones, so another ship that sailed due to my impatience. That said, I don't know that I want to have really short videos on Youtube. Maybe if I keep them to half an hour or so, and keep the shorter files for my DVD archive? Not quite sure how best to do this yet. I doubt I want to redo this character after as much time (and in game credits) as I've put into him, but I may. I'm not feeling like it represents my best, merely my prototype, warts and all. Plus, I've figured out how to make decent money by selling crafted stuff finally, so the money is less of a problem than it used to be. So... what's it going to be? Scrap my work on Taul Kajak and start over with.... Kaul Tajak or something? I just might. I'll have to think about this for a couple of days before I know what want to do, I think.

After editing all of my sessions, I was left with eight videos ranging from just under 5 minutes to a little over half an hour. I've since combined them into two videos just under an hour each. Those are what I'll load up onto Youtube as well as make part of my DVD videos when I'm ready to burn those. I had hoped to do one planet per DVD-R, but may not be able to, based on the file size. Oh, well. I'll do what I have to do, one way or another.

Anyway, as soon as my last video finishes exporting and I can get these loaded up on Youtube, I'll come edit this post to include the links. And now that I'm done with Tython, I'm considering at least kicking off another character. Maybe my sith pureblood scoundrel.

UPDATE: Yeah, the problems with these videos are going to bug me. I decided that I'll come back to the Jedi Knight later with a new Jedi Sentinel character, once I've got some new black-green crystals from the rakghoul event. In the meantime, I started a smuggler. I'll probably bounce back and forth between various characters, and try to keep them more or less at the same place. It'll keep it from getting too stale to go back and forth (I hope) while giving me something to do for months to come. Plus, I'd really like to actually create all of the characters before the update hits and makes character creation all different.

This series (and all subsequent ones) will be much shorter videos, so you'll have to watch them with the playlist feature, or just accept shorter <10 minute videos or so.

After figuring out all of my sound issues... I forgot to plug in my sound device. Luckily, I realized it right as the opening crawl started that my USB cord was sitting there unplugged so you don't really miss anything.

Couple of good Z-man posts

FYI. If you aren't reading the Z-man most days, you probably should. Monday is the best day to hit him up, because he has his normal column on his Wordpress site, but also a second column at Taki's Magazine.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=26406

https://www.takimag.com/article/a-new-threat/

Anyway, again; I don't always love the Z-man. My biggest points of disagreement with him are 1) his secular, anti-religious viewpoint. He fails to recognize, or at least fails to personally consider, the primary place that Christianity must occupy in order to have any well-running society that has even a passing resemblance to Western Civilization, and 2) he's got the peculiar failing of my Generation-x cohort in feeling like taking a pose of bemused detachment while the world we know burns down around us is the only reasonable action to take. Obviously that's not true. Now, granted, I don't know what action to take that would actually be useful, but I'm at least looking for an opportunity to find one that has some merit, I'm not sitting around preaching that nothing can or should be done except wait for the world to collapse and then say that I told you so.

In spite of these two failings, he does tend to usually hit the nail on the head otherwise with considerable accuracy and charisma. And actually, I don't know that he's really from Gen-X or not, although his attitude certainly sounds like it. Somehow I always imagined him as a bit older than me. I'm a bit on the younger side of Generation X (at least until marketers decided to throw Generation Y into Generation X, or the Millennials, depending) but I somehow kind of imagined that the Z-man was Generation Jones.

As an aside, I'm a little irked that Generation Jones and Generation Y seem to have been swallowed up by some kind of advertising consensus. Pretending that Generation Jones is just younger and significantly different cohort within the Baby Boomers or the early Generation Xers, or that Generation Y is just a cohort within either Generation X or the Millennials, but which is completely different than either is just stupid. There were already labels in place. Were they too confusing for some idiot CEO of an advertising company, or something?

Classes and races (SWTOR)

I'm obviously increasingly frustrated with real life events, as my last post showed. I try to avoid drinking too deeply from the firehose of information, specifically to avoid allowing myself to get worked up by all of the things going wrong in our society, often disastrously. And there are so many catastrophes either ongoing, or having gotten to the point that their happening is inevitable to choose from. 

For this reason, I often dive into diversions and hobbies.

I've kind of enjoyed starting up my recordings for SWTOR. I created a stylish, "smuggler-looking" Jedi Knight; a Mirialan swashbuckler with ash-colored hair. I've only recorded a few missions; not even enough to upload to YouTube yet, but I'm already enjoying it. I went and played around with the character creator, although I didn't create any characters, I set up parameters for the additional characters that I will do. I decided that none of them will be human (at least not yet) although that's a bit of a fudge on the cyborg character; all of the cyborgs are human, just with some gadgets attached to their faces. This will probably be what I record, although I reserve the right to tweak a few details as I go down the line.

Jedi Sentinel: Mirialan male, swashbuckler "smuggler" type outfit.

Jedi Sage: Rattataki male, gray "ninja"-like outfit (still working on exactly how to do this)

Scoundrel: Sith trueblood male. He'll have a typical "smuggler" outfit (which I don't associate with smugglers; it's just casual space clothes) and no facial droopy things.

Vanguard: A body type 3 Chiss fellow. Good and alien without being overly so.

Sith Juggernaut: Curiously, although I'm going to make this guy a zabrak (Republic style) he looks not dissimilar to a regular white guy; just with a few horns pasted on his forehead.

Sith Sorcerer: my only female character, a Mirialan. I might end up changing that race, though.

Operative: Imperial style zabrak. Male.

Mercenary: white guy cyborg with "sunglasses" eyes as his cybernetics. I'll probably dress him more as a space gunfighter than as a Mandalorian style heavily armored guy. Also, big body type 3 like the trooper. I'll never use the skinny runt 1 or the Chubba the Hutt type 4, but these two characters will be my first attempts to move off of body type 2.

My recent trips

My trips to the South and the West respectively, have caused a crystalization of a number of views that I hold. The Z-man handily summarizes them with his recent Taki Magazine post, so I will quote (and paraphrase) him just a bit.

Most normal people have always known that there are people in the world who are just on the edge of sanity. Maybe it is the nutty aunt who is always into some cause, a cause that changes with the news cycle. Perhaps it is a friend who knows a bit too much about conspiracy theories. Of course, everyone has been cursed to know someone who thinks Hitler is hiding under their bed or in the fine print of the Republican platform.

Up until fairly recently, it was possible to get along with the crazy aunt or the old left-wing college buddy by avoiding certain topics. The cost of tolerating these mentally unstable people and keeping them from going berserk was to walk on eggshells around them in normal conversation. If you avoided their trigger topics, their insanity was for all practical purposes a private affair. It stayed in their head.

Social media changed this. One reason liberal democracy finds itself in a crisis is normal people have discovered just how many nutjobs there are in this world. Worse yet, we get a daily reminder on Facebook or Twitter that many of the people in positions of authority have heads full of nonsense. No man is a hero to his valet, and we have all become the valets of our ruling class through social media.

In the old days, it was possible to avoid mentioning a trigger topic around crazy Aunt Betty, but now your social media timeline is full of these people. They are like a plague of lunatics with infinite triggers. A mild joke about a politician can quickly become a three-hour argument online. The mass media age has made it almost impossible for normal people to avoid the insane. [...]

Of course, you could unplug [ed. which has been my solution to much of this over the last few years], which is becoming a thing among people who are waking up to the reality of hyperreality. A big part of the dissident right is the process of separating from the Potemkin reality of liberal democracy. Cut the cord, drop off the mainstream social media platforms, and disconnect from the media. The new countercurrent mantra is “Turn off, tune out, drop out.”

The problem is, Covid has now allowed virtual madness to leave the matrix and invade the physical space. Everywhere you turn when out in public, you are reminded that there are many people with a tenuous grip on their sanity. For going on two years, the harridan with a mask has been stalking the public square, hunting the barefaced like she is rooting out the agents of Old Scratch.

The ceremonial face covering has become the mark of the beast. Everywhere you go there are people wearing a mask, often multiple masks. Talk to one of them and you quickly learn that they are not motivated by bad information. Instead, the masks and the other performative gestures are emotional support items. Instead of carrying a plush toy around for support, they are performing Covid rituals.

It is no longer possible to ignore what used to be private madness. A bit of carny trash assaulted an old man on an airplane who was trying to eat his dinner. Her reason for assaulting him was that he did not have on his mask while eating. [Another] woman tested herself mid-flight, got a positive test for Covid, then locked herself in the toilet for the remainder of the flight. For the passengers, there was no escaping her madness.

These are entertaining cases, so they get lots of attention in the media and online, but the media is also pushing the madness. Whether it is crazy people taking over the media, or the media being told to trigger the deranged, the mass media now feeds the lunacy of the Covidians. They claim the health care system is about to collapse and society is on the brink of destruction due to Covid.

Most people had hoped that this madness was just a panic and that it would pass once people realized Covid was not an extinction event. It was just another relatively mild pandemic that has been a part of human existence since the beginning. Once the reality of Covid was made plain, so the thinking went, the panic-stricken would get back to normal, maybe having some anger at having made fools of themselves, with the encouragement of the mass media.

Two years on and this is clearly not happening. The Omicron variant is about as harmful as the common cold, but it is causing another wave of mass lunacy. There is increasing evidence that many of these people are hooked on panic. Their lives have become defined by this crusade against an invisible villain. The Covid rituals now define their lives. They were told they could never live with Covid, but now they cannot live without it.

As a result, America is separating into two realities. In a place like Florida [or Alabama, or Wyoming, South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, and Utah if you avoid downtown SLC—all places, including Florida, that I have visited since the covid hysteria started], people are going about their business. Covid is a minor nuisance for most people and Covid theater is nonexistent. In a place like Massachusetts [actual location redacted for my privacy], this is the long dark winter promised by Joe Biden. The faithful wait for hours to be tested and then spend their days hiding in their homes. Red states and blue states have been replaced with normal states and Covid states.

These two realities are showing up in population movements. Normal people are fleeing the lands of the Covidian for places like Florida. For sure it is not just the lunacy of Covid theater, but it is playing a big role. We now live in two separate cultural and psychological spaces. There are those with triple masks, barrels of hand sanitizer, and a full booster card. Then there are the purebloods with their bare faces and their increasing impatience with the Covidian.

What Covid has done is bring two important questions to the fore. One is a question about the cause of this madness. Have we always had this number of crazy people, but they suffered in private, or has something caused many to go mad? It is possible that mass psychosis is an inevitable end to mass society. Perhaps knowing so much about the rest of us drives many humans insane. Ignorance really was bliss.

The other question is how can we ever go back to normal knowing that so many people are on the edge of madness? Even if we could turn it all off, can we forget that on every plane is a young woman ready to lock herself in the toilet or ready to pounce on the elderly at the first sign of the sniffles? Will normal people forget and forgive the obnoxious harridans harassing people over masks?

Like a marriage headed for divorce, Americans may be at that point of no return where one or both sides realize it is over. Normal people could tolerate the goofy politics and weird social fads, but Covid is the breaking point. Normal people are not just out of patience, they want out of this dysfunctional relationship. Normal people want a divorce from the mentally unstable. This relationship has reached its end.

Book of Boba Fett - brief thoughts (so far)

There's only two episodes. I've seen the first one twice and most of the second one twice. It's not really that great, but it has some potential. In some ways, Boba Fett has become a less compelling character than he was. Plus, he looks kinda old and flabby compared to when he went into the sarlacc. Given that nothing has happened to him that should make him become so, that's unfortunate. I mean, I know why it is; because they wanted to keep using Temuera Morrison who played Jango Fett in Attack of the Clones nearly twenty years ago. He just doesn't look anything like Jeremy Bulloch did in 1983. Even though Bulloch never took off the helmet, he's just obviously a very different man to even a casual viewer. (This was a problem already in the prequels. Not sure why Lucas cast Morrison. He was fine as Jango Fett, and did a good job, but if Boba Fett was supposed to be a genetic clone of him, that never worked, because he never looked anything at all like Boba Fett had in the original trilogy. Yet another bad call by Lucas during the prequels. I know that in the wake of the sequel trilogy, it's somewhat fashionable to now pretend like the prequel movies were good movies with good choices made during their production process, but the reality is that they never really were. They just weren't overt dumpster fires like the sequel trilogy movies have been.)

But honestly, I'm not really digging the very slow burn of current events with the crime lord stuff followed by his "A Man Called Horse" flashback scenes. I'm very tired of "white man must come to respect the primitives who took him captive and abused him" story. It's little more than Stockholm Syndrome writ large. Of course, they deliberately recast Boba Fett from a white man in the 80s to a Polynesian man in the 00s who is now a middle-aged man to boot. But still; the flashback scenes are much less engaging, and yet they seem to take up more than half of the runtime of the episodes so far. I'm sure that they're setting up some kind of "Fett's relationship with the Tuskens will be crucial to his success with the crime lords" type of resolution (I called it here first!) but again; I read A Princess of Mars years ago. It was published before my grandfather was born, and I'm already a middle-aged man about to turn 50 myself. The story isn't exactly a new one anymore.

And I don't really get where Fett is coming from in the non-flashback scenes. He wants to be a kinder, nicer gangster? Yeah, I don't get it. I want to see a combination of space western and space Scarface here, not space West Side Story.

The show has potential. I hope it gets better. Right now, I'm still waiting for it to do something interesting.

Back in town

Well, I'm back in town. This was one of the longest (and least fun) vacations I've been on. Part of it wasn't ever meant to be a vacation; I had to move my son into his dorm, which meant I had to drive all of his stuff across the country. I ended up doing the leg home on my own. Normally, I really enjoy road trips, but this one wasn't my favorite; I was dogged by bad winter weather that even caused my car to have its air filter and engine flooded with snow at one point (seriously; what?!)

I did however, manage to install and briefly play a little SWTOR while gone. I missed the armor set sale (sadly) but the mount sale and the collections unlock sale was still on. I got some armors anyway, and I'm more or less OK there now; there's only a very few that I have much interest in pursuing that I don't already have now. I'm pretty well taken care of in terms of "smuggler" type armors now, which is what I prefer most characters to wear most of the time anyway, as it resembles casual "everyday" clothing, in my experience. Even troopers and bounty hunters don't run around in armor all of the time, except when the occasion specifically calls for it. And I don't like to put Jedi into robes all of the time; although I did buy the Steadfast Master armor set, which is basically Obiwan's clone wars era look.

Anyway, just a heads up, since I hadn't posted anything in a few weeks.

I did do a bit more recording this morning, and obviously I still have a few kinks to work out. My mic was on, but I got no sound from the game! Urgh. I can't redo these missions either, so I guess I'll have to figure out what's wrong and live with it. Either that, or do a new character. Either that, or abandon the entire project, because I don't really need to do it anyway. I don't know what happened, though. How irritating!