Model Railroading

I actually have another blog dedicated to my armchair model railroad... not that I post there much, and probably won't until armchair starts to transition into something more tangible... but I have been watching a lot of model railroad videos on youtube lately, and there are a few things that bug me pretty consistently about most peoples' railroads, or at least their presentation of them.

I. Wasted Space. I get it; you want to model the wide open expanses of the American West. Who doesn't? But your space is limited. Modeling the Tehachapi Loop more or less to scale might seem cool, but it isn't. All you've managed to do is take space that would be big enough for an entire model railroad and cover it with nothing but gently sloping hills, grass and a few bushes. Model railroading is a hobby where space is at a premium, and utilizing it efficiently and smartly is a plus. Doing otherwise is... not cool. I'm less and less impressed by big vistas in model railroads than I am with creative compression that gives the illusion of space without actually taking a lot of it.

II. Realism or Operation Over Fun. It's been a thing in the hobby, probably since the beginning, that we want to create realistic railroads. However, the Koester crowd has turned this into a spergy caricaturish parody of what it once was; the idea that you're only modeling a very specific real place during a very specific and limited real time, is boring. One of the things that was always fun about model railroading is creating something unique. This is sometimes called "freelancing" but in reality, the evolution if the term freelancing has become considerably less free than what it used to be. We almost need a new term to specify what we mean when we're creating our own stuff that isn't specifically supposed to represent a real railroad or real place except in broad terms; a Ruritanian railroad, or something like that. For the entirety of the hobby, the gorgeous modeling and realistic looks is what has impressed people and fired their imagination. Your realistic scheduling and operations only impress the spergs.

III. Poor Lighting and Composition. If you're going to film or take pictures of your railroad, for goodness sakes don't do it "warts and all." Nobody wants to see the shadow of your buildings or trees on the wall right behind them; move some lights around so you can't see that! Even moreso, nobody wants to see people standing around in the background or other things that give away the illusion; that this is a model in a basement rather than an actual railroad. One of the things I'm more and more impressed by with the really famous railroaders of the 70s and 80s like Dave Frary, John Olsen, Malcolm Furlow, etc. is that they were as much photographers as they were modelers, and beautiful photographs of model trains on model scenery was at least as much of an aspirational product as the model itself. They were always careful to move lights around, work on composition, etc. that furthered the illusion in their magazine and book photographs, or videos in the rare occasion that they existed back then, that these were real photos of real trains, not models sitting in someone's basement. Heck, even John Allen himself was a professional photographer, and his realistic photos are what put him on the map. It helped that his photos were realistic also because the models were also high quality and realistic, of course, but that wouldn't have been enough without his professional lighting and composition that furthered rather than destroyed the illusion. 

It's been especially disheartening to see these flaws turn up in the Great Model Railroads issues of Model Railroader the last many years. Truly the triumph of the spergy Koester crowd, which as Malcolm Furlow "hinted darkly" would ruin the hobby; because it fails to understand what the appeal is to the majority of normal people, has been a tragedy for the appeal that it has. Great Model Railroads is supposed to be the gold standard of presentation of railroads, not of piss-poor presentation of railroads that impress the operational spergs.

IV. Dead Layouts. Another thing that Olsen, Furlow, Allen and more did that really made their railroad photographs pop was the inclusion of many, many scale figures of people, animals and more. To be fair, I'm not sure how many of these "lived" on the layout normally as opposed to being trotted out and placed specifically for the photo ops, but most of the time when seeing modern railroads in photographs or video either one, they look like dead machines running through ghost towns with hardly anyone out and about. Olsen in particular designed the J&S and its extension, the BA&W as almost like a series of linked dioramas that were separated visually through subtle vertical elements. He could take advantage of that, again, through lighting and composition to not only make his modest sized layout look incredibly large, but also by increasing the illusion of scale by having these linked dioramas seem separate, discrete and different from each other. Sometimes the link between them was somewhat subtle, and he didn't always show it to not break the illusion, but one of my favorite pictures from his book, which I took a quick snapshot of below, is the line between the mountainous "background" scenery of the J&S and the BA&W urban waterfront scenery. The transition is really quite clever, so that unless you're specifically focused on the transition, it doesn't necessarily feel like one. Putting his small buildings up on terraces to better transition to the mountains, and having the trains pass from one module to the next via a hidden tunnel works extremely well, given the sharp contrast in themes, tones, and even colors between the two modules.

There's a reason that when I make my model railroad, if I ever in fact do, that I'm going to use the track plan and broad scenic plan with very little, if any, change from the J&S. I'll also have thematic contrast, although I'm retheming the Jerome Arizona area to trans-Pecos west Texas like the Davis or Chisos Mountains, and the Back Alley & Wharf to a more frontier-like boomtown and set next to a Louisiana style bayou with cypress trees with their knees popping up out of dark fetid water, dripping Spanish moss, etc. And in light of my approval of "unrealistic" whimsy, I might even have a small scene of Inspector Legrasse breaking up a lascar cult of Cthulhu worshippers just for the heckuvit. Then I'll have another entire 4x8 railroad based on Rocky Mountains scenery attached to the other end of the BA&W part.

UPDATE: Here's another image of the border between the main railroad and the expansion, from another level. Here you can see the line between them, of course.

Does system matter?

Question of the day: does the system that you use in your RPG actually matter? Naturally, I'm not going to offer up a pat and simple answer, because there's a lot of "it depends" and other caveats. Part of this is because of trends in the RPG market that have gradually offered up a slightly different take on what exactly "system" even means.

It used to be that the system was just the rules that the game used. Back in ye olden dayes, especially with regards to TSR games, this was a pretty simple question, because different games used very different rules that had little in common with each other. However, there were some other companies that did things differently, even back in the day. Chaosium used their BRP system as the basis for their games, and had differing, yet obviously related systems for RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer, for instance. But this was seen as merely convenient, and I know that I didn't think of them as a "system", merely that the systems for each game had the same basic framework in terms of how they worked. But gradually, this morph of system into being the system for a specific game and more of a higher level structure that could span multiple games started to gain traction. In the middle/late 80s, Steve Jackson Games released GURPS, the Generic Universal Roleplaying System in a core set, followed by tons upon tons of supplements that tweaked various buttons and levers within the system to allow it to play in various genres with various tones. This was seen as kind of unique at the time, though, and although perceived as a cool innovation, I don't think the market was entirely ready for it yet; most people liked (still) that different games felt different mechanically and didn't use the same chassis, so to speak, to get to the same result. Later, in 1990 or so, the old Champions superhero roleplaying game was repurposed as the Hero System, which had the same intention; it could be used for anything, and supplements that were broad but also different from each other, like Pulp Hero, Fantasy Hero, Star Hero, etc. came out for it. I don't know how much this caught on; I never saw anyone use it, but I heard chatter on the internet in the later 90s about it. My impression is that it was a niche product in terms of its appeal. White Wolf also had a house system, although most of their games were released in the same setting, had similar tone and themes, and it was kind of seen that they were meant to interact with each other and be compatible. This wasn't entirely true, of course. Few people remember the Street Fighter game (except me, because I was a huge fan of both Street Fighter and roleplaying games) and Exalted, although it used the same system base, is usually seen as too different.

When Wizards of the Coast released D&D Third Edition, it also spawned the d20 family of games, and over the next few years, a number of games, both "official" and third party were spawned that used this system as its framework. From WotC officially, we had d20 Star Wars (in three editions), d20 Wheel of Time, d20 Call of Cthulhu and d20 Modern, the only one of the batch that was truly built as a toolkit approach. Unfortunately, I think they inadvertently set back the migration to common systems by released tentative and timid interpretations of the system that didn't sufficiently change the rules. Certainly this was a complaint that many had in particular with Call of Cthulhu, which of the batch is the one most dissimilar in terms of genre and tone. Around this time, Savage Worlds was also released, which has become a very popular "universal" system.

I may be charting my own perception of things more than any actual trends in the industry, but it took until d20 for me to actually really see what the appeal of having a single higher level system was. I do think that there was a sea change in perception across the board, and I remember lots of people saying things like "one system to rule them all" and whatnot at the time. d20 didn't end up being the system for me, or not unless you consider Microlite to be a radical variation on d20, which in reality it is. I've since pulled back just a little bit from some of the radicalness of Microlite; Dark Fantasy X, and all of the X games (if I ever get around to spelling them out) will now use all of the original D&D attributes, or stats, for example, and will have six skills. This 6x6 is as important to me for, if no other reason, so my character sheets are visually balanced. 

So, when we say system, what we tend to mean more often than not nowadays, in contrast to year past, is this higher level system, and in my opinion, no it doesn't matter. Pick one that you like and stick with it; there's no problem with that. Any system can be tweaked, house-ruled or modified to accommodate any genre, tone or playstyle preference, although clearly most systems also have some element that they do relatively well and is a key component of them. For example, the tactical grid-based combat of d20 is kind of core to the system, and almost every iteration of it requires it unless you eliminate all kinds of tactical and positioning rules. If that's something that you enjoy regardless of genre, tone, etc. then d20 is a good higher level system for you to use. If it's not, you might want to consider a different one. But even d20 can be modded down to a rules-light theatre of the mind variant, such as Microlite, so again, I don't think system matters. If this is what you mean by system.

Or rather, it doesn't matter in that any system can be modded to do anything, but it could very well matter in terms of picking a system that you like, prefer to use, are comfortable with, that your players intuitively handle well, etc. And it could matter, as noted before, in terms of how much you enjoy one system versus another. In that sense, system can matter a great deal. But I also believe that most people are simply most comfortable with whatever system that they've used the most. I prefer D&D-like systems, because those are the ones that the majority of my games have used since the early 80s, and even in the 00s when I was playing a lot of different things, I used d20 for most of them, including Star Wars Cthulhu, Modern and more. I certainly no longer enjoy system for its own sake, and now prefer a common background higher level system. Ideally, I'd use a common higher level background system for every game I ever play. Ideally, I'd use my own system, although I'd never actually play if so, I'd only run. But that would probably be OK too, honestly.

Now, if you pull back and refer to system as all of the rules, like we used to, then system matters a great deal, of course. The fact that a system can be used to successfully emulate the genre and tone of Star Wars and Call of Cthulhu means, of course, that they need to have some rules that make significant changes to the way in which some of the details of the game work. I've actually come to quite enjoy seeing and thinking of ways to make different systems work in different ways, and I've obviously given a lot of thought to how to do so with my own custom system for my own setting. And I think that the changes have had significant effect on the tone and mood and feel of the game. But I'm starting from a higher level system that is well-suited to my playstyle and to my history of the hobby, because it's super familiar to me from my past games. I no longer, if I ever really did, honestly, value system for its own sake, and I actually am sometimes annoyed by the requirement to have to learn a whole new system to use a given supplement easily. I simply no longer have time or interest in learning whole new rules systems; although modular-like rules that can create significant changes to the way that different variants of the system work from game to game are actually very interesting to me.

Blind Beckett

I don't have the energy after the last few weeks of work to do much more than veg so... Here's Blind Beckett, a character with which I've done little but who's look I really like.

First, the original image. Probably slightly modified by me for proportions and colors, but otherwise a library model from Hero Forge. The kitbashing feature is pretty cool, but difficult to use. I've watched Hero Forge whizkids like Derf on YouTube, and I can't do what he does for many reasons. Not least of which is my rig, which lacks a graphics card. I can sorta do it on my phone, but there the menu and lack of mouse makes it much more difficult to do stuff with.

I also don't have his patience. Or his creativity. 

Next, my AI generated version... 

Then, going back to Hero Forge, now with much more functionality, to make something more like the AI images. 

It's true... AI is crappy with bows and crossbows.

And then, for fun, a new wave of AI images.

New Secretary of Defense

https://voxday.net/2024/11/13/the-new-secdef/

Pretty good analysis. One big missed observation, though. China has absolutely engaged in war after war of conquest. It was just against their immediate neighbors. When the Portuguese discovered Formosa, there weren't any Chinese people on it, there were native Formosans who were linguistically and culturally related to the Indies and Polynesian Islanders. Now the indigenous Formosans are a tiny percentage of the people of Taiwan, and most of them speak Chinese and are even genetically Sinicized to a great degree.

I do think that it's fair to assume, however, that if we leave China alone and hold a strong line against their buying out of American interest (and sending colonists to North America) then we shouldn't have any reason to fear them exactly. We need to stop propping up their economy for cheap bankster profits for globalist corporations is all, mostly.

Media Malpractice

https://www.thewrap.com/media-problems-trump-election/

So close and yet still so far. She is still so incredibly and unaccountably sure that she's right and the problem is messaging and how to reach people... not that her message is dishonest, fake, blatantly and observably false, and completely out of touch with anything approaching reality. No, the sources are just wrong because it's not what she wants to hear. Not because she's bothered to investigate any of their claims, like the Right does for the Left's spurious claims (sometimes) because the Left, much more than the Right, only accepts facts that they want to believe, and then look for data to justify them rather than data to falsify them. Hardly surprising for what is essentially a cult built on envy, spite, covetousness and self-aggrandizement, narcissism, and need to position themselves as superior in their own eyes to everyone else around them who isn't part of their cult. I mean, she called Harris immensely qualified and competent; but she's never demonstrated anything other than affirmative action/DEI appointments in her entire career, and hasn't accomplished much of anything in any role she was ever in. The only thing that she seems qualified to have done was to be Willie Brown's side piece. But that's just one of the blatantly ridiculous claims that she makes as if its self-evidently true instead of self-evidently false.

Which I can see people claiming are spurious claims, but I've been watching with a critical eye for many, many years, and digging into the philosophical and historical precedents, as well as the behavior of those who practice these ideologies. As Christ himself said; by their fruits shall ye know them; and their fruits are abundantly in evidence. Although people people are willing to know them by their fruits, or even admit what the obvious fruits are, because it makes them feel bad to notice.

The Z-man talks about this kind of bias all the time; the modern managerial people who believe that creating wishful thinking Narratives will magically cause reality to bend to the narrative. The idea that Trump is a felon because they said so and came up with trumped up (no pun intended) kangaroo court charges to bring against him, or that he's a bigot because... (I honestly still don't know why they're saying this. For the slightly more logical who need a fig leaf of non-emotionalism, I suppose it's a permutation of opposing immigration is racist? I don't know. The felon charge they at least have some justification for making, even though it's spurious and based on their own narrative smoke and mirrors, but the rest of them are just ridiculous. And that's why we've seen these absurd, hysterical freak-out videos online all over the place. 

I wonder. Most of the videos, of course, are made by women or gay men, as you'd expect. I don't know if it's their mercurial nature to simply have these mental vomit sessions that shouldn't be taken seriously, and nothing that they actually say or do when in this hysterical state should be seen as salient content, its just emotional diarrhea. In a few days, or a few weeks, they'll probably still be woke and retarded, but at least they crazy hysteria and the claims made while in its grip will have subsided? (Sucks to be the obnoxious little girls pretending to be women who shaved their heads, I guess--I'm quite confident that all of them will regret that a lot in the next few weeks and months.) Or are these people really so broken, dysfunctional and narcissistic that they can't handle not getting their way about everything and it doesn't subside, just turns into this time bomb of impotent rage? Another Z-man phrase I like to use is that reality is that thing that doesn't go away even if you don't believe in it. But in my experience, even running face first into the brick wall of reality that you were trying not to believe in isn't sufficient to cause some people to actually believe in it. 

While it's encouraging to see what happened last week actually happen, in more ways than one (1. the actual results, and 2. the quiet effort by the RNC under new leadership to actually keep an eye on election integrity and not allow the same kinds of fraud that obviously threw off 2020 to happen again) I'm still concerned on what happens in 2028, and if anyone with the chops to take up Trump's mantle is in the wings to follow. Or, for that matter, if Trump really has the chops to do what needs to be done. It's easy to make the case that he didn't before. Positive signs are yet positive signs, but we know from prophecy that times are going to get worse and people more wicked yet before they get better, so my expectations for temporal salvation from an arm of flesh are, needless to say, pretty muted.

B! Machine is back! Have been for two years, in fact

Here’s a topic I don’t really talk about enough sometimes, and it beats just posting an AI or Hero Forge image from my setting. I miss Todd Durant of A Different Drum. Back in the 90s and early 00s, the synthpop musical genre, which had enjoyed enormous success in the 80s, had the market fall out from under it as we underwent a pop culture disruption. This also coincided in my particular case with a disruption in my partaking of pop culture, because I was in Argentina serving a mission for the Church from Jan 1991 through Feb 1993. When I got back, all of the cool electronic pop music that had been popular when I left was underground, and instead we had all kinds of grunge and other assorted Seattle hipster music; a group of styles that I still kind of resent. After struggling to find new music to listen to (I experimented with some Euro-dance, but it just didn’t hit the same way, and I don’t really like all that much of Ace of Bass, 2 Unlimited, Real McCoy, etc) compared to the earlier Depeche Mode, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, etc. music. And a lot of the bands that continued changed their sound too. There was only so much obscure back catalog to be found, although the arrival of the Internet on my college campus helped. Of course, I rapidly found that there was an underground scene for synthpop, and it wasn’t just focused on talking about Depeche Mode and Erasure, or even the slightly more “fringe” groups like Seven Red Seven or Cause & Effect or Camouflage or Red Flag or some of the others who were sorta one-hit wonders… for a generous definition of hit. Genuinely newer bands were creating a scene, like De/Vision, Mesh, and many others. Some of these, like the stable of the early Synthphony Records label had a lot of duds; I bought a lot of those early CDs in the late 90s only to find that they were mostly… mediocre and forgettable. But the scene gathered a lot of steam relatively rapidly, and really good stuff started coming out. Much of it was fed to me by the mailing list of A Different Drum, which started as a store, and eventually became more of a distributor and even record label of a lot of the really good stuff. Some of my favorite post 80s synthpop work came out of this crucible. Album’s like Iris’s Disconnect, for instance and some of the early Cosmicity albums, are still albums that I consider landmark standouts of the genre overall.

Another one that really hit well and became an early favorite was B! Machine’ s Infinity Plus. B! Machine had a pretty unique sound; his vocals and harmonies were unlike anyone else in the biz, his song structures were a little unusual and more artsy, less poppy, and he definitely had a unique very minimalist synthesizer sound. I really liked B! Machine and kept track of his new releases for a number of years. Although I’ve often wandered far afield in my musical tastes, and a lot of what I listen to today is older Hard Trance, early Hardstyle, and other intense rave music, or I listen to orchestral (real or synthesized) new and classical music. 

But B! Machine is one that comes up frequently and I replay his stuff. But because it had been a number of years since I’d seen a new release, and hadn’t looked in… I dunno, a few years. Turns out that B! Machine did come out with a magnificent double album (23 tracks) about two years ago, and although I’ve (so far) only listened to it all the way through twice, I’m pretty confident in saying that it’s his best work. Which is cool; there are so many bands or artists that start out strong,  and then either lose their way or meander through varying quality; B! Machine has probably always had a fairly consistent high quality, but he has had a gradual evolution in pretty cool new ways. Jarkko Tuohimaa of Neuroactive did some co-production on a number of tracks on Infinity Plus, and the two have very complementary sounds with some similar elements, but it clearly helped B! Machine see new ways of integrating beefier percussive and bass elements. (Although his unique approach to that was part of the uniqueness of his sound; I’m glad it was Tuohimaa instead of someone else who took it that direction. Like I said, they had some similarities that complemented each other without actually messing up his sound, I think.)

Over time, many of his tracks have become less cold, but still unique, and his synths—while still sounding very similar—are a bit less minimalistic than they used to be. But these changes aren’t unwelcome; B! Machine still has a unique signature sound, even as it’s not exactly the same sound that he was exploring 25-30 years ago. 

I highly recommend checking out B! Machine’s “new” album Snake Charm Girl. Check it out on Spotify or YouTube and then go buy it on Bandcamp.

Right now, if someone were to ask me to give a sampling of my taste of music, I’d give four albums to be representative, and this one would be one of them. Even though it’s new to me, it’s a perfect encapsulation of my synthpop taste, and I’ve been a big fan of B! Machine’s older work for many years already. 

The other three would be Der Ring Ohne Worte; the Mazaal arrangement of Wagner’s Der Ring, although I also like several the Tarkmann interpretation. (Or any interpretation, actually. I’ve got several recordings of the de Vlieger summary too). Then maybe the Gladiator soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, and the Bas & Ram setlist from In Qontrol 2004, which you can find on YouTube and probably Soundcloud. That’s only a small sampling, but it gets you sufficiently there to understand the breadth of my taste.

New Portraits for Revecca von Lechfel

A few new portraits; because I didn't completely love all of the ones that I had. First is Revecca von Lechfeld; a minor cameo character in Shadows Over Garenport, but a major NPC/supporting character in Cult of Undeath. Probably too many alternates. I also like her with pale eyes, but these dark-eyed AI girls are, frankly, just too beautiful to pass up as possibilities.

Blogging vs vlogging

I haven't done much with my blog, because I've been busy (spent the whole week in Mexico for work, blegh) and because I've been enjoying vlogging more. I've even created a playlist for my Shadows Over Garenport videos, of which so far there are only three, but more to come.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvM0oK6Bq9KntfV2pUi3gSz_ty3gh_r3W

Check it out; there's still gaming content! I have—somewhat—however, switched venues for it.

With that, here's some updated Scooby Gang Hero Forge models. I'm more convinced than ever that the Scooby gang deaths need to happen at the beginning of every single campaign season, every single Dark Fantasy X story, etc. Does it make sense that somehow these same characters keep getting killed over and over again, even though they have no memory of it from story or campaign to story or campaign and there's no real resurrection magic in this setting? Dude, lighten up, it's just a pop culture joke.

UPDATE: Did a slightly student Velma. Zelda. Whatever. Did you know that the Scooby gang was based on the Dobie Gillis show, where Velma's prototype was named Zelda?

Vecna slightly reimagined

Watched a lore video about Vecna recently. Most of it I knew because I've been a gamer for a long time, but I'd never really attempted to pull his story together the same way older Warhammer stuff pulled together the (kind of similar) lore about Nagash.

I do, however, feel like visually Vecna hasn't always been super visually interesting. I've been more and more enamored recently with the idea of liches and wights with the remnants of beards hanging from their skeletal faces, which is a cool but still kind of unusual. Give him an eye patch instead of just a blank skeletal socket, and a pirate hook instead of just a missing boney hand, and he's really kind of a unique looking character all of a sudden.