AI Panickans will never lear

Here's an interesting article: https://aicentral.substack.com/p/verified-human

And here's another: https://sigmagame.substack.com/p/why-deltas-hate-ai

And here's one of my AI generated character portraits for Dominic Clevenger, using a Hero Forge model that I made as a reference. I'll make another post sometime later showing all of the variants. Clearly I'm not afraid of using AI. I have used it to generate images of ... OK quality for my campaign setting. I've used it to help generate first (poor) drafts of fiction text. I haven't even gotten around to really seeing if they're sufficiently decent to be used as a basis for editing it into something workable, or if I should just ignore what it generated and write it the old-fashioned way. I'm not one of those AI panickans who is terrified that AI will make me obsolete. My job is unlikely to be successfully rendered obsolete by AI, and while AI can be a shortcut to some of my hobby endeavors, it's not likely to be a suitable replacement for a person there either, except in limited manner, like I can get mediocre images to use on my blog posts and in my pdfs. I could possibly get a passable book cover from AI. With a lot of effort. The propaganda that AI is going to replace people's jobs really only applies if your job is a make-work busy work job that... honestly, probably doesn't need to be done at all. There's a lot of those. SWFs hardest hit. 

To get any good results out of AI, you still need a lot of human shepherding. Those who are capable in their fields will inevitably find that AI can be a useful shortcut and time-saver, but that it won't literally replace their need to manually intervene in the results. Those who are fearful of all of the propaganda about AI coming for their jobs will—mostly—discover that propaganda is just propaganda, I'd guess. They're either adapt what or how they work a bit, or the whole thing will fizzle anyway. 

Because I also read Ed Zitron. Here's one example: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/ The AI bubble is just like every other bubble; a lot of hype, a lot of shady claims by shady people, leading to a lot of transfer of money to said shady people, leading to an inevitable failure to be able to deliver on the shady promises. AI isn't completely a scam, of course. It can do a lot of pretty cool things. But I'm pretty skeptical about a lot of the narratives that we're being fed about it at the same time. 

Anyway, the main point of all of this is that I find the AI panickans at places like reddit and ENWorld extremely tiresome. Of course, people at those places are tiresome about almost everything that they say, do, believe, claim, and worry about. But their visceral reactions anytime the trigger word AI is posted in any context is becoming a particular pet peeve of mine. AI Slop, which usually accompanies AI, isn't any worse than human-created slop, of which there's way too much. I'd honestly rather read an AI slop replica of some old-fashioned pulp stories than human-created woke garbage. Hollywood in particular has been banging the "AI is scary" drum for a few years. But Hollywood produces tons of slop that people don't like, and their livelihood is directly threatened by AI democratizing the ability of normal people to get past their gatekeepers and produce content that competes directly with them. Average writers  of all kinds of slop, which sells as ebooks on Amazon are also worried... but that's because fundamentally their business model is to try and monetize slop, and AI slop is faster, more prolific, and unlikely to really be much worse than what they're producing, causing them to inevitably get lost in the crowd. 

I recently read the following passage, which I think sums up my perspective on AI. It's about AI being used to write fiction, but it really applies to almost any usage of AI:

Writing fiction isn't like riding a bicycle. You don't just figure it out once and coast forever. It's more like learning to play piano, where your first attempts produce noise instead of music, and only through deliberate practice do you develop the skills to create something worth hearing. This reality becomes even more important when you're working with AI. You can't edit what you don't understand. You can't guide AI toward quality output if you don't know what quality looks like. You can't maintain consistency across a novel if you don't grasp the fundamental elements that need to remain consistent. The writers producing AI slop aren't failing because they chose the wrong tool—they're failing because they never learned their craft. The writers succeeding with AI assistance aren't lucky—they're skilled enough to make informed creative decisions regardless of their tools.

Ripping off the mask

Not shocking. But this Breitbart article is still interesting. I'm copying and pasting most of the text.

Given their voluminous schedule of speaking engagements and media appearances, politicians often suffer slips of the tongue, though most are of little consequence.

But while ordinary gaffes are daily occurrences, witnessing a lawmaker commit an infamous Kinsley Gaffe is extraordinarily rare. The term, coined by political journalist Michael Kinsley, refers to when a politician accidentally tells the truth, specifically one they are not supposed to say publicly. Unlike a simple slip of the tongue, it’s an inadvertent and major reveal of a politician’s genuine thoughts, or an admission of their party’s undisclosed positions or motivations.

Such was the case in 2024 when Democrat Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut appeared on MSNBC and committed a classic Kinsley Gaffe while responding to a question about the status of his party’s longstanding push for illegal alien amnesty. “Well, I mean, Chris, that’s been a failed play for 20 years. So you are right that that has been the Democratic strategy for 30 years, maybe, and it has failed to deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country.”

Inasmuch as the senator attempted to euphemize “illegal aliens” as “undocumented Americans,” the message was loud and clear; those are the people his party cares most about.

The clip resurfaced recently in the context of the ongoing debate over Department of Homeland Security funding, and while it justifiably sparked conservative outrage, Sen. Murphy’s disclosure shouldn’t be surprising given the Democrat’s decades-long advocacy on behalf of illegal aliens.

Their opposition to enforcement and support of illegal aliens is well documented and extensive. While hundreds of immigration-related bills have come and gone, a few highlight the Left’s consistent advocacy of illegal aliens over time. In 2005, the Sensenbrenner bill sought to criminalize unlawful presence as a felony. It was opposed by 82 percent of House Democrats, who argued it would “criminalize” millions and militarize the border without offering a legal path forward. In 2013-2014, Democrats opposed the Gang of 8 bill. Even though it included a path to citizenship, the party rejected House Republican efforts to add enforcement elements to it. And in 2023, Democrats opposed the Secure the Border Act, criticizing it for wasting billions on a border wall, ending certain parole programs, and limiting asylum grounds, calling it an “ineffective” strategy that ignored broader reform (amnesty).

At the state and local levels in mostly blue areas, Democrats have demonstrated their affinity for illegal aliens even more robustly over many years. Sanctuary policies now exist in 1,003 jurisdictions; 19 states and the District of Columbia issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens; and 20 states grant them in-state tuition subsidies. The net result is that 18.6 million illegal aliens now reside in the U.S., costing taxpayers $151 billion, clear evidence of the accuracy in Senator Murphy’s admission that his party elevates the interests of illegal aliens over Americans.

Senator Murphy unwittingly revealed who the Democrats prioritize, but he stopped short of revealing why. No matter; others have. In 2009, Eliseo Medina, Secretary-Treasurer of the far-left Service Employees International Union (and an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America) unabashedly stated, “We can create a governing coalition for the long term … if we can get immigrants on a path to citizenship, we can create a governing coalition for the long term that will allow us to win on all the issues that we care about.”

Medina was well connected to the Obama White House as a surrogate voice pushing “immigration reform” (amnesty) yet not a single Democrat at the time objected to his audacious statement, likely because most agreed with his comments suggesting that illegal immigration serves their electoral needs.

That is, of course, why Democrats have rallied in opposition to today’s SAVE Act (H.R.22) which imposes stronger identification requirements that would prevent illegal aliens from voting.

Based on the Left’s words and actions over many years, it’s clear that mass migration is their tactic to incubate future voters and solidify party dominance for all perpetuity. This explains why Senator Murphy wants to “deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country.”

To be fair though, others also corrupt immigration for their narrow self-interests. Industry favors mass immigration to replace American workers and suppress wages; Third World nations rely on porous borders as a safety valve to export citizens they cannot support or do not want; churches, charities, and NGOs depend on flows of migrants to fuel their virtue-signaling and fundraising initiatives; socialists, communists, and anarchists promote mass migration as means to achieve a disorderly, non-consensual make-over of the U.S.

In the end, Senator Murphy shouldn’t fret too much about having committed that Kinsley Gaffe. Sure, he spilled the beans by revealing that Democrats favor the interests of illegal aliens over Americans. And sure, he violated his party’s Sacred Veil of Secrecy that cloaks their true immigration motives, but it really was no big deal because here’s the thing:

Americans have known it all along.

Renwick Bennett

I created a Hero Forge character for one of my NPCs, but I decided to see if Grok could make a better image of him based on my Hero Forge original. Here's a bit of the process...

This is the original. My Hero Forge model with an AI generated background The AI didn't do anything to make the model more realistic yet.

These three were attempts by me to get it more realistic. They... kinda worked, but Grok was very conservative in terms of making changes to my original model.

I finally convinced it to be a little bit more daring and make some more substantive changes, and I got these two versions.

For some reason, it turned the pouch into a pocket, but that's OK I also got the face a little bit more exaggerated and more like the original in terms of tone.

Then I asked for a few other changes, including adding the pouch that he was holding back again and having him put his foot up on the chest. But for some reason, it switched which side everything was on.

I asked it to switch sides again, and got these two nearly identical versions. The lighting is just a little bit different, but hardly enough to bother with.

Anyway, that's Renwick Bennett, a crime lord in Barrowmere and a character that the PCs would interact with in the first phase of a DARKNESS IN THE HILL COUNTRY campaign; the intro that precedes the 5x5 Fronts. 

I'm not actually 100% sure that the iterations really even improved the image, to be honest with you. Maybe. The background certainly looks good. I'll do similar things for both my iconic characters, and some other important NPCs.

Old Night name changes

I'm seriously considering renaming the Hill Country. I have a Northumbria and a Southumbria on either side of the Umber river. What if I change Northumbria to North Humberland and Southumbria to South Humberland, and the entire Hill Country as Humberland? I'll think about it, but I probably will go for it.

The image is a grok generated image of Torkertown, a fictional town in the public domain that's part of the Solomon Kane mythos. It's a cool name, and it's public domain. Why not go for it?

Combat as...

From a post at ENWorld, of all places. ENWorld is one of the worst places on the internet; worse even than reddit, but there are only so many places to talk about RPGs, and all of them are dysfunctional woke cesspits, or have too little traffic or too tight of a focus to be useful. Sometimes, you have to just deal with it. This post, however, I thought was interesting. I've edited it mostly just for formatting, but occasional word choice to be more explicit in what I think is accurate:

I've seen the "Combat as War vs. Combat as Sport" framework come up a lot in RPG discussions, and I think it's a very useful distinction. It captures two very different priorities:

* Combat as War: asymmetric, player-driven, where preparation, avoidance, and clever tactics matter more than balance.

* Combat as Sport: balanced encounters, challenge ratings, tactical puzzle-solving, and fair challenges designed for engagement within a defined ruleset.

This comparison was frequently used by the OSR community to demonstrate a difference between OSR and 5e D&D approaches to combat. However, I think there's a third mode that often gets left out of the conversation, even though many tables quietly prioritize it: Combat as Theater.

By "Combat as Theater," I mean treating combat primarily as a performance or scene rather than an asymmetric test of survival or a challenging tactical puzzle. The focus shifts toward narrative/character expression, pacing, and dramatic impact. 

In combat as theater combat becomes a vehicle for expression: showing who a character is under pressure, how relationships evolve, or how themes emerge in action. Outcomes are often appreciated not just for success/failure, but for how they feel in the unfolding narrative. Players and GMs emphasize vivid descriptions, cinematic moments, and dramatic choices. Turns and actions are framed to highlight character identity, tone, and story beats.

Where War asks, "How do we win (and survive) this through preparation, tactics, and asymmetry?" and Sport asks, "How do we win this fair encounter efficiently using our abilities?", Theater asks, "How do we make this scene compelling while expressing character and drama?" (These questions may vary but are meant to be more illustrative of general ideas.)

I don't think these three modes are mutually exclusive. In practice, most tables blend them. A group might use sport-like mechanics, war-like caution, and theater-like narration all at once. But explicitly recognizing "theater" as a distinct lens can help explain why different groups sometimes talk past each other when discussing combat expectations. It helps clarify disagreements that aren’t really about rules, but about what combat is for at the table. What is sometimes called "Combat as Sport" may not actually be "Sport." It may actually be "Theater."

I think that this was a pretty insightful and compelling new nugget to the vocabulary of RPG philosophy. Posting it in the forums at ENWorld is searchable, sure, but it's pretty ephemeral. I wanted to give it a place where I can find it again as needed. I do also think that he's correct; tables don't really cluster too often at the actual endpoints, although to some degree, rulesets can and sometimes do. It's also yet another brick in the wall of "philosophical points that the OSR people either don't understand, refuse to understand, or lump together because they don't actually care about the differences." While a lot of interesting RPG philosophy comes from OSR thinkers, it's true that they are kind of blinkered in terms of what they allow themselves to see about playstyles that vary too much from either OSR or at most Classic.

Erasure

As I've added a bunch of stuff to my playlist queue on Pulsar, my Android mp3 player app, I've gone through most of what I have of Erasure. I was unpleasantly surprised to see that some tracks that I have were not on my phone. I didn't realize that, of course, until I was out of town listening to it on the road trip. I'm almost done with the list of Erasure songs... sorta. Certainly now that I'm home and will be listening only on half of my commute, mostly, it could take the rest of the week to get through all the tracks, but shouldn't take any longer than that. 

As I pulled up to the office parking lot this morning, I was about halfway through "Take a Chance on Me" from their "Abba-esque" EP from the early 90s. My mp3s of these were stripped of their album listing, so they, along with much of the more "modern" Erasure tracks are not sorted by album, but rather part of a large big mass of songs that are just playing in order of file name under the album heading of <no album>. I'm almost done with that large bag of tracks, and I do have one more Abba cover in the form of "Voulez-vous". 

Now, I can unironically like Abba (or ABBA, if that's how you're supposed to type it.) They are, admittedly, somewhat cheesy at times, and the late stage disco era of pop that they represent isn't my type of music really. That said, ABBA were incredibly talented song-writers, and while their style may not be my favorite, that doesn't actually diminish how great I think that there songs actually are. In fact, if anything, it focuses on it; I can't snooze through the songs just based on the style being my style; the songs have to be great or I wouldn't have any interest in them. In any case, ABBA hardly needs me to defend them; they're widely highly regarded, and are one of the most commercially successful pop bands of all time. Their influence is undeniable too. I'm an Abba fan, and I don't mind saying so. I'm also an Erasure fan, and I don't mind saying so, although in Erasure's case, it was easier because they do make music that's my style. But this means that I can coast and snooze through the songs; even mediocre ones will sound OK to me, because I do like the style of music. Mostly. When it isn't too flaming gay, which sadly, it occasionally is. Which is why it's a little bit sad to report—admittedly many years or even decades after it matters, I think, that "Abba-esque" is frankly kind of boring, and Erasure didn't do anything to what are generally pretty great tracks to make them interesting. I remember thinking that in the 90s, of course, after I picked it up. "Abba-esque" is the second EP Erasure released (if you don't count the odd "Am I Right?" remix EP/single) after the excellent "Crackers International" in 1988, and it follows fairly closely on the heels of the excellent Chorus album. It's a little weird, honestly, that it feels so hollow. Erasure were a great band, at the peak of their "power" if you will in 1992, and they were covering great songs by one of the greatest pop acts of all time. And yet, the thing just has no energy. 

Maybe I'm wrong. Abba-esque seems to have been popular enough, at least in Britain, and it's reasonably well reviewed by the music press. But I always thought it was oddly disappointing. I mean, heck—Information Society did a much better cover of "Lay All Your Love On Me" just a few years earlier in 1988, and in general, Information Society was not Erasure's equal... although they have a few fun tracks too, and in the mid-90s, at least, they put on a decent live show. And the same year Abba-esque came out, they were putting out Peace and Love, Inc. which sadly was not well-promoted by the label, and which was probably too late to really benefit from the electronic music heyday by that time. Eh, we'll catch them some other time.

I can also say that as much as there are some decent tracks here and there in the post-eponymous album era, that whole group kind of blends together in a vaguely acceptable sludge. Chorus was the last truly great album by Erasure, in my estimation, and they only had occasional moments of brilliance on some tracks here and there in the post-1991 phase. I  should probably queue up the full albums on YouTube or Spotify and give them a fairer chance than I have so far, but I don't anticipate changing my mind on that. 

They're not the only one of my favorite 80s bands that kind of petered out in the early 90s, though. Depeche Mode still had a great album in form of 1990's Violator, but I was disappointed in its direction, and I haven't liked anything that they've done since even as much as I liked even Violator. Playing the Angel and Memento Mori are reasonably bright spots in their subsequent repertoire, but they aren't as good as they were in the 80s. The Pet Show Boys had a few great tracks on Behavior (1990) and Very (1993) was actually quite good, but I kind of lost interest in them too.

Part of that was, no doubt, me and the musical landscape in general. I was no longer a teenager, I was a young married man by 1994, and young father by 1996, and grad student by 1998, and a young professional in a professional career by 2000. I had a lot on my mind other than pop music, and my concerns and what I thought was interesting or insightful had no doubt changed. And the rise of the Seattle Sound, grunge movement, and the general pop culture rejection of the late 80s sound was both very disappointing to me, but probably also had other subconscious impact on what I was listening to. I think the "big names" of the later 80s felt tired to me by then, not edgy and slick like they did in the 80s. This is especially true for Depeche Mode, who rejected the slick electronic sound to become a weird bluesy and noisy 90s band, but I lost interest in all of them, and got more involved in more indie-bands that were treading the same territory, like De/Vision, Mesh, Cosmicity, B! Machine and many others. I think that that indie aesthetic made them more appealing to me than the guys who'd already made it big and were now retreading, or abandoning, neither of which I liked, the sound that I had originally loved them for. 

Some of these bands later did stuff that I really liked. Like I said, Depeche Mode's Playing the Angel and more recently Memento Mori were pretty decent. Not as good as Black Celebration or Music for the Masses or even Violator, but maybe as good as Songs of Faith And Devotion or Ultra. Camouflage's 2003 album Sensor was probably actually their very best, much better even than their brilliant freshman release Voices & Images. Real Life sounded very 90s in Happy, but did a great cover album in 2009, which included a re-recorded "Send Me An Angel" which is also really good (although still not quite as good as the 1989 version.) Red Flag had some good 90s and 00s releases, but their initial offering is still their best. There's something about the dark reverb of the extended mix of "If I Ever" that I just really love, and although mislabeled on my 1989 CD version, it was still present that far back.

What can I say? For whatever reason, when the 80s ended, the 80s music ended too. What remained may have been "80s-like" in some ways, even in my own personal esteem, but it wasn't really truly the exact same thing. Erasure were, sadly, one of the casualties. I still like their early stuff; the same stuff that I liked as a teenager many decades ago, honestly, but otherwise I don't really care anymore. 

Dire "wolves"

Another option of what a dire "wolf" may have looked like. They've got a pretty wolf-like form, but I made them tawny-colored and kind of shaggy compared to a wolf.

I've long had the idea of tawny, shaggy, heavier wolf-like canines. Here's a few "browner" options, where I tried to get it to make them less wolf-like in form. Honestly, though, this is less about actual dire "wolves" from the Rancholabrean fossil record and more about "bone dogs" from the old Dark•Heritage setting, revitalized and reintroduced into Old Night.

Although, ironically, the D&D "dire wolf" would probably fit them fairly well, or something more like the Middle-earth warg or D&D worg, perhaps.

UPDATE: I'll not as an update that just since yesterday when I generated these, grok stopped allowing me to generate more updates and Imagine stuff. I'm not going to be subscribing just to generate a few images here and there.

Over-used RPG buzzwords

I'm not a fan of faddish buzzwords at the best of times, but having them intrude into my hobbies is especially a pet peeve. Here's some of my observed over-used buzzwords.

This is just a minor rant for amusement value. None of this should be taken too seriously. I mean, these buzzwords really are pet peeves of mine, but whatever. Pet peeves, by definition, aren't really important.

• OSR - OK, this first one is a little tongue in cheek. But given that nobody knows what the OSR really is anymore, and there are at least two overlapping yet also conflicting camps on what the definition really refers to, it's actually not a super useful label anymore.
• Cinematic - this one is another one that gets tossed around all the time, but I'm not very clear on what people mean by it. I'm not sure that they are either.
• -punk - this has been a pet peeve of mine for years. Unless it's related to a dystopian worldview and an anti-establishment youth street movement, it's not -punk. Steampunk gets a grudging pass because it's obviously a derivative evolution of cyberpunk, where -punk was actually used correctly. People who think that they're clever talking about hope-punk, or calling Eberron magi-punk do not.
• Liminal - I know that it's a pretty cool word, but c'mon. Horror in hallways and doorways? People use this all of the time to describe horror themes that are just... regular horror themes. It's either over-used now, or it's been under-used for decades. You could say that the original dungeon-crawling activity was liminal horror, and it'd be a mostly correct usage of the term. And yet for decades nobody felt the need to do so. There's really no need to do so now either; nine times out of ten, it's just a signal; "look at me; I use fancy vocabulary to describe regular things."
• Diagetic - what was wrong with in-game and meta, like we used for decades? Was the hobby over-run by a bunch of sound engineers from the movie business who brought their vocabulary with them to replace words that were already in use? More likely, as above, it's a "more intelligent sounding" word, so people like it because they feel like they sound more intelligent by using it.
• TTRPG - I feel like there's no need ninety-nine times out of a hundred to specify the context where an RPG is a TTRPG as opposed to a CRPG or ... I dunno, some other kind of RPG. (LARPG? Bedroom RPG? What other kinds even are there anyway?) Leave the TT off. It's superfluous. And a new, faddish addition to something that worked just fine for decades and still works fine. In fact, the more people play online, the less accurate rather than more accurate it becomes.

It's a Jeep thing...

I've long been a fan of Jeeps. Even as a kid, I loved the old CJ Jeeps, which were still being made up until 1986; four decades of them! The CJ-7s were relatively modern compared to the ones from the 40s, of course. All of these years, I've always kind of wanted a Jeep, but never gotten one; it was never a vehicle that it made sense for me to buy, and I still have never owned a car that I thought, hey, this is a fun car that I actually want as opposed to just a cheap and practical car that I need in order to commute and get around. Some day, maybe. Sigh.

Anyway, the shine on Jeeps has worn off on me. I was talking to a couple of people at church on Sunday about Jeeps, and I realized that I simply don't even want one anymore. They were both former Jeep owners and one was clearly a Jeep cultist. They were talking about the "ducking" practice, which I said I thought was really dumb and is a great example of how the brand has lost its way. The reason I always liked Jeeps is because it had a rugged outdoorsy masculine vibe to it. When they started embracing soccer mommification and Barbie Jeeps for daddy's little princess, they diluted the main appeal of the Jeeps in the first place. And yes, the sale figures back me up. From a peak of over 240k units moved in 2018, they fell to about 151k in 2024. There's a slight uptick in 2025, but something happened to the Jeep brand. And yes, the marketing focused on weird cult rituals like "ducking" which undercuts the whole Jeep thing and appeals to soccer moms, bratty princesses, and weird cultists who do dumb things just to be different; the dumber the better. The ducks are now a key part of Jeep's marketing strategy. It's weird. And when I said I thought it was weird, I got the rote "It's a Jeep thing, you wouldn't understand." Actually, I think I understand quite well. People like behaviors that are in effect "positional goods". Why would I not understand that? I'm fairly intelligent, and my initial training before getting into something more practical is in economics as an academic discipline. It's a cult signal, essentially. I understand it exactly. Which is exactly why I'm not impressed by it.

Sure, sure, other problems have plagued the brand, and I can't discount those. Price has gone to an average of ~$60k for a Jeep, which is insane. Meanwhile, the always crappy reputation of quality has taken even more of a beating, and Ford finally (I have no idea why they didn't do this years ago) launched a genuine competitor in the form of the Bronco, and even Toyota got back into the game with a new Land Cruiser, and the 4runner is always a possibility. A few others have entered the competitive landscape, although I'd love to see even more players, honestly. I'd love to see Nissan come out with a revamped Xterra, for instance.

In any case, I think that my love of Jeeps has turned into a love of "jeeps" lowercase, and that I'd really prefer something else altogether anymore rather than an actual modern Jeep. The real interesting, although even more unaffordable than a Jeep, movement is in restomods, and three vehicles in particular get a lot of attention there; old Dodge Power Wagons, old Ford Bronco Is, and old International Harvester Scouts. These can cost as much as a house, which is obviously too much, but they're way cooler than even the best Jeep Rubicon.

On another note, I recently was able to acquire for a decent price a used copy of the ten book D&D Iconics collection of novels that came out in the early 00s. While I certainly don't expect them to be great, reviews on Goodreads are that they're actually relatively fun. And the relatively more negative reviews talked about stupid stuff, like "implicit sexism" demonstrated, according to the review author, by Regdar noticing a some village girl looks good from behind. Ooookay. I think I'm going to like these more than I expected if that's the case. We'll see. I've already started the first one, and they're slim little books like the kind published in the 60s and 70s before bigger fantasy became the norm. Should be quick and easy reads, if the quality holds up.

Which it may not. Although all credited to the same author, T. H. Lain, that's not a real person; it's a pen name that applied to at least nine different authors. Only the first and last books in the ten book "series", which I use kind of loosely, were written by the same author; every other book was a different author. 

I'm exhausted...

Everyone at work is running around with their hair on fire. It's exhausting. To make matters worse, the same thing is going on at home right now. And even church is adding to the flame. It's been this way for weeks, at least. More accurately it's approaching months status. I'm just exhausted. No wonder my reading is so down this year. Four books so far, and we're more than halfway through March. Last year by this time, I'd read at least twenty or thirty, I think (I must have to have topped one hundred in the year. If not technically, then by smoothing out the averages.)

I can't keep up this pace for long. 

Bad news; sometimes when I'm really stressed and frustrated, I end up becoming more argumentative in "real life." I'm trying to keep it under wraps as best I can, but sometimes I get in more stupid arguments online that I'd otherwise ignore when I'm in a bad mood.

Luckily, my wife stepped in and stayed on the line with one of our issues while I was doing work stuff and couldn't spend all that time on my phone. At least that will be one issue checked off.

UPDATE: My wife's been on the phone for over three hours, I think. It wasn't quite as easy as she assumed it'd be. But, she had the time to do that and I didn't. We'll see how she feels about stepping in to do it after I get back. I think she already thinks that I somehow could have done it on the weekend or the evening... y'know, after they were closed. I love her, but she doesn't always understand how things work because she usually doesn't do them, so in her mind it's much simpler than it actually is. UPDATE ADD-ON: She got it done. She was on the phone for five hours. She said I could have done that on evenings or weekends, but that's not true. They aren't open evenings or weekends, and until this morning, we didn't know that that's what would need to be done. I'm glad that that's done, but the way she's acting like she came in and did something that I couldn't do because I'm just not persistent enough rather than because I don't have time to do it honestly makes me even more tired. Sigh.

UPDATE 2: While I was in a meeting and the agenda wandered for a moment from my stuff, I got my crappy profile pic from LinkedIn, uploaded it to Grok and told it to make me a resume photo out of it. First it tried to change my greenish hazel eyes to brown, and I said that it was wrong and it gave me Fremen blue eyes. Luckily, I just resized it so you couldn't really tell and reuploaded it on LinkedIn in low resolution. It mostly looks like a good picture of me after all. I hate LinkedIn. It's the worst of the social medias, but it's also the one that I don't feel like I can get rid of as long as I'm working and potentially will be looking for another job again someday. Ugh. 

Genetic history

So... I have a blog that I usually forget about all about archaeology, history and archaeogenetics. Sadly, my own genetic profile didn't give me my haplogroup, and I'd have to have paid quite a bit extra to get my ancient genetic contribution, so I have to guess. But here's some graphs.

This first one is a simplified Mesolithic Europe. The yellow part is where Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers were found, the green hatching is the spread of farming... which in Europe came later when the EEF ancestry, or Anatolian Neolithic farmers, as they are labeled here, started to spread through Europe. There aren't any yet, except some small contributions in the Balkans and north of the Black Sea.

The classic WHG ancestry is here called the Oberkassel cluster, or also the Villabruna cluster. This is the source of "native" Mesolithic people, and their ancestors come from further East, it is believed, in the Paleolithic. There were actually other Paoleolithic peoples here earlier, in two clusters, the Fournal and Věstonice clusters, who were themselves distantly related. The last lingering impact of that population is shown in the map below as the Goyet Q2 ancestry (the orange), also known as El Mirón, or the Fournal Cluster. Ancient paleolithic populations like the Solutreans or Aurignacian Cro-Magnon populations, but they are essentially gone now, with only trace amounts in the DNA of modern Europeans. Even in the Mesolithic, nobody has more than half of this ancestry of those plotted here.

The blue, then, is the WHG Mesolithic population, which as the Paleolithic turned into the Mesolithic, they kind of took over. Much hay is made by diversitarians of the apparent lack of light-skinned alelles in the WHG population; they appear to have been relatively dark-skinned and blue-eyed, unlike any population today. The modern populations that have the highest concentration of their ancestry, however, are the whitest people in the world; from Scandinavia and the Baltic shore. I kind of like the idea of a population of blue-eyed, but slightly brown-skinned people with brown hair that look like a long lost ancestor of modern white people without being really white people themselves, but I'm a little skeptical of the narrative. Some bad faith actors have seized upon the flimsiest of evidence to suggest that they were as dark as Africans, in an attempt to delegitimize the claims of Europeans to their own ancestral lands. 

The red is the Eastern Hunter Gatherer ancestry, which probably shouldn't be seen so much as a separate ancestry, but as a cline of sorts, separated by distance, but ultimate from the same origin. T EHG ancestry came to central and western Europe early in mixed form in the Scandinavian Hunter-gatherers, and later as a large component of the Western Steppe Herder ancestry, i.e. with the Indo-Europeanization of Europe. Of course, prior to that, the Neolithic Revolution saw the spread of a vast population of farmers out of Anatolia through the Balkans in two trajectories; one that went northwards and one that went westwards and then much later, came back east bringing WHG genetics with it that were otherwise mostly missing from the Balkans and Central/Eastern Europe. 

This later map is the end of the Mesolithic and start of the Neolithic. The Green Cross-hatching is, again, where EEF populations essentially took over. Most of the population is considerably more mixed, as you can see, and the Goyet Q2 cluster is mostly bred out. Samples from within the green cross-hatch would be mostly green, with a relatively small sliver of blue. But, as you can see, the more western portion of the Neolithic area always had a fair bit of blue, and there was a resurgence of sorts of "blue" ancestry which moved eastwards. We tend to see the Neolithic as a big wave, but in reality, there were always much smaller waves as a closely related people mostly replaced another; we now have high enough resolution to recognize the waves that came with the Funnelbeaker culture, for instance which replaced the Linear Pottery Culture before it, or the next wave that came with the Globular Amphora in the eve of the Indo-Europeanization of western and Central Europe as the earliest Corded Ware burst out of the eastern forest steppes across the entire continent. 

I strongly suspect that the history of Europe... and probably everywhere else too... has much more population replacement and waves of migration than we suspect. It does take high enough resolution to see it, though; not every wave of new population is genetically super distinct from the one that it's primarily replacing. This is why the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon migrations into Britain were both invisible to genetics until higher resolution sampling became available; they were simply too similar to the earlier Bell Beaker migration to show up. Now we can tell that they were a significant population movement, but from a low resolution genetic profile, the invaders were very similar to the people already there, so the movement wasn't transparent. 

Of course, when the Bell Beakers showed up, that was easier to see. They were more significantly different than the Neolithic megalith builders that they mostly replaced, so the population movement was easier to see. 

This PCA also shows the clusters of the older groups, and how far apart they are. Interesting stuff.

Its discouraging to think of all of these genetic clusters that, as far as we can tell, just completely disappeared. Whomever the original Paleolithic people of Europe would have been, it looks like their genetics were completely swamped or replaced; at most there is a small percentage of El Mirón ancestry in the Basques, for instance. Heck, even the WHG Villabruna and Oberkassel clusters are pretty dilute in modern Europeans. I think it'd be fascinating if there were a population that resembled them and were closely genetically affiliated with them still, like the Sardinians are to the original EEF people, for instance. Especially as they appear to have likely been visually fairly distinct. 

As a purely cosmetic aside, my original SWTOR character, Graggory is deliberately designed on similar principles; fairly dark skin, brown (but not dark/black hair) and blue eyes. At the time, my thought was more along the old sci-fi chestnut of the "spacer's tan" but more and more I was drawn to the idea of him being an example of the alleged WHF phenotype. 

American "cheetah" and dire "wolves"

Found on Deviant Art; some images. It's worth pointing out that the American "cheetah". Miracinonyx is not, actually very closely related to the true cheetah, Acinonyx, but is instead most closely related to the mountain lion, Puma concolor. It probably resembled the true cheetah a great deal, at least in terms of morphology, but not necessarily in terms of coloration or soft tissue, which is where many people get it completely wrong when restoring it. This is a nice picture, but still too "cheetah-like" in terms of facial markings and spots. I've seen restorations that are more mountain lion-like in coloration, and I think that's a better interpretation. Not to say that it had the same coat as a mountain lion; after all, tigers, lions, jaguars and leopards are all closely related and don't have the same outer tissue superficial resemblance at all, really, but there's no reason to assume that they looked like cheetahs, especially with the unique spotting that they have compared to other cats, or with the unique "tear tracks" that cheetahs have. 

I do think that it's extremely inconvenient that we don't see these guys anymore. All of our missing megafauna is fascinating to me, and I strongly suspect, as I mentioned yesterday in my Appalachian jaguar post, that the whole narrative of the Quaternary extinction event is largely false, and many, if not most of those megafaunal animals survived into the modern age, and some of them were even seen by the earliest Americans. (Not; Injuns are not Americans, and were very specifically excluded in the Preamble to the Constitution. The Americans were the descendants of European colonists, primarily British.)

The dire "wolf" is also not a wolf, as was previously assumed, so restoring it as wolf-like may not be very correct. It is a member of the Canina tribe, so it's not closely related to the South American weird guys, or to the foxes, but within Canina, it is the most divergent. It is less closely related to wolves than modern jackals are, or African painted dogs or the Indian dhole, etc. It would be more likely to be accurate to restore like like African hunting dogs than like wolves, although I've never seen anyone do that before. But I have seen a start of restoring them as not wolf-like, which is really fascinating to me. I love the idea that they were probably unique with a unique visual cue that you could spot right away if you saw one.

Same artist as above.

In theory, although in practice this doesn't much matter, the Old Night setting has a North American Pleistocene fauna, with anything from the Old World present as needed... but honestly, are they needed?

North America had its own horses. Many Injun tribes claim to have had their horses for many generations longer than Spanish had released them, and say that the narrative that they became expert light cavalry and riders in just a couple of generations by trial and error is, of course, absurd. They were good horsemen because they'd always had horses.

True, Injuns say a lot of things that are historically suspect. But this one I think is likely. Sadly, we'll never really know, because the US cavalry killed most of their horses, and any that they have now are ones that they've acquired more recently. DNA tests will, therefore, give false positives (or at least possible false positives) in favor of the Narrative, not the Injun story.

America also had camels. And long-legged lamas. And, as noted, "cheetahs". The Columbian mammoth is more closely related to the Asian elephant than the African elephant is. If it had survived to be seem by modern eyes, we'd simply call it the American elephant. That same is true for the wooly mammoth further north. We had stag-mooses. Shrub-oxen. More varieties of pronghorns. Sabertooths. Scimitar-tooths. American "lion" (also not a real lion, spoiler alert.) The short-faced bear. And, of course, all of the same animals that we do know because they're still here; the moose, the elk, the grizzly, the mountain lion, the beaver, the antelope, the buffalo, etc. 

Most of those have an old-world analog, so I'm not sure that it makes much sense to split hairs and say, "No, no, it's not a dromedary camel, Camelus dromedarius, it's the Camelops hesternus, the Western camel. What's the difference, you say? Well, not much. We're not sure if the western camel had a hump, it otherwise was about the same as a dromedary."

Well, then why distinguish them at all? That's my dilemma. The North American megafauna is specifically interesting to me, but there's no reason to not just make it be the same as old world.

Appalachian jaguars

During the Pleistocene, jaguars were common throughout the entire Americas, and had a size cline, i.e., in the northernmost and southernmost parts of their range, they were the largest. They no longer live in that part of their range at all, being confined to the middle section: central America up to northern Mexico and (apparently) a bit into Arizona and the rest of the southwest, and South America down to the end of the jungle regions, where the continent narrows at about the latitude of the Arica bend (also known as the Arica Elbow, or the Bolivian orocline.) However, as with most "Pleistocene extinctions", that's kind of a just-so story based on incompleteness in the fossil record, and there are plenty of first hand accounts that suggest that it's not true. Thomas Ashe, a British explorer, wrote an account of a voyage of exploration and surveying he made in the Carolinas in the early 1680s, and John Lawson, an English surveyor who wrote an account of his trip in the very earliest 1700s of the Carolinas, both of whom have first hand accounts of "tygers" which were very different animals—and they make a point of saying so—than the "panthers." The tygers were occasionally found deep in the swamps and woodlands, but are most known from beyond the western crest of the Appalachians, although they were known to roam on the eastern side as well. 

The panthers are interpreted as Puma concolor, i.e., the current mountain lion or puma, which still is seen in the Carolinas, even though "officially" they're extinct in that region. The larger, more aggressive and much less secretive tygers are interpreted as Appalachian jaguars. 

They probably were still lingering well into the late 1800s; French polymath Constantine Rafinesque claims to have seen them, and their skins up on the walls of barns, in what is today the Midwestern states west of the Appalachians, from Kentucky through Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin.

But like I said, official accounts of extinction are kind of suspect. In theory, there are no mountain lions in the eastern United States, but I know of many people who claim to have seen them, seen them on game cameras, and surveillance cameras, etc. throughout much of the Carolinas and other parts of the east that are not heavily populated. I don't think that they're extinct, I think that they're merely rare and very secretive. Likewise, I think most of the Pleistocene megafauna probably survived the 10,000 year or so ago extinction event in spite of what "science" tells us. Indians in the 1600 and 1700s routinely mentioned knowing of some kind of "elephants"; mastodons or Columbian mammoths or both, and of having their own curly-haired ponies that were not recently acquired Spanish mustangs, etc. So why not jaguars in America?

Jaguar itself, as a word, is of course almost certainly of a South American Injun origin, probably Tupi, which is spoken in Brazil and Paraguay and is closely related to the Guarani language, which I heard some of when I was in Argentina. Of course, nobody in North America would have called a jaguar by any word that sounded like that. I'm not aware that any North American Injun word for the cat was preserved by Ashe or Lawson, but of course, they used the word "tyger" to describe them, which is probably what we'd have called them had they lived here long enough and in enough numbers to have not become lost and forgotten as part of our original faunal assemblage. 

Man, I'm always saddened and disappointed by all of the animals that used to live here that we just missed seeing. Probably by less than "SCIENCE!" tells us that we just missed them by. There's just way too much evidence that they lingered much longer than "science!" is will to admit. 

What if nukes... are a hoax?!

From Vox Day's post today.

I’m not so sure, despite my own enthusiasm for game theory. Consider this analysis of the Sutton Analogy in the context of the 2026 Gulf War, as presented in fictional form in his excellent 1968 novel The Programmed Man. This is just a thought experiment, but [...] I thought it might be interesting to walk through the idea that what we’re observing in the Gulf isn’t just a war and an economic crisis, but perhaps the end of a long-running geopolitical theater piece.

For eighty years, the post-WWII order has rested on a foundation that no party with knowledge of its true nature has had sufficient incentive to expose. Nuclear deterrence has served every major power simultaneously: it caps conventional conflicts before they become existential or excessively expensive, it justifies astronomical defense budgets, and it provides smaller states with a diplomatic weight they could never achieve through conventional military development alone. The arrangement has been self-reinforcing precisely because the costs of exposure fall on everyone inside the club equally, regardless of their nominal alignments. American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, and Pakistani leadership have all had stronger reasons to maintain the narrative than to shatter it.

Iran represents the first state in the nuclear era with both the strategic motivation and the ideological disposition to force an exposure, if indeed there is anything to be exposed. Unlike every previous threshold state, Iran has not sought entry to the club on the club’s terms. Its nuclear program has functioned less as a weapons development effort than as a prolonged demonstration that the red lines drawn around it are not enforced because they cannot be enforced. Thirty years of imminent-breakout assessments with no breakout, combined with increasingly direct conventional confrontation with Israel, have been a controlled experiment in how much pressure the system can absorb before its internal contradictions become visible to everyone.

Israel’s behavior during the current conflict is the most diagnostically significant element. A state genuinely possessing the Samson Option, facing simultaneous existential pressure from Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and daily Iranian ballistic salvos, would present its adversaries with a credible escalation threshold. Instead, each escalation has been met with a carefully bounded conventional response, and the publicly articulated doctrine has remained entirely rhetorical. Whether this reflects Israeli restraint or Israeli limitation is precisely the question Iran has been engineering conditions to answer. Every round of escalation that Israel absorbs and responds to conventionally narrows the range of explanations available to outside observers.

Does anyone really believe that Israel, which is hardly known for its self-restraint, isn’t willing to use even small tactical devices in order to “stop the Iranian nuclear threat” for fear of global public opinion?

Russia’s notably tepid support for Iran throughout this period would appear to indicate a different calculation. Moscow benefits from US distraction, Gulf instability, and eventual US retreat from the region, but benefits far more from the continued credibility of nuclear deterrence, which underpins its entire strategic position in Europe and its implicit claim to great power status. A Russia stripped of nuclear credibility is a large conventional army with second-tier economy. Putin understands this arithmetic clearly. Russian support for Iran therefore stops consistently at the point where Iranian pressure might force the exposure scenario, a boundary that has held even as Russian-American relations have deteriorated to their lowest point since the Cold War.

And China’s behavior is arguably the hardest to explain. Its manufacturing power dwarfs that of Russia and the USA combined, yet it is content to maintain a relatively small nuclear arsenal that is a fraction of the other two global powers, and instead of catching up and surpassing them, focuses on manufacturing large quantities of conventional weapons.

The United States and its regional partners are caught in an increasingly narrow corridor. Allowing Iranian conventional dominance to consolidate visibly undermines the credibility of American security guarantees, but forcing a confrontation that reaches the declared nuclear threshold of any party risks the exposure that the entire architecture exists to prevent. Which threshold, by the way, includes sinking a US aircraft carrier.

The longer the current conflict continues without a decisive conventional resolution, the more the behavior of all parties makes the most sense under the charade hypothesis. What looks like strategic incoherence from the rational actor perspective, the superpower that won’t win, the nuclear state that won’t escalate, the revolutionary regime that won’t build the weapon it has spent thirty years almost building, resolves into a coherent picture once you accept that all of them are navigating around the same unspeakable fact that no one, after eighty years of the historical narrative, would ever even begin to imagine, let alone believe.

It may be that Iran’s true objectives do not end with the defeat of Israel and the withdrawal of American forces from the Gulf. Iran’s primary objective may be to bring about the end of the entire post-WWII global order, which might explain the increasing desperation with which the USA is calling for a ceasefire.

Lights

Seen on a thread about ShadowDark, where someone was asking about hanging a lantern on your backpack or belt to keep your hands free. Interesting stuff, if you haven't ever thought of it before.

First, let me acknowledge that the goal with Shadowdark is not realism. So, do what you want at your table. Also .. magic! So ...

But then let me say that I have done a fair amount of medieval re-enactment and tried out candles, oil lamps, lanterns, torches etc.

Attaching a lit torch to your belt or pack is obviously going to set you on fire. The big advantage of torches, assuming they are well made using pitch or resin soaked rope or cloth heads and water-soaked wood or even metal shafts - they are quite difficult to put out. It would take extreme winds or quite a lot of water to do so. Dropping them probably won't extinguish them unless it's into water, for example. However, they tend to be a bit nasty as they will set things on fire quite readily so you need to be careful around other people or tents or thatched roofs or curtains, they drip hot or even flaming blobs, they are stinky and smoky. If you are carrying other torches it's real easy to accidentally light all of them at once with some flaming droplets from the lit one in a moment of inattention. They tend to only stay lit and bright for 15-30 minutes and at the high end you are talking about a big, fat head on the thing loaded with pitch or such (quite a beast of a thing to wrangle).

Candles. Small, light, flexible in size and burn times can be very long (like, all night is possible). Very subject to wind and a single drop of water will extinguish them. They really only cast light to a modest distance, although, once you are well dark adapted if you don't look into the flame you can probably see OK out to Near with one. Fairly safe if you keep it away from flammables. Hard to wander around with a naked candle without extinguishing it, accidentally settings somebody's hair on fire or whatever. The tall thin ones which tend to be brightest also go out easiest and burn fastest and drip wax.

Candle lanterns. Basically, a candle in a cage shielded by velum, parchment, rawhide or something translucent. The translucent materials available tend to cut down on light from the candle somewhat. Could have a reflector side for directional light which helps preserve dark adaptation for the user and make up some of the difference in light lost to the translucent sides. Very diffuse light. Pretty robust against wind, rain etc. If you drop it though, 95% chance it will go out. Candle lanterns solve most of the practical issues of wandering around with a light source in my view. That said, if you strap one to your belt it will still burn you, it will tilt the candle and it'll burn unevenly, drown the wick and go out, spill hot wax on your legs etc. Same with attaching it to your pack - you really need to hand-hold these things - usually hanging from a cord, chain or ring - steadying it in front of you at almost arms length as you move. It's a bit of equipment that needs to be 'operated and managed' - they are not like a LED headlamp or something that you can just turn on and let it do its thing.

Oil lamps. Getting oil that burns well / cleanly is harder than you think. Even the medieval oils that burn quite robustly tend to create a lot of black soot - and burn hot. This makes them pretty hard to get working in a medieval lantern - the translucent shell quickly turns black and/or the whole thing will catch fire. Managing air-flow is an issue. And traditional oil lamps tended to just rest a wick in a pot or tray of oil - so the whole thing can fall apart or the wick can easily fall into the oil and drown if not handled carefully. In practice, these work fairly well when carried carefully by hand as open lamps - if you can get an oil that burns well like whale oil. Really though they are at their best when stationary. The oil itself isn't as much of a fire risk as fantasy makes out - if you throw nut oil on somebody and try to light it, yeah .. that's not likely. Same even if you spill it. It needs the wick to stand much chance of burning. Medieval lamp oil is more like cooking oil than gasoline.

I think there is a very important reason that we don't really see portable glass oil lanterns everywhere until the 1800s. Kerosene (or similar) with brass or tin pressure vessels, widespread availability of glass, adjustable flat wicks, ventilation schemes etc. This is also when we start to see stuff like lamps rather than candles on miner's hats/helmets. It's a whole other level of technology. These lanterns became very bright, reliable in a wide range of conditions and relatively safe.

A niche quirk of history is the renaissance lantern shield. However, as you can read in the wikipedia entry these were mainly a gimmick intended to put an opponent at disadvantage in a duel, not for general illumination.

So, if we're trying to be somewhat consistent with medieval technology .. the practical reality is that light sources need to be managed and operated by somebody who is carefully hand-holding them.

I don't really care about ShadowDark that much, because it's especially focused on dungeon crawling, which I dislike. But who cares? This is a good summary of an issue that applies in any fantasy setting. People don't really understand about oil too. It's not nearly as flammable as most people treat it as. Without a wick, you can't set it on fire at all, and with a wick, you get a tiny, smoky flame, not a gigantic conflagration.

Environmental hazards

I'm the kind of guy who likes the outdoors a lot. I enjoy road trips. I enjoy hiking and camping. I love the wilderness, especially the wilderness of the American west and southwest; the Rockies and the deserts, in particular. I've been hiking in multiple spots in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, Texas, and Utah, as well as some in Arizona, California and Washington. And of course I've also been hiking in North and South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan and elsewhere in the east or Midwest as well. I could always do more. Especially in Wyoming, which is my favorite of all of those locations, but Colorado, Montana, Utah and Idaho are not at all far behind, and some of them are pleasantly under-rated by the outdoor club, so you can get pretty good solitude out in the wilderness. Which is, along with the awe-inspiring scenery, exactly the reason to do it, of course. 

But one thing that you'll notice if you do this is that it isn't just a boring walk in the park. Wild animals can be legitimately dangerous; big, aggressive guys like moose, buffalo or grizzlies especially, but even a raccoon or squirrel that steals your food overnight can actually create a legitimate crisis if you're unprepared. Weather is similar; your chances of being struck by lightning during a violent storm are greatly increased if you're at high elevation and outside of tree cover. Rain, sleet, hail can get you soaked and cold, and then you're at real risk for hypothermia or other problems. And your food may be ruined too. I thought of this because of our weird weather today. When I left the house this morning at 7:20 AM or so, it was warm; just shy of 70⁰, but dark skies were threatening to change that. Sure enough, within about an hour or so, it was actually darker than before sunrise, pouring rain, and the temperature had dropped 25⁰ to a rather chilly under 45⁰. And I almost came to work in a short-sleeved polo because yesterday had been warm and the morning was warm. Glad I looked at the sky and thought better of it! Now, in the later afternoon, it's become bright and sunny again, but still cool, and the high for the rest of the day is barely going to skim 50⁰ if we're lucky.

I'm not a huge fan of overly complex or involved resource management rules, but I am certainly a fan of creating scenarios where resources actually matter; like what if you get turned around and start to get hungry before you find your destination? What's your plan B to keep yourself fed? What happens if a terrible thunderstorm comes by at night and your Bill the Pony runs away with your food still on his back? Plus, you're now soaking wet and it's 40⁰ and you can't get a fire started because everything else is wet too? What if raccoons steal your food? What if you slip crossing a river, get injured and lose your weapons, or more? What if someone gets giardia and has violent diarrhea for days while traveling? OK, maybe that last one isn't one that I'd be interested in in my fantasy, but the rest are all legitimate things to have to deal with that actually make travel kind of interesting. Plus, there are few things that make the game feel more grounded than having troublesome adventures just trying to get from point A to point B. The adventure isn't a location somewhere else, and the journey to the adventure isn't just a boring commute. The whole thing needs to be the adventure. And even these kind of mundane things—to say nothing of haunts, monsters, or other supernatural or fantastical hazards—emphasize that point.

Erasure

Man, they're getting old. And this is from 2024.

I put a bunch of music that I haven't listened to in a while on my phone's queue in my mp3 player (I refuse to stream music. This is why I need an Android; I need to be able to plug in my microSD card with all my music on it into my phone.) I listened over the last few weeks to several of my 90s and beyond synthpop bands, like Cosmicity, etc. I earlier had put all of my Red Flag on tap. Most recently I finished all of my tracks by the Pet Shop Boys, and moved into Erasure. A few years ago I got all of the "modern" albums (at the time) that I didn't have and added them to my phone, but I'm not even sure that I've listened to them more than once since then. I suspect that I have a bunch of tracks that I don't even care about, but I don't know them well enough to say. I have a more curated list of the tracks from the era when I was more into Erasure, i.e., from the 80s and early 90s. 

I was a big fan of theirs at that time. I kind of saw them as the anti-Depeche Mode; where Depeche were dark and pensive, Erasure were more light and whimsical, offering a different side of the same coin of synthpop music. Not that I used the label at the time; I called it synthesizer New Wave. And that's not exactly true; Erasure certainly had some serious and even somber tracks, but speaking in generalizations, their vibe was very different than that of Depeche Mode's. Yes, in spite of Speak & Spell and Vince Clark's original founding of that band as well. But in the 90s, I kind of lost the plot with Erasure. At some point after their eponymous album released in 1995, I didn't pay attention to them for a while. So, from my perspective, older albums like Cowboy and Loveboat were "modern" albums, by which I mean that they came out during the winter of my discontent with Erasure and I hadn't heard them before. I don't remember how far I got at the time, because the tracks are mostly all mixed without their album tags retained, but I've got a lot to listen to. But I haven't (yet) heard any songs that I didn't already know very well.

I first heard of Erasure when "Chains of Love" hit the radio airwaves in 1988, and I fairly quickly bought The Innocents. It took probably a year or so before I bought the two earlier albums, and I bought Wild! when it was new in late 1989, during my senior year of high school. Chorus came out when I was on my mission, but I saw it in a store on a p-day and bought it, even though I didn't have a CD player and couldn't listen to it until I got home, so I think my release might be a South American release. Not that that matters anymore; I haven't even unpacked my CDs, and rarely listened to any of them for the last ten to fifteen years anyway. Just a small note. I Say I Say I Say came out shortly before I got married, and I think I bought that new too; although I didn't love that one. And, as I said, the eponymous Erasure came out a year later, which I also bought new and which was the last I bought for years.

Some friends of mine and I, who were into the same kinds of music, all agreed that Erasure tended to be really good on every other album. Wonderland was wonderful, and I was surprised to discover later that it had not been a commercial hit for them, since I  always liked it a lot, and found it to have some really iconic tracks. Especially "Oh L'amour" which has become one of their signature songs, and had a top ten run on a re-release in 2003, of all things, nearly twenty years after its initial release (and now over twenty years ago too. Man, getting old kind of sucks. But I'm not as old as these artists who all predate me by about a decade.) The Circus, on the other hand, was their first hit album, but I was always kind of skeptical of it, and other than the hit "Sometimes" and a few moody album tracks like "Spiraling" and "The Circus" itself, and the uncomfortably lyrics of the otherwise interesting song "Hideaway" I never loved that album. The Innocents, on the other hand, was a brilliant album in every way, and deserved all of the success that it got. And, of course, its lead track "A Little Respect" is probably also one of their most signature tracks too, maybe even more than "Oh L'amour."

Wild! was again disappointing. It has some good tracks; "Blue Savanna", "Drama" and a few others, and I even have 12" singles from that era, for instance. It wasn't a bad album, just like The Circus wasn't a bad album, but it wasn't wonderful either. It was... a bit disappointing after seeing how great Wonderland and The Innocents were. Chorus was new and fresh sounding, and very good, while I Say I Say I Say is, again, mediocre. When they broke the pattern and Erasure was also mediocre... at the same time that "mainstream" synthpop was pretty much over. This is when I lost the plot; I didn't buy the next albums for many years after the fact. 

Anyway, I don't talk about my 80s New Wave music that much anymore. I honestly think that maybe I'm a little over 80s pop music of all kinds. I still enjoy it, but I don't really enjoy just sitting and listening to it anymore. I don't care about it as much as I used to. In spite of my pretentiousness about music when I was younger, all pop music is essentially meant to be disposable and generational, and what can I say? My generation is getting older, and our songs are too. I don't want to be like the predictably narcissistic boomers and assume that the music of my teenaged years is so iconic that everyone must recognize how great that it is... although I will point out that 80s music has had a bit of a revival, and even with people my kids' age. But the same thing happened briefly to 50s style music when I was a teenager. I don't think that that's anything that will really last. The music that I think does last is classical, especially the more accessible Romantic era classical. That I can still listen to and enjoy. And I listen to a lot of forgettable instrumental music, but I honestly admit that it's background music while I'm reading or otherwise doing something else most of the time.

Seen on reddit... narcissistic Gen X gamer imitating a boomer

Original post:

I am old. I am 55. When I started playing D&D, your key items were a ten foot pole, balls of string, chalk, oil flasks, ballbearings, a bell, torches , a tinder box and THEN potions and so on.

My recent players are young (20's) and NEVER buy any of this stuff. They dont buy rations, water or stuff like that without being prompted.

Now when I was young, we were all pretty hardy kids from poor backgrounds and in the 70s and early 80s were taught to figure **** out for ourselves, and "mend and make do".

Is this a generational thing?

I remember having a rogue who set up tripwires with bells attached so we could rest in unsafe areas, she had a pole attached to her belt with branches tied to it so it obscured footprints as we walked, her main weapon was a handful of caltrops or a flask of oil!

Just struck me now while I looked through the character sheets. They have basically nothing to help them survive!

My response:

I guess I'm nearly old. I'm 54. The way you play is a very specific style, and not some kind of One True Way™. Don't try and make it a generational thing, or an example of "grit" or whatever. It's just what you like, and it's neither better nor worse than what other people like. That tendency is exactly why everyone thinks boomers are such narcissists.

Yeah, yeah... like I said, I'm basically the same age as you. I grew up relatively poor too. I grew up (and still do) enjoy camping and making do with less in the wilderness. And I prefer to go hiking deep into the wilderness by myself with an almost ultralite set-up. I know how to "mend and make do." That's not what this is about.

Your players simply don't think that that kind of game is fun. Or, at least, that's not what they're coming to the table expecting. And why would they? Gary Gygax famously published the Appendix N of inspirational literature which supposedly informed what D&D was like. You never see Conan or the Gray Mouser or any of the characters in any of the literature doing stuff like that. The entire skilled play puzzle box tournament style gameplay where you are rewarded for being "clever" (or at least giving off that vibe to the DM) was always a very niche approach. If your players aren't into it, maybe stop trying to force them to be.

This kind of latent "boomer narcissism" is disappointing to see in Gen X people like me, but sadly it's always been a kind of inherent in a lot of the early OSR posters... y'know, before they became kind of trendy and young and hip and NSR. They do that now too, no doubt, but without the narcissism; they just see their playstyle as their playstyle, they prefer it, and they create their own kind of walled garden where they only interact with people who share similar tastes. The whole "what's wrong with kids today who can't play right?" vibe feels very... I dunno, ten, twenty years ago. That was all the rage in the late 00s and teens as people preached the superiority of their playstyle and pretending like they didn't understand why everyone else didn't play exactly the way that they do. That, honestly, was a major turn-off on the whole movement to me for many, many years. I still wandered about the fringes of the movement, because I had some interest in what they were doing, but that smug, self-congratulatory attitude about how to play really grates on the nerves. I didn't include more of the thread, but there were more posts from the same guy in response, and it's even worse than it seems from the OP. Playstyle discussions tend to bore me, though, although for different reasons than they used to. 

Still preferable to Millennial woke smugness, I suppose. And I firmly reject the disappearance of Gen Y into Millennials. There is a whole generation separating true Xers from true Millennials who aren't all insane. Remind me to blog about the online gamer bubble about AI usage some day. Lots of really ridiculous bubble positions that people believe everyone thinks and are objectively true, but which are stupid beyond all reason.