Monster Manual II

Although I don't have a specific "trawl" for it, I've been slowly rereading most of my 3e era books for the last year or two. I think the first ones I read were Elder Evils, Exemplars of Evil, and Drow of the Underdark. I've read most of the monster "specialty" books following Drow, including Lords of Madness, the first Fiendish Codex, Libris Mortis, etc. except for the devils book and the dragons book, but I decided that I wanted to go back and focus on the actual original monster books recently, so I've now read Monster Manual (3.5 update) and Monster Manual II, which did not get a 3.5 update. Chronologically, Fiendish Codex is next, which also did not get a 3.5 update, so I'll probably put that in my backpack next. But I won't read it until I get some of the Paizo stuff out of the way that I've been carrying around first. There's really no rush. Sadly, I didn't buy IV for some reason when it was new(ish) so I had to buy a pdf of it. It's the only one that I don't have physically. But pdfs are cheap on drivethrurpg for that. 

Most of the 3e era collection is probably available on archive.org too, but I haven't really checked.

I also read another chapter of Cults of Freeport last night, so I'm slowly getting back into the reading gig. I also want to finish my much delayed Rise of the Seventh Moon Eberron novel in the next few days. So after I finish those, my next reading projects will be the second half (three books) of the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path, whatever the two Paizo books that I stuck in my backpack last time I added new books there, and the Del Rey Solomon Kane collection that's also been in my backpack for some time. I hesitate to look too far ahead after that, but most likely I'll add two more Paizo books, start the next Paizo adventure path, read Buccaneers of Freeport to keep that trawl moving, and try and check out the next module in my 3e module trawl, "Speaker in Dreams." For actual physical books that aren't gamebooks, I want to read the four book James Silke "Horned Helmet" series now that I finally have all four of them in my possession. On Kindle I have Out of the Shadows by Vox Day from the Midnight War series (first novel, I believe. It started as a web comic) and Write Great AI Fiction by J. W. Riceman, who is really the genre-fan gadfly John del Arroz, who would probably be a midlist author under the old publishing regime of my youth. But books on authorship seem rarely to have been written by bestselling authors, who usually have more important things to write, after all. I read the introduction so far and it looks like it's probably pretty good. I'll watch some Sudowrite YouTube videos too, and maybe stick for a Sudowrite paid subscription for at least a short time to see how it works. It love to get some Old Night novels written. If it works well, and I'm happy with the result, I'll even do some Capes & Rayguns novels too.

As of today, a new season is supposed to be starting in SWTOR, and it is giving older rewards again, from seasons 1 and 3. I actually did season 3 when it was current, so I don't care about that, but getting the season 1 stuff plus more cartel coins and whatever is usually worth it, so I tend to do seasons if I'm online when they run. The ones that I did were 2, 3, and most of 9. 7 is the one that I'm really missing and wish I could have done. But, maybe it'll come back around again. This season is supposed to regift seasons 1 and 2, and next season is seasons 3 and 4. Both of those include a season that I did and one that I didn't. But I don't want SWTOR to consume my time as much as it did in January and the first couple of weeks of Feburary when I started having to spend all of that time out of town, so I'll keep my reading up too.

Revecca von Lechfeld

I should have been using Grok's image generator instead of ChatGPT all along. This is great! Some images of Revecca von Lechfeld, showing the iterative process of actually trying to get them. Every single one of them is better than what ChatGPT gave me.

Back in the saddle

Well, last time I posted, I said I was rushing off to my parent's current home town due to my father's illness taking a turn for the worst. I think we all saw it coming, but less than twenty-four hours after I arrived, he passed away. Obviously, I've been kind of occupied lately, and haven't made any posts.

I think up until even a few weeks ago, we had hopes that he would make some kind of recovery, and there were treatments that he had scheduled, but in the end, maybe this was the best way for him, at least. At 79, he wasn't young, but wasn't too old, although he did outlive his younger sister by a few years and is survived by both his older brother and sister, and of course, my mother, who now threatens to live for another twenty years, since she's on her own now. She turns 81 later this year. Another twenty years would be... well, beating the odds, let's just say. Luckily, I work at a place where my team jumped in to take care of stuff without me, and they aren't even immediately bombarding me with stuff now that I'm back. I've got over 900 emails still to read (and I've already gotten rid of quite a few—over 350) so I won't have my head above water for several days, if I even get to that point at all this week. 

I spent four days of business travel, was home for less than 24 hours before heading out of town for the weekend, and then was back less than 48 hours before heading out of town for my dad's death and funeral, which ended up being nearly another two weeks. I burned four days of vacation and my week allotment of bereavement leave. But luckily, I have enough seniority that I still have four weeks of unscheduled vacation left for the year even after the stuff that I've already done and just had to do. Another week I should have already scheduled for a vacation at the end of this month I went ahead and put in. I'll also need time off in late June for my youngest son's wedding out of state, and I'll probably burn some time at the time to go hiking in the Rockies since I'll be nearby. If the snow situation is good at the June/July crossover, I may go to Red Castle in the Uintas. That may be early for such a high mountain range, but so far at least, the snow situation has been extremely lower than average, and the expectation is that without significant changes in the next little while, the high country snowpack will be lower and will be gone sooner than on average. Normally, I'd prefer that hike for a late July or even August time frame. I think I might be able to get it done early this year, of all years, which is convenient.

If not, the Lost Creek Wilderness in Colorado is my backup plan. It's a bit lower and tends to be snow free earlier even in general. I'll probably have a third backup just in case that one's not good too, though. You never know, especially a couple of months or more in advance. A third backup isn't a bad idea.

My AI alter-ego who looks sorta like me and is a good stand-in actually looks pretty good in those two environments, which ChatGPT can replicate fairly accurately by scraping images online of those places. Although curiously, Red Castle looks a little underwhelming in that image compared to most that I've seen. I guess I'll see when I actually go there what it's really like. Also, although I like the look of a walking stick, I don't actually hike with one. That's just an affectation of mine for the AI images.

Other than that, I haven't read as much as I hoped while traveling, I haven't played as much SWTOR as much as I'd hoped because of so much travel, and my blogging has been pretty vacuous fluff for a couple of months or more, even by my already pretty weak standards. 

However, one thing that I did do while traveling was to watch/listen to some of my old YouTube videos to remind myself of where I was a year or so ago on gaming. I would like to at least finish the racial Deep Dives in the next few weeks or a month or so. I have a few left to do, and many of them are more than one race dumped together, i.e., the Elementalists are really four races, the Expansion races are several races, the High Fantasy races are several races, etc. And the human one is extraordinarily complicated, of course, as well.

Doing so will, however, get me back in the saddle when it comes to game setting development. Some of those are slight modifications to existing blog posts, but some of them I'll need to write from scratch.

Now I need to finish reading the book that I started, Write Great AI Fiction by J. W. Riceman (i.e., John del Arroz) and get a pro subscription to Sudowrite or something, and see where it goes. I'm also almost done (finally!) with Monster Manual II, and I'm getting closer to finishing Rise of the Seventh Moon, and I also started reading Cults of Freeport and should finish that pretty fast. Keeping the Trawls moving, slowly but surely. I need to finish Curse of the Crimson Throne (I'm about halfway through) before I forget what was going on when I last read the last portion of it, a few months ago now. I also have a bunch of unpacking to do tonight, so I may not get much done with SWTOR, but I'd like to do one more weeks worth of Heroics with the "Just Started" characters, at least. That's probably the only thing that I'd worry about for now, though. That's not insignificant. Technically, I'm trying to do the Tython Heroic every week with Gãndalf Greyhame, the three Ord Mantell Heroics each with Kenth Odon, Vandal Guent and Karr Tanus, the four Hutta Heroics each with Iakar Kodo and Jado Vikunn and the two Korriban Heroics with Goth Severax. That's twenty missions, and some of them are not really all that fast. That'll keep me busy for at least an hour... if I can spare that much time. 

And one more ChatGPT conversion of some SWTOR screenshots into a character sketch. Anstal Tane, my "space biker" Scoundrel character. One that I'd love to adapt somehow to Capes & Rayguns, even though Psarians aren't normally a "PC race" that I'd give much thought to.

Post weekend update

Well, I was home for literally less than 24 hours before leaving town again to spend a whirlwind weekend at my daughter's house, celebrating her son's 1st birthday with her, her husband, my wife, and my other son and his family and kids who lives nearby. It was fun, but... whirlwind. On top of that, my dad is not expected to recover. The whole "recover and then do another procedure in Houston" is no longer the plan; he's now basically going to go on hospice and linger... for a few weeks, and then he's done. At this point, he's ready to go, honestly, and my mom has accepted it too. My wife has been telling me for a few months that I needed to be prepared for this, and I agreed, but didn't really think about it, because that wasn't "the plan." However, he's having cascade failures of multiple systems at this point. So, back out of town again shortly; I'll spend all of next week at their house, seeing them before he's gone, and helping my mom out. Not sure what's on the agenda; but there's a long list, including buying a cemetery plot. I think my brother will probably get that done before I get into town, but we'll see what still remains on the list. If all I do is spend a week sitting with them and talking, well... that's not the worst thing either. But I think that there will still be plenty to do. My one brother actually does financial planning professionally, so he's the executor, and is working on their taxes, etc. so I don't need to do that, at last. I think that they're hoping to buy the plot before I get there, but there's plenty of other things to do.

Anyway, I didn't really expect that complication, although I probably should have. I kind of did in the back of my mind, but in the front of my mind, I hadn't really thought too much about it. 

Meanwhile, the paperwork fiasco that is my mortgage refinance, which is struggling because I don't actually live in my house right now; I'm kinda sorta relocated, but not really. I haven't sold my house, because my son is still living in it, so we're renting here locally, and my son is paying our house payment to us. That's been an additional level of stress on top of everything else going on.

So, I'll probably have to go back again soon for a funeral. I also have my youngest son's wedding later this year. My wife is trying to take us to Epic Universe. But what I really want to do is just get away and be outside. Preferably in the West where the scenery is beautiful and the solitude is for real. 

My son will be getting married in late June in Utah. I'm going to keep an eye on the snow and temperature situation, and see where I can go while I'm up there—it might be too early for high mountains, and too late for nice temps in the desert. Or maybe I can do either. Or both. Depends on the year, I guess. I have more time off available to use than my wife, so I'll probably spend an extra week after she goes home to hike and site-see. I need it. I need to decompress. I think that's why I've been so into SWTOR instead of reading; it's more decompressing to just play a relatively mindless video game than to read. 

Again, that isn't me. That's an AI generated model of someone who meets my description, but who actually looks like someone else that ChatGPT created. But it's pretty darn close except for details of the face. I like to hike in bucket hats too.

At some point soon, though, I have to think that things will settle down. Work won't be one emergency after another forever. My dad will go the way of all the earth, and life will have to go on, as it does. The refinance will be finished, and my wife will stop stressing so much about cash flow. One thing after another. When it does, I want to start doing some of the hobby things that I wanted to do last year but didn't get around to, like some specific YouTube videos I wanted to make. I want to slow down on SWTOR (although I'll probably hang around long enough to do another Season first) and get back to reading. I want to stop traveling to Mexico. Mexico is a dump, dirty country with a dysfunctional and corrupt culture and terrible weather. And the food isn't as great as people make it out to be; I get much better "Mexican" food on the Texas side of the border, and I always have. I look forward to not having to have any aspect of Hispanic culture other than Tex-Mex tacos, burritos and fajitas shoved in my face ever again. I don't want to keep going to Mexico. I don't want to keep running into Mexicans in my country, or other Third World Hispanic peasants. I wish that I could retire early to a ranch in the country in Wyoming. I'd even be happy doing what my wife wants to do instead; retiring early to a house or condo on the beach in Destin or Pensacola Beach. I wouldn't like that as much as Wyoming, but I could live with it.

And I want to get my trawl reads going again. And my putative game running. The "flaky" guys have actually been better lately, so that hasn't come back up too much. 

UPDATE: Although I must say that if our conflict with Mexico continues and we end up picking up more territory like we did after the Mexican-American War, I'd certainly go visit Copper Canyon on vacation when the weather is nice. But I wouldn't want to pick up any part of northern Mexico as long as its still full of Mexicans. I think we've confirmed through many years of experimentation that they don't really integrate well with Americans, and they need their own country just like we need ours.

UPDATE 2: Latest news is that my flight plans might already be too late; he may not last the week, so if I fly out on Saturday, it could be after the fact. Talking about changing the date and possibly leaving tomorrow.

Well...

What a terrible week. Not only has the work trip been quite frustrating, but it's not just work; I'm trying to refinance my house with the lower interest rates now in play, and there's been snags, and my assignment at church has had someone who's really anxious and pressing on something that she thinks is super urgent and needs immediate attention even though I'm out of town, and my dad's health has gone from bad to considerably worse over the last few months, accelerated even more in the last few weeks. I'll probably have to take some time to my folks house and help my mom out with him. And, who knows? At his age, these compounding health issues simply are not a great sign. His younger sister passed away a couple of years ago; it might be his time this year too, unless he can rebound shortly. 

So, my plans to have a semi-relaxing work trip didn't work out. When I wasn't frantically texting or calling people in my off time, I was pretty drained, and just kind of sat and vegged with my phone; either listening to music, blowing through YouTube videos that I was only semi-interested in, or otherwise doing things that required little to no brain power or emotional investment. I did not read anything other than a couple of chapters of Rise of the Seventh Moon. I'm still a little bit shy of halfway. Which is easy to tell, because I'm reading it on my Kindle app on my phone. 46% right now. Maybe I'll finish that with my additional personal travel that I'm doing tonight and this weekend in general. Sigh. I'll take my stuff if I go to my folks house too; I won't be busy literally the entire time, of course.

The image is ChatGPT generated, of course, but it's a reasonably accurate facsimile. Maybe he's a little better looking than me, and maybe just a little bit grayer. (Or maybe not.) But otherwise, that's pretty close. Other than that I don't wear dress shirts like that very often, especially when sitting in a hotel room by myself. 

Anyway, yeah—sometimes life sucks, and sometimes the suckage lingers for a while. Don't get me wrong; things could be worse. But I've mostly just been very busy, very stressed, and very frustrated by things, and haven't had an avenue to "come down" and decompress very well. I think that's part of the reason I've embraced SWTOR so much lately; it's a pretty brainless activity that accomplishes that. Without it, my more aggressive reading plans ended up not being the best—they required more mental horsepower than I had left at the end of the day. 

I do need to mark my completed book in my tracker, but with only one complete, that's not super urgent. I just don't want to forget it. Although maybe I don't need to worry so much about tracking my reading. I've only done that for the last four years, and I was reading just fine before that. I did find that tracking my reading ended up encouraging me to read more, but even that wasn't necessarily consistent. 2024 wasn't a good year for reading, for instance, even though it was a good year for tracking what relatively little I read. 

Anyway, it's nice to make plans, even for something as frivolous as how to spend my free time while out of town on a business trip, but making plans is no guarantee of keeping plans. I don't know if this is literally true, and Google's seach AI seems to suggest "sorta" but I'm feeling it today.

D&D again

I'm afraid—or maybe it's not something that I'm afraid of—that my work travel next week followed by some personal travel followed by more work travel will cause me to drastically lose momentum in SWTOR. Not that that's bad, but I feel like my momentum is already flagging somewhat, and I'm getting kind of excited about reading some more D&D. One side effect—predictably—of re-reading a lot of older 3e era books is that I'm more charitable towards 3e now than I used to be. Although I've had an on again off again relationship with D&D specifically for many years, 3e is by far the edition that I'm the most familiar with, that I spent the most money and time on. It's not exactly my platonic ideal of D&D, because I'm not blind to both it's flaws and the things that it does that aren't what I want. But it's still a great system, and there's a lot of things that I like about it, and if I run it in a handwavy "theatre of the mind" fashion and either just avoid playing higher level, or officially adopt E6 or something, it's actually got a lot to like. I'm certain that I like it better than any other version of D&D, at least. The d20 family of games is more than just 3e D&D too, of course; I also adopted and have most of the products for d20 Modern and d20 versions of Star Wars, The Wheel of Time and even Call of Cthulhu. All published officially by Wizards of the Coast. I have plenty of divergent third party escapades using the system too, not least of which is of course Pathfinder 1e and Starfinder 1e.

While 5e fixed some problems with 3e, and feels like an iterative version of 3e (that tried to sweep 4e somewhat under the rug after quietly taking a few of its better ideas) it's not entirely clear to me that 5e really improved on 3e. In many ways, it did things that I don't like as much as it did things that I did. I'm still not super familiar with 5e, honestly, even after playing for better part of a year in a campaign of it. Because I don't need to be. It plays enough like 3e that I can mostly fudge it and not worry about trying to make it be different than 3e. Some of the details are different, but those are details that I mostly would have had to have looked up anyway, so I don't really notice it too much. But I'd rather start with a baseline of 3e instead of 5e and then fix it from there. The "fixes" that 5e offered mostly left my major problems intact, and instead "fixed" things that didn't bother me. I wish that I could, sometimes, run an E6 or at least lower level d20 game in fantasy and in space opera. I usually like fantasy a little better than space opera, but not necessarily D&D specific fantasy, and it's always close anyway. I've obviously loved space opera since at least 1977 and the original release of Star Wars. If I was aware of it before that, I'm not sure. I was five when that came out.

Here's a few screenshots of Wulf Hengest, my "vanguard" hunter from Wave III where I could for the first time create characters with mixed and matched mechanics vs story. Prior to this, all hunters had to use one of the two hunter classes; powertech or mercenary. As a vanguard, he's got similar mechanics to the powertech, but pretty different visuals for the execution of them, and of course he uses a blaster rifle rather than a pistol. I had the idea that Wulf would specifically be a bowcaster specialist. I do have one or two outfits that use a different weapon, but those are mostly just prototype builds to look a certain way, while his "real" outfits all have the bowcaster. This one in particular is his everyday tac suit. I have some AI generated versions of it too for visual interest, but sometimes those turn out OK and sometimes not. I dont' know what they did with his boots, and the bowcaster looks a little mangled if you look at it too closely.

Anyway, I'll be talking about gaming again soon, and I'll be talking both fantasy and space opera. I wonder what it would look like if I created 5x5 Fronts for Space Opera? I really should finish the ones I high-level outlined for Old Night first, but I do also want to have a couple of Capes & Rayguns 5x5 Fronts too in the future. 

And here's my Disco Sith Lord, with whom I just finished the story and entered him into the "semi-retired" phase.

I'm surprised I got that image, actually. ChatGPT got weird and feminist/Puritan on me and refused to modify it because of feminist/Puritan encoding.

This is what it told me:

Yeah, I get why that feels frustrating 😅 — especially since a “bikini” by itself doesn’t sound wild on its face.

What trips the wire here isn’t just a bikini in the abstract, but the combination of factors in the scene: a character posed admiringly at someone’s feet, paired with a very minimal outfit that’s strongly associated with sexualized depictions. Put together, that crosses a line I’m not allowed to generate visually.

That said, we’re absolutely not stuck. There are a bunch of nearby options that usually work just fine and still hit the vibe you’re going for:

Easy alternatives that should be allowed

• A Leia-inspired armored outfit (metal plates, boots, cape, but not a bikini)

• A dancer or ceremonial outfit with metallic fabrics instead of exposed skin

• A slave-Leia–adjacent aesthetic but reimagined as sci-fi armor (same silhouette energy, more coverage)

• Make her standing or kneeling respectfully rather than clinging to his leg

• Shift the focus to heroic / cinematic admiration instead of submissive framing

Then I said, nevermind; give me the version right there with the green Vette and give me a blue alternative. It changed her pose completely and made her fat. 

Woke garbage in, woke garbage out. Maybe I should just be happy that I was able to get what I did out of it and cut my losses. 

Do you laugh or does it make you angry?

Not sure. Both, I suppose.

All of these "right wing conspiracy theories", most of which were blatantly obvious to people who were paying attention at the time, turned out to be spoilers for the people who weren't. 

This one in particular made me laugh, because someone posted something deliberately false in an attempt to get community notes that is a major red pill.

In unrelated news, I finished Dweller in the Deep yesterday, and look to be on track to finish Monster Manual II in the next few days, before I go out of town. I'll finish Rise of the Seventh Moon on my Kindle app on my phone on the plane, I think, and I'll replace Monster Manual II with Fiend Folio in my backpack, but I won't actually start reading that until I read a few other things first. 

My trip next week is to Del Rio, Texas, although my real business is across the border in the dumpy little town of Ciudad Acuña. After I'm back, I have to turn around and leave town for a previously scheduled weekend "back at home" for my grandson's first birthday in less than 24 hours. I'll be gone all weekend. Then I'll have another week at home like normal, before probably having to do more work travel in the first week of March to Hermosillo. 

I don't really love traveling to Mexico. Mexico is a dumpy, corrupt, third world trash pile, and the more time I spend there, the more convinced I am of that. (Also the more I interact with Mexicans here, the more convinced I am that they all need to go home.) Luckily, when my business is in the border towns like Acuña or Juarez, I actually stay in a hotel in Texas, eat at a restaurant in Texas, and just go work in Mexico during the day.

Of course, more travel means more reading; it's really the only thing that I can easily do while traveling to entertain myself during my downtime. No TV (well, that's not really true, but watching TV on my phone isn't any fun), no computer, etc. So reading it is. I'm actually not too sad about that. 

I've already got The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane in my backpack, but by the time I get around to the second trip, I'll probably be carting one of the James Silke Horned Helmet novels. I have a well defined list of game books to read, well into the year and probably well into 2027 and even 2028. However, I'm not sure about novels and fiction; my plan is much more vague and much shorter. I've got Solomon Kane and King Kull still to read on Howard. I've got a (sorta newly) purchased Lovecraft collection; complete for stuff written under his own name. I've got the four Silke novels. I've got the three Zahn Star Wars novels. After that... I'm not sure what's next, or even what order I'll read those. Solomon Kane is the only one that I'm 100% on what I'll read, and I'll read it next. 

I've also got a John Carter omnibus; the first five novels in a nice hardback. And a Robert Ludlum omnibus. I read this same omnibus probably 25 or even 30 years ago; it includes The Holcroft Covenant, The Matarese Circle, and of course The Bourne Identity. These are not new books. They were published first in—respectively—1978, 1979 and 1980. But they're still great. I enjoyed reading them in the mid-90s, and I tracked down the same omnibus on purpose to read all three of those. So those will be on the list for this year too.

There's talk at work of sending me back to Juarez/ El Paso too soon, so that would be three trips in short succession. You can't travel to any of these places without spending at least a whole day traveling on both ends, so I've ironically found that traveling for work is less stressful in some ways than just working. Because I'm traveling, I'm not expected to be too reactive to stuff happening, and I'm generally not available. People talk about falling behind, but much of the stuff that comes up is resolved by the time I get to it, so it's not that bad.

Not saying that I want to actually take that third trip, but it might happen, and if it does, I'm not going to cry too much about it.

Sometimes ChatGPT is stupid

I tried to do another AI generated synthesis of one of my characters from some screenshots. Got some decent images, but then when I asked for a modification, AI got stupid and couldn't figure out which image I was asking it to modify. Here's what it gave me.

I really like the profile view, but I wanted him to turn his head to a three-quarter view. However, first it modified my image from yesterday instead of that one. Which is fine; I didn't need them, but they were good enough looking alternatives, I guess.

Then it still did the wrong one and give me this awkwardly posted alternative...

What's he doing? Saluting? Tipping his hat? Wrong image!

Anyway, I quit while I was ahead, but I want to continue to revisit using AI to turn screenshots into more artistic renditions of these characters. The result is usually pretty cool when I can get the AI to actually recognize what I want from it.

Here's one for Karr Tanus too, although it shortened the gun too much. I tried to get that fixed, and they just made it chunkier rather than longer. I'm not going to bother putting those fat gun images in.

ChatGPT turning SWTOR screenshots into character art

This seems to be a great use for ChatGPT for space opera or specifically Star Wars games. Take screenshots of your characters, have ChatGPT create new images based on those screenshots, etc.  Here's the two images I uploaded, followed by the three that ChatGPT generated for me. The first one had the same lighting as the screenshots, for the next two I asked for brighter daylight, and got two options to pick from. Of course, I didn't pick, I just downloaded them both.

Character is Vash Galaide in game, but since I borrowed the Galaide name from a cluster of star systems, I had to modify it to Vash Gavenk for Capes & Rayguns. He's meant to be a James Bond in space kind of agent, and this is his casual walk around in space Monte Carlo looking spy-like. I'm actually kind of happy that the droid's face was updated to be more human-like while otherwise looking very similar.

Reading and gaming

So, I am still pretty occupied with SWTOR, but I've also made some pretty good progress on Dweller in the Deep, the Dark Waters trilogy final book that I've been reading. I'm now down to about 40-45 pages left. I might finish it today, but tomorrow is more likely. I'm also doing fairly well with Rise of the Seventh Moon, the final book in the Heirs of Ash trilogy, although whether I finish it before leaving town, or finish it on the flights I have to take (three legs on Monday) is TBD. I'm quite sure that I'll at least finish it on the flight if I don't before. But like I said, I've got plenty of other things that I'm set to read while traveling. It's been kind of nice to get back into reading just a bit after a good two month break where I didn't read much of anything because I was either out of town and busy, or playing SWTOR. I wonder how much of SWTOR I'm going to play "this time around"; will I re-up when it expires again in late March or early April, or will I have played enough by then to feel fine letting it go for a little while? Either way, I can't spend almost all of my free time on it every evening anymore. I'm already feeling a little bit burned out on that. I presume a new Galactic Seasons run will start before too long, though. We're starting the last week of the current season today. We'll see if I can get to the +200 cartel coins or not before the week is over. If I do, I'll almost certainly be able to get two characters in early March when the cartel coins for security key and subscription drop. I've got four planned characters that aren't built because I don't have a slot for them. Of course, if I decide to delete Embric Stane (and maybe re-purpose the name!) then I can get three of them built quickly. Whether I can actually play them or not remains to be seen, of course...

That honestly may be the best use of Embric Stane. I don't care about him as a character, and I don't really want to play him, but I've been reluctant to just delete him. But maybe I should, so I can play someone else that I'm more interested in playing in his slot. Next character to create, just based on how my doc is sorted, would be a trooper using the Operative class. Of course, I already have a trooper that I haven't started actually playing yet, so maybe he's not the best choice. I dunno. We'll see. I still haven't decided to delete Embric yet anyway.

So, Dweller in the Deep is an Arkham Horror novel, technically, but of course that just means that it's a 1920s Arkham Lovecraft pastiche; there's very little if anything that's specific to Arkham Horror that isn't already present in Lovecraft's own writings, or that of his contemporary "Lovecraft Circle" of writers. And I'm coming much more over the years around to the idea that the "correct" way to do Lovecraft pastiche isn't to use Lovecraftian elements, but rather to write stories with all new entities but which explore the same themes and ideas. That makes it less like pastiche and more like... just similar, in some ways. But that's probably for the best. The fact that Warhammer stuff is in some ways one of the best explorations of Lovecraftian themes isn't true because it was so true to a pure Lovecraftian aesthetic, but rather because it took the same ideas and did something new and different with them, in a new context.

Which is also the fun—sometimes—of seeing Lovecraft-like ideas in D&D. Although they normally do it wrong and just stick shoggoths or mi-go directly into the game. Zargon, in spite of his corny, hoaky name, is a good example of doing it right. Especially, and I kind of hate to say this, but it's true, with the 5e version of his art. Although I doubt anything else about the 5e iteration is the correct level of Lovecraftian.

Heirs of Ash, on the other hand, is an Eberron novel trilogy, and yeah; I'm almost done with that series too; should finish on my upcoming work trip, if not before. There's a little bit of Lovecraftian vibes here, with the myserious, unknowable Draconic Prophecy and those who pursue it, the mystery of the Mournland and what caused it, and the mysterious ancient, eldritch whatever stuff that's going on here and there. It's much more subtle, but it works, again, precisely because of that. The Lovecraftian pastiche that's really in your face starts to feel as if DisneyWorld created a LovecraftLand amusement park attraction, and the shoggoths and mi-gos are just animatronic features to entertain you, not have a genuine horrific vibe. 

Mi-go outside Akeley's farmhouse

Frankly, mi-go aren't even part of the Cthulhu Mythos proper anyway. Like "The Colour Out of Space", it's really more of a science fiction pulp story with horror-like vibes. But maybe that's the way Lovecraftiana outta be. Science fiction or fantasy with horror elements is like how Lovecraft himself often did it, and how Robert E. Howard did it, or Clark Ashton Smith, etc. 1920s rural New England is a strange place to keep as an iconic setting for Lovecraftiana anyway. 

I'll also finish Monster Manual II (the 3e version) and then I have at least two Pathfinder 1e setting books in my backpack to read while I'm at it. If it looks like I'm ahead on MM2, or even if I can finish it before I go, I'll load up a couple other books just to have more in my backpack to handle. And I'll load a few pdfs on my tablet and pack it in too. Not only will I be able to read while on the plane, specifically, but that's pretty much the only thing I can do other than fart around on YouTube and Reddit or whatever in the evenings in the hotel. No doubt, my supplier that I'm visiting would be happy to take me partying in the evening, but I don't really want to do that; after spending a whole day traveling or a whole day at their site, either one, I kind of want a quiet evening after with a nice dinner by myself, a phone call home to my wife, a nice hot shower, and a quiet evening in bed with my books until I fall asleep. That should mean that I get plenty of reading done.

I'd really like to read Cults of Freeport and even all three of the remaining Curse of the Crimson Throne modules before the month is over as well as the books I'm reading now, as well as whatever I read on my trip, but we'll see. I'd have to forego a lot of SWTOR to pull that off, I think. Which maybe isn't the worst thing for me to do anyway...

Reading goals

Well, I haven't actually read more than a few chapters of books that I was already reading when the year ended. Over a month, and nothing finished. That's bad. Thanks, SWTOR, and me getting back into it.

However, shortly, I'll have some work travel. My goals are as follows:

• Finish the novel I'm reading before I go. (Dweller in the Deep by Graham McNeill)
• Finish the Kindle novel I'm reading before I go. (Rise of the Seventh Moon by Rich Wulf)
• Finish the physical gamebook that I'm reading before I go. Monster Manual II)

I've got some other books in my backpack already, which is probably enough to get me through the trip, including a few Pathfinder books, and the Solomon Kane collection by Robert E. Howard. I think that'll do for my trip. I would, however, like to read at least a few pdfs on my list before February is over. If February doesn't end up being a great month for reading, I at least don't want it to be as completely useless as January. Maybe I'll even load them on my tablet and bring them along on my trip. Shortlist of pdfs to read include Cults of Freeport, the next in that trawl, as well as the back half of the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path, so "A History of Ashes," "Skeletons of Scarwall" and "Crown of Fangs." To break that up, maybe The Rise of Tiamat from my 5e crawl, and maybe Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond from 4e. I've actually read that before, maybe five years or so ago, but I remember quite liking it, and thinking that the Shadowfell is an interesting adventuring location. Ben Wooten did a piece of art for it that I've always really liked, and have used copies of with many posts in the past. I actually described at a high level that picture to ChatGPT, and it generated an image that is... well, it's not really very similar other than that it's got a similar vibe, I suppose.

I'm not really a huge fan of extraplanar jaunting anymore, after flirting for a little while with the high concept of Planescape. But the Shadowfell is kind of the exception to that. It, or something like it (I fell in love first with its predecessor, the 3e Plane of Shadow. It's gotten around. Both the Wheel of Time and even Stranger Things with the Upside-down had similar extradimensional words.

Oh, and I asked ChatGPT to make a foggier version of that, just for the heckuvit.

I'm not actually sure that it looks like the Plane of Shadow, or the Shadowfell, or if it just looks like a dark fantasy dungeonpunk city, like the one in the old video game Thief. Whatever. It's still a pair of pretty cool images that I can certainly use. Some kind of Shadowy alternate plane is the only non-normal world that the Old Night setting has officially "endorsed" although of course, it does lead to even stranger and more exotic alternate worlds if you travel through them, including Hells where daemons come from, and more. Like the Plane of Shadow and like the Upside Down, the main purpose of it is not to be a location in its own right, although it is indeed that, but you find out that it's really a gateway to get to ...somewhere else. Somewhere worse, most likely.

On a completely different note, my wife asked me to watch most of The Big Bang Theory with her. I'd actually seen a lot episodes here and there from the earlier seasons previously, but she wanted to start when the girlfriends/wives started showing up, because she thought that the relationships made the show more interesting. She's probably right, and I've enjoyed it well enough. With the exception of a three month break we took from doing it while she was out of town with the twins being born and all that, we've trawled through almost six seasons in the last few months, and only have two and a half seasons left to go. The show started way back in 2007 and ran until 2019... kinda sorta coinciding with Peak Geek Chic, if you will, and probably not by coincidence. When the show started, the characters were meant to be quite ridiculous. If they had cringy behavior, that was because they were super nerdy geeky characters, and they were supposed to. As the show became more mainstream, this aspect was somewhat toned down... somewhat, and the characters became more normal and relatable, with their geeky hobbies and habits being softened to try and make them more endearing rather than cringy.

I'm surprised to find that what I thought of the show is that while it got less deliberately cringy, in at least one aspect, it got more unconsciously cringy. It simply isn't realistic or believable that these really nerdy and kind of useless characters start having reasonably attractive, or even genuinely beautiful in some cases, women throw themselves at them, unless the girls themselves are incredibly flawed or broken in some way. Since they weren't, the whole show started to take on wish fulfillment fantasy vibes of the writers' room, which is pretty cringe. It was one thing when it was "straight man" Leonard getting hit on by Alex, but when Sheldon was getting hit on by Dr. Norawki, or whatever her name was, that's when it was a bridge too far. And honestly, all of Raj's white girlfriends were absurd from the get-go.

I enjoy the show well enough, but nothing like it will ever be made again. Because we're long past Peak Geek Chic, nobody will likely greenlight a show about geek chic like this ever again. And even if they do, and even if it's as good, it won't be as popular. The audience itself has moved on from having a fond appreciation of geek chic pursuits. Geek hobbies still have some inertia in the mainstream, but it's fading fast, and they'll go back to being geek hobbies once again, to the extent that they haven't already. Hobby tourism in geek hobbies is going to dry up, probably for the best, honestly. Those that remain will be more committed. That doesn't mean that it will look like it did before the tourists came along, but it'll be more like that than when things like D&D and Marvel Comics characters are considered mainstream.

Professional asshole Wil Wheaton had a recurring self-deprecating role as himself on the show. He probably appreciated it and it may well have been a bigger deal than his actual Star Trek role as Wesley Crusher, but nothing like that will come along for him again either. Which is probably good for the rest of us.