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.

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.