It's a Jeep thing...

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm exhausted...

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

I can't keep up this pace for long. 

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

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

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

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

Genetic history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

American "cheetah" and dire "wolves"

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

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

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

Same artist as above.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Appalachian jaguars

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if nukes... are a hoax?!

From Vox Day's post today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Environmental hazards

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

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

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

Erasure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original post:

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

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

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

Is this a generational thing?

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

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

My response:

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

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

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

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

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

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.