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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, I am still pretty occupied with SWTOR, but I've also made some pretty good progress on Dweller in the Deep, the Dark Waters trilogy final book that I've been reading. I'm now down to about 40-45 pages left. I might finish it today, but tomorrow is more likely. I'm also doing fairly well with Rise of the Seventh Moon, the final book in the Heirs of Ash trilogy, although whether I finish it before leaving town, or finish it on the flights I have to take (three legs on Monday) is TBD. I'm quite sure that I'll at least finish it on the flight if I don't before. But like I said, I've got plenty of other things that I'm set to read while traveling. It's been kind of nice to get back into reading just a bit after a good two month break where I didn't read much of anything because I was either out of town and busy, or playing SWTOR. I wonder how much of SWTOR I'm going to play "this time around"; will I re-up when it expires again in late March or early April, or will I have played enough by then to feel fine letting it go for a little while? Either way, I can't spend almost all of my free time on it every evening anymore. I'm already feeling a little bit burned out on that. I presume a new Galactic Seasons run will start before too long, though. We're starting the last week of the current season today. We'll see if I can get to the +200 cartel coins or not before the week is over. If I do, I'll almost certainly be able to get two characters in early March when the cartel coins for security key and subscription drop. I've got four planned characters that aren't built because I don't have a slot for them. Of course, if I decide to delete Embric Stane (and maybe re-purpose the name!) then I can get three of them built quickly. Whether I can actually play them or not remains to be seen, of course...
That honestly may be the best use of Embric Stane. I don't care about him as a character, and I don't really want to play him, but I've been reluctant to just delete him. But maybe I should, so I can play someone else that I'm more interested in playing in his slot. Next character to create, just based on how my doc is sorted, would be a trooper using the Operative class. Of course, I already have a trooper that I haven't started actually playing yet, so maybe he's not the best choice. I dunno. We'll see. I still haven't decided to delete Embric yet anyway.
So, Dweller in the Deep is an Arkham Horror novel, technically, but of course that just means that it's a 1920s Arkham Lovecraft pastiche; there's very little if anything that's specific to Arkham Horror that isn't already present in Lovecraft's own writings, or that of his contemporary "Lovecraft Circle" of writers. And I'm coming much more over the years around to the idea that the "correct" way to do Lovecraft pastiche isn't to use Lovecraftian elements, but rather to write stories with all new entities but which explore the same themes and ideas. That makes it less like pastiche and more like... just similar, in some ways. But that's probably for the best. The fact that Warhammer stuff is in some ways one of the best explorations of Lovecraftian themes isn't true because it was so true to a pure Lovecraftian aesthetic, but rather because it took the same ideas and did something new and different with them, in a new context.
Which is also the fun—sometimes—of seeing Lovecraft-like ideas in D&D. Although they normally do it wrong and just stick shoggoths or mi-go directly into the game. Zargon, in spite of his corny, hoaky name, is a good example of doing it right. Especially, and I kind of hate to say this, but it's true, with the 5e version of his art. Although I doubt anything else about the 5e iteration is the correct level of Lovecraftian.
Heirs of Ash, on the other hand, is an Eberron novel trilogy, and yeah; I'm almost done with that series too; should finish on my upcoming work trip, if not before. There's a little bit of Lovecraftian vibes here, with the myserious, unknowable Draconic Prophecy and those who pursue it, the mystery of the Mournland and what caused it, and the mysterious ancient, eldritch whatever stuff that's going on here and there. It's much more subtle, but it works, again, precisely because of that. The Lovecraftian pastiche that's really in your face starts to feel as if DisneyWorld created a LovecraftLand amusement park attraction, and the shoggoths and mi-gos are just animatronic features to entertain you, not have a genuine horrific vibe.
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| Mi-go outside Akeley's farmhouse |
I'll also finish Monster Manual II (the 3e version) and then I have at least two Pathfinder 1e setting books in my backpack to read while I'm at it. If it looks like I'm ahead on MM2, or even if I can finish it before I go, I'll load up a couple other books just to have more in my backpack to handle. And I'll load a few pdfs on my tablet and pack it in too. Not only will I be able to read while on the plane, specifically, but that's pretty much the only thing I can do other than fart around on YouTube and Reddit or whatever in the evenings in the hotel. No doubt, my supplier that I'm visiting would be happy to take me partying in the evening, but I don't really want to do that; after spending a whole day traveling or a whole day at their site, either one, I kind of want a quiet evening after with a nice dinner by myself, a phone call home to my wife, a nice hot shower, and a quiet evening in bed with my books until I fall asleep. That should mean that I get plenty of reading done.
I'd really like to read Cults of Freeport and even all three of the remaining Curse of the Crimson Throne modules before the month is over as well as the books I'm reading now, as well as whatever I read on my trip, but we'll see. I'd have to forego a lot of SWTOR to pull that off, I think. Which maybe isn't the worst thing for me to do anyway...
Well, I haven't actually read more than a few chapters of books that I was already reading when the year ended. Over a month, and nothing finished. That's bad. Thanks, SWTOR, and me getting back into it.
However, shortly, I'll have some work travel. My goals are as follows:
Well, I decided not to go back and reread the Freeport Trilogy already, at least not yet. Both of the "flaky" players that caused me to think we needed to have a backup campaign confirmed that they're in on Saturday, so we're back to our normal Tyranny of Dragons for at least another week.
Both of the other characters wanted to create elvish characters, which for a a low fantasy pirate themed game is... well, not ideal. But I didn't tell them that they couldn't, so it's on me if I don't like it. Luckily, I'm pretty sure that "elves" this case will just mean "short, thin pretty humans with pointy ears and no beards."
I admit, this above is a little bit more what I had in mind. I guess maybe the concept below isn't too different from that...
From a Sigma Game substack post. What explains the lack of leaders in Western civilization? Four reasons, annotated with comments by me.
Feminism and the rise of credentialism. The transformation of the university demographic has been astonishing. From negligible numbers in 1960s to nearly two-thirds majority in the 2020s, women have taken over higher education and eliminated its function. Being completely converged, it no longer serves its purpose of educating society’s future leaders and preparing them for their responsibilities, it’s now just a credential mill for midwits and worse to be provided make-work jobs and serve as a faux elite that will do whatever it is told.
To be fair, plenty of men have recognized the fake and gay nature of university educations over time, and skilled trades are growing again. But much damage was done in the meantime. And skilled tradesmen may be doing fine on their own, but they're not getting into leadership positions anytime soon.
Diversity and social atomism. The more diverse the society, the more people stay at home and avoid socializing. The black block party, the white suburban barbeque, the men’s club, the Junior League, all these ad hoc organizations are largely a thing of the past due to the demographic changes combined with the legal elevation of equality and the demise of the right to free association. A potential leader can’t lead a nonexistent organization to which he doesn’t belong. Even the organized churches are dying.
I don't know that there's anything more to say on that, or not. Even in my church, which is not dying and which does generate local leaders because of our lay volunteer clergy for all but the highest levels of the church, we're not doing all of the things that we used to when I was a kid, and many of those things I used to do were things that were done for generations. Of course, churches are more susceptible to the side effects of diversity. The Gospel is for everyone, regardless of their state, their race, their culture, or even their legal status. It's not the Church's place to turn people away, even if those people should be remigrated back to their homes where they can participate in Church meetings there instead of here. But that's the state's job. The Church's job is to bring the Gospel to them regardless.
Of course, that doesn't mean that people in the church shouldn't remigrate if they don't belong here legally, or if they came under dubious auspices, or that people in the church can't work with ICE and whomever else to make sure that people who don't belong are sent back home. But I do understand why people are conflicted about the question, even if I am not, and I do understand that churches have to accept a higher level of diversity, perhaps, than other organizations do. Everywhere that I've lived, there's been at least one Spanish speaking congregation for every 10-12 regular English speaking ones. As long as the people are here, they need that kind of ministering. Whether or not they should be here isn't a question that relates to whether or not the church should minister to them while they are.
But, of course, the diversity contributes to lack of social cohesion and and increase in atomism. It just is what it is, as the post says.
The GATE/Epstein/gangstalker phenomenon. Young men of potential are identified early and then either sidetracked, controlled, or eliminated before they can rise along the probable trajectory of their lives. This probably goes too far into the conspiracy zone for most people, but it’s not a coincidence that the sort of self-righteous losers who attend Mock UN and student-leadership conferences are actually being put in charge of major corporations, resource-rich NGOs, and other organizations they manifestly have no business running. No wonder nothing works anymore.
It does go too far into the conspiracy zone for me. I don't disbelieve that at least some of this exists, but that people are literally running around "beaming" people just so that they have headaches and can't function well in regular normal roles is a bridge too far. I don't believe that's happening. Of course, that doesn't mean that there isn't some of this applied to people who do reach a certain level. It's no secret even to non-conspiracy-like people that Epstein and blackmail have been used to control many of our politicians, and there's even the slightly conspiracy zone idea, but one that's quite believable, that you can't even rise to a certain level very easily without allowing yourself to engage in blackmailable activities, because you're literally shut out of them until you do.
It doesn't need to be quite the crazy Anonymous Conservative level of "American Stasi" and beaming and testing of smart little kids to still be effective at the top levels of corporations, NGOs, and politics at a much more low-key yet still substantial level of activity.
The technological distraction. Between video games, weed, and pornography, young men simply don’t have the burning desire to succeed that they once did. Mediocrity is much more pleasant now, and much more personally satisfying, than it ever used to be. Why bother working hard to buy a nice car when you can drive a better one for free in a racing game any time you want? Pleasure on-demand is inevitably demotivational and debilitating.
This is undeniable. And it needs not have anything said about it, I don't think. Especially when the most successful way to rise above that kind of mediocrity is not to achieve better, but to sell out to the powers that be.
Sigh. Trump's more or less (so far) success at draining the swamp could be a sea change, but it will take time, the swamp is weakened but not gone, and the damage of generations of this—starting with the Boomers on down—will take more generations to completely undo, I'm sure.
