Friday Art Attack

Given my poor performance at posting these the last few months, I'm going to do a really big one with lots of art today.

An interesting design for a Millennium Falcon sized freighter that doesn't look like the Millennium Falcon.

I dunno what this is, but isn't it dramatic?

A Star Wars Old Republic space battle.

Friendly neighborhood Spider-man...

I love Dacians and their falces. Or falxes? Not sure which is the better plural form. Truly one of the forgotten great barbarian populations of Europe; forgotten because they don't have obvious successors like the Germanic and Celtic peoples did, sadly. Although they lost their culture, they are probably among the core of the population that later emerged as Romanian, though—after getting washed over by a major wave of Romanization. The original Dacians were probably more "Nordic" than the Romanians are today.

For what it's worth, I do also subscribe to the idea that the Dacians and Thracians were likely very closely related genetically, culturally and linguistically, although given the paucity of evidence for all of the above, that's a dicey subject. I tend to see the Dacians as Thracians that pull Celtic in terms of culture because of the waves of earlier Celtic tribes who washed over the region. I also like, although I don't find it tenable given what we know so far, the notion that Thraco-Dacian might have been related to Balto-Slavic. Anyway, keep in mind that Pliny and Strabo both tie the Dacians and Thracians together, often via the Getae, saying that they speak "the same language" even though they obviously all three had different identities.

On either Phobos or Deimos. Love the gigantic surface of Mars looming as the whole sky.

Speaking of Mars, this Michael Whelan picture of Thuvia and her banth has always been one of my favorites.

When you like Darth Maul, but you can't use Darth Maul exactly, you get something sorta like this.

I like futuristic military vehicles. And who said tanks needed to have treads anyway? I mean, I'm sure that there's a perfectly valid engineering reason why we went with them instead of big tires, but I like this look.

When the hounds of Tindalos come for you because you're crazy. Or something.

I think I often forget about using Classic Mythology in my work, unfortunately. I should use it more.

This was, in my opinion, the obvious best series of Lin Carter, a kind of faux Barsoom. That doesn't mean that it was great, just that it was his best. It petered out near the end, but it had several good short novels in it before that happened.

An alternate Mandalorian design.

John Colter, one of Lewis & Clark's guys, and a total awesome fellow.

A very stylized, yet awesom picture of the Monkey King, somehow suspending himself on the end of his staff.

Another of my favorite Burroughs covers, this time by the legend, Frank Frazetta himself. This time, the cover for the Mood Maid.

A somewhat more macho version of the duel between Morgoth and Fingolfin than I usually imagine it. But cool.

I just like this image. I remind myself frequently that my fantasy is as informed by horror as a genre as it is by classic high fantasy or even sword & sorcery tropes.

Some cool Warhammer artwork of the Mortarch of Grief being commissioned, or whatever, by Nagash himself. I do with that they'd return to the original Warhammer setting, though. Even when they have cool ideas for this new setting, the context that they're in just doesn't do it for me.

An illustration of the city of The Mountains of Madness.

A vampire devolved into a feral, bestial state.

A fascinating alternative design for the Emperor's Throne room, with a kind of samurai fantasy vibe.

Anothe Frazetta cover for another Burroughs novel, this time The Mucker. Again with the samurai.

I do also really enjoy this kind of pseudo-realistic old school positive thinking hoorah America kind of science fiction art, too.  Even though I normally am not quite sure what to do with it, because relatively near future harder science fiction that isn't dystopian or neo-cyberpunk can be fun to read or watch on occasion, but I don't do any of it myself.

I dunno. A foo tiger or something. Whatever, it's a cool image.

Red Dead Locations and their Real Life Counterparts

The graphics (and scenery) for Red Dead Redemption 2 are phenomenal, and most gamers recognize that. Many even compare the scenery in the game to real life as if real life needs to step it up. This is, of course, exaggeration, especially considering that in general, the scenery in RDR2 is a muted compression and stylization of certain real life places. What are these places, you might ask?  Let's have a quick and dirty run-down, starting with each "state" and its constituent regions.

Ambarino

• Grizzlies West—this could be any number of mountains in the west; given that they're covered in snow, it's a little hard to see a lot of the finer features of rock and vegetation, although they do seem to be granite based gray. I don't see any aspens, so I'm going to go with granite and/or gneiss based mountains of the greater Yellowstone region which is centered on the NW corner of Wyoming, but includes some areas across the border in Montana and Idaho here and there, specifically the Tetons, Bearthooths and the Wind Rivers.
• Grizzlies East—this is very similar terrain, except without the snow. I think in particular it reminds of the Beartooths and the Wind Rivers because of the shape of some of the formerly glaciated granite peaks, as well as the specific vegetation. Again, the no aspens is a tell; aspens are common in the Rockies a little further south, such as Utah and Colorado and New Mexico—at least if they are low enough elevation. Plus, the Cotorra Springs region is clearly a little mini Yellowstone, complete with colorful hot springs and geysers.

West Elizabeth

• Big Valley—West Elizabeth was in the first game, but was a much smaller area. With the addition of Big Valley, it got a more than 100% increase in size, although Big Valley itself is a largely depopulated frontier in valleys and meadows at high elevation. Again, it has much of the same look as Grizzlies East, and reminds me most strongly of the mountains around Yellowstone like the Tetons and the Wind Rivers and the Absarokas. Some peaks even look like they could almost be modeled after specific prototypes in the Tetons, for instance. Although it does have loons, which are a west coast animal, over on Lake Owanjilla and elsewhere. And that northwest corner of Big Valley is also next to Tall Trees, so let's move to that now...
• Tall Trees—This is clearly California; not only are there Sierra Nevada variants of the wildlife (instead of Rockies) but it just looks like the Sierra Nevada, including the very particular sequoia trees and other small details that separate the look of the Sierra Nevada vs. the Wind Rivers, or something like that. Granted, even in real life, it's hard sometimes to tell the difference when looking at pictures; the rock itself looks almost identical in both color and shape and formation, and most of the flora is common to both regions. But the sequoias in particular give this a California rather than Rockies aspect.
• Great Plains—This is a more generalized praire environment that could be anywhere from West Texas to Oklahoma to Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, etc. Most of the real life Great Plains is very similar to other aspects of it with the exception of how much snowfall and cold weather it gets, but given the lack of very many trees and the fact that grass mostly looks like grass no matter the latitude, unless you get all the way up to the near polar regions, there's no telling where this could be.

New Hanover

• Heartlands—Although separated in game by two rivers and a small, forested line of hills, the Great Plains region and the Heartlands region are both based on the prairie ecosystem of the American Great Plains. However, there's a noticeable difference between the two; you make your river crossing and suddenly the grass is a bit greener and shorter in Heartlands. This represents the classic short-grass prairie of the more westerly prairie, such as you'd find near Scott's Bluff or Pawnee Buttes in Colorado and right across the border in Nebraska. The chalky limestone bluffs even look so similar that they are almost exact replicas. The Red Dead wiki calls out the Pawnee bluffs specifically, but I think the Twin Stack Pass is a dead ringer for Mitchell Pass, which runs right through the Scott's Bluff National Monument. Given the pioneer trail history that used it as a major landmark, I find this a more likely prototype for the game model, but realistically, the two look very similar, and if you were to go to either of them in real life, you'd certainly get that "just south of Valentine" feeling.
• Cumberland Forest—while providing a transition zone between the Grizzlies and the Heartlands bluffs and prairies, the Cumberland Forest doesn't really have to represent any real place. That said, many have noted the resemblance it has to the Black Hills of North Dakota, a small, relatively low, granite mountain range that's a little bit disconnected from the main thrust of the various Rockies ranges. Fort Wallace and the Wapiti Reservation located in this area are a subtle nod to the whole Little Big Horn fiasco which took place in and around the Black Hills too.
• Roanoke Ridge—This is very traditional "hillbilly" eastern mountains, and many real life places can stand in for them. The Appalachian Scots-Irish, the coal mining, the heavy foresting, the frequent fogs—I think of them as the Smokey Mountains and nearby areas like the Blue Ridge Mountains, but further north in the Appalachian Range would be essentially indistinguishable, like most of West Virginia, for example. For that matter, the Ozarks, which are completely disconnected from the Appalachians per se, would look exactly the same too. Some Red Dead fans think that because of the proximity of Roanoke Ridge to Lemoyne that the Ozarks are more likely, but c'mon; the Roanoke Ridge area blends seamlessly into the Grizzles, which makes no sense from a real world geography standpoint. But, if you go to either Gatlinburg Tennessee in the Smokies and tool around in the woods, or go to Branson Missouri in the Ozarks, either one, and you'll feel that Roanoke Ridge vibe very strongly.

Lemoyne

• Scarlett Meadows—While all of Lemoyne is clearly based on Louisiana, Scarlett Meadows is the part that would fit just about anywhere in immediately post-bellum Dixie. Up by the Red River in Louisiana just north of the marshes and bayous would probably be the best direct analog, but honestly, part of East Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and even Florida and Georgia and South Carolina could all have looked pretty much just like Scarlett Meadows, and to some degree, still do.
• Bayou Nwa—where Saint Denis is located, is clearly the marshy flats all around New Orleans. While Saint Denis is multicultural to a fault, although there does seem to be a strong urbanized French element there, the backwoods bayou folks, from places like Lagras and Lakay seem specifically Creole or backwoods Cajun in nature. I don't know what kind of word Nwa is supposed to be, but I actually suspect it may be an in-joke reference to N.W.A. Saint Denis is so obviously New Orleans that it literally copies a handful of buildings and recreates them.
• Bluewater Marsh—Although not located on an actual coast (and Flat Iron Lake is no Gulf of Mexico), but rather beside a very large proxy for the Mississippi River, Bluewater Marsh has a southern tidal flats feel to it that is unmistakable. There are areas near New Orleans that would be a perfect stand-in for this environment.

New Austin

• Hennigan's Stead—New Austin seems to have the most extreme compression when it comes to representing real life regions. Hennigan's Stead, only one of four regions within New Austin itself represents three or four different parts of Texas just by itself; the central area is very much like the Hill Country of south/central Texas. You can see towns like New Braunfels or Fredericksburg appearing smack dab here, or rather, if you were to go camping nearby to those, it would look very much like this. However, as you come off of the higher ground and head into the open desert further west, you have territory that is a dead ringer for the areas further west. The northern part, the canyons that you wind through to get from MacFarlane Ranch to Armadillo, are extremely similar state parks in the panhandle like Caprock State Park and Palo Duro State Park, whereas the more southern part starts to get into trans-Pecos Big Bend country style desert. The coastal areas of Hennigan's Stead, such as Thieves Landing, Stillwater Creek and Quaker's Cove have more of a Gulf Coastal Texas feel to them.
• Rio Bravo—As Hennigan's Stead's southernmost area starts to transition into Rio Bravo, it greatly starts to resemble the Chihuahuan Desert of west Texas and New Mexico. Fort Mercer has a look to it reminiscent of old border town Columbus New Mexico, where a battle was fought between Pancho Villa and Colonel Slocum. And it's probably no coincidence that there is a west Texas town literally called Plainview; although it's more up in the Panhandle rather than the Big Bend region.
• Cholla Springs—On the other hand, Cholla Springs has a very distinctive type of vegetation, the saguaro cactus (contrary to what you may hear, in English of course you do pronounce the G. For that matter, in most accents and dialects of Spanish you'd say it too, although not as strongly as in English) which is really only located in the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona, a small corner of southeastern California, and the Sinaloa region of Mexico itself. The town of Armadillo makes a good stand-in for places in Arizona like Jerome, or even more famously, Tombstone itself. It's... your huckleberry, yeah.
• Gaptooth Ridge—This could still be in Arizona, but it's obviously getting closer to the California and Nevada borders if so, because you start to see much more of the iconic Joshua trees, another iconic and regionally constrained bit of vegetation. It's the Mojave desert, or at least the transition to the Mojave desert, and while I tend to think of that as a southern California thing, the fact that there are still saguaros in Gaptooth Ridge would suggest that it's actually still on the Arizona side; the range of the saguaro is curiously almost exactly along the state line.

Hopefully we get Nuevo Parasio added to the game at some point, but with a rumored PS5 announcement imminent, maybe they won't put quite as much effort into RDR2 anymore. Curiously, much of the terrain of this fake Mexican state actually closely resemble further north geography from southern Utah and the Four Corners area. But my experience with that isn't direct, because although I've played the crap out of RDR2, I've never played RDR.

RDR Online player types

Of this list of 7, what type do I consider myself?

1) The Casual. Well, I'm not that casual. Not even knowing about features in the game? That's not me. But I'm not really into PvP or grinding.

2) The Griefer. I'm absolutely not this type of player. I can't stand them, and I'd prefer a more solo experience if I can get it. Luckily, the griefer type has been much farther and further between than in the early days of the beta.

3) The Cheater. No, I don't even know how to do this kind of stuff, and I'm not very interested in it unless it's really easy. Plus, the nonsense of talking about it non-stop is silly.

4) The Nice Guy. I don't have time for this. If I was down to randomly looking for people to help, then I am done with playing the game; I clearly don't have anything else meaningful to do. I don't care about hanging around "socializing" in game all that often.

5) The Pre-pubescent Outlaw. My youngest son, who is 16 now, bought this game. I'm a middle-aged man, fer' crying out loud. Besides, I have my voice chat turned off.

6) The Role-player. I kinda wish that the game enabled this, instead of it just being telling stories to your friends with your toons. I have no interest in playing this way, but I wish the game itself enabled it somehow.

7) The Completionist. No, I just want the stuff I want, and then I'll get bored with the tedium of getting everything else.

After posting that, he got lots of feedback and posted a follow-up based on that.



8) The Complainer. Heh. I admit; I have a bit of that in me sometimes. I do think it's annoying that there are things that you're used to from Single Player that you can't get in Online and vice versa, for instance. But I haven't played much Single Player in a long time, so I've mostly accepted Online for what it is and am used to it by now.

9) The Fashion Enthusiast. I'm definitely this type in many ways, although I can't afford to be the way I want to be in online. With my family of players as an example, I definitely trend this way much more in Single Player than anyone else, even my daughter.

10) The Jokester. This isn't really me on a regular basis, but I do sometimes engage in a bit of this, I admit. See the video below for something I think would be really cool to do online with some actual friends that is up this alley.

11) The Artist. I see a handful of Youtube videos from people like this, but I wouldn't even know where to begin.

12) The Cowgirl. I don't believe that these really exist in the way that he describes them. Sure, there are girls who play (again; my daughter is one) but that nonsense and political correctness is stoooo-pid. Girl players, when they exist, are not well-rounded or better than guys, or anything like that. They just are girls who belong to one of the other categories. Most girls who play will trend toward the Casual, the Fashion Enthusiast, and the Roleplayer, although that's a trend, hardly an absolute.  And yeah—if there's one girl for every ten guys playing, I'd be surprised.

13) The Lone Wolf. Waves. Yes, that is absolutely me.

14) The Hunter. I was one of these in Single Player, but I'm less likely to be a hunter in online so far. I like the idea of making a character that looks like an Injun, though. I'm actually thinking of going that right for a second character later down the line, maybe.

Anyway, some silly stuff to do when you've done everything else...

SWTOR vs RDR Online

Well, another week passes today where I still haven't heard from my brother that my computer is ready. I think he's still waiting on the wifi card, which he had forgotten to order two weeks ago, and I think he's tracking one down on ebay, which maybe explains the delay. A month to six weeks ago I was super excited about playing SWTOR, and as time has gone on and my computer hasn't been finished, I've gradually felt that ardor tamp down. Now, that doesn't mean that when my computer finally does arrive that I won't install it and play it, but it does mean that in the meantime, I've gotten into RDR Online, and that's where my attention is right now.

Of course, as I pointed out the other day, RDR Online has plenty of bugs, although I haven't struggled with some of them as much as I have with others (I find plenty of animals over by Blackbone forest or Little Creek area, for instance—if you set up your camp nearby, you can keep Cripps stocked fairly easily). One glitch that I've had for the last two bounties I've attempted for the bounty hunter role, which I'm struggling to get traction on, and this partially explains why, is the bounties spawning too far away to be feasible. Last night, I picked a poster up in Tumbleweed for a woman who was "running for the mountains", i.e., the edge of the map. I did a quick look at my map to see where she was, whistled over my horse and mounted and started riding towards her, and before I even got out of town; like ten to fifteen seconds after picking up the poster, I got a message saying that the bounty had escaped and the mission was over. What?! I mean, I hadn't even had time to leave town yet from where I picked up the poster, and I wasn't dithering around at all either. It just ended almost immediately after starting, because they spawned her almost right next to her escape point. Seriously, what?!

This morning I woke up a bit early and couldn't go back to sleep, so I spend about an hour to and hour and a half on the game. Tried another bounty that I picked up from a poster at Wallace Station, since my camp is very close, and the bounty was at the Prinz slaughter house at the outskirts of Saint Denis. And the timer started right away. Seriously, what? It was almost as far away as it could be without me starting in New Austin, and it took two thirds of my time just to get to where the bounty was. If you have any hitches with catching the bounty, then you're screwed, because you have almost no time to deal with it if you have to spend most of your timer just getting to the area where the bounty is. I thought they were supposed to spawn relatively close to the town where you pick up the poster? Anyway, because I haven't bought the reinforced lasso or the bolas yet, it was challenging; the target ran while I was mired in fighting thugs, but I managed to get passed that, lasso him up and put him on my horse, but he got out of the hogtie and ran again and then I ran out of time.  Sigh.

The bounty hunter role was the one I was the most excited about doing, but I've so far had pretty miserable luck with it. I think maybe my strategy will be to keep doing stranger missions and trading runs until I can afford to buy the bolas and the reinforced lasso before getting too heavy into the bounty hunter missions. The bolas are often described by players as useless, but I actually think that they can come in pretty handy to trip up the target and leave him entangled while you fight with thugs for a bit, and the reinforced lasso, of course, hogties the target in such a way that he can't escape. I'm hoping that these two items can make my bounty hunting a bit more successful. But if I have glitches like the two mentioned there, it'll still be somewhat challenging. There's nothing you can do if your target spawns so close to the escape area that you can't possibly hope to get there in time to catch her, for instance.

I also think some throwing knives would be good. I don't have those yet, and sneaking into camps of thugs and murdering some of them before you have to just fight a gigantic gang while the target is running would probably help. I don't have any method of stealth kills other than my Bowie knife right now.

RDR2 in the future

Given the likely reliable rumors of a PS5 launch announced and the kick-off of a new console generation, I doubt that my RDR2 (to be nitpicky, it's my son's) will be getting major upgrades, because it will belong to the last generation of consoles and will gradually fade away the way the first RDR did when PS3 moved to PS4. So, this is a pipe dream of a post, really—unless they decide that a massively expanded and remixed RDR2/Online with twice the territory, twice the missions, twice the items and twice the everything is the way to go for a PS5 game, none of this is likely to ever be possible.  But, if that generation change wasn't on the horizon, or if RockStar decided that updating and vastly expanding the game were part of their PS5 strategy, how would I do it? What would I want to add if I were making RDR2-PS5? What do I think it really could use to be a lot more fun?

First of, clearly it needs the various bugs to be fixed. My last post detailed a few of them, but some of them aren't exactly bugs as they are... poor designs. Private lobbies so you don't have to deal with server issues or griefers either one are a must. Double or even triple the random animal generation. (Heck, for that matter, I'd probably increase the random NPC generation too. There really aren't very many in Online compared to Single Player at all.)  But those are givens. What else?

First; expansion of the map. The Nuevo Paraiso section should be a no brainer, because we already know what's there, and it appears that models are even in the game that just need to be cleaned up and turned on. Beyond that, the section north of New Austin and west of West Elizabeth and Ambarino is a big blank corner that could be filled in to give us a more square-like map with plenty of new territory, if they can figure out something interesting to do with it that isn't derivative (PNW style scenery, maybe? Thick, green, mossy forests with lots of creeks and waterfalls?) You could easy add another 25-35% territory to the map simply by adding this. And frankly, Flat Iron Lake seems like a big wasted opportunity; there should be some kind of cool island or something out there that's not too hard to reach that can be explored too. We could easily get up to 50% more map without even really expanding beyond what's already there, although some development filling the rough models in the code with more texture, more towns, NPCs, sites and whatnot to explore would, of course, be necessary.

You could keep a steady stream of new stuff going on by adding a new role every... what, six months or so, maybe? Along with mixing it up with new PVP events, new stranger missions popping up here and there, new bounties, etc., you can keep an evergreen cycle of new things to do that don't require too much work from the developers, all things considered.

I kinda like the hunting a lot, and I think even more exotic animals could be added. When Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis & Clark out West, he believed it likely that they'd find surviving megafauna like ground sloths, sabertooths, mammoths, etc. still lurking out there in the vast, unknown West. Sadly, there weren't, but what if there were? What if... there were Columbian mammoths, sabertooths, terror birds, American cheetahs, or a handful of other unusual animals to hunt? What if one of the new roles was some kind of hunter, and the missions that you'd be given were actually to find these and bring them in? Much more exciting than legendary animals from single player.

What if one of the roles were a kind of Old West Scully & Mulder investigator of the paranormal? Single player already has ghosts, ghost trains, sasquatch skeletons (there's at least one sasquatch that makes an appearance in Undead Nightmare, I think), nightmare daemonic cults, human sacrifice, a Nosferatu (maybe. Unless he's not just a crazy person who kills you surprisingly easily with a knife if you let him.) There's UFOs, there's mutants, there's Night Folk who are pretty darn close to being like zombies already. Making a role around that stuff would be AWESOME!

Ultravox

I talk a lot about Depeche Mode, and their best stuff is my favorite pop music, in large part because of it's underground, new wave edginess, polished, dark melancholic sound, and high quality of songwriting.

Of course, DM didn't operate in a vacuum. Vince Clark's change of the sound from a more traditional guitar and rock based structure to electronic music came about because he heard an OMD song. The New Romantic movement, to which Depeche Mode arguably never really belonged, although they looked like maybe they could have back in 1980-81 or so, had a lot of really great synthpop bands that would have sounded very similar to Depeche Mode in many ways. Actually, they were considerably darker and more menacing in most cases than early Depeche Mode, although later Depeche Mode mostly swapped that again, although not under the aegis of New Romanticism as a fashion movement, at least. Arguably, thought, the music and artistic aspects of it remain unchanged.

Here I'm talking about bands like Visage, Duran Duran, and Spandau Ballet. Boy George is also a quintessential New Romantic, but he's mostly devolved into a bit of a joke because his songs were campy and the Adam Sandler flic The Wedding Singer made fun of "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" so much. In America, New Romanticism wasn't really a thing, but once bands like Duran Duran lost the worst of their "gay imagery" on their eponymous first release, then they were able to be labeled the Second British Invasion, a kind of slightly edgy, dance-oriented synthesizer driven pop. Their second album Rio and their third, Seven and the Ragged Tiger with heavily played, highly produced, fun to watch music videos on new cable channel MTV being a major driver of their success. Duran Duran were often compared to Spandau Ballet, who also had at least a few American hits (everyone knows "True", at a bare minimum, although a few other tracks are familiar to many) but I always thought they were better compared, in many ways, to the Midge Ure classic line-up of Ultravox.   Two member of this version of Ultravox were linked with Visage (Midge Ure and Billie Curie), and by sound and tone and mood and theme, they were quite similar to the early Duran Duran releases. They weren't really New Romantics, although they were often labeled such by the press; probably because they sounded like New Romantics and had two members who had been in Visage, but New Romanticism was always more of a visual/fashion movement than anything else, and New Romantic music could sound nearly identical to non-New Romantic synthpop or electronic music going to at the same time alongside New Romanticism. (Like OMD, Human League, New Order, Soft Cell, etc.) Unlike Duran Duran, they weren't young, art-school pretty boys either, they were rather more established musicians who had been in the punk and early new wave scene for some time, including the earlier punk and post-punk iteration of Ultravox, the Rich Kids, and others.

Anyway, Ultravox had been around through much of the later 70s, and are often credited with inventing the first synthpop song, "Hiroshima, Mon Amour", and the world's first synthpop album (although not super commercially successful, it is praised highly by Gary Numan and others, who said it was his single biggest musical inspiration) in Systems of Romance. But that version of the band imploded when lead singer John Foxx got tired of struggling with the band, went solo, released Metamatic (which ironically, due to some issues of timing, sounds derivative of Gary Numan in many respects) and the band reformed about a year or so later after Billie Currie had toured with Numan and done the first release of the Visage project, etc. He had met Midge Ure during this time, and invited him to helm Ultravox, and this line-up released four of the best, although sadly under-rated and unknown (at least in America) New Romantic or new wave or synthpop or whatever you want to call it albums during the early to mid-80s. I mean, they're just real classics—almost every track is good, and they have a very fresh sound, even today, almost 40 years later. They gradually drifted over this four album arc into a somewhat more mainstream sound, but they still manage to maintain that new wave edge. After the four albums, they put out a greatest hits album, canned Warren Cann, the drummer, and put out a fifth album with this slightly revised line-up, but it was a fan and critical flop, and Midge Ure left the band afterwards and that was that.

But Vienna, Rage in Eden, Quartet and Lament are all fabulous albums, and anyone who has any appreciation for 80s new wave Second British Invasion music should own all four and wonder to himself why Ultravox didn't get the same recognition that Duran Duran did. Although it's worth pointing out that in the UK, they did have a number of hits. Like Duran Duran, they also had a string of visually striking music videos. I discovered them, albeit a few years after the fact, when I got the Collection CD, which admittedly does have most of the highlights of this era. We kinda fell in love with their sound at my house when I was a teenager, and heck—my younger brother even went through a phase where he tried to grow Midge Ure's trademark pointed sideburns, as seen on the "Vienna" video, and honestly, throughout much of this era. (He was too young to pull it off, and it wasn't right without the mustache anyway.)

RDR2 bugs

I've seen most of these. And I've only been playing Online for a few days.

1) camp not setting up? Yep, that's happened to me.

2) clipping hair styles and clothes. This happens a ton in Story mode too. For that matter there's a lot of clothing glitches in SWTOR too.

3) low animal spawns. There certainly are less animals in Online than in Single Player, but I haven't seen that it's a crippling problem.

4) loading screens that never load. This seems to happen to me when going to appearance manager 100% of the time so far, but it's happened once or twice in another screen too.

5) broken posse management. I don't know; I haven't tried to form or join a posse yet.

6) daily challenges not registering. Yesterday, I got 4/5 lasso an NPC from horseback. However, I actually lassoed about 15 people from horseback. Luckily, I got other daily challenges done, but still...

7) Moonshine glitches with wagons and reset of production progress. I haven't unlocked the moonshine role yet. I just unlocked trader and bounty hunter.

8) dead lobbies in PVP matchmaking. I haven't actually had a problem with this, but I don't do very much PVP. Plus, he says its worse on PC, which makes sense. I play on a PS4.

9) connectivity issues. I actually haven't ever had this one happen to me, though.

A good, succinct explanation of the Cult of Wokeness

De/Vision reviews upcoming

I've talked a bit over the last few months of my gathering of all of my Depeche Mode music into folders; first, the actual CDs (albums) themselves, and then rounding them up with the b-sides and other bonus tracks, and considering that my own version of a "deluxe" album, and then reviewing it as such.

Another band I like, which is similar in most respects to Depeche Mode is De/Vision, and I've done a similar thing for them. However, I've magnified the scope even more by including the remixes and alternate versions that I have of them. Granted, I probably couldn't do this with Depeche Mode, because of the sheer number of alternate versions and remixes that I have, many of them unofficial bootlegs that I've collected here and there over the years, but while the scope is pretty massive for De/Vision, and still a pretty monumental task, it's smaller than it would have been for Depeche Mode.

I don't pretend to have literally every version of every track that they've ever released, of course. For one thing, De/Vision have really embraced the business model of patronage, limited editions, and collectible releases, so it's not really feasible to get everything that they've ever released anyway, but I do have most of it. I tallied 358 tracks collected into a variety of folders starting from their very earliest release Boy on the Street in 1992 (I don't have any copies of their self-released cassette from the late 80s) through to their 2018 Citybeats album.

There are actually a handful of alternate versions of some songs that I know that I have somewhere kicking around that I didn't even bother looking for, actually—an alternate version of "Aimee" remixed by Intuition, and all of the "Turn Me On" remixes except for the Rename one, are tracks that I have somewhere but didn't go dig through my CD-R archives to see where I left them. There may well be a few more that I'm not even remembering too. Sure, I could probably find them without too much trouble, but I also remember not caring one way or another about those, so certainly I don't care too much about the ones that I don't even have.

I also took the alternate versions from Zehn and Remixed and filed them with the original album as "bonus tracks" and don't consider Zehn or Remixed to be their own albums in their own right. And I did something similar with the various Popgefahr remixed albums, save that I didn't duplicate any of the tracks that appeared on both the German and the US releases. And I did find a handful of bootleg or other remixes of a few songs and included them. Some of them were, I believe, done for Popgefahr but not chosen by the band, but later given away by the remixers.

Although I did thrift out some of the tracks I don't like by not including them, I do know for sure that there are several tracks on Remixed and the Popgefahr remixes that I don't like too, but I did not thrift them out yet, mostly because I don't remember very well what the ones I don't like are like.

Anyway, I'm going to go through a project where I go through these albums, sorta like what I'm doing with Depeche Mode, except not quite as formalized.  I can already tell you more or less what I'm going to think; the early stuff isn't generally as good, although some of the really classic tracks like "Your Hands on My Skin" or "Try to Forget" come from this era. Fairyland? is the first album that I'd really consider overall high quality and interesting to listen to instead of being a mediocre synthpop album with a handful of good tracks. Monosex, which follows it, is probably the very best one. After that, there's a bit of a dearth of great albums, even though the song production has improved, the songs themselves largely have not. Most of these albums have at least a few really good tracks on them, with the possible exception of Subkutan, but overall, they're not wonderful, and there's a lot of mediocre tracks too. Noob is the first really good album after Monosex, with a more than 50% great tracks ratio, and Popgefahr follows it, which is the other contender for their best album ever. The Popgefahr remix albums were also a very interesting experiment (they released no fewer than five different remix albums, and although a handful of remixes are repeated here and there, in general, there are loads of alternate versions of all of the tracks on Popgefahr.) Some of these alternate versions are phenomenally good, but many of them are not.

After Popgefahr, a number of additional albums came out that in general rate just below Noob, I think. They have plenty of good tracks, and a number of mediocre ones.

Relative to Depeche Mode, I'd say De/Vision have less of a quality arc; that is, their quality is more consistent, especially after they got through their early days and picked up some experience. That said, they aren't as good as Depeche Mode. They maybe have as many really good tracks, but that's only because they've released so many more tracks to choose from. Depeche Mode, on the other hand, went through a phase, peak Depeche Mode, where almost everything they released was great with only a few exceptional wrongly considered tracks and then after their "crash" came back as a mediocre post-electronic band who only occasionally dazzle us with their brilliant potential. De/Vision aren't, I presume, just quite as brilliant, but their work ethic and sheer number of releases means that they've risen to a pretty high status in my esteem, and they have a lot of tracks that I really quite like.

Anyway, I'll get to this project a little bit later, but since I've now completely and thoroughly organized all of my De/Vision music, it's actually something that I can do now, and will within the next few weeks.

Friday Art Attack

I am incredibly delinquent in the posting of Friday Art Attack posts, so this will be a rather large one, and I might even post another one a little bit later today if the day looks like it will accommodate doing so.

I've always been a huge fan of this kind of retro-futurism. Y'know, the future as envisioned in the heady, optimistic days before we became mired down by loss of confidence in our own culture and society, bastardized by those who couldn't ever have managed to build even the groundwork for this future, subjected to false guilt and shame for who we were, etc.

Elements of this still lingered like a sputtering light into the 70s and early 80s, but by then the grungier post-apocalyptic look was more common. Even Star Wars contributed, honestly—that was one of its big innovations visually, the expression of a science fiction setting that looked poor, used, lived in and old.

Lucas did focus a little bit more on this kind of visual for the prequels, and even some of the more developed places in the OT. Cloud City had some elements of this kind of vibe, for instance, while Tatooine obviously never did.

Speaking of Star Wars, here's three Mandalorians. I'm a bit conflicted about Boba Fett and the Mandalorian and the entire Mandalorian concept in general. I generally much prefer the original supercommando concept from the pre-production of Empire, where they were less political correct and more like space Spartans or space Varangians, or something. Which is exactly the direction, of course, that I took my own Cilindareans, which I would think look somewhat like the Mandalorians and the Halo characters and Warmachine all rolled into one look.

A couple of WAR images; one of Eberron and one of Age of Worms. Both are unusual. Paizo and WotC (and Disney Star Wars, and BioWare, and even the guys who make The Witcher, if what I hear is correct) have fully come on board with the multicultural nightmare version of reality, and can't imagine places that are actually the homelands of a specific people and culture rather than a multicultural mess.  Both Eberron, and the iconic Paizo characters, and more are a very bizarre mixture of cultures, sexes and races all thrown together, and we're supposed to expect that that kind of thing actually works, in spite of our actual evidence from real life in front of our eyes about how that actually increases conflict, stress and unhappiness in general.

A Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, I think. If not, well—it's some kind of bizarre Lovecraftian something or other, anyway.

A somewhat different take on the appearance of orcs. The hunter gal—oof. I'm really, really over the trend that's become ubiquitous in the last few years that tells me that masculine women who are just like men except smaller and with boobs is cool. No, they're not. Feminine women who are pretty, pleasant, and who you want to protect are what's attractive in fiction and in real life both.

The classic wolfman. I'm always on the lookout for some kind of artwork to represent my woses (formerly changelings, formerly shifters, etc.) race, but there really aren't enough that I think have the right look that I can find, sadly.

As I said earlier, I was really quite into Red Dead Redemption 2 last year, and I enjoyed in particular the supernatural and weird elements that were in it, especially because they were so subtle. Anyway, this bayou reminded me of the haunt of the Night Folk. Good stuff.

People riding on dinosaurs and fighting more dinosaurs is something that I'm always in favor of. Sure, this guy looks a little bit like a pretty boy, but that's still loads better than a woman. I'm not complaining. And pretty people can be cool too. They can't help their looks really; it's part of their genetic heritage.

Let's finish off the day with some retro-futurist moon colonization images. Actually, the last one is, I believe, Mars, although the moon and sky aren't really quite right.  Whatever.

When I was a kid, I was sure that by now we'd have colonies on the Moon, at least, if not Mars, and I'd probably be living there because why wouldn't you, if you could? I'm still disappointed in that a little, although I also don't think I'd want to live there after all.  The American West is my geographical home, and the American South is my cultural home, and I'd never be happy anywhere else.

2019 and 2020

I'm not a huge video gamer. I just turned 48 (today, in fact! Happy birthday to me!) so I'm the right age to have been part of the arcade generation. When I was a kid, arcades were present in every mall, and even a few cabinets were sitting around in every grocery store and 7-11. And yes, I used to head over to the mall on my bicycle with a pocket full of quarters as often as I could get away with it. I remember when the first Atari's started popping up at my friends' houses, and I remember ColecoVision and some of the other early console wars stuff. My little brother got an 8-bit Nintendo before they were really very old, and my in-laws got me, for my first Christmas after getting married, a Super Nintendo (which wasn't new at the time; the first Playstation would have recently launched at that time.) For many years, I lagged behind in the consoles because 1) I was cheap and poor; a grad student and young parent, and 2) I'm neither an early adopter nor a hardcore gamer. Gaming to me is a leisure hobby, and I don't play a ton—but I also don't not play. But I don't necessarily play a lot of the hottest games either, and my gaming is more casual. It's not even my main hobby that I give the most thought and attention to, although... I'm not sure what that is anymore either.

In any case, we're mostly up to date on consoles now; heck, tons of games are on phones nowadays anyway. We've had a PS4 for a few years now, although I haven't bought any games for myself. We don't have a Nintendo Switch, but we still have a Wii U and occasionally someone in the house still busts out a game for it. Especially Breath of the Wild.

For quite some time, I had a reasonably capable gaming desktop too, although reasonably capable is a debatable. It ran everything I wanted it to, and had a good graphics card, but I wasn't using it for much for several reasons; one of which being that it was a shared computer and when my wife needed it, she was usually doing something considerably less frivolous. And the location was bad too. It was was equipped with Windows XP, and both The Old Republic and Steam eventually stopped working on it because they no longer supported that OS. For the entirety of 2019, it's been a non-starter for any gaming.

Which is fine. One of my sons pre-ordered Red Dead Redemption 2, so we got that in the fall of 2018, and four out of the five people in my household were all playing it quite a bit. Most of my 2019 gaming was, in fact, RDR2 gaming. In the last few months I admit that I have gotten to the point where I'm kinda done with the collectible and challenge kind of completion stuff that I still haven't done, and I'm not very interested anymore. Although my daughter recently went back to her online account while I was sitting there watching, and heck—it looks very different. Not only are there not a bazillion griefers running around shooting at you just because, but there is a lot to do. It's not exactly all story mission stuff, but they look for the most part like reasonably entertaining side quests, bounty hunts, and stuff like that. I do think that it looks like I might revive my interest in RDR2 for 2020, maybe, if I get into the stuff that you can do in Online. I do wonder, though... there really doesn't ever seem to be a lot of people on when my daughter has logged on, so I wonder if there's enough going on to keep it running. I know that's always a concern with online games, but it's really a notable difference from how it was earlier on. Y'know, back when we all got turned off from doing much with RDR2 Online because it was a stupid free-for-all of grief and frustration. I admit I don't know much about how it works now, though. I only this week rediscovered the fact that there's all this stuff to do there in the first place.

Anyway, if 2019 was the year of RDR2, then 2020 will likely be, at least for many months, the year of rediscovering and playing through a lot of SWTOR. I have my new desktop, which I can set up in a dedicated location where I can be on it (within reason) as much as I want without any interruption, and it is also dedicated solely to my use. I do intend to install SWTOR as just about the first install (after basic tools like a free office suite and an improved browser like Brave, etc.) and then get the two month non-renewing subscription. (It's curious that you can buy a one month subscription, but it automatically renews, and I don't really want to worry about remembering to cancel it, honestly.) That will unlock all of the story content available by the end of my subscription, even when it expires, which will give me plenty to do. Although to be fair, most of the stuff that comes after the main class stories aren't worth doing over and over again with each class, because the content is basically the same other than a few minor details of the voice acting and dialogue, although hopefully it's at least worth doing with each faction. The expansion storylines are relatively big; as big as a normal game by itself, honestly, but after playing through eight unique class stories, it does seem—although understandable and certainly forgivable—disappointing to not have more variation in how it rolls out.

Anyway, yeah—in 2019 I was more constrained in my video gaming, and RDR2 was just about the only thing I played. I'll probably try the brave new world of RDR2 Online in 2020, but I'm looking at SWTOR along with some blowing off steam on Steam using my copy of Street Fighter IV to round that out. That's probably about as much video gaming as I'll have time and stomach for, quite honestly. If I do play anything else, I'm leaning towards maybe a bit of Blood Bowl, maybe a replay of Force Unleashed, and maybe Spider-man PS4, which my other son bought and played through back when RDR2 came out. I always kinda half intended to play that too, but never got around to it. I may still not; it's not a high priority.

It's curious, is it not, that my video game "goals" such as they are do not revolve at all around anything new. RDR2 is the closest thing to a "new" game showing there (and Spider-man PS4) and they're both almost a year and a half old by now.

New Wave music and Clone Wars

Often my blog topics have a direct correlation to what's going on in my real life. When things are slow(er) and I have time to think, you get more topics on RPG stuff. Y'know, the stated purpose of the blog. When things are more busy and chaotic, I have to post things that require less mental horsepower to create; in other words, I simply chat about someone else's creative output. In recent months in particular, that has meant Star Wars and Depeche Mode, but other topics will also come and go as things happen. Star Wars has particularly been on my mind, obviously, because of the release of Rise of Skywalker and The Mandalorian, but if you check my posting history, I've obviously been talking about Star Wars for a long time.

As an aside, I've been re-watching the Clone Wars in preparation for the February release of the new Season 7 material. Starting with the theatrical release movie and then going through the 5½ seasons that were released earlier and which are available in HD on Disney+, which makes it easy to watch them. Not that I necessarily expect it to be great, but I expect it to be OK. I've found as I've rewatched the Clone Wars the last time or two, and that impression has been strengthened by this time through again as well even though I'm still in Season, that it actually isn't as good as I remember. It was good enough to both rehabilitate the franchise brand overall to me (especially when combined with the Knights of the Old Republic game) and it was good enough to rehabilitate to some degree the entire Clone Wars era of the setting, but that doesn't mean that it was all roses with this show either. To wit, I think it has the following significant—maybe even crippling—and recurring problems:

• It really wasn't a smart era to set the show in. Not only do we already know what happens, but we already know what happens specifically to most of the major characters of the show, because they're the same characters who showed up in Attack of the Clones (which predates the show) and Revenge of the Sith (which postdates it.) That means that there is relatively little that can be done to put anything in real peril or shake things up in a meaningful way, making the show much lighter on tension and excitement than it should be. It becomes little more than esoteric fan service at its worst. That said, when the show was at its best is when it was charting new directions that couldn't have been foreseen from the movies, like the story arcs of specific clone troopers, or the Darth Maul storylines.
• The Jedi philosophy is hoaky and weak and makes no sense, and the more that they explore it, the more farcical it appears. I just watched, for instance, the episode Jedi Crash, in which Annakin, Ahsoka, Rex and Aayla Secura crash on some grassland planet and go get some help from Scottish rolling lemurs. The rolling lemurs have a philosophy of pacifism, and even though they are asking truly stupid questions about bringing peace by not fighting aggressors, and diplomacy and whatnot.  This is similar to the pacifism often bleated about by other supremely annoying characters like Padme and Duchess Satine, and the Jedi are shown conflicted by the messages, as if they were somehow compelling. I said earlier that thanks to the work of the Anonymous Conservative and his brilliant use of r/K-selection theory to make sense of socio-political stances that I wouldn't have the vocabulary to address this other than to call it imbecilic, historically willfully ignorant, and craven—the latter perhaps being the worst of the three. But by understanding that in spite of the K-strategist nature of a show about a conflict, the writers are r-strategists who can't function properly in a K-selected environment, I've been able to make sense of this major flaw in the show. Unfortunately, this seriously mars, if not destroys, the potential of many ideas that would otherwise be quite brilliant, in this show. To be fair, it's also not unique to this show. I made a similar complaint about The Old Republic's storylines, and the Clone Wars show is doing nothing if not reflecting the ethos of the prequel trilogy anyway. One could even easily make the case that this problem started during the Yoda sequences of The Empire Strikes Back and became seriously problematic in Return of the Jedi, but it wasn't until the prequel trilogy that it truly metastasized. 
• Speaking of problems that were drawn from the Prequel Trilogy, in the Original Trilogy the Force was subtle and relatively low key. In fact, when Vader is lightsaber fighting Luke and also using the force to throw boxes and crates at him, we're supposed to be seriously impressed with his talent at using the Force, and when the Emperor starts blasting Luke with lightning from his fingertips, it's supposed to be shocking (no pun intended) because nothing that overt had ever been seen or even hinted at about the Force before. However, in the Prequel Trilogy and in the Clone Wars (and everything subsequent, quite honestly) the Jedi, the Force, and even their lightsabers are absurdly overpowered. The Jedi become ridiculous Mary Sues who wade through most combats like they're bored and entitled to victory just by virtue of the fact that they showed up, and the writers tend to accommodate that sense of entitlement, sadly. Only when the writers stop and remind themselves that, "oh, yeah—action scenes aren't actually exciting if there's no sense that the 'heroes' might actually fail," that the show manages to rise above being mediocre. Sometimes they do this in various ways, not necessarily combat, but it is especially galling to watch Jedi fight droids over and over and over and over again throughout the show and never once feel like it is in the least interesting, much less exciting. There are plenty of other issues (bypassing all security or armor by simply, easily and quickly cutting through the metal with your lightsaber is another pet peeve of mine) but George Lucas created a serious Superman problem for himself in the Prequel Trilogy, and sadly, the Clone Wars not only mimics it, but makes it even worse.

So, my expectations for the coming Season 7 are not necessarily super great. When Disney took over Lucasfilm and the Clone Wars was retired early in favor of Rebels, which had the same creative team but a greatly inferior product, my hope that they'll be able to resist the SJW direction from on top is seriously reduced. Even if Kathleen Kennedy truly has been sidelined and kept away from the product as much as possible as many rumors suggest. But with Star Wars, in spite of my better judgement, hopes springs eternal that they'll be able to fix the problems with the franchise. In spite of decades of various forms of abuse, its fans still want it to succeed, although they want it to succeed because its managed to be at least as good as they know it can be, not just because its entitled to by virtue of its brand name, or whatever.

Anyway, on to another topic. When I started this post, I thought to only make a very quick and even kind of oblique reference to Star Wars, and it ended up being nearly long enough to be a post in its own right. Sigh. PA said recently the following: "Someone said that the 2020s be the decade of 1990s nostalgia. Time to move on the from ’80s. Let’s go with that. Eighties music, described in one word: stylization. Nineties music: sincerity." I could not possibly disagree more. Then again, PA is probably a few years younger than me, so the 90s has much more nostalgia for him; to me, the 90s was a complete and utter wasteland of pop culture vapidity. What he calls sincerity, I call the bleating of pathetic and self-indulgent betas exploring their feelings and vulnerability in a way that is anti-masculine. Now, that doesn't mean that he doesn't have a point about the 80s, although I don't think its totally fair either. Where the 80s pretended to be frivolous and disposable, they've actually managed to stand the test of time and be memorable; the 80s started 40 years ago, and many elements of 80s pop culture, especially the music, is still memorable and has emotional and cultural resonance today that something like Stone Temple Pilots or Kurt Cobain never will. And underneath the apparent shallowness of much of 80s pop culture is the pathos of frantic fear of global thermonuclear war. Now, whether or not it really was very likely that the US and the USSR would blow each other up entirely, it was certainly drilled into our heads that that could happen, and it was something that we were brainwashed to fear. Probably because the r-strategists in the media industry, the education industry and the entertainment industry themselves had absolutely no understanding of peace through strength and were constantly bawling and crying about how we needed to show submission or something disastrous would happen. Such is their way, of course, but we didn't necessarily know better as kids in the 80s. In any case, that context gave the 80s a kind of artistic pathos that... I dunno, maybe you have to have lived through it to get it. But at the same time, most normal people didn't really go around stressing about nuclear warheads with a hammer and sickle painted on them dropping on our heads at any moment, which meant that the 80s was also a time when American culture and Western Civilization overall was much more confident in who they were than they are now. In fact, in part thanks to the cultural leadership of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher bolstered by a robust economy, this sense of optimism and confidence, undergirded by constant reminders that it might not last forever, is a fundamental part of the 80s oeuvre. I will never be convinced that the wretched 90s will ever be able to compete with that.

All that said, my love of regular top 40 80s music is almost certainly driven more by nostalgia than by anything else; the music that I came to love during the decade was the more artistic, edgier stuff of electronic new wave. Granted, much of this had mainstream popularity during the 80s too, or otherwise I probably wouldn't have known much about it. If I hadn't been primed by the mainstream success of Duran Duran, a-ha, OMD, etc, I doubt I'd have discovered Depeche Mode, for instance—I'd just have a vague memory of People Are People being a pretty cool song back when I was 12 years old. Now, granted, Depeche Mode isn't synonymous with 80s music, but to me, at least, the Depeche Mode middle to late 80s output remains my favorite popular music of any kind whatsoever; Some Great Reward (1984), Black Celebration (1986), Music For the Masses (1987), 101 (1988) (a live compilation album) and even Violator (1990) although that's the start of the tapering off. With 1993's Songs of Faith and Devotion, Depeche Mode began a significant transition into a totally different kind of band. I'm at least somewhat gratified or vindicated in one sense for preferring their work that predates SOFAD, though—Depeche Mode is very often imitated, but as far as I know, not really anyone at all is imitating the SOFAD or post-SOFAD sound. What they're imitating is the late 80s smooth, electronic, European pop music that's aggressively dark, artistic and edgy without being noisy or industrial exactly.

Because there are a number of guys who are openly imitating this phase of Depeche Mode and DM have themselves completely reinvented their sound starting with SOFAD, it's fair to say that some of these albums by other guys sound more like Depeche Mode than Depeche Mode themselves do.  I especially explored a lot of these guys in the 90s and maybe the first half of the 00s. I'm still into them now, of course, although I also have wandered more into other, different styles. Many of these artists have had evolution of their sound too, and the "core" of this sound isn't quite as late 80s Depeche Mode sounding as it used to be either; the influence of futurepop and trance and other electronic genres has been too marked for them to simply tread water for the better part of twenty-five or thirty years, after all. That said, even fairly newish examples of this sound still have a remarkable broad fidelity to what many earlier ones would have had. A relatively recent example like 2015's A Worthy Compensation by Beborn Beton or 2017's Null Kelvin by Eisfabrik would still sound like "Depeche Mode with sharper teeth" as one reviewer puts it unless you're so embedded in the scene that you make a big deal out of subtle and esoteric distinctions and differences.

However, three albums, all of which are earlier than these, merit special mention at this point as "better Depeche Mode than Depeche Mode these days" all of which date from my earlier obsession with finding a replacement for Depeche Mode that hadn't gone and become all 90s on me. All of these date from the days when I was a member of the listserv operated by A Different Drum and saw them as the hub of how to get music. Keep in mind that this was before iTunes, Amazon music, Spotify, or even YouTube having music on it; buying CDs was still standard. A Different Drum was not only a music label of synthpop, but also the distribution hub and place to get it, via mail order. While ADD couldn't keep doing what they were doing in today's environment, I have no doubt, I miss them. I miss having a hub where you can find stuff, and have stuff pointed out for you so you don't have to just wander around blindly on the internet hoping to stumble across the next great electronic music gem. Anyway, I bought CDs of all three of these albums directly from Todd's mail order store, and I still don't regret it in the slightest.

First up, from 1998, is Monosex by De/Vision. De/Vision had been around for quite a while already at this point, and had released, depending on how you count it, four studio albums already prior to this one, but this was their best release to date, and arguably still their best or second best even now. De/Vision were always a very competent Depeche Mode imitator, although I've gotten into plenty of arguments with fans about the degree to which they are "imitating" them as opposed to simply making... extremely similar music. Whatever. Where De/Vision isn't likely to be as good as peak Depeche Mode is that their English isn't as good (they are Germans) and their lyrics are often very awkward and sometimes veer into the laughably overly melodramatic. Although they've finally backed off from this vibe too, De/Vision also thought for a while that it was very edgy and cool to be dismissive and even insulting of religion, and a few of their earlier tracks dig deeper into this kind of topical material than they should—although to be fair, although he was subtler, Martin Gore didn't completely refrain from doing that too sometimes.

Standout faster or mid-tempo tracks include "Strange Affection", "Hear Me Calling" and "Slaves to Passion." The first two in particular are notable for the great remixes by Mesh, although they are somewhat difficult to track down, actually, based on the way the album was released. The best tracks are the slower ones, though—"We Might Be One For a Day", "Deliver Me" and "Drifter". The latter is particularly and sharply dark and poignant. Even the lyrics are much better than normal (although there is a bizarre grammatical error that is hard to ignore.) The rest of the tracks don't stand out as much (if they all stood out, they'd defy the definition of being "stand-out") but that doesn't mean that they aren't uniformly pretty good, with the exception of the first track, "God Is Blind" which is only mediocre musically and absurd topically and lyrically, and "Shoreline" which is a somewhat forgettable instrumental in the middle of the album.

Like I said, a couple of slightly smoother and certainly dancier remixes by Mesh of "Strange Affection" and "Hear Me Calling" are worth tracking down. The former is on a CD single of the track, although the planned CD single of "Hear Me Calling" fell through. You can get some of the remixes on the ADD compilation Mix, Rinse and Spin II, but the best one, EnTrusted to Mesh, can only be found on a promo-only release of "Hear Me Calling," as an extra track on a promo-only release of "Blue Moon '99" or as an extra track on the single release of "Foreigner".

The album itself is somewhat hard to find new, and it's not readily available to listen to on Spotify or YouTube even, but buying used CD copies doesn't seem to be too difficult, luckily.

By 2002, Mesh had been around for some time (they are the remixers I mentioned above, for one thing). In addition to compilations of gathered tracks like Fragmente, Fragmente 2 and Original 91-93, they'd had three "regular" studio albums and a live album prior to the release of Who Watches Over Me? Whereas De/Vision had had to claw their way up to a quality album; their first three aren't really all that good, although they do have a smattering of classic tracks between them, Mesh were good right from the get-go. They didn't necessarily set up to imitate the Depeche Mode sound; in fact, some of their earlier studio albums, like In This Place Forever and some of the tracks on The Point At Which It Falls Apart sound as much like they're trying to imitate Pretty Hate Machine era Nine Inch Nails as Music For the Masses era Depeche Mode. And after this album, they changed their sound some-what to a richer, fuller sound with lots of layering, more guitars and whatnot—although curiously they did what sounds like the same thing Depeche Mode had done earlier, but they managed to not do it in the same way as Depeche Mode at all, and after Who Watches Over Me? they actually sound considerably less like a Depeche Mode imitator in many respects. This is the album where their peak Depeche Mode imitation... well, peaks.

Unlike De/Vision, Mesh are British, so their English is at least flawless. Relative to peak Depeche Mode, I'd say that they somehow manage to sound slightly more poppy and accessible in some ways, even as ironically they're much more underground, because they post-date the peak of synthesizer new wave music. While they try to sound very dark and edgy the way Depeche Mode does, they don't somehow manage to sound quite as effortless about it, and occasionally veer into "trying too hard" territory. Only a few of their slow and medium tempo songs are really all that good, for instance (although when they are good, they are often extremely excellent), and Mesh's specialty seems to be rather the harder edged dance tracks. Mesh even have interludes tagged on to the end of a few of their tracks here, making their imitation of Depeche Mode even more obvious, if anyone were inclined to argue against the fact that they are doing so.

In the case of Monosex, I recommended you look up a couple of remixes. Here, I think the remixes are fine, but not necessarily worth seeking out on their own accord, although that doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't some great remixes. Rather, the b-sides for "Friends Like These" and "Leave You Nothing" are what are worth seeking out—"From This Height" and "Let Them Crush Us." The latter, in fact, is a contender for best track from this era of Mesh's output. And although I said in general the slower songs aren't as good as DM's, I actually think the slow album ender, "The Trouble We're In" is the other main contender here.

As with Monosex, however, it's a little hard to get your hands on this album. I don't see it on Spotify or YouTube, and you can buy it used as a CD from Amazon, but I don't see it available in other formats.

This isn't true for the last album I've picked, 2003's Sensor by Camouflage. You can find this one relatively easily on Spotify and YouTube, you can stream it from Amazon or buy it as CD or mp3, etc. This is relatively recent, though—for many years, it was actually really quite hard to find.

Although this is the most recent of the albums I've picked (although I'm not trying to imply I think 2003 is recent), the "lead single" "Thief" actually came out as early as 1999, and then curiously, we didn't hear anything from Camouflage for a long time. I'm not sure what happened, although I think there may well have been record label disagreements of some kind involved. Regardless, Camouflage was famous in the later 80s for sounding like a much less articulate Depeche Mode imitator, with many of the same issues that I highlighted for De/Vision in their first album, Voices and Images. And that's fair. They tried to go their own way a bit for a while, but as I remember reading on one review, the live oboe in "Love is a Shield" somehow made them sound even more like Depeche Mode, although to be fair, the album overall didn't necessarily. While they did a lot of wandering in different directions throughout several album releases in the 90s, this was after electronic new wave had fallen off the labels' collective radar, and many of them didn't even get domestic releases, at least not until much later.

Sensor may well be the Camouflage album that sounds most like it's trying to sound like Depeche Mode with the possible exception of their debut on Voices and Images, although Sensor is a much more mature and musically capable album, even if it lacks the earnest charm of that way back release. I do miss the "Thief" single mix and Opal Mix in particular, which are both excellent, and neither of which sounds anything at all like the album mix here. (The other older single remixes are more forgettable.) They are, however, extremely hard to get a hold of as near as I can tell, sadly, although there may be a remastered version floating out there somewhere (if so, it's not on Amazon at least. I didn't check everywhere. I think the 7" version at least is available on the Singles collection). Otherwise, this album is just all around excellent, and hardly anything on it is forgettable or skippable. It doesn't have much in the way of danceableness compared to some of the options I've held out, opting instead for more medium tempo songs in general, but the song composition quality is really quite high. (There are some exceptions such as "Me and You" and ""I Can't Feel You" which are both quite danceable in a traditional sense.) It's amazing to think that when they debuted, Camouflage's English grammar and pronunciation were both pretty bad; if you didn't already know better, you could be forgiven for assuming that they are native English speakers here.

But given how easy it is to listen to this (it's on YouTube and Spotify) rather than tell you too much what I think, I'd instead just encourage you to go listen to it yourself if you have any fondness for this type of music at all.  I think it's just truly an excellent gem of dark, peak Depeche Mode like electronic new wave.

My favorite track is almost certainly the very dark and slow "Lost", although "Thief", "Me & You" and "I Can't Feel You" are also standout tracks. But as I said, picking standouts is a bit harder on this one, because the overall quality is very, very good across the entire album.