Franklin & South Manchester

I earlier showed a larger scale yet highly detailed model railroad that I aspired to be as good as, but it's always nice to see someone in my preferred, smaller scale, HO, who can do it too. George Sellios is probably as good as John Allen was, if not even better in some ways, although since he didn't model the western mountain scenery but rather East Coast urban blight during the Great Depression with a bit of coal country northern Appalachians in between his big cities, I have to say that I kind of prefer Allen's work. That said, there is a lot to love about George Sellios and his urban blight railroad. He's one of the best modelers in railroading who's still active, so to speak (he actually retired his fine scale model business; I'm not sure if he's active in any other form or not. That said, his stuff is still out there.)

Here's a link to a lot of still imagery in, sadly, not super high resolution form. http://www.modvid.com.au/html/body_franklin___south_manchester_re.html

And here's a video tour of his railroad.

Lizard people in the mid-east?!

https://www.bitchute.com/video/79wH4vqj0JUw/

Hahahaha! A guy got a DNA sample from his bearded dragon, a kind of Australian lizard that's somewhat popular as a pet (for a lizard, anyway) and sent it to 23andme. The result? 51% Ashkenazi Jewish and 48% Levantine West Asian. (In other words, the nearest neighbors and closest relatives of the Jews.) This is the DNA from a lizard. 

Now in 23andme's defense, their tests aren't designed to test animal DNA, and it probably did the best job it could deciphering the DNA that it got. But it's clear that there isn't any human supervision of the results that's competent. It makes it a little hard to trust any results that you get in a normal situation.

Although... maybe we should trust the "science" done by 23andme? As funny as it sounds, the Chosen people being lizard people explains so much...

Err... assuming that the reporting of those results isn't a joke itself, of course.

Details, details, details

Although this is a larger scale than most people model in, with almost everything being custom built, George Selios certainly showed that this degree of detail can be done in HO scale as well. This is the secret to model railroading, and honestly, I think most people miss it. It's details, details, details. No matter how many scale people you have sitting around doing stuff on your railroad, it's almost certainly not enough. No matter how many animals you have, you could have more. No matter how many little random piles of junk and litter you have, you need more. Almost every square inch of this railroad is a whimsical museum quality vignette. From black bears scaling the scaffolding of a trestle to a puppy chasing a bullfrog to a bucket full of water with a goose and her goslings floating in it, to a table with a rabbit being butchered to a tree full of pre-teenaged boys climbing up to get a glimpse of the naked ladies on the second and third floors of a cathouse, you just can't beat the detail of a railroad like this. The operational guys who nail down thousands of feet of track in complicated yards but can barely be bothered to glue down some flock to represent grass simply don't get it. Look, if that's how you want to spend your free time in your basement or wherever, knock yourself out. But don't expect anyone else to be very excited about your spergy, joyless parody of the hobby of model railroading. Especially not if you're going to self-righteously attack the very people who make the hobby interesting to those outside of it by calling their work a caricature or cartoon.

Model railroading as a hobby has completely lost its way, judging by the kinds of people who run the magazines that are the voice of the hobby, and the kinds of people who drive much of the discussion online. Without rediscovering what it once was about, I predict that it will confine itself to an increasingly shrunken, self-referential ghetto that has nothing to offer those outside of it, until the businesses that support it are no longer able to sustain themselves. At which point the whole hobby collapses. Maybe it can be reborn like a phoenix when those who refuse to give it up, forced to scratchbuild, remind people about what made the hobby a fun one to have in the first place.

Anyway, this video is a reminder of what the hobby can and should be. View it on YouTube and full screen and at least HD resolution if not 4K.

These guys are open one day a month out in Odessa Florida, a suburb of Tampa. Next time my family wants to go to Orlando to see the Pedophile amusement parks, maybe I'll be making a run to Odessa. It's only a two hour or so drive. It looks like it actually hosts four rail lines, probably because they were made by different craftsmen. The Sundance Central is the one shown here, but there's also the Muskrat Ramble that has a kind of bayou Louisiana vibe to it, the Dolly Varden Appalachia-style railroad, and the Silverton Central.

Rod's MR

Speaking of model railroading, what an astounding article! Apparently Rod Stewart is a model railroad enthusiast, and his model railroad is, quite honestly, pretty darn good.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7678617/amp/Rod-Stewarts-secret-hit-track-Veteran-rocker-finally-lets-world-legendary-model-railwa.html

Layout design

In particular because I play Trainstation 2 on my phone as a time-killer, I find that model railroading is never too far away out of my mind, even though it's one of the great hobbies that I never quite managed to have, but always wanted to. I find that my approach to the hobby, were I to be able to indulge in it after the kids are gone and all that (and who knows, I probably can. And that's not very far away, really) is quite a bit different than what seems to be in vogue nowadays, in two key areas.

One of them is actually the simpler of the two; I have no interest in "prototype replication" which seems to be the way most modelers do it. It's all about operation on layouts that have little if any interesting scenery, and the operation is meant to replicate the real thing from a specific time and place as closely as possible. To me, this seems like a spergy, joyless parody of the hobby. Since the very beginning, back to John Allen and Bill McClanahan and Lynn Westcott and others of the original bunch of the hobbyist magaziners and whatnot from the 50s, whimsy, fantasy and fun were the whole point. I don't know that I'd be quite as whimsical as to name my railroad Gory and Defeated or anything like that. This paradigm was still prevalent in the 80s when I first got interested in hobby; heck; John Olson and Malcolm Furlow were both probably at their peak influence and popularity at the time. Exaggerated and beautiful scenery were the whole point, almost more than train operation even, and I always was drawn to model railroading for the same reason that I'm drawn to worldbuilding in fantasy fiction or roleplaying games (see how I keep it topical?) Not only would my railroads focus more on scenery and theme, but they'd also be alternate history, Ruritanian romance type locations. Not unlike these images I just found online, actually; check out the PNW logging and mining railroad, and then the whimsical scene of a poached Triceratops being loaded on a boat. Maybe they forgot to tell modelers in France that model railroading is serious business.

Speaking of Ruritanianism, Red Dead Redemption 2, which I haven't talked about in quite a long time, is a good example of the kind of Ruritaninianism I'd like to see. In fact, I'd almost like to specifically replicate the same environments as RDR2 in many respects, although I certainly wouldn't be so freakin' revisionist that I'm practically woke, like RDR2 is. Read chapters 7 and 8 of Reassessing the Presidency and then read Clyde Wilson's stuff. At the very least, the brief essay on the Yankee Problem, if not the entire book. If that doesn't depress you, then imagine a model railroad based on a Ruritanian "Greater Texas" that includes everything from the eastern Texas Piney Woods and the bayous to the trans-Pecos desert mountains, the southern reaches of the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains in all their glory that either never joined the Union at all and remained an independent Republic, or which won the Southern War for Independence and remained an autonomous Republic in loose association with the rest of the Confederacy. Unlike the Deep South further east, this Greater Texas never really indulged in much chattel slavery for its labor, so it remains a fairly homogenous population of Dukes of Hazzard style cowboys. Maybe Boss Hogg and Roscoe P. Coltrane would even be railroad bosses on this layout, and the Dukes would be protagonist Robin Hoods of the backwoods.

No, but what I always liked was the idea of modular railroading. I don't mean that the way most people do, though. I mean, what if I started off doing something like John Olson's 4x8 foot "standard beginner" type railroad (the Jerome & Southwestern), did a 2x8" Back Alley & Wharf addition, but instead of stopping there, had the BA&W railroad abut a completely separate 4x8 railroad on the other end? I'd start off with the 4x8, but with switches already built in with the expectation that the 2x8 expansion would come as soon as the original 4x8 is done. Each would be added discretely, so that I've got a fully operational railroad while the next module is under construction. I can actually see, if I had a 25x20 foot or so room to build it in, having nearly four full 4x8 railroads connected by narrower expansions, so I can easily reach everything. 

I've never known of anyone doing railroading this way, but the idea appeals to me strongly. Each 4x8 could even be ecologically discrete, with the thinner sections serving as transition pieces. Let's explore how I'd like to do this, shall we? Here's a diagram.

The orange in the top right would be the original railroad, and like the Jerome & Southwestern, it'd be a mountainous desert region with all kinds of southwestern flavor (although I'd probably go more for Big Bend and the Davis Mountains terrain rather than Arizona.) The green extension would be like the BA&W extension in Olson's railroad. He did it as 2x6, but I always thought that was unusual. With 4x8 being the standard plywood size (hence its ubiquity as the standard beginner's RR size) then why not just split it up the middle and make it 2x8 rather than 2x6? I assume some kind of space constraint must have driven that, but whatever. With an extra 2x2 on the far end, I've got a bit more room to do something interesting. I actually wouldn't do this as an urban environment really, although a cowboy town like Blackwater might feature at the top end of it, then a big river gorge with a cool bridge for my trains to cross before entering the Rocky Mountains section in the next module, the light blue.

I admit that the corner here would be the hardest to reach, and if I don't have room to come around from the back to work on it, I might want to come up with something clever like some kind of access hatch or something. The yellow section would again be transition, probably going through farming and ranching rolling high prairie with western Nebraska style Scott's Bluff and Chimney Rock like formations here and there, on its way to the Appalachians (not unlike the Heartlands region of RDR2's New Hanover, with the purple railroad being the Roanoke Ridge area.)

The final pink addition is a little different, as in order to make it fit a bit better, I've cut a section out of the 4x8. That's OK, it'd be the Saint Denis-like fake New Orleans, nestled in the bayou, although a lot of the buildings would be suggested by the backdrop rather than it being thickly modeled with them. Although no doubt it would have quite a few; probably as many as most of the rest of the modules combined in some ways.

Because model railroads are distinguished by their extreme compression and the use of forced perspective and divides to suggest distance that doesn't actually exist, I can see a good two small desert towns in the first module, one on the second transition module, at least two stops on the Rockies one (a logging town and maybe a livestock town near the transition area, as well as maybe a mine buried in there somewhere too. The desert mines copper, the Rockies mine silver, and the Appalachian section will have coal mines as well as maybe some river trade. The bayou/city area might have some different kinds of livestock, as well as of course a big city with a wharf and port, so it can be whatever I need it to be.

Again, where I'd be different is that each individual 4x8 would be seen as an independent "beginner" style railroad with its own loop of track (plus sidings and spurs, etc.) that just happens to be connected in modular fashion with additional railroads so that trains can travel the entire breadth of the area.

I'd also like to embrace the new(ish) technology of dead rails; remote control locos that are powered by batteries, not by the tracks, which aren't even wired in this paradigm. My locos might have colorful names like the General Lee, the Jeff Davis or the Stonewall Jackson. I don't know how many I'd need, but realistically how many times are more than two or three people going to be using it at once? I'd probably want a roster of half a dozen or so just for variety, but with that much space to cover, they don't have to "belong" to any specific 4x8 module. The modules don't have to be seen as independent regional railroads anyway, although that's much more the way that the South would have done it, rather than the power and plunder-grabbing Yankees, which led to the big railroad moguls.

UPDATE: Here's a slightly smaller version of the same idea, but with significantly shorter transition bars. I actually probably like this one better.

Friday Art Attack

Ghost Riders in the Sky or something. Does anyone younger than my generation even know what that is anymore?

Other than the bizarrely distended lower jaw, this is a pretty cool werewolf image.

Ghosts on the warpath.

My last undead of the day. Well... maybe one more down below.

Ilum, one of the coolest environments for Old Republic, although mostly because of the strange night sky.

The image is called a Caledonian Death Lord, but he looks more Norse than Scottish in my opinion. But maybe I'm just reading too much into that Viking axe and the details of his sword. His helmet and the horns could be Celtic (although they have more the look of the Gauls than the Scoti) and the woad tattooing in the woman makes her seem like a Pictich lass.

Apparently, in the right circumstances you can summon the Death Star with your naked chick witchery...

An older piece of artwork for dire wolves, comparing if they were descended from a North American wolf like ancestor vs a more native one. We can pretty confidently say that the right hand image is more likely to be accurate now, given that dire wolves are more distant to wolves than African painted dogs, who look considerably different.

Nobody does Conan like Frazetta, but this is still a nice bit of work.

The Millennium Falcon is a pretty iconic design, but this is more what I'd have expected an intersteller free trader type of ship to look like than that.

Ah, yes. Undead crows and ravens. 

If you can look past the strangely cartoonish style, this is a nice alternative design for Darth Vader.

 A pulpish mystery cover. I like it. Classic stuff.

Middle men

I really need to get back to RPG related topics, but I've got a lot of irons in the fire, and talking about current events, or sometimes just pointing you towards something someone else said, is always easier than creating content, isn't it? I only got halfway through my DUNGEON YOG-SOTHOTHERY project, so I'll pick that up again shortly. But in the meantime, here's a valuable little nugget of wisdom from the Z-man. Speaking of the real estate controversy related to Blackrock, he says:

[A]ll of those middlemen are now consuming the host. This army of people involved in every deal are no longer just a weird patina on the economy, but a very serious rot of the system. This is why hedge funds are buying up residential housing to create new renters. The very top of the rentier economy has run out of people from whom to skim, so they are forced to eat their own. The big skimmers are now going after the small skimmers down the ladder from them.

Running a skim is nothing new, but even the mafia understood that you can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin him once. The modern mafia, the managerial elite, entangled with the powerful, are moving from sheering to skinning. They have busted out everything, so now they are busting out the bust outs. The hedge funds robbing the real estate bandits is like a bank robber robbing drug dealers, in that it says the criminal ecosystem is out of balance.

That has been one lesson of Covid. The reason the economy did not collapse when millions were sent home from their jobs is that most of the people being sent home were not doing anything all that useful. Some were, for sure, but the empty offices went unnoted for a reason. Just as every snowstorm in Washington reveals that vast number of unessential workers, Covid revealed the vast number of middlemen. Many were unaware of their middleman status. They thought they were essential.

Of course, the bizarre fads vomited up by the Cloud People is another sign that we have too many people standing around looking for something to do. Idle hands [are] the Devil’s work[shop] and Old Scratch is spoiled for choice these days. We simply have too many middlemen with time on their hands. The system is overstocked with them, so they sit around dreaming up new ways to horn in on the life of the productive. Now the middlemen have middlemen and that cannot go on forever.

Albums of

It's always difficult to know why I did or didn't buy certain things as a kid. Certainly, my limited budget was a constraint, but why I bought one thing and not another is sometimes now lost in the mists of time. For example...

My favorite non-fiction series of books when I was a kid were the Album Of books, most of which (and all of the ones I was interested in) were authored by Tom McGowan and illustrated by Rod Ruth. I really loved these books, but sadly, the only one that I actually bought and therefore still have access to today (albeit in a pretty beat-up format) is the Album of Sharks. I'm pretty sure that the Album of Whales was only available in one of my middle school libraries, so I only had access to it while I was a student at that particular school, and our local public library had Album of Dinosaurs and Album of Prehistoric Animals, which were of course my favorites. The Album of Reptiles is the last one that I might have been interested in, although I only ever saw that once or twice in a book store or two, and honestly it was the least interesting of the bunch, because it talked as much about turtles and regular lizards as it did Komodo dragons and crocodiles. Which was, of course, a major failing. (In fact, Komodo dragons might well have merely been part of the monitor lizard section, and didn't even get a color full page illustration. Maybe that's why I never had as much interest in that one as I thought that I would.) These books are nearly as old as I am; first published in the mid 70s, but they remained in print through the 80s at least, including with updated text from time to time as scientific names changed and what-not. I don't know when the last printing was, but I know that there was one in 1989.

Now don't get me wrong. I loved my Album of Sharks book. I read it and re-read it over and over again. But I really missed out on not getting the others while I could. As luck would have it, I recently found a used copy in decent shape at a pretty cheap price for Album of Prehistoric Animals and just ordered it. I'll enjoy that, even if it was written for kids. I have a particular fondness for the extinct Cenozoic animals. I remember back in the mid 90s or so, when I was in my early to mid-20s and the book was already a good ten years old or so, reading Robert Bakker's Dinosaur Heresies and hearing him talk about how in the "bad old days" dinosaur paleontology was a dead-end to nowhere, and all of the sexy work in the field was being done with mammals, which is what most people were interested in. As a kid, the exact opposite was true. It was easy to find a whole shelf at every library I ever went to (granted, as a kid, that was usually limited to my modest yet pretty capable public library as well as the various school libraries of the public schools I was enrolled in, which changed from year to year, naturally) of dinosaur books. It was hard to find any information at all on prehistoric mammals. Everyone knew about woolly mammoths, of course, and everyone knew about saber-tooth tigers, but actually finding material to read about them was pretty difficult. And finding out about anything else was a nightmare. I think maybe that's the reason that my love of Album of Prehistoric Animals was so intense; I had an fierce demand for that kind of product, and it was one of the very few books that provided it. I also had the Golden Play Book of Animals of the Past Stamps. It covered the entire gamut of prehistoric life, but that's where I first read about Seymouria, for example, and Uintatherium. I really treasured the rare opportunity to get an illustrated exegesis on Cenozoic animal life.

I've included an image that I found online that was always my favorite and probably the most memorable (aside from the cover) of the full color illustrations in this book; Brontotherium running away from a volcano. Brothotherium has, sadly, had to see a lot of name changes due to the pedantic way in which scientific names for fossils works. Given how well known it was, changing it seems almost petty and sadistic, but it's actually changed at least four times, and its current name is one that is very poorly known compared to some of the others. Brontotherium worked. Titanotherium was OK, and seems to have replaced it in popularity at one point. And then suddenly, we had Brontops, which—hey, it's easier to spell, at least. Now, we're at... Megacerops? Does anyone who's not a professional Cenozoic paleontologist know that name? What a joke.

Anyhoo, the brontotheres belong to the Priabonian, or Late Eocene; about a five million year period from 38-33 million years ago. Lots of them have been found in the northern Great Plains area, in particular Nebraska and South Dakota. The Sioux used to find their bones exposed by rainstorms, and called them "thunder beasts", hence the name brontothere. Many of these seem to have been killed in volcanic eruptions; during the Eocene the Rocky Mountains were still volcanically more active than they are today (it's not true to say that they're not today. Haven't you ever been to Yellowstone?) In this sense, both the text by Mr. McGowan and the art by Mr. Ruth are quite well-informed and well-researched, which I appreciate even today. The art also features herds of Poebrotherium, "grass-eating beast" although this early sheep-like camelid was probably more of a browser than a grazer. Indeed; the transition from Eocene to Oligocene was marked by cooling and drying, and the great forests of the early Eocene giving way to the early expanses of great prairies and steppes, which previously had been much smaller and less ecologically significant. This is frequently a theme throughout the Cenozoic. The early Cenozoic indeed was probably even warmer than much of the Mesozoic, in which tropical and subtropical conditions extended into fairly high latitudes and there was no polar ice at all. The PETM, or Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum were the conditions in which gigantic snakes like Titanoboa could thrive, and crocodilians existed in high latitudes. Of course, the end of this trend was the literal Ice Ages of the Pleistocene, but the reality is that the climate is not as steady as we are often led to believe, and warming and cooling pulses seem to be constant, and separated by relatively small windows measured more in centures than in millions of years. That said, the Cenozoic more broadly can certainly be described as a cooling period from this PETM to the Ice Age, and also broadly, one can say that cooling leads to more aridity. Forests turn into grasslands and grasslands into deserts. Where the Eocene may well have seen most of the world covered with forests, these shrank over time and steppes and prairies expanded. During the coldest part of the Cenozoic, the glacial maximums, much of what is now boreal forest was completely turned into mammoth steppe, for instance. These pulses of climate change led to pulses of ecological change, which led to extinctions and the subsequent spread of new animal life. While much of the fascination with the Mesozoic era has to do with its extreme exoticness—nothing like the dinosaurs is around today—the Cenozoic is instead interesting because of it's subtle exoticness. Animals that are clearly related to and similar to animals that we know quite well, and yet not quite right. Camels in North America that correspond ecologically to antelope or giraffes. Rhinos in Florida that look more like hippos. Horses that are one part wild horse, one part zebra, and one part... something a little different. Bear-dogs and dog-bears. (Yes, those are two completely different types of animals. That happen to look almost exactly like each other.) Hell pigs. Gomphotheres. The list goes on and on.

Anyway, I'd like to start a new series of on again off again posts. These will be like my Meet the Tyrants or Meet the Carnosaurs posts, but less regular, less organized, and focused on a family of Cenozoic mammals, like the Camelidae or the Nimravidae. Rather than talking specifically about each individual, I'll probably talk about the family overall and maybe hitting some of the highlights, and maybe skipping over species or genera that we don't know enough about to say anything interesting about.

Random

Two quick topics, that have nothing to do with each other, or with any of my original purposes for this blog. Sigh. It's hard not to be distracted by current events, even when I deliberately try to avoid being distracted by current events.

First, Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of mRNA "vaccines." From his linkedn profile: "The inventor of mRNA vaccines and RNA transfection, Dr. Malone has extensive research and development experience in the areas of pre-clinical discovery research, clinical trials, vaccines, gene therapy, bio-defense, and immunology. He has over twenty years of management and leadership experience in academia, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, as well as in governmental and non-governmental organizations.

Scientifically trained at UC Davis, UC San Diego, and at the Salk Institute Molecular Biology and Virology laboratories, Dr. Malone is an internationally recognized scientist (virology, immunology, molecular biology) and is known as one of the original inventors of mRNA vaccination and DNA Vaccination. His discoveries in mRNA non viral delivery systems are considered the key to the current COVID-19 vaccine strategies. Dr. Malone holds numerous fundamental domestic and foreign patents in the fields of gene delivery, delivery formulations, DNA vaccines and mRNA vaccines."

By any stretch of the imagination, he's an expert on the subject. This is his tweet on it: "What happens to confidence in public health and USG if Ivermectin turns out to be safe and effective for COVID, and the genetic vaccines turn out to have significant safety issues?  This looks like a very plausible scenario from where I sit."

Boom.

And then there was that time that a North Korean defector says that even North Korea wasn't as nuts in their brainwashing as the Ivy League school she went to...

https://www.dailywire.com/news/north-korean-defector-after-attending-ivy-league-school-even-north-korea-was-not-this-nuts

By their fruits shall ye know them...

Interesting data from Gallup. I don't think Gallup is the best polling, and I certainly don't trust them on Presidential polling data, but this is probably reasonably good data, for what it's worth. This is what is "morally acceptable", liberals vs. conservatives. This should, although it probably won't, make it clear that they're not just some other guys part of our same community, but who disagree on the details of how to run it. This is a cohort among us that wants to destroy our society by calling good evil and evil good. I've come to the conclusion that eventually we will reach the point where there's no living together, liberals and conservatives. And by "eventually" I mean sooner than most people think. The reality is that liberals are threatening to call down the wrath of God like on Sodom and Gomorrah and the other cities of the plains. I don't plan on being someone who burns in fires from heaven, and I don't plan on being someone who turns to a pillar of salt either, because I'm unwilling to let go of the world.

I'm adding my own percentages for just me. What, isn't that a yes or no? 0% or 100%? No, I've decided that 0% is my answer for "not morally acceptable", 25% is "not morally acceptable, but not really appropriate for society to unilaterally condemn or ban it either", 50%—which I probably won't use—for no opinion on the morality of this at all, 75% for I believe that it is morally acceptable, but with some caveats or reservations, and 100% for "yes, this is completely morally acceptable." I do have a few other 25% answers, but I'll explain them below.

Most of these items are, of course, immoral. I'm a little iffy on stem cell research, but that's mostly because I know that they use aborted fetuses. If it wasn't, I'd be a little more accommodating of it as a useful use of a resource to—in theory—save lives. I'm also a little iffy on suicide, because I believe that most people who get to that point are not well enough emotionally to make a moral choice. Not being capable of making a moral choice, it can't be immoral. If that makes sense. I guess I'm just a bit sympathetic to people who get to the point where they feel like suicide is a rational answer to their situation; they need to have had help before hand, but once you get there, they have no more true agency to make a moral choice than a child does.

Sex between teenagers assumes unmarried teenagers. It is possible for teenagers to be married, and wasn't even uncommon through most of our society, but once married, they are effectively adults.

I don't think divorce is necessarily a moral question either, or rather, functionally it often is a moral decision, but at the same time, I recognize that there are situations where it is not immoral to get a divorce because the situation has just become untenable between two people. I'm more wary of being unrighteously judgmental of someone who's been divorced than I am of the concept of divorce itself, although I recognize that a large number of divorces, and probably even the majority, are not moral divorces, they are selfish ones.

I don't know why animal cloning would be immoral, although I guess I can recognize that it could be uncontrolled or unregulated to the point of being an affront to moral society, so I gave it a 75%. Polygamy is also an interesting one. Obviously, Christians recognize the polygamous nature of the patriarchs, and that they were ordained of God, yet we don't practice it here in our culture. But that's more of a cultural thing than an absolute. That said, hedonistic polyamorous relationships are not what God had in mind either, which is what we're more likely to see in our society. I wasn't quite sure what to give that one. I can see a situation where in the future, after the hard times that will be our inheritance have passed, that there might be a time in which polygamous relationships are necessary and even commanded of God. And I've long thought that there would be more women than men in Heaven anyway. In the church, women outnumber men 3:2, and 50% of our women are unmarried in the temple. Polygamy will probably be the only solution, unless eligible bachelors literally start falling out of the sky.

Gambling is just straight up I don't believe it should be outlawed necessarily, because that's beyond the scope of the righteous dominion of anyone to infringe to that degree on another's agency and freedom. And friendly low stakes poker games just for fun, or making bets and deals between friends isn't necessarily immoral either. I got a free dinner in 2016 because I bet a friend of mine on the election results. Birth control I think is mostly fine, although there are some types of it that are morally iffy, like morning after pills. I also am a little wary of the use of birth control giving the impression of a free pass for fornication or adultery.

The last three are not immoral at all, and only liberals with their bizarre, inverted morality tend to think that they are. I do believe that the death penalty should be used very sparingly and judiciously, but every righteous civilization in the history of the world recognized it.

Anyway, as I said, by their fruits shall ye know them. Liberalism is of Satan. There are other lines of evidence that further that statement, but this data right here is conclusive enough. The sad thing is how much liberalism has been enshrined in our culture now, due to the abject failure of conservativism to stop it, to the point where people who call themselves conservatives are much more permissive and even accepting of wickedness and evil than they should be.

Friday Art Attack

Hopefully no fan of roleplaying games needs to be introduced to the Larry Elmore BECMI box covers. This one was the Expert set, and was always my favorite of the series. Along with the Companion cover.

I don't know what this is, but it's pretty cool.

Hopefully fantasy fans also don't need to be introduced to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. This isn't my favorite bit of art of them, but still...

A landscape from the movie Fantasia, specifically the Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, which they decided takes place in a beautiful, springtime version of mythic Greece.

Fantasy apes. I rarely can find enough of the kind of "awakened apes" artwork as I'd like, but this isn't a terribly bad example.

A nice example of very traditional fantasy.

A great panorama of a fantasy port city. Nice work.

Some wrap-around covers from the Fabled Lands series of gamebooks.

Dragons hunting mermaids. I dunno. Weird, but cool image.

Another classic from the world of D&D, one of Clyde Caldwell's Lord Strahd images.

A decent Paizo cover by WAR, if you can get past the strong wamman nonsense.

Miocene megafauna

I should have plenty of time to do a Friday Art Attack later, but first I wanted to post this video that I stumbled across completely by accident. I've seen others like this, but this one is quite specific to a particular time period, and its one that few others really spend much time on, sadly.

The Miocene is a fauna that feels considerably "modern" (with the exception of a few representatives of a few families that are now gone, like the handful of creodonts, the bear-dogs, the dog-bears, the barbourofelid, etc.) yet exotic and different than anything living today. Not so exotic that you'd look at them and wonder what they were exactly, but they just look different. Elephants with four tusks instead of two, little elephants. Fast, elegant running rhinos as well as pot-bellied, low-slung hippo-like rhinos. Half-sized horses. Double-sized camels. Cabyparas as big as a wild boar. Anyway, you get the drift. If there was another continent in our world that had these animals on them, we'd think of them as exotic but not so exotic that we'd wonder what the devil they were.

Anyway, with any luck, he'll do the Pliocene and the Pleistocene too, during the which we'd see this already pretty modern-looking fauna become more and more obviously modern. 

The Oligocene would be interesting too; without modern carnivorans, it'd feel pretty different, but maybe not quite as exotic as all that even so. The Eocene and the Paleocene, on the other hand, would certainly feel exotic and probably even strange and impoverished to some degree in terms of diversity. Any animals that were representatives of modern families would also look strange and unfamiliar, like little Eohippus, for instance. For that matter, the earth itself during the three paleogene periods might seem oddly foreign, with widespread oceans and tropical conditions extending much farther north and south than they do now.

Another quick aside; I just recently started re-reading the Malloreon, the sequel series to the Belgariad. I think this may be the first time I've re-read it... ever. Right off the bat, I'm reasonably impressed with the first ten chapters or so that I read, but the new author's forward to the omnibus printings is nearly as absurd as the first one. On top of that, he made the ridiculous mistake of claiming that he has twelve books in the megaseries, just like the Iliad. Of course... the Iliad is made of up twenty four books, not twelve. And he wrote this in the era where the internet was a thing, too. Sigh.

I've also received the 80s printings of Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master which I ordered from Thrift Books, and I've got the 80s version of Silverthorn on its way too. Within a few days, I'll have the entire Riftwar Saga in it's original version back in my hands. The copies I've got of the Magician books, while certainly old, are actually in better condition than the ones that I used to have too, which is kind of nice. Although I've certainly got plenty of other things on my docket to read, I'll probably bump this up to near the front of the line. It's been a long time since I've read what used to be one of my favorite fantasy series. Let's see if I still think it's as good years later.

Epic vs High Fantasy

I don't know what this image is. I found it on a GIS for "epic fantasy" and because it looks cool, why not?

If you look on Infogalactic or Wikipedia, epic fantasy redirects to High Fantasy. But I wonder if they aren't really not quite the same thing. I mentioned in a post a few days or so ago that while the Riftwar Saga was always one of my favorite High Fantasy series, I had lost the first three (of four) books when I lent them to a friend who ended up moving across the country before giving them back. No problem, I thought—they're still in print. Sadly, what has been in print since the early 90s is the "Author's Preferred Edition" where he undid some of the good work that his editors had done in the 80s. I was always disappointed in them, and preferred the original versions where the editors did their job and actually improved the book in a few minor details, so I never ended up rebuying them. I did, however, recently find copies of the two volumes of Magician—Apprentice and Master in the original 80s printing and ordered them. I'm waiting on Apprentice to arrive, but Master already has. Pretty soon, I'll do the first re-read that I've done in quite some time of this series. The third volume, which I also need to get, is Silverthorn. I couldn't find the original 80s version of this one, but I think it's mostly Magician that had the more noticeable changes, so if I end up having to buy it in a more modern printing, I'll probably be OK (although it'll look out of place on my shelf with the other three in their 80s versions.)

Anyway, all that needless talking about myself aside, the reason I bring that series up in particular is that the third volume, Silverthorn, is probably a good example of a High Fantasy that isn't an Epic Fantasy, although as a semi-independent part of the greater Riftwar Saga, which is Epic Fantasy quite clearly, this may seem a bit odd. But because it is semi-independent and autonomous, and can be read quite fine as a stand-alone novel if you want to, it makes for a good point of contrast. Which is good, because much of High Fantasy is Epic Fantasy too, or aspires to be at least, so pointing out where they differ is nice to have a point of reference.

This post will contain some spoilers, so if you haven't read the Riftwar Saga and think that you will, you should probably quit now.

High fantasy is defined, primarily, by taking place in a secondary world that isn't Earth. This is what distinguishes it from low fantasy (not, as many believe, the relative prevalence of magic and fantastic elements.) In addition to that, it often, although not obligatorily features a Bildungsroman story, where the main character "comes of age." In the case of Bilbo and Frodo, they are already "of age" but are required to mature and develop significantly in a thoroughly different direction than the course of their life had been so far, but more commonly this starts with young characters who grow up literally and figuratively during the course of the story. It often features a mentor-wizardy character of some kind and a dark lord antagonist, and in fact, the good vs evil dynamic is a strong element of high fantasy (although most people would still consider A Song of Ice and Fire as high fantasy, even though it specifically rejects the good vs evil dynamic altogether and makes everyone... mostly kind of evil, as near as I can tell. That's because George Rape Rape Martin is a despairing nihilist, I think. Authors reveal more about themselves in their work than they wish to sometimes, I think.)

Vox Day separates Epic Fantasy from High Fantasy by suggesting that Epic Fantasy also needs the following traits: 1) an assumed adult (not YA) audience, 2) multiple POV characters, 3) a certain length; a trilogy seems to be the minimum, and 4) truly epic scope.

Silverthorn, then, deviates from this epic fantasy definition (although not from the high fantasy definition) in a number of ways:

• I don't remember if there were multiple POV characters because it's been a while since I read it. I'm pretty sure that both Arutha and Jimmy the Hand are both POV characters, and maybe Martin at times too, and there may even be a scene or two with Locky or someone else thrown in. But mostly, it's Jimmy, and to a lesser extent Arutha. Contrast this with the Wheel of Time, for instance, which has dozens of POV characters, and even a good dozen or maybe more that can be considered protagonists in their own right within a significant arc that's developed over multiple books. Certainly there's only one major story arc in Silverthorn, although both Jimmy and Arutha are main characters within it.
• While Silverthorn is of course the third of four books in the Riftwar saga, it's also self-contained and autonomous within it. While it does forward the "meta" plot of the saga, it's also the novel that touches on it the least (by far) and instead is very much the story of just what's going on in this novel. The "main" plot of the series overall almost feels more like a cameo than the focus here, making this a non-epic high fantasy tangent within an epic fantasy series.
• The scope and stakes are considerably less epic too. While both of the Magician volumes, as well as the final volume, A Darkness at Sethanon are about the clash of empires across time and space from separate world, and ancient evils in the form of the Valheru and their Pantathian servants, Silverthorn is really about one man (and his handful of trusted companions) making a raid into a dangerous territory full of dark elves to recover an antidote to save his princess who was poisoned by an assassin. While it's all very serious business, with a pretty great bit of horror thrown in to boot, it's not exactly epic in scope in the same way that the rest of the series is.

I had forgotten when I started writing this, but I remembered as I went through it; there is also another minor subplot where Pug and Tomas are wandering around trying to find stuff out. Some of it is pretty interesting, but it's just a background thing going on in the shadows of the main story. This is kind of where the links to the greater saga are more pronounced, but given that the entire little side-story with them feels much more like an afterthought than the main focus of the book, I don't think it qualifies to make the scope epic in its own right. It's a bit like the whole business with Gandalf during The Hobbit. Peter Jackson tried really hard to pump that up, but even in the movies, that subplot was clearly a subplot and attempt to tie The Hobbit movies more closely to The Lord of the Rings movies. 

For that matter, comparing The Hobbit (the novel, that is, not the movie series) to The Lord of the Rings is another good example, and probably a more iconic one anyway, of the differences between High Fantasy and Epic Fantasy; the former being "merely" high fantasy, and the latter being more clearly Epic Fantasy. 

Retro Spective

I've been going through a project where I'm sorting all of the 8500+ tracks or so on my phone into sensible folders, so if I'm in the mood for some quiet synthwave, I can hear that, and if I'm in the mood for some pounding EDM that's intense enough to melt your face off, then I can do that too. Another folder that I'm creating is synth/future pop, because it is mostly a repository of synthpop and futurepop from the 90s and beyond, as well as a few 80s songs that maybe fit better there than in the regular pop/rock folder (although those are mostly going to be co-located in both folders if so.)

As part of this project, I'm listening to literally every single song on my phone and then deciding after I've listened to it which folder to put it in (although honestly; I already know for most where they're going to go before I start, obviously.) This is obviously going to take me a long time, but it's nice to be working at home where I can do this on my personal computer in the background while working on my laptop. I finally finished the file names that started with numbers and the letter A and got to the letter B. The first artist here is B! Machine, one of the guys I heard of and got into a bit when I was going through my first late 90s A Different Drum discovery of underground synthpop that had survived the pop culture wasteland of grunge and folksy hippy rock that otherwise made up much of the 90s. While A Different Drum did end up hosting releases for a few good old boys who were "somebody" in the 80s, like Pete Byrne of Naked Eyes, Alphaville, Real Life and a few others, mostly the label was a showcase of guys who had always been underground synthpop guys who post-dated the 80s heyday of that kind of music. Nate Nicholl, the guy behind B! Machine was always that kind of guy; a very independent artist who had a unique style and apparently a fascination for Japanese culture (although that plays out not at all in his music, it is in the name of the band itself that he created for himself as a nom de plume.)

I recalled that my mp3s on my phone were lower in volume than the average, so I intended to open them with Audacity, boost the volume, and then resave them, but for some reason I couldn't open them in Audacity (although I could play them) so I went downstairs and got the CDs that I'd burned the tracks from and re-burned the audio so I could manipulate the volume level. Because I had stopped my inexorable march through my tracks to do this, I thought I'd have a look at the albums that I never picked up; I only had Infinity Plus as well as a few tracks and remixes on other CDs from A Different Drum. I knew for sure that he'd had at least one other album before signing with A Different Drum and at least one other album after Infinity Plus. Sure enough, most of his material is on YouTube and Spotify and Myspace even, as well as bandcamp, and most of his older stuff can be picked up as mp3 downloads from Amazon. 

B! Machine is a bit unusual; he has a very retro sound in some ways; a kind of tinkly bob nearly analog-sounding early 80s sound, but his style is completely different to anything being made back then. It's mostly got a kind of sonic subversive quality to it; rather than being overtly poppy or catchy, it instead is very dreamy, understated, and almost surreal sounding. Extremely minimalist, yet not harsh or cold for all of that. Almost always melancholy, although not dark in the way that classic Depeche Mode or the Cure were, the Infinity Plus songs that I had were always some of my favorite of that era of my life when I was picking up late 90s and early 00s synthpop. In spite of everything, perhaps, I found myself revisiting B! Machine much more extensively, and listening to his albums that I never bought back in the day. In fact, I find that I like many of them even better than Infinity Plus. If there's anything to be complained about with B! Machine, it's only that his style is so distinctive that it can start to sound a bit samey if you're not really paying attention to sometimes rather subtle differences. I wish I'd gotten on board earlier, because although I always liked Infinity Plus, I think that after that he got even better in general. I remember that he said online that at Todd Durant's recommendation (the label boss at A Different Drum) he get Jarkko Tuohimaa of Finnish synthpop/EBM hybrid Neuroactive (also on the same label for a time) to do some extra production on a few songs, which turned them... well, not exactly club thumpers, but maybe a slight bit more mainstream sounding. Neuroactive were a pretty minimalist outfit themselves in most respects. But Nicholl said that he learned a lot from what Tuohimaa did to the tracks, especially with regards to percussion, and I think that after Infinity Plus the albums get a little bit more accessible, at least. Although they still absolutely maintain the B! Machine sound. 

If you have any interest in electronic pop music, especially melancholy, minimalist, dreamy and surreal stuff, do yourself a favor and check out B! Machine. They were a bit of a surprise hit to me. I got Infinity Plus as part of a package deal with a number of other albums, if I remember correctly, or I might not have picked it up at all, but of that bunch, it's probably the one that has stuck with me the most. It was the most pleasant kind of "surprise and delight" offering; I had no expectations, but ended up really loving it. 

On Amazon you can buy the albums but you can listen to them on Youtube at least (and I believe Spotify as well) first:

• Aftermath (1998)
• Infinity Plus (1999)
• Hybrid (2001)
• The Evening Bell (2004)
• The Falling Star (2007)

As well as the compilation: Alternates and Remixes (2002). Youtube also has two of the singles, with the remixes and b-sides: "Angels" and "Forget", both from The Evening Bell album.

I hadn't expected to like Aftermath as much as I did, knowing that it was a freshman effort, but it's really good. At the same time, I found that after Infinity Plus that Hybrid and The Evening Bell were improvements in many ways on an album that I'd already liked for many years a great deal. The Falling Star didn't do quite as much for me for some reason. Maybe it was just B! Machine fatigue a little bit after listening to so many of his tracks back to back to back, though.

While I was listening to all of this, I took a break from work and read the last few chapters of the final book of The Belgariad too. I don't mind the Tolkienesque story beats as much as some people now do; in fact, I wish a few more people would be a bit more respectful of some of those beats. I know, I know—I often say you're better off not copying Tolkien too closely lest you invite unfavorable comparisons—but what I really mean is you need to understand what works and why and not reject anything even remotely Tolkienian for its own sake. While the same things that have always bothered me about this series are still very much evident. The inexorableness of prophecy/fate tends to take away the agency of the characters, making their actions feel less heroic, certainly. The caricaturish nature of the national personalities still bothers me somewhat, especially because the details are so often repeated. Other than that, I found that the plot still holds up relatively well, and the majority of the main characters still have enough charm and chemistry that they're enjoyable to read about. The series ends with a flurry of weddings that almost makes me think that he was influenced more by Jane Austen than he cares to admit (or his own wife, which he did admit.) Sadly, most of the characters almost ruin it here at the very end by being such ridiculous betas. That's probably a reflection of Eddings himself, but then again, I've never claimed to like the man personally, to the extent that I even know anything about him at all.

In any case, I liked it well enough that it convinced me to request the Malloreon from the library (I had to get interlibrary loan because our library doesn't have them for some reason) which I've only ever read once before, way back when I was still in high school in the latest 80s. I'll probably have David Eddings fatigue by then. I'm also revisiting some other epic fantasy from the 80s; Raymond Feist's Riftwar Saga and the original Dragonlance Chronicles. I've heard that Legends is an even better trilogy, but I figure I better re-read the Chronicles first. 

I doubt I'll try to reread Terry Brooks. I've only ever read the first Shannara book once, I think. When I tried to re-read it, it didn't grab me at all, and when I tried to read the sequel the same thing happened. Not quite sure why; I remember liking it well enough when I first read it. Then again, I was probably a dumb 14 year old back then.

Extinction Event

Paraphrasing the Z-man: The Covid hysteria combines multiple lines of social pathology; the civic religion (complete with martyrs and fanatics), the primitive fear of nature and Gaia's wrath, and the Puritan tendency to indulge in wave after wave of panics. This allowed normal people to temporarily (hopefully; I'm surprised how many people still cling to this, though) suspend their disbelief in such a fundamentally unlikely premise.

The scary thought is this, though: if you can convince people that a slightly worse than average, but still within the range of normal distribution seasonal flu is equivalent to an extinction event for humanity, then what will they not believe? We may well crash like a bumper car from one ridiculous hysteria to another until the whole of society finally finishes collapsing and we can rebuild along more sensible behavior. Assuming, of course, that it is us rebuilding, and not the descendants of the envious and entitled Third World hordes rebuilding in our place because we're all gone.

UPDATE: As long as I'm punting and paraphrasing the Z-man, let me quote a short post of Vox's too.

Dear Boomer,

No one, since the literal creation of Man, has accepted "but the Devil made me do it" as an excuse. No one forced you to reject your history, your traditions, your nation, and your ancestors. No one made you neglect your children and your grandchildren. No one forced you to go into debt and eat the seed corn.

You did those things. No one did them for you or to you. You were presented with more freedom than nearly any other generation in human history and you freely chose to be wicked. You created the "latchkey children". You failed to pass on a functional society. You failed to pass on the knowledge that your fathers passed on to you. You planted no trees. You strip-mined the economy. You left your wives, and left your husbands, and you shattered your families, simply because no one forcibly stopped you. And if anyone tried to convince you otherwise, you dismissed them as fascists and religious freaks.

So don't blame your parents, society, the Jews, Vietnam, the black community, the communists, Kondratiev waves, or anything else. None of your excuses matter and none of them will be accepted by anyone. The more you defend yourself, the more you will be despised by the younger generations and the generations still to come. You're not sexy, you're not cool, and the Beatles will be forgotten about five minutes after the last Boomer dies. Seventy is not the new twenty.

You will never be forgiven because you will never repent of your wickedness. So, eat, drink, and be merry today, for the Day of the Pillow is coming.

Ok, Boomer?

My own parents were a little on the young side for my age. Most of my Gen-X cohorts my age had Silent era parents; mine were cuspers; right on the in-between of the Silent and the Boomer generation, or in the final years of the Silents, perhaps. Which is moot; my parents were good parents, and other than some civic nationalist naivete, I have little to complain about their political or social positions and what they passed on to me and my siblings. But it's not about the individual. It's about the trend, the average, and the masses. Society is indeed the collection of individuals who make it up, but one who goes against the grain does not change the course of society very often.

Friday Art Attack

I'm still amazed that Frank Frazetta did concept art for the original run of Battlestar Galactica. Really cool stuff.

I wish we had really dramatic night time skies like this on Earth. No doubt this is artwork that I grabbed from a trance mix on youtube; they love to use this kind of art.

I personally think that if you're going to do ancient undead, then giving them a classic almost Mycenean Greek kinda look or something like that is a great idea.

Some concept art for the spice mines of Kessel—yet another nod in a detail that shows that Dune was probably the single most important source for Star Wars, at least in terms of setting.

I don't know if I'd pose like this after killing a giant bug. He certainly looks strong enough, but holding it up like that looks heavy. Plus, why isn't it dripping whitish bug viscera all over him?

Some new discoveries have really updated our view of what Spinosaurus was like since Jurassic Park 2 was made. It was amazingly crocodile like in many ways.

I can't remember where I found this, but what a great idea for an encounter, if not an entire module worth of adventure!

When I was a kid, I LOVED the artwork of Rod Ruth, who illustrated kids non-fiction books on dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals and sharks. Others too, but those were the four or so that I had: three from the Album of series and one was the Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs. The Little Golden Book of Dinosaurs is another staple of my childhood, but it had a very different art style.

I haven't played it in quite some time, but here's another Old Republic landscape, this time from the planet of Quesh. I honestly believe that Quesh was originally designed as half of Hutta, but when they split it, they made it much more ochre-colored to just make it stand out from Hutta a little bit, given that Hutta was so yellowish.

Another really cool image of a mummy, but without the overly Egyptian stuff all around it.

Some kind of Star Wars concept art, but I'm not sure from what.

A very unusual bit of undead art. Very stylized.

I'm not 100% sure what this is, but I think it was originally intended to be some kind of Traveller fan art.