What's with all the bizarre spelling changes in the news?

This is how you know Fox News and Breitbart aren't really any different than the rest of the mainstream news; they move in lockstep with this bizarreness. For generations, we've written and pronounced Kiev. Now, everyone's stumbling over each other on who can write Kyiv and say "keev" faster than their competitors.

We saw the same thing happen when Osama bin Laden was suddenly changed to Usama bin Laden, although nobody outside of the news really caught on to that one. And earlier, Moslem for some unknown reason changed to Muslim. (And "headscarf" or turban changed to hijab. I don't care what the brown people call it; we already have a perfectly functional English word for it.)

I'm also a bit irritated that people started saying Mumbai instead of Bombay. Nothing changed in any Hindi language; for some reason we decided that we needed to change it in English. Why? And why did the Ivory Coast suddenly not get translated out of the French anymore. Cote d'Ivoire, even without the diacritics on the o is a pain in the butt.

It's come to my attention (not for the first time) that I have little patience for people's foolishness. This usually comes to a head when I get caught up in discussions on the internet, where people for some reason feel that showcasing their foolishness isn't actually foolish. After having to call out some idiots in the comments at Breitbart for saber-rattling against Russia, China and Iran when it's clear that none of them want anything from us other than for us to leave them alone, and that we've got problems enough at home to clean up before we worry about anyone else and that it's clear that our most significant geopolitical enemies are actually Mexico and Israel, not Russia or China at the same time that I lost patience with being told that I must be trolling because I think that people who think a minor inconvenience in a video game, like too-bright lines on the inventory for SWTOR is some kind of life or death struggle and they're talking about the new inventory screen literally harming them are the real trolls, I decided that nothing good can come of any of these discussions other than that I'll lose my temper with these stupid people and say something that I'll probably regret saying. Better to just avoid them altogether. Better to avoid the internet, mostly, or at least discussion on it, and better to avoid people.

That's one thing that the covid-nannying nonsense has taught me the last two years. I'm perfectly OK staying at home and not going in the office or much of anywhere else where I have to socialize, because my socialization needs are shockingly minimalistic.

Who is Bezos trying to impress?

From a youtube podcast. This is a small selection from his introductory monolog.

"Who in the world does the richest man want to impress by creating the most expensive series in film history? It's not Hollywood celebs or DC politicos because Jeff Bezos can buy them in bulk for a discount. And we definitely know its not the fans, and I have even more proof of that; a video that Prime UK delisted from their YouTube channel which confirms that they are not dedicated to faithfully recreating the majesty and magic of Tolkien's lore and legacy. So who's left to be impressed by the Rings of Power trailer? All that remains is God and the devil. And my bet is that Jeff Bezos, thinking that he's the Almighty himself is going to do his damnedest to sink to his lowest to get a high five from the prince of darkness."

Hahahaha!

Without need for comment.

CYOA: #2 Journey Under the Sea by R. A. Montgomery

https://darkheritage.blogspot.com/2022/02/choose-your-own-adventure.html

The second book in the series is Journey Under the Sea by the second author, R. A. Montgomery. Montgomery's a strange man with a strange history. I'm sure I read his biography at some point when I was a kid, but none of it stuck. I re-read it again just recently. He worked in administration for an Ivy League university, founded a summer school which he headmastered for a couple of years, founded an R&D company about which his biography says very little, consulted with the Peace Corps in DC and Africa, and of course founded Vermont Crossroads Press, a small (or even vanity) press that discovered and first published Edward Packard's prototypes of what would become the Choose Your Own Adventure series—and later became a bestselling author of volumes in that series when it was sold to Bantam. That's an awful lot of weird and disparate things to do in one's career; I suspect that many of those ventures actually failed, although his biography doesn't mention that. I wouldn't have thought much of it as a kid, but some of those are red flags of weirdness to me now, especially working in DC for the Peace Corps and in academia as an administrator. Be that as it may, he did write some of my favorite volumes in the series, and I always appreciated his style (that said, for many years I could have sworn that he was the author of one of my favorite early entries; turns out all along it was Edward Packard and I just remembered it wrong.) He was a fan of international adventure in weird Third World craphole countries, but then again, this was an era when that kind of exoticism was cool again because of retro pulp influences. Indiana Jones was hugely popular, TV shows like Bring 'Em Back Alive and Tales of the Gold Monkey were popular, so that was OK. What is less appealing is some of the weird tripe-hippy mumbo-jumbo that sometimes he inserts in his books, including quite a bit in this one. Back in the day, I would have thought it merely harmless nonsense, I now see in it the hubristic heresy of Babel; trying to build some kind of secular futuristic Utopia without any reference to true religion. 

Not that I expected my CYOA books to have doctrinally correct Christian themes, necessarily. But as I've aged, I have less patience for philosophies that make a big show of rejecting them all the same.

On top of that, Journey is kind of all over the place. I said earlier that that wasn't necessarily a flaw of Montgomery's compared to Packard; his sense of how to organize the books, I mean. But in this early outing, it feels a little bit all over the place. With very little explanation or exposition, you're immediately whisked off to choices, but you have little context in which to make them, so they feel a little bit random. In spite of this, you sometimes linger on something a little too banal to justify the attention; I made no less than half a dozen decisions back to back on what to do about a stream of bubbles coming from the sea floor, fer cryin' out loud before Montgomery finally let me resolve that issue. A shocking number of the decision points amount to little more than "do you give up yet, or do you go on?" Some of the give-ups bring you to an end, but not as many as you'd think. I think having better choices with a bit more context in which to make them would make the whole thing feel less like random coin flipping to see what happens next, which it sometimes feels like. 

He also did a few other structural things that were interesting, some of which informed later books or even other series, but others I don't recall ever seeing again anywhere else. One of these is that there aren't really two streams based on the base decision that you make first; whichever of the two you pick, there are loads of points in the branches that end up sending you back to the other one or vice versa. This reached its peak in the Tenopia, Kingdom of Frome, and Time Machine series in which there was only one ending and you just kept making choices until you figured out how to avoid looping back again and again into different areas and find your way out of it, like a text maze of sorts. Edward Packard wrote the first two of those series, by the way. Figures. There are also two places in Journey where you get to an ending, but below there is still some direction, telling you that if you don't like that ending, you can turn to another page and get an epilogue to it. One place has a choice; the first one asks if you want to do something, and if so, turn to page whatever... like normal. The other one merely says, If not, The End.

Plenty of hazards that you face in this book are what you'd expect from an adventure story about divers and submarine exploration; sharks, giant squids, whirlpools, etc. But the real meat and potatoes, if you will, is your attempt to discover Atlantis. Atlantis, in Montgomery's world, isn't a sunken ruin, but usually a high tech society living under the waves. Sometimes its aliens. Sometimes its trans-human David Bowman from 2001 weirdness, like people who travel time and space as disembodied thoughts. Sometimes they're people with gills. Sometimes they're feudal layabouts trying to overthrow a king who (it seems probably rightfully) thinks that they're kind of good for nothing and need a strong hand of leadership. 

Montgomery is a little all over the map with his interpretation of Atlanteans, and he has more than one interpretation make an appearance here, but it's obvious that his favorite and most developed is the "advanced" unexplainedly peaceful trans-human interpretation. Who, of course, are thoroughly evil and will only talk to you under threat and duress of kidnapping you permanently. Why there are several endings where you willing submit to this and are supposed to come to think that it's wonderful is something that I'll never understand, because my personality could never accept it. But the alternatives he offers are either cowardly or foolish, so there aren't any good choices to make when you end up in this type of situation, which happens a fair bit, actually.

I had forgotten that while the concept of this book intrigued me a great deal as a kid, especially when there were a lot fewer options to choose from in the series still, the reality of it always kind of disappointed me. Montgomery did get better and some of his later books are among my favorites in the series.

I had this in my original run of CYOA books that I owned, but I lost or sold it years ago. However, I also regained it somehow, after seeing it for sale cheap, I think, a few years ago. But then I never re-read it until now. My version is the 6th printing from March 1981. It has 42 possible endings (out of 117 pages, but some of those are full page artwork, and the preface warning is page 1. That's at least a third of the pages are endings which if you think about it is kinda crazy. 

Another curious thing about this book, and quite a few of Montgomery's books, for that matter, is that the second person protagonist is not portrayed or treated like a kid at any point. Paul Granger's artwork shows a manly dark-haired big-chinned classically American manly man kind of guy who is is assumed that there's a whole history of him developing expertise as a submarine operator and diver. This assumption allows for a greater breadth of storytelling, of course. Edward Packard never seemed to really embrace it. But it's crucial to the whole premise of this book. 

In terms of endings, I:

• Was eaten by sharks
• Eaten by a giant grouper
• Get the bends after a too rapid escape and have to drop out of the mission.
• Get crushed traveling to the center of the earth
• Break the dyke holding the sea from Atlantis and kill everyone in a gigantic flood. Complete with an all caps message that I MADE THE WRONG CHOICE!
• Killed by a poisonous sea serpent
• Give up and someone else discovers Atlantis instead of me
• Captured and detained by Atlanteans for the rest of my life. Several discrete times, actually.
• Give up but several months later, another group invites me to join their team to search for Atlantis, so I try again.
• Have an operation that gives me gills, so now I'm a permanent resident of the seas.
• Get stuck in an Atlantean zoo with a sad horse. Not kidding.
• Get blasted by some weird Atlantean raygun trying to escape. I end up rescued, but my eyesight is permanently damaged, and my career as an undersea adventurer is over
• Get caught in a storm and the submarine is damaged and the mission has to be scrubbed.
• Leave the Atlanteans rather than accept their demand to never return to the surface, but feel bad about it forever.
• Live with the Atlanteans in peace, but never able to leave. Several discrete times, actually
• Join a faction of Atlanteans who are the bad guys, and am sad about being stuck with a bunch of losers for the rest of my life.
• Become an underwater Atlantean farmer. Twice, actually.
• Become an underwater administrator for the king, and the most important person in the kingdom
• Rescued by a whale and brought to the surface where I am then rescued again by a helicopter. Twice, actually. There's actually a lot of me being a damsel in distress in this book, if you think about it.
• Lead a successful, bloodless coup against the king and become one of the Atlanteans, a hero of their Glorious Revolution. Twice.
• Saved by my ship when the choice offered to me was literally "if you don't know what you want to do turn to page 87." I'm shaking my head and chuckling at some of the ideas Montgomery had at this early stage.
• The mission is scrubbed and I can't go back, for reasons that Montgomery doesn't really explain. I just bailed and gave up, and that's that. I'm a loser.
• The laser canon on my submarine (don't ask) blows up because I overheat it trying to cut into Atlantis, and it destroys my entire craft and me in a brief fiery explosion. Which is no doubt immediately put out because I'm underwater.
• I manage to return to the surface, without my sub, but I can't find my ship anywhere. I drown in the middle of nowhere in the ocean. This also happens once where I do find my ship but I'm too injured to signal them and they don't see me.
• Saved, but nobody believes my crazy stories.
• Get turned into a being of light and thought against my will.
• Get turned into a being of light and thought with my express permission. Twice.
• Become Atlantis' greatest musician with some kind of stupid electronic instrument that you feel rather than hear. lolwut?
• Get fed a nice fish dinner by the Atlanteans and then packed away and told never to return.
• Captured by the Atlantean military because I stumbled into their military base. Prisoner for life.
• I go back to find Atlantis again after giving up earlier, but for some reason when I get there, it's come up to the surface.
• Vaporized by the Atlantean secret police because I'm plotting with revolutionary subversives.
• Spend 1,000 years as a being of thought and light and then return to Earth in my body again to find that society has become post-Apocalyptic, Luddite hippy farmers. 
• I give up my revolution against the king because Atlantis is about to flood. I spend a week along with the Atlanteans working double time to save it, and when I do I find that I don't care about Atlantean politics anymore. Not quite sure why I ever did, to be honest?
• Escaped Atlantis when the imminent flood distracted everyone and high-tailed it back to the surface.
• Arrested and imprisoned for life for my part in a plot to overthrow the king.

My weird stint as an Atlantean Brownshirt, as well as my acceptance of weird hippy guru "being of light" nonsense aside, the rest of the book has some pretty cool ideas in it. After reading it again many years after the last time that I did so, I'm convinced that it's not really one of the best titles, and a lot of its structural elements are pretty primitive and poorly conceived compared to things that came along later. But its not one of the worst either; it reads like it's Montgomery's first book in the series, which it is.

I do recall that Montgomery was kind of into weird eastern mysticism in a few other books too, like the one about yetis and Shangri-la, or whatever eastern Utopian fetish he made a part of that book. Maybe that was something that he was kind of in to and I didn't really notice it until now.

CYOA: #71 Space Vampire by Edward Packard

https://darkheritage.blogspot.com/2022/02/choose-your-own-adventure.html

Well... I made a big deal about not having Space Vampire and kind of wishing that I had bought it. I did another search on the broader internet because I thought that the Abebooks, Amazon and Thriftbooks prices were all too high. And guess what? It was up on Scribd, a service to which I have an account. I was able to read the entire book online, in a high quality scan. I still don't have it, but I did just barely read the entire thing, exploring, again to the best of my ability to determine, every single branch and reading every single page. I think. Although I didn't buy a copy and add it to my stack in my old basement bookcase, I feel it's appropriate to review it, since I just read the darn thing in its entirety last night over the course of an hour or two.

I should probably do a small digression here and talk about Edward Packard and R. A. Montgomery. They aren't the only authors of CYOA books, of course, although one of the two of them is the author of a good two-thirds, probably, of the collection. The two of them probably jointly deserve credit for the Choose Your Own Adventure series overall; Packard seems to have invented the concept and written the first one, of course, but it was Montgomery's vanity press that first published it, and it was Montgomery's salesmanship (or his wife's, maybe) that got him a major contract with a major publisher (where he promptly invited Packard to join him). Without either of them, there's no CYOA series. And, like I said, they wrote most of the books between the two of them. Packard wrote 60 of the 184 books of the original run, as well as writing several other similar books in similar series (Which Way, Escape from Tenopia, etc.) while Montgomery wrote 37, and his sons wrote a couple more. Montgomery also wrote a number of the Choose Your Own Adventure for younger readers series, which I don't know very well (apparently the age range expected for the original run was about 10-14.) Packard is still alive, although he's now 91 years old; Montgomery was about five years younger, but he died in 2014 at the age of 78. When the CYOA series went big time in '79-'80, Packard was already nearly 50 and Montgomery was well into his 40s. 

Fans of the series sometimes talk about the distinct personality differences between them that are apparent in their work. Montgomery's books in particular are known for having multiple branches that often have little in common with the other branches. Some of the books in this series (including Space Vampires, for that matter) have a consistent premise, and regardless of what choices you make, other elements of the setting (and "plot" if you want to call it that) are consistent. Montgomery's books often did not do this at all. House of Danger for instance, which I'll review at some point, can be a story about time travel and Civil War ghosts, or it can be a story about alien invasion. Or it can be a story about talking chimpanzees who are counterfeiting money so they can drop it all over the world from egg-shaped space ships to destabilize economies all over the world. I'm actually not kidding about that in the least. Montgomery is also famous for making his adult readers feel like they've stumbled into some kind of strange acid trip of the most bizarre ideas that you've never before imagined because they're so crazy. As he matured as a writer in the series, he developed more consistency sometimes, but I do think that there was a fundamental philosophical difference between the two of them. While obviously not every CYOA is a science fiction story (although a very high percentage of them have elements of this, even those that aren't overtly science fiction in theme) the difference between pulpish "red sci-fi" and post-pulpish "blue sci-fi" applies I think to them. (See my earlier discussion on the concept here.) While Montgomery may have occasionally wandered outside the pale with his crazier ideas and structures, I always thought of him as the more cool and fun of the two. Packard was more likely to try and be a little bit smug and educational, using science more correctly and with almost the sense of a lecture thrown in, or exploration of weird philosophical ideas or a moral ax to grind, etc. But this isn't exactly fair; I mean, it was Packard after all who wrote the book that I'll (eventually) get around to reviewing today, in which you're a recent graduate of the Academy and therefore a member of the Space Force looking to stop an actual vampire on a space ship. Packard being "less fun" than Montgomery merely means that he sometimes has other considerations in addition to "what's cool and fun and gee whiz that I can throw in here?" which Montgomery was less likely to bother with. And yes, this diversion will come in handy as I continue to review these, but it also impacts Space Vampire, sometimes, as we'll see below.

I posted the cover art above, and as you can see the trade dress changed. As near as I can tell, the first volume to use the new trade dress was #70, which immediately preceded this one. While the cover art is probably technically superior, it lacks the charm of the earlier stuff and somehow comes across as very generic. This was a step downward, in my opinion, and one of the signs that the series was starting to get tired and lose its way. Plus, what are those two kids looking at? The door is open right next to them to outer space and a vampire is walking in, and they are looking a something else to the side? What is so compelling that you'd ignore imminent death to watch it instead? I know the 80s was before the time of DVRs; maybe they thought that if they missed that episode of Miami Vice they'd never be able to catch it  again, or something. "Hold on, Mr. Vampire and explosive decompression. I'll get to you when there's a commercial break!"

Interior art is by Judith Mitchell. She's not one of my favorites from the series, although I have a fondness for Paul Granger and Ralph Reese as the iconic CYOA illustrators that makes me see almost anyone else as "not right." I also tended to gravitate away from the artists who were soft and feminine in their style. Ahem. See image to the right. Big calf eyes and long eyelashes aren't made scary by the weird teeth and bushy eyebrows; it still looks soft and silly. Granger's and Reese's style were pretty cartoony rather than gritty or realistic or dark or edgy, but they were consistent with the tone of the stories, and in my opinion they are iconic. The look of this book is a serious strike against it.

When you start, you end up going through several pages of text before making your first choice, although it doesn't feel like "frustrated novelist" syndrome, I think Packard just really wanted to set up the premise and scenario/setting a little more than some of the other books where you can pick up the gist of what's going on without any context setting. Curiously, the first choice has an option to, basically, "ignore the vampire and go do something else." Of course, if you pick that, you end up having a vampire stowaway on your ship anyway, so you don't really ever do what you think you're going to do, but what an odd first choice! That said, even though the "no thanks!" option is still all about the space vampire, it's also relatively small with only a few branches; the other one is the main thrust of the story. But the other one immediately gives you somewhat passive aggressive choices, i.e., you can make a choice to run away from attacking space pirates or fight back... but you can't really, because the Captain just wanted to see what you'd say, and he does what he wants to anyway. In fact, he demotes you and crocks your career if he doesn't like your answer. This same dichotomy is given to you a couple of other times, most notably if you don't really like being the bait in his absurdly dumb plan where you fall asleep and count on someone else to freeze the vampire with a force field right as he's about to attack you.

There's a few interesting options where you're kind of pissed off about being busted back from your potential for not agreeing with the Captain and attempt to win back favor by stealing an experimental new ship and going after the vampire on your own, although none of the branching endings along that path work out for you, unsurprisingly. You can kind of tell after a while (sometimes) what the authors are likely to think a "good" choice is and reward you for it, a what they think a "bad" choice is and lead you into a mess. In fact, it's a complaint of some readers when "good" choices have "random" bad things happen to you that you have no control over. I disagree with this; I think the impact of random chance makes these books interesting, and I very much dislike subtle indoctrination to "be safe and do what you're told is always the right thing" vibe that sometimes runs through these. No doubt two years of ridiculous covid nannying has made this seem more obnoxious to me than it would have thirty or forty years ago, though.

While the "main" thrust of the plot is dealing with a ship that's got a vampire on it killing everyone on board and headed towards Earth, there are other ways of encountering the vampire, and a couple branches even have you travel to "Akbar 5" the home planet of the vampires where vampires live in peace with each other because the oceans are made of blood so they have no need for conflict due to the vast, endless expanse of resources. At one point, there's even a paragraph or so digression about this aspect of the vampires, although luckily Packard didn't go all "let's feel sorry for the monsters" here and pull back from the fact that they are, in fact, monsters who prefer to prey on human flesh for their food. In fact, one aspect of the book I liked was that there were several moments where you may have thought you were doing something quite clever and fooling the vampire only to find out that he saw right through what you were doing and outsmarted you instead. Sometimes this was obvious, and anyone reading should have seen the red flags of "don't do this, it can't possibly be a good idea!" but a lot of times that wasn't the case, and choices that might have seemed good in the context of what usually works in these kinds of books didn't actually do so here. I thought this was actually quite novel, and few of the books in the series would do that with any regularity.

There were some "blue sci-fi" moments, where the details of how much air, food and water you had mattered, or other engineering or physics details. This never really rises to the level of a meta lecture on science to the reader, but it occasionally felt dangerously close to veering into that territory. Although once it was used for kind of comic effect; when almost out of air and food you land at what you think is a space force base only to find out that it's empty and there's a big "COMING SOON!" sign on it. Presumably you die shortly after that.

The book also doesn't shy away from the reality of vampire attacks at times. In the 80s, violence on what was "kids entertainment" was often seriously censored and undercut. Despite the popularity of Star Wars with kids as young as five (like me) with arm-lopping and burned up skeletons of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, most of the similar entertainment that you'd find elsewhere couldn't manage to have a decent shootout or swordfight without making it crystal clear that nobody was ever actually getting hurt. The CYOA books weren't as bad as some on this, because from the very beginning there was the assumption that bad choices had the potential of your own ignominious death somewhere. But it's rare that you'd see the crew of your ship killed by a vampire and left a withered husk, especially as a direct consequence of a poor choice that you made. Not unheard of, but rare enough that it really stood out to me here when it happened on more than one occasion.

One interesting Edward Packardism is the presence of Dr. Nera Vivaldi, his favorite "NPC" from the series, who serves as a convenient stand-in for any sciency exposition need, in at least one of the branches and its attendant choices. However, she seems to have been "recast" from her appearance in every other book; instead of having sensible shoulder-length black hair and being young to middle-aged in appearance, she now looks like your grandmother, including with a white grandma cut hairdo and a saggy old-person face. lolwut?! Did Judith Mitchell just not get the notes and went her own way on the art, or what exactly happened?

Anyway, in reading this book I:

• Died as my space suit ran out of oxygen on an asteroid in the middle of nowhere.
• Got busted back to a boring assignment on Pluto, but promised that I'd still be the hot-shot space ace that I wanted to be.
• Got court-martialed and sent to jail. More than once, actually.
• Successfully beat and killed the vampire several times in different branches. One odd one has me feeling sorry that it had to be done. Not sure why and that came out of left field.
• Died due to hull breach and decompression, taking the vampire with me. Twice.
• Was killed on several occasions by the vampire, or even other vampires.
• Hurled into the sun with the vampire. At least I didn't die alone!
• Let the vampire escape on Earth, where presumably he'll have a heyday killing people left and right.
• Was responsible for an entire spaceship full of vampires heading for earth, and the story ends with me hoping Space Force has what it takes to stop them.
• Got turned into a vampire myself.
• Convinced the vampire king Sangfroid on the vampire planet that they don't actually want to come to our solar system (curiously, they are under the mistaken belief that Mars is covered in blood is the main reason that they wanted to come in this ending.) Vivaldi and I part ways on relatively friendly terms with the vampires, expecting that there's no reason they'd ever come to Earth, or earthlings ever go back to Akbar 5 either one.
• Steal the vampire's ship, thwarting their earth invasion plans, and then discovering that me and Nera Vivaldi will have to make the three month long trip with nothing to eat but dried blood. Ha.
• Drifting in the darkness of outer space, presumably lost forever. Although in one ending, I did get found by one of my new friends who knew I were around here somewhere, just as I was about to run out of oxygen.
• I'm given some garlic early on; in only one of the endings does this foreshadowing come back, and I manage to use it to thwart the vampires on the vampire planet. Curiously, I get here by making a lot of "wrong" choices that get me demoted and busted back as a loser, only to, at this last moment because the ship's cook gave me a little bottle of garlic, get hailed as a hero and promoted to command of my own ship.

I wasn't quite sure how Packard would handle the concept of science fiction and space travel and vampires, and I had been curious about that for years, when I remembered to remember the question. However, he did the simplest thing that he could have, probably; just treated them like normal vampires in almost every way, with the assumption that the sun's light is weak enough beyond Mars' orbit to not harm them. I'm not yet sure if I think that's an admirable solution for its elegance and simplicity, or if it's disappointing for its banality.

Although I did actually think the text was one of the better books in the series, I don't think it's worth the inflated price that it seems to be selling for. And honestly, I was sometimes frustrated by the lack of "objectivity" in the text; Packard seemed to think that certain choices were "obviously" better than others, and the whole of the setting would turn against you in a way that didn't feel random, it felt petty and passive aggressive, if you made the wrong ones. This was kind of weird; in most past volumes of the series, having something bad happen to you was part of the fun, but here it somehow didn't feel very fun, it felt arbitrary and somehow borderline preachy. 

Pretty highly recommended, with the caveat that only if you can get it for a reasonable price that's on par with where most of the rest of the volumes are selling. At the price it seems to be going for, I wouldn't buy it, even for the nostalgia bait.

CYOA: #1: The Cave of Time by Edward Packard

https://darkheritage.blogspot.com/2022/02/choose-your-own-adventure.html

I pulled down my aged, yellowed copy of The Cave of Time and because I had enough free time to do so, I read it through a bunch of times. In fact, I read it enough to catch all of the branches, I think. I skimmed through pretty quickly when I was done, and I'm pretty sure I hit them all. I'm not sure what I expected; I mean, I fell in love with this book when I was eight or nine years old. I'm a bit surprised that it held up well. I expected the text to be brief and punchy, and that was always a strong point for the CYOA series. If the CYOA authors started acting like frustrated YA novelists the books suffered. (As the reviews go on, I know I'll have at least one with this problem.) Give us a crazy high concept, throw some weirdo ideas at us, and make us make a choice. That's all this series needs to work.

My well-loved copy in all of its beaten up glory

What did surprise me, though, is that in hardly any of the branches does the actual concept of the Cave of Time really get described. You're expected, I presume, to catch up because of the title, and when they refer to the Cave of Time (in caps, as a proper noun) author Edward Packard assumes that you've figured it out, even though there's no reason your character, i.e., the second person YOU referred to throughout the book, ever would. But there's a lot to be said for this. Like I said, I wasn't reading The Lord of the Rings yet at this age; I was reading Bunnicula. I don't know what I expected, but like I said up top there a little, some high concept and some crazy ideas, and then move on to the next one; don't spend a lot of time developing it in detail. You're supposed to be excited by the wave of crazy ideas more than anything else, not entranced by the prose or the loving detail given to setting the scene or developing characters. Even a coherent plot kinda defeats the purpose to some degree.

With those expectations firmly in place, I found that The Cave of Time was pretty good. There's a few unusual CYOA tropes, like being off visiting an aunt or uncle with no mention of parents. I don't know what the assumed age of the second person protagonist is, but with Paul Granger's illustrations, you come across as middle-school looking, I think. That was always a bit of a shady detail that it was better not to think too much about, given that you're often wandering alone in dangerous environments. I mean, you start off in Snake Canyon by yourself, hiking I presume, in the backcountry of your uncle's ranch somewhere.

My copy is pretty beat up, even compared to other CYOA books in my collection. I think either my younger brothers or even my own kids at some point got a hold of it and did kind of a number on the spine. I've taped the binding with some clear tape, but pages are threatening to come loose even so. And the book's cover is noticeably faded, and the pages noticeably yellow. But this was a mass market paperback. My copy was the 11th printing from June 1981, and it retailed for $1.50 according to the price printed on the front cover.

The series had an interesting start, and before Bantam took a hold of it and turned it into a household name, several "prototypes" were printed, by either small, local New England presses, or by Archer. Books that were part of this prototype period later went on to become Choose Your Own Adventure entries, and include #62 Sugarcane Island, #7 The Third Planet From Altair and #8 Deadwood City in the late 70s. But for whatever reason, the first book in the series was this one, and it was written by Edward Packard, one of the two main authors of the series for most of its run, and the inventor of the concept. As you can see from the front cover, there's plenty of exciting potential there; a weird Medieval king with a big beard who never actually appears in the book anywhere (there is a Medieval king, but he looks nothing like that!), a dinosaur in Monument valley, a Chinese warrior from their own feudal period, the Loch Ness Monster, etc. 

The cover art is by Paul Granger, who also did the ink line art in the interior. Apparently that's a pen name; for some reason, he illustrated a couple of later versions of books in the series under his real name, Don Hedin. His work is kind of cartoony and stylized, but I always thought it thoroughly appropriate for the subject matter of Choose Your Own Adventure stories, and to be honest with you, I've never really liked anyone else's illustrations as much as his when other artists started to get thrown in except for Ralph Reese. His style was different, and yet similarly cartoonish, if that makes sense. It fit the concept equally well. In fact, when they changed the trade dress and art style, my interest in the series waned precipitously. The whole package of how it was when I was introduced to it became part of its success, at least for me personally.

My cover says that you can choose between 40 possible endings. I didn't count them, but I notice that covers of earlier printings within this series say 39. Did they add a new one and revise the text, or is one of the two of those an error? Structurally, this one is perhaps a little on the primitive side, but it works for the concept. By that I mean that some more "advanced" CYOA titles had a single main plotline, and different choices gave you more detail and further fleshed out what was happening, without contradicting each other in any ways. Others had an A story and a B story (and occasionally a C story) depending on your first choice, and the two branches explored the high concept in very different ways. The Cave of Time, on the other hand, just had you continually popping in and out of the Cave of Time, and ending up somewhere that felt mostly kind of random; your temporal destination having little bearing on what you decided to do. The decisions mostly either moved you from one time to another, or had bearing on your success or failure while in a particular time. I actually quite liked the idea that if you ended up somewhere you didn't want to be, you could usually pop back into the cave in a few pages, or less sometimes, and get zapped somewhere else to try your luck there. Mostly these were unique, but there's a few places you could get to through more than one point.

There are plenty of "good" endings where you end up back home where you started, there are plenty of "decent" endings, or maybe some of these are even good, where you end up in some other time and build a fun and exciting life there instead, there are a few endings where you end up somewhere and aren't sure how much you want to be stuck there, and of course, there are plenty of endings where you die horribly. Some of the endings include:

• At least two endings where you make a new life in Anglo-Saxon England nearly a hundred years before the Norman invasion. Although they just treat it like "generic Merrie Olde England."
• Another one where I get hanged from a tree by the king's men in less-than-merrie olde England.
• Two where I go so far into the future that the sun is a swollen red giant about to die.
• Three endings where I talk to some timeless old philosopher who sends me back home.
• One where the timeless old philosopher sends me into WW2 and I get killed by a bomb almost as soon as I arrive.
• Two where I live with cavemen in the Ice Age for the rest of my life.
• One where I go home, but although only a few weeks have passed for me, everyone else is a dozen years older.
• One where I'm on the back of a mammoth who's driven off the edge of a cliff and an astounded paleontologist thinks my bones look shockingly modern for someone who died thousands of years ago.
• One where I linger in a strange Brave New World-like future, not quite settled, but never able to put my finger on exactly what's wrong with everyone.
• One where I'm eaten by some kind of giant bug-looking thing. Not even sure if that's supposed to be the future or the past.
• One where you end up living in a tropical paradise surfing in the ocean and never actually find out if you're in the future or the past.
• One where you get killed by a snake in the jungle while trying to find the Cave of Time to go home.
• One where you're on the Titanic as it sinks, but you escape in a lifeboat. But you're stuck; your exit is on the ship somewhere. Whoops!
• Several where you bring a plesiosaur egg home, and either it gets stolen. Or you give it to a scientist. Or you put it in an incubator, waiting to see what's gonna hatch out of it yourself.
• One where you bring a cute girl your age back from the future and she gets stuck in your time. How YOU doin', Louisa?
• Several were you get home just fine and everyone wonders where you were for a few hours; in one you later write a book about the Cave of Time.
• One where you get captured and conscripted to build the Great Wall.
• Eaten by a saber-tooth.
• Eaten by a T. rex.
• Eaten by the Loch Ness Monster
• One where you're on a semi-submerged reef and can't find any other sign of land anywhere.
• One where you're stuck in the Battle of Britain.
• Several where you end up in Colonial or Westward expansion United States, running a printing press, or a soap manufacturer, or some such. Sometimes this is happy and exciting, sometimes you miss home and are always looking for clues about the Cave of Time again.
• One where you become a reporter in the 20s or 30s or something and have a good life, dying of old age just a few years before you're born.
• One where you meet Abraham Lincoln, but then are stuck in the 1860s. You find that no radio, TV or constant bombardment by pop culture is kinda nice.
• One where you go so far back in time that there's not enough oxygen in the atmosphere yet and you die of suffocation.
• One where you bring a Colonial fellow back with you because he's dying of tuberculosis and he believes your bizarre time traveling story. He ends up becoming a professor of history famous for his knowledge of Colonial America.

This was exactly the kind of weird, exotic, fantastic high concept that made the series so successful, especially in its earlier entries. Sometimes later the themes of the books became too focused and you couldn't do all that much that felt very different. This is related to the "frustrated novelist" problem that marred some of the books. 

If you're a 50 year old man, like me, then you're not likely to get too much out of this other than a sense of nostalgia, remembering that sense of wonder when you first read these forty or more years ago, and maybe the seed of an idea that can be built into something else. These are hardly high literature, or even something that will be remembered by future generations. Heck, it's already been mostly forgotten except by people my age who read them as a kid. But given that I did in fact read these as a kid and have really fond memories of that, I found that my nostalgic trip through the Cave of Time was pretty fun. A worthy use of a spare hour or two. I suspect that most of the other ones that I actually like will be good for the same reason, and these reviews might start to get repetitive. But we'll see. 

UPDATE: I may keep doing this, and in fact, I may do them out of order. I have #2 and #4, but I long ago lost #3. I have it on order, but if I really go through these fast, I may not want to wait for it to arrive.

Obviously, I don't have the entire series. But I ordered most of the ones that I used to have but no longer do, with the exception of Inside UFO 54-40 which always kind of disappointed me, even when I was a kid. I also ordered at least one that I never had, but which is seen by most fans as one of the best ones. I also always wanted Space Vampire and its sequel Vampire Invaders. I almost bought that when it was new, in 1987, but by that point I was more like 15 and wasn't really buying CYOA books very often anymore. I wish that I had, though. For whatever reason, that sells for $30-40 bucks, which is more than I paid for all 5 of the others that I ordered combined. I can't bring myself to spend that much money on a book that I probably won't really like all that much. I have no idea what it's really about other than that vampires are apparently a race of aliens, but that sounds cool enough to me. If I'd bought it in 1987 when I was a teenager, I'd still have it today. Sigh.

If anyone wants to send this to me, or if you find it at a better price than that, let me know. I'd be up for some Space Vampires.

Choose Your Own Adventure

The year is 1981 (or so.) A young Desdichado is selected for the STEP program at his local elementary school in a modest-sized central Texas town where he grew up. I no longer remember what the acronym was supposed to stand for, but it was the "gifted and talented" program that the school district was trying to get off the ground. I don't know what, exactly, young Desdichado's teachers thought were his gifts and talents, but what that seems to have meant is that school was relatively easy for me, I was frequently bored and thus spent time doodling or reading in class. And young Desdichado was certainly a reader; he was a curious kid who's mind was often on more exciting things than what was actually going on around him.

I was a kid who loved the classic "Boys Adventure Tale" type story, and the more strange and exotic the better. I loved fantasy, dragons, dinosaurs, space opera, outer space, and all that jazz. Library day was my favorite day of the week at school. At Henderson Elementary school, there were three classes per grade of about 30 or so kids each class, and from that pool, somewhere between a dozen and dozen and a half kids were put into this STEP program. I think it was mostly an effort to give them something to do that was more interesting than what they were otherwise doing, because clearly these kids either weren't very interested, or found school fairly easy, and the teachers thought they needed to be challenged. But I don't think, at least in the first year or two, that they had any idea what to do with us. We didn't even have a proper space to meet the first year; I remember clearly that an unused little hallway with some spare desks set up in it was where we started. And that's where I was introduced to the Choose Your Own Adventure books. A quick; "here, see if they like this" kind of thing, I suspect. I remember for a couple of weeks we were allowed to read the first 10-11 or so titles (the only ones that were out by then) as well as a couple of titles from the Which Way series. One that I particularly remember from Which Way was Sugarcane Island by Edward Packard, one of the two main authors of the Choose Your Own Adventure series. It was actually the first—the prototype, if you will—of the concept, and it has been reprinted numerous times. (I remember it mostly because of that distinction. It wasn't the best one.) In mass market format, it was first published as #6 in the Which Way book series, post-dating it's release in The Adventure of You, a small somewhat local series, and it was also re-issued as #62 in the Choose Your Own Adventure mainline series. Packard invented the concept, and was published by small press owner R. A. Montgomery. Both felt that the concept had more promise than they were able to deliver, so Montgomery beat the bushes and sold the concept to Bantam, one of the big-time publishers at the time. After landing the deal, he invited Packard, who of course created the concept, to join him in the new line. Most of the original run of the books was written by one of the two of them, although they later brought a few others on as semi-regulars to keep up with demand. 

I loved the CYOA books. I actually still own a lot of my original purchases from the early 80s, although I've lost (or sold; ah, the folly of youth!) some of the ones that I used to own. But I had the entire run up through #25 (minus one title) and I continued to buy them off and on up into the 50s or 60s. I actually even continued to buy a few more after that, but by then I was nostalgia baiting myself; I'd obviously moved on to other things most of the time by middle school, let alone high school. But because I'd had such love for the series, I still kept in touch with at least a little bit throughout the 80s. Once when I was about ten or so, I was out of school for a week with strep throat and I even tried to write one in notebook. I illustrated it and everything, and got... I dunno, a good forty or so entries written. I wish I could still find that. I probably threw it away over thirty years ago. I'm sure its terrible, but I'd be interested in seeing it again.

Because used books aren't usually too hard to track down and sell at decent rates in this day and age in which reading books is sadly kind of passé, I'm seriously considering picking up all of the ones that I lost over the years, plus one or two others that I always kinda wanted to get but for some reason never got around to, but you have to be careful! Many of these titles have been re-released in recent(ish) years with revised text, new trade dress and new illustrations. This simply won't do; I can't get that good old-fashioned Choose Your Own Adventure feel without the original art, original trade-dress, and original early 80s text. Good old big-chinned art by Paul Granger is a must!

Anyway, I'm not sure why I'm talking about this other than for some curious reason I've having a nostalgia moment about this series. I may even do reviews of the books that I have! I thought I'd make a list of what I've owned. The list is books in my current collection, but I've also included in gray text books that I used to own but no longer do (but probably will again shortly) and in green text, books that I never did own but always kind of meant to, so I will probably order them eventually too. I changed to blue titles that I've just recently ordered. When they arrive, I'll change them to normal black text. Meanwhile, those I've reviewed will get a checkmark. I'll update this post when that happens.

1. The Cave of Time by Edward Packard ✔

2. Journey Under the Sea by R. A. Montgomery ✔

3. By Balloon to the Sahara by D. Terman ✔

4. Space and Beyond by R. A. Montgomery ✔

5. The Mystery of Chimney Rock by Edward Packard ✔

6. Your Code Name is Jonah by R. A. Montgomery ✔

7. The Third Planet from Altair by Edward Packard ✔

8. Deadwood City by Edward Packard ✔

9. Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? by Edward Packard

10. The Lost Jewels of Nabooti by R. A. Montgomery

11. Mystery of the Maya by R. A. Montgomery

12. Inside UFO 54-50 by Edward Packard

13. The Abominable Snowman by R. A. Montgomery

14. The Forbidden Castle by Edward Packard

15. House of Danger by R. A. Montgomery

16. Survival at Sea by Edward Packard

17 The Race Forever by R. A. Montgomery

18. Underground Kingdom by Edward Packard

19. Secret of the Pyramids by Richard Brightfield

20. Escape by R. A. Montgomery

21. Hyperspace by Edward Packard

22. Space Patrol by Julius Goodman

23. The Lost Tribe by Louise Munro Foley

25. Prisoner of the Ant People by R. A Montgomery

27. The Horror of High Ridge by Julius Goodman

28. Mountain Survival by Edward Packard

31. Vampire Express by Tony Koltz

33. The Dragon's Den by Richard Brightfield

37. War With the Evil Power Master by R. A Montgomery

38. Sabotage by Jay Leibold

45. You Are a Shark by Edward Packard

50. Return to the Cave of Time by Edward Packard

55. The Trumpet of Terror by Deborah Lerme Goodman

56. The Enchanted Kingdom by Ellen Kushner

57. The Antimatter Formula by Jay Leibold

71. Space Vampire by Edward Packard ✔

73. Beyond the Great Wall by Jay Leibold

86. Knights of the Round Table by Ellen Kushner

91. You Are a Superstar by Edward Packard

92. Return of the Ninja by Jay Leibold

117. The Search for Aladdin's Lamp by Jay Leibold

Going through the list of titles and cover images, I honestly almost want to add a good dozen more to the list and buy them too. I doubt I'd really enjoy having them for very long, but such is the power and draw of both the concept and some of the boy's adventure exotic pulp themes that the series was well known for. I mean, c'mon! Vampire Invaders? Moon Quest? Through the Black Hole? Ghost Train? Outlaw Gulch? The Forgotten Planet? Dinosaur Island?

Such is the draw of a sense of wonder.

Of that list, over the years I've especially missed The Race Forever and Escape, both by R. A. Montgomery. I remember thinking those were among my favorites in the series. I can't believe I let them go.

I had some other books that worked the same way, but from other series, of course. I have seven books of the Star Challenge series, but I have them in Spanish (Reto de las Galaxias) which, luckily I can read. I had a few Endless Quest books. I had the Escape from Tenopia and Escape from the Kingdom of Frome books. I had a number of the Time Machine series. And I had a few copies of books in the Which Way books series, although I read more than I had; I can't remember for sure which ones I actually owned anymore. That was an interesting sister series to Choose Your Own Adventure, since it's a follow-up by the same publisher who first published some of the Edward Packard books that later were part of the Choose Your Own Adventure series by Archer. One of them, Sugarcane Island, was the first published of any of this type of book, and it appeared (in it's third form, although first truly mass market format) as #6 in the Which Way series. It later made an appearance as #62 in the Choose Your Own Adventure series proper. And of course, there were competitors, like Scholastic's Twist-a-Plot series. But the CYOA series proper is the one that captured the public's imagination, and the ones you could readily find, and the ones that I mostly read. In general, I'd suggest that it was the best of the choice-making second person type books until more overtly game-bookish constructions, like Fighting Fantasy came out later.

And of course, I had a ton of those Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and the TolkienQuest (later Middle-Earth Quest) books and the Lone Wolf books, which were the ones that I lingered on the most. It's kind of a shame that this format has fallen out of favor. 

Legacy of the Sith

OK, I've played Legacy of the Sith for over a week now. Time for a more in depth review of what I think of the significant changes. There's no doubt plenty of little minor changes (according to the patch notes there certainly are) but most of them have only minimal impact on the game. Before I begin, I should point out that I'm almost exclusively a solo player. I've grouped up here and there for a few small things, like a heroic when someone else was standing around and invited me to group up, or something like that, but I'm not really a group player, and don't care about group activities. I've never played an Operation, I've only occasionally played a group flashpoint, or fought a group world boss, etc. This will have a significant impact on my opinion of the update. People who do grouping are very motivated into a kind of hyper min-maxing mode of thought which I do not share. So many of the complaints seem over-wrought to me, because I don't care about every little tiny point of advantage. I didn't even have level 306 gear for any of my characters when the thing rolled over; my semi-retired characters who had finished the main story ranged from about 284 gear rating or so to about 296. 

One. The obvious thing is the new content; the Manaan world area and the Elom flashpoint. I haven't played either yet. To be honest with you, while the story since the end of the class stories has had some pretty cool moments, the lack of diversity (i.e. class specific stories) has made all of that content less appealing to me than the original class stories. I've played all of it once with my Jedi Knight. I've played much of it with my Sith Warrior. Everyone else who's finished the class stories is at some level of completion between the post Corellia stuff and the Shadow of Revan; nobody else, however, has moved into the Fallen Empire and Eternal Empire expansions. I guess I just don't care that much about much of the new content. Complaints are that it's very short. OK. I could play it with my Jedi Knight; he's ready to go, but I just haven't been motivated to. I'm more motivated to go back and do more with the original stories, so I've started a whole host of new(ish) characters in the last couple of months. Not only that, reports are that the new content is pretty bugged, and the Manaan daily area hasn't even launched yet. No hurry. I've got plenty of other things to do.

Two. The class ability changes and ability trees have mostly been cried about by the fans. A lot of abilities have been removed, moved, adjusted, etc. Most of your characters now play a bit differently. Most of your characters no longer have abilities that they used to have. Ironically, some of these are the iconic abilities for your class, if the Heroic Moment is to be any guide. My commando and mercenary lost their sticky bombs, which is the iconic heroic moment ability, and my scoundrel lost his nut kick. They may still be out there on another combat spec that I'm not using, and honestly the commando had two sticky bomb options. I miss some of those, but overall I'm kind of in favor of the idea of trimming abilities. I used to routinely use four toolbars, although the two secondary ones were not full. I found that with none of my characters do I need a fourth one, though. I can fit all of them on three toolbars now. I suppose that's a positive.

Again, the min-maxers are bent out of shape that their "rotations" on longer work. Personally, I'd never play in such a way that I'd use a term like "rotation" but I do kind of get it. There's a little bit of a learning curve to adjust to the changes, and a few of the misses are a disappointing. Overall, I'd call this a mostly neutral to negative change. Good idea, not great execution.

Three. The transition from advanced class to combat style was one that I actually kind of didn't care a lot about, but I find now that having the ability to stick a stealth-using secondary class on literally every single character so I can have the option of clicking it on and skipping past trash mobs is totally worth it. There's things that I don't like about how it works; I think switching combat styles through loadouts is kind of clunky, and I dislike how it throws the gear from your other style into a random spot in your inventory instead of just keeping stored in the loadout. But in many ways, that's just an awkward feature of the new inventory, which I'll talk about below. A similar, although technically different change is the divorce of class story from combat style, where you can now play a character with a different combat style from another class. I didn't think that I cared about this either before launch, but now I'm getting a little jazzed about playing a vanguard bounty hunter who uses a bowcaster as his signature weapon. I just need that BBA event to come around so I can have enough of the event currency to buy the bowcaster that I want now! (which is, sadly, a lot. I'll be grinding like crazy that week, probably in March.)

Four. The new inventory UI is not good. This includes not just the inventory, but the class sheet, the outfit designer (which is now outfitter), the preview pane for gear, etc. It's super buggy, and a super bad design. The clean, easy on the eyes inventory system that's been in place since literally the launch of the game is replaced with a harsh grid that's a bit confusing to look at. Basic features like drag in the preview pane are mysteriously missing. Things like the unify to chestpiece color toggle are bugged and don't work. The outfitter didn't get the cosmetic weapon that we were expecting (to launch in 7.1, apparently... whenever that happens to be.) It's also no longer very helpful when it comes to actually showing you what your outfit looks like, because it's in a combat stance. If you have a blaster or sniper rifle, you can't even see your chest or face very well. You can no longer see your outfits without activating them. Loads and loads of what are inconveniences and bugs; all to replace a system that literally nobody had a problem with. Nobody asked for this. There's a lot of fainting couch drama on the forums, and outright absurd lies, like the UI is giving people headaches, hurting their eyes, causing them harm, etc. That doesn't help anyone's case to throw such an obvious, childish, dishonest tantrum like that. But the reality is that this whole new system wasn't asked for, nobody wanted it, and I haven't yet seen anyone that likes it. Honestly, if they fix the bugs, I can probably adjust to the other inconveniences, which are relatively minor after all. However, the cumulative effect of lots of minor inconveniences is a fairly major dissatisfaction with the change. And it's one that impacts you pretty much all of the time.

Five. Gearing has had lots of complaints. However, those complaints usually come from min-maxers at 80th level. (To be honest, I don't see the point in all of this level cap increase that they keep adding. If they level synch every planet, which they do, then why did we need any level increases at all? The complaints seem to be focused on two things: 1) getting top level gear is a major, tedious grind for all of your "alts" or "toons" (I cannot tell you how much I hate those terms) that nobody wants to do anymore, and 2) you can't get the highest level gear with the cosmetic weapons that you want, so you "can't use" your cartel market stuff until the outfitter gets the cosmetic weapon feature added. 

I agree that this is probably a bad system, but since I'm still operating at a less 1337 sub-306 gear level, I haven't actually seen any change in my own game yet. Other than that, curiously, I started getting a handful of 306 level drops here and there. This change was supposedly to alleviate complaints about the random nature of drops, but if so, I think that it overshot the mark; people preferred dealing with some RNG more than they like dealing with this new system, apparently. For solo players like me, I find the whole thing uninteresting. I still don't even have a character that's got all the way to level 80 yet, so I haven't even interacted with the new system much with the exception that I've got a few drops in my inventory that I can't use until I get to level 80. Which, even just running around doing Seasons grind and whatnot I'll probably start hitting with some of my characters in the next few days or so. I think my highest level character now, my grinder sniper (who ironically has among the lowest level gear of all of my semi-retired level 75 characters) is level 79. And that's just from grinding seasons and a few reputation tracks. Mostly seasons, though. 

Six. Rotating focus weeklies has had a lot of complaints. People have said, again, super exaggerated things like they took away things to do. No, they didn't. They did, however, take away some of the reward for doing them. You can still do all of the Heroics that you could before. However, there aren't weekly bundled rewards for doing them on every planet every week anymore. I think the idea was to attempt to funnel more players into the same activities, giving the illusion of more life when playing. A kind of Potemkin popularity, if you will.  Of course, the illusion doesn't work if you're doing the Heroics for another planet anyway. Last night, I was doing the Heroics on Hutta with one of my characters; my sniper or one of my powertechs; I can't remember now. For the first time in forever, especially on a Tuesday when the week resets, I could do it without having to wait for respawns, or do without the bonus missions because it wasn't worth it to wait for the respawns. Hutta seemed dead. I guess everyone was off doing something else. That hasn't been the case when doing Hutta heroics in forever, though. I was honestly pretty surprised. So anyway, no... they haven't taken any activities out. They have taken away some modest bonuses for doing certain things at certain times, though. Again, only the rabid min-maxer probably really cares about the difference.

Seven. Galactic Seasons 2 is the big thing that I've been working on. It's pretty cool, although some of the Conquest-like grind isn't always my favorite. It's nice that they give you a variety of things to grind, but it's not so nice that it's mostly a variety of things that were already in the game and had been for years. The new reputation track is honestly new, suppose, and the new currency (blegh; we've got too many of these already) but I'm finding in general that this grind, compared to more specific reputation grinds that I've worked on in the past, is a bit fresher, and the rewards are really pretty cool. Heck, among other things I've got 600 cartel coins out of it already. Combined with my monthly subscriber drop of 525, that's been enough to unlock most of my recently acquired collections. Along with next month's subscriber drop and what I should earn between now and then through seasons, I'm thinking of buying one of the hot new armor sets... and not actually spending any of my own money on it, which is the key. I know that the cartel market is what keeps the game afloat, but I hate putting more than a couple of bucks into it here and there. The microtransaction business model really kinda chaps my hide.

Conclusion. Most of the things that the player base is complaining about the loudest probably don't actually affect the majority of the player base. Here I'm operating under the assumption that the majority of players are solo and story players, not min-maxers, raiders or PVPers. All of those groups, on the other hand, seem unhappy. Other than that, the other new stuff that doesn't impact min-maxers, raiders and PVPers is a mixed bag of "good idea!" or "good idea, but flawed execution" with a handful of real clunker "why in the world did they do that?" ideas thrown in. But if they fix a few niggling bugs, and maybe tone down the ugliness of the new UI a bit, and I'll be happy to say that overall the change was a positive one, albeit somewhat underwhelming.

And I think that's the real story here, which I haven't really addressed. This has been pretty seriously hyped as this big 10th anniversary celebration, and overall, even if we didn't have a new UI that nobody likes and a number of other features that have taken the wind out of its sails—let's assume for the sake of argument that none of that was an issue—it'd still be a pretty darn underwhelming 10th anniversary celebration. A little bit of new content, a new way to use old content (combat styles divorced from class story) and... so far, that's it. And the new story content is underwhelming too, from what I've heard and seen, although it's expected that more of that will continue to dribble out throughout the year.

If this is all that they can muster for a big-time 10th anniversary celebration, then the game is running on autopilot with a skeleton crew of developers. Which, to be fair, nobody thought otherwise. But this is certainly confirmation of that.

The Spin

The Book of Boba Fett is, sadly, a very stupid show. Boba Fett was one of my favorite characters. When I was about 7-8 years old, and The Empire Strikes Back hadn't even come out yet, you could turn in... what was it, ten proof of purchases, I think? And they'd send you a Boba Fett action figure from Kenner. I had one of those. That Boba Fett action figure was one of the action figures I played with the most. I didn't necessarily imagine that he was Boba Fett, just that he was this super cool supercommando who shot missiles out of his wrist and his backpack, in addition to the gun he carried around. Boba Fett was done wrong by George Lucas himself in Return of the Jedi when he died like a chump for no good reason, but then he was trotted out in the special editions as lame gratuitous fan service. But that could... kinda... be ignored. But this show turning him into a sad, senile, confused, out of shape old man who wants to run a criminal empire by being nice and never making any decisions at all is just pathetic. A real disgrace.

And I actually laughed out loud at a part that wasn't supposed to be funny; The Spin. Here's a clip of it, turned by the genius of the Internet, into a disposable yet hilarious meme.

SWTOR Update

Well, after about 24 hours, I've settled in a bit on my opinion of the update. I still think it's kind of buggy. I think that the new character and inventory combined sheet is ugly and non-functional compared to what it replaced. I've been a little bit frustrated at the grindiness of Galactic Seasons.

I'm not, however, too upset about gearing and grindiness of conquests in general for gear, for the simple reason that I never had optimal gear anyway. I'm actually getting better gear now using standard methods than I used to. Those were concerns that I never really had, although I know that there's lots of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth in the player base overall around it. I also haven't even tried to do the new story elements yet, which everybody is mocking because they're so short and pointless and silly. But then again, I've always understood that the story was supposed to dribble out over the entire course of the 7.x series, not that it'd be dropped all at once. And I've only got one character eligible to play it so far anyway.

I'm also not overly concerned about changes to the classes. I've spent more time playing with my Sniper and Gunslinger than with anyone else, although I've also played around just a tiny bit with my Jedi Guardian and with one of my Powertechs. I'm a little intimidated to do more than that, because the learning curve for the changes is a little steeper than it should be, so doing fewer of the characters at a time seems prudent. I've also so far only grinded; I maxed out my GSI reputation (after only two characters even, not three) and I'm moving about as fast as can be done with the new Shadow Syndicate reputation that's associated with the Seasons 2 rewards. I actually quite like the Seasons rewards, but they'll take some doing to get done, so I'll probably be grinding pretty regularly and doing less with my new characters in the short term. I'll also probably put some of my other grinds on the back burner, with the exception of the BBA when it comes up, because there's stuff that I want from that. On the other hand; I'm not quite sure what the reputation does for you. I don't think it actually makes much difference for the rewards. One of the nice perks that it does is that it gives you a fair number of cartel coins; 200 at a time, about every five reward tiers (there are 100. I didn't count them, but that should come to 4,000 cartel coins.) I've started unlocking a few of my collections already with the 400 that I've earned so far, but I need a good 1,400 or so more to get everything unlocked that I already have. And then I'll probably want to buy one of the hot new armor sets, just because why not; I'll have cartel coins sitting around for the first time in forever. 

So, I'm a little meh on the expansion other than to note that that's maybe an overly ambitious word to use to describe it. It has some stuff I like well enough. It has some stuff that I don't. I'm gradually getting used to the latter; or at least some of it. I'm hardly one of the fans who show up on twitter or the forums and loudly flounce away (although I wonder how many of them truly leave; if you have to announce that you're an old-timer who's been playing all along and now you're leaving, then chances are you're just being dramatic and aren't really leaving anyway). But clearly there is a lot of drama, and the player base does not seem to be very pleased. I've only seen one example of this in a fandom that I was part of, and that's when the The Forge was going to be part of the Armageddon's Blade expansion for Heroes of Might & Magic III. I remember strong fan backlash to that idea too, but in that case, NGC actually backtracked their plans and did something else with the expansion pack. Although I feel like there was some lingering and pretty obvious bitterness that the fans didn't just sit down, shut up, and consume what we want to produce, they did actually listen to the fanbase enough to stop before launching something that would have been deeply unpopular. BioWare, on the other hand, ignored six months of comments in the public test server that many of these changes were bad ideas. 

Wow, that was over twenty years ago now. Crazy.

One amusing or obnoxious bug or feature; nobody seems to be sure which, is that they added some more aggressive stubble as a complexion in the game. However, the exact same skins are available on men and women both. Most normal people think that making bearded women characters is, of course, a ridiculously obvious bug that's good for a laugh, maybe, but of course there are a few loudmouth crazy perverts who are certain that this is a blow in the culture war for the "rights" of crazy perverts who can't figure out what their biological sex is or what that actually means. So far, nobody from BioWare has commented, so everyone is left to speculate. I think the crazy people are probably right. Whether it truly was intentional or just lazy, I doubt that they'll change it, and I suspect that they'll use the inane hoax of "trans rights" or "trans representation" or whatever as an excuse to get out of fixing it.

Given the fact that there are an inordinate amount of fat characters, and that they actually offered you the ability to make morbidly obese yet shockingly atheltic characters, I suspect that some absurd SJW is trying to virtue-signal how much she rejects reality. There's a reason that I made the terrible dreadnaughts from my Revanchist Republic who annihilated a world of billions through orbital bombardment the RSS Inclusivity and the RSS Diversity after all.

UPDATE: One curious aside. I was online doing some quiet crafting updates while working, and I got a message that the servers are about to go down for maintenance. Checked BioWarer's twitter page; it's a hotfix for a fairly serious bug. In less than 48 hours, this is at least the third time that that's happened now. What a mess. This was a seriously botched roll-out, regardless of what you think of the changes.

It's the economy, stupid

As the saying goes. But it's entirely wrong. Two smaller selections from a Z-man post.

If you are over a certain age, something you will remember is that the economy used to be a central part of the daily news feed. People talked about the economy because it was always in the mass media. Of course, you had lots of news about finance, especially the stock market. This dovetailed with the stories about the federal budget and the resulting deficits. People used to talk about the federal debt because it was a number that was easy to conceptualize.

One reason people are not talking about the economy over lunch is the mass media has been told to drop it. The real power of corporate media is the power to ignore, which is what they have done with economics. When was the last time the New York Times did a big story on the finances of the government? There was a time when this was a stock feature. People used to know the size of the federal debt because it was a number that was made meaningful by the media.

The truth is the economy is something people care about and it is something they can know about without the media. If you are a Dirt Person, you have been watching your food bill tick up over the last year or so. You have chatted about this with people at work and with friends at parties. Food inflation is becoming a feature of life. Now gas prices are starting to creep into the conversation. The solons in the mass media may not notice it, but everyone else sees it when they gas up.

The last time inflation was a thing, Reagan was going around the country while running for president, saying, “Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.” This sounds way over the top, but it resonated with people because at one level he was right. Crime is about social trust and the crime of inflation robs the people of their trust in the basic functioning of society. Inflation puts everything about economic life up for grabs.

Compounding things now is the fact that the core demographic responsible for there being an economy has lost all trust in the government. The inflation numbers recently posted were met with scornful laughs. Everyone knows they are under-gunning the inflation numbers, because these are people who have lied about everything for the last decade or more. The same people who wear ceremonial face gear and lie about the Covid problem are now reporting seven percent inflation. Right.

This is why inflation should be the number one topic on people’s minds as we proceed through the long dark winter Biden has inflicted on us. Even the fake numbers the government released say that something must be done. The Fed has committed to tightening the money supply starting in March. History makes clear this will result in a recession and an uptick in unemployment. Put another way, the bad news on the economy is just getting started.

Yep. To make matters worse, most people's financial situation is worse than they think it is. For a variety of reasons, we've all become over-leveraged and own very little. Our soi-disant masters want it that way; they will own everything, and we'll merely rent it from like like feudal serfs.

How will the public respond to the first real recession in decades? How will they respond to the rambling about it by a geriatric old fool who can barely put two sentences together? How will Americans respond to the stream of managerial sociopaths that will be sent out to insult our intelligence? How will the media respond? They have been the Greek chorus for the system for so long, are they even capable of dealing with a practical issue at this point?

This long vacation from reality that our ruling class has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War is about to end. They can stick to whatever theories they remember from their grad-school seminar on diversity and equity but the reality of the human condition has not changed. The ruling class of any society is responsible for the general welfare of the people in that society. When they fail, they are held accountable. This is an immutable law of human organization that never goes away.

This is why the situation in Canada bears watching. Trudeau is a simpleton who has no business being in charge of anything. Contrary to the old chestnuts about democracy, he is not the ruler the people deserve. He reflects the competence of the ruling class that installed him in office. The people who thought this feckless pansy was right for the job are so far proving to be incapable of managing this trucker crisis. They have made Canada the first English speaking dictatorship.

The holiday from reality is over and we are about to enter into a period in which serious topics with real meaning return to the fore. The reckless sissies and addle minded old fools who have been playing make believe for the last few decades will now have to face a real crisis. Similarly, a lethargic and prostrate people will now have to remember how to stand up for themselves again. It will not be long before the last few years of the culture war seem like a golden age of tranquility.

7.0

I'm trying to log in on the side while getting caught up on some work stuff on my other computer after my unexpected personal day yesterday while I was sick and had to have a furnace repairman over. I played a fair number of hours yesterday evening after the work day was done. And I've looked a lot through the forum discussion on SWTOR's website. There's... not a lot of positivity about this update. Very few people believe that it was worth it, and if there's a feature that they think was a good idea, it's balanced out by several "features" that were a bad idea as well as a fairly buggy or inconvenient, at least, rollout makes even the positive features difficult to enjoy. Anyway, I can't because the servers are down for some kind of fix, so I thought I'd make a post.

I'm not willing to be too judgmental too soon; I might end up liking things when I get used to them that I don't like all that much now. I will say, however, that I think some of my early impressions will likely remain. Let's cover those.

• When loadouts and combat styles work properly, instead of scrambling your ability set-up, it's a pretty good idea. I already love that I can add a stealth secondary combat style and when I'm done fighting pointless trash mobs, I can switch to stealth and skip to the good stuff. I strongly suspect that every single one of my characters will have an Operative or Scoundrel if they're a tech character and a Shadow or Assassin if I'm a force-character, just so I can avoid fighting the stupid trash mobs.
• The idea of being able to play, say, a Vanguard in the bounty hunter story (one that I'm specifically intending to do) is pretty cool. That's a positive, although it's not anything that I've actually done yet... For the most part, I didn't mind that the classes and the stories were wed all these years. In fact, it all kind of made sense to me. This whole paradigm of changing that seems like trying to take old content and make it feel fresher by putting it in a different context rather than actually giving us new content.
• Almost all of the UI changes are terrible. Some of them actively so, some of them I'll probably get used to and not mind as much in a few weeks. But none of it needed to be done, and I'm not clear why they thought it was a good idea to do so.
• We get these ridiculous new Shaka Zulu hairstyles which most players will never use, but we still can't get Theron Shan's original hairstyle? Sigh.
• The grind and gearing system is also not popular. I wish the Seasons felt different than a more tedious version of Conquests. Which is already kind of tedious, because it tries to force you to do all kinds of stuff that you may or may not want to do.
• Not all of the abilities trimming has been bad, although it's been a common complaint. My sniper has evolved into one of my grinding backup characters that I play a lot of, but finding that I can now do all of my abilities from behind that little force field thing was an improvement. I presume that that change was mirrored to the Gunslinger too, but I haven't played much of my Gunslinger yet.
• Why in the world did common fonts change here and there? It feels like someone was trying to justify that they were actually doing something; please don't fire me.

New Legacy of the Sith cinematic trailer

It's been quite a while since BioWare have given us a cinematic trailer for SWTOR. This just dropped less than an hour ago. I said the following, and I'll say it here because most likely it'll be deleted on the YouTube channel: It's hardly new news anymore that the Jedi are actually lying manipulators rather than paragons of virtue or goodness. However... well, actually it's hardly new news anymore than women are too emotional to handle too much responsibility. The anti-suffragettes said so quite plainly, and it was just an implicit assumption of society before they had to actually say it to rebut the crazy people who denied it. But it IS certainly new news for BioWare to openly portray that! Kudos for the realism, I guess.

Vant Galaide

The servers are down for deployment of the 7.0 update, so I'm taking some time to edit some videos together. I'm on a personal day for work, so I can take a nap later (my wife and I both slept terrible) and because I have a furnace repairman coming over later today too. Sigh. Cold day for our furnace to not be working, although this same guy just installed it a few weeks ago. Probably a simple thing like frozen condensation blocking the air intake pipe, or something.

Anyway, last night I finished Ord Mantell with Anstal Tane, my scoundrel. I find that I'm a couple of levels short on the Scoundrel and Operative compared to the other classes; I'm leaving the starting planet at level 17 instead of level 20. Technically, you only have to be level 10 to go to the fleet, or you're only "expected" to be. I presume that I'm missing a little bit of XP because instead of killing all of the tedious trash mobs, I'm turning on my stealth generator and sneaking past a lot of them. Because otherwise, I'm doing all of the missions. I didn't think XP from kills was really as big a deal as all that; I thought the missions were by far the bigger deal. They probably still are, but y'know. Plus, if I don't start killing a few enemies, I'm not getting the bonus missions, which are just a modest amount of credits and XP. But at these lower levels, even a modest amount of XP is something.

To be honest, any new character I ever do from now on will probably have a stealth generator option as my second combat style; Scoundrel or Operative for all tech classes and Shadow or Assassin for all force classes. Because sometimes those tedious trash mobs are just sooooo tedious. Actually, most of the time they are. So I was actually thinking that hitting the fleet is a good opportunity to shut down for the evening, and then since the week resets today when it comes back on after the update, I can use the Heroic Transport to do the Ord Mantell heroics again, and probably get another level or two out of the deal before I go do the Esseles Flashpoint and get—hopefully—yet another level and then end up at level 19-20 on Coruscant after all. 

I'm reminded that the writing on the starting planet isn't just bad for the Jedi Knight; the smuggler and trooper have to deal with all kinds of whiny, entitled virtue signaling too. Ugh. But I'm also reminded that the gunfighters in space ideas tend to be more compelling to me than the Jedi and Sith; the "space wizards" and their ideological wars, if you will. I just in the last few weeks did the starting planets for the Smuggler, Agent, Jedi Knight and now about half of the bounty hunter too. The Jedi Knight stands out of that group as being the least engaging... and he's the most engaging of the force class stories (although the Sith Warrior is a close second.) The trooper never did much for me, but those other three really have the best potential. 

I decided to make my Mercenary a pretty typical gunfighter in space in terms of how he dresses and whatnot. The dialogue occasionally refers to his heavy armor and all that, but I doubt I'll actually ever really wear any that's very over the top; I'll focus on making him look more like a cowboy in space. I've also equipped him with Provenance, one of the Cartel Market pistols that I bought. (And of course being a Mercenary, he uses two of them.) Many of the pistols are pretty big and chunky, but I especially go in for the even more exaggeratedly big and chunky pistols, and Provenance certainly is a big boy. It's also got a very unique clackity-clack sound like its throwing expended shells out of a side vent or something; the animation even looks a bit like that too.

UPDATE: I was having real trouble with names in the game until I started borrowing names from my existing settings. Anstal Tane is actually a minor NPC from my DARK FANTASY X game, shown here in this campaign proposal. And Vant Galaide is actually just the last name of existing Star Wars character Cobb Vanth slightly respelled, and Galaide is from my own SPACE OPERA X setting, where the Galaide Worlds are a subset of the Dhangetan Cartel; formerly Altairan worlds that were "sold" by corrupt oligarchs to the Dhangetans, a kinda sorta stand-in for the Hutts.