Next steps; blogging and vlogging

OK, time to take a step back. I haven't done any of my plans for the last month or so with regards to blogging or vlogging, so let's reiterate the next things that I want to do and see if there's a time that I'll get them done in the next week or two or not. I have family showing up at the end of the week, so I'm unlikely to sequester myself somewhere in the house to record a video or type up a blog post while they're here, but maybe during the work day, if work slows down, I can do so, for at least some of it.

But here's what I wanted to do. In vague terms.

1. Cult of Undeath Fronts 2-5. I've done the work for the first front, mostly, but I have only a very vague handwavey outline for the other fronts. They need for me to spend some time to make sure that they're fleshed out.

2. Shadows Over Garenport Front #1 Video. This was supposed to be the next video I made, and I haven't made one in at least a month.

3. Supervillains of Dark Fantasy X Video. I had a pretty brief blog post about this, but I'd like to flesh it out slightly and redo it as a video. Another one that I announced some time ago and haven't worked on.

4. Development of Nizrekh, Porhomok and the Corsair Coast. I've also made some brief rumblings about these "new" areas, but there's not much there yet. Although it's not urgent, at least one of the two new areas, maybe two of them, will also feature as an expansion "travel" region for Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes, which was originally scheduled to follow Cult of Undeath. 

5. Sort out exactly what I'm doing for future campaigns. But I've also talked about adding at least one if not more campaigns, as well as some shorter "mini-campaigns". I need to at least decide what the high level plan is.

Here's a picture so this post isn't a complete waste. A village on a river into Porhomok inland from the Corsair Coast most likely. 

DEI and the New Right

I still haven't blogged about almost any of the topics that I promised to blog about before the year ended. Sigh. And even now, I'm punting and simply annotating another Z-man post. 

It's important to not oversell what is happening. He makes this point with the collapse of DEI, while pointing out that nothing really substantial is changing; it's just going a bit underground and more quiet. People really don't want conflict. They want people to agree to be sensible and fair without having to tear down the artifacts of society that have been corrupted to prop up the nonsense and unfairness, but it isn't very likely to actually happen, and it very, very rarely has ever happened historically. When a ruling caste has become so hostile to the people that it rules that every aspect of the system that props them up is rooted in that hostility, the only solution is to destroy that system and rebuild a new one.

People sometimes call Trump a wrecking ball rather than a "regular" political figure, and in some ways that's true. But in most substantial ways, it's not. He's really not all that radical, and he wants to reform the system while somehow still preserving it. I think it's a bit more shrewd and has had his eyes opened, or has been red-pilled, to some extent, since his first term, but in reality, he's just a warm-up to what must inevitably come, unless he's shockingly and astronomically improbably successful in reforming the system. What must come is either a hard reboot of the American system back to it's install version in the late 1700s, or more likely just a complete collapse of the American system and the building of something else to replace it. We should hope that Trump will be successful, because the alternative is either a Napoleon or Pinochet to clean up the mess, or just a bigger mess; a complete collapse into anarchy and a destruction of the current system entirely.

A lot of people think that the collapse is a prelude to the Second Coming and therefore we don't need to solve our problems. I think that may be somewhat hubristic. Maybe the American Empire is important enough that its collapse corresponds to the End Times prophecies, but clearly that's been thought many, many times before in Christendom, obviously in vain. There have been many large societal collapses before, and what usually happens is that it's followed by a Dark Age before someone else rebuilds a new system. The Bronze Age collapse of an interlinked "global" system turning into centuries of Dark Ages until the Classical Greeks, Celts, and Iron Age Fertile Crescent societies rebuilt a completely new system in their place is a good example. 

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=33193

One of the things that got the “new right” buzzing in the closing months of the election was the sudden pullback by corporations on the DEI front. A bunch of large companies announced they were terminating these programs. This led to the online wing of the “new right” to confidently say “we are winning!” It was part of a wave of pro-Trump confidence that kicked in during the final six weeks of the election. After the election, the same forces sense they can clear the field of DEI.

That is the subtext to this post by Christopher Rufo, who has made a lucrative career out of opposing the DEI machine. It is a letter to the Trump transition team urging them to reverse the various executive orders creating the DEI bureaucracy within the federal bureaucracy and replacing it with a “colorblind” evaluation system. By acting quickly, Rufo thinks, the new administration can deal a death blow to the DEI movement, while momentum is on their side.

Rufo is smart to point out that public sentiment has shifted strongly against DEI, so Trump would not be battling with a hornet’s nest if he does this. Rufo frames his approach as low hanging fruit that would make Trump’s voters happy without spending too much political capital. On the other hand, the closest thing to eternal life is a government program, regardless of origin. Every president has dreamed of killing at least one government program. None have succeeded.

To his credit, Rufo seems to get this reality. Merely rescinding these executive orders would change nothing, as these race operations are now enshrined in the budgets of the main government agencies. More important, the workforce inside these agencies are committed to defending them because of the iron law of bureaucracy. The people actually running these agencies are solely committed to defending every paperclip that exists inside their agency.

There is something else missing and that is any thought as to why private corporations have made a big deal out of killing these programs. The main reason is they have proven to be bad public relations. It is not the existence that is bad public relations, but the over-the-top embrace of these race programs. Execs were sold on these being a great way to built favor with the diverse public. It turned out that they had no impact on sale, despite claims to the contrary.

In other words, the marketing campaign in favor of these programs became a pointless hassle for the companies doing it. Anyone who has spent time in a corporation understands that management is always ready to eliminate a pointless hassle, especially one that has no revenue stream. Like the company that puts up a sign that reads, “Under New Management”, these companies are hoping to turn a bad marketing scheme into a second chance with their customers.

The programs themselves, however, have not changed much as all. Again, anyone familiar with corporate life knows that “diversity” has been a part of the system for decades, long before Mr. Rufo noticed them. The DEI department will simply be renamed and folded back into human resources. The reason for that is these are a necessary defense against lawsuits. Diversity programs are a defense against lawfare, which is as permanent as a government program.

No matter what the public might think about any of this, the lawfare will continue, which means diversity pogroms will continue. The reason the lawfare will continue is, in part, to keep the diversity rackets going. There has always been a lot of coordination between the diversity pogroms and the lawfare. The main reason, however, is the law requires the diversity lawfare to continue. The civil rights revolution created a legal framework to impose what cannot happen naturally.

The point of the Brown case was not simply to overturn the Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, but to lay the foundation for a new moral order within the law that future cases and future legislation could build upon. This is exactly what happened over the following decades. Katzenbach v. McClung, for example, gave Congress a broad, extra-Constitutional mandate to address discrimination. In that case, they found a way to ban discrimination, despite having no jurisdiction.

This is what the “new right” fails to grasp about their calls for “colorblind” policies and the dismantling of DEI. What they want is not just impractical, but legally impossible, as a result generations of jurisprudence. The courts have repeatedly affirmed the two truths of our current legal framework. Discrimination is always bad and therefore always assumed to be illegal. Inclusion is always good and therefore should be the outcome of constitutionally defendable policies.

That means a “colorblind admission policy” at Harvard would be discriminatory if the result is a tiny number of black undergrads. It sounds insane, but by the logic of the law, it is perfectly reasonable. Our legal framework is not just eliminating observable discrimination, but also fostering inclusion. This is why the DEI people say it is not enough to be not racist. You must be anti-racist, by which they mean creating an inclusive racial environment everywhere.

This is why the war against DEI is nothing more than hacking at the leaves. The roots of the problem go back much further than the current racial fads and they have sunk deep into the psyche of the managerial class. It is why the word “inclusion” and variations on it salt the language of the ruling class. They are all about openness, because openness is the highest moral good according to the civil right ideology. This is not a front brain thing for them. It is a part of their internal logic.

It is not all bad news, however. The “new right” campaign against DEI has had the unintended side effect of delegitimizing the civil rights ideology. People have grown used to mocking this stuff, which is a small step from rejecting the primary goal of civil rights ideology, which is the open society. This was the motivation behind the censorship campaigns. The ideologues understand that if you can mock any part of the regime, you can mock all of it.

In this regard, Christopher Rufo and the “color blind new right” are a rearguard action, defending what they can of a regime that is losing legitimacy. It is an attempt to meet the public halfway. They get rid of the more odious parts of the regime but keep the parts that make the regime possible. That is the play of a loser, so the rise and prominence of the “color blind new right” is a positive. The generations old racial regime is in retreat in the face of an increasingly skeptical populace.

The CEO Assassination

My first thought was that people don't really care that much about the CEO assassination, because of a general sense that even if it was a murder, the guy probably deserved it at some level. Our sense of outrage at a social order motivated crime like this against a person who probably has contributed in general to our lives being worse just can't be raised. Even though the guy was a big figure in a quiet way on the national scene, it was really just a local murder story, no more worthy of being the target of national news that any other random murder story. The Z-man had a similar take, but took the analysis of what it might mean further. His thoughts on the matter are kind of interesting, as is often true.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=33176

An interesting bit of subtext to the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO is how the reactions to it reflects the shifting politics in America. Twenty years ago, the general reaction online would have been what you see in television police dramas. The vast majority of the public would have been cheering on the police as they searched for the killer, while his family was paraded in front of the cameras. The dead guy would have been the unquestionable victim of a terrible crime.

On top of that, the people we call conservatives would have been waddling about in their comfort fit chinos, beating their chests about crime and the demonization of capitalism by the people we call the left. As soon as it was clear that the perpetrator was a white male, the people we call the left would have been tub-thumping about the need for gun control and maybe white male violence. Both sides would have done their act in front of predictably adoring audience.

Both sides have tried their normal act, but the world has changed and that means the audience is not as interested in the old shows. The people we call the left got this right away and stuck to giggling about the victim being the head of one of those evil health insurance companies they have been demonizing for decades. They were sure the killer was one of their own, due to his wearing a dark hoodie. In fact, a lot of people in the dissident camp assumed [he] was Antifa too.

Based on the news reports, we can eliminate Antifa from the story. The guy they arrested has “pepe” in his social media profiles and is a fan of Uncle Ted, the avuncular character knowns as the Unabomber. While it is unlikely that he is “our guy”, he is clearly a young man who escaped the old political paradigm. He does not fit the left’s version of a hero or the right’s version of a villain. He has become a bit of a folk hero for many of the people who voted for Trump.

That last bit is what is vexing to the right-wing influencers. Their script does not have a section for this sort of character. The main job of conservatives is to celebrate and defend corporate power, but the bulk of their audience has long ago become fed-up by the abuses of corporate America. It was not the government banning them from the internet or cancelling their bank accounts. It is not the government race-swapping cultural content or running ads in favor of buggery.

There you see the big change in attitudes that is vexing legacy politics. For the last decade or so, it is the people we call the left who have been cheering on corporate America as they made war against our rights. The people we call conservatives sat silently as this went on. The CEO of United Healthcare could have been an anarcho-capitalist for anyone knows, but for the general public, he is the faceless symbol of corporate greed and avarice. People have had enough of it.

This case also reveals that the old American love of the outlaw is still there, buried under the piles of corporate slop. As the great Southern bard observed, outlaws touch the ladies somewhere deep down in their soul. America is a woman, so she has always had a love for the outlaw. The reason for that is the old frontier sensibility tells us that sometimes, you need the outlaw, because sometimes, a man needs killing and you cannot do that within the law.

That ties in neatly with the whiff of revolution in the air. The election of Donald Trump and the apparent acceptance of it by the political class has people thinking about more than just “owning the libs” in an election. To a lot of people, the bad guys look scared right now and this event feels like a nice reminder to them that there are worse things than losing an election. If the 2016 election was a warning to the ruling class, then the 2024 election is the final warning.

There is another angle here. The people we call the left have been demonizing health insurance companies for a long time. In typical bougie fashion, the rhetoric has gone well beyond factual criticism. Since Hillary Clinton waddled onto the stage, the left has been calling healthcare companies parasites that must be destroyed. Logically, it means the people running them are evil parasites who must be destroyed. Inside the real halls of power, people are making the obvious connection.

What the 2024 election revealed is there has been a shift in the economic elite. Some members have figured out that there is real danger for them, and they backed Donald Trump and continue to back him as he prepares to take power. Elon Musk is not bunkmates with Trump by accident. This will not be a repeat of the first administration. Some members of the economic elite want reform because they do not want to be on the wrong end of the next viral assassination video.

In other words, it is not just the change in public attitudes that has the chattering classes vexed, but also the change in the economic elite. The killing of that CEO kicked over more than just the rock of public opinion. It revealed the growing angst of the economic elite in response to changing public opinion. Even though it was just one young man on a mission, it is a reminder that history has often pivoted on one man or one event, setting off a chain of events.

When the desires of the economic elite align with the desires of the populace, things can start happening in a hurry. That is the conclusion of this big study on how policy is formed in America. A decade ago, researchers discovered what has been obviously true since the dawn of time. Every society has an elite and they generally get what they want, despite public attitudes, but they always get what they want when they are on the side of the people.

This is why the chattering classes are struggling with this story. It is why they will put the whole thing on ignore now that the killer has been caught. They have been selected and trained to play particular roles in an old show, but now the curtain is falling on that show, so they must scramble for parts in the next show. The reason for that is the audience has changed and now the producers are changing along with them. Luigi Mangione put a bullet in all the old acts.

Southern Utah

I've spent most of the last two weeks out of town, although I am now back, back at work chugging through all of the missed emails (and finding out that I'll likely go back to El Paso/Juarez for a quick work trip next week; right before Christmas. Sigh.)

That said, I love the American West, and I'm not averse to spending some time when the weather's relatively nice in El Paso. I spent most of last week in Southern Utah. I saw a number of sites, and the pictures below are only a small sampling of the places I visited, including:

• Little Wild Horse slot canyon
• Valley of the Goblins
• Canyonlands Island in the Sky Unit
• Factory Butte
• the "Long Dong Silver" geologic feature
• Swing City
• Moonscape Overlook
• Arches National Park
• Natural Bridges National Monument
• Bears Ears National Monument

I'll make a more detailed set of posts on my hiking blog later. For now, this'll have to do.

Looking at a pass out of the moonscape region

Hiking towards the absolutely barren "Long Dong Silver" feature, also called the Dark Spire. But not by anyone online.

One of the views from the Moonscape Overlook

Another Moonscape Overlook picture

From behind the Dark Spire. It's not really a spire; from the side angle it looks more like a shark fin

The cliffs of Moonscape Overlook with Factory Butte looming in the background

"Presidential" natural bridge, the largest of the three. I hiked to the bottom of all three and stood underneath them

On the trail down to Sipapu Bridge

The Bear's Ears themselves

I didn't realize I had another view of the same bridge. I do have more pictures of the others, but they'll have to wait for another post.

A kiva on the way down to Sipapu bridge

Petroglyphs near Wolfe Ranch in Arches National Park

Me standing under Delicate Arch, the most iconic scenic formation in the entire state

Some Anasazi ruins in Bear's Ears. Yes, I know they don't like to say Anasazi anymore. I don't care

The whole place was crawling with ravens. I got this close up of one of them

The feckless West

From today's Z-man post. Edited by me for a few typos and for (some) brevity. Not that that's my strong suit either.

It appears the plan is to fill the time between now and when Donald Trump regains the White House with stories about starting a nuclear war with Russia. First, we got the NATO missiles strikes on Russia, then it was the Russian use of a mystery weapon that should terrify everyone. Instead, the response from NATO is a series of stories about doing even dumber things than the missile strikes. It is as if Western leaders are in a contest to see who can think of the dumbest idea possible.

Of course, all these ideas are being floated by people who would urinate themselves if faced with a physical confrontation. Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron are ridiculous people who have landed in these positions due to the collapse of their respective political classes. The rest of the European political class is equally silly, but most lack the vanity of these two. Most are like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who seems to cherish being a middling mediocrity.

The question that is never asked is how did it come to this? Surely Britain has better men than Keir Starmer. The UK has a lot of problems, but it still has some of the best human capital on the planet. The same is true of France. This is a country that defined diplomacy in the West. There must be a deep well of talent in the country, despite generations of bad policy making. How in the world did these two feckless nitwits end up ruling these two once great nations?

Obviously, these two men did not arrive on the scene by chance. They were selected and groomed by the political system that rules their countries. They made the right friends, followed the right advice and most importantly, never asked the wrong questions about the current narrative. In many respects, these two men were selected purely on narrative grounds. They filled a role in the story better than the alternatives, so they got the job and here we are on the verge of war.

This is a recurring theme in Western politics. From top to bottom it is people who are very good at playing along inside imagination land and even better at avoiding anything that resembles real life experience. Generations ago, the Prime Minister would have served in the military and maybe even seen war. Even the more effete politicians could rely on a class of men who understood how the world actually worked. Today such men are treated as skunks at a picnic.

In the fullness of time, the defining characteristic of managerialism will be its boiling off of the capable, independent men in favor of compliant mediocrities. Lacking genuine men of action, the compliant mediocrities search for consensus, which becomes their authority figure and their moral authority. It is why everything that comes from the think tanks and media reinforces the agreed upon positions. The most terrifying thing for a mediocre man is to stand alone against the consensus.

The narratives we keep seeing serve to make manifest the consensus and cast those within the consensus as the white hat in the drama. Much of what seems to drive these mediocre men of late-stage managerialism is moral affirmation. It is why they have all herded themselves off the Ukraine cliff. They care only for being seen at the sincerest believer in the prevailing narrative. For the political class, it means public policy is always a public act of piety.

Curiously (or not) this decision by consensus and following the herd is a very feminine way of socialization. Of course, Starmer and Macron are (allegedly) male. Why do they behave like women? Why does the entire managerial caste behave like women? In the fullness of time, this will be seen as the wages of feminism. The entire movement, yes, even back over a hundred years ago in the days when women's suffrage was a relevant question, was based on resentment, envy and covetousness, and the desire to shirk responsibility and duty. It's literally an evil and destructive ideology and has been from the beginning. Seeing what it's done to the managerial caste, and somehow how the managerial caste was able to come into power, highlights that in strong relief. By its fruits shall ye know it.

Sadly, Bing's AI blocked me from attempting to generate an image of Starmer and Macron as women.

UPDATE: In the comments section of an article about the Gulf cartel using drones against Mexican police, the following commentary exchange (so far) is interesting.

Boomer Grandparents

Both my parents and my husbands parents are making us do early Christmases between their Mexico trips. This is my sons 1st Christmas. #boomers

I have so many questions. My parents are technically just over the hump; they're a year or two older than the boomers. My wife's parents are boomers. Granted, both our parents had us pretty young, and we had kids pretty young, but... what?! You've got Boomer parents and in-laws and have a baby less than a year old? I have just missed being boomer parents and boomer in-laws, and I have grandkids older than that. What the devil have you been waiting for?

Secondly; what do you mean they're "making" you do Christmas early? How about just do Christmas, tell them they're invited, but if they're out of town, they miss out, we're going on without you. How do your boomer parents make you do much of anything, unless you're still financially dependent on them? We've done plenty of Christmases on our own when we had younger kids and we'd moved out of state. In fact, that was our default assumption. 

For what it's worth, I'm not doing Christmas with my grandkids this year either, because my daughter and her husband who don't have kids yet, and my other sons (and one of their wives) are coming instead to our house and my son who has three kids hates traveling. He's not coming until the summer. He's also started a new job this year, and doesn't have a lot of time off. And we go to visit him plenty. Technically, he lives in our house out of state that we vacated but let him stay in with his family. Just because you don't do every holiday together, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I have no reason to feel neglectful or that we don't do enough for them.

So, yeah... just do your own thing, don't sweat it, don't try to guilt trip them for having other plans, don't get bullied into doing something you don't want to do, and just because you're old and only have one little baby, don't expect everyone else to dote on them the same as you do. I have four kids, three (and a half) grandkids, and I expect to have many more. I can't spend every Christmas with all of them. My parents had five kids and eighteen grandkids. My in-laws had five kids and eighteen grandkids too (by pure coincidence). I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to get out of this little anecdote above. That boomer grandparents are the worst? Or that Gen-Y or older Millennial (or whatever) parents are?

Cult of Undeath

Here's my list of "proto-fronts"; a quick and dirty brainstorm.

• Front #1: Murder of Alpon von Lechfeld, etc. Already done.
• The swamp snake cult, centered around the blinded medusa who instead of petrifying her victims, she hypnotizes them and gradually starts turning them into snake cultists. She's not truly blind, because all of the snakes have eyes too, but you get my drift. Heavily based on Cult of the Reptile God combined with some of the early Age of Worms adventures and the Lovecraft's story The Shadow Over Innesmouth except with lizards and snakes in a swamp instead of fish on the coast.
• Ghouls and other "savage" proto-vampires are also coming out of the swamp in the other direction, westwards into the Bitterwood, and are attacking villages, hamlets, and even hunting lodges frequented by wealthy and powerful. This will replace the werewolf and/or swamp witch idea that I had previously, which was loosely based on one of the adventures of the old Carrion Crown adventure path. Y'know, who whole reason Cult of Undeath was originally created. 
• Vampire threat; I had previously thought this might be in Grozavest, but it needs to be in Mittermarkt instead. And it needs to be relatively unique so as not to steal the thunder of the upcoming more classic vampire "Timischburg proper" front mentioned above.
• A mundane threat of highwaymen and bandits making travel between the Copper Hills and Mittermarkt (via Eltdown) dangerous; not to mention all of the crap going on in Eltdown mentioned above. Maybe this one can get up into the Sabertooth Mountains itself, and at least have a different environmental theme too.

I'm going to combine dot points three and four into a single front; they're too thematically similar as it is. So I'll need to come up with another one. The fifth one is also extremely anemic, but maybe that's OK at this stage; I can come up with more as I develop it.

One thing that I thought of, and I don't know if it's a separate front, or something that I maybe combine in some way with the highwaymen and bandits, is literal The X-files. I often compare my gaming tastes to that show, but I'm talking more about theme and tone and the whole shadowy conspiracies and the PCs being like Mulder and Scully in the sense that they either have a loose roving commission from the Ranger Corps Shadow Division, or they are actually supernatural bounty hunters. But I mean more specifically The X-files; my wife, in a maybe somewhat uncharacteristic move, saw an episode or two of the Netflix documentary Investigation Alien and thought I'd enjoy watching it with her. Neither one of us "wants to believe," to paraphrase Mulder, nor did we find the documentary super compelling in terms of convincing us of anything we didn't already believe. However, a strange thought kept occurring to me as I was watching it; what if my DFX game incorporated the spookier less hoaky parts of the UFO mythos as a front? I mean stuff like cattle mutilations, missing time. abductions, etc. How can I incorporate this kind of stuff into a low fantasy, dark fantasy, approaching but not actually reaching grimdark game?

One thing for sure is that it won't be aliens. But do I need to actually construct an alternative mythology that mirrors the alien mythology but in a Lovecraftian (I suppose?) fantasy context? Something like mindflayers, but new, unique and less D&D? I'm not sure. It clearly bears some more thought and pondering for me to come up with something that works for me, but which is clearly and obviously based on the UFO mythos; clearly and obviously enough so that no player seeing it will miss the obvious reference.

One alternative is something a la the Shaver Mysteries; underground deros (or derros) or something else even more alien and strange, but acting more overtly like the UFO mythos than like D&D derros, which have become pretty mainstreamed by now, and have somewhat lost their connection to whatever inspirational root first caused them to be created. This seems a little too obvious to me, perhaps, but then again, it is also probably the best way to "fantasy up" the UFO mythos. Then again, this isn't too dissimilar to Lovecraft's own take on underground horrors, as in his "The Mound" and "The Nameless City" stories.

One thing that is both Lovecraftian and hinted at in the documentary we watched was the possibility of an underwater rather than underground source for the "aliens." Another one was that they were evolved post-human descendants of us traveling in time. That one kind of blew my mind; not because it isn't ridiculous, but because it's quite an interesting science fiction concept. But how I can adapt it to fantasy is probably ... honestly, I probably can't. But I'll keep thinking, pondering and noodling on this stuff for a little while before I go hard on a solution.

Model Railroading

I actually have another blog dedicated to my armchair model railroad... not that I post there much, and probably won't until armchair starts to transition into something more tangible... but I have been watching a lot of model railroad videos on youtube lately, and there are a few things that bug me pretty consistently about most peoples' railroads, or at least their presentation of them.

I. Wasted Space. I get it; you want to model the wide open expanses of the American West. Who doesn't? But your space is limited. Modeling the Tehachapi Loop more or less to scale might seem cool, but it isn't. All you've managed to do is take space that would be big enough for an entire model railroad and cover it with nothing but gently sloping hills, grass and a few bushes. Model railroading is a hobby where space is at a premium, and utilizing it efficiently and smartly is a plus. Doing otherwise is... not cool. I'm less and less impressed by big vistas in model railroads than I am with creative compression that gives the illusion of space without actually taking a lot of it.

II. Realism or Operation Over Fun. It's been a thing in the hobby, probably since the beginning, that we want to create realistic railroads. However, the Koester crowd has turned this into a spergy caricaturish parody of what it once was; the idea that you're only modeling a very specific real place during a very specific and limited real time, is boring. One of the things that was always fun about model railroading is creating something unique. This is sometimes called "freelancing" but in reality, the evolution if the term freelancing has become considerably less free than what it used to be. We almost need a new term to specify what we mean when we're creating our own stuff that isn't specifically supposed to represent a real railroad or real place except in broad terms; a Ruritanian railroad, or something like that. For the entirety of the hobby, the gorgeous modeling and realistic looks is what has impressed people and fired their imagination. Your realistic scheduling and operations only impress the spergs.

III. Poor Lighting and Composition. If you're going to film or take pictures of your railroad, for goodness sakes don't do it "warts and all." Nobody wants to see the shadow of your buildings or trees on the wall right behind them; move some lights around so you can't see that! Even moreso, nobody wants to see people standing around in the background or other things that give away the illusion; that this is a model in a basement rather than an actual railroad. One of the things I'm more and more impressed by with the really famous railroaders of the 70s and 80s like Dave Frary, John Olsen, Malcolm Furlow, etc. is that they were as much photographers as they were modelers, and beautiful photographs of model trains on model scenery was at least as much of an aspirational product as the model itself. They were always careful to move lights around, work on composition, etc. that furthered the illusion in their magazine and book photographs, or videos in the rare occasion that they existed back then, that these were real photos of real trains, not models sitting in someone's basement. Heck, even John Allen himself was a professional photographer, and his realistic photos are what put him on the map. It helped that his photos were realistic also because the models were also high quality and realistic, of course, but that wouldn't have been enough without his professional lighting and composition that furthered rather than destroyed the illusion. 

It's been especially disheartening to see these flaws turn up in the Great Model Railroads issues of Model Railroader the last many years. Truly the triumph of the spergy Koester crowd, which as Malcolm Furlow "hinted darkly" would ruin the hobby; because it fails to understand what the appeal is to the majority of normal people, has been a tragedy for the appeal that it has. Great Model Railroads is supposed to be the gold standard of presentation of railroads, not of piss-poor presentation of railroads that impress the operational spergs.

IV. Dead Layouts. Another thing that Olsen, Furlow, Allen and more did that really made their railroad photographs pop was the inclusion of many, many scale figures of people, animals and more. To be fair, I'm not sure how many of these "lived" on the layout normally as opposed to being trotted out and placed specifically for the photo ops, but most of the time when seeing modern railroads in photographs or video either one, they look like dead machines running through ghost towns with hardly anyone out and about. Olsen in particular designed the J&S and its extension, the BA&W as almost like a series of linked dioramas that were separated visually through subtle vertical elements. He could take advantage of that, again, through lighting and composition to not only make his modest sized layout look incredibly large, but also by increasing the illusion of scale by having these linked dioramas seem separate, discrete and different from each other. Sometimes the link between them was somewhat subtle, and he didn't always show it to not break the illusion, but one of my favorite pictures from his book, which I took a quick snapshot of below, is the line between the mountainous "background" scenery of the J&S and the BA&W urban waterfront scenery. The transition is really quite clever, so that unless you're specifically focused on the transition, it doesn't necessarily feel like one. Putting his small buildings up on terraces to better transition to the mountains, and having the trains pass from one module to the next via a hidden tunnel works extremely well, given the sharp contrast in themes, tones, and even colors between the two modules.

There's a reason that when I make my model railroad, if I ever in fact do, that I'm going to use the track plan and broad scenic plan with very little, if any, change from the J&S. I'll also have thematic contrast, although I'm retheming the Jerome Arizona area to trans-Pecos west Texas like the Davis or Chisos Mountains, and the Back Alley & Wharf to a more frontier-like boomtown and set next to a Louisiana style bayou with cypress trees with their knees popping up out of dark fetid water, dripping Spanish moss, etc. And in light of my approval of "unrealistic" whimsy, I might even have a small scene of Inspector Legrasse breaking up a lascar cult of Cthulhu worshippers just for the heckuvit. Then I'll have another entire 4x8 railroad based on Rocky Mountains scenery attached to the other end of the BA&W part.

UPDATE: Here's another image of the border between the main railroad and the expansion, from another level. Here you can see the line between them, of course.

Does system matter?

Question of the day: does the system that you use in your RPG actually matter? Naturally, I'm not going to offer up a pat and simple answer, because there's a lot of "it depends" and other caveats. Part of this is because of trends in the RPG market that have gradually offered up a slightly different take on what exactly "system" even means.

It used to be that the system was just the rules that the game used. Back in ye olden dayes, especially with regards to TSR games, this was a pretty simple question, because different games used very different rules that had little in common with each other. However, there were some other companies that did things differently, even back in the day. Chaosium used their BRP system as the basis for their games, and had differing, yet obviously related systems for RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer, for instance. But this was seen as merely convenient, and I know that I didn't think of them as a "system", merely that the systems for each game had the same basic framework in terms of how they worked. But gradually, this morph of system into being the system for a specific game and more of a higher level structure that could span multiple games started to gain traction. In the middle/late 80s, Steve Jackson Games released GURPS, the Generic Universal Roleplaying System in a core set, followed by tons upon tons of supplements that tweaked various buttons and levers within the system to allow it to play in various genres with various tones. This was seen as kind of unique at the time, though, and although perceived as a cool innovation, I don't think the market was entirely ready for it yet; most people liked (still) that different games felt different mechanically and didn't use the same chassis, so to speak, to get to the same result. Later, in 1990 or so, the old Champions superhero roleplaying game was repurposed as the Hero System, which had the same intention; it could be used for anything, and supplements that were broad but also different from each other, like Pulp Hero, Fantasy Hero, Star Hero, etc. came out for it. I don't know how much this caught on; I never saw anyone use it, but I heard chatter on the internet in the later 90s about it. My impression is that it was a niche product in terms of its appeal. White Wolf also had a house system, although most of their games were released in the same setting, had similar tone and themes, and it was kind of seen that they were meant to interact with each other and be compatible. This wasn't entirely true, of course. Few people remember the Street Fighter game (except me, because I was a huge fan of both Street Fighter and roleplaying games) and Exalted, although it used the same system base, is usually seen as too different.

When Wizards of the Coast released D&D Third Edition, it also spawned the d20 family of games, and over the next few years, a number of games, both "official" and third party were spawned that used this system as its framework. From WotC officially, we had d20 Star Wars (in three editions), d20 Wheel of Time, d20 Call of Cthulhu and d20 Modern, the only one of the batch that was truly built as a toolkit approach. Unfortunately, I think they inadvertently set back the migration to common systems by released tentative and timid interpretations of the system that didn't sufficiently change the rules. Certainly this was a complaint that many had in particular with Call of Cthulhu, which of the batch is the one most dissimilar in terms of genre and tone. Around this time, Savage Worlds was also released, which has become a very popular "universal" system.

I may be charting my own perception of things more than any actual trends in the industry, but it took until d20 for me to actually really see what the appeal of having a single higher level system was. I do think that there was a sea change in perception across the board, and I remember lots of people saying things like "one system to rule them all" and whatnot at the time. d20 didn't end up being the system for me, or not unless you consider Microlite to be a radical variation on d20, which in reality it is. I've since pulled back just a little bit from some of the radicalness of Microlite; Dark Fantasy X, and all of the X games (if I ever get around to spelling them out) will now use all of the original D&D attributes, or stats, for example, and will have six skills. This 6x6 is as important to me for, if no other reason, so my character sheets are visually balanced. 

So, when we say system, what we tend to mean more often than not nowadays, in contrast to year past, is this higher level system, and in my opinion, no it doesn't matter. Pick one that you like and stick with it; there's no problem with that. Any system can be tweaked, house-ruled or modified to accommodate any genre, tone or playstyle preference, although clearly most systems also have some element that they do relatively well and is a key component of them. For example, the tactical grid-based combat of d20 is kind of core to the system, and almost every iteration of it requires it unless you eliminate all kinds of tactical and positioning rules. If that's something that you enjoy regardless of genre, tone, etc. then d20 is a good higher level system for you to use. If it's not, you might want to consider a different one. But even d20 can be modded down to a rules-light theatre of the mind variant, such as Microlite, so again, I don't think system matters. If this is what you mean by system.

Or rather, it doesn't matter in that any system can be modded to do anything, but it could very well matter in terms of picking a system that you like, prefer to use, are comfortable with, that your players intuitively handle well, etc. And it could matter, as noted before, in terms of how much you enjoy one system versus another. In that sense, system can matter a great deal. But I also believe that most people are simply most comfortable with whatever system that they've used the most. I prefer D&D-like systems, because those are the ones that the majority of my games have used since the early 80s, and even in the 00s when I was playing a lot of different things, I used d20 for most of them, including Star Wars Cthulhu, Modern and more. I certainly no longer enjoy system for its own sake, and now prefer a common background higher level system. Ideally, I'd use a common higher level background system for every game I ever play. Ideally, I'd use my own system, although I'd never actually play if so, I'd only run. But that would probably be OK too, honestly.

Now, if you pull back and refer to system as all of the rules, like we used to, then system matters a great deal, of course. The fact that a system can be used to successfully emulate the genre and tone of Star Wars and Call of Cthulhu means, of course, that they need to have some rules that make significant changes to the way in which some of the details of the game work. I've actually come to quite enjoy seeing and thinking of ways to make different systems work in different ways, and I've obviously given a lot of thought to how to do so with my own custom system for my own setting. And I think that the changes have had significant effect on the tone and mood and feel of the game. But I'm starting from a higher level system that is well-suited to my playstyle and to my history of the hobby, because it's super familiar to me from my past games. I no longer, if I ever really did, honestly, value system for its own sake, and I actually am sometimes annoyed by the requirement to have to learn a whole new system to use a given supplement easily. I simply no longer have time or interest in learning whole new rules systems; although modular-like rules that can create significant changes to the way that different variants of the system work from game to game are actually very interesting to me.

Blind Beckett

I don't have the energy after the last few weeks of work to do much more than veg so... Here's Blind Beckett, a character with which I've done little but who's look I really like.

First, the original image. Probably slightly modified by me for proportions and colors, but otherwise a library model from Hero Forge. The kitbashing feature is pretty cool, but difficult to use. I've watched Hero Forge whizkids like Derf on YouTube, and I can't do what he does for many reasons. Not least of which is my rig, which lacks a graphics card. I can sorta do it on my phone, but there the menu and lack of mouse makes it much more difficult to do stuff with.

I also don't have his patience. Or his creativity. 

Next, my AI generated version... 

Then, going back to Hero Forge, now with much more functionality, to make something more like the AI images. 

It's true... AI is crappy with bows and crossbows.

And then, for fun, a new wave of AI images.

New Secretary of Defense

https://voxday.net/2024/11/13/the-new-secdef/

Pretty good analysis. One big missed observation, though. China has absolutely engaged in war after war of conquest. It was just against their immediate neighbors. When the Portuguese discovered Formosa, there weren't any Chinese people on it, there were native Formosans who were linguistically and culturally related to the Indies and Polynesian Islanders. Now the indigenous Formosans are a tiny percentage of the people of Taiwan, and most of them speak Chinese and are even genetically Sinicized to a great degree.

I do think that it's fair to assume, however, that if we leave China alone and hold a strong line against their buying out of American interest (and sending colonists to North America) then we shouldn't have any reason to fear them exactly. We need to stop propping up their economy for cheap bankster profits for globalist corporations is all, mostly.

Media Malpractice

https://www.thewrap.com/media-problems-trump-election/

So close and yet still so far. She is still so incredibly and unaccountably sure that she's right and the problem is messaging and how to reach people... not that her message is dishonest, fake, blatantly and observably false, and completely out of touch with anything approaching reality. No, the sources are just wrong because it's not what she wants to hear. Not because she's bothered to investigate any of their claims, like the Right does for the Left's spurious claims (sometimes) because the Left, much more than the Right, only accepts facts that they want to believe, and then look for data to justify them rather than data to falsify them. Hardly surprising for what is essentially a cult built on envy, spite, covetousness and self-aggrandizement, narcissism, and need to position themselves as superior in their own eyes to everyone else around them who isn't part of their cult. I mean, she called Harris immensely qualified and competent; but she's never demonstrated anything other than affirmative action/DEI appointments in her entire career, and hasn't accomplished much of anything in any role she was ever in. The only thing that she seems qualified to have done was to be Willie Brown's side piece. But that's just one of the blatantly ridiculous claims that she makes as if its self-evidently true instead of self-evidently false.

Which I can see people claiming are spurious claims, but I've been watching with a critical eye for many, many years, and digging into the philosophical and historical precedents, as well as the behavior of those who practice these ideologies. As Christ himself said; by their fruits shall ye know them; and their fruits are abundantly in evidence. Although people people are willing to know them by their fruits, or even admit what the obvious fruits are, because it makes them feel bad to notice.

The Z-man talks about this kind of bias all the time; the modern managerial people who believe that creating wishful thinking Narratives will magically cause reality to bend to the narrative. The idea that Trump is a felon because they said so and came up with trumped up (no pun intended) kangaroo court charges to bring against him, or that he's a bigot because... (I honestly still don't know why they're saying this. For the slightly more logical who need a fig leaf of non-emotionalism, I suppose it's a permutation of opposing immigration is racist? I don't know. The felon charge they at least have some justification for making, even though it's spurious and based on their own narrative smoke and mirrors, but the rest of them are just ridiculous. And that's why we've seen these absurd, hysterical freak-out videos online all over the place. 

I wonder. Most of the videos, of course, are made by women or gay men, as you'd expect. I don't know if it's their mercurial nature to simply have these mental vomit sessions that shouldn't be taken seriously, and nothing that they actually say or do when in this hysterical state should be seen as salient content, its just emotional diarrhea. In a few days, or a few weeks, they'll probably still be woke and retarded, but at least they crazy hysteria and the claims made while in its grip will have subsided? (Sucks to be the obnoxious little girls pretending to be women who shaved their heads, I guess--I'm quite confident that all of them will regret that a lot in the next few weeks and months.) Or are these people really so broken, dysfunctional and narcissistic that they can't handle not getting their way about everything and it doesn't subside, just turns into this time bomb of impotent rage? Another Z-man phrase I like to use is that reality is that thing that doesn't go away even if you don't believe in it. But in my experience, even running face first into the brick wall of reality that you were trying not to believe in isn't sufficient to cause some people to actually believe in it. 

While it's encouraging to see what happened last week actually happen, in more ways than one (1. the actual results, and 2. the quiet effort by the RNC under new leadership to actually keep an eye on election integrity and not allow the same kinds of fraud that obviously threw off 2020 to happen again) I'm still concerned on what happens in 2028, and if anyone with the chops to take up Trump's mantle is in the wings to follow. Or, for that matter, if Trump really has the chops to do what needs to be done. It's easy to make the case that he didn't before. Positive signs are yet positive signs, but we know from prophecy that times are going to get worse and people more wicked yet before they get better, so my expectations for temporal salvation from an arm of flesh are, needless to say, pretty muted.

B! Machine is back! Have been for two years, in fact

Here’s a topic I don’t really talk about enough sometimes, and it beats just posting an AI or Hero Forge image from my setting. I miss Todd Durant of A Different Drum. Back in the 90s and early 00s, the synthpop musical genre, which had enjoyed enormous success in the 80s, had the market fall out from under it as we underwent a pop culture disruption. This also coincided in my particular case with a disruption in my partaking of pop culture, because I was in Argentina serving a mission for the Church from Jan 1991 through Feb 1993. When I got back, all of the cool electronic pop music that had been popular when I left was underground, and instead we had all kinds of grunge and other assorted Seattle hipster music; a group of styles that I still kind of resent. After struggling to find new music to listen to (I experimented with some Euro-dance, but it just didn’t hit the same way, and I don’t really like all that much of Ace of Bass, 2 Unlimited, Real McCoy, etc) compared to the earlier Depeche Mode, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, etc. music. And a lot of the bands that continued changed their sound too. There was only so much obscure back catalog to be found, although the arrival of the Internet on my college campus helped. Of course, I rapidly found that there was an underground scene for synthpop, and it wasn’t just focused on talking about Depeche Mode and Erasure, or even the slightly more “fringe” groups like Seven Red Seven or Cause & Effect or Camouflage or Red Flag or some of the others who were sorta one-hit wonders… for a generous definition of hit. Genuinely newer bands were creating a scene, like De/Vision, Mesh, and many others. Some of these, like the stable of the early Synthphony Records label had a lot of duds; I bought a lot of those early CDs in the late 90s only to find that they were mostly… mediocre and forgettable. But the scene gathered a lot of steam relatively rapidly, and really good stuff started coming out. Much of it was fed to me by the mailing list of A Different Drum, which started as a store, and eventually became more of a distributor and even record label of a lot of the really good stuff. Some of my favorite post 80s synthpop work came out of this crucible. Album’s like Iris’s Disconnect, for instance and some of the early Cosmicity albums, are still albums that I consider landmark standouts of the genre overall.

Another one that really hit well and became an early favorite was B! Machine’ s Infinity Plus. B! Machine had a pretty unique sound; his vocals and harmonies were unlike anyone else in the biz, his song structures were a little unusual and more artsy, less poppy, and he definitely had a unique very minimalist synthesizer sound. I really liked B! Machine and kept track of his new releases for a number of years. Although I’ve often wandered far afield in my musical tastes, and a lot of what I listen to today is older Hard Trance, early Hardstyle, and other intense rave music, or I listen to orchestral (real or synthesized) new and classical music. 

But B! Machine is one that comes up frequently and I replay his stuff. But because it had been a number of years since I’d seen a new release, and hadn’t looked in… I dunno, a few years. Turns out that B! Machine did come out with a magnificent double album (23 tracks) about two years ago, and although I’ve (so far) only listened to it all the way through twice, I’m pretty confident in saying that it’s his best work. Which is cool; there are so many bands or artists that start out strong,  and then either lose their way or meander through varying quality; B! Machine has probably always had a fairly consistent high quality, but he has had a gradual evolution in pretty cool new ways. Jarkko Tuohimaa of Neuroactive did some co-production on a number of tracks on Infinity Plus, and the two have very complementary sounds with some similar elements, but it clearly helped B! Machine see new ways of integrating beefier percussive and bass elements. (Although his unique approach to that was part of the uniqueness of his sound; I’m glad it was Tuohimaa instead of someone else who took it that direction. Like I said, they had some similarities that complemented each other without actually messing up his sound, I think.)

Over time, many of his tracks have become less cold, but still unique, and his synths—while still sounding very similar—are a bit less minimalistic than they used to be. But these changes aren’t unwelcome; B! Machine still has a unique signature sound, even as it’s not exactly the same sound that he was exploring 25-30 years ago. 

I highly recommend checking out B! Machine’s “new” album Snake Charm Girl. Check it out on Spotify or YouTube and then go buy it on Bandcamp.

Right now, if someone were to ask me to give a sampling of my taste of music, I’d give four albums to be representative, and this one would be one of them. Even though it’s new to me, it’s a perfect encapsulation of my synthpop taste, and I’ve been a big fan of B! Machine’s older work for many years already. 

The other three would be Der Ring Ohne Worte; the Mazaal arrangement of Wagner’s Der Ring, although I also like several the Tarkmann interpretation. (Or any interpretation, actually. I’ve got several recordings of the de Vlieger summary too). Then maybe the Gladiator soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, and the Bas & Ram setlist from In Qontrol 2004, which you can find on YouTube and probably Soundcloud. That’s only a small sampling, but it gets you sufficiently there to understand the breadth of my taste.

New Portraits for Revecca von Lechfel

A few new portraits; because I didn't completely love all of the ones that I had. First is Revecca von Lechfeld; a minor cameo character in Shadows Over Garenport, but a major NPC/supporting character in Cult of Undeath. Probably too many alternates. I also like her with pale eyes, but these dark-eyed AI girls are, frankly, just too beautiful to pass up as possibilities.