Once again on the road

Traveling for a long weekend for a wedding out of state. I wish that I could spend some time while out West in the Rockies hiking or sightseeing with outdoor sites, but I won't have any time. Friday and Monday will be mostly traveling, Saturday will be the wedding, and Sunday will be Easter Sunday. That's all she wrote. Not exactly the most relaxing long weekend, and as I'm coming off of a several weeks, if not even several months, of absolutely exhausting, tedious, difficult and toxic stuff going on at work, I really need a break... that I seem to never be able to actually get. It's catching up to me, and I'm starting to really be unhappy with work, and to a certain degree, because work takes up so much of my time, with life in general. I need a break pretty desperately, but it's hard to get one at my current job. I'm also interviewing with someone else right now, but because it will require relocation to a place that's more expensive, because I'll lose my employee car lease, and because if I relocate that'll leave my other son and his family who are living with us temporarily (but realistically, for quite a while longer) high and dry, I have to honestly assess that it will be difficult for them to make me an offer that will make the math work out favorably for me. Even if I would love the job—honestly, I doubt that I'd love it. But I hope not to hate it and be constantly frustrated by it like I kind of am lately with my current job. 

The good news for me is that although I'm not actively looking for a job, I pretty routinely get tapped to interview. This hasn't worked out yet, but it takes time to find a really good job, and when I have a job which I don't like, but which does a pretty fair job of paying the bills, I've got time to get it right. I really hope I don't end up retiring from my current job in 15-20 years, because I really don't want to be stuck doing it that long, but we'll see, I suppose. There are worse things than that, if it comes down to it.

Anyway, my fleeting hobby time has been spent lately with SWTOR, as any readers have no doubt noticed, if there were any readers, not Dark Fantasy X, but I'm always keeping both Dark Fantasy X and Space Opera X in the back of my mind, just in case. One thing that I will do on this trip is take my journal with me where I keep notes for potential games and stories. I'm actually kind of excited about this, although it's not something that I spend much time on. But I'd like to, and being away from my computer for four days is a good opportunity to spend some time with my earbuds in, thinking about Dark Fantasy X and Space Opera X and where, if anywhere, I'm going with them.

Anyway, this isn't exactly where I'm going to be out West, but it's close enough, and if I somehow, I dunno, won the lottery or whatever, here's one contender for where I'd end up.

Once again; leftism = mental illness

https://www.psypost.org/study-woke-attitudes-linked-to-anxiety-depression-and-a-lack-of-happiness/

This one was research performed in Finland on Finns, but there's no reason not to believe that it is a similar condition across the West. (To the degree that Finland is part of "the West." Like Ireland and southern "Mediterranean" Europe and western Slavic peoples, a case could be made that they're an outgroup, or other group within Western civilization, or a para-Western civilizational grouping that isn't part of Western Civilization per se, but is closely related to and still travels with Western civilization.)

The curious part is that women are so much more favorable towards wokeness compared to men. Sadly, and I was offended when this was first presented to me but the data is pretty incontrovertible now; the anti-suffragettes seem to be completely and totally vindicated by the data. 

As an aside, remember when Miss Helsinki 2017 went viral on the Right, where an African girl who looked like a somewhat prettier version of Flavor Flav won Miss Helsinki over about a dozen very pretty European women? Yeah. Finnish men weren't in favor of that, I'm sure, even if virtue-signaling Finnish women reluctantly refused to take a stand against it.

Here's the older link to a Danish study that reached similar conclusions; the most mentally ill group is white, woke women, the least mentally ill is based conservative Christian men.

https://vdare.com/articles/it-s-official-again-leftists-particularly-leftist-women-are-nuts

Of course, this doesn't really need to be "proven", although it's nice that it is. But it's pretty obvious and self-evident. Even SNL made a joke about it on the weekend following Donald Trump's election; all of the liberal white folks in the apartment were chewing Xanax like they were Tic-Tacs.

And don't think that this is unique to Scandinavians, of course. All of the West fits this. And Denmark is about as firmly within Western civilization as you can get anyway.

Where Eagles Dare and Star Wars

I've said before that the middle section of Star Wars is very similar, probably on purpose, to the plot and situation of the popular 1968 WW2-spy movie Where Eagles Dare. I've always liked Eagles, but I hadn't watched it in a while. I own it on DVD, so it was just a question of making some time and doing it. My youngest son likes to watch movies with me, and this was one where we were both in alignment that we wanted to see it, so we watched it this weekend. Because the movie is long and we started it late, we actually watched half of it on Saturday (up to the end of the interrogation scene in the Great Hall of the Schloss Adler. Then we watched the second part last night, which is the escape from the castle, and by far the best part of the movie, with the thrilling murder of a gazillion Nazis, as well as the iconic cable car fight scene. This is the part that especially reminds one of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and the rest of the bunch being stuck on the Death Star. I'm not the only person to have noted this similarity over time; I did a quick search, and found that many other people had remarked on it (some of them also remarked that the part that followed the escape from the castle; the flight to the airport, etc. could easily be a prototype for the truck chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think it's fair to say that Lucas liked Where Eagles Dare. The biggest tell, which I hadn't recognized until now, was the Clint Eastwood's character says to Richard Burton's character, more than once in fact, that "we've got company", a line which Lucas adopts pretty closely when Han shouts to Luke that "we're gonna have company."

He used some other WWII action movies from the 60s; 633 Squadron and The Dam Busters (actually, that one's a little older; from 1955); this is even less secret; he showed this films to his special effects guys saying specifically that that's what he wanted the X-wing fight scene to look like. Of course, the plot and situation is lifted right from those movies, both of which had a very similar scenario.

Dumb virtue-signaling people like to say that Star Wars was a reworking or even a remake of The Hidden Fortress, but in reality, the movie bears very little resemblance to it, in favor of the movies listed above, except for maybe the opening act, and the concept of the bickering droids mirroring the bickering peasants, and some of the other set-up. Where Eagles Dare also doesn't feature the rescue of a princess, which The Hidden Fortress does, but it does feature the rescue of a downed American general who has access to secret plans. Given that princess-rescuing is a pretty time-honored scène à faire, pegging that to A Hidden Fortress is dubious. Certainly, however, the earliest drafts of Star Wars more closely resembled The Hidden Fortress but by the time we get to the movie as filmed, it's at best the source of the first act only, if even that. 

Of course, by saying that Star Wars used these elements, I don't mean to say that they were the Tragedy of Darth Plagiarism the Wise or anything, just that they clearly form the inspiration core that was adapted and adopted to fit into the screenplay as it emerged. There's nothing wrong with doing that, and hardy any writer, even one much better than George Lucas, will fail to honestly admit that writers to that all the time; take an element from some other work, and then adopt and adapt it to fit into their narrative. Assuming that they also adopt and adapt other elements too and mingle them, and twist what's left to be unique somewhat so that it's not an obvious copy-paste routine, then why not?

I always say that writers and game-masters too, for that matter, should be familiar with lots of different fiction traditions and genres, and what makes them work and not work. I've heard of D&D players that not only only read fantasy, but they even only read D&D fiction! I doubt that's true anymore for this guy, since he said that years ago, and I don't think WotC publishes many novels anymore. And even if it was literally true and not some weird exaggerated claim, then that suggests that he probably just doesn't read much at all; I doubt that he doesn't watch TV, movies or play video games of various genres, at the very least.

As Lucas himself proved, his greatest inspiration for the setting of Star Wars was almost certainly stuff like Dune and the Lensman series, and the old Flash Gordon Republic serials, but when it came to plot, his greatest inspiration wasn't science fiction at all, but a Japanese historical swasbuckling film, a WWII spy-thriller, and some WWII war movies.

Switching gears, I watched a YouTube video recently about Star Wars and Dune, and it claims that Brian Herbert called his dad in late May of 1977 telling him that he needed to see Star Wars because it copied so many elements of Dune that it was scary. Then he specifically mentioned the desert planet and the evil empire. If that's really all he could think of, he was really reaching. Evil empires are a stock plot element from all kinds of fiction, and in any case, the most obvious proximal source for the Empire was the caricature of the Nazis that our propagandists have foisted on us to justify our involvement in WW2, not anything out of Dune. It's not clear that the Empire is even necessarily evil in Dune, or if it is, that Paul Atreides and his Fremen jihad aren't even more evil. And a desert planet? That's a little easier sell, but then again, desert planets are hardly unique to Dune, especially given the prolific subgenre of science fiction set on Mars. In fact, Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark double book The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman offers a more Tatooine-like experience, I think, than Dune does. Dune isn't anything all that interesting or unique without the context of spice, the worms and the Fremen, all of which Tatooine lacks. Although the offhand shot of C-3PO walking by a long giant skeleton is maybe supposed to be a veiled Dune reference, and certainly his fear of being shipped to the spice mines of Kessel is a veiled Dune reference. It's a little unfortunate that Star Wars used the word spice at all in any context other than something you put on your food to make it taste more interesting, although it was just an off-hand reference in the one movie until the EU and then the Disney movies (Solo in particular) made it more mainstream again. Of course, Star Wars spice has developed in ways that bear little resemblance at all to Dune spice.

I don't actually like Dune that much as a novel, which I think I mentioned recently in reference to the new movies. I think the movies are better then the book, but they still aren't great. A lot of people think that Dune is to sci-fi what Lord of the Rings is to fantasy. I completely disagree. It's epic in scope, but lacks epic themes. Dune is A Song of Ice & Fire, a disappointing and nihilistic critique of humanity and Western civilization in particular, a dark and cynical downer where there are no heroes, no good guys even, and no good even at all. Everything is dark, tawdry and cynical. 

Also, Dune hasn't had the effect on the genre that Lord of the Rings has, although there it at least comes closer. Rather, I suspect Star Wars is itself the Lord of the Rings of science fiction, or at least it was when we only had the original trilogy. It's the work that's the most imitated and has done the most to make the genre mainstream. Like Lord of the Rings, it also synthesizes older, familiar tropes and puts them in a new context; in Lord of the Rings case, it hangs mythology and old Germanic sagas on an epic good vs evil struggle, where Star Wars takes an even broader selection of genre tropes and also hangs them on an epic struggle of good vs evil, even going so far as trying to justify its seriousness by appeal to Joseph Campbell's debunked and out of favor "monomyth" theories.

Yes, that's another tell of someone who isn't very educated but is trying to appear so; if you refer to Joseph Campbell without even knowing that his work is largely discounted, discredited and not taken seriously at all by academics, then you're just a parrot trying to appear intelligent by referring to an academic thesis that you've heard about vaguely but don't understand at all. Please just stop. Nobody is impressed by the fact that you've heard the name Joseph Campbell and might even know the name of his most famous book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The more you try to summarize the Wikipedia summary of it, the deeper the hole you're digging for yourself for anyone who actually knows the status of Joseph Campbell's credibility to see.

Anyway, here's Johnn and his common law wife Raina Temple on Tatooine, which isn't really very much like Arrakis. In fact, here it specifically has a Lovecraftian vibe to it, although I think that was mostly made up for the Old Republic material, rather than something that is otherwise very present in the Star Wars franchise overall.

Here's a better view of the outfit. It's based on the Intelligence Agent's Armor, with a secondary black (IIRC) dye module, and the Crimson Raider helmet. 

Season 6

It’s now Thursday morning and I’ve had two days to play around with 7.4.1. Some people on Youtube and elsewhere have made a big deal about the addition of the "Date Night" events. This makes me wonder who the devs are targeting with this update, and who the player base is, or who they think that it is. Maybe I'm the one who's mistaken, and the romance options and stuff is drawing more women to the game than I imagined. I like a good romance as much as the next guy, but if that becomes the main focus of a swashbuckling space adventure game, then something is out of whack, by my account. The perfect amount is John Carter and Dejah Thoris from A Princess of Mars. Sometimes the originals got it so right that nobody else can top them.

That said, I don't really care very much about the expansions. Most of my characters go into semi-retirement after finishing the class story and then very leisurely wander over to Ilum, Section X and The Black Hole… if they actually make it there at all. By semi-retirement, I usually mean that I use them for seasons, events, outfit design for concept art for SOX, and other things like that, rather than that I'm actually playing the story with them. I think it's worth taking a moment to take stock of where my semi-retired characters actually are.

• Maark—the most far along; just finished Ruhnuk with him. Not super motivated to go to whatever is next; the new Voss area, or whatever, so when I play him, I'm very slowly grinding for Ruhnuk reputation. Not that I've done much if anything on that the last two weeks.
• Mat Thew—the second most far along; just finished Yavin IV and the Shadow of Revan stuff; haven’t yet gone to  Ziost, but that would be the next step. Not sure that I want to go on past Ziost and change all of the functional nature of his companions.
• Luukke—somewhere on Makeb. Haven’t gone back to see what’s still to be done, but I think I’m almost finished with it.
• Johhn—still on Ilum; I think I’ve done the Black Hole with him too. Or maybe Section X. I’m not really considering using him for any additional story stuff, though.
• Phillippion—haven’t started any post story stuff with him; I’ve only taken him to Ilum to grind Gree reputation (which is now complete.) Might have grinded some other reputation with him over time, like Oricon or Section X—certainly I did THORN and the BBA, but I’m not doing anything else story-wise with him at all. Don’t care to either.
• Graggory—I might have finished Ilum with him, maybe not. I think I’ve got Makeb on his next mission, but that’s been true for a long time.
• Hutran Thanatos—because he’s the most recent to finish, he’s the only one who I’m actually approaching the post story stuff systematically anymore. He’s finished Ilum (except the two flashpoints) at which point I’ll eventually do The Black Hole and Section X with him, and presumably after that, Makeb.

In general, I don’t much care for the post main story expansion stuff. Some of it is visually pretty, like Odessen or Ossus or Makeb or Onderon, etc. but I only go there for aesthetic reasons or to grind some special event or something like that. I don’t really care what happens to the characters after the main story when there no longer is a unique story for each class, and there’s barely a unique story for each faction. Sorta. None of these characters are advancing very fast, and for the majority of them, I really don’t expect that I’ll ever play past Ziost at the absolute most. I’m especially reluctant to use my crafting characters post Ziost, because they’ll lose access to their companions. Ironically, some of my newer characters might be better positioned to move forward past that, because their companions are just sidekicks along for the ride and the combat support.

The crafting characters, if they do advanced story content, it will probably be because I popped into a flashpoint for some reason. I am still trying to grind for a group achievement, after all, although I haven’t done anything with that since coming back to the game a couple of months ago. Too many other things to do!

So, date night and story advancement; I don’t care. Why do I care about game updates at all, then? Honestly, I don’t really. I find them inconvenient mostly, although I’m glad that they add some new elements, some new environments to visit and go do daily areas on (although lately, you can’t do the dailies without first doing the story, which sucks) and stuff like that. And I like Seasons well enough.  I’m doing season 6, and it’ll be third that I’ve done; the other three taking place while I was away from the game.  I’m not sure that the seasonal armors and weapons are all that cool this time around, but the mounts are nice, and I get extra cartel coins, plus season tokens that I can spend on older season stuff that I missed here and there. (Just added the Rapid Recon Walker to my collections in mounts a day or two ago, for instance.) Two evenings of seasons, and I’ve done all of the weekly stuff that I can. Just the log-on bonus and the dailies will get me another two or three reward track elements before next Tuesday. 

I’ve said before that SWTOR always leads me mentally to Space Opera X, and I’ve had some thoughts on the SOX setting, and how to make it potentially much more useful and fun for me by getting rid of the political alignment of most of the systems, and instead having all major political groups potentially operating on any planet. There’s a reason most planets in SWTOR have both Republic and Imperial stuff going on. Even Ord Mantell and Hutta are notable for their neutrality, and its telling that Ord Mantell for both factions was added to the latest update, and Hutta is coming yet this year too. Voss is maybe the poster-child of the neutral planet where both Empire and Republic have to operate discretely, but that’s just a case of mediocre execution of what is otherwise actually a good idea.

And here's Johhn on Oricon in his Daft Punk outfit.

New outfit video for SWTOR characters

SWTOR characters, and what they can represent in Space Opera X, since I like to use SWTOR outfit designer as concept art for SOX.

SWTOR end game

Well, I had mentioned that the lag seemed to be improved. I still had a lot of it playing Taul Kajak on Voss yesterday. I did finish Voss, including the bonus series. There were two major problems: 1) if playing Jedi Knight, then you actually defeat Sel-Makor as part of your class story before you face his minion in the faction story and have a lot of dialogue that doesn’t make any sense anymore, and 2) the bonus series is super long and tedious. I did it specifically because I hadn’t in a while and wanted to see it again, but I doubt I’ll do it with any of my next wave of characters (I guess I’ll do one Imperial character too, just to see how its different.) I also switched to my second combat style to sneak past a bunch of tedious trash mobs, and it completely screwed up my buttons when I switched back. Overall, my Voss experience was pretty frustrating. Too bad, as I think that it’s a pretty planet, at least, but that’s not sufficient to account for all of the other frustrating or dumb things that Voss offers. It hasn’t been one of my favorite planets to actually play. Of course, if I can get rid of the lag by getting a new graphics card and/or motherboard, that’ll be a major improvement, at least.

 I’ve been waffling a bit on whether or not I want to do the faction story on Corellia with this character, or wait for the next one to come around, but I’m thinking I’ll do it with Taul after all. For all subsequent Republic characters, I’ll just completely drop all exploration, heroic, extraneous flashpoints or faction story missions as soon as I hit max level. I mean, like a hot potato. I’ll abandon the missions in my mission log and ignore all of them from that point forward.

Unfortunately, I’ve never much liked the end game planets as much as I wish that I did. Hoth is the last planet that I really like. Belsavis and Voss and even Corellia have elements to them that are cool, but others that are not. I kind of like planets like Ilum and Rishi or even Yavin IV that come later more than I like these three. Part of my dislike of Voss is the “anthropology lesson” that the writers want to subject you to. They are proud of their setting development on Voss, and spend way too much time going over it with you as opposed to just letting you go adventure out on the planet. You’re constantly having to navigate the supposed tricky diplomatic situation because  of the Voss and their weird culture, and the impact of the Mystics, etc. The writers indulged in that way too often with many of the companions in the game, but Voss is where they really let it hang out there for the whole planetary experience.

In any case, with Taul Kajak now ready to go to Corellia, which is the last normal planet, I’ll almost certainly make that my priority, and just do Corellia and have done with it. Then I can check one more character off as “finished”, or moved into semi-retirement is perhaps more accurate, and decide what to do next. I’d kind of like to finish the two Ilum flashpoints with Hutran Thanatos, actually, and then have him do The Black Hole and Section X, etc. And I’d like to grind reputation on Ruhnuk with Maark. And, I’ve got Anstal Tane and Vant Galaide to move forward with, not to mention Mirabeau Tane. Plenty to work on; I mostly just have to decide what of all of those options I’m more in the mood for. And as I get Taul into semi-retirement, I’d like to make some outfit videos with him and Hutran, my two green guys, at which point I’ll feel like their semi-retirement is more legit. I somehow feel like there’s something still to do with them, and I think that that’s really it.

And then last night, I deferred some of my real life responsibilities to "veg". I listened to some music. I watched YouTube videos about the philosophy and text of the Dune books (the more I learn of them, the less I like them. I'm glad that I only read the first one, didn't even finish it, and instead just watched the sci-fi channel miniseries and now the new movies. They were better than the books, in most respects.) And, of course, I played around in SWTOR. I went to Corellia, although not with Taul Kajak; rather I took my old bounty hunter Graggory, my old agents Johhn and Hutran Thanatos, my old commando Philippion and my old gunslinger Luukke to the Spike and spent some time in the rakghoul tunnels. I had earlier reported that I might delete Philippion, but I'm now thinking that I probably won't; he's my only commando, and I won't be able to showcase any outfit videos or anything else using a cannon if I don't have any commandos. Since I don't really need or want a second commando, I might as well just keep him. Too bad he has a dumb name, but the same is true for Mat Thew, Maark Luukke and Johhn in most respects, and yet I'm not getting rid of any of them. Oh, well

I took some video in the rakghoul tunnels and on the surface of Corellia with another low cost outfit on Thanatos, but I haven't edited the video file or otherwise done anything with it, so here's some other screenshots taken earlier of the outfit that I had Graggory running around in. I'll get some rakghoul stuff later. Because there are two daily challenges that give you rakghoul cannisters, and you can do them pretty quickly, I did them both with all five of the characters mentioned, netting me ten new rakghoul cannisters. If I do that a couple more times this week, I'll be sitting pretty with regards to rakghoul cannisters. I'm a little short on bounty contracts, though—next time that event comes around, I'll need to grind a good twenty new contracts or so.

As noted, this Graggory outfit is very "smuggler-like" rather than hunter-like, but I tend to like my hunters to dress in normal gunfighter clothes quite often. Here he is showing off his stuff on Dantooine, Korriban, Balmorra and Nar Shaddaa respectively.

UPDATE: Actually, maybe I'll go back and do the Voss planetary and bonus series Imperial side with Hutran Thanatos, as well as Corellia planetary. And for Republic, I can do the Corellia stuff with Anstal. Because they belong to Operative and Scoundrel. I can sneak past the trash mobs easily. There's no point anymore in worrying about XP or bonus missions, etc (well, there won't be by the time Anstal is on those planets) so the whole thing will be faster and less tedious than with anyone else. And once I've said that I've done it again relatively recently, I won't feel obligated in any sense whatsoever to try it again for quite a long time.

This is part of what I mean by "semi-retirement." Hutran Thanatos finished the main story, he's max level—but there's still plenty that I can do with him, I find, so there's no reason to delete him, and plenty of reasons to still keep him around for certain things and do things with him. I'd actually like to play the next part of the expansions, probably up through Ziost at least with him too... but I feel no urgency to get that done.

UPDATE II: Good and bad news on the rakghoul tunnels. I didn't realize this before, but if you fast travel straight from the tunnels to your spaceship, it still shows your location as in the tunnels, which are treated as a separate world from the world that you're actually on. This means that if you exit your ship, you go straight to the tunnels too. Nice shortcut! Also, and I think this seems to have been changed, it seems almost impossible to draw aggro now in the tunnels unless you literally attack one of the monsters. You can literally walk through them and not draw aggro. This is very convenient too. The bad news: I forgot that you can only do the Jeelvic mission once per character per week. If my goal was to get 30 rakghoul cannisters, I'll now need to do it at least two more days than I thought, or with more characters than I thought. Or, I can settle and get less. We'll see how it goes. Taking five characters just to ride around and binocular the ceiling in a few places each isn't the most exciting thing, but it's pretty quick and harmless and gives me the currency I need. Sadly, all of the other missions just give reputation, and I'm all done with reputation.

I guess I could do the Heroic 4 and group up with somebody or other, maybe... Might be nice to try something different, and maybe I'll even get grouping credit for it on the social achievements.

Graggory on Dantooine

Hutran Thanatos' rakghoul hunting "discount" outfit

Graggory on Korriban

Graggory on Balmorra

Hutran and Raina about to enter the rakghoul tunnels...

Graggory on Nar Shaddaa

Forced ranking of class stories; what would I change?

As part of my mother of all SWTOR reviews, I ended up doing a forced ranking of the class stories, least to most favorite. Then I released a modified version of it later. I guess this is the third one, although I'm focusing more on "what would I change" rather than the ranking itself. 

I think with my most recent playthrough, I'm finding that all of the tech classes are preferable to me to force-users. Especially because you can use more varied mechanics to represent them now. That said, that is a personal preference that has little to do with more than the fact that I like guns better than lightsabers. Part of that is the many, many trash mobs you have to face. It's much less tedious, for whatever reason, to engage them by just standing back and plinking at them with the 1 key than it is having to move around and engage them in hand to hand. That's a very esoteric and kind of strange rationale for preferring the techs to the space wizards, but there you have it. It is what it is regardless. If you could take that element out of the picture, I think my previous ranking would still work; least to most favorite: consular, inquisitor, trooper, knight, agent, warrior, smuggler, hunter. With the caveat that the daylight between all of the top 5-6 classes is extremely small, and very minor tweaks could make them move many spots, because they all have essentially the same score, and it comes down to fine-tuning the decimal places. For this post, however, let's just do the force-users first, and the tech classes second, in this order: consular, inquisitor, knight, warrior, trooper, agent, smuggler, hunter. So; what would I change?

First off, let's again reiterate the criteria for why a class story succeeds or fails. There are several elements: 1) main character characterization, 2) the actual plot, 3) companion characters, especially girlfriend options (again, I almost exclusively play male characters). I had mechanics in there, but given the greater flexibility now, I don't think that matters as much. Although clearly I have my favorites in terms of mechanics too (gunslinger, mercenary, powertech, sniper.)

Consular. One of the consular story's biggest weaknesses is the boring main character who has no character. There needs to be a serious rewrite where the concept of the "earnest Jedi who speaks in boring fortune cookie expressions" is replaced with someone who resembles a real person, cracks some better jokes, has some more interesting opinions, etc. This is a systemic problem that affects both Jedi classes, so I won't get into details here, but I think BioWare's writers got caught in the "righteous, liberal vision of a serious hero" paradigm, and the problem is that the character is such a boring cypher with no personality that it's just frustrating to play him.

Of course, the consular's companions are pretty weak too. I never had much interest in Dr. Lizardo, who you have to run around with for several planets as your only option, while he constantly gives you lizard anthropology lectures. The only possible exception is your girlfriend character, who isn't too bad, if a little mouthy, pushy and self-important. Still, she could be much worse, and some of her worst traits come across as more immaturity rather than true character flaws. But she's not really very cute, and you get her very late, so you have no opportunity to have a proper romance with her. Plus, honestly, there's no chemistry between you and her, and that's mostly on the writing of the main character himself.

The plot is also sadly kind of flat. The dark side plague that you run around healing and the Manchurian candidate dark side brainwashing that you encounter has some potential, but it never quite seems to live up to it. They also are very similar and kind of bleed into each other, which amplifies the repetitive nature of it even more than it already is. And your villains aren't very memorable either. The other element that you do as part of your plot, running around with all of these entitled, bratty little princess diplomats, is more tedious and frustrating than fun. Honestly, the entirety of the consular story needs some serious overhaul. The main idea, of a dark side plague of some kind followed by sleeper agents who don't even know that they're sleeper agents, has some potential, but it needs a more interesting character, more interesting companion dynamics, and the adversaries and plot problems to be solved need to be much more lively.

Inquisitor. Here, the main character himself or herself—and this is probably the only class story where I actually think it works a little better as a woman—isn't really too bad. But the companions are mostly pretty lackluster, and the plot is mostly kind of silly. To the point that you wish that they'd committed to making it a farce instead of trying to pretend that we can take it with a straight face. If the whole thing had been more light-hearted, the plot itself could have worked. But the character really needs better companions. If you play a girl, you have a serviceable if pedestrian romance option, but if you play as a guy, all you get is a severely unlikeable weird alien girl. Apparently, Khem Val is romanceable, although only in the Ossus+ expansions where super gay and weird options were something that they made a point of offering. I can't imagine it for either a man or a women; the "morose monster" is, at best, only vaguely humanoid to begin with. You don't get Ashara, the romanceable alien, until you finish Taris, which is not as bad as the consular geting Nadia Grell on Quesh, or wherever it is that you finally pick her up as a companion, but it's still too late, in my opinion. Romanceable characters should be available on the first or second planet.

The villain is also really flat. You never really understand what his beef is with you, or why either of you should care one way or another about each other.

Knight. The Knight actually has a pretty good story, marred by two somewhat glaring problems; 1) lame main character, who really needs a lot more personality and spunk to feel anything at all like a real person (see similar complaint for the other Jedi character noted above). Tython is also a very rough first planet, where you are put in one hoaky moral dilemma after another where the "light side" choices are all stupid and the "dark side" choices are mostly just childish, and no matter what you pick, the stick in the mud Jedi council will lecture you like a Karen hall monitor about it. The story improves tons when you leave Tython, you get a great girlfriend character, probably the best in the game, even, and you get her on the second planet after having already interacted with her a lot on the first planet.

The plot itself is mostly pretty cool, albeit somewhat repetitive, for the first act, but it's a little silly when you're part of a strike team to go kidnap the emperor and bring him to Tython to turn him to the light side. Lolwut? I remember in college hearing about an idea floating around in Kennedy's CIA about sneaking into Cuba and shaving Castro's beard off, thinking that that would cause his government to fail. This idea is only marginally less stupid. Still, the Jedi Knight story mostly delivers interesting swashbuckling action, thrilling heroics, and over-the-top melodrama, which is pretty iconic to the Star Wars franchise, after all.

Warrior. The Sith Warrior is the dark mirror of the Jedi Knight, and if you sometimes have to choose a few dark side options on the Jedi just to not be a ridiculous parody of a liberal hero, you have to mostly choose a lot of light side options as the warrior to not be a tactically obtuse, childish psychopath. I personally find the character most enjoyable when I play him as a kind of reformer, who finds the insane dictates of the worst of the Sith counter-productive to the growth and success of the Empire, not to mention worthy of summary execution for its own right. The Sith are maniacs, and while that's kind of how they're supposed to be, it also begs the question of how their society ever formed in the first place, much less managed to last as long as it has. The early stuff has a kind of rough Spartan agoge feel to it on occasion, which kind of works, but later it's just nothing but insanely counter-productive whims and backstabbery. This weakness carries forward in the faction stories of all of the Imperial classes to a fair degree, but it really only applies as a plot point in the class story that you have to ignore and pretend that it isn't there for the two Sith classes. In the agent class, on the other hand, it's a plot point, but is treated much more reasonably, and the Imperials are constantly careful and cautious and also sometimes kind of resentful of the prominence that the Sith and their stupid ideas are given. For the most part, they do their best to stay out of the Siths' way and ignore them, so that they can competently run an Empire. 

Because the Sith Warrior isn't bound to try and be serious and heroic in the minds of writers who don't understand either dimension, he actually is kind of a likeable character and feels like a real person. This is true whether you play him more dark or more light; he's still a more interesting and likeable character. I prefer him, as noted, a bit more light, but I can understand wanting to do either.

While none of the characters hit five home runs with their companions, the Warrior and the Knight both do pretty well, and have at least three or four pretty good, interesting ones. Quinn isn't exactly likeable, but he is interesting, and has some interesting plot elements inherent in his story. Vette is a likeable girlfriend, and if she wasn't a funky colored alien without any hair, I'd like her quite a bit better. Jaesa is another really interesting character, but if you run her light-side, she disappointingly doesn't offer the romance option that you kind of want from her. The writers, to their credit, took this feedback and added an expansion romance that is very satisfying; kind of suggesting that you had a lot of romantic tension all along that she tried really hard to put aside, but ultimately failed to do. But the expansion is out of scope for this discussion, so I'll say that I was always just a bit disappointed in the romance department with the Sith Warrior. Jaesa having a real romance option was a must, and having Vette be human would have been nice too. 

Trooper. The plot of the trooper is surprisingly good. I think it would be greatly improved if they admitted the obvious; this guy isn't really a soldier, he's more like a spy or hitman; an "asset" as they call them in the Bourne or Bond or Mission Impossible movies. I also feel like the second act when you're recruiting your team falls a little flat; there are a few where you can quite sensibly tell your CO that you don't want this person on your team, but you have to pick him up anyway (Tanno Vik being the most obvious here, but Yuun is also super boring.) The main character himself, again, has the same problem that the Jedi have; the writers want to promote him as a serious yet heroic figure, and they have no idea how to do that without taking out all personality and character, and making the main character that you play super boring. The villains get to have more fun, and the smuggler by his nature, but these three all get really short shrift, because being told what to do by superiors and being good little boys and girls who follow orders without any attitude is what the writers think a good guy hero is, and they can't seem to add anything at all to that without making them boring. But as I said before, the trooper was a pleasant surprise to me; in spite of foreseeing the things that I wouldn't like about it accurately, it turns out that they weren't as bad as I feared, and the other elements were mostly done fairly well. 

Elara Dorn is the romance option, and she's actually quite charming in many ways. I mean, as a real man if she were a real woman, I'd probably get tired of pursuing her with the hard to get attitude that she sometimes has, but that's an artifact of the way the game is structured; you can't have the romance finish up too early, so there's nothing else to do about it other than accept that you need to wait until the right pacing moment in the story.

I also feel like the trooper suffers more than most in terms of losing focus after Act I is done. This is true to some extent for all of the characters, but what follows for the Trooper until you get to the end is worse than most. Also, the second villain you get isn't very well developed or interesting.

Agent. The agent has a really interesting story, and although there is occasionally a loss of agency (no pun intended) inherent in it, the plot is probably among the best of all of the class stories. However, as I've said before, the companions are among the worst in the game. The only one that I really like is Raina Temple, but even then I have to swap her out for a prettier customization, and you get her way too late to have a credible romance with her. Kaliyo, who's supposed to be your romance option, just isn't attractive at all in looks, in personality, and especially in baggage. The idea that any man of value would have an interest in a woman like that is laughable. What's wrong with the writers? Are there not any actual men among them, only really toxic betas and women?

A better romance companion, which you pick up earlier, and better companions in general is the main thing that the agent story needs.

Smuggler. The smuggler struggles a bit with this same problem, but if you stop worrying about trying to fit what the game thinks your characters want to hear and just doing what you should be doing anyway, the smuggler works better. (Ironically, also true in real life.) It's another case study in how the writers don't seem to know jack squat about what alpha males are really like and what women actually want. It's not so bad that they made the successful men into the villains, like in Revenge of the Nerds or Beauty & the Beast, but if you're willing to take a few hits on companion approval and maybe not flirt with every single NPC that it gives you the opportunity to flirt with (most of whom a real man wouldn't be all that interested in anyway) the smuggler is a charming and engaging character to play.

I am a little frustrated that Risha, your default romance option, isn't "officially" a companion until the end of Act I, even though she's on your ship and is an NPC that you interact with a lot. It almost feels like you pick her up at the end of Coruscant, but you don't really do so completely in terms of being able to use her as a companion or customize her appearance. She's also a bit pushy and holds out too long too, but again, there are structural reasons why it has to be this way, even if it doesn't really feel right from a chemistry perspective. And, of course, you have another romanceable option among your companions, but not one that I can take seriously, so I've never pursued it with any of my many smuggler characters, nor do I intend to.

I also feel like the second act where you do privateer work is a bit weak. And the attempted plot twist feels more forced rather than clever or natural. The whole freakin' game I was saying, bring on Rogun "the Butcher", but we're "supposed" to be afraid of him the entire time. Kind of frustrating too. The whole point of a character like the smuggler is that he takes his own destiny in his hands and makes things happen, but you have to be way too much of a follower here. I know; to some degree that's dictated by the structure of the game, but a good writer at least doesn't allow you to notice it so much.

Bounty Hunter. The hunter plot isn't super complex or deep, but it works pretty well. The whole concept of the Great Hunt is a little dubious, but once you accept it, it works fine and some of the hunts in particular are actually fairly interesting. This is especially true for the Eidolon on Nar Shaddaa and Tiresias Lokai on Tatooine. As weak as the Great Hunt motivation is in some ways, it does seem to feel a little better than what follows, where you're still doing hunts, but the motivation for doing them seems even weaker. The Great Hunt contrivance is contrived and forced, a bit, but the Black List is worse. It's a little bit of a shame that the writers couldn't quite manage to rise above what they did and create something that feels just a bit more compelling. Should have probably watched more classic westerns and gangster movies before writing this. There's nothing wrong with what we got, it just feels a little too safe and not quite creative enough somehow. A kind of deja vu, too obvious plot.

I don't really love Torian Cadera as a companion, because I don't really love the standard EU presentation of Mandalorians, but I'm sure that I'm the exception there; I think otherwise that's kind of popular. Mako is one of the best girlfriends in the game, in my opinion, and Gault is pretty fun. Blizz is... whatever, and I don't know why I have to take Skadge at all; in a realistic world, I'd never accept him on my ship; I'd have killed him as quickly as I could in game as a psychopathic criminal and villain who had started targeting me and my crew to scam. Mako is also your first companion, way back on planet one, which is really how most of the girlfriends characters should be, honestly. Kyra being at the end of planet two is the only other acceptable alternative, and all of the other classes who don't do that are doing it wrong.

I'm not sure how they could have done this without making the game quite a bit bigger than it is, but the attraction of the smuggler and hunter in particular is that you kind of want to disassociate them from the faction. The smuggler isn't really a Republic agent, just like the hunter isn't an Imperial one, but you're constantly dragged back in as if by an inescapable event horizon.

SWTOR Character updates

I had a busy week last week, and if anything I'll have an even busier one this week. On my docket for personal things that need to happen:

1. Income tax filing.

2. Paperwork to rollover my 401(k) savings, modest though they are.

3. We need to buy another car, and I need to pursue loan paperwork.

All of those paperwork tasks are hours long, I imagine, with the possible exception of 2. I'm hopeful that with less than half an hour or so on the phone, I can get the final form that I need forwarded to me.

4. Travel with my wife and some friends across the state to see Les Miserables on stage. Yeah, I'm not worrying about vowel diacritics there. This will probably mean leaving a little bit early from work on Friday, and being home late on Saturday, so most of my weekend is gone before it even starts. Not to say that I don't want to go, to support my wife who loves the show, and to get out of the house for a bit, and to hang our with our friends, and do the other stuff that we'll be doing on Saturday... but sometimes even fun things aren't fun anymore when you're too busy, and I'm kind of feeling that this week, even more than last week. So I'll make a SWTOR progress report now, because I doubt I'll have tons of progress to report at this same time in another week, sadly.

First off, my son-in-law, who's played around in the game before, has expressed some interest in jumping in after seeing my SWTOR videos that I've watched pop on on the TV on the Youtube app. I'm considering telling him he can create a character on my account, although because I have a security key, he'll probably have to do it over here. He can project the laptop to the TV and we can all watch it together, though. My oldest son and his wife might actually rather enjoy that, if he doesn't take too long doing it. Anyway, stay tuned; not sure what the development is really going to be there yet.

Secondly, for whatever reason, I've had better luck with lag, and it's been more like it used to be before I updated the game more recently. I've played around with Taul Kajak, my Jedi Sentinel, on Voss, the second to last "normal" planet before the official ending of the class storyline. I hit max level with him not too long ago, so I've stopped doing exploration and bonus missions, because there's little point, but I am still playing the faction story for the planet with him, and I am planning on doing the bonus series too. This is because I just haven't seen those in a long time, and usually by the time I got to the last three planets or so, my characters were already pretty high level, and I wasn't in the mood to play those anymore because they had gotten repetitive and tedious. I'm thinking that I'll do Voss with Kajak, but save Corellia's Republic faction story for Anstal Tane when he gets there. But we'll see. Maybe when I get to Corellia, I'll feel like just going ahead and doing it anyway. I barely remember the Corellia missions at all, because I hardly ever have played them on either faction. Corellia doesn't have a normal bonus series, but it does have the Black Hole, which kind of serves like a bonus series on steroids, I suppose.

Thirdly, the rakghoul event starts tomorrow. I've already got max reputation with THORN, but I wouldn't mind picking up some more rakghoul currency to spend on stuff later, and getting some video down in the rakghoul tunnels. Curiously, this time around it's going to be on Corellia, so it's a good time for Taul Kajak to try and finish up Voss as reasonably quickly as possible and spend some time there, if I can make some time for it. Later in the month will be the Gree event, so maybe I can finish up Corellia by that time and have him on Ilum, along with a lot of other of my characters in semi-retirement who are at about that same stage of post-story story. Even Johhn still hasn't finished the Ilum missions, and Hutran Thanatos still needs to do the two back to back flashpoints to be done with the planet himself.Luuke, Maark and Mat Thew, on the other hand, are all well past it, but can always return to sport their winter gear some more. 

Fourth, Vant Galaide just finished Act I of his story, i.e., the Great Hunt itself. I created a new Mandalorian-esque armor suit for him to finish in, although it's also unique, of course, and he's wearing it now.

That puts him in the same place in the story as Anstal Tane, so the two of them can leapfrog each other a little bit when Taul Kajak is done. Both are level 64, so they're in decent shape as long as they keep doing the faction stories, without having to grind heroics or flashpoints or anything with them. Although both are also high enough level that they could do Directive 7 just for the XP, and since it doesn't really fit in the story anywhere, well why not, I guess? We'll see if I feel motivated to do that in the next couple of week. I doubt I'll have time or motivation to do it this week.

If I do do any grinding, it'll be some modest grinding of rakghoul events for the currency, or Ruhnuk events with Maark for the reputation. I haven't felt motivated to do any of that this last week, although if I really want to get access to that new Mandalorian armor set, I better get on it. I'm only still at Newcomer status, I think, so I've got a long way to go to get the Legendary and finish it off where the chestpiece and helmet are available. But those are the only two pieces that I actually care about; the rest of it, I can make do with something else. In fact, I'd rather do so.

Retroactively, let's call that discussion of reputation grinding our fifth point. The sixth and final one is to think about who to start advancing in a more focused manner once Taul Kajak is done with the story. I've got a lot of choices to slot into his position once he's done. Elemer Kell might be an obvious one, but I actually think I want to wait on him, since he'll be repeating the same Jedi Knight storyline. Just in terms of who I haven't seen in a while, one of my two secret agent-style troopers, Codon Veile the Chiss sniper, or Mirabeau Tane, the cyborg gunslinger makes a lot of sense, but from another perspective, one of the three outstanding force-using characters I have who's not a Jedi Knight makes sense too; the Sith Warrior, the Sith Inquisitor or the Jedi Consular. Regardless of whether I focus on them or not, I think it makes sense to advance both of the Sith, at least, at least one more planet. I think they're both about to start Balmorra, which is where most of my Imperial characters other than Vant are currently waiting. I'm quite positive that both of the Sith as well as Vash Galaide and Embric Stane are at that same point, and Wulf Hengest is actually on Balmorra waiting in the cantina, having picked up a few minor missions, but still needing to actually run them, if I remember correctly. Breaking up the logjam means focusing on some of the characters that are all in the same place and getting them out of the same place, even if it's just for a planet or two, and not all the way to a stopping point like the end of Act I, which I did with Anstal and Vant.

In any case, that's thought for a little bit further ahead. Like I said, I'll be lucky if I can finish my plans with Taul Kajak this week, given all of the things that I have going on. And I don't want to put Anstal and Vant on the backburner while I'm doing this either, so I'm looking to keep them going while just replacing Taul in the rotations.

The chestpiece here is the Contractor's (I also have the slightly less detailed Classic Contractors) but it is also just a color-swapped version of one of the CZ-198 Czerka reputation chestpieces. It's dyed with a crafted Dark Blue and gray dye, but because it's not a weird Czerka green base color, but rather a metallic gunmetal gray, I could use a secondary dye module in its place, like black, dark gray or even the easily and cheaply crafted medium gray, and it might look just as good if not even better. I might tweak the color just a bit over time. We'll see.

UPDATE: I was mistaken. It's not Wulf Hengest that's walked out of the spaceport on Balmorra and picked up a mission or two, it was actually Mirabeau Tane who did it on Tatooine. Given that he's ahead of the curve a bit, I think he's the next obvious one to work on, clearly, maybe even before Taul Kajak is done. If I can get Mirabeau to the same place that Anstal and Vant are, that leaves me room to get either Revecca Arden, Sith Inquisitor story or Phovos Maledict Sith Warrior story out of the pack on Balmorra. I'll have four characters that I'm actively moving forward at that point.

Elemer Kell is also a bit ahead, having already finished Taris (the Republic equivalent of Balmorra, at least in the place in the story) but because he's basically another Taul Kajak, or at least playing the same story with the same mechanics, he's staying on the bench a little longer.

Crafted Armormech armors

For some reason, I have a set of all of the Armormech crafted armors that I had Graggory make a long time ago, and then store in his cargo bay. For some reason, he ran out of room, and I sent them all to Galation to store. As I recently deleted Galation, I sent them all to Johhn, my banker, to store. But what in the world do I want all of these for, and why did I make them anyway? Realistically, most of them look kind of dumb, and many of them are in fact almost identical to other armors out there. 

https://swtorista.com/articles/swtor-armormech-crafting-guide/

They're also variable depending on the faction, unlike the stuff you buy from the adaptive armor vendor, for example. So if I make a Terenthium Onslaught armor to let my character be a Han Solo lookalike, something that I did in fact do with my old Luukke playthrough, my first smuggler, there's other good options out there that I could have used instead. Playing as a smuggler on Coruscant means that you'll get slightly recolored versions of almost the exact same armor set (minus the dumb beanie), or you can buy them now from the Coruscant planetary vendor. The drops are bind on pickup, but the planetary vendor pieces are legacy bound and wearable at first level instead of tenth, like the crafted one (the earliest you can wear a crafted set, by the way.) The cartel market Interstellar privateer is also almost identical to the crafted piece, except without a hat and a very slight difference to the vest that you probably don't even notice unless you really look hard for it, and of course, the cheap RD-07A Spider set on the Fleet is also legacy bound and wearable at first level, and costs very little. Although it has colors more like the Coruscant armor than the Terenthium. I tend to have used the Spider set frequently, and dyed it with a craftable dye as my most common approach.

Regardless, my point is that the crafted armor set doesn't really offer me anything that I need. So why am I holding on to it?

A few of the higher level stuff is better. I really have always liked the Imperial Vandinite Asylum helmet, although I don't care for the rest of the armor set. But why am I holding on to an entire armor set for one piece that, if I wanted another one, I could make again pretty quick? Why not just trash, or sell, or whatever, the sets, free up my cargo hold (not that I'm using it for anything, but still) and not even hold on to these anymore? After maybe going through them and deciding if I want to build any outfits with pieces of them, since I've already got them made, and all? Another thought is that maybe I'd create characters that used these pieces the way some of my characters have used a progression of crafted weapons, i.e., as soon as I'm high enough level to use them, I'd put them on! When I switched them out, I'd create outfits out of the old ones.

It's not the most elegant solution, and I don't know that I like the armors enough to want to do that, but it's somewhat intriguing nonetheless. If I do do this, I'm thinking about making a girl smuggler and using the Onslaught sets or a girl bounty hunter for the Asylum sets. Swtorista made a couple of videos about smuggler armors and bounty hunters armors you can craft where she modeled those series specifically on a Mirialan girl, and... I kinda like them. Maybe enough to even do that. Plus, I really haven't experienced the girl voice actors much.

Of course, what's maybe an easier alternative is to throw these sets on to my companions of various characters. I often don't really give a ton of thought to what they wear, and just grab something out of collections without giving it much thought. This might be a good way to use these pieces a little more smartly. But, of course, that's something like twenty companions across various characters; not sure that I can really use them all. But maybe it's better than most of the alternatives.

In addition to maybe a girl character, maybe a big fat character who I play for laughs would work too, and he can wear some of these armors. I dunno. I guess I'm just noodling around with ideas. No idea yet what—if anything—I want to do with these pieces that I made.