Music, movies, books and Eberron

In spite of the fact that my daughter, son-in-law and grandson were visiting all of last week, and that my wife was going through a bit of a professional crisis (at least it felt like it to her) and needed to spend some time talking to me and watching some shows to take her mind of things that were stressing her out, I still managed to do some reading. And, as I mentioned earlier, I'd been listening to some classic John Williams music too as part of a retrospective. Mostly during my commutes and then when I go out to my car during lunch, but still, it's something. A few things happened.

First, although I posted earlier that I'd been pretty soured on both Star Wars and Indiana Jones by the actions of Disney and even George Lucas himself, I still found myself feeling nostalgic, especially while going through the Special Edition expanded soundtrack albums for Empire and Jedi. When my wife goes out of town in a month or two to help my other son with his coming twins and I'm stuck at home alone most evenings and weekends, I think it likely that I'll pull out my old laserdisc rips of the theatrical original versions of the original trilogy and watch it again, and maybe the original Indy trilogy too. In spite of my fickle moodiness about the two series, they were good movies, which is why I loved them for so long. I don't have to have a relationship with the movies, and they don't have to be perfect to still be enjoyable. I also don't have to like the creator to enjoy the creation. 

I literally just finished the Special Edition soundtrack end titles for Jedi—as I'm writing the last few notes are playing in my earbuds (quieter day at work. Or at least fewer meetings.) Next up are some of the incidental songs, like the ewok village music, "Lapti Nek", the original version which was replaced (foolishly) in the Special Edition by "Jedi Rocks" and then the original "Yub Nub" version of the end titles. My own folder is better than the soundtracks that I bought years ago in some ways, because I prefer the original versions there. That's also why when I watch them, I'll watch my laser disc rips rather than my Special Edition discs, or stream it from Disney+ or whatever.

I may also end up watching "Andor" while my wife is gone. I've been trying to get her to watch it with me, but she has been kind of reluctant. I guess I'm not "completely" over Star Wars after all. Like I said, it's not an ex-girlfriend. It's a few movies from my childhood, as well as various additional titles and media projects, of wildly varying quality. I can appreciate those that are decent and roll my eyes and avoid those that aren't. 

Secondly, by funny coincidence, one of the things I watched with my wife when she needed to distract herself from being stressed about work was The Big Bang Theory, and we saw the episode where Amy Farrah Fowler "ruins" Raiders of the Lost Ark for the guys by pointing out that Indiana Jones himself was completely incidental to the plot. Nothing he did made any effect on anything; the Nazis would literally have found the ark with or without him, they would have taken it to their island, they would have opened it, and they would have all died. Indy brought it back, just so it could get stuffed in a warehouse and forgotten. That's his only actual accomplishment in the movie, according to her. This isn't entirely true; Marian would probably have been killed by the Nazis, and arguably, Indiana Jones reconnecting with Marian was a more important plot point than finding the ark even. So it made a difference to her. There's even a line in the movie where this is acknowledged, but whether this was a nod by the screenwriter Kasdan that he recognized this or not is unclear; when Indy has the bazooka trained on the ark before the Nazis open it, he tells the Nazis that all he cares about is the girl. 

Anyway, shortly I'll listen to a Wandering DMs podcast, then the Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones soundtracks. I don't have the same nostalgia for the prequel trilogy as younger Millennials do, so I don't expect anything to come of that other than my original intention; hear the John Williams soundtracks and appreciate them for their own sake in spite of the movies. Then another podcast, followed by Revenge of the Sith and The Force Awakens, etc. until I run out of Star Wars soundtracks to listen to. I've got plenty of other music, of course, after that, to keep the same basic pattern going. 

Thirdly, on our side of the social spectrum, there's obviously been a lot of disappointment in more recent Star Wars offerings, and a desire to have a good swashbuckling space opera that recreates what was good about Star Wars while excising the stuff that sucks about it. This is especially relevant, because Star Wars was just a grab-bag of copied elements from a bunch of older space opera anyway; it's almost as if the setting was a hybrid of Dune and the Lensmen, and the plot was a hybrid of Where Eagles Dare in space with The Dam Busters Anyone can do essentially the same thing; take a bunch of old space opera elements and rather transparently put them all together and rip them off. I've even done so myself. For a while, I hoped that the Galaxy's Edge series would be the replacement Star Wars I was hoping for, but it's not. Cole and Anspach said that's what they were doing, but only one of the novels actually felt like Star Wars; the rest of it was overtly military science fiction, written for former military science fiction fans. Not bad, but not Star Wars, and not my cup of tea either. I also thought that maybe John C. Wright, who's well regarded in "our" sphere might be the guy. He's got a four-book space opera that claims to be exactly the kind of old fashioned Star Wars rip-off space opera that I'm looking for. My daughter bought me the first book in the series (off my Amazon wish list) a while ago (for Christmas I think) and just finished the first title, Space Pirates of Andromeda. Honestly, I didn't really love it, and based on my now a couple of different experiences with John C. Wright's work, I think he's a over-rated. He's a great prose stylist, I'll give him that, but that's one of the author skills that I care about the least. I didn't think his character or plot development was anything special at all, and his world-building kind of actively turned me off on occasion. Apparently the space-faring races of his space opera Andromeda galaxy are just animal people, and their species names are the scientific names of the animal families that they resemble; deer people are Cervidae, weasel people are Mustelidae, fox people are Vulpinae, etc. 

He also shares, to some degree, with Lucas himself, a somewhat beta (delta?) approach to girls in his fiction. The somewhat bratty space princess teenager with the special magical powers that nobody else has has to save the hapless hero several times through her astral projection. That kind of turned me off too. In fact, in general, he didn't really get the old-fashioned vibe of capable men who just jump in there, roll up their sleeves and make things happen. There's considerably too much reliance and technology and magical powers (of someone else, no less) and considerably too little on his own competence, resilience and innovation. And I literally groaned and rolled my eyes when he referenced Asian-morph humans as the most attractive. Nerds with yellow fever are particularly cringe.

And his Christian references were too on-the-nose for my taste. I prefer Tolkien to Lewis, but Wright is writing the Narnia of space opera, not the Lord of the Rings of space opera. I feel like... eh. I do think that I'll get around to ordering the next three books of the series—eventually—but I'm not in any particular hurry to do so. Especially because, see below:

Fourth, I finally found a lot of the books that I'd been looking for in boxes in my garage, which I didn't have space to unpack after relocating (yet) so they were kind of "lost" in storage. That brings a bunch of stuff back to the reading list, including an omnibus of the Drizzt prequel series (I read the original Halfling Gem trilogy a year or two ago, and meant to read this shortly after, but then when I relocated, it's been lost in storage for just over a year), an omnibus of the first five Barsoom books, the original Timothy Zahn sequel trilogy of novels for Star Wars, and maybe some of the M.Y.T.H. and Thieves World books by Robert Asprin (et al.) I also have plenty on my novel list already; a trilogy of Arkham Horror novels, The Mad King, the James Silke Horned Helmet four-book series, Dracula, and another dive after several years into Lovecraft, etc. Before any of that, I want to finish the Riftwar Saga and read the last book there, A Darkness at Sethanon. Man, I've got so much to read. But that's novels. In terms of game books:

Fifth, I'm only a few pages away from finishing the original Eberron book. I actually just need to read the Forgotten Forge adventure included at the end, at which point I'll be done. I'll be picking up the next Eberron book, which is the first module, on pdf next, as well as the next Freeport book, which is "Black Sails" in physical gamebooks, so my "what I'm reading" is A Darkness at Sethanon, Black Sails Over Freeport and Shadows of the Last War by this afternoon. I don't want this Eberron (and other) trawl projects to start muscling out Freeport, but some of them were ideas that I had in mind for what to read for a long time before I started the Freeport Trawl anyway. The Freeport Trawl, for instance, is going to eventually feed my Curse of the Corsair Coast 5x5 Front, so of the bunch, it's the slighter higher priority. But I also don't want to lose momentum on my Eberron Remixed 2e project, which now has a page created on the Eberron Remixed site (although not yet any content on it) and reading the products that I haven't in many years is the best way to keep up my motivation to do that.

And to end, here's a ChatGPT image of ghostly pirates; a theme of Black Sails if I remember correctly. Although, again; I'm expecting Black Sails to be silly, it mostly takes place in weird pocket dimensions, and it probably isn't really very appropriate for Old Night use. I hope that after I get past this product, though, that most of the rest of what Freeport offers will be more appropriate for my use.

UPDATE: Finally, I picked up Black Sails to start reading it this evening, and right there in the very first paragraph, it makes mention of Tales of Freeport already being out when it came out, so my order is a little wrong. Sigh. It probably doesn't matter, but I'm going to pull that one ahead and read it first now. I was thrown off by a typo somewhere, because I thought it was released in 2005, which was... obviously not correct.