I have a few topics, but only one of them is both lengthy enough to justify a post, or at least most of a post, and on topic for this blog... even given the pretty loose definition of what I consider on topic.
First off, the one I want to speak about probably the least, but which is the more important one. I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I lived for many years in Michigan. I am in fact visiting Michigan right now, and I was at church when the church shooting happened in Grand Blanc. I wasn't in Grand Blanc; I was at church with my daughter in Monroe, but they sent us home. My son, who's also in another congregation in Michigan, was sent home, but because his church start time is later, he got sent home basically while on the way to church. He pulled up in the parking lot, turned around and went back home. This was no doubt a precaution, because nobody yet knew what was going on in Grand Blanc. I think that we still don't. There are reports that the guy hated the Church and had some kind of personal grudge against it, although that's just a comment from the White House press secretary without any background that I know of.
I don't trust official narratives very much. There's usually a lot that they don't want to tell us that's actually quite salient. There's also a bunch of stuff that they tell us that is pretty suss, as the kids say. But I'd have already guessed that this is someone who has a grudge against the church. Most people who do are people who are in the LBGT community, but not necessarily. It's a bit grotesque that I've seen liberals online desperate to jump on board the narrative that he was a MAGA guy, because they desperately want there to be a violent crazy person who isn't a member of their rabid animal cult of violent extremists. Even if this guy doesn't turn out to be liberal at all, it looks very unlikely that his attack was politically motivated anyway, so like I said, the impetus to assign a MAGA political identity to the guy is at best grotesque... but also very revealing of the desperation that they feel, because they know the score. Democrats are the party who romanticizes hatred of normal life and violent revolutionary overthrow of the stable order for anarchy wherein they imagine that they will be free of... something. Or perhaps they imagine that they will be at the top of the order that they imagine will replace the one today in their new dystopia. An ideology based on resentment, entitlement and frustrated narcissism always has those kinds of stupid delusions at its heart.
In any case, as someone who is relatively close to this event, it had an interesting psychological effect on me and my family. I'd been to the building that burned down at least half a dozen times when we did bigger, broader activities that involved multiple congregations, and while I didn't know anyone in Grand Blanc, I'd likely met at least one of the victims briefly in the past. I do have a good friend here in Michigan who was part of that congregation for a while before moving to my neck of the woods and still retains friends there, I believe. He's also a professional federal law enforcement officer, and we're supposed to meet for dinner tonight. His perspective will no doubt be closer to it than even mine.
It was also nice, I must admit, to hear the French names pronounced correctly, or at least I presume correctly. The book was, of course, as good as I remember it. It's at least the fourth time I've read it, probably more like the sixth, but I haven't really been counting.
Although not nearly as good as the novel, the 1952 film adaptation with Stewart Granger, Mel Ferrer, Eleanor Parker and Janet Leigh is still a fantastic old swashbuckling movie of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and the duel fought between Granger and Ferrer is one of the most famous old school swordfights from Hollywood. I love the voiceover during the old trailer: "The hot-blooded adventures of masterful men! The bold intrigues of seductive women! The pageantry of a great novel! A fabulous swashbuckling era comes to life!" Yeah, that's what I'm talking about! Man, it is so good! But the novel is at least an order of magnitude better still. There's a reason that it easily hits my top five books of all time.
Also, in the wake of the socio-sexual hierarchy articles I've read, and I've read a lot, it's curious. Sabatini was probably a Sigma himself, based on the fact that his characters seem to be very clearly Sigmas themselves, not to mention what I know of his biography. Andre-Louis Moreau, Mr. Scaramouche himself, is perhaps one of the most iconic Sigma protagonists I know of in literature, although placed in a somewhat conventional swashbuckling romance. I haven't read them super recently, but I certainly remember thinking that Peter Blood and Charles de Bernis, the protagonists of Captain Blood and The Black Swan respectively give off very strong Sigma vibes too.
Third, The Living Daylights is a criminally under-rated James Bond movie. The first (of only two) to star Timothy Dalton, it's famous for it's more grounded, darker and edgier approach that wouldn't come into vogue again until the Daniel Craig era, in the wake of the wildly successful Bourne movies. I might actually like it better than most of the Craig Bond films; it's possible that it's my favorite of the entire series. The follow up was even darker, License to Kill, but Living Daylights was always my personal favorite. I love the Cold War vibes to it in particular, and honestly I think James Bond beyond the Cold War is a bit of a fish out of water anyway.
I also really love the soundtrack. Of course, it's got a great a-ha song, when they were still a kind of 80s new wave slash synthpop band. (As an aside, their second album, Scoundrel Days is actually better than their first one, Hunting High and Low, even though it lacks the big hits. The first album is wonderful; one of my favorites of the 80s as a pop album especially, but the second one as an "alternative" New Wave style album, a little bit rockier but still very synthesizer 80s sounding. Absolutely recommended.) It's also got a great "other" song by The Pretenders, which becomes the de facto theme of the KGB assassin dude. I didn't realize this until just recently, but it's also the last James Bond soundtrack composed by John Barry. The orchestral score soundtrack is really, really good. But again; everything about the whole movie is under-rated. If you haven't seen it, or haven't seen it recently, I highly recommend that you watch it. It's pretty cheap, actually, which is nice. I also think you can get streaming James Bond on Amazon Prime of the entire run for a decent price. Which, I mean, why wouldn't you?
I did see a funny exchange online recently about this movie in particular: someone called it gritty and realistic; someone else sarcastically remarked that it was especially realistic when they were sledding down the mountainside under a hail of bullets sitting in a cello case.
The final part of this post is my belated notice of a major change in the strategy of Paizo "adventure paths." Adventure paths started as linked modules in Dungeon Magazine during the later 3e era. Dungeon Magazine had been outsourced to Paizo by this point, so in theory, Paizo invented the Adventure Path as it has been known the last nearly twenty years. WotC at the time released at least a few large mega-modules, what they now call campaigns. The one that sticks out most to me is Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, an expansion of the old Ravenloft 1e module into the size and scope of the modern WotC campaigns, such as Curse of Strahd which is the latest iteration of the same adventure. But for whatever reason, the adventure path seemed to have captured the market's imagination in a way that these hardback ~250-350 page "campaigns" did not, at least at the time. When 4e was to launch and WotC canceled their agreement with Paizo to do Dungeon and Dragon Magazines, Paizo decided to (among other things) create their own subscription model to continue adventure paths, and they came out with their popular adventure path subscription, starting with the classic Rise of the Runelords, and then the more than 40 or so adventure paths. They were especially popular during the 4e era, but when 5e came out, WotC was able to regain their king of the hill approach to system. They also started issuing big loads of campaign books. They released enough of them that they started to compete credibly with the adventure paths. They are, after all, quite a big cheaper.
The "classic" adventure path was a 90+ or so page paperback book with a big module, and a few appendices, including a small bestiary, some setting info, and even often some short stories, which sold for about $20. Maybe more; the current price is $20 for a digital copy, and $30 for a physical copy, but I think that there's been inflation since 2008 or so. And classically, you had to get six of them to have the whole campaign. At a minimum, the adventure path cost $120, and at a maximum, $180. And they generally went from levels 1 to about 14-15 or so.
In recent years, they experimented with different lengths of campaigns and different ranges of levels, but the "classic" line-up is by far the majority of the Adventure Paths. In fact, three volume more condensed adventure paths that cover ten levels seem to have been the intermediate step that they've been doing the last couple of years. But I'm way behind on collecting and reading them, so I'm not as familiar with the newer stuff.
The WotC campaigns, and they varied somewhat, were levels 1-10 in a single hardback volume that cost $50. (And the price hasn't really changed; the most recent one is listed on Amazon at $48 and change.) Needless to say, this is a better deal financially. Sure, sure... you don't get as much content, but the fact is that Paizo buffed up their content with stuff that people didn't really need. What you really needed was the adventures, not the fiction, not the setting essays, not even the bestiaries (much of which was more or less reprinted in the actual Bestiary books, and few of the animals within actually appeared in the adventures. I believe, although I haven't actually checked, that the actual adventure page count is probably more or less equivalent (more or less) to the WotC campaigns.
Mike Mearls in a podcast interview, I think the one with Questing Beast, mentioned that the campaigns were a direct attack on the adventure paths, and given the most recent announcement from Paizo, I have to assume that they have been successful enough to have Paizo adjust their business model to one much more like WotC. Their "adventure paths" will now be basically equivalent to WotC campaign books in page count and format, and they'll issue one every quarter, I think they said. However, they will charge a fair bit more than WotC; $80 vs ~$50.
Of course, all of that assumes a consistent quality if you're going to assume the same value for price, and that's hardly a given. Some of the WotC campaigns are pretty good—reportedly—while many of them are largely considered ridiculous jokes. At least by the kind of people who's taste I trust. I think with Paizo, the quality is more even, but not necessarily anything super either. They're less obnoxiously woke, but it's still there in the ambient background, and slowly building like the temperature of the boiling frog analogy. Not that that's the only quality problem, but it's the biggest one in much of the entertainment industries, including RPGs.
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