I spent much of the weekend not feeling good. Part of it is being home by myself. I feel like I want to do everything and nothing at the same time. Everything I try to do, I lose momentum after twenty to thirty minutes and want to do something else, so I bounce around from one thing to another. I think I'm partly sick because I'm home alone, meaning that I'm more bored than normal, which means I'm tired and not sleeping super well at the same time. I crashed early last night so I could have a chance at a decent day in the office today. Partly because I'm probably not eating well, which is messing me up digestively. Ugh, it's the worst. I haven't been apart from my wife for this long in quite a long time, and of course, I'm really kind of just starting. I may not see her in person again until the week of Thanksgiving, and she won't be home again until after New Years.
So I've got movies to watch, although I'm finding that after 25 years or however long it's been, that I don't really like Brotherhood of the Wolf that much after all. It's a good study in mood, costume and visual design, etc. but I'm not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I did considerably better a few days ago with The Living Daylights and the new Naked Gun. I'm also starting over with season 1 of The X-Files, but again, I've seen the first few episodes of the first season several times, and I'm not feeling it as much as I'd hoped. I'll probably feel the same about Supernatural which I also wanted to watch. I even stalled out on a slow episode of Seinfeld.
I'm reading Magic of Faerun, which I didn't expect to love, although I like it better in many ways than I expected to. But I'm about to get to the tedious list of spells, which makes up almost half the page count, so I'm not anticipating it being a good read going forward. I'm also reading the Ghoul Island campaign by Sandy Petersen Games, and it's a little on the rough side. It's fine enough to read, most of the time, but it would be terrible to play, and it has other challenges as well. Honestly, I think I'd enjoy it better as a novella in a collection of Lovecraftian-themed fantasy stories, like the Swords Against Cthulhu series. Honestly, it probably would have been among the better ones in the first volume of that collection. I wonder if the rest of the campaigns will feel that way too? In any case, I also want to start reading "Rise of the Runelords" shortly, and advance in my Adventure Path trawl, as well as "Mansion of Shadows" to continue my Freeport Trawl. Was that the title? I'm going by memory here.
I'm also reading a very old book that translates (among other things) the Mabinogion, but that's been a difficult read. Once I finish this Celtic volume, I still have a Norse volume to read. I read the Greek volume earlier this year, all of them nearly 500 pages. I guess I kind of hoped that they'd been rewritten to be... better written, but they're more "original" text volumes. I feel like it's a good thing that I'm reading them because I want to have read them, but I'm not really enjoying it. Then I have Stormwrack, the next in my environment read-through, and the penultimate that I have left to read, although I haven't started that yet, and I'm about ⅔ through Homeland the first book in Salvatore's Drizzt prequel series, long delayed after I finished the Icewind Dale original trilogy a couple of years ago. I would have started that earlier if my omnibus book hadn't been "lost" in storage for over a year. Of all of the entertainment media I'm trying to consume, that's the one that I'm finding the easiest to digest this last weekend, but I still found that I couldn't read more than a few chapters at a time before wanting to stop and do something else. This kind of lack of focus and motivation is unusual for me, but I find that it seems to spike when I'm home by myself. I have all kinds of grand plans of things I want to do when I'm alone and uninterrupted, but I find that it's supremely difficult for me to just settle down and do any of them without being distracted by the thought of doing one of the other ones of them instead.
Maybe I would be better served by actually doing something rather than passively consuming something; i.e., I haven't made a setting related YouTube video in months, and I should buckle down, finish the Cult of Undeath 5x5 and rework the parts of it that are clunky, and just have both that and Darkness in the Hill Country presented as a decent set of notes that I could literally sit down and start running right away if I wanted to. And maybe I should start writing that Darkness in the Hill Country serialized story that I've been wanting to do for a long time. Then I can pivot and do Cult of Undeath. Cult of Undeath in particular seems like it's been begging for some attention, and given that it's now late October, it's the perfect season for it, isn't it?
Weather's finally improved too, and the Indian summer seems to have ended. I want to see if I can do some of the small mountain hikes nearby while there's still some evening daylight, like Hanging Rock or Pilot Mountain. Given that sunset is 6:37 PM today according to weather.com, that means I'll have to either do it on Saturdays, or I'll have to leave work early to do it before it gets dark. Or both, ideally. I certainly can't today, but I'll keep my eyes open on my schedule for an opportunity to duck out an hour or two early this week. Spending some time outside in cool but sunny air with fall colors sounds absolutely perfect. Just what I need to clear my head.
That long off-topic intro aside, one thought that really struck me while reading the Forgotten Realms books is that the setting seems to have been written by and for gammas. I wouldn't have had the vocabulary to really articulate it back then in the early 00s, or even before, but something about the setting was always very off-putting to me, and it was hard to describe exactly why. The setting always seemed to be focused on magic-users, and more martial "jock" type characters were minimized... when they weren't women. These wizards and other magic-users all have this arrogant, smarmy, talk too much personality, and in the fiction, they're unaccountably successful with women. Who all kind of wander around in a hippy free-love commune style social network.
If gammas can be described, among other things, as imaging that they secretly deserve to be alphas, while being completely clueless that they don't have the goods to be alphas, then it's pretty clear that the Forgotten Realms is the fantasy playground of gammas. Of course, it's sufficiently professionally written to still be workable to everyone, but like I said, in spite of whatever good ideas and presentation it had, there was always something very off-putting to me about it. What really clinched it this time around reading through it was a few off-hand quotes added from a couple of major characters; Elminster and Khelben "Blackstaff" Arunsun, where their smarmy, overly wordy, arrogant monologues to unnamed characters who didn't matter came across as the quintessential gamma posturing and grand-standing. Once that clicked, the rest of the setting clicked too. Ed Greenwood is a quintessentially creepy old midwit; a gamma for certain, and Sean K. Reynolds, the writer during the 3e period most closely associated with Forgotten Realms, is prone to all kind of gamma rage episodes. He may be good at what he does, maybe, but gammas can be, if you can get them to just focus on and do it. I obviously don't know either of them personally, but they both come across as gammas.
The detail of Forgotten Realms, for which it is famous (or infamous, perhaps) is another gamma tell; it gives gammas the perfect opportunity to know more about "the lore" than anyone else around them and be able to bring it up and score points in their own mind for knowing stuff that people around them don't. Now, none of this means that Forgotten Realms should be absolutely ditched and not used by "normal" people. It's still a setting with plenty of good ideas, if you like a very D&D-ish superhero themed game, I suppose. I'm enjoying my 5e Tyranny of Dragons game well enough, even if it is both Forgotten Realms and 5e; both typically red flags against it, because of course the most important component of anyone's game is the people that you're playing it with. I've enjoyed the Salvatore Forgotten Realms books, or at least I've enjoyed the original Icewind Dale trilogy and the prequel Underdark trilogy. I read 3-4 or so of the books that followed, but I enjoyed them less over time and eventually quit caring. I've also read some other books; Paul S. Kemp, etc. and liked them a little less, but they weren't terrible, just not what I was interested in. And I've read some of the campaigns here and there. I'll read more as time goes on. I certainly think Forgotten Realms is a useful setting to be familiar with, and I'll continue my 3e Forgotten Realms trawl. But this eye-opening realization certainly explains why I've also found certain elements of the setting very off-putting, and more specifically, why I've found fans of the setting kind of off-putting. Being aware of their genesis in gamma attitudes means that I can avoid the pitfalls more easily, I suppose.
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