Reading while flying

Work continues to suck. I had to travel to Hermosillo again, and not only is that kind of a dumpy little town at the best of times, but June is not the best of times. 106° highs every afternoon. I had no car. I went basically back and forth from the airport (via shuttle) to a hotel, to a supplier a block away from the hotel that was in crisis mode unable to adequately deliver parts. Travel to Hermosillo sucks; I had to spend a night in Phoenix, and then travel an entire day through DFW to get home... but thunderstorms in DFW got me stranded there another night. I'm really, really sick and tired of work completely eating into my personal life, and causing me a lot of stress and anxiety that I can't escape from in the evenings and on weekends. That said, being on site was, in some ways, less stressful than being here, even if days were longer and I had to spend my weekends traveling. And while I never really adjusted to the time zone, and didn't sleep super well, I did still have some reasonable amount of time and mental energy to read some, at least, while I was traveling. Not as much as I would have a year or two ago when I was much more relaxed while traveling. I finished three books, although one of them was short: the Pathfinder Companion version of Osirion (there's a bigger one on the Pathfinder Setting/Chronicles line, but I haven't gotten to that one yet, and it was published quite a bit later), the next book in the T. H. Lain 3e iconics character novels--this one was City of Fire and added Krusk and Alhandra, among others, the barbarian and paladin, as well as half of the next novel after that, and I finished Faiths & Pantheons, a crappy 3e Forgotten Realms sourcebook. 

I say crappy, but what I mostly mean is that it's not my type of book, I had little interest in it before I read it, little interest while reading it, and I have no idea what I'd do with a book like that anyway. I felt obligated to read it as part of the trawl, but I just wanted to get through it and move on to the next one. Which is the infamous Silver Marches, famous for the fluff vs crunch debate and drama caused by one of its main authors, Sean K. Reynolds, who comes across as a raging gamma. (It's interesting to note that he was laid off by Wizards shortly after this. Maybe getting in a public internet slap-fight with your upper management on the strategic direction is a bad move. Especially when you bet on an outcome that, as near as I can tell, doesn't come true.) In the next half dozen or so titles on my FR Trawl, I've got City of the Spider Queen, a somewhat lengthy adventure, Unapproachable East, Underdark and Serpent Kingdoms, all books that I've actually wanted to read for some time, but until I started this trawl, I never got around to. 

I also read a little more than half of the Pathfinder Freeport book on pdf, but then my hardcopy arrived while I was out, so I abandoned the pdf read, stuck a bookmark in the hard copy, and started reading it in physical form instead. I actually just read, last night, some of the early "Denizens of Freeport" chapter, where they added the character who's on the new, updated cover art. She's a terrible, terrible, unlikeable girlboss May Sue, but although they added her, I haven't seen (yet) that they've tied her to any plots or anything, so whatever. There's a lot of terrible girlboss Mary Sues in Freeport, sadly, including the Sea Lord herself. I had thought that I saw somewhere that she was going to be replaced in later products (the Return to Freeport AP maybe?) but I'm probably wrong. We'll see when I read that relatively shortly, but I doubt that such confirmed "male feminists" like Chris Pramas and his partner or wife or whatever he calls her Nicole Lindroos would ever take a powerful woman NPC off of her perch on an unmerited pedestal. (I presume that they're that kind of partnership. I don't actually know or care for sure. He could well be gay, and "she" could well be a he, for all I know.)

Luckily for me, when using any of this material from any of these woke mutants, I would necessarily need to modify all kinds of details; it would hardly resemble the original once I'm done. My reworking of some Freeport elements into Curse of the Corsair Coast will be a pretty brusque reworking, if not just new material altogether that has the same theme and tone, sorta. Changing the name and sex of an NPC that is important on paper but doesn't really matter in terms of any of the adventures, really, is super easy; barely an inconvenience.

Anyway, other than being slightly more woke and significantly more thicc, due to also incorporating all kinds of material from the Companions, this book clearly is meant to replace the older systemless Pirate's Guide, so I'm sure I'll shelve the older book in the archive section, and this will take its place. Although since I will have read both in the last three years when I finish it, I probably won't pick it up again for quite a while unless I run Curse of the Corsair Coast and need to reference it. I don't I'll actually read it cover to cover again for some time. 

As an aside, let me reiterate a point I've made before, although it's merely a minor pet peeve. Pramas and Lindroos pronounce Green Ronin like Green Roneen. That's clearly wrong. Ronin is already a word in the English language, and it's pronounced Ronin, so that's how I pronounce their company name. You don't get to establish artisan pronunciation of an existing word just because you want to, even if it's kinda sorta closer to the Japanese pronunciation where the word originally came from.