No more pop culture for me

For many years, I've kept a toe in the water by being subscribed to a number of pop culture commentators on Youtube. Geeks & Gamers, Ryan Kinel, Overlord DVD, Nerdrotic, Critical Drinker, and a few others. For months now, I only kind of skim over what they're posting. I made the hard decision today to let it all go and unsubscribe from all of them. I simply don't care anymore about pop culture. I don't care to see more details of "go woke go broke" and the commentators who have little more to say than that. (And if they're repetitive and offer little, you should see what the comments say.) The reason that I hung on to them for so long was because I still had a complicated break-up going on with pop culture, I think. I'd said before that my relationship to Star Wars, Marvel, Disney and more had all turned to apathy, and while that's largely true, I was still resentful of them for what they'd done, so there was a thin thread of non-apathetic emotional ties to the industry. I still loved some of the older content, and I still held on to some kind of hope that it would be restored. Or maybe I didn't hope that anymore, and I just was angry enough to enjoy watching it burn. 

But as I've had a harder and harder time over the last several months engaging with this type of Youtube content, I've had to accept that I really truly have reached peak apathy. I don't ever care to watch it burn. I'm content knowing that it did, and then not thinking about them anymore.

My connection to Star Wars is maintained because I own all of the older movies that I'd care to watch again, although to be fair, I don't do that nearly as frequently as I used to. It's been years since I watched any of them, especially the prequel trilogy. I never even got around to watching the "new" season of the Clone Wars, and I don't care about anything else happening in Star Wars, with the exception of The Old Republic, which I'm still coming back to from time to time, including (obviously) now.

My relationship with Marvel is a bit different; I spent a few years as a buyer of comic books, but that honestly was in the late 80s. The Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri X-Men, for instance, and a few other books from that same era (New Mutants, X-Factor, Avengers, Thor and Iron Man. The last three, especially the last two, weren't really super popular at the time, so that was an outlier for me with the market overall.) Previous to that, I'd really liked a lot of superhero cartoons, especially Spider-man and Hulk themed ones, when I was a younger kid. So, I'd always been a Marvel superhero fan (and I watched Batman and Superfriends too, but I was mostly a Marvel guy), but I was a fringe fan, not a hardcore fan who was really into the collecting, or even reading the comics, honestly. I also bought a few trade paperback collections of some more recent stuff, like the Ultimate Spider-man for a while, but I'm still the kind of guy who was never super into it. I enjoyed the brief high profile mainstream popularity of Marvel characters in the movies, and was especially gratified to see Thor and Iron Man come into their own, since I'd liked them way back in the later 80s, but letting go of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is pretty easy, because I only have a somewhat tenuous connection to the older content anyway, really.

For Disney, my relationship is even more complicated. I grew up trusting Disney as a family entertainment company, like everyone of my generation, but I've also been aware of their subversive nature for a long time. But I wasn't ever a huge fan of anything Disney. My wife is a huge fan of Disney, and I let her drag me many times to the parks, to the movies, etc. I think she's disappointed that I've deferred from Disney, but honestly, I wasn't ever that much of a fan anyway; I mostly did it for her.

There's little else going on in Hollywood that I care about. Our pop culture has become completely moribund. And honestly, the corporatization of that is as much a problem there as the wokeness. Pop culture hasn't had a chance in many years. Brian Neimeier, who I don't really read anymore, but who is a good commenter on pop culture stuff, describes how almost all of pop culture went bad in 1997. Long before wokeness was a term (although proto-wokeness was certainly still a thing with many of the same ideals, just not yet metastasized into full on craziness.) It's a good read, and even then it's several years old.  https://brianniemeier.com/2018/01/ground-zero/

I admit that it feels a little strange to be disconnected from almost all pop culture except for old stuff and some occasional indie stuff, but honestly, I already was. I was just holding on to something because of memories of a good time, like an ex girlfriend that you can't quite let go of.

But not long ago, as I mentioned, I watched The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland. My oldest son and his wife watched it with me. That's still a great movie that still entertains, and it's over 80 years old (released 1938.) This weekend we'll be watching Rebecca from 1940 with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine (which was her step-father's last name; she's actually Joan de Haviland and was Olivia's little sister.) Although I suggested it, it's really "presented" by my wife and daughter. On my reading list recently was some equally aged planetary romance from Otis Adelbert Kline, and some cheeky noir/fantasy by Simon R. Green from the very earliest 90s (Hawk & Fisher)

I find that reading old stuff from the age of my teenage years or older is still fun. They were fun in the 80s, and even in the 80s I liked old movies, because my dad played them a lot for us. Errol Flynn swashbucklers like Robin Hood and Captain Blood have always been among my favorite movies. Sometimes things don't get better with age, but sometimes timeless stuff is still timeless, and progress isn't a given. Pop culture hasn't had progress since the 80s-90s. It had a major drop-off following the hippy revolution, climbed back up to another peak in the 80s and maybe early 90s, and then has had a fairly steady degradation and decay since then. Today, pop culture only produces something of value almost on accident, unless it comes out of an indie scene with someone who isn't beholden to corporate interests and still understands what made timeless stuff so timeless to begin with. 

And maybe that's not so bad. After all, until recently, it was normal for people to look at a much broader spread of pop culture. My generation read stuff like David Eddings, Terry Brooks and Weiss & Hickman, of course, but they also routinely read Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock. I hardly knew a D&D fan in the 80s—and we were junior high kids—who hadn't read "the classics" at least as much if not more than the modern authors. Older movies were still broadcast on TV and as VCRs and home media rental became a new business during that decade, older movies were certainly a huge part of it. I used to work in a VHS rental store as a teenager; I remember quite well what rented. Sure, new releases were (of course) the biggest renters, but older stuff had a steady stream of rentals. Later, when stuff became cheaper, archive older movies were popular. Older books were routinely brought back into print, a process that continues through Kindle and vanity/indie presses even today.

It's a brave new world out there, folks. I'm finally addressing that head-on by decoupling myself from my last routine and regular attachment to mainstream pop culture, even if that last regular attachment was just the critics mocking its failure.

Just to add some visual interest to an otherwise banal and boring post, here's a few new screenshots of Luukke in his "Frontier Gambler" mien. The main gist of the outfit is courtesy of Vitnir, who did one very similar in his unique smuggler outfits video series. The head, torso and leggings, as well as the dye module are courtesy of him. I also used his boots and gloves and belt originally, but then decided that I wanted them to be different after all.

Honestly, those matter a lot less than the torso, head and legs, and the dye module, if present. 

Oh, and I always do my own thing with weapons.

And you may notice that there are no shadows. I noticed that the shadows don't line up with the ground very well, and make the floatiness even more obvious sometimes, but even when they don't they cause lag on my rig, which doesn't have a graphics card. I've mentioned before, I had a graphics card, but for some reason it always made the rig crash when my brother was building it, so we decided not to put it in, since the processer was fast enough that I'd be able to play older games just fine without one, mostly. The shadows on this game are one concession to that.

It still lags a bit on really busy environments, like Mek-Sha and Dantooine. Although I remember that people even with super hotrod rigs complained about lag on Dantooine, especially during the pirate event, so I don't think that that's my computer's issue.

I should go check it out, though. The pirate event is ongoing right now, and they did migrate to cloud servers some time ago since I last played.

BioWare blegh

I've been a little frustrated with BioWare lately. Their 7.0.1 update today, which was supposed to fix some bugs (which, presumably it did do. I notice that the unify colors problem seems to be working finally now) seems to have broken Galactic Seasons. I'm not getting rewards on the reward track that I'm earning. They just disappear. Luckily for me it's only been one weapon. I've seen reports of other people have worse problems with rewards not dropping, like cartel coins and more. 

I'm reminded of other problems that I have with them, of course. Their political correctness predates the use of the word woke, but it's the same problem. They've been saying for some time now that the character of Knights of the Old Republic 2 is Meetra Surik, an action-grrl Jedi. Which is fine, except that it's not true. Had they always initially intended for the character to be a grrl Jedi, it seems unlikely that the iconic artwork (other than the slipcase's cover art) showing the main character would have featured a man. Yes, some of us remember, BioWare. You can't tell us that one thing happened while we remember first hand that something else is actually what happened instead.

Ironically, had the character always been meant to be a grrl, and the artwork showed that clearly, it probably wouldn't have been a big deal. I mean, I doubt I'd have been quite as in to that, since I'm not a fan of the action-grrl stereotype. Like a normal, psychologically function and healthy person, I like women to be feminine, not act like Fake Men. But I could have overlooked it if everything else was done well, which it most respects it was. After all, we all know that the character is who you pick. If you make a female character, then the Jedi Exile is female for your playthrough. So making a big deal of virtue-signaling that the "default" assumption was that she was female comes across as virtue-signaling and obnoxious.

Of course, we also know that the fanbase for 1) Star Wars and 2) video games is heavily slanted towards young men. Not as much as it used to be, as more and more young women are getting into video games, although they don't necessarily play the same games or relate to the characters the same way. But still. Who did they think they were kidding? The default for the character was the one that was illustrated in their promotional artwork.

UPDATE: Now it's not just one weapon, it's also 200 cartel coins. I specifically DIDN'T claim them because of the bug, but it "autoclaimed" them anyway. Except, of course, that I didn't get them.

Three open tickets all related to the same bug. Hope I get the stuff that I earned from the helpdesk somehow, but I don't know. This is one of those game-breaking moments that causes people to walk away, folks, if it isn't addressed quickly and satisfactorily. Because of this, I feel like there's not any point in even playing at all. I'll get shafted from rewards if I do.

Old Republic Update

I haven't played a lot of SWTOR lately. I've logged in every day and done the Seasons daily challenges—because let's face, it I've had the weekly challenges done every week so far on the first day that they're available. Three weeks of them so far, and I'm on level 32—or rather, only one daily challenge shy of it. That's about a third of the way through in 3 weeks; so even with some Spring Break traveling, I should be done quite early with the entire thing.

This coming week, which starts tomorrow, I should be extra busy in the game, however, since it's Bounty Hunter week and I need to get a bunch of Bounty Hunter contracts. I've got at least seven characters who need to get a bounty contract every day. I think that may be all that it allows me to do, actually. If I can get more than one contract for those characters, then I will. I can't remember for sure how it works, however. I may be able to get contracts with some of my lower level characters too. I'll need to check on that, though; I've never tried to do it with a character who wasn't mostly done with the main story before.

Even so, if I can get fifty contracts this week, that'll be pretty nifty. I'll be able to buy the bowcaster rifle that I want and still have a fair number of contracts left to buy something else further on, when I decide what exactly it is. And I'll be able to accrue enough rep to hopefully get my BBA rep up to Legendary status. 

After that, I need to decide what to work on. I'll still have Seasons to do, but it isn't enough to really keep me very busy. This week, on most days, I only logged in for about fifteen minutes a day to go get a few syndicate plans and sell them for rep tokens, which in turn gave me my daily challenge. I played just a bit with my greenskinned agent, who I'm no longer recording, but I'd like to get back to my recording characters. That said, I've got a fair number of lower level characters that I need to continue doing; Anstal Tane the Scoundrel, Vant Galaide the Mercenary, Hutran Thanatos the Operative, Elemer Kell and Taul Kajak the Jedi Sentinels, and Revecca Arden the Sith Sorcerer. And I want to start a new Vanguard Bounty Hunter too. So I'll have plenty to do, but it'll all be relatively low level, and I'll be recording most of what I'm playing with them. But I have relatively little to do with my other characters, other than reputation and seasons.

All of that will keep me pretty busy. And then, when I get word that the Legacy of the Sith stuff has been sufficiently debugged, I'll probably take my main Jedi Knight M'aa'rk and go do that stuff. Other than that, there's still a little bit of daily reputation for places like Makeb, Section X, Yavin 4, Ossus, etc. that I want to continue to chip away at. I'd like to think that every week or so I'd finish off another one of those until I've only got a few left that I may or may not even be interested in, like the various swoop bike gangs, etc. Makeb and Yavin 4 are already at Champion level, so they'll be relatively quick.

I've only got seven Legend rank reputation tracks so far, and with four more that are close or that I'm specifically targeting.  

To be fair, though--some of my other hobbies are starting to peek through the clouds again and demand attention. I've got the materials I need on hand to build a DIY dice tray so I can throw my metal dice without scratching our kitchen table, and I've got people that I could potentially play with again too. I'm getting remotivated to draw more maps again for my Dark Fantasy X setting. I've been doodling again with Space Opera X as a setting, adding a few more things to it. The weather is improving, and some hiking possibilities are starting to take shape. I've even started reading more again, and dabbling more with music again. It's crazytown right now, I tell you.

Most of those latter updates, if they get a blog update at  all, which they will not all do so, will be over on my Dark Fantasy X blog, however, rather than here. I've tried to take most of my RPG hobby stuff over there, my hiking stuff to Lone Star Hiker, etc. 

UPDATE: To my surprise, I did a lot more today than I thought possible. I finished all of the weeklies fairly early, and I not only did all of the seven high level characters through the bounty hunter, but I took four lower level characters through it too. A fifth one can do so if I spend an hour or so (tops) finishing up just a bit of what he's doing on Hutta and get him to the fleet.

This means, of course, that I'll have considerably less to do this week than I thought. Other than 12 (!) BBA missions each day, which are largely repeated grinds, I'll have little to do. 

UPDATE 2: I made my Vanguard Bounty Hunter, as well as a Mercenary Smuggler. But I'm not in any particular hurry to play either of them. That said, I will buy the bowcaster I want today because I'll have enough by this point, and I'll mail it to my vanguard. He won't be able to use it right away, because it has a level 10 prerequisite, but that's OK.

UPDATE 3: I did it. Finished all of my bounties for the day. I bought the bowcaster, and I have 6 bounty contracts left. I'll get 48 more if I do henchmen bounties for a total of 54. If I buy one more kingpin bounty, that'll take that down to 49, but give me one back for getting the kingpin bounty, leaving me an even 50—which is exactly how much I need to buy some of the most expensive of the BBA gear, like the dye module schematic, or the HK-51 skin. I'd like a few of the bounty hunter monster rock n roll speeders, which are 25 each. I can either get the dye module schematic, or two of the speeders. I think I'll go for the dye module, and catch the speeders next time this comes around.

I do find, however, that the event is starting to get tedious. This is true for all of the grind type activities, but I'm now regularly doing 12 bounties a day with each of my characters (ed. that is, 12 bounties a day because I have 12 characters. Each can only do one per day), and then I've unlocked two of the kingpin bounties (I'm planning on slowly unlocking more of those) which gives me a bit more. This isn't cost effective if the goal is to rack up completed bounty contracts; you still only get one contract for doing a kingpin bounty, but you have to pay five to unlock them. You get better reputation, but I'm almost certain to exceed the reputation I need to cap it permanently this week anyway. I'm already capped for this week, but I'll have the trophies in my inventory to spend next week and even the next week after that most likely to get me up to Legend rank. There won't be any reason to do the bounties next time around except to earn contracts, and it costs contracts to unlock kingpin bounties. The only reason to unlock the kingpins would be to have them available to break the monotony of doing a bazillion henchmen bounties every week that it comes around. Blegh. Wish I could have unlocked the kingpin bounties by rep level instead of having to spend contracts. There's a lot of stuff I'd like to buy with the bounty contract currency, and not enough opportunities to earn it. That's why I'm so focused like a freakin' laser to earning as much as I can this time around.

Meanwhile, I now have both a Vanguard bounty hunter, with a bowcaster (which he can't use quite yet) and a Mercenary smuggler with double Fortitudes, the biggest pistol (I believe) in the game. Meanwhile my "normal" mercenary is finally unlocking enough of his abilities to be fun to play as I'm approaching level 20 with him. I've been doing Hutta bounties with, because technically he hasn't really advanced beyond Hutta except for to the Imperial Fleet just briefly to pick up bounty missions. After this week is over, I'll finally do the Black Talon and take him to Dromund Kaas. 

And finally, I'd love to do another Agent, since I haven't really been recording Hutran Thanatos after forgetting to record some of his story. He's also an Operative, and I find that I don't really love the Operative mechanics. I do really love the Gunslinger and Sniper mechanics, but I don't have any other than my original Gunslinger and Sniper, so I'll probably do my next Agent as one of those two again. But I'm juggling enough characters right now that I don't need to worry about that right now.

One more small thing; the login rewards do now occasionally give bounty contracts, so before the event comes around again, I'll probably get a dozen or so contracts. Not enough to do much with, but a little extra padding. I may buy some of the "frozen in carbonite" decorations, because they only cost 1, and make my strongholds just a little bit less empty.

Old Republic Update

I'll take a break from my CYOA reviews to talk about Old Republic. When I get back, my #3 By Balloon to the Sahara order did come in—earlier than expected—so I'll continue in order, I presume. I also have already #s 4, 5, 6, and 7. #s 8 and 10 are on order and should show up in a day or two, long before I get to reviewing them. I also have #9. When all's said and done, I'll have every title between 1-25, except for #24, which I never did have in the first place, and #12, which I deprioritized in my ordering because I remember not really liking it as much as I thought I would even back when I was 10 years old, or however old I was. And then I've got about half again as many titles to go after that; I think my grand total of titles that I own (or will own once the titles that I ordered come in) was just one or two shy of 40. However, while I didn't reorder #12 Inside UFO 54-40, which I used to own, I did order #27 The Horror of High Ridge which I haven't ever owned previously. So I'm mostly replacing titles that I once had but don't any more, but I did swap one that I didn't ever like very much with one that is extremely highly regarded among adult fans of the series. 

We'll see where we go from there. That'll keep me busy for a long time. I'd actually like to see if I can recruit my wife, my daughter, and maybe her boyfriend to do podcasts about these, where I read the books and they make the decisions, and explain why. I listened to a couple of episodes of a podcast that did this already, but I didn't like a few things about how they did it, so maybe mine will turn out better. Or... well, at least more to my liking, if not necessarily anyone else's. 

Anyway, so two weeks now of Update 7.0 in SWTOR. I've done two weeks of Galactic Seasons, and started just today the third week. That's been my favorite part. Not that I necessarily love the missions that it assigns, but because of the pretty constant sense of progress as well as a decent batch of rewards to work for, I think that's the best part of the update. I've come to terms with most of the other things that've changed, even if I don't necessarily like the changes all that much. I hadn't played much with my "new" characters, but I did go back just last night, kinda for the first time, and do some stuff with Hutran Thanatos, my Mirialan operative, who's on Dromund Kaas. It's been quite a while since I've done that, so I'm excited even about the exploration missions and stuff, but as I do more and more characters, I'll probably get burned out. That's what happened before, anyway. The faction stories, or planetary story arc, or whatever you want to call it, plus the Heroics and exploration missions that you can pick up from random quest-givers around the map, are all relatively weak compared to the actual class story arcs. But if you only do the class story arc, you'll be lagging behind where you want to be in terms of XP and level. So, unless there's a very lengthy double XP event coming up soon, I doubt I'll be able to skip too much of that stuff. When I did Graggory, my first playthrough attempt, I got to max level (75 at the time) on Alderaan, so before finishing Chapter 1, which is about half of the main, OG game. After that, I mostly only did the class stories with him, because by then I'd seen the faction stories with lots of other characters. I did play him during a long double XP event that lasted for a good month, though. None of my other characters leveled that fast. In fact, I finished two characters at level 65, never really went on with them, and eventually ended up deleting them.

I find that in general, the changes to the game for 7.0 have less effect at the lower levels. The movelists take longer to fill out, as they've removed some abilities and stretched out the progression for the rest of them, which I think is a mistake. But not a huge one. It just feels like it takes longer to actually be playing your class, because you're just spamming the same three moves for more levels and more planets. But mostly I've had as much playing my "new" characters as I did the first pass through. I don't like the Operative and Scoundrel as much as the Sniper and Gunslinger. But I'm sure that the 7.0 update isn't the cause of that. I do, on the other hand, really like the Mercenary variation to the bounty hunter, but not necessarily at the expense of the Powertech. I just really like both of those.

A week from today is when the BBA event will start, and I want to hit that pretty hard and earn as many contracts as I can so I can buy, at least, the elite bowcaster, and play my Vanguard bounty hunter. It'll be weird running two bounty hunters at once, but they'll both be very different mechanically than the bounty hunters that I already have, both of which are powertechs. But, as you can see, the BH story somehow just ends up being my favorite. I may think about something else too, like a Gunslinger agent, or a mercenary scoundrel, or something, but we'll see. I'm already doing an operative and a scoundrel, so I may be burned out on all of this story stuff for a while.

SWTOR videos going forward

I finally decided that I'm going to do Elemer Kell, the Jedi Sentinel who looks like Darth Maul's teenaged nephew or something, at least at first. I'm going to record the entirety of Tython and the Republic Fleet with him (including the Esseles Flashpoint) and present edited versions on Youtube, as well as create a disc offline that I can have as an archive. 

I actually wanted to know what my oldest son thought, because I was doing it mostly for myself, but partly for him, because he's a big fan of the older Old Republic games, but hasn't ever played this one. I thought he'd enjoy watching it. But I haven't heard, and I made an executive decision anyway. But it's not a huge deal which one I start with, because I'm only going to do the starting planet and then jump to a different character to do their starting planet. I'd kind of like to do a very different character than the Jedi Knight after doing it, so I'm leaning towards maybe the Imperial Operative or Mercenary for my second one.

In any case, here's the list of playlists on the channel that I'm using specifically for this project. Updates will appear there. Each small section will (hopefully) be fairly short; around 7-10 minutes or so long each. The total time value of each planet is going to be—again hopefully; once it's edited down—about equivalent to a full-length movie, i.e., ~2 hours.

As an aside, I've finally found a way that seems to be generating a modest, yet significant way to earn some money, and it's with the Cybertech crafting. I'd previously ignored that, mostly, because I wasn't interested in the products themselves. But I've now got speeder schematics, and they're among my favorite speeders, so I've been making them for all of my characters. But more to the point, the Advanced V-9 Seismic grenades sell for a decent amount of money. I can craft 25 of them in the background in a couple of hours, and then sell them for about 5 million credits. Mostly, these sales go through pretty quick; within a few hours. On a really productive day, I can sell three or four of these a day, although that means spending more time doing that then other things that I'd probably actually rather be doing.

Because I've made a decent amount of money (although it would have been good money a year ago; now it's fairly modest) I've bought a number of relatively cheap yet attractive cosmetic things. Not so much armors, although I have bought some of those too; mostly pets and weapons. However, to unlock these in my collections, I need cartel coins, and I'm pretty much out of those. Every month I get about 650 if I'm subscribed, because of my subscription and my security key. I need 1200, and that assumes that I don't buy anything else. I don't know how much of this I'll want to use with my current crop of characters, but the pets can be adopted at any time, just like mounts can.

UPDATE: And here's the playlist for Elemer Kell, my "Darth Maul's teenaged nephew" Jedi Sentinel. So far, I've added 8 videos of running around on Tython, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through that planet. It'll end up being twelve or so total videos, depending on how many times I cut my playthrough up. The last two videos were a bit on the longer side, because I was doing a bunch of little rinky-dink missions. I'd actually prefer to be on the shorter side, but it's kind of an issue of which missions are available and when.

And as an aside, I've really got, I hope, all of the cosmetics that I "need" and then some. I do need to unlock two more guns in Collections, which I can do when my next round of cartel coins grant shows up. But neither of those are going to be used anytime too soon.

I had had a discussion on the SWTOR boards briefly, where someone asked what combination of class story and mechanical suite we were excited to play. I said that this was just taking old content and giving it the appearance of freshness; we aren't actually getting anything new, and the ability to use sniper (or whatever) mechanics with the bounty hunter story doesn't really make it exciting per se. However, part of that is just me being crotchety. I actually think it'd be pretty cool to play a sniper or maybe better yet, a vanguard, with the bounty hunter, and use the legacy bound elite bowcaster as his signature weapon. Sure, he can't equip it until 10th level, but you'll tend to hit that about two thirds of the way through your starter planet.

One more minor update; I've been playing the rakghoul event a bit this week, which started yesterday. I think I'm about done with it, though, to be honest. I've already maxed out the reputation for T.H.O.R.N., so I don't care about doing it for reputation anymore. I've also got thirty six rakghoul cannisters right now, and nothing in particular that I'm planning on spending them on (I already bought a third lightsaber and several more rakghoul crystals) so my urgency to grind through it just to hoard rakghoul crystals for some future use is low. Maybe if I do the bowcaster bounty hunter in the future, I'd use the very expensive outer rim hunter's helmet as part of his outfit, but even that only costs 30 rakghoul cannisters (plus the Gree helixes and bounty contracts.)

SWTOR Playthroughs - all character intros

I've now recorded the character introduction to all of my characters.

Because I had previously played all of the class stories with white male characters, I decided that this time I wouldn't have any white male humans (with the exception of the cyborg. Because they count cyborg as a different race than human.) Six aliens, one cyborg, and one girl—I figure that's alien enough to count as a seventh.

I haven't yet decided which one I'm going to prioritize and start doing their opening planet missions first, though, but I do intend to leapfrog between all of these characters so nobody gets too far ahead of the pack, and nobody falls too far behind it either. Obviously, this means that the long-promised update will happen in the middle of this series... but that's OK. I actually very much wanted to start all characters before the update hits. Among other things that are changing is the character generator interface.

Anyway, in no particular order:

Our Jedi Sentinel Elemer Kell, who looks a bit like a teenager cousin of Darth Maul. He'll have red lightsabers too, when he gets his lightsabers, and dresses like a Sith Lord. That doesn't mean that I'll be playing him dark or anything. I just thought it would look incongruous and kind of cool.

Anstal Tane is a Sith Pureblood for his race, but he's on the Republic side (kind of) as a Scoundrel. I always thought that the fun of the smuggler and bounty hunter classes were that they weren't conceptually tied to the factions, really. Sadly, you still have all of the faction missions on each planet. You can skip them, but if you do, you probably won't level up fast enough unless you grind Heroics, or do it during a double XP event.

Hutran Thanatos is our Operative, and I decided to make him a blond Mirialan.

The Sith Juggernaut is a Republic-style zabrak, but you'll probably often forget that because he wears a face-hiding helmet. It'll automatically come off when he's doing companion dialogues and stuff, but otherwise, that's his look.

Codon Veile is a rattataki Jedi Sage, who also wears a stealthy, colorless suit that matches his skin tone. I tried to get as little of the Rattataki face tattoos as I could, but the option with the least tattoos does have "tattoo eyeliner", so my character will look much more emo than I intended, I've noticed. His face is mostly hidden except the eyes normally too.

Osan Galaide is my Big Boy chiss vanguard. I actually deliberately, if you haven't noticed, tried to use Imperial races on Republic classes and vice versa. Of course, you won't really notice him either, because he wears armor head to toe. But not only is he an Imperial race, but he wears Mandalorian style armor, which isn't standard Republic issue by any means. But screw that; the Havoc Squad standard issue white with orange markings that look like Stormtroopers is not for me.

Only the second Big Boy character I've ever created (I didn't make Fatso the Hutt characters, just the big brawny guys) is my cyborg mercenary. This one is a little bit of a cheat; cyborgs aren't counted humans, but I'm sure that I'll almost always forget that.

And finally, Revecca Arden, the Sith Sorcerer. Or witch, if you prefer, although I figured that if I'm going to make a girl character, I'm going to make her a good looking one, at least. I was initially going to make her a Mirialan too, but I didn't really want two of them. I thought about a Miraluka or twi'lek, but let's be honest. I don't like those races at all, and neither of them are very pretty either. And, to paraphrase one of my sons, if a girl can't be pretty, what is she good for?

He actually said that it doesn't matter how hot a girl is, if she can't be pleasant to be around, what is she good for, in regards to a very pretty girl that had an obvious crush on him, but who got so awkward and nervous around him that she was impossible to talk to. I think he should have given her another chance, personally, but he seems to have moved on. You can eventually overcome that shyness, and then you're left with a very pretty girl, after all.

Anyway, the look of the characters will probably be the same, more or less, the entirety of the run. I tried to create some costumes for them that are iconic enough that they require little updating. A few of them were built with some Remnant armor pieces in mind, and you can't wear those until Level 10, though. In particular, you may notice that a lot of characters are wearing the same gloves. However, for many of them, these gloves are surrogates, and once they hit level 10, they'll replace them. 

Here's a brief list of what will change, once I can do so:

• Hutran Thanatos is wearing surrogate goggles. He'll have different ones, which are actually agent drops on Hutta, as soon as I can find them. He also has a second outfit, because as the intro suggested, he's going to go undercover as a different character shortly, and I thought it appropriate for him to have a disguise for that effort.
• Phovos Mal will replace his gloves, and maybe his boots and leggings too.
• Osan Galaide is waiting on gloves, boots and leggings/greaves, so what he's wearing now are surrogates.
• Embric Stane will replace his gloves and his boots.

In addition, all of the Jedi and Sith characters both don't have their lightsabers yet. I could, actually, equip lightsabers, but since in story they don't have them, I thought that that would look a little silly. Some of the characters will, in fact, go through a series of crafted weapons—rifles this time for Hutran and Osan. I did the same thing with double-bladed lightsabers on two characters in the past, as well as blaster pistols, assault cannons and sniper rifles. Five characters went through this routine, and I liked it. One of the things that will happen with the update when it comes is that weapons will be cosmetic like armor is, so you can have the look of any weapon of your type that you want, regardless of what you're actually wielding. I'll probably settle on a single look rather than an ever advancing one once that feature goes live, but I don't know for sure what weapons I'll be using for that yet. Some of the craftable weapons are butt-ugly, but some of them are quite attractive, and I might seriously consider using them. And finally, my smuggler will pick up a pistol from a vendor on the Fleet when I get there. It's Bind on Pickup, so nobody else can buy it and send it to him; he'll have to buy it himself. That'll be the last piece of gear that I'll be waiting on to get all of them "properly" "cosmetically" geared.

A final note; the graphic quality still isn't as good as when I'm actually playing the game. I suspect that my computer just can't handle the graphical oomph required to export these videos as well as I'd like. I did mention many posts ago that due to incompatibility issues that we didn't figure out, when my brother and I were building my computer, we ended up leaving the graphics card out. Curiously, it's still got a fast enough processer and enough CPU RAM that it does most things I want it to quite well. This is one of the few times that I've had an issue with the hardware. 

Too bad. I bought a really hot graphics card, but we couldn't get it to work with the build without causing problems. If I'd been able to install that, it'd really be screaming.

Best timeline

Being born in the early 70s suburbia was the best. Although many of the sicknesses that will most likely prove terminal to America (and certainly to America as we knew it) had already set in, they had not yet metastasized, so we didn't really know it. I got to grow up during the 80s, a kind of last gasp of our culture from when it was confident in who it was and its place in the world, and honestly--we didn't worry too much about "the world" anyway.

I mean, sure--the BEST timeline would have been something like the 80s, but one in which the Yankees didn't win their mean-spirited and hateful war of conquest against the rest of the country in the 1860s, so we really had America in the 1980s, not the Yankee parody of America that most of the twentieth century ended up being. But that said, the 80s that we did get was pretty special most of the time, and it carried forward for a time into the 90s. 

This is especially true for fans of fantasy, of course. While fantasy has its roots in the very earliest myths of Western civilizations foundational pillars--from what we know now, going back into the Neolithic at least, and the spread of the Corded Ware culture and it's various "children" which gives us our various pre-Christian pagan mythologies of gods and monsters, the reality of course is that fantasy is also a thoroughly modern genre. J. R. R. Tolkien and even E. R. Eddison and William Morris may well have been trying to channel aspects of this early era in our history, but they did so by writing thoroughly modern novels, incorporating in many respects thoroughly modern ideas and perspectives. Much has been made of how Tolkien's experience in the Great War colored his views of Middle-earth as it developed for example. The reality is that all art and literature is a product of the time in which it is made, no matter how much it may attempt to "call back" to earlier times and places. In fact, the very desire to call back to a more fantastic, simpler time of clear-cut heroes, feminine damsels in distress and exciting, colorful adventure in the way that fantasy does is itself a product of the times in which it was written.

Of course, Morris, Eddison and even Tolkien were "old news" by the 80s, and by then fantasy had been even more thoroughly modernized, in particular by the grand pastiche nature of Dungeons & Dragons, which created something which has sometimes disparagingly been called "extruded fantasy product." This was "dumbed down" even more at the actual tables of most people who played, who often churned out nearly plotless hack and slash as the distillation of what had been a proud and grand literary tradition when it started. But that's fine; in fact--it was kinda cool in most respects.

Personally, I always felt that hack and slash was better suited to a different medium than face to face tabletop roleplaying games, because using those for hack and slash was not only kind of boring, but also squandered the potential of face to face gaming anyway. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who thought so, as hack and slash D&D-like video games reached a peak in the years immediately after the 80s. Some will say that the Diablo games of the late 90s were the ultimate expression of this, and it's hard to argue that. But we had pretty good stuff in the 80s and 90s already. 1985's arcade game Gauntlet was already exploring what hack and slash D&D could look like in a visual medium, which was honestly probably more in line with what hack and slash is suited for anyway. But for my money, it wasn't until the beat em up genre appeared that a really good type of hack and slash that wasn't so gonzo that it was a parody of the concept really appeared. The first of these was Sega's 1989 Golden Axe which later morphed into a series that has, depending on how you counted them, between three and eight entries. Capcom got into the action with King of Dragons in 1991, but probably produced the best D&D inspired hack and slash beat em ups when they made the two D&D licensed games: Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara. 

The entire beat em up genre went underground shortly after these games came out, until their modern resurgence as people tire of "modern" consumer dreck and have found that indie developers digging into the 80s and 90s can actually provide a much better experience than many (if not most) modern struggle sessions masquerading as entertainment. 

It may seem odd that Japanese developers created these classics of Western fantasy, but keep in mind that during the 80s "cultural appropriation" wasn't a dirty word; in fact, if someone liked aspects of our culture enough to copy it and provide us something back in return based on it, we considered that flattering rather than insulting, as normal healthy people should. Of course, with the case of Golden Axe, it was developed by a guy who loved the Conan the Barbarian movie; in the case of the D&D license, it was developed as it was because of the protectionism of TSR of their brand, and their insistence that someone who knew the territory oversee some aspects of the development to make sure that what came back would be recognizably D&D to American audiences, and not some weird Japanification of it. Not that that would have been terrible necessarily; keep in mind that during the 80s and 90s in particular we were at peak Japanophilia in America. Icons of Japanese culture like samurai and ninjas were ubiquitous in American pop culture by this point, and Americans were taking karate and judo classes at probably their highest rates. The myth of ancient Asian wisdom was flying pretty high at this point, and Americans thought even fortune cookies offered a profound exegesis on life. A Japanified D&D wouldn't have necessarily been bad. But getting very recognizably western D&D was obviously, I think, much better. And this is the kind of environment where hack and slash can thrive, in my opinion, much better than an actual tabletop experience, which just begs for more because the environment allows for it so easily.

Most of these games are available relatively cheaply as part of some collection or other; the D&D games are available together as a bundle on Steam, the Beat em Up bundle by Capcom also has King of Dragons as well as several other classics of the genre (including Final Fight, arguably one of the best examples of it ever made) and I believe that there are Golden Axe compilations as well. In fact, I believe that until recently you could get Golden Axe on iOS even.

If you search Tower of Doom longplay on Youtube, you'll get loads of examples of someone playing the full game all the way through. Edited and with continues and whatnot, most of these take about an hour to watch; it probably would take you or I a little bit longer than that to play through ourselves. But it's worth checking out. Shadow over Mystara is a better game in almost every respect, but I don't believe you should do that one without doing Tower of Doom first.

And I do recommend picking up Chronicles of Mystara on Steam. It has both games, edited and tweaked slightly from the arcade originals to be better suited to todays audience and hardware and playing experience (I doubt most people are actually inserting quarters into their computers, for example.) It's only $15. At that price, it's about the same as getting a new streaming movie from Disney+ or Amazon Prime, and yet offers a better experience that most of what those guys are offering. And if you can get online with a few buddies and play it cooperatively, the way it was originally intended, holy cow, now you're talking fun. Plus because of the choices, there's some replayability. You get totally different levels with your choices. Here's one example. Look up more; I don't know that this is the best one. It's the best advertisement if you still don't believe you should buy your own copy and play it yourself.

(In fact, actually the guy playing this isn't very good. Chances are you would do at least as well picking it up cold with no experience. Which makes it even more interesting as a possible sales tool, I guess.)

Old Republic Progress

Just a fairly quick note on my progress on Old Republic. People may well say; dude, that game is nine years old and most Star Wars fans have played it through years ago. Yes, that's true. However, I'm slow. Plus, because of the recent Steam launch earlier this summer, there are probably more people playing than before; in fact, there is some evidence I've seen here and there that suggest that more people are playing right now than have played in a long time. (This is true for other video games I play too; probably related to people being stuck at home and being monumentally let down by other avenues of entertainment. Movies, TV, most books, even sports all suck right now, so people are turning to video games for their entertainment. Those are starting to attack them with wokeness too, but the rot is considerably less far along in the video game world than in Hollywood or New York or in the NFL and NBA, etc.)

So with my free to play account, I had played the bounty hunter up through about halfway through Balmorra, including doing most if not all of the planetary missions on Nal Hutta and Dromund Kaas. But I was playing on an older computer that still had Windows XP, and when that OS was no longer supported, I had to stop playing for the better part of two years, I think. I was already super behind even then. Now that I've reinstalled it on a newer rig, I've sprung for a subscription temporarily. I may go ahead and keep it as long as I'm actively playing, because it seems like it offers a number of benefits. One that is a temporary benefit is that it offers Shae Viszla as a free companion, even before you normally have access to a companion, I've found. Because of that, I'll probably go ahead and create a character for every class, although I don't intend to play them yet; just enough to get that Mandalorian gal as a companion so I can use her when I do play those classes.

I did go ahead and finish the first chapter. This sounds small, but keep in mind that the prologue and first chapter, especially when done in conjunction with all of the planetary missions and heroics, as well as a few flashpoints and whatnot here and there, is at least as big—probably bigger—than the entire Knights of the Old Republic game was on it's own. The end of the first chapter for each story arc is also a major stopping point in the plot; it's kind of like I've watched the entire first Star Wars movie (about a bounty hunter, in this case, not a budding Jedi wannabe) after I watched an entire prologue movie that we didn't even actually get in reality. My character has been leveled up to max level for most of the time that I was on Alderaan before I went to the end-game (of this phase) starship insertion, so I've been building up a decent collection of Legacy levels and legacy drops on equipment; plus, green bar drops are now pretty awesome stuff, at the 270+ level equipment. I find that I still spend money almost as fast as I get it, though—probably related to my constant desire to tinker with cosmetics—so that's the only thing that I wish I had more of; credits. I've bought even a handful of cartel coins, but given that that's real money and not in-game "money" I probably won't do that anymore; I'll just save up my monthly drops of cartel coins from when I'm subscribed.

In any case, it seemed like a good time to furlough the bounty hunter for a while now that I'm halfway through his story arc, so I started up a Jedi Knight character as well, and I've finished Tython and am plowing relatively quickly through Coruscant with him, in an attempt to get my second real companion and romance option (Kyra) as well as my own spaceship, which makes a huge difference. I'm also trying to get a speeder; somehow my bounty hunter has three all of which I got for either free or pretty cheap. It seems like getting one for my Jedi will not be either, sadly, but it's a game-changer to have one instead of having to run around on your feet like a chump at half the speed. (The inclusion of fast travel is another game changer, although you can only use it to travel to places that you've been before. And you still often need to speeder around to get to exactly where you're trying to go after you've fast traveled to a taxi location or whatever. I think that's a subscriber perk, though.) My plan, after getting to the end of Chapter 1 for the Knight was to start a Sith Warrior and then a Smuggler, doing the same thing, before then turning back to the bounty hunter, probably and advancing some of my other characters that have been furloughed. Although maybe I'll add an agent in there too.

My interest in the Jedi diplomat and Sith sorcerer, as well as the trooper (whatever those classes are called; I can't even remember off-hand) are considerably less, so I was going to get to them later after I've done the ones that I really want to do. However, like I said, getting a free and relatively cool companion right away up through October 5th means that I'll probably actually create all of the other characters I want, maybe mail them some gear so they don't look like n00b chumps, unlock the companion which if I remember correctly from doing the Jedi Knight requires at least a little bit of playtime and a few cutscenes before you can use, and then having them sit waiting to "really" start until later. It's just too good an offer to pass up, and I want to do all of the characters eventually anyway. Why not create the characters so I can get the perk?

This begs a few questions, though, or maybe even an entire discussion on the nature of swashbuckling space opera. I'm finding that so far I think I really only want to create characters who are 1) men and 2) human. At least for my first pass. Why is this? In part, it's because I'm 1) a man and 2) human. But it's more than that. It occurs to me that all of the stars of the original series and the prequel series too are 1) men and 2) human. Oh, sure. Princess Leia and Queen Amidala. But they aren't stars as in the protagonists or deuteragonists sense. They're the love interests, which is a different role; swashbuckling action movies with women pretending to be men is off-putting. That said; after I've done all of the stories as a man character, I might be interested in doing it again as a woman character just to do it differently. That's a bit iffy, though, given how much I will have played the game by then.

I also find that the aliens work better as sidekicks and antagonists. Every time I think I'll make a zabrak or chiss or mirialan character, I find that it just doesn't feel right and I end up not doing it after all. Maybe this is related to my embrace of humanocentrism in fantasy; a humanocentric space opera is a little different; it's more about the protagonists, deuteragonists and love interests than it is about the setting overall, but again—it's surprisingly consistent with the Star Wars movies, if you stop to think about it. I think that unless I'm redoing the stories a second time, that they just wouldn't feel right without a protagonist who's a white, human, and young-looking man. That's just the way action stories to Americans need to be to not feel "off." And, admittedly, being a little off sometimes for variety isn't a bad thing. But I don't want to go all the way through the entire story for each class feeling off. 

Then, I also need to figure out which of the characters I actually want to do the expansion scenarios with. There are eight unique stories for each class, and then the expansions are the same (more or less, although with some minor variation between dark and light choices) regardless of which character you play, so there's no reason to play them with each class unless you just can't get enough of repeating them.

If you think about the fact that my bounty hunter playthrough, which is only halfway done, is about the size of the entire first KOTOR game, then this game is thoroughly massive compared to KOTOR. Some people say that the stories aren't as good as the KOTOR story, but most fans suggest that the better stories here are as good, and only the weaker stories are lesser than KOTOR. Granted, after I've finished the bounty hunter and Jedi knight, I doubt I'll go back and do all of the planetary missions with each character and focus more on the class missions instead (which, admittedly, means that they'll level up less fast too, but that's OK; I'm at level 75 which is supposed to be an end-game expansion level, and I got there less than halfway through the bounty hunter storyline. Which, in the original version of the game topped out at level 50 at the end-game of Chapter 3. Trying to figure out "how many KOTORs worth of content are there in this game" is probably a difficult question and pointless anyway, but the answer is clearly "at least a dozen." It's that big, and especially when you get into the Eternal Throne expansion storyline, it's as amazing and galaxy-shattering as the KOTOR stories or the original trilogy movies, if not even moreso in some aspects. Valkorian/Vitiate is as good a villain as Palpatine. In some ways, he actually might even be better.

I feel like it's a little bit of a shame that this is the venue that we have to get this content; I'd almost prefer to have a Clone Wars-like Old Republic show that adapted these storylines into a visual story arc that you watch as an action show. In some ways this is what is offered to us, except that the graphics are hit or miss and the action scenes are interactive in a hot-key combat sense, but not very immersive or exciting, honestly. The real "charm" of Old Republic, if you want to call it that, is the talking heads stuff, quite honestly, which is why I wish that it'd be converted into a new venue, because I really miss the good action scenes; blaster fights, lightsaber fights, chase scenes, starship combat, etc. It's OK in game, but does not compare at all to what the movies offer us, or even the Clone Wars or Mandalorian show. Although I don't trust anyone to do that without messing it up with wokeness and nonsense, of which there's already a bit of it in the game as it is (although the worst of it is ignorable if you just don't pick options that show it.) So what we have is likely the best that we'll get, and as we go through it, we just have to imagine what it could be like if done differently. But look how weak Rebels was compared to the original Clone Wars series, and even then Clone Wars was fitty-fitty, and The Mandalorian was much more average than it should have been. Lucasfilm just doesn't have the chops to make good stuff for the big or small screen either one.

In many ways, this is like watching the prequel trilogy anyway. You can imagine what Lucas was trying to do, and see that grand vision, but what you actually got was a very flawed execution with a lot of misses and challenges that you have to overlook, and the end result is unsatisfying in some ways and disappointing, not only because it just doesn't quite work, but even moreso because you can see how with a little bit different execution, it could have. 

RDR3?

RDR a few more pictures

A few more self portrait style pictures. Mostly to show outfits that I'd tinkered with, but also for a few other reasons; I like the weird pagan ritual thing that I found recently; I don't know how I missed it for as long as I had (it's not that pagan ritual that Arthur draws in his journal, nor is it anywhere close to it geographically. Nor is it as graphic or obvious.)

I've also picked up two Nacogdoches saddles, and have really noticed a difference. I was adamant for quite some time that I wanted to use the role saddles with the role horses, but the difference in stamina drain and speed and acceleration is so noticeable that I can't not use it anymore, I think. A real shame, because I had five very expensive saddles, which I now will probably rarely if ever use. And they mostly all looked great too.  Like I said, so far I have two Nacogdoches saddles, fully kitted out, including with lanterns. The saddle itself is over $500, the lantern is $350, and the saddle bag and stirrup upgrades are somewhere between $100-150 each. A fully kitted out Nacogdoches saddle is over $1,000; more than the horse, even, even if you get one of the most expensive ones.

I also, after not using my Kladrubar much, have really felt like he was super slow using him recently. I just put the second Nacogdoches saddle on him, and I'll run him around for a while, but I'm not sure that I love that horse as much as I thought. He's great when you want to get into gunfights or if you run into a cougar or wolves, but given that I spend most of my time on horseback just crossing space on the map, I've come to really appreciate the Criollo, which had been my least favorite of my horses. I now think that if I were to rank my horses as most likely to use to least, I'd put the Criollo and Norfolk near the top, the Breton next, and the Turkoman and Kladrubar near the bottom. Sigh.  So now I'll probably want a Missouri Foxtrotter even more than I did before, because it's much more likely to be a top tier horse even in my own personal stable, having almost identical stats to the Criollo, but a significantly different look.

My dog is named Robin Hood, and my horses, in order that I got them, are Little John, Will Scarlet, Alan-a-Dale, Friar Tuck and Guy of Gisborne. I'm running out of Robin Hood related names that are meaningful enough to use. King Richard and Prince John are about all that's left; and I'm almost at the point that I'd rather get a mare and name her Maid Marian anyway than use those. But given that I can see myself getting at least two more horses in the relatively short term; the Missouri Foxtrotter and whatever the new role horse will be (I presume that there will be one, and I hope it's significantly different than what we have. A noticeably shaggy little horse of some sort would be cool) and maybe still a white Arabian, that'll use up my stock of names. Not to mention most of my available stable stall spots, even if I buy up all of them that are available.

The only downside with the Nacogdoches saddle is that the single colored Collector's saddle bag doesn't match them very well, and they do have improved saddle bags that specifically are designed to match the various colors of this saddle. While mostly this isn't a big deal, it means that the max number of outfits I can carry on my horse is now five instead of seven. Because I leave one space blank on my horse, to make room for the inevitable "custom outfits" that it creates when my hat falls off or my bandanna glitches away, that means that I can have one cold outfit, one hot outfit, my basic outfit, and only one other. So, I'm spending a bit more time making outfits that I actually want to wear, because I can't quite as easily swap between them if after a while I think I look silly.

Anyway, on to the pictures. A few feature horses, mostly my Criollo, Will Scarlet. In keeping with his name, I tried to give him a reddish mane and tale. I also exclusively use the "mohawk" style mane, because in cinematic mode, it doesn't wave behind the horse's head like a weird, stiff flag. Same thing as the longer tails on my coats; the animation for them just doesn't look right, so I prefer not to use them and look silly. After all, when running across the map for long distances, I have to look at it quite a bit.

The weird pagan ritual site. It was also the location of one of the treasure maps, as you can see by the chest at its foot.

I prefer camp in the Heartlands, although Great Plains would probably be more convenient, being significantly closer to my moonshine shack in Tall Trees. We'll see what the new role brings and where the best place to set up ends up being, but I like the Heartlands prairie for aesthetic reasons as well. Here I am with an outfit I tried out using the weathered blue Hartman jacket. Which, I believe, is the same "design" as the scout jacket from single player, which I also really liked, although most of the colors are completely different.

In the Great Plains with my basic outfit. I'm actually showing off my new reddish beard, which I "grew" as part of a daily challenge, which asked me to change my appearance at the barbers. I'll probably keep it for some time; maybe even until that challenge comes up again in the rotation. And my Criollo and my first Nacogdoches saddle are in the background. I don't like all of the colors, but I'll probably end up with at least three or four of these saddles before I'm done. I have two now.

Another outfit that's not too different; it uses a different hat, vest and shirt (and probably a few other minor things like gloves, bandana and gunbelt, etc.) but which especially uses the tan cordury version of the Hartman jacket. I really need to find another jacket that I like as much as this one, but I'm unlikely to, I admit. With a similar jacket and the same chaps and boots, it looks very similar to my basic outfit. 

A different take on the blue weathered jacket outfit. And my horse, again, up near the foot of Window Rock where I like to fish. I think Madame Nazar was there when I took this picture, which explains what I was doing there too.

Another Hartman jacket outfit using a different variety. It's surprisingly not very warm, even though it really looks like it should be, so not having a vest means I need to try extra hard to make it warm enough to qualify as appropriate for average temps. In this case, part of what I did was put these big furry warm chaps on.

The same outfit, out in Tall Trees where I'd just spawned after starting the game in West Elizabeth free roam after having to switch servers because of a glitch with my moonshine shack (luckily, I was very close to it, at Bear Claw camp.) Without crossing my arms, I was trying to show off my sweet green patterned shirt, but the shadow makes it difficult to make out anyway. Oh, well.

Another outfit and another spot in the Heartlands, this time near Emerald Ranch. Bad weather looming ahead. It rains quite a lot in this game, one of many clues that points to a spring time setting. 

A hot weather outfit made entirely of black leather. Black leather hat, vest, shirt, pants, boots, gloves, sunbelt, and half chaps. In real life I doubt I'd ever wear so much black leather. 

The black leather on a rainy day at Braithwaite Manor. Shortly after this I deleted the outfit and tried out a different look. 

Another average temperature outfit with a new jacket.  I do need some hats that match my tan and brown leather since I wear that so much. 

It wasn't cold, obviously, but this is a cold water outfit with a new color of the sheepskin coat, one of my favorites. I've probably got one more variant color of that that I'd like. Let's see if we get any new limited time clothing options tomorrow first, though. 

My replacement hot weather outfit. The black version of this jacket was rhe first cosmetic piece of clothing I picked up, but I haven't used it or this brown one much since. Unfortunately, it has a short "butt tail" of sorts, and looks a bit stupid from behind, which is how I, as the player, see it most of the time. If the back were the same length as the front, it would look a lot better.

RDR sales

As an aside, I deleted many of those outfits already. There's a HUGE sale on clothing this week (and Red Dead's week always starts on Tuesday). I've been picking up stuff like crazy, and running my money out. And then I spent many more hours than I'd honestly have liked chasing around all of the three most valuable lost jewelry collections and the coins collection this evening after it reset at 8 PM. I wasn't completely uninterrupted, and I did get a few extra things too like the creek plums and some vanilla flowers, etc. so I can keep making wild creek moonshine. I went from having no money; like 77¢ and my camp disappeared because I couldn't afford the maintenance of it to suddenly having over $1,600 once I got to Madame Nazar. (Where does she come up with the cash to fund me, I wonder? Not to mention all of the other players that I always run into when at Madame Nazar's.)

Of course, I've now spent most of that too. The most expensive thing I got was a pair of semi-automatic pistols, because they were 40 or 50% off. I got several gun belts at a major discount, but the matching off-hand holsters were not on sale, so I spent a fair bit there too. And I think I've bought all of the clothing that I could possibly want until some new stuff gets released, or goes on discount. I even broke my own rule and went below 100 gold bars to fund some of the discounted stuff that I wanted. I probably should have just been patient; I have until next week to buy all this stuff before the discount goes away. But I had time today, and I may not later in the week, so I bought it now, and I'm down at 95 and some change gold bars. Not to worry; I usually get between 3-4 gold bars a day doing daily challenges. If I just do a few fast and easy ones, I could get as low as about 2, but other days I easily get 4-5. It all depends on what the challenges are, and how much time I'm willing to dedicate to them. In general, I'm certainly going to slow down significantly after peaking today in terms of how many hours I spend on the game.

Because it was after midnight, my son was begging me to get off the PS4 and make room for him, and it was dark in game anyway, I didn't really have a good chance to redo outfits. Because I have so many new clothes, I was really looking forward to coming up with something new, but I only made a quick new cold and new hot (blue) outfit, so I have the bare minimum on my horse, and then I logged off after giving it a moment to "save." I'm not even sure that I like these new outfits; like I said, I couldn't even see them really. Sometime in the near future, I'll redo them if I don't, and create some more alternates so I can go back and forth while out and about. Not only did I not have time to do that, but I certainly didn't have time to sell the moonshine that had been sitting there waiting for me, which is good because I'm back down to $30 or so after the huge splurge I just had.

But I hadn't had a any pistols the entire time I've been playing; only revolvers, so it was nice to get some really quite pricey pistols that I enjoyed a lot in single player, get two of them even, at about half price, and load up on clothes for my cowboy fashionista. Clothes horse, maybe, is the better expression to use for him.

I also haven't used my Turkoman horse much since maxing him out. For whatever reason, I switched fairly early back to my Kladrubar, but he seemed really slow to me after running with some other horses. I also used the Norfolk roadster a bit, but I ended up doing the four hour collector marathon with the Criollo, which seems appropriate, given that that's the collector horse. In the past, I haven't loved that horse, but today it was my favorite. I'm kinda starting to think that rather than getting two more top tier horses--a white Arabian and the champagne dapple Missouri Foxtrotter, that I'd do better getting rid of the idea that I've locked certain saddles with certain horses, get a couple of different Nacogdoches saddle color schemes, and use them more often, assuming that they really are as good as everyone says and that they do really increase the speed and acceleration like everyone says. That's certainly a cheaper option than doing that plus getting two more stable stalls and two more really expensive horses, and then having to go through the painfully long horse bonding procedure with them before they're really "usable" the way that I'm used to. There can be time to eventually get them later. If I decide that I even still want to.

I'm determined to spend a minimal amount of time, relatively speaking, on the game tomorrow. I'll do a few daily challenges, and a moonshine run for the cash, and go back to the shack and start another batch of moonshine so I can do it later. (Actually probably in the reverse order. There's a chance that when I finish with the daily challenges, I'll be able to sell a second batch right away.) If the challenges aren't very good, I might even do a bounty hunt or two, because they pay in gold as well as cash (although a relatively small amount of the latter, it's the only role that actually gives you gold. But even then, the daily challenges are usually more lucrative.)

And then I'll get on the PC and maybe write a bit. I did start up a DH5 story, but I wasn't liking the way my intro was turning out, so I'll probably scrap it and start again. I'm mostly just noodling; I don't have a plan. But I've learned that with this enforced shut-in and even mandatory paid vacation that I'm on this week, if I don't do something other than play the game, I'll just end up playing the game. And I'd rather add something at least a bit more productive to the rotation of things that I'm doing rather than play 6-8 hours or so. Not non-stop, at least, but today I might have even logged more hours than that, and I kinda feel like while I accomplished some things in game, those obviously aren't real things that I've accomplished. I'm going to peak with the game and dramatically and quickly lose interest if I spend too much time on it, and the only mitigating factor is the upcoming update, new role, and new outlaw pass that we're all expecting.

Anyway, that's what I've done today. Ugh. That and running a few errands with my wife earlier.

RDR2 pictures

I finally got off my duff, created a Rockstar Social Club account, and downloaded some of the pictures I've taken in game to my computer. Actually, I mostly took pictures months ago when I was pretty much done with single player, but still dabbling in challenges and exploration and stuff with John Marston. Then, after my big months long hiatus and coming back to online, I hadn't really taken any pictures, so I took a bunch just recently.  First, some long-range views; one of the main reasons I love hiking in real life, and one of the main reasons why this game, when I'm stuck literally in the house in an midwestern suburb during the winter, scratches an itch for me. Kinda a surrogate, I guess.

A crossroads in the desert of New Austin

Wide view of much of New Austin from the top of the mesa, looking out into the desert valley.

Less dramatic, but beautiful in it's own way; Great Plains, the region where John ends up settling, and where I spend a fair bit of time in the Online mode.

A view into Nuevo Paraiso across the river. This area was part of the game in the first one, but is sadly not available for exploration in this one (although in return, we got a HUGE new area added. Even without this, the de facto area of the game is almost three times what the firsts' was.)

Next, a small handful of my John pictures. Without caption; they just are, mostly. The first one was a somewhat tongue in cheek attempt to create an Indiana Jones looking outfit. And by bizarre coincidence, he's smoking in both pictures.

I like John's build, although Arthur's is even better. Sadly, none of the build choices available in online really look quite as athletic. But we do our best. Here's my Online character in a variety of outfits and locations.

If you pay attention to that kind of thing, you'll notice that many of my outfits use the Hartman jacket. I've found that I really like that jacket, and I have every single color variation available, and use them often. My character, as I mentioned, looks a little round-shouldered without a jacket, so I like wearing them if I can. This one is light enough (although it doesn't look like it) that most of my outfits default to being appropriate for hot weather unless I pair it with some other, warmer accessories; warmer hats, warmer vests, gauntlets, gloves, chaps, etc. Even then, sometimes it's hard to get it into average territory, and I can only get them appropriate for cold by pairing them usually with a vest that's guaranteed to make the outfit cold weather appropriate. Most of these outfits are average temperature, but some of them are hot.

I also prefer shorter jackets without tails or other really long accessories. I find that the animation for them works very poorly when you're riding your horse, especially in cinematic mode, which I often use to just grind out long distance chugs without having to pay all that much attention because the AI steers your horse. Although I do use and like a few longer coats, I find that even more I like coats that don't hang down lower than the characters hips. There's plenty of them that do this, but most of them are quite warm. The Hartman coat is one I can use in milder and even hotter temperatures.

Because of the vest and hat, I call this my Everyday Gator outfit

Here's another view of it. These two pictures are at the lake in Aurora Basin in Tall Trees. I'd just done a bootlegger delivery to the shack in the first area. It was pouring down rain when I started, but when I finished, it was bright and sunny; perfect picture taking weather.

Experimenting with trying to capture some motion while changing poses in front of my Tall Trees moonshine shack. This outfit I call my Everyday Blue (because of the jacket) and it uses one of the Collector outfit hats.

One of my hot weather outfits. I thought the ivory color scheme worked; made it feel like a boater outfit or something.

Blue again up near Window Rock. This is one of my two favorite fishing spots too, although now that I've maxed out my health ring and usually have better ways of making money than fishing, I mostly only do this for various daily challenges. It's a bit of a shame, though. I do kinda enjoy fishing in game. (More than I do in real life, actually. Probably because they bite much more often.)

Another of my more unusual average temperature outfits, with a very short jacket and a hat that looks almost like a sombrero. I also was experimenting with setting up my camp in Cumberland Forest, because I felt like I didn't utilize or explore that area as much as I'd like. I didn't really love having my camp there, though, so back to the Heartlands I go. I'd really love to set up in Calumet Ravine. I know it's far away from everything, but I'd deal with it for the pleasure of waking up every time I logged in to Calumet Ravine.

I'm not quite sure what I was thinking with this outfit, and a ruined campsite near Plainview. I often experiment with a handful of outfits that are unusual, that I wear around for a little bit and then decide I don't really like them so I delete them and replace them with something else. This was one such; an attempt to use some of the Pittman outfit elements that I got from the Outlaw Pass 2.

An earlier version of the Ivory outfit out near Plainview. You may notice that the hat is not quite the right color; it's a light colored Calgary hat from the top level bounty hunter outfit. The ivory colored Kennedy hat that I went out and got looked much better.

Two views of my most default outfit, the Everyday Original. No hat, so I wouldn't lose it in fights, a weathered brown jacket and chaps, and a furry vest, it's still average temperature rated. Also showing is one of my five horses; a dark bay Turkoman.

I've already showed all of these outfits, but here they are again where maybe you can see them a bit better, and with in the case of all but the last one, a more intriguing scenic vista in the background.

And finally, the Black Mask; my character's alter ego. Maybe I should have put the bandanna up over my face for the pictures, but in reality, I don't do that when I'm playing very often, so probably won't for the pictures. As you can see, the balloonist goggles do a credible job of standing in for a Lone Ranger style eye mask.

The default average temperature version. The holsters and gloves and bandannas all have minor red highlights, as you can see, because it's hard to get just plain black everywhere.  Actually, that's not really true. I just have used the role gunbelts and holsters rather than the non-role ones, and they all have highlights of various colors on them.

The cold weather version using the black leather version of the winter shotgun coat, one of the few long coats that usually looks pretty good. In fact, the entire set-up just looks really bulky altogether. I also am using a different hat that has slightly smaller gold decorations on the hatband, and a lower profile compared to the previous, "regular" version. All three of the hats used in these variants come from bounty hunter outfits.

The hot weather version, without chaps, a lighter jacket and vest, and a different hat. I actually used this quite a bit because it's hot in most of Lemoyne and most of New Austin frequently. On the other hand, I don't use the cold weather variation all that much because I rarely go where it's sufficiently cold. That's one of the reasons I thought the all day snow day we had not too long ago is something that should be repeated regularly. Let us wear our cold weather clothes without having to sit around by ourselves in the West Grizzles without anything much to do!