SWTOR Characters

Every once in a while I'll go trawl through the user-submitted images on TOR Fashion looking for ideas on how to build cool looking characters. Here's a few of my latest finds. These are available on that site, of course, but I saved them and I'm going to post them so I can delete them from my desktop, where they're taking up space and cluttering things up.

I actually have three characters with a somewhat similar look (without the cyborg eye-patch) as this character, Vant Galaide (he has a Van Dyke beard, though), Wulf Hengest (a bit darker and with yellow eyes) and Haul Romund (lighter hair, but with pretty dark five o'clock shadow.) The outfit is based mostly on the Expert Outlaw, which I've had for some time and I like to use elements of it. Vant Galaide already has an outfit based on it too, actually.

This is based on a world drop jacket, butit looks like a color swap of the Madilon Onslaught jacket, which I have the schematic to make. I've, in fact, got a similar outfit on one character, although it's a lighter brown and the highlights are a dark red; the bounty hunter dye module, actually. I also love those boots. 

In two color variations; a reddish brown with teal shirt and saffron-colored scarf, or a variation where the shirt is gray and the jacket is teal. In reality, this is readily available in all kinds of colors; it drops pretty regularly as part of any Republic character, and there are schematics (which I have) and even a couple of Cartel Market jackets that all have this look. Most of them look different on an Imperial character, but not all of them. I also have those boots, that jacket, and I think even those guns. I could make this same outfit, pretty much, almost exactly as is. I don't have those exact pants, but I do have in my collections one that looks just like them except the cargo pockets are in the secondary color, which is admittedly a little weird. 

Although I've used a more neutral colored shirt that gives it more of a 50s greaser appearance, I have a couple of different color variations on this same outfit here below too, and I actually really like it (my default Anstal Tane look, for instance, if you remember my Sith Scoundrel videos or screenshots.) Not sure why I'm showing someone else doing something that I've already done other than to validate it to myself, maybe, and take note of the coloring.

I've discovered that one of the keys to making this oufit successful is the bracers. You'll either want something that covers this weird jacket cuff up entirely because its so big, or something small and unobtrusive that can disappear.

I used this exact same jacket, and hence a very similar look, on my own OG gunslinger when he went to Ilum and I decided I wanted him to dress for the icy weather. It just goes to show you; some of the cheap and craftable items really look good.

This last set of images for this character uses some elements that I don't have. I've discovered that for the most part, it's the jacket and helmet more than anything else that make an outfit, though—the other pieces can usually accept substitutions without making it look very different. I do like the alligator skin pants, though. Almost bought that outfit durin the Christmas sale. Wish now that I had.

The next one below is extremely similar to my own Mirialan Operative. I like the outfit well enough, especially with either a secondary black dye module (I think it's secondary) or even better the black and dark brown (again, can't remember if I used Honorable General or the Underworld Boss dye module) on it. This is unusual, because the jacket/chestpiece itself doesn't require it. But if you don't do it, you get a weird bright orange secondary color on everything else that you use if it's color-matched. Blegh. In a pinch, I suppose you could use a mostly black outfit or outfits to build all of your other pieces and don't unify the colors. The example here uses the expensive black/black dye module. That's overkill.

Again; what am I doing here? Looking for validation on choices that I've already made with characters I already have? I'm not sure. I may yet make my upcoming new agent character that will, unlike my Mirialan, not skip around missing tons of recording (plus he'll be human) use a similar variation on this theme again, although I'll probably give him more than one outfit to go between, like I did Vant Galaide, my Mercenary.

The two images below, however, will almost certainly be my default look for that character. I've got access to that chestpiece and helmet, and I've even got a black/black dye module that I picked up cheap when I saw someone selling it cheap (honestly; I wonder if they forgot to add a zero to the end of their asking price) and I've been saving it for a rainy day.

Finally, a really awesome "rugged" or maybe even "ragged" variation on the Mandalorian theme. I'd do it slightly different, but I still think this character is just freakin' awesome looking as depicted here.

Here, the chest piece is one that I'm not 100% sure of; I think it's actually a world drop piece with several variations, which means that it might not really be available to early characters. The rest of the pieces are cartel market items, but they come from three new and very expensive sets. The helmet and big chunky bracers are from the ersatz "Mandalorian" armor, called Infamous Bounty Hunter. I actually have an alternative Mandalorian style helmet that I like better because it's not quite so iconic, which means it feels a little bit more unique. The boots and belt can be subbed if necessary, although I like the look of them here; they come from the Cybernetic Pauldron set, which is an attractive set in its own right.

The piece that really makes it, though, is the makeshift kilt over trousers look, which comes from the Furious Gladiator. That set it unfortunate in the sense that it would be MASSIVELY awesome if the faceplate were always down. It looks great when its down. But unless you're in combat or otherwise have your weapon drawn, it goes up and you look like a dumb version of the mummy underneath. What an unfortunate missed opportunity.

Finally, this last bounty hunter is mostly Roland Dyre's armor with a dye module and some variations that I could build something very close to right now.

You'll notice that it uses the same boots as the one before.

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.

Classic high fantasy and other vintage books from my youth

I'm not taking a break from SWTOR, even though I've not blogged about it all that much. Tomorrow, in fact, we're due to get update 7.01, although that promises more to fix a few bugs than it does to actually provide us with any new content. That said, I'm a lot closer to catching up on editing my raw game videos than I have been a long time. I should probably get back to it a bit more than I have been; I've mostly been doing bare minimum daily and weekly tasks. I've set some new goals for my use of my free time, and frittering away as much of it as I did on the internet or SWTOR is not a new part of the plan. Rather, I'd like to make actual progress on things that I'm doing online, or not do them, for the most part.

One thing that I used to do all of the time but which I haven't done much recently, is read loads of fantasy books. I've got loads to read, some of it stuff that I've read before (but not in decades, in some cases) and some of it is stuff that I haven't read before. Almost exactly a year ago at this very time, I was re-reading The Belgariad, for instance, and... y'know, honestly, I liked it better than I expected. In my mind, its flaws and the complaints levied against it by its critics had been magnified in my mind until I was under the impression that I didn't actually like it anymore after all, even though I remember liking it in the past. Of course, what I found that while the plot and some of its other features were fairly primitive, if not banal, the series itself was well-written and charming. I should have known. 

In any case, in spite of whatever weaknesses works like The Belgariad may have had, or other works of similar vintage by authors like Terry Brooks, R. A. Salvatore, Raymond Feist, or Weis and Hickman, I still think that they are vastly superior to the modern, "subversive" crap, very little of which I've enjoyed, and which can take the majority of the blame for my eventual dismal view of reading fantasy as a hobby overall the last several years. So, it's time to revitalize my reading, by making an effort to set aside time every day to read. I'll play either some orchestral movie soundtracks or classic music in the background, and have at it. While I've got plenty of books to have a go with, I should probably list at least some of my early targets to make sure that they get read.

• I read, quite some time ago, the first book in the Brian Daley Han Solo Adventures trilogy. Of course, I don't have that book, what I have is all three of the books in the trilogy in omnibus format, so I really have no excuse for not having read the second and third yet. They're not even very long. First target.
• I've also had Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars out and off of my shelf for some time. This is two short novels, or maybe novellas that are usually packaged together: "The Secret of Sinharat" and "People of the Talisman." I have read these before; more than once, even, but I'm due and they're really good.
• I've also had some Robert E. Howard for a long time. While I rather easily read the Del Rey Conan compilations, I have not read the Kull or Soloman Kane compilations that I bought at the same time; they've sat untouched on my shelf for years. Time to remedy that.
• It has been way too long since I've re-read The Lord of the Rings. I've lost count, but I know that I'm close to a score of read-throughs, but I also haven't done it in a good ten years. I may do this as an audiobook while walking around the parks and neighborhoods, or I may just read them like normal.
• It's also been a very long time since I've read R. A. Salvatore's Icewind Dale trilogy. Kind of on a whim, I bought an omnibus copy of the Dark Elf prequel trilogy, which I read once long ago. I'm a little annoyed that in this new packaging, the prequel omnibus is volume 1, while the original trilogy is in omnibus format as volume 2. Chronological order is not all that, guys. Publication order is more important, because that's the order (and therefore context) that readers will have originally had, and which it was originally written as. 
• Also in the D&D fiction category, which I sadly have probably way too much of, I've read the first of four loosely connected novels in the "The Inquisitives" series for Eberron. I have the other three, so I should just power through and read them too.
• Finally, I picked up the missing copies of my Riftwar Saga books a while ago, but I haven't re-read them since picking up the copies of books that I lost when a friend moved with them in a box somewhere. I never rebought them new, because I disliked the "author's cut" versions that had been in print since the 90s. Great cover art, but the editors, quite honestly, had improved the books. I found and picked up the older 80s printings that I had had before, and now I've got all four volumes again.
• Long ago I bought a copy of Dracula. I've read it before, but I always wanted to own my own copy. However, I haven't ever read my copy. Sigh. 

I've got plenty more, but that's enough to get me going for quite some time. One thing that you'll notice is that nothing on it has been published more recently than the mid 90s with the exception of the Eberron novels. In fact, other than that I've only got the Salvatore stuff written in the 80s and earliest 90s. The rest of that stuff is significantly older, much of it written before I was born. But, of course, I originally read either it or related works by the same authors in the 80s, so they're associated with that same period in my life. 

Frankly, if I can get all of that read before summer is halfway over, I'll consider this a rousing success, even though when I was younger finishing all of that in a month or two would have been easy. Because I've also got a few non-fiction books on my list, like the four-volume Write Great Fiction series, for instance, even in best case scenario, getting all of this read before the summer is too far along will be challenging.

Jon of the Rice on The Batman

I like Jon reasonably well. And the main point he makes here is true. 

However, it's a bit funny to hear a Fake American who's Hispanic-ness is the core of his identity (not his American-ness) say over and over again "You have to go back". While he talks about white identity in this video, he doesn't himself share it.

I think that like many good Fake Americans, he buys into the proposition nation myth of America, and refuses to see (or at least admit) the whole reason he was welcomed here and wanted to be here in the first place was because America was built by an overwhelmingly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant population; so overwhelming that anyone else who added a bit of spice to America was just that; nothing more than a bit of spice. The WASP culture, language, religion, and way of life was able to overwhelm entirely anyone else that merged with the population until the Ellis Island wave at least. And even then, it wasn't until a few years after Reagan's amnesty started to bear fruit that it really finally broke. But ironically the WASP people are just about the only people in the world who would have welcomed hordes of Fake Americans and treated them like family.

The black population is different, as it always existed rather awkwardly as a parallel nation within the same (sort of) space as the actual American nation and never came close to being mistaken for similar in either phenotype or behavior. But if Jon takes his argument to its logical conclusion: most likely he has to go back too. Maybe he'd still be welcomed to stay, because he's been a pretty good ally. But he's still a Fake American at the end of the day, and his actions only indirectly benefit Americans, because what he really wants to do is preserve America so that his Hispanic amigos can take advantage of it. Or at least him himself and his family.

My Fake American great grandfather (yes, I'm 1/8 Fake American and 7/8s True American) had a very different sensibility. While he was born in America to Portuguese immigrant parents, he was keenly aware of his status, and didn't try to pretend that he could be both Portuguese and American at the same time. In fact, when he moved from his original hometown, he didn't even tell people he was Portuguese, he told people that his last name was French, because it sounded less foreign, and everyone pretty much knew that French names had always been in America because of the Normans, a few Huguenot refugees from the Colonial period, and the Acadians that got merged after the Louisiana Purchase. His actual Portuguese ancestry wasn't discovered until two generations later when my uncle, as an adult, spent some time in Brazil and recognized the names in the old family Bible family tree for what they were. By this time great grandpa Henriques had been dead for many years already. My great grandmother (a Scots-Irish Galloway, so pretty iconic American stock) went to her grave refusing to believe that her husband had been Portuguese, and she got pretty animated about it, in fact.

My great grandfather is an interesting case study in assimilation. Actually, my entire family is, as my other great grandparents, my grandfather's family (as opposed to my half Portuguese grandmother) are an interesting case study of assimilation of another kind. Despite living for more than three generations on the West Coast, they remained stubbornly unassimilated Southerners, who practiced Southern culture and Southern values. Not Gone with the Wind Southern values; more like Dukes of Hazzard Southern values. When my father finally moved back to the South (or at least to Texas, which was primarily settled by Southerners) he was amazed to find himself culturally at home, and that what he had previously believed, that his family were just unusual iconoclasts, wasn't really true. Rather, they were simply strangers in a strange land; foreigners, if you will, practicing a foreign way of life in another region of the US than the one that they belonged to. (My mother's people were all pretty iconic Rocky Mountain states rural people. While not exactly the same as Southerners, they're similar enough that they tend to get along pretty well. I feel equally at home in the South and in the Rocky Mountain West. My cousins on that side are ones that I relate to pretty well. And I like the scenery and the climate of the West better than the hot and humid South.)

Jon, I think, wants to have his cake and eat it too. My great grandfather did his best to assimilate, but was still keenly aware that he was always going to be a Fake American. But he abandoned his prior identity. He intermarried with an American girl and raised his children as Americans. It wasn't even until two generations later that his 1/4 Portuguese grandchildren discovered that he'd been Portuguese at all, which is probably going too far. For me, and even more for my kids, it's merely an interesting conversation piece. My son once asked me what that one ancestor was again: Puertorican or something? Jon, on the other hand, doesn't appear to want to assimilate. He wants to revel in being Hispanic, while being in America. His website splashes in gigantic letters that he's the leading Hispanic voice in science fiction. He's all Hispanic, Hispanic, Hispanic all the time. In the past, we've mostly allowed people to do that, and didn't give them much if any grief about it. But the over-reach of every other minority—including tens of millions of entitled, demanding Hispanics—will certainly be the undoing of that paradigm. America will fall apart. I'm not sure how much of it will remain America vs. being ceded to invading conquerors that we've foolishly welcomed to come in. Either way, in True America, if it survives, people won't parade around their minority status anymore, because it will be remembered as the trigger that made our entire way of life fall apart. They'll prudently minimize or even hide it, if they can; change their names, etc. Like they used to, curiously, when they didn't even have to. In the past, immigrants wanted to assimilate. They wanted to be Americans. They didn't want to hold on too tightly to identities that they'd deliberately left behind. In Fake America, most likely, Americans won't be very prevalent at all, and they might still remain a focus for resentment and bitterness for people from failed Third World cultures who envy and covet what Americans built for themselves and then fecklessly threw away. Either way, there won't be room for Jon's vision of America in either True America or Fake America either one. And if Jon is allowed to stay among the True Americans, he'll probably change his name and be glad that he can physically pass for a white guy and doesn't have an accent.

UPDATE: Here's another video that gets it and describes the problems with this movie pretty well. I've had my own complaints about the movie here, but I haven't really dug into it other than to mention the wokeness. To be honest, that wasn't my initial strong impression of the movie, even though that's what I mentioned most. But I didn't really love it. However, in the time since I first watched it, the problems have risen in my consciousness until that's all I can see. That often happens to me with movies. Other than absolutely terrible movies, I usually enjoy them well enough when I first see them, because I'm not really thinking too hard about them. Mediocre movies that I don't really think about after I see them often get a pass at me ever even paying attention to their flaws, because I don't bother thinking about them at all, and forget them soon after watching. This means that if something reminds me of them, I might actually remember them more fondly than they deserve. However, movies that have enough substance of some kind will make me think about them more, and then I will often notice things that I otherwise might wish not to. It can make good movies turn sour on me as I see the subtext more clearly.

Here is Midnight's Edge, explaining how the subtext which I also started to notice after seeing it, has made me gradually start to hate the movie and get pissed off about it.

Masks and Russia

While at Church on Sunday, I couldn't help but be distracted by the handful of people who are still wearing masks. Now, first of all, I should point out that science isn't what the bureaucrats say. It isn't even what the scientists say. It's what the data says. And the data has said for well over a year now that masks and cancellations/lockdowns were completely and utterly statistically irrelevant to the number of covid positives reported. They literally had no effect whatsoever. And that, my friends, is SCIENCE! Except for real, and not the puerile virtue-signaling Fake Science that liberals love to point at. 

But no; that's not what people wearing masks at Church made me think of. What it made me think of is how everyone (well, nearly) voluntarily adopted to masks all at once like a school of fish. Nobody ever seems to lead a school of fish, but they are so attuned to the movements of each other that they seem to move in an almost hive-mind like fashion. The tiniest motion of someone in the school and the entire school mimics it and keeps formation. That's how the mask adoption went. But masks are now a thing of the past. Nobody is talking about covid. It's not in the news. It's not on the politicians' minds. Lyin' Dr. Fauci the war criminal hasn't been seen in weeks if not months. 

Covid hysteria isn't Current Thing. Current Thing is let's hate Russians and virtue signal about Ukrainians, even though everyone knows as little about that situation as they do epidemiology, and what most people believe is as completely backwards from the truth as what they believed about covid too.

So I wondered and kind of felt sorry for some of the mask wearers at Church. Some of them are strident harpies who have loved to virtue-signal and have something that they can use to boss around and bully the noncompliant, but many of them are just weak-minded nice guys trying to be polite to those that they are imagining are suffering from covid hysteria. Like the stormtrooper literally looking right at the droids that he's looking for but is readily suggestible that he's not, they simply don't have the will or wherewithal to do other than what they're told to do by authority figures. Kind of the opposite of the American personality and the whole reason for being that sparked the birth of America if you think about it. But for months now, these mask wearers have gotten more and more out of touch. At first it was merely "radicals" like me who believed in logic and independent research and actually knowing what the data says as opposed to what we're supposed to think that it means as it's been spoon-fed to us. I looked at mask wearers as sadly gullible at best, suitable for nothing but slavery at worst. But gradually over the last year and a half or more, more and more people got tired of wearing masks, started exercising some belated skepticism, and stopped caring about masks. Policies started changing, and mask wearers—depending on your region—either almost disappeared entirely (if they were even ever a majority in the first place), or were only exercising vestigial politeness by still wearing them.

But now that the masks have completely been dropped and everyone is now turning their attention to Russia, then people still wearing masks don't have anyone left to virtue-signal to who still value virtue-signaling about masks. They somehow failed to take their cues from the rest of the school of fish. They're defective fish.

What a way to live. I can't even imagine. And the sad thing is that the sudden pivot to Russia should be a wake-up call that the mask wearing was always nothing but virtue-signaling and even the Cloud People didn't ever really believe in it—else why was it so suddenly dropped for no scientifically rational reason in the first place? But it won't. Because stormtroopers always believe that these aren't the droids that they're looking for.

Ukrainian False Flag

The biggest disappointment of recent years has got to be Mitt Romney. Not that I expected him to be wonderful, but I expected him to be decent, and to have some decency and integrity.

Watching him offer bald-faced lies to the public over and over again in the last couple of years, and double down on them, and then make vague threats against anyone who calls him out, like Tulsi Gabbard, is just execrable. As Mr. Lira points out, he represents one of the many interests in the US who wants to get us involved in war with Russia, and he clearly has wanted that for many, many years.

It's hard to imagine that kind of evil sinking in to a normal, "nice guy" mentality that Romney portrays. I'm forced to conclude that he likely wasn't ever really much of a nice guy at all.

I'm also really quite disappointed in the people who swallow the propaganda about how Russia is losing so badly, Putin is so desperate, he made a major miscalculation, etc. People who really should know better. I'm less inclined to be judgmental to the many, many idiots out there who are super gullible and always have been, but far too many people should know better and don't.

Gonzalo Lira has some other cool videos too, that I'm liking. His puppets of the west video is really good, for instance.

Once again, the Z-man. I link and quote him a lot. Not because I think he's the smartest guy out there, or even that he's always right. But when he is right, he manages to be both right and very articulate in describing how he's right. He's quite gifted and describing reality, when he can manage to see it. Which, luckily, is also a skill that he has where he's better than average.

Last week, the current president of Ukraine thanked Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for his role in helping him win the propaganda war. Facebook lifted its ban on praising the various neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine. Then it announced it would allow calls for violence against individual Russians. In the world of infinitely malleable ethics, this is what Silicon Valley now calls a principled stand. Ukraine supporters are proud of their work on social media wining the meme war with Russia.

In the real world, the Russian army is slowly turning Ukraine into the world’s largest mound of rubble. In the Donbass, they have the Ukrainian army and the tens of thousands of militia members surrounded. It is not easy to get reliable information about what is happening on the ground, but reliable estimates say fifty thousand pro-Ukrainian fighters are now trapped in the Donbass “cauldron.” Barring a peace deal, they will be vaporized over the next couple of weeks.

In the south, the Russian army has created a corridor to the Crimea. This was a primary objective of the invasion. Mariupol, a city in southeastern Ukraine, lies along the estuary of the Kalmius and Kalchik rivers near the Sea of Azov. This city has been surrounded and cutoff by the Russian army. The Ukrainian army based there has been given the chance to surrender, but the irregulars will be given no quarter. It is a preview of what will happen in the Donbass over the next month.

The point here is that despite losing the social media war, the Russians are winning the actual war in Ukraine. It has been slow going as the Russians do not wage television friendly wars, so no cool video. Ukraine was slowly being turned into a fortified outpost by Washington, so the Ukrainian army is well trained and supplied. Digging them out of those fortification will not be easy, but it is inevitable. The Russians will turn Ukraine into rubble if that is what it takes to achieve their objective.

What this war has revealed is a clash of realties. On the Washington side, reality is played out on TV chat shows, office politics and the internet. They really think winning the public relations campaign matters. In the reality in which Western leaders live, words count for everything. Facts are just tools to be used to decorate a clever argument or a novel public relations campaign. From the perspective of the West, the war has been a disaster for Russia.

On the other side, the Russians operate in a different reality. They are focused on securing their border, which means neutralizing Ukraine. They have prepared for the economic consequences. They have prepared their people, who seem to be overwhelming supportive of the effort. Westerners have described Putin as having a medieval mindset, which may be true, but he is dealing with a people and a reality that still thinks the old way about the world.

Quote of the Day

Granted, it was a few days ago, but still: "I miss the days when D&D wasn't a fashion item for locusts." Found in the comments section of a YouTube video from Clownfish. I'm not a huge D&D fan, but I'm a huge fan of the hobby that D&D created, and I do have plenty of fond memories of D&D even so. 

There's no way I'd spend any money on modern D&D. For various reasons, but I admit to some schadenfreude about watching these SJW converged IPs flounder, struggle and shriek that people are all racists because they aren't popular enough. As if you can guilt your way into popularity as opposed to make yourself much more unpopular by trying.

Athens and Sparta

The Z-man has two posts today about Athens and Sparta and how the neocons and Western Civilization in general (to which the neocons don't really belong, honestly) are dominated even now by the spectre of the Peloponnesian War. I think that that conclusion is the tail wagging the dog a little bit, but certainly comparisons can easily be made. https://www.takimag.com/article/the-last-war-for-the-neocons/

[I]t is good to think about the Peloponnesian War now that we once again have a war in Europe. Athens triggered the war with Sparta by getting involved in the dispute between Corinth and their colony of Corcyra. Corinth was a Spartan ally. Athens also imposed sanctions on Megarian citizens, another Spartan ally. The Athenian ambitions compelled them to confront Sparta, which was happy to remain in its own sphere of influence and let the Athenians dominate theirs.

This behavior is oddly similar to what we see from America with regards to Russia since the end of the Cold War. It has been three decades of pointless provocations, which have finally broken the peace in Europe. The entirety of the neoconservative subculture is now organized around using the war to bring the United States into direct conflict with the Russian Federation. They see this as their chance to bring about the last war.

Interestingly, the Golden Age of Athens preceded the war with Sparta. This came after the defeat of the Persians. This was when Athenian influence grew primarily through the flourishing of trade. After the Spartans finally defeated the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, there was another period of cultural flowering. In the years following her defeat, Athens gave us Plato and Aristotle.

The point being that the Athens that looms over Western civilization was the product of peace rather than war. Wartime Athens was belligerent, arrogant, and destabilizing to the rest of the region. The great contribution to the West made by the Spartans was in finally defeating her old rival and ending her imperial ambitions. The Spartan defeat of the Athenian empire may have made Western civilization possible.

That is highly debatable, but it is something to consider as the Global American Empire stumbles into what is looking like its Sicilian Expedition. The thirty years of economic and technological flowering after the Cold War have made the American empire belligerent, arrogant, and destabilizing to the rest of the world. To the rest of the world, the modern Athens is becoming something to fear rather than admire.

Athens did not regain herself until it was finally defeated at the Battle of Aegospotami and forced to surrender to Sparta. Perhaps that is what we are about to see with the Global American Empire in Ukraine. Thucydides wrote that war is a violent teacher. Maybe this war finally breaks America of its imperial ambitions. Perhaps then America can go back to being what it aspires to be, the modern Athens.

SWTOR Videos

I've got quite a few videos that I've recorded, but not edited or posted. I've actually spent some of my time the last few days after I've done my daily requirements for the BBA event and the Galactic Seasons cleaning some of that up rather than playing too much more. However, the next two videos in my queue to edit are ones where I forgot to plug in my headset. As I was having lots of problems with sound when I first started using OBS, I set it somehow so it only records sound when my USB headset is inserted. If I forget to put that in, then I get video that doesn't have sound. Usually I don't forget to do this, of course, but occasionally I do, because it's playing well out of my bluetooth speaker and I forget.

Sadly, one of the two recordings I made was the initial video for my Vanguard bounty hunter. I haven't done anything else with him yet, except the intro cut scene. I'm trying to decide if I want to just go through that without sound for my video series (it is subtitled, for example) or start over; deleting the character and creating a new one that looks the same. I'm not out too much other than some time and credits that I spent on outfitting him, but my budget is such that losing a couple million credits isn't a big deal to me anymore. I can earn that back in no time selling some crafted V-9 Advanced Grenades or something.

That's probably what I will do, although its a real shame to have to do so.  Sigh.

The second video that doesn't have sound was the last part of Vant Galaide, my normal Mercenary, on Hutta. Luckily, he'd already finished all of the story, and this was just some clean-up on a few exploration missions that I wanted to finish before leaving the planet. That one I can't redo even if I wanted to, so I'm going to upload it as is, with just the note that if it really bothers anyone, they can skip it if they want.

UPDATE: Did it. Deleted Wulf Galaide and replaced him with Wulf Hengest. I like the Anglo-Saxon better anyway. Well, kinda. Hengist is usually how it's spelled, but Hengest is also attested. He looks the same. It cost me an extra 2 million credits, but I'm selling probably twenty million of items that I crafted this afternoon, so no biggy. I'm actually really looking forward to getting more acquainted with the Vanguard combat, which should be the same (well, mirrored abilities, but differing animations for them) as the Powertech, and I've certainly played plenty of Powertechs already. 

UPDATE 2: In terms of more general updates, I've spent almost all of my SWTOR time this week grinding for bounty contracts, because that's a limited time event, I missed it last time it came around because I was out of town, and there's tons of stuff I want to buy that require the BBA currency. I'm finding that although I quite liked that event before, compared to most of the others, I'm getting a bit burned out on it. It's grindy and after a while, it's tedious. It takes about 15-20 minutes to get a character through a BBA contract all told, between all of the things that you have to do to complete it and cash it in. And since I have twelve characters who are at a place that they can play in the BBA sandbox, that's the better part of three hours, or even three and a half a day doing just BBA stuff. 

Luckily, doing BBA stuff is 1) giving me plenty of conquest points to meet my Galactic Seasons daily requirement, without me having to go do something else unique for that, and 2) is actually giving me enough XP to be noticeable. My lower level characters, of which I have five participating, four of which haven't even finished the capital world and picked up their ships yet, will probably get a total of 4-6 levels each just from doing BBA stuff. It'll actually be nice when next week rolls around to try and slowly move my characters forward again. They haven't really gotten very far. Hutran Thanatos is the farthest of my low level characters, but that's because I deliberately stopped recording him, so he's a bit easier and more relaxing to play.

I also still have three characters that I started but literally haven't done anything with other than their opening scene and equiping. (Actually four, but I doubt I'll play one of them. I'm reluctant to get rid of him, though, just in case.) And I've got two more in mind; some kind of Sith Sorcerer, although maybe being played as a Jedi Knight, and another agent to make up for the mistake I made on recording with Hutran Thanatos. I also don't really like that he's an operative; I dislike the operative mechanics so far. I haven't decided if I'll play my next agent as a Gunslinger, or as a Sniper again. Either way, I really like both mechanics, and I'd like to have an excuse to use them both. Plus, I've got tons of collected blaster pistols and sniper rifles, and it seems a shame to not use more of them.

UPDATE 3: I'm finding the bounty missions are starting to get tedious. I guess that's what happens when you do twelve of them every day for almost a week now. I've got one more day of them. One of the things that I'll do is buy one more kingpin bounty. I should still have enough to buy the 50 BBA currency item after I do it, but I'm cutting it down to absolutely the last BBA currency unit I'll have. Sigh.

However, I was thinking about how frustrating it is that I want to have a bounty hunter vanguard with a signature weapon of a bowcaster, but I can't actually equip the bowcaster that I bought from the BBA vendor earlier this week until 10th level. But then I thought; hey, how about before I do any missions I run around killing random enemies and see how hard it really is to get to 10th level before starting? The answer, it turns out, is that it's kind of tedious but not that bad. It took me about two hours, and I got quite a few syndicate data files to turn in for syndicate reputation later, I got the whole map of Hutta uncovered, I did two Heroics because while wandering around I found and remembered that the quest giver is right there. I wasn't going to do missions, but because those are repeatable anyway, I figured what the heck. My gear is pretty upgraded due to drops, and I've got quite a few more abilities unlocked (although still not enough to make the character all that interesting to play yet. Sigh.) But I got there. I equipped my bowcaster and now, except for the opening cut scene, I'll do everything with my signature weapon. I could, actually, have done it even before doing the opening cut scene, so I'll keep that in mind for the future, maybe.

But I really shouldn't prioritize him quite yet. I've got plenty of low level characters who need to advance their story still without starting my new bounty hunter vanguard, mercenary smuggler or whatever mechanics I end up using agent. Sigh again. But it was an interesting experiment. Certainly it's possible, and not too terrible to get to 10th level, allow yourself to equip items that you can't otherwise equip, like Alliance crate armor pieces, my scalene armor, the bowcaster, etc. without putting too much work and effort into making it possible, and then you can play the game with even more options on customizing your appearance. Plus, because you'll be doing level 1-2 levels right at first while already 10th level, they'll be easier than expected, I suppose. And when I finish my starting planet and move on, I should be a few levels head-started compared to the other characters I'm doing. Staying a few levels ahead of the curve is always preferable if you can pull it off.

BioLabs

Two days ago, "fact" checkers dismissed the idea of bioweapon labs in the Ukraine as Russian propaganda and conspiracy theory.

Clearly, the Russians aren't really into propaganda these days. "Russian propaganda" is usually the media's lying term for "well-established fact" and conspiracy theory is the lying media's term for "spoiler alert."

Because the US just admitted that it has bioweapons labs in the Ukraine, now that Russia is likely to get ahold of them. And as for Nuland, who's kind of a confirmed war criminal, who gleefully admits responsibility for overthrowing the democratically elected government of the Ukraine in 2014 to establish the kleptocratic and violent and completely useless government that has been there ever since, demonstrates the third law of the SJW: SJWs Always Project.

Nuland Warns Russia May Seize Ukraine Biolabs, Stage False Flag Using Bioweapons https://t.co/awVrq74F0O

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 8, 2022

Our government is not run by serious people; it's run by childish, idiotic sociopaths who live in a delusional world of wishful thinking and self-aggrandizement. 

UPDATE: After I posted that, I got a feed from the Z-man's blog. He noticed the same thing and reached the same conclusion, unsurprisingly.  https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=26877

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.

Movie extravaganza

The youngest of my kids is 18. He just left home, for two years, earlier this week, to go do some missionary work. Now, I do have a 23 year old daughter who's living back in the house while working at a vet clinic, but in a sense, this was the domino that made us empty nesters, at a relatively young age. I just turned 50 a few weeks ago, and my wife is a year and a half younger.

Anyway, long story short (too late) my wife wanted to get out of the house instead of sitting around thinking about how empty and quiet it was. And because I'm a nice guy who takes care of my wife, I agreed to go do a bunch of stuff that I might otherwise not have been super inclined to do. Last night, we watched the Wedding Veil trilogy, a kind of "sisterhood of the traveling pants" about a wedding veil that was filmed on the Hallmark Channel. A lot of guys my age (or any other age) might take a dim view of Hallmark Channel movies, and I can't exactly blame them. However, I do think that when you have charismatic enough actors who have some fun chemistry between them, that the execution is sufficient to make up for any other defects or flaws that that specific iteration of the Hollywood machine might spit out. Nothing I ever watch on the Hallmark Channel is likely to be so memorable that I can tell you much about it a few days after I've seen it, and often even less than that if its particularly forgettable, but that doesn't mean that I can't enjoy the better ones.

This one focused on three friends, and each of the three girlfriends was in all three movies, but each had a movie that they were the particular star or focus of. The first one had Lacey Chabert, who I always think of as the little kid from Party of Five (a show that I actually never watched, but back in the early to mid 90s you could hardly escape hearing about what was popular on network TV even if you wanted to. I know quite a bit about Dawson's Creek too, even though I never watched any of that show.) More particularly, she's the voice actress of the girlfriend of the bounty hunter in SWTOR, and the bounty hunter is my favorite storyline. She ended up marrying a good old fashioned American guy who had a lot of money that his father had made, but he wanted to be involved in art, and he had the money to do it, so voila! Classic stuff. And Lacey is still pretty cute, even at her age. Because let's face it; Party of Five was... what, twenty-five years ago now? She turns 40 this year, but she still can pull off the "young enough to be a credibly attractive single girl" thing. To be fair to Lacey, I think part of her charm is that she really is to some degree the good girl that she plays in Hallmark movies. She says she loves working for Hallmark and that they've been very good to her, and she's proud of the message that they promote.

Anyway, I'm not going to talk too much about these movies, because I know this is hardly the target audience for them, but they weren't bad. But the first one was the best. The second one featured a girl who was a little too "spunky" for my taste; she came across as almost pushy and unlikable at times. Plus, she ran off to Italy and married an Italian guy. What; you're telling me that of the millions of American guys in your age set, you couldn't find one that floated your boat? That said, he was a decent Italian guy. And the north Italian Po Valley are Hajnal line people that I can relate to, and Verona in particular and Padua, where the movie mostly takes place, are pretty important to Western Civilization and even English Literature in particular, being the setting of some of Shakespeare's most iconic plays (settings from Romeo and Juliet in particular were prominently mentioned. Funny how they didn't look up settings from The Taming of the Shrew! I guess that may not be a favorite of the heavily middle-aged women demographic that watches that channel...

The third one hit a less than stellar note with me, because it was heavily focused on the immigrants of Ellis Island, and talked about these Fake Americans as if their story were the American story. I understand why mainstream "normies" aren't yet ready to accept that that narrative is a basket of big fat lies, but because I'm on the other side of that divide, my perspective on these things isn't the same. The male love interest in this one was an Italian New Yorker, and his mom and "nonna" or grandmother were both still in the picture, and they were more Italian and less New York than he was. (Actually, although the actor looked dark enough and had a credible Italian look, his real name is Victor Wagner, and he seems to be a pretty bog-standard Canadian of English descent.) Anyway, at one point, his mother and grandmother were having a discussion about his girlfriend, and the grandmother commented that she wasn't Italian. This irked me a bit; you know where Italians can go find other Italians to marry? There actually is a place specifically for Italians. Guess what? It's not New York. It's Italy. Either be a little more grateful and appreciative that Americans have allowed you to live here, or go home.

Anyway, today we saw first The Batman. This was a reasonably good movie, but I didn't love it. I just liked it. A few things brought it down for me. I'll have some minor spoilers in the paragraphs that follow. One of them I've heard almost everyone mention; when Zoe Kravitz says some line to Robert Pattinson about white privilege, the movie came to a screeching halt, the idiotic writers came out and delivered their idiotic message, and then they were lucky that we could get the movie started again fairly seamlessly without that ruining the movie. What a moronic thing to do. It came close to messing the whole thing up, and it certainly took away any chance that it'll displace The Dark Knight as the iconic Batman story on film. The rest of the anti-white hatred was a little more subtle. The race-swapping, for instance. Catwoman has been race-swapped many times before, starting back when Eartha Kitt replaced Julie Newmar in the late 60s, but it still bugs me. Kravitz has this weird mystery meat vibe to her, given that both of her parents, quite curiously, are half black and half Jewish—an unusual mixture for one person, but for a married couple, even more unusual. In any case, I don't really love Catwoman as a character and I'd like to see someone else come forward for once in a Batman production, but I'm not a purist about her either. Her backstory was significantly changed, but I think only serious Batheads will care. I mostly was put off by the fact that I don't think that she's as attractive as Hollywood apparently does. Then again, the Cloud People have spent quite a bit of effort in getting us to accept exotic, mystery meat unattractive women as attractive. Have you seen the pictures in the stores in any given mall lately? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

I was a little less charitably inclined to accept the vandalism done to the backstory of Thomas and Martha Wayne, Bruce's parents, who now have to be saddled with a shady past for no good reason whatsoever other than to make all white people into villains. There's a strong vibe of the idea that People of Color (POCs, or POX—as in "upon our house"), especially women POX will save us from our whiteness. This was, of course, exacerbated by the race-swapping of Jim Gordon into a black man, and the black woman who was supposedly the only virtuous politician ever in the history of Gotham City. Given that fact that it is extremely well documented that POX and minorities in general are much more inclined to criminality than the actual Anglo-Saxon American stock, and that statistics proving this go back generations, that particular slander is especially galling. And then, of course, there's the part near the end when the threat ends up being... nerdy white incel domestic terrorists who spend too much time on the "dark web" or whatever. Blegh. It's curious that Hollywood and the Cloud People generally so fear this imaginary specter of angry white male incels that they continue to demonize them... even as they fail to actually materialize in real life. But SJWs Always Project.

In spite of these obvious and ultimately kind of crippling failings, there are others that are more structural and less meta. For instance, a seawall is threatened and Gotham floods. Except that before that happens, we're never even given even other than a single off-handed reference to even its existence. And I'm not even sure if I accurately remembered that that offhand reference even exists; I may have subconsciously invented it to circumvent the fact that there was no foreshadowing, or anything else to suggest that the seawall was even a thing that existed at all. The whole plot twist came out of nowhere. As long as the movie was, it was a little all over the place, and didn't spend time developing things that it it really needed to develop. And it was long. 176 minutes. Even though I was very careful with drinks before and during the movie, I barely made it through without running for the john. And when I did, there was a flood of men in the bathroom doing the same thing I was.

Then we stuck around and watched Uncharted. My kids are big fans of the video games, and we own all four of them on the PS4, but I'm not a purist there either. I've seen them playing a lot, but I haven't played them myself. So, my kids have purist complaints of sorts about the movie. Not that it's a bad movie, but that it would and could have been better had it been more true to the source material. To me, it was like a somewhat more forgettable but charming enough variation on the National Treasure theme. And it lacks Nicholas Cage. But even so, it had some problems for even a guy like me who's only passingly familiar with the source material. One: Chloe Frasier, who is obviously a white girl, and I happen to know for sure that she's a gray eyed English girl in the second game, was race-swapped into a strangely unattractive, horse-faced Indian girl, although still with a super-white English name. lolwut? Meanwhile, Elena, who's the iconic love interest of the series and literally the first NPC that you meet in the first game, if I remember correctly, was nowhere to be found. Two: Antonio Banderas is set up as the villain and SPOILER ALERT, he's undercut in an extremely dumb and poorly thought out plot twist where one of his much less notable or interesting subordinates murders him and that's that; he's suddenly out of the picture. It's not quite as bad as the Snoke "subverted expectations" because it's only one movie to build him up. Then again, he was built up more than Snoke was in even one movie, so cutting his legs out from under him wasn't a clever plot twist, it was an obnoxious, and arbitrary one, just to be dumb and unexpected. Another mostly entertaining, but also sadly kind of of forgettable effort, I'm afraid. 

The last movie we saw was Marry Me which unless you're an angry, entitled, bitter Hispanic lesbian feminist, I can't imagine you liking. It is so incredibly obnoxious that I only didn't completely and utterly hate every minute of it because Owen Wilson and Jennifer Lopez had more chemistry together than I ever would have expected. In addition to the very non-subtle woke lies about race and feminism, Owen Wilson was also a super cringy simp and beta. Almost as if the message is that white men can be allowed to live, as long as they know their place and defer to anyone and everyone else. And he never even said wow. But seriously; the woke stuff is so exaggeratedly stereotypical that it almost loops back around to being comically absurd rather than merely insultingly hateful. Minority girl math nerds in wheelchairs? Has any such person ever actually existed? Avoid that one at all cost. Watch all three of the Hallmark movies if that means you can avoid this one instead.

The Batman

If the movie is actually good and entertaining, in some ways that's almost worse. Race-swapping Commissioner Gordon and Catwoman (even if that was first done way back when the cast Eartha Kitt to replace Julie Newmar in the late 60s) just normalizes the process, increasing the theft of American culture and heritage from actual Americans by the Fake kind who hate us.

Oh, I'll see it. My wife already bought tickets for Saturday morning matinee for us, my daughter and her boyfriend, in fact. But I'm a bit wary and my expectations aren't super high. The movie industry has long been inhabited by the absolute worst kinds of people (read Shirley Temple's autobiography where (((Arthur Freed))) exposed himself to her when she was 11 while in the office next door, (((Louis B. Mayer))) was groping and sexually assaulting her mother; (((David Selznick))) chased her around a locked room when she was 15, (((Samuel G. Engel))) tried to rape her, and (((George Jessel))) sexually assaulted her. All while she was underaged, sometimes dramatically underaged. 

And as the last few years have given them license, so they feel, to rip the mask off of their hate, it's hardly surprising that even relatively decent and entertaining movies will vandalize and loot white people for their stuff with this kind of race swapping. The Daredevil show did it too, by oddly race swapping Ben Ulrich. It's just ubiquitous. But Gordon and Catwoman aren't relatively minor characters.

Russia tells the UN about our last election

No kidding, guys. Thanks for the tip two years later...

https://twitter.com/HTTP_404_NotF/status/1499106731858800643

I wonder if the Chinese will confirm it... as well as provide proof? Maybe not, since they have successfully bought the current regime anyway.

A couple of memes to make this post a little "fuller."

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.