SWTOR Progress update 1/24/24

Well, I settled in and decided to see who I'm going to play right off the bat and who I'm going to wait on. I obviously can't play all of my characters at once. First things first:

1) I figured out the changes to GTN. While crafting advanced seismic V-9 grenades shouldn't be as profitable as it used to be, it should still generate decent income. I ran some crafting in the background with Johhn last night, and put it on the market, cost leader (for now) and it should bring me in more than 4M credits. That's not crazy, like the people who really made billions during the inflation craze, but it's not to shabby, and should be sufficient for my needs.

2) Hutran Thanatos, the Mirialan Operative with the damage over time spec with all of the green poison effects (what is that called, Lethality spec, I think?) is the farthest along. Probably because I gave up on trying to record him ages ago and just played him. He was due to go to Voss, as I thought, and he's already max level. I played him a bit last night, and I'll keep doing so. Because I'm max level, there's little reason to do the planetary or exploration missions, unless I just really want to see them again, so I'm probably going to skip almost all of them and just focus on the class story. He'll be done shortly, and then he'll be done done. Nothing left to do with him that I need to do.

I did find out, as I mentioned yesterday, that I can't just deactivate him, so I need to decide if I'm going to keep him in storage or delete him when I'm done. He's kinda grown on me again, which is probably why he's the farthest along of all of my unfinished characters. But he's got no crafting skills, nothing particularly noteworthy other than his race/class combo, and because I can have two classes per character, I can always have just about any other tech class be a lethality operative if I want. I do tend to use some kind of operative as my second class for all tech characters, so that if I feel like putting on stealth mode.

As an aside, I'm still using that same outfit for most of my Hutran Thanatos playing, with the exception of the better goggles (which was always my intention to switch to them once they were available anyway.) I need to get an action shot of him with his tommy gun looking blaster rifle too, because that wasn't my original intent for him; it's just that once I had it available from the Nightlife event, it was too good to pass up. I really love this black ops look for an agent, though. I've been wearing it most of the time except sometimes when I'm supposed to be more social-undercover and therefore wearing a more normal looking outfit. That black ops outfit screams "I'm sneaking around", of course.

Anyway, if I can't deactivate him, and he isn't super unique mechanically, is there any reason to keep him? Well, I have 24 or 26 character slots filled. Not sure how I ended up with 26; I must have picked up an extra two at some point. So I'm not at the point where I need to decide right away. In fact, its really not an urgent issue to resolve at all, so I may end up going ahead and just keeping him. When I let my subscription lapse, inevitably, in the future, I can maybe try to keep him in inactive status somehow. I'll prioritize finishing Hutran Thanatos, and that'll probably be the majority of what I play right away.

Along with him, though, is this fellow Mirialan Jedi Sentinel Taul Kajak (Combat discipline) who I just finished on Alderaan last night. He hit level 60 while finishing off Bouris Ulgo too. He'll be the one that I give second priority too. According to my flowchart, after finishing Alderaan, he should go do the Nar Shaddaa bonus series, but I'm pretty sure that I did that after I finished Nar Shaddaa with him, since he would have been high enough level. That said, the bonus series are optional and kind of not my favorites anyway. He's high enough level for his place in the story that I don't feel any particular need to worry too much about XP farming. If I don't go back to Nar Shaddaa, which I almost certainly won't, then after he finishes off a few interplanetary minor missions, he'll head to Balmorra next, where I'll probably do both the class and planetary story, and probably be up close to level 70 by the time I'm done. If I'm not, maybe I'll do the bonus series for that one. After Balmorra are the two back-to-back Revan themed flashpoints, so I should be well into the 70s by the time I'm done with those. 

I said earlier that I'm not very interested in unlocking new stuff or whatever, but I am considering doing the reputation track on Ruhnuk just because there'd be a cool legacy bound Ruhnuk Wanderer Mandalorian looking set. I now have quite a few decent Mandalorian options, including no less than half a dozen or so helmets (five on the cartel market collections alone) which is the most important part, because they can be paired with any armor set really) so I don't really need it to get a good armored trooper type look. I have other non-Mandalorian helmets too that look armored, but in this case, it's less about the helmet and more about the caped chestpiece that I like.

I dunno. We'll see. Taking on getting up to legendary reputation on a whole new track isn't really what I wanted to do, but I may end up doing it anyway, because I frequently end up getting distracted by things like that.

I've got plenty more that are in the mid to upper thirties in level, but let's take a step back and not worry too much about planning out beyond that yet. Here's a shot of Hutran from the back, showing off his tommy gun blaster rifle, and checking out the sights on Belsavis.

SWTOR again?

I haven't played any SWTOR in... almost exactly a year, I'd guess. At least that's the last time I made a post about it, January 2023. That's probably about when my subscription lapsed and I let it, stepping aside to do other things for a while. I'm giving some thought to picking up another two months bundle, and maybe another two months after that if I'm still going strong, and playing through some more of my older characters that are still a long way away from finishing their stories. I doubt I'll worry about recording them anymore; I'm kind of over the hassle of trying to do that project. But I would like to actually play them, I think. I opened the launcher and updated the game.

To be honest with you, I've very little to even no interest in the new content that's dropping still, at an unsteady slow drip. I mostly just want to play the class stories again with the characters that I've already started. I have little interest at this point in things like seasons, reputation tracks, collecting this or that, or—like I said, the post-endgame content. I don't even know if I care about Ilum; once you finish the class stories on Corellia with all of my new characters, I might as well delete them and start over with some new ones. If I really want to play that much.

I dunno. I'm giving this some thought. There's a bundle right now that's offering a 60-day subscription, 2400 cartel coins and an exclusive mount for $39.99, which isn't a great deal, but it's not bad either. 

This isn't one of my characters, but I found this screenshot from older material, and it's a cool bit of SWTOR concept.

We'll see if this notion actually advances to an actual resubscription and some playing or not, though. Meanwhile, let's review the characters I have, shall we?

Retired characters that I still keep because they do crafting:

Graggory - Human male advanced prototype powertech

Maark - Human male focus Jedi Guardian

Mat Thew - Human male fury Sith Marauder

Luukke - Human male sharpshooter gunslinger

Johhn - Human male marksman sniper

Phillippion - Human male gunnery commando

Galation - Human male pyrotech powertech

Deleted character that I played all the way through:

Actsion - Human male deception assassin

Newer characters that are advancing quickly because I wasn't recording them:

Hutran Thanatos - Mirialan male lethality operative

Taul Kajak - Mirialan male combat Jedi sentinel

Embric Stane - Cyborg male arsenal mercenary

Mirabeu Tane - Cyborg male gunslinger trooper

Newer characters that I either was recording or was planning to, so are still much fresher:

Phovos Maledict - Human male juggernaut sith warrior

Codon Veile - Chiss male sniper trooper

Wulf Hengest - Human male vanguard bounty hunter

Haul Romund - Human male mercenary smuggler

Vash Galaide - Human male powertech agent

Vant Galaide - Human male mercenary bounty hunter

Anstal Tane - Sith male scoundrel smuggler

Revecca Arden - Human female sorceress iniquisitor

Elemer Kell - Imperial zabrak male Jedi sentinel knight

Gändalf Greyhame - Human male sorcerer consular

Beorn Hengest - Republic zabrak male sniper bounty hunter

Gael Heckett - Cyborg male powertech smuggler

Saxon Hettar - Sith male gunslinger agent

I actually do have seventeen characters that haven't finished their story or maxed out their level. The latter will happen before the former, but either way, I've got a lot of material to play that I've already kicked off. Of course, by then I can start deleting characters that I'm done with and starting over with new ones, if I still want to. I suspect, however, that by the time I finish these seventeen characters, if not long before that happens, I'll be ready to take a break from the game again. 

UPDATE: Well, I went for it. Spent the $40, reactivated my subscription, checked out a bit of new stuff, reacquainted myself with the controls, and messed around with two of the newer characters that I'd already long since stopped recording, both my Mirialans, by funny coincidence; Taul Kajak the Jedi who's on Alderaan, and Hutran Thanatos, the  agent who just did some small between planet missions. I'm not sure that I remember which planet I'm going to go do next when I finally actually get back to going and doing another planet. I know for sure that I finished Hoth with him, but I'm pretty sure that I haven't done Voss, so I think that I'm in between there somewhere. In any case, he's already level 80, so I doubt I'll be doing the planetary missions, just the class story missions with him. There's no point in farming for XP that I don't need, and the planetary missions aren't always as fun as I wish that they'd be. They end up being a bit tedious more often than not. 

I do want to go take some screenshots or video of him running around doing his thing though, while I still have him to run around and do his thing. Although I stopped recording him long ago, and there won't be many reasons to keep him after I finish his class story. There's a max of 24 characters per server, and because all of the legacy unlocks and stuff is per server, I don't want to spill into another server. That means that I'll need to free some of these guys up in order to create new ones. As I finish the stories with my newer crop of characters, I think I'll take some screenshots and delete them, or maybe figure out how to make them inactive, or something.

While I've got 1) an active subscription, and 2) my oldest son living with me, who also happens to be a big KOTOR fan, I'm thinking of letting him play through some characters on my account too. I could even spare some extra credits and other goodies for him to make it easier, plus, if he does it on my account, he automatically gets access to my collections, and other things that I've unlocked through legacy, like extra starting companions, and stuff like that.

UPDATE 2: If I let my son play a character, or if I do another one after this giant batch of characters that I already have (and I am pretty sure that I can turn them inactive rather than having to delete them) then I'm not sure how to proceed. Having 1337 gear (how's that for old school?) is not at all important to me because I almost exclusively play solo story stuff. Having gear for cosmetics is pretty easy now that weapons are in Outfitter, so it doesn't actually matter what your armor and weapons are; you see the ones that you pick in Outfitter regardless. In the past, I've enjoyed crafting stuff and letting the character use the crafted gear. At least for weapons, although I've done that less for armor. I don't really need to do this because, although it's slower, drops from enemies will tend to keep you more or less up-to-date and good enough for story play. If you use all crafted stuff, you can stay a little ahead of that curve on average, although occasionally something will drop in one gear slot that's a little better than your current crafted item.

But it's a little bit of a pain. I think the best way to play it is to craft some low level stuff that you give your character right away, but then don't worry about keeping them in crafted gear; let them replace it as they get better drops just through play.

Of course, it's not just gear and cosmetics. Some of the legacy perks require an outlay of credits for each character, like some of the quick travel to the fleet, to your ship, the XP boosts, etc. In my opinion, these are all worth doing, but I'm not yet clear what the new economy looks like. I have over 800 million credits in the legacy bank, but I can't count on making that back if I go crazy spending it, because they've done some things to address inflation, and the cost of stuff I used to sell is greatly reduced from what it once was. I'm feeling like I should be economical and careful with my money now, and not drop hundreds of millions of credits on a cartel market cosmetic clothing set on the GTN just because.

In the past, I've forwarded about five million to new characters as they start the game. This will give them plenty to unlock the legacy perks and some outfitter slots, as well as have plenty of money to just play through without ever worrying about money. I do think, however, that for my son, this may be a bit much. I'm not even sure that he wants to play. I think he kind of does, but the keyboard and mouse (vs the old Xbox controller, like he played it in the past) isn't his thing. He's really a console guy. I'm told that you can set up SWTOR to be mostly playable with a controller, but I've never tried, and I do the regular keyboard/mouse combo.

UPDATE 3: Actually, there isn't any way to deactivate a character, it looks like, except letting your subscription expire. Once you resubscribe, it automatically reactivates your characters, unless you somehow have more than your limit. You can, however, buy new character slots. Maybe they're not too expensive on the GTN, or I can buy them with my monthly allotment of cartel coins. Although not now; I'm fresh out. Bought (and unlocked) the covert (i.e., invisible) armor set, something I've always wanted so that I don't have to obligatorily have gloves and bracers, for example, or even a shirt) as well as a bundle of Mandalorian style helmets.

UPDATE  4: Part of what motivated me to play again was watching a youtube playthrough of the new Girlboss Chains story, or whatever exactly its called. That's exactly why I greatly prefer the original stories. Most of the more recent story updates consist of the writer's favorite girlboss NPC of the month starring in the show, and the actual player character being reduced to supporting cast. The expansion stuff simply isn't very compelling. Which is sad, because it could be. But dedication to The Message™ and general incompetence gets in the way, and the new stuff is just... some of it has potential, but none of it is very engaging. None of it since the final final conclusion to the Vitiate/Valkorian stuff has been very interesting. This whole Mandalorian girlboss catfight storyline just is boring, and whatever's going on with Darth Malgus is too obtuse to catch my interest. And none of the new characters are very intriguing at all.

On another note, I find my list of characters cumbersome. I have so many in part because I wanted to try different combat styles, and the more nuanced differences between combat styles—for example how Graggory is an Advanced Prototype Powertech and Galation is a Pyrotech Powertech. I'm thinking of creating more of a matrix type chart that shows what each character does and why I have him; combat style, crafting or what have you, that makes him important to keep.

CYOA #10: The Lost Jewels of Nabooti by R. A. Montgomery

When I first discovered the Choose Your Own Adventure series, back in third grade or whatever age exactly that I was, I'm pretty sure that the first eleven titles had already been released. I have a clear memory of the launch of title #12 Inside UFO 54-40 and walking to the mall where there was a Waldenbooks, and buying it when it was still new. (I miss the days of walking to the mall and perusing the shelves of Waldenbooks. Sigh.) The Lost Jewels of Nabooti is one that I had when I was a kid, but I lost it at some point, and rebought it relatively recently. The copy that I have now is a first printing, from March 1981, and has a cover price of $1.75; already a decent price up from the $1.50 cover prices I used to have. My older copy must have been a later printing, as it had the alternate spine trade dress. But my copies of #8 Deadwood City and #11 Mystery of the Maya look to be first printings, and they have the alternate spine design too, as well as a $1.50 cover price. Not quite sure what exactly was happening with the trade dress and printings here. Maybe not all copies actually tell me that it's a second, third, fourth, etc. printing, so my assumption that it's a first printing isn't correct.

In any case, because its an early Montgomery title, and he (or his estate) now owns the brand now under the Chooseco company, it's been reprinted and retitled, and slightly reworked. A newer reprint says that it has 38 possible endings, but my cover says that there are 36. I've since found that sometimes those counts aren't completely accurate, but more likely there were changes made to the text. Montgomery's titles, relative to Packard's, seem to have less text before making a choice, and more endings. He doesn't (or at least hasn't yet) had much in the way of structure; the choices are kind of all over the map, and the results are even more all over the map. Whereas in #9 Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? for instance, there was one solution to who the murderer was, and the choices just gave you different ways of interacting with the same story, in Montgomery's titles, for the most part, every choice could lead you to some random idea that Montgomery had. Some of them truly are random and have little to do with the theme of the story at all. I haven't decided yet if I think this is a good thing or a bad thing. One advantage of it is that Montgomery can add all kinds of ideas as they come to him and not limit himself to a smaller box. Although honestly, Montgomery's ideas aren't as great as all that sometimes. And of course, limits aren't necessarily bad; would Harlowe Thrombey have been better if there were more endings where other suspects were actually guilty? I suspect not. It would have just felt haphazard instead, and there would ideally have needed to be some set-up before the narrative veered in a different direction. Montgomery doesn't often give us this set-up, which makes his books sometimes feel a bit like an acid trip where stuff just randomly jumps out of nowhere and happens. I suppose as a kid, where punchy narrative that was fast-paced was better than set-up, description, characterization, etc. this didn't bother me at all, but it does now. I remember thinking from my younger days that Montgomery was the author who did all kinds of crazy exciting adventure story ideas and Packard was the guy who occasionally tried to be more educational, stuffy and lectury. After reviewing the first ten titles so far, six by Packard, three by Montgomery and one by a one-and-done guest author, I don't think that that's the case at all anymore. Packard wrote some great titles where he really iconically encapsulated various genres and Montgomery did a bunch of weird hippy propagandizing disguised as adventure. We'll see if this trend continues: the next book up is #11 Mystery of the Maya also by Montgomery, and then I never rebought #12, a Packard title, so after reading two Montgomery titles in a row, I'll read... another Montgomery title, #13 The Abominable Snowman. I remember quite liking that one, but we'll see what I think about it when I get to it. I don't remember really loving #10 or especially #11 very much, although the latter might be because it has a new illustrator who's work I didn't like, who also illustrated you, the protagonist, as a young girl in pigtails.

Lost Jewels should have been right up my alley when I was a kid. It's got exotic, globe-trotting spy-like action all throughout. The story begins when your cousins contact you that their father's prized possession, the allegedly mystical titular jewels have been stolen and they've been threatened to walk away. You're whisked off almost immediately for Paris and later Morocco to help find them, and right away suspicious things start happening, weird people are following or threatening you, and you get weird hippy mysticism thrown at you, which you're supposed to accept without any second thought. Although, to be fair, as a nine or ten year old kid, I'm pretty sure that that's exactly what I did.

Although it sounds great on paper, even at the time, this wasn't one of my favorite titles. I liked it well enough as a kid, but I didn't love it, and it's one that I didn't read after I lost my copy of it for a long time, nor did I miss it even as much as some other titles that are arguably not even as good (Montgomery's own #2 Journey Under the Sea, for instance.) Something about it just didn't click with me as a kid. As an adult, I didn't really love it either, but for very different reasons; it's just too unfocused, all over the map in strange ways, and has too much unexplained and bizarre hippy mysticism. There are also a lot of endings where you get involved with some Wakanda-like hippy Illuminati organization, that despite their obviously shady dealings we're supposed to be OK with, because they gratuitously toss around the word peace in their mission statement. I do admit that my own current political, social and cultural beliefs seem to put me at odds more and more with Montgomery's work; the idea that an African-based Illuminati could possibly be good for anyone just beggars the imagination, yet Montgomery clearly thought so. His career in academia and proto-globalist NGOs didn't seem sinister in the 80s when I was a kid, but it does now.

That said, I don't want to think that every Montgomery book will end up being a social commentary, or that my own commentary on his social commentary will swallow up any other commentary about the book. I'll say instead that my impression of this book as an adult is similar to what it was as a kid; on paper it looks great, but in actuality, the end result is pretty mid. Even his exciting and good ideas don't get enough development to be the least bit satisfying, and the way the plot unfolds by bouncing around unaccountably and without much thought to any reasonable justification for why your choices lead you to where they do just isn't all that fun. And some things, which I probably didn't notice as a kid, are kind of cringey now, like the inclusion of his two sons Anson and Ramsey as cameos, or the odd references at several points to exciting adventurer Beech Muzzwell, who despite your best efforts you never actually meet in the book. At one point, there's a choice to literally just give up; it doesn't take you to any page, it just ends the story. The idea that anyone would actually do that is kind of depressing; is the book so bad and incoherent that you'd be looking for an excuse to just quit reading it and bail?

I know a few adult fans of the series look at this one, and Montgomery's #15 House of Danger as kind of high points in the series, at least in terms of liking them for being so insane; kind of like how you like really bad b-movies that are so bad that they wrap around to being good again because they're so bonkers. I'm not quite sure that this accomplishes that; it's not bad enough, for one thing, although I do see how fans of the series could hold that opinion.

All in all, although I don't regret rebuying this book, and having it in my collection, the chances that I will ever again in my lifetime at this point feel like reading it again are very low. If you're a completionist kind of collector, or one who expects to be entertained by the gonzo incoherence of the story I suggest checking it out; otherwise give it a pass. If you do, however, do not get any of the reprints with the new art and edited text. I've said before that I dislike all of that in every title that I've ever seen, but in this one if particular, if you're going to pick it up for either of those reasons, you need an original trade dress, original text and original Paul Grainger art copy of the book. I don't think this is Grainger's best work or anything, but Grainger is always preferable to any other illustrator who worked on this series, with the possible exception of Ralph Reese, and he does have some nice pieces here, including some high intensity action shots, and a moody Paris street scene by night, and a few others. We didn't realize how badly we needed Grainger until the next book, however, where we got a different illustrator for the first time. Grainger still did pretty steady work on the series for many more volumes, but eventually his work kind of petered out, and it was truly the end of an era. The less there were Grainger illustrations, the less I found myself very entranced with the series. Part of that was my own natural aging and moving beyond the target market for these kinds of books, but part of it was that Grainger just had more personality and style than almost anyone else who followed in his wake.

Anyway, let's get to summarizing the crazy things that happened to me while reading:

• While trying to recruit Beech Muzzwell, I get a call from the FBI that he's been kidnapped. Peter, Lucy and I give up.
• I blow up in a totally random terrorist attack in the Parisian subway.
• I get kidnapped and taken to some remote rural cabin, where a tarantula bites me and I die. (It's worth noting that in the real world, no fatality has ever been attributed to a tarantula bite.)
• I get accused of stealing the jewels myself, get tied up in red tape with the French police, and the embassy suggests that I go home and stay out of trouble.
• I get shot by some mysterious shady people in Morocco.
• Too many suspicious people are following me. After taking a hydrofoil from North Africa to Spain, I go home and give up.
• Montgomery's own son is called to Paris, but disappears. You give up the quest for the jewels and decide to find him instead.
• The jewels mysteriously appear in my pocket and I give them to some weird African wise man, who turns into a young, good-looking hippy Messiah before my very eyes. lolwut!?
• The jewels don't mysteriously appear in my pocket, the old man gets angry, and I walk out in the streets of Tangiers confused and unsure what I'm going to do next. But the story ends anyway. Also lolwut.
• I fall into a trapdoor (see illustration on back cover) and die of starvation or dehydration or something because nobody ever comes and gets me.
• I'm on a plane that is randomly hijacked by someone who has nothing to do with the jewels, but carries me and our plane off to China. Twice, in fact.
• I'm in a helicopter that is shot with a rocket launcher and blows up in rural France. Literally don't even know who shot me.
• A midget dressed like a little girl walks up to me with a dog that turns out to be robotic, and which also turns out to be a bomb that blows up and kills me.
• My plane gets shot down in Africa, and has to make an emergency landing in the desert. Without any survival gear, it's heavily implied that I'll die of exposure shortly.
• I went to the shores of Lake Chad, met the mysterious Nabooti tribe, and the jewels had mysteriously been returned to them, and peace is mystically flowing out of Lake Chad to the whole world. Even though I didn't have anything to do with their return, I'm congratulated on doing a great job anyway.
• I go to club Nabooti somewhere in Africa and find that the jewels were sold so that the resort could be financed. Who stole them from my cousins? How did they end up here? These are the kinds of questions that Montgomery rarely thinks to address in his endings.
• I go to Club Nabooti and find that it's actually not a resort, it's a training area for the hippy Illuminati organization called Nabooti, which I join.
• I get a random cable while in Paris that Peter and Lucy somehow got the jewels back and I should go home.
• I get the jewels, but they've been ground to powder.
• I once again and even more randomly join the hippy Illuminati.
• I end up in Greece after the hijacking affair mentioned above, and I like Greece enough that I bail on my cousins and just start working for an English language newspaper there as a journalist.
• I get kidnapped and stuffed in a trash can behind a restaurant. But for some reason I escape, give up and go home, complaining about smelling like fries and mustard.
• I get thrown out of a plane, but miraculously land unharmed in a farm pond. And then the story ends, even though that hardly seems like an ending.
• I get thrown into a French prison for charges that are... unclear... but I'm promised a long, tedious legal battle before I can do anything else again.
• I meet the crown prince of the Nabooti tribe or nation or whatever exactly it's supposed to be, but he's impressed that I seem to have a larcenous bent. It's implied that I'll join him in a criminal enterprise of some kind.
• I'm in the streets of Paris where I'm warned to run for my life. For some reason I stand around confused, and eventually find out that Run For Your Life is a rock band throwing an impromptu concert right there on the streets. I'm told to chill out, relax and enjoy the music, presumably forgetting all about the jewels. I think Montgomery may have literally just smoked a joint when he wrote that one.
• It turns out that the real jewels of Nabooti aren't really jewels; they're actually the four leaders of the hippy Illuminati organization. The way Montgomery describes the one I meet makes him sound like a insurrectionist and a terrorist, but I'm supposedly brave for helping smuggle him somewhere or something.
• I'm warned by some hoodoo symbol of dead mice not to touch the jewels of Nabooti, but I do and I'm struck by lightning. Inside a hut. The jewels vanish and I'm not worthy or something.
• Instead, I leave my African buddy with the jewels and head down the oddly alpine mountain glacier in western Africa, where I fall in a crevasse and die. 
• I randomly get the jewels in a package, and they feel warm, peaceful and mystical when I have them.
• In another ending, I'm randomly given the jewels by someone I just met.
• Somehow, in spite of the fact that they were just stolen from my cousins, they are in a museum back in America, and the exhibit that showcases them is so popular that there's a new hit single called "Do the Nabooti" playing out in the street, lolwut.
• I'm in a boat that crashes at the Pillars of Hercules and all hands are lost.
• I'm taken hostage, along with my cousin and a French gendarme inspector, where it's implied that the jewels aren't delivered and we'll all get our heads cut off.
• I go up on the Eiffel Tower and look at the lights of Paris by night and consider that maybe they're the real jewels of Nabooti. Lolwut, yet again.
• I get a floating cutlass with the jewels of Nabooti set in the hilt, and I'm chosen as the new guardian for the jewels. Suck it, Peter and Lucy, who are conveniently forgotten about once again!
• A confusing and incoherent few sentences where I'm told I'll never find the jewels and I guess I just give up.

Bas & Ram

I've been putting together these hard dance megamixes for a few years now; mostly hard trance songs from 2000-2010 or so, but also including some newer hard trance, a fair bit of hardstyle, especially early hardstyle, and a smattering of hard house, tech trance, acid, and other harder-sounding EDM tracks. But classic hard trance is really the core of the project. Curiously, one of my early favorite hard trance artists was Bas & Ram, but by the time I was putting these megamixes together, they'd kinda fallen out of my gaze and I had forgotten about them. Not entirely; I have a few of their tracks here and there, but there were always a bunch of tracks that I'd liked that I'd forgotten and not even "uptempoed" and put in my 150 bpm folder. Bas & Ram stuff isn't really all that available in general either; its not on Spotify, Youtube, any of the other streaming services, nor is it for sale at places like beatport or junodownload. Of course, "not on Youtube" means not officially available on Youtube. Bootleg vinyl rips and uploads aren't terribly hard to find of most of their stuff. And Bas (by himself) has some new stuff; he seems to have gotten back into the game. (Actually, there seems to be a lot of that going around. Maybe there's a minor boom in retro hard dance stuff happening right now.)

However, I'm now questioning whether Bas & Ram were really as good as I thought that they were. Their output wasn't as high as I thought, and much of it is collaborating with producers like Ralph Novell or others. The "Chimps & Pimps" record was produced by Gareth "Dark By Design" West. Another track that I liked a lot but had kind of forgotten was their song "The Bells" which is really a remake of Quench's "Dream" except without the sample of someone saying "dream" with lots of echo effect layered on it. I mean, OK, OK, lots of talented producers do remakes or covers or bootleg remixes (I'm not actually sure what exactly the difference is between all of those; they kind of blur together.) And of the remakes/remixes of that song, I think "The Bells" is probably the best one (Miss Shiva has some good ones too.)

My old copy, which I had to rip from Youtube to mp3 because I could get it any other way, had a lot of ambient vinyl noise and scratchiness (I really don't understand vinyl snobs. This is ridiculous.) so I was looking for a better copy, and I found the one by ConnecteD, who does a good job of providing Youtube videos of otherwise difficult to find or older songs from the classic hard trance era. (I still had to use the noise reduction tool to clean up some ambient vinyl scratchiness.) However, in the comments to that video, Rainer K, another (albeit newer) hard trance artist claimed that the track was ghost-produced by Dark by Design!

This is really weird, because usually discogs will give an "uncredited" credit once that kind of thing is known, so I guess this isn't well known. However, Rainer K is in a position to know; he works with these guys, probably knows them personally, etc. Plus, "The Bells" has some iconic Dark By Design sounds in it; it really sounds like a Dark By Design remix of "Dreams." Makes me wonder what exactly the Bas & Ram contribution was. Don't get me wrong; I'm sure it was something significant or it wouldn't have been credited to them, but I wonder. It seems like most of their work requires some kind of collaboration after all.

After all this, you'd think I'd post a link to that song, but actually, while seeing if I could verify any of this, I stumbled across Dark By Design's soundcloud page and found this great 2022 rework of Zombie Nation's "Kernkraft 400."

Dark By Design also did a remix a number of years ago of R.B.A.'s "No Alternative" which is, transparently, a remake of "Kernkraft 400". They're not really done in the same style, so they're interesting to listen to back to back.

D&D and genre over time (1974-1984)

OSR types will typically tell you that the original mode of D&D is sword & sorcery of the type that was popular when Gary Gygax was writing. In other words, guys like Robert E. Howard were back in print (the famous Frazetta cover volumes), the Fahfrd and the Gray Mouser stories were popular, Jack Vance was popular, and “pastiche” writers like Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp were at their peak. In my opinion, this is both true and also untrue. It’s true that that’s what a significant portion of fantasy looked like in the early/mid 70s if you trawled through your typical bookstore or library shelf. And no doubt Gygax really liked that kind of stuff and heavily leaned on it for basic implicit setting assumptions. Famously, the Thief was supposedly based on the Gray Mouser to a great degree, and the magic system was heavily influenced by (or even copied explicitly, according to some) from Jack Vance.

However, by the time D&D came out, high fantasy had become extremely popular. The Lord of the Rings was very popular, Ursula LeGuin was popular, etc. It’s a little hard for Gygax or his OSR adherents to claim that D&D was explicitly sword & sorcery and not high fantasy when the game explicitly included elves, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, balrogs, rangers based on Strider and more as core, integral elements of the game. Gygax famously claimed in a column in Dragon Magazine that the inclusion of such was a bait & switch to get high fantasy fans into the game, where the fun would convince them to stay. However, this claim always struck me as disingenuous, and even if Gygax himself believed that, my experience with my friends in the 70s and early 80s was that high fantasy fans did not abandon their high fantasy preferences and play Leiber, Howard and Vance inspired settings as they adopted the game. Even Greyhawk itself didn’t feel much like the Hyborian Age or Nehwon but more like the Medieval real world with funny names and some Middle-earth elements generously sprinkled in here and there. Every setting that I ever fooled around with or played in was much more high fantasy than sword & sorcery when I was younger. And we drew maps based on the famous Christopher Tolkien map included in the copy of Lord of the Rings. True; many D&D maps from this era were hexmaps, but every novel, every story, and eventually almost every D&D map published started to resemble them as well.

Conan the Renegade. True S&S, or military fantasy pastiche?

High fantasy was always in the DNA of D&D from the very beginning, and it became more prominent very quickly as D&D absorbed more and more high fantasy fans; or at best, fantasy fans that weren’t particular between styles of fantasy and were happy incorporating any element from any style of fantasy into their game. But mostly high fantasy, because that was quickly becoming, if it hadn’t already, the default mode of fantasy that most fantasy fans thought of first. As an aside, not only was Lord of the Rings in print by this time, but so was Earthsea, Deryni, Narnia and Prydain. Shannara and Thomas Covenant would follow shortly, and before long the Belgariad and Riftwar series. Most of these were already out before AD&D itself was, but they certainly predate 2e, and clearly by the time D&D became 2e, the expectation of the game was that it more resemble those high fantasy works than anything by Howard or Leiber or Moorcock (Moorcock himself is, perhaps ironically, considered high fantasy by many critics.) But that change doesn’t mean that D&D changed from sword & sorcery to high fantasy between 1974 and 1984. Quite simply, the high fantasy was always there, although its influence and overtness grew swiftly during that decade. Gygax may have not understood why anyone would want to play a wizard or elf, but he made those options available, and they were among the most popular from the get-go.

In addition, early D&D had a lot of other stuff in its DNA besides sword & sorcery and high fantasy. Science fiction, post apocalyptic, planetary romance and horror all put their two cents in, although these gonzo elements were often novelties and had relatively low sticking power, other than a few minor elements like the displacer beast or the gorillon. Horror seems to have been the most successful, with vampires ripped straight out of Dracula, zombies pretty much straight from George Romero, and plenty of Lovecraftiana. But that stuff was always in fantasy anyway; a lot of the Howard Conan and Kull stories could be considered Cthulhu Mythos stories in their own right, and Solomon Kane was even more overtly horror-influenced. Psionics has an uneasy relationship with the rest of D&D, but it does survive from its importation into the game straight from science fiction, at least. The old gratuitous slick Heavy Metal was maybe a better description of D&D's implicit setting than anything specifically sword & sorcery. I don't know for sure what you'd call that kind of gonzo 70s van art type of fantasy, but it didn't necessarily resemble the sword & sorcery of Howard or Leiber very much.

Perhaps most jarring is that any attempt to link early D&D to sword & sorcery explicitly can only be done at the implicit setting level anyway (and as seen above, I don’t buy even that.) Nothing about D&D, especially as it was played, resembles sword & sorcery. Going into a dungeon, and then “resting” in between dungeon delves to recover, train or level up, spend your money on improvements, is completely unlike anything in sword & sorcery. The zero-to-hero leveling paradigm is also nothing like any sword & sorcery character; Conan, Fahfrd, the Gray Mouser, or Elric are all supremely competent adventurers even when striplings. And the character-driven sword & sorcery genre has little to do with the ensemble D&D adventuring party, especially as it was played in the early days with large groups and a dozen or more characters all participating at once, not to mention hirelings and other assorted followers and hangers-on. If anything, the fellowship of the Ring is a more true-to-life model for D&D parties as they were played, and no genre of fiction at all really resembles the “story” of D&D of “clearing dungeons” for loot and competency advancement.

However, now that I’ve spent all of this time attempting to debunk, or at least validate my opinion, that early D&D was never really sword & sorcery, it’s certainly worth pointing out that it was more like sword & sorcery in most respects than it later came to be. The implicit setting may have been more like a more humano-centric and overtly Medievalesque high fantasy setting, but it was more likely to feature some more overt sword & sorcery tropes than it did later, for the most part. Much of the way campaigns were expected to be structured, and for that matter, the way modules were written, would likely have resembled some sword & sorcery tropes such as punchy, action-packed short stories that weren’t necessarily meant to be stitched together into a “novel” form or over-arching campaign metastory, and the stakes were usually lower and more modest, much more like sword & sorcery. Whether or not the characters were heroic high fantasy archetypes or charismatic antiheroic roguish archetypes from sword & sorcery was, as it is today, up to the actual table and players, not the game itself; although high fantasy archetypes like the paladin were included early on. (It’s worth pointing out that antiheroes were increasingly common in American and western literature and entertainment outside of the fantasy genre during this period. James Bond and the so-called Man With No Name were already household names by 1974. Dirty Harry had been out for a few years, and Death Wish also came out in 1974. You don't need to refer back to Howard or Leiber to get antiheroes.)

James Maliszewski of Grognardia calls this period the Golden Age of D&D, and although I disagree with his assessment that this would resemble sword & sorcery, I think his delineation of its limits in time is spot on. Let me quote his brief description of it:

Golden Age (1974-1983): This is the era of D&D's ascendancy and, for me, its perfection. The argument could be reasonably made that the "pure" Golden Age ends somewhere between 1979 and 1981, depending on whether one considers the completion of AD&D or the mass marketing of the game through the Moldvay Basic Rules to have struck a heavier blow to the culture of early D&D. If one wants to make such fine distinctions, the period between 1979/1981 and 1985 (or thereabouts) is the Electrum Age, which straddles the tail end of the Golden Age and the beginning of the Silver. The Golden Age is one of "gonzo pulp fantasy," with a hodgepodge of influences, particularly Howard, Vance, Leiber, de Camp, and Pratt. The dungeon remains the linchpin of adventure design and the sandbox is the assumed role for a campaign setting.

He's correct both in that the release of AD&D and Moldvay changed the culture of D&D, but perhaps only indirectly. Both were responses to changes in the player base as the game became more popular, marginally more mainstream, and certainly attracted large numbers of new fans who simply wanted the game to pull more in the direction of their tastes and preferences, which were not the same as the  original wargaming crowd the mid-70s in Wisconsin. New focal nodes of player bases sprung up that led the game in different directions, or even experimented with abandoning D&D altogether to develop something more along the lines of what those regional players bases were looking for. By 1983 the Mentzer boxed sets were out, and the Ravenloft module was published, and by 1984 the first Dragonlance novels were in print and selling like gangbusters. By that point, none of those products very closely resembled sword & sorcery at all except in a number of superficial ways, and they set the direction for the game much moreso than what came before. But as I said, this coincides pretty well with similar movements in the fantasy genre overall; sword & sorcery was still in print, but new stuff was rare. Conan pastiche novels were being written, but arguably being novels, they had already abandoned one of the core defining elements of being sword & sorcery; they weren’t short stories with punchy, pulpy action, they were longer and focused more on more complex plots and characterizations. Eddings, Feist, Brooks, and more were what mainstream fantasy looked like by the mid-80s, not Howard, Leiber and Moorcock.

Which makes for a good stopping point for this post, and I’ll come back to 1983-4 for my next one and talk about the trajectory of D&D leading up to and through the release of 2e. The release of a new edition actually was probably driven more by business needs for more sales and the removal of “family unfriendly” elements that were causing the game bad PR than it was a marker for a change in the direction of the game, really. D&D after the release of Dragonlance was on an unbroken cultural trajectory up until TSR went bankrupt and the brand was acquired by Wizards of the Coast.

Happy 50th, D&D!

Speaking of birthdays; I just had one as I mentioned in my last post, and sometime in 2024 is the actual 50th birthday of Dungeons & Dragons, which was released in 1974. By default, this also means it's the birthday of the entire hobby, since it effectively didn't exist until D&D created it. I believe June is when the first printed copies started shipping, but of course the "birthday" of a product isn't like the birthday of a person, so we'll celebrate the birth of the hobby under the tag 50th all year long in a series of posts. I'm not sure exactly how I want to celebrate this, or what I want to say about it yet, but I've got all year to think about it.

For now, let's just announce the anniversary, and say Happy 50th, D&D! I'd love to see you make it another 50 years, and if I live as long as Olivia de Haviland, who I mentioned in my last post, I'll actually be able to see it for another 50 years, which would be tremendous, not to mention statistically unlikely.

I think for my first post on this topic (after this one) I'll talk about the change in implicit setting over time in the game, from thud & blunder to extruded fantasy product, to Millennial wankery and the sometimes subtle changes over time that enveloped it. I'd say, for instance, that both 2e and 3e were characterized as extruded fantasy product, but they were also quite different; the first being inspired by forgettable high fantasy of the 70s and 80s like Terry Brooks or David Eddings, and the latter picking up a kind of Mad Max video game edgy vibe.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I'll have to give that post some thought, and maybe do a bit of research even before I'm ready to write it.

Happy Birthday, TTRPG hobby!

Iowa Caucus

I don't really care to comment on, or even pay too much attention to, politics. Yesterday wasn't the Iowa caucus to me, yesterday was my birthday, and I went out to eat with my family to a restaurant of my choice that none of them would ever want to eat at (except my son-in-law), and I made those who stayed up after dinner watch a movie of my choice that none of them would ever have picked (The Adventures of Robin Hood from 1938 with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland. What a great movie.) However, I read a little bit of commentary on the proceedings, so here's the Z-man's take, which I endorse and agree with:

All of the study of rat behavior obscures the fact that the only reason any of this is happening is Trump dared to speak for normal white people in 2016. Whites are about seventy percent of the voters right now. Twenty percent of them are insane, leaving about half the voters with no representation in the system. The Democrats explicitly hate these voters, and the Republicans implicitly hate them. Elections are about who gets to spit in these people’s faces first.

That is the subtext of this election. The regime is debating with itself whether now is the time to close the door entirely on the white voter. They believe the time is near when national elections will be like we see in Democrat controlled states. There is a permanent majority called Democrats, a ceremonial opposition called Republican and the goal is to prevent the majority of citizens from getting any say. The results last night suggest they still have some work to do.

It seems supremely unlikely that any election, no matter how hard we vote, is likely to get us out of the trouble that we've been set up to have meet us inevitably and inexorably.  But maybe I'm wrong. The success of AfD in Germany with its platform of mass repatriation of foreigners suggests that such a movement could sweep all of Western Civilization shortly. It's kind of a long-shot, but we should exhaust all attempts to resolve our problems as peacefully as possible before resorting to last resorts, right? Even those solutions in which we have low confidence but which are the right things to do, we should attempt first.

As an aside—on that birthday movie, although it was her second blockbuster together with Flynn, Olivia de Haviland turned only twenty two a few weeks after the release of the film. She was only nineteen or even eighteen for the filming of her earlier blockbuster with Flynn, 1935's Captain Blood.

Young Olivia de Haviland was an absolutely brilliant star in the Hollywood firmament. Her younger sister, Joan Fontaine (really Joan de Haviland; she used her step-father's last name as a stage name) was equally beautiful while young, and in fact looked a lot like her older sister. The similar movie Ivanhoe, which tackles similar themes, being set at literally the exact same time and dealing with John's attempted coup over Richard and Richard's dramatic arrival in England in disguise, stars Fontaine as Rowena. However, since it was made in 1952, nearly fifteen years later, she was now too old to really be comparable to her older sister in 1938. Besides, that movie is really all about young Elizabeth Taylor anyway. Fontaine in Rebecca or even Jane Eyre would be a better comparison, although those aren't Medieval pageantry epics like Ivanhoe and Robin Hood are.

Ah, the belles of Old Hollywood! I doubt I would have actually liked young  Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Fontaine, Olivia de Haviland or Grace Kelly had I known them in person in their primes. They probably were terrible people with loads of personality problems and drama—and in fact in some cases we know this explicitly. Grace Kelly was a notable nympho who slept around with every male star she could. Fontaine and de Haviland had a strained relationship full of drama because of unresolved issues from their childhood. Taylor was notoriously married more than just about any other actress, which isn't just a red flag; it's the whole communist parade. It should be noted, however, that there is a suggestion that the drama between the sisters might have been drummed up as a publicity stunt, and that they got along fine. Olivia lived to be 104, the oldest Academy Award winner and one of the last surviving veterans of the Golden Age  of Hollywood. She was also  the last surviving cast member of Gone With the Wind, and said that she still watched it from time to time to reconnect with her dead castmates.

But at least they were smart enough to put on a good show and not be so blatantly in your face about it. I think a young Denise Richardson was very pretty too, but she was so stupid that she did that reality show when her career was faltering, and showed the entire world how vapid, narcissistic and unlikeable she actually is in person. Now I can't look at her without being turned off.

CYOA: #9 Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? by Edward Packard

The final title in the five-book run of Edward Packard classics is #9, Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?, a classic murder mystery. Packard does a good job of trying to hit the rather strict beats of this very specific genre; the rich guy in his country estate mansion, murdered while a number of suspects, all with their own reasons to be suspicious, are all present. It also has the bumbling police detective and his rivalry of sorts with the brilliant amateur, played by you. The detective is even called Inspector Prufrock, even though Inspector isn't, of course, a title in American police structure. 

You supposedly have a reputation as an amateur detective, sufficiently so that wealthy plastics tycoon Harlowe Thrombey calls you because he's worried about his life and wants someone to keep an eye on things to protect him. In this, you're destined to fail, because no matter what happens, Harlowe Thrombey gets murdered; that's the whole point of the book—you trying to determine who did it.

Immediate suspects include his disgruntled wife Jane, his niece Angela and her boyfriend Dr. Robert Libscomb, as well as nephew Chartwell. Yes, it's really spelled like that. The cook Helga and the gardener Jenkins aren't really presented as suspects, but they are people that you can also talk to.

My copy is, I believe, a first printing (at least it doesn't mention being a subsequent printing) dated February 1981, and the cover price was $1.50. Unlike almost every other Choose Your Own Adventure title, it doesn't announce how many possible endings there are in this book on the cover; rather it simply says in the same place that you're the detective and it's your first murder case! I suspect that's because this book has considerably fewer endings than any published so far (and most published afterwards). I counted thirteen is all, compared to numbers in the upper twenties to mid-forties for a typical variant of this kind of book. Like all books in the series (so far) it was illustrated by Paul Grainger

My understanding is that this is considered one of the real classics of the genre. Not that this means that I recommend the movie or anything, but Knives Out makes overt homage to this book by naming the murder victim, played by Christopher Plumber, Harlan Thrombey. (It's really too bad that Knives Out wasn't a better movie.)

The structure of this book is a little bit unusual too. Not only do we have, as mentioned, very few endings, but there are a lot of branches that don't really branch at all. Immediately after the murder, for instance, you can question any of the four suspects, or search the pantry for clues, but after doing so for a brief page, all of them lead you to the same next page where the police in the form of Inspector Prufrock arrives. While you aren't exactly expected to solve the mystery yourself from the clues, given the nature of the book as a Choose Your Own Adventure written in the second person, it does allow you to gather the clues that you will gather, and ignore the ones that you will. There are more situations like this where you can interview a certain character, but regardless of what you pick, you go to the same place, presumably with having gathered whatever information you gathered by the choice that you made, and whatever you didn't by the choice that you chose not to make.

There's also a page near the end that you are very likely to end up at no matter what you've chosen where it simply says "WHAT WILL YOU DO NEXT?" with a small image of the brandy bottle that contained the poison that killed Thrombey, and then it gives you a dozen potential choices to make. By this point in the book, you're in the end game. A few of them are red herrings, and you're told that there's no information there, and sent back to the same page to pick something else, but many of them lead to the some of the endings that you end up with.

There's not really multiple guilty parties either, depending on the choice. In every case, the same suspects are innocent and guilty, although there some ancillary secondary characters that may or may not make an appearance, including a hitman named Keane, a rival young detective named Jenny Mudge (more on her on later posts) and the iconic Choose Your Own Adventure lawyer, Gilliam Prem.

While I can't say that a quintessentially British rich country estate murder mystery is my favorite genre by any means, this is one of the better classic titles, and it's really quite clever how Packard structured and wrote it to evoke that genre as well as he did. This is one of the classics of the series; absolutely one of the best to get your hands on if you care to get your hands on any of these at all. I thoroughly enjoyed this one, and it is probably one of the best of the early titles. Packard really showed, especially with these five in a row, that he could absolutely call up the classic tells of all kinds of genres, and make them work effectively. In fact, I think that that may be a big part of the appeal of the earliest classic titles in the series; while many later titles are also quite good, they weren't just iconic representations of a specific genre anymore after this.

After this, we have two R. A. Montgomery titles, The Lost Jewels of Nabooti and Mystery of the Maya, the first book to have a different illustrator. After that, is Inside UFO 54-40, the first in the series that 1) I don't have anymore and don't intend to replace, and 2) that I remember being released when it was new after I'd already discovered and fallen in love with the series. At some point here too, the series entered a new phase, even if only in my own perception; it was becoming more established and the novelty was being replaced by other things. For instance, in #14, The Forbidden Castle, Packard starts to become self-referential; you get to the middle ages through the Cave of Time, which he assumes you know about because you've read The Cave of Time before. New artists, and shortly afterwards, new authors start to populate the series, which changes the look and feel of the series a fair bit. Not that these new artists and authors are necessarily bad; I think Ralph Reese is every bit Grainger's equal and nearly as quintessential and classic to the series as Grainger himself, but others just don't really have the right look, some of them have a softer little kid approach and just in general, as the series matures and becomes more established, some of the classic appeal starts to wear off. Not that this happened too quickly; some of my favorite titles, at least when I was young (we'll see if I still think so on re-reading them shortly) are in the late teens and twenties, although by the twenties, I've also started to feel like there's a lot of missable titles in the series that I don't care to collect.

That said, Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? is certainly a title when the series was at its peak, and is a must-have. Let's review the endings that I encountered, shall we?

• I solved the case, and Prufrock rushed off to arrest the guilty party without thanking me. Twice, actually.
• I solved the case and got a $5,000 check for my trouble.
• I got hit on the head, and while recovering in the hospital, my rival and friend Jenny Mudge solved the case instead. People are now talking about her as the prodigy detective instead of me.
• I get shot and murdered by a hitman that I'm trying to question.
• I solve the case by cornering the hitman and turning him over to the police so he can spill all the details about what happened.
• Jenny solved the case by sitting behind the guilty parties at a movie and listening to them talk about how they did it.
• Bumbling inspector Prufrock actually solves the case instead of me.
• I got shot and murdered by the murderer.
• Jenny and I solve the murder together by comparing clues and decide to become partners.
• I give up on the case.
• I'm in the classic "all of the suspects and the Inspector in the library" scene where I accuse the guilty party in front of everyone and solve the case in the very classic British whodunit resolution scene.
• I solve the case, but it's kind of a cop-out, because the book doesn't actually tell me the resolution, just that apparently I solved it and told Prufrock exactly what happened.

Blogging in 2024

The last few months have been a disaster in terms of blogging; I haven't been consistent, and my topics are all over the place. This probably inevitable for a variety of reasons; I don't want to be rigorous about blogging; it's meant to be fun and relaxing and I talk about whatever I feel like. I don't blog for an audience, I blog for myself. That said; I've felt pretty disorganized and chaotic.

The biggest part of that is that my life has been disorganized and chaotic the last few months. My youngest son came home from California a few months earlier than we expected him due to some health problems, and my oldest son moved in temporarily with his wife and three small children so he could finish his Masters degree, find a job, and then move back out again eventually. He was burning out trying to work full time to pay the bills and do all of this at the same time, so we were glad to help out. But, of course, it meant that my home life has become very chaotic since late August or early September when all of this started. On top of that, my new (it's not so new now, but still—after more than twenty years in one job, a little over a year in a second one still makes it seem new) job continues to be more stressful and busy than my old one, and bleeds over into my free time somewhat. Even if it didn't, I'm more in the market for "veging" as they say with my free time than doing anything productive. Even if by productive, I merely mean making blog posts.

So let's get a little bit organized for the new year, shall we? 

• I had a decent run the last few months of posts about Heroes of Might and Magic III. I haven't played that already now in more than two months, probably closer to three or four. I don't think it's likely that my picking up of that hobby is going to stick; I'm just over video games of any kind, even older strategy games like this one. I doubt I'll post about it anymore, or do anything with it anymore. I know my oldest son is going to be disappointed, but that's the way it is.
• I haven't really blogged about Star Wars related anything in a long time, and I doubt that I will anymore. Although I do still watch a fair bit of pop culture youtube commentary from guys like Nerdrotic, Ryan Kinnel, Midnight's Edge, etc. the reality is that I've become very disengaged from pop culture otherwise. Sometime last year, and I think it was the Boba Fett show that was the nail in the coffin for me, my attitude towards Star Wars completely changed to one of absolute apathy. I simply don't care about Star Wars anymore. That had been building for a long time, but now the conversion from Star Wars fan to ex-Star Wars fan is complete. I probably won't talk about it anymore. There's juicy commentary to make, about the execrable Obaid-Chinoy, or whatever her name is, being assigned to direct the up-coming Rey movie, but it's just tired commentary at this point. Yes, it will be terrible. Yes it will be woke. Yes it will directly insult the original long-time fans while generating absolutely no new ones. We already know all of this. I simply don't care.
• On a related note, although I never blogged much about it, my attitude towards Marvel has taken a similar trajectory.
• I don't have any concert plans this year, after having had a pretty busy concert schedule last year; we saw Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Air Supply, and a few others that I can't even remember off-hand this last year. This year; probably nothing. Having my sons back home has been a noticeable drain on our budget for both money and time, and my wife's work has largely dried up for reasons that we haven't completely understood yet, so she's making less money than we're used to. Good excuse to tighten the belt. Realistically, we should be doing smarter things with our money than seeing a bunch of concerts anyway. My being laid off in 2022 really borked my retirement plans, and we're not saving more for retirement like we should be. That means that realistically I won't retire anytime too soon, of course, because I won't be able to afford it. If anyone can afford to retire in the future, which may be a debatable thing. I should also get my mortgage paid off, which would free up tons of cash, but will require throwing extra cash at it in the meantime first. This belt-tightening for various reasons means that we'll be doing less frivolous yet fun things to blog about, and even when we are making more again from my wife's babysitting, we should keep the belt tight for other reasons too. We also spent a ton of money just now on my son's wedding and the trip out of state to support it. Much of that cost we threw on a credit card, so we'll be paying it back down over the course of the next several months.
• That's probably more personal information than anyone needed to know, but still; that will be a theme for 2024. Doing less, saving and paying stuff off, rather than running around having lots of fun. We still have some big costs on the (relatively) near term horizon that we know will hit us soon, like one more wedding (not imminent), more grandkids, more kid moves, etc. Not saying that I expect any of these to be imminent or even in 2024, but we have at least two trips that are obligatory in the coming year, so we're doing our best to keep that contained and preparing for the future.
• All that said, I do blog from time to time about music, and no doubt still will.
• One hobby that I haven't done as much with as I'd like in the last couple of years is hiking in the Rocky Mountains, or the Southwestern deserts. I'd love to get back on the bandwagon this year, but I don't know if it'll be really feasible or not. I have done a lot of day hikes here locally with my wife and some of our friends, but hiking in the forested Northern Midwest is not really the same hobby at all, and I certainly don't backpack here. To be honest, I need a new backpack. I bought a bunch of cheap Amazon Basics backpacks a few years ago, and most of the cinch buckles have failed, making them almost unusable. Once I get a new backpack, I'll probably toss them entirely, since they're not really any good to anyone. What a disappointment those ended up being.
• To be fair, hiking and backpacking are not necessarily the same hobby. I might be able to do a bunch of low altitude desert red rock hikes after Easter Weekend. But I might be in too much of a hurry to get back home and work. It's not clear to me yet what I'll be able to pull off there, because that's a terrible time for work to be away, given that we have a April 1st fiscal year. Sigh. What I really want to do is a late July or August hike somewhere in the high elevation Rockies. I've got a lot of ideas in my head about where to go, but I don't yet know which (if any) will be feasible to actually do this year.
• In any case, as details start to flesh out, I'll probably talk more about them on my long-neglected hiking blog anyway.
• I ended up reading 39 books last year. While I didn't talk a lot about my reading, I set a goal more in line with my actual performance for 2024 of 30 books for the year with a 40 book stretch. I read several books at a time, usually if they're in very different formats or very different subjects so I don't get them mixed up. I'm already in the middle of two pdf gamebook, a regular hardcover gamebook, a slim hardcover neo-retro sword & sorcery novel or novella, an old Kindle adventure story, and I've got a regular fiction and non-fiction and religious book all queued up too. To hit my goal, I need to average 3 books a month, or more, but with any luck, I'll actually knock out half a dozen in January. I need to stay focused on that, though. With all of the craziness of the trip, year-end, the wedding, etc. I haven't read much since before Thanksgiving, so I need to buckle down on that.
• I've also pretty much bailed on Hero Forge. I haven't renewed the subscription (unless it auto renews; I should double check that, I guess) and I haven't played around with the app in quite a while.
• And finally, my fantasy gaming and science fiction setting design. The ostensible purpose of this blog, which I talk about increasingly infrequently. Sigh. I do not intend to not talk about this, but I need to come up with some specific plans of what I think I'll talk about relative to these topics, and soon. I have a few ideas:
• I do intend to get my campaign with my daughter and her husband, and my son and his wife going again. We've all been caught up in a lot of the exact same chaos, but the new year looks like it'll settle down into a routine, I hope, so there's hope that this will be easier than it ended up being in November and December.
• I do intend to finish the Races Deep Dive series, specifically by talking about the human ethnicities of Dark Fantasy X, which was my intention last time I actually posted on that. I think I've done all of the non-human races now, but I'll double check.
• I'm not sure if I'm going to do any more Space Opera X (formerly Ad Astra) data sheets or other setting development. Probably not. But, possibly. 

College and IQ

At the risk of sounding behind the cool kids and their lingo, "oh, snap!"

Background. According to a widespread belief, the average IQ of university students is 115 to 130 IQ points, that is, substantially higher than the average IQ of the general population (M = 100, SD =15). We traced the origin of this belief to obsolete intelligence data collected in 1940s and 1950s when university education was the privilege of a few. Examination of more recent IQ data indicate that IQ of university students and university graduates dropped to the average of the general population. The decline in students' IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years. Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s. Method. We conducted a meta-analysis of the mean IQ scores of college and university students samples tested with Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale between 1939 and 2022. Results. The results show that the average IQ of undergraduate students today is a mere 102 IQ points and declined by approximately 0.2 IQ points per year. The students' IQ also varies substantially across universities and is correlated with the selectivity of universities (measured by average SAT scores of admitted students). Discussion. These findings have wide-ranging implications. First, universities and professors need to realize that students are no longer extraordinary but merely average, and have to adjust curricula and academic standards. Second, employers can no longer rely on applicants with university degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without degrees. Third, students need to realize that acceptance into university is no longer an invitation to join an elite group. Fourth, the myth of brilliant undergraduate students in scientific and popular literature needs to be dispelled. Fifth, estimating premorbid IQ based on educational attainment is vastly inaccurate, obsolete, not evidence based, and mere speculations. Sixth, obsolete IQ data or tests ought not to be used to make high-stakes decisions about individuals, for example, by clinical psychologists to opine about intelligence and cognitive abilities of their clients.

It kind of seems like if they were as smart as they thought that they were, everyone would have suspected that to be the case based on logic and experience without having to have someone literally do a peer-reviewed study to prove it. At least the guys doing the study suspected what they were going to find, so kudos to them, I suppose. I've known too many college grads and seen the effects of college becoming the new high school first hand. This isn't surprising in the least, and I would have told you I believed this before someone decided to do a study on it.

Of course, the average IQ in America is going down too, so average according to the old average is also false. But that is mostly correlated to massive migration of Third Worlders where the average IQ is a standard deviation or more lower than it was amongst actual Americans.

Physical media and Depeche Mode soundalikes

I like having physical media of stuff that I actually want to watch or listen to repeatedly. For movies, I actually use the physical media frequently; I admit that for my CD collection, I don't very much anymore. I don't even have a convenient CD player to use handy, and my car isn't equipped with one either; I used rips to mp3 on my phone almost exclusively. 

I had said in my last post that I had a modest Christmas; what with my son's wedding, his honeymoon (paid for by me) and the trip out of state for the wedding, we'd expanded our budget significantly as it was. When mentioning the things I got, I don't think I mentioned the physical media movies that I got, though. I had 4-5 movies on my Amazon wishlist; some of them were actually collections, because they're just as cheap that way, and I got three of them: Napoleon Dynamite, Taken (actually the trilogy) and Back to the Future (again, actually the whole trilogy.) The Richard Lester Three and Four Musketeers collection is the only one left on my wishlist right now, actually, although I'll probably add a few more things as I think of them. We also actually watched all three of those movies (the sequels to the Taken and Back to the Future franchises were just a bonus. I got them because the trilogy was at least as cheap if not cheaper than the first movie in the series; but it's really only the first in both that I care enough to own.)

Why do I like physical media? Two reasons: 1) you never know when finding a movie is difficult or impossible online, or the internet is down, or the provider decided to cancel your "ownership" of something "in the cloud". 2) You never know when the provider is going to mess with the file that you own. Star Wars is the most egregious example of this, but frankly, a lot of Disney+ products are either on the line or get obnoxious warnings because they offend mentally unstable woke individuals. But trying to watch the original versions of Star Wars without owning the last release of the VHS tapes was impossible for many years. Even today, I have DVD's ripped from the laser discs, and that's the only version that I'll watch. Lucas' attempts to "update" the movie constantly were at best unnecessary, and at worst kind of offensive, hugely distracting, and obnoxious. I believe that he's finally given in to demand and released the original cuts somewhere at some point in the past, but I don't care to find out. I've got my own physical media, so I don't need them.

With music, it's a bit more ephemeral, but having your own copies is greatly to be preferred to streaming. I bought, years ago, the original Hollywood soundtrack to Kismet from Amazon; not on physical media, but as mp3 downloads. It has since been disappeared. I bought them, but if I hadn't saved the actual files, I'd be out of luck. The soundtrack fell out of favor with the self-appointed racism police, and now you can't get them. There's no record on Amazon anymore of me owning these, as near as I can tell, because they just want to pretend like the soundtrack never existed and they never sold it.

This isn't what I wanted to talk about today, really, if you'll forgive a lengthy set-up. I found that the best of Mesh's albums, Who Watches Over Me? is literally the only one that I can't find on Spotify or Youtube. Well; that's not entirely true. I can find bootleg playlists constructed of bootleg uploads of it on Youtube. Luckily for me, though, I have it in physical media; I bought the CD years ago, so I don't have to worry about that surprising hole in their catalog.

But that's what I really want to talk about again; the Depeche Mode soundalikes. I loved Depeche Mode as a teenager. I remember when "People Are People" was on the radio (although I was young enough not to be paying attention to who sang it) and I remember rediscovering them for real when "Strangelove" was on the radio. That's when I went into Depeche Mode bigtime; my sophomore, I think, year in high school. I listened to Music for the Masses more times in the first week that I bought it (coincidentally while reading Dracula for the first time; a star-crossed literature-music matchup if there ever was one) than I've listened to their most recent album, Memento Mori, in the almost year since I've had it. And I think Memento Mori is one of their better albums; the best since Playing the Angel (2005) which was in turn the best since Violator (1990). Depeche Mode have changed a lot over the years, but my favorite "version" of them was the mid to late 80s. In the earlier 80s, they were very much a synthpop band, but they focused as much on the pop as the synth, and though I love pop music as much as the next guy, it is kind of cheesy by definition sometimes. By the time they released their fourth album in as many years, Some Great Reward, they'd become a very dark band, full of melancholy and menace in their sound and tone, and had pioneered the use of sampling in a way that previously had only been done in a very artsy and non-commercial way. Some Great Reward and the two albums that followed it, Black Celebration and Music For the Masses changed the landscape of electronic music forever. By the time we get to Violator, Depeche Mode had found mainstream success, but were becoming less and less of an electronic band by that time too. Subsequent Depeche Mode releases have nodded at their electronic synthpop past, while also attempting to get away from it as much as they think that they can without losing their audience, which is part of the reason that Depeche Mode isn't as exciting as they used to be, and their new releases are... OK, whatever, most of the time now.

While most people will say that Depeche Mode's most influential material is their most popular and mainstream and well-known material, like Violator and maybe Songs of Faith and Devotion, I'll point out that there are dozens of Depeche Mode also-ran soundalikes, and none of them are imitating or building off of the sound of Violator; they all build off of the earlier sound of the three albums I mentioned earlier. 

I remembered one of these bands and listened to a number of their songs last night. I've been listening to a lot of hard dance lately, and hard dance is easy and simple to like. A dance-floor banger mostly just has to bang, and it's satisfying. It doesn't have to do much else, or offer much, so in most cases, it doesn't. But the music that I used to listen to more was music that I held to a higher standard, and I still think that it meets that higher standard. I always come back to it no matter how much I've been into this hard dance thing for the last few years. The band in this case is Mesh.

Mesh has some stuff that sounds like it's more Pretty Hate Machine era NIN than Depeche Mode, and more recently, they've gone for a stadium electronic sound, with very lush, layered stuff. But I think their best single song is probably "Confined" from 1996's In This Place Forever, and the next two albums, The Point at Which it Falls Apart (1999) and even moreso Who Watches Over Me? (2002) are their real masterpieces. I made a brief playlist of the album closers from those three albums; "Confined", "Not Prepared" (the album version, not the club-thumper single version) and "The Trouble We're In" and holy cow was that a great little playlist. I added more to it later, of course, but those are the three best dark, brooding, menacing slow songs; probably their three best tracks.

I could also talk about similar bands Camouflage and De/Vision, but I'll save that for another post.

Updates

It's been almost a month since I posted, but... I feel like I don't have anything to post about. I still haven't played our session 2. Our trip out West was fraught with drama in many ways, but we successfully married off my son, saw lots of extended family, spent more time with immediate family than we already do, and generally had a reasonably good time (it helps that the weather cooperated. Driving out West across Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, etc. in the winter can be hazardous if there's lots of snow falling. Instead, we got over two weeks of bright sunny skies and generally relatively high temperatures... for this time of year, anyway.)

I had to spend about a week of the time I was away working remotely, which kind of sucked, but it petered off at the end of the week because of the approaching holiday. I'm back at work now, but again, it hasn't really kicked back in yet because of the holiday. I work for a company headquartered outside of the US, and apparently at HQ their holiday is even longer than ours, so it's been quiet. Lots of people here locally have extended the holiday by taking vacation.

Christmas was nice. Given the wedding and travel, we spent a ton of money, so our gift giving was a little subdued to keep the budget manageable. I got a few new flannel shirts, a few blu-ray movies that I wanted in my physical media collection, and a few books, and a few party games (one of which we already own under a slightly different name; for whatever reason my wife's brother gave us the British version, which is identical except for a few letters in the title.) I also have my birthday coming up in a week and a half or so. Maybe I'll get a few more interesting things then.

A few hobbyist thoughts (from various hobbies) have crossed my mind. 

1) Knave 2e is shipping any day now. I actually have the pdf version of the game now, and I believe, if I'm interpreting the email correctly, that that is the final version. I'll wait until my physical copy arrives to read it/ Not sure completely why I bought this. I didn't need another OSR-adjacent game, but the promise of the tables looked... well, promising, and it's nice to support someone sometimes, even if they're selling something that I don't really need. I'm sure I'll talk about it briefly when I get it.

2) In spite of the fact that our second session while out of town didn't materialize, I think there's still plenty of demand for a game, if I can just get it scheduled. I'll work on getting that done sometime in the next few weeks. It's already been over two months since we last played, so I'll have to do a refresher before we start. Maybe a once a month schedule would be sustainable with this crew? Hard to say. Lots of changes still ongoing, including my oldest son's imminent new job.

3) I've been listening to a bunch of hard dance music again, and made a "fix" to one of my megamixes, as well as putting together a new megamix, and queueing up yet another two more megamixes. I feel like the first four that I made I know quite well and listened to a lot, but the fifth one I still don't feel as familiar with, even though I've had it for months now. The new sixth one even less so. Once I bang out seven and eight, although I have a nine mapped out, I'll probably slow down and enjoy what I have more before moving on.

As part of that, I'm rediscovering some files that I haven't listened to in a long time. Really since I got them, in some cases, which is kind of sad. These tracks are excellent, and I've had Klasic & Sanders "Space Odyssey" (sped up tempo to 150 bpm from 140 bpm) playing a fair bit the last day or so, and I've made it a component of the next megamix that I'll mix. For part six, I also pulled out a few classics that I loved when I discovered them but then kind of fell on to the backburner, like some tracks by DJ Darkzone, Cosmic Gate and Bas & Ram that I hadn't listened to a lot since I first got into this hard dance scene. Kind of too bad. I'm sure I got too many tracks way too fast, and just couldn't keep up with most of them.

4) I can't go out west to Wyoming and Utah (and add Colorado, Montana and Idaho to that list too, although I didn't go to those states this time) without feeling the call of the Rockies. I love the mountains and even the deserts, and the big sunny skies, and the wide empty spaces. I'm happy enough living in the northeastern Midwest, but it's not my native country, and if I could afford to decamp to a small town in Wyoming, I'd do so in a heartbeat (now you know what my lottery plans would be if I ever won the lottery.)

I'm not entirely sure that I agree with the US Census bureau's definition of the Midwest, graphically represented here courtesy of Wikipedia. The western four states that make up "the Midwest) are culturally, geographically, politically and climatically extremely different from the core that surrounds the Great Lakes. North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas may well not exactly be Rocky Mountain states, unless you count the Badlands and the Black Hills as eastward extensions of the Rockies somehow, but otherwise, once you cross the Mississippi River and especially the more westwards Missouri River, you certainly feel like you're in the West. Iconic Old West locations like Dodge City and Deadwood City are technically in the Midwest, not the West according to this definition.

That said, there is a difference between Rocky Mountain states and Great Plains states (even if most so-called Rocky Mountain states are dominated by the western section of the Great Plains. The mountains of Montana are only at the far western edge, while the vast majority of the state is Great Plains. Does this make it substantially different than the Dakotas somehow?) The presence of the mountains seems to somehow define these states more than most other features, and makes them stand out. Technically, my in-laws, where I spent much of my time while out of town, live past the Rockies and in the Great Basin, the large geographical feature that makes up about half of Utah, most of Nevada and a decent chunk of Oregon—and more modest parts of Idaho and California too. The basin and range mountains aren't technically Rocky Mountains at all, although western mountains are western mountains, and I still love them dearly. They are a bit drier and more xeric in nature than the Rockies, certainly moreso than the PNW Cascades, and have an almost but not quite desert feel to them, rising as they do out of the desert basin floors. Their elevation means that they catch more water vapor than the desert, tend to have more trees and some streams and creeks, and otherwise look like a hybrid between desert and alpine. 

I'm considering doing some hiking in some of these mountains soon, if I can break away. The Ruby and Snake ranges in Nevada are justifiably kind of famous, but the more obscure ranges of Utah, like the House Range, the Tushar Range or the Fish Springs Range are also very tempting. In part because of their obscurity; relatively speaking, nobody goes there, which is what makes them fun.