Ad Astra manifesto

Today is, of course, a frustrating day. Donald Trump clearly won the election, but the voter fraud operation is attempting to see how much cheating they can get away with today in a number of key counties, including, sadly, the one that I live in. This is a likely scenario for the actual election results, although it's still "conservative" in the sense that it doesn't involve investigating and overturning likely rampant voter fraud in Arizona and Virginia that would almost certainly flip the states. To say nothing of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The source is AC's page, one of those linked on the side there. But given that there's little that can be done right now about it, I'm going to attempt to not think about it too much. The reality is that although senile Biden is one of the clearest choices for evil that the American people have ever been faced with, the less clear choices have won by being more discrete and careful than Biden has been quite often, not by being less evil. A second Trump victory would likely only delay the coming collapse into chaos of the American nation by a small amount, not actually make it less likely to happen. It's almost certainly inevitable, and the cards were dealt decades ago that made that the case. It doesn't matter what I think about it, and it doesn't matter what you think about it; this is just the playing out of strategic moves that Satan took long ago that weren't blunted in time to make their conclusions and consequences avoidable.

There's simply no political will to do what would be necessary to save us anyway; massive repatriations of Fake Americans, massive clean-up of corrupt officials at all levels of government from the federal bureaucracy to your local public library board. Including tens of thousand if not hundreds of thousands of executions of literal traitors by a strict legal definition. The overturning of the "dual citizenship" and "birthright citizenship" frauds and most of the avenues for "legal" immigration that have been abused for decades. The abolishment of our treaties with the UN, NATO and just about every other entangling alliance that we foolishly persist in being in. Yeah, I'm not holding my breath. It would almost be better in the long run for a massive economic and political collapse, which would at least encourage most of the Fake Americans to just pick up and look for greener pastures on their own, as well as the establishment of smaller, more manageable and accountable polities that aren't accountable to a massively over-reaching government body. Y'know, kind of like how the Founding Fathers envisioned and which we haven't had since the war of Lincoln's Proto-communist Revolution, otherwise known to the historically illiterate as the Civil War.

So again; what can be done about this? Not a whole lot other than praying, at least by folks like you and me. At least right now. We'll see as this continues to play out over the next few days and weeks what will happen. I still hold on to a glimmer of hope that some substantial swamp draining will yet take place. (As I've been typing this, thousands more "lost Biden votes" in Michigan were "discovered" making that state now "lean Democrat." Riiiiight. Funny how these mysteriously "found" ballots always end up flipping states from Republican to Democrat, and have done so every election for years. Not enough people in jail for serious felonies, I suppose. Al Franken got away with it, so they keep doing it. Maybe Civil War 2.0 is closer than a lot of people think. This kind of obvious and blatant cheating makes sure that nobody has any confidence in the integrity of the process or the legitimacy of the government, and disenfranchises tens of millions of voters. I think people really are sick and tired of this kind of crap by now.)

So, after saying that I didn't really want to talk about that, I typed more than I intended already. Let's turn to the real meat of my intended post; a manifesto on what Ad Astra is. First off, it's also occurred to me for quite a while now that Ad Astra is a bit too obvious and over-used of a title and it probably needs a bit more to truly be unique. Rather than attempt to be clever and add more Latin, I'll probably go for something a little more down to earth, or something. Ad Astra Privateers, or something like that, since I envision this as very much like a Rafael Sabatini book set in space; a kind of Sea Hawk or Captain Blood to the stars. But I don't love that either. Suggestions welcome, otherwise, I'll keep noodling around with it on my own. But, what exactly am I trying to do with this? I've talked a little bit about it before, but that was quite a while ago, and it's probably time for an updated manifesto. Especially as I'm seriously thinking (albeit again) with doing something with this other than tinkering on the world-building side. It's long overdue for some plot and character, not just worldbuilding! It's my intention to make this post be that manifesto of sorts.

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I was five years old when Star Wars came out. It's quite literally the first movie that I remember seeing in theaters. Nobody can deny that Star Wars was a breath of fresh air in the gloomy and cynical theatrical scene of the 70s; a kind of early harbinger of the 80s, in fact. The 80s were a decade which is defined in many ways in America by the fact that it was a prosperous and confident era in which the American people were confident and proud of their culture, and in many ways the last decade in which the American people were allowed to have their country and their culture without too much obvious meddling and interference from those who wanted to take it away from us and destroy it. The 80s were unashamedly American in America; the exact opposite of the siege mentality that grips Americans today. But in many ways the 80s, or at least these particular trends that we associate so strongly with the 80s, were really part of a 15 or so year period not just a decade, and it started in the late 70s and went a bit into the early 90s. Star Wars, as I said, was an early harbinger of it, even if George Lucas never meant it to be.

And I think some of the most interesting things about Star Wars are things that weren't necessarily intentional and which George Lucas would probably vehemently deny today (maybe with nervous looks over his shoulder, even) but which are obviously true nonetheless. Star Wars was made in a time when America was undeniably American in demographics. If you watch movies, documentaries, even news broadcasts from the 70s and 80s, you'll rarely see a minority, although if you do, it's generally unremarked on. We had them, and they were allowed the same grace that Americans were allowed, because they weren't here in enough numbers to show the ravenous ingratitude, entitlement and covetousness that they do now. We had good relationships with our minorities, because they were minorities, and weren't threatening to become majorities, nor was there any of the propaganda that is rampant today that white people and specifically white males are born with some kind of cult-like version of original sin. Star Wars was made in an era when Hollywood was an organization that made movies by white males, mostly (although often financed by Jewish interests) for an audience of white people, and starring mostly white people (with the obvious exception of the blaxploitation genre of b-movies.) On top of that, Star Wars was openly (and admittedly) imitating a number of genre elements that had fallen off the mainstream table during the 70s, but which earlier had been very mainstream; the Flash Gordon Republic Serials in particular, but the whole body of work that led up to them and followed in that same vein; Edgar Rice Burroughs and his John Carter stories, for instance, or Leigh Brackett and her Eric John Stark ones. E. E. "Doc" Smith, the so-called creator of space opera was obviously and heavily borrowed from in Star Wars, as was Frank Herbert's Dune and a host of other similar stuff like Edmond Hamilton, Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl and more. 

One thing that you may notice, in spite of the shrieking harpies who shriek such things about diversity, inclusion and The Force is Female and stuff like that is that there certainly is a type of cultural homogeniety to the creators of space opera. About the closest thing to diversity is the fact that Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore were female, although that seems to have had little impact on their writing compared to their male counterparts, and they certainly weren't inserting feminist identity politics into their stories. To be honest, this is one of the things I miss most about space opera. The entire genre, up to and including Star Wars, was written by Americans about Americans and for Americans—although the characters weren't as overtly American in the sense that they were called Americans, they obviously and clearly always were Americans in culture and genetics nonetheless. It's our genre, or at least one of our genres. Which is exactly why seeing entitled, screeching hordes of the creatively bankrupt militantly brownwashing, blackwashing, and pinkwashing our genre entries rather than simply making their own entries, or better yet their own genres, is so offensive. It's narcissistic and sociopathic. Seeing "the Force is Female" and movies stocked with minority Mary Sues while white males only relegated to being able to be the cartoonishly idiotic villains is a mockery of the genre, and a deliberate one. It's mean-spirited and petty, meant to humiliate the creators and the fans openly.

Star Wars used to be, and should be again but isn't likely to be, a story primarily about white, American heroes carrying on swashbuckling, chivalric romances with white, American love interests. If minorities are truly to be believed, and they can't relate to stories that don't have protagonists that "look like them" on the screen (in spite of the success of Star Wars across the world in the late 70s, which would obviously tend to make that claim untenable) then I claim the same privilege. I want stories that are about people like me, written for people like me, by people like me. The failure of Star Wars in recent years can be blamed, in large part, on its embrace of the biologically and psychologically ludicrous notion that people are all the same regardless of their genetics and biology. Women are not just men in a woman's body. Black people are different than white people who are different than Hispanic people who are different from Asian people who are different from MENAs, and so on and so forth. 

And white, male American fans of space opera, which remains the largest group of fans of the genre, as near as I can tell, deserve the right to have stories for them. Especially now when the zeitgeist in America is to attack all things American by the resentful, the covetous, the envious, the nihilistic, the narcissistic. 

Of course, the other major problem with Star Wars is one of execution. Regardless of whether or not the concepts behind more recent Star Wars entries are good ones or not (mostly they're not) even the good ideas are marred by poor execution. Poorly written stories with unlikeable and uncharismatic characters, with missed opportunities for tension, suspense, or anything else that makes a story good and entertaining to watch are par for the course for the franchise these days. Because of these problems, Star Wars fans are actually pretty starved for entertaining content, and often greedily gobble up even mediocre content because at least it doesn't too actively insult them. This is the secret to the Clone Wars series and The Mandalorian, both are which aren't really great, but because they aren't terrible, Star Wars fans love them. Truthfully, we deserve quite a bit better, but it seems unlikely that we'll get it. 

But, when I was a kid in the very late 70s, I'd play my own games with my Star Wars action figures—supplemented by G.I Joe and Adventure People stuff from the same scale, and rubber dinosaurs and other stuff from different scales. I renamed my characters, and just used the elements that I had, like a Boba Fett action figure, a TIE fighter, a submarine, a T. rex-sized tiger, Clawtron, and who knows what else. Regardless of what Star Wars was doing with these elements, I did my own thing. As Nick Cole once said in a podcast, this was pretty much the genesis of the Galaxy's Edge series that he wrote with Jason Anspach. In a discussion the two of them were having after some kind of writer meetup or get-together or something like that, Nick asked Jason what he really wanted to write, and he said Star Wars stuff. What Nick said to him was that, look—the elements of Star Wars are all scenes-a-faire, and Lucas himself borrowed them from somewhere else in almost all cases anyway. How about just make a Fake Star Wars that has the same feel, but is made up of your own take on the elements rather than Star Wars' specific take? He also likened it to playing with your Star Wars action figures out in the lawn, doing your own thing with them, which is how they see Galaxy's Edge. It's kind of like, what if I had made Star Wars the way that I'd have wanted it to be? It's deliberately pastiche, but there's nothing wrong with good pastiche. Good pastiche can sometimes be better than the original. You can certainly make a case, for example, that Flash Gordon has had more of a mainstream impact on science fiction than John Carter, and yet Flash Gordon was deliberately created as a pastiche when King Syndicates wanted to compete directly and head to head with the popular Buck Rogers comic strip but couldn't get the rights to Barsoom. 

So to me, this is what AD ASTRA is, or at least what I hope it will become. What Star Wars should have been. Or to be really nitpicky, what Star Wars briefly was but then mostly lost. Just like Alex Raymond created Flash Gordon when he couldn't write John Carter stories so he could write stories pretty much just like John Carter in his own setting, and George Lucas created Star Wars when he couldn't get the rights to Flash Gordon so he could write stories pretty much just like Flash Gordon in his own setting, and Jason Anspach and Nick Cole couldn't write Star Wars stories, so they created Galaxy's Edge to write stories pretty much just like Star Wars in their own setting, AD ASTRA is doing the same thing. Borrowing from the vast body of space opera work, probably even hearkening back to more old fashioned, red-blooded American takes on the genre even than original Star Wars did, keeping to the swashbuckling, space western vibe rather than the overtly military action story take that Anspach and Cole kind of ended up doing. My own take on it, naturally, and one that avoids the many pitfalls that I believe that Star Wars has fallen into. So specifically, what makes it different than Star Wars?

Obviously, based on my earlier paragraphs, you can infer that my setting and my characters will largely be heavily influenced by classical space opera American cultural tropes. I doubt anything culturally that post-dates the hippies will really have any influences on the stories I intend to tell, unless they are specifically one of the villains of the piece. (Note that this includes the fascination with Indian Buddhism and other exotic gurus that gripped the hippies in the late 60s and 70s and was a huge influence on the Force and the Jedi. To say nothing of Lucas' Japanophilia with regards to starting out the Jedi as space samurai. Was there something wrong with Western tradition knights in space?) I also intend to rigorously pursue story arcs that cater to biologically and psychologically normal people. I refuse to have women who act like fake men; women, to be desireable and attractive need to be feminine and men need to be masculine in classical, biologically relevent senses of both words. I expect the plots and characters of my stories to more closely resemble a hybrid of swashbuckling romances, classical noir stories, or old school westerns than anything else more modern. Expect more of a Edgar Rice Burroughs meets Rafael Sabatini and Sir Walter Scott meets Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler meets Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour with a heavy dash of James Bond too. In space, of course, with a cold war between galactic superpowers heavily featuring in the region that I'll set it. There'll be plenty of magic and fantasy, but none of the childish and absurd light side dark side fake morality that marred the execution of Star Wars over time.

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The following custom figurine sculpts for Star Wars reimagined are pretty close to the "vibe" I'm kinda looking for. Very old-school pulp, in most respects.

Once Upon a Time in Space 

Serial Wars

And here's an interesting video. Make of it what you will. I suspect that even if the rumor isn't factually correct in its numbers that it's generally correct in the gist of what it's saying.

One down; second soon

I finishd Belsavis, the first of three planets that are part of the third and final chapter of all of the class storylines with my Sith Warrior character; second to play. Only two more planets to go, and the third one doesn't even have a Bonus Series (although there's the finale and a handful of other non-planet missions to work in there.) I was a little shocked at how quickly it went down; in only two or three days—days, I'll mention where I worked full time and had some busy personal commitments in the evening too—I did all of the Belsavis Heroic missions, all of the planetary story missions, all of the class missions, even the exploration missions, and then did the Bonus Series. I feel like I just did Belsavis with my Knight only a week or so ago (which is true; I'm playing a lot right now) and the first time through it felt like it took longer, even if the missions were different. Just about the only thing that I didn't do that I did with the knight, although this only took a few minutes really, was wander around the map to uncover the whole thing as far as it could be reached.

So, yeah—I've got some experience tinkering with some of the other classes in the past too, where I studiously avoided the force-using classes for whatever reason. And I've watched an awful lot of playthrough videos over the years on Youtube. I think I can say something about what class to play and why at this point, even if I'm still a far cry away from playing all eight of them all the way through. I'll put out the order that I've chosen for my playthrough and why, I suppose, although of course, naturally I'm leapfrogging rather than playing one through non-stop and then moving on to the next. As I go through the post "main story" stuff with my first two classes, I'll start on the next two immediately.

1. Jedi Knight. This is considered the most iconic story, and this is the character that is kinda sorta "in canon" assumed to be the one who actually goes through the expansion packs. Often considered, "KotOR 3" because of this, from a story perspective, it's probably the absolute best to go through first. However, it's not perfect; given that it's a melee rather than ranged combat class, it's a little bit harder to use than some of the other classes. In addition to this, the character is so bland, boring, and lacking in personality that he's really not a great choice to be the masthead for the entire game with the most iconic of the stories. That said, I still think it's the best choice for a story-first type gamer (as opposed to a more MMO style gamer) to play through. Kira as the default love interest is a classic love interest; and let's face it, Star Wars needs to be a swashbuckling romance; a kind of Sabatini novel set in space, in order to work (this is a big problem with Luke Skywalker's story arc in the original trilogy; when they made the change to pawn Leia off on Han and not let Luke have a love interest, that was a major blow to the credibility of the story as a classic story.)

2. Sith Warrior. As kind of the dark mirror of the Jedi Knight, the Sith Warrior is an obvious second choice, and his story is also very iconic and classic Star Wars. I actually prefer to play him a little less on-the-nose petty evil and more of a pragmatist working within a corrupt system (the Sith Empire) and mostly ignoring the light/dark implications of the choices you make. (Although most of them will end up being light even so if you're not some kind of weirdo psychopath yourself, thinking that the darker choices make sense.) One way that the story doesn't work, building a bit on my comments for the Jedi Knight above is that the "default" love interest, Vette, may well be kinda cute in personality, but I just don't really like making love to aliens, so I'm working on the Jaesa angle. The dark side Jaesa is kind of interesting in a twisted, disturbing kind of way, but the light side Jaesa, which doesn't pay out until literally the very end of the game, at the end of the Onslaught expansion, is among the best romances in the game.

3. Smuggler. This fairly classic swashbuckler/pirate/crime lord style story is one of the more attractive ones, and the witty banter and dialogue seems to often be some of the best in the game. Amusingly, the smuggler character has single-planet romance options; he can leave a trail of broken hearts all through the galaxy, which is kinda sorta unique to this character, although a handful of other characters have a handful of single-planet romance options. Risha is the main love interest, however, although I recommend getting a reskin if you can. I'm qualified to buy the blond reskin in the Cartel market, so as soon as I go through her very first cut scene, I'll pop into the fleet and pick that up so I can have her run around as a prettier version of herself first. I played most of the first two planets way back when that's all you could do with this game on free-to-play (and I did it as a girl character too, gack) and it really sold me on the idea that Star Wars can actually be better without the Force and lightsbers. Although I like the way the character was written, a combination of the writing and the limitations of the medium make the character come across as just a bit too passive and beta for all the action that he's capable of getting, though.

4. Agent. I'm actually on the fence if I want to do this one as part of my leapfrog options or the bounty hunter, which I've played quite a bit of as an alt. The agent is rumored to be the first story written for the game, and in most respects, it's the most ambitious; a kind of James Bond in space type character, with three different (although related) story arcs for each major chapter of the main plot. The first one has a 24-like foil the terrorists vibe, while chapter 2 is a psychogical thriller with mad-science tones, and chapter 3 is the big-old globalist (galaxy-wide, in this case) conspiracy kind of story. While the character himself isn't nearly as dashing as the smuggler, he's got this kind of much colder, scarier vibe to him that gives him some of the charm of the darker James Bonds that we've seen; it really is quite well done. That said; again, the romance options, which is an important part of any good Star Wars story (and any good James Bond story, for that matter.) Kaliyo is the default one, and she's a hot mess of drama and baggage. Not a pleasant or attractive girl at. all. Just a horrible choice. However, much later in the story you pick up Raina Temple. Slap a customization on her (#4 is available, luckily, right after you pick her up, and #9 is great too, if you can find it.) and you're good to go. She actually seems like a likable character too, which makes the inclusion of Kaliyo all the more baffling. The only explanation I can think of is that whomever was in charge of that aspect of the story is too irreconcilably beta to have any understanding of what an attractive woman is actually like.

5. Jedi Consular. While the Jedi Knight is sometimes considered the prototypical "heroic Jedi" this one is sometimes described as an "average Jedi." Some people seem to really like this story, but I've heard a lot of others say that it's a bit slow and underwhelming. I figure by the time I come back around to it I'll be in the mood for another Force character, but I'm not expecting to really love this story so much. But we'll see; maybe it'll surprise me. Scuttlebutt is that the default romance option, Nadia Grell, while a little bit funny looking may be one of the sweetest and most likable of the girl romance options.

6. Sith Inquisitor. I don't have a lot of info on this class story either, except that it comes across as perhaps a little too passive; doing too much of someone else's step and fetchit, and supposed to be a double-crossing genius but who can't see obvious plot twists that the players can. Again; I'll play it because I'm planning on playing them all, but I don't have really high expectations on this one really. Not sure what to do with the romance either. The default is the Togruta gal, but I don't really love romancing aliens too much. Maybe I'll hold out and romance Lana Beniko with this character?

7. Trooper. Another class that is often considered one of the poorer ones; a strong start and strong finish, but an awful lot of draggin in between. Plus, the concept just doesn't appeal to me too much. I'll almost certainly not change my mind about putting this one off until nearly the end.

8. Bounty Hunter. The only reason this one is so far back is because I know so much about the story and have played a considerable amount of it with a character who I flubbed up and locked out my companion storylines before finishing them. I actually quite like almost everything about this guy; a laconic alpha of occasionally dubious morality with a very cute sidekick/romance option played by none other than Party of Five and Mean Girls star Lacey Chabert. Also, I want to have the best ability to have loads of cosmetic options, so playing it late means that I will have everything collected by all of the other classes that they didn't or couldn't use available for this bad boy to take on. 

I'm somewhat amused

There's something dodgy with the scale. I'm using the Agent ship from Old Republic, although I could do this with any of the six ships; look at the cutaway version first. This is consistent with my experience of playing the game and seeing the ship both from outside and inside.

However, the official descriptions describe them as much bigger, and these images show people that... must be only about two feet tall. Talk about some weird scaling issues!

Old Republic Update

Not that anyone else cares, as I'm way late on this given that the game is coming up on 10 years old in 2021 sometime, but my Old Republic progress continues apace. I finished, just this morning, actually, the class story for the Jedi Knight, which is considered probably the most iconic and classic of the class storylines. Sadly, the Jedi Knight is also one of the most bland and boring of the characters, and a lot of the missions that he's required to do are hoaky and silly, as are his responses to them. It's as if tiny children tried to come up with moral dilemmas which normal people just find asinine, for the most part. That can kind of be ignored, a bit, and some of it isn't the Knight anyway, it's the Republic class story that is often worse than the class story in this regard (and the exploration missions, which although they give you a handful of fetchit quests, actually bring down the writing quality average considerably because they're usually pretty stupid.)

Anyway, one down; seven to go. The Sith Warrior is starting chapter three, so he's within striking distance of finishing up too. I actually intend to take both of them through the expansions, but I seriously doubt that I'll take all of the characters through them, because ugh. Too much repetition. 

But what to do after finishing the story with the Sith Warrior? Do I want to leapfrog back to the Knight and do some of the epilogue stuff like Ilum, Section X, the Black Hole, etc. and then leapfrog back to the Warrior to do the same again? Or do I want to start a more complicated leapfrogging by adding the Smuggler and Agent prologues into the mix first? With a four character leapfrog, my progress between the four will be slower, and I do want to get to at least Chapter 9 of Fallen Empire with at least one character so I can start opening all of these Heroic crates that I have and distributing whatever armor I pull out of them to the other characters still coming. Which means that I'll probably keep the Agent and Smuggler stuff moving a little slower; I'm thinking that maybe I'll do the epiloge stuff first, then the Smugger/Agent prologues, and then moving into expansions with the two knight/warrior characters. I think according to this plan, I'll get to the crate opening stuff after the smuggler and agent have finished chapter 1, which means anything that I open up that would look good on them can be worn through chapters 2 and 3 and however much of the expansion content I decide to do with those two characters.

I have not, you may notice, thought too far ahead beyond that, because obviously I still have four more classes to do after that; the other Jedi and Sith classes and the trooper and bounty hunter. Who will all benefit enormously from having much more choice of rare armor and weapon cosmetic items, and who therefore may look quite a bit cooler than my "main" characters who had to blaze the trail first without the benefit of being able to follow someone else who unlocked a bunch of crap for them already.

I do really enjoy a lot of the cosmetic stuff, to be honest with you. Star Wars, even the bad movies like the sequel trilogy and to a lesser extent the prequel trilogy always got at least one thing pretty right; the visual design. That said, there are some even cooler things in this game than in the movies, at least conceptually. Although often held back by the limitations of the medium. For quite a while now, my Jedi Guardian has had a black core blue lightsaber crystal with a big, chunky Onderon pummeler's hilt (I think that's what it's called anyway. Regardless, I like the look of it quite a bit.) This makes it kind of look like a darksaber that's blue instead of white, which is a really cool look, by the way. In fact, I like it so much that I've decided all of my force characters will have a variant of the black-core crystals. My Sith Marauder has two black core orange crystals, which are ferocious looking and super cool, and I need to get a hold of the black core green and purple crystals for my other Jedi and Sith characters with their double sabers respectively.

I also had a bit of a strange affectation with my Jedi Knight where I refused to dress him in those dumb brown robes. I have six alternate outfit designed, and I did relent a little bit and have a charcoal gray jedi robe as one of the later ones that I added. In fact, for quite a long time; the first two planets, basically, I wore the craftable Terenthium Onslaught armor followed by the Xonolite armor, with the head uncovered, which gave him a more of a Han Solo scoundrel kind of look. I did eventually come up with my own alternative Jedi classic outfit when I got some kind of dressy tunic of sorts that's mostly tan but with goldish accents. I gave him one of the headbands to look a bit like a crown (although there's an even cooler one in the tactical sets that really does look like a crown; time to upgrade eventually—when I want to spend a million credits and three thousand tech fragments on it, which won't be right away. I've spent too much there between my two characters and my tech fragment budget in particular is a bit depleted.) But mostly, I figure an action oriented knight would wear action-oriented clothing, not peasant robes. That was one of the few major misteps Lucas made on visual design; deciding that rather than Ben Kenobi wearing clothes that looked exactly like Uncle Owen's style because he was living in the same environment in hiding, that that's actually what Jedi dressed like. So, Uncle Owen dresses like a Jedi, even though he's just a dirt poor peasant farmer in a galactic backwater. Maybe he raided Qui-Gonn's closet when he was last on Tatooine or something. 

I did also do a white robe highlighted with blue while on Hoth, but mostly because I thought it looked warm and I happened to get it at the right time to wear it for that planet.

I still think that the way to save Star Wars from itself is to start doing stuff that takes place as far in the future after the movies we have now as the Old Republic is in the past. But maybe borrow some of the color visual design elements that Old Republic did, which make it look familiar yet also a little different to emphasize that yes, this is Star Wars, but it's separated in time from the Star Wars that you know. 

On the other hand, the super exaggerated spikes and pauldrons that a lot of the design elements have are really stupid and need to be toned way down.

Ad Astra armor

 Early on I made, as an example, a Cilindarean commando suit. Think of it as a fully loaded Mandalorian warrior suit, or maybe a bit like Warmachine from Marvel. (Really, they're pretty similar in most respect, except that the Star Wars versions probably have less ammo for their bigger weapons, and there's no such thing as the repulsor blasts.) I'm heading towards the crew of a ship that are iconic for Ad Astra, and it includes two main characters who are partners as well as their associated sidekicks and others who make up their crew. All in all, maybe a half dozen characters, maybe one or two more if you include a droid or two. One of them is an ethnic janissary, and although the janissaries and the Cilindareans aren't exactly the same, I'm using the Cilindarean armor that I already devised in the m20 game to represent janissary traditional armor too; the two groups are related culturally in a somewhat uneasy rivalry yet also alliance kind of fashion, and although janissaries are much less likely than Cilindareans to hire themselves out as mercenary bands, considering themselves blessed to have won their freedom and happy to keep it as armed and very capable militias on their colony worlds, a Cilindarean and a janissary are meant to be more or less equivalent as a military unit.

The second half of this partnership, though, is a renegade Serean knight; one who probably grew up on a planet of one of the colonies and has had, since at least the time of his parents, little connection to his Serean culture, having rejected it and embraced the Christian religion of the Bernese and others of the old Marian Empire tradition (some of the Revanchists are a type of heretic Christian, but most of them have abandoned their faith within the last three or four generations or so.) What kind of gear would a Serean knight (or for that matter, a knight generally) be expected to have, especially one who runs as a kind of privateer/smuggler as a living? And how to do I make sure that his combat effectiveness is about as good as that of the janissary with his fully kitted out suit?

I refer you, again, before we begin, to the m20 document that has the rules for the game, specifically the equipment page. So, let's get started. I think a knight in Ad Astra isn't exactly like a Medieval knight, with the heaviest armor available, but he's also not like a Jedi who just wears dumb brown robes. This character (name TBD) wear a black ballistic cloth flight suit with some embedded shielded plates on them, with another padded jacket, tunic or vest on top of that, which has a built in energy shield. While his traditional weapons are his psionic sword and shield, he also carries a heavy radium pistol, a number of grenades, maybe some additional smaller pistols in another holster or two, and knives in his boot sheathes. He's probably got a helmet, but may not always wear it, prefering often to simply put up the hood of his jacket.

Because psionic powers are penalized with any armor heavier than light, this description of armor will be (and honestly sounds like, anyway) light armor, +4 to AC. This is a 2,000 credit base cost. The really expensive addition is the energy shield, which is unusual on a personal armor set, especially a light armor set (although notably, nothing in the rules precludes it, just setting stuff that says it's unusual.) This adds Damage Reduction 10 against radium weapons and adds an additional 10,000 credits to the cost. (For reference, my fully loaded Cilindarean battle suit costs 18,575.) The knight suit would also have a commlink for 50 credits on one wrist bracer or gauntlet, and a utility belt for an additional 250. It would have, in particular for this character, active shadow camouflage, giving him an armor affinity for Stealth (2,000 credits) and the ballistic cloth is especially treated by psionic sages and warlocks to give it the ability to absorb small amounts of kinetic energy and store it for later use (seen, kinda sorta, in the Black Panther's suit in the Marvel movies.) This gives him also the Acrobatics affinity, so that's another 2,000 credits.

He doesn't have a jet pack, but I imagine he owns some kind of small speeder and keeps in "garaged" on the ship when not in use, and he has an optional face shield that would look very similar to the Winter Soldier's face mask that serves as a sensor and HUD interface as well as a breath mask (Perception affinity, +2,000 and 250 respectively.)

This armor, then is certainly in the same ballpark as his partner's fully loaded janissary suit; it's 16,300 not counting the mask and 18,550 with it. I'm actually a little on the fence about the mask. If I were more inclined to tell stories about singular characters, I'd rather let him have it, but since I'm talking about stories about a partnership, I don't think that they both need it. Plus, the psionics powers that he has allows him to do a bunch of other stuff; maybe it'd be nice if they had their own space a little bit more. 

On the other hand, I'm also on the fence about the radium shield. The psionic power negate energy would represent his psionic shield and do something similar, and I could maintain the setting element that this is more of a vehicular bit of equipment rather than a personal clothing/armor piece of equipment. However, I'm also considering maybe giving him a couple of one-of-a-kind warlock powers made incarnate on the armor; maybe catfall and biofeedback. If I do take away the shield, I'll certainly add those, and be much more likely to assume that he does have a facemask, although he may not always have it with him.

Me on Star Wars on Youtube III

 

I was falling in love

 https://open.spotify.com/album/30bWTGXXlc2APoa8Nzss0Z

An underrated, underappreciated when it was new, and sometimes forgotten gem of the 80s (in favor of their bigger hit I Ran), Space Age Love Song is really the best song A Flock of Seagulls ever did, and one of the better love songs of the 80s in general. The original is brilliant, but this much more recent collaborative affair with the Prague Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra is magical. Michael Score, the lead singer and main guy for A Flock said that while the band came together fairly quickly, they struggled to find a guitar player, and had at least a dozen guys come in. Most of them heard the synth heavy sound, which in the very early 80s was deemed sufficient, I guess, and asked them why they wanted a guitar player at all. But Score knew that their sound would need it (he was a big fan of more guitar-heavy traditional indie stuff; the name of the band comes from a line from a Stranglers song, for instance, that they'd just seen in concert together). Can you imagine this song without that insistent guitar riff? It really makes the song what it is, and replacing it with some analog synth voice would have been devastating to the sound.

Anyway, a bit random, I know, but there it is. To make up for my randomness, I'll point out that I'm making updates to more Ad Astra planetary data sheets, I'm just not posting them on my blog. Because I'm also unhappy with the format of Google Sites these days, I'll actually probably transfer them to some offline format (like an odf doc, probably), and if I share them again, it'll be en masse as a pdf.

Watch the original version of the song here with clips from a very early 90s (but still classic 80s style) rom-com movie with a young Jennifer Connelly. Again: magical. I don't necessarily buy into it myself, but there's a consistent theme among many on the internet that Jennifer Connelly in the middle to late 80s (and she still squeeks by in this video, although her buy-by date would be approaching fast) is the most beautiful woman of an entire generation. Again; while I don't necessarily agree with that, she is certainly a beautiful woman, or at least was back then. That can't be denied.

Me on Star Wars on Youtube Part 2

 

Me on Star Wars on Youtube

 

Story mode shenanigans

I make no secret of the fact that I was only interested in Star Wars: The Old Republic as a greatly expanded and improved sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic games, not as an MMO attempting to grab the (at the time) market share from Warcraft. I have NO interest in shared anything, and if I could play the dumb game offline completely by myself and still get all of the content, I absolutely would. So when BioWare toned down the multiplayer and subscription requirements, made the game free to play, and made the character stories a part of the full free to play experience, that's when I got interested in it. Curiously, in order to play it, I went ahead and got a subscription, and I may well keep it as long as I'm actively playing.

But there is still tension between the developers attempts to create a really great, big, CRPG and the business side that said to make it an MMO because that was where all the money was (supposedly) in the late 2000s and early 2010s while it was under development. One such side effect of this tension is that the story can get screwed up if you do things out of order, and it's not hard to do things out of order because of the online multiplayer need to have kick-offs always available. I accidentally kicked off the Oricon missions, which are from the latest expansion Onslaught, on my Bounty Hunter story, even though I'd only finished chapter one (because I had maxed out the level on the character.) What does that mean? It means that all of my relationship stories and companion missions got locked out where I was and I can't seem to engage them anymore. Grrr!

It seems that in order to actually play the game properly, you have to do some research and not get ahead of yourself, accidentally kicking off the wrong quest by talking to the wrong quest giver. Sigh. My bounty hunter was my oldest character, kicking around from many years ago, but left on Balmorra untouched for the better part of two or even three years, and it's disappointing to have him now locked out of being able to finish all of his story content. So disappointing that I actually created a new character to replace him so I can do it again. He doesn't look exactly the same, but he's very similar, and I'm going to do all of the planets that he's done so far again with him. Sigh.

Anyway, I created a tracker on Google docs that you can see, just in case you ever feel the need to have one of these too. The gray boxes are the ones that I've done. In a few cases the order isn't exactly right; the bonus story missions can be (and probably should be) come back to and done later. I also didn't put any of the exploration or heroic missions on them. I'm now picking up all of the heroics at the Fleet right as I start a planet, but let's be honest; I'm mostly doing those to farm for XP and gold and equipment drops. Because combat is actually a bit tedious in this game sometimes, I hardly would be interested in doing them for fun. And most of the exploration missions are kinda dumb, honestly. And there aren't really that many anyway. I keep those turned off on my map and ignore any icons when they pop up; exploration missions I don't want to do and heroics I'm already grabbing at the fleet anyway.

I also marked the bounty hunter stuff that I did already in yellow, for now, although eventually I'll replace those with gray too.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HizeXpP5FMex40lWvKg_aKtfDr5u6xae3iJw-CzRc7c/edit?usp=sharing

It's a little funny to think that back in the day, the game topped out at level 50. With my bounty hunter, I was at the new max of 75 while on Alderaan, near the end of the first chapter. I finished to the same place in the story with my Jedi Knight in the lower 70s range, and I've since topped him off with a few heroics. I'll start chapter 2 soon with him already maxed out level-wise. My Sith Warrior is now in the mid-60s in Alderaan, but I'll be close to 70 if not over it by the time I finish. I suspect that as I play more and more classes, my level at that same point will drop, because I'll skip or handwave my way through certain quests that aren't class specific that I would have already done several times by then. And there's only so much farming I can do before it's too tedious to be endured, so I'll probably do less as time goes on. That said, there's certainly something to be said for going through stuff overleveled. Sure, you have level syncing, but if your equipment drops are appropriate for your level, then you've got great equipment which makes your character breeze through (relatively speaking) Flashpoints and Heroics. I don't have a problem with that myself, since I think, like I said earlier, that combat in the game is pretty tedious and overly long and time consuming anyway. Anything I can do to keep it breezy is a good thing.

Star Wars and Old Republic character notes

I made an off-hand reference in my previous post that I actually thought about a bit more since I made it. Looking at the original trilogy, Luke is the protagonist of the series overall, of course. Han is the deuteragonist. And Leia is the love interest, although there was a curious diversion where she became Han's love interest and Luke had to become a celibate monk or something. Which then later evolved into actually Leia was his sister all along. If you read The Secret History of Star Wars which examines older drafts of the scrips and the comments of the creators and actors, it becomes very obvious that those were later developments, though—the original plan for the script was much more straightforward. When Leia appeared to be the love interest in the original Star Wars, that's because she was. When Ben Kenobi told Luke that Darth Vader killed his father, that's because that was the original plan. Even in the early drafts of The Empire Strikes Back we see Luke's father make a brief appearance as a force ghost or voice or something. The change of Leia to Luke's sister wasn't done until the drafting stage of Return of the Jedi where Lucas felt that he had to tie up the loose end that he'd created perhaps foolishly by making an offhand reference to Luke not being the last hope so that there was more tension; the audience was meant to think that if Luke went to go fight Vader that he didn't necessarily have bulletproof plot armor. 

Of course, it had the additional benefit of giving another subconscious reason for why Leia was diverted in her role from Luke's love interest to being Han's love interest. In my opinion, nobody really needed this; I think subconsciously everyone got it anyway. Although Luke was the protagonist and Han the deuteragonist, everyone also understood implicitly that Han was an alpha and Luke was considerably less so. In spite of his non-protagonist role, Han was the one that men identified with or wanted to be because of his character (this was maybe less true for younger boys) as well as the member of the pair that women were more attracted to. And part of that had to do with how the script and later casting and acting played out in the first movie. I seriously doubt that it ever occurred to Lucas to make Leia shift her love interest focus from Luke to Han until after the first movie was finished, at which point it seemed maybe a bit more obvious. In fact, obviously it didn't; when Lucas had Alan Dean Foster write up a sequel for Star Wars, this shift hadn't happened. This is Splinter of the Mind's Eye which was also meant to be a low-budget sequel to Star Wars in the event that it didn't make enough money to merit a big budget sequel, which is the outcome that Lucas expected. And in that book, Leia is quite clearly still Luke's love interest; Han only gets a brief offhand mention, and Luke and Leia have all kinds of flirty moments with each other. Although Foster had a lot of leeway in terms of what kind of plot he developed, he did work closely with Lucas, and Lucas' only input to the plot outline was to remove a space dogfight which would have been effects heavy and therefore expensive to film. Other than that, Mind's Eye is the "truest" sequel to Star Wars in some ways; i.e., the sequel that held most closely to the spirit of the first movie, before Lucas got more ambitious and serious and "mythic" as the critics love to say in Empire.

In any case, I've now made sixteen characters for Old Republic, mostly so I can get the free Shae Vizsla companion for all of them. After creating the characters, I had to watch the opening cut-scene, close out the tutorials (why isn't the game smart enough to recognize that if this isn't my first character on the account, I obviously don't need the tutorials again!?) and go find the mailbox right outside of the opening cut scene location so I can open my mail, which is how ou unlock Vizsla. As well as the two pilot outfits, the old anniversary fireworks and a few other perks for new players and subscribers, etc. as it happens. And then after I did that, I logged out of that character, and decided that I'm going to be done with them until I open them back up.

I started off making eight characters. As I mentioned in my earlier post, which talked about my preferences for space opera protagonist, deuteragonist and love interest characteristics, all of these eight characters are human males. In fact, they all use the same body type and I think I even picked the same face style for all of them. This isn't meant to imply that I made the characters all look the same (although I did have at least a bit of that idea in mind) because they don't. I have different shades of skin tone from pretty darkly tanned with sunburned cheeks on my bounty hunter to pretty pale on my two Sith characters. The bounty hunter, which of course I inherited from my free to play days, has light blue eyes and my agent has green eyes; the others all have either the silver-chrome or the wolf-eyes gold colors, which I unlocked via cartel coins. And they have a variety of hair styles and colors from nearly jet black to silver-white, although some kind of brownish or blondish is the most common. My trooper even has gray hair, although in the lighting in which I picked it, I thought it looked more like a grizzly brown, so that was kind of an accident. But I think I'm going to keep it anyway. Makes the guy look older and more experienced (which is funny because in the cut scene, he's called "kid" by the other guy doing the talking; Gearbox or whatever his name was. This one was my trooper.)

But then I made eight additional characters, which I may or may not get around to playing through with. They are all women, so I can get the other dialogue actor's performance, and they are all non-humans so I can more broadly unlock the races if I ever come back. I can't remember exactly how I did it, but the last one had to be a cyborg because I was out of more alien choices to pick from. I didn't spend the cartel money to unlock the Kit Fisto race; nautolan, or whatever they're called, or the cathar or the togruta. Not only do I not want to spend real money on those options, but I don't really love any of them anyway. Again, I can't remember exactly how I did it, and I may not even ever play them anyway, but I think I have my two sith are the Darth Maul style zabrak and a trueblood, although I can't remember which is which, and my bounty hunter is chiss and my agent a rattatak. She almost looks like she could be Kaliyo's sister, which may influence how I play her, if I ever do. My two jedi are a Eeth Koth style zabrak and a miraluka although again, I can't remember for sure which is which, and my smuggler is a miralian and my trooper a cyborg.

Because each story class has two variants, which are "repeated" with cosmetic difference across factions, I was able to spread those out as well a bit. With my first pass, with one exception (the vanguard trooper variant) I avoided any of the class options that had healing options with my male characters, because that's a multiplayer option that I set my companion to do passively otherwise, while I focus on DPS-style, mostly. But with the second wave of girl alien characters, I finally went ahead and have the other variant on all of the ones I picked. If nothing else, the weapon choice will look different for them.

Old Republic Progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old Republic

I haven't made a new post (although I have had a number of YouTube videos posted about D&D and other things) but as I'm now back at home again after several weeks on the road, and back to sitting around at home working, but also just mostly being at home, I've engaged in video games again. I've started working on rebuilding my streak for daily challenges on Red Dead Redemption so I can be ready and set for the October outlaw pass that we know is coming in the next few weeks or so. They've also released some great new clothing items, which are fun to wear because they look pretty nice. But the Naturalist role is still very hit or miss. I like the legendary animals, but I've found that the Gus clothing are all kinda samey after a while, and not all that cool to begin with (why can't we have the hood without the coat, already?) and Harriet and literally everything associated with her is absolutely terrible. Granted, I think that her idiot aggressive and bullying SJW approach is supposed to be kind of a joke, but it's not a very funny one, because there's no remedy to it other than to refuse to engage in the role. You can't tie her up and throw her off of a bridge, or feed her to an alligator or bear; you can't catch her tent on fire and watch her burn alive and then piss on her body, which is exactly what I'd want to be able to do.

So, I haven't been doing too much beyond the basics of keeping a streak going and earning cash to buy the cool new clothes, especially the ones that will go away soon. Unfortunately, there are more gold bar gated items than I'd like, but that's always been the case. What I've actually spent a good deal more time on is the Old Republic, though. I've picked up my old bounty hunter game, where I was only about halfway through Balmorra, and I've burned through that planet, Nar Shadaa and Tatooine now, including all of the planetary missions. Rather than run off to Alderaan, I've also spent some time on Ilum, because you could pick up some missions there on the fleet. I'm trying not to get ahead of myself, though, with jumping up to a expansion before I've finished the main story, other than some basic flashpoints and other simple missions that I can do that don't have any bearing on the story.

I've decided to spring for a subscription, obviously, and I've not only nearly finished Chapter 1 (finally) but my character is now level 69; fairly close to the max level. Heck; I've even got it on during work and I do crew crafting skills in the background on one computer while I'm working on the other. Anyway, I don't have too much to say about this other than that I'm doing this, but here's a few observations:

• Combat is kind of tedious and not really all that fun. Just jacking up the hit points of enemies to make them take longer to kill doesn't make it more fun either, although at least some opponents do have some tactical stuff here and there. But mostly it's just key-mashing your way through the combats.
• I wish there was some kind of vehicle chase action scene of some kind. That's a major miss.
• Playing on the Imperial side but not being overly "evil" is probably the best to avoid silliness. I think BioWare took to heart the complaints that they had from the earlier Knights of the Old Republic game about how dark side options were just petty and stupid; sadly, it seems that the light side options are now idiotic hand-wringing rather than actual heroism or goodness.
• No sensible person will ever pick 100% light or dark. My character is about four-fifths light to one fifth dark, and I'm sometimes surprised that being true to your word and not lying is dark side, when you knew going in that that was your mission. For that matter, saving bad guys isn't always a good choice. Ever hear of a thing called justice, BioWare? Of course not. They're SJWs. But most of the missions themselves and their obvious resolution default to favoring the light side, even on the Imperial faction.
• I haven't gotten into the weird higher level pervert romance options yet, but in the age where the Democrats and their surrogates in Hollywood and elsewhere are cratering into scandal after scandal of pedophilia and harrassment, it doesn't come across as a good look. Honestly, it never did, but it seemed like relatively harmess if moronic virtue signaling a few years ago. Now, it comes across as shockingly tone deaf.

Anyway, I'm so far quite enjoying being back in, although I continue to wish that the Old Republic had been converted into some other kind of medium and cleaned up by a writer who isn't pyschologically disfunctional and creepy. That said, even with a lot of virtue-signaling and women acting like men, and strangely diverse human populations, and whatnot, it's still better Star Wars material than almost anything that's come out in the last twenty years, and certainly better than anything Kathleen Kennedy touched.

Friday Art Attack

 It's been a quiet week. It's actually been a busy week, which means that my efforts on my blog, my Youtube channel, and elsewhere have been quiet. So, the last post I made was a slightly delayed Friday Art Attack, but now it's time for another one.

The only thing otherwise that I've done that's on topic, and it's relatively significant, is that I've read the newest Dresden Files book. I actually had stopped paying very close attention because it had been so long, and when I looked; lo and behold! A book had been released just a few weeks ago. Because our public library is in pickup by appointment mode only, stuff isn't getting checked out very often, so it was available. I got it over the weekend and finished it a day or two ago. It's not my favorite book of the series, but it's not my least favorite either. It feels kind of like an entire book of set-up for the next book, which at least is scheduled to come out very shortly; in late September, actually. I've already put that on hold at the library too; the lockdown and mask hysteria crap won't end until November 4th, at least.

Anyway, on to the art!

Knights of the Old Republic characters put in the classic, original Star Wars poster format. Kind of brilliant, actually.

Nagash and his rebirth. I've probably posted some version of this art before, but I still love it.

Nothing super dramatic, but a classic example of what Star Wars looks like in its quieter moments.

Some kind of furry, gigantic viper of some type. Really nice. 

Nightgaunts attacking some of the more esoteric Paizo iconic characters.

Exotic cities at night.

I think this speaks for itself. It's not quite as exotic as the old video game from the 80s called Joust, but it's a similar idea.

Just brilliant.

The largest of the gorgonopsids from the late Permian.

A classic D&D demon. A quasit, if I recall the artwork correctly.

Lovecraft and Innsmouth turned into a pulpy b-movie.

The Jabberwocky vs. some Paizo iconics. Honestly, most of the Paizo iconics are pretty stupid, in my opinion. But then again, Paizo has become a nest of SJW corruption, so that's not shocking.

Another image of the jabberwocky. Which, while classic, isn't really a folkloric animal, which is probably why they tend to become much more dragon-like over time.

The Jaguar King! Nice stuff here!

Space opera ship battle. Nothing special, but still great.

A great image of a jedi.

And one of the cutest of the pterosaurs in a pretty realistic fashion, even if the trees behind him are very stylized.

Friday Art Attack (delayed)

 

Dux bellorum, the title in the earliest texts given to Arthur (not king.) It translates more or less as warlord, although more literally, it's actually Warduke. I'm pretty sure Gary Gygax would have known that, if the name Warduke rings any bells. Although the character he created sounds more like the Horned Helmet character of Frank Frazetta fame. See below...

This is a pretty iconic style image. I don't know why that place looks like Orthanc, but those characters don't look like Aragorn and Gandalf and Merry really, at least not to me.

Goblins from 4e. Nice image, actually.

Some kind of Greek warrior. I dunno. Nice picture, though.

The tyrant lizard king in a quieter, more artistic moment. But still showing off his impressive chompers.

I don't know for sure what's going on here, but this is a cool image. Always remember; in my fantasy, magic certainly exists, but it's ALWAYS unnatural and therefore extremely hostile to human life. Yeah, yeah... that's an elf, it looks like. But still. Elfs, if I have them at all, are also uusally unnatural and extremely hostile to human life.

A couple of landscapes from Dromund Kaas, the capital of the Sith Empire in Old Republic.

Castle Ravenloft! What a great, iconic image. It doesn't hurt that Ravenloft is, of course, copying great iconic imagery from Dracula. One of the strengths of D&D was its ability to incorporate classic elements and turn them out as recognizable pastiche. When it tried to be more original is often where it went wrong.

Very early concept art for the "supercommando". As you can probably tell, it ended up evolving into Boba Fett, but there was a whole concept behind him originally that was different, as was the Clone Wars of which he was supposed to (originally) have been a leftover.

Some more intriguing Star Wars concepts.

A fascinating landscape of a fantasy port city.

Some Assassin's Creed Odyssey art, if you go with the female version of the main character, I believe.

A typical day in the gallery forests of the Morrison Formation, with two Diplodocus emerging from the forest into a ferny meadow.

Nedry from Jurassic Park. The little guy is the Dilophosaurus from the movie. The big one is what an actual Dilophosaurus woulf have looked like.

DEUS VULT!

I'm not quite sure what this desert warrior thing is; maybe a hobgoblin or something, but it's a very cool image.

Luis Royo. I once kicked off an entire campaign based around this image. Turned out great, too.

Some kind of spirit of the wild type thing.

Shipyards in deep space.

A pastiche of the famous Death Dealer character created by Frank Frazetta (I told you to see below.) This does seem to be a more proximate visual inspiration for Warduke, even if the title itself seems to come from Arthur.

Grr... Google!

I've deliberately been using Google Classic Sites because I greatly prefer it to New Google Sites. I do grudgingly admit that New Google Sites is probably better at looking good across multiple platforms, including phones, whereas Classic Sites was optimized for your typical computer monitor or laptop screen. However, it had a lot of customization options in terms of the look and feel of the site that New Sites does not have.

However, I just got an email from Google that if I don't migrate, eventually my sites will disappear. Sure, sure, this wasn't set to happen for over another year, but I figured why wait if I have to do it anyway? I'm only going to get more used to New Google Sites by using it. I'd rather not, but if I'm not going to have a choice anyway, might as well do it sooner rather than later. 

I went ahead and migrated all of my sites, although I admit that some of them may not be relevant, or they may be redundant with each other too, but I'll clear that up later—I can always delete sites I don't need later. This is especially galling because I just set up the Eberron Remixed site a week or two ago, and I'm still fairly heavily involved in editing it. Anyway, I may yet play around with the formating, or more likely I'll just have to forego having any kind of really custom formating anyway. Maybe that's for the best, given that I want it to be cross platform viewable anyway, I guess.

Anyway; I missed the Friday Art Attack last week after trying to get it back up again, so I'll make sure and hit that later today.