SWTOR Playthroughs - all character intros

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

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

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

Anyway, in no particular order:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star Wars and Planetary Romance

Planetary romance, or sword & planet as it was also called in the 60s, is—arguably—the original subgenre of science fiction. The trail was blazed in terms of what planetary romance was by the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the original "pulp era" there were a number of successful series here; ERB also wrote a Carson Napier of Venus series, for instance, and later one that took place on the Moon. Otis Adelbert Kline wrote a number of series taking place on the Moon, one on Venus and one on Mars. Other writers dabbled here too, but those are the ones that seem most remembered from the original run. Curiously, probably the best known of these types of stories comes from another medium; when King Features Syndicates wanted to do a John Carter comic strip, they weren't able to get the rights, so they just "pastiched" it; wrote one of their own that is in the exact same genre and features similar scenes a faire. This is Flash Gordon. 

You'll also notice that the genre fades imperceptibly into traditional space opera. John Carter is transferred to Mars by some kind of mystic process that is never explained. In the Kline Mars and Venus stories, there's some handwavy pseudo-science about telepathic transference of consciousness, or some such. But Carson Napier and Flash Gordon (and later other characters in ERB's Mars books) travel by normal space ship to an exotic planet. They usually then get stuck there, and adventure on the planet, rather than zipping around in space ships between planets—which seems to be the only significant difference between this genre and early space opera, such as the Leigh Brackett or C. L. Moore stories featuring Eric John Stark and Northwest Smith, respectively. There are a lot of other forgotten authors who wrote in this genre; in fact, Brackett and Moore (and early Ray Bradbury) famously were among the frequent contributors to Planet Stories; a pulp magazine that ran from 1939 to 1955 and which specialized in this kind of early space opera that was only a tiny bit removed from planetary romance.

After old fashioned space opera had itself started fading, curiously planetary romance came back into style for a while, and people like Lin Carter and others wrote planetary romance stories in the 60s, immediately preceding George Lucas' own Star Wars early drafts. By this time, the genre was often called sword & planet, but it was deliberately—even almost slavishly—imitative of the earlier wave.

Anyway, while I was running around doing one of the grind chores for tauntaun mounts in SWTOR last night, while my character was traveling across the landscape of Hoth on a speeder to get to the various tauntaun nests and feed fruits to the taunlings in hopes of luring a tauntaun parent to the nest—which isn't a disagreeable task, but which is a bit time-consuming and repetitive—I was considering one of the funniest aspects of Star Wars; the single environment planet. Tatooine is the desert planet, Endor is the forest planet, Hoth is the snow planet, Dagobah is the swamp planet, Alderaan is the mountain planet, Coruscant is the city planet... and so on and so forth. Of course, Star Wars wouldn't really be all that different if instead of being based on early space opera it was based on planetary romance. What if instead of planets, those environments were just regions on a single planet? What if instead of space ships, they had speeders. Han Solo could still have been a smuggler hotshot pilot if the Millennium Falcon was an airship instead of a spaceship. The Death Star could have been a gigantic floating fortress, like a supersized helicarrier from the Winter Soldier movie instead of a space station. There could still have been dogfights and a trench run to destroy it, without them having to go into space.

Now, going into space allows for more varied, exotic and strange landscapes. Or, at least, you can have weird things like the gigantic red disk of Yavin in the sky, and the asteroid dogfight between Jango Fett and Obiwan is unlikely to play out well on a single planet. But other than a few scenes, which could be easily reworked if needs be, Star Wars is really not much different as a planetary romance than as a space opera.

Although, I will own to the fact that it would seem odd for there to be all kinds of weird aliens all over the place on a single planet. But planetary romance is certainly famous for having exotic races of humans with blue skin or red skin or green skin or whatever. Barsoom has the thoroughly alien "green men" of Mars, the mostly human red men of Mars, the white-guys yet bald Holy Therns, the jet-black alien First Born, the lemon-yellow polar men, and of course, there are lost valleys, cities and whatnot with all kinds of weird aliens scattered here and there. It starts to get silly after a while. But Star Wars only throws a handful of aliens in important roles; most of the aliens are just background color. As I'm fond of pointing out, Star Wars as a menagerie of weird aliens is an artifact of later Star Wars; the original Star Wars (the entire original trilogy) is largely the story of people in space. Not just any people, but people who are recognizably normal Americans and British people, in fact. In SWTOR, most of the aliens are just funny colored people, with some contact lenses and a few minor make-up attachments, that an amateur could come up with using supplies from your local Halloween store. Like my most recent alien SWTOR characters, for example.

Kinda emo-looking space biker red-skinned dude

I don't know if it really makes any difference if Star Wars is space opera or planetary romance other than the bigger potential scope of space opera kind of captures the imagination. However, in terms of actual execution, that bigger potential scope is hardly ever actually used. Like I said, the entire Star Wars original trilogy could easily take place on a single planet, or even in a single large country the size of the US. The same is (mostly) true of the prequel trilogy with the exception of the asteroid, as mentioned above. The same is pretty much true of the sequel trilogy too, I think—not that anyone cares one way or another about that. And the same is true of the Mandalorian. The Book of Boba Fett not only could take place on a single planet, but it actually does. (So far. With the caveat that I haven't seen yesterday's episode yet.) This opens up some interesting possibilities when it comes to treating these stories slightly differently, and giving them a more grounded, down-to-earth (literally, in this case) feel that space opera doesn't always have.

Anyway, just some musing while I've been going about a relatively relaxed set of crafting and selling and gathering and stuff; all less stressful and low-key stuff that I've been spending a fair bit of my SWTOR time engaged in lately. (I've also been attempting to level up my reputation on a few factions. And next week, I'll need to be at least a little bit engaged in gathering rakghoul cannisters so I can spend them on new crystals.) Other than that, I'll be slowly creating my new characters over the next couple of weeks or so, for my recordings, but I'll also be slowly moving them forward. Including a replacement Jedi Sentinel that will replace the terrible quality videos that I have for Taul Kajak. Ugh. I'm frustrated that that didn't work out very well, and it sucks to have to do it again. But there's worse things.

As an aside, I'm considering switching two of my characters' races. I think maybe a Darth Maul style zabrak as a Jedi Knight and an Imperial Agent as a Mirialan might sound more compelling than the other way around. In fact, I'm thinking of not only making him look like Darth Maul, but dressing like a Sith Lord and using red lightsabers. I think it'd be a little amusing to have a visual Sith playing as a Jedi. 

Tython done

Well, last night, I finished recording and editing the last of my Tython missions for my Jedi Knight recorded playthrough. A few thoughts:

-- First off, it took me a few "sessions" to get the equipment right. However, since you can't redo missions in SWTOR, with the exception of the Heroics and a few other repeatables, I had to live with a few minutes worth of video with crappy audio, including one small section with no audio at all. Egh. Anyway, it's over with soon enough, and then I move on to where I figured it out better. But the initial start is a little bit rough from an audio standpoint, I have to admit.

-- I had considered doing some really "fancy" editing, but I didn't end up going for it. I just have cuts—sometimes, admittedly slightly awkward ones because I didn't think to record with slight pauses where I thought I'd later want to cut it. Mostly what I was thinking about doing was turning down the music volume and adding music in later manually. I ended up not doing this, and the cuts, obviously, will be pretty apparent in the music breaks. But this is less distracting and clunky than I feared, so I don't think I'm going to change it going forward.

-- I tried to eliminate most of the running around and fighting "trash mobs", although I did leave a few mob fights in to be "representational" rather than anything else. I also left just enough running around to be able to get a decent sense of what the planet looks like.

-- Rather than the audio commentary that I thought I might do, I added much more minimalist text commentary. Trying to leave the mic open for audio commentary was exactly why I was having sound issues early on and the text commentary forces me to be much more brief anyway. I think I'll stick with this for the time being. Probably, actually, for good.

-- The video quality drops dramatically when my character is moving. I don't know why this is. My experience playing the game doesn't look like this. It's either an artifact of the OBS recording, or the Microsoft Photos editing and exporting or the YouTube uploads. Don't know what (if anything) I could do about it other than have a better computer with a sick graphics card. Curiously, during cut scenes, and any scene where my character isn't running or moving, the quality quickly improves to regular HD.

-- A bit more fiddling, including the recording of a relatively shorter video on the Republic Fleet now that I'm done with Tython. The "raw" video was about half an hour, but after editing all kinds of shopping, moving of items from my character inventory to my storage locker, etc. it came down to about 5-6 minutes. I had no problem with video quality on this smaller video. I think the problem is exporting longer video files out of Microsoft Photos to mp4. This means that I basically screwed up my source files when I combined them into two hour long videos. Sigh. More experimentation gone wrong with my first run at this. Sadly, I already deleted the original shorter videos after I made the longer ones, so another ship that sailed due to my impatience. That said, I don't know that I want to have really short videos on Youtube. Maybe if I keep them to half an hour or so, and keep the shorter files for my DVD archive? Not quite sure how best to do this yet. I doubt I want to redo this character after as much time (and in game credits) as I've put into him, but I may. I'm not feeling like it represents my best, merely my prototype, warts and all. Plus, I've figured out how to make decent money by selling crafted stuff finally, so the money is less of a problem than it used to be. So... what's it going to be? Scrap my work on Taul Kajak and start over with.... Kaul Tajak or something? I just might. I'll have to think about this for a couple of days before I know what want to do, I think.

After editing all of my sessions, I was left with eight videos ranging from just under 5 minutes to a little over half an hour. I've since combined them into two videos just under an hour each. Those are what I'll load up onto Youtube as well as make part of my DVD videos when I'm ready to burn those. I had hoped to do one planet per DVD-R, but may not be able to, based on the file size. Oh, well. I'll do what I have to do, one way or another.

Anyway, as soon as my last video finishes exporting and I can get these loaded up on Youtube, I'll come edit this post to include the links. And now that I'm done with Tython, I'm considering at least kicking off another character. Maybe my sith pureblood scoundrel.

UPDATE: Yeah, the problems with these videos are going to bug me. I decided that I'll come back to the Jedi Knight later with a new Jedi Sentinel character, once I've got some new black-green crystals from the rakghoul event. In the meantime, I started a smuggler. I'll probably bounce back and forth between various characters, and try to keep them more or less at the same place. It'll keep it from getting too stale to go back and forth (I hope) while giving me something to do for months to come. Plus, I'd really like to actually create all of the characters before the update hits and makes character creation all different.

This series (and all subsequent ones) will be much shorter videos, so you'll have to watch them with the playlist feature, or just accept shorter <10 minute videos or so.

After figuring out all of my sound issues... I forgot to plug in my sound device. Luckily, I realized it right as the opening crawl started that my USB cord was sitting there unplugged so you don't really miss anything.

Couple of good Z-man posts

FYI. If you aren't reading the Z-man most days, you probably should. Monday is the best day to hit him up, because he has his normal column on his Wordpress site, but also a second column at Taki's Magazine.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=26406

https://www.takimag.com/article/a-new-threat/

Anyway, again; I don't always love the Z-man. My biggest points of disagreement with him are 1) his secular, anti-religious viewpoint. He fails to recognize, or at least fails to personally consider, the primary place that Christianity must occupy in order to have any well-running society that has even a passing resemblance to Western Civilization, and 2) he's got the peculiar failing of my Generation-x cohort in feeling like taking a pose of bemused detachment while the world we know burns down around us is the only reasonable action to take. Obviously that's not true. Now, granted, I don't know what action to take that would actually be useful, but I'm at least looking for an opportunity to find one that has some merit, I'm not sitting around preaching that nothing can or should be done except wait for the world to collapse and then say that I told you so.

In spite of these two failings, he does tend to usually hit the nail on the head otherwise with considerable accuracy and charisma. And actually, I don't know that he's really from Gen-X or not, although his attitude certainly sounds like it. Somehow I always imagined him as a bit older than me. I'm a bit on the younger side of Generation X (at least until marketers decided to throw Generation Y into Generation X, or the Millennials, depending) but I somehow kind of imagined that the Z-man was Generation Jones.

As an aside, I'm a little irked that Generation Jones and Generation Y seem to have been swallowed up by some kind of advertising consensus. Pretending that Generation Jones is just younger and significantly different cohort within the Baby Boomers or the early Generation Xers, or that Generation Y is just a cohort within either Generation X or the Millennials, but which is completely different than either is just stupid. There were already labels in place. Were they too confusing for some idiot CEO of an advertising company, or something?

Classes and races (SWTOR)

I'm obviously increasingly frustrated with real life events, as my last post showed. I try to avoid drinking too deeply from the firehose of information, specifically to avoid allowing myself to get worked up by all of the things going wrong in our society, often disastrously. And there are so many catastrophes either ongoing, or having gotten to the point that their happening is inevitable to choose from. 

For this reason, I often dive into diversions and hobbies.

I've kind of enjoyed starting up my recordings for SWTOR. I created a stylish, "smuggler-looking" Jedi Knight; a Mirialan swashbuckler with ash-colored hair. I've only recorded a few missions; not even enough to upload to YouTube yet, but I'm already enjoying it. I went and played around with the character creator, although I didn't create any characters, I set up parameters for the additional characters that I will do. I decided that none of them will be human (at least not yet) although that's a bit of a fudge on the cyborg character; all of the cyborgs are human, just with some gadgets attached to their faces. This will probably be what I record, although I reserve the right to tweak a few details as I go down the line.

Jedi Sentinel: Mirialan male, swashbuckler "smuggler" type outfit.

Jedi Sage: Rattataki male, gray "ninja"-like outfit (still working on exactly how to do this)

Scoundrel: Sith trueblood male. He'll have a typical "smuggler" outfit (which I don't associate with smugglers; it's just casual space clothes) and no facial droopy things.

Vanguard: A body type 3 Chiss fellow. Good and alien without being overly so.

Sith Juggernaut: Curiously, although I'm going to make this guy a zabrak (Republic style) he looks not dissimilar to a regular white guy; just with a few horns pasted on his forehead.

Sith Sorcerer: my only female character, a Mirialan. I might end up changing that race, though.

Operative: Imperial style zabrak. Male.

Mercenary: white guy cyborg with "sunglasses" eyes as his cybernetics. I'll probably dress him more as a space gunfighter than as a Mandalorian style heavily armored guy. Also, big body type 3 like the trooper. I'll never use the skinny runt 1 or the Chubba the Hutt type 4, but these two characters will be my first attempts to move off of body type 2.

My recent trips

My trips to the South and the West respectively, have caused a crystalization of a number of views that I hold. The Z-man handily summarizes them with his recent Taki Magazine post, so I will quote (and paraphrase) him just a bit.

Most normal people have always known that there are people in the world who are just on the edge of sanity. Maybe it is the nutty aunt who is always into some cause, a cause that changes with the news cycle. Perhaps it is a friend who knows a bit too much about conspiracy theories. Of course, everyone has been cursed to know someone who thinks Hitler is hiding under their bed or in the fine print of the Republican platform.

Up until fairly recently, it was possible to get along with the crazy aunt or the old left-wing college buddy by avoiding certain topics. The cost of tolerating these mentally unstable people and keeping them from going berserk was to walk on eggshells around them in normal conversation. If you avoided their trigger topics, their insanity was for all practical purposes a private affair. It stayed in their head.

Social media changed this. One reason liberal democracy finds itself in a crisis is normal people have discovered just how many nutjobs there are in this world. Worse yet, we get a daily reminder on Facebook or Twitter that many of the people in positions of authority have heads full of nonsense. No man is a hero to his valet, and we have all become the valets of our ruling class through social media.

In the old days, it was possible to avoid mentioning a trigger topic around crazy Aunt Betty, but now your social media timeline is full of these people. They are like a plague of lunatics with infinite triggers. A mild joke about a politician can quickly become a three-hour argument online. The mass media age has made it almost impossible for normal people to avoid the insane. [...]

Of course, you could unplug [ed. which has been my solution to much of this over the last few years], which is becoming a thing among people who are waking up to the reality of hyperreality. A big part of the dissident right is the process of separating from the Potemkin reality of liberal democracy. Cut the cord, drop off the mainstream social media platforms, and disconnect from the media. The new countercurrent mantra is “Turn off, tune out, drop out.”

The problem is, Covid has now allowed virtual madness to leave the matrix and invade the physical space. Everywhere you turn when out in public, you are reminded that there are many people with a tenuous grip on their sanity. For going on two years, the harridan with a mask has been stalking the public square, hunting the barefaced like she is rooting out the agents of Old Scratch.

The ceremonial face covering has become the mark of the beast. Everywhere you go there are people wearing a mask, often multiple masks. Talk to one of them and you quickly learn that they are not motivated by bad information. Instead, the masks and the other performative gestures are emotional support items. Instead of carrying a plush toy around for support, they are performing Covid rituals.

It is no longer possible to ignore what used to be private madness. A bit of carny trash assaulted an old man on an airplane who was trying to eat his dinner. Her reason for assaulting him was that he did not have on his mask while eating. [Another] woman tested herself mid-flight, got a positive test for Covid, then locked herself in the toilet for the remainder of the flight. For the passengers, there was no escaping her madness.

These are entertaining cases, so they get lots of attention in the media and online, but the media is also pushing the madness. Whether it is crazy people taking over the media, or the media being told to trigger the deranged, the mass media now feeds the lunacy of the Covidians. They claim the health care system is about to collapse and society is on the brink of destruction due to Covid.

Most people had hoped that this madness was just a panic and that it would pass once people realized Covid was not an extinction event. It was just another relatively mild pandemic that has been a part of human existence since the beginning. Once the reality of Covid was made plain, so the thinking went, the panic-stricken would get back to normal, maybe having some anger at having made fools of themselves, with the encouragement of the mass media.

Two years on and this is clearly not happening. The Omicron variant is about as harmful as the common cold, but it is causing another wave of mass lunacy. There is increasing evidence that many of these people are hooked on panic. Their lives have become defined by this crusade against an invisible villain. The Covid rituals now define their lives. They were told they could never live with Covid, but now they cannot live without it.

As a result, America is separating into two realities. In a place like Florida [or Alabama, or Wyoming, South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, and Utah if you avoid downtown SLC—all places, including Florida, that I have visited since the covid hysteria started], people are going about their business. Covid is a minor nuisance for most people and Covid theater is nonexistent. In a place like Massachusetts [actual location redacted for my privacy], this is the long dark winter promised by Joe Biden. The faithful wait for hours to be tested and then spend their days hiding in their homes. Red states and blue states have been replaced with normal states and Covid states.

These two realities are showing up in population movements. Normal people are fleeing the lands of the Covidian for places like Florida. For sure it is not just the lunacy of Covid theater, but it is playing a big role. We now live in two separate cultural and psychological spaces. There are those with triple masks, barrels of hand sanitizer, and a full booster card. Then there are the purebloods with their bare faces and their increasing impatience with the Covidian.

What Covid has done is bring two important questions to the fore. One is a question about the cause of this madness. Have we always had this number of crazy people, but they suffered in private, or has something caused many to go mad? It is possible that mass psychosis is an inevitable end to mass society. Perhaps knowing so much about the rest of us drives many humans insane. Ignorance really was bliss.

The other question is how can we ever go back to normal knowing that so many people are on the edge of madness? Even if we could turn it all off, can we forget that on every plane is a young woman ready to lock herself in the toilet or ready to pounce on the elderly at the first sign of the sniffles? Will normal people forget and forgive the obnoxious harridans harassing people over masks?

Like a marriage headed for divorce, Americans may be at that point of no return where one or both sides realize it is over. Normal people could tolerate the goofy politics and weird social fads, but Covid is the breaking point. Normal people are not just out of patience, they want out of this dysfunctional relationship. Normal people want a divorce from the mentally unstable. This relationship has reached its end.

Book of Boba Fett - brief thoughts (so far)

There's only two episodes. I've seen the first one twice and most of the second one twice. It's not really that great, but it has some potential. In some ways, Boba Fett has become a less compelling character than he was. Plus, he looks kinda old and flabby compared to when he went into the sarlacc. Given that nothing has happened to him that should make him become so, that's unfortunate. I mean, I know why it is; because they wanted to keep using Temuera Morrison who played Jango Fett in Attack of the Clones nearly twenty years ago. He just doesn't look anything like Jeremy Bulloch did in 1983. Even though Bulloch never took off the helmet, he's just obviously a very different man to even a casual viewer. (This was a problem already in the prequels. Not sure why Lucas cast Morrison. He was fine as Jango Fett, and did a good job, but if Boba Fett was supposed to be a genetic clone of him, that never worked, because he never looked anything at all like Boba Fett had in the original trilogy. Yet another bad call by Lucas during the prequels. I know that in the wake of the sequel trilogy, it's somewhat fashionable to now pretend like the prequel movies were good movies with good choices made during their production process, but the reality is that they never really were. They just weren't overt dumpster fires like the sequel trilogy movies have been.)

But honestly, I'm not really digging the very slow burn of current events with the crime lord stuff followed by his "A Man Called Horse" flashback scenes. I'm very tired of "white man must come to respect the primitives who took him captive and abused him" story. It's little more than Stockholm Syndrome writ large. Of course, they deliberately recast Boba Fett from a white man in the 80s to a Polynesian man in the 00s who is now a middle-aged man to boot. But still; the flashback scenes are much less engaging, and yet they seem to take up more than half of the runtime of the episodes so far. I'm sure that they're setting up some kind of "Fett's relationship with the Tuskens will be crucial to his success with the crime lords" type of resolution (I called it here first!) but again; I read A Princess of Mars years ago. It was published before my grandfather was born, and I'm already a middle-aged man about to turn 50 myself. The story isn't exactly a new one anymore.

And I don't really get where Fett is coming from in the non-flashback scenes. He wants to be a kinder, nicer gangster? Yeah, I don't get it. I want to see a combination of space western and space Scarface here, not space West Side Story.

The show has potential. I hope it gets better. Right now, I'm still waiting for it to do something interesting.

Back in town

Well, I'm back in town. This was one of the longest (and least fun) vacations I've been on. Part of it wasn't ever meant to be a vacation; I had to move my son into his dorm, which meant I had to drive all of his stuff across the country. I ended up doing the leg home on my own. Normally, I really enjoy road trips, but this one wasn't my favorite; I was dogged by bad winter weather that even caused my car to have its air filter and engine flooded with snow at one point (seriously; what?!)

I did however, manage to install and briefly play a little SWTOR while gone. I missed the armor set sale (sadly) but the mount sale and the collections unlock sale was still on. I got some armors anyway, and I'm more or less OK there now; there's only a very few that I have much interest in pursuing that I don't already have now. I'm pretty well taken care of in terms of "smuggler" type armors now, which is what I prefer most characters to wear most of the time anyway, as it resembles casual "everyday" clothing, in my experience. Even troopers and bounty hunters don't run around in armor all of the time, except when the occasion specifically calls for it. And I don't like to put Jedi into robes all of the time; although I did buy the Steadfast Master armor set, which is basically Obiwan's clone wars era look.

Anyway, just a heads up, since I hadn't posted anything in a few weeks.

I did do a bit more recording this morning, and obviously I still have a few kinks to work out. My mic was on, but I got no sound from the game! Urgh. I can't redo these missions either, so I guess I'll have to figure out what's wrong and live with it. Either that, or do a new character. Either that, or abandon the entire project, because I don't really need to do it anyway. I don't know what happened, though. How irritating!

Scott Adams, the "Great Predictor" is a liar

What kind of nonsense is this? Making a decision based on what we already know about coronavirus vaccines like this which were NOT approved for SARS for instance because of known significant safety issues with them isn't rational? Because it's not certain? Certain = rational = science?

Sorry, Adams. I remember when we learned how science works in middle school. I remember learning how to use a dictionary even earlier than that. What you're saying simply isn't true. Not even a little bit. The fact is that the information to make a rational decision absolutely was available. You, Lying Adams, just didn't take advantage of the opportunity to try and find it or understand it. You just listened to "experts" which a rational person would already have known not to trust very far and so should have done the research to make a rational decision. 

What's really happening is that you're lying because you're desperate to create an interpretation of reality in which you weren't wrong. Which you are very much starting to believe that you are as more and more info about the "vaccines" comes to light. You are sharp enough to understand that there's a high probability that you were very, very wrong. But you can't imagine how anyone else could have figured that out before you did, so you're lying about what science is and about what a rational decision means. 

I don't know if this desperate CYA rearguard action is to try and protect your professional reputation or to protect your toxic beta ego. Either way, it's contemptible. You threw in with the wrong side. And now you want to pretend like you didn't because if YOU didn't know better than NOBODY could have known better. Sorry, but no. You're not that special. 

UPDATE: Although published about a week after this post I made, this is a very good descriptor of what's happening with Scott and many Americans who you would think would know better... but who don't. https://neociceroniantimes.wordpress.com/2022/01/04/scott-adams-come-to-fauci-moment/

Legacy of the Sith

While I'm not exactly a black-piller doom and gloomer, and I kind of despise too much of that attitude, I think some of the black-pill comments about SWTOR are probably directionally correct. The game is old. The updates are puny. Even this "big update"; what a UI change and a character designer change, and some mechanical stuff that is allegedly going to make existing content feel a bit more fresh again? My thought on the "combat styles" was "Cool. (shrug)" If there were new content, new stories, etc. I'd feel like this game really had some life in it. I feel like the devs are trying to give us the illusion that there's life in this game while, in reality, they're just letting it mostly sit there and make modest money from cartel coin sales and other cosmetic stuff that they put out to nickel and dime the players with in microtransactional (or not so micro-sometimes) fashion. We actually haven't heard anything about the new content.

To be fair, they did do a fairly big content update of that kind a few years ago with Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne. And scuttlebutt is that the reaction to that was mixed. I think the reality is that BioWare isn't really doing much with this game, and isn't likely to. The lead developer may have recently said publicly that he expects the game to be going strong for many years to come, but the reality is 1) what else is he going to say, regardless of what he does or doesn't know? 2) he's not likely to be in a position to know what the head honchos at EA are thinking about the game and its life cycle, and 3) it hasn't been "going strong" by any reasonable definition of that phrase already for a long time.

I think I'm justified in moving forward, and maybe in fact, in advancing my timeline, of recording the stories. Oh, sure... sure... there are other people who have done this already, but I want my own versions of the characters. And I want to keep it saved for posterity so that when the game is gone, if I feel the itch, I can relive it with my recordings. 

Where I'm being a bit wishy-washy is in how to record it. I've already played every class through once. Twice, in the case of the bounty hunter. And my first run through was done very iconically; white males as the characters, and the most iconic (in my opinion) of the advanced class options. So... do I do the same thing over again so that I have iconic recordings? Or do I explore the alternative options; alien races and less iconic combat mechanics? If I do, will that mean that I'm ultimately less happy with the result? Do I want to record more than one of each class?

I don't know. And on top of this, I'm a little intimidated by the technology; I've never really done much with OBS Studio, or movie editing, and I don't know how difficult it will be to do. Which causes me to demur somewhat and not get around to recording anything. I need to do a little bit of experimentation, and probably soon, just so I know how it all works. I'm almost tempted to do the cutting and clipping on my phone, of all places, because I am familiar with KineMaster, at least. And I'll probably want relatively short cuts to build up to the total movie. The editing is likely to be a big task. And do I want to mostly turn the music off in the game, and add music in myself? If I don't, I'll likely get weird music cuts because the music will be playing in the background while I'm cutting and chopping up the experience. That just makes the editing more work. 

So yeah; I've got a lot of stuff to figure out, and because I'm kinda wishy-washy and a bit intimidated by the project, it's taken much longer to get off the ground than I initially thought. But, the Legacy of the Sith expansion actually suggests to me that I better do it soon. It's not a super substantial expansion. And at the 10th anniversary? Either BioWare is playing their cards very close to the vest in terms of stuff that we'll see this year, or they're just not really making a huge deal out of it. Either way... the future of the game, especially at its age, is probably uncertain. Just like you go and ask your grandfather to tell stories of his youth while you still can, knowing that his age means that you could lose access to them if you don't, I'm feeling like I better do this while the game is still here. And then, with any luck, it'll still be here in five more years. But if it isn't, well... I'm not left high and dry.

UPDATE: As I kind of suspected, feeling intimidated by the technology was foolish. I did a trial, and it was easy. I went ahead and recorded the opening cut-scene of my new Jedi Knight. I made him a male Mirialan, and as is my wont, I did not dress him in a typical "Jedi" fashion. What most forget, in this post prequel era, is that there was no indication throughout the entire original trilogy that the Jedi Knights wore any kind of robes. Obiwan did when we meet him, its true, but then again, he dressed like that because he was in hiding on a poor backwards planet. If you recall, there's essentially no difference at all between how Obiwan dressed and how Uncle Owen dressed. For that matter, Luke's own "moisture farmer" outfit with a simple homespun tunic and leggings wasn't particularly different either. 

Obiwan was then, of course, shown that way as a force ghost, so he'd be easier to recognize (I presume) and so that they didn't have to make him a new costume. Yoda also wore simple, homespun peasant gear. But he was also in hiding in a hut on a primitive planet. If you'll recall, Luke never wore anything like "Tatooine peasant" garb in The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi. And it wouldn't have made sense for him to have done so, either. He wore his orange X-wing pilot flight suit, and he wore a khaki set of "fatigues" jumpsuit for lack of a better term, during the second movie; an all-black set of fatigues-like outfit during pretty much the entirety of the third. He did have a cloak on early in Jedi, but that's probably better seen as a concession to the environment of Tatooine than trying to look like a Jedi.

Anyway, I could be wrong, and maybe Lucas knew all along that the Jedi wore plain robes, rather than him deciding that during the prequel pre-production in order to give them obvious strong visual cues. And there's something to be said for that, especially as his Jedi became more and more monk-like in many respects. However, I've never been a fan myself, so my Jedi are not weird, monastic characters sitting around being pretentious and spouting fortune cookie wisdom without any context, like Lucas' do; my Jedi are simply swashbuckling action heroes with a lightsaber and some modest magical powers.

I used the type 2 body (as I—so far—have always done) with the Trailblazer jacket (dyed black and deep red), the Trailblazer gloves, the Series 615 Cybernetic belt, Advanced Slicer pants and Thermal Retention boots. Head slot is hidden, although for the heckuvit, I put the Thermal Retention goggles on, since I'd already pulled them from collections anyway. Maybe I'll use them visually occasionally. I played around with the color unification to give me a good look; sometimes unified, sometimes not. And I replaced his dumb practice sabers with some vibroblades that I have in my collections as well. He's got double crossed swords on his back right now, since he's a Sentinel. It's more of a "traditional" smuggler look than a Jedi look, but again; I suspect that utilitarian casual clothes are what everyone wears day to day, regardless of class. I think it fits my vision of this character quite well, and my vision of what the Jedi should be like anyway.

It took me a couple of hours to record what was essentially about five minutes of video. Part of this is because I actually had over thirty minutes of video, and I had to edit and cut what I had. Why'd it take so long? Because getting the stuff to look right is tedious. I "escaped" out of the cut scene so I could run to the mailbox, get all of the stuff that I get as a new character, exit out of this character to one that has some money and other things, mail that to my new character, log back into my new character and retrieve all of that stuff, set up my UI the way I want it, grab the stuff in collections that I needed, equip my character, and then run back and start the cut scene over again, except this time equipped. It turned out fairly well, but was more time-consuming than I thought. And then, of course, I had to actually cut and edit the thirty minutes of footage that I had, and watch them a time or two to make sure that it all worked. Then I had to do more cutting of "dead footage" to make it a bit tighter, and watch it again. And then once again I did more cutting and more watching. I had recorded some voice-over during all of this stuff that I was doing, thinking that it'd make a good "behind the scenes" stuff, but I wasn't thrilled with most of that, so I'll probably not use it for anything. (Maybe I can do voiceover that I record separately over some of that footage after all. I'll keep it just in case. For a little while, anyway.)

The only thing that I messed up and will have to live with is that I didn't mute my microphone when I wasn't talking, so there's some minor mic noise here and there, during the opening crawl, for instance. I forgot that there was a mute button on the mic cable. Oops. 

Anyway, I'm reasonably happy with how this turned out. I don't know that I'll be able to record any more before going out of town for the holidays, but when I come back, I will focus more on this aspect of the game than my existing characters, who are mostly just tooling around with dailies and reputation and other things like that. I'd like to get these class stories recorded sooner rather than later (ideally before the launch of the update, although that seems very unlikely) and now that I've actually started, it seems more doable than ever.

Next time I post about this in particular, hopefully I have a link to my actual first Youtube upload in this series. And then I have to figure out my cadence. Do I want to stick with this character, Taul Kajak (names borrowed from my Space Opera X game), or do I finish Tython and then do another character's introduction too?

AIDS, Covid, Fauci and the medical-industrial complex

Interesting article. I recommend reading it in full.  https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-vaxxing-anthony-fauci-and-aids/

Unz makes an offhand claim partway through that correlation does not imply causality. This is incorrect, however. Correlation certainly does IMPLY causality. It doesn't PROVE causality. But correlation is the classic case of where there's smoke, there's often a fire. It bears investigation to make sure that the correlation and causality relationship is correct. But you NEVER have causality WITHOUT correlation. Indeed, you have to have it. So correlation and causality are, not to be cute, themselves correlated. The maxim that correlation and causality are not the same thing isn't meant to be imply that correlation and causality aren't often linked, merely to be careful not to casually and incautiously assume that correlation is causality.

In any case, the lesson, as always, is that it's not just the news that's fake. Science and history are equally fake. A huge portion of the world, as we collectively believe it to be, is a hoax or a lie.

Bounty Hunters

While waiting for the servers to come back online after being shut down for a patch update, I've been watching some SWTOR on YouTube, including a bounty hunter playthrough that I've been going through very slowly for months by username Hathur. I'm watching Taris now, and she's (? The character and user avatar are shes) is doing the Imperial faction story. It occurs to me that it doesn't really fit the bounty hunter very well, as many of the Imperial faction stories don't. Because when I came back and reinstated my OG bounty hunter Graggory, I was already max level, I just did the class story stuff for chapters 2 and 3 and ignored the faction stories completely, I'd kind forgotten how badly the bounty hunter in particular fits. Taris as the Imperial faction story is clearly a caricature of moustache-twirling Sith philosophy. And even my Sith lord characters would probably not really have cared to have gotten involved in such a silly escapade. The whole point that the Empire is waging war on Taris is absurd.

Star Wars has really kind of ruined the notion of bounty hunters. I think that the whole idea of bounty hunting was a fringe activity that most people didn't think about or even know anything about prior to the popularization of Boba Fett. And, of course, Boba Fett gave them the wrong idea. Bounty hunting doesn't mean that you're muscle or a contract killer/kidnapper for organized crime, as Boba Fett was. Bounty hunting was the privatization of law enforcement. Quite the opposite as presented in Star Wars, to be sure. And it used to be that law enforcement was a much more privatized affair. Sure, there were the sheriffs, and whatnot, but when they needed help, they didn't call paramilitarized SWAT teams, they formed up posses of volunteer, deputized civilians. The bounty hunter was another useful extension; a way to get law enforcement activity beyond what the sheriff himself had the manpower to do. 

Curiously, Red Dead Redemption 2, in both the story mode and online, does bounty hunters more or less correctly. Which is curious, because the characters that you play are criminals, but when they're bounty hunting, they're not engaged in any crime, but rather—quite literally—a patriotic public service.

I hadn't played Graggory in a long time, but I usually play my characters as "neutral", that is, I'm kinda harsh and gruff, but underneath it, not really a villain at all. This ends up resulting in, because off SWTOR's ridiculous morality, a neutral effect; sometimes doing the sensible thing gives you light side movement, but sometimes dark side movement. And I tend to play all of my characters this way. I don't imagine that Graggory (or Galat'ion, my other powertech) are bad guys, and most of the Imperial class story crap that they're expected to do, I wouldn't actually do it if I were RPing in a tabletop environment, rather than a CRPG environment. 

For that matter, a lot of the class story is kind of weird too. "Bounties" that you are intended to pursue are sometimes legitimate bounties, but are frequently just when some criminal or powerful person wants to eliminate, cripple, or otherwise deal with a rival. The bounty hunters aren't hunting bounties, they're just mercenary enforcers for criminals. That's not bounty hunting. 

And yet, that's kind of how Star Wars has always treated them. Boba Fett's profession was always treated with contempt, he was always a villain. When he was hunting Luke for Darth Vader, even though Darth Vader was a bad guy and a tyrant, he was legitimately a privatized extension of Imperial law, though. When he took Han Solo to Jabba the Hutt and otherwise hung out as part of Jabba's entourage, he was not. He was just a criminal.

Han Solo, on the other hand, is a legitimate criminal, and in spite of his "heart of gold" story arc, Star Wars has actually reversed the bounty hunter and smuggler roles. Putting the smuggler on the Republic side, where he—laughably—at one point refuses to smuggle because that's against the law! is ridiculous, and putting the bounty hunter on the Imperial side, where they are effectively little more than paid criminal enforcers is equally bad. How interesting it would have been had the roles been reversed!

In reality, of course, one of the attractions of both roles, which is sadly not realized nearly as much as it should be, is that they are kind of neutral actors. Neither should really be associated with either the Republic or the Empire. In fact, they should be able to move between them somewhat at will.

That said, I've also thought that the events are another opportunity to get people to explore places that they otherwise couldn't. The BBA event, for instance, actually brings classes that otherwise couldn't ever go to Ord Mantell to Ord Mantell to get a bounty. Why not have all of starting and capital planets work that way? How fun would it be for a Jedi Knight to be hunting a bounty on Korriban or Dromund Kaas?

In any case, this end game stuff, after the class stories, is where my bounty hunter really feels more like how he should feel. I wish the BBA event was a bit bigger, and ran all the time like a regular reputation track planet, like CZ-198 or something, rather than an event that only comes once every other month for a few days. Both the bounty hunter and the smuggler benefit especially from feeling like they have material to do which suits their class, and of course, there's no reason why anyone of any class can't join the fun. Instead of a recurring event, that should just be a normal part of the game. They should integrate it into the game—and probably Dantooine pirates, because that feels like it gives a reason for Dantooine to even be on the galactic map; having it only come up once every other month or so is very strange there too. Swoop bikes, on the other hand, kind of "vandalize" the scenery, so having that event be more off and on is nice. The rakghoul event, on the other hand, by virtue of its very nature, is also more of a recurring kind of thing. The Gree event has it's own special third of Ilum dedicated to it; it seems odd when the event isn't running that you can still run around out there with nothing to do.

In general, I think a good half of the recurring events should be folded into the main game as always available now, and probably a couple of new events should be developed. I'd actually probably rather have that than minor story expansions that dribble out a little bit at a time. They feel more "evergreen" than another story flashpoint and daily area.

UPDATE: If I were in charge, this is how I'd do it. At this point, the main story mostly focuses on Jedi or Sith (depending on if you're playing Republic or Imperial faction.) The tech classes can play them, but they feel like afterthoughts that don't fit very well. They need some kind of endgame activity that feels more attuned to their specialities. I'd take four of the five current rotating events and make them permanent; you can do them all of the time. This is the BBA bounty hunting, the Gree event, the Dantooine pirates, and the rakghoul event. The BBA event doesn't even require much space, while the Gree and Dantooine pirates already have unique space that just sits there empty without anything going on when the event isn't happening. The rakghoul also doesn't take much space, plus it happens on one of three planets. I think the planets should still rotate, but it should always be happening somewhere. The swoop bikes, I'll admit, I don't like as much, so I don't care. Plus, they "vandalize" a lot of real estate when that event is going on, so making it be usually off is better than having it always on.

And then I'd task the developers with coming up with three or four new events, that would be the subject of future patches or minor expansions. These would also rotate more rapidly. There's only an event every other week. Given that they're rotating five events out, that means that any one given event turns up at best once every two months, at worst, once a quarter. You could replace most of the event vendors in the bazaar section of the fleet, because they'll always be available at the actual event, which is no longer an event, it's just a daily area. (Area isn't entirely accurate for the BBA event. That probably needs to stay on the fleet where it is, as well as the specialty vendors and the swoop bike vendors.)

The Mother of All SWTOR Reviews: Part VII: The Expansions

There were some original add-ons after the class stories; a continuation of the faction story, at least, with some class specific dialogue. I was actually surprised to learn that the original plan was to continue the class stories in the expansions, but when EA cut staffing and left a bunch of bean-counting yes-men (not my term and I'm hearing that second hand if not even... more hands than that, but it sounds eminently believable) it didn't happen. The original stuff that was added was actually in many ways a foreshadowing of the daily area, reputation stuff and group content that there is now a lot of. This includes the Ilum stuff (a beautiful planet, with a fascinating night sky view) which ends on back to back story flashpoints, the Black Hole; a special separate area on Corellia that serves as a weird kind of coda to the stories on that planet. The former is a must-do, but the Black Hole is skippable if you're not interested, and you won't miss much.

There's some other stuff too; Section X, which you need to be subscribed to access (or buy access on the cartel market—a weird experiment, which luckily they didn't try again) along with the seeker droid and macrobinocular missions start off a fascinating sub-story about the Dread Masters, which of course we know from most of the stories on Belsavis, or at least the faction stories. This goes on and on with several little chapters that pop in, but which sadly ends in a series of operations, so solo players will not be able to finish it. There are, however, reputation tracks and unlocks available along this, including for Section X itself, and the follow-up for it on Oricon, the "horror planet" where the Dread Masters showdown takes place (in back to back operations.) It's too bad because the ambiance on Oricon is one of the best, but you have an ongoing cliffhanger, sadly.

This is true for some of the other stuff that starts at this stage too. The Seeker Droid and Macrobinocular quests are quite long, and varied, and kind of interesting, but you can't quite finish them when you get right down to it, unless you do grouping. And finding a group that's still going to do those really old quests is easier said than done. I actually tried to for a while, in spite of my aversion to grouping, but couldn't ever find anyone interested. There's a Czerka planet, CZ-198, which is also pretty interesting, but it also ends on two back to back flashpoints that are not soloable. (I tried. Maybe I'm just not good enough, but it doesn't seem reasonable to play these without a group.) So, you can get introduced to the concept, and go do some dailies on the planet, get some Reputation and buy some interesting unique gear.

There were some other interesting expansions, like Galactic Starfighter and Galactic Strongholds, which are just asides for collectors, in my experience. But the first expansion, and certainly the first "real" expansion, is Rise of the Hutt Cartel, which offers faction story expansion, with some class specific dialogue here and there. It offers a significant story element, as well as a reputation track, and a quite large new planet to explore; quite a bit larger than Oricon or CZ-198, or Ilum, for instance.

However, all of these lack the depth, length and focus of the class stories, which are obviously significantly more meaty. This is especially true of the second and third smaller expansions, starfighter and strongholds, which only add "asides" to do. However, with the fourth expansion, Shadow of Revan, the "main" story really gets started again in a big way. Shadow of Revan includes four back to back (to back to back) soloable flashpoints, with accompanying cut scenes, and three planets (albeit one of them is quite small.) These include the pirate planet of Rishi, Yavin IV and Ziost. All three of them have reputation tracks and dailies. These planets are mostly pretty fun, especially Rishi, which is one of my favorite planets in the game. Rishi also has a class specific small quest for each class; the last time something like that was done. Otherwise, all classes go through the same story, although there are some faction specific stuff. It's clear that the developers basically expect you to play these expansions with a Jedi Knight, or maybe a Sith Warrior, and everyone else fits a little less well.

The flashpoints are also quite interesting; there are invasions of Korriban and Tython, and depending on your faction, you do them differently (needless to say.) Rakata Prime and Manaan, both from Knights of the Old Republic, also make reappearances in the flashpoints. Although the end of the Jedi Knight story is that he kills the Emperor, it turns out that it didn't "take" and he managed to survive his death (much like Sidious, by coincidence, although here it's not nearly as badly and confusedly executed as the sequel trilogy.

There are two big expansions which follow and which kind of serve as back to back parts of the same long story arc. This is Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne. It turns out that the Emperor has, for decades, been living a secret "bigamist" life, as another guy entirely who's also the emperor of Zakuul, a planet lost somewhere out there in the galaxy. However, he's got this crazy fleet of robot starships under his control, as well as his own order of force-using Jedi/Sith analog knights, and he sends his twin sons out to go conquer the galaxy. Which they do, pretty effectively—their force knights and their "Eternal Fleet" basically bring both the Sith Empire and the Republic to their knees. Your own character, along with Darth Marr, ends up going to face this Emperor and recognizes him as the Sith Emperor in a different body. But one of the Emperor's sons kills the Emperor, kills Darth Marr, makes you the scapegoat, and freezes you in carbonite for five years. The next thing you know, some of the characters you know from Shadow of Revan are rescuing you. You find out that the emperor still lives after being killed again, but as a disembodied entity in your head. You've lost all of your companions, but you get new ones, and gradually are able to re-recruit most of your past companions (as well as past companions for many other classes from your faction in particular, but occasionally from others.)

Anyway, you end up becoming the leader of yet a "fourth" super power in the galaxy, the Alliance for the overthrow of Zakuul, with a group made up of Imperial, Republic and criminal elements all out to overthrow the current rulers of the galaxy. This is quite a good story, actually, although it makes the most sense if you play it as a Jedi Knight in my opinion, and because it's exactly the same (for these two expansions anyway) there's not a lot of reason to play it with all of your classes. When its done, the Emperor is dead yet again, your Alliance is in possession of the Eternal Fleet, for a while until that goes caput, and you end up having to pick a side; Republic or Imperial again. This paves the way for more "traditional" Republic/Imperial factions and rivalries going forward.

Both of these expansions play a bit differently than the game had done until this point. You move from chapter to chapter, and each chapter is more like a flashpoint that you play solo than like traditional planetary missions. There are a lot of planets that appear in these chapters, but they aren't open planets that you can go and explore in a traditional sense. 

The next expansion, which is for a little bit longer, the current expansion is Onslaught, works a bit more traditionally. There are a few story missions on small planets, which you can then go back and do dailies on for reputation. There aren't any class stories anymore, but there are faction stories (which; again, seem to assume that you're either a Jedi Knight doing the Republic faction or a Sith Warrior doing the Imperial faction. Anyone else can do them, but they make a little bit less sense and feel much more forced.) There's a final coda to the story of the Emperor, before he's well and fully purged from the galaxy for good for good. You get a fairly detailed biography of him as it goes on, and the three personas that he had. Tenebrae is his original form, where he was "the black-eyed Sith lord", and a member of the Sith Pureblood race. Vitiate is his form known from the original class stories, where he is a human Sith Emperor who looks and acts very much like Sidious/Palpatine from the Star Wars movies. But they talk all through the class stories about how he was often missing in action and hadn't been involved with the Empire in a regular way, if at all, for years. This is because of his third persona, Valkorian, where he was the human emperor of what became the Zakuul Empire, which briefly conquered both the Republic and the Sith Empire.

It's interesting because of the obvious parallels with what Jew Jew Binks (as E;R calls Jar Jar Abrams—see my last post) tried to do with Sidious in Rise of Skywalker, because the ideas are very similar, but one is well developed and reasonably well executed, and one is a slap-dash, obviously thrown together afterthought done for poor reasons and extremely poorly executed. If you're interested in getting the total view of the Emperor's biography, there are some YouTube biographies of him out there here and there, and of course you can read a lengthy discourse about him on Wookiepedia. 

Anyway, as I said, with Onslaught on, we get back to more simple stories; the Empire vs the Republic, small story updates on small planets, and the addition of a flashpoint and operation here and there. All of these new smaller planets have a reputation track and dailies, and special gear that can be unlocked via the reputation system. We get planets like Iokath, Ossus, Mek-Sha, and Onderon. Dantooine makes an appearance as a flashpoint, where we get to explore deja vu style the ruins of the Jedi Enclave from Knights of the Old Republic in an area that's separate from the Dantooine that you see with the pirate event and the swoop bikes event.

Without the Emperor, the threats are more realistic but less focused and obvious. They've tried to use Darth Malgus (the bald guy from the cinematic trailers), first as a stand-in in earlier years for the Sith overall, but later as the kind of overarching bad guy who replaces the Emperor, but it's unclear if the story group for the game is up to the challenge of creating story content that's even a fraction as engaging as the original class stories, or the Valkorian arc.

The good news is that there is no reason to buy the expansions. If you subscribe, even for a single month, then you unlock all of the expansions currently available... forever. (Except for Section X. You need to be subscribed, or buy that with cartel coins, i.e., real money, to play that.)

Legacy of the Sith is the most recently announced expansion. It was supposed to launch next week, but just in the last day or two a delay of two months was announced.

Finally, and this is the last word on the Mother of All SWTOR Reviews, one of the things that I do content wise is the recurring events. About once every other month or so, each of these events comes up for a week in rotation. There are some other events that occur less frequently. Mostly, these include some special areas to explore, daily missions to do and a reputation track. Many of them give out special currencies, which can be spent with special vendors on unique items, some of which are hard to get and indicate a fair amount of effort put into getting them if you see them on someone. Some of these include minigames, like the swoop bike races for the swoop bike event, or some of the weird cooking events on the Feast of Prosperity event. Some of them are more straightforward, like the bounty missions on the bounty hunter week, or the pirate missions on the Dantooine pirates event, or most of the events in the rakghoul caverns for the rakghoul events. The Gree event is, other than swoop bikes, the most unusual of them, as while easy to earn reputation, more or less, as a solo player, its much more difficult to earn the gree currency, gray helixes, without doing either grouping or PvP stuff.

I tend to like these events, and I'm sometimes frustrated at the amount of time in between them. I've been waiting for a few weeks for the bounty hunter event to get announced, as I need some more reputation and currency for some stuff I really want to buy from the bounty hunter vendors. Of course, it was just announced as taking place while I'm out of town, so now instead of weeks, I'm going to have to wait until probably at least February and maybe even March for it to come up at a time when I can play it. Sigh.

And a very newly implemented event, or maybe event isn't quite the right word for it, is galactic seasons. It came out while I was offline, and when I came back, it was just wrapping up. The next season won't start until the expansion launches, so I can't give you much firsthand experience with it, but it's something that I'm excited to try out because it's got loads of pretty cool rewards.

But you see the trend. Reputation. Dailies. A reason to keep coming back and tinkering. That's what they offer now. The story has taken a back seat to just "wander around doing repeatable stuff."

Of course, the story's still there, it's just that there isn't much added to the story these days. Which is probably OK, I suppose, because what they are doing is no doubt easier and cheaper, and SWTOR wasn't the "WoW killer" that many fans thought it would be in advance of its launch. 

Overall impression? I'm not a big video game player in general. I played quite a bit of RDR2, as my back catalog of posts might suggest. I played a lot of Street Fighter (and similar) type games. And I play the BioWare Star Wars games. That's about it. Of them, this is probably my favorite game, and one that if it's still out there, I'll probably keep coming back to for years to come.

However, it's literally celebrating it's 10th anniversary this year. The game engine and graphics weren't really top of the line when it was new; they're certainly not any more. Of course, being even older hasn't made Knights of the Old Republic less of a classic. But, I can't imagine that this will be around forever. All the more reason to record some playthroughs so I can have them archived when the game finally locks up for the last time and closes its virtual doors. It's inevitable that it will happen. Hopefully it's later rather than sooner, but we'll see.

E;R on Star Wars

E;R is a bit crankier and more complainy than I am. Plus, he's younger than me, which means that he only appreciates the original trilogy in a more academic sense rather than visceral one, like I do (like my own sons do, for that matter.) And, I also appreciate what Star Wars did to pop culture generally throughout the 80s, which was my formative cultural touchstone, being a little kid when the 80s started and about to graduate high school shortly when they ended. 

But other than that crankiness, his commentary on various elements of Star Wars is pretty much spot on. Watching all of these is, admittedly kind of long. It's also kind of yesterday's news, if by yesterday, you mean the last several years. But Star Wars is always on topic for me. Both how much I love it for what it (briefly) was and what it reached for and how much I hate it for what it descended into being.

SWTOR 7.0 Update

Not that I'm a SWTOR news source or anything, but just today, BioWare announced that the release date of December 14th for the 7.0 update will be delayed until mid February. Which means... my subscription will probably have just barely run out, or is just barely about to. Nice.

Still, I don't know if this is because of technical challenges that they're facing (their implied claim) or loads of feedback from players that there are elements of the change that they don't like (they made a mention of something that might be interpreted this way. And certainly there is loads of bad feedback) leading to hasty undoing of some "features" that nobody asked for.

Sigh. Meanwhile, the flash sale today on the Cartel Market was Provenance, a pistol that I've had my eye on for some time. I spent some real money because I couldn't resist. Sigh again. This thing is pretty fly, though. Although my Mercenary and my Scoundrel both had something else in mind to use. I re-equipped my existing Gunslinger with the new gun (and a few companions who use pistols) and decided to do a bit more with him in the meantime so I can enjoy these. 

Next characters

Although the update in the next couple of weeks will split the class story from the class mechanics, somewhat, I still want to play the other alternate of each character that I haven't done yet. That means, let me whip up a quick and dirty table:

Class	Already played	Will Play
Jedi Knight	Guardian	Sentinel
Jedi Consular	Shadow	Sage
Sith Warrior	Marauder	Juggernaut
Sith Inquisitor	Assassin	Sorcerer
Smuggler	Gunslinger	Scoundrel
Trooper	Commando	Vanguard
Agent	Sniper	Operative
Bounty Hunter	Powertech	Mercenary

These will be the ones that I attempt to record. I don't know how much I'll be doing human characters, since I've already played a human male character for all of the classes I've played. I've unlocked most of the alien races that I'd be interested in playing, and I'd actually kind of like to play some of them in "unconventional" places, like a Chiss Jedi or a Sith pureblood smuggler, or something like that. I don't know for sure that I want all of my new characters to be aliens. I actually don't think I like that too much. But I'll do some. I haven't yet decided which characters will go with which races, although I do have a few in mind.

My Jedi Sentinel, which will probably be the first one that I do, will be Mirialan. I've already decided that I want him to use the rakghoul event lightsabers, and the rakghoul event black-core green crystals. I like the idea that his lightsabers will match his skin tone, somewhat. Don't yet know how I'll have him dress, but I don't really go in for traditional "Jedi robes" kind of looks; I tend to have more smuggler-looking outfits, which are more traditional casual outfits. Will I try to make them be mostly green? I dunno. That might be too much green.

My mercenary will probably be a cyborg, with the "sunglasses" looking implants. I've already decided that he'll wear less of the heavy armor and more of the gunfighter or space cowboy kind of look. Less Boba Fett and more Cad Bane.

My other non-humans I'm a little less sure of. I haven't bought any of the cartel market races, like togruta, cathar or nautalan, because, they're too alien and I know that I'd never use them. I also haven't unlocked the twi'lek or miraluka either, although I have unlocked Mirialan, Chiss, Ratataki, Sith Pureblood, the two Zabraks and Cyborg, so I can have all of the options that I'd actually want to use.

Although I may change my mind, I'm considering the Sith pureblood as a scoundrel. I also want my two Sith characters to be aliens, given that their romanceable options are aliens. Probably my Jedi Sage too. Haven't decided which for which, though. I do like the idea of using the Republic Zabrak as an Imperial character and vice versa, though. 

Some other cosmetics; I decided to have my Jedi Sentinel use the rakghoul lightsabers with the special rakghoul crystals, but I also have other black-core crystals. And, of course, I have other crystals too, including craftable ones, some of which are kind of cool. Who's going to use which? I don't know. If my Sage ends up being a reddish Darth Maul looking Zabrak, I'll use the black-core red crystal with him to match, no doubt. Of course, with the addition of weapons to outfit designer, I can have more than one color crystal per character, using them to match outfits specifically. 

Another interruption in your Mother of All SWTOR Reviews

Well, I feel kind of sheepish and stupid. I had believed that I had locked out my story on my first character, a powertech named Graggory. It turns out that I had not. I had believed that I'd locked out my romance with Mako because it wasn't working the way it did in the KOTOR games. But I hadn't locked it out after all; although I had gone to some planets that were above the main story, like Ossus and Onderon and Ilum. However, I hadn't done any of the story missions above the main story mission, so I actually still had it open all along. And because I had believed that I'd locked it out, back when I still was kinda new to the game and didn't know how all of the mechanics worked, I just never really looked back at Graggory, and I did a different bounty hunter named Galat'ion. I'd deliberately made him to look a lot like Graggory, and I'd had the same advanced class, same discipline, and everything. But now I feel kind of stupid. I can finish the second half of the story with Graggory after all, and because I've been max level for a long time now, I don't have any reason to do anything at all other than the class stories, so I can also do it fairly quickly (in fact, I blazed through Taris and Quesh earlier today, before doing a bunch of stuff on the Gree event with all my other guys.)

So now what? I don't have any need for two nearly identical powertechs, but there are some other reasons why I don't want to get rid of Galat'ion either. So, I spent just a small handful of cartel coins to update Galat'ions appearance just a little; changed his hair and eye color, really is all. Just enough to make him look a little bit different than Graggory. And, I also went to the disciple retrainer on the fleet, and since I'm a subscriber, I can change that for free too. I changed pyrotech to prototype, so I've updated some passives and just a few of my attacks on Galat'ion. I don't think I'll be using him for anything but reputation dailies and events and stuff now that I'm done with his story, so it'll be nice to have them both just a tad different from each other. In fact, I'll probably work on some dailies the next few days with Galat'ion in particular to get used to his new abilities on his new discipline.

Swtorista, who's one of the most popular YouTubers in the SWTOR community, actually said not too long ago that she has a character for every single discipline. That's a lot; there are 16 classes when you split each class story into its two advanced classes, and each of those 16 classes has three disciplines. Does she really have 48 characters? That's how many you'd need to have one of each discipline. Yeah, she probably does. Her full-time gig, as near as I can tell, is as a SWTOR content creator, and she's been subscribed since pretty much the inception of the game. I'm not quite that serious, to say the least, so there's no way that I'll ever have that many different characters. But I can have a few alternative versions, and since the bounty hunter is my favorite class anyway, it makes sense to explore the options there a bit more than normal.

UPDATE: I still, of course, have the "opening crawl" text say that I'm on my way to Makeb and the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion. I feel less stupid about believing that I'd screwed up my game. Everything about it seems to be telling me that I'd screwed it up with the exception of one small marker that I had another story mission to go do. Because I also had story missions on Ilum and Makeb, that can perhaps be excused for getting lost in the shuffle, and it is more explainable why I thought I'd messed up my game and started all over again, this time actually tracking my progress.

That said, it's been pretty fun going through stuff again so soon. Belsavis is not very fun for the bounty hunter; it's poorly designed in terms of having to sit around waiting for those bounties to respawn (and those are poorly implemented anyway; not very interesting) and of course you have to deal with Skadge the entire time. This time, I'm not even having the companion conversations with him. I'm going to stuff him in the corner of my ship and pretend he's not there as much as is possible. Ugh, I hate that guy. But so does everyone else, apparently. Even if I do have the companion conversations with him, because he was the last pick-up, exposure to him is pretty small anyway. If they hadn't made him so important to the story of Belsavis, I'd probably like playing that planet as a bounty hunter a bit better.

Anyway, I'm on to Corellia, so I'm almost done now. I've also done a ton of Gree stuff during the Gree event this week. I'd never really spent any time on that, but I maxed out my reputation, and I've got a ton of reputation trophies to spend as soon as the week resets. (I may even have enough that I'll max out next week too and have to spend some the week after.) Earning the Gree currency is pretty hard. I've done the Gree Relay quest with all of my characters, which earned my a fair bit of gray helix currency, but you can only do that once ever per character, so it's pretty much done. The only way to really get more is to do the heroic, which is difficult to do alone, but you can do impromptu quick groups with the people standing around the pylon, which tends to work fairly well, and the weekly stuff. 

What I really want is more bounty hunter contracts. I don't know when the bounty week will be back on, but I'm afraid it could well be while I'm out of town (although if the rotation actually works like a normal rotation, it should probably be Dantooine pirates while I'm off for Christmas break—too bad; I'd like to get some more reputation for that event too and buy the blue Dantooine pirate outfit.) There's a bunch of stuff I'd like to buy with bounty hunter contracts, but I've only got 12 of them on stock, which is barely enough to buy most of it. A lot of that bounty contract gear is bind on pickup rather than bound to legacy or even bind on equip, which means you can only buy it with the character who's going to use it, and then he's the one stuck with it forever. Not sure how I feel about that, but what can you do? That's where I got Galat'ion's totally awesome gun, by the way. I've got some other pistols that I'm eyeing for my mercenary playthough in the future on the other platform opposite the BBA platform; the grek pistols that you can buy there with cartel certificates. You get a decent little stack of those every month if you log in every day, and I'm already legend status on the rep track, so I can buy it all if I can afford it. I need to keep that going too so I can keep getting the currency to spend.

Other than that; well, I'm starting to think about how I'm going to make my next set of characters for the next playthroughs. Although the 7.0 release will be out in just a couple of weeks, and will have the new combat style stuff, I actually think that I probably prefer (at least for now) to play the class mechanics that are meant to go with the class. What I mean is, when I play my mercenary and my Jedi Sentinel, for instance, I'll play them as bounty hunter and Jedi Knight, the way that they would have been prior to 7.0. The same will probably be true for all of the other playthroughs that I intend to do.

Anyway, my work day is wrapping up soon, and I'd like to get an hour or so of playing in before I have to start my evening stuff. Maybe I'll finish the story with Graggory today yet. If not, for sure I will tomorrow.