SWTOR playable races and classes

My brother is putting together a new desktop for me. The one we'd had for a long time still has Windows XP and for various reasons, we don't want to update it (my wife has too much stuff on it that she doesn't want to mess with.) This has, sadly, meant that over the last year or so most of my games that I had on it won't run anymore, as Windows XP is no longer supported.

I also have three laptops, but none of them have a graphics card. My work laptop also doesn't allow me to install stuff without an administrator password (which I don't have) and my wife has kind of taken over the other one. The third one is old and the wifi card is broken, so it's good for doing some things, but not really something I can use for gaming except for some older offline games that are installed on it already. So having a second desktop with a good graphics card that's just my very own computer completely under my control and only my control is a welcome addition to our collection.

Sadly, it's taken longer to come my way than I expected (I first hoped to have it over the Christmas break; I now hope to have it before the end of next week, if I'm lucky).  One of the very first things I'll do once I've got my "basics" set up, installed and running is to install Steam and download the games that I'd had (95%+ of the time, my Steam account was used just for Street Fighter IV) and The Old Republic.  Given my "Star Warsy mood" of the last few months, the latter is what I'm most excited about, and I plan on getting a two-month one-time subscription.  Not only the subscriber benefits will be welcome on their own right, but I'm also excited about it permanently unlocking the extra content and preferred player status. I'm also likely to throw a few bucks at the cartel market to get a few additional perks here and there that are direct purchase microtransactions, just for either convenience or because it's something that I want.

What I probably won't buy, because I have no plans to use them, are the three cartel market expansion race selections.  Let's go over the race and class selections briefly, just for fun, and because it's nice to review that kind of thing and compare it to my PnP AD ASTRA options to see if I'm in the same ballpark in terms of quantity and other similar features.

RACES (in alphabetical order, base races first, then cartel races)

• Chiss—as a base race, only usable for the bounty hunter and Imperial agent, although you can unlock it for all classes.
• Cyborg—every class can play a cyborg, although the little electronic gadgets that show on your face look different for every class too, unless you unlock the full gamut for all classes.
• Human—of course, you can play a human for every class, although you need to buy some of the hair styles, colors, etc. and if you don't, your options are much more (too) limited.
• Miraluka—the eyeless but otherwise human-looking race is a little weird; you can only use them as the Jedi without unlocking them.  Although I'm not very interested in every using them, honestly.
• Mirialan—the green-skinned and tattoo-faced aliens are only usable for Republic without unlocking.  They just look, like the Chiss, like an exotic human ethnic group, though.
• Rattataki—bald and gray-skinned aliens that are not Dathomiri women, but look exactly the same as them. Usable for Imperial only (but not Sith Warrior) without unlocking.  I would consider using this race for a male character.  Maybe a bounty hunter, for instance.
• Sith Pureblood—only the two Sith classes can normally use this, although I believe you can unlock them and use them for anything, even Jedi, which one of these days might be fun to try just for the novelty value alone.
• Twi'lek—Without unlocks, the  class selection available to this race is kinda odd; all Republic classes except Trooper, and none of the Imperial classes except Agent.
• Zabrak—although available to all classes, the Imperial and Republic zabraks are two different ethnic groups (without unlocks to get them to be available for everyone); the Imperial zabraks being dark and red like Darth Maul and Savage Opress and the Republic zabraks being lighter, like Eeth Koth or Sugi (the Clone Wars bounty hunter).

The Cartel races are a little bit less humanoid, in general. Because of that, I find them less interesting; they look too weird.  That doesn't mean that I dislike non-human characters in general, but I don't think they work quite as well for this particular game.  For instance, I wish you could be a droid bounty hunter, agent, smuggler or trooper, but how could you do anything with the character romances, etc.?  So what you can do in this CRPG shouldn't necessarily map to what you can do in a PnP RPG.  Besides, I might prefer alien races that aren't as weird or cringy as the ones we did get, perhaps.

• Cathar—look like the characters from Cats, except with elf ears instead of cat ears. Mostly really pretty cringy as an option.
• Togruta—the race of Shaak Ti or Ahroka Tano.  Colorful, and has head ornamentation that's even more bizarre than the twi'leks, but I think they look weird.  I'm not very interested.
• Nautolan—the Kitt Fisto race, with big dark fish eyes and loads of tentacles coming out of the back and top of the head instead of hair.

CLASSES (there isn't really as much variety as you'd like; there are four classes for each faction, Imperial and Republic, and each class has now been split in two developmental/progression models, but each one mirrors one that's in the other faction. This, again, works well for the kind of game that this is, and the classes are often as much about having a different story as it is about having a different experience in terms of combat and abilities. Which is fine, but probably not exactly something that I can compare to my AD ASTRA system.  I have my Knight class works just as well for the "Sith", the "Jedi" and every other order without any change whatsoever, for instance. SWTOR has half of the class list making fine distinctions between them all.

• Jedi Knight—the more combat oriented Jedi class with a story that is the most "protagonist" for the entire game, with
• Jedi Guardian—a heavily armored tank or DPS spec using one lightsaber
• Jedi Sentinel—a medium armored DPS spec using two lightsabers
• Jedi Consular—the more "wizard" oriented Jedi class, with
• Jedi Sage—a lightly armored (robed?) heal or DPS spec using a single lightsaber
• Jedi Shadow—a lightly armored tank (not sure how a lightly armored tank works, but it seems to be class progression of shield type abilities) or DPS spec using a double-bladed lightsaber.
• Smuggler—the stereotypical "rogue" archetype, with a great treasure hunt/pirate storyline, and
• Gunslinger—a medium armored DPS spec with double pistols
• Scoundrel—a medium armored heal and DPS spec with a blaster pistol in one hand and a shotgun in the other.
• Trooper—a heavily armored soldier who goes heavily into special forces type storylines (although it's considered by most one of the poorer stories in the game), has
• Commando—a heal and DPS spec with an assault cannon, a very iconic look
• Vanguard—a tank and DPS spec with a blaster rifle

While the Imperial classes line up in terms of abilities perfectly with the Republic classes, the look and weapons are occasionally a little different. (And the graphics for the abilities look very different; Force pushes vs. lightning attacks, etc.)

• Sith Warrior—lines up perfectly with the Jedi Knight in terms of spec, armor and weapon use, including
• Sith Juggernaut—the Imperial guardian, and
• Sith Marauder—the Imperial sentinel
• Sith Inquisitor—lines up perfectly with the Jedi consular in terms of spec, armor and weapon use, including
• Sith Sorcerer—the Imperial sage
• Sith Assassin—the Imperial shadow
• Imperial Agent—the Imperial smuggler, although with more of a James Bond in space story, and a few differences in equipment, although in terms of spec and armor they match up exactly with the smuggler.
• Sniper—instead of double pistols, has a sniper rifle and a vibroknife
• Operative—instead of an off-hand shotgun, has a vibroknife
• Bounty Hunter—although their story (and role personally) couldn't be more different than the Trooper; a rugged individualist vs. part of a well-oiled team, the Bounty Hunter, like the trooper, uses heavy army, the same specs, and cosmetically different but otherwise identical abilities.  There is a slight different in equipment, too.
• Mercenary—the Imperial commando, but with double blaster pistols instead of a low-slung cannon (more's the shame)
• Powertech—the Imperial vanguard.

Depeche Mode Survivor

I'm woefully out of date and haven't made a significant update on my Depeche Mode album reviews in a long time.  That's OK, because nobody is listening to them anyway, and I'm only doing it for my own amusement and because I love the sound of my own voice too much.  But I made reference in those reviews to a Depeche Mode Survivor series of polls going on on the Vaughn George facebook group, associated with his own Vaughn George album reviews.  The format was like Survivor; you started with the full list of albums and then voted your least favorite off the island, at which point you did the same thing again a few days later, but one album shorter.  This led to a situation in which an approximation of the most to least popular albums, among a population of at least 200 voters (all DM fans) emerged, and it had a few surprises.  I'll eventually continue my album review podcasts, but in the meantime, here's the list, in order, least to most favorite.

14. Spirit
13. Delta Machine
12. Sounds of the Universe
11. Exciter
10. Playing the Angel
09. Speak & Spell
08. Ultra
07. A Broken Frame
06. Construction Time Again
05. Some Great Reward
04. Songs of Faith and Devotion
03. Music For the Masses
02. Black Celebration
01. Violator

I'm surprised (although delighted) to see that Songs of Faith and Devotion didn't rank higher than it did.  I've never really thought that one was all that great, and I was sad to learn that fans approved of the massive change in that album as much as they did—although confused, as they haven't much liked the output that followed in the wake of that change.  If SOFAD is so good, how come you hate the subsequent albums that sound so much like it?  I also thought that Playing the Angel was more popular than it was, but I guess maybe that was mostly just me after all.  Granted, it's a post SOFAD album, and it sounds like it, but it also has a much better ratio of good to mediocre songs compared to most of the others in its category, as well as having Precious, which is absolutely a top tier song.  This makes Playing the Angel jump up out of the first chunk, even though by regular, objective, measurable features.  It "belongs" with the post-SOFAD group, but by quality, it belongs with the next group instead.

My own list, which I probably shouldn't spoil, but I'll go ahead and do it anyway, goes something a bit more like this, and I've divided the list into three chunks:

CHUNK #1: Bottom tier, bluesy, rocky, "modern" Depeche Mode

14. Exciter
13. Spirit
12. Delta Machine
11. Sounds of the Universe
10. Songs of Faith and Devotion

I don't like most of these as much because I don't like the direction the band went in, and on top of that, I don't think that their songs were as good as they had been in prior albums.

CHUNK #2: Middle tier, albums that all sound very different from each other, and to be fair, could all be shuffled around without much impact.  They don't really compare well to each other because they are all so different from each other, so the order is just based on how much I like to listen to them at the point in time that I'm making this list.

9. Speak & Spell
8. Ultra
7. A Broken Frame
6. Construction Time Again
5. Playing the Angel

Speak & Spell is so different it's effectively a different band, even though it has the same name and a few of the same people, A Broken Frame and Construction Time Again are both transitional albums that don't really sound very much like any other album in the oeuvre.  Ultra is kinda like that too; a bit of a throwback after SOFAD, but which doesn't sound like SOFAD, and Playing the Angel is a post-SOFAD album that just is way better than any other post-SOFAD album.

CHUNK #3: "Golden Age" Depeche Mode from their best and most productive period, when they perfected their sound and were at their peak.  My order is a bit different than the normal one; I actually think Violator is the least of this period rather than the best.

4. Violator
3. Some Great Reward
2. Black Celebration
1. Music For the Masses

I admit that I sometimes am on the fence about whether or not I think Black Celebration or Music For the Masses is really my favorite of the two, but I usually give the nod to the latter for two completely subjective reasons: 1) it's the one that I first discovered, after hearing radio play of Strangelove, and sometimes first love is best love, and 2) it's the one after Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones took a step back.  While I've got to give them a ton of credit for helping create the Depeche Mode sound, and MFtM does have a producer credit, Alan Wilder has said that Bascombe really played a role more like an engineer than a producer, and so Masses is really the album that is the "purest" Depeche Mode; their own work, without influence from others.  Granted, I didn't even actually know that until fairly recently, but I do also think that it's a really cool thing.  That said, it's probably mental justification for my emotional resonance a bit more with that album than Black Celebration, when I otherwise might want to justify BC as a slightly more artistic album.

Star Wars is for kids....

... well, sometimes.



2:51 — With this passcard, you may enter Lord Grathan's secret chamber.

4:55 — And with this passcard, you may enter my "secret chamber."

Kill the dad, bang the wife in the kid's bedroom, make your girlfriend watch, and brag about it to your boss.

Sith Warrior's are dope.

How to do Star Wars

I do tend to talk about Star Wars a lot on my blog.  That's always been one of the "core" topics; not the topic that I started the blog specifically to talk about, but one that's always on topic.  Star Wars was the first movie that I remember seeing in theaters, back in late May or early June of 1977 (I would have been 5½) and I've been a fan ever since.  For more than twenty years, I told anyone who asked that The Empire Strikes Back was my favorite movie.  I'm always up for some discussion of Star Wars and space opera generally, and one of my two remaining core RPG settings is a space opera heavily influenced by Star Wars—heck, it started off as a Star Wars derived setting, but I ended up filing the I/P serial numbers off and it evolved somewhat in some different directions.  It will still feel very much like a very similar type of setting, though.

My fandom of Star Wars has been strained of late, of course, just as it has been for most Star Wars fans who consider themselves long-time fans who've been involved in more than just watching the movies when they first come out.  That's just normie behavior.  I'm an actual Star Wars fan who's more into it than that by a long shot.  Not only did Lucas himself make a bunch of dumb moves in the 90s and 00s, but Disney Star Wars has mostly been an unmitigated disaster.  Well; that's not entirely true.  It's been slightly mitigated.  The Special Editions were exciting when they were announced, but rather poorly received after they ended up finally coming out.  I saw Star Wars Special Edition in theaters on opening day, after waiting in line for hours.  I saw The Empire Strikes Back fairly quickly.  I saw Return of the Jedi on video months later.  The Prequel Trilogy was not only a dud of an idea—seeing Darth Vader as a whiny brat pleased no one, and there's not a ton of tension when everyone already knows how it's going to end before it even starts—but was very poorly done in general; the movies look very pretty, and have a number of great ideas, but are hampered by all kinds of poor craftsmanship issues: poor casting, poor pacing, poor dialogue, poor screenwriting, poor editing, poor directing, etc.

And, of course, there's very little about the sequel trilogy that's recommendable at all other than some of the visual design.  And even a lot of that isn't all that impressive.  Other than the visual design, almost everything about the sequel trilogy is not just poor, but actively insultingly so; as if it were done by people who didn't actually like Star Wars and actively hated its fans.  Which, to be fair, is actually true, although the last minute attempts to assuage "the fandom menace" shows that at least someone at Disney has enough sense to step back from the edge of the cliff and not double down by doing an eff you swan dive off of it to the rocks below.

However, to mitigate that string of disasters, there has been some other good Star Wars content out there.  The Old Republic material is flawed in many ways, but shines through with some genuine brilliance nonetheless.  The Clone Wars cartoon was often quite good, and rehabilitated the prequel era quite a bit all on its own.  It wasn't always great, and it was followed (as yesterday's post described) by the extremely disappointing Rebels show.  And, of course, The Mandalorian is pretty decent, even if it is surprisingly cavalier with a lot of Star Wars canon.  It doesn't seem to bother Star Wars fans as much as I'd have thought that it does, and I think that's a testament to the fact that decent quality material is generally acceptable.  I also thought the Force Unleashed game from a number of years ago was quite good (although the sequel was not) even though it was also saddled with being set in a difficult time period in which to tell decent stories.  My son tells me that the new Fallen Order game is pretty good; he's already completed it at 100%, although he also says that it is often very frustrating to play, and the story is only average (and even then is salvaged by the very final act.)  There have been other, older games that are fairly well regarded, like the Kyle Katarn games from the mid to late 90s.  And of course there are a lot of books, novels, comics and more of varying quality, although everyone pretty agrees much agrees that at least some of it is excellent.  Especially the Timothy Zahn sequel trilogy.  Fans of the franchise have just enough good content to keep us strung along for more, even when we now have to sift through a number of bad products to find the nuggets of good ones.

And I've heard mixed reviews of the Star Wars land at the Disney parks, and the attractions therein, although my wife loved it, and even my highly critical son said that he couldn't argue that it wasn't pretty cool (he was more critical of the ride itself, though.)

I've also said before that after I read The Secret History of Star Wars, which is quite an interesting book, even though it does get kind of repetitive about its core premise after a while, I found that the original vision for what Star Wars would be was better than what we actually got, even with regards to the original trilogy.  Instead of an often dour space Hamlet, the ten movie Flash Gordon Universal Serial type model, except modernized in terms of technical excellence (special effects, mostly) and the fact that each chapter was a full-blown movie, could have been some great visual story-telling. (The original Flash Gordon serials had 10-15 episodes of about 18 minutes each.)  Really, the format is somewhat less important than the storytelling conventions and the pulp feel.

Curiously, the closest thing Star Wars actually got to the Flash Gordon serial storytelling format was the long stories, including the expansions, told in the Old Republic game.  Now, that doesn't mean that you should go look for a play through and expect to see a good Star Wars movie, because you won't.  BioWare has a number of limitations that makes it impossible for them to give us that, and the medium of a video game has others.  Namely:

• There's an awful lot of running around looking for McGuffins.  A little bit of it is fine.  In Old Republic, that's all you're doing, so it's kind of amazing that a better high level story is extractable from what is often tedious in game.  It helps that if you watch cut scene edits, you get the highlights more than the tediousness.  But even then, you can see that it's there.  This isn't shocking for video game plots, though—most of them default to this kind of stuff, just to give you plenty to do and not end the game too soon.
• On the other hand, if you watch just the cut scenes, mostly all you get are talking heads talking at each other a lot.  You miss any cool action, and you miss any of the cool scenery and exotic locations of the planets your on, not to mention some of the cool alien monsters and such.  On the other hand, combat in the Old Republic isn't all that interesting to watch anyway, so that's mostly OK.  Watching combat in the game isn't anything like a good action scene in a movie anyway.  But this is a major miss from what you'd ideally want and expect from any competent Star Wars story.
• Much of the minor plot details are hoaky. I'm quite sure that the writers are thoroughly betas and/or women, and r-selected, and yet what they're trying to write are interesting alpha male characters running around in a K-strategist plot.  They're in way over their heads, and much of what happens and how the characters behave and what they say is painfully cringy as a result.  The romance plot lines are especially cringy, and many of the romance partners you're default assumed to romance are thoroughly unlikable (Kaliyo being the most egregious here, I think, although many of them suffer from some elements of this.)  This only gets absurd in the expansions when you get [Flirt] dialogue options for nearly everybody that comes along.  It's one thing to flirt with any reasonably pretty girl, alien or not (or guy if you're playing a girl character) but when you're given options to flirt with gay alien lizard people and gigantic tubby aliens, and all kinds of other options that no normal person would ever find appealing, it's just wasted effort at best, and opportunity cost because they could give us more and better dialogue options instead. At worst, it's seriously off-putting.  There's a lot of this kind of "low grade" social justice nonsense in the game, most of which is... well, it's often low grade.  The sheer number of "tough black women warrior" archetypes, which of course, isn't really archetypal at all except to an SJW, and other stuff like that, is tedious after a while.
• Admittedly, though, some of the characters are better written than others.  I wasn't ever really annoyed by the twee-ness or beta-ness of the bounty hunter, for instance, although I frequently was for the Jedi knight, and occasionally for the smuggler, the agent, etc. And not every class story is created equal; 
• The "hurry, we have to stop the bad guys from finding the lost, ancient super weapon of the week" routine gets old pretty quick.
• As an aside, the medium/format requires that the characters take a much more passive role than is natural, because it's not a film or even a novel, but a video game.  They can only write so much, so you're assumed to pretty much follow the plot line along, which means the protagonist doesn't really get to make too many decisions on his own, actually.  He mostly has to just go along with whatever the NPCs tell him he needs to do.
• The "morality" and dark side slash light side duality is both idiotic and insulting in this game.  I don't know how many "Don't kill your enemy who just killed millions if not billions of people so he can be sad and then decide to maybe be a good guy... maybe," points are buried in this game, but it's a lot.  Not to mention the many, many, "Oh, my gosh, they're shooting at civilians; abandon the battle plan and go save them; somehow it'll all work out!" moments there are.  The Jedi knight play through I watched also had an enormous number of "But you'll kill thousands of people!" exclamations, only to have the villain say something that was a surprisingly polite version of, "Yeah, you moron, that's the whole point!" but then again, I wouldn't have picked those dialogue options myself, because I'm not a moron. It's an r-strategist writing team trying to make sense of a K-strategist scenario, and failing to do anything other than look foolish.  But I admit that without my understanding of r/K selection theory, I'd find the whole thing bizarrely confusing.

All that said, it's still pretty cool, and a great concept for what Star Wars could be, if they'd get some better, more psychologically normal writers, and do this in a different medium, like a movie or streaming TV show or something.  And it does have that long-running serial feel to it, just like Star Wars was really supposed to have, before George Lucas lost the plot for a variety of reasons, some good and some not so much, back in the early 80s.

I recommend looking up Youtube user Retale and watching his class storylines playlists.  They're kinda long, but that's the point.  And they'd be way longer if they weren't pretty heavily edited, but they're not edited to make good movies, they're edited to show you the story that BioWare put in, warts and all, by showing you most of the cut-scenes, and usually what he considers to be the "default" kind of dialogue choices, as well as pretty iconic visuals in terms of building and costuming the character.  The exception is his kinda darker smuggler done up as a more iconic pirate villain, or at least pretty darn dark anti-hero.  But I admit I haven't watched all of his playlists either.

And before you do, if you haven't already played it yourself, you might want to watch a playthrough of the earlier Knights of the Old Republic game.  The Jedi knight class story in particular feels like a Knights of the Old Republic 3, and the Eternal Empire and Fallen Empire stories tie together stuff that comes from the earlier games quite well, making for a surprisingly cool epic arc out of the whole affair.

https://www.youtube.com/user/RetaleGames/playlists?view=50&sort=dd&shelf_id=11

The story of Star Wars

Sigh.  Yep.  And, Disney did it to The Spectacular Spider-man too, and replaced it with the greatly inferior Ultimate Spider-man (which has now been replaced too, because it sucked.)  And they did it with Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, which they replaced with the greatly inferior (yet better than Rebels or Ultimate Spider-man) Avengers Assemble.

This is ground zero for why I don't believe that giving the reins to Dave Filoni or even Jon Favreau is going to save Star Wars.  They will be—maybe—as good as the prequel trilogy. But they are incapable of being better than that until they learn better craftsmanship in the writing of characters and plot structure.

Based on Filoni's CV, The Clone Wars which has about a 50% pretty good episode rate, and Rebels, which has... a much lower good episode rate, he's not the right guy for the job.

And honestly, Jon Favreau isn't that great of a film-maker either.  What's on his CV?  A whole bunch of mediocre and forgettable stuff, with only a handful of gems.

Filoni is too reverential of EU "canon" and is constantly trying to reintroduce elements of it that George Lucas had previously invalidated (like almost everything about Mandalorian culture, for instance) and Favreau probably just doesn't really care that much about canon and is too cavalier for it.  This wouldn't be as big of a problem if they were really good film-makers, but given that they're mediocre film-makers, the combination is that they're making stuff that barely qualifies as Star Wars, honestly.  And I say that as a fan of The Mandalorian streaming show.  But it really barely qualifies as Star Wars in most respects.

The Future of Star Wars

Well, I've now seen Rise of Skywalker and the entire run of the Mandalorian, and my prognostication for the future of the franchise is... that, well, there's some life yet in it, but it's going to have a hard time flourishing under the foolish stewardship of Disney.

First the movie.  It's been out a week now, so I'll give a quick capsule overview.  As Overlord DVD said, and I agree, it's the best of the sequel trilogy, yet it's also the worst.  It's the best in that it's the most charming to watch, and the characters finally have some charisma and chemistry.  There's a handful of ideas that are actually kind of clever, even if they're hampered by being stuck in a stupid plot, and of course, it's a very pretty movie most of the time.  It also minimizes the wokeness, no doubt as an apology of sorts for the Last Jedi, as well as the numerous franchises that are falling to audience rebellion due to their execrable social and political posturing and their outright hatred for the core audience that loves them.

It's the worst of the Star Wars movies because the plot is stupider than any others.  It finally manages to undo literally everything that happened in the Original Trilogy (and even the whole point of the prequel trilogy, for that matter) just so Rey can do it right the way those stupid white males like Luke and Han and Annakin and Kenobi couldn't.  It doesn't even bother explaining how things happen.  Why is Palpatine alive after we see him die, and then to make it even more final, the Death Star he just died on is blown to atoms?  I dunno.  Shut up and consume.  Speaking of the Death Star being blown to atoms, why is the wreck of it sitting out there in the ocean on Endor?  I dunno.  Shut up and consume.  This kind of farcical nonsense happens over and over again.

Also, Rey is such a dire Mary Sue, that she gets new powers that would have dramatically changed the course of the prior movies if they were actually a thing.  The force teleport thing between her and Kylo, and the force healing are usually shown as the most egregious offenders here.  Although--I have to be fair and point out that the force teleport is a kind of unique thing because they are a force dyad (whatever that is), so it isn't meant to be something that's just a magical convenience.  (No, it's a rather deus ex machina plot device unique to these two characters.)  And the force healing is a thing that's been common in many Expanded Universe things for some time now, and technically, we saw it more recently in an episode of the Mandalorian a few weeks earlier.  Nobody seemed to complain about it then; in fact, in general, the people who love to hate on the movie love to love on the Mandalorian.  But the fact is that the Mandalorian is just as cavalier with established Star Wars plot points, even though they're usually more local and detailed in scope.  The force healing that Baby Yoda does to old Apollo Creed is just the biggest; the details about Mandalorian society are completely at odds with other canon sources of info on the Mandalorians such as the Clone Wars and even Star Wars Rebels.  Since when can Mandalorians not take off their helmets?  They do all the time in those two shows.  Since when are Mandalorians not a race but a creed? On Mandalore and Kalevala in the Clone Wars, they absolutely were the former not the latter, but the new show makes the opposite true. (Although I'm not naive; I know what's happening here.  George Lucas invalidated a bunch of older EU stuff about Mandalorians, and the Disney custodians have been just semi-quietly bringing it back since the acquisition as much as possible.)  On the other hand, they at least are telling entertaining stories (mostly) and the set up for new stuff, especially given the last couple of episodes, is intriguing for once.  If the Mandalorian is the template for New Star Wars, it won't be great, but at least it won't be terrible either.  It'll be somewhere between the quality of the Clone Wars and Rebels, most likely.  Hopefully more like the former than the latter, as r-selected writers and quiet woke moments, such as Sabine Mary Sue, the Mandalorian Asian girl, and bratty Ezra, who's supposed to be a cool, relatable teenager, but only if you were a really stupid, entitled, bratty teenager does that actually work, etc. kinda ruined Rebels a fair bit, and the moments of brilliance it had was much fewer and farther between than on the earlier show.

If I were somehow suddenly put in charge of Star Wars, I'd... well, first, I'd fire almost everyone working on it and tell them to take a hike.  Lower budget stuff with compelling characters, as in the Mandalorian, would be my first step to rehabilitate the brand, whether to theatres or a streaming service or however it was most convenient to be done, with the goal towards making blockbuster movies again.  But I'd have some other design principles in common first too:

• First, I'd have everyone on whatever creative team I put together go outside and engage in some coed team sports.  If that doesn't alleviate the nonsense about women acting like men and vice versa, then those who can't get with the program get fired too.
• Then, we'd do an exercise where we watch both the older 1981 Clash of the Titans and then the 2010 (or whatever year it was exactly) one back to back, with a particular emphasis on the characterization of Perseus and his love interest (which for some dumb reason isn't even Andromeda in the second movie) and why they work.  If I really need to spell out the fact that masculine men and feminine women are attractive to normal people of both sexes and r-selected palette swaps between men and women are off-putting to normal people of both sexes, then I clearly have the wrong creative team.  Adhering to biological sex roles works because... well, because it's biology.  Anything else marks the movies as a time capsule from a period of Clown World.
• By the same token, what is Star Wars?  A space opera?  Yes, heavily based on the Lensmen, Dune, Flash Gordon and John Carter.  It also has lots of elements of the Western in it, and Ruritanian romance.  What do all of these have in common?  They are unique stories created and told by white men for white men.  And while they have a kind of timelessness about them that makes them popular across the world, the core audience for Star Wars has always been white men.  We're not going to chase phantom diversity audiences, we're going to focus on our core demographic.  The majority of the protagonist, and even secondary and love interest characters should all be white.  Diversity casting (otherwise known as blackwashing and brownwashing of white, American culture) is cultural appropriation of the most egregious kind, and if it's good for the conservative goose, it can be good for the liberal gander.  You don't get to complain about cultural appropriation of non-white cultures while looting white cultures for whatever you want to take, and expect us to accept that.
• The sequel trilogy was a debacle, but for "normies" they probably don't want it soundly denounced.  A better way to go about it is what I've always suggested for STAR WARS REMIXED; go forward in time far enough that you wipe the slate clean.  Refer to some of the characters of the old movies as legendary figures about which no truth is remembered, and strongly imply that we don't even know anymore what of what is seen in the older movies was actually true and what wasn't.  And then largely ignore them anyway and focus on more immediate characters and events.  Nostalgic callbacks are for losers who don't have anything interesting to say in their new movie.  A few are kinda fun, but don't overdo it.  Feel free to depart from some of the tropes of Star Wars if necessary; this was done to good effect in many of the better Clone Wars episodes, for instance, and some of the better material in Old Republic.  The latter was seriously held back, on the other hand, by trying to imply too much stasis in many ways; four thousand years before Star Wars, everything was pretty much exactly what Star Wars had been?  C'mon.
• Knock it off with the Jedi and Sith.  Sure, you can have them, but the orders after thousands of years won't look like what they did in the prequels.  I actually like how the Remixed version had a kind of fragmentation of force using and lightsaber wielding traditions as well as a balkanization of the political structure of the galaxy anyway.
• As another aside, in the original trilogy, while the Jedi and Sith were both these kind of space wizards, their powers were subtle, understated, and not terribly drastic and amazing.  When the Emperor starting shooting lighting out of his hands at the end, that was a dramatic moment, because nobody suspected that that could even be done, and it's strongly suggested that he was some kind of force using prodigy anyway (same for Yoda.)  As the movies progressed, even under Lucas' supervision, the Jedi and Sith became outright superheroes, completely disconnected from anything that a "normal" adventuring character in the galaxy could ever expect to be able to match.  The Mary Sue aspects of Rey were previewed by the Mary Sue aspects of the Jedi overall long before Rey took it over the top.  Let's pull that back down.  Sure, they have some pretty cool acrobatic and combat abilities with their sabers, and they are capable of some minor misdirection and persuasion here and there.  Force abilities and lightsabers themselves have gotten too over the top.
• Now, that doesn't mean that wild Hong Kong style fight scenes should go.  Those are, of course, freakin' awesome.  No, what it means is that rather than an action tax on the Jedi, everyone should, if need be, be a credible threat, because cool, swashbuckling action isn't limited to people who use the force.  A Mandalorian, for example, should expect to be the equal of any Jedi.  Stormtroopers should be feared rather than mocked.  Experienced, James Bond-like agents, smugglers, criminals, soldiers, mercenaries, bounty hunters, and what-have-you should all be action heroes of comparable ability to any Jedi, Sith or member of any other knightly order.

In fact, it's really not that hard to make good Star Wars content, as a variety of fan films on Youtube and elsewhere show.  It's just that the people in charge of making actual, official Star Wars content are incompetent people who hate the audience for the franchise, and hate what the franchise actually stands for, so they are deliberately tearing it down.  Not that I think these highlight all of the dot points I do, but they are reasonably good Star Wars fan films, which proves the point: it's not really that hard to do.

Shill media

What happens when the shill media gets tired of shilling?

Remember that with the Last Jedi, the shill media had a score in the 95+ percentile.  The audience reaction was in the 30s until Rotten Tomatoes purged tons of reviews, because they themselves are shills, and they used the dishonest narratives of Russian bots, and alt-right trolls, and crap like that to purge tons of reviews.  (In spite of that, it's still in the mid-40s.  Dishonestly high, compared to reality, but not high.)

The early reviews for Rise of the Skywalker are low.  Mid-50s low.  More reviews are coming in, and the shills are helping that to rise, but it's still not good.  This screenshot says 56%, but the most recent one I saw was 62%.  That'll probably continue to climb over the next few days.

And although I don't trust that the audience score won't be manipulated by positive bots and Disney shills, it'll still be low too.

Either way, this is a confirmed dumpster fire.  It might even be worse than The Last Jedi, although that would be shocking, given the last minute desperate reshoots and cuts done to eliminate the worst aspects of their original cut.  I almost wish we could have just seen Jar Jar Abrams' and Kray Kray Kathy's original vision, just to see how badly they could ruin the franchise, and make sure that neither of them ever work in Hollywood ever again, but instead, we get watered down suck.  So not only is the movie not going to be good enough to please anyone, but it's not even going to suck enough to become a spectacle of badness either.  It's just... bleagh.

The Fall of Skywalker

I strongly suspect that this is completely true.  Sadly, as I said, because I don't talk about Star Wars much with my wife, she bought tickets for us to go see it in gigantic imax on Friday.  Granted; we used free ticket vouchers, so we didn't buy them per se, but for accounting purposes and from an opportunity cost perspective, we've contributed to the opening weekend of Star Wars.  Sigh.  Sometimes she's pretty cute when she's trying to help but gets it wrong.  So, although next weekend isn't likely to be a great opportunity for me to log in and review the movie, I'll eventually do it (probably too late to matter, because everyone who will see the review will already have seen the movie or decided that they won't under any circumstances anyway.)  As the video linked above says, we can already basically review the movie based on the spoilers that have been leaked; even through desperate reshoots, recuts, and re-edits, they still don't have a fan pleaser on their hands, and they know it.  I almost wish that they had gone with their disastrous first instinct, just to make sure that Kathleen Kennedy and Jar Jar Abrams never work in Hollywood again.

Meanwhile, the Mandalorian has played out pretty much as I predicted it would in my earlier post on the subject.  It continues to be... OK.  Not bad at all.  Which, compared to everything else going on in Star Wars the last several years means that relatively speaking it's fantastic, but the truth is that the show isn't great.  I actually really hoped for more from it.  Granted, even though it's a shorter show streaming on a streaming service, it's still a show at the end of the day, and I always give shows several episodes to find their legs before I judge them completely.  But we're almost done now; there's only eight episodes in the first season, and we've now seen six of them, and it really hasn't quite risen to the level of being more than a paint by numbers, emotionless Western set in space, with characters that have almost no charisma or chemistry with each other.  Nobody is really a memorable character; even the title character of the show himself.  The only break-out is Baby Yoda, and there's not even any good reason for it other than he looks like a much quieter and more passive version of Gizmo from the Gremlins movies who doesn't shed. This isn't meant to sound like a negative review, because I don't dislike the show at all; I just really hoped to actively like it better than I do.  Sigh.

For whatever reason, though, I'm getting re-enthused by The Old Republic again.  Now granted, I haven't played that in a long time, and I actually had some issue where it wouldn't launch on my computer with the hot graphics card anymore (probably because I still have Windows XP on that computer and hardly anything runs on that anymore unless it's an old version of the program.)  "Our" laptop has been effectively commandeered by my wife as her own (and it doesn't have a graphics card anyway, and although I attempted to install it on that, it didn't run very well), "my" laptop is provided by work, and I can't install games on it.  I am, however, expecting a new second desktop, which we'll put in the office at home instead of the bedroom, and one of my first things to do with it once it's up and running is reinstall Steam and Old Republic, and then enjoying games that I haven't played in a year or more, including Old Republic, which I' never really played as much as I'd have wanted to.

Playing Old Republic is both fantastically fun in some respects and shockingly frustrating in others, but I'm aware of the limitations of the medium and the studio, so I don't expect to be as frustrated by the unfortunate elements of it as if I didn't understand those quite well, at least.  It's curious that there's a fair bit of activity here.  A new expansion just came out a couple of months ago, and I was probably dragged in because of both my intense schadenfreude watching the sequel trilogy burn in a dumpster and anticipating both the Mandalorian show and the new episodes of the Clone Wars in February.  The Old Republic's most frustrating aspect, though, is the potential I can see through it and in the setting, which isn't realized because something like The Mandalorian or The Clone Wars wasn't the product of the setting.  Can you imagine a decently made ensemble cast ongoing series set in that setting?  How awesome would that be?  Granted, BioWare probably has some strange rights meaning that Lucasfilm would have to pay them royalties back in return to use their version of the setting, or some other such complication, but that's exactly why I've always thought that going forward in time from Return of the Jedi sufficiently that the setting can be made to resemble the Old Republic setting in some ways, and yet do its own interesting things at the same time. That was the whole point of my Star Wars Remixed tag, after all, and I still maintain that that would make better new Star Wars than what we're actually getting by a long shot.  In fact, that's almost always been the main problem with new Star Wars; both the sequel trilogy and much of the Expanded Universe material, for that matter.  It either tinkered with a story that was already told and didn't need any expansion or tinkering, or it sperged out on some minor detail and made it tedious.  What it always needed was new stories about new characters, yet set in the same setting.  Preferably characters that were a little more evergreen, in many respects.  The saga of Luke Skywalker was always a closed circuit; there isn't anything you can do with Luke after Return of the Jedi that's interesting or desirable, because his story was already done. This is the fatal flaw of both the prequel trilogy and the sequel trilogy; trying to milk the same story that was already concluded.  It's also where the potential of the Clone Wars and The Mandalorian, when they were really on their best game, came through.  If only the creators (including Lucas himself in the 90s and 00s) had had the sense to do something new like this, we'd have had a very different conversation about the Star Wars franchise than the one we've had the last couple of decades, where fans are labeled as "toxic" because they rightly recognize that the potential is being wasted.

Anyway, here's an interesting hybrid video put together that's The Mandalorian + The Old Republic.  If this doesn't at least jump start thoughts in your mind about the potential of Star Warsian space opera, there's no hope for you.

Quick update

Quick udpate; my access to blogger was actually somewhat restricted this last week, and even if it wasn't, I've been super busy.  Next week, I'll make some real updates.

But, in the meantime, it's been curious watching the Star Wars franchise literally collapse before our eyes in the wake of the new movie coming out.  I wanted to see the new movie eventually; kinda like how you want to watch a video of a trainwreck, or something, but I didn't want to see it opening weekend, or pay full price for it.

Sadly, my wife, who doesn't care about any of that kind of stuff, went out and bought tickets for us for opening night.  At a discount, I think, but still.  She's cute when she's trying to help, but misses the mark.

Oh, well.  I'll be fun, I suppose, to get the hot take nice and early.

Meanwhile, I'm kinda falling behind on the Mandalorian, which isn't as good as I'd hoped, although I'll get caught up once Christmas vacation is fully upon us.  I'm also watching a bunch of Old Republic playthroughs on YouTube; I'm getting a new computer, and I'll load that game on it again and play through the stories and stuff.  I've always been fascinated by that game, but haven't ever really done enough with it.  Oh, well.  Maybe I'll have some reports there, although naturally by now the game is hardly new anymore.

Bounty Hunter armors

While the graphics for Old Republic aren't really very good, I've long thought that there was a lot of potential in that game for a good Old Republic themed ensemble Clone Wars type show.  One where a major character of each of the eight classes is done and then followed throughout the show, highlighting how their interactions intersect with each other over the course of many narratives.  And while the graphics aren't good, there are some good principles of visual design in the show that, if applied to a different graphics engine, or better yet, turned into actual cosplay costumes or something, would look really cool.

There's a channel on Youtube where the creator basically does Old Republic fashion shows; it's kind of an odd idea, but y'know what?  Why not?  You want your character to look good, after all, if you're going to be looking at them for many, many hours of game play.  Plus, you can consider it concept art for a show of the type I mentioned above, not that there is one.

In honor of the Mandalorian, she did a newer video just a couple of days ago about the ten best bounty hunter armors you can craft, find or buy in the game.  So, for your enjoyment (or not, depending) here they are.

1131 Pentase

System: Pentase
Hex Location: 1131
Star Type:  G7 V
Number of Worlds: 14
Gas Giants: 2
Planetoid Belt: None

Starport Type: A
World Size: Earth sized
Atmosphere Type: Earth like
Surface Water: 60%
Population: Large ~4 billion
Political Affiliation: Cilindarean Arm
Tags: Civil War, Eugenic Mania, Mining World
Notes: Pentase is one of the more "southerly" worlds of the Cilindarean Arm.  It is a beautiful, very Earth-like planet, with multiple ecosystems and a reasonably large population, made up mostly of ethnic Cilindareans.  It is also one of the few sources of pentase steel, a metal harder and yet less brittle than most, and highly valued by the Cilindareans, especially in the construction of their ships and armor and weapons.  It isn't the only source of this type of metal, but it is such an important source of it that the metal is named after the system.  Large deposits are found on the surface of the main planet, but they seem to be meteorite in origin, and asteroids and centaurs and other irregular bodies throughout the solar system, including some of the smaller rocky/metal worlds and their moons, are also good sources of the metal.  For this reason, the world is very important to the Anaxaster.  That said, it is not connected via Cilindarean controlled space lanes, and is somewhat geographically isolated from the rest of the polity.  This has made the political scenario somewhat tense for the neighbors of Pentase, because they know that the Cilindareans would greatly prefer to have unimpeded space lanes to Pentase, and have no problem conquering other planets and exterminating or banishing the population already there if they do not accept their military occupation, but for now, the Cilindareans have treaties with a number of systems that allow them space lane access, and the peace—if uneasy—still remains.

Pentase is also home to internal conflict rooted in the Cilindarean culture.  Ethnic Cilindareans are very socially stratified.  Only full citizens enjoy all of the perks of society, although they have lots of skin in the game and are expected to render a number of duties to the state in return.  The mothakes (singular mothax) are another level in society that, while free, does not qualify for full citizenship.  There is a great deal of envy among many mothakes for the status bestowed upon full citizens by right of birth, although curiously, there is a growing sense of envy among many citizens of the mothax for his freedom from certain responsibilities as well.  A very prominent, wealthy and popular mothax, Harmost Lysander, has rebelled against the citizen planetary governor in Pentase, sparking a civil war in the system that, while sometimes quiet, still lingers.  The anaxaster and the rest of the central government has resisted getting involved; while in theory, the planetary governor has the right of rule and Lysander is a traitor, it's a well-known fact that the planetary governor is both ineffective, petty and a tyrant.  The anaxaster has decided that whomever wins this conflict will be granted legitimacy, as long as the conflict doesn't spill out of the system, or affect the greater Cilindarean Arm overall.  This is a very Cilindarean attitude, where trial by combat is still considered a legitimate legal remedy for the settlement of disputes.

Part of this dispute is the eugenics mania among the citizens of Pentase.  Both genetic engineering and cybernetic augmentation are extremely popular among them, as is a obsessive-compulsive focus on heritage.  Lysander, and many of the rest of the Cilindareans, for that matter, see this as heretical or even abominatus.  Because of this, Lysander has been receiving covert aid from a number of Cilindarean factions who think he should be promoted to full citizen status, or at least given the planetary governorship even though he's only a mothax based on his obvious merit.  The Bernese colony of the Machesk Frontier, which borders the Pentase system, is also not so subtly in favor of his rise at the expense of the current governor, Alcibiades.  This is one of the few times in which the nearby Revanchist colony of the Calder Settlements sees eye to eye with their Bernese rivals.  However, the nearby Seraeans from Outremer are backing Alcibiades, and with less discretion than the others.  This is threatening to become a full-blown diplomatic incident between the Cilindareans ad the three Great Powers if it continues unabated much longer.

2328 Kribblu VII

System: Kribblu VII
Hex Location: 2328
Star Type:  G3 III
Number of Worlds: 8
Gas Giants: 4
Planetoid Belt: Kuiper and asteroid belt

Starport Type: A
World Size: Mars sized
Atmosphere Type: Thin
Surface Water: 23%
Population: Small settlements; ~800,000
Political Affiliation: Dhangetan Cartel
Tags: Thaumatophobia, Balkanization, Secret Cabal
Notes: Kribblu VII is a manufacturing haven, but it is not manufacturing that benefits most of the people in the region.  On paper, the Dhangetan Yith Vhadrath rules the system, but the various cartel heads see him as aloof and uninvolved in cartel business sufficiently to please them.  The excuse that justifies this behavior is his struggle to control various factions on his planet; while he oversees the space port and ship foundries (as well as much of the raw material harvesting both on world and from other sources within the system) with his personnel resources (a great number of Earth-human and skiffer and cepheid bravos and militia, stiffened by mercenary companies of Cilindareans and Arcturans.)  Most visitors see this as the society on Kribblu VII, but in reality, he's at constant war with two other factions who vie for dominance on the surface of the planet; a leftover death-sage known merely as the Arch-Tyrant and his forces of cyber-undead and Neferran dog-soldiers, and a third faction that is a curious mix of Bernese exiles, and Kusans, one of the most unlikely of races to be part of a spunky rebellion against a Dhangetan status quo.

What few know, although some of the clever Dhangetans on other worlds are starting to suspect, is that Vhadrath himself is merely the junior partner of a silent power behind the "throne"; a small triumvirate of Seraean and Idacharian shadow-knights in this case, who are funneling the lion's share of the production to some other source.  It doesn't seem to be the Empire, or if it is, these shadow knights are extraordinarily discrete; most likely it is an independent power play of some kind by them themselves.  These three have also managed to spend an inordinate amount of time creating propaganda about warlocks and space wizards and psionic knights, so that all such, if they're recognized, are seen with a great deal of distrust and hatred by the populace, unless of course, they are relatively recent arrivals from off-world.  They tend to see the Arch-Tyrant as the inevitable end-state of those who meddle with things that man was not meant to know.

Although Kribblu VII is viewed by those from outside as a bizarre powder keg of a world, with all kinds of tensions, conflict and weirdness going on in the system, for the most part, its neighbors are content to let it stay that way.  The very productive shipyards of Suly look with a little bit of anxiety at the manufacturing potential of Kribblu VII as a significant economic threat (as do the smaller and more "boutique" shipyards of Lyrae VI, Jhantor and Miroon, for that matter), but since its production somehow doesn't seem to make it to the general market, and nobody knows for sure where it goes, it's a worry that they can put on the back burner.  Although in the long run, what's happening here is eve more worrisome than what isn't happening in the short run, and the world is starting to get a lot of attention from its neighbors in the Carrick Grand Marches and from the rest of the Dhangetan Cartel, who are both starting to want answers about what mysteries are happening on this planet.

Ad Astra next steps...

Looking over my map and some of the other work on my actual site for AD ASTRA, let's look at what I've got and what I'd like to have before I'm done.

I've said many times before, that I generally consider my "protagonist" peoples to be the Bernese Colonial Worlds, and I see them very vaguely as similar in some ways to the American colonies during the 1600s and 1700s.  This is somewhat vague, but close enough as a space surrogate, I suppose.  But the Bernese colonies are surrounded by a number of other nations and colonies from other nations; if you see the colonies as specifically the British colonies at a time when there were still Spanish, French, Dutch, etc. colonies in America too, if some of those nations were nations of SJW hordes, Sith lords, and worse.  Anyway, I've done the following Bernese colonies so far:

• the Bechtel Marches (3 systems)
• the Carrick Grand Marches (7 systems)

with the following still to be done.

• the Emerus Marches (5 systems)
• the Machesk Frontier (3 systems)
• the Viomium Marches (3 systems)
• Tossa (1 system)

Allied with the Bernese, but not part of them culturally or politically are the Voormellei Federation (4 systems) which has been done already, and the Tantych Kingdom (3 systems) and 3 solo systems, all of which need still to be done.

The Revanchist Colonies are more modern post-American America; the SJW hordes, basically.  They're kind of like kooky and creepy Bolsheviks, just like they actually are in real life, and there's some admittedly not so subtle metaphoring on my part in including these.  Some of the citizens are groaning in globalist slavery under these villains, which should hopefully make them more sympathetic.  Especially if they are ethnic Bernese, which some of them are.  While not the melodramatic villains of your typical space opera, in reality, these are probably actually more villainous in their intentions than even the Seraeans, who are loosely based on the Sith Lords.  I've so far only detailed the 6 worlds of the Carthen Colony, but I have three additional colonies to do still:

• the Calder Settlements (4 systems)
• the Rhyne Colony (3 systems)
• 3 1 system colonies: Liara V, Hewood and Esbrook.

The Revanchists also have their allies.  I've detailed two one-system such allies so far: Bersefels and Shoa-Shanian, but still need to detail:

• the Nhindua Equalocracy (3 systems)
• the Broone Democracy (2 systems)
• and the Gallia Confederation (4 systems)

The Seraean Imperial Colonies are the much more aggressive, "traditional" villains of the setting, and I've done a handful of their worlds so far, including the Principality of Tan Kajak (4 systems) and the Vorgan Than Viceroyalty (4 systems)  The following Imperial colonies still need work:

• the Civitas Ordenis Umraci (8 worlds; one already detailed, but it's a holdover/conversion from back when this was Star Wars + 1,000 years)
• the Kingdom of Phatoru Shdor (3 worlds)
• Moaktor Phok (5 worlds)
• the Sarkmina Duchy (2 worlds)
• 9 independent allies, most of which would be Idacharian rather than Seraean. I've detailed one of these so far, but it's also a holdover from the earlier setting.

The Cilindarean Arm is an actual polity, not a colony of another polity, and while it's not as big as the Bernese Monarch, the Revanchist Republic, or the Seraean Empire, it's bigger than most of the colonies of such in the sector combined, and half of the Arm is outside of the sector anyway.  I've identified 11 systems from this to detail, and two of them are legacy (from Star Wars originally) and therefore already done.  The Cilindareans also have a number of allies and/or clients, many of whom are worlds settled by janissaries in years past.  There are 7 single world groups of these, as well as the 4 system Takach Kingdom, all of which have not been detailed yet.

I have 16 worlds of the Dhangetan Cartel selected to detail, but 11 of them are already done.The Dhangetans are less of a normal polity and more like loosely allied city-states; united more by culture than by politics necessarily.  However, 4 of the worlds already done belong to a subset called the Galaide Worlds.

And finally, I have True Independent Systems.  I have 9 identified, and 4 are already detailed (only one of which is a legacy system, curiously.)

I've got 92 worlds to detail, which is a fairly tall order, given that I've only done so far I think 52, if I counted correctly (although 3 of those are off map and I can't really use them for anything.)

Revised Ad Astra sector map

I've made a new Ad Astra sector map.  It isn't actually different from the one I had before in terms of the data, really, but it certainly is more more attractive and aesthetically appealing, as well as hopefully at least marginally easier to use.  Maybe you remember, if you have followed at all my Ad Astra project (or likely you do not because you have not so followed), the Ad Astra system was originally devised for what was meant to be a Star Wars setting, customized by being set far in the future (kind of a reverse Old Republic.)  However, the mapping and space travel rules were much more similar to the rules from Traveller.  Therefore, my sector map is very similar to what you'd get from using Traveller.  My setting represents a swashbuckling Star Wars like space fantasy set in a pony express colonialism paradigm of Traveller, therefore.

How did I do the mapping?  Traveller assumes some randomization of star system generation, and while I modified the Traveller system significantly to have both different randomization parameters as well as considerably less jargon and technical detail that isn't very helpful for a swashbuckling space opera.  Traveller assumes a 50% density, so on average, half of all hexes on the big 1,280 hex map would have a star system in them.  I generated data on a 33.3% density, so I would have expected an average of 425 systems (I actually got 421.)  (Because of slight differences with regard to hyperdrive assumptions between Ad Astra and Traveller, that actually makes navigation potentially a bit more interesting to have slightly less dense population of stars.)  BUT!  Just because I generated a system and marked the hex as having a system doesn't mean a lot.  I did assign a political color code to each system that got a planet, but for about half of the systems, that's all that they will ever have; a hex number indicating their location, and a color code indicating their broad political affiliation or alignment.

The other half got names assigned too, mostly from a name generator for star systems.  Of this half, about another third—maybe, at most—will get an additional level of detail.  That's about 65-70 systems; I've so far done generation of details for forty-three systems.  One may ask; if that's all I'm really interested in detailing, why did I bother generating systems for the entire sector?  For context, mostly.  I was able to use clusters of same colored systems to create "nations" in the sector, but all I really need for these nations is their name and a paragraph or two of summary, and that way I can refer to them obliquely, i.e., characters can be from them, without me having to detail anything about the systems which comprise them.  As we get closer to my "protagonist" areas, I have a little bit more detail, including the names of the systems, but even then, about a third of the named systems—at the absolute most—would I ever envision having detailed system write-ups.  And detailed is a matter of some relativity, of course.  Detailed enough to be used, I suppose, but if you're really setting anything on one of these planets, you'll still have to do a lot of work on details which I won't be providing as part of this write up.

Anyway, here's the revised map.

Revisiting

I found an older post of mine about what I considered the top five songs of the 80s recently.  I don't normally like making lists, but five years or so ago when I made that, I had younger kids who always liked to see how I ranked things, so it made sense at the time.

Honestly, I'm not quite sure what I was thinking when I made it, though.  Most of what I picked, being new wave synthesizer pop music (because that was my favorite kind of music from that era) will still be OK.  Not ranked, but all in the top five then will remain: "If You Leave" by OMD, "Bizarre Love Triangle" by New Order, and "A Little Respect" by Erasure.  I think picking "Behind the Wheel" from Depeche Mode wasn't really the best choice; I'd swap out "Never Let Me Down Again."  And including "Animal" by Def Leppard because I wanted some hair rock band work was nothing more than tokenism.  Clearly, I think a-ha's "Take On Me" is a much more iconic song of the decade and deserves that slot more.  Besides, if I did have a hair band rock song on it, I wouldn't even pick that one, I don't think.  One hit wonder Autograph with "Turn Up the Radio" would be a better choice, or "Bang Your Head" by Quiet Riot.  "Livin' On a Prayer" by Bon Jovi is probably even more iconic than either, though.

I also rewatched the two episodes that are so far available for The Mandalorian again the other day, and I saw Overlord DVD's review of the first episode.  I do kind of agree with Overlord, but also kind of disagree with him.  I disagree with Overlord that hitting predictable beats of a spaghetti Western is necessarily a bad thing. I actually kinda like that they did that, actually, and while maybe it's not quintessentially heroic space opera, it's still very much one of the elements that was integral to Star Wars. I think part of Overlord DVD's complaints are that he doesn't think the spaghetti western vibe (including the music) is really appropriate for Star Wars, which I very strongly disagree with.  I do agree with him, though, that as far as spaghetti westerns go, this isn't the most exciting plot or characterization that we've seen.  If the show doesn't improve, it'll be seen as ultimately pretty forgettable.  As ODVD says, part of the context is that we're so jaded by having had bad Star Wars thrust at us that we are so happy to have something that isn't insulting and sucks that we think things that are mediocre are incredible.  But that won't last.  I liked all of the prequels and even The Force Awakens the first time I saw them too, although I was aware of the worst of their flaws.  As I saw them again, the flaws become much more obvious, and I wondered that I was even able to have the gilded view that I did watching it once.  I blame my nearly life-long love of the franchise and my desperate desire to see good space opera and fantasy which gilds my view and makes me only see the good parts the first time through.

After a while, the flaws become impossible to ignore, though.  And "after a while" usually means, "the second time I see it" if not even earlier, as I think about watching it the first time.  The prequel trilogy I now see as badly paced, badly scripted, badly cast and in some cases, badly conceived, with way too much deus ex machina and chumping of cool villains that you actually find interesting, but which Lucas then ruined.  Not a complete loss, but mostly badly crafted.  The Force Awakens is a highly derivative plot with unlikable characters who have no chemistry or charisma, a blatant Mary Sue in the form of Rey, and the pointless and needless humiliation of Han Solo just to screw with the fans.  It's actually better crafted, at least in some ways, but much more badly conceived and it much worse than the prequels because of it.

Likewise, the Clone Wars TV show isn't quite as good as I remember.  When it is good, it is, but it's really only good about half of the time.  Granted, the rest of the time it's more likely to be mediocre than actively bad, but still; it's not the franchise saver that I initially thought it was either.  Same thing for the Old Republic games: Knights of the Old Republic and Old Republic itself, of course.  While there are some elements of pure genius in them, there are also loads of really tedious, idiotic and banal crap all through them as well.

The Last Jedi I never thought was any good, even the first time I saw it.  Although I do recognize at least one or two action sequences and some visual design as not bad.  And I never thought Solo or Rogue One were anything better than OK.

Anyway, here's some comments given on the Overlord DVD video that're pretty pertinent, I think.  I liked them and agree with them, at least.

Joshua Crane
Star Wars feels like reconciliation with a cheating spouse. The suspicion will always be there.  Even when Kennedy leaves, I'll always have my shields up. 

sinistavoicez
Yes, you're jaded. I'm jaded. And it is justified. The end.

Angus Podgorny
The plan here is to lure you in with zero SJW content, and then start blasting you with woke SJW scripts toward the end of Season 1. 

Angello Hector
SafeWars: The Mandalorian
When we yearn for something new, but what we get is not too risky, but is better than most of the stuff we've been getting 

kerrick001
I think you hit the nail on the head when you say that Star Wars fans have been so abused at this point, we are just happy to see something that doesn't blatantly suck. I'm a grouchy old man. I liked it better when there was only ONE Boba Fett who was a badass bounty hunter.....not a whole race of them. I liked it when there was ONE IG-88 who was a psychopath droid.... not a whole line of "Bounty Hunter" droids. I liked it when freezing someone in carbonite took a whole room full of equipment and they didn't even know if it would work. Now Boby Fett 2.0 has the Carbonite3000 in the back of his ship......meh.. 

Editor note: there were always a whole race of supercommandos, of which Boba Fett was merely the only representative to appear on screen.  Although that's been kinda weirded out too; Lucas has clearly said it, in dialogue even, that Jango and Boba Fett were not actually Mandalorians, even though they had Mandalorian armor.  Sorry; fanboy nitpick...

Joel Gawne
"The Mandalorian" is the Star Wars equivalent of Imperial Rations.  Your overlords recommend that you take it, because its all you're getting this year. 

Intel Kore
A young, innocent boy was separated from his family at the US-Mexico border. He went on to become The Mandalorian. If there was a wall we'd never see this show! 

RobotShlomo
I can't help but think we're being set up for a bait and switch.

The Mandalorian

Although I wasn't a seriously early adopter, i.e., right away, I did download the Disney+ app to our PS4 (I don't have a Roku, and my Smart TV isn't that smart; if I can add new apps to it, I don't know how to yet.)  Yesterday, my oldest son prevailed on my wife to sign up for an account too (I personally would have been happy waiting until the Christmas holiday, or more around there).  Because he's going through some headwinds which makes my wife feel bad, she sprung for the account (the free trial is only a week long.)

Disney+ is not releasing stuff the same way that, say, Netflix or Amazon Prime is releasing their material.  You can't binge watch the Mandalorian (at least not yet) because they're releasing one episode a week from now to the end of the year. (Why I was OK with waiting until the Christmas holiday to sign up, where I could binge watch the show while off of work.)  But, we got our account on Sunday afternoon, so my youngest son and I watched the first two episodes, which are the only available so far.  So, what's the good, the bad and the ugly on this show so far?

The Good
Luckily, for the most part, the show really embraces the good.  It eschews most of the nonsense that has suffused Star Wars for quite some time, and just attempts to be a fringer story; basically, a spaghetti western set in space.  The title character, who's name and face is not revealed (although he's played by Pedro Pascal and we know what he looks like, and Pedro slipped he name of Din Jaron (sic?) out in an interview at one point.  This is kind of on purpose, I'm sure—to make him like the Clint Eastwood character of the spaghetti westerns, except even one further, because he's wearing a helmet that looks like a cross between a Spartan style Corinthian helmet and a crusader's great helm with a mirrored shade covering the entire t-visor.  The plot is quite straitforward (so far), much like a spaghetti western dragged out into a 10 or so episode miniseries would be.  The character says very little, as expected given the archetype that he's emulating, but there's more subtle characterization going on than you'd expect.  The plot is also quite straightforward so far, and heavily features action that's well conceived and choreographed.  While the main character is an iconic tough guy, he hardly seems to be invincible; he's no Mary Sue, and he is quite frankly, in over his head at some points, much as Clint Eastwood seems to be in A Fistful of Dollars.

Some of this characterization is going on with the supporting cast, though—IG-11, the bounty droid who constantly wants to initiate his self-destruct sequence, or the Nick Nolte voiced ugnaught character Kuiil (I have spoken!)

The show does not (as yet) focus on the big and the bad in Star Wars.  There are a few stormtroopers featured very early on in the first chapter, but they are obviously a remnant of the Imperial defeat; their armor is battered and dirty, and they hang around as a small squad with some kind of officer or nobleman or some such.  There aren't any space-battles at all, yet.  What there is is desolate wilderness frontier planets, much like Tatooine, that are sparsely inhabited by a rather rough lot of mostly aliens and tough guys.  I'd like to see this expand a bit more, but I honestly have little idea where the storyline is going so far, which is kind of interesting.

There is some CGI, of course, but the show features relatively low budget practical effects.  This was deliberate, both to keep the budget manageable, and to get that original Star Wars movie feel to it, and it looks and works absolutely great.  High praise indeed for the look of the show so far.  The music is also unusual; it doesn't sound anything like Star Wars.  It has a similar kind of vibe as the Morricone spaghetti western soundtracks without actually sounding like them, if that makes any sense (if not, go check out the soundtracks on Youtube and listen to them.)

Despite the very early phase that we are in, and the fact that I don't really know much about what the setting is trying to show me, or where the plot is going, I'm so far very impressed with the show.  It's much more personal than I'd have thought, but if it remains that way, I won't complain, and if it (as is much more likely) starts to broaden the scope a bit, introduce more characters and tell us more about the setting and how this ties (assuming that it does, and hints from some of the creators suggest that it will at least give us some Easter eggs to this effect) the fall of the Empire to the rise of the First Order.  While I don't really care much about the First Order or anything else going on in the sequel trilogy, nor am I likely to, some hints at the larger setting would not at all be unwelcome here.  Considering that Mandalorians featured not insignificantly in the Clone Wars and Rebels shows that took place between the prequels and the original trilogy, telling us more about what's going on with the Mandalorians themselves wouldn't be unwelcome at all either.

Is it so good that it makes up for the spit in the eye that is the sequel trilogy?  No, of course not, which is also why I think tying it too closely to that dumpster fire is a bad idea.  It would be theoretically possible, although probably quite beyond the abilities of the morons in charge at LucasFilm and Disney, to have separate Star Wars brands within the greater Star Wars umbrella, and keeping the Mandalorian somewhat separate would be a good idea, though.

The Bad
As I said, so far, the series is a bit sparse.  We don't know a lot about the characters.  We don't know much about the setting.  We don't know much about even the plot.  There's a series of action sequences loosely tied together so far, and that's about as far as it goes.  To be fair, it suggests and maybe implies what's to come, but so far, it hasn't come, and it may not.  This isn't so much a complaint as an observation that the series needs to grow, I think, from the adventures of one guy wandering around in a mostly depopulated frontier fighting jawas, a handful of random outlaws, and dangerous wildlife.  That can only be interesting for so long before it gets tired.  Although, it is a great way to start a saga.  And the more this keeps itself somewhat separated from the comings and goings of the "great saga" of the entire galaxy, the better it will be.

The Ugly
I remain very guarded about the appearance of social justice nonsense in this show.  Even writer and creator Jon Favreau has hinted at coming political/social nonsense in the show.  Luckily, what we do have so far is fairly muted, and something so ingrained in us by Hollywood that we hardly notice it anymore, even though it is both nonsensical and in fact quite hateful.  The first is the presence of the lady Mandalorian blacksmith.  We have been taught for so long that women can be just as tough as men that many of us, especially if you've never actually played any co-ed sports, might actually think that the notion of a woman blacksmith, or a woman in a traditionally male role in general, is not weird and anti-science and anti-biological, so it goes unnoticed.

It might also not be something that most people notice that there aren't any truly American characters of any note yet in the show.  Pedro Pascal is a Chilean, who's family were Allende communists who fled Chile just in case they got a helicopter tour from Pinochet's regime, which suggests that they were thick in the corruption of the Chilean government of the mid-70s.  The Imperials who give him his assignment are played by an Iranian (who's character is named Pershing!) and a German with a very distinctive accent, Werner Herzog.

The exception is Carl Weathers making what is almost (so far) a cameo as the connection between the bounty hunters guild and the Imperial remnants.  Although "American" is a label that is worn somewhat uncomfortably at best, and rejected outright at worst by the African population within America.  They are very clear that they are a nation unto themselves with their own culture, society, values and everything else that makes a nation what it is that are completely separate from that of the Americans who founded, for example, the Constitution, or who conquered the West, which is more relevant to this show.  I'm inclined to take them at their word and not count them as Americans proper, but as African-Americans; a completely different nation that is only called American by virtue of geography, not by any relationship of note with the American nation.  So I don't count Carl Weathers as an American in this context.  This is particularly ironic; not only is the Western—which this show clearly is—such an American genre, but also the ironic fact that the Mandalorians are Nordic blond people according to the Clone Wars, who even have Finnish names of one of their planets (Kalevala).  (Of course, they do also refer to the title character here as a Foundling, which suggests that he was an adopted member of a clan rather than an ethnic Mandalorian.)  The Rebels show seemed to try really hard to undo this with Sabine's obviously Asian character, but honestly, I haven't watched that in its entirety, and don't know much about what it says about the culture, other than that the "bad guy" Mandalorians seem to be all white men.  In my opinion, it's clearly LucasFilm trying to go a different way than George Lucas outlined anyway, probably to restore as much as possible of EU traditions.

The cultural appropriation of what is so iconically and irrevocably American as the Western and refusing to cast it with Americans is an insult that, sadly, we have become very used to, but that doesn't make it any less insulting or ridiculous.  Keep in mind that Hollywood is almost completely controlled by Fake Americans who in fact hate America, its culture, its society, etc..  They desire only its money, and they want to get it by trying to teach Americans to hate their own identity and see themselves as globalist slaves.  But that is a very behind the scenes kind of hatred that can only be somewhat shown given the fact that the show is what it is.  However, knowing that this is lurking behind the scenes has me waiting for the other shoe to drop on this show.  I hope that it doesn't, but I have a very hard time believing that it won't.  Disney is too fundamentally evil of an entity to long tolerate something that Americans actually enjoy.

The Great Star Wars mistake

I suspect that this theory is likely.  Rian Johnson is a major tool, but it's too much to give him credit for ruining Star Wars.  He did so with the full blessing and collusion of Jar Jar Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy, and even Bob Iger, for that matter.

The Force is female, indeed.  No place for white men anymore a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.



Despite misgivings, I went with my wife to see Last Christmas the other day.  It's not a good movie, and I don't recommend it, but it does manage to settle on a good message after farting around for more than half the movie.  That's not worth watching it, though—the main character is completely unlikable, and the movie is insulting in most respects to its audience.  The worst part, the part that stood out to me the most, was a scene where the movie made it clear that there is no place for British men in Britain; the future belongs to interracial lesbian immigrants.

Unreal.  The evil of the SJWs knows no bounds.

(Off schedule) Friday Art Attack

A Superman redesign concept; darker and more futuristic and alien.

A Styracosaurian ceratopsian.  I can't keep track of every described new dinosaur, but I can't find that this is a real one at all.

The murder of Julius Caesar.

Fantasy landscape.

Rome landscape.

Ken Kelly and Conan on a book cover.

Another great fantasy landscape.

The King in Yellow.

Some Star Wars fan art.

A great digital model of a space ship.