No more pop culture for me

For many years, I've kept a toe in the water by being subscribed to a number of pop culture commentators on Youtube. Geeks & Gamers, Ryan Kinel, Overlord DVD, Nerdrotic, Critical Drinker, and a few others. For months now, I only kind of skim over what they're posting. I made the hard decision today to let it all go and unsubscribe from all of them. I simply don't care anymore about pop culture. I don't care to see more details of "go woke go broke" and the commentators who have little more to say than that. (And if they're repetitive and offer little, you should see what the comments say.) The reason that I hung on to them for so long was because I still had a complicated break-up going on with pop culture, I think. I'd said before that my relationship to Star Wars, Marvel, Disney and more had all turned to apathy, and while that's largely true, I was still resentful of them for what they'd done, so there was a thin thread of non-apathetic emotional ties to the industry. I still loved some of the older content, and I still held on to some kind of hope that it would be restored. Or maybe I didn't hope that anymore, and I just was angry enough to enjoy watching it burn. 

But as I've had a harder and harder time over the last several months engaging with this type of Youtube content, I've had to accept that I really truly have reached peak apathy. I don't ever care to watch it burn. I'm content knowing that it did, and then not thinking about them anymore.

My connection to Star Wars is maintained because I own all of the older movies that I'd care to watch again, although to be fair, I don't do that nearly as frequently as I used to. It's been years since I watched any of them, especially the prequel trilogy. I never even got around to watching the "new" season of the Clone Wars, and I don't care about anything else happening in Star Wars, with the exception of The Old Republic, which I'm still coming back to from time to time, including (obviously) now.

My relationship with Marvel is a bit different; I spent a few years as a buyer of comic books, but that honestly was in the late 80s. The Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri X-Men, for instance, and a few other books from that same era (New Mutants, X-Factor, Avengers, Thor and Iron Man. The last three, especially the last two, weren't really super popular at the time, so that was an outlier for me with the market overall.) Previous to that, I'd really liked a lot of superhero cartoons, especially Spider-man and Hulk themed ones, when I was a younger kid. So, I'd always been a Marvel superhero fan (and I watched Batman and Superfriends too, but I was mostly a Marvel guy), but I was a fringe fan, not a hardcore fan who was really into the collecting, or even reading the comics, honestly. I also bought a few trade paperback collections of some more recent stuff, like the Ultimate Spider-man for a while, but I'm still the kind of guy who was never super into it. I enjoyed the brief high profile mainstream popularity of Marvel characters in the movies, and was especially gratified to see Thor and Iron Man come into their own, since I'd liked them way back in the later 80s, but letting go of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is pretty easy, because I only have a somewhat tenuous connection to the older content anyway, really.

For Disney, my relationship is even more complicated. I grew up trusting Disney as a family entertainment company, like everyone of my generation, but I've also been aware of their subversive nature for a long time. But I wasn't ever a huge fan of anything Disney. My wife is a huge fan of Disney, and I let her drag me many times to the parks, to the movies, etc. I think she's disappointed that I've deferred from Disney, but honestly, I wasn't ever that much of a fan anyway; I mostly did it for her.

There's little else going on in Hollywood that I care about. Our pop culture has become completely moribund. And honestly, the corporatization of that is as much a problem there as the wokeness. Pop culture hasn't had a chance in many years. Brian Neimeier, who I don't really read anymore, but who is a good commenter on pop culture stuff, describes how almost all of pop culture went bad in 1997. Long before wokeness was a term (although proto-wokeness was certainly still a thing with many of the same ideals, just not yet metastasized into full on craziness.) It's a good read, and even then it's several years old.  https://brianniemeier.com/2018/01/ground-zero/

I admit that it feels a little strange to be disconnected from almost all pop culture except for old stuff and some occasional indie stuff, but honestly, I already was. I was just holding on to something because of memories of a good time, like an ex girlfriend that you can't quite let go of.

But not long ago, as I mentioned, I watched The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland. My oldest son and his wife watched it with me. That's still a great movie that still entertains, and it's over 80 years old (released 1938.) This weekend we'll be watching Rebecca from 1940 with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine (which was her step-father's last name; she's actually Joan de Haviland and was Olivia's little sister.) Although I suggested it, it's really "presented" by my wife and daughter. On my reading list recently was some equally aged planetary romance from Otis Adelbert Kline, and some cheeky noir/fantasy by Simon R. Green from the very earliest 90s (Hawk & Fisher)

I find that reading old stuff from the age of my teenage years or older is still fun. They were fun in the 80s, and even in the 80s I liked old movies, because my dad played them a lot for us. Errol Flynn swashbucklers like Robin Hood and Captain Blood have always been among my favorite movies. Sometimes things don't get better with age, but sometimes timeless stuff is still timeless, and progress isn't a given. Pop culture hasn't had progress since the 80s-90s. It had a major drop-off following the hippy revolution, climbed back up to another peak in the 80s and maybe early 90s, and then has had a fairly steady degradation and decay since then. Today, pop culture only produces something of value almost on accident, unless it comes out of an indie scene with someone who isn't beholden to corporate interests and still understands what made timeless stuff so timeless to begin with. 

And maybe that's not so bad. After all, until recently, it was normal for people to look at a much broader spread of pop culture. My generation read stuff like David Eddings, Terry Brooks and Weiss & Hickman, of course, but they also routinely read Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock. I hardly knew a D&D fan in the 80s—and we were junior high kids—who hadn't read "the classics" at least as much if not more than the modern authors. Older movies were still broadcast on TV and as VCRs and home media rental became a new business during that decade, older movies were certainly a huge part of it. I used to work in a VHS rental store as a teenager; I remember quite well what rented. Sure, new releases were (of course) the biggest renters, but older stuff had a steady stream of rentals. Later, when stuff became cheaper, archive older movies were popular. Older books were routinely brought back into print, a process that continues through Kindle and vanity/indie presses even today.

It's a brave new world out there, folks. I'm finally addressing that head-on by decoupling myself from my last routine and regular attachment to mainstream pop culture, even if that last regular attachment was just the critics mocking its failure.

Just to add some visual interest to an otherwise banal and boring post, here's a few new screenshots of Luukke in his "Frontier Gambler" mien. The main gist of the outfit is courtesy of Vitnir, who did one very similar in his unique smuggler outfits video series. The head, torso and leggings, as well as the dye module are courtesy of him. I also used his boots and gloves and belt originally, but then decided that I wanted them to be different after all.

Honestly, those matter a lot less than the torso, head and legs, and the dye module, if present. 

Oh, and I always do my own thing with weapons.

And you may notice that there are no shadows. I noticed that the shadows don't line up with the ground very well, and make the floatiness even more obvious sometimes, but even when they don't they cause lag on my rig, which doesn't have a graphics card. I've mentioned before, I had a graphics card, but for some reason it always made the rig crash when my brother was building it, so we decided not to put it in, since the processer was fast enough that I'd be able to play older games just fine without one, mostly. The shadows on this game are one concession to that.

It still lags a bit on really busy environments, like Mek-Sha and Dantooine. Although I remember that people even with super hotrod rigs complained about lag on Dantooine, especially during the pirate event, so I don't think that that's my computer's issue.

I should go check it out, though. The pirate event is ongoing right now, and they did migrate to cloud servers some time ago since I last played.

Hutran Thanatos as the Red Blade

Early on in the agent storyline, you impersonate a notorious pirate known as the Red Blade, under the impression that nobody on Hutta knows the Red Blade, what he looks like, or really anything about him. Of course, this doesn't really work out; you do run into someone who tries to shake you down, and before you leave Hutta, the real Red Blade shows up. He's dressed in a Lando Calrissian skiff guard disguise kind of outfit, except with some red highlights on it, but the whole point was that nobody knows what the Red Blade looks like, right? Plus, that's not even very interesting. For all of my agent playthroughs, I come up with a Red Blade disguise that I can wear while pretending to be him, which is really about half or more of Hutta. 

And then, because I didn't really have anything else I wanted to do with Hutran other than mostly wear his regular black ops design, I kept the outfit. I ended up creating a few alternatives for him, an "undercover" Han Solo, which has the added Easter egg advantage of being green Han Solo, as one of the early designs for him was, and prisoner disguise while on Belsavis, a winter outfit for Hoth, a hazmat-like outfit for Quesh, etc. Very functional stuff for him.

But the Red Blade does make a reappearance of sorts on Rishi, if I remember correctly, or at least he's referenced. And if he is supposed to be some kind of space pirate, that's obviously an obvious place for him to occasionally hang out.

Sometimes people like to use the Red Blade outfit when in the Red Blade disguise, but it's a dumb looking outfit, and if nobody knows what the Red Blade looks like, then what good is it anyway? Anyway, here's one of my own takes on the Red Blade; the red scalene armor from the Gree event, but with an eyepatch as my "hat." Because, y'know. He's a pirate.

Blending in by helping this guy fix stuff

Just chatting with the boys. Y'know, like a Red Blade does. Raina is obviously bored.

Cheap lodgings. The Red Blade doesn't travel in style yet, apparently

The Red Blade is "shopping" for a ship

Thinking red thoughts on Rishi

I don't know why, but Raiders' Cove always seems really hazy to me.

OK, so it's  not the prettiest beach, but I still think this place qualifies as a honeymoon destination, right Raina?

Hanging out with this big boy at the docks.

Whoa, sorry, guys. I didn't know this was "your" saloon.

Some more chatting with the boys before having a drink.

After a few drinks, the Red Blade likes to get down.

SWTOR Screenshots: Johhn's experimental fringer outfit

I have a hard time getting really good screenshots. What I really ought to do is record video of the cutscenes and get my screenshots from there. But mostly, I just go out somewhere where it's hopefully kind of bright and naturalistic lighting, take off the UI and take a screenshot. Unfortunately, because of the tethering to the ground, you can't get just any angle on your characters very well either. So my screenshots always look kind of static, samey and boring.

But that's OK. The main point is to show the outfits and what the character looks like.

Here's some of my old original agent, my "banker" and the guy who makes almost all of my money on the GTN by crafting Advanced V-9 Seismic grenades in batches of 30-40 and then selling them for ~125,000 credits each; a haul of ~4 million per batch. I can easily do one of those every evening, although sometimes if I'm more distracted by, y'know, actually playing the game, I don't.

This fringer outfit is courtesy of the cybernetic pauldron armor set; I'm using the chestpiece, boots and gloves from it anyway. Along with an unusual cowboy hat gas mask (which isn't nearly as hard to get anymore as it used to be) and a few other pieces too.

You'll also notice my "common law wife" Raina Temple. I used to always have my girlfriend characters run around in the Leia slave girl outfits, because I thought it was kind of funny. But these digital models weren't that sexy, and the whole thing started to feel hoaky and immature after a while. I'm gradually going through and converting all of my girlfriends to regular practical clothing.

You'll also notice that Johhn seems to be floating slightly above the ground in all of these shots, and that no matter what I do, his face seems to be in deep shadow because of the hat's brim. Not much I can do about either of those. So, here he is on the character select screen. It even says that, because his antenna sticks up so I couldn't crop the text out of the way. Sigh.

Here's Johhn in his slightly modified hunter outfit. I have a lot of Mandalorian looks for all of my characters, since the Mandalorian look is so classic and looks so good. Besides, all of my characters occasionally did the bounty hunting event. I may not anymore, though—I've maxed out the reputation, and I don't know that there's anything else that I want to buy using the tokens from it.

Tried a few more shots, mostly on Onderon, because it's got cool scenery and decent lighting.

SWTOR 1/25/2024 big ballooned out update that was meant to be minor...

Just a quick update, without even an image file to pretty it up (unless I edit the post and add one later, which I may do.) By grinding for a few hours last night, I finished Hutran Thanatos' story, and I'll let him fall to the back of the list of characters through non-use, I think. I may yet return to him, and do Ilum, or some of the other post story story, if that phrase makes sense. Maybe Makeb, and Rishi, and all that, although I tend to peter out with all of my characters after Yavin IV at the very latest, and honestly, even getting past Ilum is sometimes tricky. Makeb is big and kind of intimidating to start when I feel like the payoff isn't as big. What I really miss are the class specific stories, and without them, I just don't care nearly as much. The big story expansions; KotET and KotFE aren't class specific, and really only make sense for a Jedi character anyway. I know, I know... you can play them with anyone. But it only "feels" right with a Jedi, or maybe a reformist Sith, if you played a relatively light-sider Sith.

Hutran Thanatos would also be a great candidate for grinding through potential reputation or seasons (when another one starts), if I still have any interest in getting reputation. It's not a sure thing that I do. But now that I'm back in the game, I'm still interesting in the drip, as the kids say, because it's one of the few things that you can do that at least gives you that dopamine hit of being fresh for a moment. Otherwise, I've got loads of story still to play with loads of characters, and then I need to decide what I'm really going to do with them. Honestly, I don't really know what to do with all of these characters. I'd like to play them to completion, but after that? I have no idea. I don't really want to get rid of them. Maybe I'll use my slow drip of cartel coins to buy a few extra character slots so I can keep these and not feel like my character slot situation is quite as full as I feel like it is now. I do still have two slots, but that's not a lot. I'd like to have a buffer of a few more, especially if I do let my son play through. He'll obviously take one. Realistically, I probably can't and don't have much need to keep all of these "junior" characters. If I decide that I want to keep them instead of the originals, then I'd need to max out the crafting on the newer characters, and try and get them a load of schematics that my current characters have. I doubt that I'd have any interest in doing that, although at least it'd give me something to do with them. The only reason that I'd otherwise keep these newer guys is because I have some reason to come back and play them again. I doubt that that's will be true, but in the meantime, I'm having a hard time making that decision and letting go. To be fair, I literally just finished the story with him last night...

As a quick aside, the ending for the agent was a bit underwhelming, although appropriate. For the Jedi Knight, for example, and most of the other classes if I remember correctly, there's a whole big deal obviously modeled after the medal ceremony in the first Star Wars film. For the agent, you just have a quiet moment with your crew. Your crew that I mostly can't stand, if you'll remember. (The companions are clearly the worst aspect of the Agent storyline.) I was kind of waiting for something else before I realized that I was actually done and that the next thing I was supposed to do was go ahead and go to Ilum.

Or, maybe I can do a few non-solo flashpoints with him still. I'm starting to lag behind even with my top characters in gear rating for group stuff, and these newer characters are farther behind still. I guess I can go pick up stuff on the Fleet to get him more up to speed than he currently is, but I just don't want to grind for a few points of gear rating; or even a few tens of points. It simply doesn't matter enough for any of the material that I prefer to play. I'll make another plug for I wish BioWare, or Broadsword, or whomever it is these days, would allocate someone for a few weeks on making all of the Flashpoints soloable. Half of them were upgraded, because they're important to the story, and you can't really do solo story play without them, but why not do the rest of them? And figure out some way to have solo flashpoint versions of the Operations and Heroic 4s too. Here's a flowchart of a lot of this stuff. It doesn't have the newest stuff on it, but the newest stuff is more obvious anyway.

I kind of like Ilum well enough. It feels like a nice coda to the original faction/planetary stories, as well as many details from many of the class stories. I might yet go back to Thanatos and do Ilum. And maybe the Black Hole and Section X, etc. By the time I get all the way to Makeb, however, I'm much more likely to feel "done" with the character, and if not, I really am usually by the time I'm done with Rishi or Ziost at the absolute latest. Although in light of above; I should double check and make sure that I've maxed out my Makeb reputation. Right now, like I said, the only one that I'm super interested in that I haven't finished (or even started) is Ruhnuk. And I may only have one character who can play that. I'm not sure. I think I have to do the Ruhnuk story before I can do the Ruhnuk dailies for reputation.

Meanwhile, Johhn, my OG agent and one of the more important of my crafters (because he makes by far the most bank on the GTN, and looks poised to continue to do so even with the GTN changes) is still crafting Advanced V-9 Seismic grenades, which I can sell for about 125,000 credits a pop. In an evening, even in the background, I can usually have him craft 30-40 of them, and my net profit is ~four million credits per batch. If I keep him pretty anxiously engaged, I can actually afford to keep shopping on the GTN on occasion, although even the cheaper of things that I really want tend to be tens of millions of credits, so... a of work to get, say, an adept pilot dye module for ~60 million.

I had thought that I'd turn to Taul Kajak, my Mirialan Jedi who I already finished Alderaan with earlier this week, but I didn't really feel like picking him up again, and I ended up going to Taris where my more junior zabrak Jedi was in the middle of some missions instead. I like this guy, because he looks more like Darth Maul (with a bit of red hair) and has blood-red black core dual lightsabers, but I'm playing him straight as a "chaotic good" Jedi. By "chaotic good" in this sense, I mean that I'm not caring what the game itself thinks is light or dark side, because as I've said many times before, the moral compass of the game itself is ridiculous, and the moral dilemmas that they try to set up are hoaky and stupid.

I also have a swamp camo outfit for him, which I'm enjoying on Taris. Probably the only place where it would be appropriate to wear it anyway. Except maybe Rishi, Rakata Prime, or possibly Onderon. I also created a "stillsuit" outfit from Dune that he can wear on Tatooine later, or any other hot planet, I guess. All of my characters also have at least one cold weather outfit, since Alderaan, Hoth and Ilum are all cold worlds.

Honestly, that's what I should have done all along; had outfits specific to each planet, and named them after them. Maybe I can still do that with my newest ones; see below...

Anyway, after I finish Taris with Elemer Kell, including (probably) the Taris bonus series, it'll be time to bounce back to an Imperial character. Probably Vant Galaide, the bounty hunter who's due to start Balmorra. He's at about the same stage in the story as Kell which works well. In fact, if I could (in theory) keep almost all of my characters at more or less within a two-three planet band of each other as they progress, that would be ideal. But I have... had... Hutran Thanatos all the way about to start Voss until recently, and Haul Kajak just finishing Alderaan, they're kind of the outliers. And the several characters that I have who effectively haven't started yet and are still on their home planets with their introduction done and their first real mission still waiting for them, can probably be part of another wave. There's four of those characters, Saxon Hettar (agent story), Beorn Hengest (bounty hunter story), Gael Heckett (smuggler story), and Gändalf Greyhame (jedi consular story).

That still gives me almost certainly too many characters to try and keep in the same place; Mirabeau Tane (trooper story), Anstal Tane (no relation) (smuggler story), Codon Veile (trooper story), Phovos Maledict (sith warrior story), Revecca Arden (sith inquisitor story), Vant and Vash Galaide (maybe a relation—brothers or cousins or something) (bounty hunter and agent story, respectively), Embric Stane (bounty hunter story), Elemer Kell (jedi knight story), and of course Haul Kajak (jedi knight story), who's kind of out in front. Ten characters to juggle still, not to mention the stuff I'm still doing off and on with my "finished" characters, and four more waiting in the wings to launch after that?

Not for the first time, I'm wondering if I didn't bite off more than I should have attempted to chew.

And that's sometimes what drives me to the more mindless tasks, like grinding for reputation, or taking screenshots of outfits.

UPDATE: The "minor" update ended up being a longer post than my major update (post title changed.) In any case, I didn't realize it, but that version of the flowchart doesn't have the bonus series. There is a bonus series on almost every major planet after the capital worlds. Haul Kajak should go back and do the Alderaan bonus series, and Elemer Kell should count on doing the Taris bonus series while he's still on-world. Honestly, I'm thinking maybe something to do with Hutran Thanatos, now that he's done, is go back to Belsavis,, Voss and Corellia and do the planetary series as well as the bonus series for the first two of those (Corellia doesn't have one, although you could consider The Black Hole to be a de facto Corellia bonus series.) Or maybe I can do all kinds of missions on bonus series, since they're repeatable, and get footage or screenshots of various of his outfits while I'm at it. That would be a nice epilogue to the character, and a way to send him off in style. Once I've done that, I'll still keep him on the backburner, because I may want to do Ilum, the Black Hole, Section X, and maybe all of the rest of the stuff that was added to the game in Rise of the Hutt Cartel and Shadows of Revan. Not that I'm super pumped to do that; I still haven't done it with most of my original run of characters, after all. But we'll see.

A quick quote from an old Kairos post by Brian Neimeier:

1997 began with a film event that would portend an even more ominous trend than the aforementioned Batman and Robin. The Star Wars Trilogy Special Editions were released starting in January and continuing monthly through March. Thus began the cynical strip-mining of a 70s space opera that until recently was the only remaining cultural touchstone that bound the atomized American populace.

Everybody likes to point out how the warning signs of what awaited us in the prequels were all there in the Special Editions. But now another, more distant, red flag pops into focus: the fact that George Lucas doesn’t particularly care about the iconic saga whose artistic success he personally had little to do with. If he was willing to shoehorn in Special Jabba the Hutt and a CG Muppet dance number, we should’ve known he’d eventually sell out to the highest bidder.

In short, the bastardization of Star Wars that plagues us to this day began in 1997.

The post is about the decline of arts and entertainment in general in Western civilization, and makes a pretty convincing case that 1997 is the day that all of it dies, fed only by inertia in the years since, which has mostly completely run out. Any actual good art doesn't come out of the industries that specifically are supposed to produce and distribute it anymore, but rather from indie or even individual artists doing what they love for love of the art alone. But I think he's right; the release of the Special Editions was supremely disappointing, and I say that as a guy who waited in line for hours when the first one came out. It was clear even then that George Lucas either didn't really understand why his own creation was so successful (which may well be true, because he never expected it to be, and back in the day farmed out the stuff that he couldn't do well to help; he had help with the script, with the dialogue, with the pacing, with the editing; the only thing that he actually was good at was 1) restating what made older space opera so beloved into a slightly revised format, and 2) spectacular visuals the likes of which hadn't at that point been seen. And frankly, almost anyone could have done 1) if they'd simply been bold enough to do so. Arguably, Gene Roddenberry did it too more than a decade before Lucas did.

Star Wars' inertia was considerable for people like me, who grew up on it, who were naturally inclined to be science fiction fans anyway, and who also enjoyed the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom, that's still going strong, although not being led by Star Wars anymore. Like I said, the Special Editions were excruciatingly disappointing. They showed us exactly what to expect from the prequels, which were also excruciatingly disappointing. Star Wars was at a nadir until a few things, including the Clone Wars animated show, and a series of video games (especially Knights of the Old Republic) reinvigorated it for me. The Old Republic itself bears some credit for having made Star Wars cool again, although they had a very rough out the gate approach, due to supremely shortsighted and foolish business decisions to try and cash in on WoW money. Once they finally fixed that and made SWTOR a good single player experience, it remained one of the  last good Star Wars products that has a lot of replayability/rewatchability potential.

And, of course, we all know about how Disney has completely destroyed most of the goodwill fans have left. SWTOR's newer material suffers from most of the same problems, but at least you can still go through the older stuff. But almost everything that was good in the Old Republic is over a decade old now.

UPDATE: As promised above, here's a few images of Thanatos, one in his classic "work outfit" and two in his "retired attire".

Sadly, the "retired attire" outfit doesn't show properly on the character select screen. There's an issue where sometimes your dye modules, especially if you have separate ones on some components, land pants seem to be the worst offenders, won't color right. He still looks good, but his pants are black with a gray stripe rather than khaki in that view. 

I really love the rifle he has in that look too. Of course, I also really love the laser tommy gun look he has going on his "work clothes."

SWTOR Progress update 1/24/24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SWTOR again?

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

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

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

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

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

Retired characters that I still keep because they do crafting:

Graggory - Human male advanced prototype powertech

Maark - Human male focus Jedi Guardian

Mat Thew - Human male fury Sith Marauder

Luukke - Human male sharpshooter gunslinger

Johhn - Human male marksman sniper

Phillippion - Human male gunnery commando

Galation - Human male pyrotech powertech

Deleted character that I played all the way through:

Actsion - Human male deception assassin

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

Hutran Thanatos - Mirialan male lethality operative

Taul Kajak - Mirialan male combat Jedi sentinel

Embric Stane - Cyborg male arsenal mercenary

Mirabeu Tane - Cyborg male gunslinger trooper

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

Phovos Maledict - Human male juggernaut sith warrior

Codon Veile - Chiss male sniper trooper

Wulf Hengest - Human male vanguard bounty hunter

Haul Romund - Human male mercenary smuggler

Vash Galaide - Human male powertech agent

Vant Galaide - Human male mercenary bounty hunter

Anstal Tane - Sith male scoundrel smuggler

Revecca Arden - Human female sorceress iniquisitor

Elemer Kell - Imperial zabrak male Jedi sentinel knight

Gändalf Greyhame - Human male sorcerer consular

Beorn Hengest - Republic zabrak male sniper bounty hunter

Gael Heckett - Cyborg male powertech smuggler

Saxon Hettar - Sith male gunslinger agent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bas & Ram

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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