"A giraffe comes into frame"
- storyboard for Alejandro Jodorowsky's misconceived and thankfully stillborn 1970s ... "adaptation" of Frank Herbert's Dune
(In the event anyone reading this is unfamiliar with Dune, no, there is no giraffe involved at any point, nor any artiodactyls of any stripe. I dare say not even ungulates as a whole played a role in Dune's plot, or for that matter non-human mammals in general. It's not a "Noah's Ark" sort of story.)
Dune is, undeniably, one of the most memorable classics of Science Fiction, both for its grandiloquent characters, complexity and moral weight and for nailing the SF niche market's extremophilia. And, like almost every such work, it has never been adapted well to film, good futurism being almost by definition transgressive of contemporary expectations. More recent attempts tend toward the bland, cheap, timid and amateurish. The version which truly stuck in everyone's memory was David Lynch's 1984 acid trip, remembered by fans for a few memorable scenes and a lot more random batshit insane filler devoid of meaning or substance. And, watching the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune I find myself thankful for Lynch's version because things could've been much, much worse if the original director had gotten his way:
"In my version Duke Leto is castrated. And then how he will do a son? And then his wife, a marvelous woman, a wise woman. And the guy have a love, a cosmic love when he see this woman. And how he will make a child? And she take a drop of his blood and she change the blood into semen. And then we see the drop of blood going inside the vagina, the uterus, and we will follow the blood, the blood coming and go inside the ovum and explodes there. She gets pregnant with a drop of blood. That's what I did."
Why?!? WHYYYYY would you do that? What was your chain of reasoning? Where is the narrative causality in any of that? What in the everloving name of fuck does randomly castrating a pivotal character and reverse-menstruating to a TNT-loaded conception have to do with adapting a book about intellectual capacity, exofauna, strategic resource monopolies and the role of leadership in human societies?
And look, I won't contest the potential of such scenes in some other context. But if you're gifted with such unstoppable inspiration, then make a movie about that other context! Write your own original work with all the space-spice-pirate giraffes, castrations and exploding ova you want. (In fact, if you want to make a movie about going up the vagina, there is an entire industry dedicated to that very imagery.) I am, myself, mildly curious about La Caste des Méta-Barons, Jodorovsky's Dune-inspired comic book creation. Inspiration from previous works is inevitable. Acknowledge it and build upon it what you will. But it's a whole different matter to willfully misrepresent someone else's work, to work under the umbrella of another's fame - and that, unfortunately, seems to have been Jodorowsky's true talent in the 1970s: networking. By some staggering animal magnetism (and lavish budget-draining gifts) he had lined up a cast including Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, Gloria Swanson and Salvador Dali, and was going to have Pink Floyd in his soundtrack at the height of their popularity. That his artistic team later went on to do the movie Alien under Ridley Scott says much about Jodorowsky's ability to spot, engage and exploit others' talent. His respect for such talent on the other hand might better be expressed in his own words on directorial fiat vis-a-vis adapting someone else's work:
"Is different. It was my Dune. When you make a picture, you must not respect the novel. It's like you get married, no? You go with the wife, white, the woman is white, you take the woman, if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to... to rape the bride. And then you will have your picture. I was raping Frank Herbert, you know, raping, like this! But with love, with love."
Ok... just waiting for the incredulous laughter to die down... because his attitude waxes even more farcical when the topic flips to the impact of studios and producers on a director's artistic vision:
"The picture need to be exactly as I am dreaming the picture. Is a dream. Don't change my dream."
Hah!
Awwww, honey-schnookums, don't worry your pretty little head. They didn't change your dream, merely raped you. You're just jealous they're capable of so much more "love" than you are.
In the 20th century, you could toss a coin as to whether a SF book's cover actually reflected anything in the text. Publishers instead seemed to commission stock portfolios of images involving rocketships, ringed planets, little green men, square-jawed macho men hefting bulbous zap guns, clanking giant-antennaed robots or just random surrealist imagery, and slapped them on whatever novel they released more or less as they came. It stemmed partly from the publishing industry's... frugality, let's call it, and partly from an ingrained disdain for imaginative stories as child's play. Sadly, after the brief golden age of Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, this misinterpretation of imagination as shallow gibberish impermeable to reason meshed perfectly with postmodernism. You can see the shift in the "adapted" version of Paul Atreides. Where Herbert was socially aware enough to reference mythopoiesis as a cynical tool for manipulating the masses, Jodorowsky took the character's messianic qualities at face value, with all the uncritical ardor of a star-struck apostle, imbuing the young Atreides (like so many other half-assed heroes of the past three millennia) with both a virgin birth and an ascension to omniscience beyond mere prescience.
If you pull up a few creations by the postmodernism generator, you might notice a trend toward name-dropping famous writers to make you swallow its algorithm-extruded bullshit. The same method was also employed in the famous Sokal hoax, because it's fundamental to the pseudointellectual rot which has called itself post-modern. Try reading any paper from the past few decades' social "sciences" and see how few don't resolve to a circle-jerk of citations of "theorists" with no evidence or even a coherent conceptual framework for their assertions. This seems to have been Jodorowsky's approach as well. Half his crew seems to have had only the vaguest idea of what Dune was about, but it didn't matter. He was globetrotting in search of even more great names to append to his work, and how could anything turn out bad if it included Orson Welles and Mick Jagger? Who cares that the script itself may as well have been laid out by a random number generator? When you bind your book in such flashy covers, who judges what's between them?
It's hardly surprising to see his old circle of sycophants sport the punctiliously rebellious hipster look of skintight turtlenecks and ponchos. Jodorowsky himself in the documentary hardly ever mouths a phrase not befitting a showboating idiot child, overacting a gross caricature of the artistic spirit, drunk on the undeserved attention he receives from others who really should know better. As I listened to his incoherent rambling about spirit warriors, bodily fluids and universal consciousness, my mood gradually shifted from outrage at his vandalism to amusement at hearing him complain about film studios' profit motive.
See, as we've garnered a better understanding of our neural infrastructure's evolutionary underpinnings, we're learning that the distasteful practice of money-grubbing shows only one facet of our runaway adaptation of social dominance. A chimp may gain breeding rights by either beating up his opponents to become chief chimp or by banging tin cans to scare them into submission. The beatings and banging mask the underlying drive. Humans seek status, outwardly expressed as monetary profit or military rank, or your number of friends on facebook, or the people you don't invite to your parties, or hits on your blog, or your ranking on a leaderboard, or your name, Leo Bloom, in lights. So of course good old "Jodo" was perfectly comfortable raping others' dreams even as he upheld the sanctity of his own virgo morphica intacta. Thrust and parry to victory. As an auteur of a major project he positioned himself for a chance to both snub other powerful, moneyed individuals like studio executives (elevating his status above them) and to buy Orson Welles a personal chef and a giraffe for Salvador Dali. That, my friends, would be some highly conspicuous consumption!
In himself, I doubt Jodorowsky is as terrible as he seems to me as an outraged SciFi fanboy who dreams of running my own sandworm farm. Like I said, I'm honestly curious about The Metabarons and he boasted a true flair for dramatic imagery. The fact that he's such a neatly recognizable "type" however reminds me just how easily we naked apes are taken in by charismatic, energetic personalities. Even with certifiable creators we need to get better at spotting when they're acting from a true creative drive and when they're facetiously inflating their self-image.
________________________________________________________
P.S.:
No, seriously, why a giraffe? Why? I just... I need to know!
Friday, June 28, 2019
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
City of Heroic Lycanthropes Past
"I'm stuck in this dream
It's changing me
I am becoming"
NIN - The Becoming
The recent quasi-revival of City of Heroes by fans is tempting me terribly to give it a try, despite being sure I'd wind up with a stolen identity and a virus-melted hard drive for logging in to a fan run game server. I'm also painfully aware how misplaced my nostalgia truly is, considering I quite cheerfully neglected to log into CoH for years prior to its final demise. In terms of gameplay it was a mind-numbing grindfest.
But you see, in yon days of yore there existed this concept of "roleplaying" and even for those like myself who never really got into the amateur theatre aspect, investing one's virtual selves with personal personality was a major selling point for online games. CoH excelled in inspiring and empowering users to do so, by letting you pick both a wide array of powers and an even wider array of costume pieces to mix-and-match into a unique individual look. Its graphics were simple enough to be expressive, detailed enough to express nuance. Certainly most players did not bother with this creative angle, and either hit the randomizer, copycatted print superheroes or just half-assed a completely nonsensical identity to feign nonchalance. However, a surprising proportion of CoH's population proved creative enough to turn heads. Each player could moreover pen one's own autobiography, and as the game heavily encouraged large alternate character rosters, I spent quite a bit of time coming up with alternate me-s.
Almost all of them were werewolves named Werewolfe, Werrewulfe, Werwulfe, etc. I had some other ideas, like a force field robot from beyond the solar system, or a teleporting assassin robot looking for its lost master, or a bird-winged lightning-summoner, or a clown with boxing gloves named The Unstoppable Farce, but mostly I took it as a challenge to interpret as many archetypes and powersets as I could in terms of lycanthropy, from magic to high tech, from punching to healing. Most of them were, to say the least, a bit of a stretch. And, while most of my CoH screenshots got nuked upon switching PCs last decade, I had a habit of writing my character descriptions into text files before pasting them into the game's interface. The largest of those text files survived. So, here they are, what few remain of the many-fold me of fifteen years ago:
_______________________________________________
Earth / Storm Science Controller
The will may sometimes bind to itself even the wildest of forces.
Lost now to memory, an ancient thinker once sought immortality and found it in the tainted blood of Lycaon's cursed ilk. A hermit found the stones and sky echoing his howls. An alchemist linked his hunger to the natural forces of earth and air and brought them to serve at his fingertips. Of late, a wolf came out of the woods in Paragon City and calmly asked if he might have use of a physics laboratory.
What has the philosopher, the witch, the alchemist, the scientist sought through the ages? No sacrifice too great, no change too frightening, no battle too difficult, even against mortality, but for the gift of knowledge.
(This was my main.
The controller archetype was arguably the squishiest in the game on the hero side, but I delighted in taking its most defensive powersets and adopting a hulking brute aesthetic. It helped that earth and storm powers come across as druidic enough to lend myself a nature-mage air to suit my lycanthropy. Of course, since most of my characters were created long before City of Villains added wolf heads, claws and such to the existing costume options, my early incarnations mostly just looked like filthy hobos in torn clothing, with the odd fangs or darkened eyes to suggest bestial natures lurking beneath.
Hard to put a lycanthropic spin on far-reaching crowd control powers. It worked much better than anticipated. For as long as I played the game, I never got altogether bored of playing this guy.)
_______________________________________________
Sonic / Dark Magic Defender
It has been centuries since the curse came upon me. If you hear the agony of my victims in my howls, mourn them not, for through their deaths you have gained an ally in this troubled night. It is through the madness of his hunger that the lycantrope gains respect for life and the will to defend it.
(Never was particularly crazy about this one. Too... "goth" for lack of a better term, for a healer. Should've just gone with a more druidic description.)
_______________________________________________
Dark / Sonic Mutation Defender
What is lycantropy? An age-old curse or the natural advancement past our human forms? The scientists marvelled at my genetic make-up and called me transcendent. The commoners just screamed and called me "freak".
If, with every passing year, i feel as if i am changing into something new, why is my body taking on forms older than humanity itself? Why does my voice echo ever more clearly the primeval snarl and howl of the wolf, and why do i feel more at ease stalking through the night than under the celebrated sun?
Until i find the answers, i will remain among the hungry damned, the beast-men of the forest, the only ones who ever called me "brother". I do not yet share their strength or their resilience, their physical maleability or their torment of hunger, but it is perhaps because of these lacks that they see, in me, hope.
(Can't even remember what this one looked like. Much better angle on the description though.)
________________________________________________
Plants / Ice Magic Dominator
I am the dying echo of a world you'd wish forgotten. I am the vengeance of abandoned gods, pushed ever northwards by impertinent children playing at shaping their world. I am the icy breath of the tundra and the creak of the endless primordial taiga. I am the hunger of the world you've scarred, and the chilling embrace of the world-tree's roots follows behind me.
(Ah, my first villain. Yeah, I went for the "ancient evil" routine. Sue me. Also, for some reason my controllers tended toward magic backgrounds. Even I couldn't make too many of CoH's powersets fit a werewolf. Archery or fire or force fields just didn't mesh with my central theme. So I did a lot of regeneration, nature themes, darkness, howling, and so forth.)
_________________________________________________
Necromancy / Poison Magic Mastermind
"The hunter in the moonlight, the stalker whose breath reeks of tombs and shallow graves... yes, yes, i have met him, i have seen him, never such a night as when he beckons you to surrender to his grisly feast. Soft paws and the velvet rumbling of his growl, it's all you'll know, just the caress of fangs is all his victims ever feel.
No death, no death, no peace and slumber for the bitten; his prey is ever a part of him. The shambling remnants of those he defiles herald his coming and the pestilence and venom of the scavanger's maw spread in his wake."
(Masterminds, for the record, were a villain pet class almost entirely dependent on their pets. Very fond of this one conceptually. Modern media tend to forget that old werewolf myths reflected, like vampires and ogres and other fangs in the night, the cannibalism taboo, and were also heavily associated with graveyards, grave-robbing, necromancy, etc. Real-life wolves' propensity for scavenging certainly helped.
I think the only thing I'd change now is having my venomous breath herald my coming and my shamblers tread in my wake.)
__________________________________________________
Warshade
The other lives superimpose themselves on the present sometimes. Against the backdrop of this great metropolis i see a ravenous monster stalking old world forests through the ages. Opposed like a mirror image of the same beast is the ageless evil of the nictus, frantically wandering alien worlds in search of victims.
No. No more. Let the hungers within me feed on each other. Whatever the two halves of my being wrought upon the universe in their dark pasts, i shall redeem now.
(CoH featured an alien symbiote species, Kheldians, as superheroic origin story. They were difficult to write for, already having a pre-set backstory. You were basically creating only half a character. On the other hand, their transformation motif and warshades' own vaguely lycanthropic lore meshed almost too well with my predilections, to the point of redundancy.)
__________________________________________________
Ice / Sonic Magic Corruptor
My shackles broken, captors scattered
My pain returned a hundred-fold
Yet cursed, by no remorse now burdened
I feel my hunger driving stronger than of old.
This pledge, to those who've sinned by one who's sinned:
Hide though you might behind your iron citadels and lies
My vengeance heralded by howls on arctic wind
Shall drown you lawful torturers' last cries.
(Another villain. Yes, some of these were in verse. Deal with it. What more appropriate wolf-man form of self-expression than... doggerel? And damnit, I still think this sounds like a badass antivillain declaration of war upon the world which wronged me. His costume was one of the later, wolf-headed ones, with chains wrapped around his bare torso. Guy was freakin' METAL!)
__________________________________________________
Super strength / Dark armor Natural Brute
Not been born with sharp wolf fangs so i sharpened them myself. Ain't no son of a demigod, so i give my hatreds form. Never had no head for gadgets so my body's my greatest tool. I see reason beyond reason in the will to frustrate norms. I am myself, perfected and improved. It my strength which crushes your achievements, my will that saps your own. I am more, in myself, than you whole herd of humanity in your interdependencies.
(My tanky villain. Byron, eat your heart out.)
__________________________________________________
Claws / Reflexes Science Stalker
A dash of this, a pinch of that. Fangs and claws and disembodied midnight howls, this is what little lycantropes are made of. Who says mad scientists can't do their own dirty work? Quick as your last breath and silent as your lost hopes, look for me under the full moon. One touch is all i want..
(A villain in a lab coat, complete with bright yellow lab gloves and hood obscuring his Mr. Hyde visage. Unsurprisingly, I had a lot of trouble fitting lycanthropy to the "science" and "technology" backgrounds. Thank you, Robert Louis Stevenson.)
__________________________________________________
Sonic / Ice Technology Blaster
What do you expect of a lycantrope? A ravenous beast, fangs dripping with gore? A mindless monster on the outskirts of society? I have no interrest in being your superstition, your rumour, your primal fear. Accursed or bestial, i am at my core what i always was. This body is but a tool with which the mind can build, a framework upon which i, the intellect, can create new forms. Dynamos and amplifiers, capacitors, routers and zero-point energy drain, stacked fer-on-fur upon the howling, hulking predator whose body i inhabit. What is a lycantrope's body? To me, it's no more than a battery pack.
(I'm not much for damage-dealing in games. A blaster is such an inelegant weapon. Still, I ended up enjoying this guy more than I'd expected. He was a howler with a muzzle like Bane's from Batman, which fit more neatly than most of my creations. Plus, I still find "fer-on-fur" a delightfully pithy turn of phrase.)
___________________________________________________
Arachnos Widow
Out of the forest and into the wild. I sometimes wonder what it must have been like before i was changed, before gunpowder, silver bullets and canine tracking teams. Ah, to have roamed the woods of mesopotamia and stumbled upon plentiful and unwary primitives, instead of scrambling to track down lost children by the highway before police sirens shatter the night.
If there's one thing you learn quickly in your first nights of hunger, it's that pride has little place under the full moon. Most lone wolves don't last long. I've learned to keep an open mind about... employment opportunities.
I usually have to keep a low profile. Even the most vicious humans don't trust me to keep my fangs to myself. What they don't know won't hurt them until it suits me. That's the beauty of Arachnos though. The fortunatas already knew my little secret by the time i found them.
And they didn't care.
(The villain counterparts to the heroic Kheldians were also difficult to write for. Though fully human, they were intrinsically tied into the main villain organization, which came with its own rather strict spider-themed aesthetic. There was absolutely nothing in Arachnos lore about werewolves. On the other hand, I had no trouble imagining that a ruthless megalomaniacal supervillain organization might keep werewolves on its payroll...
Coincidentally, since widows were described as an all-female order, this has been one of my scant handful of female characters in any game. Hey, you go where the lore takes you, even if it's to a snip-snip parlor.)
___________________________________________________
Arachnos Soldier
I've been around. Climbed through the Black Forest with the trees crashing behind me, got out before the pack's empty stomachs turned us on each other. Hounded the wounded in Crimea and took three bayonets for every bite. Outran the rescue planes in the Alps when the hikers started carrying radios for emergencies. Circled London ten times over hoping for a power failure so the lights wouldn't cut through my fog cover. Got chased across the fjord by those older, stronger and hungrier than i was.
This isn't an age for old legends. There's little place for the hunters in the night beneath the glare of science. I've gone hungry for too long, far too often. And then a fortunata sought me out, a wolf in sheep's clothing. Said there's no shame in being domesticated. Just gotta play hound-dog for the right master. So i took the deal. I took the leash.
But hey.
All you can eat.
(One of the last characters I ever created. It was nearly 2010 and I was toying with the notion of starting a blog, having noticed I'd developed the ability to turn the odd phrase over the years. Man, I was really channeling Neil Gaiman with this one. I do like the sonority of "hounded the wounded" and "took the" repetition.)
___________________________________________________
Ice / Stone Magic Tanker
Hoarfrost on your windows draped in candle-light
Daylight through the sunless hours on the plains veiled white
Tired bones all welcome creaking night by endless night
Permafrost on matted wolf-hair, and it still feels right.
No regrets for age-long bargains spoken under shimmering veils
Fear me, curse me, make of me the monster of your tales.
No regrets for dust returned to the dust from whence it rose
Tenfold i repay my blood price through the blood spilled by your foes.
Let my howls serve as your warning, stay inside tonight
Through my woods i'm called to follow a much older fright:
Fangs and claws, cold-hearted nightmares we once knew too well
But far greater gluttons they than can your stories tell.
Stay inside fair children, tired workmen, aged friends
Ageless i remain your monster, hunted foe to greater ends.
Stay inside and tell grim stories, out of winter's sight
Fear the fang and frost for sometimes, i must claim my right.
(Never really got to play him before losing interest in the game as a whole. Pity. More poetry but damnit, I'm kind of proud of this one too. Good rumbling tanky cadence, apt imagery. Ties everything together: the self-sacrificing antihero schtick, the link of a werewolf to nature magic, the dark bargain and blood price angle. Old school druidism right here.)
_____________________________________________________
I need to turn some of these into stories at some point.
It's changing me
I am becoming"
NIN - The Becoming
The recent quasi-revival of City of Heroes by fans is tempting me terribly to give it a try, despite being sure I'd wind up with a stolen identity and a virus-melted hard drive for logging in to a fan run game server. I'm also painfully aware how misplaced my nostalgia truly is, considering I quite cheerfully neglected to log into CoH for years prior to its final demise. In terms of gameplay it was a mind-numbing grindfest.
But you see, in yon days of yore there existed this concept of "roleplaying" and even for those like myself who never really got into the amateur theatre aspect, investing one's virtual selves with personal personality was a major selling point for online games. CoH excelled in inspiring and empowering users to do so, by letting you pick both a wide array of powers and an even wider array of costume pieces to mix-and-match into a unique individual look. Its graphics were simple enough to be expressive, detailed enough to express nuance. Certainly most players did not bother with this creative angle, and either hit the randomizer, copycatted print superheroes or just half-assed a completely nonsensical identity to feign nonchalance. However, a surprising proportion of CoH's population proved creative enough to turn heads. Each player could moreover pen one's own autobiography, and as the game heavily encouraged large alternate character rosters, I spent quite a bit of time coming up with alternate me-s.
Almost all of them were werewolves named Werewolfe, Werrewulfe, Werwulfe, etc. I had some other ideas, like a force field robot from beyond the solar system, or a teleporting assassin robot looking for its lost master, or a bird-winged lightning-summoner, or a clown with boxing gloves named The Unstoppable Farce, but mostly I took it as a challenge to interpret as many archetypes and powersets as I could in terms of lycanthropy, from magic to high tech, from punching to healing. Most of them were, to say the least, a bit of a stretch. And, while most of my CoH screenshots got nuked upon switching PCs last decade, I had a habit of writing my character descriptions into text files before pasting them into the game's interface. The largest of those text files survived. So, here they are, what few remain of the many-fold me of fifteen years ago:
_______________________________________________
Earth / Storm Science Controller
The will may sometimes bind to itself even the wildest of forces.
Lost now to memory, an ancient thinker once sought immortality and found it in the tainted blood of Lycaon's cursed ilk. A hermit found the stones and sky echoing his howls. An alchemist linked his hunger to the natural forces of earth and air and brought them to serve at his fingertips. Of late, a wolf came out of the woods in Paragon City and calmly asked if he might have use of a physics laboratory.
What has the philosopher, the witch, the alchemist, the scientist sought through the ages? No sacrifice too great, no change too frightening, no battle too difficult, even against mortality, but for the gift of knowledge.
(This was my main.
The controller archetype was arguably the squishiest in the game on the hero side, but I delighted in taking its most defensive powersets and adopting a hulking brute aesthetic. It helped that earth and storm powers come across as druidic enough to lend myself a nature-mage air to suit my lycanthropy. Of course, since most of my characters were created long before City of Villains added wolf heads, claws and such to the existing costume options, my early incarnations mostly just looked like filthy hobos in torn clothing, with the odd fangs or darkened eyes to suggest bestial natures lurking beneath.
Hard to put a lycanthropic spin on far-reaching crowd control powers. It worked much better than anticipated. For as long as I played the game, I never got altogether bored of playing this guy.)
_______________________________________________
Sonic / Dark Magic Defender
It has been centuries since the curse came upon me. If you hear the agony of my victims in my howls, mourn them not, for through their deaths you have gained an ally in this troubled night. It is through the madness of his hunger that the lycantrope gains respect for life and the will to defend it.
(Never was particularly crazy about this one. Too... "goth" for lack of a better term, for a healer. Should've just gone with a more druidic description.)
_______________________________________________
Dark / Sonic Mutation Defender
What is lycantropy? An age-old curse or the natural advancement past our human forms? The scientists marvelled at my genetic make-up and called me transcendent. The commoners just screamed and called me "freak".
If, with every passing year, i feel as if i am changing into something new, why is my body taking on forms older than humanity itself? Why does my voice echo ever more clearly the primeval snarl and howl of the wolf, and why do i feel more at ease stalking through the night than under the celebrated sun?
Until i find the answers, i will remain among the hungry damned, the beast-men of the forest, the only ones who ever called me "brother". I do not yet share their strength or their resilience, their physical maleability or their torment of hunger, but it is perhaps because of these lacks that they see, in me, hope.
(Can't even remember what this one looked like. Much better angle on the description though.)
________________________________________________
Plants / Ice Magic Dominator
I am the dying echo of a world you'd wish forgotten. I am the vengeance of abandoned gods, pushed ever northwards by impertinent children playing at shaping their world. I am the icy breath of the tundra and the creak of the endless primordial taiga. I am the hunger of the world you've scarred, and the chilling embrace of the world-tree's roots follows behind me.
(Ah, my first villain. Yeah, I went for the "ancient evil" routine. Sue me. Also, for some reason my controllers tended toward magic backgrounds. Even I couldn't make too many of CoH's powersets fit a werewolf. Archery or fire or force fields just didn't mesh with my central theme. So I did a lot of regeneration, nature themes, darkness, howling, and so forth.)
_________________________________________________
Necromancy / Poison Magic Mastermind
"The hunter in the moonlight, the stalker whose breath reeks of tombs and shallow graves... yes, yes, i have met him, i have seen him, never such a night as when he beckons you to surrender to his grisly feast. Soft paws and the velvet rumbling of his growl, it's all you'll know, just the caress of fangs is all his victims ever feel.
No death, no death, no peace and slumber for the bitten; his prey is ever a part of him. The shambling remnants of those he defiles herald his coming and the pestilence and venom of the scavanger's maw spread in his wake."
(Masterminds, for the record, were a villain pet class almost entirely dependent on their pets. Very fond of this one conceptually. Modern media tend to forget that old werewolf myths reflected, like vampires and ogres and other fangs in the night, the cannibalism taboo, and were also heavily associated with graveyards, grave-robbing, necromancy, etc. Real-life wolves' propensity for scavenging certainly helped.
I think the only thing I'd change now is having my venomous breath herald my coming and my shamblers tread in my wake.)
__________________________________________________
Warshade
The other lives superimpose themselves on the present sometimes. Against the backdrop of this great metropolis i see a ravenous monster stalking old world forests through the ages. Opposed like a mirror image of the same beast is the ageless evil of the nictus, frantically wandering alien worlds in search of victims.
No. No more. Let the hungers within me feed on each other. Whatever the two halves of my being wrought upon the universe in their dark pasts, i shall redeem now.
(CoH featured an alien symbiote species, Kheldians, as superheroic origin story. They were difficult to write for, already having a pre-set backstory. You were basically creating only half a character. On the other hand, their transformation motif and warshades' own vaguely lycanthropic lore meshed almost too well with my predilections, to the point of redundancy.)
__________________________________________________
Ice / Sonic Magic Corruptor
My shackles broken, captors scattered
My pain returned a hundred-fold
Yet cursed, by no remorse now burdened
I feel my hunger driving stronger than of old.
This pledge, to those who've sinned by one who's sinned:
Hide though you might behind your iron citadels and lies
My vengeance heralded by howls on arctic wind
Shall drown you lawful torturers' last cries.
(Another villain. Yes, some of these were in verse. Deal with it. What more appropriate wolf-man form of self-expression than... doggerel? And damnit, I still think this sounds like a badass antivillain declaration of war upon the world which wronged me. His costume was one of the later, wolf-headed ones, with chains wrapped around his bare torso. Guy was freakin' METAL!)
__________________________________________________
Super strength / Dark armor Natural Brute
Not been born with sharp wolf fangs so i sharpened them myself. Ain't no son of a demigod, so i give my hatreds form. Never had no head for gadgets so my body's my greatest tool. I see reason beyond reason in the will to frustrate norms. I am myself, perfected and improved. It my strength which crushes your achievements, my will that saps your own. I am more, in myself, than you whole herd of humanity in your interdependencies.
(My tanky villain. Byron, eat your heart out.)
__________________________________________________
Claws / Reflexes Science Stalker
A dash of this, a pinch of that. Fangs and claws and disembodied midnight howls, this is what little lycantropes are made of. Who says mad scientists can't do their own dirty work? Quick as your last breath and silent as your lost hopes, look for me under the full moon. One touch is all i want..
(A villain in a lab coat, complete with bright yellow lab gloves and hood obscuring his Mr. Hyde visage. Unsurprisingly, I had a lot of trouble fitting lycanthropy to the "science" and "technology" backgrounds. Thank you, Robert Louis Stevenson.)
__________________________________________________
Sonic / Ice Technology Blaster
What do you expect of a lycantrope? A ravenous beast, fangs dripping with gore? A mindless monster on the outskirts of society? I have no interrest in being your superstition, your rumour, your primal fear. Accursed or bestial, i am at my core what i always was. This body is but a tool with which the mind can build, a framework upon which i, the intellect, can create new forms. Dynamos and amplifiers, capacitors, routers and zero-point energy drain, stacked fer-on-fur upon the howling, hulking predator whose body i inhabit. What is a lycantrope's body? To me, it's no more than a battery pack.
(I'm not much for damage-dealing in games. A blaster is such an inelegant weapon. Still, I ended up enjoying this guy more than I'd expected. He was a howler with a muzzle like Bane's from Batman, which fit more neatly than most of my creations. Plus, I still find "fer-on-fur" a delightfully pithy turn of phrase.)
___________________________________________________
Arachnos Widow
Out of the forest and into the wild. I sometimes wonder what it must have been like before i was changed, before gunpowder, silver bullets and canine tracking teams. Ah, to have roamed the woods of mesopotamia and stumbled upon plentiful and unwary primitives, instead of scrambling to track down lost children by the highway before police sirens shatter the night.
If there's one thing you learn quickly in your first nights of hunger, it's that pride has little place under the full moon. Most lone wolves don't last long. I've learned to keep an open mind about... employment opportunities.
I usually have to keep a low profile. Even the most vicious humans don't trust me to keep my fangs to myself. What they don't know won't hurt them until it suits me. That's the beauty of Arachnos though. The fortunatas already knew my little secret by the time i found them.
And they didn't care.
(The villain counterparts to the heroic Kheldians were also difficult to write for. Though fully human, they were intrinsically tied into the main villain organization, which came with its own rather strict spider-themed aesthetic. There was absolutely nothing in Arachnos lore about werewolves. On the other hand, I had no trouble imagining that a ruthless megalomaniacal supervillain organization might keep werewolves on its payroll...
Coincidentally, since widows were described as an all-female order, this has been one of my scant handful of female characters in any game. Hey, you go where the lore takes you, even if it's to a snip-snip parlor.)
___________________________________________________
Arachnos Soldier
I've been around. Climbed through the Black Forest with the trees crashing behind me, got out before the pack's empty stomachs turned us on each other. Hounded the wounded in Crimea and took three bayonets for every bite. Outran the rescue planes in the Alps when the hikers started carrying radios for emergencies. Circled London ten times over hoping for a power failure so the lights wouldn't cut through my fog cover. Got chased across the fjord by those older, stronger and hungrier than i was.
This isn't an age for old legends. There's little place for the hunters in the night beneath the glare of science. I've gone hungry for too long, far too often. And then a fortunata sought me out, a wolf in sheep's clothing. Said there's no shame in being domesticated. Just gotta play hound-dog for the right master. So i took the deal. I took the leash.
But hey.
All you can eat.
(One of the last characters I ever created. It was nearly 2010 and I was toying with the notion of starting a blog, having noticed I'd developed the ability to turn the odd phrase over the years. Man, I was really channeling Neil Gaiman with this one. I do like the sonority of "hounded the wounded" and "took the" repetition.)
___________________________________________________
Ice / Stone Magic Tanker
Hoarfrost on your windows draped in candle-light
Daylight through the sunless hours on the plains veiled white
Tired bones all welcome creaking night by endless night
Permafrost on matted wolf-hair, and it still feels right.
No regrets for age-long bargains spoken under shimmering veils
Fear me, curse me, make of me the monster of your tales.
No regrets for dust returned to the dust from whence it rose
Tenfold i repay my blood price through the blood spilled by your foes.
Let my howls serve as your warning, stay inside tonight
Through my woods i'm called to follow a much older fright:
Fangs and claws, cold-hearted nightmares we once knew too well
But far greater gluttons they than can your stories tell.
Stay inside fair children, tired workmen, aged friends
Ageless i remain your monster, hunted foe to greater ends.
Stay inside and tell grim stories, out of winter's sight
Fear the fang and frost for sometimes, i must claim my right.
(Never really got to play him before losing interest in the game as a whole. Pity. More poetry but damnit, I'm kind of proud of this one too. Good rumbling tanky cadence, apt imagery. Ties everything together: the self-sacrificing antihero schtick, the link of a werewolf to nature magic, the dark bargain and blood price angle. Old school druidism right here.)
_____________________________________________________
I need to turn some of these into stories at some point.
Monday, June 24, 2019
Alpha
Would you like to be pleasantly surprised by poor production values? Watch Alpha.
One of the DVD extras for Quest for Fire described an unforseen difficulty encountered when they tried to film scenes involving mammoths. They used circus elephants as handy stand-ins, garbed in shag rugs and whatnot so as to lend them an air of mastodonity. (And by the way, wouldn't you love to be the one to hand the make-up crew THAT assignment.) Unfortunately for them, elephants turned out to be just visually oriented enough to panic upon seeing each other in Halloween attire. Cue the Yackety Sax.
Luckily for anyone filming a stone-age adventure these days, you can avoid such shenanigans by computer-generating your Pleistocene megafauna. Unluckily, doing it well still requires more moolah than Alpha's crew was willing or able to fork out. Most of their cable documentary reenactment-grade beasties would make poor doomed Varok and his mammoth look lifelike by comparison. Even on the live action end of things, most of the extras could've used a couple more days of rehearsal. And if those flaws might be overlooked, the Flintstones costumes were just unforgivably discrepant. Though supposedly made for the movie itself they still look like faux-leather biker jackets bought at Sears. On clearance. It takes a lot of cut corners and laziness to make me complain about costumes, of all things, but nothing about modern production techniques can make for an authentic-looking stone-age overcoat. The exterior is too glossy, the stitching too rectilinear, the hems too even, the lining too clean. Alpha's immersion could've been aided greatly had the costume department simply taken the time to toboggan down some rocky slopes atop their new creations before declaring them caveman fresh. All the more perplexing that this was marketed as, among other things, an IMAX feature.
And yet... Alpha is a good film. The showstopping climactic scene on the ice paradoxically benefited from the cheap CGI's more stylized look. The core cast of around three or four (wolfdog included) acted their hearts out, more than compensating for the more befuddled bit players. The costumes... were still crap, but at least hair ornaments and other jewelry looked authentic.
Most importantly, it's a good story. "A boy an his dog" being nearly as trite a setup as "boy meets girl" makes it hard to believe anything worthwhile might come of it. Yet the prehistoric setting puts it in a new, much less sappy light. For the same reason, the coming of age motif seems entirely more apt to a paleolithic tribe which could be more logically expected to abide by such primitive ritualism. Being written, directed and produced largely by the same author, the entire flick holds together remarkably well from start to finish, with almost no unnecessary digressions, none of the usual gratuitous sex scenes or cackling villain monologues or contractually mandated close-ups. Though it takes some liberties with its factual inspiration, it's nonetheless surprisingly engaging.
One of the DVD extras for Quest for Fire described an unforseen difficulty encountered when they tried to film scenes involving mammoths. They used circus elephants as handy stand-ins, garbed in shag rugs and whatnot so as to lend them an air of mastodonity. (And by the way, wouldn't you love to be the one to hand the make-up crew THAT assignment.) Unfortunately for them, elephants turned out to be just visually oriented enough to panic upon seeing each other in Halloween attire. Cue the Yackety Sax.
Luckily for anyone filming a stone-age adventure these days, you can avoid such shenanigans by computer-generating your Pleistocene megafauna. Unluckily, doing it well still requires more moolah than Alpha's crew was willing or able to fork out. Most of their cable documentary reenactment-grade beasties would make poor doomed Varok and his mammoth look lifelike by comparison. Even on the live action end of things, most of the extras could've used a couple more days of rehearsal. And if those flaws might be overlooked, the Flintstones costumes were just unforgivably discrepant. Though supposedly made for the movie itself they still look like faux-leather biker jackets bought at Sears. On clearance. It takes a lot of cut corners and laziness to make me complain about costumes, of all things, but nothing about modern production techniques can make for an authentic-looking stone-age overcoat. The exterior is too glossy, the stitching too rectilinear, the hems too even, the lining too clean. Alpha's immersion could've been aided greatly had the costume department simply taken the time to toboggan down some rocky slopes atop their new creations before declaring them caveman fresh. All the more perplexing that this was marketed as, among other things, an IMAX feature.
And yet... Alpha is a good film. The showstopping climactic scene on the ice paradoxically benefited from the cheap CGI's more stylized look. The core cast of around three or four (wolfdog included) acted their hearts out, more than compensating for the more befuddled bit players. The costumes... were still crap, but at least hair ornaments and other jewelry looked authentic.
Most importantly, it's a good story. "A boy an his dog" being nearly as trite a setup as "boy meets girl" makes it hard to believe anything worthwhile might come of it. Yet the prehistoric setting puts it in a new, much less sappy light. For the same reason, the coming of age motif seems entirely more apt to a paleolithic tribe which could be more logically expected to abide by such primitive ritualism. Being written, directed and produced largely by the same author, the entire flick holds together remarkably well from start to finish, with almost no unnecessary digressions, none of the usual gratuitous sex scenes or cackling villain monologues or contractually mandated close-ups. Though it takes some liberties with its factual inspiration, it's nonetheless surprisingly engaging.
Saturday, June 22, 2019
Cutting Through the Treacle: I Want a Little List
There's something I want every company who advertises online to try, and I'm concerned especially, as is my wont, with computer game designers. From now on, I want you to carry out all of your intra- and inter-organizational communication via Tumblr-style tiles, or animated banner ads, or youtube videos with hammy narration and bombastic Hollywood movie preview soundtracks. All of it. No more helpful flowcharts, no more concise and clearly explicative memoranda, no more easy-on-the-eyes bulleted lists with neatly nested annotations, no more calendars delineating who works when and on what task. I want you to try getting all your information via flashy, endless Tumblr jumbles. Since you seem to think it an appropriate means of conveying information about your product, since you think it's good enough for your customers, then it must also be good enough for your workspace.
But if it's not good enough for you to be treated like an idiot, inundated with flash instead of substance, glitz instead of information, then describe your product!
List your system requirements.
List the genres your product might fit.
List gameplay options.
List your factions.
List your classes.
List your weapons.
List your map sizes and terrain types.
List your monster types.
List your skill trees.
List everything! In plain text! You are not transcendent artistes birthing wonders beyond mortal speech. You're a bunch of semiliterate code-monkeys, technicians with maybe one or two decent ideas in your heads worth paying for. Express those ideas clearly and succinctly, without the industrial light and magic. In order to get information about your product, I should not have to glean every single scrap of useful info out of half an hour's video of some degenerate nasal-voiced dweeb slobbering all over the microphone and fumbling at building hype. Provide clear information. Document your product's features just like you're supposed to document your code.*
Note, I'm not (just) complaining about the existence of advertising. I'm pissed off that for over a decade now it's been impossible to find any official information, about any product but especially games, outside of advertisements. Where are the fact sheets? In the days when games still came in cardboard boxes, companies grudgingly compiled lists of features if for no other reason than to have something that could fit on a game box. Unlimited broadband has transmuted quick-reference cards into tedious animated, narrated, triple-pixelated fudge ripples for only $9.99 for a limited time in the cash shop 'til you drop loot don't scoot before you get the boot and what was I talking about again? Oh yeah: obfuscation.
Just tell me what you're selling, and do away with that profligate poseur and cheat, the youtube narcissist. He never will be missed. They'll none of them be missed.
___________________________________________________________
*Though, from some of the complaints I've been hearing about recent games, documenting code has gone out of style as well.
But if it's not good enough for you to be treated like an idiot, inundated with flash instead of substance, glitz instead of information, then describe your product!
List your system requirements.
List the genres your product might fit.
List gameplay options.
List your factions.
List your classes.
List your weapons.
List your map sizes and terrain types.
List your monster types.
List your skill trees.
List everything! In plain text! You are not transcendent artistes birthing wonders beyond mortal speech. You're a bunch of semiliterate code-monkeys, technicians with maybe one or two decent ideas in your heads worth paying for. Express those ideas clearly and succinctly, without the industrial light and magic. In order to get information about your product, I should not have to glean every single scrap of useful info out of half an hour's video of some degenerate nasal-voiced dweeb slobbering all over the microphone and fumbling at building hype. Provide clear information. Document your product's features just like you're supposed to document your code.*
Note, I'm not (just) complaining about the existence of advertising. I'm pissed off that for over a decade now it's been impossible to find any official information, about any product but especially games, outside of advertisements. Where are the fact sheets? In the days when games still came in cardboard boxes, companies grudgingly compiled lists of features if for no other reason than to have something that could fit on a game box. Unlimited broadband has transmuted quick-reference cards into tedious animated, narrated, triple-pixelated fudge ripples for only $9.99 for a limited time in the cash shop 'til you drop loot don't scoot before you get the boot and what was I talking about again? Oh yeah: obfuscation.
Just tell me what you're selling, and do away with that profligate poseur and cheat, the youtube narcissist. He never will be missed. They'll none of them be missed.
___________________________________________________________
*Though, from some of the complaints I've been hearing about recent games, documenting code has gone out of style as well.
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
Snub the Passive Voice
"Their mother wasn't raped; I ate her pussy while she was asleep"
Eminem - Amityville
"That's the mentality here
That's the reality here"
also Eminem - Amityville, on a different topic
_____________________________________________________
"It always seems impossible until it's done."
Nelson Mandela
_____________________________________________________
A recent visit to some relatives got me watching some good old-fashioned teleo-vision, including a nature documentary about mountains, itself including mountain dwelling snub-nosed monkeys. It featured an adorably snub-nosed little monkey (truth in advertising) who gets abandoned when his mother shacks up with her former mate's murderers. The juvenile now has to find a group of bachelor males with whom to huddle for warmth against the night's freezing temperatures. The voiceover repeatedly drives home the point of just how wild and brutish the murderous bachelor males are. Especially the leader. And how amazing it is that they'd take in a useless little orphan monkey-boy. Amazing. Just amazing.
... Wait, it seems like we fast-forwarded past something here. Can we go back to the part where a helpless little monklet was bounced from his clan? That part is apparently not amazing. In social mammals, as a rule, females band together around their charming princes and the rest of the males are on their own. Didn't warrant much commentary. It's just business as usual. And in fact it is perfectly natural from an evolutionary perspective, fitting both male and female reproductive strategies. Male offspring are a high-risk, high-payoff proposition. They're a gamble. The successful few are really successful. The rest? Our savage mother nature doesn't give a shit.
Polite, civilized society, on the other hand, is supposed to give all of the shits.
And what could be more polite and civilized than the English? My recent exposure to tha teevee also included the pilot episode of Jamestown, which being advertised as created by former Downton Abbey hotshots, inevitably caters to much the same middle class female audience. Now, when one has less to say, one tends to say it louder, and as Jamestown is of lower budget and quality than its predecessor, it compensated by ramping up the female chauvinism. Leaving aside other offenses, I was amused at the dramatic line used for advertisements:
"these men have been on their own for so long they've ceased being men"
First, just try reversing the polarity on that. Imagine a show being promoted with the line "these women have been on their own for so long they've ceased being women" and then imagine the ten ton boot that would be used to kick the hapless writer out the studio's doors.
Second, and more importantly, just try to gauge the unmitigated conceit of that statement. Those men have been suffering the privations, dangers, isolation, humiliation and terror of frontier life for a dozen years to provide you with a safety net upon your arrival. Oh, how saaaad for <you> that <they> suffered a dozen years of dehumanizing experiences!
But ok, let's switch media. Webcomics, for their relatively high creative freedom, youth appeal and need to incorporate audience expectations into rapidfire four-panel humor, present an interesting delineation of modern social acceptability and transgression. Take Questionable Content for instance, which recently had a male character yank a grey hair out of a female friend's head and mock her existential despair at getting old, pawing at her head for more grey hairs as she sat there whining pitifully. Cue laugh track. Then on the next page she innocently points out it's no worse than that one wrinkle he's gotten, at which point he pulls a knife on her and threatens her into recanting the observation while cowering from him.
Hah! Hilarious, amirite?
Oh, wait, I should have noted I'm doing that "reverse the polarity" thing where I reverse male and female roles to test the objectivity of pro-female chauvinism. I guess the original version with the female mocking a man and threatening to fly into a rage is... cute. Right? When a double standard favors women, we're supposed to applaud it.
Or try a 2014 strip from Candorville, a left-wing political comic wavering between sanity or blindly mouthing the Democratic Party's talking points. A strawman conservative complains about the truth gap in the supposed gender wage gap, and is shot down by the author's avatar - not by actually addressing the point but by complaining that "a lot of industries still won't hire women" with a specific jab at the tech sector. In the fine print rant below, the author treats us to this gem:
"Even though women outnumber men at the top schools and in the workforce and use the latest gadgets and apps in equal if not greater numbers, they still represent a small fraction of executives, entrepreneurs, investors and engineers."
Well, at least this time I didn't have to reverse the polarity; he did it for me. Yes, how sad for women that despite being handed every social good and advantage without working themselves to death, they're still refusing to work themselves to death to prove their worth by amassing superfluous money and fame.
How sad for them. On the other hand, the men whose buying power has been hooked and crooked into women's hands, whose seats in universities have been wrested to give the lady a subsidized fainting couch called gender studies? Darrin Bell didn't need to worry about those men. He can't worry about them, for fear a feminist lynch mob will shove his Pulitzer up his ass.
I also enjoyed the webcomic Leftover Soup through to its somewhat sappy end. Quirky characters straddle that nerdy line between reality and fantasy enough to make me swallow what is otherwise merely a "slice of life" comic. Like most urbane, media-savvy modern men, the author's got a huge fucking blind spot when it comes to... fucking, or more broadly,broads gender relations. Unlike most of us, he's been actively working to improve his thinking on the matter for two decades now, with mixed success. He's done a couple of bits on the topic of rape. One involved a gay member of a polyamorous ... coven? cabal? tupperware club with benefits? what the hell is the proper term for that anyway? In any case, gay guy in a polyamorous relationship confesses to having sucked off straight guy within same relationship without his knowledge despite knowing his friend's aversion to boy-boy love.
Is that rape? The comic goes into several dozen panels of discussion on the topic, but I always meant to comment on this page in particular and its author commentary for its apt display of doublethink. The victim doesn't want to use the R-word to describe what happened to him because
A) the event wasn't traumatic until he found out about it and
B) He's a dude, dude.
A lot of effort, planned or unwitting, sinks into supporting feminists' self-justifying "rape culture" paranoid fantasies, to feed the entitlement of women as heroines over men as villains. As one example, the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. years ago fabricated a separate category of sexual assault called "made to penetrate" for abuse of the penis to ensure that women who rape men can be arbitrarily excluded from r-a-p-e statistics when politically convenient. So when Brunhilde holds a gun to your head and rides you like a unicycle until your skin tears, take solace knowing you won't be permitted to infringe on women's absolute moral superiority by the galling suggestion that you, a lowly male, might be entitled to the same consideration as your female superiors in the natural order. Glory in your government's righteous defense of the gender oppression fairytale. Man bad. Woman good. Shut up.
In the case of Leftover Soup, the author's commentary below the comic was often as interesting as the comic itself. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. He may think "The R-word is what happens to chicks" is one of the most horrible sentences he's ever written, but as far as the government's concerned it's public policy. Women don't rape men, at least not as long as you don't define women forcing sex on men as rape.
Of course the real issue, as I often say, is to imagine the reverse. Reverse the polarity. I have to wonder if Tailsteak, as edgy and risque as he markets himself, would have supported one of his female instead of male characters stating that she didn't suffer enough at the time of her explicitly nonconsensual sex act for it to count as rape. She was too drunk to remember it so who cares. Roofied girls don't remember it so it's cool, yo. I mean, that IS what the beginning of Kill Bill taught us, right? Comatose girls are fair game. Take it like a man, babe. Or, in the author's words:
"I think Trent's mindset is realistic and understandable, though. There's a male ego thing involved - as Dave Chappelle once said, there's an impulse to walk it off."
I love the passive voice here in particular. "There's" this-and-that. There just is. Imagine this same argument sixty or seventy years ago. There's a female ego thing involved in keeping house for her man and having him handle the finances. And yes, there may very well be some nesting instinct factor to women's traditional role in relationships, but we're supposed to be capable of acknowledging that where instinct leads to self-harm or a loss of personal agency, instinct should be curbed or at least counterbalanced by reason and polite discourse. We would see as the pinnacle of political incorrectness any claim that female reticence to raise the hue and cry about an unwanted sexual contact just "is" and leave it at that - to say that if she doesn't want to condemn her abuser then eh, it's a chick thing. There's a female ego thing involved.
Yet Tailsteak was at least right in calling his own enforcement of self-destructive male competence and the taboo on male neediness realistic because you see this bullshit day in and day out, all our lives. Listen to how the topic of husband-beating's handled, the few times it doesn't just yield laughter and mockery of male victims. Men are stronger than women so it hurts less when women hit so therefore shut up and take it like a man.
Oh? So it's fine if male wife-batterers agree to hit their wives just little less violently?
Well you see there's a female ego thing involved in just taking her husband's abuse and keeping up the facade of a happy relationship to make her girlfriends envious.
It's not a valid argument to distinguish men from women if you wouldn't accept it as a valid distinction between females. If it's physical strength that matters, how hard does a man have to hit a woman before it counts? How many newtons per zygomatic centimeter delineate an acceptably feminine strength of abuse?
Bring up the topic of genital mutilation as another example and hear the utter silence from self-righteous social activists on the topic of worldwide, entrenched male circumcision - even as they wail and tear their hair out about the much less popular female version limited to northern Africa and the Middle East. People will waver and stammer and inevitably hit upon what seems to them like an irrefutable argument.
Well, I mean, it's not as bad for boys, is it? They're not cutting the whole penis... it hurts less, doesn't it... they don't lose as much sensation, not all of it.
In other words, walk it off you big literal baby.
Who the shit gives a crap? You're gratuitously chopping pieces off an infant with the express purpose of limiting its future capacity for pleasure, even if you couch it in superstitious babble.
Would you accept the argument that certain forms of cliterectomy shouldn't count as abusive because they don't inflict enough suffering? If so, how little or how much pain and anhedonia amount to justification in mutilating women?
Yes, but you see, there's a female ego thing involved in it. There's an impulse to just walk it off. They feel more like princesses if they're missing their pea.
Made to penetrate? There's that passive voice again. So very very useful. Almost as though there was no second person involved at all. Rape involves a rapist, but what's this supposed to imply? A makist? On the other hand "penetrate" in fact certainly makes it sound like that man was doing something instead of being attacked. He's verbing all the way.
We're obsessed with playing knights in shining armor. Anything in our society which putatively harms women must be made the target of trillion-dollar decades-long eradication campaigns. If anything harms men more than women on the other hand, then "there's an impulse" to ignore it. Male suffering is just how the world works. Incarceration rates, medical research, workplace safety, lower higher education, hospital care, preventive medical care, divorce laws, violence, homelessness, circumcision, military brainwashing campaigns, dying at least five years younger and the endless injustice of female conditioning of male behavior to make us swallow all this bullshit, it all just "is" as if it were an immutable law of the universe. And when what we consider a stereotypically male-on-female crime like rape, child abuse or spousal abuse turns out to contain as many or more female-on-male acts, when social ills like religion, consumerism or the anti-abortion movement turn out to be majority female, well, that half of the equation? That ain't even "is." We just... walk it off. Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.
It just feels right, in our subconscious naturalistic fallacy, that men should incur higher damage and receive less help. In our neural infrastructure, we are still to a large extent furry little tree-dwellers huddling together in terror of the night. We are apes, primates, monkeys, and for thirty or sixty million years we have ensured our genetic continuation by having our females band together in safety and tossing males to the wolves. When our genus branched off, when the tyranny of our prolonged gestation and infancy wore so heavily upon women that they grew dependent on male protection and providence, this entitlement was not reversed but only reinforced, each man competing for female attention then shackled to a designated recipient of his labor. Any harm men incur while carrying out that instinctive role, well... just walk it off. We don't even have to think about it. It's our default setting. It seems impossible that it would be otherwise.
And yet, to what extent is the impulse to walk it off instinctive and to what extent does it stem from our socially inculcated mores, our chivalry both medieval and modern, our desperation to reinforce women's tacitly presumed higher value, higher entitlement to peace, safety and happiness and men's subservient role in securing women's safety and contentment? And if it is an instinct, isn't this one of those cases where instinct should be curbed in favor of more civilized self-respect instead of slavishly "walking off" abuse by the unfairer sex? We are minds, not merely ape bodies. We are not natural creatures, lest you think yourself natural in your polyester clothing, sipping your latte while thumb-scrolling through this on your smartphone in an air-conditioned steel cave. We need to address such matters rationally. The issue isn't whether men can "take it" more resiliently than women, but that no-one should be brainwashed into taking abuse in the first place.
How valuable is the victimology pecking order to you? I guess that depends on your definition of equality.
Eminem - Amityville
"That's the mentality here
That's the reality here"
also Eminem - Amityville, on a different topic
_____________________________________________________
"It always seems impossible until it's done."
Nelson Mandela
_____________________________________________________
A recent visit to some relatives got me watching some good old-fashioned teleo-vision, including a nature documentary about mountains, itself including mountain dwelling snub-nosed monkeys. It featured an adorably snub-nosed little monkey (truth in advertising) who gets abandoned when his mother shacks up with her former mate's murderers. The juvenile now has to find a group of bachelor males with whom to huddle for warmth against the night's freezing temperatures. The voiceover repeatedly drives home the point of just how wild and brutish the murderous bachelor males are. Especially the leader. And how amazing it is that they'd take in a useless little orphan monkey-boy. Amazing. Just amazing.
... Wait, it seems like we fast-forwarded past something here. Can we go back to the part where a helpless little monklet was bounced from his clan? That part is apparently not amazing. In social mammals, as a rule, females band together around their charming princes and the rest of the males are on their own. Didn't warrant much commentary. It's just business as usual. And in fact it is perfectly natural from an evolutionary perspective, fitting both male and female reproductive strategies. Male offspring are a high-risk, high-payoff proposition. They're a gamble. The successful few are really successful. The rest? Our savage mother nature doesn't give a shit.
Polite, civilized society, on the other hand, is supposed to give all of the shits.
And what could be more polite and civilized than the English? My recent exposure to tha teevee also included the pilot episode of Jamestown, which being advertised as created by former Downton Abbey hotshots, inevitably caters to much the same middle class female audience. Now, when one has less to say, one tends to say it louder, and as Jamestown is of lower budget and quality than its predecessor, it compensated by ramping up the female chauvinism. Leaving aside other offenses, I was amused at the dramatic line used for advertisements:
"these men have been on their own for so long they've ceased being men"
First, just try reversing the polarity on that. Imagine a show being promoted with the line "these women have been on their own for so long they've ceased being women" and then imagine the ten ton boot that would be used to kick the hapless writer out the studio's doors.
Second, and more importantly, just try to gauge the unmitigated conceit of that statement. Those men have been suffering the privations, dangers, isolation, humiliation and terror of frontier life for a dozen years to provide you with a safety net upon your arrival. Oh, how saaaad for <you> that <they> suffered a dozen years of dehumanizing experiences!
But ok, let's switch media. Webcomics, for their relatively high creative freedom, youth appeal and need to incorporate audience expectations into rapidfire four-panel humor, present an interesting delineation of modern social acceptability and transgression. Take Questionable Content for instance, which recently had a male character yank a grey hair out of a female friend's head and mock her existential despair at getting old, pawing at her head for more grey hairs as she sat there whining pitifully. Cue laugh track. Then on the next page she innocently points out it's no worse than that one wrinkle he's gotten, at which point he pulls a knife on her and threatens her into recanting the observation while cowering from him.
Hah! Hilarious, amirite?
Oh, wait, I should have noted I'm doing that "reverse the polarity" thing where I reverse male and female roles to test the objectivity of pro-female chauvinism. I guess the original version with the female mocking a man and threatening to fly into a rage is... cute. Right? When a double standard favors women, we're supposed to applaud it.
Or try a 2014 strip from Candorville, a left-wing political comic wavering between sanity or blindly mouthing the Democratic Party's talking points. A strawman conservative complains about the truth gap in the supposed gender wage gap, and is shot down by the author's avatar - not by actually addressing the point but by complaining that "a lot of industries still won't hire women" with a specific jab at the tech sector. In the fine print rant below, the author treats us to this gem:
"Even though women outnumber men at the top schools and in the workforce and use the latest gadgets and apps in equal if not greater numbers, they still represent a small fraction of executives, entrepreneurs, investors and engineers."
Well, at least this time I didn't have to reverse the polarity; he did it for me. Yes, how sad for women that despite being handed every social good and advantage without working themselves to death, they're still refusing to work themselves to death to prove their worth by amassing superfluous money and fame.
How sad for them. On the other hand, the men whose buying power has been hooked and crooked into women's hands, whose seats in universities have been wrested to give the lady a subsidized fainting couch called gender studies? Darrin Bell didn't need to worry about those men. He can't worry about them, for fear a feminist lynch mob will shove his Pulitzer up his ass.
I also enjoyed the webcomic Leftover Soup through to its somewhat sappy end. Quirky characters straddle that nerdy line between reality and fantasy enough to make me swallow what is otherwise merely a "slice of life" comic. Like most urbane, media-savvy modern men, the author's got a huge fucking blind spot when it comes to... fucking, or more broadly,
Is that rape? The comic goes into several dozen panels of discussion on the topic, but I always meant to comment on this page in particular and its author commentary for its apt display of doublethink. The victim doesn't want to use the R-word to describe what happened to him because
A) the event wasn't traumatic until he found out about it and
B) He's a dude, dude.
A lot of effort, planned or unwitting, sinks into supporting feminists' self-justifying "rape culture" paranoid fantasies, to feed the entitlement of women as heroines over men as villains. As one example, the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. years ago fabricated a separate category of sexual assault called "made to penetrate" for abuse of the penis to ensure that women who rape men can be arbitrarily excluded from r-a-p-e statistics when politically convenient. So when Brunhilde holds a gun to your head and rides you like a unicycle until your skin tears, take solace knowing you won't be permitted to infringe on women's absolute moral superiority by the galling suggestion that you, a lowly male, might be entitled to the same consideration as your female superiors in the natural order. Glory in your government's righteous defense of the gender oppression fairytale. Man bad. Woman good. Shut up.
In the case of Leftover Soup, the author's commentary below the comic was often as interesting as the comic itself. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. He may think "The R-word is what happens to chicks" is one of the most horrible sentences he's ever written, but as far as the government's concerned it's public policy. Women don't rape men, at least not as long as you don't define women forcing sex on men as rape.
Of course the real issue, as I often say, is to imagine the reverse. Reverse the polarity. I have to wonder if Tailsteak, as edgy and risque as he markets himself, would have supported one of his female instead of male characters stating that she didn't suffer enough at the time of her explicitly nonconsensual sex act for it to count as rape. She was too drunk to remember it so who cares. Roofied girls don't remember it so it's cool, yo. I mean, that IS what the beginning of Kill Bill taught us, right? Comatose girls are fair game. Take it like a man, babe. Or, in the author's words:
"I think Trent's mindset is realistic and understandable, though. There's a male ego thing involved - as Dave Chappelle once said, there's an impulse to walk it off."
I love the passive voice here in particular. "There's" this-and-that. There just is. Imagine this same argument sixty or seventy years ago. There's a female ego thing involved in keeping house for her man and having him handle the finances. And yes, there may very well be some nesting instinct factor to women's traditional role in relationships, but we're supposed to be capable of acknowledging that where instinct leads to self-harm or a loss of personal agency, instinct should be curbed or at least counterbalanced by reason and polite discourse. We would see as the pinnacle of political incorrectness any claim that female reticence to raise the hue and cry about an unwanted sexual contact just "is" and leave it at that - to say that if she doesn't want to condemn her abuser then eh, it's a chick thing. There's a female ego thing involved.
Yet Tailsteak was at least right in calling his own enforcement of self-destructive male competence and the taboo on male neediness realistic because you see this bullshit day in and day out, all our lives. Listen to how the topic of husband-beating's handled, the few times it doesn't just yield laughter and mockery of male victims. Men are stronger than women so it hurts less when women hit so therefore shut up and take it like a man.
Oh? So it's fine if male wife-batterers agree to hit their wives just little less violently?
Well you see there's a female ego thing involved in just taking her husband's abuse and keeping up the facade of a happy relationship to make her girlfriends envious.
It's not a valid argument to distinguish men from women if you wouldn't accept it as a valid distinction between females. If it's physical strength that matters, how hard does a man have to hit a woman before it counts? How many newtons per zygomatic centimeter delineate an acceptably feminine strength of abuse?
Bring up the topic of genital mutilation as another example and hear the utter silence from self-righteous social activists on the topic of worldwide, entrenched male circumcision - even as they wail and tear their hair out about the much less popular female version limited to northern Africa and the Middle East. People will waver and stammer and inevitably hit upon what seems to them like an irrefutable argument.
Well, I mean, it's not as bad for boys, is it? They're not cutting the whole penis... it hurts less, doesn't it... they don't lose as much sensation, not all of it.
In other words, walk it off you big literal baby.
Who the shit gives a crap? You're gratuitously chopping pieces off an infant with the express purpose of limiting its future capacity for pleasure, even if you couch it in superstitious babble.
Would you accept the argument that certain forms of cliterectomy shouldn't count as abusive because they don't inflict enough suffering? If so, how little or how much pain and anhedonia amount to justification in mutilating women?
Yes, but you see, there's a female ego thing involved in it. There's an impulse to just walk it off. They feel more like princesses if they're missing their pea.
Made to penetrate? There's that passive voice again. So very very useful. Almost as though there was no second person involved at all. Rape involves a rapist, but what's this supposed to imply? A makist? On the other hand "penetrate" in fact certainly makes it sound like that man was doing something instead of being attacked. He's verbing all the way.
We're obsessed with playing knights in shining armor. Anything in our society which putatively harms women must be made the target of trillion-dollar decades-long eradication campaigns. If anything harms men more than women on the other hand, then "there's an impulse" to ignore it. Male suffering is just how the world works. Incarceration rates, medical research, workplace safety, lower higher education, hospital care, preventive medical care, divorce laws, violence, homelessness, circumcision, military brainwashing campaigns, dying at least five years younger and the endless injustice of female conditioning of male behavior to make us swallow all this bullshit, it all just "is" as if it were an immutable law of the universe. And when what we consider a stereotypically male-on-female crime like rape, child abuse or spousal abuse turns out to contain as many or more female-on-male acts, when social ills like religion, consumerism or the anti-abortion movement turn out to be majority female, well, that half of the equation? That ain't even "is." We just... walk it off. Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.
It just feels right, in our subconscious naturalistic fallacy, that men should incur higher damage and receive less help. In our neural infrastructure, we are still to a large extent furry little tree-dwellers huddling together in terror of the night. We are apes, primates, monkeys, and for thirty or sixty million years we have ensured our genetic continuation by having our females band together in safety and tossing males to the wolves. When our genus branched off, when the tyranny of our prolonged gestation and infancy wore so heavily upon women that they grew dependent on male protection and providence, this entitlement was not reversed but only reinforced, each man competing for female attention then shackled to a designated recipient of his labor. Any harm men incur while carrying out that instinctive role, well... just walk it off. We don't even have to think about it. It's our default setting. It seems impossible that it would be otherwise.
And yet, to what extent is the impulse to walk it off instinctive and to what extent does it stem from our socially inculcated mores, our chivalry both medieval and modern, our desperation to reinforce women's tacitly presumed higher value, higher entitlement to peace, safety and happiness and men's subservient role in securing women's safety and contentment? And if it is an instinct, isn't this one of those cases where instinct should be curbed in favor of more civilized self-respect instead of slavishly "walking off" abuse by the unfairer sex? We are minds, not merely ape bodies. We are not natural creatures, lest you think yourself natural in your polyester clothing, sipping your latte while thumb-scrolling through this on your smartphone in an air-conditioned steel cave. We need to address such matters rationally. The issue isn't whether men can "take it" more resiliently than women, but that no-one should be brainwashed into taking abuse in the first place.
How valuable is the victimology pecking order to you? I guess that depends on your definition of equality.
Saturday, June 15, 2019
Stellaris
"Open fire 'cause I love you to death
Sky high, with a heartache of stone"
Ministry - NWO
Still disappointed by Galactic Civilizations 3 and Distant Worlds: Universe, I haven't been very willing to jump back into the 4x genre. But, when I discovered last year that Stellaris, of which I'd heard relatively little, was made by Paradox itself and not merely marketed under their logo, I decided to buy it without further question.
Now, Paradox is far from saintly. They're as enamored of market manipulation and datamining their customers as any other for-profit enterprise, to the point of constantly trying to sneak log-in incentives and other camouflaged Digital Rights Management mechanics under GoG's radar. Most infamously, they're prone to releasing products as mere skeletons of what they should be, only to bleed their audience with endless downloadable content packs for five to ten dollars a piece. In fact, half of Stellaris' content seems to have been released in just such a manner, more than doubling the game's price. Nevertheless, Paradox has remained one of the major positive forces in the game industry for its willingness to advance more thoughtful genres like strategy or role-playing in a marketplace glutted with ACTION!
Welcome to Nyctimus, ca. 2680. Second moon of the gas giant Lycaon in the Bendis system, homeworld of the mountain-born and high-minded Feral species...
... and capital of the more than hundred inhabited worlds (ringworld included) and five hundred stars of the nearly galaxy-spanning Feral Transcendence.
The purple empire on the left is my protectorate. The orange one near it and just above my border was my first alien contact and has remained my stalwart trading partner and ally from the beginning of recorded history. Though, more recently, they've been massing defenses along our shared border. I don't know why. Maybe it has something to do with the threat posed by my endless rampage through the galaxy's southern reaches, culminating in the near-extermination of the filthy hu-mon species... which to my great chagrin pre-empted my final war declaration by wheedling their monkey paws into a last-minute alliance with by declared besties. Despite my best efforts I won't be killing all hu-mons today :(
Yessir, Stellaris has diplomacy, a surprisingly well-tuned system of likes and dislikes based on past actions, trade deals, and your civilization's governing ethics. AI opponents do not simply declare war as a default action, nor do they meta-game as a single entity against you. They perform like reasonably discrete actors with declared agendas, in a style reminiscent of Alpha Centauri. It boasts about the same amount of modular unit design as well, which is to say not much, but enough to fiddle with occasionally. There's a great deal of other inspiration, declarative or implied, from other games as well (and not just the inevitable Master of Orion similarity) but to me the greatest inspiration, oddly enough, seems EVE-Online. Maybe it's all the asteroid mining or the Titan ship class or the ships catching each other while trying to leave a system, but mostly the heavily interdependent in-game economy. Much like Mount and Blade, Stellaris creates an impression that if you were to replace all the individual NPCs and faction with actual players, this is what an MMO should look like: packs within packs of constantly interweaving individual actors and not a homogenized herd of obedient servants all performing one utterly predictable task. From your intrepid exploration vessels to star-occluding fleets and massive megastructures it provides interesting and costly choices for domestic development to picking your friends or foes, to choose-your-own-adventure interstellar dramas, to crushing your enemies and seeing them etceterad before you. And, though they're not as impactful as they might be, it even incorporates some of the grandiose capstone projects so conspicuously absent from some of its competitors.
In fact it's difficult to find anything specific to discuss regarding Stellaris precisely because it's both so vast in scope and so well integrated. Its individual elements show little depth, but the game as a whole is impressively engaging in the balance it strikes between automating repetitive drudgery while still letting you decide upon the myriad facets of interstellar governance, and remaining fundamentally an expansion-oriented 4X title. You do have caps on your various measures of success (fleet sizes, number of colonies) but they're softer than usual soft-caps letting the player deliberately balance the empire's economy and decide just how far over the limit to go. My own empire has hovered about three times its administrative capacity throughout its growth from the first dozen stars to five hundred. Even your expansion ties back into a conscious decision of who you are as a leader, as the "influence" currency you use to claim systems is partly generated by the various political factions in your empire, each with their own demands and reactions to your political stances. On the galactic level, scalable, customizable maps, time frames and factions give it a great deal of replay value.
Conceptually, this is more of an embodiment of the genre than an advancement: all four X-s accounted for. Yet every aspect, every stage of the game, is expertly handled. The interface alone should humble other would-be designers. Planet, fleet and other screens are designed around presenting a Milky Way's worth of information clearly and functionally with just enough fluff to give it some personality, with adept use of ideograms to cram as much data as possible into every screen without cluttering it. Almost everything is cross-referenced, letting you jump from leaders to their domains to production and map locations seamlessly.
It's huge, it's deep, it's hard, it's long, it's... starting to sound pornographic... and building a rearguard of tight'uns isn't helping. With just a few more overpriced DLC packs, Stellaris will earn its permanent place in gamers' memories as a definitive strategy title.
Sky high, with a heartache of stone"
Ministry - NWO
Still disappointed by Galactic Civilizations 3 and Distant Worlds: Universe, I haven't been very willing to jump back into the 4x genre. But, when I discovered last year that Stellaris, of which I'd heard relatively little, was made by Paradox itself and not merely marketed under their logo, I decided to buy it without further question.
Now, Paradox is far from saintly. They're as enamored of market manipulation and datamining their customers as any other for-profit enterprise, to the point of constantly trying to sneak log-in incentives and other camouflaged Digital Rights Management mechanics under GoG's radar. Most infamously, they're prone to releasing products as mere skeletons of what they should be, only to bleed their audience with endless downloadable content packs for five to ten dollars a piece. In fact, half of Stellaris' content seems to have been released in just such a manner, more than doubling the game's price. Nevertheless, Paradox has remained one of the major positive forces in the game industry for its willingness to advance more thoughtful genres like strategy or role-playing in a marketplace glutted with ACTION!
Welcome to Nyctimus, ca. 2680. Second moon of the gas giant Lycaon in the Bendis system, homeworld of the mountain-born and high-minded Feral species...
... and capital of the more than hundred inhabited worlds (ringworld included) and five hundred stars of the nearly galaxy-spanning Feral Transcendence.
The purple empire on the left is my protectorate. The orange one near it and just above my border was my first alien contact and has remained my stalwart trading partner and ally from the beginning of recorded history. Though, more recently, they've been massing defenses along our shared border. I don't know why. Maybe it has something to do with the threat posed by my endless rampage through the galaxy's southern reaches, culminating in the near-extermination of the filthy hu-mon species... which to my great chagrin pre-empted my final war declaration by wheedling their monkey paws into a last-minute alliance with by declared besties. Despite my best efforts I won't be killing all hu-mons today :(
Yessir, Stellaris has diplomacy, a surprisingly well-tuned system of likes and dislikes based on past actions, trade deals, and your civilization's governing ethics. AI opponents do not simply declare war as a default action, nor do they meta-game as a single entity against you. They perform like reasonably discrete actors with declared agendas, in a style reminiscent of Alpha Centauri. It boasts about the same amount of modular unit design as well, which is to say not much, but enough to fiddle with occasionally. There's a great deal of other inspiration, declarative or implied, from other games as well (and not just the inevitable Master of Orion similarity) but to me the greatest inspiration, oddly enough, seems EVE-Online. Maybe it's all the asteroid mining or the Titan ship class or the ships catching each other while trying to leave a system, but mostly the heavily interdependent in-game economy. Much like Mount and Blade, Stellaris creates an impression that if you were to replace all the individual NPCs and faction with actual players, this is what an MMO should look like: packs within packs of constantly interweaving individual actors and not a homogenized herd of obedient servants all performing one utterly predictable task. From your intrepid exploration vessels to star-occluding fleets and massive megastructures it provides interesting and costly choices for domestic development to picking your friends or foes, to choose-your-own-adventure interstellar dramas, to crushing your enemies and seeing them etceterad before you. And, though they're not as impactful as they might be, it even incorporates some of the grandiose capstone projects so conspicuously absent from some of its competitors.
In fact it's difficult to find anything specific to discuss regarding Stellaris precisely because it's both so vast in scope and so well integrated. Its individual elements show little depth, but the game as a whole is impressively engaging in the balance it strikes between automating repetitive drudgery while still letting you decide upon the myriad facets of interstellar governance, and remaining fundamentally an expansion-oriented 4X title. You do have caps on your various measures of success (fleet sizes, number of colonies) but they're softer than usual soft-caps letting the player deliberately balance the empire's economy and decide just how far over the limit to go. My own empire has hovered about three times its administrative capacity throughout its growth from the first dozen stars to five hundred. Even your expansion ties back into a conscious decision of who you are as a leader, as the "influence" currency you use to claim systems is partly generated by the various political factions in your empire, each with their own demands and reactions to your political stances. On the galactic level, scalable, customizable maps, time frames and factions give it a great deal of replay value.
Conceptually, this is more of an embodiment of the genre than an advancement: all four X-s accounted for. Yet every aspect, every stage of the game, is expertly handled. The interface alone should humble other would-be designers. Planet, fleet and other screens are designed around presenting a Milky Way's worth of information clearly and functionally with just enough fluff to give it some personality, with adept use of ideograms to cram as much data as possible into every screen without cluttering it. Almost everything is cross-referenced, letting you jump from leaders to their domains to production and map locations seamlessly.
It's huge, it's deep, it's hard, it's long, it's... starting to sound pornographic... and building a rearguard of tight'uns isn't helping. With just a few more overpriced DLC packs, Stellaris will earn its permanent place in gamers' memories as a definitive strategy title.
Thursday, June 13, 2019
Sunday, June 9, 2019
Beyond This Horizon
As befits the celebrated name of "author" Robert Heinlein set out several recognizable recurring themes throughout his career. Chief among them featured individuality, the delicate balance of personal freedom and self-appointed duty, a balance fine enough to allow for socially responsible cannibalism. Unfortunately, most of his fans over the decades have tended to fixate on the political convenience of disparate statements and supporting arguments scattered through his works. To nudists he's a nudist; to gun nuts he's a gun nut. Feminist reactionaries claim him as a writer of "strong women" and family-oriented reactionaries love his paternalist alpha males. Socialists can find benevolence in his characters' actions while libertarians cling to their refusal to accept charity.
Beyond This Horizon was written at the start of his career, before his name was even recognizable or his style developed... and it shows. It certainly did not deserve any great awards, as the writing is more disjointed, the characters less defined, the tech-talk more grinding and jarring, the over-drawn pulp SF gunfights more gratuitous. It's inescapably amateurish, twitching spastically among Heinlein's eventual ideas without adequately developing any of them. At its core, being first published at the height of World War 2, it was perhaps inescapably informed by the period's major sociological development: the takeover of entire governments by fascism. Present from the start was Heinlein's keen awareness of the pervasiveness of organization and authority, its inevitability among social apes and the necessity of choosing the lesser of two evils. From the start he did not fall into the facile presumption of the righteousness of plucky rebels. The action adventure climax of Beyond This Horizon casts the hero, having infiltrated a subversive organization, then gunning down its adherents in order to preserve freedom by preserving the government.
For much the same historical reason, much of the plot revolves around eugenics. It drips with the author's unfortunate distaste for transhumanism of any sort - a theme to which he returned in every other book only to reach the same pro-human conclusion despite obviously being intrigued by the question of advancement. Interestingly, he did not dismiss the entire notion of the betterment of the type. His heroes defeat a cadre of overtly idealistic, intrinsically self-serving transhumanist eugenicists... while at the same time themselves practicing a scaled down form of eugenics aimed at merely achieving the pinnacle of purely human development. Hardly a decisive solution, but it does approximate his treatment of the issue in later novels (e.g. the Howard Families) albeit in a less blatant form.
But then everything in this novel had to be toned down to achieve the more thoughtful approach later in his career, and nowhere is this as obvious as the topic of guns. Critics love to remind the public of Heinlein's dictum "an armed society is a polite society" and Beyond This Horizon is the earliest work in which I've encountered it verbatim. He describes an entire population of pistol-packing manly-men ready to duel to the death over the slightest insult, so farcical an image of Utopia than he even had his hero question it before the story's end. Though the rest of his novels still acknowledged the occasional necessity for a direct application of force, his later heroes become more and more likely to adopt creative alternatives to simplistic gunfights. Where the heroes in Beyond This Horizon wax poetic about their sidearms, later protagonists simply... know how to shoot, and that's good enough if it ever comes up at all. In fact if there's a single theme which consistently declined in his works, it would have to be the love of firearms - amazingly enough even while he maintained his stalwart defense of militarism. You'd think the many Americans so eager to co-opt his name in defense of offense might take the hint.
But for me personally, it was most gratifying to discover the last part of the book revolves around the discovery of telepathy, and ends before taking the idea anywhere. It only reinforces my conviction that there is nowhere to take that particular idea, that it harms more than it helps any but the most summary SciFi plots. As it abrogates the construction of agency according to consistent universal laws which best delineates SF from Fantasy, telepathy has remained a non-starter, a superpower so apt to eclipse all else in a fictional universe that to resort to it is to strangle any concurrent or future plots in the cradle.
Beyond This Horizon was written at the start of his career, before his name was even recognizable or his style developed... and it shows. It certainly did not deserve any great awards, as the writing is more disjointed, the characters less defined, the tech-talk more grinding and jarring, the over-drawn pulp SF gunfights more gratuitous. It's inescapably amateurish, twitching spastically among Heinlein's eventual ideas without adequately developing any of them. At its core, being first published at the height of World War 2, it was perhaps inescapably informed by the period's major sociological development: the takeover of entire governments by fascism. Present from the start was Heinlein's keen awareness of the pervasiveness of organization and authority, its inevitability among social apes and the necessity of choosing the lesser of two evils. From the start he did not fall into the facile presumption of the righteousness of plucky rebels. The action adventure climax of Beyond This Horizon casts the hero, having infiltrated a subversive organization, then gunning down its adherents in order to preserve freedom by preserving the government.
For much the same historical reason, much of the plot revolves around eugenics. It drips with the author's unfortunate distaste for transhumanism of any sort - a theme to which he returned in every other book only to reach the same pro-human conclusion despite obviously being intrigued by the question of advancement. Interestingly, he did not dismiss the entire notion of the betterment of the type. His heroes defeat a cadre of overtly idealistic, intrinsically self-serving transhumanist eugenicists... while at the same time themselves practicing a scaled down form of eugenics aimed at merely achieving the pinnacle of purely human development. Hardly a decisive solution, but it does approximate his treatment of the issue in later novels (e.g. the Howard Families) albeit in a less blatant form.
But then everything in this novel had to be toned down to achieve the more thoughtful approach later in his career, and nowhere is this as obvious as the topic of guns. Critics love to remind the public of Heinlein's dictum "an armed society is a polite society" and Beyond This Horizon is the earliest work in which I've encountered it verbatim. He describes an entire population of pistol-packing manly-men ready to duel to the death over the slightest insult, so farcical an image of Utopia than he even had his hero question it before the story's end. Though the rest of his novels still acknowledged the occasional necessity for a direct application of force, his later heroes become more and more likely to adopt creative alternatives to simplistic gunfights. Where the heroes in Beyond This Horizon wax poetic about their sidearms, later protagonists simply... know how to shoot, and that's good enough if it ever comes up at all. In fact if there's a single theme which consistently declined in his works, it would have to be the love of firearms - amazingly enough even while he maintained his stalwart defense of militarism. You'd think the many Americans so eager to co-opt his name in defense of offense might take the hint.
But for me personally, it was most gratifying to discover the last part of the book revolves around the discovery of telepathy, and ends before taking the idea anywhere. It only reinforces my conviction that there is nowhere to take that particular idea, that it harms more than it helps any but the most summary SciFi plots. As it abrogates the construction of agency according to consistent universal laws which best delineates SF from Fantasy, telepathy has remained a non-starter, a superpower so apt to eclipse all else in a fictional universe that to resort to it is to strangle any concurrent or future plots in the cradle.
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
Saturday, June 1, 2019
You Encounter a Level 17 Green-Eyed Monster
"Bin ich mutiger
Töte mich und iss mein Herz
Hab ich dein Weib
Rammstein - Eifersucht
Champions Online, among its other failings, tends to copycat superhero comic book tropes more slavishly than its predecessor City of Heroes did. So, naturally, you spend some time in an alternate dimension where a tyrannical empire grinds the world under the heel of giant robots suspiciously reminiscent of the X-Men's Sentinels. It's a decently long story arc (and a pain in the ass to solo as an undergeared newbie, let me tell you) where each mission tends to revolve (thematically if not practically) around the Sentinel copycats: evading them, halting their production and generally cowering in terror of being stomped on. Then, in one of the last missions, you get to reprogram and pilot one of them, zapping tanks and tanking helicopter missile barrages.
Stomping around the city as a mecha terror while tiny, insignificant soldiers pelt you with equally insignificant pop guns would've been mildly amusing in itself. What makes it significantly more satisfying is the preceding missions' buildup, the frustration of scampering about in the shadow of such colossi.
I also criticized Spellforce 3 for its quaint but ultimately failed attempt at melding RTS and RPG mechanics, but it did a few things very right. Throughout the campaign you occasionally fight big tough Swamp Thing looking demons called Devourers, each of which more or less qualifies as a boss fight initially. Imagine my delight upon discovering that my black magic spell shrub's capstone is the "summon devourer" ability.
Not only does a massive, life-stealing, self-resurrecting meat shield with PBAoE damage rank as fairly overpowered in preventing attrition for your other forces, but it's just so damn gratifying to have your character learn to harness one of the grandiose forces of the world around you.
Spellforce 3 likely copycatted Warcraft 3, and if there's three things Blizzard Entertainment has done well over the decades, it's
1) dumb down better games' concepts
2) advertise
3) manage its audience's expectations. When the opening War3 cinematic showed themagma golems "infernals" smashing down like meteors from the sky, it perfectly built up the mystique of one of the "ultimate" abilities to... do exactly that, in-game.
Games have rules. A good, consistent game world functions according to a set of defined rules. Rules accessible to all participants. Those big, bad boss-level abilities or badass gadgets should not exist only as props for NPCs. They work best as emblems of heroic apotheosis, as signs that the hero has conquered and mastered that which once stood as his greatest obstacles. Yes, show NPCs using them and then allow the hero to capture or learn to use them. If it's a level 21 ability, then let me reach level 21 at some point and get it. If it's an admiral's flagship, then let me reach the rank of admiral at some point, after many trials and discombobulations. Don't just give NPCs nondescript energy blasts and glowing effects, but actual abilities from player skill trees, tools and transportation purchasable by players themselves. Build up the player's envy at others' displays of power, then stage a context-appropriate pay-off at the next level-up.
In my last screenshot commemorating my first playthrough of the highly memorable RPG Tyranny, my character's wearing strapped to his back a weirdly-shaped glowing blue-headed oversized mace. It's Peacemaker, the legendary weapon of Graven Ashe, Archon of War and General of the elite iron-clad Disfavored legion. It makes a highly visible prop hoisted over his shoulder whenever you encounter him. As luck would have it, my character specialized in two-handed weapons and I spent most of the game allied with Ashe's mortal enemy (until he made an unreasonable demand) and thus eventually wound up graving Ashe. To the victor went the gaudy spoils. As they should. It was to some extent even more satisfying than proclaiming my own edicts, as it existed within the game mechanics, more... tangible, for lack of a better word.
Multiplayer games have already adopted this mindset by building up customers' envy of each other's gear, but too many single-player games still fail at fabricating and satisfying jealousy. (In that order.) There's something viscerally, atavistically satisfying about not just victory but conquest, about eating your enemies' hearts to gain their rich, tasty courage, about the Highlander routine of taking power at the same time as taking heads. Don't merely abstract it as "experience points" and don't separate the player from the game world by separating player and NPC skill trees. Allow me at the very least to gain the same abilities displayed by my enemies, to mount their heads as trophies on pikes in my yard, and wherever possible allow me to outright take their power as spoils of war. All their base should belong to me.
Töte mich und iss mein Herz
Hab ich dein Weib
Töte mich und iss mich ganz auf
Dann iss mich ganz auf
Doch leck den Teller ab"
Doch leck den Teller ab"
Rammstein - Eifersucht
Champions Online, among its other failings, tends to copycat superhero comic book tropes more slavishly than its predecessor City of Heroes did. So, naturally, you spend some time in an alternate dimension where a tyrannical empire grinds the world under the heel of giant robots suspiciously reminiscent of the X-Men's Sentinels. It's a decently long story arc (and a pain in the ass to solo as an undergeared newbie, let me tell you) where each mission tends to revolve (thematically if not practically) around the Sentinel copycats: evading them, halting their production and generally cowering in terror of being stomped on. Then, in one of the last missions, you get to reprogram and pilot one of them, zapping tanks and tanking helicopter missile barrages.
Stomping around the city as a mecha terror while tiny, insignificant soldiers pelt you with equally insignificant pop guns would've been mildly amusing in itself. What makes it significantly more satisfying is the preceding missions' buildup, the frustration of scampering about in the shadow of such colossi.
I also criticized Spellforce 3 for its quaint but ultimately failed attempt at melding RTS and RPG mechanics, but it did a few things very right. Throughout the campaign you occasionally fight big tough Swamp Thing looking demons called Devourers, each of which more or less qualifies as a boss fight initially. Imagine my delight upon discovering that my black magic spell shrub's capstone is the "summon devourer" ability.
Not only does a massive, life-stealing, self-resurrecting meat shield with PBAoE damage rank as fairly overpowered in preventing attrition for your other forces, but it's just so damn gratifying to have your character learn to harness one of the grandiose forces of the world around you.
Spellforce 3 likely copycatted Warcraft 3, and if there's three things Blizzard Entertainment has done well over the decades, it's
1) dumb down better games' concepts
2) advertise
3) manage its audience's expectations. When the opening War3 cinematic showed the
Games have rules. A good, consistent game world functions according to a set of defined rules. Rules accessible to all participants. Those big, bad boss-level abilities or badass gadgets should not exist only as props for NPCs. They work best as emblems of heroic apotheosis, as signs that the hero has conquered and mastered that which once stood as his greatest obstacles. Yes, show NPCs using them and then allow the hero to capture or learn to use them. If it's a level 21 ability, then let me reach level 21 at some point and get it. If it's an admiral's flagship, then let me reach the rank of admiral at some point, after many trials and discombobulations. Don't just give NPCs nondescript energy blasts and glowing effects, but actual abilities from player skill trees, tools and transportation purchasable by players themselves. Build up the player's envy at others' displays of power, then stage a context-appropriate pay-off at the next level-up.
In my last screenshot commemorating my first playthrough of the highly memorable RPG Tyranny, my character's wearing strapped to his back a weirdly-shaped glowing blue-headed oversized mace. It's Peacemaker, the legendary weapon of Graven Ashe, Archon of War and General of the elite iron-clad Disfavored legion. It makes a highly visible prop hoisted over his shoulder whenever you encounter him. As luck would have it, my character specialized in two-handed weapons and I spent most of the game allied with Ashe's mortal enemy (until he made an unreasonable demand) and thus eventually wound up graving Ashe. To the victor went the gaudy spoils. As they should. It was to some extent even more satisfying than proclaiming my own edicts, as it existed within the game mechanics, more... tangible, for lack of a better word.
Multiplayer games have already adopted this mindset by building up customers' envy of each other's gear, but too many single-player games still fail at fabricating and satisfying jealousy. (In that order.) There's something viscerally, atavistically satisfying about not just victory but conquest, about eating your enemies' hearts to gain their rich, tasty courage, about the Highlander routine of taking power at the same time as taking heads. Don't merely abstract it as "experience points" and don't separate the player from the game world by separating player and NPC skill trees. Allow me at the very least to gain the same abilities displayed by my enemies, to mount their heads as trophies on pikes in my yard, and wherever possible allow me to outright take their power as spoils of war. All their base should belong to me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)