Stand Still, Stay Silent

"Lose all to save a little

At your peril it's justified
And dismiss your demons
As death becomes a jest
You are the laughing stock
Of the absinthe minded
Confessions stuck in your mouth 
And long gone fevers reappear"

Opeth - Reverie / Harlequin Forest

Witness the Internet's foremost pan-Scandinavian zombie fungus vision quest digi-watercolor apocalypse serial! Also cats.
I'd meant to talk about ST:TNG next, but derailed myself by checking up on one of my favorite webcomics just in time to catch page 263 going up.
And... wow. That's a good page.

I've mentioned Stand Still, Stay Silent once before here in the context of other supernatural-themed post-apocalyptic comics. Like Derelict or Soul to Call, it mixes low tech with low magic and an emphasis on high adventure. It is, however, slightly lighter on the horror elements, though the author has proven more than capable of a tearjerker moment when the situation calls for such. This is her second webcomic that I know of. The first, A Red-Tail's Dream, riffed off Finnish folklore. While surprisingly advanced in light of being started by a first-year university student, it suffered mildly from occasional awkward or generic visuals and awkward phraseology (at least in the English version.)
aRTD already outshone most of its competitors.
SSSS improved on it, and while I'm not sure what recognition Sundberg's been getting for it, it's probably not enough.

It would be easy to recommend it by its grim but not self-indulgent background story, or by its characters' quirks or by its grisly monsters or by its lavish scene-setting splash pages. However, page 263 best embodies the whole lovely mess by capturing most major facets while at the same time telling an uninformed viewer almost nothing - except that, apparently, the cows came home. It includes tech, magic, the wilderness setting and the tension of encroachment, with the slightly fish-eyed viewpoint amplifying the art style's deliberate ambiguity and eeriness. For those who've been following along it summarizes the adventuring team's progress qua team by its junior member having grown both more competent and more trusted.

I'm impressed also by how SSSS employs its unusual simulated watercolors. Normally I'm more about science fiction instead of fantasy, hard lines and definitions, clarity. But the blending effect, used most heavily whenever the supernatural shows up, allows not only for quick yet impressive backdrops but for the fungoid "trolls" to meld with their surroundings, to slither and tumble menacingly out of the shadows in the best horror movie tradition. Which is not to say the comic plays up the ambiguity unnecessarily. Its greatest charm is probably its attention to world-building: Tolkien-ish maps, calendars and genealogies abound, as do charming little instructional pamphlets to acclimate the reader to post-divine-microbial-zombie-cataclysm lifestyles. The background is getting slowly filled in, the characters are growing into their pleasingly varied personae, the humor keeps dripping in just lightly enough so as not to water down the sense of danger or exploration, and the dramatic moments remain grim enough to wring sympathy from even a sour old demi-human like myself. This is what we were hoping webcomics would become back in the late '90s, when stick figures cracking one-liners about Quake were cutting edge.

And of course, I am in no way praising this particular comic at this particular point in time because phrases like "shield themselves from a disease and humans who spread it" sound in any way topical, no sirree, nope, nope.

not this year, not I not not will not crash

Starman Jones

"Where can you find pleasure
Search the world for treasure
Learn science technology?"

Village People - In the Navy


___________________________________________
Spoilers for the book in question follow. While not one of Heinlein's greatest, it's a touchingly bittersweet adventure to leaf through for fans of his other tales.
___________________________________________

Robert Heinlein wasn't shy about abusing the classic hero's journey when it suited him, but in Starman Jones it's more obvious than even in the rest of his "juvenile" books. The innately clever farm-boy hero of a noble lineage is set out of his home by an inimical presence, befriends a grizzled, slightly abrasive old mentor possessing arcane lore belying his unassuming appearance, sets out on a quest to better his station in life, meets a plucky princess love interest and a recurring high-ranking antagonist, establishes cooperation with an animal guide, crosses over into uncharted territory, is captured along with his damsel by inhuman monsters, executes a daring escape, saves the damsel, witnesses his mentor's heroic sacrifice and finally puts the lessons he's learned during his voyage to use in navigating himself and all his companions back to the mortal realm, restoring the status quo thereby returning to his old farm a hero. For a story to get any more monomythic than this, it'd have to be indented into clay tablets by some olive addict in a robe.

Its uncharacteristically bald-faced by-the-numbers basic plot suggests that Heinlein paid more attention to other elements, two of which are rapidly accentuated before even the halfway point: militarism and cynicism.
For one, shipboard ranks and their interactions are laid out in lavish detail, along with quite a few details of conduct and ethics. While Heinlein frequently touted the (questionable) charms of uniformed life, he rarely did so in any great detail, with the exception of Starship Troopers which would be written several years after Starman Jones.
For another, while the background and events of the book are nowhere near as bloody or disastrous as some of his other works, they are presented in a surprisingly bitter tone:

"When the idea soaked in, Max was shocked. "But they put you in jail for that!"
"Where do you think you are now?"
"Well, I'm not in jail. And I don't want to be."
"This whole planet is one big jail, and a crowded one at that. What chance have you got? If you aren't born rich, or born into one of the hereditary guilds, what can you do? Sign up with one of the labor companies.""

Heinlein's protagonists never had an easy time of it, sure, but none of them sounded quite as hopeless and lost as Max Jones the illicit enrollee prey to his own impostor syndrome, catapulting himself through military ranks out of desperation at standing still, fearing escape even more than he fears discovery of his imposture.

It took me over half the novel to connect these two aspects, to realize the smattering of SciFi or social commentary dressing them up matters as little as the plot's monomythic skeleton. This book's not about the romance of space travel, or about the necessary equanimity of inter-sapient communication, or about politics and legal systems or about science or leadership. This one's about the Navy life, the life denied to Robert Heinlein decades prior by tuberculosis. Even the oppressive caste system in Starman Jones, left unexplained in contrast to the detailed future histories the author would normally imagine, serves only to highlight the pining for that idealized, more meaningful meritocracy, to be sought even as a quasi-stowaway shoveling manure in the lower decks.

One might wonder whether Heinlein would have retained such a hopeful outlook of military life if he'd stayed in to continue dealing with officers like Max Jones' antagonist, had that life not been denied to him, had it not become a forbidden fruit, but even that is beside the point. He weds his bitter sense of loss to the figure of the countless adolescent hayseeds throughout man's history desperate to prove their worth, who abandon their ramshackle multi-generational homesteads to sell their lives as cannon fodder in (vain, realistically) hopes of glory or betterment. And, true to his masterful touch, by the end of the story Heinlein makes good on false promises. In the last few pages he brazenly abandons the hero's journey.

Max Jones returns to his home in the Ozarks to find it abandoned. He is not welcomed as a hero, or even at all. He does not reclaim his heritage but instead cuts his ties to his past. He does not get the princess. He does not, in fact, even retain the riches he's earned, as they're sacrificed in payment for his deception. He just sets off towards port once again, eyes to the horizon, having gained nothing more or less than a way out.

A mediocre adventure story with a beautiful ending.

Declaring Men

"'Cause I am whatever you say I am
If I wasn't then why would I say I am?
In the paper, the news, everyday I am
Radio won't even play my jam"

Eminem - The Way I Am


Among my short story collections sits proudly the Science Fiction Writers of America's "Science Fiction Hall of Fame" Volume 1, covering the mid-20th century. Most of the 26 stories are true classics. There's Flowers for Algernon and The Roads Must Roll and Scanners Live in Vain and The Nine Billion Names of God and Mimsy Were the Borogoves and Arena and Nightfall and so on. Yet, in-explicably plonked in the middle of such august company like a goose in a nightingale chorus we find the 1948 story That Only a Mother by one Judith Merril. Ever helpful, Wikipedia's summary gives away the grand reveal: the heroine has unwittingly been caring for a mutated limbless infant daughter for the past ten months; her motherly love was so great it put up a psychological block as to the child's deformities. Interestingly, the Wikipedia summary does not see fit to contextualize this discovery within the other half, the emotional half of the story, which ends with the child's father returning from a military deployment and upon seeing his mutated daughter, mindlessly strangling her in her crib.

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

That Only a Mother reiterates several times the teratogenic effect of radiation, to provide a rationale for the mutation itself. The other half of the story warrants less than a paragraph of vague hints: "More infanticides all the time, and they can't seem to get a jury to convict any of them. It's the fathers who do it." And, at the end: "His hands, beyond control [...] His fingers tightened on his child" Despite devoting the entire previous page to a languid description of mother-daughter bath time, the author felt no need to flesh out her (obviously very intuitive) assertion that MEN ARE INFANTICIDAL AUTOMATONS. And of course they're all in on it together.

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

It doesn't need to make sense. As critics and Wikipedia remind us, this is "a woman's perspective" with the implication that any man who would dare question a woman's slander must be a filthy misogynist pig. The story's plot might remind us (not accidentally) of, say, The Screwfly Solution written in 1977 by James Tiptree Jr. a.k.a. Alice Sheldon, by which time feminism had upped the ante to have all men murdering all women across the globe. Interestingly enough, the story's titled after a method of pest control in which sterile males are introduced into an insect population in order to copulate (pointlessly) with females, denying them fertilization thereby decreasing the next generation preferably to zero. In other words, no murder needed. Sheldon, who at least conjured up a diabolus ex machina at the end of the story (unlike Merril) could have had her alien menace adopt that much simpler solution against humans instead of brain tampering... but then, that wouldn't have sold nearly as well as centering the action on women as innocent victims of GYNOCIDAL AUTOMATONS.

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

Never mind that in evolutionary terms, the husband from That Only a Mother would've been more likely to start murdering all the infants around who weren't limbless mutants than to turn on his own progeny. Never mind that murdering one's (potential) mate(s) incurs a much lower adaptive cost for females than it does for males, to the point of becoming adaptive, and this is a blatant case of psychological projection. Never mind that even a cursory look at human society would reveal that almost all of males' violence is directed against each other in contests to become the designated protectors of women and children. Don't think about it too hard. Just repeat the mantra.

The turning point for me, the moment when I realized that the abuse I'd had to put up with all my life was not just the work of a few bad apples but an intrinsic theme in the background noise of our society, came a few years ago. I enrolled in a university literature course on short stories. The course text was a collection already heavily slanted toward female-friendly drama, which the instructor (who bragged that all classes she taught were social justice courses) had further cherry-picked to equate masculinity, in turn, with each and every evil of the world. One male was a lazy brat, others petty thugs, others charlatans, another murders his wife for no reason... though it's hinted he was just emasculated by her ovaried awesomeness. Another story openly states that men can never experience the depth of emotion that women can, while equating men with oncogenic factory smoke. Another equates men with colonialism and women with conquered nations, despite the author serenely ignoring his own introduction in which his heroine deliberately abandons her comfortable old life to seek adventure and riches. In one story set on a sailboat, a woman is unhappy with her husband but luckily a female whale happens along to smash the boat to pieces so that the two females of different species can commune telepathically in mutual understanding and thanks for conveniently murdering a male. (Screwflies? Try a screw-whale solution!)

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

There's a pattern to the very lack of pattern in such demonization, and "declaring men" is the best I can summarize it. Not merely "declaming" men as evil in a generic sense but constantly hunting for more and more specific evils to pile onto men's communal conscience, constantly fabricating more justifications for female moral supremacy. Profiteers and peddlers of self-justification need neither ground their accusations in observable reality nor remain consistent. It doesn't matter what you're declaring men as long as it's bad. At some point in such a story, women will be equated with everything good and men will be declared a threat, and the accusation left to stand at face value. Merril's mutant child from in That Only a Mother is idealized as superintelligent (a four-year-old's mental development at only ten months of age) and naturally, is born female in solidarity with her mother against the male menace. Her mutation is repeatedly implied to be the fault of the father for having worked near radiation... with no mention as to the necessity of such action or its harm to the man himself. Declare the man a murderous radioactive monstrosity. No need to analyze it further. Just repeat the mantra. The much more successful Margaret Atwood is hailed as a transcendent visionary for declaring men repressively anti-sexual... at the same time that she declares men rapists... uphill both ways through the snow!

Declaring men, anything, so long as it's bad, has been a sinecure for endless journalists, novelists and professors for the past fifty years, an easy route not only to social acceptability but to acclaim. The tactic, this flat, uncritical gnosis of male evil, transcends genre. It can sell anything from video games to the next great American novel, from tearjerker slice of life stories to ersatz futurism, YouTube channels to scientific papers, comic books to war propaganda. Imagine this being the mainstream consensus for any other demographic in the modern developed world. Imagine Disney founding entire cable channels dedicated to declaring... let's say Jews, to be infanticidal con-artists. Imagine university professors basing entire curricula around story after story after story of Amerindians as omnicidal terrors in league with alien menaces. Imagine endless scriptwriters writing every Italian in every TV show as nothing but greasy, stupid loudmouths, and all gays as rampaging pedophiliacs, and all Protestants as witch-burning fanatics.

Now imagine them all winning Nebula awards and Pulitzers. Imagine Robert Silverberg obligated to include at least one such diatribe in a 25-story collection to pacify the Inquisition. Imagine anyone who tries to argue against such a program of indoctrination being derided and ostracized as a bigot for defending nominal villains, and you'll get some approximation of the insanity of feminism.

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra. But no other such mantra has ever gained the universality of innocent female characters being threatened by cackling male villains, decade after decade, century after century. We are instinctively susceptible to women's claim of a male threat, and it is that underlying bias toward female safety and well-being, our eagerness to lash out against any man declared [evil] in some opposition to femininity, which we need to address.

Smoulder in Peace; Tides Cannot Reach You

"Fall deeply into the mundane
Don't let the screaming that riots within have a voice"

Faith and the Muse - The Red Crown


I'm giving Torment: Tides of Numenera a third go before uninstalling it in favor of... hopefully Cybepunk 2077 or V:tM-B2... soon... soon, I'm sure. I've talked quite a bit about TToN here before (it has a tag, people; uuuuse, the, tags, Luuuke!,) It was in many ways an excellent roleplaying game with lots of skills checks, resource management, a heavily interwoven main plot which attempted to bring roleplaying back into line as consistent characterization and meaningful decision-making, with very few quests requiring a combat solution. Unfortunately, if you did want to fight, its combat side was rudimentary at best, awkwardly imprecise and frequently buggy. Still, its "crisis mode" interspersing combat with dialogues makes it a hopeful vision of cRPG player interaction for the future.

Unfortunatelier, Tides sacrificed its own stated goal as a spiritual successor of the classic Planescape:Torment. Not from lack of skill but obviously a conscious choice on the developers' part to pull the usual "bait-and-switch" of sequels: they wanted to be bankrolled by fans of an 18-year-old title while at the same time appealing to 18-year-old gamers. This unfortunately meant trying to adapt what was once a fatalistic, depressive, grim, bleak, morbid and gruesome tale of futile aborted redemption, a tale of bitter regret, hope lost before it ever breathed, and inescapable mazes... to the tail-end of the millennial generation... to snowflakes... to a generation of preening facetious self-righteous narcissists incapable of either admitting the inherent darkness of human nature and the universe's futility or of objective ethical evaluation. Perhaps inevitably, Tides came across as a watered down version of Torment's themes, where your moral choices rarely connected. For a fairly concise example (and one of Tides' worst-written chapters) you can take a look at the obligatory RPG tavern in the first act.

Dominating its corner of Sigil's expansive slums, The Smoldering Corpse Bar provided exposition, ambience and a couple of recruitable companions, as well as a variety of exotic drinks to help carry the point of Planescape's vast, otherworldly setting. Its counterpart location from Tides, the Fifth Eye... also serves drinks.

You meet O from the original Torment once again, just to cement the two locales' reiteration, and he pulls the same inscrutable cosmic consciousness routine.
The expository Candrian and Creakknees are replaced with Arthour, but where Ebb Creakknees' dialogue had a wistful, bittersweet air and Candrian served as object lesson as to the planes' dangers, Arthour is just devoid of personality. Ysg, overtly suffering the same affliction as Candrian, is even more pointless.
Where the Corpse's patrons bristled a bit at your approach, the Eye's supplicate themselves for your assistance. Instead of demons in disguise growling at you about the Blood War you get a gratingly upbeat recruiter telling you about the Endless Battle.
In the Corpse you were tasked with getting rid of the deadbeat barfly Mochai by either paying off her considerable debt (for that point in the game) or poisoning her to death, which netted you some cash in addition to free drinks. This was a valid roleplaying choice: stroking your own ego by playing the hero should cost you. Mochai's counterpart in the Fifth Eye (female, alone in an alcove in the same relative position) turns out to be a damsel in distress, part of a quest which can only be completed by playing the knight in shining armor.

The worst of the worst are the five without original Torment counterparts, lifted from any number of Young Adult Fiction stories in which utterly unsympathetic boogeymen are defeated by a plucky five-man band simply by passing some mental purity tests, proving themselves pure of heart, by being mentally "special" while bypassing intelligence. Granted, my distaste for these "psychic veterans" stems largely from the focus on telepathy/telekinesis, a dead end crutch for lazy writing which has little place in SF in the first place and which Tides' writers abused to an immoderate extent even by the standards of pulp video game fiction.

But even ignoring their science fantasy brain wizardry, it's their infantile moralism that grates. Planescape: Torment ran you ragged through a world of bad and worse choices, with many of your best options being merely to minimize the suffering - inflicted as often as not by you yourself. Tides' Erritis, brainchild of Chris Avellone who headed Torment's scripts, unsurprisingly remains a rare example of this principle. The Fifth Eye's "psychic veterans" on the other hand stumble cliché after cliché into adolescent incompetence.
Their quest has nothing to do with the rest of the game but is utterly overblown in its world-destroying scope, especially for the first act.
Their antagonist is referred to as "The Adversary" and even Tolkien barely pulled off such stentorian grandiloquence. These days you'd have to play it tongue-in-cheek as Neil Stephenson did with Hiro Protagonist, a level of genre awareness utterly lacking here.
Their dialogues' unabashed self-aggrandizement would sound more appropriate in the mouth of Conan the Barbarian: "We keep the minds of Sagus Cliffs safe from threats they don't even imagine."
Token heroic sacrifice included, natch.
Worst of all, their enemy is worst of all and juxtaposed with cozy plains-ape normalcy: "Inhuman, with no negotiation." Hilariously, Tides itself presented a much better version of the same idea just one act later, in a quest chain written by a fanboy of the old Torment. The Endless Gate cult culminates in an encounter with Lovecraftian monstrosities on the same malice and power level as Malaise the Adversary - but those horrors from beyond were illustrated largely by their human followers. They were shown to exploit all-too-human despair, human bloodlust, human viciousness, human sadism, human cowardice, human servility, human hatred and self-hatred. In contrast, Malaise's defeat is a cheap fairytale dichotomy with unambiguous heroes standing for the plains-ape status quo, to be reinstated by defeating the unknown.

All this adds up to a noticeable absence of Ignus. For all the Fifth Eye tries to evoke the Smoldering Corpse, it lacks said smouldering corpse, or any attempted facsimile of Torment's unforgettable sadomasochistic mono-pyro-maniacal loose cannon of an underling. (If anything, that glowbug Erritis again comes closest.) To me it's an admission of both defeat and guilt, an admitted break in the spiritual succession. For those of you who've played Torment, think back to Ignus' very first action upon being reawakened... yeah, the very first thing he does... yeah, THAT. Try selling THAT as a companion to snowflakes. Try getting them to admit they want that companion.

The worrllld will end they say
So why not watch it buurrrn?

ColonySiders and the Definition of "Playing"

"Your dark satanic mills
Have made redundant all our mining skills"

Sting - We Work the Black Seam



I'm done with AoW: Planetfall for the moment and I'm starting on a final playthrough of Torment: Tides of Numenera. However, between strategy with a smidge of role-playing and role-playing with a smidge of strategy this seemed as good a time as any to retry a genre I normally don't bother with. Of course, Darksiders mostly serves to remind of some very good reasons why I don't bother with "action" adventure, RP or other such Gs.

Heap big buyer's remorse. I have no idea how I wound up owning Darksiders I and II, except they must've been on a pretty hefty sale as promotional material for the launch of Darksiders III and IV this past year... also I was just holding it for a friend and a virus must've downloaded it, and I was just asking the young lady for directions, officer, honest!

Unsurprisingly, being a mindless hack'n'slasher with Warhammer / Diablo aesthetics befitting a Saturday morning cartoon, it's also a console game, a gamepad button-mashing game. Due to a fair bit of redundancy in activated abilities / items, its controls seem impossible to map comfortably to mouse&keyboard. Especially galling since even if ability A automatically over-rides ability B (e.g. sword / crossblade modes) they will not function bound to the same key. And there are lots of keys. As noted about Don't Starve, any situations beyond "hit shit" boil down to one-to-one reactions: if X happens, activate Y.  I've gotten as far as the first real boss fight (Tiamat) which apparently puts me about 1/5 of the way through, and I'm not even going to try to beat her. Not because I don't know how but because from the first glance at the battlefield, I'm being put through a blatantly obvious sequence of events. The boss flits about my platform, out of reach. There are bombs I can throw and stick to her, and fire with which to light their fuses, and exactly one weapon with which to do so. The rest is mindless repetition to mold my nerves into performing the physical actions themselves and y'know what? I like my nerves fine where they are.

My own screenshot above illustrates just how much the concept of a "game" can diverge. Upon first entering that building, the treasure chest on the left was just a shadowy outline, inaccessible, and the mottled scalable wall on the right blocked by a weird red growth with a bomb on it I couldn't activate. As a veteran strategy/roleplayer I took obstacles placed in front of me as puzzles to be solved. I tried different weapon swipes, jumping up and down and dodging and trying to clip my view angle through the textures for a hint of mechanisms underlying these objects' inaccessibility. I spent at least fifteen minutes circling both levels of the building, wall panel by panel, looking for secret passages, tried hitting all the light fixtures and other potential hidden levers which might trigger some kind of "passwall" spell.
Of course, there never was a puzzle.
The chest automatically solidifies after you advance the main quest past a series of Eye-of-Sauron minibosses. The wall can have its bomb exploded after you advance the main quest past acquiring a throwing weapon. Your only task is to remember to backtrack pointlessly to the same point. Twice.

So, OK, screw that. I'll play a city sim instead. Those are multifaceted, player-driven strategic challenges, right? Wrong.

Aven Colony was developed simultaneously and would be best discussed in competition with Surviving Mars. Now, while Surviving Mars had its weaknesses preventing it from reaching its potential, it nonetheless offered an enjoyable and challenging escalation of costly expansion, resource acquisition, infrastructure balancing, large-scale construction projects and population management with several capstone "wonders" to round out its otherwise lacking end-game. Aven Colony features most of the same gimmicks: a "day-as-year sol" mechanic, construction via drones, air and water management, interior farming, but where Mars took some minimal effort toward a hard science baseline, Aven is entirely a pulp SF color-by-numbers routine with redundant phlebotina and structures. And I do mean endlessly redundant, as its city expansion seems to function according to the antiquated SimCity2000 approach of placing the exact same half-dozen residences, workplaces and commercial/support structures over and over again to create cookie-cutter neighbourhoods. Hospital. Fire station. Police station. Lather, rinse, repeat. Except this one's got three kinds of fire stations. Balancing workplace importance fills up a bit of your time early on to maximize production, but rapidly loses importance as your city fills up.

Worse yet, its only apparent end-game consists of nothing but whack-a-mole. Your buildings decay and can be damaged by storms and the "Impending Breakdown!" complaints start at 70% structural integrity with function loss at 50% - which means keeping your city operational boils down not to making correct decisions but to clicking the same red floating icon and the same repair button on 200+ structures. And again this is an especially galling (and obviously intentional) timesink since building construction is already handled automatically by drones which fly over to each site on antigravity to spew "nanites" at it. Where Mars actually decreases some of your micromanagement as you advance technologically (triboelectric scrubbers, automated food service, etc.) Aven banks on it.

Though I haven't played God of War, Darksiders has been noted as a blatant copycat of that earlier game. Aven Colony technically predates Surviving Mars, both likely being more inspired by past decades' handful of uninspired Sims/SimCity In Spaaaaace!!! colony-builders (Space Colony, Planetbase etc.) Their simplicity is not merely a result of copycats rushed out the door to steal a slice of the pie from worthier incarnations of the same concept. Nonetheless both Darksiders and Aven Colony share a complete lack of depth to their player interaction. Second by second, your objective is obvious and you're not meant to plan ahead, merely to react. Even taking the initiative to find "secret" bonuses in Darksiders requires simply destroying everything in sight until you get a cutscene showing the treasure chest appear.

We need some new basic terminology so as not to conflate "games" which the player plays by deliberately choosing and moving the pieces with "games" which play themselves out with the human element merely hitting the "repair" button every so often.

The point: yes, some genres are better than others. Aven gets called out on its simplicity and repetitiveness in most user reviews. In contrast, the complaints about Darksiders (and it's not hard to find complaints about anything on the internet) touch on weapon upgrade balance or level design but never bother calling it out on its simplemindedness. You accept being treated like a hyperactive idiot child simply by buying such nonesuch. Which makes me wonder why we don't have a whole sub-genre of "Action" City Simulators, in which the player merely clicks the "more money" pop-up button while buildings construct themselves in the background.

How long before the game industry obsoletes players?

Let My People Cough!

Welp, it's almost Easter. While churches are setting up online services and Tweeting the holy spirit or whatever the fuck else they're cooking up to continue justifying their idiotic blind belief in primitive hocus-pocus, there will be congregations tomorrow. For all the warnings, for all the pleading, for all the well-reasoned arguments, no-one particularly doubts that religious cretins will congregate for Easter and continue spreading the COVID-19 pandemic.

Retards.

Now, I'm pretty sure I'd be fine denying medical care to any worthless imbecilic sacks of filth who get infected on Easter. Just tell them their lungs are filling up with Jesus. They bought a lifetime's worth of even less believable bullshit; they'll buy that one too.

But, on the lighter side, isn't it funny they'll be doing this on a holiday commemorating the time when Jews hid indoors so they'd be Passed Over by a plague?

Return from the Stars

"Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea"

"Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet."

different versions of The Road Goes Ever On by J.R.R. Tolkien
__________________________________________________________

Spoiler alert:
Stanislaw Lem's Return from the Stars is more of a gradual expansion on themes discernible from the start (reintegration, alienation, finding purpose) with no traditional grand reveal, but you might still want to read it first.

__________________________________________________________

"It was a civilization that had rid itself of fear.
[...]
For we, in the course of ten years, had gone through so many horrors, everything that was inimical to man, that wounded him and crushed him, and we had returned, sick of it, so very sick of it; any one of us, hearing that the return would be delayed, that there would be a few more months in space to endure, would probably have leapt at the speaker's throat. And now we -- no longer able to stand the constant risk, the blind chance of a meteorite hit, that endless suspense, the hell we went through when an Arder or an Ennesson failed to return from a reconnaissance flight -- we immediately began to refer to that time of terror as the only proper thing, as right, as giving us dignity and purpose.

[...]

"The public is not aware. . ."
"Of what?"
"Of the fact that the spirit of exploration is dead. That there are no expeditions, they know. But they don't think about it. They think that there are no expeditions because expeditions are unnecessary, and that's all. But there are some who see and know perfectly well what is going on, and what consequences it will have. Has already had."
"Well?"
"Pap. Pap and more pap for all eternity. No one will fly to the stars now. No one will risk a dangerous experiment now. No one will test a new medicine on himself now. What, they don't know this? They know! And if the word got out who we are, what we did, why we flew, what it was all about, then it would be impossible, you see, impossible to conceal the tragedy!""

from Return from the Stars
_________________________________________________________

Generally speaking, I see three kinds of SciFi dystopias.

The 1984 variety present a blatant shithole of a society, which only the most brutal militaristic autocracy and/or pervasive government propaganda could attempt to glorify.

The Fahrenheit 451 type aren't halfway bad for about a quarter of their inhabitants. Bread and circuses abound if you can afford them. Sure, all your neighbours are being marginalized, disenfranchised, ostracized in the classic or figurative sense, lobotomized or just plain exterminated, but if you merely crank up your drug dosage or are willing to squint hard enough, you can almost ignore the planet being gradually mismanaged into the gutter.

The Brave New World sort are objectively nice, pleasant places to live, so long as you lack any ambition beyond fleeing, feeding, fighting and fu-ornicating. Usually not even the fighting. Such tales' basic complaint is that humanity has lost that special something, that spark of humanitude, that shit-flinging ape spirit, that pioneering near-pining, that thirst for unquenchableness or, as some might tastefully venture to ad, a taste for adventure.

I don't know whether Stanislaw Lem ever wrote one of the first type. He did write at least one novella set in the second type. 1961's Return from the Stars was his stab at the third... sort of... maybe? Despite stories like Solaris or His Master's Voice reshaping entire sub-genres of SF, his various works were in themselves very difficult to pin down to a particular ideology.

Return from the Stars begins with an explorer returning from relativistic spaceflight to find Earth incomprehensibly altered after more than a century - the entire first chapter is a somewhat overextended description of the narrator lost in a... spaceport? shopping mall? he can't even tell. For all its glitz, the new human norm is revealed to consist of dystopian mind control via chemicals and indoctrination both subliminal and liminal, rendering the entire populace risk-averse to the point of catatonia. The Earth has been made a safe space. The narrator rages against such control and that's where most authors would have stopped, with the manly-man from the past trying to teach a decrepit future how to fight or possibly flight. Lem went several steps further.

Whatever the author's initial intentions for the book, it's worth noting that it somehow became at least partly a commentary on war veterans attempting to re-enter peacetime society. Don't even try to tell me that first paragraph I quoted isn't really about the glorification of WWII. Awareness that the glory of risk-taking is so often ginned up post facto serves to temper and offset the rage against enforced caution, and unlike most entertainment which glorifies the consumer's own status quo, Return from the Stars ends with the narrator allowing himself to fit his new surroundings, psychologically separating himself from the ideals of the mid 20th century. Even more astoundingly, this itself is not a blanket renunciation of exploration as an ideal. Against expectations, the chemically castrated populace of the future allots the narrator's colleagues, other former explorers, resources to restart the space program, with the implication that the old-timers are instigating some moderate degree of social change. Thus by the end the world of the future seems a great deal less dystopian, and the main thrust of the story is rather toward mental flexibility, adaptability and personal freedom, with the understanding that freedom of action implies freedom of inaction and freedom from harm implies the freedom to risk.

While worth reading in itself (despite translation difficulties) it's also a story I'd recommend not to the young but to my own age group in dealing with the young, as many scions of  the '80s and '90s attempting to communicate with snowflakes are very much cast in the role of morlocks among eloi. There's something encouraging about the narrative's willingness to find worth in a society over-ridden by a farcical, facetious, absolutist emphasis on self-castration and political correctness, without trying to make war upon it.

So faintly you came tapping that I scarce was sure I heard you

I've come as close to hitting the "subscribe" button on YouTube as ever after finding the Falconry and Me channel, and apparently I'm not the only one. Last week when I first hit upon it, the channel had 22k?-ish? subscribers. Now it's at 45k and still climbing. The first few videos date from six years ago and follow a familiar routine for internet audiences: videos of baby birds growing up, set to soft music, titled in Lucida Handwriting. Artsiness. Feels. Marketability. Or at least such an attitude and gimmickry as we've grown up being told to adopt in dealing with others, creating a brand image. After that, several years of silence.

So what enabled its impressive resurgence a couple of months ago? An exotic topic helps. Quick, tell me everything you know about falconry! Nothing? Thought so. The presenter being a pleasant young female certainly helps; she'd have to put a helluva lot more effort into keeping people's attention as a balding middle-aged male. A British accent always sounds better too.

But alright, lest I wax too lupine vis-a-vis homini, there are some very valid reasons why she deserves her success. Despite her channel being ostensibly centered on falcons, it's her raven Fable that's been stealing the show (a million hits just for her introductory video) - chatty, clever and a bit of a diva! The birds in general are also in sparkling good health and obviously very much at ease with their caretaker. Mostly though I'm impressed with the delivery. Prop the camera up, grab some hook-beaked nightmare from the night's Plutonian shore and just start showing it off, explaining and demonstrating. The videos are well edited, focused, simple and straightforward, the delivery clear, the information neither terse nor whatever the hell antonym of terse I'm exemplifying here. They are both interesting and pleasant to watch, and though I haven't the slightest intention of ever raising a bird of prey, much of her advice would apply to caring for and interacting with other animals in general.

Remember how nearly impossible it was for anyone to publish anything in itself and for itself before YouTube, WordPress, Blogger, various comic strip hosting services, etc. without genuflecting before the gods incarnate of Condé Nast or Warner Brothers. The ability to address one's potential audience directly, sidestepping gatekeepers, has among other things revealed how much of our previous decades' culture grew not out of cultural discourse but out of the barriers imposed by hierarchical control over the means of (content) production. Impartial hosting, publication and self-publication has allowed us to once again present a thing in itself, without being forced to bundle it with a corporate boardroom's best guess of what might sell in the next quarter. Look up how many now-respected Science Fiction stories or authors owed their existence or careers to Playboy, for fuckable's sake, because they didn't fit the particular brand image of other publications!

A million people have now watched a carrion-eater lovingly crooning "boop-boop" at her owner. Fifty thousand people are eagerly awaiting the next video on the grave and dire threat of frayed jesses, and other terms most of us have probably only encountered in The Once and Future King.

In case you can't figure it out, this blog post was about the importance of Internet freedom.

Astro-Sect Sects? Think Stink

Dear readers, today's post concerns a topic which assuredly must occupy all our minds lately: giant psychic space bugs.

(Yes, of course they occupy our minds; they're psychic!)
... But why are they philosophical? I mean, psychic.

Age of Wonders: Planetfall, my topic from last week, features an obligatory race of space insectoids called the Kir'ko, featuring utterly superfluous psychic powers. In this case the problem goes beyond my usual complaint that Telepathy Is A Dead End For Science Fiction and beyond my general complaint about Planetfall overusing telepathy even by the ever-so-stringent worldbuilding standards of pulp SF, because the Kir'ko in particular could have been perfectly impressive without their "fire brain laz0rz, pew-pew" angle. They're spindly, hyperaggressive melee monstrosities with unit upkeep discounts and a defensive clustering bonus to encourage swarm tactics, and can supplement that with armor-melting acid sprays. Their apex military unit, the Harbinger, looks like Shub-Niggurath trying to claw her way up her own gullet.

(Kudos to the visual artists on that one btw.)
But look at that thing and tell me whether it actually needs brain-magic when it has so many potentially interesting bodily features. Did you really exhaust the thematic gamut of invertebrate evolution so as to fall back on Mesmerism? Why not expand on metamorphosis by some kind of combat molting? Or giant termite heads planted as fortifications? Or maybe single-use bee stingers or cnidocytes? Stag beetle grapple attacks? Squid ink? Chromatophores? Octopus flexibility? Dragon fly nymph masks shooting out à la Alien? Vampiric health stealing via a tick hypostome? Units twinning with each other like mated schistosomes? Or here's a crazy idea, why not actually put in the effort to imagine what sort of technology a sentient space-bug species might create to go along with arthroponderous biology?

Of course the lazy, trite shortcut to science fantasy pathos termed "psi" was hardly invented by Triumph Studios. Some of the biggest names in SciFi have been guilty of it, including where it comes to insectoid aliens. Robert Heinlein assumed it's how his Starship Troopers bugs would be commanded and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (which owed a great deal to Heinlein's Troopers) expanded it to a central plot point. George R.R. Martin resorted to it for his own Sandkings. Hearkening back to Science Fiction's explosion in popularity as a genre at the previous turn of the century, Gustave Le Rouge had his swarms of Martian vampire squid-bats commanded by a mountain-sized brain and H.G. Wells, though he admirably did not fall back on the crutch of mentalism, helped cement this precept of an insect hive being mentally controlled through his Selenites' cephalomorphic grand leader in The First Men in the Moon.

It's hardly surprising that the copycat brigade at Blizzard Entertainment made telepathy a centerpoint of their Zerg, which is the source Planetfall most likely employed as one of its many unimaginative pulp SF crutches, alongside the Borg or Xenomorph infection. But Blizzard is the lowest common denominator, and you've got to set a higher bar for yourself than that! Giant psychic space bugs? It's been done. Done to death, for over a century now. Invertebrates can provide a hundred, a thousand different mind-bendingly inhuman features, tangible ones with materialistic explanations, around which an alien species might be based in lieu of the tired routine of space wizards with throbbing temples.

As a last point, the case of psychic bugs is even more annoying than most abuses of telepathic magic in "science" fiction. Superficially, it fits with the idea of a "hive" or "swarm" exhibiting stunningly complex meta-behavior, but in the real world of course social insects achieve such behavior by naturalistic means, which are consistently more impressive than if they all really did have radios in their heads. Whether it's buzzing, multi-spectral color markings, pheromones or Her Majesty's Bouncing All-Bee Ballet, please dream up some more interesting means of hive communication than dyeing your damage numbers Palantir Purple and calling it "psi!"