Thief: The Dark Project

"Woke up in my clothes again this morning

Don't know exactly where I am

[...]

It can be no optical illusion

How can you explain?"

 

Sting - Shadows in the Rain

 

 

I was dimly aware of Thief's reputation back in high school but paid it no attention. For one thing, at the time I was busy with Half-Life and Starcraft. For another, I've never been a fan of stealth-based games, with the odd exception of truly atmospheric ones like Amnesia or Miasmata or SYABH. I prefer my enemies to see me coming, to witness my numberless armies descend upon them LIKE AN INEXORABLE TIDE OF DDDOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM !!!

 

Ahem.

Where were we?

Thief. Right. Thief made some waves at its release and is arguably the defining ancestor of first-person stealth gameplay in general. I'm trying it now (after twenty years) for actively avoiding Cyberpunk 2077 because it looks halfway decent and I'm deferring my inevitable disappointment. So I tried one of their earlier ouvres, The Witcher 2, which turned out to be crap for numerous reasons I'll get into at some later date. Given C77's inclusion of crouching, line of sight, noise, and hiding corpses to avoid raising suspicion, I decided to also check out the grand-daddy of such features' implementation into FPS.

It's not what I expected.

Alright, so in some ways it's exactly what I expected. In fact this floor puzzle with dart traps was probably as played out as the Sphinx' riddle by 1998... and has continued to persist in remaining outdated even as it's being reused today. Still, three or four missions into things, other aspects either diverge from Thief's spiritual descendants or from the expectations of its own time in interesting ways.

 

1) Oh, you mean it's the "thief" class

Being slow-paced by the standards of FPS with plenty of time to take in the scenery, later stealth-based games have tended to bank on memorable settings. Thief on the other hand seems a fairly generic mishmash of supernatural medievalism with random Van de Graaff generators and burglar alarms thrown in, a common ailment of even the better half of games until ~Y2K when more gamers started favoring more coherent, better-researched settings. Aside from zombies riding elevators, the tendency to fall back on Dungeons and Dragons is also evident in pitting your eponymous Thief against stereotypical sword-and-board Fighters and fireball-flinging Wizards and Clerics wielding blunt weapons. You're also obviously a "thief" peppering foes with arrows, instead of the later redesign of a "rogue" around overpowered backstabs.

2) Gettin' physical

More fighting than I'd expected, to the point it slightly undercuts the game's premise. Evidently its creators did not think they'd be founding a sub-genre and did not feel comfortable dropping most of the First Person Slasher elements.

On the plus side, the physics feel surprisingly realistic for something from '98, though inevitably dated by even early 2000s standards. Arrows and thrown objects follow ballistic trajectories but enemies lurch about barely moving their limbs, and sword / sap swings connect properly only about half the time and have a serious issue with verticality. (This problem was reiterated by some of its contemporaries and imitators.) I was nonetheless impressed by finding out I can accidentally kill an unconscious guard... by dropping him down a stairwell. (Ooopsie.)

3) Swash or buckle, at will

Action and stealth interweave to such an extent as to yield more freedom than you would normally find outside sandbox games. I ran the introductory (heist) mission stumbling in circles around the mansion at a dead run, trying to lose alerted guards and frustrated at exploring too slowly while sneaking; the jailbreak by murdering or incapacitating almost every enemy and setting off all the alarms just for sheer mayhem; the tomb raiding mission in uncharacteristically stealthy fashion, as I discovered I hate fighting the infinitely self-resurrecting zombies or the cave-lizard-dinosaur-dragon-whatevers. For the botched assassination I'm currently trying to clear a path as directly as I can straight through the front doors and middle of the mansion. Granted, I can do all this in large part because this first third of the game is on the easy side (on "normal" difficulty anyway) but just the fact it's not hardcoded to prevent you from doing things your own way is a breath of fresh air... from two decades ago.

4) Level-headed design

Underpinning this freedom of choice, level design should probably be considered Thief's most concrete accomplishment. Albeit sparse, the individual maps feel HUGE by late '90s standards and at least the first few are just convoluted enough to challenge while falling short of sheer frustration. Being denied a true map or detailed instructions is a cheap gimmick, and I won't deny I've cheated via a walkthrough, but it's mostly to save the time of backtracking rather than being truly stuck. The simple graphics can at once make for confusing Hanna-Barbera backdrop repetition and render the few noticeable landmarks even more noticeable. What seem dead-end corridors often loop back to an earlier point and even false paths usually reward you with some minor loot so that exploring each map so far is entertaining enough in itself.

 

At least in this "Gold" version, no area feels perfunctory or ignored, with multiple routes the norm rather than the exception. Slowly crawl up a ramp or time the perfect second to climb up a ledge. Blow a zombie up with holy water or sneak past it or lure it to a far corner and cut it down or simply run past its pathetic shambling. Pickpocket a guard by leaning around a corner or lure him away from his post with a little noise and sneak past or sap him, or arrow him to death from afar. You'll find most options, the corners and shadows and silence and verticality and occasional firepower, have somehow been provided for, either in your mission gear or your surroundings.

Granted stealth games are still not my cup of tea so I likely won't suffer the dated combat mechanics much farther into the campaign, but as with System Shock (and unlike most oldies) I can at least see how Thief advanced the possibilies of its creative medium.

Worth its renown.

"mindless group euphoria"

"[Charles Manson's psychic powers] were believed by people with at least a primary public school education in the enlightenment of the space age, and these beliefs were repeated about a man who is still alive today. So if this had all happened two thousand years ago? With every exaggeration or alteration accepted as gospel by people who are determined to believe whatever they're told without reservation? Then I could see an alternate timeline where my now-Mormon family might instead be attending the Church of Charles Manson, of Latter-Day-Saints"

 

AronRa - Mythical Man, St. Louis, Missouri, 2017/07/30

 

 

Witness Yuletide ritual among the Nacirema.

So, yesterday was Christmas, that most magical children's holiday when a fat old livestock rustler in an unregistered vehicle squeezes his toy collection up and down your hot dark chute. (If I die before I wake, give it hard and fast to my brother Jake.) So noble and respectable an occasion prompts one to reflect upon... just how the mountains of bullshit we call religion spring up.

While faith in general is both stupid and insane, I do find the more recent faiths more perplexingly so, due to the abundance of countervailing evidence. Take two of the more quintessentially American inventions, Mormonism and Scientology for example. Most religions' founders sit comfortably shrouded in conveniently unverifiable, multimillennial folklore. We know little to nothing about their deeds and character except that proclaimed by their own adherents. No wonder Christ is such a Christ-like figure! In the cases of Joe Smith and the bard, Elron Hu, on the other hand, we have endless sources both outsider and lapsed from among the faithful to provide context. We know that one was a dime-a-dozen confidence artist who tried scam after scam in town after town until one of them (the faith scam) stuck. We know the other was a struggling scribbler who bragged that the best way to make money would be to start his own religion, and eventually did exactly that, in as cold-bloodedly profiteering a fashion as possible.

This knowledge has not been passed down by some folkloric telephone game reiterated through the centuries, but in dry, dull, extant stenography. No indescribable states of heavenly bliss and inspiration here, no alien spirits or deities conveniently unreachable for comment or unreplicated miracles or oneiric whispers atop clouded mountain peaks. No, these men's lives are chronicled via the most mundane historical data imaginable. We have court records and sales receipts and the first-hand kvetching of contemporaries who saw nothing Messianic in either case, who merely got ripped off trying to find gold on their property or happened to attend the same fabulists' social club. Man oh man, wouldn't historians give their right hands for a glimpse at the same kind of information about the older religious founders? Wouldn't they love to sit down for dinner with Jesus' old drinking buddy or see Lao Tzu get sued over a bar-room brawl in stentorious courtroom officiousness, or Siddhartha or Mohammed get their mules pulled over on a routine hashish possession charge, or Moses losing his copyright to the ten commandments on a technicality?

For all the social damage they can do, these latest but far from last rising religions offer invaluable in vivo observations of human gullibility and the transition from roadside shrine cult to megachurch. If any of their claims stand up to scrutiny, it is this: they are as worthy of the title "religion" as any other creed in history. Their demonstrable weirdness appears to us outsiders as a caricature of ritual and mythology... but then caricatures by definition over-emphasize features. They do not invent them. The new faiths use old tactics, from sotto voce promises of betterment and community spirit used in proselytism, to fabricating an invisible spiritual poison and withholding the imaginary antidote in some form of salvation attainable only by adherence to the one true faith, to the gradual monopolization of their subjects' lives to wring more and more service out of them, to the social isolation and threat of disconnection and all too mundane ostracism to limit heresy and apostasy, to banding together against outside critics in tactics of intimidation and outright violence.

We can laugh at an E-meter and "auditing" but are they any different from rosary beads and confession, save for being invented within a society with a much higher baseline for technobabble and psychobabble? Laugh at Mormons' magic undies all you like, but that figurine of a zombie rabbi around your neck isn't warding off any more demons than their cushier talismans. We can watch, in real time, the deformation of these cults' folkore, from self-help book to vague spiritualism to supernatural doctrine, or watch them drop practices like polygamy which cause friction with society at large, then remember mainstream Christians used to toss bags of cats into bonfires under suspicion of being witches' familiars. (Next time Mittens pukes in your shoes, remind her of that.) Read just a Wikipedia-grade smattering of the myriad bits of folklore condensed into modern Christmas rituals, from giving pointless Saturnalia gifts for the sheer pointlessness, to chimney-delivered sweets, to wooden clogs to 19th century cartoons and 20th century advertisements, and realize how many of these elements would look just as insane as planet Kolob if viewed at the resolution provided by the lens of modern mass-media sensationalism.

 

Most importantly, the newer religions can illustrate the shift from merely proselytizing to outright breeding second an third-generation adherents, as apostates' testimonies demonstrate. When the answer to how you came to believe such things is more often than not "was born into it" you have to realize that the venerable patina of Saturnalia, mangers and Sinterklaas itself lies in the clouded eye of the beholder. The seeming immutability of more mainstream religions comes from indoctrination performed on us when were were at our most defenseless, before the time we even formed permanent memories. "Give me the child until seven and I'll give you the man" quipped Ignatius in a display of cynicism that would make King Lycaon look like an amateur - but it would mean nothing if so many mammals did not prove utterly willing to hand over their infants to memetic predators spewing the infectious miasmas of mindless belief.

We are all born into some strain or another of endemic mental disease.

Immunize your children instead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________

edit 2023/06/26: few typo fixes

edit 2024/04/08: As the phrase appears in the process of being purged from search engines (at least it's still up on Wikipedia... for now)  "a temperate zone voodoo, in its inelasticity, unexplainable procedures, and mindless group euphoria" was the apt descriptor used by Dianetics leader Helen O'Brien in 1966 for Hubbard's shift in '53 from Dianetics' origin as a quack cure-all to openly supernatural claims or "the religion angle" in Hubbard's classicly crass scheister wording. O'Brien herself quit after being beaten and robbed as part of Hubbard's push to establish totalitarian control over Dianetics, as confessed by Hubbard's son in 1982.

If You Believe

"Here's a little agit for the never-believer

[...]

Here's a truck stop instead of Saint Peter's

[...]

Moses went walking with a staff of wood

Newton got beaned by the apple good"

 

R.E.M. - Man on the Moon

 

 

Like everyone who's anyone, I spent my solstice evening watching the Greatest of all conjunctions! (- and I am very much including "but" for "and" "or" other junctions) yet it wasn't until I zoomed the image in to its full pixelated glory that I noticed a couple of surprise appearances.

 

I thought at first the flattening on the left of both planets might be their night side, but other reference photos and the planets' positions relative to us and the sun make this out to be just an artifact of my jittery hands.

 

Also, they don't line up with the light's angle on the moon and all these fancy space rocks are supposed to be roughly in the plane of the ecliptic, but then again what do I know from optics and axial tilt?

Nothin'! - that's what.

Still, for a snapshot taken freehand while shivering on a clear but windy winter evening, I'd say I caught a decent one. And no, I did not howl at the moon, thankyouverymuch. These days nights the discerning lycanthrope just snaps his fingers a few times with an air of solemn detachment, beatnik style. Diana digs it.

 

More startling, I was not expecting the little clusters of pixels around Jupiter, which though distorted vertically just like the two planets are a bit more solid than the usual amateur photographic artifacts. They seem to be at about the correct distance for me to brag I managed to accidentally photograph two of the Galilean satellites. Io and Europa, maybe?

If those stray pixels really are the real deal, then I have to wonder how Galileo and Kepler ever managed to spot them though primitive telescopes of 8x-30x magnification and foggy focus and probably worth a house to boot, the pinnacle of scientific equipment back in 1610, with Ottoman pirates hounding the coasts and the West Indies a largely unexplored shore, and inquisitors breathing down your neck lest your new toy with the stacked lenses catch Yahweh with his pants down.

 

Millions of better images were produced yesterday, of greater magnification and clarity than my own feeble attempt, but this one remains noteworthy by its very feebleness. I do not work at an observatory. I don't even own a telescope. I did not drive up to a mountaintop in search of clear, rarefied air or torture the digital image through a quadrillion clock cycles' worth of post-processing. Ignorant and unmotivated, possessed of no specialized knowledge whatsoever, I took a five minute stroll, two hundred meters away from my apartment complex to an empty field, aimed vaguely in the direction astronomers pointed out, and clicked the shutter on my $160, off-the-shelf, mid-range consumer-grade autofocus camera. The same instrument I use to snap pictures of the family dog and funny-looking birds and the forest at sunset and a selfie for my senile grandmother, this half-kilo plastic, glass and copper lump in my coat pocket, can bring into mundane reach aspects of the universe which puzzled and frightened better men than myself for millennia. There was a time when the existence of other planets' moons was denied, because nothing could revolve around any astral body other than the Earth.

We most often hear scientific advance described either in terms of abstract, specialized projects like supercolliders or of technological intrusion into our social lives like cellphones, but somewhere between those extremes, between the abstruse and the vulgar, lie endless straightforward, accessible means to verify reality for ourselves. This is a golden age for autodidacts.

Now flip the channel to current events.

There's the astrology section, going as strong as it ever has. There's the state lottery raking in tens of millions. There's another stampede at Mecca. There's a million Flat Earth conspiracy nuts calling the moon landings hoaxes, and dust-caked sadhus with million-dollar Swiss bank accounts claiming they eat cosmic rays, and Bigfoot lurking in every blur, and Jehovah's Witnesses scared of turning into Dracula and presidents farting from the strain of trying to disbelieve the existence of methane, and Deepak Chopra curing your quantum autism by squinting at you, and neon-haired attention-whores claiming their gonads are a social construction, and grunting, hooting creationists missing as many links as they can, and Alex Jones defending us all from gay frogs and feminists defending us from rapist ducks and flood "geologists" whitewashing all the rock strata, and separatists goose-stepping in protest against "the government", and the political correctness police crying "defund the police", and tarot decks prophesying the fifth or sixth Mayan apocalypse this year alone, and bored widows with university educations paying through the nose to speak to the ghosts of their dead poodles, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, idiots, morons, cretins, imbeciles, retards by the billion, by the billion, a never-ebbing tide of simian degeneracy choking the life out of the world...

At some point you have to realize it's not just stupidity but neurophobia. Terrified of their own inadequacy, of being outpaced by reason, the masses take refuge in denial, in as ludicrous an idea as possible, the better to define themselves by their dogma. Their goal is not to seek alternate interpretations of the world but to find allies in anti-intellectual vandalism, to band together under the standard of a shibboleth in defense against an incomprehensible reality. Apes huddling in the darkest cave they can find, blinded by a few points of light giving the lie to the center of their universe.

"Is the rabble also necessary for life?"

Pacing Mars

"The trap that holds you down
The safety of your net
Creates a yearning to regress"

 

Chiasm - Delay

 

 

I'm finally ready to uninstall Surviving Mars. GoG claims I've spent 359h,45m playing this good game which could have been a great game. Of course, this being a city simulator, at least 4/5ths of that is AFK time, cooking dinner or playing Dwarf Fortress or Darkest Dungeon or clicking through unemployment pop-ups in Stellaris while my Martians monetize more technologies and plant more trees.

 

Welcome to Nyctimus, 356 sols (days / years) after its founding, viewed from its initial landing site now known as Lycanthrope Loch. Technically, the atmosphere has been breathable for at least fifty sols, but I kept the domes up because, well, I decided I like domes. So there.

(they look like shiny boobies... heheheh...)

Therein lies the problem. I feel no particular incentive to open up the domes. Terraforming adds a much-needed end-game stage, it's true, but its interplay with the rest of your colony-building is shallow at best, and also brings to the forefront one of the myriad small problems I cited back when Surviving Mars first released:

Pacing.

Surviving Mars is an object lesson in poor pacing.

Remember this?

A rover caught in a dust devil.

At the game's launch, this was one of your nightmare scenarios. Not just drones but rovers required both electricity and cleaning. Your colony's early stages amounted to teleoperating without a net, struggling to maintain a functional mechanical work force long enough to establish the various life support functions for human settlement. Having one of your rovers dusted into malfunction halfway across the map meant deliberately shifting your priorities to a power / repair expedition, all the while hoping you weren't throwing good machinery after bad.

These mechanics could certainly drag out past their plot relevance until they became pure drudgery. Once your priorities shifted to human settlers, rover maintenance rapidly grew onerous. But, instead of being shortened, this first colonization stage via teleoperation was removed altogether. Rovers are now self-cleaning, you're handed more powerful wind turbines for power, right from the start, and instead of consciously weighing your oxygen / water / power needs you can just plop down a self-sufficient habitation dome and immediately start your colony.

 

At the other end of the story, every run-through of Surviving Mars featured a randomly-generated "mystery" or long-term challenge, usually alien contact or some kind of political event requiring massive resource investment. Unfortunately these trigger a bit too early (usually before you fill your second dome) and did more to break up the rising action of colony building than to provide a satisfying boss encounter. By the time you finish a "mystery" you'll still be faced with half a campaign's worth of reiterating shiny boobies all over the landscape.

 

Terraforming would seem to fill that end-game void, but in practice it's merely a separate minigame. I decided to quit when I discovered that vegetation stops spreading at 40% completion, with the remaining 60% being doled out by the game itself at its own convenience as "special projects" artificially inflating the campaign's timescale. So where two years ago I'd run a colony about 50-100 sols after a mystery ended before losing interest, terraforming merely doubled that timespan while eliminating the last remaining challenges like disasters (cold snaps, dust storms, meteor showers) which might have spiced things up. I finished building space stations for Gene Roddenberry's imaginary counterpart in sol 123. This is basically what would happen if Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star thirty minutes into the movie then spent another hour farming moisture for your entertainment.

To reiterate:

Vanilla Surviving Mars suffered from a slightly overextended micromanagement first act and a rushed final act leaving you building redundant domes to fill your time.

The new and improved version of Surviving Mars deprives you of the first act altogether, stretching the dome building routine in both directions by demanding you stick around to wait for "seeding" special project availability... all the while failing to address and even worsening its premature expostulation problem.

The sad part is that, as I said two and a half years ago, there is a lot to like about Surviving Mars. The resource management and infrastructure maintenance are as good as any other city simulator, and the exploration and disaster angles add both proactive and reactive incentives. It banks well enough on its retro-futuristic, hopeful vision of exploration, plays smoothly with intuitive controls, offers a variety of side projects into which you can sink resources. But, aside from my smaller quibbles about writing quality and whatnot, it lacks an overall vision for proportional escalation. And, instead of realizing the problem, its developers have only further flattened their plot diagram after release.

Buying Time

Why can't I hate this comic?

Buying Time uses Flash animations, which glitchy, resource-gobbling mess of a plug-in would normally put me off from the start. It's a slice of life comic, most of which I find rather dull. Its characters' codependence grates. It abuses nudity for cheap appeal. Worst of all, it's about gay guys dating, which given our modern milieu immediately rang my "snowflake social justice warrior" alarm. So why can't I hate it?

It's set in a hundreds-deep underground vertical city in which social stratification naturally flows downward floor by floor from proximity to the surface, in which all interpersonal contact has been commodified, with the panopticon automatically charging your account for anything from saying hello to a hug to a night of passion. Also, cyborgs. Then again, lots of similar webcomics from the past decade started with workable or even intriguing premises only to get hopelessly bogged down in pronoun policing and other petty narcissism.

It's not as though Buying Time ever veers off its focus on interpersonal claptrap. From start to finish, panel by panel, it inextricably concerns itself with a short, dumpy, shy gay musician / welder's attempts to woo his laddie love. Yet, while the characters themselves remain motivated by their personal concerns, the SciFi setting never fades either, limiting and defining, skewing and intruding into every interaction. I suppose this is what made me ultimately enjoy it. It remains true to Science Fiction's exploration of technological developments' effect on sentient life, from living in a postapocalyptic crater to something as seemingly mundane as SMS charges run amok. Its characters are shown acting both emotionally and rationally on a scale consistent with their social position as little fish in a mind-bending pond, adapting to their environment instead of merely navel-gazing.

All in all, surprisingly good job.

[blue] Butterfly [wing] Collector ['s edition]

"As you carry on 'cause it's all you know

You can't light a fire

You can't cook or sew"

 

Butterfly Collector by The Jam (or alternately, Garbage)

 

 

So, as I said, forestalling my dive into Night City's fluorescent wasteland I've installed The Witcher 2, having been insufficiently impressed with the original to buy its sequels on anything but the hefty sales preceding Cyberpunk 2077's release. Not that they're terrible games, but CDProjekt seems incapable of putting out a real RPG, instead marketing simplified "action" third person slashers to the braindead gamepad crowd. For the moment I'll just stick to bitching about loot and crafting, but let's backtrack a bit to a thematic counterpoint first.

 

The Age of Decadence seems fairly... controversial... even among the old-school RPG fans it targets, with its low-budget, low number of very difficult encounters and skill checks forcing you to navigate a maze of life or death choices. It can be a bit of a chore at times. Nevertheless it stands out in a crowd, not least because its resource scarcity makes you latch hungrily onto the few pieces of loot you can grab and manage your finances more carefully than Scrooge. Every mushroom, every scrap of leather grows more significant. Most games, even modern ones, go the other route of showering you with piles of useless trash loot, doing nothing to reward careful oikonomia, an insult to their better customers.

So I ran through The Witcher 2's tutorial, and its tiresome, lengthy and cutscene-choked prologue, and its first actual mission or two, relentlessly snatching up every piece of trash loot and scattered crafting ingredients I could and hoping for a payoff when I finally find a seamstress to turn all these bolts of cloth into belts for clods, or something. Imagine my disappointment when:

- crafted goods turn out to sell for a mere fraction of their manufacture cost, rendering my piles of dutifully amassed ingredients little more than unlabelled trash loot. Much as in the Original Sin games, crafting seems a tacked-on timesink, good for little more than interposing an extra, perfunctory step betwen players and their exploration rewards. If that.

And, while The Age of Decadence rewards your crafting investment in a much more satisfying fashion, I'd argue there's still very little difference between the good and bad way to handle a feature extraneous to the genre in question.

Crafting has little place in story-based RPGs.

In sandbox games, sure, the player can deliberately manage the cost/benefit analysis of bending over to pick up every penny off the sidewalk or every dandelion from a field, or of taking a trip out to the dandelion field or sidewalk in the first place. Trade runs can be planned, as in Mount&Blade, with supply and demand estimates in mind. However, in a game with a fixed number of zones with a fixed number of resource spawns and a fixed number of encounters demanding resource expenditure, gathering ingredients is simply a foregone conclusion, a chore, and the more ingredients the bigger the chore. Either grab everything before leaving your current zone or you lose money, you loser.

I could think of a couple of good arguments to be made in support of crafting during a scripted campaign, both sorely undercut by a glance at how such games handle the feature.

1) Crafting is a character skill, a measure of one's roleplaying. It can require an investment of skill points. Therefore, it's not just a "feature" but a valid route of character advancement and personalization.

[Unfortunately, in most cRPGs crafting is a freebie, a separate minigame, requiring no balancing act with other skills.]

[Even when properly implemented, it requires foreknowledge of the campaign to know what resources will become available and when. My AoD loremaster / alchemist had a devil of a time finding black powder, yellow powder and white powder for late-game encounters.]

2) Resource scarcity during a campaign can force players to choose gear upgrades more carefully, therefore becoming a roleplaying choice.

[As with investing in a crafting skill, investing in a crafted item among a fixed pool of resources depends on foreknowledge of the campaign so you don't waste your future +5 sword ingredients on a +3 sword right before +4s come into play. It's not like an endless game where you can shift your priorities to compensate.]

[Also, this does not require a crafting "system" per se. If only a few gear upgrade choices will ever be relevant, those few can be handled through dialogue or context menu interactions. For the rest, if every single player will acquire enough materials for exactly 37 rusty daggers, every single campaign run-through, then just cut out the middle-man and give us 37 rusty daggers to vendor. The only thing worse than trash loot is crafted trash loot.]

Cutting out the middle-man is probably the sorest point here. As I sit looking at The Witcher 2's gratuitous timesink of a crafting interface I can't but wonder at how many developer work-hours it must have eaten up, which wasted time gets passed on to customers, included in the program's price tag. I have to wonder how many more side quests, how many more dialogue options or monster types that "feature" cost us, or how many bugs could've been debuggered in that time.

_____________________________________________________

P.S.

The title was a Skyrim reference. I occurs to me now that enough time has passed since its release for not everyone to remember one particular crafting ingredient. Not everyone lives inside my own head, I keep forgetting...

Oh well.

Cyberpad Denominator

"Your life your strife your fear is clear
You're scared you dared to feel sincere"

 

Syntax - Tower of Power

 

 

I'd started a completely blind run of Cyberpunk 2077 but it's really not enchanting me right out of the gate so far. Granted I'm impressed with the size and detail of Night City as well as the well-polished combat mechanics (auto-leaning around corners, etc.) at least in the first fight or three. However, I'm quite annoyed that they wasted development time to implement customizable schlongs but not arrow / numpad key rebinding (always hated the WASD setup) and it seems much too console-friendly in general (a.k.a. idiot-friendly) so far barely hinting at an RPG side of things to lend its Grand Theft Auto routine more complexity.

I'll probably give it a pass for the moment and go back to play The Witcher 2 instead, see how that turned out. Still, a couple of quests past the tutorial, something bugs me.

, sample package mouthwash, tiny bars of soap, single-serving friends,

This is not my apartment.

Sure, I know, it's "V"'s apartment and I'm just playing V, this premade character with premade friends and premade life goals and premade aesthetic tastes. I've always preferred blank slates onto which I can project more aspects of my own personality, and my persona extends to my base of operations. Though of course a customizable, functional lair would be preferable, some games can manage to render the simplest digs homey. Your first apartment in Bloodlines, for instance, obviously could not be customized, but immediately established your newfound position in society, your bower, your extended phenotype as a bottom-rung parasite, a grungy, decrepit second-story gutter... where you belong. Cold iron, cold filmy glass, denuded furnishings, outdated electronics, a nearly contiguous layer of grime punctuated by a single overstretched, pathetic little rug failing to splash some color into the scene. Death and waste and degeneracy. Vampirism.

Customizability aside, V's apartment on the other hand is so generic as to express nothing at all, either about my own character's tastes or about my social milieu. Neither rebellious nor indulgent, primitivist nor futuristic, stark nor elaborate, carnal nor mechanical, physical nor cerebral.

 

I can only hope that its very lack of personality deliberately condemns prefabricated consumerism, employed to offset later, better defined environments by its mundane human hive tedium, a springboard for monomythic escalation.

I can only fear it rather reflects CDProjekt's target audience, a console game straining for mass appeal, afraid to threaten its customers' all too human expectations. No ode and no dirge, incapable of melancholy or ambition, mere human resentment toward the extranormal, metastasizing monotone mediocrity.

Come on, IKEA boy, I want you to hit me as hard as you can!

"Are we not men?"

Consider all the simple, spontaneous playground games which routinely crop up among human children... and among dogs: tag, tug of war, keep-away, wrestling, fetch (a.k.a. most ball games) etc. Do you find the similarity a heartwarming reassurance of our quadruped playmates' elevated sensibilities? Or can you admit the human norm remains hopelessly, animalistically primitive?

I got a new phone recently, and flipping over the quick-start leaflet noticed "Printed in USA" on the back. Sure, as far as the product itself goes, the components are made in China and assembled in Taiwan and the charger is made in Singapore and the patent's Japanese and everything's packaged by Indonesian eight-year-olds and it's all being marketed by some South Korean art and design studio and the paper and cardboard all come from some Madagascar bamboo plantation and the profits regardlessly all vanish into some offshore tax shelter... but! We can all rest easy knowing our leaflet printing industry's still going strong.

Whew.

Had me worried there for a second.

Dungeon Liberation: 40,000 Final Rats

"Do you remember lying in bed
With your covers pulled up over your head?
Radio playing so no one can see"

 

The Ramones - Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio?

 

 

Looking for a new RPG I decided to try Dungeon Rats, the Fallout Tactics or Icewind Dale non-roleplaying spin-off of the role-playing game The Age of Decadence. Which is to say, a straight-up dungeon crawl. No exploration, no plot options, no mysteries or puzzle-solving, no moral or style decisions, just stat min-maxing and a linear series of scripted combats.

 

I'm less than enthusiastic about such pure party-management games to begin with. I can get the same party-based combat in strategy games like Age of Wonders with a lot more economic and empire-building goodies on the side... or in a role-playing game with role-playing choices on top. Dungeon Rats might be assumed to suffer less than others by this single-minded focus, because AoD already boasted anachronistically difficult combat as a selling point. However, it did so amidst a host of other difficult choices offering alternate paths to success. If a fight was too hard, you could go shopping / exploring for more crafting ingredients and better gear or advance in some other part of the city via a noncombat quest. While in AoD you might ocasionally have to repeat the same combat thirty times over, praying to RNGesus for the crits to go your way, Dungeon Rats makes this your only option! That. Is. TheGame. Moreover, being party-based unlike AoD only increases the frustration of randomization under such high damage / health ratios, as it only means I now have three characters instead of one to fumble a defensive roll and die (permanently, with no chance of recovery or resurrection and few opportunities for replacement) forcing more reloads.

 

Looking for a new strategy game I decided to once again try Final Liberation, an old WH40K game I abandoned twice before: first because it dates from the Full Motion Video era (a.k.a. spectator LARPs - 'nuff said) and second because it seems to lack any sense of scale or escalation. Before uninstalling it yet again, I still find myself unenthused by simply being handed huge numbers of redundant units to maneuver one by one across forgettable but oversized maps. But speaking of enthusiasm:

 

That's just a "detailed stats" pop-up info window, but the backdrop added a bit of flair, placing the unit in question in action movie context. It looks... what's that word I've been using again?

Enthusiastic.

Final Liberation dates from the "Betty Boop" era of computer games, when consumers more often expected to immerse themselves in the activity, to be consumed by this novel medium instead of merely consuming. Granted, it attempts this in fairly stupid ways (FMV and that intrusive, detail-obscuring, cluttered unit stats window above) but it felt the need to offer something. Not every game needs every sort of fluff, be it flavor text or mood music or lavish backdrops or voice acting or character customization or level design or world building, but each needs to put some effort into a few of these fields. Otherwise a game with "retro" aspirations risks bringing to mind not the more memorable titles of yore, but the mountains of decrepit shovelware churned out by formula over the past half century.

More than even its frustrating combat limitation, I think it's this lack of interest that puts me off Dungeon Rats. It is possible to build a game around combat while still interjecting background information, decision-making, humor or drama (see FTL) to pull the player into its world. The Age of Decadence had that enthusiasm in spades. Dungeon Rats lacks it, gives the impression it must've been a chore to make and so its makers, in retribution, inflict it as a blasé chore upon their customers.

How I Learned to Stop Filtering and Love the Spam

The organization currently pulling my strings sends out daily reminders to monitor our health vis-a-vis the Chinese virus currently depopulating the globe. At first I was annoyed and nearly opted out, but gradually I grew to enjoy the willful delusion that someone out there actually gives a shit about my health.

Next thing you know I'll be cheering in crowds.

Cosmetic Earjury

"All of my life I was very angry, until one day I just talked like this. All of a sudden everybody was smilin' at me and I was only doing good on this earth. So I kept on doin' it."

 

Leon Kompowsky, the Michael Jackson impersonator from The Simpsons impersonated by Michael Jackson

 

Let's say that tomorrow, a postmodernist social critic deconstructs every religious, legal and folkloric text in the history of humanity, feeds them through a magic Derridecoder ring, and finds a common chain: all the world's ills have been caused by people with detached earlobes. The media immediately latch on to this sensational (and thoroughly scientific) finding. It becomes a catchphrase, a fad, a common gimmick for made-for-cable movies of the week to pin all villainy on monsters with dangling ear lobes. Politicians pour gas on the flames in search of public approval, swearing to bring equity via the newly formed attached earlobby. Laws begin to squirm their way into the books declaring those with dangling earlobes (let's call them "danglers" for short) suspicious and deserving of summary arrest whenever in conflict with their assuredly innocent victims with attached ear lobes.

Pretty soon, though danglers die younger and score lower in every metric of physical and mental well-being, though they do all the most dangerous or unhealthy jobs and can expect to be arrested and jailed far more often for the same crime than their angelic attached-lobe counterparts (let's call them attachés, or "ches" for short) they are only being vilified more and more as hoarding all of society's goods for themselves. Everything is the fault of the danglers and their fault only, from wars to economic downturns to religious repression and prejudice and anything bad that might happen to the attachés. Children grow up indoctrinated into considering danglers disgusting, innate criminals who can only be redeemed by a lifelong program of abuse by, and service to, their superiors in the natural order. Any attaché can point a finger at any dangler and claim to have rubbed ears unconsensually, and that dangler instantly gets ostracized with no chance to defend oneself. From cradle to grave, danglers hear nothing but their own vilification and the glorification of the ches, while still being expected to sacrifice themselves for the ches' benefit.

But wait! For the price of a small operation, a little nip and tuck and some hormone treatments, you can declare that you were never a dangler, that there was really a che inside you all along just waiting to be properly expressed. You're not one of the villains. You're one of the angelic elite! You can glue your earlobes to your head and convert to one of the righteous.

 

Would you do it?

Male-to-female transsexuals have consistently outnumbered female-to-male pretty much since recording began. The numbers I've seen usually range anywhere from 1.5:1 to 3:1 depending on definitions, place and time, but even the low end of that scale is off the charts to anyone familiar with male/female differences, which rarely break a 5-10% spread. Politically correct explanations tend to be formulated with the incentive to insult men at every turn, to declare this as proof that men really are defective in some fundamental way and the human ideal is female. In a way, yes, because in a species in which favors and sacrifice already flow naturally from men to women, from nuptial gifts to "with your shield or on your shield" the past half-century has only sweetened the deal further by constantly demonizing men and sanctifying women, by raising men to hate themselves and hold women up as deserving of all the world's good. We should remember that even the tropical fish everyone loves to cite as evidence of natural sex changes do so when socially favorable, and we have made femininity overwhelmingly favorable. Under such conditions, the surprise isn't the heavy skew away from dangling. It's that anyone would want to dangle at all.

And I hear you say "Werwolfe, you're pissing on the wrong bush! Ear lobes are one thing but I'd never dole my balls just to get out of a few traffic tickets! What kind of man do you think I am?" To flip an old joke though, we've already established that. Now we're just haggling.

________________________________________

P.S.:

You make me want to stop dangling.

The Unmarried Mother

"If you want, we're concerned with systems, and so are you, or at least you want to be, or else you wouldn't be a cowboy and you wouldn't have a handle, right?"

 

William Gibson - Count Zero

Though I generally avoid television, I finally cracked some years ago and made a Netflix account and have repeatedly re-activated it while lying to myself about the wasted money. Unless you're dying to watch Yet Another Zombie Movie or Dating Sitcom #4593 their lowest common denominator line-up has precious little to offer beyond classic Star Trek or Twilight Zone episodes. However, I confess to being downright impressed by Dark, a low-key German Science Fiction series with a plot requiring several flowcharts to follow. Literally. As in, they're on Wikipedia.

 

Rounding the halfway point of the third season, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the finale to do it justice. This entails repeating two mantras:

1) Please don't pull a "Lost" - remain a Science Fiction show instead of retreating into facile supernatural excuses.

2) Cool it with the stupid sex scenes already.

I merely rolled my eyes at the pilot episode opening in medias ingress and wrote it off as a bearable attention-grabbing concession to mass appeal. But instead of leaving it at that and focusing on more relevant details, later seasons stubbornly waste more and more screen time showing us the central characters humping. Will the heroine's mathematically precise panting pattern turn out to decode a diary's cipher? Will the hero's swiveling his hips before thrusting unravel a causal paradox? If not, there's no excuse for continuing to include such scenes. By the second season, much less the third, either you managed to grab your audience's attention or not. You should be done with the gratuitous gimmicks.

For many years now (ever since playing The Witcher) I've been meaning to write more on the issue of gratuitous sex scenes and romantic subplots, and the medium does not particularly matter. For the purposes of this post, it's the endless repetition of sex scenes, episode after episode, which lowers Dark's value and which I struggle to explain. Time and again, apparently, the audience must be permitted to transpose themselves into the form of limber, photogenic adolescents mindlessly reiterating mammalian pair-bonding rituals, to identify with the characters on screen via the basest, lowest of all common denominators, "young love". For my own part, the character whose lines even remotely echo my own conclusions so far is Adam. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, let's leave it at that.

I do not easily identify with either fictional characters or the personas of others. As far as games go, the mere existence of Twitch TV turns my stomach. Granted, I was never big on old-fashioned spectator sports either, but "e-sports" in particular make me want to strangle you cretins with your mouse cords. For actual sports, real-world sports, sports which merit the designation of sports, at least doing and watching were separated by a significant gulf in activity level, but I cannot for the life of me fathom the mindset of sitting in front of the same screen at the same keyboard yet watching some degenerate mouthbreather across the world play the same game you yourself could be playing right now at the same moment on the same machine... I... how? What? Huh?

 

The answer once again looms in this mystical "identifying with" the object you observe, that in passively devoting your attention to the perfect tragic romance or the perfect rocket jump you somehow feel yourselves included in, invested in, profiting from, the perceived value of the act. While not immune to this mental disease, this spiritual communion and prayer unto higher realms of base commonality, I cannot imagine a life of endlessly repeated enrollment, of being caught up, constantly, in shared experiences. So many times I've sat amidst a crowd and felt a communal action flow into being around me, whether it's a chant, a peal of laughter, a pattern of motion, a round of applause, yet I can no longer discern either its origin or its beachhead upon your herd psyche. What can it be like, to live one's entire life as a vehicle for others' thoughts, to have notions, impulses, scenes, continually enter and exit one's head unaltered, unanalyzed, to be ridden with and by memetic cacodemons, to have forsaken one's existential foundation as an individual pattern of information processing. Processing, not absorption and automatic reiteration.

Fads are bad enough. Slogans are worse. But cyberspace handles have perplexed me more and more. I took it for granted, when I started playing games and posting online, that I was taking the reins of my personal fable, a far greater control over my own becoming, a knowing means of "making a soul" as Ursula K. LeGuin's characters might say, wandering in introversion among a planet full of introverts. I became a symbol of myself as naturally as breathing. I have been Werewolf, Werewolfe, Werwolfe, for two decades now. Imagine my consternation every time I see anyone using throwaway aliases or worse still, some variant of real-world names like "SuperBob1234" - how do they avoid collapsing into miniature black holes under the negative pressure of their own inactive synapses?

Thus, with black holes, we return to Dark. I've repeatedly made a distinction on this blog between Science Fiction and Fantasy based on personal agency. Fantasy, clinging to the supernatural, hinges on top-down cosmologies, power flowing mysteriously down to supplicants from an ultimate source of its own accord. Science, on the other hand, is a bottom-up process in which rational agents construct solutions via materialistic means. The show indulges in some heavy religious symbolism via names, but in the end it could go either way. Adam and Eva could master their chosen roles or be subsumed by them, could "identify with" their tulpas or define a mythology unto themselves.

Robert Heinlein, an early master of such stories saw the potential in foreknowledge and framed the temporal paradox not as a trap but as the ultimate opportunity for self-determination.

"I know where I came from -- but where did all you zombies come from?"

RimWorld

Hark ye to the tale of Captain Kaleun

A former cadet on a three-hour-tour

A doughty old hottie of much-guarded poon

Faceplanted on <planetname> one fateful moon

 

 

She found herself whistling Robinson's tune

With a hermit called Alistair who hated to rassle

And a doting wife Fletcher who thought fights a hassle

So they all nearly died to a guinea pig hustler.

Kaleun then recruited some muscle to aid her

By beating them senseless and shooting their brethren

But the idiots died to wolves, goons or weather

Leaving more work to their glorious captain.

She quarried and sculpted, brought home the bacon

She hammered their steel into helmets and guns

She scienced technologies odd and arcane

But with each caravan her strength lastly waned

An arm lost to robots. Leg? - rabid bisons

Confined her to researching better prosthetics

Which Fletcher attached with stiff analgesics

In time for their captain to hold off the formics

Yet giddy with victory, the grizzled corsair

Tarried too long outside of their lair

Not sensing the fallout that dusted her lungs

Scanning and mining for wealth uncompared

Her sanity waning, her faculties faltering

She wanders forgetting, negotiates slurring

Yet the slayer of bandits and beasts beyond counting

Clings to her shotgun and stares down contenders:

"If you try to replace me, I'll buckshot your nethers!"

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------

 

If Northgard reminded me of Lords of the Realm, RimWorld reminds me of The Oregon Trail. Slightly off target, as RimWorld's closest relative is obviously Dwarf Fortress: digging, seasonal changes, room designations, animal breeding, materials of varying value, finished goods of varying quality, happiness metrics by the Stepford, more ways to die than you can shake a scythe at, etc. with the major caveat of a lack of three-dimensionality. It compensates for that lack by letting you mount expeditions outside your starter zone, which only partly accounts for my Oregon Trail comparison.

 

You start your adventure with only three colonists instead of seven and expansion is much slower, with ideal colony size seeming to peak around ten, one-twentieth the size of a dwarf tribe. They don't breed and while you can occasionally buy a slave or rescue a crashlanded survivor, you'll do most of your recruiting by capturing prisoners from the frequent raids sent against you and feeding them until Stockholm syndrome takes root. This can lead to some amusing situations down the line:

 

I built a monument to me kicking your ass. Best buds?

In fact it's lucky that scenario doesn't register as an official insult, because RimWorld encourages an almost Sims-level micromanagement of your colonists' moods. With so few workers, having even one drop into a depressive funk can prevent finishing a project on time, and lashing out against each other can quickly steamroll into crippling your colony's production until they're barely feeding themselves. The situation is even more grim for your original three, with any relevant gap in their skillsets rapidly becoming obvious. I wasn't joking when I said Kaleun's colony, with the other two incapable of combat, was almost wiped out by a single guinea pig. I have to reiterate my observation vis-a-vis Into the Breach: small numbers and randomness do not mix. If one of your first three dies you may find yourself lynchpin-deprived and might as well quit.

 

Of course, once you hit your stride, get some fields planted, climate-control your compound, set up barricades and traps, tame some livestock, you're much less susceptible to individual events. They may eat their weight in meat, but I've found a phalanx of mountain lions to be every bit as effective as the phrase "phalanx of mountain lions" suggests. Then, every time like clockwork, the events get tougher. Here's where we have to address RimWorld's official main selling point, the "storyteller" AI, really just a way of saying the algorithm spawning new objectives, hazards or enemies for you adjusts to your colony's success. A.k.a. level-scaling for a base-building game, a.k.a. treadmills, a.k.a. leveling sideways.

 

No matter the usefulness of such mechanics in keeping the action flowing, I still bristle at having an algorithm arbitrarily decide at exactly which time I should be punished for my success. In RimWorld it comes across as contrived as being notified that some occupant of my Oregon Trail wagon has spontaneously contracted and just as spontaneously succumbed to dysentery. Randomness is bad enough without edging into preordained calamity of a random nature. I'm getting a bit sick of killer robots raining down from the sky whenever I hit eight or nine colonists. I'm supposed to be playing the game, not vice versa; I'm supposed to be the one driving the action, not merely providing fodder for an algorithm to run my life. Though I don't play tabletop games, RimWorld's "storyteller" AI feels like playing with a G.M. who arbitrarily spawns a lich to attack you because you've looted your thousandth gold piece. Less storytelling and more like a jealous toddler throwing a tantrum.

I could cite other minor gripes, mostly having to do with colonists' skewed priorities, like running around hauling rocks with a gaping chest wound or going to sleep in a freezer because their last task happened to be storing food. However, I'm wary of unduly bashing RimWorld simply because it fundamentally grinds against my lycanthropic, hermit-past-the-edge-of-town mentality. To me, city simulators are about grand works, not citizens and the "Sims" precept of insinuating oneself into the private lives of others and manipulating their thoughts has always been inherently... creepy. I can certainly enjoy the propensity of simulators to fabricate personal or social dramas (exhibits A, B and C). I've been well amused by the antics of Captain Kaleun, the man-hating, half-senile, brilliant researcher, crafter and sniper, as well as the dashing young power couple (animal tamer / planter) who ruled my previous attempt at a colony... but building a base should still be about objects, not people, grand works and not the filthy workers.

RimWorld sticks laudably to its space western theme, and it truly does excel at weaving personal NPC narratives, but its main effect on me is rekindling my desire to fire up another Dwarf Fortress world and build my legendary monuments on the hundred-fold corpses of disposable nobodies.

 

____________________________________________________

* Apparently I've reached that Grandpa Simpson age where everything reminds me of an interesting story. (Actually, it's not so much interesting as it is long.)

Northgard

"Sola vendar hausten sendar

graset gulnar, blada fell

lyse dagar er på hell"

 

Wardruna - Jara

 

 

I stand by my statement that "real-time" strategy games are largely a fad of the '90s and fundamentally pointless, consistently devolving to button-mashing instead of strategic planning. Still, I retain a soft spot for Homeworld, I do plan to try at least one of the Total War games at some point, and when Northgard came up on sale I bit the bullet, gave it a chance and was pleasantly surprised.

The basic Settlers-reminiscent gameplay presents a weird compromise toward turnstile mechanics: tiles, but no turns. Units move freely within discrete territories with fixed construction capacity and hard boundaries restricting events to one tile at a time. A few effects can be global, like healers able to reach your other units anywhere within your own boundaries. The basic resources, food, wood and gold, are both produced and consumed continually for upkeep, making you scramble to maintain threshold values, while the stone and iron you'll need for upgrades come in finite deposits and a very slow availability in the marketplace. You'll likely struggle most to maintain high happiness, as you only gain more workers (to be recruited into the military) via a slow trickle of immigrants.

All in all, this is an RTS with a very strong managerial emphasis, to the point it feels like a more fluid version of Lords of the Realm. Conquest is in fact the least likely victory scenario, as you can also win via research, gold production, sheer expand&exploit or capturing "king of the hill" terrain tiles depending on map. Charmingly, much like Dawn of Man, your gameplay is heavily marked by the yearly summer / winter cycle, your greatest enemy looming in the severe upkeep hike incurred by winter weather. Interestingly this also makes winter raids a risky but potentially devastating proposition. The various clans (added as paid DLCs per current marketing dogma) also alter basic gameplay in a surprinsgly fundamental fashion, heavily shifting your economic balance or the utility of your units, especially your army's hero(es).

So I've already played more of Northgard than I would have ever guessed just looking at screenshots... but entirely in single-player. Despite it obviously being developed with multiplayer in mind, the core flaw of RTS, button-mashing, still renders combat too much of a nuisance. While you need to control far fewer units than usual (your army will rarely reach a dozen) and don't need to spam activated abilites, your success still relies on pulling individuals out in a timely fashion as their hit points drop and gaming the zone line system to instantly escape to safety. Incidentally, zone lines also result in counterintuitively building defensive towers as far back behind other buildings as possible. Northgard is an admirable and surprinsingly immersive attempt at reconciling RTS with the word "strategy" but the genre's core flaw remains insurmountable.

Translation: LOLWUT

"My Love! thou mock'st my weakness; and would'st steel
My breast before the time when it must feel.
But trifle now no more with my distress,
Such mirth hath less of play than bitterness"

 

Lord Byron - The Corsair

Ah, that verbose old-timey English writing. Gotta love it.

Avant-Guard-'Er

I haven't written much on the topic of webcomics this past year, largely because I've been reading fewer of them. The medium seems to have run its creative course for the time being, awaiting future decades' kick in the ass to escape its current mire of milquetoast, politically correct dating dramedy. Ignoring the newer, snowflake cartoonists who largely came by their idiocy honestly via the rapid decline of universities' LAS education since the '90s, most of the active authors predating the current era have also been drinking the Woke-Aid.

The earliest major and most infamously virulent example was of course Tatsuya Ishida of Sinfest, but others like PvP or El Goonish Shive or Something Positive or Questionable Content gradually degenerated to rewriting or introducing "special" character after character, all as blandly idealized as Disney princesses, to enforce the superiority of non-heterosexuals, non-whites and especially non-males. Who needs a plot when you have conceit? Even my perennial favorite Christopher Baldwin has fallen prey to the fad, and Tailsteak, whose ideas were always threatening to run away from him, may or may not be feeding or deliberately bucking the trend with his newest serial Forward. Time will tell.

 

Feminism, commanding the largest baseline of inherent adherents, tops these former creators' compendium of unquestioned holy writs in their quest for unquestioning approval. Flip a couple of pages and you'll inevitably run into the endlessly reiterated ritual of a female browbeating or condescending to a strawMan. So when glancing at the authors' names one must at some point note that most such notable worthies are in fact male, self-flagellating over being born the wrong sex.

Funny that even in producing their own supremacist propaganda, feminists have fallen back upon the time-honored, all-purpose solution of torturing a man until he does it for you.

Seraphs sob at vermin fangs with [vermin] gore imbued

"When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys."

 

Edgar Allan Poe - The Masque of the Red Death

___________________________________________________

 

"I could no longer doubt the doom prepared for me by monkish ingenuity in torture. [...] It was hope that prompted the nerve to quiver -- the frame to shrink. It was hope -- the hope that triumphs on the rack -- that whispers to the death-condemned even in the dungeons of the Inquisition. [...] There could be no doubt of the design of my tormentors -- oh! most unrelenting! oh! most demoniac of men!"

 

Edgar Allan Poe - The Pit and the Pendulum

___________________________________________________

 

 

It's Halloween, a night to shudder behind one's mask at the shadows dancing beyond the lights of civilization, to thrill at grotesque malformations lurching from house to house demanding plunder. Ah but this year the byways are silent, the porches unlit, the rustle of bedsheet spectres nowhere to be heard. A more tenebrous wraith stalks the border between life and death, the first of what will likely be many pandemics as the human population grows both larger and less stable, swarming mindlessly, ravenously, noxiously over the face of an overheating, defoliated, polluted globe. Poe's Masque of the Red Death prods insistently at our attention as we stumble from room to room in social isolation, our diseased ape minds cloaked in pretense and bravado to ward off the invisible touch of bodily decomposition. You will die. Dare ask the why? In response I would point you rather to The Pit and the Pendulum, remarkable for some of Poe's most visceral imagery while uncharacteristically eschewing the supernatural tinge of his other famous works. From start to finish it reminds its readers that all the narrator's torments are conceived and put into action (at great cost) by human superstition, human viciousness, human sadism and bloodthirst - then, even his deliverance, the deus ex machina in the form of a French revolutionary takeover of Catholic excess, serves only to remind us of the story's opening quote condemning the Jacobins.

It's Halloween, a night to shudder behind one's face mask at the shadows of duplicitous gods, mad tulpas dancing against the dimly lit walls of our caves. Tremble in fear at the latest Chinese plague inflicted on the world, then remember the barely contained "antivaxer" measles epidemics across the U.S. in which the Amish, fundamentalist Jews and California yuppies have all been doing their best to outdo the Chinese as plague rats. We move closer to dictatorship with every election, closer to theocracy with every panic prompting imbeciles to retrench in primitive superstitions, closer to mob rule with every cry of "defund the police", closer to feudalism every time landlords brand their serfs. Humanity has a death wish. Maybe it's time to give in to the imp of the perverse and just let them go through with it? Being alive now feels more and more like Poe's victim of the Inquisition, lashed down in the dark, feeling the innumerable gnawing vermin, insatiable, insalubrious, swarming over your body. No good guys and no bad guys, no right or wrong side anymore, nothing but drowning in an implacable tidal wave of eight billion degenerate cretins, all self-assured of their cannibalistic sainthood, all brandishing their shibboleths, their rainbow flags and swastikas, their racks and thumbscrews. Stuck between the Inquisition and the Jacobins. Shall we unmask the crimson intruder who lurked among us all the while?

So, what's your flavor? Pit or pendulum?

Animal Husbandry

"I always hear women say 'you know, married men live longer' - ah, yes, and, an indoor cat... also... lives longer. It's a furball with a broken spirit than can only look out on a world it will never enjoy, but it does technically live longer."

 

Bill Maher - Victory Begins at Home (2003)

"Married men live longer" ranks one of the rankest true lies that just won't die. Every couple of years the media rediscover this totally shocking "scientific" discovery and morning shows ring far and wide with men's insufficiency unto themselves. It fits our "man bad, woman good" preconceptions beautifully, declaring males to be both inherently defective and beholden to female benevolence in a single statement.

Correlation is not causation however, the most effective lies are half-truths, and a quick reference of our animal nature suggests the opposite interpretation. While sexual attraction is based on many factors, a basic and usually unspoken one for both sexes is physical health. We subconsciously evaluate everything from infection susceptibility to metabolic and anatomic fitness based on skin condition, bone structure, musculature, fat reserves, hair maintenance, scent, etc. Men do it too (and arguably more actively) though the standards for female ability are less stringent. As long as the chick looks like she won't keel over for a few years (i.e. she can carry a foetus to term and nurse it to foraging age) go ahead and stick it in, worry about the rest later. Women, however, benefit from their mate's long-term value as a protector and provider. If the wimpy, jittery guy doesn't look like he can down a wild boar, much less beat other men away from the carcass to bring you home the bacon, then screw him... or rather, don't.

For once, I won't even bother looking for references, because this should be our starting point for the discussion, both intuitive and logical. That sexual partners might become emotionally attached and care for each others' health, eh, fine, it's a valid argument; yet nonrandom mating, sexual selection, mate preference, call it whatever, it by several orders of magnitude an older, more pervasive and entrenched instinct. Married men don't live longer. Men with the potential to live longer, healthier men, are more attractive and more likely to be permitted to mate by women. Females are less likely to bet on a lame workhorse. They desire one they can bleed for as long as possible. You are as attractive as you are potentially useful.

 

Never mind that at an even more basic level, reproductive contest in the majority of species without paternal investment hinges on the male's health as guarantee of offspring viability.

And this is all before we even reach the quality of life issue. Domestic animals can indeed live longer than their free counterparts, as a resource to be husbanded.