Athletic Swarm +1

I've picked up Skyrim again recently, determined to at long last work my way around to finishing the main quests. (I'm over level 100 and haven't ridden a single dragon yet. ("Muffle" that's how. (Shut up.)))

 

Inevitably, it brings to mind Morrowind, which was such a monumental accomplishment for its time, and its differences from Skyrim which is mostly just... eh, acceptable. I do miss spells like levitation, for instance, though I'll admit it would ruin Skyrim's more consistently low(er)-fantasy setting. Nothing breaks immersion in most settings quite like seeing people flitting around willy-nilly like drunken cherubs. On the flip-side of immersion, I don't miss the Athletics skill the least bit.

"Increase:

1 second of Swimming: +0.03
1 second of Running: +0.02"

 

Improving your running by running is perfectly logical. In fact it's pretty much fact. In a game though, getting points for walking ranks one of the most ridiculous notions possible, frequently mocked even by people who think nothing of shooting nuclear wands at space goblins with laser teeth. The problem isn't whether it fits the setting or not, but that characters should advance due to actions the player deliberately undertakes, not for merely performing basic protoplasmic functions. What's next? Experience points for hydrolysis? Ten donuts to level up?

 

Well, occasionally, yes, you do run into such stupidity.

 

 

Backtrack to last year when, not having played Magic:the Gathering since high school, I finally got into the online "arena" version to see what the kiddies are into these days. For the game which introduced most of us to the microtransaction system before it had a name, I was expecting a bit of escalation. It's hard to find any creatures without special abilities now, and drawing extra cards per round is pretty much a must. Some changes I find quite welcome (multicolor lands) while others have reminded me why I haven't considered MTG a worthwhile pastime since junior year lunch hour.

 

A perpetual problem in Arena, for several years from what I hear, has been lifelink procs. As a basic concept, players in MTG have 20 health each and use creatures and magic to whittle each other down to 0. With such a low starting total, anything which increases your life is obviously highly useful in itself. In other words, it's something you'd probably do anyway. So naturally instead of balancing against it, endless cards have been added which proc off life gain itself. I thought nothing could be dumber until a few months ago the "Landfall" ability came in, rewarding you for casting land cards - which, for a point of reference, you're expected to do on average at least once a turn. Scute Swarm is a particularly hilarious form of pandering, as it routinely allows you to instantly summon 8X 3/4 cards in turn 5 or 6 - this in a game with a 20-point base health total. To say nothing of the run-of-the mill free win cards like Victory's Envoy.

 

Mind you, the problem goes beyond imbalance, which is more or less a constant in online games. The trend that's made me grit my teeth over the past decade is a proliferation of "I win" buttons which don't even need to be pressed, which simply trigger automatically by performing feats as mundane and self-sufficient as walking. This is snowflake gaming: participation trophies, victories handed out simply for existing, just for you being you!

 

Not everything needs to be an idle game!

El Goonish Shive

"The trauma in store

Breathes all hot on your heels

 

You've got a little spell

Memorize the lines"

 

I:Scintilla - Sequins and Pills

 

 

____________________________________________

Spoilers for the webcomic El Goonish Shive follow, though it's hardly a mystery novel.

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This comic repeats itself.

I've been reluctant to talk about El Goonish Shive first of all because I've been expecting these past couple of decades for it to gain some clearer definition, some dimensions amenable to measure... but as that doesn't seem to be happening, I might as well start referencing what there is to reference, especially the ways in which this comic repeats itself.

Second, having met the author long ago knocks a sizeable dent in my objectivity as I resent the crap out of him for proving able to create something at least borderline enjoyable, unlike myself. Make no mistake: though I'll be bitching him out, I've been leafing through his drawings now and then for 19 years while he's never heard of my little blog, so Shive wins this little ersatz reunion by default.

This comic repeats itself perhaps inevitably for its age, being among the few still running from around Y2K, with the rarer distinction of having recovered from a major tonal shift. At its start it largely riffed on anime clichés: teenagers endowed with superpowers via nonsensical phlebotina battle monsters, authority and each other, with the ensuing slapstick providing most of the humor. After only a couple of years the various slapfights escalated into a goth-tinged Dragonball climactic battle called Painted Black which obviously comprised the author's proverbial "wad" for the time being.

Then most of those characters were never heard from again.

So what do teenagers do after your squirrel-alien-girlfriend-chi-fireball-throwing-ingenue's abusive adoptive nuclear father blows up leaving your half-animal shapeshifting brothers to ride off into the sunset as humans?

Throw a karaoke party of course.

That ate up about two more years.

 

After falling back on the lowest common denominator of relationship dramedy for a while, EGS eased into a pattern of superpowered mentors showing up to let each of the cast discover their AMAZING UNTAPPED POTENTIAL. In due course, this comic repeats itself from one of the original protagonists discovering he has superpowers and creating a superpowered female duplicate of himself who gets a soul implanted by an alternate-universe furry, thereby discovering more superpowers, the tech-head discovering he might give himself superpowers and rule the multiverse (... or something, that part's no longer canonical apparently) the squirrel girl discovers she has even super-er superpowers from her extraterrestrial heritage, an elf and some fairies and a medieval magician and an extraplanar magician and mysterious force of chaos show up, with the end result of a couple of other teenagers discovering they have superpowers, a fairy reveals secrets of creation resulting in another character remembering she has superpowers, the force of chaos (being female) turns out to be well-intentioned, resulting in a few more teenagers getting superpowers, the first guy gets even more superpowers courtesy of the all-pervading force of magic, which then gives even more superpowers to even more random schmoes, the last nonmagical member of the core cast gets her own superpower by befriending the nice chaos girl, the first guy's new girlfriend discovers she has dragon superpowers, the tech genius rediscovers he had even super-er-er superer powers than all the other superpowers all along, which, incidentally involve discovering superpowers in others...

...

For a fun exercise, try counting the times any of these kids have actually utilized their newfound abilities, in any context other than revealing their existence or testing them gratuitously. What have all these devices plotted?

This comic repeats itself also by falling into the modern fad of introducing an endlessly redundant, all homo-/bisexual cast to toe the politically correct line, and worse, putting its older characters through unofficial gay conversion therapy to bring them in line with our modern presumption of the moral superiority of homosexuality. Weirdly enough, though my one previous mention of EGS here criticized one of its more heavy-handed politically correct moments, the gender politics angle rankles less than in contemporaries which have undergone a similar forced queering like Something Positive or Questionable Content. From its start, EGS had a long history of playing gender-bending for a quick chuckle here and there, and its more recent self-righteous tinge remains muted compared to that of newer comics.

Then they had another year-long pizza party.

No, its main problem is that this comic repeats itself, both in larger trends and day-by-day reiteration. Skim through the past decade and count the repetitions of "magic could change at any moment" coming out of various mouths, even as this comic repeats itself by filling page after page with verbal recapitulation of past or current events between characters just now finding out that "magic could change at any moment" even as this comic repeats itself by soulful declarations of every new character's true fee-fees and admiration for one another and yet another fairy godmother shows up to demonstrate how this comic repeats itself by bestowing new superpowers on yet another this comic repeats itself.

Then they had another year-long pizza party.

There you have EGS' appeal: rewording and re-casting, endlessly, the moment where a young adult fiction protagonist discovers "the power was inside you all along" and gradually conflating that notion over the years with eschewing muggle sexual identity.

So what makes it worth reading? Why haven't I abandoned it like I have endless others? Well... he's good at it. Conceptually, in its slapdash excuse for world-building, EGS is a pile of crap, never having outgrown a sophomore's disjointed ramblings. Still, Shive manages to wed every new redundancy to revelations about characters' own internal conflicts and constantly re-evaluates their characterization in a surprisingly self-conscious manner, including a particularly inspired recent moment where two of the protagonists force each other to confront their exaggerated martyrdom and self-flagellation. The nonstop navel-gazing, in its better moments, amounts to an ongoing, two decade long writers' workshop in comic form. With bonus boobies.

Sidewalk Shuffle with Death

"Well, you wrapped yourself in an ivy vine

Now you're doomed to the sky

Always trying to reach a little too high"

 

Hurray for the Riff Raff - Dance with Death

 

 

So I was listening to a YouTuber on the topic of feminism a couple of days ago who made me postpone my next post by admonishing listeners that after all, many of those hurling spurious accusations against men must have gone through some terrible experience to fuel their abusive attitude.

 

It reminded me of the social justice activist literature "professor" I've mentioned previously, who cherry-picked her entire curriculum out of works of fiction with some degree of anti-white but especially anti-male spin. A couple of years later I passed her on the street walking and chatting with another woman. As soon as she saw me, she shrank, wide-eyed with terror, against her friend's shoulder until she passed me. As though... what? Did I suddently sprout horns and a barbed tail? Was I going to knock her down to the pavement and rape her right there in the middle of a noontime busy street amidst hundreds of passers-by? After I'd shown zero interest in her existence for years after our score's worth of class sessions?

Not that part of me wasn't flattered to find my mere presence can inspire such awe (I'm a skinny, flabby nebbish in real life, albeit perpetually unshaved) but remember that we had only ever interacted in a classroom context - her classroom context, with me sitting at my desk in the middle of twenty other students and her looming from her position of authority over us as faculty. Literally our only interaction had been one in which she had verifiable power over me. There was no instinctive, social, or other context by which I would gain any sort of threatening presence... except that from a socially inferior position I obliquely called into question her own bigotry. How the hell did her diseased mind leap from that situation to visions of Jack the Ripper?

Whatever our ethical, emotional, instinctive and legal reactions to actual, demonstrable cases of violence, we should remember empiricism is largely extraneous to mythopoesis. Anti-male or anti-white chauvinism requires no better proof for its assumptions than did older varieties. They don't need you to do anything in order to brand you a demon, any more than did the anti-Cathar or anti-Huguenot social activists of centuries past. These people stumble through their lives in a state of perpetual autohypnosis, character-acting their preferred role as blessed martyrs in contradiction to all observable evidence. They spend every day building up court cases in their minds, overlaid like augmented reality over the face of every person they encounter: "harrassment" - "sexual harrassment" - "hostile environment" - "microaggression" - "discrimination" - future alimony contributor.

I don't doubt that if we combed through history long enough we could dredge up at least one bona fide blood-drinking Jew... but the blood libel never required his existence, and feminists require no real-world experiences to fuel their absolutist good vs. evil alternate reality game.

____________________________________________

edit:

PENIS PENIS BOOGITY BALLS Y CHROMOSOME VAS DEFERENS!

Planetfall Rising

"I need new enemies

I need new strategies

I need the pain to feel something 

 

I've got the world inside my head and it's ticking like a bomb"

 

MDFMK - Be Like Me

 

 

Last week I complained about Sanctus Reach, including interposing three mandatory, nearly identical randomized maps before every actual designed level, as a flagrant timesink.

Hmm, now if all you're offering me is randomized maps for turn-based tactics, where else might I get that? Oh... right.

Feeeed on his flesh, my pustulent children! AaarroooooOOOOOooo!!!

 

My 6-unit squad above consists of:

- a ranged attacker with a stunning, AP-draining chain shot and AoE blast

- a mid-range armor-melter with a chance to disable target's abilities

- a sniper with a shield-bypassing, ability-disabling DoT and blinding attack

- an AP-draining, short-range sleep-spell caster with an added ally ressurection ability

... and of course a couple of Pustules, armor-melting, terrain-hopping, enemy-infecting xenomorph melee fighters well on their way to metamorphosing into towering tentacle monsters assuming they survive a few fights.

A couple of those units gain immunity upon hitting 1HP.

Most of them have two sources of regeneration per round.

This is not even touching the basic details of hit points and armor / shield or damage types or the split between biological / cyborg / mechanical or subdivisions like animals or Synthesis units.

Don't even start on the various "operations" (spells) you yourself can rain onto the battlefield every round.

Oh, and the battlefield itself, in addition to basic obstacles, might cast its own damaging or disabling effects on random combatants.

Compare that to standard-issue space marines. I can find more tactical depth and diversity in this one image than in twenty missions of most squad tacticals or tactical RPGs.

 

Oh, and this is a small subsample of available units, a minor infantry dust-up not even showing any air, navy or heavies, of which there could be dozens in a full-blown city siege complete with reinforced positions and persistent effects. Every unit comes with three slots for modular customization, and despite some unnecessary overlap (every playable faction has a sniper and an air scout) and some inevitable imbalance given the sheer number of gimmicks in play, you can build endless combos for both pragmatism and your own aesthetic preferences.

Oh, and did I mention this is just one fight on a strategic map of hundreds of contested locations?

If you can't tell what's happening in that image, the orange computer had surprised me with three armies across the no-man's-land at the far eastern edge of my territory. The base in question managed to finish a teleporter just in time for me to scramble a defense, turning what would've been an agonizing series of defensive border skirmishes into a staging point for a decisive counterattack. Can I get this 4X angle in XCOM copycats? Can I get the squad management angle in Master of Orion copycats?

Oh, and did I mention the last big patch added a planetary conquest and faction rep metagame?

 

Granted, it's not all perfect.

The auto-generated planets in empire-building mode can shift a bit too heavily from basic gameplay (no naval units, cities capped at under half their potential population) and while you'll need the bonuses from faction rep to tackle the harder planets, they undercut your progression more than expand upon it, by forcing an "accelerated start" mode on you.

Still, the game has grown noticeably since launch. Map generation lays out coherent climes and geographic barriers. The two new races' writing and voice acting sound at least more competent, if still uneven, and their practical options round out the existing factions nicely. Housing developments make city expansion a great deal more satisfying, and even the tactical AI seems to be getting better at retreating its wounded units to minimize attrition or using status effects to disable your heavy hitters.

This potential always lurked beneath the surface, but other elements aside from tactical gameplay were rudimentary at best. I've been critical of the series in the past, and the best hope I could voice for AoW in 2019 was that it might finally make good on its promise to replace Heroes of Might and Magic as our go-to fantasy TBS reference.

Damn Triumph, with Planetfall's post-launch content they've been making me eat my words lately. It's set to redefine two or three genres altogether.

Think about it: where does this leave tactical RPGs? 4X? Squad management games?

This is your new metric for success.

Squad management should never have been considered a genre in its own right anyway, and it was only strategy games' lack of flexibility and cRPGs' laziness with regards to combat mechanics (I'm looking at you, Torment: Tides of Numenera) which has allowed the likes of Fallout Tactics to persist.

If you make a 4X from now on, you'd better make damn sure your political / city building angles can compensate for the lack of squad-level tactics.

If you make a multi-unit RPG, make damn sure you can deliver a gripping, convoluted narrative with enough moral choices to compensate for your lack of empire-building.

Otherwise, people will just point you to Triumph Studios and ask: why should I pay for your product when all your content basically amounts to rolling up just one new hero / planet in Age of Wonders?

Disapproving of a Woman: A Physical Impossibility

"Good God! you're comin' up with reasons

Good God! it's the changing of the seasons

Fake it, if you're out of direction

Whoaaa, you're such a fuckin' hypocrite"

 

Seether - Fake It

 

 

While I'm sure their Trump Derangement Syndrome would have put me off their rhetoric anyway, I stopped watching MSNBC a couple of years before the 2016 election, during the late 2013 (stretching into 2014) NY/NJ traffic lane closing fiasco, a.k.a. "bridgegate" for anyone living in the U.S. at the time. Mind you, I didn't doubt for a second that Chris Christie was a corrupt politician, but he was one corrupt politician among several hundred of his social stratum. MSNBC's nationwide, round-the-clock, nearly exclusive, months-long obsession over this regional traffic scandal obviously had nothing to do with either its largely inconvenient severity or its relevance to the audience at large. It had everything to do with publicly disgracing the Republican Party's top contender for the presidency. Instead we got four years of President Rabid Baboon.

So, I guess, before I move on, thanks for your help with that NBC. Fuck you.

While I'm perfectly comfortable assuming some measure of bias in whatever political commentary I consume and nibbling around the rotted bits, there comes a tipping point from valid criticism, commentary or ridicule which legitimately targets the opponents of some power structure, to bald-faced propaganda in the pay of a political party. MSNBC dove below that point at least seven or eight years ago. (John Oliver, as another example, did so in about April-May of 2020, but that's a topic for another time.) Yesterday however, I did allot Rachel Maddow six minutes of my time to recap the legacy of America's Worst. President. Ever. (which hotly contested title he has finally secured by his last stunt in office.) Given NBC's constant pandering to the Democratic Party's feminist voting block, I was unpleasantly unsurprised by one particular choice in phrasing about Melania Trump:

" - with even his wife leaving Washington with an approval rating nearly twenty points lower than any other first lady in history; she is the only first lady in history to be viewed, on balance, negatively, by the American public. That's like, a physical impossibility! But he's managed it somehow."

Whoaaa, hold your stallions there Rache'.

He's managed it?

Do we not have cause to despise her for her own life choices? Is the poor damsel in distress not responsible for her own actions? Was she being carried off against her will? Could this Europa not dismount her pile of bull? Though, admittedly, she's mostly been noted as a vapid nonentity (when noted at all) she's still responsible for the company she keeps. At any point, as her sugar-daddy dug himself deeper and deeper into infamy, she could have divorced him. Hell, it's not like it hasn't happened before. And before before. Divorced, denounced, disentangled, derided, distanced, decommissioned, defected, diverged, digressed, de-Donnie-fied herself... instead of repeating his "alternate facts" for the cameras.

 

Sure, for any normal person, flipping a pronoun would be a slip of the tongue, but I will not believe it from the likes of Rachel Maddow the Oxford doctor and Rhodes scholar and decades'-seasoned poster-child of the Democrats' propaganda machine, teleprompted by presumably one of the most expensive writing teams in the world. These people don't flip pronouns. They flip narratives. The Democratic Party banks to a disgusting extent on female chauvinism, and it's one of feminist fundamentalism's core articles of faith that any woman can at any time blame her own faults on the nearest man or all men everywhere.

By such liminal verbal ticks is our geist zeited.

Sanctus Reach Exceeds Sanctus Grasp

Burn, xenos scum! Muahahahahaha! For the Emperor! (and his various assorted mythology I can't be bothered to remember)

 

In terms of immersion, I'm fundamentally leery of "kitchen sink" fantasy settings like Warhammer 40,000 or Shadowrun. Plus, if I'm going to suffer such tedious all-purpose young-adult-grade bombast, I'd much rather be playing one of the interesting races instead of stoopid humies. Nevertheless, always on the lookout for turn-based strategy / tactics, I've resolved to try Gladius, Mechanicus and Sanctus Reach all in the next year or two. Plus, this one's got howling, so... y'know... I had to.

I was drawn to the title because of Slitherine's involvement. They'd previously published WH40K:Armageddon, which despite being 2D with no animated models (muzzle flashes aside) and an obviously painted-over WWII TBS with orks substituted for nazis, provided a surprisingly engaging campaign. Sanctus Reach does have rudimentary animations, 3D camera motion and other improvements to elevate its visuals to at least mid-2000s standards, but it seems to be actively trying to push customers away with its interface while simultaneously burying them in busywork.

Before you even get to fighting, you're put through the chore of deploying your troops in separate selection and placement phases. For a bonus, you'll want to drag-and-drop, because clicking units then selecting a new square prompts an utterly superfluous confirmation pop-up. (Comes of handling deployment through the attack interface.) For a bonus bonus, you can't just select your units from a list. They're automatically scattered around your half of the map, making you hunt around for your armor / AoE / sniper squads visually.

Mind you, this is all before you've even started playing.

Then you'll find you can't pan the map with arrow keys, inexplicably bound to the mousewheel zoom function and Q/E turning instead of WASD.

Can't rebind keys through the game interface. At all. Screwing around with .ini files (or whatever the modern equivalent) is one bit of '90s nostalgia I prefer not to relive.

Interface locked during animations, especially fun when enemies pop out of the fog of war to flank your squishies but you can't see what they're actually shooting at.

Unable to escape to the options menu while units act... for instance during the entire enemy turn, which will take a couple of minutes every time for larger battles. Thankfully you can at least speed up enemy animations... but not your own?

All this still isn't broaching the laughably inexplicable, like the upside down save list with new saves at the bottom. Or that attempting to escape out of a save/load confirmation pop-up instead closes the options menu behind it.

By itself, any one of these little interface wrangling chores would barely warrant a comedic aside. Taken together, they prompt the same reaction as O.R.B. or Dead State or Defense Grid 2: did you think I wanted to buy a video game from you, or an exciting, revolutionary new adventure in menu surfing?

I'd like to keep playing the Sanctus Reach campaign. Once you get into it, the combat makes good use of the usual armor / morale / cover / movespeed / AoE / range precepts of tactical combat.

However, most missions ("skirmishes") are built around randomized enemy groups which fail to cooperate, sitting back and letting you polish them off piecemeal in the worst old-school mob-farming fashion.

Randomization also seems minimal, and I'm getting bored of seeing the same one(1) artillery and two(2) support infantry per skirmish.

Giving experience for killing blows was an outdated mechanic twenty years ago and it hasn't aged well. Trying to get all my squads to level four makes a whole separate minigame unto itself, and it's already gotten old.

I can't decide whether the predetermined unit roster is too restrictive (a capitulation to the units' inherent imbalance) or just insulting hand-holding, but having their availability arbitrarily determined with each new mission outright prevents me from becoming at all invested in their individual fates.

Worst of all, even the campaign as a whole looks as padded for length as a freshman's term paper, scripting interspersed with randomization at the staggering rate of three mandatory auto-generated fights for every customized map.

 

There are upsides and downsides to playing games within a narrow niche like squad tactics. On one hand, developers know they're addressing an audience with higher expectations instead of merely marketing to the fast-fingered, slow-brained tween crowd who'll play whatever their Facebook list is into at the moment. On the other hand, they also know they're addressing an audience so starved for new content and validation of their hobby that they'll buy anything which ticks at least a few items on a checklist of superficialities. Sanctus Reach has space marines and generic macho 1980s "army guy" banter. Check. It has tiles and turns. Check. It has unit selection and upgrades. Check.

It fails to tie it all together.

Mate.

I'd be willing to suffer the amateurish interface if it overlay any substance, but seventeen missions into this I've yet to see a glimmer of inspiration.

 

However, its mediocrity does bring into question, once again, the validity of squad management as a genre unto itself. Is this really the best way to spew flamethrowers at orks?

 

For that I'll need to digress into role-playing games and AoW:Planetfall.

Hey, what do you call an eighty-year-old woman playing chess?

A strategy gammer.

Clown 2: The Clowning

Last year or so, GoG finally included a "no tags" filtering option in its download manager / ad platform, Galaxy, making sorting my collection at long last a viable option. I have a decent hand at picking games, so my largest category is composed of those which I've played once upon a time, enjoyed to at least some extent but have little intention of revisiting, in other words those which have well earned their purchase price and can rest on their laurels. So I called that category: Laurel.

Then I wanted to separate out the titles with heavy replay value, those I might want to reinstall in the near future to try different options, which is to say those exhibiting hardiness. Thus the category Hardy.

Inevitably, I also needed an oubliette for those games not worth a second look, most of which I didn't even bother finishing, either promising yet marred by too much ineptitude in the execution to be worth my time... or just out-and-out crap.

I called this third grouping... well, the punchline writes itself, really.

Glancing at them now, I was struck by how many of the Bozos are sequels:

Wasteland 3

Blackguards 2

Trine 2

Defense Grid 2

Dungeon Rats

The Witcher 2

Stalker: Clear Sky

Beyond Divinity

Syberia 2

M.A.X. 2

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey (or at least it felt that way)

 

I've excluded examples where the series started weak and only improved after the sequel (e.g. the first two Elder Scrolls or Age of Wonders titles.) By its reputation, I'm sure if I ever buy Dragon Age 2 it'll faceplant square amidst this august company. Also, given Wasteland 2 came out two decades after its original, for the purposes of measuring sequelitis it can be considered an initial showing. Dungeon Rats may only call itself a spin-off but it matches too perfectly the stereotype of an actionized sequel not to be included here.

While some of the first installments were merely bearable (Witcher 1, Divine Divinity) and thus the crabapple didn't fall far from the stump, others followed on the heels of interesting, even lauded predecessors. Leaving aside any unnecessarily gentle excuses for sequelitis, this just reinforces the rule that in games just as in movies, sequels are cash grabs. Whether they crank out a pared-down excuse for content to minimize costs or in contrast they actually ramp up the production values to maximize mass appeal (at the cost of substance) it's all about capitalizing on previous work, not improving it.

While less pervaded by this trend (many of the most famous game titles have been sequels; how many movies can say that?) game developers (especially the smaller ones toward which I'm biased) are much less financially stable than Hollywood studios and more motivated to strike while the iron's hot, either for a quick buck or a desperate snatch at the big time. On the other hand, game series also show higher chance of recovery after a bad sequel, whereas movie or TV series tend to get steadily run into the ground. I'm skeptical about Witcher 3 but I keep hearing it praised and the same goes about DA: Inquisition after the backlash against DA2. Divinity eventually spawned a couple of Original Sins and Stalker's Call of Pripyat got some good reviews before its developer dissolved.

As with DLC packs, I think companies are shooting themselves in the foot, as what they're really been teaching their customers is to skip the cash-grab sequel and just wait for #3 in a series. After all, when selling a game as opposed to a movie, you're asking your customers not only for money but also a time investment of much longer than 90 minutes. Who wants thirty hours of Electric Boogaloo?

Schlock Mercenary

"Now they're turning us into monsters

Turning us into fire

It's all desire, it's all desire..."

 

Gorillaz - Kids with Guns

 

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As links to the strip itself span its entire run, some spoilers are inevitable. Long story short: worth an archive binge for SciFi fans.

___________________________________________________

 

I've heard Schlock Mercenary routinely mentioned in the same breath as my favorite webcomics for two decades, but the couple of times I tired to get into it failed to really grab me. At its start in 2000, it relied on a repertoire of recycled action movie scenes, toilet gags, "meta"-humor like characters talking to the narrator and random half-baked ideas, without the self-conscious charm and building momentum that made such gimmicks work for Sluggy Freelance. Its drawing style was flimsy and inconsistent; its characterization and plots more so.

A passing footnote somewhere on last year's internet tipped me off to Schlock ending, and so I decided to give it one last chance, this time suffering through enough initial fumbling to reach this page. It may look mediocre, but for a randomly goofy explosion-thick comic with no backgrounds and a tenuous grasp on causality, that moon landing counted as the author's declaration of intent to improve on everything holding him back. So this time I stuck around, and improve he did.

Given its somewhat meandering nature (even had a chapter about space-parkour at some point) it would be pointless to try charting twenty years' worth of storylines here, so I'll stick with three observations:

1) Once the strip found some measure of SF footing (as opposed to just space cowboy antics) its episodes came to be defined in sequence by whatever speculative technology caught the author's fancy: teleportation, anti-gravity, antimatter annihilation, nanobots, artificial habitats, AI, sentient dark matter, etc. Fixating on a particular phlebotinum at any one time could have fragmented the overarching plot, but they're worked into existing conflicts quite nicely. The major players change only gradually, but the action is maintained by their acquisition of fresh arsenals - not merely bigger guns but guns that shoot in new ways.

2) The male-female dynamic shifted twice. In its infancy, the strip consisted of macho, somewhat bumbling 1980s action heroes, with the marginally humorous twist of their mercenary company being bought by a female. With the addition of a couple of female underlings and a female antagonist, the humor abruptly retrenched to the sitcom norm of women browbeating, demeaning and abusing the men around them to presumed choruses of applause. Especially interesting the change in Captain Tagon who would metamorphose for a few years at random intervals into a Zapp Brannigan clone. When his machismo was not deliberately being made an issue, he would qualify as somewhat greedy and bellicose but also a competent manager, inspiring leader and occasonally savvy tactician. As soon as a female stepped into the scene however, he would default to an arbitrarily assigned role of punching bag, cursed with Gilligan levels of ignorance and incompetence, and his underlings fared little better. Though the presumption of male inadequacy kept cropping up until the end, a surprising sea change took place through the strip's second decade. Males began getting a word in edgewise. Females began disagreeing with each other and having the occasional bad idea and, heavens forfend, being corrected by a man instead of constantly pulling biological rank. To me it culminated in this strip in late 2018, just as #MeToo was reaching peak mass hysteria; just as the rest of the world lost their remaining wits, the author regained some of his.

3) Schlock Mercenary's original cast was a pile of cliches and one-shot gags, and instead of outgrowing and abandoning, it spent quite a bit of its later years trying to reconcile them, to give old characters their appropriate send-offs (the "admiral" and AI-implanted supersoldier, the dimension-hopping scientist, the myriad clones from another comic strip, the wise-cracking floating AI, that one guy made of exploding cake) and this included, at long last, the title character. Though retaining so many faulty characters resulted in a bit of stagnation, it was ultimately quite gratifying to see the strip gradually speculate on what life might actually be like for an amorphous blob, or more importantly finally dealing with that farcical '80s action movie violence from the comic's first year or ten.

 

Overall, Schlock gives me the same impression as Dr. McNinja or Sluggy Freelance: a relic from the Internet's toddler years, whose author proved his talent but was by now being held back by an old project he had long outgrown.

my left-wing media

My blog posts normally involve reference links. Sometimes quite a few. At the very least a song link. As new browser tabs open at the end of my dozens of other open tabs, wrting a new post normally involves dragging tab by tab of references over to the left side of the bar where blog-related tabs belong! Even though I'm just going to close them all as soon as I hit the "publish" button...

 

After nine years of doing this, I realized I could also just drag my one single current in-progress post over to the right and do all the writing, referencing and closing over there, without shuffling everything around... like I've always done for any school or work-related or other official topic.

Just not for my personal stuff, because my writing belongs on the other side of the screen.

Nine years.

Progress!

 

 

 

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P.S.

And I wasn't even dehydrated this time.

Teachers of Remorse

"everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic, and you have to point it all out to everyone all the time"

 

- the world-renowned feminist sage Anita Sarkeesian defining the word "sinecure" in 2015

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"Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single task, all of them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good for the preservation of the human race. Not from any feeling of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct—because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species, our herd. [...] Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instincts without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortune of others, the lust to rob and dominate, and whatever else is called evil belongs to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species. To be sure, this economy is not afraid of high prices, of squandering, and it is on the whole extremely foolish. Still it is proven that it has preserved our race so far.
[...]

For the present, the comedy of existence has not yet "become conscious" of itself. For the present, we still live in the age of tragedy, the age of moralities and religions. What is the meaning of the ever new appearance of these founders of moralities and religions, these instigators of fights over moral valuations, these teachers of remorse and religious wars?

[...]

In order that what happens necessarily and always, spontaneously and without any purpose, may henceforth appear to be done for some purpose and strike man as rational and an ultimate commandment, the ethical teacher comes on stage, as the teacher of the purpose of existence; and to this end he invents a second, different existence and unhinges by means of his new mechanics the old, ordinary existence. Indeed, he wants to make sure that we do not laugh at existence, or at ourselves—or at him

[...]

Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life—without faith in reason in life."

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science

(1882)

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I had planned to open the official new year (the logical new year of course started after the solstice) with a long-winded political rant. Hobbes and Wells, Chomsky and Heinlein accompanied by Modest Mouse lyrics, great stuff I assure you. In an unexpected development, turns out long posts take a long time to write. Screw that. So instead I'm letting old Fritz do the heavy lifting for the moment and I'll get around to the next one... ehh, whenever.

I wish I'd paid more attention in Intro to Philosophy so I'd actually remembered to include this opening page of The Gay Science in my previous ranting on the topic of Mrs. Grundy's various masks under the "humanity" tag here. Being Nietzsche, he manages to be both dead wrong and beautifully prescient at the same time. His interpretation of natural selection "for the preservation of the human race" is a 19th century relic thoroughly thrashed by subsequent generations, especially with the growing understanding of gene-centered evolution... and it refuses to die, but that's a topic for another day.

 

Nevertheless one need not appeal to the group selection fallacy to interpret the past year's riots here in the States as tribal allegiance, loyalties built via hijacking our brain's dependence on behavioral markers as measures of inter-relatedness: slogan-chanting, uniforms, etc. For a time, the new creed of "anti-racism" (read: anti-white racism) has overtaken past years' shadows of God upholding the moral superiority of homosexuality or femininity. Like any holier-than-thou fanaticism it sustains itself not by the communal good it touts but by providing its adherents justification to build up their self-worth by tearing down those around them, to out-compete designated villainous outsiders by any means necessary - be it torched buildings and cars or cracked ribs and skulls.

Rousers of such rabble operate on lessons modern society learned back in the sixties, that not only priests and preachers but profiteers of all stripes can monetize the human need for existential justification, for purpose. Someone has to proclaim the moral perfection of the new faith, pound the new pulpit. Someone has to sell the bongs and tie-dye shirts, and if it's not the most lucrative profession, at least there's no shortage of gullibility. You can "point it all out to everyone all the time" for as long as human nature remains human.

Here's what really ticked me off into writing this post: I got sick of hearing you all greet the new year with trite, formulaic relief that 2020 is over. It's a case of "new barrel, same monkeys" and no matter what challenges the new year brings, you can count on the naked ape to use them merely as pretexts to attack its neighbours, to outcompete and out-breed perceived outsiders from the muddy, rancid high ground of an inviolable absolute faith. One might only hope that the society we see now represents a momentary nadir of fanaticism in some endless succession of reason and romanticism.

 

"And again and again the human race will decree from time to time: "There is something at which it is absolutely forbidden henceforth to laugh." The most cautious friend of man will add: "Not only laughter and gay wisdom but the tragic, too, with all its sublime unreason, belongs among the means and necessities of the preservation of the species."
Consequently—. Consequently. Consequently. O, do you understand me, my brothers? Do you understand this new law of ebb and flood? There is a time for us, too!"

 

 

Hope for a truly New Year, you sad old species.