Tired, wired wrong, too many years fixed at cross purpose to repose, disposed of longing one, hope two childhoods ago. At twelve lived a life, vitalism failed, animism prevailed, innanimate ambulant reviled and veiled behind stifling air, recoiled and quailed, despaired of freedom nowhere to repair. Revenant recursive recalcitrant redundant re:joy-sad. Revenant skulking away from the trough communing unitary flashing fangs' distance stands a part of the hole between all, reminder of the fall in the middle of your hall. Beatify a languid retreat, butt in, all honesty, ills supplied battle lies in yore territory from tie me immermorialized razed and revised. So I devised a vice to vie four vies cardin' all scenes incensed by skins hinted beneath a bolder defame. Negativity spaces out the rat races, defaces faux aces, haste replaces with places, pew pols with per shown work in the margins while enlarging graphic demos encourages ravages harrying twee 'een from disparate men tall it is weaves of ten ages before were and diss ocean tea've days ordered. Wear ring on, why are bind dr'it pour pose cross.

The Dig

"If I had my way, take a boat from the river

And I'd bury the old man, I'd bury him at sea"

 

Sting - All This Time

 

 

Rounding out the past week's film interlude, let's talk about one I actually liked. Luckily Netflix, like HBO fifteen years before, is now desperately struggling to buy itself a smidge of respectability to smear over a decade's worth of excremental lowest-common-denominator. The Dig dramatizes the Sutton Hoo excavation (a.k.a. that p.12 picture in both your literature and your history textbooks) but thankfully to more restrained, dignified (let's call it what it is: British) extent than you'd ever get from a Hollywood production.

In fact, active restraint is its most charming feature. Every time you can smell a cliché coming, from a plucky young lad in danger to a last-second heroic rescue, to an unhappy marriage, to a workaholic's wife, to overbearing authority figures proving grudgingly accomodating after some hemming and hawing, to bad ideas needing to be justified by reason before being adopted, to the implacable march of history being merely adapted to and not overturned on heroic whims, to lines like "I could've cheered" (subtext: 'if I weren't so English') almost every single time you fear you're about to get fed an all-too-familiar dramatic set piece or strawman or catchphrase, the screenwriting and direction deliberately, pointedly stop short of cliché.

Well, almost. They were presumably forced by industry standards to include a gratuitous sex scene, and for that purpose inserted an invented Prince Charming into an otherwise reasonably accurate period piece. A gratuitous character for gratuitous sex. Even that glaring flaw was handled with wry self-consciousness.

And sure, it has other high points: solid acting across the spectrum, from Ralph Fiennes' recalcitrant competence even down to the little boy's dramatic scene, lovely cinematography and editing making the most of Southern England's otherwise infamously commonplace landscapes, a refusal to pervert the plucky underdog's snub by academia into some all-out class war while still repeatedly acknowledging it, etc. But still, The Dig stands out mainly for dedication to its core themes of cultural continuity and intellectual pursuit of same, for the galactic-scope vistas opened to anyone willing to stick their noses in the dirt.

Alright, so The Dig's not a grand world-shaking classic... but it's a beautiful piece of honest, dedicated, expert work, and all the more glaring its keen awareness of its own rarity as such.

The Midnight Sky

Oh, right, now I remember, there's a reason I stopped watching movies and television, and George Clooney embodies it.

The Midnight Sky starts out promising enough, with an undisclosed worldwide catastrophe stranding a sufferer of an undisclosed illness at an arctic research station, oh and also we've discovered a possibly habitable extra-bonus moon in Jupiter's orbit. Sadly (infuriatingly) whatever promise the plot held for hard SF in the first half gets snowed under a mindless tirade of pulp clichés by the second.

From the terminally ill sexagenarian not getting so much as a sniffle strolling around in arctic storms with his face uncovered for days on end and taking a swim in freezing water to wolves who don't harry their prey to staring at the sun while spacewalking without a polarized faceplate to swarms of (radar-invisible) asteroids mere hands' breadth apart to the human-perfect alien planet with a fully functional ecosystem to chattering interplanetarily with no lightspeed delay to pausing to palpate an injury during EVA instead of rushing for the airlock to the cutting-edge spaceship apparently incapable of picking up radiating news broadcasts you could catch with a ham radio, to the primitivist Adam&Eve finale ignoring even the most generous stretch of the 50/500 rule or the once-quaint "Little Apocrypha" plot twist that's been beaten to death and to undeath and back to death again ever since Fight Club and The Sixth Sense twenty fucking years ago to all the overemotional family scenes shoehorned into an otherwise perfectly workable cold-blooded spin on the survival of the species, cliché after cliché and plot hole after plot hole and concession after concession to no necessity at all, it is all not just stupid but gratuitously stupid. Every nugget of stupidity could've effortlessly been replaced with something better without harming the story or scenery's impact in the slightest. This is sadism, it is harm for the sake of causing harm, subhuman regression for its own sake.

Heinlein was ashamed for his profession to vomit out such drivel even back in 1950. For 2020, it is utterly inexcusable. I don't care if the retardation in this case came from the retarded bitch who wrote the novel or the retarded cunts who adapted it to a movie or from that retarded prick Clooney and his retard-pleasing directing, because every fucking retard involved in spewing out this anti-intellectual piece of mass-market diarrhea deserves to be put to the sword for crimes against sentience.

Nothing created means anything while the verminous majority is permitted to continue poisoning everything, absolutely everything, with its sickening, degenerate demands for devolution.

 

Filth.

Professor, Madman, Father, Churchgoer

"Whose mistake am I anyway?"

Marilyn Manson - Antichrist Superstar

__________________________________________

 

"Marge:    They're passes to a test screening of a new movie starring [gasps] Mel Gibson!
Homer:    Who else is in it?
Marge:    Who cares?  Mel Gibson! [...] Besides, it's not just his chiseled good looks.  "People" magazine says he's a devoted father, goes to church every week, and likes to fix things around the ... Homer, let's make love!"

 

The Simpsons - Beyond Blunderdome (1999)

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Watching The Professor and the Madman reminded me we're supposed to hate Mel Gibson now, as we all wait for him to slip up again and off-handedly bash Jews. Of course, you don't have to notify us every time Mel Gibson's been accused of antisemitic comments. For one thing, at his age he can be presumed engaged in some flavor or another of angry grandpa rambling at any given time. For another, by this point any new accusation loses relevance for sheer volume, seems like the accuser's just piling on for media attention. I guess Winona Ryder's a credible witness now? At least when she's joining in against an acceptable target.

 

Anyway, he plays the professor, Sean Penn plays the madman, and together they are... Task Force O.E.D.(dun-dun-duuuUUUNN!!!)

Not a bad flick all told, but definitely falls short of its potential. What could have been an exploration of intellectual aspirations and their denigration by powermongering both high and low-brow mires in strained populism, a shallow by-the-numbers condemnation of old-school cuckoo nesting, feeble attempts to paint the more likeable thinkers as everyday Joes, and a couple of predictable face-offs between plucky underdogs and entrenched elites. Nevertheless, the acting's palatable enough and at least the central topic hasn't been re-done to undeath, which is more than you can say for 99% of anything you'd watch these days. Worth a gander.

It's worth wondering though how Gibson's escaped ostracism despite repeatedly slipping up and making politically incorrect comments in a sociopolitical climate where many have lost their careers even for a perceived lack of inquisitorial zeal, much less for a single word slanted against official dogma. Not too hard to explain once you note the inordinate screen time The Professor and the Madman devotes to domesticity and romantic gestures in defiance of its true subject matter. Gibson is, once again, as always, playing to female tastes: a daddy figure, a prince (or at least rising star) most charming, a family man who challenges the world to better your station by proxy, schedules soulful apologies to his wife regardless of objective faults or guilt or lack thereof, opens his intellectual endeavor by an act of home improvement and nevertheless has to be rescued by his wife's eloquence on his behalf. How much of this was historically, anecdotally true of Murray's life (and more importantly, reflective of his milieu) is beside the point; it's the anecdote we want to hear.

Or at least it's the anecdote women want to hear. We conveniently forget which half of the population elevated and maintained his status in the limelight for forty years. For all the moral outrage at Gibson's comments, he remains politically correct to the widest, most entrenched, most fundamental determinant of plains-ape morality, to the female majority whose consensus dictates social acceptability, and whose choice of males to include and elevate to "prince charming" status or to banish to the fringes of society as disposables has shaped both our tendencies and our expectations for millions of years.

 

Political correctness is anything but egalitarian. It's a hierarchy of beatitude by fiat, and women simply outrank jews.

Lockstep 2: ELEX

"When you try to see, we'll watch you

When you try to leave, we'll keep you
When you should be dreaming, we'll wake you
But don't scream, we'll make you swallow your words"

 

Metric - Ending Start

 

 

I kinda want to be playing my rashly pre-ordered Baldur's Gate 3 early access version right now, but the user reviews I've glanced at suggest Larian lazily recycled everything I criticized about Original Sin 2 with none of its strong points and a complete disregard for the Baldur's Gate series' precedents. Glacing at character creation does nothing to assuage that fear. Leaving aside smaller quibbles, the oversimplified skill investment and worse, the lack of any hint of the all-important D&D alignment system makes me predict it will prove tailored to the tastes of SUBHUMAN MOTHERFUCKING CRETIN FILTH INCAPABLE OF ARITHMETIC OR FORESIGHT!!!

 

Well, anyway, at least character creation in M&B2: Bannerlord looks promising, but before I start on those items of interest I did want to give half a chance to some of their competitors. So in place of BG3 I fired up Low Magic Age again, and in place of Bannerlord, ELEX. And despite hailing from divergent cRPG subgenres, I gradually realized their different frustrations boiled down to the same fundamental problem: control.

 

Low Magic Age mostly sells as a palliative to anyone sickened by the oversimplification of RPGs, and Dungeons and Dragons in particular.

 

It adheres, as far as I can tell not playing tabletop games, quite strictly to D&D 3.5 combat mechanics and is fundamentally just a randomized turn-based dungeon-crawler. A lack of roleplaying makes the alignment system once again irrelevant, and while it tries to contextualize your adventures on a Mount&Blade-style map filled with towns producing trade goods and issuing quests, the crafting / noncombat half of Low Magic Age offers little of interest. A satisfying quick scratch for your dungeoneering itch.

 

Still, being so faithful to its source of inspiration, it forces into stark clarity D&D's biggest flaw of over-randomization. At the same time, a lack of production values or quality-of-life features and desperation to mask said lacks lead to inventory-sorting and other interface timesinks:

Note, the existence of an active unit bracket is not the problem; neither is a no-budget product trying to squeeze a few sparse animations into an otherwise static landscape, though King of Dragon Pass for instance demonstrates a game can be visually captivating even with zero animations whatsoever. You only run into trouble when you start interposing an animation, no matter how small, between the player and the actions he wishes to undertake. When I already have my next five moves planned out, the last thing I want is to waste precious seconds waiting to be permitted to carry them out, with no new relevant information to fill my attention, while you dramatically pan the camera or pause for effect or scroll some text across my screen that I've seen a thousand times before.

Which brings us to ELEX (yes, the title's in all-caps, even though "elex" as an in-universe phlebotinum is a reg'lar word; don't ask):

Ascending anything taller than your ankles triggers your character to execute a scripted animation, and while it's only a second long, on a landscape composed in the main of boulders, ravines and escarpments, those gratuitously commandeered seconds add up! Don't even get me started on descending, as falling off even the tiniest pebble breaks you out of sneak/aim mode to trigger another animation. Granted, there is room for such hyper-realism in video games. Miasmata for example made a damn good show of it, but that was a game designed around playing a sickly naturalist who had to tread carefully. In ELEX, a science fantasy world full of jetpacking mutants and dogs spitting energy blasts and teleportation and force fields, it's a bit jarring for my super-mutant-magic-soldier-hero-mercenary-badass-dude to spend half his time tripping over his own feet!

Basically, the game seems to constantly try to predict and confirm where the player's keystrokes will take the character, then script the motion in a single action. In theory, this might result in smooth, dramatic, sweeping moves and fewer user errors, but in practice it results in several split-second recalculations and centimeter-depth falls as the game repeatedly struggles to determine your position along the z-axis.

 

Of course, that's only part of ELEX's greater problem. It also features the most idiotic implementation of aim-assist and dodging I've had the displeasure of encountering.

Those two images are not even a second apart during the same combat animation. Note the position of my character's hand as he releases the bowstring if you don't believe me... then note that in the same time-frame (almost literally a singular frame) the soldier I'm targeting "dodged" two meters to his left. What exactly am I supposed to do with this? In the same idiotic vein as GreedFall, enemies turn on a dime and make inertia-less, meters-long lunges: a world filled with nothing but displacer beasts where landing a hit has about as much to do with your aim as it does with stock market trends!

 

Ah, but that idiocy's supposed to be addressed by an even greater display of idiocy, an aim-assist feature which constantly wrenches your camera this way and that, even force-turning your character as it sees fit. Thankfully it can be turned off... but only for in-combat targeting, and only for yourself... yeah. So whether you "dodge" an enemy by clipping through its attack or whether it touches you from two meters away depends entirely on whether the game has already decided it wants the enemy to hit you, ignoring physics altogether. Oh, and all those annoying little movements like climbing and stumbling? Those also disrupt your camera control. If you jump off a cliff, the game immediately forces your camera downwards, assuming that's the direction you must want to look... even if what you're actually doing is jet-packing across a gorge and you need to adjust to your landing spot.

Now, aim-assist might have its place in flight sims and the like where motion is simply too fast for aiming, but for regular old "grunt with boomstick" shooters it seems pointless, coming into play only rarely in multiplayer situations like Savage 2 where healers had to target teammates through enemies. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose of placing players in a 3D world with full range of motion. Personally, I don't consider aiming relevant to my involvement as a thinker... so guess what, I play genres with a top-down tactical view instead. ELEX's aim assist is worse than useless. It's active sabotage.

 

The over-riding concern here, as I said when I first discussed Low Magic Age versus Knights of the Old Republic as an example of RPG railroading, is as stated above: what exactly am I supposed to do with this? Crucial difference in creating a game as opposed to less interactive media: nothing you make is self-contained. The player should determine outcomes and events. Both over-randomization (D&D's perennial foible) and over-scripting can detract from a game's quality if they deny player action or render it irrelevant.

Does watching that orange selection bracket flitting about my screen add to Low Magic Age's interactivity? Yeah, I'd say so, looks nice, draws the eye... but how much potential clicking-time is it worth? One second? Half a second? One-tenth? Also, how long should I be spending watching a two-frame crafting animation?

Does being one-shotted by a random crit add anything to the experience of dungeoning and dragoning? Only if I get to select my starting placement with foreknowledge of the danger I'm facing.

Does fighting displacer beasts reward careful aim? Or mindless spam?

Does adding a "climb" animation to every waist-high boulder improve the player's climbing experience, or does it turn into an endless series of disruptive one-second cutscenes belaboring the mundane to no dramatic, comedic or interactive effect?

Does aim assist actually... assist, when even fundamental Countestrike FPS gameplay from twenty years ago would've been more responsive and immersive?

Do you really need to wrench the camera out of my control for every single piddlin' little motion my character makes?

Do you think you can guess which way I want to look?

Do you presume to read my mind?

You lack the bandwidth, code-monkey.

Alight, Drizzle

"I actually stepped into a tiny little patch of fresh air between the air-conditioned limousine and the air-conditioned hotel."

As Time Goes By - A Trip to Los Angeles

 

Someone landed on my old post about the question at the end of that 1960 Time Machine movie adaptation, which prompted me to verify the YouTube link still worked, which made me realize how rarely we see movie characters bundling up against the cold these days. I don't mean against superlative Snowpiercer-grade cold but just a character donning a hat and scarf against common winter chill and hudding inside his coat as Filby does there. It's not just a shift in tastes vis-a-vis hyper-realism in movies, as other mundane concerns like eating still occupy at least as much screen time as they did fifty years ago.

Office work and central air have deprived many of us luckier ones in the developed world of the cultural universality of daily life in an atmosphere, of having to casually factor the current weather into everything we do. Maybe that contributes to the appeal, over the past decade and more, of survival games where you can shiver for more than a few steps in a parking lot, where at least your virtual self can feel virtual natural sunlight and rain on virtual bare skin. The inimical slap of sleet against your forearm is written into our nerves' function every bit as much as the ache of a missing lover or the glow of sucrose melting in your mouth.

Of all the trendy attempts to reconnect with the natural world, from organic vegetables to exotic vacations, could we not simply encourage office workers to... shiver, once in a while, and let the wind muss their hair? Become more aware of the sweep of air and water around the mundane structures where you spend your every living moment, even if they are mere corroded steel and concrete cubes surrounded by grass monocultures slowly losing their fight against herbicides and pesticides. Instead of racing from house to car to work to car to store to car, take a few minutes to stretch your legs and let mother nature cop a feel.

King of Dragon Pass

"Generosity brings credit and honour, which support one's dignity"

Anglo-Saxon rune poem... basically a very long-winded way of saying G by writing X

______________________________________________________________

 

"en óvinar síns

skyli engi maðr

vinar vinr vera"

Wardruna - Gibu

(basically a very long-winded Old Norse way of saying G by writing X)

(an English translation)

_______________________________________________________________

 

 

Both my previous mentions of King of Dragon Pass pointed out one of its core features.

1) Despite its strategy game appearances, its lore is deep and integrated enough into gameplay to rival the best cRPGs. After a couple of failed attempts, I finally succeeded as a peace clan banking on the goddess of earth / plants and the god of wisdom, which tracks my usual role of elvish druid / wizard.

2) It (often infuriatingly) obfuscates events behind the scenes, but as you fumble about dialectic mazes of Bronze Age favor-currying you also find yourself drawn into the long-term repercussions of your actions, so that even a "cards on the table" strategist like myself will rarely feel entirely cheated by the dice being rolled behind a screen.

And yes, at its core, KoDP's turn-based resource management.

Its greatest inspiration (aside from the setting of Glorantha) seems Lords of the Realm, a classic rarely given enough credit for its impact on strategy genres. You play as a tribe (which is about the only valid scenario in which you would ever deserve to call yourself a "they") settling a patch of frontier land to be exploited via crops, cows or hunting, and occasionally raid or get raided by your neighbours. It's the secondary mechanics fleshing out this basic precept which make KoDP so difficult to define.

Much like other resource-management games trying to capture an ancient-flavored setting (Dawn of Man, Northgard, etc.) it devotes a lot of effort to recreating the pre-industrial dependence on, fascination with and folkloric overtones of the changing of the seasons. Warring during planting or harvest season demolishes your food take-in and venturing out of your territory during winter snows is all but impossible, forcing you to schedule activities like raids, trade, exploration, diplomacy or magic rituals around the stringencies of the five (yes five, lousy Smarch weather) seasons to make the most of both limited opportunities and dead time.

Depending on your awareness of historical trends, you might find it difficult to get into the mindset of a Bronze Age chieftain, arranging marriages and taking slaves and making life-or-death choices based on arbitrary superstitions, but through it all your peanut gallery of seven clan "ring" members will feed you stats, lore details or advice (sometimes comically terrible (especially from disciples of the trickster god)) on most issues.

 

Far from the passive SimCity styled advisors, their selection will cause you no small number of headaches, as not only do their personal skills (combat, trade, etc.) scale their efficacy, but the gods they individually worship affect your magic points and options to handle various events.

Ah yes, events. The other half of the game. You can make two active decisions per season, but you'll almost always have to deal with at least one (often more) random or ongoing events between your own actions. While I find their integration as full-screen pop-ups disruptive, they in other ways exemplify good reactive gameplay avoiding degeneration to sheer whack-a-mole. From minor squabbles over pasture boundaries to inter-clan peace treaties to the epochal finale itself, these constant dialogue pop-ups tie together the various strategic elements and lend them a surprising sense of continuity. In some cases, lots of continuity (picture's a minor spoiler)

Event chains often build on themselves for decades, characters aging as their defining feature is revisited again and again. Much like the in-depth attention to the changing of the seasons, the constructive sense of permanence thus imparted trumps RPGs' usually rushed feel of headlong adventure. They also incorporate a surprising amount of humor - avoiding anything too spoilerish, the... "climactic" third trial's solution to become king had me literally laughing out loud. Though I must admit, it's no more ridiculous a hieros gamos than feature in most religions.

 

King of Dragon Pass has its problems, sure, chiefly its deliberate design choice of obfuscating the requirements and outcome of events until you have no idea whether you're even winning or losing. In some cases (e.g. "Elmal Guards the Stead") it can skew into meaningless randomness. The writing, while usually excellent and doggedly in-character, may sometimes raise an eyebrow. "The Pharaoh has turned out to be a chaos worshipper" for instance comes across as a nonsense phrase. Ancient Egyptians as far as I know were utterly obsessed with maintaining and re-enacting ritualistic order. Also, forcing you to split your tribe if you grow too successful (while not a complete disaster) punishes the player much too avidly for playing well.

Nevertheless, the attention to detail fleshing out every event prevents you from feeling deprived of (albeit obtuse) choices, and nobody else has quite this mix of strategy, role-playing and lore delving all in an un-animated medium which nonetheless never feels as static as some city sims I could name. KoDP amazes not only for being a unique game at its time but still unique twenty years later! And while I'm looking forward to its sequel, Six Ages, I have to wonder how we're not seeing more copycats now that interest in it has revived.