VALIS

"I need someone to show me the things in life that I can't find"

Black Sabbath - Paranoid

 

The hero saw a flash of pink light, which obviously means aliens are broadcasting a message to him about ancient wisdom reincarnate in a theatrical toddler and a conspiracy involving Roman Emperor Richard Nixon and alternate reality movie productions. There can be no other explanation for pink!

 

An online acquaintance claiming to have known Philip K. Dick described him as "a beautiful mind" with both implications that carries. We've likely all seen it in action or experienced it to a smaller extent: intelligence sees connections between ideas, but hyper-connectivity skips the crucial steps of analysis, verification or a full review of whatever flight of fancy you've so unwittingly boarded. If you're truly unlucky the damn train of thought canalizes and you lose your return ticket, to slightly overextend the metaphor.

VALIS is not PKD's last book (and far from his best) but it was the beginning of the end, and the best known manifestation of his last years increasingly fixated on the delusion that he had received a personal, gnostic revelation in a flash of light reflected off a pretty girl's neck wear, that all of reality was a sham and only he (and his hero's helpers) could see it. To be sure, a glance back at his career indicates he was always headed in that direction. His stories make such profitable Hollywood (mal)adaptations particularly for their persistent undercurrent of paranoia, the impostors and conspiracies lurking around every plot twist. His intemperate consumption of hippie-era narcotics merely sped along his decline.

Still, VALIS stands out from his other stuff in the same reality-warping vein like Ubik or Palmer Eldritch or Flow My Tears. For one it's littered with real-world reference characters, and unlike in Flow My Tears they're quite plot-irrelevant. For another, the plot itself is largely irrelevant. All you really need to know is that something, some events here and there, have altered Horselover Fat's mood and thereby triggered a deeper sink or brief surfacing from insanity - because this is a book about insanity, whether the author intended it as such or not. As such, it can be even more painful to read than A Scanner Darkly, depending on your life history.

 

I remember around twelve I realized being smart enough for introspection means smart enough to realize everything that's wrong with you... while still lacking recourse. Possibly the gruesomest moments in VALIS come during the author's self-projection's brief moments of clarity, especially when he outlines his experiences' far more plausibly parsimonious explanations to no avail, expounding his own absurdity even as he embarks on a lifetime's obsessive search for a lost marble. There's an especially cruel twist to that lingering self-reflection allowing him to realize he's gone off the deep end but unable to pinpoint where or how and spending an entire novel on the unspoken lost hope that if only he could, if he could only locate that tipping point... ah, but there are more important messianic children to locate now, aren't there?

Wake up one day to find yourself missing, with no clue as to how long. It's a more common and more justifiable fear than we care to admit, and it doesn't require alien lasers.

For my own part, I won't be reading The Divine Invasion. I'd rather go back to his early years' short stories and remember him as the author of Second Variety and The Golden Man.

"Lilacs" !

---

Lindsey Stirling - Take Flight

---

 

The weather was lovely yesterday, a nearly freezing dawn breaking into a sunny, rapidly warming, breezy day, so I went for a walk in a nearby natural park, to be homosexually serenaded by the finches and warblers and whatnot. Photographed a few late-season snowdrops (it's been a cold spring, as per winter being delayed later and later every year) almost drove over a squirrel, guessed which way a forest trail would loop, metabolized me sum vitamin D on a tree stump, good times all around.

 

But I just couldn't place the name of this one flower... you know, the purple-ish one? Lavender? Was it lavender? No, wait, that's the knee-high one; this one's... come on, it even has a color named after it... And it's not like I didn't know what lilacs are. I grew up in a city full of the damn things. When my memory lapse finally broke, it opened into a montage of childhood memories.

 

It's weird feeling old synapses you forgot you'd so painstakingly built for yourself creak and click in appreciation.

Bah, NerdLord: White Elephants and Horse Trading

I was planning a quick run-through of Baldur's Gate 3's early access content, but aside from the absence of alignments, the presence of warlocks and other stupidity, just seeing that 5e fighters can apparently self-heal now (and presumably shoot infinite lightning from their eyes as a free action) almost made me upchuck my lunch. Uninstalled at character creation. I'll suffer through that mess exactly once after release. You're better off buying Low Magic Age.

 

Back to Calradia then.

Having secured Baltakhand against the Easterling hordes, I discovered to my dismay that one cannot govern in absentia and therefore I cannot govern anything myself, more or less forcing you to leave companions behind at settlements. Not a terrible design decision in itself, except much as with Pathfinder: Kingmaker, I have to wonder at its somewhat inconsiderate implementation. Half my skill choices so far were at least partly informed by potential governance. If a blurb in the Civilopedia says "assign companion" but fifty skill descriptions in your own character window say you'll be using your personal bonus, you're more likely to take your almighty character sheet on its word. At least add a "you cannot personally govern anything" loading hint. I also wasted a year before my first construction project because I hadn't noticed my low stability outright negates its progress. The new town management screens could certainly use more explicative tooltips (use Stellaris or Europa Universalis as examples) detailing the numeric weight of various factors into every derived stat or outcome. Other lack of interface functionality like inability to rearrange the production queue certainly doesn't help. The same is true of kingdom management or other new features like sieges - I went at least three sieges wondering why my Engineering skill wasn't leveling or my engines not being built before I discovered by dumb luck the need to individually click-build siege engine tiles on the overland map.

 

By now I've also reached the point where I can answer one of my own questions from three months ago, when I said M&B2 has obviously shifted its gameplay focus from M&B1 but I just wasn't seeing the payoff yet. It takes a decade of in-game time to get there. The shift has been away from RPG party adventuring and toward kingdom management.

 

But... it's a mixed bag. Aside from the need for companion-governors reinforcing the observation that everything now comes back to renown, leaving so many of them behind to literally hold the fort means your companions no longer keep you company, explaining why they're not even given any dialogue, randomized as it might have to be. Above that at the kingdom level, your fellow lords' personalities very rarely outweigh their common algorithm in their decision-making, meaning any political decisions besides fief allocation (and even that) tend to be decided by near unanimity with little chance to rock the vote.

 

Which wasn't so bad until I was shocked by my newly-depleting coin purse. I had expected a fief to produce not cost money, and a quick glance through town management reveals why. That asshole Lucon handed me a lemon! Baltakhand's got jack-shit for amenities and they must've plundered it after capture because its loyalty starts out nigh-rebellious... having rebelled once already if memory serves. The next few years fly by in desperate attempts to stabilize my increasingly volatile economy. After securing nearby Kaysar castle, their constant troop recruitment quickly puts me in the red, and while I'm managing to defend my own neck of the woods the other end of the Northern Empire is falling apart. After Diathma we lost Saneopa as well, with Epicrotea being wedged farther apart from the rest of the empire to the point of becoming indefensible. And much as with the constant tournaments, the AI seems determined to force a feeling of constant action-action-action by unending war declarations, meaning I can't spend time manually working up some cash either. You're lucky if you get half a trade circuit in between wars. At least I get some more territorial expansion out of it, albeit all of it initially in the form of a low-yield string of castles out in the marches: Khimli, Usek, Hakkun, Akisek, covering all but the Southern end of the now increasingly former Khuzait homeland, strung out in a vulnerable line making it hard to reinforce them.

I finally realize Lucon fucking hates me. I mean, that's what it means when the emperor keeps giving you white elephants as presents, right?

 

Ah, well. It's not all bad. All the warrin's done wonders for my combat skill progression and I did eventually secure Ortongard as well, easing the tax burden a bit. I'm now level 24, and given the nature of the skill-based leveling I might possibly make it to 28 for another attribute point.

 

The new system is quite strict, limiting the returns on any one particular attribute by making your overall level (and therefore skill points) dependent on total skill gain across the board, feeding on itself and discouraging min-maxing. I'll have to see where it takes me.

 

My new villages illustrate the picturesque quality of nomadic isolation, be it in summer

hawt yurts

or winter

 

cool yurts

but if you look closely you'll also see the Khuzaits' main economic headache trotting about. Give up?

Yep, that's a sheep alright.

The herd-lands produce herds. Horses, sheep, more horses, a cow here and there. A few ancillary trade goods like wool or butter as well, but the common link is herds. As these cannot be fed back into the local economy via workshops like you would timber or iron, and are not immediately useful like foodstuffs, they more or less require cross-map trips to the North and West ends of the subcontinent (there's bronies in them thar hills) and (though horses do have the reliably highest profit margin) given herding places more stringent movement penalties on your party than does trade good weight, I end up having to repeatedly stampede as fast as I can before that idiot Lucon declares another war. What's worse, steppe warhorses being twice as expensive as their imperial counterparts makes it more profitable to sell them and buy chargers, and difficult to upgrade that iconic central Asian light cavalry.

Well enough of that!

Realizing I'd saved up 1800 political influence, when the Western Empire next kerfuffled in our direction, I decided to take matters into my own hands, at least as much as I can without running the kingdom. I assembled a 1200-strong army and recaptured Saneopa. Then the retaliating enemy army. Then Diathma. Then a couple of the surrounding castles. Then, though it took hundreds of influence points to keep it together, marched straight East (as that idiot Lucon re-opened hostilities with the Khuzaits while we were still occupied in the West) and captured and claimed Chaikand, a fully-built city far more profitable than my existing properties. By the turn of the century I've maxed out my reputation at rank 6, the tartar hordes have been reduced to lonely Simira Castle and its two villages (invisible here in the far SE) and it looks like the Battanians (green) are next on the chopping block.

While ambivalent about the diminished adventure party gameplay and of a mind to tone down some of the constant warring and tournaments just a smidge (and disappointed at some interface lacks still two years after release) M&B's sandbox charm continues to come through in every aspect. While the AI alternates between cut-throat offensives and abject incompetence, this is largely because you're expected to take charge: from trade, skill and unit investments to battlefield deployment and engagement to Magellanic trade runs to covering your battering ram's advance to the gates

 

 

to saving your imperator from his own incompetence by leveraging your political power to lead your faction to victory. I could probably even cheat the white elephant system by giving away my castles right before conquering a town, but simply decided to roleplay the cards I was dealt. Overall, still the industry's best example of how to both provide content and an overarching framework and at the same time allow the player to direct the action.

There's only one thing left to do and that's look to my clan's continuity, which also gives me an idea for how to get back at old Lucon for making me his whipping marquis.

I'm'a fuck 'is grand-daughter!

Cretins 'n Cowards Inc.

I'll go out on a limb here and say online games are in more trouble than they realize. Any discussion of MMOs these days tends to veer into the question of the genre's waning, obvious to anyone who looks past subscriber numbers to the lack of interest players display even as they keep logging in. Legitimized cheating is the main culprit still, but the underlying issue of oversimplification and toddler-grade lack of challenge will also have to be addressed at some point, and has pervaded all genres. When being angry at your teammates for sabotaging the team is a bannable offense... but sabotage never is... no wonder we've fallen back on deathmatch idiocy instead of anything more complex.

As for other online game genres, the real question isn't why you're failing but how you ever managed to last as long as you did with a campaign of overt anti-quality. How is it that broadcasting "ONLY RETARDED, DICKLESS LITTLE BITCHES SHOULD EVER WANT OUR PRODUCT" never struck anyone as an ultimately self-defeating marketing strategy to begin with?

Totapism

"And your biggest vices become their addiction

Why? Who knows but you gotta supply it

You gotta provide it -- 'cause you know they'll buy it

They don't like the good, they're in love with the bad side

[...]

I swear this is not my fault -

- If it's not yours whose fault is it?

My brain's a nice home with a rude dog in it"

 

Hopsin and SwizZz - The Lucifer Effect (The Lucifer Effect) ((The Lucifer Effect))

______________________________________________________

 

"People often use the word 'systematic' when they talk about repression, or abuse of human rights, they say these things are systematically abused. Of course that's a correct way of understanding it, but it misses a certain point. It must be unsystematic also. It must be capricious. It must be unpredictable. Nobody must know that they're safe. Nobody can think I now have passed all the tests that make me a loyal member of the Ba'ath Party, I'm... I'm gonna be alright. They will never be allowed to get to that moment."

Christopher Hitchens - The Axis of Evil speech ~min12

______________________________________________________

 

 

I spent my first five school years in a system still debating whether or not to phase out corporal punishment a.k.a. beating children. Slapping our heads, pulling and twisting our hair or ears. Pulling on my left ear still results in a barely audible little crackle and quick inflammation, suggesting their edifying ministrations left some permanent cartilage damage. There's a detached lump in there, a perpetual reminder that I was once bad at... something... maybe subtraction? or watercolors? was it watercolors? Then of course that perennial favorite, calling you up to the front of the class to have your hand ceremonially slapped with a wooden ruler. If the teacher was in a bad mood, she'd turn it edgewise. Seeing her screeching in a nine-year-old's face in front of the class, calling him gutter trash who'll never be good for anything but hauling garbage seems downright benign by comparison.

At least it wasn't happening to me, except when it was. I was very rarely punished. It was't until my mid-teens that I became a problem child. At first I was a teacher's pet. I answered all the questions, solved all the problems, penned florid compositions with flawless grammar, sat quietly with my hands behind my back and averted my eyes from the teacher's gaze like the lowly scum I am until called upon. All of which renders more vivid the memory of my (rather more vivacious) friend sitting next to me talking at me during class... repeatedly... and the second I turned my head once to him, being immediately yanked up to the front to get my palm crossed. Such moments stand out because the teacher must have been watching and waiting specifically for me to crack under my classmates' pressure. Other instances followed the same pattern of deliberately hunting for fresh victims. Around thirty, I related the story at a family picnic as a quaint anecdote. Cue the echoed "what, you too?" from my mother, uncle and aunt, all of us congenital grade-stockpiling nerds suppliant before authority in our childhoods, all of us slapped around precisely because we had not given cause for a slap.

As above, so below. Sure, comparing being slapped with a ruler to being tortured to death by the ruler's secret police might seem a stretch at first, but even at such vastly different scales, places or times, methods of social control end up quite faithfully reiterated because they are not products of their environment so much as human nature. The children punished systematically/unsystematically according to a teacher's caprice grow into the adults jockeying for favor with corporate department heads, always willing to denounce their peers to turn authority's attention away from themselves. Or the social activists desperately struggling to prove their ideological purity so as not to be ostracized by holier thous. Too often I hear others question why a state, a corporation, a political movement, a religious cult, any organization might have adopted certain policies of social control and manipulation. Because it works. The reasons behind it are always the same. They do it because we instinctively desire power and control, because we evolved as tribal creatures whose relative reproductive success depends on one's position in the tribal hierarchy and the quantity of slave labor and cannon fodder mustered in contests of strength against neighbouring tribes.

 

I bring this up now because I just happened to finish Robert Jay Lifton's 1950s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Actually, that's a lie. I read it months ago but thought Easter may lend its discussion greater effect, and watching some ex-scientologist testimony just completed the authoritarian confluence. Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath abuses the usual overemotional dramatization format in everything from dramatic framing to scare chords to wait, how much freakin' air time have you spent hugging so far? Still, if you can stomach scraping off the schmaltz you'll discern some solid familiar patterns to the inner workings of one of our world's newest mass delusions, from their abuse of religious exemptions to what is even more clearly than usual a for-profit enterprise to their obsession with digging dirt on their own adherents. The rampant mass snitching and piles of dossiers can't help but recall the practices of police states turning citizens informant, but it's the infamous "auditing" and other demands for confession-writing that could be pulled straight out of Lifton's observations on Chinese Communist brainwashing at around the same time Dianetics was being refined as psychological control:

 

"It was to be a life history, beginning two generations back and extending through the thought reform experience, describing, candidly and thoroughly, the development of one's thoughts and the relationship of these to actions. [...] After a ten-day writing period, [university] students read their summaries to the small group. They encountered even more prolonged and penetrating criticism than before, since everyone was now required to sign each confession read, to signify his approval and his responsibility for letting it pass. In Hu's group, some students were kept under critical fire for several days and wrote many revisions. As usual, the students themselves worked upon each other, but cadres and faculty members had the final say; they later added their own evaluative comments to the thought summaries. The final document then became a permanent part of the student's personal record, and (in the possession of his superiors) accompanied him throughout his future career." - Thought Reform p.267

 

Such confession writing (whether in existing universities or new re-education centers or in prisons) began with listing faults, ways in which the writer was guilty of working against "the people" in his unenlightened pre-Communist life. Unsurprising since half the point is to force the victim to collude in his own condemnation, to align himself psychologically with his abusers, until, in the words of Mr. Hu himself:

 

"'Using the pattern of words for so long, you are so accustomed to them that you feel chained. If you make a mistake, you make a mistake within the pattern. Although you don't admit that you have adopted this kind of ideology, you are actually using it subconsciously, almost automatically'" - p. 270

Which brings us back to religion, because most of you reading this probably spent this past Sunday roped into some sort of celebration of the twice-baked zombie Jesus, pretending to feel yourself groped by the spirit of holes, pressured to celebrate as if there were something worth celebrating behind the whole sadomasochistic rigamarole, no matter that for all the zero evidence Christians have ever produced of their magic sky daddy you may as well be throwing an international holy-day in honor of the tooth fairy. And so you go along until the abyss stares back into you. And, should you voice any reticence, there are probably a host of family and friends waiting to pounce on you to enforce your participation, to stage a soul-saving intervention. The "hsueh hsi" sessions of public confession and accusation described by escapees from 1950s China did not fail to suggest to either Lifton or to other observers at the time religious rites, a bitter irony considering Maoist pretense of doing away with superstition. In fact, fifty years prior, none other than the author of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds gave us this memorable viewpoint of a young boy being dragged into church by his own relatives to be cured of his atheism by the entire community's public and unanimous censure:

 

"But I didn’t expect to have the whole meeting on Sunday turned on to me.
It was. It all comes back to me, that convergence of attention, even the faint leathery smell of its atmosphere returns, and the coarse feel of my aunt’s black dress beside me in contact with my hand. I see again the old Welsh milkman “wrestling” with me, they all wrestled with me, by prayer or exhortation. And I was holding out stoutly, though convinced now by the contagion of their universal conviction that by doing so I was certainly and hopelessly damned. I felt that they were right, that God was probably like them, and that on the whole it didn’t matter." H.G. Wells - Tono-Bungay

 

I don't doubt I could dig up endless such examples of child abuse even today, from the Bible Belt or any supposedly modern nation's equivalent of such cretinous backwaters, not to mention countries entirely dominated by such primitivism. The similarity is far from accidental and far from limited to ChristiCommuanity. Given Scientology and the Aftermath already provides examples of church officials enrolling family members to gang up on someone they felt might leave or just isn't "voluntarily" paying enough cash into their pockets, the public confession/condemnation/rebirth rituals can't be far behind. No spoilers though! I haven't seen season 2 yet.

 

I do find Scientology and the Aftermath reprehensible in trying to juxtapose Scientology with more established religions instead of showing they're using the same tricks, though the political motivation in securing both interviews and publication is obvious here. Let's remember A&E is owned half by Hearst and half by Disney which now also technically-doesn't-own-Fox-News. To his credit, Lifton was braver even sixty years ago in gently pointing out the similarities of Communist brainwashing to religious fundamentalism, especially when presenting one French Jesuit who was quite taken with the ideology (though he ultimately stuck with the church):

"Like other priests among my subjects, he felt that he had reinforced his own spiritual life through his imprisonment. 'The fact of feeling guilty is good Christian humility.' But unlike the others, he believed that the Communists themselves possessed Christian virtues ('I feel that most of the Communists are humble'), a strong expression of praise from a Catholic priest."

 

To any non-religious observer, Father Simon's testimony, with its doe-eyed admiration of merciless Maoist crowd control, alternates between frightening and hilarious in how artlessly it gives the big game away from both sides of the field, laying out the core absolutist (or "totalist") mentality underlying both supernatural and Communist superstitions' tools of psychological control:

"I remember in jail everyone told their faults against the discipline, then we decided to get deep into the reasons. Then the others would say 'This and this is the reason.' We would say 'No, no, no -- that's not it.' Then at night you would think they are right, and as soon as you realized this, the fault was corrected at once... This is very important for the religious life... A very powerful tool.

[...]

Lenin borrowed many things from religious orders, but amplified them a lot.... If we can get them back from Lenin, that is all right.

[...]

To understand Communism you must compare it with Catholic belief. If with Catholic belief, you don't accept one article of faith, you are not a Catholic. If you don't sign a blank check, you are not a Catholic." Thought Reform pp. 216-217

 

One does not criticize the prophet L. Ron Hubbard.

 

I'm reminded of an anthropology professor (who later ordered me to drop her class or be thrown out for "causing a hostile environment" for among other sins pathologizing the human-animal bond, oh irony of ironies) responding to my criticism of an article she had presented by telling me the writer is "a highly respected scholar" at the University of [REDACTED] ... which has about as much to do with defending the ideas in question as a fatwah. I had missed the distinction that at that point I was not dealing with a Doctor of Anthropology but with a priestess of animal rights abusing her PhD and tenure to employ any pressure she damn well pleases in promoting her particular one true faith's moral supremacy. Even though I was largely on her side (I've kept various pets all my life and my current fish are pushing four years old and quite happy with their mammalian bondage) any heresy had to be expunged from her sphere of influence.

It takes all kinds.

And all kinds will inevitably try to exterminate all other kinds.

Which is just one of the many reasons I call myself a half-kind, even if it makes me un-kind.

But PETA-style insanity is just one flavor of many. In fact, a common thread running through all my recent years' annoyance at self-declared leftist movements in the modern age (the anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight propagandists) is just how slavishly they ape the obsessions of older inquisitions. Evergreen College's infamous 2017 riots included a proposed mandatory program of public confession-writing by faculty members chillingly reminiscent of Lifton's summary of Maoist confessions, complete with the presumption of guilt (including innate guilt) and obligatory rewrites to the satisfaction of the apparatchiks. Around that same time, the grievance studies hoax (which deserves more attention than I care to give it) produced a quote by James Lindsay (pleased to see it's now Wikipedia's illustration as well) which seems to recapitulate this entire post:

"The best I can tap into is that there's a kind of, like, religious architecture in their mind where privilege is sin, privilege is evil, and that they've identified education as the place where it has to be fixed. So you can come up with these really nasty arguments like 'let's put white kids in chains on the floor at school as an educational opportunity' and if you frame it in terms of overcoming privilege, and you frame their resistance, that they won't want this to happen to them, that they would complain about this, if you frame that in terms of oh, they only complain about that because they're privileged and they can't handle it because their privilege made them weak, then it's right in."

For anyone who still harbors delusions that social "progress" is linear or unidirectional, let me just point out that even my slap-happy grade school teacher thirty years ago never dared put us in chains, a notion seriously considered in 2018 by the polite, highly respected and presumably well-paid pseudoscientific journal editors who accepted Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose's papers. To put those born the wrong skin color in their place. If you're wondering how this came about, remember it's not necessarily the strength of the pressure to conform so much as its perceived pervasiveness that best guarantees brainwashing. If you define yourself as a person by your good standing within some ideology, then failing to maintain that standing amounts to existential negation. If everyone in your field of study, the thing you are when anyone asks if you're a [...] nods along to the notion that children should be put in chains (purely for the most noble didactic reasons of course) you will surreptitiously find yourself measuring little handsies for manacles.

"The totalist environment -- even when it does not resort to physical abuse -- thus stimulates in everyone a fear of extinction and annihilation [...] Existence comes to depend upon creed (I believe, therefore I am) upon submission (I obey, therefore I am) and beyond these, upon a sense of total merger with the ideological movement. Ultimately of course one compromises and combines the totalist 'confirmation' with independent elements of personal identity; but one is ever made aware that, should he stray too far along this 'erroneous path', his right to existence may be withdrawn." - Thought Reform p.434

But one element I don't see mentioned nearly enough is the continuity, the direct, intergenerational, societal and global, multi-millennial continuity between methods of thought reform, manipulation and control from grade schools to cults about alien ghosts to sickly hammerers promising the meek shall inherit the Earth, to traditional superstitions about magic sky daddies. Christopher Hitchens liked to point out the similarity between Tsarist divine rule and Stalin's cult of personality complete with thaumaturgy (a repurposing of blind faith which has served Tsar Putin quite well these past decades) but I do also like the way Lifton summarized Maoist grappling with the most entrenched traditional Chinese cultural value, filial piety... by simply repurposing it with a new definition of state parentage.

 

"Emotions of loyalty, self-discipline, and respect for authority remained alive side-by-side with their negation, and these were emotional commodities too valuable for the Communists to waste, even if it were possible to dispel them. 'Hate your past to win your future' the reformers urged, and they meant it. But they might well have added, 'Do not hate it so much that you cannot bring us its sense of filial dedication.' The reformed intellectual was expected to be, as before, loyal, self-disciplined and obedient -- now a filial son of the Communist regime." - Thought Reform p.379

 

Xi Dada no doubt agrees.

 

This applicability knows few boundaries. Schoolmarms can repurpose dictatorial caprice and unpredictability to maintain their young charges' fear. Anti-white racism repurposes the sins of the father. Feminism repurposes chivalry and the instinctive protectiveness of males toward their tribe's females. I was amused and slightly shocked to learn from Scientology and the Aftermath of the cult's recent ties (the episode implies attempted takeover) with the Nation of Islam, given their very different demographics... but is it so surprising? Market share aside, how much would a comparative study find in common between them, or for that matter in common with Mormonism or the feminist claim of a Minoan matriarchal golden age or those thinking themselves descended from Atlantis or spacefaring Malinese or a thousand other fabrications of ancestral rights and supremacy just begging to be reclaimed? "Make X great again" is as weather beaten a slogan as any.

This is why I scoff at not only new movements' claim to originality but stories like Snow Crash and the naive notion of traditional values serving as inoculation against new insanity. I liken it to curing a headache with a shotgun. Not only are the more refined, time-tested strains of mass insanity far more capable of harm but, as I keep trying to remind you, we are talking about the same people. Mrs. Grundy's just wearing a new hat. They cannot meaningfully replace each other because they are mere carbon-copies of the same unthinking impulses in a new milieu. They justify each other by their existence, endless plucky rebel alliances to revolutionize/become endless evil empires. To his credit, Lifton once again managed to squeeze this observation in at the very end of his surprisingly insightful old work.

 

"In studying patterns of historical change, we should divest ourselves of the psychological illusion that a strong filial tradition is a bulwark against modern ideological totalism (or most specifically, Communism). The opposite seems to be true. It is precisely the desperate urge to sweep away decaying yet still powerful filial emotions and institutions that can call forth political totalism." - Thought Reform p.470

JORDAN PETERSON, THIS MEANS YOU ^

Or (and thanks to George Packer who brought it up in an interview with Hitchens) as Orwell put it in an essay I otherwise disagree with:

 

"People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business college worships Lord Nuffield. A New Statesman reader worships Stalin." - Raffles and Miss Blandish

In episode 7, Scientology and the Aftermath references a moment when four ex-wives of men who had left scientology were interviewed by Anderson Cooper in 2010 to denounce their former husbands and praise David Miscavige. The show of course interprets this from the viewpoint of cult indoctrination and turning families against each other, which is a valid point... but it misses a very important underlying pattern. The women in question had gotten as far up the ladder as their now disgraced husbands could take them and were faced with a choice between a depleted resource and Prince Charming, the alpha male, the pinnacle of an ultra wealthy power hierarchy. They traded up, as per female plains-ape instinct. Regardless of what they consciously thought they were doing, what material gain they expected from their show of faith and loyalty to the faith, their instincts were also obviously pointing them toward a higher-value potential mate. This was their glass slipper, their 'in' with the prince.

All such behaviors, all such social movements, all such hierarchies, all such obsessions, share so many features because they address unthinking, animal impulses. Just one obvious example is our neotenized dependence on parental authority constantly leading us to fabricate celestial parentage. I'm thetan-er than thou. Do not be surprised when superficially novel fads mimic, on even the slightest scrutiny, the most antiquated and haggard superstitious gibberish in practical application. The content matters little compared to the form. As long as you are promoting uncritical belief in declared dogma, slogan-chanting, you will always be one step away from prayers and supernatural faith. Confession-writing was preceded and informed by religious confession, as Father Simon the Jesuit Communist so helpfully pointed out. And religions didn't invent the psychological weaknesses they exploit either. They've just been riding that wave longer. Due to their fifty thousand year, global test of applicability, religions reflect the most exhaustively re-tested principles of social and interpersonal manipulation short of mating rituals and food sharing.

 

The mental disease faithosis is by no means unique in our psychology, but merely the most enduring cultural expression of our worst, tribalist, supplicant, dishonest, irrational animal nature.

Colony Ship: A Post-Deadline Factory Roll-Play

"Bound for a star with fiery ocean

It's so very lonely, you're a hundred light-years from home"

 

The Rolling Stones - 2000 Light Years From Home

 

 

Continued from here.

Colony Ship has made me revise my plans twice now, first by convincing me to write down a play-by-play, now by delaying the promised Chapter 2 until I've decided to just shelve my playthrough to its official release date. Long story short, despite some needless frustration I'd recommend this one more confidently than I did Iron Tower's previous Age of Decadence.

 

Still, I might as well post my experience in The Factory, a sort of intermission zone between chapters, whose action revolves around various gangs facing off over a cavernous industrial expanse from production units turned into towering fortresses. I didn't quite make it to level 5/10 in the first chapter, which only further suggests that I'm probably doomed, but mayhap my dedication to the nerdlier arts will pay off somehow.

 

Love the initial run between forts doubling as a gauntlet of mid-difficulty skill checks covering almost everything from pocket-picking to picket-poking. The random single decisions break your stride, masking the obvious excuse to make you pause and look at their level design every other screen. Sneaky! This is what every game should have instead of scene-setting intro cinematics.

But oh noes! It's an ambush! And what with the half a dozen different off-hand comments about it being a quiet day but the enemy might strike at any moment, I never even saw it coming! Hmmm, should I abandon my ironically nicknamed guide to her death and run, thereby also abandoning the initial bump of loot and XP which will get me through the rest of the chapter, or valiantly stand against impossible odds defending yon plucky maid and fighting for every scrap of advantage in a game with zero chances to recuperate a missed opportunity? Can you kids at home tell our valiant hero the correct choice?

Fifty tries later (and that is NOT hyperbole) Smiles remains pearly, Stanton (he of the Fort) is happy and we're off to turn street gangs against each other... iiinn SPAAAAACE! Meaning I can now explore the factory at will.

As a multi-layered, gigantic interior space littered with the efforts of past generations it serves both for Iron Tower to showcase progress from AoD's rather sparse desert tilesets (oh crap... the twist at the end... it's not going to be some "it was Earth all along" schtick, is it?) and to illustrate the ship as its own self-contained world in keeping with its inspiration's original title of Universe... but also that it falls short in one sense: gravity. While Orphans of the Sky's action centered on warring mutant ape tribes with no knowledge of astronomy or their "universe"-s nature, Heinlein deftly, unobtrusively reminded you every few pages the story was set IN SPACE usually by remarking on mutagenic cosmic rays or gravity increasing or decreasing with the protagonists' ascent or descent through deck levels, strengthening or slackening the effects of rotation. In contrast, Colony Ship's inhabitants are painfully aware of their thankless role as the middle children of history and make occasional verbal references to their descendants' destination... but it's no longer enough. A visual or interactive medium presumes some shift to visual or interactive cues, and by now I find myself wondering whether I'm actually in Detroit-in-space... or just Detroit. Not a major drawback, but still, an actual mechanism like variable artificial gravity would've helped cement the spacefaring setting.

 

Short exploration. Pop some frogs, crash a turret, jimmy a mnemonic, good stuff.

Oh, did I not mention the frogs?

 

 

 

Instead of rats as basic vermin you get frogs, just to keep the routine swampy-fresh. Given the many SciFi references which pepper Colony Ship include a vault dweller suit, they're probably more than a little inspired by Fallout 2's golden geckos. Still, they came out entertaining enough thanks to putting some extra work into their combat animations. Can't remember seeing RPG mobs pulling my leg before... or trying to bite my ear off once they've knocked me down.

 

Starting to notice a slight skew to the new skill leveling. While I've run across several computer/lockpicking checks at level 2-3 allowing for their use as a secondary skill, speech skill checks rose exclusively to the prohibitive 4-5 range i.e. maxed out. Maybe it's due to diplomacy being more of a stand-in for combat (replacing more content than the technical skill bypasses, therefore more powerful) but it still seems just slightly over-balanced. Suffice to say my interview with gangster #1 did not go well.

Join us for glory: [FAIL]

Join us or we'll kill you: [FAIL]

Join us because gangster #2 will turn on you: [FAIL]

Fight all of them head on? Not a chance.

 

At least talking to gangster #2 I found a more attractive option:

Join us bec- oh, fuck it, just toss me in prison: [SUCCESS]

The point being to stage a jailbreak of course. IT'S SNEAKY T-

sorry ... (it's sneaky-time)

 

Yes, I know about the typo, but can't fix it now.

 

Stealth runs show Colony Ship at both its best and its worst.

On the plus side, fairly thorough skill integration. Low sneak and computers would let you kill one, maybe two guards before getting caught. With high points in both you may be able to sweep the base clean. Not being specialized in sneak I still picked up the boss' office loot and nominal mission success by environment interaction.

On the minus side, it takes 8-9 rounds to reach the above point of divergence via exactly the same steps (and stabs) every time, Colony Ship does not allow saving in combat, and failing triggers a cutscene catapulting you into the next zone, wasting even more of your click-through time reloading. Like most developers from loner undergrads to EA, Iron Tower pads out its campaign length with some pretty blatant timesinks.

Anyway, turns out that perhaps due to failin' me parlay, despite succeeding against Mano Negra my tour guides were backstabbed by Detroit. That's the mentality here. That's the reality here. Did I just hear somebody say they wanna challenge me... in the next zone? Because one way or another that's where you're headed. I did tell Stanton to seek allies and get ready to retalliate against a home office takeover, so hopefully that'll get the diplomacy over with before I return. Anyhoo, welcome to the shuttle bay, where nothing shuttles except the fundamentalist transients.

It's not so much the repurposed shuttlecrafts that get me as the tents pitched atop cargo containers for lack of lebensraum. Bleedin'-edge graphics or not, these little details will tell you whether a developer is actively engaged, paying attention to the world being built or merely phoning it in.

I'd been sent to gather allies for my home town but the Church of the Holy Hand Grenade or whatever is suffering its own schism due to an influx of refugees making them look like a juicy conquest to the bigwigs. Buuut, given this is just a taste of faction conflict, it's not really worth discussing yet. My course of action was not dictated by moral but by practical roleplaying choices anyway. To side with the incumbent you'd need... well, all the skills I ain't got. Lacking Smiley's added gunnery, the combat option here proved flat-out impossible, so I ended up taking the upstart's side, which fast-forwards to a relatively (for this game anyway) easy stealth run assassinating an enemy commander.

 

Aaaand with that we've run out of content for now. Conclusions?

Iron Tower has come a long way in addressing the min/maxing issue from AoD. If combat is the most reliable and diplomacy/stealth the default alternatives, I'm probably betting on the lamest horse by focusing on science. Yet not only have I never yet been completely stumped, I've somehow stumbled into a secondary stealth role by an unforeseen combination of knives and cloaking fields. The same might be true of speech if my DEX/CHA scores were reversed but I can't prove it. I also can't prove my evasion stat is actually doing anything, since enemies never seem to miss me entirely... but then I don't know how often they'd glance/crit me without my evasion either so this rock certainly seems to be keeping the tigers away!

 

Overall, I'd say get in on this action. While the occasional quality of life feature is begging to be added (e.g. reloading/quitting during dialogue, saving during non-randomized stealth missions where you're just brute-forcing alternate paths) what's there is both creative and multifaceted if you like a challenge, and if I'm not mistaken the price will rise as chapters are added. Yeah, you'll still spend a frustrating number of reloads praying to RNGesus, but then as I said even about the weaker Age of Decadence, it's better to be frustrated than bored.

Now Featuring: the Wildest of Jokers!

"And when she spins that bottle round and round

Every time it leaves me gagged and bound"

 

Billy Talent - This Suffering

 

 

I keep trying various multiplayer games, despite knowing full well none of them will be worth playing. The overwhelming majority of humans don't want to play games. They want to cheat. Thus, the game industry sells cheats, with so-called games merely a convenient cheat distribution system. However, since I'm not smart enough to beat even a medium-difficulty (a.k.a. idiot-level) AI at Chess.com, I keep banging my head against various other walls for some quick honest competition.

 

Collectible card games having served as initial vector for the microtransaction disease in the first place, you'd think they'd be satisfied with just forcing players to buy new cards on a regular basis. But of course by the very definition of capitalism, enough is never enough. I've been giving Gwent a try lately. Aside from being more simplistic than Magic: the Gathering (advantage doesn't work toward a goal; advantage is the only goal) with plenty of interface timesinks tacked on (cards flipping, avatars spouting redundant catchphrases, dramatic camera shakes) to stretch out match lengths in overcompensation, there's this:

The funniest part? "No holding hands" the store page brags

Gwent suffers from the two major faults of such games:

1) If you don't have the latest "I win" cards you lose.

2) If the random number generator hates you, you lose.

So of course they sell players the ability to cheat the RNG. While MTG always had a few of these allowing you to select any <type> card from your deck, Gwent's strategies are entirely built around them. Play any card whatsoever. Play any card from a particular set. Play any card from your opponent's set. Play any of the worst cards. Play any of the best cards. Etceteree, etceterah. Keep in mind this is a game in which a single card can be so powerful (e.g. resetting powers, all-purpose lock) as to negate or wipe out all build-up. Meaning it doesn't particularly matter how carefully you predict or plan your hand, what surprises you hold in reserve, your enemy will beat you with no planning or prediction by whipping out one of the "do whatever I want" crutches. Nothing you do matters.

So now you have the honor of buying not just the "I win" button, but the finglonger to push it with!

Screw it.

Back to the chess bots. At least I don't need a dice stick to move a rook.

Chant the Creativity Away

"Totalitarianism is a cliché. Dictatorship is based on clichéd thinking, on very tried-and-tested uniform stuff. They don't mind that they're boring. They don't mind that they're obvious. Their point is made."

Christopher Hitchens - The Axis of Evil Revisited

 

Why do I bother visiting Dork Tower anymore? A mix of nostalgia and momentum, I suppose. For about fifteen years on and off, it successfully poked fun at gamer foibles. Then its author succumbed to the mass insanity of our time, replacing his more entertaining old cast with politically correct stereotypes to the point even the black paladin had to be replaced by a black lesbian. Of course, since (as noted about similar such comics) the new characters are by definition idealized and cannot have any negative traits or enter into conflict with each other for fear of prompting the wrath of the woke inquisition "milquetoast" would be more than can be said about them. Though I haven't dropped by often, I've found none of the comic's older humor or insights in its past five years' SJW revamp.

Checking in yesterday, I found one of these new characters walking past a "pray away the gay" sign and spraypainting it to read "pray away the hate" ... and that's it. That was the joke.

A cursory glance at a rhyming dictionary site brings up 450 rhymes for happiness, so at a conservative estimate maybe you'd find 100 options superior to the imperfect "hayte" and that's ignoring non-rhyming fun you could have with that idiotic slogan, like inserting "from the" or rearranging it into "gay the pray away" or "pray the gay way" or "ray the gay way" with a rainbow spraypainted next to it, or anagrams or fuck, ANYTHING other than trying to out-bland the church ladies!

Never mind that prayer itself will prove nearly as irrelevant in heterosexualizing anyone as it does in curing cancer or turning the score of a basketball game or putting the ace in placebo. In fact if anyone out there's planning an attempt on my life I certainly hope they do it via prayer-bombs. Let's concede there are valid cases to be made that nobody should be subjected to the social censure of being prayed at like a cartoon demon, or that this represents the thin end of the wedge to more gruesome attacks against non-heterosexuals. But even giving Kovalic that undeserved benefit of the doubt, the sheer laziness of his pandering should disqualify any would-be creator. You'll also have to ignore the by now standard SJW hypocrisy of Dork Tower itself running a story about the lesbian turning her female roommate, because curing heterosexuality is of course a noble undersheetstaking. Straight conversion therapy is like totes legit, but anything said against a member of a protected species is a hate crime.

 

If even a nobody like me can talk circles around you, I'd be ashamed to have you represent my viewpoints. In fact, if I thought for a second that homosexuality reduces one to a slogan-chanting dunce incapable of untying a tongue, then I'd be all in favor of awaying the gaylings. Lucky musical theatre isn't relying on Kovalic-quality rhymes or reasons. Hell, I avoid the news cycle on this damn blog partly because too often I found myself regurgitating instead of putting any fresh spin on the subject matter. If you don't have anything to say on a topic that a million tweets haven't belched out in the past 24 hours, avoid that topic.

 

But of course the blandness is the point. It's not about humor or creativity or enlightenment or lightening the realization that some out there hate you for all the wrong reasons. It's about making a show of strength, imposing your position on others. Drowning out all other viewpoints.

Re-tweeting. Mass prayer.

Cleverness might detract from the brutish punch of a demand for conformity, as much for the gayers as for the prayers. The end effect? His PC thuggery isn't affecting my views of homosexual behavior one way or the other, but it's really making me hate John Kovalic.

 Time heals all wounds. Mostly because the dead can't be said to be wounded.

Skin Horse

"Steel assembly line define the others' fate

Blind the believers, a blend of church and state

Who calls upon you, claim they shall be saved

We will all love you, conform, submit, behave"

 

I.Scintilla - Machine Vision

_________________________________________________

 

I've kept telling myself I'd do a full archive binge of Skin Horse before writing up a reaction, but realistically, nothing I've randomly sampled of its last few years is encouraging me to do that, and I doubt its upcoming finale will either. It's yet another case study in our past decade's pop culture insanity. For anyone looking for mad science experiments' comedic superpowered hijinks, it actually started out great and only gradually devolved to shallow running gags, plotless self-reference and pandering to the snowflake market - so you can at least count on some initial entertainment. Here's the beef, if you don't mind some

 

----------------------------SPOILERS--------------------------------

 

At some point during the past year, Garrity, the visual artist, threatened to quit... because of negative comments. Never mind what little I skimmed of the comment section seemed full of shameless simpleminded adulation and even on her worst day she still receives thousandfold more support and appreciation than my admittedly failed creative attempts ever will. I myself noted her previous work, Narbonic, benefited from a better breed of audience than any webcomic short of XKCD can reasonably expect. I don't know much... okay, anything, about her co-author Jesus Christ Wells, but given Skin Horse spun off Narbonic's comedy mad science precept and even borrowed at least one recurring character, it's not too far a stretch to compare them at least partly.

Start with stagnation. Skin Horse started in 2007 to a host of (deserved) accolades. By 2013-ish it had revealed its over-arching plot in the Colodi chapter and others around that time. Note it is now 2022. It's spent almost a decade reiterating the same foregone conclusion (the fuddy-duddies cannot win) then breaking off to introduce new stories which are never resolved before it has to remind fans of the overarching plot with its foregone con- well, you get the point. Much of this time has been spent restating each character's central gimmick without any of them actually going anywhere. When the water cooler gets more character development than anyone else, you've got a problem. Just as Garfield hates Mondays and eats lasagna... and will always hate Mondays and eat lasagna, unto infinity, Skin Horse's characters began dropping in, sequentially, to restate their quirk then exit, stage nobody cares. The Russian security guard talked about his muscles, Unity punched/ate something inedible, Moustachio spoke in old-timey gallantry, Tip romanced someone to decreasing effect, Artie was attracted to a man, the dudebro unicorn said something to which the woke could take offense, etc.

Which brings us to the pandering, because nowhere have the authors spun their wheels so much as in constantly reaffirming their SJW credentials. Artie, the gerbil who can transform into a human, was permanently recast as a black gay human male, Tip went from a stylish babe-magnet transvestite to still being defined by his romances, but now unsuccessful ones because karma or something. Also homosexual. Once the female zombie and the bitchy bitch hooked up, it was pretty much the last word on either of their stories. The foulmouthed male gamer acquires a female clone of himself whose main purpose seems to be talking down to him, and is redeemed by winning the acceptance of a female. The most benign man in the comic turns out to be the villain while the token villainess heralds salvation as prophetess of Lovetron. Not to mention random new characters like the lesbian zombie couple. The less said about strong woman Hitty, and the unwarranted number of panels she takes up with her single running gag, the better.

 

So I'm not particularly surprised at the authors choosing to wrap up their two thirds filler by volume comic with a grand finale in which all non-human sapients are offered a free ride to planet Lovetron, which is by word of goddess "a harmonious, functioning society" in direct contrast to Earth. No mundanes allowed, and at this point we need to bring up Narbonic again. Superficially, Lovetron recalls Helen and Dave exiling themselves (at least temporarily) on a private tropical-island-cum-mad-scientist-lair. But their reward had been narratively hard-won by virtue of their intellectual (and therefore existential) superiority, by their mad genius. Skin Horse's nonhumans in contrast are simply handed their reward for being <SPECIAL> by the degenerate definition of young adult confidence-building pablum. Most of these beings have in fact been amply demonstrated since 2007 to barely crest the nadir of sapience. Conversely, plenty of humans would place much farther from the human norm by their actual thought, their individual persons, than the mindless masses of Joe Sixpack zombies who merely happen to be missing a pulse.

 

Therein you have the narcissistic insanity of current twenty-somethings to whom Wells and Garrity are presumably marketing. You don't have to prove yourself deserving of a free place on idyllic Lovetron. You don't have to make anything great, to create or design or analyze or advance ideas or write or speak or at the barest think well. No. Rewards are for those declared part of an arbitrary in-group of specialness.

 

Lovetron is only for <our people> of the correct skin color horseness, and damn those other heathens no matter their objective qualities.

Maybe they'll twist the ending. I'd very much like to believe they intend to subvert this expectation, redeem the past decade's stagnation by a more conscious finish, and am posting my thoughts before the comic's official end precisely to give Wells and Garrity a chance to prove me wrong. But I doubt it. At most, I expect Tip might get himself bitten by a vampire/zombie to qualify as nonhuman (or turn into a wolf again) or some other flavor of condescension by rainbow fiat.

Bah, NerdLord: Semper Descrescis, Aut Crescis

Having lost my previous Bannerlord playthrough to a corrupted savegame, I rerolled exactly the same character as before and (avoiding gatehouse towers this time) set out to recapture my glorious destiny!

Unfortunately, while for my first attempt I'd stuck to a sensible, slow build-up opening strategy, this time I risked first hiring an expensive companion instead of cheap basic troops... and lost. Big time. I lost my first fight and almost couldn't recover, spending the next couple of years escaping capture almost broke then being intercepted by more bandits (who this time around were both more plentiful and contained more non-looters) and struggling to scrape together new starting cash in arena fights, over and over. Damn you, Ira the Wronged! This is all your fa- naaah, who am I kidding, I can't stay mad at you, babe.

I finally reached safety in the town of Saneopa, and decided to make my home in the Northern Empire's northwestern reaches. Compared to the Southern Empire, town approaches in this region (Saneopa, Diathma and Epic Scrotea) are more convoluted. It's hard to make good time for quests or chase down targets of opportunity, but on the flip-side the narrow canyons make it easier to corner bandit parties once you close in, so I'm actually leveling faster than I did the first time around. On the other other hand, the longer paths led to discovering noble NPCs can actually beat you to the chase, solving problems in their villages before you get a chance to accept the quest. Nice touch.

It wasn't long before I'd contracted with Lucon's Northern Empire as a mercenary and started playing around with some features I hadn't tried yet.

- Sacking villages seems an even worse idea than in Warband, given it carries an attitude penalty with the entire clan controlling that village, which now presumably carries over in perpetuity.

- Splitting my party... seems to garner significantly faster XP for the companion I select to lead the second party, but given the lack of control over the AI's suicidal tendencies, led to defeat and leader capture in short order, wasting both initial troop costs and continued wages. Damn you, Castor the Boar! This is all your fa- naaah, who am I kidding, I can't stay mad at you, bro. Still, a "meh" kind of mechanic.

- War! (hunh;yeah!) What is it good for? Capturing expensive war horses (good god y'all!) to upgrade top-tier cavalry for more warring (say it again!)

- Big improvements in chasing and being chased. Back in Warband, if you were slower or faster than an enemy party, or bigger/smaller, that was the end of story. Now:

While adventuring in enemy lands, you might notice you've acquired some tagalongs, small enemy groups insufficient to beat you individually, shadowing you should the opportunity arise to gang up on you with a larger band. There's some wiggle-room to the system, as the AI is intentionally, medievally bad at arithmetic (the four parties in that image could easily take me on but none want to be the first ones in) to prevent it from being too predictable, and best of all it also works in reverse:

 

Git off ya own lan'!

Faster, smaller allied bands will also spontaneously help you chase down enemies they couldn't otherwise tackle on their own. Overall, an elegant sandboxy solution to a persistent old problem. Nice work TaleWorlds.

 

The nearly 900-strength party in that second image is an army, now no longer merely individual bands following each other but a single coalesced blob traveling at its leader's behest recruiting more troops and usually finally attacking a major objective like castle, town or other army. While the AI has some issues (constantly countermanding orders and wasting days upon days marching hundreds of soldiers back and forth recruiting one peasant at a time in a couple of villages) they do carry out major offensives with some regularity. Interestingly, not all nearby parties will join the main siege (especially mercenaries) but will sack villages near the main objective. Defending these villages or intercepting reinforcements is actually a great opportunity for easy money regardless of which side you're on, as raiders let themselves get caught instead of running, resulting in reliable battle initiation instead of time-consuming chases. Again, nice gameplay diversity growing organically out of the basic army objective.

The Northern Empire soon finds itself in dire straits, a dogpile by both other Imperials seeing the loss of Diathma, but Baltakhand rebelling and falling into Imperial hands balances out the net gains and long-term viability. Thinking I probably won't get a better offer, I decided to bite the not-yet-invented bullet. After saving Emperor Lucon's purpurous ass from enraged Khuzaits upon the field of Locana, I swore fealty to the Calradian Empire and its rightful Imperator

 

Little did I realize that Baltakhand had not been assigned to anyone yet, and as freshly-minted noble with no properties it more or less defaulted to me.

 

 

So much for my plans toward the Battanians, thinks I, and amble over to survey my new digs in the far NorthEast.

Little did I realize a Khuzait counter-offensive twice my size was already on its way to recapture the town, hitting not even a day later. So much for my plans to hold Baltakhand, thinks I, and settle in for a desperate losing battle.

Little did I realize that nomads are still shit at sieges, but I'm getting ahead of myself

Sieges were crap in the original Mount&Blade. Everyone knew it, grumbled but accepted it since nobody else (except maybe the Stronghold games) even had medieval sieges at the time. One problem was units' lack of flexibility resulting in comic incompetence like your top-tier knights trying to storm the walls with their hopelessly unwieldy ten-foot-jousting-poles and getting punched to death by peasants. Far worse, every castle, every town had a single access point, regardless of being accessed by a ladder or siege tower, and aside from a bit of arrow-slinging the siege came down to waiting for a hundred attackers to struggle up the ladder one by one until one of them managed to survive an extra second making room for a constant trickle behind him. Mostly sieges provided a good opportunity to use Nord Huscarls, an otherwise expensive yet mediocre unit.

Now, in addition to the ladders plus battering ram and generally multiple attack points, Bannerlord has spruced up the field with some extra utility. The attackers especially get a lot of use out of barricades, about the only time you're really required to use first-person mode.

While siege weapons reliably one-shot soldiers and are automatically staffed by the AI

 

To further break up the monotony, you might at first be surprised by the message "The defenders have pulled back and are mounting a last stand inside the keep." Prepare for a nasty, crowded, confused, dimly lit, desperate melee.

But that wasn't necessary in this case. The larger army crumbled upon the dawn-lit walls of Baltakhand. My mixed infantry held the gate most valiantly, and up on the wall my reliance on Imperial Sergeants served me very well, as they didn't just whittle down incoming enemies by crossbow but proved rather immovable even when pressed in melee and forced to whip out their swords and boards. All in all, a heroic eff... effo... oh, holy shit, how did this even happen?!

Four local fresh recruits I'd panic-bought at seeing the enemy approach somehow wound up killing seventeen enemies between them in a flawless display of cut-rate heroics, outperforming even most top-tier units, at least in straightforward headcount. You were supposed to be cannon fodder you magnificent redshirt bastards!

Oh, right, no cannons...