With Good Intentions

"Kerensky - Dr. Kerensky was President of Russia after the Tsar was overthrown and before Lenin came along. He is still living, in Palo Alto. I was unable to find anything about Kerensky in any Russian museum. I asked about him, and yes, they had heard of him - and changed the subject. He is becoming an unperson... as soon as there is no one left alive who remembers him. All visible traces of him are gone. Trotsky - Lenin and Trotsky were a team, like Khrushchev and Bulganin, in the early years of the U.S.S.R. While we were there the U.S.S.R. was holding a great Lenin celebration; among other exhibits were hundreds and hundreds of news photographs from the early days of Communist Russia. I looked them all over carefully trying to find Trotsky’s unmistakable face, searching especially in group pictures of the Central Committee, pictures of the various ministers on official, occasions. Not one picture - Trotsky is an unperson. He exists only in the memories of those old enough to remember the early twenties. 

[...]
But I wonder what our own history will be, say fifty years from now? Will it turn out that there never was a Cold War, never was a Korean War - and that the United States and other free countries voluntarily joined up as people’s republics immediately after Mother Russia’s glorious and unassisted victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1940-45? Will Plymouth Rock and Jamestown be dropped out of history books in favor of the Russian colonies which in fact existed in California and Alaska? What new unpersons will there be? Edison? Einstein? Eisenhower?
I don’t know, I can’t guess. I simply know that when the government controls every word that is printed, every idea that is taught in school, history is no longer a record of the past but is a changeable thing, whatever is convenient to the government. And I am strongly of the opinion that our most likely future is a Communist World State. This is not a certainty - but it is the strongest of the probabilities.
[...]
The ultimate weapon was invented in pre-history. It is a kitchen knife in the hands of a determined man - who is fed up."

 

Robert Heinlein - The Future Revisited, speech given in Seattle, 1961

 

 

 

The upcoming Chinese expansion will mean the destruction of the vast majority of ideas, culture and art, as any dictatorship exterminates anything which might give the lower classes a hint that anything can exist outside the state's propaganda. But no need to wait that long for rampant revisionism. We already occupy a milieu in which The Lord of the Rings has been rewritten as a story about dwarf lesbians who do everything better than men, and nobody ever said the word "nigger" while rafting down 1840s' Mississippi, and Fahrenheit 451 is a movie about a black martyr striking back against a white villain. That one particularly grates, as the core of Bradbury's argument, the spark of brilliance which set his apart from more popular dystopias, was spotting the anti-intellectual undertow inherent in mass appeal and instinctive, bottom-up tribalism, that it is precisely demands from various political lobbies for revisionism which legitimizes censorship, repression and oppression. You can bet when the coming dictatorship (whether fascist, corporatist or just plain woke) skins you alive, it will do so in the name of "human rights" - because no matter who you are and how benign, someone somewhere has branded you a villain. "Everybody's someone else's 'nigger'" after all. I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.

 

I remember a webcomic from the Internet's early exponential spread... late '90s, early 2000s maybe? Certainly is was a quitessentially "goth" '90s affair. A teenage boy with demonic powers (who, if memory serves, went by the bombastic name of 'Azrael, angel de la misericordia!') tread a black-and-white night in a sinful city where nobody believes his stories about devils, culminating in a scene where he prostitutes himself to curb his own pride at his AWESOMAH POWAH but ends up getting assraped without lube. I lost track of it afterwards and was never able to find it again, not that I tried very hard. Can't even remember its official title. Still, for all its largely unoriginal, unskilled and crass adolescent posturing, puerile shock value, I remember spotting an endearing earnestness in that weird little mess of a comic. Certainly I don't think it deserved to fill textbooks alongside Raphael's School of Athens... but it deserved to exist. At least five or twelve of Beyonce's billion fans would spend fifteen minutes better by clicking through that comic than on her Twit feed.

 

The internet has created an illusion of permanence (you can still find the dancing hamsters) but webcomics especially, with their rather ephemeral hosting services, trapped in a no-man's land between the low cost of text and the high advertising revenue of video, make a bitter counterpoint. Just visit TheWebcomicsList or The Belfry sometime and count the dead links. When a visually intriguing if philosophically overinflated little quasi-surrealist affair called Age of Clay ended, I may have even contributed by one of my characteristically snarly comments to the author's decision to take it offline just days later - too soon for the Internet Archive to have captured its last chapters for posterity.

While we're at it, don't count on the Internet Archive. Not only has every single power structure in the world already painted a bullseye on them, but we are headed into societal collapse and no centralized, high-visibility target survives long under such conditions. Save your favorites. Whether in preparation for Sino-Imperialist repression, or corporatist suppression of independent communication, or climate-driven mass starvation and a century of economic nullity, or merely the general attrition of entropy gradually erasing your memories, save a bit here and there of what you can save. Not just the universals. Ten billion copies of Hamlet will serve no better than ten million. Save the little bits of someone's soul you've run across: a joke, a rant, a stupid stunt caught on video, a transcript, a few dozen pages of drawings, that old novel your book club argued over that one evening. Fill a few thumb drives and secret them away in a waterproof backpack somewhere. Print Nietzschean aphorisms alongside your favorite forum flame-war in eight point font double-sided and just toss the pages in a folder, easy to hide under a car seat when the firemen come for your house. They may not seem in need of saving... but then I doubt that kid with the goth comic would've expected some middle-aged nerd to reminisce about it twenty years after he gave up the project.

And when it comes to the big names, save the originals, because revisionists will torture them before murdering them. An un-redacted copy of Huckleberry Finn will be an albino tiger twenty years from now - and just as dangerous to hold onto.

Above all, stop counting on the internet to do your remembering for you. Fahrenheit 451 has proven the most prophetic of the old warnings. Remember how it ended, and be ready to become a walking book.

Validheshun

"Remember me? I used to live for music

Remember me? I brought your groceries in

Now it's father's day and everybody's wounded"

Leonard Cohen - First We Take Manhattan

Say you're the average human female at some indeterminate point in history. You've got this big hairy beast at your disposal. In return for permitting him to (potentially (he doesn't need to know about last night)) impregante you, he owes you... everything. Every day you pack him out the cave door to return with spoils and win you higher esteem within the tribe. The means are his business, and if he gets caught you can maintain deniability while he hangs for "his" crimes. He is an extension of your larder. He might lose some toes to frostbite, have a snakebite turn necrotic, be clawed and bitten and bludgeoned and lose an eye or ear and he will quite likely die in a contest to the death with some other man for dominance or the tribe's territory, for the right and privilege to supply you with the lifestyle to which you've become accustomed. You will weep at his funeral, and remind your new hairy brute every day just how much more of a man your last one was, for his devotion unto death.

For most of history, this would warrant not a single disputing thought, partly because nobody's brain can handle a single thought beyond "don't eat the red berries" or pretending fairies in the clouds are going to make you immortal. The idea that a thinking being, every bit as existentially competent as yourself, exists to die for you... just is. That's how the world works. That's how it's always been. And besides, it's so easy to hate him. He's uglier than you. His voice sounds more gutttural. He's not permitted to seek sympathy by maintaining infantile attention-seeking behavior into adulthood, like crying.

Then comes the industrial revolution. No longer need every ape spend every day staving off starvation. Safer streets. Maybe you can take care of yourself, participate directly in public life without a human shield. Working outside the home no longer means working away from shelter. Acquiring resources directly becomes ever more attractive a proposition. But what about your hairy beast of burden(s)? You no longer strictly need him to protect and provide for you, but do you really want to let him go? You might even, occasionally, feel uneasy when notions of human rights don't mesh with his disposability, that every dirty, dangerous or otherwise unpleasant job is still done by the hairy brutes while you're sitting in an air-conditioned office shuffling papers, and if a war breaks out you'll be sitting at home getting ready to cry at his funeral.

But what are you gonna do?

Slap on a helmet and jump in the trenches?

Break your neck falling off a roof or girder during construction?

Stave off frostbite and strain against a hernia unloading trucks in the dead of winter?

Deny yourself his salary, your rightful uterine tithe?

You're not stupid, right? You're a smart girl. Why give up your original advantage just because you've gained others? The beast is too useful as a beast to be allowed to run free. All you need is a moral dodge.

There must be a way to have your cake and eat it too, maintain your half of the old status quo...

Lucky this one political movement out there keeps gaining steam, proclaiming the beast you abuse is worthy of nothing but abuse, and it's sounding sweeter with every twinge of conscience at seeing all of society's resources pour along your side of the gender divide. The beast is bad. He is unworthy of your sympathy. You shouldn't worry about his difficulties, its sensibilities, his dangers and fears, because it's guilty of crimes against you. Crimes. Crimes do you hear!? Because the beast was the one taking action (while you just took advantage) then it must be guilty of all the world's ills, just by existing. It owes you. It deserves to suffer, expiating its original sin by assuming every danger and hardship. It deserves your abuse. Really. Truly. Trust us. Put the beast back in its place. Doesn't it feel right? Empowering? Don't you deserve to be taken care of? And protected? After all, such a monstrous creature must be kept in line, for the safety of the better half. In fact, you know what, he's part of an immortal conspiracy to oppress you, and all the favors, all the care, all the protection and support he has bestowed upon you are only tricks, no matter how tangible - but your intangible "love" for the disgusting piece of slime, your "emotional labor" makes you a martyr, and entitled. To everything. Up to and including his death.

Sounds good, don't it?

Sounds real good.

 

Everyone, including its critics, mistakenly classes feminism as an upsurge, as at worst misguided utopianism, with any harm it might cause framed as a question  of whether it has "gone too far" by overplaying some sort of idealism. I would contend it is in fact an undertow, the most conservative viewpoint short of primitivist farming communes, reasserting the primeval flow of labor, resources and sacrifice from the disposable half of the species to the child-bearing half by fabricating constant pretexts of guilt by which men must be obligated to cede in favor of women. Feminism's popularity is explained at least in part as governments' need to guilt half the population into accepting poorer conditions, and conversely as the other half of the population's psychological necessity for self-justification in clinging to their subsidized diplomas, housing or sinecures, their alimony checks and the all-male military draft.

"Orthodoxy is Unconsciousness"

"Is there a secret way

Is there a secret door

Do I have to pray

To reach the promised shore?"

In Strict Confidence - Promised Land

________________________________________________

 

"I think it's easy to say that you distrust the government, that you distrust the state. Again, that's something almost no one will take you up on. But if you say that you are very often pretty sure that it's the majority who is wrong and the way the public opinion is constructed that's wrong, the way that popular mandates are construed that's wrong, then you can be accused of being an elitist or a snob and so on, and then you know you're on to something."

 

Christopher Hitchens - Interview with Harry Kreisler: "A Dissenting Voice", 2002

(Corresponding Conversations with History episode available here)

________________________________________________

 

"In Christian eyes, Galen was not to be worshipped, God was. Gnosticism, a highly intellectual second-century movement (the word "gnostic" comes from the Greek word for "knowledge") that was later declared heretical, didn't help. Heretics were intellectual, therefore intellectuals were, if not heretical, then certainly suspect. So ran the syllogism. Intellectual simplicty or, to put a less flattering name on it, ignorance was widely celebrated."

Catherine Nixey - The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

________________________________________________

Does anybody actually like Fandom.com?

Wait, backtrack a bit for context. Sam Harris has no tribe.

Wait, more basic than that: if you want some dirt on the Jews, ask the Muslims. If you want some dirt on the Muslims, ask the Christians. If you want some dirt on the Christians, ask the Jews. Fact-check, of course... but the system works. It stops working when you declare one side above criticism and muzzle the others.

I have been muzzled, and I'm not even on anyone's side.

Back in 2012, just three months after I'd started this blog I noted the new pattern of censorship in the modern age was to simply bury the offending material by promoting competing dross. As a corollary, we've now added old-school censorship to that. All through the 2010s, Google has been increasingly abusing its search algorithm to favor certain commercial companies, presumably in exhange for kickbacks. As one example, the website Wikicities/Wikia/Fandom.com has existed for quite some time, as a low-quality, blatantly profiteering and disinterested attempt to cash in on interest in various fictional works, but it rarely held a candle to sites created by actual fans. It was only after being bought up by the investment firm TPG Capital in 2018-2019 that Wikia suddenly skyrocketed to the top of Google hits for... ANYTHING, be it book, game or movie. The site's still crap. But deeper pockets now have an interest in shoveling that crap down your throat, and Google's only too happy to supply the shovel.

This year however saw an obvious escalation in Google's more blatantly censoring your searches under political excuses, morally cleansing the zeitgeist. From the start I have refused to promote this blog in any way, and most of you found it by keyword searches. But since spring, Google hits have dropped to nothing. Key phrases which I knew from experience would previously yield front page or top-line image search hits to my blog suddenly saw me knocked down by several rows and pages. Newer posts, especially containing politically sensitive terminology (just tried "werwolfesden nomenklatura" for instance) don't show up on Google at all. On DuckDuckGo, they still yield first page hits (while Fandom.com drops like a rock) - but then nobody uses DuckDuckGo. I have never relied on a single audience with a single viewpoint. I'm an equal-opportunity snarler. You come, you read for some time, you nod in agreement, you scoff in disdain, maybe you link something of mine to your friends if I'm lucky, then you wander off and others gradually trickle in from search engine hits depending on how much their interests match mine. This was as it should be, the promise of the free internet. No captive audiences. No captive writers. Now, I as many others find myself choked to death by the lack of replenishment. When the last handful of you leave, no-one will know this blog exists, because no-one will be permitted a keyword match. The irony of it being hosted on Google's own servers, of Google censoring itself, does not escape me.

But it's a sign of our times.

On the second of this month, I was struck by a random news story confirming the inevitable: that Black Lives Matter like any martyr cult is among other things a scam, with one of its leaders being accused by peers of having palmed upwards of $10mil. I was struck, I say, because this story had not been included in my Reuters feed. Nor was it present on BBC's U.S. news list, nor on any of the other usual suspects who had done nothing but slavishly adulate the slightest warble from BLM for the past several years. You'd think top-level graft in an organization that can marshall twenty million fanatics to terrorize America for the entire summer of 2020 would warrant some attention, wouldn't you? It took three more days for CNN to grudgingly acknowledge the story, and others still refuse to do so. Wouldn't want our nice shiny cradle for violent racists tarnished by something so crass as a financial scandal, now would we? For a bonus, BLM's finances were already being called into question back in January for long-standing issues of lack of transparency or accountability, having gone dark throughout the preceding year soon after its windfall of support during the George Floyd riots. None of us heard about it back then either, from any major outlet above the city level. Our own morality police decreed it not a topic for polite discussion. For a bonus bonus, just three days before it conspicuously refused to pick up the BLM scandal, Reuters ran a fairly extensive article on censorship in Turkey. Oh, well, so long as the censorship is, y'know, OVER THERE somewhere, okay.

Such media bias is as old as the media, sure, but one thing that has changed is public acceptance. Back in 1980 Isaac Asimov warned (in his article on elitism as a slur) that the public could no longer read, at least not coherently and critically. Forty years later, even the "pointy-headed professors" he lamented were being demonized by the ignorant masses can no longer hold themselves above mindless slogan-chanting. We've become so comfortable with phrases like "through a feminist lens" that even our lobby-appointed intelligentsia get the vapors at analyzing anything except as sanitized through some politically convenient bias. I have bashed and slammed many, many social groups here over the years, from bronies to Trumpists... but ultimately, the ones to silence me were Google, the tech sector, the educated, well-heeled, self-appointed "liberal" inquisitors.

 

As a gratuitously perverse twist, Google censors by using exactly what it prevents others from using: keywords. I very much doubt anyone at the organization sat and pored over my thousand pages of rambling mostly on the topic of goblins and spaceships. Far more likely they simply programmed their search parameters to excommunicate anyone caught using heretical terms like, maybe "misandry" because certain words must be excluded from language, so that the concepts they represent cannot be discussed, analyzed or criticized. Does that remind you of anything?

"Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime."

- see how long before you can no longer Google even that quote because it makes our overlords uncomfortable.

We Happy Few

"I down a couple downers

 

I've been to mushroom mountain

 

Cool, calm, just like my mom

With a couple of valium inside her palm

It's Mr. Mischief with a trick up his sleeve

Crawl up on you like Christopher Reeves"

 

D12 - Purple Pills

 

 

"You are congealed" - (what I always think the game is telling me while I wait around in bushes or dressers for aggro timers to expire.)

I remember a brief chat several years ago with someone who protested there are simply too many open-world RPGs being made. While I happen to like the sandbox routine, I had to concede most rushed blindly to copy Skyrim's success, when Skyrim was only borderline sandboxy to begin with. If you'd like to see a good game which fell prey to that pitfall, try We Happy Few. You've probably heard of it: that one about a town full of drugged-out '60s Brits. If you've heard any reviews, they'll be of the mixed variety: good concept, poor execution. But that's not entirely fair. After all, Wellington Wells portrays a deluded dystopia quite amusingly, with signs of drug culture and its impact permeating all interactions and perceptions.

Left-to-right: On Joy / coming down / clear head / Joy crash*

 

Took me a while to realize the withdrawal filter imposes a slight fish-eye effect to make the architecture loom over you menacingly. Damn graphic design majors earned their keep for once. Wizard of Oz similes are obviously intended. Most would liken the game's basic plot to Brave New World. I find its layers of (self-)deceit better recall the tone of a (sadly) lesser read novela by Stanislaw Lem, The Futurological Congress, which I cited before as example of SF stories about population control... ironically enough in current context. Eh, don't worry, that grand reveal is not so grandly revealed in the first zone after the tutorial. Really, I found my impression of We Happy Few hit me in distinct waves of admiration and disappointment:

Stage 1) The "wow" factor

It kicks off strongly enough, with a potential nonstandard game over as soon as the curtain lifts. Though cutscenes are frequent they're also, as I suggested, sufficiently prefaced not to jar you out of gameplay itself and often paced by your own keystrokes. The campy retrofuturistic aesthetic is played up to great success, voice acting dependably charming, and even the endless references (from balm of Gilead to the little dalek trashcans to quests like "The Scottish Play" to snippets of poetry mumbled on the roads) support rather than disrupt the setting. Uncle Jack's broadcasts warrant halting for a listen, going the extra mile in recreating the incompetent guile of early radio - and holy shit, you will learn to hate his creepy fake laugh!

Stage 2) The grind

But then you get into the open world elements. The various zones are randomly generated, which is to say quest/loot locations are randomly shuffled around. In its campy English setting and in its combat mechanics, WHF so closely resembles Sir, You Are Being Hunted that I was surprised to find they weren't made by the same team. Unfortunately, this means my criticism "the British heath soon grows frustratingly dull" from SYABH also applies here, with randomization yielding an overly-tame, flat, repetitive clutter of identical houses and plains.

Like SYABH this is not a strict stealth-based game but an FPS with a high damage/health ratio heavily encouraging stealth. However, while combat does include blocking and block breaking, it still boils down to left-clicking and popping insta-heal potions, so you'll probably avoid fighting because it's largely unrewarding and clunky. Technically you could make use of a wealth of consumables, but the quickslot system expects you to rummage through dozens of flashlights and rubber duckies trying to find your darts while you're being walloped with frying pans and rolling pins. Targeting is also marred by an infuriatingly oversensitive pointer snap range, so don't be surprised if you find yourself chugging drugged water by mistake while reaching for medicine cabinets.

So you'll be relying heavily on your stealth skills, aggroing the hair-triggered NPCs then running around the nearest corner to hide until they reset. This single routine outweighs all the rest of the action combined, and when the most common activity in the game is "do nothing for thirty seconds" you can damn well expect a few negative reviews.

Stage 3) The play's the thing

However, if you have the patience to advance through all the zones, you start encountering Wellington Wells' true charm, one chunk of fool's gold at a time.

 

The plot grows beyond a simplistic "plucky underdog vs. evil empire" routine by forcing the realization that the underdogs are the empire, their urban decay self-inflicted. Quests' tone mostly runs a wide gamut of gallows humor never quite letting you forget the town's absurdity masks a dreadfully serious menace. Their content varies more than most games', with a few fetch quests, some basic-difficulty environment puzzles, some logistic elements, only two or three forced fights and a great deal of loot hauling.

 

Particularly inspired though is the overall portrayal of the Wellies themselves. While bashing escapism in a video game is always risky, We Happy Few goes a step further by equating dissasociative bliss with infantilism, a stance I find myself forced into more and more* witnessing the computer game creative medium and especially cRPGs fail to outgrow grade school theatrics even as their market demographic has shifted toward thirty-somethings. Incapable of all but the most abbreviated thoughts, grinding through their lives by sheer routine, the Wellies are reduced to playing Simon Says to the point of elevating it to a religion and splashing mindlessly about in puddles like toddlers. And then... you discover an old soldier's secreted-away military radio** communicating with the resistance. Brace yourself.

Stage 4) Playing's a letdown

However, as I rounded out my playthrough of Arthur, the first and supposedly longest of the game's three viewpoint characters, I found my disappointment washing over me again in force. My pile of hundreds of accumulated foodstuffs, grenades, balms and cricket bats went entirely to waste, as the action failed to ramp up to any climactic battles requiring you to splurge, and the stash doesn't carry over between characters despite them sharing the same environment. This is not helped by needing to burgle for more important items, which almost inevitably makes you sift through mountains of trash loot, compounded by most stat increases coming from skill books spawned more or less randomly in certain uncertain locations, forcing even more obsessive hoovering through every closet in town.

At first you'll welcome your skill trees offering more utility allowing you to move about freely, but as the need to allay NPCs' suspicions or even feed yourself disappears, as you become so stealthy (shoes, camouflage, night bonus) as to never need to fight, nothing takes the place of these as gameplay elements, leaving you with an unsatisfying walking simulator as timesink between the admittedly well executed story quests. Items like gas masks are only used half a dozen times, flashlights or electrical protection only twice or so each, and rarely in any interesting combinations. Others like water filters prove completely useless, as you can make a couple of trips back to Barrow Holm and stock up enough drug-free water to last you a month in a two-week campaign. Worse yet, you're often treated to idiot-friendly supplies placed in boxes near where they'll be needed, denying you even the satisfaction of meeting new challenges by a well-stocked inventory.

It's one thing to display artistic awareness, and quite another to be induced by that awareness to scoff at the quality of your own work. While decent from a linear storytelling perspective, as a game too much of We Happy Few seems phoned in, treated as an external concern beneath the designers' conceit, just slapping on as many selling points as apossible. Customers like Skyrim open-world exploration? Give 'em that! They like loot? Give 'em mountains of loot! They like combat? Give 'em grenades they'll never have cause to use! That'll shut the rabble up.

And with that I'm afraid we've come to the end of our time, as little here makes me want to start all over again with the next characters, or get my money's worth from the DLCs I got with the super-deluxe edition or whatever. Tune in next time for more of Uncle Werwolfe's fan letters.

 

 

____________________________________________________________

 

* Exhibits a-(1) and a (2) and a (3) and a (4) and a many another, probably.

** I honestly can't help but feel this blog is that radio.

Errementari

"a comic where a happy mother and son can frolic through the forest chasing butterflies and the readers are sweating buckets with each panel"

- top reader comment on page 1105 of Wilde Life (mind spoilers on surrounding pages)

 

 

Errementari's one of those pan-European film productions which manage the unexpected on a low budget by pooling resources, adapting one of Western culture's oldest (if not most popular) folk tales. The low budget certainly shows in its special effects' stiffness, but these are used creatively enough to enhance demonic otherworldliness, as are the Foley slaps and other exaggerrated sound effects. The acting's a bit harder to defend. Even across the unusual Basque language barrier many lines come across as stilted, not helped by an over-reliance on child actors. But, in creating a somewhat alien storybook atmosphere, it can be hard to tell where the incompetence ends and the stylistic brilliance begins.

 

While George R.R. Martin's marketing success adapting Game of Digressions has primed audiences for darker fantasy themes than they accepted twenty or even ten years ago, it's still relatively rare for modern takes on old folklore to capture the nerve-jangling uncertainty of our ancestors' daily lives and imaginations. Whatever the pulpit-pounders might say, humans' general attitude toward the magical creatures they imagine has rarely held these as agents of superlative good or evil, but as inherently dangerous independent actors. Danger is opportunity. Deals may be struck. Trust may be broken. Death lurks behind every pair of eyes beyond the campfire... but may be restrained to lurking if proper precautions are taken. Wilde Life manages it to the point of making its readers tremble at heartwarming family scenes for fear of what may be hiding just outside each frame. Errementari manages a similar effect by instead making you question each character's motivation, gullibility and dedication in every scene. The dangers are obvious... but will they come into play?

While the movie may be based on a moralistic version collected by a priest, the basic story (of a craftsman trapping and tricking a malevolent spirit to escape the costs of a dangerous bargain) is rooted in the neolithic, millennia before some rebellious rabbi got posted between two thieves... and it shows. This is folk Christianity, light on theory and heavy on fear, not a stentorious proclamation of absolute truth but a wary question on your lips about the undiscovered country. It's great-grandma telling you to cross yourself for the priest's accusing eye, but also throw some salt over your shoulder when he's not looking and throw the fairies a few drops of milk just to keep your options open. It speaks of a millennium and subcontinent's worth of societies which understood the church as powerful but unreliable and a whispered rumor worth more than a sermon, where the faith was not neatly inscribed upon gold foil within a tome of ancient "wisdom" but a half-remembered mumble of a poorly translated prayer, desperate sinners tearing scraps from the robes of the holy, a rusted century-old chunk of clever metalwork or your grandfather's stick cross rotted through. The priests offered "salvation" but "saving" yourself was still understood to depend on your own wits and will and if promises were not dependable, prophecies and psalms were even less so.

After all, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

"I leave symbols to the symbol-minded"

Apparently my ritual offering of five mugged (imaginary) British grannies yesterday was enough TO BRING ABOUT THE DEMISE OF A QUEEEEEN!!! Muahahaha, let all trrremble at my occult puissance! AaarrooooooOOOoOOOO!

 

Honestly though, I almost wish I could give a shit, but find myself singing neither Ave Maria nor Ding-Dong the Witch Is Dead. I wasn't exactly waiting for her next novel to be released, or for her to discover cold fusion; conversely, whatever subhuman street thug brains me with a brick won't need her help to do me in. The royal family is an entertainment product (and not a particularly entertaining one at that) a public relations service for British finance, and the best I've routinely heard said about ol' Liz painted her as merely the least embarrassing representative of the European subcontinent's centuries-inbred gaggle of parasitic fops. Are you weeping for her because gran-gran was the last of them you could trust not to shit herself in public?

What knowledge about her deeds made you value her existence in the first place? Did she write your favorite song lyrics, operate on your mother's appendicitis, optimize your car model's catalytic converter, place the concept of habeas corpus into proper historical context, pen startling visions of future dystopias, reduce computer fan power consumption, drew your favorite storybook's illustrations of the labors of Hercules, performed the labors of Hercules herself, can you name anything at all this person did to warrant your attention aside from occupying an enviably destructive social rank?

"Famous for being famous" indeed.

I made a penta-gram!

 

They're just unconscious, so this is not creepy at all

 If there's a better argument for including varied character models in your game, I haven't seen it.

More Guns, More God, More Government

"What have you become?
Could you please them all?
Living someone else's life
Distraction keeps the blinding light
Deflecting off the horror
You've lost your soul or slowly let it die
It's not who you are"

 

Faith and the Muse - When We Go Dark

 

 

Whenever talking to relatives or acquaintances abroad, you'll hear quaint anecdotes... and everyone chuckles at those kooky Poles or Australians or Panamanians or Japanese or French or Canadians, or French-Canadians, and moves on. But I've found discussing America in particular prompts a whole new layer of incredulity at just how backward, parochial and flat-out primitive Americans choose to behave, despite having the greatest opportunity to prove the opposite. With recent religious attacks against public safety, personal rights and freedom, many in the world at large seem surprised at what to the untrained eye might appear a sudden turn, when really religious reactionaries have always been America's groaningly ubiquitous braindead zombie swarm, kept at bay merely by a few flimsy rotted boards nailed over its legal system's windows.

I'm not sure how to convey religious primitivism's pervasiveness in American life, even living in a fairly centrist, even consistently left-leaning state, and in a small college town no less, where the abnormally high professor-to-yokel ratio could supply ready explanations against superstition, even in the produce section at the supermarket. Maybe remember that health insurance makes an exception for religious smoking. Maybe you'll be convinced if I tell you the hick handing me my burger at the drive-through window tells me to "have a blessed day." Or maybe it would mean more that when interviewing for a teaching assistantship, you should expect a standard question of whether you're willing to teach evolutionary topics in the lab, or how you'd answer a (university!) student worried about a faith conflict with evolutionary theory.

 

But maybe the best way to get this point across is sheer volume. A town with a population just breaking into five digits (much of it itinerant) supports at minimum 20 churches. Baptists, methodists, presbyterians, anglicans, more baptists, catholics, episcopalians, lutherans, more baptists, more lutherans, more baptists, plus all the generic protestants and even more generic "we's gots us sum Jesus" and that's not even counting the little prayer meets and clubs and the smatter of muslims, hindus and other imported idiocy, like there wasn't enough of the home-grown variety. Basically, whichever way you want your children raped and beaten to death, we can accomodate all your faith-based needs! Even headshrinkers and "counselors" make sure to advertise faith-based solutions. Yes, about half the mental health professionals openly advertise belief in magic sky-daddies.

While the rest of the world is laughing its ass off, let me turn to the American contingent and point out this not only is unhealthy, IT IS NOT NORMAL. A European village will always feature The Village Church, more or less maculately whitewashed and frequented by everybody's grandmother, plus an alternative for the major minority... but for the most part, they're content with that. Not everyone who moves to town needs to build a new steeple. Religious ritual is never absent from their lives, but it does not escalate to the demented extent that bullshit dispensaries outnumber all your gas stations, grocery stores, schools and pharmacies combined!