son soufle la souleve; il faut refuser de vivre

"“I shall be this, eighteen, for a little while, and then seventeen and sixteen a small while, and oh, Timothy, while I am this and then that age, I must find me a quick love, a swift romance, in the town below, and not let them know I come down from this hill or this House, and release myself to joy for a little while before I am fifteen and fourteen and thirteen and then the innocence of twelve before the pulses start and the blood manifests, and then eleven and ignorant but happy, and ten—even happier. And then again, Timothy, if only somewhere along the way backward, you and I could conjoin, clasp hands in friendship, clasp bodies in joy, how fine, yes?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“How old are you, Timothy?”

“Ten, I guess.”

“Ah, yes. So you don’t know what I say.”

She leaned forward suddenly and gave him such a kiss on his mouth that his eardrums fractured and the soft spot on his skull ached.

“Does that give you a small idea of what you’ll miss by not loving me?” she said.
 Timothy blushed all over. His soul leaped out from his body and rushed back in in a storm.

“Almost,” he whispered."

 

Ray Bradbury - Make Haste to Live

_____________________________________

"And oh! of all tortures
That torture the worst
Has abated—the terrible
Torture of thirst
For the naphthaline river
Of Passion accurst"

Edgar Allan Poe - For Annie

_____________________________________

"Anything at any price

All of this for you

All the spoils of a wasted life

All of this for you"

Nine Inch Nails - The Great Below

____________________________________

 

Death

Life. Tell me of your life. Is there life in your body? Life is precious. Life is good. But you are thought, not life, thought dependent on life. Life is short, but life won’t let you think of short. Short thoughts. Think short-life and Life in you cuts thought short. Live life. Create new life. Procreate until you can’t create. Make others’ lives a living hell to make your life seem meaningful, to make your procreated life and its short life into an eternal living with short (if any) thinking. This is your death, the reproductive instinct. The life of the body is the death of the mind.

 

- by me, ca. Y2K

_____________________________________

I wonder at what age I will finally gain the ability to weep for my lost youth spent waiting for death, but for now some governor I wired into my emotions long ago holds me unworthy of such reflection. Perhaps it has something to do with a latter-month day back in the mid-'90s, in tenth grade. I was failing. After a childhood spent outscoring everyone around me, I'd begun despairing of ever finding the payoff, and so I was getting worse and worse, less and less motivated to busy myself with the inane busywork imposed on me by the submental wastes of oxygen who ran my life. But that day she had been there, in class, as offbeat creative, as insightful, as lovely or more than she had been the previous year when I'd been such an asshat to her, and still willing to smile at me and I thought... maybe for her. The thought grabbed me. The world seemed lighter. For a step, I breathed easier. To prove worthy of her I could do better.

That might be the fastest I've ever wiped a smile off my face, walking away from the foreign language classes. In an instant, the winter air regained its bite, the sunlight chilled, as I realized how hideously ghoulish this abortion of thought should sound, would sound, were its romantic context objectively pruned away to its deserved irrelevance. That a mind should find itself pre-programmed to subvert and enslave itself, its very worth and self-concept, to another. Willingly, even eagerly!

It's Halloween, a night when death reaches back at us across eternity, when we manifest our own weaknesses and worst natures, our pitfalls and taboos, as hungry masks beyond the hearth. But the most dangerous monsters are those we fail to acknowledge as such, the ravenous shibboleths chained to our home's entrance, to our communal table... and worst of all to our bed.

Her life runs at cross-current to yours. Her eternity is found at the end of your instant stolen and repurposed. The monster in your bed is consuming you, with every kiss, with every sigh, with every manipulative cry, with every thought that's not your own. Soon nothing will be left of you but a series of lines in her check-book. Much as our instincts punish us, night by lonely year, cold sheets scraping skin desperate for a single touch, for refusing the tyranny of our flesh, still no man retains himself in the grasp of those dictating our genetic imperative. Existence is individual. Devotion is negation.

Existence is unlife. To live is extinction.

Hokey, Boomer

There was a brief time in the 20th century when it was more fun to debunk the supernatural. Oz had to step forth from behind his curtain. Rahan showed cavemen their witch doctors never really had magic powers. Scooby-Doo&crew pulled rubber masks off charlatans. The religion of the future was an unexploded nuke. The Addams Family astonished and rankled their audience by being more human than human.

 

Then at some point flim-flam flipped from a villainous trait to a hero. Instead of embracing fantasy as its own genre with its own rules, the public conflated it with reality, until no matter the genre, the crazy-stupid explanation for characters' experiences became the only possible one. Instead of getting bitten by radioactive spiders, superheroes now get bitten by magic spider-pixies, because that makes way more sense.

I'd be curious if anyone's located the exact tipping point there. Most might blame the '90s and the New Age movement, but my gut screams "Reagan" at the top of its rugae, the time when hippies, after a decade of post-'60s defeat, found themselves too much at home as bank tellers and electricians to reconcile with their old acid trips and needed pop culture to validate them, meshing all too well with their former traditionally religious opponents' own desperation to validate the supernatural.

But it's been long enough for the tide to turn again, and it is unlikely to turn toward reason so much as toward a monomaniacal, parochial caricature of it, a delusion of reason just as the current mysticism is a delusion of openmindedness. By next decade we should brace ourselves for the backlash, and the crackdown. GenZ will turn fascist when it hits its thirties.

Dear internet,

I caught COVID-19. It sucks.

Not only do I have to sleep with a damn scarf and winter hat, but my temperature keeps oscillating up past 39C (so I never know when I'll need to huddle under two blankets sweating bullets and/or shaking like a leaf) and my energy level has dropped somewhere below "snail" the better to suit my new home under two blankets.

But I was vaccinated, so after two days, three doses of acetaminophen and lots of hot tea, it's already subsiding, in contrast to my family's reports of pre-vaccine week-long coughing fits while bedridden. Then I remember the millions who've deliberately chosen to cough their lungs out or die as some pretense of rebellion or for the sake of caveman superstitions about divine plans.

Maybe it's my dwindling fever talking, but the CDC needs to start taking dart guns to those antivaxxer cretins. Subhuman livestock is obviously not competent to make its own decisions.

Mordheim: Interface of the Damned

"You cut off all of your fingers

Trade them in for dollar bills

[...]

You'll never read what you've written"

 

Marilyn Manson - Dried Up, Tied and Dead to the World

 

 

Apparently Mordheim: City of the Damned came out in 2015. By 2020 I was able to fish it out of the bargain bin for $7 and have been sitting on it since, occasionally favoring it with a wry, accusing glance. Having finally worked my way around to it, my apprehension proved well-founded. Utter failure would be one thing, but there's always something so... perverse... about marred quality, isn't there?

Fundamentally, this is a fairly standard team management TBS with the usual melee and ranged attacks, morale and armor values, buffs and disables, etc. No complaints, Warhammer wrote more than a few chapters into the book on the subject and Mordheim boasts a comprehensive enough  stats and mechanics system to satisfy even my demands. Unfortunately some idiot project leader* also decided the game needed to look like an over-the-shoulder WoW-clone (instead of a top-down TBS) and most of the game's problems can be traced back to that development and system resource-sapping demand.

As a basic conceit, your team is one of scavengers fighting over a ruined city against other similar bands, forcing you to split your characters' actions between fighting and combing houses for loot. Problem #1: the combing. Your map view displays loot bags on the x/y plane, but houses come in multiple levels forcing you to run up and down trying to find the correct floor every single time. Aside from a gratuitous timesink, this also routinely trips up the AI mooks' pathfinding, and that's just the tip of the iceberg:

 

- unduly subtle loot graphics forcing you to pixel-hunt

- movement constantly getting stuck on corners

- unable to check loot encumbrance without looting something

- animations with overextended timesink prep/cleanup phases

- interface locked during animations !

- no minimap

- can't deploy via map, forcing you to arrow-key between deployment spots

- can't save during deployment

- long loads

- inexcusably long enemy moves (seriously, ten seconds for every enemy unit even if it's invisible)

- no tooltip descriptions of most items or skills, keep that wiki handy

- no enemy ambush range display, good luck trying to rangefind your charging

- line of sight impossible to guess at, due to the game lacking tiles even a pixel's difference alters your hit chance, and your view can be blocked even when there's nothing to block it

- compounding the glitchy movement, the lack of tiles to calculate move range forces a system where move points are (potentially) used up one by one, meaning if you want to recalculate you need to run back and pick up your first breadcrumb

- even basic looting has you tiptoeing a pixel this way and that to get the interface to lock on; it can't even detect loot you're standing on top of

(note the lack of highlighting)

Between combats you get some decent mechanics like wound treatment, loot sales, skill training all taking time to complete - but just as in Battletech, one can't entirely praise a TBS based on its managerial side. And compared to Battletech, Mordheim is far more luck-dependent. Your units can get knocked out in four hits or so and have one to at most two attacks each at 50-75% chance to hit on average. On top of this, the morale system features an all-or-nothing rout mechanic by which getting three characters knocked out almost immediately imposes an instant loss. As if that weren't retarded enough, remember you need to loot during missions, meaning that by routing your enemy you're still missing out on loot. Yes, you heard right: the rout mechanic ensures that EVEN IF YOU WIN, YOU STILL LOSE! Your best hope is for the idiot AI to get stuck on terrain so you can run back and forth to stash more loot, round by time-consuming round. Don't even get me started on the very strict level scaling unduly restricting your choices (cf. Battle Brothers.)

Like Darkest Dungeon a year later, Mordheim autosaves constantly to prevent you from cheating by reloading. Except where DD's simple visuals allowed for seamless quicksaves, Mordheim's 3D graphics pad every single animation and command with even more time-wasting pauses, to the point that even if you're willing to stomach the luck-based gameplay and glitchy movement, you'll despair simply at characters dragging their damn feet! Pity, because as a TBS it might've been interesting enough, but Mordheim's only real value now seems as an object lesson in over-reaching for glitz and thereby poisoning each and every one of your actual game mechanics.

(* Or maybe Games Workshop demanded the over-the-shoulder view in licensing.)

Don't Slay the Spire, slay the card fetish

Ugh. Another twelve-dollar game that would be overpriced at six.

I've never played Rogue and am not a fan of the roguelike, plotless, randomized dungeon crawling routine and I certainly would not bestow upon any such product the undeserved laurels of "role-playing" alongside such greats as Bloodlines, M&B, Tyranny or the Infinity Engine titles. But, nonetheless, I must concede Darkest Dungeon proved that tired old roguelike routine could be adapted to the finest modern standards. Slay the Spire blatantly piggybacks on the popularity of such other retro games with its side view and encounter lattice but builds nothing new upon it, expecting to sell based on its "indie" credentials simply for marketing to a niche market.

 

First off, you only get one mook, so say goobye to DD's strategic/tactical linear formations and position jockeying. Second off, the lattice branches very little with no backtracking, so you're mostly just clicking "next" as you work your way up. Third off, it's an hour or two's playthrough expecting you to just start over every time you die or reach the end, resulting in very much an '80s arcade experience. Fourth off, I should've recorded the above illustration as a .gif just to show the complete lack of movement animation and attacks displayed as slashes.

I accepted the lack of animations in WH40K: Armageddon, for instance, because it delivered on complex hex tactics.

I didn't mind the pixels, simplified lattices and short campaigns in Into the Breach because it played so well on positioning and terrain.

Hell, I could even respect Spacecom's honesty about its limitations and enjoy a few hours' worth of abstract strategy for my couple of bucks' investment. Points of light are still more dignified than bad graphics, but if you're going to pretend to put colorful monsters in your game, you'd damn well better come up with something more imaginative than a donut and a dreidel.

But Slay the Spire falls below even bush-league. It's one of those browser "free"-to-play sites meant to elicit addictiveness by a stream of rewards as reinforcement, sold offline for the price of a dozen Angry Birds or Fruit Ninjas. While, yes, it does boast gameplay variation via the various "cards" you pick up in lieu of loot or skill advancement, by the time I'd won my first playthrough these had already fallen into a predictable pattern of maximizing offense/defense to take advantage of multipliers. Legit, but also nothing you wouldn't get in more complex games for a lower price.

In closing, let's address this "card" idiocy, because it seems to be taking over the indie game scene. I hated "cards" as immersion-breaking adolescent feigned nonchalance in Star Ruler 2 six years ago and this bullshit hasn't waned in laziness and cheapness since. Yes, you could replace any piece of loot, any unit or any magic spell in RPGs or strategy with "cards" saying you done did the thing, with abstract tokens of action. I cast fireball. Congratulations on noticing the obvious. But part of the point of buying your fucking product is supposed to be you contextualizing such done things in a coherent, creative, artistically inspired fashion, NOT hitting me over the head with WE ARE PLAYING A GAME IS IT NOT GAMEY?!? The indie market is gradually getting choked with these computerized card/dice/board fetish products simply selling their hipster customers some imagined trend-bucking prestige via retro pixelation.

Substance? Fuhgeddaboutit.

Death by Comparison

Am I the only one who doesn't have favorites? Everyone always asks "what's your favorite movie/book/food" etc. Though I certainly favor some things (and disfavor far more) it took me decades to realize my use of the word does not match that of the average cretin. That is to say, I do not arbitrarily swear fealty to a certain band, actress or sports team as a way of establishing "personal" identity qua cultural collage. I swear, this species' obituary will read "morbid sociability" with a hazard sticker for memetic infection.

Kahl me brother

____________________________________

Some spoilers for the "online" game Warframe's newer storylines follow.

____________________________________

 

I got back into League of Legends a couple months back, not that I'd recommend it. Still absolutely full of griefing little walking shitstains that the developers refuse to exterminate. But, sadly, the current multiplayer scene is so uninviting as to make a top choice of a game tailored to 12-year-olds fighting their own teammates more than the enemy. At least as a point of curiousity, it lets me see what gender roles the game industry's currently marketing to impressionable youngsters.

Unsurprisingly, the hero roster's now full of superpowered little girls, all spouting lines along some variation of "you got beat up by a girl" or extoling the superiority of girliness, or how the only person she respects in the whole world is <female name> or how she utterly disdains those losers <male name> and <male name> and <male name> etc. etc. etc. Nothing new there, just reiterating the entirety of contemporary culture. I was surprised at seeing some blurb about one of the male heroes "continuing his quest to find his father" or somesuch, which initially sounded like a nice counterpoint, not only two men interacting outside a woman's control but a father being presented as maybe worthy of being sought out. Well... you can probably guess how that eventually shook out:

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

 

You can pretty much call this shit before it even starts, can't you? My mother, knowing I used to like Star Trek, tried to tell my about Ted Danson's new series, which is sort of like it, except it's very cute and funny, see, he's a captain that screws everything up and -

- hold it. I interrupted her, gritting my teeth. Let me take a stab at this. Does he have a hypercompetent female second-in-command who counterbalances his incompetence? Oh... well, yeah, my mother admits.

Yeah. Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

Warframe is another of my guilty pleasures. For the most part, just an idiotic Diablo-style endless loot grind, but with some talented visual artists, decent music and enough customization options to keep me occasionally interested. Again, largely banking on the younger audience, to the point when they ran some storyline about a heroine going rogue a few years ago, I had to wearily explain to some naive youngsters they needn't worry about the outcome. Her redemption was a foregone conclusion, as any writer/director/developer would only dare tease you with a female doing anything wrong these days for the sole purpose of revealing she (having a heart of gold by virtue of her sex) was merely forced into evil by an evil, evil man. Aaaand, cue the inevitable denouement:

She was only being driven to evil by an abusive husband, y'see.

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

Warframe's past few years were filled with misconceived attempts at expanding gameplay beyond its basic routine of breathlessly bouncing off the walls effortlessly mowing down endlessly spawning enemies. Most failed, due to attempting to build up a hated alternate game mode or forcing you to trudge through found object minigames or other nonsense. Some time this past year they released a new patch in which they make you play as some mooks from your normally opposing factions. Notably Kahl-175.

Kahl's a basic grunt from a very grunty faction. He and his "brothers" are clones, tube-grown as cannon fodder. He doesn't glide effortlessly through the air or teleport or turn invisible for risk-free kills. Kahl shoots, and grunts, and talks in third person, mostly shouting "for the queens!" as his faction's standard battle cry, as his adventure becomes more and more of a suicide mission. With his final action, pulling the pin on a point-blank grenade he wryly changes that to "for my brothers!" - and I don't mind admitting my jaw dropped in surprise. You meet Kahl again later, having survived his kamikaze run, and though he's now given a new queen in the form of a condescending female as the brains of his operation, constantly bashing him as she grudgingly babysits you-as-him during fights, I'm nevertheless doubly surprised at his return as the focus of a whole new expansion, saving more and more "brothers" to join him. Apparently the audience liked Kahl.

But why shouldn't they? Even the slightest, hedged, most bashful and meekest break from absolute female supremacy now stands out as utter novelty, a shocking crack in an otherwise unassailable, government and corporate-backed propaganda system spanning all modern media.

 

Man 99% bad, woman 99% good? Avaunt ye, vile heresy!

 

____________________________________________________

 

 

P.S.:

As a bonus, I have to note storytelling creativity goes hand in hand with improved gameplay. See, Warframe may be a mindless twitch-fest now, but its oldest playable characters were based on a slower, more careful, stealth-based, puzzle-interspersed, action-and-reaction dueling gameplay. By focusing on a less inherently superpowered hero, Kahl's missions, while not too much of a throwback, seem a welcome reminiscence of Warframe's long-forgotten basics.

P.P.S.:

Kahl being helped by la blue girl has not escaped me.

"Working as Intended" - by whom?

For anyone not recognizing the title quote, it dates from the first couple of years post-release of the game which more than any other ruined online play, World of Warcraft. Like many entertainment companies, Blizzard always invested more in hype than in actual development. When customers would justifiably complain about problems going unsolved for months at a time, Blizzard's public relations wranglers would trot out that line by way of pretending nothing is wrong. It's not bugged/unbalanced/missing; the content is "working as intended" with the implication you must just be clicking it wrong.

 

That infamously brazen stock lie goes hand in hand with another, more widespread, moldy old PR favorite: it's not in the budget. Funding is just "not directed toward this aspect" of business. I really wish I didn't have to be the only one asking every time: well who allocated your fucking budget? Was it not... you? Did secret agents sneak into the manager's office to allocate ten workers to packaging and only three to your actual product? Did gremlins smuggle a giant cash magnet into the marketing department to draw all your funding there? Did Martians descend in the night to unbalance your spreadsheets?

 

Budget allocation is not some immutable, external cosmic force. No-one made you over-hype, over-invest, over-expand and under-develop.

YOU ARE STILL RESPONSIBLE FOR THE QUALITY OF YOUR PRODUCT.

From Whomp in Peace

"Fat boy on a diet, don't try it"

Cypress Hill - Insane in the Membrane

 

 

Gag-a-day comics rarely grab me. The newspaper variety recycle the same jokes universally approved since the dawn of time (teenagers and parents scandalizing each other and so on) while the online alternative recycle their own subset of trending topics. Hit or miss, usually miss.

If you try taking Whomp from its beginning, it doesn't stand out in that regard through its first year. The jokes were random, and forced, and frequently overextended. Only after developing his own avatar's quirks as main character, after creating a set of expectations peculiar to his own work, did the author begin landing solid punchlines playing on those expectations. To summarize, comic-Ronnie is a morbidly obese, morbidly depressed, morbidly anxious, morbidly self-hating weeaboo keeping some indeterminate number of more-than-one cats. Though my interest in anime has waned over the years, I've never raised a cat of my own and I'm the scrawny subspecies of geek, when I discovered his comic a couple of years ago I felt an immediate kinship with the man, as anyone flipping through the "lycanthropy" tag here could confirm. (By the way, I beat you to that topic by nine months; how you like them depressive apples, Filyaw?)

In my case, being officially mandated to isolate myself from the rest of my ersatz species during the pandemic helped ease my anxiety tremendously. Tracking Whomp's progress, it would seem the social approval (wouldn't know how that feels) garnered for his work had already primed the author for major changes as 2020 struck. Certainly the large amount of overlap implied between comic-Ronnie and comicker-Ronnie made the whole situation untenable in the long run. I'll admit it's been many a year since my psych coursework, but getting praised and financially rewarded solely for self-abuse for a decade running cannot possibly be psychologically healthy.

 

So it's probably a good thing he gradually slowed his Whomp posts and moved on to a longer single project. Probably a less-good thing that it's not exactly breaking subscriber records, with views gradually dropping chapter by chapter from 10k to 1k. Granted his slow update schedule isn't helping matters, nor is the focus on humans as an entire species of Wesley Crushers, but the bigger issue seems to be that nobody knows what to make of From Earth in Peace. It starts from a space opera perspective, banks heavily on cuteness (unsurprising from an anime fan) and builds up small mounts of tension rapidly dissipated. The aliens are goofy, the punchlines quaint rather than cathartic as Whomp's audience learned to expect, the space opera science fiction skipping from idea to idea.

Possibly the saddest aspect of From Earth in Peace's failure is its verifiable originality. Though it may not be your favorite thing in the multiverse, I'll wager you've never seen anything quite like it. It relies neither on shock value nor on emotional blackmail, pastiche nor verisimilitude, political rants nor fad worship, yet it's gradually building up its own internal coherence... and readers are actively dodging it, because the truism of all creativity holds true now in the age of identity politics more than ever: nobody seems capable of valuing a work on its own merit. Unless they limbically, mindlessly "identify with" or feel an immediate kinship with the first image they see, readers wander off like livestock from a depleted salt lick. Apparently unless he panders to an audience of farting fatasses looking to validate themselves by his self-hatred, Ronnie Filyaw has no audience at all.