A House for Sorcerers

"There's no way we could have a child now. Not with the market the way it is, no."

Idiocracy's case study on smart decision making

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"Say you wanna get in

Then you wanna get out

When you get the money

To buy yourself a castle

[...]

But you won't

'Cause it's a traaaaaap..."

 

Metric - Handshakes

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A couple of months ago, most of my evenings were spent combing Netflix' infuriating selection of zombies, superheroes, teen comedies and politically correct sitcoms for something watchable. We were pleasantly surprised by The House, three stop-motion-animated vignettes about personal investment in the place called home. I say "we" not because I've become some snowflake plurality but because I was visited at the time by the family's token cinephile, who having suffered through some of my short story attempts suddenly muttered during the second segment: "this feels like something you'd write!" Sure enough, that one was my favorite. So, OK, my enjoyment may have been a tad biased, but still...

 

If the movie has one consistent weakness, it's the forced full length anthology format. Each segment leans a bit hard on dramatic pauses and extended takes. Given this was filmed by Netflix for Netflix, I have to wonder why they didn't opt for a half-season miniseries format, given both The House's own episodic nature and the fact Netflix' more respectable offerings have tended toward low or mid-budget European miniseries or short runners. (Even the celebrated Dark was visibly padded out to three seasons. (the sex scenes alone...)) Miniseries are the one thing you're actually good at. Run with it.

 

But I do also want to address The House's thematic focus on the all-consuming cares and worries of caring for the titular house, and for that we must revert to ages before houses. Savage ages that is, or more literally ferocious ages.

 

Rahan didn't deal much with home ownership, being a caveman comic. Caves and huts and the odd lake-house or tree-house existed, were inhabited, and occasionally made plot points, but more often than not our fire-haired hero spent his nights on a tree branch, because nothing says superior intellect like sleeping outdoors with only a leather diaper for warmth in the younger dryas. Anyway, while doing his itinerant troglodyte lecturer routine, he runs afoul of a tribe that's come up with a quitessentially paleolithic solution to the problem of nerds. If you hear anyone voicing new ideas, toss 'im down a big hole! Naturally, our undeterred protagonist leads the nerds who welcome him at the bottom of Le Piège à Sorciers in a daring escape via cutting-edge seesaw technology (yes) and finally, in the comic's general spirit, they scatter their think tank to the winds, each knowing, whatever comes, that the others, somewhere, are combatting savagery and ignorance.

Except savagery and ignorance are monetizable. We don't want that shit combatted. For all that home ownership is presented as a logical, sensible and wise investment for the upwardly mobile, for the sorcerous (or rather, wizardous *sniffs contemptuously) among us it manifests more as a trap, a hole in the ground where intellect can be buried and busied scaling unscalable walls. I found The House's first segment rather dull with its dull, salt of the earth yokel protagonists, but the second and third segments center on practical, vivacious, urbane entrepreneurs (grating as their quirks may be) whose existence is obscenely degraded by their self-adjudged gaoling.

Granted, buying a house, buying a bigger house, buying the biggest house suits our species' most pervasive need for intra-tribal competition, for conspicuous consumption manifested in the most conspicuous form of property, but beyond that any natural justification dives into fallacy. There's no instinct for granite countertops, or yoking yourself to a mortgage, or two-story foyers or the other nonsense tacked onto our desperate thirst for ever more status by profiteers fleecing us so they themselves can buy the even biggest house, and so on.

 

I do not know how true it may be that a house is a good investment. Logically, resalable property is more reliable than volatile currency, especially if it's a necessity like shelter with a high unit cost. However, this implies a certain stability, as all through history people(s) who expected to be run off the land any given month found it more worthwhile to invest in portable wealth like jewelry or the family silver. At the other end of the spectrum, centuries of land-rich, bankrupt aristocracy demonstrate the need for property's utility, and for a residence that means... residence. The notion of a house being a good investment depends on finding someone willing to pay you a surcharge for your second-hand cave, man, which in turn is a figment of the 20th century's criminal upsurge in human population. Housing bubbles depend on population bubbles. This will not last. Either civilization must collapse by an order of magnitude to survive, or, far more likely, it will collapse entirely, but either way future generations won't be lining up to buy your two-story plywood-and-spray-foam cookie-cutter monstrosity in the dead middle of buttfuck nowhere.

 

Forgive the previous paragraphs' digression, but it's become entirely too fashionable to bemoan younger generations no longer buying houses. That's probably the best thing they're doing. A realtor with a hundred houses can be said to own them, but if you can only afford the one you live in, it owns you. Just ask the millions of families who lost everything back in 2009, and the investors who bought private islands in the aftermath. We need to stop imagining that grudgingly permitting the little folk to "own" some property will allow them to stand up to our moneyed aristocracy, give them security. Ownership is relative. Unless private accumulation of wealth is capped, the top of a skyscraper will always find some way to leverage that wealth toward dispossessing you of your precious little cottage or devaluing it to starve you into slavishness.

You are not a homeowner. You are a self-deluded drudge maintaining a property to enrich the rich, who love taking a cut not only of each resale but of the myriad parasitic transactions associated with a property, all the repairs and replacements, all the permits and salaries for all the go-betweens, gatekeepers, lawyers, third assistant sub-comptrollers and hardworking lawn flamingos. You say you saved money in the long run instead of renting? How much of your fucking life went into that glorified shack? As I was watching The House I couldn't help recalling my parents and I re-flooring our old place, three of us on our knees day after day, measuring, cutting, cleaning, fitting, hammering planks like out-of-work pirates. That and the gutters, and the yard, and the back yard, and the basement and the tree branches out front, and the pipes, and the outlets, and the chipping paint, and the stuck screen door, and the slanted mailbox and the shorted-out garage door, and the... everything!

That is not a life of the mind. It's drudgery, and that's not a bug, it's a feature. Though less direct, the final benefit the aristocracy draw from suburban sprawl is the inefficient effort itself put by individuals into individually maintaining those uselessly oversized living spaces, taking up their free time, piling on anxiety after anxiety, anchoring your entire existence more solidly than even the job you can't afford to quit. Keeps you too busy to think. It's just one more modern means of extending feudalism, continuing to tie serfs to the land, treating you as an extension of the property, just another lawn flamingo. Your house is an oubliette, quicksand for free thought, a particularly apt trap for high-INT sorcerers because it really does appear, on the surface, to be the smart, sensible, logical investment. (Caveat in the fine print: what you invest is not just money, but your life, to be reaped by the wealthy at their leisure.)

You don't need a house. You need a cheap, clean, safe, quiet, no-frills, greenery-adjacent, private living space maintained by efficient professionals, because even misspelling angry YouTube comments is a better use of your time than cleaning gutters. We don't need suburban sprawl with monoculture lawns. We need better-regulated cities with livable apartments.

Action Relaxation

"I took that from you

The life that's born to die"

Chiasm - Embryonic

 

Stardew Valley I believe was the first game I saw routinely described as "relaxing" and though it never enticed me to buy, from its reputation it does seem to have addressed the growing demand in the mid-2010s for more freeform playing styles after a decade of WoW-inspired "kill ten rats" dragging you into quest after quest after rat-race after rat-race. Hey, I certainly like genres with a managerial side and I've got nothing against farming sims per se, having enjoyed SimFarm back in its day. But seeing "relaxing" crop up as an official tag on GoG just seems to be missing the point of this entire industry. There's a difference between freeform and no form.

Pleeeaase don't get me wrong, I utterly loathe the obssession with "action" games paced for meth-addicted ADD kiddies. I'm a big proponent of turn-based genres, which includes admitting that "real-time" strategy or role-playing were unnecessary gimmicks we too eagerly swallowed in the mid '90s simply 'cus that thar newfangled post-486 hardware could take it. I'm especially irked by designers strong-arming you into twitch-based gameplay in otherwise unrelated genres. The problem dates back at least as far as Oregon Trail's game hunting and rafting minigames.

The gunfights in Gemini Rue for instance added nothing but annoyance to an otherwise atmospheric and captivating 2D cyberpunk adventure.

I've been trying Hellslave recently, not a bad little loot-farming turn-based dungeon crawler, and can't help but roll my eyes at its trap minigame making you panic-click three random spots for a temporary XP bonus. At least it can be turned off and tends to only rear its head once a dungeon.

My distaste for "quick-time events" in The Wolf Among Us ran far deeper given their pervasive and intrusive nature.

I've run across one of the most glaring examples in Anomaly Defenders, a tower defense spin-off of 11-bit's Anomaly tower offense spin-off of the tower defense spin-off of RTS.

To spice up the whole recursive mess (in addition to making you panic-heal your towers) 11-bit severely limits one of your two resource pools and forces you to actively harvest it from dead mobs by clicking on the glowing orbs they leave behind. Wait. Pecking breadcrumbs relates to my strategic foresight in organizing a layered and thorough defense... how?

But there's gotta be a middle ground here. We shouldn't be trying to "spice up" genres which would be better served by increasing their core concept's complexity just by forcing players to SPAM CLICKS SPAM IT SPAM IT SPAMIT SPAMITSPAMIT! Neither should we be making a virtue out of dullness and passivity in themselves. You'll generally see the "relaxing" tag appended to the usual suspects like ULTIMATE FISHING SIMULATOR - now with EXTREEEEME lure bobbing! OMG totes badbass! But the few titles I've played falling under this new category make me wonder what anyone even means by relaxation.

 

Banished of all things gets slapped with the relaxing label, a game which diverged from old-school city simulators precisely for imposing scarcity, loss conditions and general stress on a genre which had more or less always presumed guaranteed forward momentum. Furthermore Banished's success in this kicked off a whole spate of survival city builders defined largely by anti-relaxation. So what the hell do you even mean by that tag? Soundtrack NOT by Mastodon?

 

If having a moment's breather qualifies as relaxation, nearly everything qualifies. I've posted endless screenshots here of my characters relaxing, watching the sunset from an awning, taking in scenic vistas, meditating on their past travails, plus watching my spaceship break atmosphere or gently nudging my empire's stats while it grows or tracking my citizens' progress through my neighbourhoods. Any designers worth their salt will leave you little opportunities to admire their handiwork. It's good business. But if you're seriously buying an interactive product for its pause button, there are other media more apt to let you lay back and passively absorb. Movies spring to mind. Enough with the damn walking simulators and idle games! A game, no matter how slow-paced, should still be judged partly for its ability to keep you engaged, considering strategies, plot and clues, moral quandaries, your resource stores, exploration paths, process flow in general.

Thought-effacing hypoactivity should be no more a selling point than thought-effacing twitch-based hyperactivity.

Being mentally absent is not a virtue!

Bah, NerdLord: The Marquis of Baltakhand

E.S. Posthumus - Antissa

 

Damn, I love Calradia.

 

Taking a break from horse-trading far south to admire a desert sunset, I ponder our decadent age. It is now autumn in the year 1112. Under Emperor Arion of the Osticos, successor to the late Lucon, the Northern Empire has stagnated somewhat, struggling against our neighbours to a standstill while the Vlandians chip away at our western gains. I was shocked and appalled at my previous love interest Epipheria's betrayal of our noble traditions in marrying a lowly Battanian hillman. But, proof of divine justice, it spelled her untimely end.

 

Battania is no more! Brought low and broken like savage Khuzait before it, its lands have seen a far worse fate. For where Baltakhand has grown prosperous under the peaceable, enlightened rule of clan Nyctimus, the old Battanian strongholds have changed hands several times each, falling to rebels, Sturgians, Vlandians and the perfidious misrule of the traitor Garios (cursed be his name) until their former prosperity is all but forgotten. As ceaseless warfare tore apart the verdant highlands' trade routes, merchants from Revyl to Hubyar felt the loss of that lamented country's bounty. The price of furs soared from 70 denars to the 400s, with wood and leather not far behind. It seems a fool's errand, nowadays, to seek any goods at the prices enjoyed by our forebears under the Empire's undivided rule. Why, I remember when five denars would buy you a sack of grain, uphill both ways through the snow! Now the crooks ask twice as much! And I sell it at fourteen! Wait, what were we talking about?

...

Bandits! It's the bandits' fault!

While the land starves around them, the vilains grow fat off the chaos, building themselves larger and more convoluted lairs, flouting all decency with their ostentatious decor. I mean... boats!? Even I don't have a boat! Why don't I have a boat? My kids would love a boat.

(Oh noes! Child pornography! Call the cops, call the FBI, call the KGB, call Buck Rogers, call Fred Rogers!)

Apparently stabbing your wife's uterus with javelins works, because we've now just welcomed our second into the world

 

 

(and in this world that's actually good news, since you don't need to change any 64-bit diapers.)

 

They're both girls though. Must be the javelins. So... maybe tomahawks for a boy? Yes, it's a heartwarming family life we've cobbled for ourselves, the lady Gala and I, amongst our beloved Khuzait subjects.

But the fortunes of war are ever fickle. After conquering Chaikand to solidify my rule in the eastern reaches, Ortongard fell to rebel filth, and even upon reconquering it, our clan was punished by the emperor (in his wisdom, felicitous be his rule and endless his days, etc.) by giving our RIGHTFUL FIEF away to the upstart fen Morcar. I mean, technically it's only been fifteen years since I swore fealty to Lucon on the field of Locana and my clan joined the ranks of nobility, so clan Nyctimus might also count as upst-... but you see fen Morcar's upper than... I mean they're lower than my upper... look, they're just the WRONG kind of starts, alright?

 

And with the new decade come new challenges. Emperor Arion (in his wisdom, blessed be his name, felicitous his rule and endless his days and may his beard never smell of onions, etc.) declared war on the Aserai. After I led a glorious army to conquer Husn Fulq, the following years saw its nigh-immediate loss and a brutal Aserai offensive into the former Khuzait lands, reaching far enough north to conquer Chaikand and force me into a series of desperate castle defenses.

But we of the Nyctimus hold strong, and the camps of the enemy burn with our rage! Chaikand recaptured, castles defended, peace secured, we now turn our eyes to the north, and the long-dormant Sturgian menace. The only remaining question being how to secure more land given our name no longer even comes up in the running for new properties, edged out by all the up down wrongstart clans joining the kindom from conquered lands.

 

Let foes ever tremble at the name of Werwolfe of the Nyctimus, Marquis of Baltakhand, aurora's bulwark, mule-trader extraordinaire, the bolt in the dolt, the terror that twangs in the tundra, dart in the desert, flechette in the forest, sureshot on the shore, the beam in his brother's eye and fuzziest among patricians!

 

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P.S.:

 

Photo mode is one of those trendy modern features which fundamentally make me bristle. How many work-hours paid by our cash did they waste on demanding free advertising from... us? Doubly odd in Bannerlord, a game largely playable from the overland map, whose aesthetic side could've easily been phoned in to halve development time.

They did not phone it in, and Calradia looks, sounds and plays prettier with every little addition. The scenery may be optional but it's nonetheless beautiful, the music was always glorious, and in the spirit of Hello Games or TaleWorlds' own gradual build-up of M&B1 to Warband, they keep adding a surprising amount of free post-launch content. Now it's new bandit camps, voicing for a few lines here and there, more gear, cutscenes for your children's births, and tomorrow? Little by little Bannerlord is padding out all the little details that make a world I could see myself still wandering into my own old age, not just my character's.

 

even their damn shingles look immersive

 

So yeah, fine, OK, I'll let myself get suckered by your free advertisement feature

because you've earned it

 you bastards.

Hammylton

"I caught a sucker dyin' 'cause he thought he could rhyme

Now if his momma is a quarter daughter must be a dime"

Outkast - The Whole World

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“PIQUANT FACTS FOR SIMILES. ‘There were originally but three Muses — Melete, Mneme, Aœde — meditation, memory, and singing.’ You may make a good deal of that little fact if properly worked. You see it is not generally known, and looks recherché. You must be careful and give the thing with a downright improviso air."

 - Mr. Blackwood coaching the Signora Psyche Zenobia in How to Write a Blackwood Article

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"There was the poodle. There was Pompey. There was myself. We were three. Thus it is said there were originally but three Furies — Melty, Nimmy and Hetty — Meditation, Memory, and Singing."

- Signora Psyche Zenobia's resulting usage of said advice in The Scythe of Time

 

E. A. Poe

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"Qui pauet[pavet?] vanos metus, veros meretur." - line from Seneca's Oedipus

who / it will stop [feed?] / empty / fear / true / he deserves - verbatim Google Translate results

"Who balks at hollow fears, true ones deserves." - my quick, lazy and ignorant poetic approximation of the above

(alternate - who feeds hollow fears)

"Who quakes at empty fears, hath true in store." - translation by Frank Justus Miller, 1907 

 

"Who trembles with vain fear, true fear deserves." - translation by Frank Justus Miller, 1917

 

"Those with false fears deserve real ones" - translation by Emily Wilson, 2010

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My distaste for emotional manipulation makes the stoics a predictable fit, to the point a couple of people expressed surprise that I haven't already been reading Seneca. So I thought I might as well and instead of downloading his plays/letters ordered myself a couple of paperback volumes. That old-timey stuff suits relaxed bathtub reading.

Emily Wilson spoiled my bath!

I'm not entirely opposed to modernization of old works, where it adds some extra layer of awareness (usually to illustrate universality) or it simply trims away intervening centuries' own undue affectations and misrepresentation of the original. We can safely do away with stuffing Romans' mouths full o' thees and thous like Miller did in those older translations. (Wilson's is certainly an improvement even by my meager understanding, not denying that.) But inserting new colloquialisms for the sake of wider appeal is by the same token counterproductive. Wilson's translation has one character bragging about eating "gourmet food" another about getting away "scot-free" (which apparently does not refer to stingy Scots as I'd always assumed, but nonetheless carries overly-specific cultural baggage) and other such awkward little attempts to connect to an imaginary plebeian readership crop up every other page.

Far more pervasively though, a sort of dross mundaneity weighs down Seneca's bombast, and though I do not truly speak Latin and can't critique the translation directly, parsing many sentences like that cited in the opening leads me to decry: "traduttore, traditore!" Creon's declaration against Oedipus' unjust accusation, a declamation against regal wrath warrants a bit of pomp, especially voiced at the very cusp of the play as characters weigh potentially disastrous revelation against the extant disaster of ignorance. Pithy as it is, the line carries both the air and weight of proverb and begs its due action verbs and descriptive descriptors. Will "pavet" not stretch to balking, quaking, trembling or quailing (or at least fearing actively) instead of merely having fear? Or "vanos" to empty, hollow or vain? Must the audience be walked like toddlers to the juxtaposition of "real" with "false" - or like remedial students sitting in front of a multiple-choice exam?

 

Ultimately, I honestly don't know. I confess to being out of my depth Latin-wise. Still, as a random schmoe, a simple hyper-chicken from a backwoods asteroid, a homini lupus, something tells me I'm not getting my money's worth out of my contribution to Oxford University Press. I ain't gettin' my dose of ancient Roman here. If "'rhetorical' and 'didactic' are no longer dirty words" as stated in the collection's introduction, why fall back on such impoverished phrasing? Ditch the iambic pentameter? I'll take your word for it. But then why did "primone in aevo viridis" shift from the more poetic interpretations of first greening, blooming, budding or blossoming to the dustily prosaic "vigorous young man"? Is Latin the real issue here, or addressing an audience incapable of figurative speech, whose command of English is no sturdier than their Latin?

 

Let's not saddle Wilson specifically with more than her share of guilt though. The fad of "modernizing" past centuries to the point of overt vandalism in desperate attempts to win over pop-culture audiences has tumesced uninterrupted since at least West Side Story. Dumbing down the general verbiage while colloquializing to inflict targeted bouts of familiarity fits the notion of a readership with a thousand-word vocabulary peppered with Jersey Shore witticisms. Even wikimedia's usage notes warn: "gourmet has become somewhat debased by marketing usage, and is considered by some a pretentious middlebrow term." It's not a bug, it's a feature, right Oxford?

 

One moment... wait, wait... who do you think your audience is? Who the futuo do you think is buying Seneca?? Will using smaller words impart to all the dudebros, drunk girls and Billy-Bubbas a sudden burning passion for Early Empire cogitations? Your potential audience consists of a million lit/theatre/philosophy majors who damn well better be shorting a few neurons pondering the original context and nuance to earn their diplomas, plus a thousand random nerds with actual interest in the topic, self-motivated enough to trudge through a few obscure adjectives or verb/noun inversions here and there. Annotate, but do not water down!

 

You will NOT sell to the majority. What you're looking for is a minority of that majority, oligoi of polloi, and you should be focusing on capturing that niche the moment their attention falls on you, not vainly, hollowly snatching past them at their thirty cousins who consider it their duty to blindly hate the classics. They will never reach for your book on the shelf in the first place, and if assigned it in school, will hate it because it was assigned in school! Go for the geek market.

Yes, we lowly rabble will ignore you in favor of Star Wars 99.9% of the time, but in that 0.1%, in those brief moments of self-improvement we want the real Oxford brand, not some rhinestoned knockoff.

Yes, you desperately need to reach fresh audiences, but those few picking up your book are less likely to be warmed by your linguistic rapprochement than insulted by your condescension. What will feel worse to them than suffering the highfalutin' snobbery of a classicist? A hundred pages in, realizing they've been getting talked down to by Suky Snobbs playing Pygmalion to their gal LaToya.

 

"Mr. Blackwood has a pair of tailor's-shears, and three apprentices who stand by him for orders. One hands him the “Times,” another the “Examiner,” and a third a “Gulley's New Compendium of Slang-Whang.” Mr. B. merely cuts out and intersperses. It is soon done — nothing but Examiner, Slang-Whang, and Times — then Times, Slang-Whang, and Examiner — and then Times, Examiner, and Slang-Whang."

Foam on the Tsunami

"So how much easier would life be
If nineteen million motherfuckers grew to be just like me?"

 

Eminem - Who Knew

 

 

One of this blog's funnier moments came upon noticing a slight spike in hits a few years back and discovering I'd attracted the attention of some parental watchdog group called "children in peril" or somesuch, presumably for my habit of demanding your darling little submental degenerate walking shitstains be skinned alive for griefing in online games.

And they'd deserve it.

But there's an added dimension. While hardly limited to children, online games do skew toward younger demographics, and as I've tried conveying in the past, this makes players' observable behavior online a crucial indicator of where the culture is headed. Their capacity for fair-play, rising to difficult challenges, self-sacrifice in service to the team, all those sportsmanlike qualities which used to define our communal mammalian play (at least as ideals) have almost entirely died away.

 

What's left, the way online gamers act now, placed in our wider cultural context, leads me to predict:

GenZ will turn fascist on hitting thirty.

And no, for once I am not speaking figuratively, or even hyperbolically. Violence in movies or games has never been an issue... but the interactivity of the violence against other human players, the underhandedness, the demand to be able to cheat or grief or punch while never taking a punch, that reflects strongly on gamers' mentality.

 

Upon returning to League of Legends after years' absence (seriously, I used to play back when it still had a tribunal) I was surprised to see the once-coveted "carry" role is now shunned, and the once-mediocre middle lane caster role is eagerly sought. It seemed impossible for players to have shifted away from direct damage and stacking their K/D ratio. But the mystery was quickly resolved. Riot simply put in so many idiotically overpowered teleporting assassin heroes (e.g. Yasuo, Yone, Zed, Sylas not to mention the older Akali, Kat, etc.) capable of getting free kills on any squishy that everyone wants mid lane not to play a caster for cover fire and crowd control that would benefit the team more, but to farm said caster for free kills as an assassin... then be useless for team fights and force your fellows to fight outnumbered. Even when they play a bottom lane carry, quite a few insist on Yasuo.

Granted, from this blog's very start I was trying to call out the heavier and heavier shift toward designated griefer classes in every single online game. And note, it's never enough to reliably get kills on enemy players. They want it to be risk-free. They always insist on also getting to "vanish" or teleport out of combat afterwards. When World of Warcraft first launched, you could tell the idiots' mentality by one of rogues' most frequent complaints: paladin bubble-hearthing. Paladins, y'see, had an immunity spell lasting long enough to teleport back to town. Rogues, accustomed to getting free kills, kept demanding paladin bubbles be nerfed... not because rogues were losing fights, but because they considered it unfair for anyone to be able to escape their griefing. Despite rogues themselves having even more convenient escapes.

So sure, the mentality's anything but new, but it has gotten generalized across all genres. Yes, AWP whores were a problem in Counterstrike back around Y2K but at least most of us were willing to call the retarded little shits whores. Were you dismayed when the youth all idealized stalwart unbreakable '80s action movie heroes? Well, now they all want to be faceless assassins. Stannis Baratheon gets degraded to a redshirt, to be replaced with Arya... and in the final tally, you think that's a step up?

 

Magic: the Gathering was never a great game, and in fact lies at the root of much of the game industry's current idiocy like microtransactions, randomized loot boxes and over-reliance on luck-based gameplay. Its chief charm though was building up your board via chains of causality that could yield truly spectacular results:

I need a cigarette.

(addendum: in case you can't tell, I actually killed myself by overdrawing there... but damn if it wasn't worth it)

 

But at some point over the past years, its focus shifted toward proliferating "kill" cards which instantly remove an opponent's assets from the table regardless of their quality or defensive ability. A quick glance at MTG:Arena now reveals hundreds of redundant "destroy" or "exile" or "counterspell" or "discard" options, all bypassing card power/toughness values altogether. Sure, it's partly because arithmetic has gone out of style, and partly because the game includes way too many cards that can win a match singlehandedly if not immediately removed... but you have to account for the inescapable feel that if anything threatens me, I should simply get to make it go away, instantly and with utter impunity.

I doubt this is limited to MTG among card games either, having retried Gwent recently and uninstalled it in disgust when I found nothing matters except damage anymore, to the point it's impossible to win defensively.

 

Building is a thing of the past. Preventing others from building, one-shotting then running away, is the name of the game. Do you imagine this mentality will not translate to physical reality?

There's an old chauvinist mantra, a bit of plausible deniability that never really dies: "sure, I'd never call for those people of the wrong race/sex/religion/sexuality to be exterminated, I'd never promote holocausts, I'm a nice little girl... but still, wouldn't it be nice if they all suddenly just... went away?"

That's adolescents' newly burgeoning spirit: instead of pitting yourself against your designated enemy's strength, mano a mano, quality to quality, you should get to make the enemy simply disappear. Such attitudes in games are decidedly married to a politically correct education. An entire generation now has grown up walking on needles from the cradle onwards, because everything they do or say will somehow be construed as A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY!!! - unless of course you align yourself with some self-appointed group of underdogs. Now you're "progressive" you're "woke" and entitled, nay, demanded to inflict as much attrition on the designated enemy as possible, while anyone speaking against you can simply be dismissed and blacklisted as an evil subversive. Life itself consists of making "problematic" people go away while hiding behind nominal oppression.

Anyone skimming through history can probably spot the problem on the horizon: a leader will arise, charismatic or simply positioned well enough politically to rescue them from uncertainty, promise these skittish executioners a complete takeover, complete cover, promise them they will never need fear being on the wrong side of history, ever ever ever again. When you have lived in fear your whole life, if not physical fear then the fear of ostracism, of existential negation, when you have spent a childhood, a youth and half a working life atoning for some ill-defined guilt in simply being born the WRONG sex/race/sexuality, anyone promising absolution is an angel inviting you to the rapture.

And all you have to do... is turn against your absolver's enemies.

That's not so hard, is it?

Just make the evil people go away. Be willing to murder for the glorious leader, and you need never fear again. Murder with impunity. You dashing Rogue, you.

(It's a lie of course. Nobody lives in fear more than citizens of a police state, the snitches and bootlicks, always feeling the noose of social acceptability tighten around their necks as the system purges more and more faithful infidels. But by the time they figure that out, it's too late.)

They're already embracing the ideal of killing with impunity in their virtual lives. Pretty soon someone will offer them that chance in real life. This is in fact what both the right and left wings have been practicing over the past decade here in the States, perfecting the formula be it white pride, black pride, gay pride, blue-collar coal miners, hashtag mobs, a grievance here, an entitlement there, rally this-and-that. The actual cause can be anything, "the flame of a blowlamp" in Orwell's prescient words. All that really matters is an entire population indoctrinated into both fear of being targeted and starving to inflict some harm in turn... so long as they get to "vanish" behind some noble cause's smokescreen afterwards.

 

Your children are not in peril.

Your children ARE the peril.

Because you've raised them as desperately, underhandedly, sociopathically, facetiously servile, backstabbing, self-hatingly narcissistic, sadistic little apprentice Nazis. An entire society shamed and feeling cheated of their righteous glory, and painfully aware how ripe for scapegoating their neighbours look. But enough about history repeating itself or 1920s Germany. You're worried about suicide bombers and school shooters now? Wait 'til the school shooters get their own political lobby under the moral umbrella of redressing the world's racial imbalance (however interpreted) as an oppressed underclass. They've toed the line so long they're about to fall in it. You've sowed, watered (and weeded of any clearheaded opposition) a generation's worth of faceless, spineless minions desperate for validation, begging to be reaped by the first charismatic powermonger to get a foot in the door. GenZ is a fascist time bomb.

Marble Drive

Like any products of self-publishing, webcomics' greater freedom and creativity has always come at the cost of overall quality and technical skill. Even some of the more successful Y2K-era examples like David Willis, Shaenon Garrity or Pete Abrams could barely draw straight lines or write curved plots (to start) and the less said about wannabes that just ramble aimlessly about their inane interests, the bett- ... errr, but we were logging about comics...

Comics!

- come in flavors both antic and dramatic, but for today I'd like to focus on two adventure stories of the past decade demonstrating how such storytelling has improved over the slapdash accounts of college students fighting vampires from twenty years ago.

Drive's author has actually been around for some time, formerly drawing Sheldon, a comic with a ten year old billionaire, but the dot-com nouveau-Richie Rich never grabbed me. Drive on the other hand is a space opera pitting alien species of various heights, builds, limb numbers and dispositions in a multi-sided galactic war(s) zone. With bubble tea and secret pocket chocolates!

 

Marble Gate Dungeon falls at the other end of pulp F/SF routine, delving the titular dungeon by most tropes (if not strictly the rules) of Dungeons and Dragons. A gifted young hayseed cleric takes her chances partnering with a drunken surly old dwarf fighter after getting ditched by her roguish friend. Undead are re-deaded, traps sprung, elf buttocks admired, toads put in the hole and much ale consumed. While their core worldbuilding and main plots may be just decent enough to pass muster, both authors have shown themselves far more adept than the rest of their ilk in handling the endless parade of bit players, set pieces and wacky wayside tribes incurred in the scribbling of years-long comedias.

 

In Marble Gate such chapters are mostly organized dungeon floor by floor, interspersed with protagonists' backstories or side quests. While the heroine's hard knock backstory as a deprived peasant might drag a bit (especially as her religious elements hint the whole comic might devolve into a proselytizing pamphlet eventually) in detailing her motivation and determination it dovetails nicely between the initial excitement of the adventure's start and her later display of determination in seeking treasure. It even balances bit players' panel time skillfully enough to let them make an impact without monopolozing the story, like, say, Sluggy stumbled into with the Oceans Unmoving chapters.

 

In Drive it's the planet-by-star trekking, narrowly hefting its various aliens above the usual one-dimensional "species" of space operas by consciously padding out their communal personalities with at least one additional dimension. One race is inventors/poets, another inventors with a monolithic scientological faith, another inventors planetbound by their biology, another cantankerous yokels descended from gifted engineers, another matriarchal warriors with a tendency to hold grudges, etc. And weirdly, though it self-consciously skirts the "planet of hats" pitfall (sometimes literally) it successfully builds nuance via the multispecies spacefarer crews' interactions on each (others') world, revisiting and recombining these interactions every few chapters.

Both authors have a knack for incorporating smaller details as well. For Drive these mostly consist of each alien species' or various organizations' quirks, even incorporating evolutionary history more coherently than you'd expect from a space opera. For Marble Gate they tend rather toward the visual, like a monster's appendages indenting cloth or other inspired little flourishes that (much like Quentyn Quinn's attention to its characters' sensory experience) render the otherwise trite "I cast fireball" RPG routine more tangible.

As I myself discovered both when I tried writing in my youth and later when I started blogging, it's surprisingly difficult to pace one's output in the absence of editorial, professorial or other restrictions, to avoid rambling tediously or skipping past unwarranted assumptions of your audience's shared experience. (Come to think of it, this may partly help explain fan fictions' massive popularity, as the original work's boundaries take the place of general knowledge or self-awareness/discipline.) Overindulgence or incoherent rambling served both as creative wellsprings and laughable foibles in early webcomics. Drive and Marble Gate show far better self-mastery in that regard... and maybe sacrifice not too much creativity in the process. Maybe. They are, after all, both working in nearly terminally re-trod subgenres.

The First Three Xes

"Rid min hest
Stormen stillnar
vil i veg, vil i veg"

 

Wardruna - EhwaR

(Don't worry, I don't know Norwegian either. Translation.)

 

 

Either I've gotten worse at strategy games over the past year or Stellaris' toxoids patch vastly improved the AI to where it's now actually possible to lose late game. Which I've been doing. A lot. Also mid game. And early game. And just quitting when I get the Grunur precursors chain, since their terraforming payoff's useless to my eighth empire type.

I'll stand by space-dragon-robo-nannies as a totally valid ScieFie concept, but in practice I'm having an awful time getting it to work. Granted, the bigger issue is workforce: if my seventh empire's void dwellings' limited carrying capacity gave me a dozen failures' worth of trouble, taking a reproductive speed malus for a race that can't import labor has left me hopelessly lagging in early productivity. Might as well run with it though.

-1000% happiness penalty. Yeah, okay, that's fair...

 

The nice part about encountering pre-space species before fellow space empires is exterminating the primitives without any diplomatic repercussions - a lesson I learned the hard way by trying it late game and getting flattened by the whole rest of the galaxy. (Hey, my Prime Directive reads: "TERMINATE!") Better off yanking the band-aid early than giving my enemies free workers later. Much as with necrophages, quite a few of my machine intelligence early games have revolved around managing native conquests, trying to guess whether a species is worth keeping spayed (lithoids usually) or in other cases whether they can be stabilized quickly enough to get some work out of the filthy beasts before I need to pretend they never existed... or whether a clean start with machines will be less trouble.

 

Eight Stellaris empires so far, and each one has played different. Rushing to bury planets' worth of corpses before the neighbours see me?

That's a new one.

 

Aggravating being stuck on this Stellaris run, having recently blown a fair chunk of cash on its more established cousin within the Paradox clan, Europa Universalis 4, when the latter finally appeared on GoG. While I haven't gotten the chance to play it yet, I did notice a couple of glaring additions right in the start-up menu: customising your own nation and/or randomizing the New World landmasses for true exploration. It got me thinking back to 1996.

When Fantasy General 2 came out I was surprised to discover its original boasts quite a vocal little clique of old fans, and since you can pick it up as abandonware or during promotions as a freebie, decided to see what the moldy old hype was about. Turns out: not much. Fantasy General was a standard hex-based TBS, and much as with WH40K: Armageddon two decades later, its orcs and knights are clearly just thinly spackled-over Nazis and panzers, except lacking Armageddon's unit variety or more experienced level design to make you ignore the fact you're playing Battle of the Bulge with a pointy-ear surcharge. Nobody would be reminiscing about it now if not for the game industry's abandonment of thoughtful genres like turn-based strategy/RPGs in the mid-2000s and only recently renewed interest. Still, while it was nothing special, it was also nothing especially terrible. It even pays due attention to many minor and sometimes overlooked mechanics like bridges as choke points, flying units occupying the same hex as ground, ranged retaliation against attacks on bordering allies, etc.

 

Fantasy General did grab my attention for coming out in 1996 though... the same year as Heroes of Might and Magic 2, its direct and far more successful competitor. In fact Fantasy General was likely churned out in a hurry after the original HoMM to capitalize on the fresh interest in fantasy TBS and undercut the sequel by several months. While HoMM2 lacked some of the other's hex-based finesse, anyone who played the series could sum up its greatest advantage in two words: "adventure map." But clippity-clopping over deserts and fields claiming mines and fairy breederies was only one part of an overarching policy of marking the player's growth, from heroes leveling up to pushing back the fog of war to incremental creature tiers to other upgrades.

Town upgrades and skill trees are unquestioned standards now (albeit usually perfunctory) but back in the day of Warcraft 2 and HoMM 2 this was rather the exception to video games' accepted arcade-style norm of simply clearing each new level as it comes within no greater structure. Gamers, after all, are not meant to think but merely react.

 

Europa Universalis has more than earned its strategy gamer in-crowd acclaim yet runs to a lesser extent into the same problem as Fantasy General, and EU4's customization/randomization features are meant to bridge the gap in appeal between the EU series and Stellaris or the various other series' map generators like Civilization or Age of Wonders. You could chalk it up to replay value, and that's certainly true, but the 4X formula's early stages also offer the opportunity of taking the unknown and making it one's own, beating an imaginary world into our own image. Chaos and order at the same time. Ah, but EU already has its own image, despite its endless grand strategy options. WW2 re-enactments even more so. Stellaris' advantage isn't just that I never know whether or whither I'll run across any empty or inhabited planets (whereas everyone knows where Norway is) but that I get to scour, enslave, uplift or naturalize in my own particular... ... ... idiom!

Not just novelty, not just personal choice, but the feeling of turning the tide of self vs. world. Not just defeating an enemy but taking his power. Not just constantly returning to an emblematic focus for your adventures, but shoring it up, building it up, solidifying a lifeline into an unshakeable foundation, turning a barren patch of land into dwarf cottages and unicorn paddocks. Not just leveling up but mixing and matching level-up bonuses into your own personalized transcendence of your humble origins. This pattern accounts not only for the success of the 4X genre but that of survival city sims or party management, and it's another reason why so many loathe linear walking simulators or level scaling and other similar "adaptive" features which flatten our narrative arc to a linear slog through inflationary spending. And, though most gamers may not consciously realize they want to strategically transmogrify a brave new world (much less verbalize their desire) they do want it, as shown by the gradual trickle of RPG-lite or base-building features into other genres. Even collectible card collectin' and cash shop status symbols can be seen as shortsighted, fumbling attempts at cheating toward such tide-turning, seeing an advantage, a potential from the nebulous OUT THERE and making it one's own. Merely winning is nothing to incorporating victory into an overarching constructive effort.

As the medium struggles out of its Betty Boop stage, I can't help but think more genres must embrace exploration>expansion>exploitation (or more generally a narrative pattern of discovery>conflict>assimilation) as a core principle of audience participation much as novels embraced the idea of a singular narrative instead of disjointed events or cinematography grew past simply filming theater sketches on a static stage. The RP / Grand Strategy routine's just the gamiest gaming there is.

Authorized Non-Globacidal Species Only

We're having a lovely summer thunderstorm here tonight this January second, reminding me for some reason of this picture I snapped last year.

No more winter wonderlands for you, plains-apes. You're cut off. The big cold snap lasted all of three days.

Make sure to give your parents an extra-swift kick in the ass for murdering the planet. Then admit you're doing the same and drive off a bridge along with your closets full of disposable clothes glued to your triple-obese ass inside your gadget-cluttered overbuilt monstrosity of a car, along with all ten of your moronic progeny. Eight billion subhuman fucking retards. I just hope I live long enough to see you all cannibalizing each other while your skin melts. Stop trying to save the world. This species wants to die. Let it die. You deserve to rot you utter brainless filth.