Kamilaroi Universalis

"They tried to fight... for liberty"   [after murdering and enslaving all nearby tribes]

"Without a chance in heaven they gave up

The white man won in the name of god

With the cross as alibi"

 

Enigma - Silent Warrior

 

 

Ah, Europa Universalis 4, a ten-dollar game costing several hundred dollars per Paradox's infamous obsession with the DLC spam business model, which is why I waited a decade before buying it despite being one of the titles I wanted to jump on right away. (That and their decade-long refusal to offer it DRM-free as it should be.)

Yes, I can exhibit occasional self-control. Please stop acting so shocked.

Anyway, I was uncommonly bad at #3 despite enjoying it quite a bit, largely because I find it difficult to think in terms of politics, of placating and manipulating others, and if asked what can you give me that Planetfall doesn't, Europa Universalis answers a confident: "POLITICS" !

So perhaps unsurprisingly I started by limiting the politics. For my first foray into this "four, eh?" I wanted a simple learning experience, some isolated single-province corner of the globe without any merchant company, papal or other entanglements. Rolled a mental D4 between the Rocky Mountains, Siberia, Patagonia or Tha Lend Dawen Undah, and the Aussies won. Crikey!

 

Avoiding the northern coast on the assumption it would be hit hardest by Eurasian colonization, I opted for Kamilaroi in 1444, thinking a landlocked capital might help defensively (proven irrelevant, but them's the breaks) and I could probably steamroll my southern neighbour Eora for more elbow room (proved harder than it sounds.) Leaving history aside for the moment, native tribes from a strategy standpoint grow out of the neutral factions we've always seen standing around waiting to be cleared from the map as prelude to the real fight between major factions. Making them playable is a riskier proposition than most might realize, as operating by different rules makes balance a nightmare. But then much of the EU series' charm comes from eschewing absolute victory as the only goal and seeing how far you can get with various factions and strategies. For a native tribe, that mostly means solidifying a decent slab of territory before the people with the big guns show up... and by "big guns" I mean "guns".

I wasted a bit of time at the start uncomprehending what, if anything I can do to expand (in the absence of colonization) before figuring out the migration feature, a roundabout way of staking out provinces for future expansion. On the flip-side, this same feature makes tribes highly resilient early on, automatically migrating to nearby unsettled land even if you conquer them. However, since the AI seems to NEVER settle down and claims only three-ish provinces as fresh pastures, I rapidly overtook my neighbours.

 

Lighter green is claimed by me via migration but unsettled

My original plan to ally with Mianjin against Eora fell through when Mianjin allied with both of us. Luckily, Palawa, which starts in Tasmania, picked up the slack, sandwiching Eora and Wurundjeri between us and eventually migrating to the mainland. (I'd forgotten there's something austral to austral Australia.) Wars against Eora earn me a few mission completions. As natives suffer severe (50-100%) research penalties, I sank my resources into province improvements, but no matter how much sense that makes economically it still earned me one humiliating defeat by the far smaller Eora and the loss of a couple of unsettled tribal provinces down south. I found this a common refrain: while building up your production/tax/manpower base raises your baseline efficacy, the massive force multipliers yielded by even minor tech/specialization advantages can easily overturn numeric superiority, to an extent reminiscent of Alpha Centauri. Maybe too easily.

Eastern Australia shook down to an alliance of Kamilaroi/Kaurna/Palawa gradually pushing back Mianjin/Eora/Wurundjeri until exterminating them via claiming all land. By the 1580s when Spain colonized Tasmania, I was struggling to vassalize and annex my allies peacefully, which proved damn near impossible -

- due to a single infuriatingly obtuse and punishing requirement: economic base. Even with orders of magnitude more provinces/development, the formula for that single factor calculated it as a stronger total negative than all possible positives put together, even after nearly bankrupting myself building up an impressive military to compensate. Seemed the longer I built up my provinces, the worse our ratio due to the potential vassal's development counting as squared (also that -90 modifier edges out even medium-sized factions a bit too forcefully.) I eventually figure out that by leading a tribal federation I can incorporate the others instead of vassalizing, but that's after decades' worth of wasted resources.

To my surprise, when I finally get a look at Madrid it only boasts a modest 12/13/7 development compared to my capital Barunggam's 23/22/20, meaning all I should have to do now is make nice with the palefaces and swap to Euro-tech ASAP and I should be golden... which basically means waiting for the Feudalism "institution" to randomly spread to me via the Spanish colonies.

 

I was right about the northern coast.

 

By 1673 when that's finally done and I flip my government to a republic and begin rapidly advancing in tech, it's too late. In a historic bombshell, Austria somehow takes control of Spain. While I'd built up a decent relationship with the Spanish, for Austria I was just a big fat negative-opinion target. War soon follows. I was expecting massive numeric losses from superior Austrian units, but morale defeated me instead, with my armies breaking and running from forces not even a fifth their size. After dozens of defeats and instant siege losses (and losing the University of Wallamaloo) I finally throw in the towel.

 

For fumbling my way through scores of unknown mechanics, I don't think my first attempt went all that badly. If not for the surprise Spain>Austria swap, my "15th-highest province value" could've given me a fighting chance to the see the end. So, first impressions of Europa Universalis 4?

 

- EU3 used to reveal the map gradually via passive "spread of discoveries" but (at least for natives?) EU4 lacks that feature. (I was Spain's colony's neighbour far more than 50 years, zero zones revealed.) Meaning the only way to see more of the map is by taking the Exploration idea group, which quite frankly looks useless late game.

- Due to the above, I only had contact with ONE (1) overseas power, meaning zero chance to build up alliances for defense and play the bigger empires against each other. Granted, it is rather historically accurate.

- Took 200 years, past mid-game, 70-ish years after contact with Spain, for feudalism to spread to Australia allowing me to change government. Got two other institutions beforehand. The luck-based spread of institutions looks fine in general, but given primitive tribes' crucial need for Feudalism to reform, maybe that's one randomizer needing a taming.

- ALL primitive tech buildings instantly getting wiped out upon post-feudalism government switch seems hamfisted and gratuitously cataclysmic.

- Note my unused merchants. Since I can't reach more than one trade node they're flat-out useless. Granted, this is especially punishing for isolated Australia, but I'll bet other corners of the globe suffer the same discrepancy to a smaller degree. Some secondary use for them might be nice, especially since the extras were inescapably tacked onto other economic advances.

- Why not incorporate the "feels threatened" coefficient into vassalage calculation, to make tiny provinces seek shelter with their neighbours in the face of total obliteration? Well, I guess the federation mechanic is supposed to make up for that, but still...

- Defeated armies now don't just retreat to the nearest province, but run all the way across your empire to safety. Annoying in itself. Utterly broken with the higher-impact morale losses causing them to rout nearly instantly. Entirely prevented me from fighting a war of attrition against Austria, as armies become functionally useless for months after a single defeat. Should a fighting retreat be impossible?

- I'm one of the few people to really voice a love of Stellaris' user interface (despite its annoying popups) and it comes down to hyperlinks and tooltips. Being able to one-click between interrelated windows and see breakdowns of various calculations at a glance is crucial to navigating a good strategy game's massive amount of information. The same can be said of Old World or Planetfall. But in EU4 most terms or mechanics like the complete loss of tribal buildings (at least those not carried over from EU3) are thrown at you without explanation, and just trying to figure out WTF IS "ECONOMIC BASE" via the wiki and reddit posts took me more time than some online game matches. Complexity should not imply obtuseness. Tell me why, tell me whyyyy, tell me WHYYYYYYYYY, in the name of god, these kinds of changes!?!?

Still, overall, playing a native tribe, especially with the migration/federation mechanics, felt impressively fleshed out given it's a mere sideshow to the main events. For my own money I'm too much a SciFi fan not to prefer Stellaris, but EU is obviously Paradox's pampered baby, and its sheer interconnected detail understandably makes nerds drool even compared to Stellaris which out-details and out-interconnects most competitors with millefiori grace.

 

I'll happily return to 1444 after some detours elsewheren... maybe as a less intrinsically doomed faction than Kamilaroi.

Cowboy Bebop: Adios for Starters

Watch Cowboy Bebop (the original, not the idiotic live action adaptation)

Spoilers implied.

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If Cowboy Bebop's fame should save me the trouble of an introduction it may still be worthwhile, after a quarter century, to try remembering why this show made such a splash in the first place, why it came as such a revelation to those of us catching it in '99. While I won't be taking it episode by episode, the first installment helps clarify that issue.

For one thing, anime at the time was still occasionally called "japanimation" in the U.S. and had rightly earned its (still fitting) reputation as low-budget, lazily dubbed, mass-produced 2FPS schlock for six-year-olds: loud, colorful, over-emoted, distorted, goofy, simplistic, etc. Akira raised a few eyebrows but quickly faded from conversation, and though Princess Mononoke argued this point rather pointedly a year prior, most of us teens simply did not consider anime worthy of continued attention, and even if we'd watched Gundam and so forth, did not consider them part of a larger subculture. Bebop spurred conversation to a large extent for NOT matching anime thereto seen in the west.

For another, in Disney's second golden age animation in general was still derided and discounted as inextricably childish, with The Simpsons only very gradually shifting public attitude on the matter. While the '90s moved beyond '80s over-the-top heroic goofiness with the more sober Batman / X-Men cartoons or especially Gargoyles, these still narrowly catered to a tween audience.

 

For yet another, television as a whole has never earned much respect for its obnoxious attention-grabbing (this was the heyday of Urkel after all) shallow comedy dominated the airwaves and drama fixated on a handful of topics like murder mysteries or cop shows with a growing side interest in hospitals thanks to ER. Shows stuck to strict formulas, usually a core cast of two or three reiterating the same weekly plot with the same running gags for as long as their ratings held up.

 

For yet yet another, Science Fiction itself was considered a fringe interest to which few would openly admit, not helped by the antics of Trekkies and the like. If you wanted TV SF your choice lay primarily between Star Trek or X-Files, whose quality varied wildly to put it mildly.

So, into this media landscape enter Cowboy Bebop #1: Asteroid Blues.

We're introduced to Spike and Jet looking for a paying job, broke enough to scrimp on food, a recurring theme over the show's course which would eventually form an emphatic bookend with the end of Hard Luck Woman toward the series finale. The future looks dingy. Spaceflight does nothing to change human nature; monkeys in space are still monkeys. The solar system benefits from interplanetary FTL travel but true to cyberpunk themes most of society wallows in its disrepair. Asteroid Blues makes an oft-overlooked mark in deliberately setting the series' tone without simply establishing an episodic formula.

 

Characters in serial works too often prove pirates who don't do anything, their original occupations, quirks or life histories thrown to the wayside as each installment focuses on the way their lives diverge from a norm the series failed to establish in the first place. See ST:TNG's first episode after the pilot, The Naked Now, for the confusion that can cause. Here we get a deliberate first impression of Spike and Jet's "cowboy" lifestyle set among the general criminality making it a necessity, plus the Bebop itself and Spike's martial prowess, but it's the world itself which receives most of our attention, refraining from the impulse to over-populate the cast from the get-go. Where normally the pilot would serve as a "you all meet in a tavern" moment fixing the core cast, Asteroid Blues teases the audience halfway through during the female mark's conversation with Spike, appearing for a moment ready to join our heroes on their adventures.

Then it ends. She and her male companion die. Brutally and unfairly, as they lived. He by her own hand to cease his suffering and struggling against the inevitable.

 

"adios"

Not until late in the show's second half would the audience learn why the couple's plight put Spike especially in such a thoughtful mood, but even ignoring personal symbolism, opening with a bitter end established overall mood, and the mood meant business. To say mercy kills did not feature prominently on television (even in the goth '90s) would be putting it mildly, and I'd bet they still do not. Hollywood's obsession with happy endings and heroic triumph precludes such unpalatable choices. But the eagerness with which many youths across generations have leapt on Cowboy Bebop for 25 years witnesses the need for such themes to be acknowledged in entertainment.

 

The next several episodes adopt a distinctively more lighthearted atmosphere, but the tone had been quite skillfully set, and it was nothing like what we'd seen before.

Adios, space cowboys, and welcome to the show.

I slept.

 I don't want to sleep

Mediation

"The best lack all conviction while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity"

Yeats - The Second Coming

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"Coming to this cinema soon!

The tender, compassionate story of one man's love for another man in drag. Thrill to the excitement of a night emission over Germany, when the pilot, Jennifer, has to choose between his secret love for Louis, the hot-bloodedly bisexual navigator, and Andy, the rear gunner, who, though quite assertive with girls, tends to take the submissive role in his relationships with men, and sensational Mexican starlet Rosetta Nixon plays the head of bomber command, whose passion for seabirds ends in tragedy! With Ginger as the half-man, half-woman parrot whose unnatural instincts brought forbidden love to the aviary, and Roger as Pip, the half-parrot, half-man, half-woman, three-quarter badger, ex-bigamist negro preacher for whom banjo playing was very difficult, and he never mastered it though he took several courses and went to banjo college... uhhh... and everything...

Don't miss it! Coming to your cinema soon!"

Monty Python's Flying Circus - The Light Entertainment War (S4E3, 1974)

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I resent the Pythons pre-empting my criticism of identity politics content generation with that hilarious movie trailer spoof, and for doing so more sweepingly and at once more thoroughly by mixing in overdone settings. That entire Light Entertainment War episode is more or less a drawn-out sigh of frustration at the endless tirade of war dramas churned out in the decades after WW2, most of which had nothing to say but all of which held themselves above criticism by the inviolable tragedy of national pride. The movie trailer segment in particular rings painfully true against contemporary media and their desperation to rehash every single idiotic cliche with special interest demographic twists, narrowing down to ever more obscure niches.

 

Reminds me of trying to sit through a bad movie called Summerland, which starts as a tale of wartime hardship during the Battle of Britain as a boy is sent to the country to live with a cantankerous female writer. Comedy... or something, should ensue, but we soon scrap the odd couple setup to segue awkwardly into a tedious lesbian romance having nothing to do with the intro besides one monstrously overblown contrivance. Seriously, they have to actively remind you there's a war on, or what year they're living in. One gets the distinct impression that Summerland's writer(s?) could find nothing either irksome or piquant in the 1940s besides closeted carpet-munching. Which likely stems from lack of research, as neither dialogue nor comportment support a period piece* and everyone's only mode of communication seems limited to copping attitude like sassy brit-com bit players. Why even bother? If you wanted to make yet another movie pitting glorified lesbians against the injustice of whatever, you could simply have made that movie, without resorting to a time period you can't accurately portray, or the informed existence of a war, or a child as prop, or confused gratuitous mysticism, or a man conveniently dying to clear the way for morally superior girl-girl love.

 

The story seems contrived backwards from homosexuality being SRS BSNS to the need for a dramatic backdrop and what the hell, WW2's only been milked for cheap drama for seventy years and counting, what's a few more? Blame it on inertia, I guess. Entertainment industries long ago grew so accustomed to copying and repackaging as to standardize even the packages. "Set piece" was not a slur to start, but earned its status as such, and it's hardly just special interest summer filler cinema getting bogged down in conventionality.

 

If you play any so-called "MOBAs" (LoL, DotA2, etc.) more properly remembered as Aeon of Strife games after their Starcraft beginnings, you might wonder why your inventory has six slots, exactly six slots, no more, no less. Six shall be the number thou shalt count and the number of the counting shall be six. Seven shall thou not count, neither count thou five, excepting that thou then proceed to six. Eight is right out. If you expect some convoluted justification based on class balance, match pacing or numerological progression, prepare to be disappointed: DotA, the one they all copy, was a custom map for Warcraft 3, not a single-character RPG but RTS with simplified skills/inventory for its hero units. In other words the 6slots were not a design choice but an incidental, arbitrary external restriction, slavishly copied by imitators for twenty years now like Corinthian columns on Howard Roark's house, for absolutely no reason besides looking more like a custom map for a game with early-2000s limitations. The same was true of the map size or shape (diagonal to fill more space, with lanes angled to fit Warcraft 3's square maps) or the 5-player teams (limited by War3's 12-player match maximum = 5+1 AI per team) though at least there five players coincide with a good multiplayer class mix.

Hardly an isolated example. If you step into The Lord of the Rings Online you might wonder at Bree's max-level NPC town guards, since monsters usually leash away from town's edge so there's nothing for them to actually fight. Well, World of Warcraft had town guards at launch partly to provide safety on PvP servers, and LotRO as WoW-clone with zero open-world PvP mindlessly copied over the superfluous guards into original launch content.

 

Don't get me started on random genres forcing you into platform jumping quests just because nothing says "video game" like Donkey Kong.

Don't even try to sell me on the artistic merits of pixelation. Pointillism's merit as clever novelty waned with the rest of the belle epoque.

On a completely unrelated topic, I don't like opera, or musical theater in general. Not to say opera doesn't occasionally offer some bangin' howl-alongs, but the few times I was dragged along or tried sitting through an entire performance I quickly grew aware of the genre's massive amounts of filler. Yes, yes, I can appreciate lavish mood/scene-setting, but generally speaking, I shouldn't have time to read the whole libretto while the plucky squire's still recitatatin' 'bout the sandwich he had for lunch. The covers are too far apart, to borrow Bierce's witticism. But the filler was originally part of the selling point, wasn't it? An evening at the theater is just that, isn't it? An evening, a social event, with the theater as pretext. When it took strapping on a corset, quadruple-tiered flowery hat and three layers of petticoats, plus a creaky carriage ride across town behind a horse's hind-hole to reach your entertainment, the least they could do was provide an entire evening's worth, complete with intermissions to intermingle. Also, singing troupes in full costume with orchestral accompaniment were the height of technological and choreographic achievement for about three centuries, the most impressive spectacle you might witness. Nowadays? Not so much. Pretty sure Industrial Light and Magic can out-glitz a dozen prancing ponces in puffy pantaloons. The strictures of form imposed by 18th-century avant-garde stagecraft no longer serve their function.

But if opera might be dead for most relevant cultural purposes, the simple observation that ILM was founded to illustrate a *space* opera speaks emphatically of its lasting influence, and the same is true of other dead forms whose functions outlived them. Romanticized drama persists.

 

Are silent films dead? Move your lips to say yes. Still, entertainment industries learned well the power of silent scenes. Peaceful vistas bloom onscreen a few seconds before the music score winds up, lovers wake alongside each other in wordless reverie, and rare is the thriller which doesn't include some nerve-jangling aural crater as the plucky squire hides... from... the... vill- BOOM, HEADSHOT! Talkies did not abolish silence, merely counterbalanced it.

 

Are radio dramas dead? Tell it to Morgan Freeman, The Narrator. Is letter writing dead? Then what the hell am I doing right now? Can you make a war movie? Sure, if the war's actually relevant. Are fairy tales dead? Not if superheroes have anything to say about it. Is ballet dead? Yes. Yes, that one is dead.**

 

A medium is not a goal. It's a means, a vehicle to be used to whatever extent it carries meaning. And that word, medium, reminded me to dig up my copy of Nicomachean Ethics:

"decision is either understanding combined with desire or desire combined with thought; and this is the sort of principle that a human being is."

Sapience is decision, the ego between id and superego. You are the process of processing. Somewhere between memories and impulses, between desire and thoughts, between desired effect and learned technique, there should be a choice, a chooser, a creator whose decisions shape those simpler elements into something worth creating.

That endangered species, the creators, have dwindled with every decade. All we have are industry standards cut and pasted, "babble babble, bitch bitch, rebel rebel, party party" as another brilliant philosopher once put it. Mercenary pandering renders bad art grotesque by its subhumanity, the degenerate, inbred, troglodytic effluent of caged animalism. The new media of the electronic age helped... for a bit... but as they outgrow their Betty Boop stage, they too have been choked with standardization and mass appeal, all features trimmed away which do not maximize short-term profit. Even the supposed alternatives do little but fetishize meaningless, outdated forms without function.

 

And the final nail in our cultural downfall is that the only members of our society now permitted to be heard are the ones saying nothing the loudest, the ones peddling moralistic prurience, desire without either thought or decision.

Activists.

 

 

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* Compare character word choice, tone and mannerisms to The Dig, set almost exactly in the same time, place and social stratum, and representing it far more believably. By the way, The Dig also managed to make a point of sexual repression. Just a marginally more dignified one.

** Nope, wait, never mind, we do have strippers.

I still don't feel like blogging today, so instead here's a random picture I snapped this past fall.

 

No context. I just think it came out well.

Huh. I might just make random images a regular thing.

Anyway, maybe tomorrow I'll talk about a stupid movie, MOBAs, opera and Monty Python.

Jacobin There, Done That

"Thou hast it now: king, Cawdor, Glamis, all,
As the weird women promised, and, I fear,
Thou play'dst most foully for't"

Macbeth, Act3, Scene 1

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"Much hath been done—but more remains to do—
Their galleys blaze—why not their city too?"⁠

Lord Byron - The Corsair

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"Democracy is coming to the USA"

Leonard Cohen

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Apropos of nothing, I've never read her novels but so far George Eliot's articles make me wanna have her babies. Felix Holt's Address to Working Men was written in 1868 as commentary on a wide expansion of voting rights in Britain, to dampen the undue enthusiasm of those who assume "power to the [politically convenient] people" to be a cure-all for society's ills. Such warnings and calls for realism are by no means new (I've excerpted a bit from this same article to sound off alongside George Carlin, Isaac Asimov and Ayn Rand when I discuss the middle class) but are worthy of attention precisely because they evoke such instant recognition across centuries. I would wish (but dare not hope) her words reflect uncomfortably upon all our modern self-glorifying rebels blacklisting each other and sharpening their guillotines. Regardless of the advances afforded by a scant few superior minds, the human ape, on the whole, is the same brutish, superstitious, envious, dishonest, greedy, gullible, destructive, murderous, shit-slinging beast it has been since prehistory. So, as I've done in the past with Wells or Nietzsche, etc., I'll just sit back for tonight, relax, and let Mary Anne do the heavy lifting of critiquing modern social activism across a gulf of 155 years.

 

Yes, it's the blog of yestercentury - today!

 

"I say, it is not possible for any society in which there is a very large body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society is—to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so much belief in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion of what pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows. Therefore, let us have none with this nonsense about our being much better than the rest of our countrymen
[...]
we are justified in saying that many of the evils under which our country now suffers are the consequences of folly, ignorance, neglect, or self-seeking in those who, at different times have wielded the powers of rank, office, and money.  But the more bitterly we feel this, the more loudly we utter it, the stronger is the obligation we lay on ourselves to beware, lest we also, by a too hasty wresting of measures which seem to promise an immediate partial relief, make a worse time of it for our own generation, and leave a bad inheritance to our children.
[...]
so long, I say as men wink at their own knowingness, or hold their heads high because they have got an advantage over their fellows; so long class interest will be in danger of making itself felt injuriously. No set of men will get any sort of power without being in danger of wanting more than their right share.  But, on the other hand, it is just as certain that no set of men will get angry at having less than their right share, and set up a claim on that ground, without falling into just the same danger of exacting too much, and exacting it in wrong ways.  It’s human nature we have got to work with all round, and nothing else.  That seems like saying something very commonplace—nay, obvious; as if one should say that where there are hands there are mouths. Yet, to hear a good deal of the speechifying and to see a good deal of the action that go forward, one might suppose it was forgotten.
[...]
for one person to put on a cap and bells, or to go about dishonest or paltry ways of getting rich that he may spend a vast sum of money in having more finery than his neighbors, he must be pretty sure of a crowd who will applaud him.
[...]
You will not suspect me of wanting to preach any cant to you, or of joining in the pretence that everything is in a fine way, and need not be made better.  What I am striving to keep in our minds is the care, the precaution, with which we should go about making things better, so that the public order may not be destroyed, so that no fatal shock may be given to this society of ours, this living body in which our lives are bound up.  After the Reform Bill of 1832 I was in an election riot, which showed me clearly, on a small scale, what public disorder must always be; and I have never forgotten that the riot was brought about chiefly by the agency of dishonest men who professed to be on the people’s side. Now, the danger hanging over change is great, just in proportion as it tends to produce such disorder by giving any large number of ignorant men, whose notions of what is good are of a low and brutal sort, the belief that they have got power into their hands, and may do pretty much as they like. If any one can look round us and say that he sees no signs of any such danger now, and that our national condition is running along like a clear broadening stream, safe not to get choked with mud, I call him a cheerful man

[...]
It has been held hitherto that a man can be depended on as a guardian of order only when he has much money and comfort to lose.  But a better state of things would be, that men who had little money and not much comfort should still be guardians of order, because they had sense to see that disorder would do no good, and had a heart of justice, pity, and fortitude, to keep them from making more misery only because they felt some misery themselves.
[...]
Just as in the case of material wealth and its distribution we are obliged to take the selfishness and weaknesses of human nature into account, and however we insist that men might act better, are forced, unless we are fanatical simpletons, to consider how they are likely to act; so in this matter of the wealth that is carried in men’s minds, we have to reflect that the too absolute predominance of a class whose wants have been of a common sort, who are chiefly struggling to get better and more food, clothing, shelter, and bodily recreation, may lead to hasty measures for the sake of having things more fairly shared, which, even if they did not fail of their object, would at last debase the life of the nation.
[...]
While we resolutely declare against the wickedness in high places, let us set ourselves also against the wickedness in low places, not quarrelling which came first, or which is the worse of the two—not trying to settle the miserable precedence of plague or famine, but insisting unflinchingly on remedies once ascertained, and summoning those who hold the treasure of knowledge to remember that they hold it in trust, and that with them lies the task of searching for new remedies, and finding the right methods of applying them.
[...]
for our own part, we have seriously to consider this outside wisdom which lies in the supreme unalterable nature of things, and watch to give it a home within us and obey it.  If the claims of the unendowed multitude of working men hold within them principles which must shape the future, it is not less true that the endowed classes, in their inheritance from the past, hold the precious material without which no worthy, noble future can be moulded.  Many of the highest uses of life are in their keeping; and if privilege has often been abused, it has also been the nurse of excellence.  Here again we have to submit ourselves to the great law of inheritance.  If we quarrel with the way in which the labors and earnings of the past have been preserved and handed down, we are just as bigoted, just as narrow, just as wanting in that religion which keeps an open ear and an obedient mind to the teachings of fact, as we accuse those of being, who quarrel with the new truths and new needs which are disclosed in the present."

Beautiful.

I hate hearing you all calling your video game characters "toons" infantilizing what should be your wholehearted involvement and spitting upon the noble tradition of roleplaying which inspired such personalized characters.

But maybe we should compromise. Would anyone object to "charactoons"?

...

Or maybe "tunacters"?

...

OK, fine, we'll keep workshopping it, good talk, good talk...

The Samaritan Paradox

Nice thing about old-style point-and-click adventures: since they're usually dollar bin material, you don't feel guilty not bothering to finish ones you don't like. They also display the inevitable stagnation of a genre decades past its heyday even in 2014. The Samaritan Paradox feels like someone just set out to make AN ADVENTURE GAME and later filled in the blanks as to what that might mean. Long story short, don't bother. Spoilers follow.

 

You are a cryptologist/librarian in '80s Sweden. Your apartment contains bookshelves, piles of books, a phone, alarm clock, television, newspaper. Your friend sends you a journalist's last book, dedicated to his daughter in Stockholm. Your character notes its ISBN looks weird, broken up into single/double digits.

Can you:

- call your friend to ask him what's up with the book?

- call your library workplace to ask about inconsistencies in ISBN codes or materials by the same author?

- find a map and compare the funky ISBN dual-digits to map coordinates, parsing as you go?

- find a map of Stockholm and look for significant patterns? maybe street numbers?

- find a biography of the author and compare the numbers? maybe dates?

- find a cryptology book and look up two-digit ciphers?

- translate the digits into alphabet letters by number?

- listen to a TV/radio newscast for more details about the death of a famous journalist?

- click and drop the curious volume to make it interact with your piles of books or bookshelves to look for matching topics?

Hell no. None of the above. Open your bookshelf, ignore the cryptology texts despite all dia/mono-logue so far have been cryptology-this and cryptology-that and click the chemistry book. This isn't about looking for logical solutions and gradually narrowing the scope of your task. It's about flatfootedly word-matching "chemistry" from the newspaper as the daughter's occupation out of twenty tones of white noise. Except good, engaging adventure game puzzles don't just front-load all the information to sift through aimlessly. In an interactive medium, your hints and clues are supposed to work with the player's input, commenting, correcting, providing some feedback on whether ANYTHING is happening.

 

The second puzzle has me showing every item in my inventory to a senile old bat until she says something relevant, after which I'm supposed to simply guess that I should alternate directions.

 

The third puzzle... well... let's just say there's a crucially important item in this image you'll need to advance.

 

Do you see it? Do you see the crucially important item? OMG how can you not see it, what are you, blind? How can you not immediately recognize it it's so blatantly obvious it's right in your face it's

It's... roughly 20 shapeless pixels by my estimate? And superimposed on another clickable item so 50/50 not even a tooltip will give it away when you're scanning the image. Yeaahhh... then you're thrown into a completely imaginary world pertaining to the plot of a novel. Which begs the question of why the game wasn't simply that novel. Aaaaand, uninstall, another Bozo for the pile.

Weirdly, The Samaritan Paradox isn't even the worst of its breed, just monumentally uninspired. You can practically see a checklist being ticked away as you play. An adventure game obviously needs:

- quirky characters (old soldier girl)

- cultural pursuits (art galleries, novels)

- hidden objects

- counterintuitive solutions

- red herrings

- exotic locales (even if imaginary)

- some justification for why this was made into a game instead of the mystery novella the author obviously wanted to write? Nah, screw that last part.

Piltdown Woman

"When nothing seems certain or safe

Let it burn through you"

 

Garbage - Run Baby Run

 

 

Weighing the potential of a minor horror game, I skipped professional critics (i.e. paid advertisers) toward user reviews, one of which gave me a fit of the giggles.

"The game allows you to turn off nudity so you don't have to see the main character, Matt's, penis. It's a nice penis. You can pee with it. As a woman that was a fun experience as I haven't done that before."

Wait-wait-wait... there are chicks out there who think a penis can be nice? Why was I not notified of this! For over a decade now the unfairer sex's party line has held male genitals so disgustingly, unfathomably, Lovecraftianly horrific that a mere glimpse will scar any woman for life and justify any and all retribution. Above all, we're not permitted to admit that even if such gonadophobic women do exist, they must by necessity be extreme outliers. We would not exist today if H. habilis damsels had a habit of vanishing into the underbrush at the sight of a twig and berries.

So why kow-tow to such blatant fictions about human nature, based solely on anecdotal noise?

 

You've heard of Margaret Mead - if not in an anthropology course then in endless "documentaries" in which heartfelt, misty-eyed narrators inform you of her discovery of innocent tribal societies unspoilt by our modern decadence, living in peaceable, ecstatic sexual freedom under matriarchal or egalitarian rule. Doth it not bloweth thine mind? Does it not make you want to restructure the entire world by their august example? One supposed tribe's men who "spent their time primping" like peacocks while the women did all important work calls back to me from both PBS and Intro to Anthro / Intro to Soc.

If my college courses made any mention of controversy surrounding her work, I sure as hell can't remember it past the simplistic, glorified image we were fed of Mead as a striding colossus sweeping aside the entrenched male opposition. Even in later years any mention of criticism has been restricted to the apparently infamous Derek Freeman calling into question her most famous work, Coming of Age in Samoa, painting the all-too-convenient image of A MAN attacking the noble lady's virtues, seemingly baseless and shiftless in his mysterious motivations and machinations. Oooohh, spooooky!

 

At least and at last, Wikipedia, at some point in recent years, has deigned to mention that Mead's claims of free gender roles, not only in Samoa but at the other end of Melanesia in New Guinea, rather repeatedly failed to stand up to scrutiny. And not by A MAN or THE MAN but by names like Deborah and Jessie the born-again feminist, and not yesterday in a YouTube comment section, but starting from '74 and '81 based on data going back to 1850. Not that you would've heard such countervailing evidence from my professors in the 2000s, as it fails to puff up the fable of Mighty Maggie braving the exotic perils of worlds beyond to retrieve the holy grail of 100% all-natural matriarchy and return to strike down evil kings.

These're ANTHROPOLOGISTS. You'd think if anyone should know the pitfalls of mythopoesis... but that's the point isn't it? She didn't need to be right or wrong, just politically convenient. The over-riding criterion for inclusion in feminist hagiography has always been a willingness to bloody men's noses, no matter the justification.

 

But the real kicker isn't the factual validity of Mead's work, or that of her ilk. It's the interpretation, the undue importance heaped on such exotic ends-of-the-Earth anecdotes by puritan audiences drooling after tales of nubile young sun-kissed nymphs sleeping their way around their villages (sounds tantalizing from either angle, don't it?) Assume all of Mead's observations flawless, her interpretation of each village's social system immaculate.

So. Freakin'. What?

At which point was the old truism "the exception proves the rule" overturned? How do those five or ten or three hundred examples stack against... the world? Y'know, like, the whole rest of it, thousands of years of history, tens of thousands spanning prehistoric relics, the myriad villages and traditions all over the globe independently arriving at the same miserable routine from Hokkaido to Sicily to Colorado to the Kalahari: family ties, headsmen>kings>emperors, male warriors squabbling over reproductive access, all that jazz. It's called an evolutionarily stable strategy. How fanatical a denialism does it take to declare nearly all observable human behavior void... because we found this mosaic of women tossing a medicine ball.

 

And isn't it odd that social constructionists, who so flatly deny natural inclinations, always latch so eagerly onto such noble savage anecdotes of alternate natural states as self-justification? Well, of course the point was never self-actualization but We Can Break You.

 

Outliers do not disprove a data set. They have their place within it. Phenotypic variation exists. There will always be some same-sex attraction, some promiscuity, some female warriors, some males who'd rather type rants about anthropology courses than go out conquering the world (nobody you know.) In fact, if you want to see men primping, just hang around Belmont&Broadway in Chicago and smell the hair gel... but then we're not talking about male/female relations anymore, are we? (So maybe the supposed constraint lies not with men but with the demands placed by women on men, but let's leave that for some other time.) The exception simply does not carry the same weight as the rule. If meteorologists acted like social scientists, our cities would consist of nothing but impenetrable, uninterrupted forests of lightning rods.

Didja hear about the world's greatest animal lover? He was wanted in forty-eight stoats.