Oldies of Fortune

"Eighties night

The kids get high and eat TV"

 

Metric - On the Sly

 

 

Allow me a little bout of nostalgia today. My first experiences with electronic games were in arcades and rare glimpses at computers at school or my family's workplaces in the early '90s, most by then outdated: Oregon Trail, a PacMan copycat, Pong, something about cavemen, a ninja fighting game, but also the cutting-edge Doom, Prince of Persia and the first Dune adaptation. My own family's first computer was a garage-assembled Sinclair Spectrum knockoff you could fry an egg on, programmed via audiotape. But it was enough for me to learn some basic programming in... BASIC, and Logo. (Turtle power!) Not that I stuck with programming after third grade, but a fundamental grasp of how instructions are fed into a machine served me well. It wouldn't be until several years later that my family would buy our first for-real off-the-shelf Windows PC and I'd really get into gaming with MW2:Mercs, C&C:Red Alert, SimCity2000 and so forth.

 

In between, though, I got a Sega Genesis as a gift in fifth grade. Major deal, since we couldn't really afford it. Among other things, it taught me what absolute poison proprietary systems are, and our desperate need for a universally-compatible, user-serviceable, moddable, scalable platform (which PCs best approach if not quite satisfy) with mouse-and-keyboard controls. Sega Genesis originally came with a three-button controller. Later I had to buy a six-button controller because some games flat-out required it, regardless any extra moves beyond three were redundant to their simplistic '90s formulae... deliberately so as to make you shill out for the extra buttons.

 

Three years later I sold it all off, along with my entire cartridge collection, for about... maybe thirty bucks? Fifteen for the console, fifteen for my admittedly meager collection? I remember trying very hard to feel like I was being mature and responsible about money and not letting things go to waste. 'Course, what I mostly learned from the experience is that being responsible gets you ripped off by the greasy jackass at the second hand shop.

 

Now, despite being remembered as Sega's competitive high point, the Genesis wasn't necessarily known for breaking tech specs so much as its excellent gamut of games. My own handful included:

- Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which still shows up as the iconic Sonic whenever anyone references the series (came with the console)

- X-Men 2: Clone Wars, still remembered for its level decor and mutant power implementation

- Eternal Champions, a fighting game more immersive than most for its character design and backstories

- the original Star Control, a TBS with Asteroids-like ship combat

- Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego ... look, it wasn't THAT terrible... for an educational game

- FIFA International Soccer (don't judge me!) (I was young and foolish)

- but there was another one, a top-down shooter. It had weird guns and weirder monsters. And default duo mode. And lots of rivers. And a cracked industrial aesthetic. Come on, what was it called, what was it called?

Unlike the others above, it took me an hour to find the forgotten Soldiers of Fortune, a.k.a. The Chaos Engine, having apparently been eclipsed by another top-down shoot-em-up called Mercs. Even at ten, I wasn't crazy about the twitchy point-and-shoot routine (and not just because I'm generally bad at it) so it was never my favorite. Looking back now, even the features I thought unique at the time, like the two-player gameplay or the ammo powerups or the monsters jumping out of the walls, had been standard for arcade games through the previous decade. But at least it put some minimal effort into justifying the monster spawning with a by-the-numbers multiverse phlebotinum (which was more than most games of its generation did) had distinctive characters, and one thing that stands out now is the setting.

 

Soldiers of Fortune was steampunk about a decade before steampunk took off as a fad, when cyberpunk itself was still just gaining traction with wider audiences. We're talking ~six years before The Matrix, couple years before even Johnny Mnemonic was made into a movie. Of course "punk" in general had been a major fad of the previous decade. So I'm thinking SoF / The Chaos Engine managed to land at exactly the wrong time. Where its competitor Mercs looks like it banked on more generic '80s/'90s action movie mass-appeal, this one depended on niches which had either died down or not yet sprung up. Weird Fiction was a bit passe and New Weird hadn't taken off yet, Punk was last decade's news and Steampunk hadn't hit its Wild Wild West / Fullmetal Alchemist / Arcanum / Girl Genius / etc. stride.

Reviewing creative works, it's very tempting to fall into the fundamental attribution error, to dissect every frame, every sprite, every bullet for flaws, when the bulk of success or failure may have been determined by milieu. Wrong place, wrong time, or maybe the product fell into a transitional period later forgotten altogether. On a larger scale, nobody associates the '90s with steampunk. On a personal level, even I'd forgotten the game's name for belonging to my brief console phase between computers.

What do you exclaim when Zeus accidentally hits himself in the face with a lightning bolt?

Ohm eye God!

Unsounded

"So much lost... a bleak fate, remarkably shaped; but God did not wholly smooth away the contour of his touch, and you thought you saw his finger prints. You interpreted them; concluded there was some meaning. Now: slay a monster, defeat a queen, uncover a scheme - will Hell open its gate? Might you bribe your way out, your undoing undone? Then home, home, home, how they'll welcome the long lost soldier. [...] You've pursued easy meaning - a comfortable purpose [...] Such casual villains we are."

 

 

Within the introduction to Elric: Song of the Black Sword, Michael Moorcock addressed the default assessment of his classic sword&sorcery protagonist as an antihero. The author held Elric to be in fact a traditional epic hero, answering the call to adventure by what he understands as an appropriate response. He generally lacks the self-defeating perversity of Byron's Conrad or a 1990s Batman incarnation. It's just that Elric's baseline for right and wrong, based on his breeding, ability, decadent imperial formative milieu, tools at his disposal and the company he keeps, falls so far below our accepted moral norms that his heroic mindset yields monstrous solutions to any obstacles.

 

Ashley Cope's Unsounded had launched the year prior to me starting this blog, and from the start I'd been meaning to say something about it. However, this sword&sorcery yarn kept growing, in the breadth and depth of its dramatis personae, in visual detail and plot complexity, in philosophical ambition, until it has, in recent years, steadily outshined competitors like Kill 6 Billion Demons or Gunnerkrigg Court to stand at the top of its game. And as it's currently hitting its existing plot's climax, I thought an overview opportune. Before I get to complaining as is my wont, I just had to say kudos. Even it goes sour from here on out, just... congratulations to the author. Your work almost makes me want to start a new Patreon account to donate. You, madam, are a killer app.

Weirdly, the closest mental link the comic forms for me personally is not to other fant'sy drawrins, but to a 1990s novel called Les Thanatonautes, in which medical researchers manage to delve, technologically, into the afterlife. Unsounded makes a decent show of rationalized magitek, though in larger fights it tends to dispense with discernible rationalizations for its rules of magic in the interest of keeping the Industrial Light&Magic flowing, and once the giant monster shows up things rapidly turn to pure fantasy. Still, it holds to far more coherent cause and effect than you generally expect from such oeuvres.

This leads to another unexpected problem, and a rare one for webcomics (which normally fall in to the sin of cut-and-paste instead): visually, in later years, it sometimes gets too busy. The artist often seems be challenging herself not only by the increasingly baroque decor but characters' twisting acrobatics and object motion that's just begging for some 3D glasses. Unfortunately, this also makes some pages a bit challenging to look at, compounded by Unsounded's propensity (much like Dominic Deegan) for breaking down panels to illustrate breakdowns in the walls of reality. Maybe print/PDF versions might be higher resolution, but at desktop web browser size I've found myself wondering "is that a foot or an armchair" all too commonly.

More surprisingly, it's coherently and entertainingly written, with characters' voices well distributed between crass, combative, vivacious or verbose, expository or curtly transgressive as the situation necessitates. Ultimately, Cope's greatest advantage may lie in a greater vocabulary than your average art major.

My usual focus on world-building leads me to mostly appreciate the various factions and subcultures, the monotheistic crusaders, the polytheistic traditionalists, the occult cult and all the smugglers, soldiers, whores and sacrificial lambs. Most will probably get more invested in the individual characters, snarking, bloviating and badgering each other amidst frequent fireball battles. In fact much of Unsounded's charm comes from personalities never oscillating gratuitously to fuel plot twists, not suddenly becoming stupid so as to lose conveniently, or gaining sudden epiphanies so as to immediately somersault to designated hero status. Theirs are hard-earned and gradual revelations, deliberate and measured character growth. Even as they perpetrate great deeds, children still act like children, small minds retain their pettiness, and a hobbyist pops out of an otherwise transformative experience still bent on his obsession.*

 

Only two major characters so far would truly fit the antiheroic mold, whether viewed from outside or from their own self-hatred: Quigley, and especially #12, in whom The Imp of the Perverse rages uncontrolled. But the rest? A world of Elrics with bad educations, swinging away at what they consider flaws - which is to say, mostly each other. Playing at heroics.

 

Despite obviously struggling not to play favorites, Unsounded isn't completely immune to the chauvinist insanity of our time. My one previous mention of it fell among other examples overusing "stock bad dads" as moralistic punching bags, and that aspect has only gotten more pronounced since. Also, despite trying to square off two morally compromised factions, you do eventually get the unmistakable impression that dark-skinned matriarchal Cresce are the flawed heroes while pale patriarchal Alderode are the (i?)redeemable villains, that Cresce's sins are symbolic (limited in scope, or merely icky but harmless, passive decadence whose downside is never displayed) while Alderode's sins are pervasive, aggressive, deliberate violence and plunder, and overall the world's shit but you'd damn well better remember who the morally superior breed is, capisce? Still, it steers relatively clear of the fanaticism seen in today's society at large, and every time you think it's getting on a high-horse, Unsounded manages to provide counterpoints.

 

In fact, I would principally fault it on the fallacy of innocence. The few overwhelmingly good characters tend to be a dog and most kids (Jivi/Matty/Sara/Siya/Ruffles,etc.) mischievous but helpful scamps instead of the sociopathic monsters children really are. Matty in particular serves as both source of their later repeated moral mantra and one of the schmaltziest Miserables in a very crowded field. Even the metaphysical side of the plot so far hinges on erasing bad memories, all gradually building up to a nasty suggestion of ignorance as world-saving virtue.**

Still, page for page this is as good as webcomics get, and a wonderful illustration (pun intended) of the medium's potential. Excellent work.

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* I win the prize for euphemism.

** Man, I have got to get around to reading A la recherche du temps perdu

Dissenters Cohere in Vain

As strategy games grew beyond shuffling chess pawns back and forth, politics and political factions began making more frequent appearances, and modern descendants of Civilization or Master of Orion proudly offer faction-wrangling as a quite involved aspect of their politics systems, interweaving territorial expansion, resource management and military policies. However, diverse political factions are still presented as undesirable stumbling blocks in the player's path, subversives, opposers and accusers, Ahrimans and Satanas causing your loyal populace to stray from your one true path as god-emperor, to be eliminated or pacified into complacency with your commands. I would contend this is another slavish concession to our society's parasitic minority of multibillionaires (and to our parasitic nature as social animals, but leave that for another time) where the true advances which have so immeasurably improved both our individual lives and communal ability to shape the environment (militarily or otherwise) have come from scattered, independent but willingly interacting intellects at the middle levels of society.

Ironically, some games do play with the notion of multiple factions' diverse viewpoints... in the one category where diverse viewpoints are both absurd and meaningless: supernatural belief. Instead of giving players research bonuses for maintaining a diverse array of deluded chanting primitives, why not instead (or at least in addition) apply this reasoning to diverse ranges of practical, scientific or aesthetic pursuits?

 

Trade guilds, colleges of various knowledge, artistic enclaves, let them feed off each other as interactive constituents, with "research" points and other advanced resources being produced by these subunits' interaction, encouraged by the player via resource/space investment, with diminishing returns for any one particular collaboration forcing players to shift priorities to new developments. The new goal would be to maintain balance between them (think of the Europa Universalis sliders between army/navy) instead of promoting one particular faction to win out over the others. In a larger sense this would also tie player actions more intricately into the world they inhabit instead of singlemindedly amassing simoleons, move beyond the simplistic pinball notion of high scores in this case a single "cohesion" score.

 

Better yet, allow these creative factions to grow and dwindle in accordance with their relevance to the natural phenomena as understood by society at large, just as resource exploitation already changes along a campaign's progress. So the spacers' guild would balloon in power after the discovery of warp speeds, continue feeding progress as hyperlanes remain relevant but gradually lessen in both economic and intellectual productivity as hyperlanes are supplanted by stargates; ditto for phlogiston theory feeding academic development and dying out with more modern chemistry and physics. New art forms would take advantage of and promote new developments. Even antiquated factions could benefit from new bursts of activity whenever a new one springs up for their interaction, with occasional chances to feed a massive upheaval - for instance the newly-invented archaeology faction reviving a languishing tradition in sculpture/painting and spiraling into an interest in geometric proportion and astral motion.

Let's admit what I'm asking for here is basically Scanners Live in Vain - The TBS.

While Cordwainer Smith played his plot as a personal/spy drama, the very weirdness of the haberman process, were it an everyday reality, can easily be imagined to spiral out to medical, artistic, humanitarian and labor movements, not by decree of God-Emperor Jeff Bezos, but by the experience of seeing one's neighbour manually crank up his nephrons. Redefine social advancement not as handed down by superior social rank, but built up by unpredictable superior minds scattered among the populace.

 

Now, what grand finale you work into such a campaign is up to you, but the sake of ironic counterpoint I suggest a singularity.

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P.S.: EU4's politics are involved enough to perhaps address my complaint here, but I have yet to play an involved/extensive enough run of EU4 to confirm it.

Accursed Dragon

"It's sad that elves just aren't 'special' enough anymore."

FFN#282 (2008/06/04)

 

 

The story gets half-decent after page ~730ish and tanks again around page ~1100ish. Probably not the greatest claim to fame.

 

Accursed Dragon came out strong with its nominal protagonist boasting several cameos on established webcomics. Unfortunately it launched in 2008, coinciding with DnD 4E's Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic. Having glanced at and discounted it back then, I gave it another chance now. I can't honestly recommend its sword&sorcery routine, but it is rather informative of its time: poorly drawn until recently and not particularly artistic now, overblown, disjointed power fantasy copied and pasted from fads.

In terms of specialness inflation, starting with a half-dragon doesn't leave you much room for escalation. Before you even get a clear image of the land the story traverses, nondescript alternate dimensions set to invading the whole world - but lucky we still drink ale in bars. By Act 2 the heroes'/villains' very farts are already leveling mountains DBZ-style and pretty much everyone is a physical god in or out of disguise. Yet due to the very flatness this lack of contrast ensures, everything still plays like a lvl3 dungeon romp for 3-4 players, with level-scaled threats and convenient macguffins.

In terms of storytelling this comic repeats itself much like El Goonish Shive by fixating on the moment in every young adult novel where the plucky young heroine discovers THE POWER WAS INSIDE YOU ALL ALONG, and reiterating that moment character after character, chapter after chapter. And the solution to every problem is yet another new superpower. Worse yet, I hope I'm not spoiling too much by saying pretty much everyone has multiple personalities and rampant, virulent amnesia that would shame the laziest soap opera hacks. Amusingly though, little of this appears haphazard in retrospect, with some twists having been long foreshadowed. It appears rather a case of sheer pigheadedness, with the author playing through a blatantly infantile plot planned a decade in advance and refusing to revise it.

 

As those original plot threads wind down, Accursed Dragon's twists and scale showed brief promises of improvement. Sadly, it's far too deep into its mess of amnesiac multiple personalities to dig itself out now, and the little progress made in its last quarter has (per recent years' insanity) been derailed by introducing one pointless character after another as gratuitous homosexual love interests.

Write off another one.

Spike Spanked; Punk Junk

"Perhaps they'll die, oh yeah"

Ramones - Judy Is a Punk

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"She had it: the thing, the moves. And she'd pulled it all together for her entrance. Pulled it together around the pain in her leg and marched down 3Jane's stairs like she owned the place, elbow of her gun arm at her hip, forearm up, wrist relaxed, swaying the muzzle of the fletcher with the studied nonchalance of a Regency duelist. It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a life-time's observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up on. For a few seconds, he knew, she was every bad-ass hero, Sony Mao in the old Shaw videos, Mickey Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and Eastwood. She was walking it the way she talked it."

 

Molly Millions' moment of glory, from Neuromancer

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The term "punk" usually comes bundled with an idiomatic descriptor: little. As in you "little" punk! Therein you may read both the early success of cyberpunk and where the whole "punk" aesthetic went off the rails.

"The work, which becomes a new genre itself, will be called COWBOY BEBOP"

The text, which became an old joke itself, would flash across your screen during the opening credits and Bebop's commercial breaks, a self-indulgent display of artiste bombast to rival Ayn Rand's claim that she was the only one writing anything original. Despite its undeniable quality and creativity, Cowboy Bebop did not become a genre unto itself, nor founded any new genres. It falls solidly into cyberpunk with even its authors' preferred designation of "neo-noir" just cementing the label. Cyberpunk was film noir with a neophyte-friendly techno spin from its inception. From that noir inspiration cyberpunk inherited the low-class and/or criminal protagonist, and few remark how important it was that Bebop's crew remained little. Small fry. Bottomfeeders. Punks. While their skills and deeds do improve along the show's run, they never balloon in importance as we expect of traditional heroes.

 

When I saw the show in my late teens I was struck by how often Spike especially got his ass handed to him, in contrast to typical movie martial artists kicking entire cities into submission face by face. Yet amazingly this never made him any less impressive.

 

I did not remember that Faye as well grows into her new life gradually. In Ballad of Fallen Angels, Sympathy for the Devil and Heavy Metal Queen she's naive, overconfident. By Waltz for Venus she gets to show off her gunnery and the next episode introduces Ed as comic relief, freeing Faye to shift more toward action and drama. Becoming a full member of the team, taking on contracts and coordinating with the others, nevertheless her self-improvement is repeatedly undercut by lingering adolescent brashness. When she gloves up to fistfight half a dozen guys at once in Jupiter Jazz, she demonstrates a couple of slick moves but is pulled away to safety before she gets herself killed, and a subsequent conversation highlights her outing's self-destructive tone.

Jet as well, though he's introduced as the stable leader of the group, makes subtle use of his tactical experience but is arguably the worst suited of all of them to the moral compromises their lifestyle entails. He loses duels, lacks the control freak qualities to keep the younger two in line and generally displays virtue in merely enduring a life which drives others into desperate suicidal gambits. Interestingly, he's the only one of the main three not truly running from his past, but the fatalistic way he awaits it coming back to bite him fits perfectly with their morbid tendencies.

 

Even Ed, the adorable kid genius superhacker tech wizard, loses the chess game in Bohemian Rhapsody and as often as not shows her very narrow skillset isn't truly enough to survive in their world.

By all of this, Cowboy Bebop held more successfully to the core of cyberpunk than most works which deliberately cling to the label. Remember this is a genre about losers, and this is precisely why it gained such traction, a harsh dose of realism belying the '80s and '90s naive fables of upward mobility and infinite improvement, fed by survivorship bias. Cyberpunk initially appealed to those who realized no amount of personal worth or ability or effort would make the lions share, who saw they would be left in the dust no matter how fast they can run in a world where others can simply buy racecars, and the dust may never again settle. Philip K. Dick grasped the public's subconscious need to acknowledge the increasing futility of personal competition beautifully in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the hollow victories in impossibly mismatched conflicts. The genre's most famous iteration, Neuromancer, confirmed the centrality of loser protagonists. Skilled losers, smart losers, wise losers, determined losers... but nonetheless losers.

Just remember how Molly's grand entrance is resolved, and realize THAT, not her chrome peepers or slick manicure, made her one of the most memorable characters in fiction.

Punks don't save the world. When later entries like Snow Crash deconstructed the genre to death, it was in no small measure by falling back on heroics and comfortable emotional anchors, or recasting loserdom as something to be redeemed instead of a framework to be grokked and acted within.

God Be with Zee

"When Friday comes, we'll all call rats fish

We'll call it all forgotten when we're done"

Rasputina - Rats

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"He must be taught to take off his shoes in a mosque and to wear his hat in a synagogue and to cover his nakedness when taboo requires it, or our tribal shamans will burn him for deviationism."

Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

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"witchcraft to many of us is absurd only on the same ground that our grandfathers’ gigs are absurd.  It is felt preposterous to think of spiritual agencies in connection with ragged beldames soaring on broomsticks, in an age when it is known that mediums of communication with the invisible world are usually unctuous personages dressed in excellent broadcloth, who soar above the curtain-poles without any broomstick, and who are not given to unprofitable intrigues [...] At present, doubtless, in certain circles, unbelievers in heavy gentlemen who float in the air by means of undiscovered laws are also taxed with atheism"

 

George Eliot - The Influence of Rationalism

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Living in a small midwestern town, I've been struggling year by year not to roll my eyes at one of the local hicks' more persistent fads: replacing "have a good day" or simple goodbyes with "have a Blessed day" 'cuz Jesus.

And a merry Shatner to you, is what I keep wanting to reply.

Initially, I felt annoyed at yet another intrusion by superstitious nonsense into daily life. Annoyance shifted to amusement though after realizing these Tweedledumbs don't seem to remember they're crusading against their own superstition. The formulaic "good-bye" started as a mere concatenation of "god be with you" so we're all already telling each other to have god-blessed days, every day.

 

The phrase never lost its meaning. The meaning was forgotten because it was meaningless in the first place, lacking any real phenomenon to describe. It's all hot air anyway. Replace it with "have a blessed day" and in another century everyone will be wishing each other "havleseedy" forgetting where THAT came from and a whole new generation of Christians would be up in arms to Christianize their dreadfully secular greeting formulae by replacing havleseedy with "may Saint Peter fondle you" or whatever.

It reminds me of religious dietary restrictions. Supposedly clear. In the prescriptive: eat certain stuff on certain days. In the proscriptive: don't eat certain stuff on certain days. Pretty simple, right? Except the handful of brutish, unspeakably ignorant herders who made up the initial rules to fit their own isolated corner of the Levant millennia ago obviously had no idea of the greater world or different calendars or how food availability might change with mass extinctions. So the rules for feasting and fasting keep getting reinvented and amended for every new village and continent onto which they're imposed by clerical fiat, constantly piling on new strictures and dispensations, exceptions and compromises, until they make tax forms look as simple as a yes/no question by comparison. Why Yahweh didn't foresee such problems... well, I'm sure you can go ahead and ask him that.

 

Possibly the funniest such dispensation is for new world societies who physically depend(ed) on other game to the point the church's fasting demands might cause mass starvation or more likely apostasy (which from the church's view is far worse.) Which led to papal decrees that since some mammals like beavers and capybaras spend most of their time in the water, they count as fish.

Taa-daaah! Problem solved! It's a fish fuzzillet. Chow down.

That booby fish gambit worked not because it somehow transubstantiated rodents into fish*, but because there was never any reason in the first place not to munch on the giant shaggy swamp rats on a given Friday. Well, y'know, aside from the obvious. The catholics merely cancelled an infinitesimal detail of their utterly gratuitous mountain of demands.

 

Are you noticing a pattern? The demands of the faithful are meaningless, nonsensical... but enforcement is everything. Enforcement is power. And that religious precept goes for the new mythology of social activism as well. Take pronoun policing, forcing everyone, increasingly by law, to pretend you are whatever sex you "identify" as. First of all, it won't last. You can't negate half a billion years of evolution just by twitching your nose and playing pretend. Make calling everyone "they" the law of the land and it will lose meaning. The instinct for reproductive contest will reassert itself. New formulae for discerning sexes will appear. You'll soon find the bearded theys start calling themselves deys and the breasted theys calling themselves zeys, thank you and g'b'wi'ye!

 

But making you call the new aristocracy by the royal "they" is a power-play, just like making you eat fish on Fridays. The real power the church holds lies not in the specific food dictated for Fridays, but in maintaining its authority to dictate, to prescribe and proscribe what you eat, what you wear, whom you fuck and when and by which hole, where and when you work or rest and whither you tithe. (Hint: that last one's particularly important.) Snowflakes' demands are nonsensical, but enforcing nonsense yields verifiable power. Step out of line, call someone by the wrong pronoun, voice socialist sympathies within earshot of Senator McCarthy, get caught with a wiener in your mouth on Friday, and out come the pitchforks and torches. Fanatical devotion to fashionable nonsense is a license to kill. Lysenko could never manage to multiply crop yields without fertilizers uphill both ways through the snow, but adherence to Lysenkoist orthodoxy allowed innumerable incompetents to remove their smarter and more honest competitors or critics from Soviet university ranks, by blacklisting, exile, torture, firing squad, or the intimidation which comes with all of the above.

The wokeysition is just one of an endless continuity of nonsensical beliefs serving as evangelizing pretext. They will make you eat fish, eat rats, eat a dick or eat shit and die. Crucifixes, hammers and sickles, rainbow flags, the pretext doesn't matter. The power-trip matters, and the charlatans and powermongers are the same every time regardless of their pretexts. But I'll get to that in a couple of weeks.

 

For now, may Saint Peter fondle you, each and every one.

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* At least not any more than all land-dwelling vertebrates are fish anyway, because technically the fishes' clade breaks down into paraphyletic unless they include all their descendants like tetrapods - so go ahead and chow down on hamburgers, alligator steaks and chicken nuggets for Lent, or for that matter some long-pig, just let not thine mouthparts toucheth red lobster meat.

 

edit: a couple weeks later turned into eight months later

Peckerin' Time!

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake

You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else"

This Is Your Life

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"The souls of beasts are substantial forms, says Aristotle; and after Aristotle, the Arabian school; and after the Arabian school, the Angelical school; and after the Angelical school, the Sorbonne; and after the Sorbonne, every one in the world."

 

In 1764, the prevailing view on similarity between humans and animals was rooted in religious doctrine despite its pretense of Cartesian mechanism: since animals lack a for-realsies human soul, they must also lack human sentiment, so any animal display of human fear, affection or pain must be somehow counterfeit. Voltaire's "Bêtes" entry from his philosophical dictionary took a concise, razor-witted axe to this notion, somewhat unsuccessfully as mammal vivisection was still widespread enough over a century later to inspire Wells' Moreau. By the straightforward observation and logic of "if it quacks like a duck" Voltaire denied the dishonest presumption that something possessed of similar sense organs and reactions as humans somehow lacks similar sensation.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, I took a walk in the woods last month, only to unwittingly land myself square in the middle of woodpecker mating season.

 

The gentleman in the image is not currently pecking wood. He has his beak open because he's rather noisily advertising his presence, flapping his wings as he hops around in a circle midway up a bare trunk, exposed far from the safety of both canopy or underbrush. Two of them, about twenty meters apart, dueled in chirps and hops on two different yet very similar trees. It took me a while to note their motivation: between them and higher, largely hidden by foliage, a third speckle-winged form kept fluttering a meter left and right, wavering undecided between her two suitors. Cherchez la femme, eh? While I lacked the wherewithal to film the proceedings, others on YouTube have done it, so here's what it looks like in action.

 

Males showing off. Female sitting in judgment of their worth. Walk around the woods sometime. Antlers and songs, flitting and posing, dueling and territories, you'll find innumerable species falling into such charmingly complex yet predictable behavior patterns every single year, at around the same time, in almost exactly the same way. Each male picks similar trees, climbs to similar heights in similarly exposed positions, chirps and flaps and hops and circles and flashes his bright red mullet in pretty much the same fashion, generation after generation. ("What is this bird, who makes its nest in a semicircle when he attaches it to a wall; and in a circle on a tree - this bird does all in the same blind manner!") Riverside forests at dusk reverberate with male tree frogs' serenades. Male rodents roam farther from their burrows. Male lizards climb to high ground to stake out their territory. Female rabbits are more likely to bite their owners. Most spider webs you see are likely to be spun by females. Even in the few species which can spontaneously change sex, behavior changes along with the sex adopted.

 

And here you have yet another species, the East-African plains ape, one monkey among many. Its ancestors' remains display sexual dimorphism going back tens of millions of years. Its relatives near and far display a wealth of divergence in behavior by sex hearkening back hundreds of millions, globally. Through all its history and prehistory, myriads of separate cultures have independently fallen into the same predictable male and female roles the world over.

 

But now, in a span of five years, by dictatorial decree, the sexes suddenly no longer exist, and even acknowledging their existence is punishable by ostracism.

 

This hit home recently when a female applied for a job here demanding to be called "they", which very likely I will be forced to do or be universally and irredeemably blacklisted as a political subversive. The real kicker is that (while not particularly ditzy, and from her initial presentation quite competent in her field) she is so thoroughly a tiny little giggling blonde that she could've jumped straight out of any 1960s teen comedy. In fact the department has employed various females over the past decade, all competent professionals, including in the leadership position, all calling themselves women, who are all less feminine than this one. Not good enough. Suddenly, no traits exist, 'CUZ GIDGET SAYS SO!

Saying sex should not influence sapient behavior is a noble aspiration. Claiming that it does not currently influence the behavior of apes is infantile make-believe. We are subject now, via the highest authority not only of academia but of corporate and government power structures, to every bit as pernicious an unjustifiable dogma as that which led centuries' worth of medical students to vivisect countless dogs under the pretense their suffering is not real. The animal continuity pointed out by Voltaire has not suddenly vanished simply because a gaggle of narcissists (who remain human, all too human in every other quality) decide to make believe they've transcended the human condition by this one disparate leap of faith.

 

A distinction which has physically, verifiably dictated animal behavior for half a billion years, for our myriad ancestors and our myriad relatives, does not cease acting upon our minds simply by social activist fatwa! If gender differences are merely a social construct among plains-apes, then so are they among woodpeckers... and deer... and moths... and towering male elephant seals thrice the size and quintuple the aggression of their mates. All of Noah's Ark must be in on the grand conspiracy. They're all just making it up. Every fucking toad and fucking kangaroo and fucking cuckoo and fucking every fucking fucker fucking capable of fucking fucking must just be pretending that sex matters... so all you need to do is clap your handsies and make believe to turn Tinkerbell into Tinkerclapper... right?

 

Reality is not optional.

 

You don't get to "identify" your ontology into irrelevance. It will come back to bite you. Any subliterate Elmer Fudd toting a hunting rifle knows it's easier to shoot bucks when they're distracted by their horns and horniness, and it doesn't matter one bit whether the stags "identify as" does the rest of the year. But Princeton, Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne all fall below Fudd intellectual standards! The true perversity of this anti-intellectual obeissance before the orthodoxy of gender fabulism comes from the fact that universities, ground zero for such idiocy, should have been the ones to debunk it in the first place, immediately and mercilessly. We can see that just as those woodpeckers hop around trees and trill their fitness to mate and the female flips between them in anticipation of picking her pecker, human males seek to outdo each other to display the high rank females demand in mates, and the female of the species goes into lordosis at the sight of a Rolex or Ferrari. It is not scientific, it is not intellectual, it is not academic, it is not enlightened, it is not honest to flatly, baselessly claim that something possessed of similar sense organs and reactions does not possess similar sensations. Even if we naked apes can act rational on a good day, mindless instinct obviously still dictates most of our behavior, from sugar addiction to herd mentality, and reproduction with its afferent behaviors is baser and more pervasive an instinct than any other. We have not even begun to shed its influence.

 

We should at the very least admit that proselytism of such fads as social constructionism itself is an instinctive means of establishing herd membership and pecking order, and carries a nuptial undercurrent. Sure, it has male adherents, but gender ideology in general borrows legitimacy from the feminist movement. Having its roots in feminist reinterpretation of sex as Marxist class warfare (with masculinity cast as decadent bourgeoisie and the erasure of sex as another version of universal proletarianism) this willful ignorance cannot but register as a demand placed by women on men, and as such, another hoop to jump through in demonstrating one's fitness. Another head-game. The female consensus decrees that good men believe thus; thus men strive to be good in the eyes of women by believing thus. Gidget makes a demand, but it is my male supervisor who orders me to obey her lack of authority. Remember it does not initially matter that the woodpecker's mullet is red or any other color. Only that once redness becomes attractive, nothing else will do. It does not matter whether the dogma makes sense. Only that proclaiming it establishes one as friendly to women.

 

The virulent spread of this insane notion that all gender is socially constructed should itself (were any still capable of grasping the irony) falsify its own claims.

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P.S.: I would've titled this post "twitterpation" if the birds in question had been anything other than peckers. (Or boobies, I suppose. (Or tits. (Or any species of cock.)))

How vile!

Crickets Below Zero

The heat's catching up with us, so let's have a picture from this past February. I went for a walk in the woods by the lake, the silent wintry woods by the depopulated frosted-over lake. Rounding a hillock I grew aware of an unseasonal soundtrack intruding on the deathly stillness: crickets.

Crickets? Had we had enough warm days for them to awaken? But even then it would be too early for them to start advertising for mates. Plus we'd just had a cold snap. Who the hell had set loose several thousand...

Wait, never mind.

It was ice by the shore, wafted by only the gentlest hint of wave motion, a thin, freshly-broken crust grinding, scratching, squeaking, and yes, chirping, millions of crystalline needles resonating in chorus. Not that I'd never heard grinding ice before, on rooftops, ground, by the seashore, on stormy lakes, on rushing rivers... but it's funny how a few changes in conditions, in thickness, wind intensity or exact temperature gradient, can make for a completely new experience.

BG3: The 3-years-running preamble

"You're sitting in the same spot, you wanna go home
But there ain't no home but home on the range
You've forgotten what you look like and it looks like you've forgotten
That the look inside your eye is very strange"

 

Scatman John - Quiet Desperation

 

 

Welcome to "Jugs", or Bidonville the cRPG.

 

Having described in my last post what I think are relatively high stakes for Baldur's Gate 3's success, let's see about that "early access" teaser everyone used to talk about. After my scheduled ocular exam from a cave squid (I didn't remember eye drops being so viscous/vicious) we proceed to character creation, and I already hate this. Every glimpse I get of D&D5e is an advertisement for letting D&D finally die in favor of better RP systems... but that's a topic for another day.

For now I made a throwaway Strongheart Halfling Barbarian with scores 14/14/14/12/8. (edit: it saw me through most skill checks just fine in chapter 1)

(Side-note: even in a fantasy world, you're not "non-binary" if you come from a sexually reproducing species, any more than hobbits are made of candy. I'm mean, they'd LIKE to be made of candy... but wanting it don't make it so.)

The "who do you dream of" step needs better explanation. I had to google it to find out it's not a real character. (Incidentally, I made a smokin' hot little hobbita)

My first 2 impressions:

1) This is obviously a re-skinned Original Sin, from terrain to animations to object interactions, which was to be expected given how rapidly Larian cranked out the "early access" version while still patching D:OS2. Even the beach landing screams "welcome to Cyseal" along with lugging around a gratuitous shovel for treasure digging. Whether it eventually turns into a BG3 or OS3 remains to be seen.

2) Much like Skyrim, the overly-flashy intro caters to subhuman retards who want the action cranked to 11 nonstop. (Granted, the dragon-on-skyship action DOES look great but still, save it for act 5.) Insta-bake Illithids don't help matters, though that one's probably Wizards of the Coast's fault. As another example, NWN's most memorable first act fight was against an intellect devourer. One. Uno. Ein. Un. Ichi. That number right there -> 1. It was a pitched fight against a weird and difficult enemy. BG3's very tutorial has you mow down a baker's dozen of the damn things. Instead of an homage, it merely registers as meaningless third grade one-upmanship: I got a million points! Nuh-uhhh! I got ten million!

Goes hand in hand with power inflation. Cantrips with 1d10 damage? 4d6 for a lvl 1 spell? Magic spear at level 2?

Nonetheless I was pleasantly surprised at both the scale and detail of BG3's first chapter, and the stunning amount of work going into it. 

No, seriously, hat off, one thing I cannot accuse the developers of is shirking their work. A rare display of professionalism in an industry which by tradition pockets your money and moves on to the next project as quickly as possible.

In contrast to my complaints of, for instance, Tides of Numenera, the overland zone is huge, nesting proportional underground/indoor zones. As in D:OS2, pretty much every NPC is individually voiced, and rather well to boot! (Though, couldn't you get some native latin-root speakers for the chanting druids? Their pronunciation is horribilis!) The writing, at least on a line-by-line basis, sounds competent for once, with even the many, many minor characters displaying personalized affectations and inflections. Dialogue interactions integrate character traits with pleasing frequency, and the quests so far have boasted an impressive array of diverging/interweaving combat/stealth/dialogue paths building on your previous choices without locking you into a single gameplay style. And the visual artists come up with some inspired gimmicks.

Writing, voice acting, 3D modeling, level and mission design, there's a lot of expertise displayed. The individual talent is there, across all categories.

But the central direction is off.

 

Larian has not yet shaken its fifteen-year history of knockoff "action" Diablo clones, nor the casual fairytale atmosphere that goes along with that. As good as their individual encounters may be, their disdain for an overarching plot or power curve tends to kill tension, immersion or the memorable epic buildup of roleplaying. You just adventure, because that's what you do because you're an adventurer and adventurers adventure.

 

Even NWN2, with its painfully generic setup, justified your various side-quests with varyingly flimsy pretexts. But in BG3, despite setting out with the imperative "we must find a healer, we must find a healer" I immediately digress into killing thieves and exploring an ancient temple with no explanation. And despite crashing in the middle of nowhere from another dimension, I met literally scores of locals without a single line of dialogue letting me ask where the hell am I?!? There's zero sense of the player setting out on a journey, planning out a course of action. You're just another 3D model the developers throw at random encounters.

Another example: the folks at Larian love puzzles. Too bad they're not very good at crafting them.

Not that it was likely even meant as a puzzle, but here's something buried under the rock. Can you dig it up with your shovel? No. Can you use your character's "shove" action, maybe combined with a strength check? No. Can you lift the rock, possibly using some sort of lever to let another party member grab the loot? No. Just click and drag. Why the fuck do I have all these tools at my disposal if all I needed is the trusty old MS Windows pointer?

An actual puzzle gives you a magically locked chest next to an statue/altar surrounded by candles. You find a prayer sheet. Given the deity in question is light-related, I tried lighting all the candles. I tried snuffing out all the candles. I tried reading the prayer, but it gives no description of actions to undertake and no hint it performs any action. I wondered if maybe I should return at night. I tried reading the prayer while standing in front of the statue as a ritual. Give up? Read the prayer at The Loot. Because you're expected to be so hyper-focused on The Loot as to ignore any context and simply mash your inventory against The Loot until you get The Loot, like a brainless fucking chimp smashing a rock against a tree to make it grow fruit.

 

Another "puzzle" has you trying to open a typical secret passage behind a bookcase. Granted, a candelabrum lever right next to the case would've been too obvious, but Larian's attempt at originality is smashing apart a random box in another corner of the same dwelling, among dozens of other nondescript boxes, barrels, jugs and trunks littering the room. Which brings us to the biggest problem: so far, BG3's all about the jugs

 

 and more jugs

and more jugs

there are literal thousands of containers and pieces of trash loot to sift through in the first chapter alone. Take the same idiocy from D:OS2 and square it. While interactable forks and mugs are common enough in The Elder Scrolls, what looks immersive from a first-person perspective is teeth-grinding clutter from a tactical viewpoint. Worse still, you really do benefit from collecting as much trash as you can early on for cash value. Spending all my time stockpiling bottles and cans really puts the hobo in murder hobo, in jarring dissonance to the overblown power fantasy with which the actual story opens.

You don't have to look far for other signs Larian's really ladling on the idiot appeal:

- the overblown animations (even basic actions like dash and jump have spell-like special effects, and the barbarian's rage looks like a fucking Implosion)

- the teleportation, which though not yet quite as absurd as in D:OS2, includes the 2nd level spell Misty Step (more WotC's fault, again) and free cross-map teleportation out of combat*, letting you cheat your way out of some troublesome locations like the final temple, and of course the first spiders you encounter are phase spiders

- fitting that same lack of forethought, the D&D alignments are simply removed without any attempt to replace them, no stated ethos for the player to follow**

- fetishizing the hobby (much like Solasta) with rolling dice animations for skill checks

- romance options. That nonsense needs to die. 'Nuff said.

- the camera is absolutely infuriating, straightjacketed to both your current position and to the terrain, never letting you get your bearings, and the map useless across multiple z-levels. Don't plan ahead. Just beach-comb.

- (edit: plus, the lack of highlighting for many interactable objects turns much of your time into that lowest of genres, a hidden object game)

- the general encounter design philosophy of throwing random shit at the wall to see if it sticks (to quote my IWD2 playthrough "sounds like you ran out of ideas and defaulted to leafing randomly through the monster manual") with just the first chapter being a pot luck of goblins, wargs, ogres, bugbears, harpies, hyenas, gnolls, gith, skeletons, bandits, druids, tieflings, intellect devourers, witches, owlbears, bears, devils, demons, dragons, mind flayers, vampires, giant spiders, drow, ents, imps, fairies, etc. Plus a frog. All scattered pell-mell across the landscape. Granted, Larian was trying to show off its range with demo content, but still, would it have killed you to stick to a central opening theme like mortuary, swamp, snow or plague?

But the worst of these is the endless, mind-numbing loot sifting, with no indication of potential utility (rope? hammer and tongs?) random amphoras scattered across dunes, woods, mud and hills, and a big redundant pile of +1 weapons by level 4, obviously banking on sub-sapient gambling addiction to keep players clicking jug after jug after jug. Power creep, specialness inflation, no sense of proportion, appealing to mindless degenerates incapable of forming coherent plans, who must be fed cheats (teleportation) and can only react to a constant stream of animalistic reward stimuli (loot) as conditioned reinforcement. All the evident talent and effort this company has mustered is directed toward treating their customers for a tactical RPG like the same mindless trash hack'n'slashing 10,000 rats in "action" games.

 

At first I was afraid BG3 would fail. Now I'm even more afraid it might succeed, and irrevocably redefine RPGs as a genre for those with no attention span, completing the work of Diablo clones.

 

 

 

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* Why not go the Solasta route instead and implement fast travel over the map, capable of being interrupted?

** If you don't think the old alignments could be applied to BG3, consider that I as Chaotic Neutral would gladly let myself get transformed into any number of monstrosities... but never a slaving mind-controlled mind controller.