Look Di, if ya weren't such a dim bulb, we wouldn't need this ugly thing

 

 

Teut Teut Universalis

"Listen, it's time I let you in on a little secret, Marge. The right house is the house that's for sale. The right person is anyone."

The Simpsons S09E09 Reality Bites

 

 

Well, having abandoned my previous playthrough when Freakin' Pomerania kicked off the Thirty Years' War early, I chanced a few more attempts with the Teutons and finally lived the tell the tale.

 

Normally I'd bumrush the Livonian Order right out the gate for early territorial gains (look, if I don't do it, the Danes or Muscovites will) which stands a good chance of also netting me the profitable Riga, and also befriend Lithuania to forestall a Polish-Lithuanian offensive. Problem with that being I'm not quite adept enough at gaming the politics for war declarations that don't set the whole HRE against me, so it didn't leave much room for expansion.

 

This time I started by allying the Livonians, Bohemia, Hungary and Wolgast (the last being an absolute necessity until I can conquer the province of Netz/Nietz/Notec linking me to my two western provinces.) The key to success turned out to be leaving a diplomat continually currying favors to lower Hungary's opinion of Austria as often as I could. Without Hungary as an ally, Austria did not take off as it normally does, which also generally weakened the HRE far down the line - a double edged sword, as the French made more headway in that direction than I did. (For starters: Alsace got Lorrained.)

One important trick in EU4 vs. EU3: you can juggle the new "powers" currency system by investing in development then rapidly playing catch-up technologically and declaring war on the cusp of institution spread, when empires' tech investment stagnates. In this case I barely scrambled for military tech 8 in time not to get Poled to death. The first big war put me on the defensive but managed to snatch all 6 northern Polish provinces, plus split Stettin with my ally Wolgast, quickly followed by more 1530s land gains in Poland-Lithuania, which damn near bankrupted me but also allowed establishment of that large army with a small state attached.

(Also, since the Livonian Order broke our alliance by refusing to join in the war, it predictably got instantly flattened by Denmark.)

 

Baltic trade started picking up a bit, giving me more cash to play with. Kept Bohemia/Hungary/Wolgast as allies and finagled Switzerland and unfortunately Russia - a devil's bargain, but necessary to protect against Denmark, which has absolutely, intractably hated my Teutonic self in every playthrough. When Protestantism caught up with me I decided to convert, but was forced to devote the next few decades to putting down revolts, paying off my gigantic pile of loans and fighting inflation, and the religious split (along with Bohemia as divisive ally) cost me my Hungarian alliance. A series of Austrian wars left central Europe in shambles.

 

The surprise split of Galicia-Wolhynia from Poland-Lithuania gave me a small but valuable little wedge into their territories. Having to decline a war I was in no economic shape to fight lost me the Bohemian/Wolgast alliances and forced an awkward, desperate, unstable Swedish/Russian/Prussian block to deter the Danes or Ottomans. For a few decades I focused on smaller states, vassalizing Lippe and Ruppin, allying Thuringia, all in an infuriatingly gradual effort at dividing and conquering those nigh-infinite German principalities.

 

In the early 1600s I finally accrued enough leverage to invade Brandenburg and take, among other provinces Berlin. Which is how Werwolfe discovered that even if the "infamy" system was nerfed from EU3 to EU4's "aggressive expansion" it still has its breaking point. That and a last partition of Poland resulted in an almost pan-European coalition against me.

C'mon Bohemia, be cool, we split Poland together!

Dear reader, I don't mind admitting at this point I just exited game and went to bed, and very much wanted to be twelve years old again so I could cry myself to sleep.

...

But, when I fired up EU4 again days later, I survived the coalition by retreating into Siberia, dragging the war out for better terms. In the end I lost my vassals, plus the provinces of Mazovia and Stettin, but kept Berlin and Brandenburg, which was my main goal, so a marginal, technical win.

 

Hilariously, the peace terms worked out even more in my favor in the long run, leaving tiny principalities desperate for a strong ally and letting me re-ally Stettin and vassalize/annex Rupin/Lusatia/Mazovia peacefully. Unfortunately (but predictably) Russia forced me to cut relations with Sweden (and at this point I don't dare lose that historically accurate Russian bulwark against the Ottomans) but luckily a new regional power had grown out of the eastern starting Austrian provinces: Styria! And it hates my Bohemian rival!

Another interesting side effect of the Russian devil's bargain was it cockblocking me from invading Lithuania by guaranteeing its independence for a solid century. Until, that is, Lithuania made the mistake of vassalizing Galicia-Volhynia, giving me a backdoor war declaration which didn't prompt the Russians to intervene. (Basically the reverse of Geneva dooming so many of my Savoyard attempts.) Nabbed me the entire western border of Lithuania, plus vassalized Galicia-Volhynia myself.

 

So, in retrospect, that apparently disastrous coalition turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

The biggest turning point was spotting the Ottoman Empire weakened by fighting the Timurids (thank you, ledger spying!) which resulted in a gigantic dogpile by myself, Russia, Bohemia, France, Spain, Tuscany, Milan, decisively turning the tables against the Ottomans:

With everyone busy, I also managed to pivot and declare war on Bohemia for slight territorial edge against it (luckily the Turkish gains didn't stack much for "aggressive expansion" purposes; no coalition this time.) Sadly, Hungary also regained much of its territory, but my Styrian allies also made out like bandits.

The elephant in the room (as always) is France, which has increasingly encroached into central Europe and moreover allied the equally powerful Spain through the game's last two centuries. Due to my advance into Lithuania, Russia also breaks its alliance with me. From ~1700 on, East Frisia, Milan, and the Timurids served as surprisingly useful future anvils to my hammer against my actual neighbours, and a follow-up offensive against a weakened Ottoman empire as soon as the truce wore off earned me most of the Balkans and Carpathians.

Then things got boring. Having doubled my territory, for most of the 1700s I struggled to consolidate it. The Age of Revolutions itself seems a pause button, as everyone struggles to violently inhere into the system those bloody peasants! Moreover, Russia allied Portugal and France in addition to Spain allied Scandinavia, leaving things at a decades-long detente. (Though I did wipe out Hungary as an afterthought ~1740.)

 

 

The break came when France turned against Scandinavia, which led the HRE at the time, thereby weakening the empire enough for an incursion against Bohemia and Opole. Then, after another Scandinavian war against the English this time, and empire leadership passing to the far weakened Austria, I again declared war on Bohemia in 1780 as a feint to finally and at long last take the Pomeranian provinces from Lubeck ( FREAKIN' POMERANIA, I SWEAR ! ) The last Austrian provinces in the NW fall to France. Styria automatically gets renamed Austria, yielding the odd situation of finishing a war against Austria by congratulating my ally Austria. Le roi est mort, vive le roi, I guess *shrug*

A large empire's economic strength but military weakness is of course its size, and in 1795, taking advantage of the Chinese kingdoms keeping it busy in the East (plus my Timurid ally) I snagged the entire Russian border, fighting it to a draw until it surrendered the provinces from exhaustion. The last three decades are spent gradually chipping away at Bohemia two or three provinces at a time, plus another advance into Russia. In 1800 East Frisia declares war letting me snatch Riga and another Bohemian province as war ally. Milan declares war on Tuscany. In 1806 the HRE finally disbands. Aaaaand, France and Spain finally declare war on me, which would've ended in disaster had I not managed to run out the clock.

So, class, what have we learned?

First of all, Rostock can kiss my ass.

More importantly, I stand by my statement that ths is a game more about classic 4X opportunistic territorial expansion than a coherent, stable "grand" strategy governing your empire, and alliances shift on a dime. Maybe matters might fall out differently if I try some state less infamously militaristic than Prussia, but I'm not holding my breath.

I love a lot of the smaller mechanics improved in EU4 (too many to even describe) and can certainly appreciate the historically accurate attention to detail. Buuutt... the general direction of the series is still too fixated on world conquest instead of delving each individual state's local adventure. A massive "economic base" penalty to small-medium states vassalizing each other, a weakened infamy system, shorter periods of rebellion after conquest, and AI programmed to give itself massive opinion penalties against you if you "have provinces it wants" plus other changes all add up to forcing the consolidation of large empires if anything even faster than in #3, and aside from the designated winners, most stand little chance of survival.

Look at that last map. Not just the HRE, not just Europe, but Africa and Asia as well spontaneously coalesced into massive blobs, wiping out the vast majority of states. I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is one of the last games that should ever have been given a high score counter.

Wince upon a time, ouch!

Vagrus: The Revisited Realms

"And Hell was so cold

All the vases are so broken

And the roses tear our hands open

Mother Mary miscarry but we pray just like insects

And the world is so ugly now "

 

Marilyn Manson - Great Big White World

 

 

I suppose it's as good as any a marker of a game's nerdiness (and concomitantly of your own) when you start spotting Sindarin in-jokes among its nomenclature. Upon reinstalling that-game-that-misspelled-my-name-in-its-preorder-credits (a.k.a. Vagrus: The Riven Realms) I decided to start a new playthrough but stick to my usual chaotic neutral elvish wizard/druid routine.

One of my first lore pages informed me we half-elves (full-blooded elves being unavailable as PCs in this setting) are also known as "pereldin" which tidbit I'd missed the first time around. As in half-elda, from the same root word as periannath. So yeah, if the gratuitous Latin wasn't enough for you, have some Elvish. Wanna sneak some Klingon in there for the full wedgie trifecta?

Oh, I've missed you, Vagrus. To the point your name came up in other conversations.

Intriguing enough to preorder, captivating enough at launch, encompassing most angles of good strategy/RPGs and charmingly dedicated to its setting's immersiveness where most developers tend to play the too cool for school card, Vagrus nevertheless suffered initially from some odd misconceptions about its basic design.

 

The first one's an oldie: a time limit on your campaign, an issue the entire industry should have learned to beware following its unpopularity in the original Fallout, to the point Black Isle had to patch it out of the game. Now Lost Pilgrims also had to go back and patch it out of Vagrus, not that it affected me much since I hit the freeplay option anyway. Steeped in fantasy and RPGs as the devs obviously are, they should've realized that while individual quest deadlines can be great, the hero's journey as a whole must center on the hero and not on external constraints. (Or at least not obviously on external constraints.) Also, there's not much point in buying freeform exploration only to race through an optimized linear sequence to the finish line.

Relatedly, development started in the wake of the survival craze kicked off by the likes of Banished and Amnesia, but getting randomly killed by overpowered events plays out very differently in a long RPG campaign. I can handle disasters changing/defeating my game plan in a five-hour Frostpunk game, but losing anything irreplaceable (like companions) during a fifty or hundred-hour RPG campaign is generally a big no-no. Killing off characters, even if it don't get your legs broke by Kathy Bates, should still be handled with commensurate decorum. If resulting from a momentous quest decision (e.g. me tossing Shadowheart to her reverend mother or turning against my party at the end of Dragonfall) sure, it can make for a memorable moral quandary, but permanently, meaninglessly losing your plucky band to random crits merely prompts reloads. Not to mention it'd lock you out of most quests (which as a rule involve a companion combat step along the way) plus the question of utility:

In contrast to most RPGs with a dozen henchmen overflowing only five slots, where letting one die would still leave you with a full party and you'd only really miss out on its personal quest, Vagrus' companions can also fill one or two strategic support roles ("deputies" to you, pahtnah) boosting your economic / strategic efficiency. There do technically exist placeholders (specialists from House Oquo at Drusian Quarry) for some of these roles, but especially on a first playthrough, not having tested the full extent of their availability, not knowing whether you can support them financially, having painstakingly scraped together a stable caravan size and not knowing how much efficiency you can lose before losing viability, not even knowing what viability means for coming challenges, once again strictly equates losing a companion to forcing a reload.

Lost Pilgrims did address this issue in part. Either I'm making better choices or companions' loyalty/favor currying minigame appears more lenient now, as the pissy little whiners haven't been ditching me like they used to. (I do have to wonder why Vagrus didn't just imitate Mount&Blade: Warband's system where companions could be re-recruited after some time in random taverns.) Also, the addition of Vorax in a truly well-traveled location helps with the crippling early-game scarcity. He's rather useless in combat except to soak damage, but while a meat shield doesn't make companion combat any more interesting, at least it makes it less frustratingly reload-prone.

I'm seeing a decrease in other gratuitous punishments hurled at the player. Highway tax events, while still present enough to remind you to favor off-roading when viable, are less frequent. The "crowded camps" morale debuff for a large caravan which so annoyed me has either been lifted or lifted to a much higher headcount threshold. Basically, I criticized Vagrus at launch as a freeform game with a torque wrench fixed idea for how you should progress (especially early on) which is to say the developers presumed they could read their customers' minds but misread us repeatedly. Most changes I'm seeing two years on unfortunately fall into making the game generally easier, but also necessarily acknowledge the old pitfall of putting players through their paces instead of enabling them to actually... y'know... play! Inelegant, but workable.

 

Elegance lies in the writing and in managing trade routes. The Riven Realms wouldn't stand out for basic fantasy set pieces: fireballs, dragons, zombies, demons, the usual Tolkienish races with unfortunately trite modern feel good spins like orcs as noble tribal warriors, and a generically Romanesque empire. But it excels in actually fleshing out these gimmicks, diving into Latin terminology for the empire's culture, playing up the postapocalyptic setting not merely for pathos but for the new culture's adaptations to current conditions, lending each town you visit its own personality whether via inhabitants or geography or major institutions, and managing the rare feat of acting genre-conscious but not jaded at even the most hopelessly re-trod material.

"They turned into ghouls" would read the lazy blurb for such a location as Tectum Kelvar in most other games. (I assume I'm not spoiling much, given you have to fight said ghouls on your way down.) But as blasé as we've justifiably become about zombies, rare are the writers still willing and able to recall the old creeping dread inherent in the infection itself, in the gradual loss of humanity, in the collapse of the cannibalism taboo and of a society not merely instantly breaking down into biters and raiders, but struggling hopelessly as best it can against the inevitable.

 

I'm edging into mid-game now.

I've also raised Criftaa, Gor'Goro and Finndurarth to level 3 and Renkailon to level 2*, allowing me to begin diving farther into the lore, as at Tectum Kelvar. So far I must say my favorite aspect of Vagrus is how well its RP/expository side blends into a core loop more literal than most. Paying your crew by the day you can never afford to stand still, and the name of the game is multitasking to get the most out of each trip. Tour nearby towns, buy low, sell high, balancing supplies vs. profit margins, balancing passengers and pack beasts vs. upkeep costs over your planned travel range. As you level up, become more cost-efficient, amass more cash to finance longer trips, you begin moving in ever wider circles, and every expedition becomes an opportunity to complete some long-standing quest or another.

 

Back when Civilization was still new on the market, many grew fascinated by "one more turn" syndrome, where you keep telling yourself you'll set just this one more thing to rights, finish this one more battle, build this one more courthouse, until you find yourself ninety turns later at 3 a.m. It's gradually been explained by a mix of short and long-term goals, the turn-by-turn resource and unit management feeding into the greater campaign goal of WOWRLD DOMAHNAYSHUN!!! so that one feels neither stuck nor aimless, but constantly, verifiably, reassuringly, validatingly advancing toward success.

 

RPGs accomplish much the same by mixing long-distance quests with opportunistic flower-picking or gear upgrades. Mount&Blade laid out a particularly clear pattern: move in a wide circuit taking advantage of towns' price differences for different trade goods while also maximizing the number of quests you can complete at varying distances and passing through warzones while also giving your army a chance to recover. Due to its more stringent caravan maintenance requirements, Vagrus does an even better job of pacing your outward spiral and interspersing it with plot-based content. You never lose the impetus to stock up on some salt or mushroom beer for sale at the next town; your focus merely shifts toward feeding the profit from salty shrooms toward a long-term accomplishment, rewarding forward planning.

 

So to advance Nedir's quest I'm still short a couple of spectral residues. Maybe It's time I tried that exorcism in Deven... and if I'm headed to Deven I may as well detour through Auguros Work Camp... and if I'm doing that maybe I'll try the valley of sleepers, see what that's about. Ooooh, looks like Tenebvitris currently offers lots of faction quests for Lumen/Arken though. And if I'm detouring west, I may as well set out light, grab that manticore skeleton for the boners over at Ioscian, angle through Drusian then pick up a larger crew in Larnak/Arken, load up on trade goods and maybe detour back through the Shelter or through the Crimson Gate or rush straight to Auguros depending on fetch quest availability. Beer, obsidian, crystal, marble, metal/salt... oooh, maybe a stack of dried fruit on the way back for the bugs? Remember to pick up another book! And if I do eventually hit Avernum for Nedir, I may as well continue through the Sadirar lands and try to finish off their quest chain, then some skullduggery in Larnak I'll likely be ill-suited to, and then? Who knows?

 

Look, it's a simple fifty-seven step plan...

 

And at every step there awaits not just some perfunctory dopamine-boosting LEVEL UP! reward stimulus or trash loot, but another immersively written foray into the cataclysmic world your character inhabits, a lovable little lost waif to escort back to her uncle, a demonic portal to scout, a tragic tale of another lost settlement, a strange new world or new civil-eye-zation. Rewarding both long-term plans and flexible opportunism, both freeform exploration and page-turning lore delving, arithmetic and spatial orientation, self-conscious in its nerdy appeal, poetic yet rarely self-indulgent, vast yet well-paced, I would say Vagrus should kick off a whole new fad in game design... but decades watching this industry repeatedly collapse onto the lowest common denominator leave me instead merely content to number myself among its dedicated, if small, following.

 

Bite ya later, vagri. I've got a caravan to load.

__________________________________

 

* Technically, leveling up your companions from your own XP pool is a good mechanic, laying more burden of choice on the player to prioritize and rewarding a complex game plan. Intellectually, I approve. Viscerally, I hate it. Feels like I'm lending them my underwear.

 

edit 20204/04/25:

Oh, come on, Kadaath in the outer realms? Seriously? And the elf-like race of Ithil? That's Klingon enough for me. Pants' em.

Cc: Utnapishtim

Around 2010 I was reading something from the 1950s and was amused at realizing the author had been inspired by work from the 1890s. More recently I read something that other worker had worked in 1915, and found it odd to see him reference something from 1775. But is it so long ago? 109 years vs. 140, give or take a generation, still amounts to a house of mirrors. Maybe that's what writers are, prisms through which the incommensurate past may be broken into intelligible wavelengths, and refracted futures focused onto a microscope slide. If you can only point your antenna through the static...

Hearing a bit of hub-bub about the Indian election, I notice all the chatter about religious and economic concerns, corruption, trade, development, etc. still omits politicians' stance on that one tiny detail:

POPULATION CONTROL !!! 

 

 

 

 

 

Twice upon a time, there was a twice upon a time.

"If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself"

"I dedicate this song to my boys who are strong

They just don't go along"

 

Kill Hannah - Unwanted

 

 

I tried the NYTimes Wordle last year for about 100 days. The results weren't terrible, 95% success rate before they cut off my stats to force me to create an account, which forced me to quit altogether. Despite losing my patience and throwing the game several times (the only word I honestly tried and couldn't suss was "ninja" (in my defense, they're sneaky)) I could manage most by the fourth line. But leaving aside my recalcitrant nonconformism, I found the experience reminiscent of text adventure games. Your minds are simply too alien for me to read.

Or maybe I'm weird.

Back when playing City of Heroes, I'd set up a pretty nifty hero base and fang shooed the base teleporters according to both general map directions and target zone levels in a way that made intuitive sense to me. Logging in one evening, I was shocked to find my sole remaining active partner in the guild had remodeled and rearranged the tubes in some utterly incomprehensible, meaningless fashion. I was livid! For something like fifteen minutes I wandered the base back and forth struggling in vain to make heads or tails of why and how he'd scrambled my handy pattern, working myself into a fine lather mentally workshopping just how I'd take him to task for his vandalism. I couldn't make heads or tails of the order he'd chosen. It was insane, it was wrong, it was evil, it was... alphabetical.

Oh.

So maybe I'm weird.

Seeing my car low on gas inflicted on me, as it does on occasion, a twinge of guilt at my consumption of this critical resource. Maybe I should take the bus to the supermarket, maybe I should walk to pick up my pizza, maybe I should walk around the block instead of driving to the woods to walk the trails. At the same time the car had developed an odd vibration when I pressed the brakes. Worried my new brake pads might be faulty, I took it in. Diagnosis: rust. Rusted brakes from not driving often enough.

The company from which I ordered this computer started spamming my e-mail with a-may-zing low-low-offers on brand-sparking-new top-quality systems. I wondered why the sudden flux, when I hadn't heard from them since my purchase a couple years prior, then realized: they can't expect you to buy a second one right away, right? So apparently, two years is the accepted timeframe in which to buy a whole new computer! My last one lasted over a decade, and the switch was prompted by Microsoft forcing planned obsolescence with Windows versions. My previous one seven or eight years. I'm planning on making this one live to fifteen, a couple component swaps notwithstanding. Even assuming the company's 2yr estimate is estimated in their interest and doubling it, buying a new system every four years is something I thought a relic of the '90s when crucial technologies like modems and floppy disks were changing from year to year and components were still routinely being damaged by heat.

But maybe I'm weird.

I felt guilty grabbing take-out or fast food instead of supermarket fare until I noticed the restaurant was packed to overflowing as is every other eatery's parking lot every day of the week. Only then did I remember for half of Americans it's a daily routine.

I felt guilty throwing out a sock or shirt every couple of months, or buying a new pair of sneakers when my old one's heels fall apart, until I ran across the jaw-dropping statistic that I'm supposed to be throwing out 37 kilos of clothes a year! How?!? Even allowing for that average to have been, say, doubled by factory overstock that never reaches consumers, how can you manage tossing a suitcase of clothes every year? Guess I could shop for disposable lead undies or something.

I felt guilty about my electric and water bills until utility companies started including usage statistics on the bills, which put me at about 1/2-2/3 of my neighbours' consumption, this being near a college surrounded by single-occupant, one-bedroom apartments. But as I write this amidst a locally chilly April, I can already hear an air conditioner running across the street.

 

So maybe I never realized how weird I am.

I remember some years ago, having gone back to college, voicing some difficulty finishing a professor's exams within the hour. The girl I was talking to helpfully suggested I tell them I'm disabled. What? Yeah, sure, just go to the counseling center and tell 'em you're disabled. They'll let you take the test in private and take however much time you need.

No, I did not do that. I dropped the course. So yeah, I'm a great big waste, I'm a failure, and maybe I'm weird. Because it never occured to me to weaponize my weirdness. At least not against anyone except myself.

 

You want success? You want this world? You can keep it.

Once upon a time, there was a blogger who considered he probably shouldn't keep these going too much longer 'cause they're wearin' a mite thin.

The Mote in God's Eye

"We have wrought upon ourself and others
With a slow and vicious gun
And although pratfalls can be fun
Encores can be fatal

 

And we don't wanna read the signs that you bore
You know, the kind of sign you hang on a door
Saying "we'll be back" what a crack
Now, don't you think we might have heard that before?"

 

Andrew Bird - Heretics

 

 

Guess I'm on a bit of a Niven kick this year. In addition to The Integral Trees I queued up its sequel for later, re-read Protector (which always felt more packed with ideas than Ringworld, absence of big dumb object notwithstanding) and picked up The Mote in God's Eye while I was at it. Often title-dropped but rarely discussed so that I honestly didn't even know what subgenre of SF I'd be reading, it turned out to be one of the finest first contact stories I've ever run across!

 

Most of the book's flaws come from playing up its setting, which even in 1974 would've been readily recognizable as a space opera space empire with a space navy and space marines... and that's about it. (I'd guess Pournelle's CoDominium normally gives politics primacy instead of relegating it to plot-unrelated backstory filler.) Also, had it limited itself to a five-man band or similar roster, the lengthy introductions may have felt less painful, but a full warship's complement took me until mid-novel to even partially distinguish, especially as their personalities rarely diverge from HelloSailors #1-15. More concisely obstructive, the climax gets interrupted so the daring space captain/prince and the plucky princess can marry... and keep getting married for a whole chapter or two... and if you're waiting for that to acquire some relevance to meeting an alien species, no, not unless you count women hailing from Venus. I kept imagining storyboard space allocated to: "a wedding, a wedding, we're going to have a wedding!"

On the flip-side, that weird pause also demarcates the last third of the novel, one third longer than you'd expect it to run. After the space marines battle valiantly against an invasion plus a plucky band of heroes stumble upon the grand reveal, leading to a climactic chase scene and heroic stand, you'd think a story'd just wind down for a few pages to a sappy conclusion. Mote instead uses the wedding breather to launch into the real pay-off: the stand-off. In the end, the two writers did end up complemeting each other well, as human militarism and political infighting reflects on the moties' own quirk recalling pak mental inflexibility and bouts for supremacy.

A fifty year old novel inevitably suffers from some more or less excusable lapses. For one thing it places heavy emphasis on security to prevent spying and invasions. On closer inspection their security measures are laughable, with lots of spottily supervised physical contact and ship boardings. Given what we now know about miniaturization, letting a potentially hostile alien just pack an overnight bag (including housepets!) and hop on over to our boat sounds crazy. Crazy Eddie even. And if the lack of teleoperation, video conferencing, simulations or automation merely reflects how badly Moore's Law blindsided us all, 1970s epidemiology would certainly have raised an eyebrow at the lack of quarantine. The moties' focus on engineering contrasted with an apparently rudimentary understanding of biology would've also been better served by the explicit absence of a doctor caste as plot point.

 

But overall The Mote in God's Eye does an excellent job of presenting an alien species strange enough to be alien but without reaching for nonsense as originality, at once sub- and super-human, initially inscrutable before discovering their driving psychosis, the proverbial beam in their own eyes. It obviously inspired many of the caste-divided aliens I've run across in later decades' scifi. Motie history itself, though not given enough worldbuilding attention for my tastes, recaps several popular scifi scenarios offhandedly. If anything, the writing lingers on the human point of view for too long and would've benefited from a more decisive shift to motie psychology toward the end, recalling Asimov's The Gods Themselves whose third part I can barely remember, a let-down after the highly thoughtful middle section. Nevertheless, the last three chapters deliver solidly on the ambiguity of a well-executed first contact premise. Neither devils nor angels, potentially both beneficial and dangerous, destructive and self-destructive, the extraterrestrials' handling is ultimately ruled by a game theoretical analysis of possibilities, not idealized expectations.

Despite some gratuitous lulls, definitely worth a read.

__________________________________________

 

(Spoiler) P.S.: If you'll permit me to nitpick the evolutionary angle, at one point it's mentioned that tribes with mediators lived longer than tribes without, falling at least verbally into the group selection fallacy. Selection must operate on units of information transfer across generations, which is to say genes. The precept can work, but it's better viewed as kin selection bias, in which mediator mules would favor the propagation of their genetically similar relatives, as genetically similar as possible. Likely each individual master would have to be served exclusively by its own mediator offspring. (If not this may, in fact, work as an alternate explanation for the mediators' tendency to go off the rails.) Also, as mediators are a master/engineer mix, engineers better able to coordinate with their mediator offspring to propagate their own line would be equally favored by the arrangement. Imagine Heinlein's The Roads Must Roll if the villain had benefited from the unshakeable familial loyalty of several media and public relations operatives.

Of course, that doesn't take into consideration that such kin recognition instincts can be hijacked even in humans (that's what uniforms, anthems, hymns, slang, fandoms and other communal badges and rituals are) but still, an interesting idea.

One 'sup on a time, there was a greeting.

Dear Zachary

"Why should I care how many people I have to kill? I can just make more in my tummy!"

The Order of the Stick #587

 

I would encourage you to find and watch the 2008 Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (in fact, don't even read that Wikipedia page if you want to avoid spoilers) despite normally finding true crime stories at once tedious and overly-dramatic. What's more, as it started as a home movie, so much of the documentary gets tied up in rhapsodizing and eulogizing that to a random disinterested asshole on the internet like myself it might drag. Might. If not for the considerable strength of the material itself. You may remember the apparently famous case (I didn't) but if the info's fresh to you it makes for an incredible story, gripping in the sheer absurdity yet perverse coherence of every new detail.

 

If you don't mind spoilers, a quick summary:

Woman reported for attempted suicide and threats of murdering a previous boyfriend, having birthed three children from previous relationships (and caring for none of them) and subject to eight(!) restraining orders against her lures and shoots her boyfriend to death in the U.S. after he tries to break up with her and flees to Canada, there giving birth to her victim's son while delaying her extradition proceedings for months after months. Despite signs of mental instability and violence while jailed, she is released with her shrink posting the bulk of her bail and the judge going so far as to instruct her on how to dodge the system. She is awarded custody of her child. She tries to frame yet another new boyfriend for her impending suicide then jumps into the sea with her offspring, to both their deaths.

The documentary itself focuses on the failings of early-2000s Canadian law, especially when it came to child protection, so instead try to think on how such a case reflects on our social priorities, starting and ending with the F-word.

 

1) Feminism

Among the literally hundreds of phone messages left to her last intended victim (after two dates) crops up the stock phrase "grow up and be a fucking man" at which point you realize she'd been pulling the same act quite likely her entire life on countless men. So reverse the polarity. In itself, letting criminals go free is not a gendered issue. But too many of the case's details sound even more absurd with genders reversed.

A man with eight restraining orders having traveled across the country to see his recently ex girlfriend, not being placed in custody when she turns up dead, shot by a pistol with a defect like the one he owns?

Highly paid and/or respectable shrinks and judges putting their careers (and half the price of a house) on the line to secure his release?

That man being handed an infant to care for???

The film rightly lingers on the judge's wording when releasing an accused murderer without even paying her full bail: "your crime was specific in nature" and therefore not a threat to anyone else. A murderer who merely murdered her boyfriend did not worry a female judge. #KillAllMen, 2003 edition. Reverse the polarity. Take a media circus like the OJ Simpson trial ten years prior. Even in so farcical a context, stating that a man likely having murdered his ex-wife and her friend was "specific in nature" and therefore not indicative of threat would've sounded insane.

Now pile on with "grow up and be a fucking woman" and take care of me, rando' chick I went on two dates with.

You don't get to pretend that decades' worth of political lobbying to frame women as victims of men and entitled to retribution against men did not frame both this murderer's personal sense of entitlement and the knight in shining armor attitude of the professionals and officials charging to her rescue.

And we've had two more decades of intensified such lobbying since.

2) Religion

Specifically theodicy. At one point a family friend states she has not prayed since Zachary died. Well, she's hardly alone in suffering a crisis of faith when something bad happens. First off, the existence of the supernatural is not mediated by personal trauma, but a matter of rational analysis. Hopes of supernatural aid were true or false regardless of my grandparents' Alzheimer's and it will continue to be true or false when my parents or I myself begin to succumb to it.

Did you as a viewer suffer a "there is no god" twinge watching the documentary's events unfold? But remember, babies die constantly, some in far worse circumstances, starving slowly, agonizingly for months on end, or raped, skinned and disemboweled while their parents are forced to watch awaiting the same treatment. Bluntly put, tragedy-mediated crises of faith demonstrate not moral conscience but a lack of object permanence.

This is not a religious matter. Perfectly mundane evidence amenable to cold-blooded rational analysis right down here on Earth could have warned against the handling of the psychopath in question's case.

What's more, religion served both sides, providing the murderer leverage to try to wheedle her way into her victim's family's new circle of friends via their church.

3) Government

Let's face it, nobody would have given a shit if the case had not led to the death of a reproductive female and infant, had not impacted the supply of wage slaves and cannon fodder for the use of the rich. Otherwise, misery is good, misery exhausts you and keeps you servile, interpersonal conflict keeps you too busy to speak out, and lawsuits feed more of your money into the system. All good.

The case, plus the grandparents' subsequent activism, did result in a Canadian law to protect children. Fine as far as that goes but how far does that go? Zachary might've then lived to adolescence when he can be thrown in prison to be tortured to death on some sadistic bitch's rape claim. Or play Bluto to her other Popeye. Or kill himself when he makes the mistake of ejaculating into a woman who then uses the baby as pretext to enslave him for the rest of his life. "Grow up and be a fucking man" indeed.

It also bears mentioning that well-intentioned as they are, laws to protect children in custody disputes are easily abused when paired with the presumption of male guilt and female innocence which pervades our society. All a woman need do is claim her ex was violent, or less, that she felt threatened. No bullet-riddled corpse or smoking gun necessary. And that brings us back to the question of sex.

 

For one thing, it's hard not to see this prize specimen of womanhood as not just cuckoo but a cuckoo, a brood parasite embodying both the habit of leaving her young to be cared for by others and the habit of abusing their protectiveness to be cared for herself as an invasive chick would. For another, multiple witnesses reiterated the same observation in different ways: the murderer had a tendency to over-act. One name for that in biology is supernormal stimulus. If your target reacts to some sight/sound/whatever, then presenting it a flashier or louder version of the same will allow you to control its reactions. The classic example involves giving birds fake eggs painted the same as their species' own, but brighter! flashier! bigger! and watching them actually favor the fakes over the eggs they've just laid. Fascinating as the broader topic may be, let's consider one deliberately ignored aspect of it.

Babies are cute. We are preprogrammed to care for the cute thing. Otherwise we'd throttle the reeking little megaphones after the two-thousandth random fit of crying and our species would die out. But babies lack the manipulative understanding to truly weaponize their cuteness: when to coo and when to cry, when to feign interest with their adorable oversized eyes and exactly when to throw a tantrum for maximum effect. But women, who retain so many more babyish features than men, have had a bit of time to work out advantageous deployment strategies, not to mention centuries and millennia's worth of industries like fashion and cosmetics increasingly adept at maximizing subliminal manipulation. The grandparents in the documentary note at one point their son and grandson's murderer did have a knack for knowing when to play nice. Their recorded phone conversations undeniably show her playing up the wounded doe act, the quavering, choked voice, the drawling neediness, the unspoken yet evident insistence that she's just... not... getting... enough... and if you want infantile tantrums, well, try hundreds of messages on your phone after the second date.

 

Most of Dear Zachary concerns the victimized family's consternation at government's refusal to prioritize the well-being of a baby over the demands of a woman. You can certainly argue economics or the legal system's inertia, etc., but consider also those in power are susceptible to manipulation of their instincts. Femininity in our species is not merely more heavily neotenized than masculinity, but a host of supernormal stimuli demanding care, favoritism and sacrifice with every well-practiced dash of eyeshadow, with every endlessly rehearsed pout or whine and carefully timed fit of manic screeching or crying jags. Women are in many ways more adept in leveraging childlike behavior for sympathy than children themselves are.

More human than human.