And they all leafed happily ever after through the time they leafed happily ever after through the time they leafed happily ever after through the time...

Twit Her

"So let's enjoy, let the X destroy your spinal cord

So it's not a straight line no more

'Til we walk around lookin' like some wind-up dolls

Shit stickin' out of our backs like a dinosaur"

 

Eminem - Drug Ballad

___________________________________________

 

"There's a woman on the outside

Looking inside does she see me?

No she does not really see me

'Cause she sees her own reflection"

 

Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner

___________________________________________

 

 

Hearing some mixed-positive comments about Darkest Dungeon 2 and thinking I might buy it (despite my wariness of cash-grab sequels) I reinstalled DD1 to finally polish off the last few bosses.

 

Occultist / Houndmaster / Man-at-Arms / Bounty Huntard

Look, at least I returned to it faster than I did to Skyrim. And I swear, I'll take the last few steps to BG3's boss fight one of these months.

Yes, it's shaping up to be a bumper year for PC games. Whether it's titles stalled out around 2020 claiming to finally near publication (soon, soon, they swear!) or the twenty years overdue Homeworld 3, or maybe Frostpunk 2 which I've preordered (and which, judging by page hits, a couple of you are also excited about) unless it's drowned out by nuclear war, much clicking shall be heard across the land in '24.

Which means soon after we'll also be just about due for another wave of mass paranoia and vituperation against video games destroying society. In case you haven't kept up, video games have been destroying all of human society constantly for the past forty years, to the point that if you listened to the quackiest loons there shouldn't be two bricks left stacked upright in the whole of the electrified world for Gordon Freeman and Mario's depredations. Though the evils of technology in general do catch their share of flak, you may have noticed it's games specifically (along with porn) that overwhelmingly get targeted by evangelists who run out of bible quotes, political pundits outside election years, journalists on slow news days and any facebooking soccer mom bored whenever the mailman's late stuffing her box.

For hints on why it's so much easier to badmouth some perceived internet vices than others (like, say, social media) let's watch and compare a bit of HBO.

Specifically:

1) Bill Maher bashing men (and specifically men, not people in general) as cowards, slobs, losers, deadbeats and school shooters for five minutes straight with lines like "angry, misogynistic digital eunuchs" over the crime of playing too many video games instead of surrendering our lives to women's control as is our natural lot.

2) Last Week Tonight's 2021 segment on misinformation in non-anglophone social networking, where a hispanic youth cites the prevalence of "'la tia del whatsapp' - it's the aunt that goes on WhatsApp and receives any type of conspiracy theory and forwards it to all her contacts" which John Oliver immediately reworded as generic gender neutral "family members" with "their" pronouns. (minute 9:50)

Do you notice how on one side gender is singled out and exploited for maximum abuse while on the other it's weasel-worded into willful ignorance despite the interviewee's actual wording? Aha, a clew! Maybe disparate demonization is less a factor of the activity itself than whether the sex preferring it is already demonized or beatified in our culture. After all, it is a cornerstone of our society that women can do no wrong. Whenever a gendered issue would reveal a female fault, everyone bends over backwards to avoid ever even hinting at the real culprit. You'll hear entire operas bemoaning the unfair or outright murderous labor practices in the chocolate or diamond industries while studiously ignoring that "chocolate and diamonds" may as well read "left ovary and right ovary".

 

Reuters for example ran a story on the rise of "fast fashion" (a.k.a. cheap disposable Chinese couture that even moths would scoff at) gaining so much traction that it's overwhelming air freight, burning endless jet fuel, proliferating sweatshops and feeding the world's largest and oldest dictatorship's economy while we're at it. The article goes on for two or three pages about such companies as Shein and Temu driving the industry. Yeah, you know who else is driving it? Their customers overseas, the vast majority of which I guarantee you are female, because "fast fashion" is just not in the standard dudebro vocabulary. I found myself surprised to wide-eyed incredulity upon hearing Americans throw out 37 annual kilos of clothing on average, but who do you think is driving that average up? The beer-swilling deadhead that owns three muscle shirts and five backward baseball caps and proudly wears his jeans to manly road warrior tatters? Or his box wine enthusiast girlfriend that drives a U-Haul to JCPenney?

Vehicularly speaking, let's also remember a constant we've been deliberately ignoring for the past few decades, best summed up by Scrubs in its ninth episode twenty years ago:

"You don't want a hundred-pound white girl mad at you. You'll flinch every time you hear a Range Rover."

If men are certainly guilty of buying ridiculous country-fried pickup trucks even though they work in downtown Detroit and never haul anything bigger than a laptop to work, it's women who buy more overbuilt gas-guzzling SUVs (y'know, for those five kids you're definitely gonna shit out once each and every one of you hooks an investment banker) and that's not even counting all the sports cars bought by men to satisfy the female gaze or all the "family" cars bought on a husband's cash but driven almost exclusively by the wife. Or, as news channels so triumphantly trumpet:

"Sixty-two percent of all new cars sold in the U.S. are bought by women, according to research from Cars.com, which also found that women influence more than 85% of all car purchases." And: "Women are less impressed with horsepower and high-speed handling. They want cars that look nice. Styling is important." A needlessly long-winded euphemism for "shallow and impractical" not that you'll ever hear a public figure admit it. The exact same "85% girl power!" statement is held unspeakable in the context of all the waste caused by the auto industry. Why? Well, to quote Reuters again randomly, in a comment that routinely crops up in some form or another in every political campaign, but almost always in the cozily feminine:

"Living in a slum in central India with her widowed mother and two young daughters, Nayantara Gupta says she owes her relative prosperity in recent years to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party."

Politicians have long known that if you get women's vote, you also get men's. We're long overdue to also admit that the economic impetus driving action undertaken by men also comes from female approval or disapproval.

The webcomic Kevin&Kell joked a couple of years ago that even in the absence of predation, overpopulation could be prevented by "male stupidity" showing a typical Darwin Awards hold-my-beer moment. Pretty standard joke. Except males who do not strive to outdo other males, who do not stand out somehow, anyhow, whether by plumage or action, bling or stunt, will not attract mates. Therefore evolutionarily they do not exist. It is female mate choice which has bred that male stupidity into the populace and continues to do so, and female majority consensus which reinforces it by every giggle, coo, batted eyelash and every other minute sign of attention which instinctively validates men's very existence. And by the way, men killing ourselves or each other does precious little to dampen population curves; it only takes one Prince Charming to inseminate the tribe's females, and they're quite happy to wait their turn for a ride. If you don't believe me, ask your nearest rock, sports or sitcom star.

I started this post with Darkest Dungeon, whose narrator gradually confesses his various crimes as you advance through flavor text. Engaging writing and voice acting, but every so often listening to his grating, loquacious, lurid admission of past crimes driven by pride and greed I'd wonder... was there ever any chance at all of this character being female? Of an old woman assuming all guilt over the ruination of your family, its name and the surrounding countryside by her selfish, sadistic and profligate pursuits? Since the same actor/character appears reiterated for the sequel, allow me to posit a "no" answer.

 

DD's Lovecraftian setting steered that train of thought toward a deservedly obscure novel titled The Inevitable Conflict. It's (mis?)attributed to HPL but reads nothing like either his style or quality, aspiring to grandiloquent commentary on race and the sexes (Mongol invasion of a matriarchal America) but crassly, artlessly mangling both with passages like:

"Men must adventure and die that the race may go forward," he continued. "Women must safeguard all that courage and sacrifice have won. Theirs it is to have, to hold and to transmit to the next generation, cradled in their arms and learning from their lips the lessons of patriotism and noble thinking."

Published in 1930, a futuristic caveat about a male rebel overturning and rescuing a matriarchy by masculine open military conflict can certainly be interpreted as a reaction against the then-new fad of chixz0rz voting and flappering, but if so, how pathetic a reaction is it? The male backlash against matriarchy consists of men begging to be permitted to suffer more for women, to give women more, to sacrifice themselves so women can sit on an ever fatter pile of pinched booty. Then again, artless it may be but it did hit upon a central feature of human mentality now declared taboo in polite discussion.

 

You'll notice that despite my stance on gender relations, I don't make a habit of quoting men's rights activists. They're not particularly quotable, and leave it at that for now. I do appreciate though their spreading the term "gynocentrism" for society's fixation on female needs, wants and whims. Sociology aside, on a basic psychological level it succinctly distinguishes that for women not leadership or action but centrality and control embody powermongering. Another webcomic, Selkie, accidentally put its thumb on it (on page #1337 no less) when the child heroine declares:

"I don'ts wants to hurts people. I just wants to stomps arounds and haves everyones worships me."

Great... except worship, stomping, hurting, etc. are not separate issues, but facets of intra and inter-tribal conflict in which violence is supplied to fit concomitant demand. To be worshiped is to outsource hurting on one's behalf. The same knee bent before one's mistress in supplication is the knee crushing the enemy's throat. We have no trouble seeing that for what it is in rare gender-flipped examples like Charles Manson shielding himself behind his groupies. We admit his guilt. Why then turn a blind eye to the dynamic's far more pervasive embodiment in the pampered princess ideal?

 

We know social networking sites are frequented generally by women more than men, in fact by half again as many women as men in the case of sites like TikTok, Pinterest or Instagram. (And that's not even counting hours per day.)  We know that teenage girls are far more likely than boys to report both positive and occasionally negative impact on their lives from such sites, a.k.a to be heavily involved. We know their main appeal, a hypercharged version of the directionless village gossip mill of ages past.

 

And you can see it in daily life as well. Uncharacteristically, I found myself at a local eatery among six men and one woman. Guess which of those spent two hours thumbing pizza grease onto her phone? Ooops, guess I gave it away! (Dose durn tricksy gendered pronouns get me every time.) Last year I spent some time with old acquaintances whose families offered brief glimpses at both the male and female variety of modern teenager. The boy did lobby to play with his phone, but could be modestly cajoled into riding a bike with his friends around the neighbourhood instead. The girl on the other hand was so glued to her magic rectangle of power that she looked as if she were hiding behind a tiny plastic veil the whole afternoon. (Perhaps a more apt analogy than I had intended?)

So sorry but evidently all the social constructionist garbage you can muster, all your multimillion-dollar misandrist brainwashing campaigns still will not change the reliable observation that gossip's more of a chick thing. Does it surprise you somehow that feminine power fantasies revolve not around what they can do, but around how much more entitled they are over others, how much of the world they can claim to have twisted around their fingers, how many eyes gaze and voices speak in their direction?

The princess walks into a ballroom wearing a gown worth more than a house, the latest fashion. She doesn't need to *do* anything. She *is* admired.

The princess is part of every major trend and conversation, at the center of it all. The spider in center of her web, everything must go through her, everyone owes her favors, everyone is emotionally dependent on her.

Maybe it's not quite the same effect, but social ape instinct seems to accept it in chump change just the same.

 

Now consider all the grousing and hand-wringing over the evils of video games must generally imply, interpret or flat-out invent consequences since games by definition occur elsewhere than the real world, while social media by definition is meant to impact the real world. No, teenage boys are not learning how to assassinate people by playing Call of Duty (they're learning it from their drunken army uncles with deer rifles) but real-life character assassination is a Facebook core feature. Over the past years, it's also gotten quite fashionable to bemoan social media's negative influence on society, from making tweens cry about their bad haircuts to staging a deadly serious yet somehow also comically incompetent coup d'etat, to TikTok as a whole being a Chinese datamining scam.

 

Yet where every reactionary outcry against video games will explictly or implicitly always boil down to "GRUNGY DUDE CLEAVE SKULL RAWR NECKBEARDS RAWR EYEBROWS" (even when pushing the male lead's chiseled features) the counterpart social media obsession is never admitted to be a flaw of women. If anything, the harder women dove into chatter sites over the past couple of decades, the harder all mainstream media figures have pushed the "crazy conspiracy uncle" image, terrified of commenting on the empress' new clothes.

When Mormons tried to convert me door-to-door in the Chicago suburbs twenty years ago, they sent a couple of cute teenage girls. Savvy marketing (especially from Mormons, even if they-technically-don't-do-that-any-more *wink-wink*) but they're hardly the only ones. Every political movement, religion, scam, corporation will fid it easier to placate critics and lower everyone's guard via friendly female faces. Why do you think every synthesized user friendly bot voice is female? Who skates by more with unchallenged bullshit claims and claims to your attention? So then, who is re-linking all that misinformation online? Who is spreading mass panic over social media? Is the demographic which predominates those platforms not due some scrutiny?

In fact, after the 2021 armed Capitol insurrection, it was occasionally pointed out that women play crucial recruitment, public relations and organizational roles in such events/groups, which were once again being conspicuously ignored even as images of the "QAnon shaman" flooded every media outlet. Moreover that a common thread in female participants' later court cases was more evidence brought against them from social media, where they had been noticeably more active than their male counterparts to the point of live-tweeting their own crimes. This was, as always, once again studiously ignored by the public at large.

Man bad, woman good; repeat the mantra.

 

Women can do no wrong. Buy what you want, waste however much you want, spread whatever lies you want. Even as social media addicts, we feel obligated to feel sorry for women, despite it being their own instinct driving them to obsession, just as men's instinct drives them to pull idiotic Jackass-inspired stunts. Y'know, maybe it's that video game I just finished skewing my perception, but perhaps there is some horrific, tenebrous, cyclopean and squamous horror at the core of our reality, mis-shaping all we perceive. Except it's no otherworldly entity but our perfectly mundane primitive instinct to protect and provide for women at any cost. We are all the same, at least in this.

 

______________________

 

P.S.:

You can probably tell by the title I initially jotted down notes for this post years ago, before His Muskness rebranded Twitter as X. Not that I ever liked Twitter to begin with; never had an account and I consider it one of the top scourges of the modern world. But "X" is a gigantic leap down in branding! "Twitter" sounded catchy, just goofy enough to instantly feel casual whenever you thought of it (which for most of you is 24/7) and pithy enough not to feel belabored. I can hardly be the only one thinking "X" sounds like a '90s teenager's generically rebellious caricature of badassery, to the point that if Musk didn't deliberately blow fifty billion on a high profile "X-ing a Paragrab" joke, I can't imagine what he was thinking. The platform's moderators should run with that aesthetic and call themselves The Xtreme Darkskull Flamedeaths or some other Y2K-era online guild title.

Anyway, if anyone needs me I'll be at the Sears tower, 'cause the Tower of Willie just sounds dumb.

Alaloth

No funny subtitle or song reference. Just don't buy it. Worst $15 I ever wasted.

 

I mentioned Alaloth here once before due to its opening cinematic's laughably generic yet overwrought pretense of fantasy RPG worldbuilding. When I finally got around to trying the actual gameplay, I automatically started mentally workshopping a "don't judge a book by its cover" moral assuming I'd find some redeeming qualities past the incompetent facade.

I can indeed say "don't judge a book by its cover" ... because the contents are much, much worse.

 

For "features" Alaloth just randomly slaps together shallow copies of cRPG/ARPG gimmicks from the past decades, like resource gathering and crafting, socketable gems to +1 your sword, or gambling minigames in taverns. Its main claim to fame seems to be using FPS controls for a Diablo-clone isometric punch-up routine. Except light attack, heavy attack, block and dodge are by no means new ideas and there's a reason click-to-move replaced eight-direction key movement in such titles decades ago. Ask yourself: does that interface setup give you anything that more fluid MOBA Q-W-E-R attacks wouldn't? And while many of its problems can be blamed on a horrible PC port of obvious console mechanics, those are padded with more than enough examples of universal idiocy.

 

Before hitting the gameplay and UI issues which make the game actively hateable, let's admit many others have skated by on poor design for their rich interactive storytelling, including some of the medium's classics like Torment or Bloodlines. This ain't that. That hopelessly generic slurry of elves, dwarves, goblins, etceteree, etceterah from the intro is pretty much all you get in-game. If it weren't released a couple years too early I'd say Alaloth's lore must've been auto-generated by some chatbot distilling high fantasy into its dullest, tritest form. You're given a hefty codex to fill with lore tidbits gathered from conversations, all of which pretty much confirm that every single group of combatants is the roughest, toughest buncha desperados on either side of Rio Grande, or that the god of smithing likes smithing, or that, yes, to your assured shock, this next NPC also hates Alaloth the big bad. NPC after NPC hand you the same "kill ten rats" quests from RPGs of thirty years ago with the same "they ambushed my caravan" excuses delivered in utter seriousness. As one example you walk into one town only to be thrown into a cutscene of two merchants talking about how this (dwarf) town's crafts are excellent. Yes dwarves make nice shit. Yes the shit dwarves make is nice. Yes the nice shit is made by dwarves. Yes. Ten paragraphs of filler later, having gone absolutely nowhere, the conversation ends.

 

Please don't wait for a punchline here. There is none. Every convo's just like this!

 

Those lore-dump NPCs? I've run into some that appear to be hallucinating.

Gratuitous ap'ost'ro'phes aside:

What beauties? What lonely?? What cave??? You're standing by yourself staring at nothing in a modestly populated tavern!

 

Alaloth feels designed half by some retired golf instructor that hasn't seen a video game since Gauntlet, the other half by some teenage apprentice code-monkey imagining himself laureled and triumphed for REVOLUTIONIZING CLICKING ITSELF by pointlessly shitting all over the myriad user interface conventions which normally make our lives easier. Which leads us to the real shit icing on the shit cake.

The basic game consists of a real-time overland map where NPCs and mobs randomly spawn and wander around, plus dungeons in four flavors of difficulty. Run into a mob patrol or dungeon to go into combat mode. Familiar enough, except you're given no stats or challenge ratings aside from rough dungeon quartiles of difficulty, no combat zone maps to unveil by exploration, everything is trial and error. It consistently substitutes obtuseness for the difficulty it pretends to offer.

 

Why does R stand for map by default instead of M? This isn't a button you'd need to mash along with your combat commands. Not a huge issue but illustrative of general irrationality.

 

Why does the Esc key not back out of the map or menus or other interface panels?

No tooltip details, which would've helped with the various ideograms for redundant effects. For example food can heal you or heal over time, which seems a pointless distinction since it's only usable out of combat anyway.

 

I pick up a quest to take something to Winterleaf. It turns out to have a time limit for some reason. Can't see Winterleaf. Can't zoom the real-timed overland map far enough out to see where Winterleaf is and am given no directions as to its general direction. Autofail.

 

I wasted my potions because the inventory list (aside from being a list you're forced to scroll through endlessly instead of a point-and-click grid) resets to the top of the list after you use an item instead of the item above or below it like most lists' default.

 

Then there's key remapping, which you're grudgingly permitted to do... but it only affects half your interactions. Some get remapped (to in my case arrow key movement with Num4 for "interact") while others default to WASD, like map movement. For bonus criminal incompetence, both can occur within the same interaction.

Augh! Index finger whiplash!

But wait, that's not even the kicker.

 

You're not permitted to save game, autosaves only because that's "hardcore" and all that. But after seeing my character relocated a couple of times after reloading, I couldn't figure out just when it saves, or especially whether (as every one of these "hardcore" games do) it saves when quitting to desktop.

So I tested it.

I stood in a tavern with 397/1500 health and ate some bread and cheese, drank some beer, ogled a waitress, good times. Watched my HP rise. Quit game. Started game. Hit continue. My HP was back to 397. Ugh, I thought, so it really doesn't autosave on quitting. What an outdated, pointless chore of a broken system for a... wait... I looked over to my inventory. The food was still gone. So it autosaves inventory but not hit points? WHAT!?! YOU UNMITIGATED IMBECILES how did you even manage that? My Sega Genesis back in '93 had a better save system than this! That is to say it had no save system, which was still better than this! I've seen freeware eroge better designed than this utter pile of garbage!

Was this thing designed as meta-commentary on cRPG shovelware? Was it designed under protest? Do the first letters of various lore dumps somehow spell out "help I'm being held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory"? Because otherwise I simply cannot explain such an irredeemable piece of shit!

Once, a pun o' time there was upon.

We Are the Incomprehensible, Buggy Dwarves

"WARNING!

You need activate gamepad control to play the multiplayer.

YES"

 

Ummm... does not compute? For multiple reasons?

I've apparently bought half a dozen so-called "games" from the Ukrainian company Whale Rock for 1-2 bucks a pop over the years, and apparently overpaid for We Are the Dwarves at $1.24 in 2019, as it's now $1.19. GoG promoted it pretty heavily for a while and what can I say, I'm not completely immune to advertising.

 

How would I summarize the gameplay... a platformer without jumping? A single-player top-down shoot 'em up? Granted I didn't even get far enough into it to meet the third character.

I did have some fun with the starting guy's quirk, using a shotgun with heavy recoil which also functions as maneuvering via reaction pistol while floating in space. But the first time you're required to use it in the very first tutorial stage to back your way through a bush, my character fell through the terrain half the time; then the animation stuck so I was sliding around on my ass through two maps.

 

Welcome to the game. Expect much more of the same.

- only a bit of ass-sliding after, I found the tutorial, instead of blocking your progress until you've cleared the map, loops you back to the beginning if you fail to kill the second set of mobs

- your dumpy little Magellans lack a map or compass, in light of which the maze-like levels just scream "timesink"

- you can only move in 2D, but your skills can miss or impact terrain on the z-axis

-  the interface is generally unresponsive, lacking hit confirmation or damage warnings, leading to a lot of surprise insta-deaths or unaccountable misses

- in contrast, you're prompted with captain obvious dopey voiceovers like "next time, I better wait until the beast hides" repeating long, long after you've already gotten the point

- your clicks may or may not over-ride your current action at random, leading to spamming buttons hoping your command will go through

- have to keep spam-clicking due to hit detection failing and clicking ground to move instead

- it's real time with pause, but the constant glitchiness somehow forces more pauses than if it were turn-based

- with all these problems hitting you in the face in the very tutorial, production time nevertheless sank into cutscenes instead of interface/intelligibility/bugtesting

Which reminds me, probably anyone'll mention the comically terrible voicing and writing.

Perfectly excusable had the developers been aware of their limitations and not ladled on the flavor text in a typo-filled ode to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Being non-Anglophone's no crime, but at least steer clear of jargon like "outta whack"! Redundant one-paragraph journal entries for the same monster (e.g. "sludge queen" and "sludge queen behavior") and obviously Babelfished terms like "giant rootage" plus missing spaces and undeleted punctuation here and there or "kamikadze" would be bad enough. But even the backstory, while superficially novel, resolves to a pile of nonsense. You're dwarven astronauts that live underground and get their power from glowing colored stars so you dive down through the ocean then fall into a cavern full of tiny black holes and also swamps and you wear spacesuits with no helmets... all of which might be more palatable if presented as the Sonic the Hedgehog pretext for a plot it is, instead of taking itself deadly serious as a grim, determined fight for survival. (Why not just call it a Hollow Earth adventure, which is all it is anyway?)

 

There may be some decent ideas scattered among the garbage (the recoil mechanic is fun enough) but it would honestly be too aggravating to dig them out. Honestly can't tell whether Whale Rock's dollar-valued library is some asset-flip scam, a pretext for programming novices to charge you for their homework or honest but ludicrous creative attempts. For now I'll join the majority who Would've Been the Dwarves (tm) and uninstall.

For the price of a candy bar, I may even have gotten my money's worth.

Starvation Rations

 

Once you pawn a time, you couldn't pay to get it back.

Present Day; Present Time

"It's about bounty hunters."

"What's she supposed to be, the bait?"

 

So snarked I upon being introduced to Cowboy Bebop via Faye Valentine's cleavage. But Bebop's well-earned fame for raising the bar on not just anime but TV series in general also applies to gradually redeeming an otherwise flat bombshell fanservice extra to a memorable protagonist.

I'd forgotten, until rewatching the series in order, the Faye is initially presented in one-shot episodic fashion riding off into the proverbial sunset at the end... until the Bebop unceremoniously fishes her back up out of space in the next episode. I addressed her character advancement vis-a-vis cyberpunk's crucial "loser" aesthetic, but for my first run through the show in 2001 I didn't think much of her, having seen many other such cartoon characters go absolutely nowhere... until this:

call me, caall meee.....

Along with Jet, Faye's character arc blows into focus mid-series, Speak Like a Child revealing not only that her past is not entirely lost, but that her pre-amnesia peppy teen personality had been drastically, unrecognizably different from her current rough cobble of hair-trigger temper, devil-may-care compulsive gambling, alternating nihilism/vanity/greed and petty vandalism. It's not just a convenient linking mechanism from a series writing perspective, but a neat little twist that in contrast to Jet (the stalwart leader who deals with both of his blasts from the past by slightly passive yet unflinching direct confrontation) Faye dithers and hides away and seems to avoid thinking about her newly recovered information for several episodes, or at least avoid letting on it's affecting her.

 

Another of the series' quirks, if you pay attention, is that it ends before the end. To allow the two-parter Real Folk Blues to focus on resolving Spike's plot, Hard Luck Woman serves as the true dissolution to the main routine of space cowboying. Though Faye appears later, it's solely as messenger and obviously no longer full participant. It's in Hard Luck Woman that the gang breaks up. Ed follows her father, taking Ein with her, and Faye overnights in the past. In a bookend to the first episode and their repeated concern with food expenses, the two men are shown silently drowning their sorrows in albumen, having secured subsistence at the loss of their companions.

That brilliant four-minute montage has stuck in pretty much everyone's memory, not only for its bittersweet tone but for not striking a single tone. Independent individuals instead strike their own courses. The men are grimly resigned, Ein's just happy to be with a now hopeful and more focused Ed, and Faye... stops to think. For the first time since we've seen her. Discovering the past hollow, she finds that hollow no less a part of herself for it. Does all that could have been belie her personal fable as a hot-to-trot damsel of fortune? If it's the future that matters, then what matters when you've been prematurely catapulted into it? Is it even worth having an identity conflict over a barely remembered and now irrevocably ruined past, a virtual life that never was?

As single scenes go, Faye laying to rest in the ruins of her life is a world-class classic, not least because instead of being performed by some personification of either wisdom or innocence, it instead falls to an energetic but uncertain clever fool, a mind caught in the moment of becoming.

Once a pawn a time, you can move two spaces.

Classes & Cogitations: Weapon Afterthoughts

By the time I got into D&D adaptations with NWN (3rd edition) weapons and their associated feats were already an overbuilt mess, and if anything proved that to me, it was going back to play Icewind Dale and finding the weaponry actually made more sense years prior.

Blame it partly on the usual one-upmanship. Every new goblin-pokin' stick gots ta be bigger an' stickier than the last to impress munchkins. Once you give them swords they want greatswords, and then grandswords and great-grandswords and megaswords and gigaswords. Once you give them double axes they want quadruple axes, and how many lightsaber blades are we Darth Mauling and Grievousing nowadays? If you haven't turned Jedis into lightsaber porcupines yet, you're obviously not trying hard enough. So let's make a few points:

 

1) Giving one class access to all weapons and weapon feats made a little sense when strictly delineating each class by one core function: hits shit, disarms traps, heals, nukes. But any more nuanced class system needs more gradations. See post #2 in this series for my case on doing away with the "fighter" class.

 

2) There's a difference between choice and redundancy. Characterizing my "dire mace" as a quarterstaff with better stats when replaying NWN's expansions a few years ago spoke to transparent redundancy in more than one dimension. In addition to power bloat you're needlessly duplicating functionality between different types of bladed weapons and so forth, which overwhelmingly invalidates weapon specialization feats for just one type of falchion/scimitar/gladiolus/whatever... and then they went and duplicated the whole mess yet again for weeaboo appeal with kamas and katanas. So let's hit that last point first. Claymores, Zweihanders, Daikatanas, unless you're specifically banking on historical accuracy to the level of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, such distinctions are cosmetic and should be treated as such. Trying to implement separate specializations in each of fifty different flavors of "yew call that a knoife" in a single campaign just invites itemization woes.

3) Homogenization is even worse. In Baldur's Gate 3 my only character who did not use a crossbow was the party's rogue, but despite abandoning most old class/race weapon proficiencies, many items still came with bonuses accessible or tailored to rogues, gith or whatever, demonstrating that complete freedom of choice wouldn't be very fun in a genre where you're expected to establish personal identity.

So where's that sweet spot between too much or too little choice? Well, the old precept of basic / martial / exotic weapons was solid, if only it hadn't been watered down. Much like the law / goodness intersection, the several axes of combative prowess (magic / range / defense / offense) go a long way toward establishing characters on a continuum in relation to each other. (A duelist for example: give it light armor with exotic weaponry; a cleric the reverse.) Problem: if completely synonymous with class choice, it's not an opportunity to roleplay. If cleric=mace and thief=dagger and wizard=staff then you may as well upgrade the weapon slot automatically as you level instead of pretending to let players distribute new cutlery among the party. Otherwise, MMOs demonstrate the logical extreme for endless, class-specific, linear gear upgrades: a mindless incremental grind for predetermined outcomes.

 

4) Weapons should be usable, even for spellcasters. Icewind Dale intrigued me not least by my casters outputting much of their damage not from limited-use fireballs but from their piddlin' little 1D4 slings. (Granted, that was largely because IWD featured a Diablo-esque quantity of trash mobs to clear, but still...) Keep Half-Life's crowbar in mind as object lesson: it wouldn't have become nearly as emblematic if you hadn't been encouraged to use it. Eliminate damage cantrips and the all-purpose magic missile. Institute spell reagents and ammunition (another good experience was rationing +l33t ammo in IWD2; black arrow, you were passed down from my father and his father, etc.) but don't fall into the trap of making everyone into a greatsword-swingin' battlemage as Larian or Bethesda do. Spellcasters should be limited to simple weapons, and also constantly falling back on those simplest of weapons for damage dealing, both to economize on precious mana or spells per day and because magic should not be a primary damage source to begin with.

 

Note much of this only really applies to party-based cRPGs or other squad management. An author or tabletop GM can tailor loot to his party's needs if he wants (see Roy, Belkar and Durkon from OOTS all getting ranged melee attacks so they're not standing around waiting for flight spells to expire) and single-character campaigns default to the player character snatching up the biggest baddest available pokin'-stick at every turn. It's when deliberately balancing a roster with frontliners, flankers and support that weapon differentiation feels most rewarding and the gamut must be best defined. Everything from whip-chains, tridents and Excalibur through simple but trusty off-the-rack spears, crossbows and shortswords all the way down to blacksmith's hammers, slings, blowguns and good old-fashioned tree branches should come with their own advantages and disadvantages, never pigeonholed to one class and never available to all.

More importantly they should play off each other: spears holding off enemies for archers to shoot, crossbows staggering enemy advance for slow-swinging halberds to wind up reach attacks, disorienting slung pebbles allowing daggers to crit, staff trip moves giving heavy warhammers an elevation damage bonus on prone targets, whatever ways you can think of weapons INTERACTING among a well-balanced party would greatly help legitimize what has in most cases boiled down to meaningless cosmetic fluff. When did roleplaying strategists forget the notion of combined arms? Blunt/slash/pierce is a nice start, but how often do you see campaigns putting to use even that basic distinction from fight to fight and zone to zone?

And if your weapons really don't work differently with different requirements and interactions, then stop claiming your game has fifty "different" flavors of sharp stick.

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P.S.:

Weirdly, you'll see single-character games like The Age of Decadence implementing basic yet impactful weapon properties (like spears blocking enemy advance) but that may have more to do with the low fantasy setting. It wasn't afraid special weapon moves would cut into the specialness of fireballs and blizzards. On the other hand, we do need to skew fantasy more toward the low end...

My-i-cide

"You would know wouldn't you?

You extend your hand to those who suffer

To those who know what it really feels like

To those who've had a taste, like that means something"

 

NIN - I Do Not Want This

 

 

How has this haphazard, awkward little journal changed over the years? Slightly improved phrasing, vastly improved typing, more pictures, wordier salads, MMOs died out so I'm not talking much about them anymore... oh yeah and over the last 4-5 years I stopped making plans to kill myself.

This is weird.

Among blogging's unexpected benefits (aside from, in a general sense, howling into the void) has been the catharsis of being able to speak of my obsession with ending it all, if oft obliquely and to no-one in particular. Such outbursts became rather a fixture here in early years. Eventually I even lost two or three steady visitors who'd been checking back for my final note and finally got bored. Too bad. Guess I'm just not that dedicated to the noble craft of bloggery.

 

The morbidity though vastly predates the blog. I'd say to my teens but weirdly enough despite my violent self-hatred, occasional thoughts of snuffin' it didn't rise to prominence until my early twenties. Until then I'd somehow been convinced I'd die at 23 (and something important would happen to me at 26, and yes I did hold both those convictions in my head, with zero context, for several years.*) For various reasons and in tandem with a cycle of anxiety and depression, the fixation then grew, and faded for months at a time but always returned, and recurred on and off for over a decade. Suicidal ideation, they call it.

 

I've been putting off this discussion because I lack the skill the describe it, that mercilessly needling, shaming, self-flagellating mix of insistent impressions, catastrophism, depression, tics and twitches and reflexively reinterpreting everything around, every day, every train, every lake, every high-rise, every bottle of bleach by its pain and efficacy quotients. Once rooted in my interpretation of the world it colored every event.

A family member acts pissy? Must be angry at you. You're too much of a burden, kill yourself.

Failed a quiz? You're worthless, kill yourself.

Broke a plate? You're a waste of resources, kill yourself.

A boss, professor or clerk brushes you off? You're not worth anyone's time, kill yourself.

Locked yourself out of your car? You're worthless, kill yourself.

Wrote a story and it's shit? Further proof you should kill yourself.

Joint pain? You're such a worthless, feeble specimen, kill yourself.

Tooth pain? You deserve it for being so worthless, kill yourself.

Boss tells you you're too slow at work? You're worthless, kill yourself.

Someone compliments you? You're being mocked for being so worthless, kill yourself.

I dreamt about it, both figurately and literally, for years. It grew to where I'd find myself involuntarily mumbling to myself about killing myself when something bad happened. Which is to say when something happened.

Never could cobble together a satisfactory suicide note, either. If I were a better writer maybe I'd be dead by now. Nor did some "off" switch get flipped to remove the underlying thought pattern altogether, but for my own part I've discovered a world of difference between knowing dispassionately that I don't deserve to live and actively wanting to die. Not a distinction I ever thought I'd be making, but, well, here we are.

 

As I realized, belatedly, that such thoughts had not reappeared, that suicidal depression had gone off and hanged itself, I assumed fifteen years' worth of Hamlettish vacillation must needs have garnered me some insight into the matter. Insight should have occurred. Surely I would awaken one morn having braved realms beyond and return like a fairytale hero bearing the secret to life not-offin'-yerself everlasting.

 

No.

 

My reasons both for the obsession and its passing will not be your own. Moreover, the larger result defies analysis for its absurd concatenation of factors.

- My metabolism shifted abrubtly when I hit 30, complete with mood changes.

- I bought a bottle of melatonin (if you're that depressed, your sleep cycle's probably shot to hell and back and back again and back again again) and the first four or five pills hit heavily... then effected a permanent change so that now they're worse than useless to me for side-effects (incidentally, anyone know the going eBay rate for ~90 long-expired melatonin tablets?)

- On a related note, I also started popping the occasional multivitamin. A diet of frozen pizza and mountain dew probably wasn't helping matters. (My current can whispers it probably still isn't.)

- Shrinks/counselors can help, not because they necessarily have any great words of wisdom to offer, but just because they're paid not to gossip. Careful bringing up the S-word though; their profession has a habit of locking you away for that. As fates worse than death go, the cuckoo's nest qualifies.

- Patching up family relations. That was a big one. Takes years too.

- Giving up the lingering insane hope for a mate. Being an evolutionary dead end (whether for incompetence or unwillingness to play the game and submit to the status of draft animal) hurts, sure. Far worse though to play pretend.

- Venting via blogging also helped me organize my thoughts, even if it may not look thus on the page.

- Being openly weird around others instead of trying to mimic normal human behavior. Being regarded as a worthless, disgusting freak is still less stress than pretending not to be one. I don't fit in. Hell, I don't even fit out. Oh well, that's that. Hand me the pelt from under that rock.

- Being less invested in the zeitgeist. Relatively easy for me, being naturally introverted, but in the internet age flame wars still tend to worm their way into your skull.

- Arguably the biggest help came from COVID. Terrible as it may sound, those couple of pandemic years were the best of my life, being given license to do what I always needed: stay indoors and avoid human contact. Only then was I finally able to identify and gradually break the anxiety>depression cycle I'd lived with most of my life.

By no means an instant break. At least a year passed between realizing I'd gone months without fantasizing how the knife would feel finally digging through my forearms and later realizing I'd gone months without falling into weeks-long bouts of depressive funk. Maybe it wouldn't have taken me a decade if the topic were less of a taboo, if even dedicated forums didn't censor honest expression. Back when I was twenty, Trent Reznor and Christopher Baldwin helped more than anyone claiming professional expertise in such matters. A decade later, being able to ramble about it myself did the same. For another year or two afterward I trudged under a lingering fear of relapse to the old obsession, and the thought of turning suicidal again makes me want to kill myself. But that hasn't happened.

 

So.

Then it was and now it isn't. And to be honest, aside from proportionally less misery, I don't feel particularly different. The world's still shit. I'm still shit. Life's still pointless. Only the impetus to add one more pointless action to all the shit around has dissipated. And hey, maybe I'll live to see this entire idiotic species kill itself soon anyway.

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* Hey, grave-robbers exist, so not as illogical as it sounds!