Crank

Jackin' the box; Jacqueline, the box.

I had an idle thought that we should force companies to print their unit cost on packaging, so customers can see at a glance by how much of a mark-up we're being screwed with every purchase. Of course, aside from the myriad ways they'd cheat their way around it, it would have the opposite effect. Everyone would start buying worse rip-offs for bragging rights, just as you all buy brand name mayonnaise instead of store brand now.

Anytime you find yourself wanting to save this species, remember it neither wants to, nor can it be saved from its own stupidity. The damage is self-inflicted. Let it rot.

blancmangey

Wait, while we're on the subject of Zone Blanche:

1) Startling Season 1 ending reveal, did not think they'd go through with it, very rare these days. Or really, any days.

2) Why the hell would you translate Zone Blanche into English as "Black" Spot? Spot instead of zone or area I get, it's snappy, but black instead of white? Why? Whywhywhy?! "Blank" Spot was right there as an option, conveying the original tone without going goth yet still so close that it suggests the word "black" were the viewer so inclined. It's not necessarily supposed to be a threatening, evil spot, but a spot forgotten by the world, off the maps, off the grid, out of modernity, out of the time-space continuum. Blanked out.

Do you ever wonder what the hell we're even paying professional translators for?

F**klore

"It's the way we have the world. Without the telling, we don't have anything at all. The moment goes by like the water of a river. We'd tumble and spin and be helpless if we tried to live in the moment.We'd be like a baby. A baby can do it but we'd drown. Our minds need to tell, need the telling. To hold. The past has passed, and there's nothing in the future to catch hold of. The future is nothing yet. How could anybody live there? So what we have is the words that tell what happened and what happens. What was and is."

 

Ursula K. LeGuin - The Telling

(slight spoiler for this below)

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"An author's way of getting to Mars (say) is part of his story of his Mars; and of his universe, as far as that particular tale goes. It's part of the picture, even if it's only in a marginal position; and it may seriously affect all that's inside.

[...]

If you're spaceship-minded and scientifictitious, or even if you let your characters be so, it's likely enough that you'll find such things of that order in your new world, or only see sights that interest such folk."

 

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Notion Club Papers

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By Grabthar's hammer, I am sick of supernatural invocations!

 

Mentioning Kingdom Come: Deliverance piqued myself to pick it back up and, having polished off side-quests years ago, finally get into its main quest. Which is how I discovered that unlike standard Elder Scrolls-ish fare, the main quest actually unlocks a fair handful of new side-quests as you advance, especially DLC material. Hey, not that I'm not complaining about finding more content for one of the most immersive games I've played in my thirty years of such... but I do think it weird to stumble across three NPCs at once blathering about dream visions:

Ran into a rando' soothsayer in the Rattay marketplace and told her she's full of shit without bothering to listen to her babbling, then the "relic" peddler in Sasau told me he dreamt about me as his apprentice and that asshole's definitely full of perpetual shit... but come on, Johanka too? She's supposed to be one of the sane ones! (Well, adjusted to a 1400s definition of sanity at any rate.)

I mean, I trust her quest will get resolved as traumatic stress. Czechia, whatever the country's faults, is supposedly one of the least afflicted by our species' superstitious idiocy (with over half the population openly non-religious) and Warhorse's so far refreshingly treated religion as historical trends explained by human psychology, mass manipulation or abuse of psychotropics. Maybe I'd feel less apprehensive if so many other works of otherwise secular fiction just in my lifetime hadn't poisoned the well by supernatural twists. Look at TV series alone:

Dark raised my hackles worse than most, as up until the end its heavy religious symbolism had been written as to go both ways, easily interpretable purely as the leads' self-definition or self-importance. The series as a whole (ignoring the tediously drawn out teenage romance abused for filler sex scenes) was to that point good science fiction rooted in a physically and not metaphysically active phlebotinum combined with sapient machinations, with no need for the multiverse to give a flyin' fuck about your life's meaning.

Before that it would've been, oh, say, Lost. Not that it was worth watching after the first season anyway, but the finale still turned my stomach. Even after the show started spewing "dharma" left and right, it could have remained a tale of reason domesticating some unknown cosmic force, as it has always done with fire, the wheel, motive forces or nuclear fission. There was absolutely zero excuse for purgatorying shit up, invalidating all the characters' action as toys of invisible supernatural actors via the trite old "it was aalll a dreeaaam" dodge.

In fact, it reminds me that Twin Peaks, fifteen years earlier, could also have taken its seeming supernatural elements in either direction, but no writers leaving themselves that option can ever seem to avoid the cheap cop-out of blaming all their plot holes and inconsistencies on supernatural boogeymen or divine plans.

Hell, I won't pretend Dallas was worth watching, but at least it was cheap, laughable human drama... up until the finale shoehorned a devil in for no particular reason.

More recently, a somewhat underrated two-season affair called Zone Blanche reiterated the Twin Peaks routine. But for all that its characters' progress, allegiances and motivations remained interesting, any attempt at ambivalence vis-a-vis the supernatural fell flat even sooner. It's been done so many times by now that if you notice writers leaving even the slightest opening for supernatural explanations, you know with a certainty they'll come true.

 

The less said about Battlestar Galactica, the better.

The Telling is rightly seen as one of LeGuin's lesser works, partly for a redundant suite of quaint native storyteller characters, partly for digressing into the protagonist's life on Earth to little effect, but not least for how hard it strains at differentiating good superstition from bad superstition, upholding that American yuppie orientalism to which we've grown oh so tiresomely accustomed.

 

Illustrating the erasure of native cultures across Asia by 20th-century Communist regimes would've remained poignant enough if she'd stuck to valid critiques against historical revisionism, censorship and outright book-burning, physical and cultural genocide or the sheer violence of the rapid, enforced shift into industrialization, but unfortunately the author also felt some desperate need to justify the continued practice of primitive superstition. And of course she couldn't. There is no benefit brought by loose storytelling about herbs and physiology that cannot be improved by organized medical exploration and standards of care. Whatever pychological benefit we draw from contact with the natural world (and we do) does not extend to dependence on the whims of one's home garden plot and the weather for sustenance or a lifetime of backbreaking manual labor leaving no time for personal growth. However enlightening a single culture's mythology may be, it cannot compare to the skeptic's freedom to explore any and all cultures' mythologies side by side, with no fear of divine wrath or falling off one's dharma by erring from various eightfold, quarterfold or howevermanyfold paths.

And LeGuin damn well knew it. The primitivism she wanted to uphold had nothing intrinsic to offer. So she did what writers always do at that point, what we pay them to do: make shit up. During yoga class, the protagonist sees someone walk on air, and later more or less confirms it. There. Value. Worth! It doesn't matter if the yokels cannot match modern accomplishments in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, anthropology, because they've got MAGIC POWERS! They and only they. And of course said powers cannot be measured, communicated or demonstrated. They must be glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye in poorly lit gymnasia by unprofessional anthropologists who've "gone native" much like divine commandments are always whispered to a single prophet atop mountain peaks and deep within caves filled with hallucinogenic fumes or behind various curtains.

But take our word for it: it's real. Somewhere in a darkened cave a holy retard walks on air at this very moment!

Why?

Why do you need to hear that?

I spent much of my childhood reading Christian myths and a two-volume set of ancient Greek myths, and fables from the Orient about dragons sleeping beneath dry wells or palaces with unending entrance pavilions, and A Thousand and One Nights and forest witches luring princes aided by helpful birds... but I never needed to believe Perseus was real to enjoy his adventures. And I never needed Sarah Connor to combat terminators by releasing djinni from bottles. Why do you?

Let's stop pretending that writers are cleverly mixing fantasy with reality or science by cramming magic into non-magical plot and settings. What they're really doing is clinging to stultifying superstition to appeal to the subhuman degenerate apes comprising 99% of this species, incapable of distinguishing between internally consistent, rational sequences of events and wish-making. Of course every-yet-anotheredundantrite deus ex machina (emphasis on the deus) need not be clever; it must needs be exactly what it is: predictably reassuring to the mindless majority dependent on some insane belief that supernatural forces are looking out for them.

 

Every seraph or fomori popping up to solve a murder case reassures the imbecile hordes that even though no trace of the supernatural has ever shown up in the real world, it must be waiting juuust around the corner, just like in them thar teevee show!

And the world's IQ slips another point.

For over a decade now we've had smartphones with pin-sized microphones capable of picking up the barest whisper. How does the giant squawk-box at McDonalds still garble everything into "chipmunk with laryngitis" dialect?

Oh what's that I hear? Far right gains traction with Europe's youth?

U.S. youth move toward the right wing?

I told you so.

I told you so.

I told you so.

No really, I told you so.

Gord

"Summer don't know me no more

He got mad, tiresome"

 

Gorillaz - El Manana

 

_____________________________________

 

Hey I've heard of gords, who says I haven't? 'Course, I learned it from another video game, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but still, I want my damn applause. Anyway: Gord (it means a voled willage) is yet another example of how thoroughly Settlers-inspired village simulators have taken over the city sim market after Banished. It's also one of the rare times even I regret having to "thumbs-down" an otherwise impressively detailed and devoted work. Correct elements are mostly present, but they fail to coalesce into a viable whole.

Mead, a sanity meter, a thriving economy and bathing beauties. Sound like a party?

So Gord's a village simulator set in Slavic mythology, thankfully not reiterating the same elves and dragons and fireballs as everyone else. It also benefits from some inspired themes like an Apocalyptic curse of eternal night. (But how do the plants grow, daddy? Kid, I just live here, don't ask me.) Villagers vary in stats and special abilities, level up their skills while working or exploring and can equip items tailored to many specialties. As in the Age of Wonders series, exploration is a rewarding and dangerous enterprise, especially as basic resource nodes respawn but advanced ones don't (though that can also be mitigated by trading.) Villager bonuses and penalties range in magnitude, a weakness vs. a specific monster type may never incenvenience you, or on the flip-side sanity recovery after completing a quest you'll only run across once in your playthrough, all the way up to universally useful movespeed or sanity bonuses. It probably says something about this game's bleak slavic tone that "grumpy" is one of your most fearsome weaknesses.

Great. Love me sum all of that.

A highly thorough Civilopedia explains most concepts, though there you're already running into some weird choices -

You don't need to lore-dump the harmlessness of bunnies on me

- like exhaustive explanations of "critters" and "creeps" which have needed no introduction since Warcraft 2-3. I initially started in on the campaign, but it progresses rather tediously through a suite of stock characters with no further personality, and forcing you to rebuild your gord and level it up through construction requirements every time even in the tutorial stages smacks of timesink. It does also make the minor mistake of lore-dumping much of the mythology on you right from the start, spewing god names left and right, instead of gradually easing an unfamiliar audience into such rarely trod material. And, while the voice acting isn't bad, it's still banal enough for me not to bother.

Luckily, Gord features a surprisingly robust (on par with Old World or other 4Xes) map/scenario generator, so I was able to... mostly... enjoy a few freeplay maps... halfway through. Because after the initial "wow" factor of diving into a complex and meaningful construction/economic/expansion system, you start running into everything preventing that system's proper functioning. Start with an interface both stunningly complex and littered with weird gaps.

- apparently the only building you can't dismantle is the palisade, despite the fact you build a second wall out from the first one and if you're not expanding from a wall with a pre-existing gate, your villagers have to exit and re-enter, and the old wall choke-points civilian traffic pernanently... and nearby constructions can block gate placement

- military units not auto-separated from workers in roster

- while it does have CTRL+# action groups, you can't SHIFT+ to add another unit to them, have to mouse-click your way through three separate panels

- items beg for a storehouse of their own instead of clumsily shuffling between individuals

- I can appreciate you being inspired by 11bit's excellent work, but that sooty full-screen pop-up transition effect which worked so well in Frostpunk is ineffectively overextended here to annoyingly black out your screen altogether

- trying quite hard for the "relaxing" tag with a fast forward mode not quite fast enough

Then there are the weird thematic choices. If you're playing up the slavic theme why not stick with it?

- clay from termite mounds? Europe's northern half is one of the few places in the world which doesn't (yet) have termite problems

- slavs fighting gators and monkeys?

- some of the randomized names sound more germanic than slavic/gothic. Yes, there's plenty of overlap there, but also plenty of non-overlap you're not using.

 

Then you've got the rage-quit-inducing bugs and design insanity:

- don't color-code shit if you're playing up the grayscale night-time theme! Squinting is not a tactical choice
- AI is fundamentally pretty good (far more thorough than some competitors like Dawn of Man) with each villager running from combat when wounded, constructing anything in range or boosting its sanity/health if it drops, and settings for these and other behaviors like gathering range... but it's also inconsistent in resuming behaviors and tends to idle after orders, making you micromanage far more than you should have to

- villagers sometimes fail to stop running before their objective, so end up running in circles around it

- anguished villager never breaks out of anguish, stands in one place permanently (and you can start with as few as five)

- a good old-fashioned fatal program lock-up

- villagers can spawn with self-defeating bonuses or penalties, like a 15% attack angle bonus paired with complete inability to fight

- wall placement after your initial gord is painfully wonky, refusing to move individual nodes due to narrow angles even though it's only the final pattern which matters, plus the "wrong length for wall section"... does that mean too long, too short, too pineapple, what? And sometimes of course it just refuses to place a node in a certain spot with no explanation. So there. Suck on it.

- you'll see the inexplicable "unable to build here" message when trying to place anything in your expansions. As far as I can tell you not only have to avoid overlapping building placement with trees, which would be tedious micromanagement (why not auto-chop as part of the build order?) but might make some sense. No, you cannot build ANYTHING in any gord extension which contains AT LEAST ONE TREE anywhere in it. Why? Fuck if I know! And did I mention trees re-grow? (In the dark, daddy? Go 'way kid, ya bother me.)

- nonsensical or luck-based quest requirements. Getting a quest to visit a dangerous area right at the start of the game when it's literally impossible to defeat the defending mobs even if you send all your villagers. Later on, Rusalka demands "undeposited" resources which you've never put into storage (there is some support for this in European folklore where creatures often require untainted or untouched resources; it may be where "cold iron" comes from) but come on, I had not a single iron node in the 2/3 an XL map I scouted and so autofailed the quest. What exactly am I being graded on here?

Pity. This could've been something great.

Maybe in a couple of years I'll check back to discover Gord will have miraculously fixed all these flaws, but I'm not holding my breath, given they already cranked out an expansion pack without bothering to fix anything.

"Maybe in time you'll want to be mine"

A comprehensive treatise on the importance of checks and balances

(June bug rampage on a linden, if you're wondering)

Classes&Cogitations: Pet Afterthoughts

I was surprised by how much Baldur's Gate 3 downplayed combat pets and creature summoning. On one hand, cRPGs always had a problem with disposable summons replacing your party's front line, but then again Larian's obsession with teleportation obviates tactical positioning anyway, so I doubt that was on their minds. Maybe it stems from some push to minimize paperwork in D&D's latter versions (more characters = more attack rolls to tally) but if so it's a woefully misplaced concern in computer adaptations because... well, y'know, "processor" and all that. And they certainly had no problem letting me pile a dozen redundant zombies and ghouls into fights. At least some of the summons they did implement move beyond mere damage soaking.

The dryad not only has a moderately useful crowd control spell but her own summon, the fallen lover, is a decent bruiser with a shitty attack roll... which can be mitigated by the dryad's own staff knockdown, letting the power duo dogpile one target rather satisfyingly. Like weapons or other specialization choices, it's nice when "different" means more than cosmetically different.

As my playstyle gravitates away from optimization and toward support roles with lots of tricks up their sleeves, I've often encountered the "pet class" problem: at which point does the class' pet become more important than the class itself? Balance concerns multiply with every mook you summon, especially in systems with relatively low damage/health numbers like, say, D20. Summoning something with baseline 1D6 damage at low levels can amount to doubling your damage, but lowering attack rolls can easily overcompensate into uselessness.

 

Practicality aside, even aesthetically the coolness of your beeping robots or clattering skeletons can draw attention away from your actual player avatar. Animal pets especially steal the show faster than Anthony Hopkins, to where you'll find yourself playing a large bear with a small druid attached. Hell, if you've ever walked a dog around the neighbourhood you can guess how encountering a ranger with a tame magic super-wolf would play out:

"Oh, hey, nice to meet - OMG is that a big pooch that does tricks!? C'mere boy, aren't you cute, whozzagoodboy, whozzagoodboy! ... Wait, I'm sorry random schmoe with a bow standing next to the GIANT ADORABLE FLUFFY PUPPY, who the hell are ya again? - whozzagoodboyyy!"

I mean, I liked Sagani from Pillars of Eternity well enough, but I still learned Itumaak's name before hers and now remember it more easily. 

So there seems little middle ground. You either have to downplay the pet into an utterly forgettable bonus attack per round... or, and call me druidically biased, but you could also lean into the pet personality dynamic and express pet classes' characteristics through these walking, flying, floating, crawling, burrowing, hopping extensions of themselves. RPG necromancers already fall into that pattern by maintaining the undeath theme. So why not force a bit of thematic specialization and pet focus elsewhere? City of Heroes' "mastermind" villain class is often cited as great fun for exactly that reason, as each of its subclasses ran with a specific theme, be it zombies, ninjas, robots, whatever, with most of the mastermind's own abilities revolving not around direct attacks but around resummoning pets as they dropped, ordering them, buffing and debuffing.

It may be better to start thinking of summoner classes as gestalts, with the main summoner/tamer being merely the most expressive and constant embodiment of that personality. Play into summoning different goons for different purposes, like wolves for combat and foxes for sneaking, or swapping out golem arm attachments for mining/hauling/sniping or an Artful Dodger summoning different pint-sized rogues for the heist at hand. Give the various pets the odd interaction or encounter of their own, give the pack or squad or murder of bots a shifting personality based on its currently dominant composition (much like One of Many from Mask of the Betrayer.) At the same time, stick to the theme! Unless generalism itself be my theme, my wizard's summons shouldn't read like the start of a weak joke: a succubus, a dire pangolin and a zombie walk into a bar...

If nothing else, it would also be a minor step toward personifying your roleplaying avatar in terms of what it does instead of how it's dressed. And come on, don't tell me you can't think of any cute, poignant or clever ways in which pets could spice up a roleplaying campaign.

 

ey, ocupado!

 

Occasionally

My, my, and one dares.

Fight Club: The Doors Are Now Locked

"I don't like your fashion business mister
And I don't like these drugs that keep you thin
I don't like what happened to my [brother]
First, we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin"

Leonard Cohen - First We Take Manhattan

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As vilifying men became the law of the land after 2010, the movie Fight Club, which had enjoyed well-deserved popularity and cultural benchmark status alongside contemporaries like The Matrix and the first (good) superhero movies, instead became a fashionable target to bash as "male" in more or less defined ways. The webcomic Leftover Soup featured a particularly scathing one in the rant below page #859 (mind the spoiler) :

"the real tragedy of this tragedy is that so many fucking people don't realize that Tyler Durden is the fucking bad guy. His transparently misogynist and classist and ableist and nihilist rhetoric resonates with his target demographic, both inside and outside of his fictional world. Dipshits think he's cool. Dipshits think he has a point. Dipshits probably think that Project Mayhem successfully erased debts, making the world a fair and poverty-free place. Dipshits probably think that a panderingly populist, destructively anarchic movement led by a single madman with virtually no democratic feedback or diversity of opinion can make the world a better place."

Given such rants inevitably suggest more than a side-glance at Trumpism, and given America's Republican constituency has called for the lynching of anyone involved in convicting their new Messiah (screw Jesus, this guy has better hair) for the same crime for which that moral paragon Nixon had the decency to willingly abdicate, maybe it's worth making just two no three wait, no, four points about Fight Club.

1) Actually, yes, Tyler Durden is cool, and he does have a point. He is also quite demonstrably and emphatically the villain of the story whose defeat concludes the hero's journey with a return to normalcy but hey, villains get the best lines. In fact his anti-consumerist, direct agency rhetoric was neither new at the time nor faded in importance since, being endlessly reiterated in everything from documentaries to rom-coms. That Tyler co-opts valid social critique as a call for misdirected action diminishes in no way the validity of that critique.

2) It's pretty much come true, in the form of both Trumpism and wokeism's myriad psychotic strains of social activist vandalism, whether anti-white, anti-straight, anti-male, whatever brand you got on hand. Not for nothing did young holier-than-thou deadheads earn the title "snowflakes" directly from the movie's soundtrack; raised in ceaseless narcissism, two generations became easy prey for any rabblerouser who might provide a totalizing framework to validate their existence as part of a unified mob. Desperate to rule the modern world as they've been promised but incapable of understanding it, the space monkeys have resolved to tear it down into something simple enough for their ignorance and stupidity to encompass.

3) Most abuse hurled at the movie has little to do with content and far more with audience. If men like it, it must be evil. (Never mind that feminist rhetoric presents far more casually abusive fantasies while drawing no criticism.) You may also see the original author Palahniuk's coming out of the closet propped up as some apologia, trying to re-frame it all as anti-masculinist gay angst. (I was under the impression gay men like maleness, but hey, I may be wrong.) Let stand the basic truism that men far more than women chafe under modern society's pervasive surveillance, overcrowding, imposed meekness and braggadocio combined, and general control freak tendencies. Standard "man against society" conflict, just more applicable than most. If the movie's plot had any inter-sexual undertone, it was a distinctly female anxiety, that potential mates' weaponizable aggression and more generally male energy may slip out of female control, that men may begin placating instinct on their own terms instead of sublimating it into everything you want to make your girlfriends jealous: concert tickets, evening gowns, 2.5 kid garages, conspicuous consumption, your fucking khakis. I look around my apartment. I don't need Brazilian cherry furniture, don't need curtains 'cause I'm fine with blinds, fine eating off a cheap acrylic plate instead of "the Royal Doulton with the hand-painted periwinkles" - so who was that IKEA furniture really for? Consciously or not, IKEA boy was furnishing a bower for an eventual IKEA girl.

4) Again, flouting or disengagement (to whatever degree) from society's demands or standards is not a novel idea, nor extremist, nor inherently violent unless suppressed. Monks and ascetics, shut-ins and raving eccentrics, clowns and vandals have always existed. Pretending a need doesn't exist does not remove it. It only removes healthy release valves. Tyler only turns truly villainous after he starts recruiting, but his success is less a rebellion against the system than said system's logical conclusion: when you inculcate impossible movie star or corporate boss ideals, you're stoking an irrational drive to be sublimated for exploitation... but you don't actually get to choose who does the exploiting. Along comes Trump - I mean Tyler! Tyler! and shoots your carefully bred monkeys into space. Interestingly though, we skipped right over the Fight Club stage (deliberate, individual participation in symbolic transgression; punching yourself in the face) to Project Mayhem's co-optation. Or at least I'm not seeing it. If individual conflict against new/old social norms yet exists, it must be expressed during, and curtailed to, childhood. By the time they become visible to us in the world at large, youths are incoherent, hermetically sealed superego powderkegs, primed for ignition by the first opportunist.

 

So maybe the real question is what the hell happened to education?