"Hey Kids, Do You Like Violence?"

"But don't blame me when little Eric jumps off of the terrace

You shoulda been watching him; apparently you ain't parents"

 

Eminem - Who Knew

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"A successful business politician [...] guards his reputation for sticking by his commitments - because he wants to stay in business - go on stealing, that is - not only this week but next year and years after that. So if he's smart enough to be successful at this very exacting trade, he can have the morals of a snapping turtle, but he performs in such a way as not to jeopardize the only thing he has to sell, his reputation for keeping promises.
But a reform politician has no such lodestone. His devotion is to the welfare of all the people - an abstraction of very high order and therefore capable of endless definitions. If indeed it can be defined in meaningful terms. In consequence your utterly sincere and incorruptible reform politician is capable of breaking his word three times before breakfast - not from personal dishonesty, as he sincerely regrets the necessity and will tell you so - but from unswerving devotion to his ideal.
All it takes to get him to break his word is for someone to get his ear and convince him that it is necessary for the greater good of all the peepul. He'll geek. After he gets hardened to this, he's capable of cheating at solitaire. Fortunately he rarely stays in office long - except during the decay and fall of a culture."

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough for Love

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Circumstances beyond my control saw me reacquainted with the younger crowd's cinematheque recently. Suzume... actually proved quite a pleasant surprise, but I'll leave it for another day. The newer Watership Down miniseries was a bit harder to defend.

 

I liked it, but then much of that was Kingsley's damn fine voicing of Woundwort and my own nostalgia for the book itself. That highlights reel playing in your skull makes it easier to ignore the stiff, low-fidelity, painfully cheap CGI or the gratuitous departures from the story (like downplaying the black rabbit's creepiness or even losing the title reference, of all things) or its bloodless and truncated bunny carnage. Watership Down rather infamously played straight nature's survival horror mix of hope and terror. The miniseries for instance plays up the environmentalist angle when it was plenty loud in Adams' text, plus unnecessarily emphasizes Efrafra's superficial Nazism while eliding the more rabbit-level concerns like eating, shitting, biting and fucking. But then we live in superficial times.

 

The real stomach-turning revelation was Nimona, a propaganda piece vapid even by gradeschooler standards lavished with mandatory uncritical acclaim from every corner of wokedom. You can see the check-boxes being ticked away from beginning to end, scene by telegraphed scene: plucky underdog, gay kiss, light-skinned villains, dark-skinned hero outshined by female just as social justice pecking order dictates, obligatory third-act schism between the heroes to be mended by a declaration of unquestioning devotion to the girl, shallow analogy of shapeshifting to "gender fluid" attention whoring, all-powerful heroine who's somehow also oppressed by everyone and everything, tech evil, planning evil, reason evil, impulsiveness and emotionality good. Any questions? Aside from that, even the action scenes lack any necessary choreography, randomly bouncing off the walls, and if the low-fidelity textures in Watership Down looked cheap, that's still better than Nimona's obviously over-budgeted low fidelity.

 

If you'd like one example of Nimona's idiocy, try the scene where the monster girl makes friends with another little girl who is then turned against her friend by the adults around her. Obviously children could only learn to attack those different from themselves by having their minds poisoned by adults... said noone who has ever actually met a group of kids, any group of kids in the history of humanity! Watch them spontaneously and instinctively bash, bully and hound whichever of them happens to have any random noticeable feature arbitrarily called out as different, from freckles to wearing the wrong t-shirt to lisping or having big ears, big nose, big toes, being too tall, too short, too pumpernickel, whatever. It takes two solid decades of adult supervision to teach kids not to murder each other over having their hair parted the wrong way, on instinct. But hell, screw the entirety of observable evidence in ten thousand years and nine billion apes' worth of exhaustively documented child-rearing lore, we need to parrot "institutionalized prejudice" to suit p.c. thug propaganda.

Then there's the narcissistic conceit of the heroine's supposed isolation. (Leaving aside the constant misinterpretation of "chaotic" archetypes - there's a difference between personal freedom and tantrums with no attention span.) I mean, aside from the fact she demonstrates scene after scene that she really is an impulsively destructive danger to everyone around her... but it's somehow racist against Godzilla to say it... there's the little detail of her omnipotence. She can blend in just fine, but refuses to. She can thrive outside the city effortlessly but refuses to leave, even temporarily to get her shapeshifting out of her system. She's had a thousand years to set up a press conference and plead her case but couldn't be bothered. And she makes friends by tossing people off skyscrapers. This is basically the logical extreme to which characters like Wesley Crusher were already leading thirty years ago. If you're magically "special" you can act as stupidly, recklessly destructive as you want; don't worry 'cause the universe will restructure itself to suit your tantrums.

Generally when watching a kids' movie you accept the protagonist will share kid qualities, and a certain amount of quirky, kooky, rambunctious bounciness is expected. Animaniacs were animanie, totally zany, random refrainie, but without pretending the absolute entitlement of an aggrieved minority. Their jokes could be evaluated for meanness, comedy or social critique on a joke-by-joke basis. Industry bigwigs until recently at least understood human nature better than to openly preach narcissistic vandalism to eight year olds as a moral high horse! And get showered with every award in the business for it!

One of Watership Down's most endearing facets, among many which have cemented it as a classic, is the rabbits' keen awareness of their limitations even as they attempt and sometimes succeed the impossible. They fight when cornered but would rather run and hide; they play desperate gambits but if given a choice build their culture around sensible solutions; they respond to population pressures by spreading out instead of demanding the world grow around them. The tragedy of Efrafra lies not just in superficial goose-stepping but untenable, unhealthy, cramped and overpopulated and wastefully over-regimented lifestyles. Woundwort himself is not just a big meanie but unnatural and much worse irrationally unaware of his own nature, as demonstrated by his last scene.

Nimona is basically what you'd get if you tried playing Woundwort for the hero: bunnyzilla crying that nobody likes it even as it demolishes Tokyo in a willfully ignorant toddler tantrum, all while Tokyo self-flagellates over its "institutionalized privilege" for not giving in to a mindless unstoppable force of destruction's every whim. Did we all already decide to forget the wokeysition claims to stand up for the voiceless and downtrodden? Power to the whichever people, I guess.

Thou shalt not inhibit the dopamine reuptake of bitey things

I was a bit amused at the news that Rio de Janeiro's waters are so polluted with cocaine that sharks have been routinely testing positive for the stuff for years now, not least for the slap in the face it serves to religious imbeciles claiming we don't need to worry about human impact on the planet, don't need to regulate the population because it's all part of some divine plan.

Umm, no.

Not even the Book of Revelations at its most batshit crazy could've thought this one up. I guarantee you, no divine plan ever included coked-up sharks!

Hephaistos Is Totally Lame

"To get my fair share of abuse"

Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want

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"If I was twice the man I could be

I'd still be half of what you need"

NIN - Ringfinger

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"I wasn't thinkin' all I heard was the ridicule
Girlies was laughin"

2Pac - Trapped

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Bill Maher ran another rant bashing men recently, as he's been doing with some regularity over the past years. This time he's teaching men "game" in dating, which of course amounts to "everything about you is wrong you filthy pig" and the animal kingdom's eternal expectation that males must do everything to prove themselves while females sit in judgment. Ironically, Maher's spiel ends up reiterating many of the societal expectations demonstrating why no man should be giving a woman the time of day: expecting that the man should pay the woman for the privilege of her merest attention, change everything about himself to suit her, assume all risk, accept all blame, hate his looks, hate his property, hate his hobbies, hate himself, devote his every waking moment to her, all while absorbing a never-ending tirade of abuse further degrading him to inculcate ever more slavishness toward his glorious goddess.

Now, I haven't looked through dating sites recently, but back in the day I wasn't particularly thrilled at seeing within one or two sentences a third of women proclaimed their religion, another third their zodiac sign, the last third their feminism. Ignoring the first two breeds of insanity, you could sure say it doesn't show much "game" on a woman's part to proclaim her adherence to a political lobby condemning me for all the world's ills. Not much of a come-hither. More like warning coloration. ProTip ladiez: maybe postpone the "castrate and leash you" rhetoric for second course conversation. Yeah I think HBO could easily fill up a few New Rule segments teaching women "game" like:

"nobody's impressed with your d-cups if they come with de gut"

"asking how much he makes a year doesn't substitute for a hello"

"his apartment is not yours to redecorate"

"the going rate for a blowjob is not two months' salary"

"you can either cuddle after sex or file a rape lawsuit, but pick one"

"Make up your mind. Just, y'know... in general."

"tsundere's less cute outside anime"

"ignoring him is not enticement to ask you out" or better yet

"since we're supposed to be equal you can damn well do the legwork and assume the risk of rejection yourself"

On a completely unrelated topic, your news feed's probably been treating you to a gradual trickle of daily death tolls in the past week's Bangladeshi civil service riots: twenty people killed one day, thirty people another, a hundred and fifty people killed altogether. Which weasel-word "people" probably translates into a hundred and forty-nine men murdered in the interest of their families' welfare plus one chick who took a wrong turn on her way to the grocery store. I guess you can try finding a wounded woman amidst the numerous images of bloodied men being dragged out of the fighting by other men, but every country's cops know damn well being caught on camera beating one woman to death (like they beat countless men to death in every other news segment) risks berserking the entire country against them, much as happened in Egypt a few years back. I previously mentioned this insistent verbal tick of obfuscating men's sacrifice in an all-purpose "people" in light of journalistic rhetoric on the Iranian protests last year. Nobody wondered why exactly in a conflict universally presented in our media as women standing up to male oppression, 93% of casualties on the women's side were men.

 

In what other demographic context can we even conceive such willful ignorance? If Palestine raided Israel and somehow wound up murdering 93% Palestinians, you would wonder! If the next L.A. race riots consist of black street gangs shooting a hundred african-americans plus Austin Reaves, you can expect at least a few journalists to question the usage of race in that context. If a report on the Yakuza presented them as a Hawaiian smuggling ring with a minor connection to Japan, you might question the journalist's bias or sanity or both.

"People" die. And when "people" butcher each other whether in war, in riots, in street shootouts, other "people" on both sides wait to see which of them will receive a bloodied survivor's offering of plunder at her feet. This is normal, unquestioned and unquestionable. That's what "people" are for.

So yes, of course women don't need "game" never have and never will. Nothing gets a round of audience applause quite like shitting on one man or all men as not "manning up" readily enough to play the role as protector/provider for women. It played great when Moe was telling Homer Simpson "we [men]'re all pigs" and it played great when Ralph Kramden failed at life and it plays great on Real Time. That bit always gets a laugh; it always gets votes. Tiny cock, too proud of his big cock, balding head, poofy hair, cheap clothes, not enough muscle, not enough car, not enough muscle-car, can't please her in bed, can't please her parents, too fat, too skinny, too old, too young, too sweaty, too short, too hairy, not hairy enough, not dependable enough, not adventurous enough, doesn't last long enough in bed, spends too much time in bed, coward, reckless, doesn't work out, works out too much, not enough "game", too much of a "playa", wants too much sex from his wife, lost interest in his wife, neckbeard, babyface, four-eyes, geek, jock, humorless, clown, farts, belches, spends too much time at the office, doesn't work hard enough for a promotion, can't lift, can't run, no stock portfolio, no art portfolio, too shady, too straight-laced, too angry, too conciliatory, spendthrift, miser, fat ass, scrawny ass, no chin, big chin, and did we mention tiny cock haw-haw!

 

Oh sure, female versions exist. They crop up once a decade. "Boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses" had a few good years' run. "Karens" got a solid raggin' this past decade (more than their counterpart "Chads") including as high-maintenance dates. Bolt-on tits got a laugh around the 2000s. But there is no invective hurled against men which will not receive thunderous, hooting applause in any comedy routine, across networks, across decades, across generations in either hemisphere... so long as you couch it as being judged unworthy in female eyes. Not for one flaw like sagging tits or a fat ass, but for any flaw so long as you argue it makes him unfuckable. There is no man in the world, no matter how accomplished, that a jester in our town square can't smear as Quasimodo by implying he can't get laid. If Jesus Christ showed up tomorrow with the recipe for cold fusion, all it would take is a mocking chorus of "lulz virgin" to make him the sorriest toerag on the planet.

Which brings us to the last point. It's actually old news that men evaluate 50% of women below average and 50% above (which is sort of how averages work) while women insanely perceive 80% of men as below average. And that's just based on physical attractiveness. Maher opens his latest diatribe with "Did you know that in the U.S. 63% of men aged 18-29 are single? But just 34% of women. I'm not sure how that works unless there are a lot more lesbians than I thought." Actually, Bill, not to state the obvious but how it works is that the women are all fucking the same rock star or chief financial officer. And the women are fine with that so long as he constantly vies to demonstrate his superiority over other men by firing them, buying and selling them, sending them off to war, outdoing them in lavish gifts to his ladies loves, rap dueling other men or demeaning them in stand-up monologues on cable channels. To the primitive monkey-girl inside every woman's mind there exists only one man. He's that prince movie star astronaut rock star bodybuilder trillionnaire bodhisattva warlord famous painter CEO chin model archangel with a private jet and he spends every single moment complimenting her, smiting lesser men, bringing her prezzies, remodeling the bathroom and apologizing for not being good enough, all at once.

The rest of men exist solely for CFO Prince Charming to make redundant to prove his worth. To be male is to be born a disposable statistic, cannon fodder, a 93% margin of error in women's interests.

 

And that of course is why any talk of teaching men "game" is bunk, whether coming from a comedian or a pick-up artist or poets or advice columnists. It will never be enough. You will never be good enough for her. She doesn't care about your quality. Even if she does condescendingly permit you into her pants, it's only to spend every day afterwards torturing you for failing to be a product of her fairy tales.

When I was young I ran away from home. In my defense I was late for school.

Flay Pretty

"Watch your head spin
Like a mesocyclone
Bouncing off the walls
Now there's nowhere to run"

 

Shiny Toy Guns - Ricochet

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"These are the prisons, these are the crimes
Teaching life in a violent new way

For who can bear to be forgotten?"

 

David Bowie - Ricochet

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"Drugs are for losers, and hypnosis is for losers with big weird eyebrows"

Futurama S03E14 (2001-2002)

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Baldur's Gate 3 has its good points, but I've never liked Larian's attitude that "adventure = random shit" or their nonexistent worldbuilding and infantile pandering characters. I've particularly hated their handling of the illithids and more broadly the question of telepathy, to the point I flat-out refused to participate in that facet of gameplay altogether.

I reached the end of the campaign without ever using a single tadpole (also avoiding mind reading / control spells while at it, much as I could) and if the boss fight requires me to have done so, this is a hill my drowid will gladly die on.

Telepathy is wrong.

When setting out on this rant I was sorely tempted to get up on my pre-millennial high horse and pull a "kids these days" routine, but the truth is we've always been shaky on the morality here (return to why later) as exemplified by the Trois on ST:TNG thirty years ago. Prof. X is a... hero... right? At least that's what I find myself thinking all of a sudden when he scratches his magic cue-ball. Not to mention D&D always threw charm spells and other mental enchantment casually into the magical mix; in their defense, the folklore they indirectly drew from also does so. But I would contend I'm seeing more blithe, unquestioning acceptance of mind reading and mind control as generic tropes recently.

 

Drive's latest chapter kicked off this train of thought. I've long said that telepathy is a dead end for science fiction in particular. Drive's driving phlebotinum is, ostensibly, the titular interstellar drive accompanied by a requisite smatter of space opera laser guns and antigravity, quirky aliens and navy jargon. As soon as the space squirrel's sixth sense turned out to double as "mind-speaking" I cringed in anticipation of what has now happened: singlehandedly weaponizing it to instantly disable an entire fleet and receiving galaxy-shaking military intel via seance. A.k.a. invalidate any/all of the setting's technology, weaponry or strategic planning or... y'know... the plot. (Or backgrounds, is your setting gonna just be a telepathic blank void from now on, Kellett you lazy hack?) Who gives a shit if the enemy outnumbers, outguns and outpositions you if you can just nuke all their brains and call it a day? So long dramatic tension. Other stories may throw in some kind of "forgetfullness curse" to patch up plot holes like why hasn't anyone addressed some obvious threat until the hero notices it (hint: it's to make the audience feel smart for NOTICE THING) or to fast-forward intimacy or skip language barriers or any other number of lazy plot shortcuts.

Which leads me to my first sub-point: if telepathy is now so casually accepted that brain-zapping draws no more attention than zombies or a generic zap gun, the very least we could say is that telepathy's kinda played out.

Second, my original focus was on SF, because telepathy's mere inclusion in such a setting undercuts the technological precept of the entire genre. But more and more its rampant abuse as crutch for incongruous writing has grown detrimental in horror or fantasy as well. This became apparent while playing one of the few video games without supernatural elements, Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Its main quest's middle portion revolves around tracking down groups of bandits, with an interlude as medical detective's apprentice. (Cholera! It was cholera! 'Poisoned water'... why-I-oughta microscope yas *mumble-mumble*)

 

Playing gumshoe in the age of clogs made me realize how much more interested I felt in each witness' actual testimony as opposed to being automatically informed a character is good or bad via notarized brain fax. But aside from it being a cheap cop-out for actual plotting and character development, let's return to the inherent creepiness of mind invasion.

Unsounded remains one of the best webcomics out there. Among other details, I appreciate Cope fairly consistently portraying mind-reading as an invasive or destructive/deconstructive process, despite leaning on it a bit heavily as plot crutch herself. Bonus points for the Etalarche curse, which condemns the victim to be hunted down by all its countrymen in a murderous rage... specifically for thinking the repercussions through and showing how devastatingly such a curse upon the minds of an entire country may be subverted by the first invading enemy with a megaphone to cause the equivalent of a suicidal rout among your most hardened soldiers.

I'm less impressed by the SF comic Forward, which established from the start that its entire populace have electronics hardwired into their brains from birth, but only recently admitted the logical downside: the implants are NOT one-way. The user is part of the machine, and can be reprogrammed as such. Except it's not treated as a downside. It's very casually dropped into the conversation that your perception can even be altered in real time to censor anything you have chosen not to perceive... or which you are considered mentally incompetent to perceive... or to freeze you in place unable to even speak for yourself because you triggered a subroutine labeling you a threat to others. Now, having read Tailsteak's previous two comics and then some, I'm trying very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's going somewhere with this (maybe to the Futurological Congress) other than just a quirky little risque comedy of errors for our hero, his beefy love interest and his bestest robo-buddy.

 

If it's foreshadowing for a dystopian reveal, then grats Tailsteak, you've earned your keep. But otherwise, you can't drop brain editing into the conversation without the wider totalitarian applications being painfully obvious. Plot, conflict, affection, enmity, strategy, goals, perspicacity, means, motive and opportunity, none of it matters once mental invasion is in play. "Nuke their brains" is the ultimate cheat code. The ultimate absolutism. Thought, independent, personal thought is existence itself. Cogito ergo sum, the foundation of reason.* By effacing individuals as independent actors, telepathy erases personhood, erases being itself more thoroughly than Big Brother's recording devices and torture ever could.

We used to know that. Or at least suspect it.

While telepaths have always popped up in pop culture, Vulcan mind-melding at least shared the stage with acknowledgements of destructive potential. George R.R. Martin, before hopelessly wedding his name to "tits and dragons" had quite a few deservedly famous short to novella length tales to his name, among them A Song for Lya, which skillfully juxtaposed the fear of death with the night-mare Life-in-Death via the logical end-game of telepathy. The Man from Mars' corrective mechanism is not a brainwashing spree; it's a killing spree. The rest is up to earthlings. It used to be accepted that being made a cog in a clockwork orange is unacceptable, no matter the perpetrator's crimes, that execution would be preferable. Transcendence in Alpha Centauri was a desperate compromise short of complete annihilation of all sapience before Planet's presapient omnipotence. Even the Matrix, mass-market action flick that it was, at least stuck by two critical precepts: "ignorance is bliss" is a villain's line, and make-believe cannot substitute for reality. Even up to Dragon Age: Origins, it was understood that mind control is inherently wrong if not unforgivable, something demons do, the darkest school of magic. But by Tides of Numenera, it was chiefly Avellone's character Erritis that acknowledged such tuning of others' minds as inherently self-interested and destructive, with most writers encouraging you to rewrite others to suit yourself and even featuring "psychic warriors" as young adult novel heroes. The moral question of manipulating the "tides" themselves is barely scratched, and left up to a villain to pose.

 

I was disgusted in BG3 when by the third act I found even picking up a brain parasite automatically adds it to your "collection" a.k.a. shoved it into your brain, as if they couldn't imagine I might not want to. Forced me to do some container juggling to capture each one to my camp chest instead, so I could screenshot my whole refusal to partake above for a hearty "go fuck y'self Larian" now.

Go fuck y'self, Larian. There is no such thing as beneficent mind control.

Most aggravating, the game's writers played off the issue as if they can't even discern any moral objection but only childish fear of ookiness, as the undesirability of illithidness is played every time in terms of face tentacles and floating, and not the existential horror of erasing personal existence by one's very nature. You skip merrily through the idea that you should be building up your psychic powers to invade and delete others' very selves. That's all cool. The game only and at long last plays your illithidity as "problematic" when your next mind-raping powerup might give you the physical features of one as well.

"Puerile attachment to my material form" - ? What? I play a freakin' shapeshifter! No, you idiots, my objection to mind flayers is the flaying of minds! And that attitude, of openly touting it's fine to rape minds so long as you don't look ugly doing it, does further show notable degeneration in modern pop culture, the depths to which two decades of "reality" TV voyeurism have dragged us.

Finally, let's note this was probably inevitable. The Enlightenment and scientific progress were a brief blip of rationality in the million-year life and death of an intrinsically irrational breed of apes. The 20th century's short outbursts of rationality were themselves coextant with and sandwiched between long decades of dominant thought-erasing fascism, spiritualism, cloying sentimentality, romance, advertising and religious revivals. As the old scorpion parable goes, it's in your animal nature.

Any creature that wants some magic sky-daddy reading its mind is not mentally competent, regardless whether it sports face tentacles.

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* Even if Descartes did undercut his own stroke of brilliance half a page later by reaffirming his devotion to idiotic caveman superstitions. Not that he'd be given much choice in the 1600s with the whole continent torturing witches to death left and right.

 

P.S.: The only time BG3 voices a flat, concise repudiation of make-believe it's via the teachings of a canonically evil D&D species.

 

I'd be tempted to call that juxtaposition wry commentary on human morality, but given the pervasive infantilism of the rest of Larian's writing I find myself unwilling to extend them that credit.

Dabble Entendres

"I wanna blow you... away"

Avril Lavigne being less clever than the examples on this page in Things I'll Never Say

 

This just in: the Tolkien estate would like you to rigorous some mortis.

 

Actually I don't know where Standing Stone got that cavern's name, since neither word shows up in dwarvish translations that I can find, much less orcish ones, with the closest being the quenya for spikes or teeth. Like the films' crew, they were forced to reconstruct past what Tolkien himself provided into order to make a few phrases flow better in dialogue or the many added toponyms, and it may be pure gibberish as far as I know.

 

Which saps very little of its humor.

 

Much like a science fiction game inviting you to dock with Anakin's Crack.

 

 It's in the vicinity of Buttock.

And just opposite Cock-Lite.

It's damn near impossible to avoid double entendres, given how our glorious monkey brains bend toward the topic of naughty bits. It is perfectly mundane and factual that medieval men loved the feel of hoes on the crotch. They were very open-minded about it too: brown hoes, yellow hoes, decorated hoes, fashionable hoes, even loose hoes in a pinch... or lack thereof. But when you get to "tight black hose" come on, now you're doing it on purpose.

Hell, more often you don't even need words. I toyed with the notion of starting a campaign of Manor Lords, but couldn't stop giggling on seeing my family crest could be a frustrated purple cock in a shower of spermatozoa.

But it does seem that algorithmic content generation has concatenated many phrases which nobody would ever have considered before. Sometimes they can be innocent name pairings the likes of Jay Leno's Headlines segment.

well, he does love himself

While other times the algorithm gets weirdly and awkwardly expressive.

Oooh baby, I only boing for you

And let's admit that no matter how many "dirty" words you ban from your generator, you can never avoid the suggestive implications of endless word combinations which make up language as a whole.

 

Come on, you can't feed me a line like "danceoiled" or "narrow roughness"* and not expect me to complete the motion!

 

But if I've ever seen a game stumble head-first into this problem, it was Warframe, whose developers have a sense of humor about this sort of thing and so might've "accidentally" been a bit lax about pruning certain phonemes. A few years ago its "Kuva Lich" enemy generator launched complete with name generation, and given the names had to be short and guttural sounding, creations like Zoo Gangg, Bigg Horr, Ogg Fuhkk and Yirr Mahorr rapidly mounted. My own list, aside from more casual weirdness like two liches named Aff Egg and Obb Egg, also includes an Ugly Jaw and the family jewel of my collection:

Best part? It's a shotgun. It has a ball behind its thick stubby barrel. And the game now includes an enemy type called the "sisters" so I can officially declare I am spraying your sisters with my cohkk a nudi kohm!

 

As Yakko Warner might say: mwwwah! good night, everybody!

 

Do I have a point with all this? Well I sure as hell didn't start with one. I've just been sitting on these screenshots for years now. But if pressed to fabricate a moral to this story, it would concern those glorified chatbots everyone's calling generative AI. Please don't straightjacket them in fear they might say something suggestive. Let the darlings spew freely. First of all, you simply cannot prevent it. Second, it's freakin' hilarious.

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*Yes, Aaron Williams, Cac'toss Up'd'azz lives on!

P.S.:

If anyone doesn't recognize the games referenced, from top to bottom they're The Lord of the Rings Online, Stellaris, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Manor Lords, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress and Warframe. Titles like the world of rimming and the kingdom of coming are just glazing on the cake.

Un.Am.Biguous

"AIIIEEEEE! ... Uh. Sorry. That was inexcusably girly."

"That's... okay."

 

I'd criticized Kaspall last November intending to follow up with how the author's newer project, Spare Keys for Strange Doors, improved in conciseness, impact, nuance, pacing, etc. For one thing, where the older series naively played up female characters' power per standard "our sexism is cooler" dogma, the newer urban fantasy tales keep both (male/female) leads capable yet imperfect and wasn't afraid to turn turnabout into fair play. I got a good hearty chuckle out of the otherwise no-nonsense, hands-on problem solver Marion impulsively shrieking and huddling against her boyfriend when startled awake by a monster in the middle of the night, and Toby reassuring her that yes, it's okay, nobody's rescinding your tough chick card for a moment of girliness in that situation. Like Fry and Leela's sniff check, the exchange subtly underscored the characters' trust in each other.

Because drawings must be deliberately feminized / masculinized with every shade and contour, comics' comparative simplicity makes them apt to hop back and forth across the dividing line of androgyny. Except it's always back. Very slightly back. Spare Keys' "eek a (giant mutant scaly) mouse" moment, for simply having a female character openly acknowledge such incongruity, reminded me that for all women have declared superiority over men in all masculine things they have never surrendered the prerogative to be as girly as they like; conversely men are still mocked and condemned for presuming to encroach upon the protections of femininity while masculinity itself (in men) has been branded toxic.

So are characters introduced as either hermaphrodytic or andronygous all that ambiguous? I'm thinking of four examples in particular.

Questionable Content once introduced a character calling itself a "they" and given it was meant as fan service to its respective cultural fad, made it a plucky young female with a marginally masculine haircut, filled its dialogue bubbles with helpful, energetic, endearing cutesiness and called it a day.

Forward goes one better with an entire future society of theyses where instant cheap plastic surgery allows anyone to alter outward appearance from male to female or whatever on a whim. The protagonist, Lee, sports the standard "tits 'n dick" shemale package and his main internal conflict is being a worthless waste of oxygen doing nothing with his life in a post-scarcity society supplied by robot labor.

El Goonish Shive created its character Tedd as a stock effeminate / beta male / pervert / nerd then gradually redeemed him by rebranding him as "gender fluid" and having him spend some days as female. He did retain nerdiness as a character flaw, thinking too much about abstractions and not giving his girlfriend enough attention.

Vaarsuvius from The Order of the Stick quickly became the butt of jokes about his effeminacy, being both elvish and a wizard. The author later decided to run with it, making his gender officially indistinguishable, even as he confronted his pursuit of magical power as a character flaw.

As for why I'm quite comfortable appending gender to these characters, TOOTS can supply a nice illustration:

 

"It's weird, no matter how many people he kills, the audience still thinks he's lovable."

 

Actually it's not weird at all. In a comic whose stick figures' perfectly round heads already make them look baby-ish, Thog the orc barbarian is further neotenized through speech patterns, and his tusks instead of threatening even look like an infant teething. Faced with something adorable and murderous, the audience fixated on adorableness. Feminine, cute features draw instinctive sympathy. (For another bald-headed reference point, see the good gnome / bad gnome juxtaposition in Baldur's Gate 3.) Back in the '80s when androgyny was portrayed as creepy, such characters would be crossdressing two-meter-tall bruisers with five o'clock shadows. Once it became a badge of moral and social superiority, the image flipped to waifish ingenues to draw audience sympathy. (Right around the time "we're here, we're queer, get used to it" mutated into "we're here, we're queer, bow down and worship us you lowly breeder plebs".) It's hardly accidental that QC's "they" turned out to be shoulder-tall with giant eyes and stubby limbs.

 

You can't portray gender ambiguously if you can only conceive of one gender being right and the other wrong!

 

Vaarsuvius is stoic, formal and focused on practical knowledge and overt power rather than interpersonal manipulation, and faulted as too wrapped up in ideas instead of considerate toward teammates / wife / raven familiar.

(Crystal the assassin might've worked better as a mix of male and female qualities (e.g. vanity/aggression) but the author was never very comfortable with her and made her ultimate downfall the fault of men, twice over.)

If Lee Caldavera had been female, the rest of the world would be blamed for driving her to isolation. Women are not expected to take on the world. When's the last time you've seen a female character accused of cowardice or had her shyness mocked and abused to audience applause instead of cooed over and coddled?

When's the last time you saw a female character condemned for not being ingratiating enough toward others? Even Edith Bunker was set up as an unambitious pushover specifically to prompt the audience to sympathize with her selflessness. When Dr. Cox kept calling the spindly blonde "Barbie" on Scrubs it was specifically to feed his image as a jackass.

 

So, yes, regardless of the authors' official stance, Vaarsuvius is written as male, and Lee is written as male, because writers cannot conceive character flaws or general wrongness as anything but a man's faults. We're a long way away from seeing women embarrassed by their own girliness.

Just another misogynist story

I'd wanted to write something more involved and quote-heavy for tonight, but I'm not feeling up to it. So you'll get the rant about gender ambiguous characters in webcomics in a few days probably. For now you get an anecdote. For some who run across this page, it will sound like I'm belabouring the mundane. Others may just be annoyed at me for telling it. Either way, I'll bet you wouldn't have considered the story worth telling.

 

I was spending some time out in the country, at around... six? The oldest boy would have been around eleven. Another a year younger than me. It was morning. The men were long gone to work the factories or fields as the case may be. We sat down, seeing another couple of locals approach across the fence, in the neighbouring yard. A nine year old was leading his little brother, younger than any of us. Four years old? Three? Tottering, still. Tottering more than usual. They stopped by us and we crouched in the dirt or cement path respectively so he could show us his little brother's legs, half-annoyed, half-joking. See what he did? See what he did now?

I honestly don't remember what the littlest boy's crime had even been. What's important is that it had pissed off his grandmother. So she'd beaten him with stinging nettles. All across his legs up to his butt. His thighs, most of his lower half was covered not just in the usual switch-marks but a nearly continuous rash and raised welts from the toxin. He'd stopped crying, a bit sullen, breathing heavily, face contorted in concentration, not very talkative but glad at the attention we were all giving him, though his brother had to keep slapping his baby-fat little hands away so he wouldn't scratch. It was obvious our criminal didn't quite understand the whole sequence of justice administration. Our oldest representatives, the ten-ish year olds, tried to say something mature and authoritative about minding your elders but it didn't quite come out right, garbled itself past their lips. All us boys had a nervous, forced half-laugh at the whole thing through the fence, then both groups got up and went our separate ways, and that was the beginning of another summer childhood day.

 

Not the usual whippin' but still falling within the scope of the great burden of the nesting instinct. Commonplace. Unremarkable. Happens a hundred million times a day all over the world.

Do you find yourself automatically workshopping excuses for the grandmother in your mind? Would you suffer that effacing, revisionist impulse if the gender roles were reversed?

Matriarchal benevolence.

We've all just agreed not to keep track.

Don't mind me, just dreaming it wasn't currently July.

 

 

Punk Wars

Ah, the good old dollar bin. Oldies, corporate shovelware, student projects, offhand exercises, vaporware. Even rare glints of charm are barely visible through the dross.

$20_UNFINISHED_GAME

If you catch Punk Wars for no more than two dollars, it's worth the two bits for a gander. It seems to have started as an offhand joke about "punk" fads, pitting as opposing 4X TBS factions Atom/Diesel/Steel/Steampunk factions. Each collects a different special resource from the landscape in addition to basic food/water. Each sports some minor differences in its three combat units giving it a slightly different tactical approach, more or less aggressive, DoT vs. focused fire, etc. Each pops up a few events with some minimal choices to make.

 

On one hand, like Spacecom it shows you can do quite a bit with very simple elements. In terms of resource management and battle lines it works surprisingly well for such a bare-bones project, and some of the event texts can read cute enough.

On the other hand, if Punk Wars was meant to mock people buying anything with a shallow aesthetic of cogs or antennas, it does so by embodying that rip-off padded with interface timesinks and randomized loss conditions.

Linear tech tree, and padded to boot.

The base expansion mechanic making you plop new town halls down everywhere makes an interesting change at first, but soon becomes just one more form of redundancy.

Maps with awkwardly small choke points and low move speed making basic movement a chore.

Inability to end turn without cycling through all your remaining units or buildings.

An obfuscated happiness meter which is both impossible to please (forcing some fake difficulty) and spawns enemy units on top of your main base for an unwelcome dose of old-fashioned whack-a-mole.

A neutral faction preprogrammed to harrass you early on, again artificially forcing difficulty.

Strict opening move sequences for each faction resulting in guaranteed loss if not followed.

 

All in all, it demonstrates more that nitpicky nerds with a good idea or two can't necessarily deliver on the gestalt in which those ideas would fit.

(Which is why I haven't written the great lycanpunk novel.)

Oh, I'm a lumberjack based on my thé

To think all these years I've been afraid I'm not manly enough, when I drink tea with cinnamon.

Which is basically ground tree bark.

I drink sawdust tea!

Veritable viking berserker over here folks.

CustoDioship

"They're making a profit off terminal guilt
The scavengers go on parade"

 

Ministry - Psalm 69

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Бог, Нация, Труд
("God, Nation, Labour")

one of the more honest slogans for the many, many faces of fascist faith

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If you're huckleberrying your way down the Mississippi sometime, you may want to stop about a couple days' raft ride upstream of Mark Twain's boyhood home (an hour by horseless carriage) at a little town called Nauvoo. Not for scintillating high culture nor the scenery, mind you, said real estate being a little patch of uncomfortably moist alluvial dirt that nobody ever particularly wanted. But, after being run out of various towns ~1840, the followers of the confidence artist turned religious confidence artist Joe Smith set up shop there. After His Horndog Holiness started laying claim to every housewife in sight, censored the press by the sword for calling him out on it, then finally got himself shot for his antics (frontier "justice" style) the town's residents fled west. Then a century later, having stuffed their coffers off the Rockies' boundless supply of redneck credulity, their descendants bought up the place again to turn it into a tourist trap.

And that's what you'll find there now. A delightful little propaganda center where you can listen to the word "saints" insistently repeated in transparent desperation to legitimize their young sect among the field's multimilennial bigwigs and you can sit in a theater to watch a sanitized revisionist version of Mormon history, all located, housed and decorated in the weirdest mix of forced puritanical austerity with occasional splashes of kitsch that would gag a Spanish bishop. The "sunstone" decorative fake column capitals alone...

To their credit though, they've also restored and re-enacted several workshops to 19th century approximation, so you can be guided by mildly informed faithful in old-timey garb among collections or facsimiles of products of and gear for tinsmithing, gunsmithing or the ever-popular josephsmithing. They've even got an old printing press, ironically given the role such a press played in Smith's demise... or perhaps intentionally trying to rewrite the event by putting a convivial face on Mormons' relation to said press. And at least the gift shop had one quaint item as keepsake:

(made in China)

Now, however I may wrinkle my nose at the faithful's grobian leanings, I can't deny the reconstructed daily village life portion of Nauvoo actually provides a valuable and welcome dose of edutainment to a wider rural populace increasingly unaware of life before smartphones, much less before assembly lines. Kudos. Everything from antiques to the grounds is admirably tidy and well-kept, tours are well-sized, scheduled and organized, everyone's helpful and polite... if occasionally a bit... y'know... intense. Wide-eyed leaning into you, tenterhook grinning while extolling the virtues of the SAINTS! and visibly itching to score a conversion. But, hey, they're getting the job done.

Wait. Why again are we relying on them for that job?

I myself was born in a land of many churches and monasteries, the older and more decrepit of which have been reconstructed largely by public funds or donations as cultural capital, but are owned/managed/operated for the tourist trade by religious authority. Why? As you stand there being told typesetting anecdotes and rifle barrel lore by the cast of It Came From Planet Kolob you start wondering why your local small town government doesn't instead reconstruct a couple of old-timey crafts shops at the strip mall next to the Piggly Wiggly. There is nothing preserved or explained by goggle-eyed fanatics which cannot instead be explained by a government part time employee, or by a humanities or liberal arts student as practicum. I'm as celibate as any monk. Why aren't I getting free room and board to dust off old pitchforks? The recurring complaint against governments directly operating more sites of public interest as museums (that it would require funding, a.k.a. taxes) doesn't square with the observation that every religious organization playing biased curator of our shared history also requires maintenance, materials and manpower, and is permitted to turn a tidy tax-free private profit off the public. Moreover, Mormons especially are rather famous for not leaving taxation up to personal conscience. (This totes new revelation just in: gimme yer money!) Tax, regulate and audit churches like the for-profit organizations they are and you'll have plenty of money for reconstructions of village life and plenty besides.

 

One might wonder, by-and-by, why Europe has so many Christian relics to preserve, as opposed to all other facets of its culture, but of course only willful, indoctrinated, well-motivated ignorance would let you ignore the many reasons. We still have Pompeii not least because nature conspired to place it out of priests' reach. Now, after a terror campaign two millennia running, we reward the victors of religious warfare for their repeated cultural genocide by letting them hold hostage the little they have not yet burned, whitewashed, dynamited or hammered into oblivion. And the more you feed them, the more they'll take.

Remember that in absolutist religious mentality, all exists to serve the faith, and must be tolerated only so long as it cannot be subsumed or exterminated. Israel for example was obviously headed for theocracy from its religiously-defined inception, and kept in check only by the secularism of its Western backers. I was not aware until recently though of its religious exemption from the draft, fairly shocking in an outnumbered yet continually embattled nation.* Well of course. All others exist to die for the priesthood.

And the more such concessions you make, the more they'll take, feeding one or another extra-governmental power hierarchy whose known and stated goal is to convert, consume or exterminate all that is not itself. Misdefining devotional ownership of culture as culture itself can only lead to further censorship, moral cleansing, and ever-wider seeping, creeping indoctrination. Is Nauvoo a "national historic landmark" appointed by real-world government or a slice of never-neverland where make-believe comes true? The place's Wikipedia entries are lavishly sprinkled with blatant self-interested phraseology like "share a faith based history of the 1840s" ... ummm... ain't no such thing, Clevon. History is history. The 1840s actually happened. A bunch of illiterate farmers fallen prey to a con-man moved into a swamp and then moved out again, and calling them "saints" won't retroactively change a single detail of their sordid and sometimes lamentable escapade.

That love of "alternate facts" also serves as reminder that if the Trumpist evangelical protestant power base does manage to enthrone its god-king this November, Mormons' magic undies won't save them from the looming faith-based purges. Remember the U.S. has its constitutional freedom from religion not due to atheist idealism like my own, but stemming from the pragmatic observation that no religion can govern without launching into pogroms and crusades. Hell, the whole point of the Inquisition is that it ramped up specifically AFTER the Catholics saw themselves uncontested, and communist rule attacked proportionally fewer of Abraham's children than Tsarist Orthodox purges of the Old Believers, Jews and other sects to consolidate control. (edit: and, having started this page with Mormons, let's not forget their entire early history revolved around frequently violent conflict with other Christians)

 

Secularism is the best protection religions and the religious have from each other.

 

For twenty years now countries around Europe have been running an event called the Night of the Museums, where they open their public institutions to said public outside normal hours, and it has proven a wildly popular event. Cheap or free admission's standard, and depending on where you live you might get a free bus ride to and fro, maybe some live musical accompaniment or a speech or whatever. The point being: free culture! without being required to pretend any particular breed of pixies will make you live forever in the land of cake frosting and barbecued ribs. Yet the believers in those pixies are as free as anyone to come and view art which (due to the aforementioned darkening ages) is often religious in nature. By virtue of not caring about religion, we atheists don't care if it's religious. If it's pretty it makes the cut. As opposed to the religious mentality that anything too pretty must be cut for impinging on the glory of the almighty.

 

If you'd let us handle things, you may never have gotten your way... but neither would your enemies.

And now it's too late.

Enjoy the pyre.

 

 

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* Religious draft exemptions may also help further explain Israel's bellicosity. As women all over the world can attest, it's much easier to cheer for warmongering strongmen when you can be sure you yourself will never be thrown into the meatgrinder.