It's lunchtime for another triangle orb weaver.

 

 

And yeah, the crunchy little bitches really do throw their webs across open spaces several meters across. At exactly my head level. Not fun when you're just trying to take a walk without inhaling spider silk.

Uzbek Universalis

or: "wants your provinces"

Long story short, in a game touting politics as a main selling point over its competitors, discovering alliances are nigh-worthless doesn't exactly inspire praise.

 

I might re-try Savoy eventually, but for now I'm sick of HRE/Papal politics. How 'bout something in Asia? I used to do Novgorod back in EU3, so not that. Japan/India look like micromanagement nightmares. Maybe something in central Asia? Timurids look interesting, but I'm willing to bet on some hard-coded vassal drama. The Uzbek Khanate on the other hand... not very rich but large, painfully long travel times but well positioned to play off the larger powers while not directly adjacent to Ming or Muscovy or the Timurids or Ottomans, which might buy me some time at the start. Plus, I'm already the marquis of Baltakhand. Alright. Let's bake ooze! ... and workshop our catchphrase while we're at it.

First reaction: replace "not very rich" with "steppes suck" 'cause despite controlling a tenth of Asia my broke ass can barely afford bottom-tier advisors. Province development is 1/1/1 across most of them. Rush to promote the Khazaks and Siberian cultures, 80% of my population, to accepted status. Kazan/Nogai/Oirat as rivals. Great Horde and Chagatai as allies.

Can't even develop. Steppes have 20% development penalty, arctic/desert 50% ... and dev penalties stack... I should've started by invading I guess?

Worse, with only one estate, summoning a diet is a no-go, since even with three options at least two were always stupid. Tried it, got a mission to invade westwards, get trounced by Kazan and Nogai while the Great Horde somehow manages to lose to Crimea.

Biggest shock of all though is the "horde unity" mechanic which continually ticks down very quickly unless you keep warring and ruins your revolt risk and army discipline when low. It's supposed to also be sated by pillaging... your own provinces... no thanks... but no chance to solidify, pay off debts, anything.

---------

Attempt 2

- 1457 Oirat declares war, loses half its territory, Chagatai immediately flips 180 from ally to rival

 

- keep getting dragged into wars by Great Horde, dump it - new allies Timurids, Delhi, Sindh, need ally in the west, start buttering up Denmark, uselessly, can't overcome the distance and "unknown" penalties

- 1508 - invade Kazan, Nogai with Timurids

- 1510 become sultanate

- 1525 - annex what's left of Kazan, Muscovy is now the major threat and I'm several levels behind in tech - 1538 death by Russia

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Attempt 3 - death in 1553-57 by muscovite opportunism while I'm busy south

--------------

Attempt 4 - death in 1489 - Great Horde declares war against Ottomans... who are four tech levels ahead of me and have four times our combined military, and I still need the Horde as defense against Muscovy - pay for Feudalism and two tech levels - my armies just instantly vaporize regardless - Transoxiana declares war on me and irony of ironies the Great Horde refuses to help, dissolving the alliance I just lost my armies to uphold

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Attempt 5 - death by Timurids

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Attempt 6 - 1451 Oirat attacks a Ming vassal, I attack Oirat... and its entire alliance turns around and travels half a continent to attack me and me alone even while Ming is taking over all their provinces! WHAT THE FUCK

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Attempt 7 - death by alliances randomly dropping - 1491 Muscovy invades

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Attempt 8 - 1480 my ally Great Horde (with Genoa) calls me in against Muscovy ... and my other aly Kazan of its own volition immediately attacks the Great Horde

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Attempt 9

- ally Crimea, GH also happens to be allied to them, hopefully a stronger regional block but leaves me defenseless in the east

- 1474 decline Crimean war against Lithuania

- 1492 Timurids and GH go to war. WHY!?!? both had closer, weaker options for expansion where I could've supported them

- 1497 Kazan and Chagatai invade me, Timurids, my last ally, refuses to join

----------------- 

Attempt 10

- ally GH and Kazan, rivaled by Nogai and Chagatai, Tims ally Nogai

- 1457 invade Nogai, Transoxiana declares independence, Timurids splinters, ally Timurids and Khorasan

- 1463 invade Transoxiana with GH and Khorasan

- 1468 support Yarkand's independence from Chagatai, drop Timurid Alliance

- 1476 Muscovy attacks GH, Kazan also hates GH and won't help against Muscovy, and I can't afford to fight Muscovy without a full alliance so... sigh... abandon GH

- 1485 Kazan declares me as rival and breaks alliance despite top relations in every other sense and despite this making it easy prey for Muscovy, GH becomes Astrakhan

- 1491 Oirat / Nogai invade Yarkand, I take out loans to rush Feudalism and hire mercs, go from 3/3/3 to 4/5/5 - manage to win a bit of Oirat

- 1497 reform my state as the Sultanate of Bukhara

 

- 1515 Muscovy invades, and is four military levels above - allies get nothing done, can make no headway even with four mercenary companies above my military level - 1518 Astrakhan surrenders and Delhi pulls out after a few fights in 1521 - Yarkand pulls out in 1522 having done jack shit - my desperate defense ends in bankruptcy

- 1530 haven't done any fighting in years, it's just muscovites putting down my rebellions - finally I lose my entire western third

- 1538 Khorasan breaks alliance, just 'cause... and immediately gets chewed apart by the Ottomans, Afghanistan, myself because what did you think would happen you idiots?

- 1545 Lithuania FINALLY wakes up and invades Russia, but my allies refuse a war - Ottomans immediately give themselves a -135 "wants your provinces" attitude penalty toward me for our shared Khorasan holdings

- 1548 Russia declares war. Ottomans refuse and break my alliance. Take out some loans, tech up to 5/6/8, but Russia has military 11 so I still have zero chance

------------------

CONCLUSIONS?

The more I play EU4, the more I hate its alliance mechanics. The Uzbek Khanate is impoverished to start but there's no reason it should be so utterly doomed. Don't get me wrong, some of the difficulty here is valid:

- Horde Unity is slightly too punishing numerically (even with constant wars you can barely keep it half-stable) but that last time I did scrape by with ~50% until monarchy, shaving a couple decades from my government reform accumulation by invading to claim this or that title like Bukhara, fitting with the rampaging horde theme. Could stand some fine-tuning but works decently in itself as a roleplaying challenge.

- Rebellions. Large distances, heterogenous culture and the fact you can't afford fort upkeep all adds up to not even bothering to keep everyone happy. Just try to time your armies' upkeep to coincide with high rebellion risk / land seizing and be ready to put down the inevitable uprisings.

- Same for desert life. I lost a lot of manpower in early attempts shifting armies across undeveloped provinces to put down rebels. But saving up monarch powers for some well-timed development edicts, I could just barely make it work.

On the other hand:

Even with knowledge sharing, adjacency and heavy use of advancement edicts, institutions DO NOT SPREAD. They just flat-out don't. Granted, some of that is due to the aforementioned development woes, but looking across the border I'm routinely ahead of steppe neighbours in development yet slower to advance.

 

By far the worst of it though is EU4's idiotic AI, especially when it comes to alliances and war declarations. We'll leave its... questionable... military tactics for another time. Being entirely geared toward the struggle between a handful of superpowers vying for the top score, it has a slew of mechanics (like the "economic base" penalty to vassalage or the absolute impossibility to annexing any vassal supported by even one foreign nation, any) specifically designed to prevent small to medium-sized nations from presenting a united front. Uzbek can't keep up with richer Asian empires at the start, so maintaining a unified regional defense is critical.

 

For instance it's impossible to find allies on the other flank of Oirat, Ottomans or Muscovy, even if those countries lack closer options, due to "unknown" attitudes and "distance between borders" penalties - except distance is exactly what would make such an alliance advantageous! (is it colonial range that dictates this?) That was in fact how my teutons finally took both the Turks and Russians down a peg, taking advantage of Ming or Timurids pulling their militaries across the continent. And even though empires are quick to dogpile the human player if they see you've lost your army, they blatantly avoid doing so against a larger NPC threat. Novgorod, Lithuania, Denmark/Sweden, Ottomans, Genoa, all frequently hold Muscovy as rival/enemy, but never invade if they see it weakened. The same seems to happen with Ottomans, Ming, France or Austria, as their many, many enemies never take advantage of moments of weakness. Just as one example I tied up Muscovy's military for fifteen years straight in attempt #10, dropping its manpower to ~20k and reserves to 0 for over a decade, yet at no point did the surrounding powers ALL OF WHICH had it rivaled and all of which were doing little or nothing else, take advantage of the situation. (Repeat for the Ottomans below)

Possibly due to limited rivalry options, nations deliberately avoid prioritizing threats. For instance the Great Horde / Kazan / Nogai / Crimea quadrangle's constant rivalries against each other guarantee one of your allies will call you into war against your other, making any coherent defense impossible. In fact, while you do have alliance breaking and opinion lowering diplomacy options you conspicuously lack any third-party mediation. Even passive bonuses to tie a triumvirate together count for little against "want your provinces" or distance modifiers.

Worst of all is the suicidally stupid way the AI will start random hopeless wars or instantly break your alliance on a whim, regardless of opinion and trust or whether I'm the only thing keeping it alive. Novgorod falls almost immediately every time. For my Teutons it was Livonia refusing to join me in war and instantly falling to Denmark, etc. Just in attempt 10 here I had Kazan and Khorasan rival me from ally despite full trust / attitude because "wants your provinces" only to instantly get torn apart by Ottomans or Muscovy for their trouble. Enjoy those provinces.

I'm sure both Paradox and its fanboys would claim this constant, knee-jerk allegiance shifting keeps gameplay moving, avoiding the stalemates which did admittedly occur in #3. But be honest, what it really boils down to is the entire alliance system being just outright broken, serving only the few nations which don't need alliances in the first place.

--------------------------------------

Attempt 11 - I thought I'd give it one last try

- rivaled by Nogai and Oirat, ally GH, Kazan and Chagatai

- 1448 Muscovy attacks Novgorod, sacrifice 2 stability to declare war, since my allies are too stupid to do it themselves - Novgorod just instantly folds and hands Muscovy its capital, but we eke out a 60% peace treaty winning my allies a few provinces and hopefully forestalling future disaster

- ally Tims, start getting Feudalism from them, start paying off loans

- 1463 Transox declares independence, supported by... everyone... including both the Ottomans and Mamluks... so I'm forced to break off my alliance with Tims dishonorably - use favors to dissolve Kazan's alliance to Nogai, invade w/ GH

- 1469 Ming invades Oirat and makes it tributary, no expandin in that direction

- 1475 Kazan invades Muscovy, and I have to take out more loans to help, luckily GH also jumps in to help, of its own accord! miraculous! then also Denmark, Sweden and Norway! why couldn't you assholes do this 11 attempts ago!?!

- 1479 dogpile on Oirat, Ming chooses not to defend it against Kara Del and Kham... then Chagatai... then me - meanwhile GH is attacked by Ottomans, decline war, they lose most of their territory - grab feudalism, tech up to 4/4/4 - situation looks... stable

- Ally Afghanistan

- 1514 reform gov. into Sultanate, bye-bye horde unity

- 1516 Chagatai demands we invade Oirat, minor win

- 1519 Kazan "wants your provinces" (of course) and breaks alliance, switch alliances to Ottomans

- 1529 Ming breaks apart

- 1535 abandon Afghanistan alliance for demanding a war against Ottomans, grab knowledge sharing from Denmark before Poland and Kazan trample it (I've created a monster!)

- 1540 Ottomans turns on Transoxiana, grab renaissance, tech up to 8/7/7

- 1543 Chagatai invaded by Shun, Kazan loses Muscovy, which it had vassalized, and is invaded by Poland

- entire southern alliance focuses on invading me while Ottomans take their provinces, but amazingly, by the end the Ottomans actually give me three provinces in the peace treaty, but the defense of Shun turns into a very expensive, 1300-ducat defeat, dissolving our alliance

- ally Jaunpur, my development is coming along nicely

- 1561 minor Ottoman expansion war, finish Colonialism (26 years !) and tech up to 10/9/10, best in Asia

- 1569 start receiving printing press from Denmark, finally pay off all loans, ally Sindh

- quiet few decades, focus on construction, accumulate crown land, cash in estate demands, all that good stuff you don't get to do while warring nonstop

- drop Jaunpur's alliance for wanting me to fight the whole rest of India

- 1599 Transoxiana invades, Ottomans refuse the war, but at least thanks to the danes, I'm now the first in Asia to get the Printing Press, tech up to 15/15/15, one military level below the enemy

- 1608 after two more military levels and Mamluks pulling out, I finally win, but at the cost of a whopping 53(!) loans - re-ally the Ottomans

- 1615 ally Shun

- 1640s Ottomans turn expansionist again, mopping up smaller nearby kingdoms, forcing me to break alliance with Singh

- 1650s Ottomans invade Kazan / Transoxiana, and after centuries of favor currying I finally manage to ally Poland - finally pay off my loans from half a century ago - once again I'm five techs behind everyone else. Buy global trade and tech up to 19/19/16 when everyone else is at 21.

- 1678 decline Ottomans' war invite and lose the alliance

- 1693 Poland is guaranteeing Kazan, so I attack Kazan's only ally, Chagatai, annex it and take a few of Kazan's provinces

- 1698 finally caught up in tech at the pre-enlightenment stage, re-ally Ottomans to bribe them to drop their French alliance and attack Transoxiana (and its ally Kazan) while it's busy with another war in India

It's the Permian mass extinction!

- grab half of each enemy then immediately drop Ottomans' alliance (hopefully triggering a pan-European war against them) and ally Deccan instead alongside Shun and Poland-Lithuania

- 1712 invade Oirat w/ Shun

- 1721 Chagatai breaks off from Shun, free provinces for me

- 1724 finish off Kazan after it was weakened by Muscovy, take a chunk out of its ally Transoxiana

- 1743 Deccan invades Bengal / Afghanistan / Transoxiana - Germany intervenes against us as a great power, so I bail out, losing 3 provinces - but the Ottomans are also busy in Africa, so I enlist Poland-Lithuania to invade from the north... except Poland once AGAIN pulls me into a war against Germany - German war fizzles, but it causes allies to abandon the Ottoman war, Ottmans gradually wear me down... until in 1757 Britain hits from the other side! go get 'em lads! and Poland-Lithuania merge into Commonwealth - use my Great Power status to break Delhi's alliance to the Ottomans

- 1759 still fighting a gradually losing war against the Ottomans, Shun calls me into war against Japan, I decline, and the limey gits have made zero attacks on the Ottoman shore so far, apparently Britannia does NOT rule the waves... in 1761 they finally break my back, make me give up a fifth? of my provinces

 

- 1768 hit Transoxiana while its best ally Bengal is weakened by a war in the east, allowing me to recapture some of the provinces the Ottomans forced me to free (a.k.a Bashkiria) meanwhile Germany and the Commonwealth go to war, wish I could join in the war as an ally, but I just know if I do the idiot AI will bail on me

- 1770s ally Perm, later vassalizing and annexing (the second Permian mass extinction!) Commonwealth somehow gets into wars with both France and Germany at the same time

- 1780 Commonwealth is attacked by France, Ottomans, Denmark and a slew of littler allies while at 0 military, unwinnable war, I betray the alliance

- 1787 Ally Denmark, Industrialize, tech up to 30, catching up to the rest

- I haven't beeen getting called into European wars, can't ally anyone in Europe due to "distance between borders" but did ally Japan to deter Wu

- 1810 with Bengal busy east, Deccan calls me to invade Transoxiana... and the Ottomans intervene against us in return as a great power - 1814 Deccan forces peace, losing me a couple of provinces

So in retrospect trying to avoid the big Asian powers early on doesn't work, since only an opening sally kept Muscovy from snowballing. And without building up the Timurids as an ally, even Deccan couldn't really help keep the Ottomans in check. The tatar hordes all seem defined not by their starting territory (which is unequivocally crap) but by their primary direction for expansion (south for Uzbek, Chagatai and Oirat/Mongolia, west/north for the other three. Attacking each other is mostly a first-century preliminary (to feed Horde Unity and avoid the discipline penalty) or a low priority, as it just nets you more worthless undeveloped provinces.

I'm actually liking the peacetime bonuses you gain from alliances, deterrence against invasion and the various favor cash-ins, but the AI seems intentionally stupid when it comes to the military angle, including war declarations. Its decision-making is weighted not to allow smaller nations to band against bigger ones to stand a chance, but to allow the bigger to divide and conquer the smaller. It's a system presuming that any human player will obviously choose one of the major powers and race for the #1 score.

Wrong.

_______________________________________

P.S.: Don't get me started on the nations generally not acting like self-interested independent actors and instead behaving as if their only purpose is to screw the player-character over.

Down by the stream draining from a reservoir, on a path about twenty or thirty paces inside a patch of deciduous forest.

Not much of a spider guy, but the orb weavers in these parts are spectacular.

Epiphyseal Platitudes

"Trying hard to fit among you
Floating out to Wonderland"

 

Garbage - When I Grow Up

______________________________________

 

"whereas young people become accomplished in geometry and mathematics,* and wise within these limits, prudent young people do not seem to be found. The reason is that prudence is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience, but a young person lacks experience [...] no real conviction in these other sciences, but only say the words, whereas the nature of mathematical objects is clear to them."

 

Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics

______________________________________

 

"It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired."

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough for Love

______________________________________

 

 

Unbelievable as it may sound the concept of adolescence is a fairly recent contrivance, a 20th century effort to explain the process of behavioral maturation by inserting an intermediate period of development. (Which is to say teenagers were invented quite recently; it was in all the papers.) Blame Piaget for his whole notion of multiple developmental stages. In preindustrial societies you might at most just get a party upon turning fourteen or fifteen; then have fun shitting out babies or getting limbs hacked off for the rest of your short, miserable life.

 

I should be doing something important right now and I'm not. I'm playing computer games and telling you about how I'm not doing the important thing. This is not adult behavior. The adult thing to do would be to lounge about dozing, find something to eat or wander around checking if any of you are musclin' in on my vittles an' wiminfolk.

...

I should probably clarify we're talking about adult animals in general, not just humans.

Humans are weird. Freaky naked pole-monkeys that act like wolves without canines.** And one of our weirdest features is retaining curiosity into adulthood. Adult mammals rarely play. In fact they generally avoid novelty on principle. From the myriad haphazard gambols and caterwauls in which a developing brain indulges, maturation prunes down to a handful of instinctively satisfying or environmentally adapted motions... and for the most part keeps performing those few motions, by rote, for the rest of the animal's days.*** But our brains are more customizable, thanks largely to our childishness, letting us assimilate more advanced concepts and for longer to boot. Daniel Dennett continued learning new ideas at an age when most people do nothing but watch sitcoms from fifty years ago, yet in every speech he somehow reminded me of that friend in grade school who used to wet his finger and stick it in your ear.

This train of thought is brought to you by one of the latest of the many adaptations of Pinocchio. I was... not impressed. (In fact Guillermo del Toro's name has lost its shine for me by his latter output.) Both the hokier-than-Disney family drama and the presumably unimpeachable anti-fascist era shift are gratuitous audience-friendly concessions extraneous to the story's original setting and charm, for which they leave no room. Worse though the deliberate vandalism of Collodi's basic message. If you hate an old story for its outdated moralism and want to provide counterpoint, great, but you don't get to claim you're adapting it any more than what comes out of my own ass is an "adapted" pizza.

Pinocchio's original adventures were very much in keeping with old fairy tales' didactic messages like "don't talk to / go anywhere with strangers" and so forth, only adapted to a social milieu in which literacy and technical know-how were gradually replacing traditional peasant life. All of a sudden the world was more complicated than hitting dirt with a stick. There was more to learn. Diverse opportunities for mischief. More temptations. Wider repercussions. More confusion. Collodi's solution was to tell you to be a good little boy and mind your elders until you learn how to be a productive citizen. Not a message that ever resonated with my chaotic neutral self, and the book was never one of my favorites growing up, but at least it made some sense of its premise.

 

The latest maladaptation does not.

Instead they turned it into yet another tedious noble savage myth in which all evil comes from some conveniently external source letting the audience know just when to throw popcorn at the screen. The utterly ignorant hero is somehow always right and anyone smart or educated must be a sinister cackling villain subverting that childish state of grace. But the message "you're perfect just the way you are" doesn't mesh with the simple observation that... you're not. You might be tempted like the rant below this comic to strain at parallels to fascism because Pinocchio is made to fall in line with the rest of humanity, conveniently ignoring Collodi's repeated demonstrations that Pinocchio's ignorance first and foremost endangers himself. Remember one of his first actions, after letting his creator get dragged away to jail under pretense of mistreatment and murdering the cricket for giving him advice, is to burn off his own wooden feet trying to dry them. In fact, children's natural need to learn from adults is rooted not in prosocial finger-wagging but in self-preserving information like "don't eat the red berries" or "stoves are ouchy" or in the case of my school-age self "don't climb atop grandma's house because those shingles aren't actually glued to the roof!" (Good to know.)

There's a word I keep finding myself applying to modern pop-culture: infantile. It grew especially pertinent when every single snowflake started demanding censorship unto its own personal safe space, but long prior we'd been hearing comments that twenty-somethings were not living stable lives, or that universities had become day-care centers, that adulthood was being delayed, etc. If it is true that preindustrial societies' teenagers didn't use to experience the same intensity of "sturm und drang" and parental conflict as they do now, it's not unreasonable to look at the earlier achievement of personal agency as at least partial explanation. On the other end of the spectrum, the word "Senate" was born of the observation that no matter what else may change in the world over a long lifespan, human nature does not, and even if age confers wisdom in no other sense, experience with the antics of one's fellow apes is directly cumulative. If a child does not automatically metamorphose into an adult upon hitting 18 or graduating high school or college, this only mirrors the equally insane popular perception of "retirement" as cessation of public life altogether.

Can a wooden boy ever grow up? How old must a man get before entish tree-ish wooden unconsciousness takes over? Most seem willing to frame Pinocchio staying wooden at the end of del Toro's rape of a classic as somehow hopeful and personally empowering, you're perfect just the way you are, yadda-yadda. But Pinocchio remains conspicuously static, stagnant**** in his gullibility and recklessness, his imprudence, until the very end. He's not just "not a real boy" but a marionette, something requiring the intent and effort of others to operate. The compulsive hedonism of childhood, aside from not being quite fully human, is nonfunctional, and progress comes when Pinocchio stops needing babysitters to save him from the gallows.

And then what? A lovable flammable scamp unto eternity?

Maybe it's my half-bestial nature talking, but I really don't like either conclusion, either Collodi's enforced maturity or del Toro's enforced childishness. Rare is the coming-of-age story which truly presents a youth as individual, not merely the target but also the impetus and process of becoming. In fact, just as consciousness itself is process and not state, we should remember there are no children. It's a temporary condition in individual life. Adult/child actions are potential in both but enabled by development and circumstance. (I've certainly met quite a few fifty-somethings who could stand to grow the fuck up.) You might say 16-year-olds shouldn't vote because they don't know anything, but be honest: neither do 20-year-olds. Most monkeys needn't worry about statistical analysis of carbon deposition trends in ice core samples from the late pleistocene, or about the effect of expansionist policy on regional financial stability in late Roman governance. Shit takes time to wrap yer head around. If many official grown-ups make such poor decisions, maybe it's because they never had that time.

 

Neoteny helps brain plasticity, but mental flexibility comes with instability. If we need adults to remain more flexible, to keep learning and adapting, then we are also asking them, implicitly, to remain more childish. You might consider it problematic that adolescence keeps getting pushed later into adulthood, but if anything, we need more layers. Or at the very least admit the phrase "he/she's an adult" means far less than we've always assumed, and the line between real/wooden boy... might be a dotted one?

 

Wow, that ran a lot longer than I expected. Who knew I had so much to say about the woodenness of boys? Smell ya later, I need to go adapt a pizza.

_____________________________

 

 

* Wow, young people wise in math? Aristotle really did live 2300 years ago!

** No I was not talking about strippers, get your mind out of the gutter. I was obviously talking about lupae.

*** Ironically "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" is one of the worst examples, as we've selected them for playfulness.

**** This is, incidentally, why I always hated Data's Pinocchio schtick on ST:TNG. Data was not wooden. He did not stagnate. His inhumanity did not hamper him. Becoming a real boy would downgrade him.

Rires-baiting

Dear readers, I come to you today in the spirit of abject penitence, and should my crimes warrant banishment I shall gladly step aside for whichever free-associating scifi fan strategy gamer you choose to replace me, and pen an apologetic memoir available at fine book$tores everywhere. With regret, nay, shock, just this morn I googled upon the incriminating discovery that the smash hipregrocrap hit from the nineties which for thirty years I have been referencing in conversation as "Mr. Bombastic" was in truth called "Mr. Boombastic"! I hereby offer my heartfelt and most supplicant apologies to Mr. Boom and the noble, marginalized Bastic lineage* for this unconscionable, decades-long shoah of microaggressions, whereby I, from my position of institutionalized White Zombie fan privilege, didst perpetuate the detestable alt-rock bom libel.

This is what you cretins sound like!   ^

Woke insanity has seen a bit of push-back over the past year or more, so maybe it's finally subsiding. Mockery like the above of opportunistic, disingenuous posturing shows up in comedy bits with more frequency, and more true believers seem to be realizing their past fifteen years' anti-white, anti-straight, anti-male witch hunts have served only the interests of morally bankrupt, self-aggrandizing null entities like Claudine Gay.

However, I don't want this awareness of special interest group rabblerousing to merely be swept under pop culture's Shaggy rug like last month's pop stars. It should stay with us. And so I have a request for the youth of today, for GenZ and whatever we're calling infants now. Luckily it's something at which teenagers have always excelled throughout history: never let your parents forget what idiots they've been!

 

 

 

 

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* Marginalized, yeah, when's the last time you actually heard that song? Also, I did see he called himself "shaggy" but I thought the aburdist angle came through amply enough without involving crime-solving great danes. Also "Boom and the Basstics" would make a good '70s/'80s cover band name.

The Research Magnificent

"I've had recurring nightmares that I was loved for who I am

And missed the opportunity to be a better man"

Muse -  Hoodoo

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"when you speak of love as a phase—isn’t it a necessary phase? Quite apart from reproduction the love of the sexes is necessary. Isn’t it love, sexual love, which has released the imagination? Without that stir, without that impulse to go out from ourselves, to be reckless of ourselves and wonderful, would our lives be anything more than the contentment of the stalled ox?'
'The key that opens the door,’ said Karenin, ‘is not the goal of the journey."

 

H.G. Wells - The World Set Free (1914)

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The Research Magnificent was published in 1915, and like Tono-Bungay doesn't bother to hide its autobiographical touches. The difference, stylistically, is extraversion vs. introversion. Given Wells wrote worlds better than he wrote people, it's not quite as good. Where the former was mostly a study of English society, with the more passive protagonist mired or inundated by both entrenched institutions and the insanity of the time, in The Research Magnificent Wells' quasi-avatar, Benham, sets out to overcome all such limitations by deliberate self-improvement. All. He's gonna perfect the human condition y'see, make himself a truly noble being unfettered by the weaknesses and venality of lesser men.

His plan doesn't quite work out that way... partly because it can't be called a plan so much as a directionless vague inkling endlessly re-evaluated as Benham grows up. A point in favor of Wells' self-awareness but accidentally condemning the lack of such from our modern revolutionaries whipping each other to "be better" or "do better" according to farcically simplistic yet fixed definitions of better. Not that Benham's quest for personal quality is particularly appreciated by those around him, who'd much rather he used his money like normal rich fucks, fucking around with riches. Though diffused throughout the book, I can't help but chuckle retroactively at the recurring theme of characters excitedly welcoming our hero's utopian rhetoric until realizing he expects themselves to follow through on it as well, the episode with the Russian jews providing a particularly concise example.

The central theme stands out for being framed negatively yet paradoxically coming across as hopeful. As the eventual four points of self-improvement all target some personal failing (fear, self-indulgence, jealousy/envy and prejudice) you'd expect the finger-wagging to get more annoying. But Wells' socialism spun it into a fundamentally optimistic outlook. After all, if the path to betterment does not require construction of superhuman abilities but merely removal of impediments, this implies that sought nobility is already inherent in us. As character study in idealism hapless Benham's just not memorable enough, explaining some of the book's obscurity. But its illustration of doomed perfectionism may stick with you.

 

It's also an uncomfortable book politically, for some brief (not entirely inaccurate) barbs at Eastern Europe or the Orient, but more so to any feminists unlucky enough to read it. Where Tono-Bungay conciliated or The World Set Free waxed poetic about women joining men as equals in the great adventure of humanity, The Research Magnificent pulls fewer punches portraying female inertia, pettiness and greed. After his mother using men as social stepping-stones and himself getting seduced by a middle-aged gold-digger, it's downright painful to sit alongside Benham watching the sharp, adventurous girl he thought he married settle comfortably into his finances and devolve at blinding speed into yet another two-faced, stodgy, gossiping, superficial, manipulative, status-obsessed London matron. Combined with best friend Prothero's own misadventure, it's the clearest expression I've seen yet from Wells of the control women hold over men (sexually, socially, emotionally) and further proof of just how far ahead of his time, or even this time, his mind could stretch.

____________________________________________

 

 

P.S.: The title has to be a reference to The Gay Science, doesn't it? I'd love to confirm that.

Why do newer fads appear so much more destructive toward the old stories? Must everything new be a lowest-common-denominator caricature of the old? Maybe it's just the endless voracity of marketing departments, the need to shill a patent with every adapted scene, to shift merch and cross-promote and revolutionize the para-dig'em. But maybe our relationship to technology has also shifted in its favor. Technology used to be location, not action. It was something held, directed and harnessed. A steam locomotive was a set. A self-driving car is an actor. A rotary phone was spoken into. A smartphone has its own yarn to spin. A bottled missive riding the ocean currents was personal intent. Algorithmically labeled psych dimensions in a user personality profile are to the mens sana what a butcher's cleaver is to the corpus.

 

None of this is necessary, of course. It is misuse. But its pervasiness does show the obsolescence of monkeys defined more by their thumbs than by their thoughts.

Baldur's Gate 3 - or - My Life as a Drowid, 7

"Just a little too late

Been so long gotta do a double take

Don't remember your face

It's all in the words and the way that we relate

Don't belong, don't believe

Mind in motion makes me weep

Twisting 'til I transmutate"

KMFDM - Get Out of My Head  *

 

"When this is over, I walk on alone" I promised before ending the abomination.

And so I took little joy in the corpse's insistence on reuniting us for one last night. We drink wine, but I am content with water. We are expected to wear finery when I am more at ease in rags. We maimed handful wander beneath a minstrel putting on a show as for a crowded city square. We ape the merrymaking of yokels and guttersnipes, we who contested with gods and worse.

Yet still... not a one of us failed to uncrease our brows at the sight of each other. I hail their ambitions, each freely undertaken, and they freely welcome my lack of same. I have torn friends asunder. I have doomed lands entire. I have toppled the greatest and aided the least. I have not suffered fools. In hindsight, the passions which flared in me at such folderol ebb, and little do I find to celebrate or to mourn. Nor would I thread the path back, for all its infuriating turns, for in the end it has yielded me my reward.

I taste the coming seasons on my tongue. The world's sweep wends beneath my feet. Light and dark mingle.

I am free.

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Several games into their collection, I still cannot stomach Larian's adherence to the childish, goofy storybook aesthetic. My comfort zone stretches to tatters among the bleak, stately, grim, dignified and aloof. And this ain't no Tyranny or Dragonfall, no Torment or Bloodlines. I've tried not to let it spoil better mechanics, but the constant mood discrepancy between the overblown seriousness of its subject matter and the light, casual adventuring tone and high-kicking heroics wore on me all too frequently. The company's simpleminded Diablo-clone hack'n'slash roots are still showing after all these years.

Three observations can demonstrate my attitude toward Baldur's Gate 3.

1) I have written more about it, good and bad, than even about its betters.

2) I have repeatedly lost interest in it, finishing Act 2 by the end of last September and Act 3 mid-April and the boss fight earlier tonight.

3) I feel no impulse to replay it.

We'll get back to that last point later. See previous BG posts for my complaints about blind decision-making, "lolrandom" adventuring, the many fights meant to be automatically lost the first time and replayed once you notice their gimmick (e.g. Grym, twice, once you see he can be taunted and once you see what activates his vulnerability) and especially the characters ruined by idiot-appeal much like Wrath of the Righteous'. What did it get right?

Well, visually it suffers no shortage of detail. If your RPG experience mostly consists of oldies or budget-strangled projects like Age of Decadence or Dragonfall, stepping into the likes of BG3 or KC:D is shocking merely for... well, having stuff to trip over. BG3 is both lushly and studiously detailed. While Act 3 was visibly less fleshed out in so many minutiae, overall the campaign still projects a "they thought of everything" feeling.

What are the odds a druid of that level would be taking his freshly learned cave-cow form for a spin around that NPC's camp? Well, as it turns out, pretty good.

The music, also, while not gloomy or bombastic enough for my tastes, does a good job of expanding on a central theme, with variations for places like the circus or house of hope. Granted, I preferred Tyranny's variations on a theme, but that's as far as I can complain. The pervasive voice acting is honestly more than I need, but again it's consistently professional, with some like Minthara sounding truly outstanding.

BG3 also features some of the best level design I've seen, convoluted yet still intelligible. Unfortunately the four-character party limit also says something about 5e's oversimplification and Larian's further homogenization. Classes overlap so much more now that there are fewer roles to fill. Druids are just shittier clerics, wizards can swap spells out anytime they want, everyone can cast scrolls, everyone's an alchemist, everyone uses crossbows, waypoint teleportation to compensate for making you constantly run back and forth (instead of trimming the back and forth) and in-combat blink, misty step, too easy teleportation combined with Larian's own abuse (everybody superjumps like the incredible hulk) wastes some of that level design's potential.

Then you've got that classic D&D dice-rolling frustration.

I had to repeat the 30DC check several times but wound up rolling a natural 20 on the 99DC check on the first try. Go figure. For my own part I ran through "tactician" difficulty refusing to either use tadpoles or change equipped spells on the fly (of all the idiotic crutches) and many reloads were just forced by a bad roll or by nonsensical jump scares. You're walking by a random spot when bam: killer teleport-monkeys!

 

Granted, it was pretty funny when the spellcaster it abducted and silenced turned into a panther and bit its face off, but over-reliance on such utterly random ambushes combined with no need to memorize the right spells every day just underscores the aforementioned "lolrandom" idiot appeal. Don't plan ahead, just react. Compounded by Fifth Edition's own oversimplification, plus the blasphemous abandonment of the alignments and the captivating cosmology which came with them. Don't establish a personal ethos, don't roleplay, just hit shit and make purely emotional decisions on the fly.

 

I keep talking about computer games' need to outgrow their Betty Boop stage, an analogy particularly apt to Larian's habit of making characters wobble in place as an idle animation, just like rubber hose limb cartoon characters (how many times have I reloaded fights because it caused me to mistarget? least it ain't as bad as D:OS1) and I've often said a good virtual world makes you feel small. BG3 drops you into some amazingly lush, convoluted, gigantic environments... but it only puts you yourself into such perspective via the occasional grand vista.

I complained that in WotR, despite the great pains it took to put you in real danger early on instead of giving you freebie levels, those low levels paradoxically didn't feel low because of the overblown enemies and import of your actions. BG3 restricts your level to 12... which would be great if you were undertaking deeds appropriate for such levels, instead of four level 9-10 characters knocking out a divine avatar or level 12s dropping a monster that can enslave multiple realms of reality. (And of course it's not enough that it's an elder brain, it's gotta be a super-duper "evolved" elder brain to boot.) A more restrained plot with more attention to narrative and not just visual detail would've served it better, not to mention the dropped plot threads or nonsensical twists.

I kept wondering when the whole Zariel / Elturel chatter would coalesce into a coherent side story. Based on how much attention it got in act 1 I thought it would be a whole act or at least a zone like the underdark; disappointed when your visit to hell revolves around something completely unrelated. Apparently they're all references to some pen and paper adventure? Then there's your ally's nonsensical panic attack at the end to join the villain, just to artificially balance out the two armies. Or the stand-in hero being apparently omniscient inside his bubble, immediately up to date on current lingo, politics and necessities. Or the rather simplistic resolution of all other conflicts as good guys vs. Absolute. My rather murderous drowid (gave Shadowheart to the Sharrans, killed the druids in Act 1 and therefore also left the Shadowlands shadowed in Act 2, took the middle road with Astarion, condemned the aasimar to existence as a battery, killed Minsc

 

 

etc.

no, really, etc. and I mean that

 

- was still treated to the good ending with little or no mention of my past misdeeds and nothing really warranting mention next to the final boss fight yea/nay. Even NWN2's staggered reveal of multiple big players was more interesting, since they operated at different levels instead of every single one being a divine champion or mythical figure or worlds-ending abomination or ... fucks goddesses, whatever. I did at least enjoy tossing my allies at that dragon in the finale, but still, would've appreciated less DragonballZ one-upmanship in power levels.

I will say that after the past decade's insanity it's nice not having to devote much of an RPG's summation to social justice warrior nonsense (Deadfire, Wasteland 3, etc.) Oh, BG3 warrants a few eye-rolls in that department, like the women being physically stronger than the men or every companion being a hot-bodied ready-and-willing bisexual (and getting chided by the damn corpse for not romancing) or the gaiety from homognomos to random male citizen talking about his husband to the shemale at the circus, but at least it doesn't completely take over the story. Close enough for jazz.

During "early access" the biggest outrage seemed to come from it dropping earlier installments' real-time-with-pause claymation for turn-based mechanics. I was on board with that change before I even heard of it, and the finished product is far more tactically sound for it. In fact I'd have pushed for a hex grid as well. I do notice that particular bitching died down fairly quick after release, so maybe everyone noticed that Larian achieved the most complex mix of weapons, abilities, positioning and environment interaction we've yet seen. For that alone BG3 well deserves its renown. Furthermore, your choices carry through to later encounters and even later acts more thoroughly than most RPGs have even attempted. From companions to NPC availability to random redshirts, those you spared, helped or hindered routinely crop up again, and have something to say about it. The sheer number of quest advancement options outstrips other cRPGs easily.

 

But when it comes to roleplaying, I'm reminded the Baldur's Gate series always tended to lowest-common-denominator. Not only was it a middle ground between Torment's storytelling and IWD's choiceless dungeon crawl, but hinged on a "chosen one" plot, banked more on cutesiness and random goofiness, jumped randomly around in themes, threw in more overpowered loot or class combos and so forth. Much of what is wrong with BG3, what detracts from its otherwise expert approach, simply stems from its continuation as BG's "accessibility" according to munchkin definitions of roleplaying, and Faerun/D&D's own datedness.

Which brings me back to point #3 from above. What would I want to see more of here? The hag's quests were better written than the rest. Astarion and Minthara had their moments. But that's not much. I played Tyranny or Bloodlines four times over. Torment and Tides two-and-spare times each. The first Pillars of Eternity at least thrice. I can see myself replaying Kingmaker, as for all its faults its basic plot was solid and its setting and atmosphere apt. And as for looking for third-party modules, Solasta has a better set of core mechanics to work with.

But after finally working up the interest to finish BG3, I mostly just find myself wondering what the competition's been cooking in the meantime.

 

_______________________________________________________

 

* short-circuit detonation (Gale) red comet glare ignite (Lae'zel) not to mention a flying brain is literally a mind in motion... the world's not short on rebellious teenage anthems, but I'd stake a small bet they were listening to this song in particular at Larian during production

Churn

"if you want our ship to go back to Earth again, you are welcome to take her there yourself. Not me. Not there. If a man is seventy-five years old there now, he becomes officially dead. His heirs inherit, he can't own property, his ration books are canceled - anybody can kill him just for the hell of it. I didn't get these passengers on Earth; they were refugees at Luna City"

[...]

"No man is an island - " Much as we may feel and act as Individuals, our race is - a single organism, always growing and branching - which must be pruned regularly to be healthy. This necessity need not be argued; anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best done before or after birth. Being an incurable sentimentalist I favor the former of these methods - killing makes me queasy, even when it's a case of "He's dead and I'm alive and that's the way I wanted it to be." But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than never to have lived at all. They may be right. But I don't have to like it - and I don't. "

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough for Love

_____________________________________________

 

"Why don't you sterilize them?"
"Two and one-half billion operations is a lot of operations. Because they breed continuously, the job would never be done."
"I see. Like the marching Chinese!"
"Who the devil are they?"
"It was a - uh - paradox of my time. Somebody figured out that if all the Chinese in the world were to line up four abreast, I think it was, and start marching past a given point, they'd never stop because of the babies that would be born and grow up before they passed the point."
"That's right. Only instead of 'a given point,' make it 'the largest conceivable number of operating rooms that we could build and staff.' There could never be enough."
"Say!" said Barlow. "Those movies about babies - was that your propaganda?"
"It was. It doesn't seem to mean a thing to them. We have abandoned the idea of attempting propaganda contrary to a biological drive."
"So if you work with a biological drive - ?"
"I know of none which is consistent with inhibition of fertility."

 

C. M. Kornbluth - The Marching Morons

______________________________________________

"soldiers! for Hynkel!"

The Great Dictator

______________________________________________

(working title: refugeriatrics)

 

If you've looked into getting a dog you've inevitably run into health warnings. Most of the most recognizable breeds (e.g. bulldogs, infamously) have acquired endless slews of congenital defects via a century of extremely narrow inbreeding to purify their appearance for dog shows. Thankfully, while the emphasis used to be solely on "caveat emptor" and possible vet bills, the conversation has shifted a bit from inconveniencing humans to concern for the pets' own quality of life. If what you think would look adorable in your purse is in fact more objectively a twisted, tortured monstrousity riddled with skin, gut, eye and ear infections, a barely trickling vascular system, high risk of cancer and can't even breathe properly for its mashed-in face, then you're not giving it a home, you're fabricating suffering.

On a completely unrelated topic, thirty years ago a college student expressed sympathy toward an Indian colleague for the Latur earthquake which killed ~10,000 people... and was somewhat taken aback by him just nonchalantly scoffing that ten thousand's nothing, they've got plenty more.

 

Well... yeah? They did. They do.

 

I've been noticing an annoying trend in recent years' news articles about governments bemoaning declining birth rates. Whether it's Korea or some small Greek village losing the war against urbanization, or baby boomer senescence in the U.S. and Europe, or even China! of all places, our overlords appear increasingly intent on convincing us we're somehow underpopulated.

 

In the U.S. at least (while few say it openly) by juxtaposing demographics many are implying we need more young to care for the increasingly senescent baby boomers... or in other words throwing more babies at the problem: a new boom to patch up the old one. First off, let's not pretend governments, corporations or anyone who flies in private jets give a shit about the elderly except to bleed them for artificial hips marked up two thousand percent, or that power hierarchies ever do anything, ANYTHING for humanitarian reasons, unless forced by fear of revolt. But more to the point, boomers will die before any babies born now have a chance to nurse them. More on that later.

 

Before I even get to the main stuff, let's point out humanity continues to swell uncontrollably with nine billion expected by next generation. While this predominantly comes from the usual culprits of the simian-termite hives throughout South Asia, South America and Africa, the U.S. itself is rife with Christian sects pushing their hicks to shit out fresh vessels for superstition by the litter, and I doubt any developed country can claim complete freedom from ye olde "go forth and multiply" idiocy.

 

So we need to mention shifting baselines. The few times overpopulation is even discussed, it's from a backdrop of modern life, of skyscrapers, megamarts and jammed highways. Governments talk to genZers as though 8.2 billion utterly redundant brainless apes constitute some manner of normalcy, and something would be lost by their reduction. But for millennials that number was 6 billion. We're talking merely the timespan it took for BadgerBadgerBadger! to be replaced with calling the U.S. vice president "brat" and that to go back out of style. We hit 5 billion when I was in kindergarten, and should the management check its complaints backlog you'll find my sandbox was already far too crowded! That same stage in my parents' lives saw the 3 billion mark, prompting Kornbluth to posit my eventual five as an apocalyptic overshoot. And when we hit 9 and 10 and 11 billion those who desire ever more cannon fodder and scabs will pretend that's normal too, and will continue demanding more slaves.

When we exterminated the last Tasmanian tiger we were 2 billion. Should we adopt that as our normal? Two billion unwashed, starving, illiterate sacks of ape shit riddled with disease. Every step up from there will require resources to be harvested, food to be grown, energy to be expended. Do you want to feed all those two billion and keep the same ecological footprint as the two billion from a century ago? Well, you're gonna need more land for each human proportionally. Better lower your sustainable population estimate by a hundred mil.

Do you want to house them in something other than my great-grandfather's wattle-and-daub cottage? Well, that's a lot of construction, better lower your estimate by another hundred mil.

Oh, I'm sorry, did you want their food to be not just plentiful, but also fresh, clean and safe to eat? That's even more effort per capita, more land use and resource use per capita.

Do you want heating for those homes, or golly gee, maybe even air conditioning?

Do you want to clothe them?

Educate them?

Educate them past basic literacy and arithmetic?

Vaccinate them so they're not crippled by polio and a pox upon ye?

Do you want potable water, a sewage system, trucking away garbage, a washer and dryer, roads to travel on and motorized transportation and two pairs of eyeglasses and aseptic medicine and dental fillings? 'Cause when that last thylacine croaked, most humans had no such things. Hell, many still don't.

Do you want internet access, and a game console, and a pocket computer with GPS and infinite video calls and a closet full of fashions and robotic prostheses if you lose a limb and experts doing maintenance instead of having to re-roof your own home with straw or buy wagon wheels from your cousin? Make-up and hair gel? None of that went into your original 2bil!

Every life-saving scientific discipline that didn't exist a century ago, that requires more technology than pulling teeth with a doorknob, means twenty or thirty million fewer humans you can support at that level. Look around your room right now and drop another ten million from the total world population for every consumer item you see that's made of plastic, rubber, stainless steel or copper wiring. Don't even get me started on anything with a battery!

 

What would be a sustainable population with a decent, comfortable lifestyle? I don't know. I suspect far less than two billion. Less than one. Maybe less than half. You can look up various estimates yourselves. But do remember every mansion and private jet must raze another town off the map, unless that town consists of nothing but mesolithic mud huts.

But of course we're not talking about keeping things livable, not for most of us. Nobody's encouraging overbreeding in order to correct overbreeding. "We need kids to take care of the elderly" is a smokescreen. They want churn. Out with the old, in with the new. Boom boom boom. Fresh corpses to replace the old. Whatever the pains of a senescent population, they are secondary to perpetuating overpopulation into yet more generations upon generations of same. Churn. As for the economy, fears of somehow lacking workers... oh, puh-leeze, workers to work what? More overbuilt minivans to sell to each other, and a new smartphone every year? While splitting the same resources even more ways?

 

At best, such hand-wringing covers up a more valid concern of being unable to defend against invasion either military or invited by one's own government as cheap labor. The world population is still growing. Only a small minority of educated countries show lower birth rates than hellholes like Sudan, and the better will be invaded by numerically overwhelming worse in the near future. This is true. But the better are not at fault for the crimes of the worse. Breeding out of control is still the crime, not failing to match crime for crime.

No, the rich want more poor. Scrap that whole list I rattled off above. In the eyes of those writing the propaganda, you deserve none of that. Churn. What the Trumps and Vaticans of the world want is dirt-farming peasants ready for conscription, is to starve you until you'll do anything for the scraps they throw you, and the best way to do that is to make more of you. Make you split the little you have many more ways, make you gnaw on the same soup bone with more siblings. They want to be able to brush off the deaths of ten thousand of YOU, because they have ten billion of YOU to spare. Nothing serves the rich quite like an abundance of poverty, quite like stupid, desperate hordes which can be easily manipulated against each other in territorial contests. Of course, the threat is more immediate: world war 3 will require cannon fodder. That is your children's only future: to be enslaved and exterminated by the Chinese so the rich can use your efforts and sacrifices to bargain themselves private empires under the new sinocracy.

 

Populations do not naturally self-regulate, but just like our desire for ripe fruit can be hijacked by processed sugar and our kin recognition can be hijacked by uniforms and slogans, mating rituals can be hijacked by their own preliminaries. Kornbluth's future geniuses were of course missing the detail that status is intrinsic to our reproductive drive, since wealth and power serve as guarantee for offspring viability. Therefore it is possible to sidetrack reproduction into a chase for status, as the story's primitive scheister did by enrolling the marching morons in a race for prime real estate, a fancier house. Nesting instinct for the gals, championships for the guys - not that men's opinion matters anyway, the uterine bottleneck being our rate-determining step. Safer ways to defuse those destructive instincts.This is in effect why current developed societies have seen a slight tapering off of birth rates, and that article about Korea spells it out quite clearly (though it's not clear if the authors understood the evo-psych / instinctual implications) by citing youth preferring rampant consumerism to family life. Well, more power to those Korean youths. Chasing boy-bands is idiotic, but still more intellectual a practice than changing diapers.

 

So let's circle back to that quality of life issue, vis-a-vis parenting itself. Why does human reproduction not rate the consideration we now afford that of dogs, of caring for their individual quality of life? Granted, I've met more dogs I like than hu-mons I like... but we're supposed to at least feign humanitarian motivations. What quality of life can you guarantee a child who will go to school with his neighbour's ten children all ganging up on him? What can you guarantee those ten? And, to voice that which none are permitted to voice, what can you give individuals to induce them to commit virtual suicide by procreating, by tying the rest of their lives to raising offspring? We have always assumed (and not unjustifiably) that animals will do anything to reproduce, that our strongest primitive instinct will force us to accept any indignity, any abuse, any punishment in return for being permitted to perform its eternal dictate. And here, at last, we're seeing a bare handful of humans out of the teeming brainless horde capable of at least temporarily deferring this basest impulse, not forced into monastic celibacy but of their own accord.

And they are condemned for it like career criminals.

 

If you want us lowly plebs to breed more, make it compatible with maintaining individual freedom and comfort. But they won't. I find it hilarious to hear our surgeon general paying lip service to improving parents' lives due to the inherent unending demands and stress of family life being detrimental to the whole family. Umm, it's not a bug, it's a feature. The fact you will do anything to promote your offspring makes you more easily manipulated. Being exhausted, and stressed, and obsessed, and broke, infighting and months-long divorce cases, all help make you a more obedient wage slave, all while producing more hopeless wage slaves. That the mere existence of progeny reduces progenitors to reflexively snarling beasts serves the rich and their propagandists far better than a populace with time and energy to devote to scrutiny of their machinations. What personal growth is achieved through producing soldiers for Hynkel? What is learned, what is considered, what is contextualized, above the mental level of a rat cooing over its litter? Spending every waking minute, every day, every year slave to the demands of highly expensive housepets you can't even flush down the toilet. Your life is over. Raising children is a self-destructive enterprise, a subversion of your own existence. Every child born is a parent's life debased to pre-sapient drives. It's easy for the rich to encourage it, since they sure as hell are not spending time raising their own brats. They have twenty nannies, private tutors, private physicians, separate wings of the mansion for every podling spawned.

So they'll keep encouraging it.

Here's a prediction: we'll soon see a surge in propaganda films, books, plays, games, advertisement, what-have-you, about big happy families and the joys of spawning. They will make parenthood and large litters a status symbol again, as it is in more primitive societies. Schmaltzy holiday flicks about big happy clans sharing meals, superheroines punching kaiju trying to eat their babies, coming-of-age stories about siblings banding together, endless reams of human interest stories about the "miracle" of spawning, heroic adulation of hick slatterns shitting out baby after baby as "super"-moms.

And it will work.

Most humans are subhuman. Most humans are vermin and vermin do not outcompete their betters by outperforming but by swarming, by ganging up on you, seven wives for seven brothers, then a generation later forty-nine thieves chopping Ali Baba to pieces for standing in their way. After which they'll tear each other apart too, but that's cold comfort to us earlier victims. That's the game plan. That's always been the game plan, since before we were human, since before we were even monkeys.

 

Churn.

_________________________________________

 

 

P.S.: I don't normally do dedications, but this one's for JG, a too-decent man I never had the courage to tell his family was killing him.

Classes and Cogitations: Quadratic for having heard of it

Millie: "Why do you suppose superheroes are all such jocks, anyway? People who write superhero comics aren't jocks. They're even bigger nerds than us."

Ozy: "Maybe it's a form of Stockholm syndrome. An identification with, and internalization of, the values of an oppressor."

Ozy and Millie 2006/05/18 (navigate back a few for the start of the joke)

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Since before I was born, gamers have suffered a morbid sort of Stockholm syndrome through their avatars, prentending they're grunting barbarians even as they memorize page after page of feats and backstory. In fact I had barely started this blog before noting that Half-Life's nominally hard science protagonist was a rare blip in a sea of marines, space marines, ultramarines and randomarines, and even Gordon just shot shit up. Entering a realm of the mind to define yourself by physical stats seems like pretty classic Nietzschean slavishness, defining your happinness by the standards of the rabble you're escaping by diving into virtualia in the first place. I especially grit my teeth at e-"sports" aping jock leagues.

 

So where's the flip-side? Where's the nerd supremacism? You'd think D&D for example, which back in the '90s would get you physically beaten for even admitting you knew of its existence, would wholeheartedly embrace a revenge of the nerds. But balancing spellcasters vs. grunts remains a major talking point in any discussion on RPGs. As a reminder of this, last year it turned out Baldur's Gate 3 got limited to lvl 12, explicitly so as not to allow wizards their high-level pay-off.

 

Um, wizards damn well should be overpowered. Reason deserves to be held superior to emotion or physicality.

 

Everything we have, everything we can do in the real world that no other animal can do, we owe to intellect, to individuals of superior reason. Everything you wear, eat, drive or type on had to be thought before it was made. Nobody makes a computer monitor by praying at it or punching it, and don't even start on investors, publishers or profiteering companies patenting their employees' work. At an even more fundamental level, thought is existence. Intellectual superiority is existential superiority. Add some universal force called "magic" and you are only adding new levers by which to move the world - and those best suited to do so would still be those smart enough to know where to place the fulcrum. The mental intricacy and fortitude to shift the very laws of nature leaves "hulk smash" a class below by its very concept. So stop trying to equivalate brains with brawn.

And alright, I'll concede a wide mix of classes definitely adds some spice. Occasionally even I play something other than an elvish wizard/druid. But classes can also consist of nothing but spellcasters differing in their means of interaction with baser matter like jocks. It's pretty common for cRPGs to just hand fighters stupidly overpowered swords and boards for endgame viability, but I'd rather keep all classes relevant by enforcing interdependencies. Stop giving wizards "nukes" and have them work through their teammates: buffs, crowd control, mobility, clairvoyance, etc. Better yet, make nonmagical classes into mooks for casters.

 

In fact, every time  this issue comes up I can't but recall M.A.X. in which you, the player, were a brain in a jar directing largely robotic forces and an automated colony base. Spellcasters, istari, and in a wider sense "the wise" direct matter inert or living. A game with wizards should only feature sword-swinging grunts as tools for wizards.

("and high disdain from sense of injur'd merit")