Monk

"It's a jungle out there"

 

I'm not one for "cringe comedy" normally. It makes me... well, cringe. Not comically either. I also would not have categorized Monk thus before trying to re-watch it recently, and it turns out much of my perception skewed more positive than it should by mostly watching the first couple of seasons when they came out. (And, admittedly, being an angsty analytical type myself, identifying a bit with the heroic freak. (Shalhoub's acting helped.))

 

For one, much as I'd misremembered Dr. Pulaski having a longer run on ST:TNG, I thought Monk's first assistant had lasted at least half the series instead of 2.5 seasons out of eight (actress wanted a raise; studio of course refused) and the switch coincided with an overall tone shift toward the trite and cheesy.

Instead of an edgy single mom from "back east" whose son sometimes gets into trouble, separated from her deadbeat husband, the new assistant's a bereaved, faithful wife of a fallen pilot, chirpy and supportive, with an adorable little girl buying Monk "get well" cards.

The police chief's comic relief sidekick, who'd been showing signs of growing into his role, shown capable at his job when not fawning over his boss, is suddenly forcefully slammed back into his pigeonhole as an idiot child who'd never even be made a beat cop in Podunk, much less a metropolitan lieutenant.

Instead of a trained professional with disabling mental disorders (but aware of his own difficulties) Monk's presented more and more as completely disjointed from reality, going from Sherlock to Rain Man.

The police angle as a whole gradually vanishes. Instead of being called in on cases as a consultant, Monk just stumbles upon murders wherever he goes, Miss Marple style.

More and more of the "plots" are somehow contrived to tie into his personal life, with the sappy dead wife flashbacks leaned on more and more for cheap pathos.

Public service announcements about gambling addiction and... well, fuck it, you get the idea.

 

I was struck from the first re-views by how much filler I'd forgotten with Monk humiliating himself obsessive-compulsing this-and-that while we point our fingers and snicker alongside the extras leering at the freak show. But these minutes-long routines only grow more frequent and extended as actual plots shrink more and more in favor of long-winded padding throughout season 4, to the point the actual case occupies 1/4-1/3 of air time. Incredulous at being only halfway through the show's run, I doubt I'll keep watching given I already find myself skipping more and more of each episode. Still, even as the detective angle disappears the audience apparently got more and more invested in the idiot savant routine, validated by the conflation of intellect with disability and outright incompetence. Season 4 which so annoys me apparently boasted peak ratings.

There is one other oddity. Monk aired from 2002 onwards, just as "reality" TV and wider sports coverage began lowering artistic and production standards across television as a whole. I couldn't believe how many early scripts featured location shots or large, even choreographed crowd scenes with abundant extras and bit players (fairs, parties, rallies, parades, crowded streets, little league games) where the little of that cash available these days would sink into CGI instead. Okay, Cleopatra it ain't, but still an impressive investment for a cable TV show. Really seems to have caught the end of an era in that sense.

 

But damn, the(y) (audience) should've just let it die sooner.

______________________________________

P.S. That theme song still rocks though.

Lockstep 5: Closing Doors

"Upwards, onwards, I hope I can rebound and flow
I just hope for one more chance to prove what I can do"

 

Prong - Close the Door

 

 

I did end up buying Darkest Dungeon 2, having heard it places more emphasis on team interconnection, but the way that's implemented is... wrong. Oh, so, so wrong...

 

Could've been worse. Could've been the flagellant.

Yes folks, the plague doctor and the leper are in love. If you'd like to buy them a wedding present, they're registered at "gauze and brain bleach 'R us" - but I guess this plays aptly enough in a game about horrible revelations.

(apropos, since when's da peedee a dame? I always thought it was just a stereotypical shrimpy little male nerdling)

But aside from socially awkward the relationship system is also (like every other part of the game) overly-randomized. Characters mostly stack random points with each other during combat, and though you can use whiskey to make them socialize at inns, its availability is also randomized, and depending on their point total they randomly might get a positive/negative relationship upon leaving each inn.

That quirk is also, of course, random

Using skills tied to that relationship buffs/debuffs each other respectively. The only nonrandom part? If negative relationships pick a skill you hadn't slotted, the game forces you to do so, ruining your range/melee/defense/support balance in the process. Meaning this emphasis on team strategy actually does more to ruin your team strategy compared to DD1. To add insult to injury, you discover only upon leaving the inn, as you're boldly going into a new adventure, that you've basically received an automatic game over. Seriously, there is no coming back from that level of dysfunction above.

I also got nostalgic for Stellaris, and though I'm not shilling out the absurd release prices Paradox demands for the latest DLCs, I did grab a couple from years ago and opted for an origin I hadn't tried yet: clone soldiers!

While their clone vats spew them out lightning fast, outstripping all but the fastest explosive breeders' baseline, their top population is hard-capped at 5 vats x 20 pops each. Combined with my rustiness at the game and some welcome (but surprising) changes made to governance (multi-leader governments and dual roles) and policing (rebellions are on a hair trigger now) this yielded a few embarrassing failures. Not to mention I neglected that my "incubator" trait doesn't affect cloning.

But finally I adjusted to leaders that die by 30, nailed down a good rate of building construction to deal with the initial overflow and then learned not to overdevelop and overshoot the hard-capped population, and got an archaeologist high enough (it was "the guest") to finish these guys' origin quest, at the end of which you decide whether to remain dependent on clone vats or switch to regular breeding while losing some of your bonuses.

I chose... poorly.

I had assumed that remaining dependent on clone vats would remove their construction limit or in some way make it scale with empire size, which would still leave your early pop cap memorable and give you a later economic hurdle of maintaining clone vats on every planet. But no, apparently not. The five you can build to start is the absolute limit. Which means, first off, my founder species could only be present on five planets so I couldn't even use them as a sparse ruling class. But more importantly, in a thousand-star galaxy one hundred is a comically, insultingly, uselessly, irrelevantly low limit. Even with a low number of habitable planets my previous empire by the end had accrued fifteen thousand total population and while sure, much of that will be other species and robots, if I'm completely dependent on those others... I may as well pick one of those others to start.

And it's a real bitch learning so five attempts plus fifty years into your campaign!

Then there's Homeworld 3, where I got annoyed and abandoned the campaign weeks ago at mission 9 (Warsage Citadel) to be picked up after I'm done gnashing my teeth. Even from back in the days of HW2, the series' developers got a bee in their bonnet about making you fly around gigantic space megastructures. That big dumb object fetish is back in force with #3.

Much of the original's charm lay in the uniquely grandiose mothership itself being the biggest, most important structure on the map, sole lifeline for your species after your homeworld's destruction, a ponderous and stately "delocalized center unto itself" for all your endeavors. Now they sped it up and every mission has you rolling past space malls a hundred times your size. Why they would go to such lengths to cheapen their own most memorable symbol is beyond me. If I wanted anachronistic subway tunnels, I'd fire up Dwarf Fortress! In case you can't tell, that's the new mothership outlined in green above, hidden behind scenery. Not quite as impressive, is it?

But the outlining brings me to the more practical impediment those big dumb objects pose. Homeworld is a game about maneuvering in space, in three dimensions. "Terrain" such as it was, consisted of ship formations and the odd asteroid. Mission 9 crams you between gigantic walls and debris, scrambling to destroy objectives on those walls as enemies just spawn infinitely everywhere around you. Meaning that half the time you're bumping your camera into the damn scenery or you find your vessels hovering in place getting shot to pieces because the AI formations can't navigate and adjust to vertical surfaces at the same time.

Leave aside the question of reasonable difficulty vs. just spawning infinite adds from random points. A claustrophobic escape room scenario is just not what I signed up for when ordering a SPACE game! In SPACE! With plenty of SPACE!

 

One of the core caveats in game design concerns control. Never actively take control away from the player, or even give that impression. Yes I must contend with inimical forces acting of their own volition, but by and large my own character, my own domain does what I tell it to do. That's the point of actively playing instead of being told what happened.

Once I set up my skills, don't change them for me.

A completely fixed constraint in a genre based on escalation retroactively cancels out all my plans and needs a clearer warning as departure from normal mechanics.

Turning spaceflight and fleets into yet another guerilla cityscape feels like false advertising and robs me of that sweeping, grandiose 3D motion.

 

Be wary of cancelling out basic gameplay features after you've established them. I do get that basic concepts need to be expanded, but if your idea for keeping things fresh consists of strangling your own baby... maybe keep brainstorming.

Men's Rights Activism

"But... let's move on to sunken costs and belief perseverance. So, imagine you have a hypothesis and you turn that hypothesis into an entire career. During the course of that career you've managed to acquire a huge amount of status - people think you're brilliant! They admire you. They pay you to speak. (... not paying me [mumbles]) They see you as someone who should be listened to. It becomes your life's work and something that you're famous for - you invest your whole being into this. Now imagine somebody shows you just one piece of evidence that undermines the foundational premise of your hypothesis. What do you do? You've invested so much of your life, your time, your energy, your heart, your soul in this one set of ideas, all of them supported by something you always considered a given, and that's now fallen - that one foundational belief is falling under scrutiny and challenge."

 

Karen Straughan, from her "Ogres, Onions and Men's Issues" speech at the Canadian Association for Equality in Ottawa on 2016/09/17 (video no longer exists)

__________________________________

"Attaching your name to a failed, racist coup isn't exactly a good look for a civil rights advocate..."

Endtown 2018/01/19

__________________________________

It's been about three months apparently, but getting back to the topic of FEMale chauvINISM I thought it might be nice to (as is my wont) switch tracks and comment on the other camp. If you flip back through the respective tag, you may notice that regardless of my stance on various gender issues I've conspicuously avoided directly referencing men's rights activists - just as whatever my stance on environmentalism, I don't build shrines to Ralph Nader.

There's an interesting detail MRAs themselves will bitterly point out on occasion: nobody cared about their movement until women joined it in a visible fashion. All of a sudden in the early 2010s the press started running hit pieces on the supposed dire threat of these misogynistic? rapist? bomb-throwing? neo-nazis? something? you'd never heard about before, every feminist on every forum had a new boogeyman and even Saturday Night Live was all of a sudden slamming MRAs as if everyone had heard of them, to the audience's confusion. But Warren Farrell published The Myth of Male Power in 1993 and men's movements had apparently been around for two or three decades before that. In fact the first time I heard about men's issues (and automatically dismissed it as a mere curiousity) was driving to work in the early 2000s listening to NPR interviewing someone on father's rights in custody disputes. (Hey, NPR wasn't always quite the useless puddle of unraked muck it is today.)

 

Men speaking on their own behalf can be ignored without consequence. They'll never be listened to and the media know it, only moved en masse to delegitimize them when sympathetic female faces on YouTube began drawing more attention. That in itself most ironically demonstrates that the feminist narrative we've always been fed, of men having all the power, is utter bullshit.

As for how to delegitimize MRAs, the classic smear was calling them pick-up artists, even though they'll generally give advice on any topic except getting laid. That or accusing them of chaining women to stoves or whatever. The newer approach is immediately trawling any male criminal's browser history for even the slightest evidence that he's ever visited a men's forum regardless of his other pursuits. In contrast, the activism itself centers on cultural, interpersonal, political or legal system bias against men... but whether or not any of their rhetoric ever hits its mark is pretty much a coin flip. I actually haven't paid much attention in recent years. After hearing meninists' basic arguments, I could much more easily dissect the various gender issues on my own terms than by listening to their repetitively self-congratulatory plucky rebel chest-thumping. I'd say I got disenchanted with them about as quickly as with the atheist movement around 2010 poisoned by identity politics. The warning bells rang quickly, as soon as I heard one in a podcast say she's getting more and more of her income from her followers' donations (hellooo skewed motivations and pandering) but my biggest gripe in both cases can be summed up in that old "politics makes strange bedfellows" saying.

 

So desperate for legitimacy, American MRAs could have well snatched the opportunity in 2016 to demonstrate they're not just a bunch of trolls who'll back any man against any woman, not just knee-jerk reactionaries. Just publicly denounce Donald Trump. Give the media a chance to use you to bash him - not even these guys want him! Admit that an insult-spewing Tourette's candidate should not be a country's top diplomatic figure, tax dodging is not a qualifier for civil service, bankrupting businesses by the dozen does not make one business savvy, cronyism does not yield functional agencies, Putin's catamite will not restore American masculinity, this third-generation nepotist is not meritocratic, this compulsive liar does not have our trust, this autocrats' fanboy is not democratic, this delusional narcissist is not a sane alternative, this incoherently babbling mental defective does not speak for us, this sub-man does not represent men! Y'know, just for starters. And of course they failed that litmus test. Never mind that in a wider sense promoting Republicans, a political party which no longer has any interest in actually governing, but only in burning the country down to loot the ashes, will harm everyone including men. The same appears true across the pond where MRAs cozied up to Tory robber barons and nationalist Brexit idiocy.

For that matter I was continually put off by the clown car of opportunists and hangers-on they attracted in interviews, whether it's Carl Benjamin a.k.a. Sargon pivoting to full-on kinder/kuche/kirche reactionary or a cult leader like Stefan Molyneux or Milo Yannopolous who always struck me as more of a sociopath with no convictions than a homosexual, and has since indeed switched gears and is pushing gay conversion therapy, at least while that notion sells. I remember trawling through Honey Badger Radio or ICMI videos years ago and occasionally coming across some speaker or another who'd veer into tangents about "the rights of the unborn" or "religious freedom" but even more damage was caused by the heterogenous gaggle of random loons. Trying to run with their image as rebels against the system, against a gummint-backed feminist movement, the "manosphere" and its prominent voices were so desperate for attention they refused to kick aside all the even less legitimate fringe interests hitching a ride. Hell, why not, let's call in all the antivaxxers, UFOlogists, global warming deniers, Jesus freak antiabortionist flat-Earthers and anti-evolutionists, gold standard libertarians, Bigfoot chasers, every last Chad and C.H.U.D. with a nominally antiestablishment axe to grind, an' we'll have us a big ol' jamboree!

... What were we talking about again?

Oh right, men!

Which brings us to how we define those, because for all the movement should and claims to stand for men living their own lives, it consistently falls back on dewy-eyed nostalgia for traditional family life and cozily familiar sports-watching, beer-drinking, roughhousing "boys will be boys" masculinity - which is probably why, aside from Farrell, so many speakers or audience commenters on men's issues remind me of every macho idiot prep/jock from high school.

 

Much of men's activism has naturally focused on the most pervasive social movement attacking them, but for all the damage modern feminists have done, they weren't the ones who chained men to supporting women and threw men into the meat-grinder while women sat back to reap the potential spoils. Traditional institutions did that, especially via religious control of reproduction, and there is no bigger fan of shotgun weddings than a priest. But more than that, push back against feminism, imagine you'll even defeat the older social norms, you'll still be left with underlying instinctive favoritism as old as our species or older.

 

Straughan's speech quoted at the top was probably the best I've heard from them for concisely but multifacetedly acknowledging that our subservience to female demands and our willingness to fight each other for female approval is not just some newfangled dirty godless commie subversion that can be fixed by rolling back the clock to before 1960, but intrinsic to our nature. From a more recent interview it seems Paul Elam himself has been halfway coming around to the idea, but from its political affiliations I doubt the "manosphere" as a whole yet realizes how radical a change it's proposing, and how inherently incompatible with conservatism. Defeating instinct requires a clarity of thought incompatible with superstitious caveman gibberish about souls, life after death or omnipotent cosmic forces who have nothing better to do than peek under your sheets. The right-wing profiteers currently using you as useful idiots against the feminist voting block depend for much of their take on male workaholism induced by female material demands. Personal agency for both men and women requires restructuring child rearing itself, a societal cornerstone if there ever was one.

All in all, you have to wonder whether a species whose males do not subvert their own lives to female whims would even be recognizably human, much less the Norman Rockwell painting so many speakers or supporters seem to think they'll reinstitute. They do make good points, but the foundational premise on which they've built their public speaking careers (and in which they are now socially/financially vested) that the world has gone wrong, is as rickety as a matriarchal hippie commune. Our world was never right to begin with.

The Right not to Hate Your Father

A quick flip back through these ~1700-ish pages will reveal that up until three or four years ago I spent much of my life drifting in and out of a depressive, often suicidal funk. So perhaps unsurprisingly, when I went back to finish my university degree I eventually wound up at the counseling center.

They weren't much help. Granted, that largely wasn't due to gender issues but age and life stage and the very limited scope of college counselors. The place consisted mostly of former art major chicks who'd been given enough psych training to reply to the usual twenty-year-olds' problems with grades, boozing, getting dumped or career panic. A thirty-year-old's cemented anxieties and existential malaise lay somewhat outside their wheelhouse. But two discoveries made clear that no matter what my problems, I would never be welcome there.

If you've ever seen one of those institution-affiliated head shrinkeries, they tend to be full of pamphlets on every topic in or out of the DSM. A hefty chunk of the gigantic binder full of typed and illustrated concerns was of course dedicated to women, with all the usual feminist rape paranoia and reasurances that nothing is ever your fault and you deserve better no matter how good you have it. I was surprised, however, to discover that it did, also, contain a section on Men's Issues! It consisted of a single double-sided page: on one side father issues (and specifically issues with your father, not parents or heaven forfend, mother) and on the other side sports.* The supposed professional-grade concerns and help offered by an institution with a yearly operating budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars reads like stage comedian beat-filler, like the offhand insults spat at straw-men in commercials and sitcoms. (You can't think of other issues which might weigh on the mind of a college-aged male? Seriously? Just brainstorming here but ida know, maybe, y'know... sex...?)

 

The waiting room had the usual smatter of magazines lying around. One day a newspaper had been thrown on top with the giant headline "why can't we hate men" from an article which made the rounds nationally after Harvey Weinstein was condemned by all the groupies who'd used him to cheat their way past their competition. But really, I don't give a fuck what the context was. Muslims could've bombed whatever they damn well please and still, any psychiatric nurse or receptionist would've checked herself before adorning her waiting room with the imperative to Hate Iranians! Or Hate Jews! Or Hate Blacks! Or Hate Gays! Or do we even need to try imagining the obvious corollary of Hate Women!?

 

So there you are, when you're already making plans to kill yourself and you work up the courage to walk into a place you're terrified you might be seen entering for the stigma of personal weakness it carries, all because you simply can't think of anything else to do in your desperation... and the socially conscious, caring and compassionate mental health professionals greet you with "hi, we hate you for being born the wrong category, everything you like is wrong and don't you ever dare find fault in your demographic superiors" and by the way all your worries can be summed up on a single sheet of paper condemning you, the better to wipe our asses with.

I'm gonna bitch out Men's Rights Activists in a couple of days. They deserve it. But you also have to keep in mind why the noise they make is nonetheless necessary, how immeasurably our society is skewed until one side of the issue is not even visible.

__________________________________________________

 

* Look at this blog and tell me again how much I care about sports. Say "sports" again, motherfuckers, I dare you!

Better to simulate walking than facerolling

"I'm so glad that I'm an island now"

Metric - Empty

 

Despite my disdain for the series, one aspect Sunless Skies did get right (and for which it's unfairly bashed from what comments I've seen) is travel. Towns are spaced widely enough that every so often you'll find yourself alone on your screen, chugging desperately almost motionless against a distant parallaxed view of foaming, uncertain infinity.

 

I've said this many times before, but it bears repeating: a good virtual world makes you feel small. The rabble expect a hefty helping of power trip from their fantasies: you're the chosen one, you get everything done, you save the world six impossible times before breakfast, you're the most important person in the universe.* But when trying to backdrop that frontloading, even small doses of such infantile narcissism render that world meaningless by comparison with the protagonist's omnipotence... and omnipresence. I shouldn't have to specify, but the world you inhabit is supposed to be bigger than you!

"Walking simulator" has been both a slam and a semi-official category for some years now. It's usually what you get when you remove too much puzzle-solving from the adventure game formula, by which it most closely relates to the "where's Waldo" hidden object subgenre. But the earliest I heard the term was ~2004 when WoW broke into the mass market, and both critics and a wider public which had dismissed MMOs as the exclusive domain of obsessive nerds suddenly found themselves amazed at the existence of persistent virtual worlds.

 

And the first thing they did was bitch about worlds being too big. One of the first critics to review WoW at launch slammed it as "world of walkcraft" and every single change in the intervening two decades has done nothing but shrink such worlds down and let you effortlessly teleport to the next goblin to hit it over the head, because to the average retard every game is a Skinner box; just like every movie must be nothing but plotless heroic set pieces, love declarations, tits and explosions from start to finish, so every game must boil down to hitting the dopaminurging "I win" button faster, faster, fasterFASTERFASTERRR!!! or better yet remove even the need for success and simply reward you for clicking "next" or pulling a slot machine lever.

 

In case you can't tell, I disagree.

 

Just to hedge a bit here, I'm aware dead air is all too common in this field. Game developers certainly love timesinks, especially ever since "hours played" grew to prominence among marketing gimmicks, and even some otherwise good titles like Battletech or Darkest Dungeon have abused half-second interface pauses by the million to create anticipatory addiction or stretch out their run time. Making you scroll through endless unsorted lists every time you want to buy or use an item, dramatic "bullet time" camera work, damage sponge monsters taking forever to kill (remember those ogres in Oblivion?) interminable cutscenes, hell, even listing all the timesinks they abuse would turn into a timesink itself.

So is travel a timesink in Sunless Skies? In one sense yes, because you can only save at ports as checkpoints any trip more roundabout than directly steaming from port to port becomes an exercise in checkpoint scarcity, forcing you to replay the entire sequence of events over and over again. But aside from dying while defogging the far corners of each map, most trips are quite well measured to make you actively weigh supply/fuel costs vs. possible payoffs, modified by random shipboard events (especially with high nightmares) and loot pick-ups / encounters randomized each time you leave port. Points of interest generally don't pop up either right on top of you or completely out of your reach, imposing a cost/benefit analysis on every detour. Distance is not just empty space. It's difficulty. For instance the second map you'll likely visit in Skies, Albion, is slightly less dangerous than the starter zone but also gives less frequent loot opportunities so I found myself gradually getting starved of cash, and the sheer logistical challenge of exploring a new map forced me to put off visiting it for some time.

 

Back in 2014 I called for more extreme environments understanding that it's the contrast with safety which makes hardship relevant, and distance makes destinations more appealing: "An oasis in the desert, the edge of the taiga in the tundra, a port in a storm, a planet in space... it is the sand, the ice, the sea, the black, it's contrast that lends them their poignancy." Better caravan management games like Vagrus or Mount&Blade also treat distance as a necessity, not only for the sake of immersion but to reward forward planning and allow for small decisions to accumulate along the way, never dropping anvils on the player but also never letting you sleepwalk your way to destination. Your first trip across the Mediterranean in Bannerlord, striking out toward a new regional hub like Avernum in Vagrus, what would be treated in most games as mere loading screens between hitting the next goblin over the head become momentous decisions and tense balancing acts for which you alter your party composition, stock up and prepare contingencies, and can play out very differently according not only to the whim of the randomizer but your own foresight and priorities.

Playing the loading screens, weird as it may sound, was originally also an important part of the MMO concept. You'd hear people complain about being made to run back and forth questing, and many times developers do make the same quest line rubberband you around nonsensically... but just as often this was lack of planning on players' part. Grabbing twenty objectives strung out all over the map is a good way of increasing the complexity of even the most simpleminded "kill ten rats" tedium by challenging you to plan the most efficient route and avoid hazards or delays. Plotting your circuits was ideally a quest in itself and damn well should be, a measure of player mental ability - suffer less by thinking more. Dungeons requiring every group member to travel to the entrance were again an exercise in planning, organization and coordination. You could see a great real-time indication of how precipitously customers' intelligence level dropped over a few short years up to 2010 in their bitching for more teleportation so they wouldn't get "bored" on the way, only to use that faster access to mindlessly grind the same instance, the same fights, the same mobs, repeating all the same motions in all the same order three or ten times more than before.

Intellect does not flatter itself devolving toward the simpler, shorter and more repetitive.

 

Mechwarrior 5 trivializes the franchise's custom bot-building or tactical aspects in favor of skeet-shooting infinitely spawning adds. Online FPS was degraded from team games backwards to 1990s deathmatch with Fortnite. League of Legends put out a patch last month hiking up damage/health ratios to allow for more 1v1 insta-gibs instead of actual teamwork and gradual terrain control (you know, the whole point of lane-pushing?) Magic: the Gathering's online version still held to its core charm years ago when I got back into it for lack of any decent multiplayer options. It allowed you to gradually build up interdependencies among your cards to eventually outposition your opponent for a decisive advantage. Now?

A 6/5 trample creature on round 3 is just the tip of the iceberg. Everything spawns tokens, everything insta-kills an enemy when cast or does player damage, everything auto-stacks +1 counters, nothing requires an extra mana cost or deliberate activation, every deck is a rush deck, most matches end by round 5.

When Starcraft came out, it was the players themselves who imposed "no rush" rules for themselves in online matches. In '98 even twitch-gamer idiots who wanted infinite resources understood that just getting a "you win" message was pointless and the real fun was making big and complex things happen on screen. Is it any wonder that now, good games are by definition single-player? What worthwhile individual would willingly wade in the sea of subhuman garbage which live only for gratuitous validation and can't even be bothered to amble a few steps towards it? Don't hate the game. Hate the players.

I know I've harped on such degradation before, and the same incapacity for coordination, cooperation, planning or organization or deferred gratification crops up everywhere. This is not games' problem. It's a symptom of degeneration pervading all our society as it collapses, heralded (as we knew from the start) decades ago by "reality" TV and the "like button" and presaged by Ray Bradbury's warning against digest digest digests back in 1953 and Isaac Asimov warning against the cult of ignorance in 1980 and universities embracing Fashionable Nonsense in the '90s and the snowflakes in the 2010s demanding never to be challenged. Leave politics aside as low-hanging fruit. I talked to someone in academia recently who confirmed pretty much what I already knew was happening, having watched it unfurl online: graduate students even in the hard sciences now increasingly lack the attention span to read and discern the value/point of even one scientific paper.

But we're still handing them diplomas.

Everyone loves a "LEVEL UP"

Mmm that's good dopamine.

___________________________________________________

 

* It's no accident that the fantasies to which humans cling hardest, religions, also function on this principle. The embodiment(s) of cosmic force have nothing better to do than to love you, or to haunt you, or to remove obstacles for you or spy on your sex life. Don'tcha feel speshul?

"The way to succeed and the way to suck eggs"

"Did you approve that awful ad, Fry?

Yes I did Leels. And I'll tell you why. Because it - grows - the brand."

Futurama S04E09

 

 

With Re-Habilis finished (you can't un-read it) I took the opportunity to explore a possible switch to Substack. Having started this blog thirteen years ago thinking it'd run a couple of months, I chose my venue largely for ease of access and Blogger offered the most streamlined (and, importantly, free) path to writing, hosting and being seen by search engines. My recalcitrant nature has always bristled at being on a Google service, and its increased (if subtle) censorship in recent years has had me wistfully wishing I'd opted for Wordpress (hosted or not) instead, not that there aren't problems there too.

 

Substack sounded like a possible alternative, but as soon as I tried to set up my basic layout I was struck by a blatant skew in priorities. When a site purportedly centered on writing or other content creation bombards you with dozens of options for monetization, referrals, social media tie-ins, joining this-or-that community, subscriptions, newsletters, automatically spamming your readers' e-mails with everything you put out, "joining the crew"(?) categorization to fit you into various interest niches, a mandatory tab in which you recommend other substacks, and generally making a nuisance of yourself for attention... but not a single interface button to change the font size and a forced phone screen layout... we're obviously not talking about writing. Not to mention the spam I've been getting from them pushing me to spam others whenever I put something up, alternating with Growth Tip: Growth Tip: Growth Tip! Surprised my inbox isn't filtering these guys out as penis enlargement spam. That and their usage statistics give even less demographic info for casual views than Blogger's, focusing instead on subscribers, especially paying ones.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, I got curious recently about a youtuber I hadn't worried about in many years (because I don't subscribe to his newsletter - see how that works?) called Sargon of Akkad. For a brief time when he launched in 2014, Sargon made a few incisive comments on the feminist insanity being screamed on- and offline, but he soon found it more profitable to push right-wing reactionary propaganda wholesale and eventually ran for office in Britain under the UKIP party (you remember, the Brexit retards?) and supposedly got comically trounced at the polls. Turns out the abrasive "shock jock" image he'd cultivated online didn't transfer well toward wheedling the trust of suburban moms. Don't bother weeping for him though. Due possibly to possessing that quality so critical to YouTube fame, a British accent, he's doing quite alright for himself still sitting pretty on 900k subscribers.

I did wonder what those million viewers were watching, given how sparse his channel looked with a bare handful of videos, all of them recent, as he'd been quite prolific back in the day. It turns out he's been quietly erasing records of his actual personality, to the point even the Internet Archive's captures of his channel don't go further back than 2022 (though a user did put up a full list, which I'll link here once they recover from their recent DDOS attack - here it is) His current crop of self-promotion (aside from peddling a 'zine full of supposedly sage personal wellness advice like subverting your life to others' whims) has just moved predictably further toward classic right-wing rhetoric. (It goes without saying he supports both Trump and that charlatan Musk.) Some videos sound like rip-offs of Miriam Godwinson's "we must dissent" speeches from Alpha Centauri, with titles like "The Future is Now" (hint: in a bad way) or "Dark Days Ahead" or "The Terminus of Civilization" generally decrying technocracy and personal independence or pushing family life, but I found more informative his "We Are Already in the Dystopia" rant. He uses the past generation's change in decor for McDonald's* (looking less like a clown exploded and more like a generic eatery) as one example indicating our society is no longer focused on children and families and blames childlessness for any doom and gloom we might be experiencing.

 

Because of course it couldn't be that individuals get depressed at being treated like nothing but assembly lines for the next generation of hopeless wage slaves and cannon fodder whose every effort will only feed the pockets of do-nothing investors unto eternity, and who will be sacrificed on the powermongering whim of corporate robber barons.

 

One of his quirks back in the day used to be occasionally describing himself as atheist, which you might rightly see as incongruous with the usual neoliberal economics / neoconservative social policy angle, and likely a major reason why he's been rebranding himself. After all, where you find kinder/kuche promoted together as moral superiority, the kirche can't be far behind (see below) and sure enough though I'm not seeing an overt bible-thumping vid... yet (he's probably waiting for more of his audience to age and turn to superstition for fear of death) he has already been peppering his phrasing with those all-time favorite non-terms like "spiritual" or "meaning in life" to prime the pump.

How silly of me to think the internet's freedom of expression is about speaking honestly and being heard freely, when clearly the point is to fabricate a persona, start a cult, cornering a market niche you can make emotionally dependent on your weekly validation and wringing cash out of them.

Growth tip: buy my zine!

________________________________________________

* I'm also guessing McDonald's might've moved farther from child appeal not due to customer preferences or any social agenda but because those playplaces have always been lawsuit magnets

P.S.: Now that he's laundered his public record, don't be surprised if Sargon runs for office again after five or ten years of cementing his image as a family values candidate.

edit 2024/10/16

I hadn't spotted his video bashing Richard Dawkins, in which Sargon spouts the incredible nonsense phrase "the New Atheists, with their dogmatic insistence on reason and science" then piles on more gibberish than I care to address about the need to revert our supposedly godless modern world to caveman fabrications... so yup, checkmark all three Ks, he's a full-on reactionary backbirth, superstitious nonsense and all

New Story: Re-Habilis

It has been three solid years since I last dared post a fiction story, so to motivate myself I decided to just imitate a bigwig. Well, not without putting my own spin on the material, motivated partly out of spite at others spinning that same material in nonsensical directions the past decades. But then, you always knew I was a biter, didn't you?

 

It's still short but giving me a chance to try some action sequences and makes good practice for plotting out some longer, novella-caliber yarns, which I haven't tried in... literally decades... and never completed successfully even back then. So even if you hate this result, I'm liking the process.

 

I'm actually planning a companion piece to this (different plot, different viewpoint, just same theme) to put up in a month or two. Also, since the previous couple of stories I posted (Buggy and Deliver) were composed bottom-up from their premise and didn't turn out as coherent as I'd hoped, I've plotted this one ahead of time, mostly completed the second and third chapters (but am tossing the first up there now to light a fire under my own ass to finish faster) and will post the final installments over the coming weekend on the story's very own page: Re-Habilis!

Sunless Skies

"And the stars will show

Where the waters flow

Where the gardens grow"

 

Roxette - Stars

 

 

After a dishearteningly tough mission in Battletech (my spaniel took it good in the meat) I decided to follow through on a decision I regretted ever since being disappointed by Sunless Sea: having already bought its sequel. To my relief though, Sunless Skies reads and plays better... better enough that if you've been curious about the Fallen London / Sea / Skies genealogy, go ahead and skip the first two and grab Skies on sale. (Though really, for a much smarter take on the same choose-your-own-adventure exploration roleplaying caravan management precept, it still can't even remotely measure up to Vagrus: the Riven Realms.)

Look, it's not like I have any compunctions against nitpicking when the mood strikes me, but every once in a while I run across even a basic concept rotted through from the bottom up. Here it's the attempt to mash together florid Victorian-flavored oneiric fantasy text walls with 2D 1980s arcade gameplay. Yes it does feel every bit as jarring as you might think to go from pages of precious poncy tea-sippin' among Her Majesty's subjects at the Maiden and Unicorn beneath the elegiac firmament of Eleutheria... straight to "pew-pew space invaders"

 

I can't avoid the impression that Skies and its predecessors (much like pixelated "retro" fare) staked out a market niche of sophomoric hipsterism, an audience which would like to play video games but also turn up its nose at them, and so will only accept a primitive parody of game-playing so as to maintain that feeling of superiority. Similarly, though the writing demonstrates plenty of linguistic aptitude and familiarity with adventure/horror tropes, every encounter rides the ironic/postironic high horse. Wouldn't want to be caught getting truly invested in a work a fiction, now would we? Chalance is ever so... common. *sniffs contemptuously* So call perception "mirrors" and call willpower "hearts" and make it a steam locomotive floating in the skies to scorn the more obvious (and just as period-appropriate) dirigibles (see space dudes not-in-space) then just ladle on a couple of repeating gimmicks ad nauseam: making fun of stuck-up old-timey brits (which SYABH pulled off better) and <abstract concept> (hours/souls/etc.) is edible/sapient/iacthulhufhtagn. Just to make sure everyone understands you're above the execution of your craft, slap on some lines like "Piranesi is, of course, bigger on the inside" (cf. "you know how elves are") and you're all set to bilk your thoroughly validated devotees by, say, peddling a $9 soundtrack for a $20 game.

 

Pity.

The creative team obviously boasted some ability. The florid prose can be quite charming when it's not crawling too far up its own ass, a few of the locations/monsters are intriguing, the layers of terrain float enchantingly below you as you chug along and the spacing of towns/hazards (along with intelligible instructions and more balanced resource consumption) makes for a far more workable horse trading core loop than that of Seas. I'll even praise Skies' travel when I talk about the virtue of distance. But the combat is both dull and annoying, the caravan simulation's pretty shallow since you rarely plan longer than one stop ahead, and engaging writing grows out of combining simpler elements (like my spaniel taking it in the meat) not strained LOLrandomness.

 

Still, unlike Sea, I have to grudgingly admit that Skies does actually... function... so long as you're willing to save-scum and not waste your life starting over every time you miss a cannon shot.

_____________________________________

P.S.: Don't get me started on their wokey abuse of the royal "they"

We are not amused.

edit 2024/10/13

Forgot to mention one bit of idiocy: why would you ever make a game about floating without taking the third dimension into account?

Necroville

"She runs through the fields of daisies

Yeah it's just a shame that they eat their own babies

Who cares, cause the air is free

When you get there will you kiss the dead for me"

 

Acid Bath - Scream of the Butterfly

 

 

In The Robots of Dawn Asimov's protagonist (hailing from an overcrowded Earth) levels a strange accusation against a planet where humans are universally wealthy, healthy and live to four hundred with a population density of one per hundreds of square kilometers, attended by slews of robots. It's the old Brave New World chestnut about losing the human spirit, somehow always intertwined with human misery. Their longevity has made them risk-averse and complacement, y'see. Naughty-naughty, how dare you not shuffle off your mortal coil at the appointed time.

You could pick many contrasting viewpoints, but my own mind recalls a fairly obscure 1994 text titled Necroville by one Ian McDonald. While hardly a masterpiece (its plot is... not much of one) it does seem underappreciated as a set of vignettes on human adjustment to rebirth or immortality. For, y'see, nanotech can recreate the dead. Endlessly. From there you of course immediately run into the discontinuity / ship of Theseus / Star Trek transporter argument, but also an entire tirade of human stupidity misusing such technothaumaturgy. Because of course a simian savanna brain is entirely built around the mindless animalistic rush to combat rivals, procreate and elevate one's progeny in social rank before yourself expiring around thirty or forty. Aggression, thrill-seeking, philoprogenitiveness, subsistence, mating rituals and contests, sadism and masochism and humanitarianism (a.k.a. favor-currying) are all thrown off their rails by removing the (pun intended) deadline.

But more to the point, McDonald manages to convey that the driving force of the new society is none of that individual, existential struggle to come to grips with an extended (or duplicated/extended) existence, but the economic exploitation of this new development. Asimov missed or ignored that it's how you're treated by the mindless infinite glut of others and otherness out there which determines the quality of your life, destroying any personal growth regardless of your personal quality or how long you have to develop it. A 400-year-old (or a 400-times reborn techno-zombie) is no less intrinsically disposable than a 40 or 4-year-old, depending on the interest others develop in murdering you after you've outlived your usefulness to them, and it turns out resurrection (here likened to longevity) by providing a convenient workforce actually amplifies disposability. Not just for the dead themselves but the planet as a whole. No matter how long you prolong your mental development, how many facets of existence you delve and transcend, how bodhisattva-like you manage to grow, nobody cares about you except insomuch as you can be exploited for their own instinctive power-mongering.

 

What's that you're asking? Does this discussion have anything to do with current political arguments about baby boomer medical costs? I'm sure I don't know what you mean.

________________________________________________

P.S. As Necroville was purchased for me by my grandmother and great-aunt on the same rainy day as the other author's short story collection, I can't help but note Robert Sheckley also hinted at the resurrection/disposability issue in Immortality Inc.

(And apropos of nothing, using nanotech to make plains-apes seems just the worst possible use of post-human technology.)

Gods of the Terror

"That's not a polar bear, the slope of the skull is all wrong."

 

My correction there drew an eye roll from the seat next to me... then an exasperated sigh and reach for the heavens when it was repeated almost verbatim by one of the TV show's characters a couple minutes later.

Comparative anatomy powers: activate!

I was equally jazzed at the subsequent blink-and-you-missed-it glimpse of the monster's humanoid phalanges. Rare is the art / effects department capable or willing to invest such work in details which, let's be brutally honest, almost none of a TV series' audience will appreciate.

 

But I do find it regrettable in retrospect for The Terror to have opened with hints of a "creature feature" to hook its audience, as that severely undersells the show's complexity. Where should I start? The, if not world-class, at least professional acting of every last bit player? The grandiloquent but believable period cast? The Inuit presented as positive characters but never diving headlong into some politically correct superiority complex? The rare splashes of low-key dark humor growing naturally from the plot and personalities? The decor, which initially put me off as low-quality but soon grew to impress me through its consciously theatrical set design? The refusal to pull punches while also never sinking to a slasher flick's cheap reliance on gore? The sun dogs? One observation surprised me more than most, and it may be better illustrated by a slightly simpler example. An illustrated example.

See, I also recently read through a comic called Gods of the Game. Six teenagers in 1987 get transported to a magical medieval world as an RPG party. At only 120 pages long it suffers from some pacing issues (after a disproportionately lengthy introduction in our own dimension, the last chapters feel a bit rushed, similar if inverted to some other examples I've given) and the solidly clichéd set-up immediately had me polishing my scoffin' fangs. Then, weirdly... it pulled me in. Clean style, not skimping on the backgrounds, decisive plotting. Something about the very readiness with which the author adopts all the standard gimmicks manages to come across as neither mercenary pandering nor naïve / blasé complacence but an endearing love of the genre shining through on every page. And, as another reader commented at some point, she managed to cram a startling amount of characterization into so few pages. As the example which most stuck with me, here's how the story handles the inevitable moment when the popular athletic girl joins the geeks' game: a weird, morose younger girl just bluntly invites her, to the slack-jawed consternation of every male in the room. And that tells you more about their personalities than pages of exposition.

Even the "don't go meta" criticism fails to stick, for much the same reason that it's not belabored into some startling plot twist. So what're you left with? Adventure. Characters adapting to new situations according to individual personalities. Gimmicks and phlebotina permutating into trials and solutions.

I hadn't realized how much I missed adventure stories.

I don't mean the "kitchen sink" approach to adventure you see in most cRPGs where you absolutely have to fight every monster in the monster manual in sequence, or the alternative of straining to turn every goblin stabbing into some supposedly grandiose social commentary like "racism against goblins is bad, mm'kaaayy?" but a story merely taking a limited premise unto the great unknown and allowing it to run its course while fleshing out naturally afferent details. You don't have to save the world. You may not even save yourself. The story gets away from you. You just do the best in the situation at hand. And, in its multifaceted problems, in its self-conscious refusal to bow to clichéd expectations of redemption or salvation, that's what The Terror in turn boils down to: an old-school adventure story, but one expertly developed beyond its stock elements.

That adventures now come as surprises probably says a lot about the state of pop culture.

____________________________________

 

P.S.: Having never read the novel on which it's based I can't speak to how much of the adaptation's quality was inherent in the original and yes, I did see that AMC's trying to cash in The Terror's well-deserved warm reception with more (unrelated) seasons under the same title, but sequelitis warns me off any such cash-grab.