More orb weavers, this time of the Spiny variety.

 

 Weird how many things in our daily environs actually look like aliens from beyond the moon.

Shecrets of the NeandHerthals

I ran across a Netflix documentary called Secrets of the Neanderthals. Despite the dumb "what they don't want you to know" clickbait title it's not the worst thing I've seen, much as re-enactments make my skin crawl. Decent update on some old debates about caveman culture like the flower burial. Compared to older treatments of such subject matter though, you might be surprised at the pervasive and explicit emphasis on Neanderthal women, with a finger-wagging overtone of how dare you have been so sexist as to only ever present them as male all these decades. Except it was women and especially feminists who enthusiastically hurled "you neanderthal" as an epithet at men (Tim Allen on Home Improvement alone...) in every medium the past century.

So what really changed?

 

Simply put: molecular biology and especially genetic testing came along. Back when we thought Neanderthals the unworthy brutes our noble ancestors had conquered and replaced, we loved mocking the losers as male hairy masculine bearded men all the way. Now having discovered we (and especially Europeans) are in fact partly descended from a few Neanderthals, we feel a sudden urge toward sympathy with them... so all of a sudden must needs render them as female to elicit that unthinking, primal sympathy.

We instinctively favor women over men, always have. Yet in the same breath as we leverage this favoritism to manipulate each others' instinctive responses, in marketing and advertising, in documentaries and public relations, we still maintain the insane pretense that women are disfavored.

Void the Void

"We transmit on all frequencies
Talk show panic gossip queens
Racing into ruin
Racing on to our demise"

 

Aesthetic Perfection - Into the Void

 

 

Before complaining about Darkest Dungeon 2, let me sidetrack to say the validity of any fad is inverse to the extent to which it is, in fact... a fad. An idiotically and endlessly regurgitated meme. A refuge for the unimaginative and simpleminded. An idiot-friendly set piece. Vapid filler. Dross.

 

Anything can be dragged down to that level if enough of the braindead majority pile onto the bandwagon.

So first off, everyone give Lovecraft a rest. He's getting as played-out as Tolkien elves by last decade. Likewise, as everyone willfully misinterpreted elves as mere spindly prettyboys while ignoring the poignancy of cursed pride, doomed creation or waning nobility, "lovecraftian" has been debased to "tentacled fish monsters" increasingly ignoring the persistent theme of human insufficiency, immeasurably vast antiquity or creeping decadence which elevated his stories past the usual creep show. When The Secret World did it, the reserves had not yet been tapped dry. This ain't then. Come now, horror's not my preferred genre, but there must be other sources of inspiration you can channel. (Just don't fall back on red horny devils or googly-eyed oni.) (Or vampires.) (Or ffs, anything but zombies!)

On a related note, stop spouting "the void" for a bogeyman catch-all. Even as a teenager back in '97 I had no trouble calling bullshit on Event Horizon's standard trappings of a burning hell being called a "dimension of pure chaos" ... which would in fact mean a whole lotta nothing at all. Certainly not a force obsessed with attacking humans. Yes, yes, the certainty of nonexistence is the core under-riding anxiety of any sapient, but you're hardly plumbing those philosophical depths by constantly spouting "the void" as highfalutin' smokescreen for generic goblins. I'm sure you all want a slice of Games Workshop's pie, but a setting designed to peddle fifty-dollar toy soldiers to fanatical collectors is just too obviously a make-work pile of warped pretextium crystals with no depth worth tapping. There's nothing there to copy. The setting really is... a void. You won't steal away Warhammer's fans unless you can slap the Warhammer logo onto your product. Even Blizzard didn't manage it.

Also, as appealing as "the void" sounds to any writer desperate to leave all options open for future sequels / expansions cramming anything and everything trendy into that kitchen sink, you do know you're not the only ones who can spot that cop-out from coherence and a proper worldbuilding framework, right? If it's everything, it's nothing. I'm not sitting here in front of my screen awed at infinite possibilities when I hear your voice actors intone "kay-oss" or "the aether" or "Tha-Voyd" * with all the gravitas of fifth graders reciting a book report on a book they didn't read. I'm thinking "yeah, mmkay, so there's maybe a 5% chance whatever rando' shit these rando' scheisters pull out of their asses next might not bore me to tears." The suspense is not killing me.

______________________________________________________________

* Or worst of all by this point "multiverse"

Of Bathwater and the Contents Thereof

It's been getting trendy to bemoan the fact that we were lied to about recycling for decades on end, and it turns out every bag and cup we threw out just ended up dumped in landfills or in the ocean, where it became the microplastics we're now ingesting by the fistful. As the human ape is subhuman and cannot hold more than one factoid in its brain at once, this has rapidly been distilled by the public as "recycling sucks" with no further nuance.

 

Actually? No.

 

Plastic recycling has been a scam, and just like tobacco companies' half-century control over regulation, its persistence due to petroleum interests is further proof that profit in any industry or endeavor should always have been capped/taxed to prevent such centralization of wealth and power completely silencing critics of an industry, inducing wasteful planned obsolecence for a few more sales.

 

But other materials were recycled before petroleum completely took over our economy and never became any less recyclable. Glass and the most common metals (aluminum, iron, copper) can be quite efficiently recovered. Even paper, which is more debatable, can be worth the trouble if your local government's organized enough. And even with plastics, polyethylene is more readily melted down and reshaped than the rest.

 

Even under a communist regime in the 1980s, my school's fence bordered a scrap metal collection point and our teachers ran paper recycling drives, and the old Communists were pretty much openly anti-nature! They at least had the basic notion of avoiding waste for economic reasons. But now, you RETARDED SUBHUMAN TRASH, after you spent decades needlessly sorting out plastics to ease your consciences when you shouldn't have been buying so many disposables in the first place, are ready to throw out recycling programs altogether, because you're brainless fucking puppets of advertisers!

Fuck it. I'm glad the world's ending. You deserve to die, I hope you die, and I just hope I live long enough to dance on this species' mass grave.

Frostpunk 2

"The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold

And it's overturned the order of the soul"

 

Leonard Cohen - The Future

_______________________________________________

 

Damn, what a gorgeous piece of work!

Anyway:

Wrap. Up. Well... The. Frost. Is. Here. (... again)

Welcome to a game where your options are either "hurray we've got gas" or "help we've got gas!"

Welcome to my Stalwart ironfisted rule over a city of reason, progress and merit, in that order. (And a lil' bit of adaptation.)

 

Custodiet ipsos babbages

I never gave the first Frostpunk nearly the amount of praise it deserved. If you haven't played it (first off what the hell are you doing with your life) it ran on the premise that the world freezes over toward the end of the nineteenth century, and you must lead a merry band of survivors to establish a steampunk city atop fossil fuel reserves for warmth. Instead of rehashing that, Frostpunk 2 picks up where the main campaign left off, with your now established society expanding (beyond) its means.

 

The biggest change is a proportional shift in basic theme. Where the original primarily fed off the "man against nature" angle for conflict, this installment refocuses on "man against man" with your main task throughout the campaign being to keep various conflicting factions functional that they in turn may keep the city functioning. This has upsides and downsides, but the various pieces do coalesce into a laudably creative and immersive whole, worth every penny.

(From 11bit's point of view it also keeps the sequel from obsoleting the original, which I'm sure played a much bigger role in their marketing strategy than they'd like to admit.)

The emphasis on interacting masses of humans entails ditching some of the old steampunk appeal, downplaying dirigibles, prostheses or automatons as visual / plot elements. While replacement pathos is included in the package (my reason-first society features serial mating, draconian medical experimentation and triage, communal child rearing and a eugenics program complete with sterilization of criminals) the immersive aspects don't quite follow through on portraying these shifts in mores quite like the original's changes in aural and visual tone. The districts don't look different enough from each other. The music also has lost a bit of its oomph. They do put professional effort in flavor text for many techs and laws, but just a smidge too rarely.

City size increases by two orders of magnitude. Instead of individual constructions on a radial grid you now position entire districts on a hex grid, dwarfing all your original efforts. On the plus side this does cut down on some of the micromanagement. On the minus side it also eliminates some of the poignancy of shifting handfuls of workers to and fro hoping they don't freeze, and the decades-long timescale compared to months in the original also makes one less invested in their eventual fates. ("the death of one man is a tragedy" etc.) * Luckily the designers were well aware of this pitfall and played up the metropolitan heartless rat race through motion conveyed as timelapse light movement along roads. ("Fireflies" the artbook calls them.)  I couldn't help but be reminded of the poultry farm scene from Baraka.

 

In terms of gameplay, the scale-up manifests as less concern with precise numbers of resources than a Supreme Commander style balancing of influx to keep resource flow out of the red as much as you can. Deposits are by default depletable, both within your city and on the overland map. Combined with a heavy emphasis on district adjacency, this yields some captivating juggling of district construction / destruction while maintaining your workforce and coffers. Interestingly, your most basic resource of heat stamps (a.k.a. simoleons) remain difficult to farm all throughout the campaign, scaling poorly with city size and acting instead as your limiting resource (e.g. influence etc. in Paradox' games) and as you make more and more stuff from it advancing through the tech tree, you suffer an almost imperceptible but decisive reliance on petroleum to address every issue instead, black gold surging invisibly beneath your golden resource of manpower through the radial clockwork of city streets. An inspired and highly memorable effect.

 

I won't go too deep into the interplay between factions. Most of your biggest hurdles entail securing the bickering cliques' votes to pass new laws, whether by building whatever they want or openly bribing them or aiding in their constant backbiting between each other. Since their percentage of council votes scales with populace, you end up spending just as much time subverting your inevitable enemies as currying favor. They do have a decent bit of personality. I actually opened my campaign on the Frostlander / Pilgrim side for the sake of nature, but turned on the Pilgrims in a heartbeat when they started in on the mystical hocus-pocus, a change of heart interestingly even acknowledged in the ending summation. Much as in the original, the deeper you dive down one particular branch, the more controversy you encounter (not that I was particularly uncomfortable with the know-it-all prescriptive bent of Reason.) I hope I'm not giving too much away by confirming they'll eventually be at each others' throats, but if you don't mind a Spoiler \ / , I would like to praise one specific gimmick.

I'd originally intended to maintain a reasonably free society, but by the time the civil war rolled around I'd already backstabbed the Pilgrims and implemented some reviled (yet cool!) techs precluding reconciliation. Plus, when the devs openly warned me trying to seize dictatorial power is the more difficult route... well now, that's just throwing down an obvious gauntlet for me to pick up, isn't it? However, I got stuck for a solid decade unable to raise Frostlander opinion to pass the final laws needed to seize power. I felt like I was doing everything right. I had surpluses in every resource, had eradicated all sniffles and grime, was putting down Pilgrim revolts as soon as they appeared while keeping their faction at 1-4% power, and lowering my Stalwarts' fervor to keep the peace... so what was I doing wrong? Apparently I was doing too much right.

I felt like slapping my forehead when re-reading the fine print that it's in times of high tension that the factions grow more willing to vote you into absolute power. Because yes! Of course! Every would-be dictator needs to drum up mass panic over the threat of some make-work boogeymen so the populace cries out for a strongman to take control!** You need to make life shit for the lower classes in order to divide and conquer them. So let squalor build up a tad, wait until a couple of districts go up in flames, THEN bribe your way to success.

 

Brilliant!

____________________________________________________________________________

 

* As an aside, Settlers-inspired village simulators (like Banished, which kicked off the survival city sim trend which Frostpunk built on) distinguished themselves by scaling down from Sim City's megalopolis to more personal, close-up caretaking. It's funny to see the pendulum now swinging back toward RCI districts and milling swarms of population.

** No, this has absolutely nothing to do with orange hair, game shows and golf courses. Why would you even think that?

Sin Eating

"He sewed his eyes shut because he is afraid to see"

NIN - Heresy

 

Saner liberals have long been perplexed at the self-appointed left wing's support for Islam and even Jihadism, the most violently, oppressively backward of any major ideology. It jumped the shark after last year's attack on Israel. Many a bitter laugh has been prompted by "gays for Palestine" and other such street protests, knowing full well the openly murderous attitude of theocrats and especially Hamas toward gays, atheists, unmaried cat ladies and any other stereotypically "leftist" demographic. These idiots make even black KKK supporters sound mentally well-adjusted by comparison.

 

To me though it just further confirms my observation that snowflakes' division of the world into pure and impure, the saved and the damned, belies their facetious rebellion against the various Christian churches. You see in Muslims everything you hate about your Christian forebears: all the racism, oppression, sexual repression, antiscientific reactionary dogmatism, all the bloodlust and sadism and petty shortsighted tribalism and prejudice against the superficially different. It's everything in your own heritage for which your conscience begs absolution across the generations. But since you have made white guilt an absolute you cannot deal directly with those emotions. By excusing and forgiving Muslims you somehow exculpate your own heritage by proxy. Call it psychological transferrence, sympathetic magic, scapegoat mentality, but it does demonstrate that as much as you may want to, you have not yet rid yourselves of religious mentality.

 

And the shallow pretense of rebellion is already working its way back toward retrenchment in primitivism, in mindless dogma which is not shamed by its own nature as such, in the faith of your fathers, the wokeisition desperately seeking validation from more grounded authorities. This is the way the world ends: with a politically correct fart in the wind, greedily aspiring to the choking aroma of incense.

On a Pallid Bust of Pallas

I've toyed with the notion of posting some of my pictures from Pompeii, but not a brick or cobblestone of that place has escaped photographing by ten million tourists already. When visiting Herculaneum though I was amused by one of the greeters in the visitor center.

 

On our way out a couple of hours later, the situation had changed.

 

Don't you have an Egyptian granary to guard or something?

Ah yes, even amidst enduring, stately antiquity, change would be good... but that's about all the change you get.

Despotism Does Not Scale

"Scrambled eggs what he says
He accuses me of treachery
Got the nine lies, got the wide eyes
Got a failing grade in chemistry"

 

Rasputina - The Mayor

__________________________________________________

"It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor. How that there had been a revolutionary war,—that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England,—and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him; but there was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was—petticoat government. Happily that was at an end; he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and out whenever he pleased, without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle."

 

Washington Irving - Rip van Winkle

__________________________________________________

 

I feel somehow obligated to speak on today's election here in the States before the results are in, as it certainly feels like one of those historic moments right before the purges ramp up and people like me get disappeared. Problem: after a decade of nonstop media obsession, I would rather talk about anything, anything other than Donald Trump! Come on, wouldn't you rather hear about my bowel movements? See, I found this half-jar of giardiniera in the fridge that I thought was still good, and, well, the results expressed both voluminously and incons-

- no,wait, we really should probably hit the politics angle.

I haven't bothered with electioneering here not only because I... just don't... and not only because of the sparse handful of you who'll read this most live outside the U.S., or because of my general opinion that humans are degenerate apes that've proven incapable of rational self-determination and so countries deserve to reap the fruits of their collective stupidity (hi Britain, how's your "independence day" coming along? shut up; don't care) but because whichever party wins will inevitably subject me to some manner or another of bigoted populist pandering witch-hunt. Matters little whether because I'm born the wrong sex or skin color or because I speak with an accent and don't pay lip-service to their magic sky-daddy, or because I'm unwilling to deny evolution or sexual dimorphism or whichever brand of science denialism both sides are championing now.

A Rip awakened from before Y2K would certainly have some adjusting to do. The once infamously apathetic American voter may appear more politically engaged now, but while election turnout has markedly risen since I was in school from ~52% to ~66% it's more noticeably produced the rampant activism and political violence and rioting we've been seeing from fanatical fringes. And, interestingly, the good cop / bad cop game doesn't seem to have ended. The entire system simply regressed further and further and ever further into reactionary dictatorship. The "liberal" wing now perpetually threatens half the population with being fired/jailed without evidence as born criminals and promotes the same authoritarian speech policing once criticized in conservatives, only with "under god" replaced with forcing you to call narcissistic twits by the royal "they" while the "conservatives" have devolved into some breed of mindlessly Luddite rampaging caveman.

 

So really, the choice has once again been the same refuge in the lesser evil it's always been (within my lifespan at least) not to improve anything but to slow down the pace of the multibillionnaires chopping the place up to sell it off for parts to each other. Except for the odd quirk that the Republicans, ostensibly facetiously once party of small government, have switched to openly pushing to enthrone their golden shower boy as a theocratic emperor. The many voices raised in consternation at how America could have reached this point seem to miss a detail long obvious to me as a damn dirty furriner, and which I've addressed with regard to religion: it was always there. Theocracy and authoritarianism dragged the country down from the very beginning. That starry-eyed notion of the pilgrims/puritans sailing from merry olde England FOR FREEEDOOOOMM! ignores the basic observation that the "freedom" they sought was to impose their own totalist superstitious dogma upon a society they could isolate from mainstream European culture and control with an iron fist. Americans were saved from their own stupidity by an overarching Federal leadership imposing limits on their power to abuse each other (and whose ideas, like it or not, mostly came from French salons) but that diseased fetish for theocratic absolutism has lingered two and a half centuries in every last Podunk and every last backwoods hick sect.

Depressing thought, neh?

Here's a vacation picture to make you feel better:

"let the bird of loudest lay / on the sole Arabian tree / herald sad and trumpet be"

... okay, so I'm not great at making people feel better.

That tree's not really in Arabia, but in southern Italy. I'd've posted pictures of the waterfront or the statue of Saint Frankie preaching to the birds, but those are readily found online so instead I'm platforming that local. I liked Sorrento, despite spending only one night there. Instead of a gaudy tourist trap crawling with grifters it imparted the cleaner, purposeful, more functional feel of a working town which just happens to have a dramatic history and tourist-friendly amenities. While I snapped a few shots of Sorrento's seafront and hotels, I realized only after downloading everything that among the literally thousands of such snaps, and despite having spent several nights there, I had no such pictures of Naples. It's not worth picturing. Of Napoli's museums and historic sites? Oh, my, yes, hundreds upon hundreds, and it's just too much to take in. But of the town itself? A couple of shots from atop Vesuvius, far enough away that you can't see (most of) the grime.

Want a one-shot impression? We were standing in line for taxis in front of its central train station. The wind kicked up, prompting the whole crowd to hold our breaths and shield our faces not merely from cigarette-laced dust but from a wave of dirty napkins, straws, paper bags and polyethylene in a myriad configurations.

 

And it's hardly the only such problem. It's hard to miss the half-renovated, half-abandoned buildings, the cracked and water-holed sidewalks splashed with last night's urine and beer limoncello vomit, the end-to-end kilometers of gang graffiti, the obviously unprepared tour van driver who's just as obviously somebody's cousin, the semi-legal Africans sleeping on mattresses out in the streets behind your four-star hotel with rooms the size of bed-plus-20cm and missing bathroom door, etc. This is all in the historic town center mind you; this is the lavish, gussied-up facade Napoli puts on for the whole world! You might protest this is a poor town, but why is it poor? Campania as a region pulls in some of the world's heaviest tourist trade. From what we paid and guides' comments, Pompei, by itself, can rake in half or even a million dollars on a good summer day in admission fees alone. Tack on room&board, transportation, tchotchkes, endless other attractions and every other tourist tax you can think of... yet somehow the city still looks like an East-European slum after the fall of communism. Where does all the money go?

The garbage problem at least is well-documented, and blamed on organized crime. Here's the thing though: Sorrento is also visible from Vesuvius, and is in fact contiguous enough to be considered an outlying suburb of the greater Neapolitan metropolitan area. So I'm having some trouble thinking it's not subject to the same criminal temptations. I guess it all depends on the quality of local mafioso you're lucky enough to get running your life.

 

The last decades have seen an increased trend in separatism, be it Brexit, Catalonia or Texans always running their mouths about seceding. The pretext is always some naive jabber about FRREEEDOOOOMS! and many in the U.S. have been half-joking about an official split between red and blue states. But I got news fer ya, pilgrim. That impulse has nothing to do with freedom and everything with the endless numbers of would-be authoritarians eager to fence off their own little fiefdoms, all the pastors and bishops swearing boy scouts and altar boys to silence, all the corporate autocrats eager to deregulate until their money can buy and sell you, each god-kings unto themselves. Deliverance is no egalitarian wonderland. A federal government or a world government is no more inherently oppressive than a slaver state or a mafia political machine or the boss of a factory town or a street gang shaking you down or a mother locking her children in the closet... except that it represents cooperation among the underclass. The rich never have trouble cooperating. The East India Company enriched plenty of Oriental and Occidental mafiosi. Naples' Camorra shift drugs, forged currency and violent force from South America to Russia to Africa to Iraq. Brexit, the anti-immigration separatist measure, actually increased British immigration, especially illegally and from third-world countries. If the Federal Trade Commission fails, Jeff Bezos will still have no problems trading federally. He just won't be getting taxed for it even to the little extent he is now. But he'll still be taxing you with every mark-up.

The absence or impotence of a central government merely leaves your fate to governance by your town's most cut-throat tyrants, petty tin-pot despots who can and will rob you, kill you, whore your ass out or choke you with garbage at their own whims.

Talk about the last king

During my recent Uzbek campaign in Europa Universalis 4, England managed to subsume the isles entirely into Britain...

... only for "Scotland" to pop up again in Polynesia. Weird from a game flow perspective, but also... just picture the demographics! I'm just sayin' if yer gonna wear kilts that might be a better location for it.

De-Regenerate

I'm gonna crash I'm gonna crash I'm gonna trash I'm gonna crash I always crash, too little scratch gonna crash too little, scratch your face itches light bright at the height of your fears of impending arrears six hours seven four three gonna crash two three gonna ate it all and left no gnossympathetik'elover debt piles all night crash out of bed 'ate-in your sleep thinner than yesterday light saving ours or yours lost the track lost the crack in the wall sole escape gotta drag yourself out of the hole you've dug drugged on your own disown it's not me its the fangs ingrown tearing in tattooed in reverse curse the day two was not enough three was not enough to get away four was insufficient for was insufficient by the time you were five you were insufficient six is enough for once but not for every once on the shelf disrespected keep it on display this play on weirds this clay of wyrds this hay unhitting haze in the light of day crash and burn oh return shelve the urn scorn the spurn

return

return

return

it's funny isn't it just not out loud you sit here putting others to sleep with your rants grants dead dream to think hands out you deserve it not enough as you repeat for a chance to repeat the same old lessons until it gives out of bed early to rise early to shinola everywhere you can't even focus I slide open to the coming grit built up seven six five four until you crash for twelve and the world will be new let yourself crash let yourself pay off lay off the stuff and nonsense I'm gonna crash and walk away for once just walk away for once don't need to leave a limb behind every time isn't a tax refund about due screw the hue and cry blank blank I shot a small part dead walk it off they haven't loaded the silver one yet pieces of eight will accumulate until disparage repairs to the back of your pate let it sate let it marinate but you don't owe it reticence that debt was paid eight by eight let yourself live they say what a laugh off the stage in yore life

be the villain?

be the monster be the night be the seven six five four three two all in one claim ownership of a diss 'im bursed eternity whatever chunk you bite off is all yours say voracious reverentious of revanches long incoming due rue screw it.

What does health matter anyway. Let yourself live, they tell you with the best of intentions, but it was never in you that your fate was written. Witness the night of spirits, the night of masks, of dissimulation, of practiced revulsion, when one may feign bogey to double-bluff the essence of man. A pressure valve for innate xenophobia, for fear of the dork, of the geek, of the nerd, but these days the kettle whistles nonstop. Were you not always a creature of their night? Resemble that remarkable, make sure they get your best angle, beast angle, boast angle, or it might not be a kill shot, head shot, mugged shot. To hell. With wellness. Aren't you tired? People are trying to sleep, and if you're not then dare you draw the obvious conclusion? The mob has your description, the dogs have your scent, the inquisitor has your number, trending up, keep positive like the air before a storm. The lightning doesn't hate you. You're merely the most convenient route to where it wants to get to. Or thinks it does. Sinks it does, irresistible attraction.

It's not the chill of the grave. Your thermoregulation's just guttering like an open stove.

What are you afraid of? Uncle Einar got the air back but who's holding your string? A monster off its leash will soon find the silver bullet.

I had an odd conversation earlier today. Brought up The October Country, thought it'd make an apt reference, but she'd never heard of it. It's by Ray Bradbury. Who? Fahrenheit 451? The Martian Chronicles? The Illustrated Man? Something Wicked This Way Comes? Who?

The Halloween Tree made an impression on me in '93, not least for its selfconscious grasping at continuity beyond one's immediate milieu. There's something particularly poignant in the loss of an author so keenly aware of loss, of the tenuous, muffled call-and-response of cultural continuity.

Later, we moved out to the suburbs. A relatively well-to-do one at that. The library had posted a list of books recommended for censorship by concerned citizens. Fahrenheit 451 was among them, I won't say ironically since it made such lists too often for even lingering surprise. The hick trash needn't have worried. Digest digest digests and Denham's Dentifrice carried the day where their protests against thought could not, and the name of Bradbury is trampled on the rainy walks this night by hordes of brats sporting action movie plastic masks whose meaning they'll forget by next month.

Do you accuse me of pining for the fashions of my youth? Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Karl May, Colodi, Verne, Tolstoy, Andersen, the golem and Ali Baba, the clever farmer's daughter, black sails upon the sea soon to receive its name, the wild man who learned to eat bread and drink beer at the foot of a temple prostitute, the witch of the woods and the old man of the mountain, mother earth and father sky, these were not my time's stories, not even my parents' or grandparents' - not even thousand-times-great grand-pere could claim them all! The goat-footed god languishes and fades, tormented by the aseptic gleam of a steeple. Or the Apple Logos, whichever comes first.

The protagonist of The Rover killed his wife and nobody cared. That's a more modern sort of tale.

I started writing this page almost a week ago and will not revise it. Forgive its greater than usual fragmentation. Here, to make it up to you I'll even give away the main theme of my stream of consciousness rant at the start. I kept returning to the sleep debt I've been accruing night by night, avoiding doing something I need to do for fear of getting it wrong. But maybe I'm even more afraid of getting it right and rediscovering what I've known all along: that nobody cares, that even the last of you have gone over to the side of the dust witch.

 

It's almost dawn. I should probably collapse.

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.

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* 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!

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* 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