Darwednesday

This Darwin Day let's note a funny detail: have you noticed religious fundamentalists are far more obsessed with ol' Chuck than atheists are? Or even biologists? Hell, in a university biology curriculum, you'll probably discuss Darwin less than once a course, with maybe one full lecture on 19th-century evolution debates and excerpts from the Origin of Species to introduce evolutionary biology. And we're done. The 19th century ended 125 years ago. But you wouldn't know that from watching the religious mad scramble to defame Darwin by claiming his old-age ailments were divine punishment for contradicting Tha Bie-buhl, posting pictures of Darwin as Hitler, etc.

 

It just reconfirms that whether by innate stupidity or their communal mental disease, believers are incapable of grasping even the basic notion of reason. Interpreting non-religion the only way they know how, as just another religion, they interpret Darwin as its deity or patron saint, and go on the attack as though it would be some great victory to tear him down. And indeed, if you were to tear down Yahweh or Krishna, none of the nonsensical piles of gibberish comprising Christianity or Islam or Hinduism would retain their appeal, because only the mindless belief in holy books' supposed authors' supernatural power induces anyone to swallow their sadomasochistic ramblings.

 

But here's a shocker: free thinkers don't sleep with a copy of The Descent of Man under their pillows. It's not our holy book and its author is not our holy man. We don't have those things. We don't need them. We don't want them. We value the intellectual advancement of the concept of natural selection because it holds up on its own, and its author only insomuch as he was instrumental in clarifying an explanation of the surrounding world which that world itself evinces as true in a myriad examples. When religious reactionaries manage to erase lessons about Darwin's finches from schoolbooks, finches will continue to exist and their beaks will continue to adapt to local food sources, and anyone who pays attention will be able to rediscover those facts. Reality gives not the slightest shit about your idiotic need to pretend fairytales are real.

 

Neither is natural selection some singular revelation on which the entirety of biological science depends to provide a better explanation for life than a magic beardy man making his clay puppets move. It was a major step in an iterative assessment of evidence. Remember it was prompted as an explanation for the natural world based on Thomas Malthus' observations about the human world. A protestant priest. And a monk, Mendel, gave us the first serious notion of heredity. You think nobody will be able to plant some peas and look at their flowers after you erase those two from textbooks? Or nobody will look at a murder-ridden slum and note not every organism lives to procreate? In fact before Charles Darwin was even born, his gran'pappy Erasmus took part in similar arguments about the malleability of species. And if you're so obsessed with natural selection itself, why do you address none of your vitriol toward Alfred Russel Wallace who independently described and co-presented the concept alongside Darwin? Come on, fundies, up your game, show Alfie some love!

Yet if you erase every famous scientist's name, if you torture to death every existing thinker, better minds than yours among your own children will retort "e pur si muove" and realize their lot can only be improved by working in reality, not make-believe.

 

Wanna know today's greatest significance to atheists? It's a weekday.

Even Potemkin Villages Breed Werewolves

Two days ago I had not yet viewed Bill Maher's latest New Rule, so did not guess that by addressing games which run faster but waste more time I'd once again hit close to one of Real Time's topics of the week. It took me a few years to figure out a couple of you watch that show, when I noticed some of my long-dormant posts getting the odd hit in suspicious correlation with Real Time having just run a tangential topic. Like his "eat the rich" segment and usually some other criticism of conventionally safe sociopolitical stances. You do have to wonder though, if a rant by a celebrity sends you back to a blog by some no-name loser, just how few voices are there in society, public or obscure, willing to speak more honestly than a party mouthpiece or a cult proselytizer?

You only have to look at formerly sane figures like James Lindsay or Bret Weinstein sinking deeper into conspiracy theories to realize that even in the absence of authoritarian pressure, audience capture will still do the work of radicalization. As I formerly put it 'this species' obituary will read "morbid sociability" with a hazard sticker for memetic infection' and I have to wonder how susceptible I'd have been to the same crazyward slide, had this blog ever gotten off the ground. Of course in my case, my own incompetence is my saving grace. But in my defense, I ask ya, who could've predicted that obscure game anecdotes and a flat refusal to cut anyone any slack would fail to induce adoration by the masses?

 

Well, I'm busy bashing FEMale chauvINISTS at the moment, so we'll schedule a cure of faithosis purgatives from... let's say Easter-ish onward? Maybe something about factory farming and checkout jobs? Or, oooohh, "racism week" I've been wanting to do that for years now!

InYourFace Timesinks, Redux with Unskippable Cutscenes

"Dumbstruck, color me stupid
Good luck, you're gonna need it
Where I'm going if I get there at all"

 

Green Day - Waiting

 

 

One of Rogue Trader's more interesting fights tries to recreate Alien's feel of being trapped on a spaceship with large carnivorous lifeforms, appropriate enough as Tyrannids are just xenomorph rip-offs in the first place.

(luckily there's no cat involved)

The genestealers run fast, hit hard and automatically retreat to heal when taking too much damage, even on your own turn, thus excelling at hit-and-run. Well, guess what, so does my make-work evasion tank Kibble! And with two Strategists and an Officer behind her, I can blitz, voice of command, blitz again, danse macabre, blade dance and return to start all day long. Thus the hunter becomes the hunted, muahahahah! In fact I was annoyed to no end at having to reload the mission when it ended prematurely on my reaching the exit, as if I were trying to escape and not slice 'n dice dese foos.

 

All that back-and-forth did take a while though. One such lengthy chase in a campaign comes as an exciting change of pace. If I see it happen a second time, I'll call it a timesink. Ditto for the Nurgle mission with the artifact spawning waves of zombies. Once is brilliant, twice is a chore.

 

A decade and a half ago when I started commenting, the chief marketing gimmick for a computer game was copies sold. Everyone wanted to be in on the next big fad, the next Starcraft or Counterstrike or World of Warcraft. And so I countered by pointing out many lesser-selling niche games were keeping their customers happy and engaged far longer than the lowest-common-denominator shovelware on which you spent your money just because all the cool kids were doing it.

 

Of course any system can be gamed, any metric cheated, thus the top criterion is always faked. As "hours played" rose to primacy in gamers' minds, so did padding in the minds of canny game marketers, to the point Strangeland featured an entire scene mocking such temporizing. Of course it mostly started with MMOs, which had a pre-existing impetus to keep players online with "kill ten rats" quests to make their servers feel alive. Minigames (Witcher, KotOR) already functioned as padding in single-player, as did unskippable cutscenes of Final Fantasy infamy, or gratuitous reloads (Arcanum) or slowly walking across giant maps (Dreamfall, etc.) but as older, more blatant timesinks became recognized by customers, a more subtle version seems to have gained prominence: stalling interface interactions.

I mean not only forcing you to scroll through endless unsortable lists (Skyrim) but basically stretching any and everything you do with barely noticeable or seemingly accidental half-seconds of dead time. Individually they don't seem like much, but adding half a second to millions of clicks adds up to forcing hours and days of dead air on players. And while I've criticized Darkest Dungeon, Battletech or even no-name titles like Ashwalkers on this point, if you want a masterclass in interface timesinks, try Rogue Trader.

Technically you can speed up its combat animations. However, not only does this seemingly not apply to ship combat, which remains slow as molasses with about as much animation as Armageddon to justify it, but it's not each animation itself slowing things down. It's the prep and clean-up phases before and after it compounded by stacking multiple separate movements like the little twirl a blade dancer performs before Acrobatic Artistry. Or really any ability.

See what my character's doing there in the bottom right? Pointing. Pointing is very important. Forget lifting your gun and shooting. Fidgeting and pointing animations are appended to every single ability, even the most routine 0AP universals you use every single round. Multiple such abilities. Every. Single. Round. And. Every. Bonus. Round. And if you're behind cover, which most of your party always should be, every single one of those momentous opportunities to POINT YOUR HAND OMGWTFBBQ!! gets padded with yet another separate animation to rise from cover because you can't POINT YOUR FINGER while crouching, that's crazy-talk, after which you separately perform the pointing animation, after which you again turn and crouch behind your cover as yet another separate animation. If you're shooting, tack on two more animations for raising and lowering your weapon. Do that five or seven times a round for six characters six rounds in a row for six hundred fights and see how much of your "how long to beat" was spent beating around the bush.

And then there's the cargo system.

Ah, yes, the cargo system.

FUCK CARGO!

I'll address its basic validity when discussing the game as a whole. It's a laudable idea in itself: your vendor trash get auto-sorted away from your usable inventory. Except every piece of vendor trash has different values, all getting binned automatically until reaching 100% to be sold as one full container, after which a new bin automatically gets started. The timesink? No sorting algorithm. Overflow can reach 120% with 105% being very common, so let's estimate letting it pile up on its own wastes 10% of your loot on average. The real kicker? Even if you try to do it manually, the interface doesn't work like a normal inventory where you can place and move loot.

- you can only add items to the currently active bin, which defaults to the top unfilled one

- you must split stacks to exact numbers beforehand because the interface won't take shift-clicking

- the gigantic list jumps around of its own accord as you fill bins, often hiding the next bin above or below the visible area

- stacks in the "to cargo" area also sort themselves of their own accord

- many cargo items share identical icons, forcing you to scroll over them constantly for tooltips

- you can sort the list, but can't view only one category at a time

- you can't move cargo back to your inventory, therefore must perform any sorting in front of a corpse or barrel on some mission map

- players will readily tell you the amount of cargo you find is not enough to satisfy all factions in the first place, so you either do some manual sorting or give up on some rewards

Now that, children, is a helluva timesink. Keep in mind they deliberately spent development work-hours, paid for by you yourself, to program a secondary inventory interface to put you through this idiotic chore.

And while I'm only using Rogue Trader as emblematic of an industry-wide problem, I do have to wonder why Owlcat, whose games do in fact hold quite respectable amounts of content under objective analysis, competitive in their field, have in all three cases transparently inflated their size like bags of potato chips.

Time Enough for Love

"Your goddess is bathed in gold while keeping us in line
We're killing each other for a woman in the sky"

 

"The end is the same for everyone
Should be enough for us to be as one
Watch me fall apart over you
Watch me fall apart tryin' to please you"

 

Nothing But Thieves - I'm Not Made By Design / Six Billion

 

 

Though marketed as a novel, we're really talking about a collection of short to novella-length stories, plus a couple sets of aphorisms composing The Notebooks of Lazarus Long - a fix-up novel if there ever was one. But being a fan generally of Heinlein's other work, the book also carries a bitter note. Time Enough for Love marks the beginning of the end, the tipping point of decline in the master's career, after which he focused increasingly on the "world as myth" notion which bore little fruit despite encompassing four volumes and spare.

 

I'll grant I'm also biased against its central figure. Though Lazarus Long has been touted as Heinlein's chief protagonist (and is indeed the most recurring one) I've always considered Jubal Harshaw the better type specimen. Where Heinlein's earlier works (especially the "juveniles") promoted boy scout grade honesty, as he aged his heroes acquired more and more of a distasteful taste for lying under the moral umbrella of some underdog status, e.g. Friday. In Time Enough for Love at least, the heavy emphasis on Lazarus as unreliable narrator and lovable scoundrel begins to wear on itself after the twentieth repetition.

But most will focus on the collection's recurring theme of, well, love. Illicit love. Illicit sexual love. Computer programs, age differences, homosexuality, prostitution and especially incest in several directions. If it seems a tad over-stretched, consider it was published in 1973, as the hippie era waned and free love was once again ground under the heel of Americans' habitual puritanical repression. The book reads, more than anything, like a last orgasmic gasp of the sexual revolution before being subverted by superstitious ritual, romantic fables and (in a sudden yet inevitable betrayal) feminist condemnation of sexuality as male aggression.

He takes it in some odd directions even by his own standards, for instance the stance he adopted in more than one book that overpopulation should not be addressed by population control but by interplanetary and interstellar travel, a new wave of colonial expansion. Unrealistic from simple thermodynamics, but also leading more than once to passages sublimating the joy of sex into a pregnancy fetish, a bit Freudian as the author himself died childless. The lengthy discussion of the twue meaning of wuv winds down into the same unintended(?) head-trip as it seems Lazarus' entanglement with Dora instilled both romantic love and a death wish in him. Reading through not just that but the passages at the end where Lazarus is shamed by his family into enlisting to die in WW1 (an echo of that nastier Starship Troopers machismo Heinlein normally kept in check) put me in mind of one of my older linguistic observations.

I find the phrase "make love" both primitively hokey and weirdly apt. Pair-bonding is the fabrication of attachment, literally making emotion in another, inducing devotion to be cashed in later, a spell serving the caster not the target. And that, in turn, makes me think of the one story in Time Enough for Love not dealing with love as a primary topic: that of the lazy farm-boy who ends up dodging his way through the military for a pension, and surviving, and thriving, instead of being packed off to death in the trenches with a white feather because a man's gotta do. I very much doubt Heinlein intended his book to send the message that for men love is death, at least not consciously, but given enough rope he would appear to have hanged himself.

Explain all these controls

"I need you to elevate me here

At the corner of your lips

As the orbit of your hips

Eclipse, you elevate my soul

I've got no self-control"

U2 - Elevation

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"I am not thinking of the abolition of woman. But I do want to abolish—the heroine, the sexual heroine. I want to abolish the woman whose support is jealousy and whose gift possession. I want to abolish the woman who can be won as a prize or locked up as a delicious treasure. And away down there the heroine flares like a divinity.’
‘In America,’ said Edwards, ‘men are fighting duels over the praises of women and holding tournaments before Queens of Beauty.’
‘I saw a beautiful girl in Lahore,’ said Kahn, ‘she sat under a golden canopy like a goddess, and three fine men, armed and dressed like the ancient paintings, sat on steps below her to show their devotion. And they wanted only her permission to fight for her.’
‘That is the men’s doing,’ said Edith Haydon.
‘I SAID,’ cried Edwards, ‘that man’s imagination was more specialised for sex than the whole being of woman. What woman would do a thing like that? Women do but submit to it or take advantage of it.’
‘There is no evil between men and women that is not a common evil,’ said Karenin. ‘It is you poets, Kahn, with your love songs which turn the sweet fellowship of comrades into this woman-centred excitement. But there is something in women, in many women, which responds to these provocations; they succumb to a peculiarly self-cultivating egotism. They become the subjects of their own artistry. They develop and elaborate themselves as scarcely any man would ever do. They LOOK for golden canopies. And even when they seem to react against that, they may do it still."

H.G. Wells - The World Set Free

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"Just say the word,—teetotal, vegetarian, aeronaut, theosophist, superman. I'll have a try at it, Gladys, if you will only give me an idea what would please you."

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Lost World

_________________________________________________

A journal article back in 2007 made a bit of splash finding that strippers taking birth control pills received mostly steady tips during the month, while women with normal menstrual cycles were not just out-earning them but varying far more in nightly monetary gains, getting twice as much in tips when ovulating as opposed to menstruating. I can't speak to its discussion in scientific circles at the time. The paper itself reads sane and professional enough, albeit awkwardly tiptoeing around descriptions of strip clubs; and no, messieurs Geoff, Josh and Brent did not spend their grant money on lap dances - the gals just filled out forwarded questionnaires. But by the time it hit our mass-media sensationalism factory, flaring up briefly in the talk radio and afternoon gossip show circuit, I remember it repeatedly presented not in terms of estrus but as evidence of pheromonal communication in humans. We're just bucks sniffing out does in heat.

A tidy little notion from the female viewpoint, neh? All she has to do is show up. She need not demean herself by responding to the call of the wild. Her body merely radiates 1D6 attraction like some holy aura. Therefore only lowly males alter their behavior to sate their primitive lusts. Our misandrist media culture ignored the more down-to-earth explanations in the study itself and immediately latched on to an explanation better fitting the feminist party line that men are descended from apes but women are descended from heaven.

 

Slight problem though: you're currently reading this instead of sniffing it in scent-code. Not only is sight our primary sense as a species, but our entire evolutionary history going back tens of millions of years through the primates confirms that, including for sexual cues. So talk show hosts focused on a bizarre leap that hormonal changes within the body of an ovulating woman were producing scent-signals to customers who drove to a strip club in the first place to watch her dance on stage. Pornstars do occasionally sell their panties, but that's an infinitesimal blip compared to the market for videos or live shows, further confounded by the "feelies" tactile element. Before assuming hormones are teleoperating the brain of a man across the room, is there not a brain far closer for those chemical signals to manipulate? Within the same body, even? The woman's own? After all, women's ability to control and enslave men in no way implies they have control of themselves.

Succinctly: you're acting like a bitch in heat. You gyrate more pointedly, strut more bouncily, pout more wetly, you smile more sweetly when your body's priorities over-ride your conceit to despise men for desiring you because only a fairy-tale Prince Charming could ever be worthy of you, when you just want your egg fertilized before it drops, carpe that estrous diem and worry about nailing down a provider later. Conversely, PMS-ing harpies act less personable.

Oh, what's that? Are you less flattered by that interpretation? Does your own body insult you by controlling you thus, forcing you to appeal to those you consider less evolved than yourself? Do you resent being puppeted by your instincts? Well, madam, suck it up, pun intended.

The presumption that sexual hormones change interpersonal behavior, unblinkingly accepted for one half of the species, is taboo when discussing the other half. Odd considering the synchronization of menstrual cycles (provable or not) among women in the same social group is openly discussed... but that doesn't involve men, so doesn't set off the same level of feminist hysteria. Even allowing for the unlikely pheromonal explanation, it's interesting, thinking back, I can't remember the reverse proposition ever being put forth in any media outlet or classroom discussion: that horny men innocently radiate attraction and women might unthinkingly act on that masculine scent like sheep trailing the muskiest ram.

Does the thought of her own body chemistry pushing a woman into a supplicant position offend thee? Must it be plucked out of any gender narrative? Why? Again, when discussing men, uncontrollable hormonal impulses are not only not avoided but openly mocked in romcoms and sitcoms as desperation to court a mate, despite the fact that men incur far greater detriment, being always in heat, always eager to curry favor, always open to exploitation - and oh, if only it were as simple for us as gyrating and getting paid for it! But the very concept that women's purity may be marred, even in the slightest, by a small chip off the same millstone men carry every day of their lives, makes us reach for any other explanation, no matter how far-fetched. Can you even fathom how deeply that pro-woman bias cripples everything which should otherwise be an honest analysis of the world around us?

Indefensible Positions

"And so here I am again feeling like an old-school liberal at odds with the new politics of the far left, because it wasn't so long ago when liberals thought shooting people who don't share your politics was bad! Or at least a microaggression."

Real Time with Bill Maher: Eat the Rich

 

With most of the webcomic field having succumbed to terminal snowflake navel-gazing over the past decade, older material has been looking better and better by comparison. Well, maybe not in image quality. Indefensible Positions was apparently created on a drawing tablet from the very start, a technology which in 2005 had not suffered much public testing. It shows. At least at first. It did improve, if not to modern glossy, shaded, curve-smoothed, consistently proportioned, colorful standards. Don't worry, the story's much better.

 

A youth ditches his plans for college, meets (sort of-) Lee and Grant the avatars of Chaos and Order and learns the true meaning of deviance. Until it deviates. That was the normal-sounding part. The rest involves witches, teleporting zombies, pigfuckery, mosquitos, a traffic light, political commentary on post-9/11 curtailment of personal freedom, and a veritable chorus-line of tulpas.

 

Its strongest part as a work of fiction would have to be the unique characters, each with wildly different origin stories, personalities, motivations, ethics, powers and fates. But it rose past freak-show appeal (and has retained lasting relevance) by returning repeatedly to the conflicts between freedom and destruction, continuity and suffocating control, personal meaning and personal sacrifice, common ground and mass psychosis, and most importantly the extent to which anyone may make able, informed, responsible and driven in choices impacting self, others or society as a whole. It landed at a strange time in retrospect, shortly before libertarianism devolved to a moral umbrella for simpleminded greed, or liberalism a crutch for narcissistic power games in the name of make-work minorities.

As urban fantasy yarns go, sadly underappreciated and just as relevant now as twenty years ago, albeit for different reasons.

Cherenkov Procs

My tendency to pick the nerdiest characters or factions and my love of support roles often leaves my front line a bit sparse. Take this mid-game fight in AoW4, where my lynchpin for holding off the enemy turned out to be one starter unit.

Granted, I set up that dwarf faction as tough nuts to crack (order / materium) thus ten armour on a first-tier mook (before shield wall) ranks fairly impressive and I sank plenty of healing and other support into keeping it alive, but I still had to move it into cover for range defense. Slight problem: said cover was on fire. The little bastards held out just long enough for my higher-tier units to turn the tide (doing respectable retaliation damage in the meantime) but finally succumbed... to the burn DoT. Requiescat in pace, noble yet crispy defenders of the faith.

I found myself on the opposite end of this retaliatory lynchpin conundrum just this morning.

I thought I'd hit an unbeatable Rogue Trader fight last night when a forgefiend kool-aid-manned at me through a wall and effortlessly wiped my party. This being my first fight after learning how to warp, I half believed I'd stumbled into a high-level zone by mistake. My first instinct had been to whittle its beefy HP down with blade dances and wow, did that ever not work! Only after getting my ass handed to me did I deign to read its ability description about retaliating every time you poke it. Luckily, when it comes to maximizing damage per hit, I built my dancers to benefit from each others' bleed procs and my three operators can shred armor and stack their bonus for a well-timed sniper shot. My second crack at the encounter brought flawless victory (and apparently chalked up some achievement for doing 100+ damage in a single hit) with I believe just five attacks on the boss, using the time it took to stack debuffs to mop up its adds instead.

 

It took me longer to figure out how I'd killed it than to actually kill it. DoT once again played a role. A "forge fiend" sounds mechanical enough, but does not take damage from Pasqal's machine spirit banishment... but like machines it also does not register bleed DoT... so haemorrhage does not involve bleeding, but is instead a regular damage proc on next turn start, which does not count as "over time" (?) ... except I also managed to do 3x8 points of "direct" damage from "where it hurts" dependent on a nonexistent effect on something that doesn't bleed because my custom blade dancer Cain's sword and executioner abilities instantly procced off the DoT that never happened...

... umm... huh?!

 

Bugs? Exploits? Easter eggs? Am I bleeding it so hard the blood's traveling faster than light? Rogue Trader picked up those lovely nested tooltips I so praised in Age of Wonders, Old World and others of the new generation of strategy games, but even with a novella-length stack of mechanics explanations, I'm having a much worse time tracking down relevant info within them. Of course, it doesn't help that Warhammer itself has a reputation for convoluted mechanics including infinitely regressing* counter-counters, but knowing the breed of beast you were adapting, maybe you should've put just a smidge more effort into clearly communicating that information! One of AoW4's best features is that I so rarely find myself wondering wtf just happened. Make my failures painfully clear! Come on, Owlcat, you've come so damn close to greatness.

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* Weregeek featured a more apt example referencing Warhammer and ultra-rippy penetration-ignoring-ignoring penetration but damned if I can find it now.

Here's lookin' at you lookin' at me, 1

Once upon a time (more or less precisely two years ago in fact) yours moderately lupine went sniffin' 'bout the woods immediately after a lightly snowy day, when the fluffy stuff was freshly stacked. I did stumble across a strange oval depression though where little to no new snow seemed to have settled, slightly less than a meter in length.

Then I realized I'd almost stepped in the yellow puddle to its left where whoever had napped there during the snowfall had taken a leak upon getting back up. Glancing about, it was easy enough to follow the hoofprints leading away uphill through the cleanly layered powder.

 

 - and if you didn't spot the culprit in the top left corner, here's the mugshot:

You done sniffing my piss yet, monkey?

Now, come on, I've never been a boy scout but can I get some manner of badge for this little hundred-pace tracking expedition?

Rogerin' James

Mentioning We Happy Few last week reminded me I've never really praised the DLC They Came from Below. While the raygun fights can get a tad repetitive and annoying, it hits a solid bullseye on the retro-futuristic charm it was aiming for, complete with a slew of references to old SciFi stories.

 

Moreover, a quick glance at this blog will show I have little patience for self-righteous "woke" bullshit, and I've given We Happy Few its requisite lumps for its feminist ramblings. One of the other DLCs, We All Fall Down, dives headlong into the same idiocy with its antivillainness blaming everything on her father and relying on her Indian mother's timeless wisdom. Because of course.

But Roger and James? A rare example of how to do it right. Developing them with actual personalities beyond merely their beatific status within group identity. Limiting their interactions mainly with each other prevents their characterization from sinking to the usual posturing as morally superior to heterosexuals, and fleshes out their dynamic as complementary individuals and not just poster-children. A flat refusal to idealize them while at the same time slipping free of comic relief and securing protagonist status. Fallible and ridiculous befitting the goofy tone of the story, you nonetheless find yourself rooting not just for Roger to save the day but for their relationship to survive.

Attaboys. Great work.

"something you tell one other person"

"So we moved together like a ball and chain

Minds becoming two halves of the same"

 

Missy Higgins - Secret

 

 

Next time you're chatting in a group, try asking them: what feature in a woman do men universally find most attractive? The obvious answers are "ass" or "tits" or to a lesser extent "legs" or if you're in politefacetious company they might answer "kindness" or "a nice smile" or even the slightly more insightful "eyes" as feigning interest in the man. All wrong.

 

The correct answer, of course, is "available" since the majority of us must take whatever we can get.

 

Now, just to test your basic, intuitive grasp of evolutionary psychology, what's men's most attractive feature to women?

Unavailable.

You know the root of the drama. You've always known it. Stop pretending innocence.

Weird West

"I hate robbing banks"

Juno Reactor - Pistolero

 

I suppose any game that lets you stuff a rat carcass full of a Tardis' worth of bacon, corn and venison and cook it by lobbing a Molotov cocktail at it can't be all bad, but when that's the high point of your adventures... well, there's a reason Weird West is on permanent sale from 70-90% off. Actually, many reasons. I motivated myself at least as far the werewolf story because... well, for the obvious reason, but rapidly lost interest, and I'm not the only one. On its Fandom wiki, the first of Weird West's five stories boasts several pages of detailed instructions and notes. The next three waver between less to more than a page. The last is a stub. And while the first story may indeed be markedly longer, it's more a matter of boredom setting in.

On the plus side, Weird West bases character advancement not on racking up kill XP, but on finding skill and feat points (aces and relics) while adventuring, or it could've been a truly unbearable grind. Unfortunately, every single enemy everywhere patrols more or less its entire map, meaning you usually end up having to clear maps anyway.

Laudably, it also imitates Divinity: Original Sin's "surfaces" so you can combine oil with burning or water with electricity, shoot arrows through AoE to gain its effect, etc.. Unfortunately, multi-part combos are far less reliable in real-time combat, making these largely useless compared to just emptying your clip at the enemy while backing away.

Are you noticing a pattern?

Intriguingly, it offers a great deal of environment interaction, for instance killing unconscious enemies by dropping them in puddles (poor pig-man brute, we hardly knew ye) or kicking, jumping and dodging around in fights. In practice, you'll never use them. Most maps you'll clear by sneaking up behind enemies which are always completely blind in their rear arc and one-shotting them. And remember I mentioned they all patrol over huge distances? When they spot a corpse they don't sound the alarm or actively pick up your trail but only rush over to gawk. 

the crate review system would have a field day here

Meaning you can sap one sap, then let patrolling saps continue pathing into it, positioning themselves for endless sapping, until your interest in combat is entirely sapped away. Then toss a stick of dynamite at the only enemies travelling in a pair or group. For every map. See my similar criticism of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden.

To challenge you, it has no passive health regen and weapons with finite ammo, imposing resource management. But you can loot far more ammo than you'll ever use and regain health not just from eating but form drinking water which is often available in infinite quantities, plus the routine of drinking from cacti to heal 5% at a time was cute for a couple of maps, but it quickly becomes a 'click twenty things twice' chore with no further resource management incentive. Cash is comically useless.

Like We Happy Few, Weird West's open world elements are blatantly tacked on to a completely unrelated concept because Everything-Must-Be-Skyrim! though at least it dodged WHF's pitfall of forcing you to start the loot-scrounging all over again with every character. Unimaginative/randomized level design makes exploration unrewarding though. The only interesting map was the haunted mansion in the indian's story.

You can get a couple of NPCs as your 'posse' and yes, as you can probably guess, they are preternaturally adept in catching your own bullets, when they're not too busy running headlong into all available enemies to die.

Visually I'll admit the heavy outline comic book look works well for its spaghetti western purposes. The audio's nothing to write home about, but competent enough - that meow-meow music track was quaint at least. But if you'd hoped all Weird West's failed or wasted potential might be salvaged by good storytelling, guess again.

The main plot(s) (an immortal mind-jumping between adventurers, each with grim decisions to make, generally involving betrayal of trust and dark secrets) could've been great, and remains interesting enough despite fumbled presentation. Some lesser flaws include dialogue which barely tries to sound period-appropriate, telegrams written in florid, soulful prose, and highly repetitive, generic flavor text from your posse. But the main problem also explains why professional critics so deliberately inflated this otherwise mediocre game's ratings: it panders to the usual politically correct idiocy. Interestingly, on the most obvious point of contention for a western, genocide against Native Americans, it's rather muted. The third story inspired by Great Lakes mythology has some groaners like townsfolk without fail referring politely to "natives" instead of calling them damn dirty hinjuns as the rednecks would've in the 19th century, or "medicine person" a phrase which would've incensed most braves into punching their squaws in the face on principle. Still, the evil you fight is itself native, the natives are not immune to its lure, and overall Across Rivers' adventure is the sanest of the four I've played through, albeit slightly blander as well.

 

Then there's comical incompetence like this.

The bulk of the bigoted pandering though is as usual reserved for bashing men and glorifying women. I won't go into every single example. Though it does provide a couple of villainnesses, just assume the eternal mantra of "man bad, woman good" is played up, that almost every man you meet will (purely by coincidence) turn out to be stupid or evil or both, and women get applauded at every turn as smarter, purer, stronger and in every way more bionic than their male counterparts.

etceteree, etceterah

The most blatant example is the entire second adventure, the man cursed into half-pig form. If you're thinking it's a "men are pigs" slam, think again: pigs are presented as an improvement on men. Just try to imagine what every critic would've rated the game had it reversed the polarity on that. (Not that there was any mystery you'd turn out to have been an evil pimp in your past life as soon as a brothel was mentioned.)

A more over-arching problem comes in the form of "with us or against us" roleplaying. Your few choices come in the form of flat good vs. evil dichotomies, usually straining to paint the politically correct choice as absolute good. The pig man, for instance, is at last faced with the stupid whore who got him cursed. Aside from the fact you're just expected to take her word about your past misdeeds, the scene lacks any option to say: fine, I was a villain, you got your revenge and then some, let's leave it at that. You're pushed to either grovel at her feet in penitence, or kill the stupid whore. Zero nuance.

So I killed the stupid whore.

 

The few less stupid bits tend to be stock figures and morals, like the greedy scheming fatcat politician. I'd been hoping for some decent werewolf action at least, but even lycanthropy is trivialized. Standard action fantasy instant shapeshifting, plus nobody acts the least bit surprised at your existence and you're being mass-produced by an official authority, as usual missing the point of the mythical skulking quasi-human stalking the fringes of civilization. And with that I uninstalled.

One last observation: the cannibalism taboo is a powerful storytelling tool, but not if you ride it into amateurish monomania. Not every story in your collection should revolve around people-eating sirens, people-eating pig-men, people-eating werewolves, even lip-chewing. Do we need to have a lie-down with papa Freud about our oral fixation?

Pssst. Hey.

Hey.

Why did Hitler punch a woman in the panties?

He wanted to fight a clit's brig.

Re: purpose?

"Tell me why, tell me who, tell me you don't know what to do"

Caravan Palace - Russian

 

Continuing my run through Weird West, I'm somewhat impressed by its many interesting mechanics, and very very unimpressed by their shallow implementation. I've tossed exactly one electric grenade in combat, to open a fight with a couple of cave terrors by slowing their movement. And why cook food when you get infinite free healing from water sources? Or why bother farming low drop rate animal hides when you get free level-appropriate gear for each character or can easily buy better gear with the gigantic pile of useless cash you rack up? Which in turn brings into question why you'd bother hunting bounties. Even the few useful gimmcks clash. Real-time combat renders complicated combos useless for their extended setup, your posse block your own shots more than enemies' and being tracked down by surviving mooks with a vendetta would be a great twist... if they didn't pop up and start a fight when you're trying to stealth around an enemy camp, promping nothing except an instant reload. But the real noodle scratcher's that in a cRPG so focused on wild west gunfights, you spend most of your time sapping victims unconscious a la Thief.

Did you forget what game you were making halfway through?

Well, it's not an uncommon occurrence.

 

If I'm not personally defending it, the Northern Empire's lost it.

I decided a few years in Calradia might be good for my health, but while Bannerlord understandably pushes its big selling point of large-scale warfare, it does so to the exclusion of the adventuring party lifestyle around which M&B was originally based, or even homesteading your fiefs. The AI is programmed to force constant warfare, no matter in which direction, and moreover seems to constantly lose territory wherever I'm not personally conquering towns for others to rule. It was great for the first few dozen sieges, but I'm beginning to sorely miss my caravan escorting and bandit hunting days, or being able to do anything other than rush to the next siege.

 

Or take Rimworld as another example. Two of its expansions, Biotech and Ideology, add a great deal of both practical and aesthetic customization to your colony. But the other two? Princesses with psychic powers and "cabin in the woods" horror with dungeon delving? How the hell do those build on the game's core Robinsonesque base-building conceit?

My recent jaunt through Fallout 3 reminded me expanding on anything with a story-based campaign in fact has always been a bit iffy. Back when it was made, companies tended to market DLCs as paid cheats, mimicking microtransaction pay-to-win schemes from multiplayer. The "content" you were buying often amounted to little more than a reskinned suit of armor with overpowered stats. But even if that trend has diminished (albeit not disappeared) you're still left with the problem of appending more content to what should have been a full campaign to begin with. Otherwise what the hell did you originally charge customers for? The spate of blatantly unfinished games marketed at full price over the past decade soured many on the concept of buying anything at release. Rare is the company like Larian which will refuse to further milk a cash cow like Baldur's Gate. (My hat's off to them on that point.) But even ignoring those issues, tacking on more content to a finished campaign so frequently smacks of pointless, gratuitous filler, like Kingmaker's endless randomized dungeon crawl minigame.

 

Or, conversely and comically, pared-down DLCs can expose needless fluff in the main campaign. We Happy Few's three add-on standalone adventures lack the main three's open world or RPG leveling elements yet play just as well or better, confirming the suspicions of everyone who pointed out the pointlessness of scrounging and crafting mountains of redundant loot. They'd obviously conceived their opus as adventure game sleuthing, and failed pretty badly at lugging that precept onto the Skyrim bandwagon.

 

It's honestly hard to discern whether more pointless bloat and feature creep stems from developers desperate to play a strength and stand out in a particular niche, or the reverse: overcooked fads and industry standards. Either way, have you noticed all the gameplay you've paid for yet neither played nor gamed?

Dumb Animals

"I was caught in Fangorn and spent many weary days as a prisoner of the Giant Treebeard."

- Gandalf, in an early draft of LotR from The History of Middle-Earth

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Amish guy smacks Berlin in the face with a bedpost, news at 11.

While I welcomed its predecessor Moon as hard science fiction at a time when the superhero movie craze was just amplifying, watching (and increasinly skipping through) Mute I found myself constantly wondering why this was made into a SciFi story at all, aside from the hero regaining his voice by technological means, which foregone conclusion hardly justifies two hours of padding. Where Moon solidly anchored its plot to its scientific precepts, Mute looks like Duncan Jones decided to make a cyberpunk flick, just because, and backfilled generic details as an afterthought. So, obviously it needs some robots for the techno angle, plus lotsa pimps 'n hoes for the gritty film noir angle, and the rest is extended shots of the hero or antivillain brooding. So much brooding.

Visually at least its cold, inhuman urban wasteland aesthetic fits the bill (and is rather skillfully conveyed, e.g. that two second time-skip at the library) but even in that department you have to giggle at the occasional gratuitous interposition of <something techy> into the scenery to remind us we're at least nominally watching SF. The plot itself (a plucky squire pure of heart and doughty of bicep, racing to the aid of his lady love) offers nothing you couldn't get out of ten thousand children's fables no matter how many broken noses and transvestite hookers you toss in to jack the rating out of PG territory. Even a potentially solid ending is undermined by sap and a lack of attention to how exactly our hero will contend with the scores of mobsters he's just set after his blood. Tone shifts hardly help either, undecided from scene to scene whether it wants to be Blade Runner or Pulp Fiction, and stock politically correct characterization just nails that coffin shut. Every man is a cackling sexual predator except the one-good-man protagonist, women are innocent victims and goodness intrinsically tied to cuteness. And of course the primitivist angle goes hand-in-hand with the feminist one for bonus purity points. If you want more depth than that, you won't find it watching Skarsgard sit dramatically at various tables.

I'm reminded Tolkien said there was only one part of LotR which flowed leisurely, which he wrote basically in one go once he had its basic idea, and that was the Rohan / ents / Isengard conflict. Of course that's largely because the ent angle runs on a stock nature vs. tech juxtaposition (and yes, it was stock even in the early 20th century, and had been for a century prior) and he lifted the hubristic comeuppance angle from Macbeth (twice: no man of woman born / 'til Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane) because he disliked Shakespeare's handling* of those plot twists. His original idea was pure fairytale fluff, in which giants fee-fi-fo-fum and carry off victims to their lairs; not much to it. Fairytales were invented by simple minds which simply imagined bigger versions of themselves, giants as giant humans, because that's as far as a dirt-farming illiterate's imagination could stretch. Tolkien did not abandon that source material ("ent" shares its linguistic root with "ettin") but tweaked it into a more naturalistic extension of the world beyond ourselves.

Nota bene, Treebeard did not shift completely from being a mean giant who imprisons good guys to a member of Aragorn's army. He (and his kin by extension) is still prickly, standoffish, dangerous independent will alien to the world of men (as magical creatures are by default outside monotheistic folklore) not evil but best left alone. And though Eowyn in turn was given the right-of-way in her big speech about being denied her chance at glory just because she's a woman, she never descended into a trite feminist "strong woman" stereotype slapping boys around to show 'em who's boss. In fact she was at one point meant to die on the Pelennor Fields, her mad quest for glory being a mode of self-destruction driven by hopeless infatuation and family tragedies, yet another victim of the defeatism Saruman/Sauron's machinations instilled in their enemies. The point being not least that anyone who actually wants to go to war must be at least partly cracked.

 

And he achieved that added nuance by moving past set pieces or stock heroics and even by critiquing The Immortal Bard Himself! But that took a lifetime of study and reconsidering many drafts, not just pumping out the lucrative Hobbit sequel his publisher had demanded.

Publish or perish. It's often remarked that Dickens' books are padded due to being paid by the chapter. But of course plenty of 19th-century writers also padded their works for the very same reason. They just lacked Dickens' flair and so have dropped from memory. How many movies have you seen which featured one or two decent scenes but obviously should never have been more than a 15-30min short - dragged out to two hours to pay the mortgages of armies of third camera grip understudy foley wranglers and buy a fifth private jet for a studio executive? How much less wasteful would it be to simply pay all such potential creators a universal income simply to exist, and let them create at their own pace, rather than actively push an economy based on the mass production of waste?

"Is the rabble also necessary for life?"

 

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* I'm of mixed opinion. I find Tolkien replacing "no man (of woman born)" with a woman instead of caesarian birth a more fitting resolution, but I do still prefer Shakes' original non-supernatural solution to the removal of the wood. (Don't get me wrong, I love the ents, but still...)

Oh ye of loosey goosey.

Oh ye of little john.

Camelot is pig country

"when I'm in this idiom I sometimes get a bit, sort of, carried away, you know"

- Lancelot in Holy Grail

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Spoilert for the first player character's bestie in Weird West

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While social justice warriors can be infuriating, they're often also unintentionally hilarious in, as I've so often noted here, tripping over their own propaganda. Weird West, as I predicted, does try to temper its rah-rah girl power, racial minorities rah-rah initial presentation after a bit (via some grimdark edge) but doesn't quite stick the landing:

Maybe the best way to help women as legitimate figures of authority or blacks as... just, y'know, people... isn't to draw, in a single paragraph, an explicit and direct comparison to CANNIBALISTIC MONSTERS LURKING IN OUR MIDST ! Where did you get this, out of some 1950s space invader allegory about the subversive red menace? Because you might've misunderstood those movies' political stance on the menace.

 

Shit like this is why so many people's reaction to social activism on their behalf rapidly sinks from

'The cavalry has arrived, huzzah!'

to

'Please stop helping!'

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P.S.: Attentive comic book fans might notice this is an old issue, most glaringly noted in The X-Men, which has tried for sixty years to equate its "mutant rights" with real-world minority movements, while at the same time demonstrating, issue after issue, the seemingly endless destruction caused by mutants. In this case, BROWN SKIN DOESN'T EAT PEOPLE, nor raise the question of what'll happen whenever you run out of helplessly incarcerated criminals to summarily execute to your own appetite. Last time I checked, weren't prisoner rights and fair trials a black American issue too?

It's not that you can't fit such elements into the same story, or hell, even combine them purposefully as provocation, be the gadfly and all that, if you'd displayed any awareness of what you were doing, if you were at least deliberately offensive. (Hell, I've done it m'self.) But tone-deaf lumping as many gimmicks as possible for attention does no-one any good, least of all yourselves as storytellers.

It Was Only a Canting Humbug

"Pretentious attention

Dismissive apprehension"

 

Serj Tankian - Empty Walls

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"what was sadder for a man of heart was the sight or the canting humbugs, who, from fear of blows, kept at an equal distance from the two camps, and who, although they allowed their selfishness and cowardice to be visible, claimed admiration for the generosity of their sentiments and the nobility of their souls. They rubbed their eyes with onions, gaped like whitings, blew violently into their handkerchiefs, and, bringing their voices out of the depths of their stomachs, groaned forth: “O Penguins, cease these fratricidal struggles; cease to rend your mother’s bosom!” As if men could live in society without disputes and without quarrels, and as if civil discords were not the necessary conditions of national life and progress. They showed themselves hypocritical cowards by proposing a compromise between the just and the unjust, offending the just in his rectitude and the unjust in his courage."

 

Anatole France, parodying the Dreyfus affair in Penguin Island

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"There was no room in the same world for men who belched and men who wouldn't tolerate belching."

Philip K. Dick - The Chromium Fence

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"I just wanna say, y'know, can we, can we all - get along? Can we, can we get along? Um... can we stop makin' it, makin' it horrible for, for the, for the older people and the, and the, an' tha keeds?..."

Rodney King, 1992

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Due to it so thoroughly embracing the short story format and Poe's "one effect" I find myself able to recall the exact endings to Science Fiction more than any other genre, the moments when our expectations of a sappy ending are turned, if not upside down, at least sideways. George R. R. Martin in particular provided some delightfully hard-hitting ones before getting himself bogged down in the fantasy epic with no ending in sight, so for the purpose of this rant let's mention Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels. Without spoiling too much, we hear tell of a far future where the human race has diverged into eloi and morlocks space men and tunnel men, on one side technocratic malaise and on the other brute primitive vitality. Then <something happens> and though it's a humdinger of a finale* I only recently noted an irksome detail. The story presents us two narratively and existentially equal breeds, yet we wag our finger directly at the educated space-man. There's really no expectation that the ignorant troglodyte in turn should have predicted error or tamped down its impact, or even had the foresight or developed the means to make the crucial overture to begin with. So why then are they still presented as matching halves of a conundrum? If you expect better from one side, then you implicitly admit it is better. Superior. And not just because it lives in the sky.

 

But sometimes both sides truly are equal(-ly stupid) and so often what was phantasmagorical reductio ad absurdum seventy-five years ago reflects all too aptly on a culture wallowing in its decay. As Hollywood has maladapted every single other PipKDick story they could get their grubby mitts on, I find their avoidance of The Chromium Fence rather glaring, especially as for a SciFi story it's inordinately easy to illustrate with make-up effects and one animatronic psych-bot. In the near future this time, American society has diverged along a political divide in... cosmetics. No shit. Actually, no sweat, or mussed hair, or bad breath, or most any natural bodily functions, unless you're on the "natural" side of the argument, in which case you make a point of being as grubby and smelly as you can be. This glorified debate over legally enforcing deodorant grows so deeply divisive that it becomes apparent whichever side wins will either forcibly convert or violently purge the other half.

Sound ridiculous? Then I'd like to remind you that countless individuals in the West now risk being fired as hostile in the workplace environment for refusing to address a self-important eunuch or virago by the royal "they" and conversely your right to buy a cake depends on whether you like hot dogs or tacos. And just like a supernumerary nipple might get you executed as a witch, it seems to matter little how little the pretexts really matter. Each new or old cause merely serves its fanatics in attacking targets of convenience, convenient means of competition for social apes obsessed with social standing. After all, it really doesn't matter why your neighbours disappear so long as you get their TV, right? If any woman has the right to order her male superior fired and move into his office by merely accusing him of <something sexual> then crime shall be supplied to fit that market demand for social "justice" by whatever definition seems most convenient. We purge the faithless and immediately forget past purges, but the opportunistic scum that got their coworkers fired and threatened lawsuits to move up corporate ladders will never be punished, and the politicians who rode lynch-mobs into office need never fear legal pursuit.

You say we should refocus on more important issues than the culture war, more practical ones (the economy, stupid) but if the fanatics are willing to murder or at least fire us for the sake of their fanaticism, that concern is quite practical. There's a universal and very real fear underlying cases like Dreyfus': that rulership willing to chase scapegoats threatens everyone, and there are no two sides to coercion or proscription enacted on imagined pretexts. It is not a debate between catholics and jews, but self-preservation in the face of such delusion as leads to walking off cliffs expecting to float.

The willingness of the left wing to embrace mass delusion has led exactly to where I predicted, all these years I've been telling you the right wing simply does that better than you, feeding back into the older mass delusions of troglodytic degenerates who literally believe that electing a grifting nepotist robber baron to destroy the government from the inside will somehow summon up a two-thousand-year-old zombie rabbi to lead them all to the land of milk and honey.

There are endless conflicts fabricated solely to supply false pretenses for powermongering, countless cases where we should get along. The trick lies in selecting the right criteria, knowing when a rat is just a rat. In particular between reason and make-believe though, the choice is life or death.

 

You've been picking the wrong one at every turn. How long did you think your luck would hold out?

It'll be your turn to play Dreyfus soon enough.

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* This is at minimum the third time I'm ripping off Martin's parting words just on this site.