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

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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?