"Gro, gro, lisle spire"

A Shock on the Doorstep

"it did not occur to them that this twelve-year-old boy might be as gifted at peace as he was at war"

Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game

 

Leafing through a few HPL stories I found The Thing on the Doorstep stood out enough to look up individually, and was surprised at finding it panned by at least the reviews cited on Wikipedia. To me, while not one of his best it's still one of Lovecraft's better works, and my reason for seeking commentary in the first place echoes that commentary's negative tone: it's not what you expect from him. But I would add: you say that like it's a bad thing!

 

It is indeed surprising to find this one of his last publications (a few months before he died) because its gothic horror tone better fits his earlier career rather than his later, more scientifictitious bent. It also plays up the interpersonal angle uncharacteristically, and there I think it's not given enough credit for character growth, not of the narrator but of Derby, whose soft, pampered upbringing is hardened through his years of psychic sparring into a superhuman effort of will by the end, living up to the superior intellect bestowed him by birth. The horrors of Derby's last act are by bulk left to the reader's imagination, yes, but you are nonetheless meant to imagine them, scrape by agonizing scrape and shuffle. Imagine, and salute!

 

Oh, Howie, you classically bigoted Boston asshole, did you not know you're supposed to manage your audience's expectations? When your middle name is cosmic horror, don't start writing about screwdrivers or they'll criticize how you handle the riveting!* And that brought to mind an example from more recent decades.

 

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy's world-class work, a rare modern SF classic. Unfortunately after that he dove into the 2000s' environmentalist disaster thriller fad, and I'm solidly in the camp viewing that by-the-numbers sensationalism as more detrimental to environmentalism than any amount of public interest it generated. But a couple of years before Red Mars he wrote a book so sadly underappreciated it rates no more than a three-line blurb: A Short, Sharp Shock. Granted it's a hard book to blurb, of a genre (if it can be called so) more obscure than the text itself. Fantasy, yes, but neither of the dark nor high nor low nor urban varieties. Oneiric fantasy strings together semicoherent imagery and recurring themes in the disjointed yet obsessive manner of dreams. It's easier done in movies than print (Mirrormask jumps to mind) and too often falls into Alice in Wonderland mimicry. A Short, Sharp Shock on the other hand rides its uphill romance and creeping multiple threads of horror beautifully, dipping between chase nightmare, body horror, existential dread and bittersweet lulls of contentment. And yet, for all the Mars books' deserved attention, for all the stupider 40-50-60 books' in-genre appreciation, this little short sharp book's never mentioned. The author's other digression from terraforming/environmental themes, the alternate history The Years of Rice and Salt, fares somewhat better.

I've touched on this before with regard to H.G. Wells, whose well-deserved fame is strictly limited to the first decade of a half-century career, despite later books like Tono-Bungay, The World Set Free or The Research Magnificent being arguably better written, more quotable or more psychosocially incisive. They're just, strictly speaking, less high-concept scie fie than his earlier stuff. Even his fans won't touch them. I myself am guilty of this tendency. I've read a baker's dozen or more of Ursula K. LeGuin's SF stories, but not-a-one of her fantasy books despite being well aware the science in her fiction falls so far into the soft side as to dip routinely into science fantasy.

 

In science one might view more skeptically the expert outside his field, but even there we're forced to acknowledge that intellect is by its nature widely applicable. If it weren't, our fang-less, clawless, flabby species wouldn't be here. Bad enough that nomini sancti of every field of human pursuit from labs to offices to recording studios will strike down upstarts and defend their turfs against perceived encroachment, bad enough that every pulpit's wrapped in barbed wire. Must we mere mortals dig more trenches for them, even between fields of fabulism?

 

 

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* See? My audience expects puns. Mission accomplished.

Good for You!

"They say that opposites attract... she's really something and I'm really nothing... How opposite can you get?"

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"By 'good' of course I mean good for me."

 

Charles Schulz - Peanuts 1963/11/13 and 1964/01/03 

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"I need a shy guy, he's the kinda guy who'll only be mine"

Diana King - Shy Guy

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That song caught my attention when I was twelve (guess why guy) but hit it with a polarity reversal and check how it rings. It's one thing to say "oh hey, on second thought that guy hiding behind the potted plant at last night's party looked sorta cute" and another to specifically demand a man broken for your convenience. How would it sound for a male to declare "I want a girl so damaged that her low self-esteem will put her under my complete control" - romantic, huh?* Oh, I'm sure we could think of a few gender-flipped versions... and just as sure they revolve around telling the shy girl how beautiful she really is, like a makeover in a Hollywood movie.

 

The Police's Every Breath You Take has taken some fashionable jabs over the years as a love song that sounds creepy under scrutiny but in Sting's defense, lines like "every night you stay" and "every bond you break" got that jealous mixed message across from the start. It's not meant to register as idealized as the fangirls made it out to be. I do have to wonder though if anyone would ever question that confrol freak persona had it come embodied in a female vocalist. Read on from that 1964 Peanuts strip to see more of Lucy's narcissism and abuse presented as cute, complete with interminable list of demands, until Linus brings her ice cream so she'll finally call him a good brother and concludes "happiness is a compliment from your sister" - would that sound as cute in reverse? Keeping in mind she's actually the older sibling?

 

It's hardly an accident that men's love songs toward women always sound like "oh baby you know I'll do anything for you" while women's rejoinder runs "oh baby you know you'll do anything for me". Widen your scope to society at large and you'll notice feminism owes its success not to reasoned argument or virtuous role-modeling, but to our instinctive drive to reinterpret in a positive light all the abuse, bullying, psychopathic control, everything we would recognize as negative from a male, so long as it's rebranded as the primordial entitlement of women to be protected and provided for. That instinctive exploitation will not go away no matter how the politics around it shift.

 

 

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* Pretty sure Bug Martini actually ran a few comics like that, purely mocking himself as a loser.

The world is others'. You intrude.

Homeworld 3

"Cause I know how it feels
Filling in the blanks
Looking on the bright side
When there is no bright side"

 

Metric - Poster of a Girl

 

 

I wanted to like it, I really did...

 

The original Homeworld is a true classic and one of my fondest gaming memories... for its time. In fact I was playing it as New Year's Y2K rolled over (yes I mean 19-2000 and not 2001) since I've never cared much for such demarcations and wasn't buying into that end of the world hype. But #s 1.5 and 2 got derailed from the original fleet combat concept and two decades later I regret having preordered #3, demonstrating the phrase "nostalgia project" deserves its derogatory context.

 

Yes, my mothership looks cool sliding over that massive expanse of space-ice.

On the other hand, I gave my strike craft an order to dock with the mothership, not the iceberg...

 

I suppose I should let Blackbird Interactive off on one major point: multiplayer genres have mostly died to player idiocy, to cheating and griefing and intentional imbalance and most of all microtransactions. Homeworld made an impression not least as multiplayer in the LAN and cybercafe era. I'm judging HW3 as single-player. But still, for all the warnings I've given on that point over the years as a rando' blogger, you'd think a team of seasoned professionals would've handled the transition better.

 

Let's start with the painfully obvious though.

In '99, the sensor manager overlay elegantly handled gigantic space-worthy distances because any 3D game would not have run without a very, very close fog horizon. But a quarter century's worth of polygon-counting pissing contests later? We've had seamless zoom-focusing since at the very latest Demigod in 2009, probably earlier if you dig around, and any ideograms can be hotkey-toggled or mouseover-faded on the main playing field itself. But they didn't implement this solely for their customers' nostalgia. It also gives them an excuse to limit zooming to horse-blinder levels in the main battle screen, which both imposes a lot of extra camera rotation to see what's going on, and more importantly from Blackbird's point of view attempts to preserve the massive screen-filling grandeur of those big dumb objects their design team's so eternally erect for: space icebergs, space tunnels, space plazas, etc. constantly interposed between you and whatever you're trying to look at.

 

If only their ship AI could actually navigate around large objects... or at all.

Yes, that's a trajectory.

If you're inclined to protest I used the M-ship as an easy or unrealistic example and pathfinding has been a constant issue in games...umm, no. HW3 doesn't have pathfinding issues. It has random stumbling issues.

 

I ordered my first three assault frigates back to mommy. Two of them took up standard positions. The third is apparently trying to ram it. Or maybe it's trying to dock? Except no, it's not, it's just hovering there, out of position and misaligned like a cat pondering the mysteries of the can opener. And good luck trying to get your ships to... just... fucking... SHOOT! at the enemy.
 

(sorry, mistakenly circled the bottom group; them's turrets)

They'll spontaneously split into wings, with some maneuvering to flank the target. Sounds fancy, until you realize it just puts half your fleet constantly out of position and closer to the enemy force to get focus-fired into oblivion, and that's ignoring the fact it just takes them longer to position when they could've already turned their guns at the enemy full-bore if they'd stayed on the same side. And please, let's not pretend this is an issue with large formations alone.

That's three destroyers ordered to attack the enemy mothership. They're in delta-wing formation. I couldn't figure out what looked weird about their weapons fire: only the front ship was actually shooting its cannons because they're staying at max range for that ship alone. The other two are... I believe the nautical term is "chillaxing" - ?

 

No I am not being unfair and no I am not nitpicking. Fan discussions abound with such complaints, and you might notice the backgrounds here all look similar. That's because all but 2 examples on this page come from a single 19-minute skirmish, and I wasn't even trying to find them!

 

Even this ship-level tactical fumbling might've been borderline bearable, were the greater strategic angle better considered. It's not. I said multiplayer in general is dead, and the RTS genre deader than most due in large part to everyone realizing how ridiculously it rewards button-mashing over any pretense of strategy. Where the newer generation of turn-based strategy games like AoW4 or Old World or even Gladius show themselves capable of coherent objectives and concerted pushes, and even Northgard's real-time combat prepares big invasions and retreats in unison, HW3's AI sticks to the old strategy game AI fallback of micromanaging you to death, spamming a constant stream of ships at you, each individually targeting wherever it'll do most damage with no greater rhyme or reason, and if I bitched out that routine in Spellforce 3 six years ago you can guess how thrilled I am to see it in a title of much higher profile and expectations now.

 

Ship classes and abilities fare just as poorly. You can research castable abilities for each of them, except hotkey-spam got old with Warcraft 3 twenty years ago and pretty much every strategy game now allows for unit customization instead of a baseline list of standard units to be churned out as-is every game. The one new-ish gimmick would be turrets you can stick to surfaces, again playing up the supposed importance of those big dumb objects (and turning a space game even more into a standard surface-oriented RTS) and those are indeed impressively effective... largely because the AI fails to prioritize/avoid them and lets itself get chewed up at close range, probably because the developers wanted to encourage use of their brand-new RTS invention of... tower defense. IN SPAAAAACE!

 

Die-hard fans might even have forgiven all this (they shouldn't but they would have; define: fans) if the campaign had managed to recapture the grandiose star trekking SCIENCE fiction feel of the original. Instead it redoubles on HW2's mystical babbling trying far too hard to copy a Dune-like feel of prophecy and warring clans and funny hats and so on. And I could go on. But really, I've lost interest in even complaining about it.

 

The nostalgia-driven flaws appeasing old fans' demands are bad enough. But the rest speaks of a design team which haven't played a strategy game in 20yrs and are still stewing over their obsession with supposed advances (like big dumb objects) which the state of the art has long since trivialized.

Dunce Macabre

"He walked aft, whistling Danse Macabre, off key again, and began to fiddle with his space suit."

Robert A. Heinlein - Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)

 

 

My recent mention of 2005's Corpse Bride reminded me the central musical number, Remains of the Day, featured not just skeleton versions of Bo(ne)jangles and Ray Charles, but title-dropped a book from 1989 and acknowledged its debt to a quite famous Disney cartoon from 1929, The Skeleton Dance. While dancing cartoon skeletons were new at that time because animation was new, musical morbidity had run in parallel via pieces like Camille Saint-Saëns' 1875 Danse Macabre, which I assume Heinlein's all-American boy next door was whistling while fighting space-Nazis on the moon just after WWII. Some of these dates are from my own youth or childhood, others from my grandparents' or from their grandparents in turn. The theme persists, art continues. But of corse that dude Cammie did not invent rib-cage xylophones either, but was inspired by the centuries-long tradition of the death dance throughout Europe, and look what I ran across at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples:

The ancient Romans didn't just coin the phrase "memento mori" but handed it out as party favors. With legs retracted, that jolly fellow's about the size of your pinkie. Bronze was probably more common and commonly articulated... so they could bonejangle it up with state-of-the-art special effects on dia de los muertos. And hey, we could keep chasing this theme both sideways and back if you like, through all of human history, a psychological artifact of our intellect's limitation within mortal bodies, of generational cycles, decay and impermanence.

 

It does help knowing which cycles, which artifacts you're actually observing, and how far they stretch. If you told me Remains of the Day's a song about two love triangles, black musicians and the jazz age, you'd be less than half right. There are older and more pervasive influences at work.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, it's well established that many signs of physical attractiveness are actually stand-ins for a mate's viability. Clear skin or fresh breath for instance pretty obviously indicate your intended's resistance to disease, and such environmental threats are always changing. As Richard Dawkins summarized in The Blind Watchmaker:

"If females really could successfully choose males with the best genes, their very success would reduce the range of choice available in the future: eventually, if there were only good genes around, there would be no point in choosing. Parasites remove this theoretical objection. The reason is that, according to Hamilton, parasites and hosts are running a never-ceasing cyclical arms race against one another. This in turn means that the 'best' genes in any one generation of birds are not the same as the best genes in future generations. What it takes to beat the current generation of parasites is no good against the next generation of evolving parasites. [...] The only general criteria that successive generations of females can use are the indicators that any vet might use -- bright eyes, glossy plumage, and so on."

 

Such divination also implies the criteria themselves are mutable, can be faked or cheated and can outweigh the animal's actual fitness due to the importance placed on them by instinct, valid or not. My old point that intra-tribal status symbolism can be considered such a runaway adaptation for humans would get me laughed out of any biology department (for one, it's entirely too wide a category) but I maintain there's something to it. Sapience threw a kink into selection. As females grew able to actively interpret new stimuli as markers of status and males able to establish new means of competition, that cyclical arms race melded into fad worship, with every new fashion or badge of moral superiority a new peacock tail in its own right. And women's own pecking order proceeded, to a lesser extent, in parallel but with the same caveat: status trumps the means by which it's acquired. Corsets, bustles, crinolines, men in pantyhose, war-steeds or sports cars, piety or patriotism, all that matters is that if you have one, you're better than those without.

 

That trend, that theme, that unending parade of self-important, self-righteous glory hogs, divas, powermongers, fops, pulpit-pounders, attention whores, etc. etc. etc., has shaped and colored the entirety of human history, globally. In fact, you can make this prediction for the future with unerring accuracy: that no matter how destitute or aristocratically bloated a human society, no matter how backward or advanced technologically, every new generation's primitive instincts will lead it to jump on new fads where available and inflate them as holier-than-thou badges of superiority.

 

Now, remember, the adaptation can easily outstrip its original, practical meaning so long as it's reinforced via status.

 

So take a phenomenon like the rise in LGBTQOMGWTFBBQ "minorities" (along with pervasive media pandering) during the 2010s, especially as the most glaring example, transsexualism. You might see two obvious explanations:

 

1) This was always the real proportion, even though it has never shown up anywhere in human history to such proportions (even the ancient Greeks in all their gaiety still mostly fantasized about knights charging to the rescue of fair damsels) and was just being repressed until now. This is not entirely without merit, especially in a chronically and comically sexually repressed society like Puritan America. But it's not exactly supported by historical and social context.

 

2) You made it a fad, made it a badge of social superiority, and youth jumped at the chance to join the ranks of the new nobility, of those who cannot be criticized, must only be portrayed as unimpeachably angelic and favored in all social interactions by mass consensus. And for fad worship, for narcissism and self-promotion, we have endless examples, globally and multimillennially! It's a thread and trend far more reliable than the danse macabre.

 

Chopping your tits or balls off is certainly counterproductive from a sexual fitness angle, but for a species whose status obsession trumps all else it still feeds into the race for legitimacy driven by an instinct far older than any culture war. If the gender Lysenkoism of the 2010s were valid, if explanation 1) more reliable, then when the restrictions on gender identity were supposedly lifted*, you should have seen a tidal wave of long-suffering gender-counterfeiting old or middle-aged individuals coming out of various closets. Instead it's been attention-seeking adolescents overwhelmingly driving the shift.

 

So what do you think will happen once fascism becomes the new genderqueer? The danse macabre has an endpoint.

 

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* They were in fact enforced to fit a new postmodernist cultural grand narrative.

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alternate title: Dead White Shemales

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edit: The cult of Cybele in ancient Rome, whose followers would occasionally castrate themselves in offering to the goddess, is strongly reminiscent of the past decades' glorification of transsexualism in the wake of feminism's takeover of pop culture.

Race the Ennui

On one hand I hate the retro game fad. I already went through the '90s once and once was enough, thanks, I've done my time, not interested. Go pixel yourselves. On the other hand, I'm always intrigued by little garage projects that try to do more with simple elements, even if it means letting myself get ripped off by blank polygons passed off as "stylized" artwork. So methought fine, five bucks for something that might give me a couple hours of entertainment, and I haven't played a racing game in so long, let's give Race the Sun a try. At least its catchy visual gimmick of racing west as the light dips toward the horizon makes it palatable enough at first.

Zoom-zoom, swish-swish... that's about it

Then it sat uninstalled in my collection for years because I remembered I hate racing games.

 

Hey! Hey, it's not just because I'm terrible at them! Sure, for a guy who's spent his whole life clicking I have remarkably poor reflexes and always did even as a teenager. Not the point! Race the Sun's fog barrier admits only two or three obstacles ahead in your field of vision and obstacles can often obscure each other, especially with its exceedingly fast pace. Thus much of my successfailure so far is based not only on reaction speed but also a need to memorize the algorithm's propensity to chain certain map elements after each other (horizontal barriers after long corridors for one obvious general gimmick) and that takes lots and lots of mindless repetition. And given this is a retro "hardcore" arcade game knocking you back to level 0 for every crash as a timesink... well, I got through two levels, that's pretty good, right? Sure. So I'll be uninstalling it now. Bye.

 

Interestingly though, I don't experience the same revulsion on getting war-decced three hours into a TBS campaign and having to start over.

No zoom, little swish, lots more about it

It took a few re-picks and even more re-rolls to secure victory with my latest Stellaris empire, but I managed to screw myself in a different direction every time. Pissing off stronger enemies, overdrawing on my early exploration budget, over-colonizing until I couldn't support their unproductive early stages, unbalanced consumer goods flow, name a pit and I've fallen in it. So it gives me something different to consider every restart: planets, spacelanes, obstacles, resources, everything. So how is that different from, say, Darkest Dungeon 2, which pulls the same restart through newbietown routine.
 

1) First off, a strategy map is more cerebral than a racetrack. More factors to consider allow for more interesting combos (even before the game starts) than wondering which of two powerups will spawn in the archway this time.

2) In a more practical sense of time investment for a pay-off of game content, one longer replay at twenty times the length still gives you more time before returning to start.

3) With any sort of algorithmic randomization there's always the gambling factor to consider. The more linear the game, the more a bad start is a game over, whereas more diverse factors keep you imagining everything else that could go right. (Assuming you have the imagination for it.)

4) How does sunk cost play into this? All those character/faction creation options in a TBS/RPG are expected to shine at some later point. Race the Sun with its loot magnet (or DD2 regardless of offering more features, given how enamored it is of wrecking your presets) doesn't make you work yourself up into anticipating payoff for your assuredly brilliant theorycrafting and/or roleplaying.

 

In any case, the genre wasting more of my time on a loss also makes me less averse to starting over. Gilding the lily's not always a bad thing.