Shecrets of the NeandHerthals

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

So what really changed?

 

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

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

Void the Void

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

 

Aesthetic Perfection - Into the Void

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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* Or worst of all by this point "multiverse"

Of Bathwater and the Contents Thereof

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

 

Actually? No.

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

Frostpunk 2

"The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold

And it's overturned the order of the soul"

 

Leonard Cohen - The Future

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Damn, what a gorgeous piece of work!

Anyway:

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

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

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

 

Custodiet ipsos babbages

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

Brilliant!

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

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

Sin Eating

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

NIN - Heresy

 

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

 

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

 

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

On a Pallid Bust of Pallas

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

 

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

 

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

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

Despotism Does Not Scale

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

 

Rasputina - The Mayor

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

 

Washington Irving - Rip van Winkle

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

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

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

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

 

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

Depressing thought, neh?

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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