It took me a bit to realize what I was seeing was not the usual invasive house sparrow but a native chipping sparrow.

I doubt I could distinguish a female if I saw one. This fellow was in full mating plumage and making quite a nuisance of himself for attention.

 

Pretty sure this is another.

Yes-yes, I'm sure the gals are all very impressed.

The Content Generation

"Looking towards the future, we were begging for the past
Well, we knew we had the good things, but those never seemed to last
Oh please just last

Everyone's unhappy, everyone's ashamed
Well we all just got caught looking at somebody else's page"

 

Modest Mouse - Missed the Boat

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"The truth the lies all fabrications
Only you control your destination
You!
You are what you do!

Sturm und Drang
Dir gehören"

 

KMFDM - Sturm & Drang

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"the bodymods took so long to install and heal up that, by the time they were done, I didn’t feel like they represented me any more. I had learned new things, I was a new person."

 

Forward #450

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A couple of years ago I discovered to no little consternation that the cutoff point between official generations had at some prior point been rolled back to the year before my birth* labeling me officially a millennial. I deny the spurious accusation by every hair standing up on my neck at hearing it! Also, it came as news to me. I could and can vividly remember being ten years old when Bart Simpson the ten-year-old was widely discussed as emblematic of GenXers' nihilism. I also recall walking out of a mall with my mother when I was in my late teens wondering what cultural trend** will define the coming generation. If anyone moved the goal posts, it was done after the fact.

 

Who decides these things anyway?

 

Apparently, after decreeing that GenZ hath ended, their successors were already appointed and obsoleted before I could blink. Quoth Wikipedia: 

"Generation Alpha, often shortened to Gen Alpha, is the demographic cohort succeeding Generation Z and preceding the proposed Generation Beta. While researchers and popular media loosely identify the early 2010s as the starting birth years and the 2020s as the ending birth years, these ranges are not precisely defined"

Yeah no shit they're not precisely defined! I don't even know where to start.

First off, such timespans too often fall literally shorter than the accepted rough human generation estimate of twenty years. If there is such a distinction to be made, it's between parents and children, not you and your kid brother. Especially so-called "generation alpha" seems trimmed down to ten years. What are we, chimps? Don't answer that.

Second, one advantage of calling a generation "Z" was hinting that this generational labeling is reaching the end of its meaningful utility.

Third, these designations were meant to be descriptive, based on some real-world characteristic. Baby boomers, the lost/silent/greatest generation, yes even millennials expressed a linking phenomenon. Granted, GenX being defined as gen nothing, gen, like, whatever, gen nemo nobody, by lack of definition, by anomie, disinterest, broken homes and alienation, that was a bit insulting, but hey, we made it our own. What idea is symbolized by labeling decades alphas, betas, gammas, deltas, epsilons and so forth? The complete death of human self-awareness and imagination at the same time? You may as well call everyone '20ers, '30ers, '40ers, etc.

Fourth and most importantly, you're already assigning a denomination for humans yet to be born in the following decades. Based on what, the noble science of asspullistry? What cuckoo's nest conceit does it take to label and schedule the shared experience of today's newborns and those of ten years hence?

 

The answer entails a bit of retrospection. While the generational labels may go back over a century, they didn't seem to get much attention until after WWII when adolescence grew more widely recognized as discrete demographic and youth culture as potential consumer bloc with teenyboppers spearheading the commercialization of ear canals.*** From then on, generations were increasingly defined by music fads and other pop culture. Tie-dye shirts, pancake makeup, nose rings, bolt-on tits, a "generation" is whatever the kids are buying.

 

Ah-hah!

Profit.

 

In that light, it makes perfect sense for social "scientists" to act as engineers, no longer observing trends, no longer describing reality but fabricating categories, selling prepackaged cohorts for the use of marketers. No need to wait for world events to transpire, for artistic trends to flourish. We can get ahead of that shit and just tell the little bastards what will define them and who their peers and heroes will be. What advertiser doesn't salivate at "if you are X you like Y" and suchlike matched fencing? I'm sure we can time the next baby boom to coincide with Apple's release schedule; wouldn't want to inconvenience the most relevant constituency. Wait for it... wait for it... aaaand -- hump-hump-hump!

 

But, oh, hold on now! If I don't like my current bin I might be magnanimously permitted to clamber on over to seek sanctuary in that of "xennials" which apparently means I like... ninja turtles and feminism?!?

Uhhh, yeah, no, fuck that. See, this is why I'm a Wer-Wolfe. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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* And now it's apparently been rolled back yet another year. 

** I seem to remember I predicted millennials would be defined by personal artistic expression. Given the widespread flamboyance and attention-whoring of the previous decades, I may not have been too far off...?

*** Open the Strait of Ear-muze! (Wow, that joke ain't gonna age well.) 

AoW4 Factions, 17

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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I wanted a good-aligned chaos faction and realized I hadn't made any elves in the freewheeling, treetop-singing spirit. The type to awaken ents with their chatter. More satisfying than my previous feytouched, combining chaos, nature and mystic summoning made for easy instant armies, and I've found myself replaying them more than most. Less nuke-oriented than other astrals because spending every round's spell on support spells works better for their random mutt and merc mishmash lacking synergy, so little chaos fireballing either. Power-leveling summons, plus piling chaos after-combat freebies atop nature territory freebies means they rarely need to recruit at all, at least during the earlier of the four X phases. The usual summoner caveat applies double, though: mind your mana upkeep.

Wolfermyth

I haven't given a spoiler alert in a while, but the Wildermyth quest The Scattered Self is a bit of a WTF? moment you should probably experience for the first time yourself.

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My most burning question once I encountered the physical transformations in Wildermyth became whether these include... y'know... the main one. The classic one. The me one. Cue Chayven Teelfletch the warrior, henceforth my favorite character. Once upon a time (I believe it was turn 26?) Chayven's party stepped into a glade favored by the wolf god, and with a resounding "Hell Yes!" piously accepted the wisdom of fang and fuzz.

Much of the time it's hard taking seriously the output of a game randomizing character names, traits, events, rewards, skill-ups, pretty much everything except the font. Still, when it works, it works wonders. Thanks to Chayven's other feats as he leveled up, he became a teleporting bruiser with multiple types of multiple attacks and my lynchpin for all the hardest fights. But that wasn't the spiciest bit.

 

First off, yes, our heroes' names are Chayven and Jaymnen. They eventually had a daughter. Her name is Chaynen. Randomizers are fuynen. The waterling says it's a very earthy name. Moving on. Time passes.

 

Now, keep in mind everything that follows is technically unrelated to the character's wolfishness, stemming from a completely different random trait. Including the first line.

Thus begins the quest The Scattered Self, which even for a fairly whimsical fairytale setting, gets a bit... trippy. You wander aimlessly until somehow stumbling by forest paths into the quester's own body, wherein awaits the personification of your body's defenses: a pig.

And yes, you can indeed go mano a mano with the swarm of parasites invading your body... or side with them, for sheer love of all that lives, forcing you to physically beat your manifested immune system into submission so it'll let them stay. We round out the whole shroomy affair back at home for another quiet domestic scene. 

Wherein our hero reassures his love (whose body he explicitly placed off limits to the parasites per article 5, paragraph 2 of the peace treaty) that he's all the better off now that he's eating for a hundred thousand.

 

Ta-daaaah! Love thy very close neighbour.

 

While I might normally chide such writing for straining too hard at creativity, having this trigger, of all my characters, on the party's werewolf, now that was just the icing on the cake. Because, yes, of course, who else would be more biologically malleable? And how much funnier is it for this to happen to the wer-wolfe who keeps calling love mind control, slavery and parasitism on his blog? Hm. You know... from this angle, I kinda get it.

Here's lookin' at you lookin' at me, 8

Coyotes may be pests in many places, but I'm still glad when I spot one.

I think Wile E. here was just surprised to see a monkey up and about so early in the morning.

AoW4 Factions, 16

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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This came from leafing through various options for whatever I hadn't played yet. So, yes, astral dragon + random panthers. There is something appealing though about a bunch of ethereal Cheshire Cats, probably because it's an opportunity to downplay both tiger roars and a dragon's sheer bulk for a nuke-happy strategy. I think I ended up investing very little in materium after the initial production bonuses.

Hey, what do you call a pious female musician's name used to refer to her entire bloodline?

A metonymic metronomic metanoic matronymic.

 

 

 

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P.S.: I had to look some of those words up again after posting this.