Pie Dreams Squared

"No denouement to the drama of the real."

_________________________________________

Fry: "How can you people be so blasé? Here you are in the year 3000 or so, yet you just sit around like it's the boring time I came from."
Farnsworth: "Boring? Wasn't that the period when they cracked the human genome and boy bands roamed the Earth?"

 

Futurama S03E15 - I Dated A Robot

_________________________________________

 

I became so enamored of webcomics to a large extent as work put forth by one or two minds, freer from interference, albeit not from comment section pandering. As a bonus, their slow pace often led to the subject matter outgrowing itself. The following two examples are both slice-of-life (slice of > pie, get it? huh? get it?) a genre that rarely grabs me, and to be honest I was never particularly jazzed about them at the time. Both started in 2007. Both have become more interesting retrospectively.

 

Punch an Pie

Queen of Wands was standard early 2000s fare, lots of generic "they can't censor us now" interwebz naughtiness which inevitably slid into twenty-somethings' dating dramedy as its other gimmicks (wiccan heroine, glorified feminist abuse, etc.) quickly revealed themselves to be going nowhere. After its end, though, the author spun off and handed off one of her characters to another writer for a more consistent slice-of-life routine solidly fixated on the inevitable post-school concerns of sex and taxes. Aside from that, it mostly concerns the heroine's character arc growing out of her lingering adolescent emotional fits and unrealistic expectations and taking more responsibility for her own actions.

 

Octopus Pie

"My everyday anxieties don't seem so unique anymore. They don't play out on this lonesome, poetic level." - mid-series turning point. 

Heroine Eve(rest) Ning (get it? huh? get it?) works a shitty grocery job and gets a wacky stoner roommate, hijinks ensue and then sort of waver and peter out. More interesting for its commentary on contemporary middlebrow yuppie/art culture and its pretentiousness, including a quick jab at what's now termed wokedom shortly before its end. I stopped reading sometime before its middle years, when it kept oscillating unstably between trying to maintain its original sitcom zaniness and increasingly indulgent navel-gazing filled with unrealistic stabs at subtlety and deep meanings or just plain art major fappery - e.g. in this strip according to the author's later commentary: "That Eve is laying flat while he's holding onto her is meant to signify that he's in need." Pardon my derisive snort. I returned when, to my surprise, she posted a couple of new chapters long after the fact, with the cast now aging, pairing off, starting families, looking back on their youth less with nostalgia than bemusement. 

 

Train Dreams

Wait, that's not a comic, how did that get in here?

It's not often I agree with film critics on artsy, slow-moving movies (especially concerning a befuddled everyman stumbling through life) but this one was just solid work through and through. If indeed the character-centered piece it superficially appears, it would be boring as all hell, its protagonist displaying all the charisma of mold. But the show's true star is the changing landscape, physical and cultural, personal and interpersonal. It packs the most detail you'll see in a movie about nothing.

 

I could never get into those pie comics while they were running, but they read much better on a binge. From '90s outrageousness to 2010s socially conscious posturing, from in-your-face cool kids to struggling to keep a middle-aged couple together, from the launch of World of Warcraft to smartphone addiction, it's not always easy to untangle the change in author or the author's personal growth from milieu. Futile efforts? Easily forgotten? Twenty years later, about as relevant as a lumberjack from 1920. But watch years' worth of panels grow into the realization that youthful rambunctiousness has stopped being cute or narcissism no longer satisfies a fading craving. There's a glimmer of hope in there for an entire culture to mature. Instead it feels like the end credits are about to roll. Someone did just launch some astronauts at the moon again. Whatever happened in between there?

Cutting through the Treacle: The Tabletop Fetish

"You said that irony was the shackles of youth"

R.E.M. - What's the Frequency, Kenneth?, 1994

__________________________________________ 

"Are you being sarcastic, dude?"

"I don't even know anymore."

 

The Simpsons, 1995

__________________________________________ 

 

 

On the lookout for any system to replace the increasingly obsolete D&D routine, I recently gave Gloomhaven a try.

If you get that character reference, you're too old.

To be fair there's quite a bit of potential there, but it's still fairly primitive with a tabletop version apparently not even a decade old. Leaving most of my bitching for some future date, I'm just amazed at how hard the computer adaptation works at preventing me from getting into it with an utterly bewildering interface feeling like it was designed by whichever librarian won the "most anal-retentive" award in 1973.

 

Sure, you've got the usual amateur designer pitfalls like the camera turning on its own or overextended animations for mundane actions like bending over to pick up coins.

 

Then it makes you pause to confirm the beginning of a new round like Battletech and lacks context-sensitive single-click shortcuts or double-clicks, making you separately confirm every action. And you can't click your other card to change action, have to manually un-click your current one. And you can't just spacebar-end a character's turn; must officially pass your remaining card and confirm. And you can restart round on your character's action but not if you're in the 'thinking' step of selecting an action.

 

But even beyond all that inexcusable stuttering, Gloomhaven's design enters a Very Special Boy category few others have managed to crater their way into. You kinda have to see it to believe it.

Yes, it makes you manually confirm your armour soak on every damaging attack. Wait! Oh god, oh god, oh god, did I remember to breathe and perspire this round?!?

 

So screw that, instead I've been devoting more time to Wildermyth, which will warrant more discussion of its greater creativity (even if it does stumble a bit in execution)

If anything even lower-budget and lower-tech than Gloomhaven, invoking 2D construction paper visuals much like Shelter did, and for the same old-timey storybook atmosphere. Or maybe its creators just watched The Secret of Kells one too many times. Look, at least they ain't chibis. It's a rare "back to basics" game which successfully revisits the core interactivity of the medium, placing heavy emphasis on your pieces clacking from square to square on a board and units and buffs being represented by "cards"

- but it's also significantly more playable than the first example, with more informative tooltips and more fluid commands.
 

On a completely unrelated topic, though I've been burned by Kickstarter projects several times (fuck Mark Jacobs) I got two e-mails in the past month from games I'm currently backing. One gaggle of fringe developers lamented their publisher deals all fell through and they're strapped for cash, laying off part of their team. The others bragged they've now implemented dice in their game. Colored dice! Rolling! Sparkling! Rolling sparkling colored polyhedral pixels! Never in the history of the Arr Enn Gee hath The Number been graced with such grace and gravitas!

 

I shouldn't have to reiterate my distaste for retro games, but they overlap so heavily with the turn-based or narrative-driven genres I favor that I keep running into this utterly shallow in-group appeal. I'm not buying a game about spaceships or fireball slinging to pretend I'm sitting around a table with a bunch of other apes. I'm not in it for the hipster meta-enjoyment of pre-post-ironic non-content. I'm not buying an escapist fantasy to pretend I'm pretending, but to pretend. That shouldn't be so fine a distinction. No cards. No dice. No placemats. No putting my little soldier figurines on plastic bases. Get that shit off my screen. 

It's like fetish porn. You know when you've hit the paraphiliac threshold because a minor detail begins replacing the core activity, be it humping or clicking. You expect a pornstar to have feet, you'd find it odd if they were missing, but you can also spot a foot fetish video if one pops up. Both extremes veer off the mark. Something in Gloomhaven's basic design philosophy emphasizes the wrong visual or interactive elements, consistently and intrusively. It makes you pause for cards to flips over, makes you backtrack through actions as if you're taking the time to physically put a card back in the deck, makes you confirm every sub-step of every step of every action every round as if the mechanical manipulation of imaginary cardboard and plastic were in itself your dungeoneering adventure. Wildermyth places you on a table with cards as well, but after that no longer belabors the point. It's still gratuitous, you can tell the fetish element has been included, but at least there's more to it than feet!

 

Yes, grids look like game boards. So? Yes, the small number randomization or random action drawing of tactical games obviously originated with dice and cards before it was electronic. So? An adaptation can never be a carbon-copy. You're making something that has to function here and now, on the screen, by the rules of electronic interaction, not by the rules of drunken munchkins smearing pizza grease onto cardboard. In 1993 Solitaire may well have been the most played game on Windows. There are reasons thats no longer the case!

 

You hit peak absurdity when you see start-ups on a shoestring budget selling Kickstarter stretch goals of dice animations and plastic feelies mailed to its audience. Could you have paid one more programmer for one more month with that cash? Three months? Look over at your neighbours packing their bindles and tell me again if you can afford to deliver a non-functional product for the sake of a handful of foot fetishists, when your entire industry's already in danger of getting automated into irrelevance.

The jerkiest

Turns out pineapple juice, when heated and (I assume) well aerated, will punch little bullet holes in an aluminum pan. At least I hope it wasn't the chicken that did that...

Oh,

Though many tobys yuk on terry oi once tried to sass katchewan but they were having nunavut.

Thou Art Moloch

"Behind the veil is the machine
It steals your soul, devouring all your dreams
My hand is firm upon the wheel
I control, I am the demon"

 

Jamison Boaz & Jason Charles Miller - Resist and Disorder (Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack)

______________________________________________ 

"The heart, the heart, there was the little yet boundless sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which the crime and misery of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere, and the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms and vanish of their own accord; but if we go no deeper than the intellect, and strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream"

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Earth's Holocaust

______________________________________________

 

 

In 1965 Harlan Ellison published "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman, a short ramble against the clockwork pace of mechanized life. It sat in the same issue of Galaxy Science Fiction as a spy story by Robert Silverberg about techno-theocracy and also Laugh Along with Franz, by one Norman Kagan who apparently lost the ensuing inaugural Nebula nomination to Ellison* who kept the narration hopping better than Kagan's more didactic exposition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the difficulty in meshing analytical and creative thought (stupid Vladimir and Estragon never stop bickering) he seems better known as a film scholar.

 

Aside from that, though, Laugh Along with Franz is yet another techno-dystopian tale. Hey, the hippie era had its fixations. Here, it's automation making almost all humans redundant, with the ensuing anomie driving much of the populace to crime, insanity and general monkey-business. Sorry, is that a bit apropos of our current arguments about chatbots?

 

Let's ramble aimlessly about a different SF yarn instead, Robert A. Heinlein's Waldo from 1942, which incidentally later became the name for such teleoperation devices. It's always been one of my least favorite Heinlein works, for the anti-intellectual twist it takes halfway through. Then again, though Wikipedia erroneously describes "the journey of a mechanical genius from his self-imposed exile from the rest of humanity to a more normal life" Heinlein actually (in contrast to, say, Valentine Michael Smith's maculate conception by towering intellects) has his customary mouthpiece curmudgeon explicitly debunk Waldo's mystique as genius, being instead an above-average intellect deriving much of his success in the field of mechanical engineering by hyper-focus and a personal stake in the machinery allowing him to live with myasthenia gravis. Which made only slightly less galling the denouement of the cranky, reclusive brainiac becoming the life of the party and carousing with the reg'lr folks after getting cured of his ailment, as though the hopeless experiential and existential gulf between competent minds and the subhuman norm were a disease of the intelligent, to be doctored back to accursed normalcy by hillbilly magic tricks.

 

Waldo's side plot about energy beams afflicting all humans with weakness is just the water fluoridation conspiracist icing on that cake, but it did mesh for me with the recent episode #466 of Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast, titled "What is technology doing to us?" which does indeed counterpose the nefarious influence of social media and chatbots against human interpersonal relations. As though the abuses of technology, from facebook gossip to nukes, were not the direct result of human effort to out-compete other humans as human social instinct dictates. As though every single Twit were not twittering of its own accord. The customer's always right.

 

'Course, that's an old dodge. Going back 99 years, I'd never bothered watching Metropolis until now. Compared to most stuff from the 1920s it's more cohesive than I'd expected, plus more modern in its action scenes, dramatic face-offs or hero, sidekick and love interest trinity. Though of course, given its outsized stylistic impact, it's hard to tell how much of that was foresight or later life imitating its art. But as far as the plot goes, imagine me blowing a very loud raspberry. Even if you look past a sludge of Biblical references, the story and moralizing are tired cliches not just for 1927, but could've been dismissed as a rip-off of Dickens or fairytales even fifty years prior. The dashing young prince saving the kingdom from an evil wizard who lusted after the queen, aided by a fetching maid pure of heart and defrosting his crusty old father's aging heart, a whopper of a quarter-hour 'think of the children' scene, villain falls off a cliff, holy Mother Goose the triteness just does not stop.

 

Has never stopped, in fact. I've commented before on the absurdity of dystopian flicks like V for Vendetta, Equilibrium, Snowpiercer, etc. pandering to their audience's herd conceit with evil wizards oppressing the salt of the earth multitudes, ignoring the dystopia could not persist without the collusion of those multitudes. The prototypical Metropolis itself places all blame with intellect, with industry, anything outside the plains-ape tribal norm. Even the climactic riot scene paints the murderous rabble as somehow innocent dupes of an inhuman infiltrator, ignoring that they literally built the system of injustice. Their instinct to murder and replace the prince presupposes such princely positions in the first place for the workers' competitive instincts to aspire to; each worker wants to be the one in the palace and for that there must be palaces, even if their own backs break in the gebilding of such.

 

You could, of course, look at the issue at even baser levels: "Who told you to attack the machines, you fools? Without them you'll all die!!" quoth a rightly enraged shift supervisor in Metropolis' lone glimmer of lucidity. No such moment comes in Waldo, where we deliberately sidestep the population pressure creating such ever-increasing demand for energy because the smooth apes reproduce with the speed of any degenerate vermin. Laugh Along with Franz ends in trite primitivism, the hero losing/abandoning his high-tech job to refocus on his relationship with a female as opposed to self-worth by social rank, but the whole pious genuflection before hormonal tyranny ignores the females are the ones imposing the race for social rank in the first place, ignores that without his fancy job she'll dump him in a heartbeat. Ellison's harlequin will not admit the people don't want to be saved from their degenerative drudgery, though unlike other examples here, Ellison was aware enough of human nature to show where that leads his hero.

 

Whose demand fuels industrial supply?

- and no money down!

I've been warming up to Cyberpunk 2077 more and more by ignoring the grind and just wandering about now and then. At least they included a tiny bit of content out in the badlands, away from the video billboard hellscape. Y'know, for us Gangrels. I was especially thrilled when I discovered the composting composition of the hills to the south. A landfill, bigger than the city itself (albeit not all in the game map and summarily rendered) is one element every modern-day setting should include, considering such do in fact exist. I don't mean just the increasingly continental great Pacific garbage patch, but paradisiac spots turned blemishes upon the face of the planet like Thilafushi.

 

It's all good to rail against Apple pushing a new smartphone every year, but where's the outrage against the billions stupid enough to buy it? You rail against chatbots as the new techno-Moloch, but it's not Sam Altman forcing reddit to fill up with AI slop. The users themselves are eating it up. Musk's Cybertruck may be an overpriced, malfunctioning road hazard, but plenty of suckers lined up for the nouveau-Hummer a few years ago. How many cases of makeup does the average ditz run through yearly? Or even monthly? How many plush orangutan dolls will soon be thrown away because millions of monkeys want to do like the monkey they saw? Until they spot the next fad...

 

In over a century of techno-dystopias the masses have been fed exactly the fantasy of victimhood they demand, an unending pretense of wizardly bogeymen exculpating the villagers with pitchforks and torches, the cold, inhuman metal face of science masking the subhuman appetites driving industry's depredations. Is technology dehumanizing? Good. Dehumanization would be the best possible outcome. "Is the rabble also necessary for life?"

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________

 

 

* Ooops, turns out they were in different categories. Kagan lost to Zelazny, three times at once.

AoW4 Factions, 11

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:

________________________________________________________________________________

When the fairies came into play it prodded me to revisit elvishness, more from the edgy, haughty Feanor-grade immortal angle. This "trader at the gates" setup, for its neutrality, actually works quite well for showing a faction's default attitude, much as in #5, the goblin example. Another unfocused faction in terms of affinity, but I remember it working better than others. With the resource bonus from talented collectors and nature expansion bonuses they grow better, and can go offensive or defensive with shadow or materium. The extra naga mobility just doubled(trebled?) down on their adaptability. I can't remember whether this or the other elvish description using the word "eschatologic" came first. I tend to fixate on elvish immortality too much over their other traits, but the poetic weight of endings and beginnings is hard to ignore.

The Truest Lie

So many insist that it doesn't matter if something is not true, believing in it still has value. The topic might be the validity of a political platform or the inherent goodness of plains-apes, or romantic love, but most often it's that other prehistoric millstone around society's neck: religion. You want to "believe in belief" but never admit the self-defeating contradiction of such a stance. That if wishing is not enough, if only pretending it to be true can satisfy, then you have conceded that veracity is indispensible. Faith invalidates itself.