Go Limit Yourself

Last month when I referenced the Netflix miniseries Ripley it turned my stomach to see it listed as a "limited series" on commentary sites, even in one of two instances on Wikipedia. That's not a valid term. It's a corporate marketing slogan. We already had a name for it, which is to say the old marketing slogan. Miniseries have existed for half a century and when they launched I'm sure the jargon sold for a while, sounded coquettish and fun like mini candy bars. Now of course a few quick economic recessions have given the public a taste for full-sized candy bars instead, so suddenly you're sold something "limited" to sound exclusive like collectable comics and get-it-while-supplies-last!

 

But why the fuck are the rest of you swallowing their bullshit? You are not obligated to use their word. You can still call it a miniseries. If it is true that you've built up a resistance to the old marketing hype, if it no longer fools you, that is precisely why you should absolutely refuse to call it anything else! In fact, whenever some Mad Man runs up to you shouting the latest focus-grouped buzz-word rebranding an existing product, the appropriate response is to kick his lying bitch teeth in, not collude in his manipulation of you!

 

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Now let's talk about "mansplaining"... 

Today is August 5, 2026.

There Will Come Soft Rains

"And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I."

- The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

 

 

Today is August 4, 2026

 

If you have not seen Grave of the Fireflies, try to find the original Japanese cut, the one that doesn't spoil the ending and dull its clout. Speaking of which, spoiler alert farther down this page. But we're starting with the weather. It was lovely until a couple of months ago. Sure, globally the warming trend continued, but in the couple of locations I keep an eye on, 2025 all the way to the early summer of '26 marked the longest stretch of sane weather in a couple of decades. We had a couple of slowly defrosting springs, a real winter with real winter freeze, a stormy last fall ending in biting sleet, a healthy amount of rain restocking the local hydrosphere after previous years' droughts, the works. Local works.

 

Every time I'd talk to my relatives and they'd remark on the cold I'd have to remind them: no, you're older than me, you should remember! This is how it's supposed to be, this is how winter felt in my childhood forty years ago, when we used to make snow forts and they'd last a week instead of not bothering with even a snowman that melts by afternoon. No, don't complain about a cold snap, March weather is supposed to slingshot insanely between freezing and balmy, not rocket straight to 30C all at once! And then in April and May they'd start commenting how nice the weather is for long walks and I'd remind them, well, just wait, 'cause the climate's still set to boil over, all the extra heat hasn't gone anywhere, that little chill, we're gonna pay it off pretty soon. And now it's pretty soon in July and August, and last year's bill's come due. Europe and Canada are getting torched by wildfires and Californians are holding their breath knowing they're next and it's pointless to remind everyone this new normal never had to happen.

 

Today is August 4, 2026

 

In Takahata's brilliance, Grave of the Fireflies' sneakiest gut punch comes not from ladling on shock value gruesomeness, but from painting its grim theme in Ghibli's habitually lush palettes. As the story progresses and our protagonists' plight grows ever grimmer, no matter how sapped they are of vitality, nature around them insists on lavishing its beauty and cheer upon other observers. Sapphire skies overlook verdant pulchritude and blade and leaf vibrate with newfound hope, perversely mocking the children's suffering. That perverse beauty shining through in Teasdale's poem as well gives the crucial counterpoint to Bradbury's automated house in There Will Come Soft Rains, penultimate story in the classic Martian Chronicles.

 

As in The Veldt, Bradbury's automated house, by doing everything for you, becomes symbolic of a system which though it appears to merely remove the drudgery of physical existence, instead overshoots into fabricating an environment feeding base impulses but where the intent and intellect which should rule such baser drives play no part, where appetites and habit formation run amok.

 

Today is August 4, 2026

 

But, like Teasdale or Takahata, I think our thousand-times-great-grand-pere of fabulism cheated his audience by holding a better option in the wings, by allowing readers a feeling that things could have been different if better decisions had been taken, that beauty can even exist to be experienced. The story was, as I said, after all, penultimate in its collection, followed by a glimmer of hope for a fresh start and conviction not to repeat old mistakes. No such hope exists. We're seeing the self-destruct quotient in the Drake equation, and it's not bombs or killer robots; it's consumer demand. The subhuman masses opt for football and empty calories and social competition, never advancement. Intellect subverted toward animal goals empowers the animal to destroy intellect. Every other human on the planet is a knife at your throat.

 

Today is August 4, 2026 

Camp Songs

Tent caterpillars make a pretty dramatic sight. Except these are not part of that specialized group.

They are instead fall webworm, Hyphantria cunea, classified instead in the gigantic Noctuoidea superfamily of moths. Convergent evolution is a wonderful thing.

Opinions seems to differ as to just how damaging the species is. I've certainly seen them kill off entire trees... but small ones, and isolated. Mostly, some people just seem to think they look creepy. Unlike tent caterpillars which build a single tent at a branch node, webworms' modus operandi is to net entire smaller branches at a time and polish off every leaf. And if you've seen them anywhere other than North America, they're invasive. (According to my mother, her grandmother used to take a literal torch to their webs.)

As an aside, notice in the next shot the six true legs (the spinier ones toward its head, toward the right part of its body) with the distinction very clear between those (which will become the insect's legs in adulthood) and the jelly-like pseudopods along the rest of its body, which will be lost during metamorphosis.

But the funny part (as with tent caterpillars) is that you can make these little jokers dance. When spooked, like, say, at certain sound frequencies (well within the range of human vocal chords) they will all start shaking their upper bodies, to prevent predators or their numerous parasites from landing on them.

Sadly for me, I visited these particular campers at dawn on a clammy, cloudy, breezy early autumn day, and they were so chilled they could barely even move. A couple of them tried shaking their groove thing, but even then it was more of a macarena than a Charleston.

 

I guess that would have been a good chance for me to lay my eggs on them. If I were so inclined. Ah, well. Opportunities lost. 

Thanks for Playing!

I tried Team Fortress 2 again recently after some years' absence. Development having altogether ceased when Valve saw Overwatch's release gut its own playerbase, pretty much zero things have changed. "Competitive" mode is still an idiotically shrunken duel/pissing contest abandoning all the game's strengths trying in vain to copy Overwatch's appeal and not worth the bother. But of course casual 12v12 mode is itself utterly poisoned by retarded trash refusing to fight, AFKing, sitting around spamming emotes or just quitting at the first death. Matches are not decided by relative worth but by which team actually has players... y'know... playing the motherfucking game?

 

It's not as though Valve wasn't always aware of this, but their insane excuse for a solution doing more harm than good remains in effect: automatically switching players from the larger to the smaller team. So after I've spent two minutes healing everyone on the control point for an easy victory, I'm forced to take the place of the dickless bitches I made quit and be punished with automatically losing during the third minute for having played too well. Aaand, uninstall again, that's enough of that.

 

But it's not as if I can get my fix of teamwork any better way. I was permanently banned from Warframe a year or two ago for raging against a griefer deliberately running up behind me repeatedly undoing all our team's quest progress step by step by step - but you can bet no action was taken against the griefer himself. Here's a snapshot match history from League of Legends* from... last year I think?

Unless you believe I was the noobiest noob that ever n00bed a noob at the start... then suddenly became an absolute GAMER GOD!!! for ten or fifteen matches straight... only to again switch to N00b!-mode for no particular reason... then again to god-mode... then again to noob-mode... and so on, endlessly, well obviously something other than my quality as a player is deciding match outcomes. The moment Riot's algorithm identifies you as better, it punishes you by giving you worse teammates, and worse, and worse, until tanking your average to its satisfaction.

 

Now, of course it's important to have balanced teams, but that's the whole point of having "leagues" so that teams can be composed of players of the same general aptitude. GENERAL aptitude. INDIVIDUALLY teaming worse players with better ones merely punishes the better and rewards the worse. Moreover, it shows that Riot's datamining can easily determine who the griefers are, and instead of eliminating those guilty of ruining matches keeps them in the playerbase for the express purpose of punishing their betters. 

 

On a completely unrelated topic, once upon a time I was motoring some Podunkian byways, late morning sometime before lunch hour, sun shining, birds singing, lovely day, when I suddenly slam the brakes! Was it a squirrel, a stray cat, a deer? No, it was some pasty guy, shirtless, tattooed up to his neck (pretty sure there was a swastika in there somewhere) stumbling aimlessly in a daze, sporting the stringy, bug-eyed aesthetic of methamphetamine addiction which you learn to spot as a self-preservation mechanism if you ever sojourn in Middle America. And who knows what else he was on. Far from jumping away from near-collision he draws himself up in surprise, still standing in the middle of the street, and draws back his fist as if to punch the hood of my car... then in the next split-second jerks his head up, blinking at the sun, distracted by some noise in the trees, and stumbles off the road again, straight into the bushes. For the record, I don't particularly give a shit what substances you're on, except as an indicator of likely behaviors including stumbling into traffic and punching cars which should by all rights disqualify you from participation in society. We have more traffic laws than anyone can keep track of. They're very good at punishing the otherwise blameless for "speeding" on empty roads. How useful are they at keeping crackheads from denting my grille?

It's gotten almost impossible to get rubbing alcohol at pharmacies these past years, simple ethyl alcohol, forcing a switch to the less digestible isopropyl. Why? I'm not the one getting drunk off the shit. Why am I being punished? Police those actually guilty of abuse. Why did we spend a quarter century taking our shoes off at the airport? And more importantly, for every convenience and dignity we have always been made to surrender in the name of some greater good, call it firearms or marijuana depending on your political affiliation, you have to ask: yes, fine, but what are you doing with the actual guilty parties you catch? Why are murderers not executed? Why is the car-punching good old boy still drunk-walking the streets? You can't seriously tell me it hasn't harmed others before. Conversely, I've committed no harm condemning me to be subjected to, and endangered by, its presence.

 

Game companies claim to fight cheating while openly cheating to enable griefers. Governments claim to promote the public good while deliberately feeding whatever worst demographic will vote for them, be it crackheads in the city or meth-heads in the sticks. Why? Online games have long achieved, by their very nature, the totalitarian mass surveillance and absolute power real-world soldiers and politicians only envision in their sadism. The griefing and cheating yet pervading all such games, the fact the companies themselves, without being asked, take it upon themselves to cheat on behalf of their worst customers and shield them from repercussions, unerringly reveals the truism of every "people's republic": that all their oppression renders life more dangerous, not less, funneling sadists up the ranks of power. Why?

 

Well, partly for sheer profit by numbers, the "for the people" motivation masking weaponized, monetized mob rule, but also because just like Valve, Digital Extremes and Riot refusing to ban potential customers no matter what harm they cause to their betters, just as their algorithms deliberately employ those griefers to harm better players, governments see value in keeping destructive filth threatening others, a ready stock of easily manipulated lynch mobs and a drain on the prosperity of the now vanished middle class. There is no way to improve any society, real or virtual, without exterminating its worst elements, and that is precisely why those elements are never exterminated, being too useful as tools of control over the greater system. Every ruler wants mindless thugs, scabs and strikebreakers, to throw at principled dissenters. Every ruler wants to be able to decree when an underling should lose a match, and to do so via proxy so as to maintain deniability.

 

Want progress? Exterminate the filth. Eh, screw it, never mind, it's about a century too late to avoid collapse anyway.

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* Yeah, I know the game's shit anyway, but it's not like the genre offers better options these days.

I am become derp, destroyer of words.

AoW4 Factions, 22

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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Not sure what syrons are supposed to be other than cheesy super-elves from beyond the moon, so never paid them any attention. In practice though, their caster focus suits me just fine. Combined with mystic potential and wizard king casting, I fell into an easy rhythm cycling buffed spells to blast through fights. Their description turned into one of the more philosophical ones too, and not a little apropos of gaming escapism. I'd still rather have elves though.