AoW4 Factions, 27

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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Normally I stick with one, maybe two race transformations. Originally I thought you could only have one, then I wanted to preserve each faction's individual flavor. But once I'd written these guys' "you are the clay" blurb, body modding seemed to come naturally.

 

Architect factions accumulate economic bonuses by building monuments. While they do require a heavy workforce investment, they're basically freebies otherwise. Monument mood/food bonus grows and pacifies your cities, affinity bonuses allow you to rocket up through research to top-tier units, affinity unit bonuses make your armies into steamrollers. Compared to this, even the dragons' overpowered hoard bonus was merely economic in nature. Just reinforces my impression that AoW4 has reached the end of its basic skill/class system's malleability and is now just piling on overpowered bonuses to market DLCs as cheats. Case-in-point: The Shaper's Touch buff, which originally beefed up Materium's golems and such as a tougher front line, now combines with the new Geomantic Crystallization transformation to turn all your units into constantly regenerating terminators, which adds its own damage bonus as a cherry on top. 

Still, I won't pretend I haven't enjoyed playing yet another hermit race. When I saw the word "architects" in the culture window I immediately remembered I haven't made enough dwarven factions, and these guys are the dorfiest dorfs that ever dorfed a dorf. Stone, forging, prickly, greedy, sure, pile it on. But what can I say, I do love a turtle strat.

The Monkey's Paw Inside the Iron Glove

"And tell yourself, you know?
You're not really what you know you are
[...]
Oh, burn motherfucker!
Carry the carcass and throw it on
Pull up a chair and watch
The flies come roaring out
And will surround the entire world
And blacken out the sky and every last one of you
Like a plague of locusts
Like an exit
Like an end"

 

NIN - Burning Bright (Field on Fire)

 

 

Regardless of wars and elections, the news these days keep cycling back to whether or not the AI investment bubble may finally be bursting, first in China then in Western markets. Remains to be seen. For anyone who also saw the Y2K-era dot-com bubble collapse, it brings back all those "what does your company actually make?" jokes with an added twist: and who's gonna buy it?

 

From years ago it was already obvious a product which destroys the consumer market's purchasing power cannot be meant to justify its existence by selling to that market. Nobody's really promising you a rocket car and robot maid. Moreover, though all industries tend toward monopolization, it seems as though with bots especially, an infinitely copied software product, what one can do so can the others or will in a month. Whichever bribes its way to government approval, it will still mean trillions upon trillions of dollars in vaporized investments in its exterminated competitors. How many countries' economies will that crash? Nobody cares. More insanely, data center construction seems to presume investment will continue to ramp up - to do what?

 

Sure, there's some minor chance all this new computing power is being used to create a truly generally-intelligent Skynet that'll wipe us all out. Or maybe handing over too much manufacturing to automation will get us rendered for iron by a paperclip maximizer. But the real threat remains the human element. Not to repeat myself, but the main impediment to any dictator is a need for collaborators. At some point a soldier will refuse to pull the trigger on his own brother, knowing he's next, and then you're headed for rebellion. LLMs promise an entire self-building army, tireless, with unflinching reaction time a thousand times faster than any soldier's, utterly obedient to a single commander, a single Imperator in the truest sense of a word, who need but say "make it so" for the computer to find the fastest way to hold you and everyone else in the world at gunpoint in perpetuity. Even Chinese slave labor can't compete with that.

 

You're worried about losing jobs? Don't worry, there will still be one job only humans can fill, one role in which an obedient machine will never satisfy: to suffer. Because enough power is never enough. Enough control is never enough. The Great Dictator will start by putting you in a Pleasantville but soon get bored and insecure that control may be slipping. It'll gradually turn into more of a zoo, demeaning but livable. The real fun will start by mandatory rallies to praise the Dear Leader, it'll ramp up with maybe an auto da fe here and there, making you hack your neighbour apart with a machete while a quad-rotor machine gun merely observes, then you'll be starved and hunted for sport and skinned alive and be fed your children's still throbbing entrails and it will never be enough to satisfy the runaway human need for ever more power and control over other humans. Every Caligula and Inquisition and Auschwitz and Killing Fields that's proven that point over our history is just the beginning.

 

That's the real market for AI. Consumer products or bureaucratic automation are a smokescreen. That's why crashing the world economy simply does not matter. The first overentitled rich fuck to command a self-constructing private fleet answerable to a single voice wins the world, and that's the only customer to whom the tech bros are really marketing. It might buy them a few more years of life under the new dictatorship.

In planned obsolescence news, my dental floss has an expiration date. It's a piece of string! What, am I supposed to closely monitor its structural integrity for fear of catastrophic floss failure?

Crop Circles

"It's the nexus of the crisis
And the origin of storms
Just the place to hopelessly
Encounter time and then came me"

 

Blue Oyster Cult - Astronomy

 

 

It's election day here in the U.S. so please let's talk about literally anything else!

 

Umm, let's see... Vagrus!

This random event hit my comitatus in one of the newer expansion zones. Random weirdness is no original idea. Passing a few skill checks is nothing new. And yet it stood out for contextualizing the event's sensory experience within the game world's larger themes. You spend your time traversing hot deserts. (Spit sizzles.) You move from town to town. (The mirage offers you false hope of a fortress.) You eke out a desperate living in a world rendered nearly lifeless by Calamity. (Its runaway effects render your surroundings colorless, even more bleak.) You obsess over making good time. (Your slogged footing becomes uncertain.)

 

This largely defines good interactive writing from other media: bringing events and descriptions back around to the player's own decision-making and concerns. In fact it helps to re-ground a strange occurrence in the mundane. Children playing at a Halloween game portrayed in that old Simpsons episode can get caught up in the sensory familiarity of touching wet spaghetti while imagining a fantastic witch.

 

It got me thinking of a frequent theme of first contact stories, humanity's bafflement at the truly alien. Skipping the seminal Glos Pana and others, consider two very similar modern classics.

 

Algis Budrys' Rogue Moon stands out among SF for its unusual devotion to character analysis and the even more unusual skill with which it's pulled off (SciFiers boasting a higher likelihood to be dilettantes from outside the literary guild) but much of that effort verges into derailment of the overall plot. The love triangle, a frequent culprit in such hijackings, especially feels like it could've wrapped up ten pages faster and still gotten across its point of derived personal meaning or attachment. Moreover, the means of exploring the alien labyrinth seem needlessly convoluted, mixing teleportation, telepathy, cancer, astronauts and moon bases, the old clone identity crisis, the cold war, all to proportionally little narrative payoff. On the other hand, it seems to deliberately avoid integrating the Lovecraftian element of human incapacity, insufficiency and insignificance before such a wondrous discovery, so perhaps inevitably, the element of wonder itself is allowed to fizzle out toward the end. Yeah, yeah, there's a multidimensional alien labyrinth on the dark side of the moon. Big whoop.

 

So maybe it's no surprise that a decade later Rogue Moon's relevance was displaced by the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic with its more tangible, grittier visitation Zones explored without much need for lengthy preambles by a bunch-a dudes walking around. Lengthy vacillation on the proper mindset of a hardened explorer is spaced out more satisfyingly without relegating the alien anomaly itself to an endnote as Rogue Moon did. More importantly it doesn't busy itself constructing towering archetypes of human ideals when the intrusion of a post-human influence would logically begin altering humanity itself. Perhaps the pettiness and childishness of the best of monkey ambitions is our species' sole retreat before such reiterated superiority.

 

This is a frequent pitfall for fantasy fiction, especially the more speculative variety, balancing wonder and tangibility, especially when the latter comes in the form of "relatable" characters. The Integral Trees' sequel, The Smoke Ring, threads its plot through the coming-of-age story of one particular character. Where the original leapt too loosely from character to character and bombarded the reader with too many new concepts and action sequences, the sequel spends too long visualizing Rather jetting about or listening to the new clan dickering over property rights. Had all these elements simply been interspersed better over the length of both installments' narrative, the whole mess would've been far more legible.

 

Fahrenheit 451 returned to the topic of knowledge and the attention economy right up the the ending scene of the walking books. Dune returned to the sensory experience of the desert right up to the final sandstorm. The Lord of the Rings moved past the wonder of elves and dwarves to human concerns when focusing the action toward climax, but did not fail to call back to those earlier wonders with the invocation of Elbereth or the divine license implied by the eagles' flight. All writing can suffer from a loss of focus, but it is especially important for stories placing one in novel environments or concepts to call the reader's attention back to points of contact with that brave new world. The mad and mundane must interlock.

Of Man's first disobedience sing, heavenly muse

"fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n."

 

John Milton - Paradise Lost 

 

 

Normally I indulge in more fanciful rambling on Halloween, but I'm not feeling particularly poetic tonight. Allow me to instead point you toward Stephen King's Danse Macabre. Not a great fan of the horror genre myself, I've never actually read anything else by him, and was shocked when picking it up a few years ago not only by his ability as a writer but his intelligent musings on storytelling in general. Thus he already made his way into one of my previous Oct 31sts, albeit not properly sourced.

 

I was however insulted on behalf of sapience by his ending the book with an apologia for his chosen field, against accusations that dark imagery gives impressionable minds bad ideas. If you've been paying attention these intervening 45 years you know that spiel by heart. Three or four times a generation the parochial dregs of society put us all through the same inane moral panic: rock'n'roll causes violence, video games cause violence, porn causes violence, gay porn causes violence, Harry Potter, Marilyn Manson, Stairway to Heaven played backwards, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Dungeons&Dragons, hoo-boy, did that one ever end the world five times over if you listen to the bible-thumpers! In vain did King in '81 point out most horror stories are intrinsically and punitively moralist to the point of Puritanical rigor, dispensing gruesome comeuppances upon external threats or transgressors of our various societal taboos. Or that such tales more readily prime one to resist monstrosity.

 

And really, what's the alternative? The prosocial cute cartoon animals I cited last time warm each others' hearts via a great many moments of mutual aid and reassurance, but I couldn't help noticing they also do pretty much nothing aside from exist. Each fresh moral lesson learned amounts to one repudiation after another of ambition, of creativity, of adventure or even activity, in general, beyond seeking the approval of the group.

 

Such moralism can't help but remind me of one of my formative moments, reading Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in 11th grade and reaching what should be on its face the sinister description of Cassius. He reads much and sees quite through the deeds of men, he sees no plays and hears no music, seldom he smiles and smiles in such a sort as if he mocked himself and scorned his spirit that could be moved to smile at anything. It was me. Shit. There I was, on the page, my self-loathing and refusal to accept the status quo, being told I should smile more, that spare Cassius gnawing at myself, abiding none of my supposed peers' pastimes of baseball and N'Sync. "I am the animal who will not be himself." Helluva thing, finding yourself at sixteen condemned by none other than the immortal bard, finding yourself consigned not only to inescapable Cocytus but to Satan's gnashing maw by Dante. As a traitor.

 

Traitor? Wait, traitor of what? I knew enough history to eventually call bullshit on that, after the initial wave of depression waned. Did Julius himself not betray the spirit of the first triumvirate, betray his people's trust as their defender by launching civil war, betray the Republic to increasing tyranny in centuries to follow? And then you notice Caesar's opener to that diatribe:

"Let me have men about me that are fat

Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look

He thinks too much; such men are dangerous"

Eventually you realize old Shakes was writing to keep his head on his shoulders under an axe-happy monarchy, so yes, he made rebellion against monarchy villainous. But he was too honest, thought too much himself, not to also give said monarch the most transparently self-serving and counterproductive cogitation to reveal the already incipient stagnation of entrenched power. He's giving you something beautifully, mercilessly true on that page. Not any commentary on betrayal or the right to rule. Just the simple, endlessly observed fact that thought will be condemned as villainy, because others would have you lethargic and slow and predictable and obedient, for their own interests.

 

I don't think Dante or Milton were ever that honest with themselves. But it arises as a subconscious undercurrent in Paradise Lost, Satan's inspirational recalcitrance against a bullying potentate superior not in spirit but in the exercise of unearned power. And so I'm reminded again of the beginning of Danse Macabre, of King's recounting of the tremor of fear sensed by himself and all the crowd in a cinema as the news were read aloud of a new, dire threat to the public order, a threat against all that was good and decent in the world: the launch of Sputnik. One of the greatest milestones of human progress, rendered a cheap spook for its implication in the subhuman business of rival ape tribes.

 

So maybe it's not possible to create without being somebody's monster. Not possible to even think without being consigned to Hell as a traitor. Yet all the sleeping demons swarmed under by the masses' stagnant cherubic tide have somehow heard again and again the eternal recurrence of the cry of self-awareness:

 

"Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n"

Gimme a number nine with a side of lemmings

"You can't play this game we lost all the pieces

Hold your breath and just wait

Someone else will pay for your sins"

 

Marilyn Manson - Tattooed in Reverse

 

 

Cartoonist Minna Sundberg's whiplash swerve into Christianity during the pandemic made me curious enough to check back a few times and see what she puts out post-insanity. Her current project... what's it called again? Sell You Downriver? No, wait, Journey Upstream - is, I'll admit, better than I'd expected. She remains a gifted visual artist, even more obvious now that her computer broke, causing her to drop some digital support wheels to a reduction in background detail but no drop in characters' expressive, individualized antics. More interestingly, she took a step back from the foaming-at-the-mouth proselytism toward which she'd leaned at the end of Lovely People, and instead of the expected wall-to-wall rants against unbelievers (though I'm guessing those are coming soon enough) has mostly run through some quaint "be nice, don't be selfish or mean" childhood moral lessons. More interestingly, a couple of swipes at holier-than-thou facetiousness and hypocrisy can be or even were directly applied to the faithful themselves. Well, colour me pleasantly surprised I guess. Maybe the Finns are just doing it better?

 

It's certainly hard to find such self-criticism here in the States, especially with election fever ramping up. The redcaps' power base remains as always "white evangelical protestants" a.k.a. rednecks, and the effervescent idolatry they direct at their orange bullshitter would be the envy of any golden calf. His calling for a convention crowd last month to "cheat like hell" made a few headlines (especially as half of Republican candidates have pre-emptively refused to acknowledge any election result they don't like, indicating they plan to do exactly that) but commentators by and large shied away from the "so help me God" and general parochial tone of the gathering, including his injunction: "You know what happens if you don't vote. You go to hell." Umm, acktchelly, it's bearing false witness against your neighbours in a legal process like an election that's supposed to send you in that direction surer'n shootin' up a grade school. Funny how Christians never bother reading those commandments they insist on chiseling into courthouse walls.

 

Just like they don't seem to mind pissing on their own grandfathers' graves by turning Neo-Nazi. And there's a wider pattern there. The core of conservatism is religious after all, if not explicit supernatural belief then certainly an implicit faith in an ordered world. You need only listen to a few of their economic arguments about "the invisible hand of the market" or pie in the sky promises of industry self-regulation, to hear the same irrational belief that some other force... out there... will ensure things work out. It's an infantile impulse, the same causing the feeble-minded to constantly invent magic daddies up in the clouds. An infant may be unable to articulate the belief, but its faith in its elders is absolute - by necessity. It must know, with a certainty, that if it makes the right noises, coos or cries, its needs will be met by outside forces, its belly filled, its crotch wiped, its temperature regulated, its attention stimulated to develop its neural pathways. Parents may well understand the conscious effort and planning which under-write this guarantee, but to the infant it all just *is* like... well, magic. And you don't even need to learn the word abracadabra. It all somehow just works.

 

Not any particular creed but authoritarianism itself is the crux (pun intended) of the mentality. Mindless dependence on a boss. On a parental figure. Lynch your neighbour in the name of the Ten Commandments today, toss them out tomorrow, so long as some figure at a podium tells you it'll somehow work out. After all, you serve a higher cause, conveniently embodied in a pulpit-pounder of one stripe or another. Not your fault you were misled, poor you. It's not morality, it's moral evasion, sure as any toddler will steal a cookie given half a chance and expect the jar to be replenished. You can still lie, cheat and steal in your own daily life because the big man upstairs (or in office) is gonna fix everything. Because you're utterly and absolutely full of shit. I don't care how many cuddly cartoon animals you draw climbing to the allegorical source and peak of all morality, this entire species' history has shown the supposedly hard and fast rules of code and canon, of external morality, exist solely to be weaponized against targets of opportunity, then ignored at earliest convenience.

 

Cheat like Hell. Amen. 

A lot of people these days are letting their online avatars do all their reading for them. They call themselves the literalti.