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.

The Necromancer's Tale

"This world's all wrong

So let's go where we belong

Pack up the stereo, meet at the burial ground

Contract malaria, meet at the burial ground"

 

The Decemberists - Burial Ground

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"Something in me recoiled at his expression of joy. How could a man be so happy while both my sleep and waking hours were tormented by whispers from the grave?"

 

It was a dark and stormy night.

No, really.

Hi-diddly-ho, neighbourinos. Don't mind me, just doing a bit of... uhh... gardening... at the witching hour of night, in a graveyard, guarded by a boiling cauldron of mind-altering brew. It's alright. I'm a professional.
 

Which is a weird way to start this, since despite overall enjoying the game I'll repeatedly be accusing its creator of amateurishness. The barrier of entry for garage projects in game design rose steeply to complete unfeasibility in the 2000s' 3D graphic arms race era, but has been gradually dropping again over the past decade as a "good enough" suite of generic engines and assets have become more widely accessible.* If credits are to be believed, The Necromancer's Tale is, more so than even Wildermyth, a mom-and-pop project authored/programmed largely or entirely by one writer and staffed in part by a suspicious repetition of that author's last name.

 

This time though, the strain really shows in some blatant project creep, straining to accommodate far more RPG stats, more NPC merchants, more items including cosmetics, than was healthy for its overall capacity. I would have rather seen more finessing at a smaller scale. The program has locked up a few times, the conversation interface resetting up and down is just visually distracting, oddball auto/quicksaves tied to manual saves themselves overwriting save titles, the mouse pointer is far too easily confused by nearby objects and requires frequent zooming and camera turning to select, pathing... gets you to where you clicked eventually but takes some weirdly unoptimized zig-zags, the repetitiveness of carrying and animating skeletons gets very grindy after a couple of chapters, the entire item system is littered with redundant or useless pickups. And while it's not really at the same level of flaws, it drives my inner librarian nuts that the town map is not aligned to North! Not all art assets are well applied to the setting, like a rather modern-looking indoor flush toilet in 1730. I suppose it's a gray area, as the nobility could've had early models... in London, not an Adriatic Ruritania.

No chamber-pots for our musketeers!

And while dialogue trees are laudably well fertilized, a one-man show simply lacked the means to address all possible interactions, yielding some comically oblivious NPCs.

Then she took an arrow in the knee

For all that, RPG fans (myself included) would gladly have sung the praises of The Necromancer's Tale for its handling of several long-standing lacks in cRPG design: avoiding a strict "chosen one" plot, making the player pay attention to his actions, and most importantly playing the dark side and smoothing out the all too facile power fantasy by a self-conscious stinginess toward spell slots and minions. In fact, the entire first chapter is an extended choose-your-own-adventure character creation device:

And if you're wondering, yes, I did end up answering precisely the right questions to yet again make myself an elf wizard. 

Hey, I gotta be me.

Even afterward, the second chapter is played in adventure game dialogue mode, the third is exploration of the town, you try your first tentative fight by chapter four and only really get into tactical combat by chapter six of sixteen. Overall I preferred Tides of Numenera's version of individual stat pools and investment in consumables (even if it was too easy to cover all bases) but stat investment strategy's still handled quite well here, never locking you out of progression yet definitely making you wary of wasting your four flex points needed to surpass a particularly obstructive skill check once a chapter. It all adds up to highly satisfying dramatic escalation paired with an equally well-considered build-up of your own occult power, from vague inklings to tentative toying and cooking experiments to fumbling first efforts to earning your place as a true force of un-nature. Nothing comes easy for our van Elstrik, but as a result each advance is far more meaningful.

 

Unfortunately, the worldbuilding's very hit-or-miss. The author did some reading, I'll grant (thematically apt literary references pepper your environs) but lacked a coherent feel for preindustrial mannerisms or speech or daily life. Incongruities crop up in every expository paragraph. There was no "pulp" fiction in 1730, books being still quite rare and scant literacy providing no market. Children would've been farm labor or at best shop apprentices. What grates most of all is the constant and absurd repetition of "okay" a quite modern Americanism which only spread to the rest of the world with 20th-century mass-media and cannot be waved away by the universal translation convention. DIY voicing lands all over the map, sometimes spot-on (the more casual anglophone characters) other times groaningly terrible (socialites or any "ethnic" accents like Slavs or Italians) to where it immediately breaks immersion.** Which brings us to the piles upon piles of gratuitous snowflakery, because there. are. a. lot. of those quaint ethnic extras serving absolutely no purpose but to stamp some "inclusivity" form in the writer's brain. It was odd from the start mixing Venice with an imaginary Ruritania, but then you pile on with Irish, German, Austrian, English, Senegalese, Chinese, Turkish, plus various nondescript middle-Easterners or East-Europeans, and the setting loses all coherence, grinding the narrative to a halt again and again and again in performative multiculturalism. With every new pointless character waxing poetic on the virtues of other cultures or voicing anachronistic pacifism and populism, I couldn't help wondering why they didn't simply set their game in such an exotic locale or go for a straight-up fantasy world.

 

The setting would have been served far better by a more coherent portrayal of peasant life and Enlightenment-era craft guilds, of noble privilege and the intrusive and abusive power of the Church, agrarian dependence on the seasons and the whims of nature. Blighting crops and killing livestock are conspicuously absent manifestations of the dark arts here. Instead much of the game is devoted to tediously and redundantly lining up all the standard "woke" saints and devils, be it kow-towing to Islam or Orientalism or homosexuality (seriously, in 1700s Europe?!? gay men were treated as only slightly less unnatural than necromancy!) or a half-black half-brutha noble of spirit, or of course, as always, the most pervasive historical/biological revisionism of all, the feminist variety.

 

Man bad; woman good. Repeat the mantra.

For just a partial taste:

- bad enough to pretend no segregation of the sexes existed, but female sailors? 'nuff said

- said female sailor openly bragging about her promiscuity and conquests? would've gotten run out of town as a harlot, possibly by the local whores for muscling in on their turf (and that would've made a better story)

- female gang leader who apparently needs no male muscle 

- a perfect, victimized mother and evil father

- industrious and matriarchal society of progress

- witch gets automatically redeemed to a peaceful, friendly herbalist by the end because all her negative traits were the fault of men 

- a woman broke a rib <breaking up a fight> on the docks not <fighting> and "Her intent did not seem rude, but rather, efficient."and she's conveniently juxtaposed to a male doctor whose male brother is caught up in shady business and her male superior won't let her investigate the case of the evil males

- when throwing dice, the woman "shows men how it's done"

- ghost story about a husband betraying his wife to her untimely demise; for a bonus, stick in some line about her being too strong-willed for him

- your childhood friends now dating are a sitcom-standard savvy attractive female and bumbling dopey fat male

- a farmer's wife bitching about her arranged marriage as cause for armed rebellion and you get punished with a relations penalty if you reply with a line about personal merit

- a wife that's all business because her husband would run said business into the ground

- a brilliant scientific/mathematical female wasting away in an unhappy marriage to a sleazy husband 

 

Man bad; woman good. Repeat the mantra. As in Disco Elysium, creativity and coherence die instantly on contact with feminism. Sad, because once again there is some evident core talent here. It's just wasted chasing performative, moral majority-approved pablum instead of building on the strengths of the plot. Beyond that, other elements were shoehorned in as industry or pulp fiction standards, like the plethora of sex/romance subplots. Son of a cocksucker, in a story about necromancy of all things? Why!? Dragging these out well into the second half when we should be focusing more on the supernatural also make the last few chapters drag a bit.

 

From a more practical angle, quest/chapter progression tends toward the idiosyncratic or outright nonsensical at times. The Necromancer's Tale sells itself as among other things an "exploration" game, but as I've tried to point out numerous times, beach-combing is not exploration. Repeatedly combing the same beach, even less so. NPCs flicker in and out of existence or utility from chapter to chapter and (per adventure game norm) you constantly have to run around individually checking each one to see if new dialogue options have become available because random schmuck #16 sitting around town just happens to have an "in" you need to exploit to complete your quest (oh, she's his maid? good thing nobody even hinted at her existence the previous eight chapters and fifty times I wandered this location asking everyone what they do for a living!) Actions become available or unavailable depending on chapter (e.g. lockpicking, or curing the beaten Venetian) doors and town gates open at arbitrary times, and there are entirely, entirely too many random "gotcha" moments where you lose faction rep for asking standard adventurer questions, e.g. asking the apothecary about your father's death or merely asking a guard who the fuck he is. Gotcha moments do not serve as a meaningful challenge, but only the author's need to feel superior to his audience.

 

Yet still, given that, given all of that, admitting all of that fumbling, bumbling stumbling so worthy of grumbling, amazingly The Necromancer's Tale still breaks slightly better than even and deserves a playthrough.

It is hard to sufficiently emphasize just how effectively it nails its core feature of a gradual slide toward darkness and imperceptibly waxing mystic puissance. The crafting system is just involved enough to make you work for your reagents. Not only do the florid descriptions of supernatural sensations lend a far more visceral appeal to what would usually be summarized as "cast magic missile" but these mesh with mechanics like your mana pool initially depending heavily on a randomized "winds of magic" bonus which becomes less and less relevant the more your own power puts you beyond the whims of fate. New discoveries chain into each other, like a mystery investigation netting you a tank mook that can pass a couple of strength checks letting you among other things acquire a wraith summon which makes it much easier to farm zombies from bandits trying to ambush you. The spirit world begins to impinge upon your perception, putting you in danger of revealing your powers by accident. Your humanity meter starts dropping... but then, is that a bad thing? Your progress toward the unnatural feels perfectly natural, beginning with the best of intentions, forced into desperate measures by economic circumstance, continuing with verifiable righteousness, overindulging under the moral umbrella of others' worse crimes, growing beyond the pettiness of human morality.
 

I've said that necromancy itself needs a more even-tempered treatment than the primitive, thoughtless disgust with which it's treated. I've praised movies like Maggie which return to the core, low-key terrors of zombification. This is the best RPG treatment of such themes I've seen in a very long time. My favorite moment in the whole game was stashing my swelling army in the farthest corner of the map, in a place of ancient magic, just leaving them to stand, silent and expectant, in the cold, secret, dark reaches of oblivion, their lurid shadows dacing on rock walls as I shuffled among them in my burial shroud grave-lit by my demonic wand, adding the latest two or three zombies to the throng, or picking my tank mook out to sneak him back into town for repairs.

 

For all its faults, there is a lot to be said for a game that can make so much of so simple and unscripted a moment.

 

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* We shall not speak of RPGMaker or other chibified, pixelated retro junk.

** One of the voices sounds like the fishwife from the marketplace on Earth in Warframe?

 

P.S.: To me, there seemed only one logical way to end the story, but if achievement percentages are any indicator, most players did not go the route of eternal darkness, clinging to the more conventional morality of a redemption story instead. The author shows a lot of potential, but it will be wasted if that mass approval lodestone keeps skewing plots toward pablum.

Under Brush

It may be a cliche, but have you ever... watched your step?

This next log seems to have been singed by a brush fire at some point. Note the larva-dug tunnel uncovered on the left.

Not sure if that's the culprit on the bottom right, emerged to adulthood. Poor light conditions. Having a devil of a time identifying its fat butt. Wood-boring is a time-honored and widely adopted profession, but from a bit of image-searching only a couple of subfamilies like Cryptorhynchinae and Mesoptilinae have such... child-bearing hips, let's say.

 

I've always been fascinated by these tiny microcosms. 

A patch of moss, a log or rock, flowers and sporangia, saplings dreaming of the canopy, there's a whole epic in a single footstep.

It brings about a perspective shift when you realize even the tiny flitting fuzzlings we so casually dismiss tower over this world.

Maybe it's how delicate everything looks. 

Or maybe it's the sheer variety of form we so easily pass by, all those alien-looking lichens and mosses which, at least on the surface, appear so unconcerned with the rest of the biosphere's struggles.

"an anarcho-syndicalist commune"

"War and slavery, exploitation
The common basis of a Western nation
Official version, a falsified story
The truth lies buried in a shroud of glory"

 

KMFDM - Glory

 

 

I've said it before, but as chauvinistic garbage goes, there's a particular comedic wealth of pratfalls in the "woke" glorification of The Correct sex/race/sexuality, in just how often the politically correct thugs manage to trip over their own propaganda. I've been trying an amateurish but promising low-fantasy, low-budget RPG called The Necromancer's Tale recently, which I'll address in full later. But among the various "man bad; woman good" moral lessons and other standard snowflakery, one of the various trendily ethnic extras assuring us of non-European superiority stands out for sheer concentrated irrationality.

I'm amused enough at seeing Senegal gradually become everyone's go-to victim nation reference after The Good Place. So nice of the show's writers to teach everyone that word. The laser-focus on "The French And The English" is standard fare for reflexive adolescent posturing in ignorance of other cultures' interplay in maritime empires. As is flat-out ignoring the centuries of existing and continuing Arabic/Muslim oppression of North/East-Africans and central Asia before West-European Christians caught up in the imperial game. But the real cherry on top of the turd comes of having a character self-righteously wail and rail against slavery while praising the glory (of all things) of the Ottoman Empire! Ya randomly lobbed yer lil' ol' pokeball and of all places it could've landed, that's who you pika-chose to name-drop in counterpoint to slaving!?

 

This is not just a matter of "everybody used to do it" oh nonono. It is difficult if not impossible to think of any slavers in all of history more vicious, enduring, conniving and prolific than the Turks! Not Chinese ports, not Viking raiders, not ancient Egypt, nobody. The Atlantic triangle trade provides recognizable talking points (plantations, racial profiling, the middle passage) and ratcheted up to a dedicated industry indeed eclipsing other examples in a couple short centuries in sheer numbers. Astounding and lamentable, yes. But the Turkish love of slavery pervaded not only their own society but the slave networks of surrounding lands as well. If it's more difficult to pin down, it's because it wasn't one vast enterprise, no one gigantic demographic like black plantation labor. The Ottomans just had their fingers in every possible form and channel of slave trafficking spanning from Northern Africa to Western Asia to Eastern Europe.

 

Its most famous feature would be the regular, institutionalized slave tribute of young boys they forced from among victims of their invasions. But then you've got the Red Sea / NE-African slave trade inherited from their Muslim precursors, the fact that their every military campaign doubled as a slave raid, the off-the-books slave raids and other local banditry they funded across Eastern Europe, bankrolling Berber slavers down across the Sahara and Tartar khanates raiding North-eastern Europe, especially Poland, being the biggest players in Mediterranean coastal slave raids alongside their rabid pets off their leashes the Barbary Corsairs (think back, who's Conrad's antagonist in The Corsair?) colluding and trafficking with the multiple (and prolific in their own right) Muslim slaver-states in India, or being the chief sex slave runners and routinely castrating the males they caught, and when the whole game finally started winding down, when Europeans finally forced them to step back, continuing in places like Circassia where they reached a heartwarming compromise of a final solution with their perennial enemy empire to the north: let the Russians handle the genociding while the Turks cozily enslaved the remainder. And yes, just like in, say, Twelve Years a Slave, this institution so pervaded daily life that the Sultan had to occasionally crack down on his own slavers poaching his own subjects to sell back to each other. (Nobody likes a re-gifter.)

 

And if Americans were late to outlaw it, the Turks did not do so for another sixty years afterward. This all and more went on not for three centuries, but for the six-and-change centuries of the empire's official existence, that's if you're not counting the region's pre-imperial view of European heathens and Eurasian native societies in general as rightful slaves of the faithful. It far preceded, it out-lasted, it omnidirectionally out-reached the European version. In fact, given its geographic position, the Ruritania wherein is set The Necromancer's Tale would have been fighting off or fleeing Turkish slave raids as a mundane fact of life for several centuries by 1700!

 

It takes a self-flagellating, brainwashing, politically correct (and dare I say it: slavish) modern education to so bullheadedly, boneheadedly ignore all historical proportion and deliberately glorify such millennial sadism as morally superior. Bloody peasant!

AoW4 Factions, 21

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 to build a giant's faction around brute force, with nasty ogres wading into fights and just hacking away at targets until they drop... and that's exactly what I got. Probably the least complicated faction I ever played. Like the primal halflings, being pretty tough they got a lot more use than others out of their primal buff stacks. They remind me of those cops from Idiocracy somehow. Ah, that's enough o' yer bullshit, sir.