Caterpillars of the Community

Speaking of darkness and sunrises. Once upon an early '25 autumn, the wolfman rose before crack of dawn and drove out to Nature, which in this case took the form of a field of tall grass just past the tree line. The air was cold, utterly quiet, still. Gradually I began spotting a lump on a plant here and there. And more. And more. Turns out many caterpillar species pick that time of year to fatten themselves up before hibernation.

The grassland was absolutely crawling with them, to the point I had to watch my step on the path not to muddy my shoes with their guts. The most obvious, by far, were banded wooly bears, a.k.a. Pyrrharctia isabella, a common sight in North America.

Always comical. 

Lacking experience with larvapidopterans, my website-derived identification may be off, but I think the solid orange ones are Virginian tiger moths. 

There was also a more sparsely-haired, graying variety which I'm having a devil of a time distinguishing due to its indistinctiveness.

It's not a dagger moth or a tussock moth, lacking the appropriate appendages. Closest I can get is the dogbane tiger moth Cycnia tenera (You may notice these all fall into the tiger moth subfamily.)

 

While the hairy ones were more obvious, there was also... whatever this is.

Honestly I could not identify it. Some type of cutworm? But the head and stripes don't match anything. Then I realized I may be looking in the wrong order. Sawflies are wasp relatives whose larvae look a lot like lepidopterans' -

elm sawfly larva from a different walk

- but the distinguishing characteristics (pseudopod number, gripping surface) are not all visible from my photo's angle. I expected the intermittent back markings to be more distinctive, but can't match those to anything.

 

But my favorite was the one that looks like it got an amateur haircut from an eight-year-old.

They were quite numerous, second only to the banded wooly bears. 

And they're further proof that nature has a bad, warty sense of humor.

Apparently it's a salt marsh moth. I just call it ugly. You ugleh!

 

I was able to photograph these in a span of ten meters, sitting still before the dawn chill abated, having arrived just before the sun broke over the treetops to warm them. The little patch of prairie, so silent I could hear nothing but my own breath and footsteps, gave way to a slight rustle of a breeze as temperature gradients shifted. A few birds gave a few tentative chirps over the next minutes. Gradually, noise pollution grew more like a slight pressure than discernible sound. A million tiny bodies were beginning to shift among the grass all about me. Then, hesitantly, after a few more minutes of sun, the humming, buzzing, chittering and cricketing of a busy field amped up to its familiar warm season volume, accompanied by more heartfelt birdsong.

 

Ahh.

 

Life.

Hello Darkness, My Old Trope

"I've come to stumble, curse and grope

Because designers, features lacking

Made a virtue of blind clicking"

- Paul Simon 

 

In the interest of clearing a bit more of my backlog of ten-bucks-or-less indie games, I decided to dive into a strategy title with an intriguing Hollow Earth premise, Anoxia Station... and immediately belly-flopped into the shallow end.

I've restarted the tutorial twice now, not least for being unable to discern which tiles I'm clicking half the time. I will concede a chthonic aesthetic benefits from a dose of claustrophobic encroaching gloom, and as you advance you do uncover some light sources - lava, glowing crystals, the usual fantasy cave stuff and stuffings. Still, it seems especially counterproductive to play up this angle in the first mission which serves, just to reiterate, as a tutorial where the player should be learning what everything looks like and how to navigate the screen, not guessing at 3D models and terrain under shadows and static.

 

My first truly conscious "enough is enough" moment of exasperation with the abuse of low light conditions came back when Doom 3 launched twenty years ago. I had a reasonably modern vid card and wanted to get in on the latest polygon-counting craze for once, like the cool kids do. The fact I paid full release price yet never even bothered finishing it probably demonstrates how badly that impulse backfired, and the disappointment became my mental reference for avoiding flavors of the month from that point on. For a game making as much noise as possible about its fancy new graphics, Doom 3 was inordinately desperate to also hide those visuals in near pitch darkness. Probably because the light of scrutiny quickly revealed it as a by-the-numbers, linear, generic shooter the likes of which had cluttered the market ever since Doom 2 showed 'em how it's done. The predictable yet infinitely redundant jump scares didn't help.

 

And it's not like it was a new problem by 2004 "crank up the gamma" being the first piece of advice you'd get from any other player before booting Diablo a decade prior.

 

Sure, it's not always a cynical cop-out. We are a diurnal species after all, and readily acknowledge darkness as the universal implied threat of predation. Always gives our monkey spines a little frisson. So a horror series like Amnesia is well served by a struggle to light one's way as game mechanic. But even they can take it too far, like forcing you again and again to run around blindly into forks and dead ends during chase sequences. Especially during Rebirth.

Even when it doesn't actively interfere with gameplay, this gimmick can still annoy. When discussing No Man's Sky I thought it absurd that my space-age space-ship lacked space for a simple magnetic compass. Added after release, like most of that game. In Cyberpunk 2077, I find myself asking instead: why doesn't V have a damn flashlight?

I've got electrical wiring up the wazoo (that particular mod was on sale for some reason) and I'm apparently an infinite-watt-hour walking power station. Half my implants glow even if they're internal. My cyber-eyes can do everything but shoot Superman lasers, but they can't perform the function night vision goggles do now? Couldn't I stick a light bulb in my navel or somesuch? Do I need to dig up a smartphone-flashlight from the dark ages to light my way in the dark? And sure, sure, I'll give CD Projekt credit for not abusing it constantly like Frictional. Only a handful of rooms in a handful of quests remind me of the lack, and it's played for due effect. But the incongruity of it is still ridiculous.

 

There can be some active utility in it, of course. I mentioned Fallout NV paired dim lighting with a largely monochrome aesthetic to make trap-finding a part of first-person roleplaying, but even they overdid it. More often than not, dark games are thrilling at first but tend to overemphasize it to the point of gratuitous punishment, or even when playing it for realism push it into unrealistic situations.

 

Reliable exceptions to that caveat tend to feature deep, deep darkness as a function not of level design but of resource management and the day-night cycle. See Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Miasmata. Paired with survival mechanics and a need to travel it encourages the player to make resource-conscious use of night-time while still leaving the option to wait for dawn if he gets too lost. Compare that to a dark level in most games where trial and error (and gratuitous reloads) is the only option. It turns a randomized failure condition into an economic decision, valuating the player's input instead of limiting it.

It's peh-DAHNT, not PEE-dent.

The Iron Heel

I've been valiantly withstanding a two-fisted dose of apocalyptic or dystopian fiction recently, which got me thinking of different approaches to the issue. On one hand, my Fallout: New Vegas campaign continues to entertain.

Ghouls bite. Gentlemen vaporize.

As my unmatched might makes all foes tremble (I don't mean to brag, but I do carry both machete and muh shotty) I've been increasingly venturing among the map's more treacherous culverts where dangers are as often as not environmental instead of interpersonal. Visions of social collapse in the late 20th century clustered around various anxieties that the technological genie which had so rapidly transformed the world could just as easily turn on it. Rockets, nukes, robots, chemicals, or maybe just cars, post-apocalyptic works lead with conveniently inhuman symbols of wrongness. As do more modern fare from among the closely related dystopian genre, like Equilibrium or Snowpiercer. But though that tendency crept in from the start with, say, Metropolis, the great works of mid-century dystopian fiction (1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World) though they present a great many technological marvels, consistently and mercilessly refocus on human misuse of those marvels, on human frailty and viciousness.

 

So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that looking even further back to the century's onset, we find an even deeper focus on dystopia as an inherently social decline. I'd of course heard of Jack London's 1908 The Iron Heel as his famous socialist tract (unless you count The Sea Wolf where the political message is more symbolic) but did not bother with it until now because it doesn't come very highly recommended as a work of either literature or futurism. Though certainly noteworthy in historical context for inspiring the next couple generations, that latter, more refined output rightly eclipsed it.

 

Its main problem is basically trying to do too much at once. It is, for instance, peppered with real-world references illustrating London's grounding in the evidence of human nature, but the footnotes (some a page in length) though fascinating case studies in ruling class sadism, become too pedantic. It's unclear how much of the narrative was retrofitted to the author's need to list real-world outrages of 19th-century labor disputes, but it's more than enough to interfere with the plot instead of supporting it. His attempt to build Ernest Everhard (how that's for a manly name?) into a larger-than-life higher man like Wolf Larsen (still cooler) doesn't transfer well from a maritime frontier setting to office politics and political offices. He cycles too quickly through minor characters for their otherwise well-conceived personalities to pay off for the reader's attention investment.

 

As an apocalyptic procedural, it's hampered by its journal-style limited viewpoint conflicting with the need to describe society-wide changes. Compare to It Can't Happen Here's quite similar tale of a fascist/corporatist takeover of the United States, only far better fleshed out by adding minor viewpoints. Of course, the latter author did benefit from a couple decades' worth of incipient disillusionment with Socialist ideology brought about by evidence of Communist repression. London viewed class conflict entirely through socialist doctrine as rich oppressing poor, while Sinclair, with the benefit of thirty years' added evidence, could admit the rabble "enjoy being bullied" by their lauded strongman dictator.

 

As futurism, the book blows hot and cold. It harps too much on socialism's edenic promises of a "scientifically" inevitable transition from capitalism to proletarian rule. But it shows stunning foresight of Cold War espionage, extrapolated from labor dispute agents provocateur. He foresees quite astutely a mass campaign to consolidate farming by forcing bankruptcy which indeed seem to have come to pass in following decades. But again he fails to predict the role of religious revivals in indoctrinating the masses into worship of wealth as divine favor, placing a conscience-stricken priest as friend of the poor as a major character. He utterly fails to address the coming impact of mass media. Worst, while the climactic conflict in most such works reflects back upon the central theme (be it tech or ray-dee-ay-shun! or class or brainwashing, what-have-you) The Iron Heel's last third or so fizzles into a generic fog of war which could have described most any armed clash and fails to further the narrative.

 

Yet still, London did retain one advantage over other writers, his habitual keen awareness of instinctive power struggle, especially during an easily overlooked point midway through. He sends his hero to speak truth, not to power necessarily but to the middle class refusing to align itself with collectivist ideology, comparing the petit-bourgeois wailing against encroaching trusts to Luddites.

 

"Here are you, a century and a half later, trying to break machines. By your own confession the trust machines do the work more efficiently and more cheaply than you can. That is why you cannot compete with them. And yet you would break those machines. You are even more stupid than the stupid workmen of England. And while you maunder about restoring competition, the trusts go on destroying you.
[...]
You, sir, are a poor gamester. When you squeezed out the three small groceries here in Berkeley by virtue of your superior combination, you swelled out your chest, talked about efficiency and enterprise, and sent your wife to Europe on the profits you had gained by eating up the three small groceries. It is dog eat dog, and you ate them up. But, on the other hand, you are being eaten up in turn by the bigger dogs, wherefore you squeal.
[...]
You don't say that you like to squeeze profits out of others, and that you are making all the row because others are squeezing your profits out of you. No, you are too cunning for that. You say something else. You make small-capitalist political speeches [...] 'Our original principles are all right,' 'What this country requires is a return to fundamental American methods — free opportunity for all,' 'The spirit of liberty in which this nation was born,' 'Let us return to the principles of our forefathers.' When he says 'free opportunity for all,' he means free opportunity to squeeze profits, which freedom of opportunity is now denied him by the great trusts. And the absurd thing about it is that you have repeated these phrases so often that you believe them. You want opportunity to plunder your fellow-men in your own small way, but you hypnotize yourselves into thinking you want freedom. You are piggish and acquisitive, but the magic of your phrases leads you to believe that you are patriotic. Your desire for profits, which is sheer selfishness, you metamorphose into altruistic solicitude for suffering humanity."

 

Yikes!

Gut-punch.

 

There's no warning trefoil for that. It's a perfectly camouflaged Terminator. There's no system in place to alert you the man chanting the same slogans as you at the rally in fact protests only the system's power to prevent him from enslaving you himself. There's no mass-entertainment genre devoted to cranking out summer blockbusters about it.

AoW4 Factions, 24

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:

________________________________________________________________________________

Another faction roleplaying against the usual stigma around death and necromancy.

I didn't check the fine print when selecting a Righteous Oathsworn faction (do-gooders) with shadow magic (which tends toward evil) but Cult of Personality's hero bonus made for cheaper early questing and the Silver-Tongued trait, though again picked haplessly, makes up the economic difference in trading with neutral towns, with Faithful Whispers' reputation gain bonus forming the lynchpin for my greater strategy. On the tactical level, at first this seemed an unworkable combo, but in between failed attempts just as I started playing it, Triumph introduced an actual shadow/order research option. The bottom-tier, melee-range zombies that shadow magic summons normally tend to be pretty useless in themselves, better at eating halberds or as living nukes. Here though, not only did order heal/buff spells turn them into a passable front line, but monkeys' agility (allowing them to pass through friendly units) prevented the swarm from tripping over itself. I ended up needing far fewer high-tier units because I could throw mid-tier units into fights to die valiantly for my noble cause, then zom-zerg my enemies to death with tier 2 spellcasters bringing up the rear. Highly satisfying.

Stock Character Paradise

"Nichts bleibt"

Eisbrecher - Supermodel

 

Barring a pile-up at the airport, this should go up a couple hours before I arrive at my apartment. I've been visiting family over the past month, and though I'd arranged in advance for a backlog of puns and run-on sentences to post during my absence (many thanks also to Secretary of Flexing Hegseth's primitive antics for an easy political segue) I at one point realized I'd be too wiped to write anything after my flight, so let's see... what media have I been consuming during my trip? Let's start with Lynn, the abstract puzzle game inexplicably featuring a strong female protagonist.

gag me with a spoon

Actually it's at least two of them so far, and I'm only a third of the way in. It reminds me of one reason I generally haven't bothered with platformers or puzzlers or tower defenses these past couple decades. Abstraction doesn't sell well, so they pad out their features with pap and sap and cookie-cutter moralism. If I roll my eyes at an RPG telling me I saved the world and won the princess' eternal love (some terms and restrictions may apply) by knocking a pixelated goblin over the head, the same emotional manipulation on behalf of sliding brackets makes me want to gouge them out altogether.

 

As a rule such additions prompt a double double-take. First off, why was the emotive fluff included at all? Second, if you're gonna do it, why must it be the same idiotically trite and repetitive nonsense every time? The little girl is sugar and spice and everything nice, the magic spirit saves and falls in wuv with a wounded manly type, toss in some goblins or something and maybe an evil wizard or cute animal companion? Sure, whatever, pile it on. Come on, even by eight years old most of us were ready for other options.

 

Or at least you'd think so. But what audience age bracket is Death In Paradise targeting? I caught a couple of episodes of it years ago and didn't think much of the old beach cops routine, nor am I much of a fan of cozy murder mysteries. A longer look these past weeks brought my attention to the show's fairly snappy directing, a formula distilled to on-cue entrances and exits, an "I've gathered you all here" ending summation every episode, exactly one-point-five emotions per character per scene, and the occasional pratfall comic relief moment. If a bot's not already copy-pasting these scripts, they're wasting money.

 

Characters naturally follow. The smart guy has to be a diffident, stammering stumblebum solving cases by what appear to be flashes of divine inspiration rather than self-driven ratiocination. Low-ranking males are comic relief failing at life in a new way every episode and tripping over their own shoelaces in scene after scene so that the nearest female may prove herself smarter, faster and superior in every way. The only dignified male is the blatantly post-sexual old fossil of a daddy-figure existing to pat girlies on the head and verbally bitchslap their tribe's other males to put them in their place. Female suspects are as a rule red herrings stepping aside for a guiltier male by the parlor confession scene. If culpable in some way, females must be provided with a greater noble purpose under whose umbrella to operate. She was saving her family. It was self-defense. She was emotionally distraught. She just wuvs too much. Or her antagonist was a beast, was a loser, was a bad businessman losing the family fortune, was guilty of <something sexual> etc. A woman's conflict against a man is an opportunity to ladle negative qualities onto him until we come out convinced any man in fact deserves whatever's coming to him, more time is devoted to her justification for murder, and she herself struts offstage to the soft twanging of emotive strings establishing her moral superiority.

 

In the one instance I've seen so far where women are guilty of killing an innocent man, it's downplayed as an accident. The victim himself is minimized, never speaking a single line or even appearing as a character to prevent us from sympathizing with him - though at least for once he's not demonized to make us believe he deserved it. The emphasis is placed on the killers' emotional vulnerability to exculpate them in the audience's eyes. We're immediately assured of one woman's morally upright contrition, and the other did it all for love, and the reveal quickly transitions into a comic relief ending scene where another woman is praised for having helped a hapless man satisfy his fiancee's demands, to reaffirm the status quo of man bad; woman good. 

 

If this tedious old routine is sounding familiar, don't credit the BBC with it. It's the same exact "man bad; woman good" formula you've been seeing in every Hollywood flick the past fifteen years (and in most of them before that) and I've been pointing it out in games and comics and really... everything. Death in Paradise itself is highly successful. You can tell when they budget extra commercials rivaling the show's own runtime. Not just one but two spin-offs already. Fifteen seasons and counting. Supposedly it's boasted five detectives in sequence over that time, and given the writing's strict worship of formula, I feel confident each and every one will prove the same exact diffident nebbish wringing his hands apologetically whenever scripted in a scene opposite a woman. And there are a thousand more series just like it in the medium of television alone.

 

I've been commenting on this topic for over a decade now, and it's still hard for even me to wrap my head around how thoroughly feminism, that is to say misandry, permeates every creative medium, every public statement and classroom and ad break. No matter if you tell yourself your own country lacks a feminist lobby as visible as in the States, you have been absorbing their abuse from the cradle, whether from Hollywood, the BBC, every "news" outlet, what-have-you. It's the default. It's safe and homey. It's a "cozy" mystery.

 

It's murder. You have to dive into the most oppressive hellholes on the planet like Muslim dictatorships or North Korea to find comparable brainwashing campaigns so unchallenged as to outreach even the universal fairytale conventions about generic toothy, googly-eyed goblins jumping out of the walls at a plucky heroine. Because if I'm being honest, even Lynn's chibified wonderland cannot be called over-done or gratuitous compared to yet another and another scene of a male character stammering ineffectively while a woman cuts him down to size by virtue of her ovarian supremacy.

 

And that's where this post would end... if I hadn't also caught one episode where a daughter is revealed as having murdered her mother. No men involved. Sure, it's not directly bucking the default man bad / woman good juxtaposition, just sidestepping it, but four years ago when it aired I would not have bet on a TV show, especially a successful one, passing up the chance to pivot to a last-minute reveal of a filthy, vicious, malevolent male at the root of all evil. Still wouldn't bet on it.

 

But it's something, damnit. Another tiny crack in the facade.

  

I can't help noting that minor heresy against feminist dogma occurred in the only episode I've seen eschewing the standard mystery boilerplate as well, dodging red herrings or a final summation. Maybe they were just in a hurry? Or maybe the feminist litany of vituperation against and degradation of men is thus revealing its proper place among the primitive, trite, infantile mass-media formulae for the exploitation and manipulation of the ignorant masses, a fairytale for the simpleminded, a pile of stock gimmicks stapled onto any and every work regardless of relevance, like goblins jumping out of the walls.

I've never lived anywhere I could see dark-eyed juncos year-round.

They do overwinter at my current location though. 

Somehow they always cheer me up a bit.

Maybe it's the smaller family groups, or the more calm and measured way they scour the ground for food. Or maybe it's how easily they lose themselves in the ashen and sober, crisped and sere winter landscape. Little wisps of dust and fog tumbling about the rest.