Le Mot Justified Alignment

"An honest propagandist for any Cause, that is, one who honestly studies and figures out the most effective way of putting over his Message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary folks--it just confuses them--to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people. And one seemingly small but almighty important point he learns, if he does much speechifying, is that you can win over folks to your point of view much better in the evening, when they are tired out from work and not so likely to resist you, than at any other time of day."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here (note, that's his villain speaking)

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Hmm, where shall we start tonight's peripatetic prose on conning? Maybe with the prosaic conman-in-chief? Various Democrat-aligned American comedians have been pulling material in spades from Trump's decline into senility, but as usual, chasing momentary profit masks the more salient, wider point. This is not a 2026 issue. He was a laughing stock even in the '90s. Old or young, Donnie is, was, has always been an incoherent babbling buffoon. Even while he retained "the gift of gab" said gab contained zero substance. At his utmost cogent, he might verbalize a platitude or truism. In any decade, any rational mind listening to a couple of sentences of his verbal diarrhea could spot in him an overeducated moron, a spoiled rich brat never called out on his mistakes, a transparently obfuscating blowhard with a third-grade vocabulary and a three-year-old's grasp of causality. No animal which communicates in that chimpanzee swagger will ever be anything more than a troglodyte. But for that to matter you'd need a public capable of distinguishing the loftiest prose from chimp grunts, and it's not as though Obama's vapid "hope and change" mantra held more meaning than "make rabblerousing great again."

 

On a completely unrelated topic, it was trendy from the late '90s to the mid 2010s to proclaim that women speak twice or three times more than men, with a knowing wink intimating this merely confirms the mental inferiority of men as dumb animals incapable of verbalizing* and presumably communicating in nothing but primitive grunts like Tim the Tool Man. Studies both back then and last year have tended to deflate that otherwise unproven assumption, with, yes, okay, women speaking consistently more, but not by much. Ten percent? Twenty at most? So now if you look up the issue you run across feminist complaints that the trope of women verbalizing more was nothing but patriarchal propaganda to put down women as chatty... even though it was the feminists and daytime talk shows of 20y.a. who popularized it as superior communication. Their revisionism is likely prompted by another realization from the intervening years which appears to have been expunged from search engines in the interest of women's dignity: that their excess speech was not, in fact, communicating anything. It comes from an increase in mundane chatter, the hi-how-are-you-hi-I-am-fine-how-are-you-also-fine-great-bye-bye droning background radiation of social life. Women just feel a need to "touch base" more. Give a guy <A TOPIC> and he'll talk your ear off too.** But for a couple of decades nobody thought to question whether the speech in question was meaningful or not. Meaning is extraneous.

 

So. This is a post about chatbots.

 

I'm seeing more and more exasperated nerds and nerdettes trying to point out that even if a bot can instantly write you a ten-page commentary on any topic, that in no way implies it's logically constructing a coherent analysis. Well, sure, thinks I, what else is new? LLMs are cut-and-paste machines, working at stunningly finer pixel-scale grain than any such effort in history, but by necessity still just outputting a probabilistic extension of a sequence reiterated in billions of extant examples. Ask a bot's opinion on a movie and it will output strings of "cinematography" and "scintillating" and "emotive" and anything else you're accustomed to hear out of a critic's mouth, precisely because you, the asker, are accustomed to hearing them. Ask it to make a movie and it will paste predicted figures onto a standardized backdrop and animate them in accordance with the maximum likelihood of such arrangements. At no point is actual creation involved. At no point does the output reflect reality any more faithfully than the topic's match to existing content. The more a culture interacts via such automated output, the more it will, by necessity, both contract toward the lowest-common-denominator and lose its grounding.

 

But if you take issue with this, be intellectually honest enough to admit the problem is not the supply. It's the demand. The "reality" TV-watching public is too stupid to detect the gradual degradation of communication and cultural capital.

Not uneducated.

Not constrained. 

Not victims of circumstance.

Stupid.

Humanity appears to have achieved Orwell's versificator, a useful tool for placating the proles, the subhuman cattle comprising the overwhelming bulk of the species. Gabbing. Limitless, prompt and bountiful gabbing. Is that a bad thing? Yes, but not for any of the humanitarian reasons you'd like to boast as moral high ground. The people don't want your help. They want the platitudes. They'll never know the difference. They will likely live happier lives for it. So why is the versificator bad? And it is. Disastrous.

 

But admit to yourself where exactly your anger should be directed.

 

 

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* Seriously though, 1800 pages, do I look like I have trouble verbalizing my thoughts?

** I'm pretty sure that if you look closer at men's speech, you'll find the prosocial platitudes replaced with slogans, chants and catchphrases. Sorry, bros, but "wazzaaaaaap" is still very much not a word. All of this is, by-the-by, not getting into the issue of gossip, of the invasive personal/interpersonal nature of women's chatter, which I'm guessing is where the difference and the mis-perception of talking "more" actually lies.

Fullmetal Passerine

No hawk's getting through THAT!

Broodhollow

"I never heard of a sawmill with a night shift. Explain that to me!"

 

The Sinking City's prohibition-era setting reminded me of one of the endless dead comics littering teh interwebz - but one of the few I really wish would have continued. Kris Straub seemed reasonably famous among the cartoonin' crowd in the 2000s for his space comedy Starslip, but I never warmed up to it. Cheesy romantic over-arching premise with heavily Futurama-derived main characters (Zapp, Bender, Zoidberg) but too one-dimensional and straining at flimsy plots even by parody standards. Through the 2010s however he ran Broodhollow, a far more creative and coherent story which died mid-rising-action after two chapters and 249 pages.

 

A jittery Roaring '20s encyclopedia salesman inherits a haunted antiques shop. He is joined by a plucky ginger love interest, a giant miniature (space?) animal companion and a hero's mentor spouting vaguely off-brand Freudianisms. Comedy ensues, chiefly from the quaintness of the titular town in which the shop is located: its quaint period jargon, its quaint speakeasy serving fake liquor, quaint non-stop string of town holidays, quaint giant mutant flying swarms and skeletons in various closets...

 

As an (aborted) example of storytelling, Broodhollow demonstrates several points easily forgotten these days.

First, that you need not take a setting too seriously to render it believably and tie it into your story's theme. It's easier to place conflicts of tradition and self-reliance, belief and truth-seeking at the onset of 20th-century modernism. (It's also easier to believe so quaint a town might stay off the radar before the electronic era, but that's another conversation.) Its more farcical elements retain proportion and relevance to the characters' plight and thus never feel like "lolrandom" filler.

Relevant to the medium, while a lot of cartoonists have been rushing to incorporate fancier (quasi-automated) detail, shading, and so forth, Broodhollow's level of visual competence just above the early 20th-century newspaper comics it apes allows it plenty of room for goofy cartoonishness ramping toward splashes of higher detail for dramatic scenes.

Also, competent female characters can be portrayed without the need to defeat men for validation at every turn. Aside from the love interest's own efforts, a major threat in the plot is subverted by a not only elegant but quintessentially feminine solution, without resorting to out-doing the menfolk.

On a more philosophical point, it portrays the terror of madness not as violence or perversion but as blankness, erasure, Hollowing, the grotesquery inherent in mental influence as implicit destruction of the individual.

 

But the biggest success of those 240-odd pages comes by portraying horror not only by hauntings and huntings, but in their impact on the mundane. Horror invades the characters' lives, twisting or effacing universal habits and sentiment, infecting with wrongness. The quote above comes late in the story, and hits particularly hard for reminding the reader (who's likely been mentally chasing flashier manifestations) how easily he has brushed aside the low-key pervasiveness of evil influence in Innsmou- sorry, I mean Broodhollow.

 

All in all, denser than it appears and worthier of attention than much longer comics.

AoW4 Factions, 9

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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Wolves! Thank you, finally, they put some damn wolves in the game! I was also surprised to find a text box in the last faction creation window, so these guys are the first to receive a description right from the start. I wasn't ready to get back into character bio blurbs though, so I ended up over-playing the repetitive verbal reinforcement. I also merely rehashed my old City of Villains dominator's bio, but 'yknow what? That's ok. That is oh-kay. I also got into a flexibility kick for a few factions around this time, so their affinity's all over the place. Not quite as satisfying from a roleplaying perspective. Effective though, even if it's not easy scrounging enough Imperium to make it worthwhile.

The Sinking City

Asbestoscape - And So the Story Goes

(you're not getting a Metallica song suggestion unless your sequel turns out much better) 

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Look out, Old Gods, I've got a Tommy gun! And springs!

I thought I'd polish off a quick adventure game in between longer titles, but somehow mixed up The Sinking City with... maybe The Forgotten City? Dagon? Apocalypsis? Scorn? my backlog's getting unmanageable. In any case a first glance at the FPS interface and expansive map revealed this is not the shoestring-budget old-timey point-and-click adventure I had expected. Which is both good and bad, as I discovered when setting out to explore the 3D wonderland a bit before the tutorial quest and, this being me we're talking about, managed to get myself stuck on terrain and die within the first couple of minutes.

Lousy Lake Lachrymose Leeches!

But alright, I told myself, I could stand for a bit of Lovecraftian lurking fear, a creeping immersion into vague hints and portents of gruesome, dehumanizing terrors metastasizing indistinctly beyond the bounds of mundane human experie - WHOA!

The honorable Bob Throg, esq. (probably?)

I'm sorry, I can't hear a word you're saying past that face. My but we're wavin' our Jermyns out in public pretty shamelessly, aren't we? Soooo... not so much with the gradual, creeping, indistinct lurking and vague portending, I guess? That, and there's fish-people and tattooed shirtless cultists walking around town openly and nobody bats an eyelash at bloodthirsty inhuman monstrosities. Thus I replaced genre whiplash with a first impression that these Lovers of the Craft possess all the subtlety of their idol without his talent for flowery escalation, and decided to give the first few quests a chance just so I could write off my old purchase as a lost cause and move on to some better game.

 

Instead, I gotta say, it eventually drew me in.

 

Quite a few stylistic details irked me, especially at first. I've always assumed Innsmouth should be pronounced closer to Inns-muth not -mouth as in chewing. One mob's a blatantly 'roided-out Half-Life headcrab. The writing is decidedly prosaic compared to its infamously purple inspiration. Not bad or jarring, but compared to what The Secret World's writers had accomplished with the same material eight years prior, Sinking's still amateur hour. The shallow and blunt presentation just reinforces my view that everyone really needs to give Lovecraft a rest.

 

Most all its flaws, though, stem from one fundamental design decision. Like We Happy Few and a string of other adventure/RPGs from the 2010s (or more recently the object lesson of Bloodlines 2) there was little reason for this to be an open-world FPS Skyrim clone, or then pile on with MMO-inspired graveyard runs and designated resource grinding zones. That's what the kids these days like, right?

 

The aforementioned rushed suspense is partly mandated by FPS mechanics, but one terrible design choice does not vindicate the other. Combat is easily the worst part of the game, with bad or nonexistent collision and hit confirmation, hitscan abuse, clumsy spawning or pathing. And they got very little variety out of it with only two boss fights, one easily skippable and the other toward the end of the Fathers and Sons chapter illustrating the system's every weakness. You get thrown into it with no chance to scout first. The chamber is gigantic and there's zero indication of what you're supposed to do. No hit confirmation on the boss so it looks invincible. Per genre conventions praying cultists normally have to be exterminated in such fights in order to render a boss vulnerable or stop add spawns but are here irrelevant. There's no indication where the biggest source of damage is coming from unless you're staring at your feet at exactly the correct moment. Outside that, though the four basic mob types and their alternate variants (invisibility, self-resurrection) are interesting at first, their random lurching movements fail to evoke their intended eeriness and simply become infuriating by repetition.

 

The setting of Oakmont itself serves as the main attraction and is indeed a lovely burg. It's got old preindustrial manor houses, dingy apartment stacks, even dingier shoreline wooden shacks. But then it duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates its available inspiration. Huge place for a no-name developer's sophomore effort. Thus it predictably sapped the team's capabilities, forcing them to copy-paste decor ("Men's finest clothing" and "Whately's household chemistry" obviously do a rollicking business with scores of storefronts near you) and the period-appropriate art assets jumble together. The nominal existence of a technology during a particular decade in no way assured widespread availability. (How many rail guns do you own?) In the 1920s, even with internal combustion use exploding and even in this the land of Our Ford and that patent thief Edison, relatively few people had electric lighting or telephones and even fewer cars (relying more on trains and trolleys) especially in a no-name New England port town.

What, no horse wagons for hicks from the surrounding countryside? No bikes? Nobody row-row-rowed a boat in the 1920s? Well, it would've required extra models and animations, but as a result the setting looks a couple decades removed. All the worse as this repetitiveness applies to some quest locations including the "secret" false walls you're supposed to find in the same exact spot every single time.

 

The FPS nonsense interferes with the game's more important detective mechanics as well. Monsters spawn in (and around) in the stupidest possible way, simply teleporting in from the floor, and can do so while your interface is momentarily locked by clicking to examine a clue. And as if everyone weren't incongruously blase about the extradimensional creeps, this clashes with basic walking about town. Cops shooting you if you pull a gun on people out in the street? Sure, makes sense. Unless you were trying to shoot a monster, which they completely ignore to start shooting at you instead of the gibbering abomination from beyond time and space.

 

But that detective angle, along with the cases you uncover, ends up being Sinking City's saving grace. When not spinning its wheels or tripping over itself, it provides a refreshing balance of eyeing supernatural clues in GhostVision!(tm)

Breadcrumb trails have never looked less edible.

- complete with a minigame placing events in (usually fairly obvious) order -

- and perfectly mundane clue-gathering:

Instead of the usual automatic HUD markers just yanking you in every direction, you mark your own map based on street directions, themselves often requiring a look-up in various local registries like newspaper articles. While, again, they erred on the side of caution by unsubtle quest prompts ensuring clues would be more intelligible than poetic, it's a solid foundation for a sequel expanding on this sort of writing/environment integration I myself had coincidentally called for in the year preceding the game's release. 

Alternate completion options may not affect your character's progression, but they're well-conceived as roleplaying quandaries. What more do you want? Colorful bit players, a few historical references, some hard quest decisions I'll split into a separate post, a bit of contextualized comic relief:

Though not a masterpiece, so much of The Sinking City is immersive, engaging, amusing, or otherwise admirable, yet at every turn hobbled by "hours played" padding and over-reach for twitch-gamer mass appeal, by farming random containers for superfluous randomized crafting loot, scanning hundreds of random blank walls with GhostVision, doing corpse runs and most of all alternately rushing and stalling plot development in the interest of getting players into the supposedly more exciting FPS side of things fast and often. Instead of easing in with a bit of sightseeing and vague hints, from the very start you're placing 21 case files by hand on the map (much of it DLC content) throwing you into monster fights. Come on people, pace is not a four-lett... pacing is not a four-letter word!

 

If you think The Whisperer in Darkness should've started with "here's a picture of a Mi-Go, go shoot it" you are missing the damn point!

What a Show, Here We Go

"And where do we feature?"

"Just listen to teacher."

 

The Lion King (Be Prepared)

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"Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent."

- from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

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"Your attitude is simply a hold-over of your religious training. That you have a DUTY toward the dull human race--which probably enjoys being bullied by Windrip and getting bread and circuses-- except for the bread!"

"Of course it's religious, a revolutionary loyalty! Why not?  It's one of the few real religious feelings.  A rational, unsentimental Stalin is still kind of a priest.  No wonder most preachers hate the Reds and preach against 'em!  They're jealous of their religious power."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here 

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"In the horizon of the infinite.
- We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us -- indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom -- and there is no longer any "land.""

 

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science #124

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Where to start? I guess we can ease into this with a game anecdote. It was only recently while re-skimming something I'd said about Rogue Trader "I started as a preacher for lack of bookish origins" that I realized that's probably more true than I'd like it to be, not just in a galaxy far, far away but to mine own self. If living in ye olden days, deprived of other fonts of learning, I probably would've joined a monastery just for the books - then, let's be realistic, gotten myself burned at the stake a couple years later as a heretic. While it maintained its Dark Age stranglehold on intellectual pursuit, Christianity also maintained a de facto prison for intellectual pursuers.

 

Another recent RPG campaign brought my attention to a phrase I had not even heard before: the so-called Black Legend of defamation against the Spanish crown at its peak of global influence. Amusing because it doesn't seem in question that Spaniards were committing atrocities, but apologists would like to point out other-people-did-bad-things-too! - or at most that the bad things were done in a slightly different location or a year or two earlier. Of course it only takes a little perspective to figure a secondary motivation behind this umbrage, beyond Spanish honor, in religious apologism, as imperialist Spain is nearly synonymous with Catholicism. It goes hand-in-hand with those heavily funded Vatican biopics Hollywood has been cranking out the past decade or so, or another trend sneaking its way through various websites of supposedly unaffiliated commentators "spontaneously"arguing the Dark Ages did not quite destroy all knowledge or that later "not all inquisitors" (#NotAllInquisitors) were raving torturers and witch-hunters. Right, sure.

 

While we're at it, let's remember a term which truly has been misrepresented over the centuries: decimation. In modern popular parlance understood to mean "completely wiped out" its original meaning was much milder, the execution of every tenth soldier of a military unit guilty of some form or another of treason, to make the other nine soldiers fall back in line. It never seems to have worked very well within a military unit whose loyalty to each other can easily be wrecked by such internal punishment, but the same psychological torture can serve much better for an outside force deliberately attempting to break the loyalty of families, villages or looser social associations and turn them against each other to make them more susceptible to brainwashing.

 

If a true believer insists "most" inquisitors were merely sent out to "teach" the ignorant masses official doctrine, take it with a fistful of salt rubbed into your wounds. Yes, half or even 9/10 inquisitors may have busied themselves just spewing chapter and verse, yet behind their every word you would see nothing but the afterimage of your parents, their limbs torn and crushed by the tenth inquisitor's torture implements, their minds utterly shattered, choking as they struggled to beg for mercy before finally expiring.

 

Ohh, yeah. You'll listen to teacher.

 

Speaking of teaching, more than a decade ago, having gone back for a university degree, I found myself listening to some classroom chatter about a particular professor's stupid views on an easily-verified and politically combustible fact. Was it global warming, vaccines, animal rights, trickle-down economics? I forget. Something outside his official specialty at any rate, so he was not speaking ex cathedra on the touchy topic. But I do remember a student indignantly exclaiming "can't we get him fired or something?" It gave me an eerie feeling I only later identified with the rise in politically correct insanity in following years. My side wasn't supposed to talk like this. It was the other guys that wrote up blacklists against political subversives. It was those church ladies, not on campus but out in churches, doing church things, they were the busybodies hounding deviants just for shits and giggles.

Right?

...r-right?

Well, "cancel culture" and the wider wokeysition has in the interval amply demonstrated humans' propensity to crusade on any nonsense. And given how many have been fired and blacklisted based on absolutist propositions like the moral supremacy of women or transsexuals, I'm unwilling to pretend this more modern McCarthyism poses any less threat than the version from seventy years ago. When you start job-firing on pretense, how far could the firing squads be? Academics have not fought back against postmodern insanity. Did it even take a tenth of their number fired to ensure the rest bent knee? I suppose the real question of recovery hinges on whether academia has been destroyed or merely decimated, and the cowards who adopted gender Lysenkoism or the false equivalences of 'multiple intelligences' or cultural relativism might find their spines once some of the pressure to conform eases off.

 

Or maybe the pressure's just switching directions. I'm seeing entirely too many TV comedians pretending they love Lent and are looking forward to the sadomasochistic spectacle of Easter. I viewed a presentation recently by a scientist who at the end thanked God among her peers and funders. Bill Maher hasn't dared so much as squeak against religion for years. Sam Harris is willing to make common cause with the religious fanatics in Israel. So there's a distinction everyone has apparently decided to forget between tolerating isolated personal derangement in individuals, and the far more destructive kow-towing to pervasive superstition to placate the mob.

 

Can atheists hold irrational views? Oh, hell yes. I refer you to Portlandia. Better yet I refer you to a series of video lectures put out by the James Randi Educational Foundation on various pseudoscience and quackery posing as official medical research. The most charismatic speaker she ain't, but do note she can rattle off five hours of (quite entertaining in themselves) references to insanity like homeopathy or energy healing, not even venturing outside the field of medicine, yet still barely scratch the surface.*

 

The relevant distinction was never between theist and atheist, but between reason and unreason, and it is very much a matter of degrees. A professor holding one kooky view is far less harmful than a department firing him for that view, especially if not passed off as authoritative. Demanding absolute orthodoxy does not produce reason; it produces a priesthood reciting cant instead of an intelligentsia seeking truth. As you have continually enforced adherence to the dogma of political lobbies like feminism as a prerequisite for participation in academia, you have inevitably regressed to pre-modern academic precursors, to monastic strictures on thought. So perhaps in that light it was inevitable for the entire intelligentsia to collapse into primitive superstition. When biologists become willing to deny biological sex for their thirty pieces of silver, they're only a skip away from averring the legitimacy of supernumerary nipples as witch-sign.

 

But such doublethink already abounds outside academia. There's something particularly perverse in the sympathetic church services held after the U.S. government's murders of civilians in Minneapolis last month, conveniently ignoring that Trump was elected under Christian ideals by Christian propaganda with the express purpose of establishing a Christian theocratic dictatorship. It was Christianity that murdered them, and it is Christianity sending military helicopters to drag children out of their beds in the middle of the night and it is Christianity driving by in unmarked vans disappearing people off the streets of American cities. And there you have another crucial difference between reason and unreason, unbelief and belief. Atheism is nothing in itself. It is a blank, a default. It mandates no action. But the civilizational decline, the destruction of intellect and beauty, the heretic burnings and other atrocities perpetrated by the faithful have throughout history been a direct result of official doctrine, of superstitious piety, meekness, obedience, proselytism, 'purification' and surrender of this world for the illusory hereafter. Of power-mongering in the name of the all-powerful.

Of all the various brands of insanity which have gripped the left wing over the past decades, the final nail in its coffin will be this. Forgetting the most virulent and debilitating mental infection in human history. Forgetting where the left wing got its name, and that the First Estate sits together with the aristocracy in opposition to and oppression of the Third.

 

 

 

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* If James Randi himself never focused on religion, do remember it's not because it was any less bullshit than his usual targets of clairvoyants or psychics (for instance one of his most famous cases was against the Christian faith healer Peter Popoff) but because the topic was too broad for him to tackle with the resources at his disposal.

The game industry needs to make more second-person shooters.