"The way to succeed and the way to suck eggs"

"Did you approve that awful ad, Fry?

Yes I did Leels. And I'll tell you why. Because it - grows - the brand."

Futurama S04E09

 

 

With Re-Habilis finished (you can't un-read it) I took the opportunity to explore a possible switch to Substack. Having started this blog thirteen years ago thinking it'd run a couple of months, I chose my venue largely for ease of access and Blogger offered the most streamlined (and, importantly, free) path to writing, hosting and being seen by search engines. My recalcitrant nature has always bristled at being on a Google service, and its increased (if subtle) censorship in recent years has had me wistfully wishing I'd opted for Wordpress (hosted or not) instead, not that there aren't problems there too.

 

Substack sounded like a possible alternative, but as soon as I tried to set up my basic layout I was struck by a blatant skew in priorities. When a site purportedly centered on writing or other content creation bombards you with dozens of options for monetization, referrals, social media tie-ins, joining this-or-that community, subscriptions, newsletters, automatically spamming your readers' e-mails with everything you put out, "joining the crew"(?) categorization to fit you into various interest niches, a mandatory tab in which you recommend other substacks, and generally making a nuisance of yourself for attention... but not a single interface button to change the font size and a forced phone screen layout... we're obviously not talking about writing. Not to mention the spam I've been getting from them pushing me to spam others whenever I put something up, alternating with Growth Tip: Growth Tip: Growth Tip! Surprised my inbox isn't filtering these guys out as penis enlargement spam. That and their usage statistics give even less demographic info for casual views than Blogger's, focusing instead on subscribers, especially paying ones.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, I got curious recently about a youtuber I hadn't worried about in many years (because I don't subscribe to his newsletter - see how that works?) called Sargon of Akkad. For a brief time when he launched in 2014, Sargon made a few incisive comments on the feminist insanity being screamed on- and offline, but he soon found it more profitable to push right-wing reactionary propaganda wholesale and eventually ran for office in Britain under the UKIP party (you remember, the Brexit retards?) and supposedly got comically trounced at the polls. Turns out the abrasive "shock jock" image he'd cultivated online didn't transfer well toward wheedling the trust of suburban moms. Don't bother weeping for him though. Due possibly to possessing that quality so critical to YouTube fame, a British accent, he's doing quite alright for himself still sitting pretty on 900k subscribers.

I did wonder what those million viewers were watching, given how sparse his channel looked with a bare handful of videos, all of them recent, as he'd been quite prolific back in the day. It turns out he's been quietly erasing records of his actual personality, to the point even the Internet Archive's captures of his channel don't go further back than 2022 (though a user did put up a full list, which I'll link here once they recover from their recent DDOS attack.) His current crop of self-promotion (aside from peddling a 'zine full of supposedly sage personal wellness advice like subverting your life to others' whims) has just moved predictably further toward classic right-wing rhetoric. (It goes without saying he supports both Trump and that charlatan Musk.) Some videos sound like rip-offs of Miriam Godwinson's "we must dissent" speeches from Alpha Centauri, with titles like "The Future is Now" (hint: in a bad way) or "Dark Days Ahead" or "The Terminus of Civilization" generally decrying technocracy and personal independence or pushing family life, but I found more informative his "We Are Already in the Dystopia" rant. He uses the past generation's change in decor for McDonald's* (looking less like a clown exploded and more like a generic eatery) as one example indicating our society is no longer focused on children and families and blames childlessness for any doom and gloom we might be experiencing.

 

Because of course it couldn't be that individuals get depressed at being treated like nothing but assembly lines for the next generation of hopeless wage slaves and cannon fodder whose every effort will only feed the pockets of do-nothing investors unto eternity, and who will be sacrificed on the powermongering whim of corporate robber barons.

 

One of his quirks back in the day used to be occasionally describing himself as atheist, which you might rightly see as incongruous with the usual neoliberal economics / neoconservative social policy angle, and likely a major reason why he's been rebranding himself. After all, where you find kinder/kuche promoted together as moral superiority, the kirche can't be far behind, and sure enough though I'm not seeing an overt bible-thumping vid... yet (he's probably waiting for more of his audience to age and turn to superstition for fear of death) he has already been peppering his phrasing with those all-time favorite non-terms like "spiritual" or "meaning in life" to prime the pump.

How silly of me to think the internet's freedom of expression is about speaking honestly and being heard freely, when clearly the point is to fabricate a persona, start a cult, cornering a market niche you can make emotionally dependent on your weekly validation and wringing cash out of them.

Growth tip: buy my zine!

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* I'm also guessing McDonald's might've moved farther from child appeal not due to customer preferences or any social agenda but because those playplaces have always been lawsuit magnets

P.S.: Now that he's laundered his public record, don't be surprised if Sargon runs for office again after five or ten years of cementing his image as a family values candidate.

New Story: Re-Habilis

It has been three solid years since I last dared post a fiction story, so to motivate myself I decided to just imitate a bigwig. Well, not without putting my own spin on the material, motivated partly out of spite at others spinning that same material in nonsensical directions the past decades. But then, you always knew I was a biter, didn't you?

 

It's still short but giving me a chance to try some action sequences and makes good practice for plotting out some longer, novella-caliber yarns, which I haven't tried in... literally decades... and never completed successfully even back then. So even if you hate this result, I'm liking the process.

 

I'm actually planning a companion piece to this (different plot, different viewpoint, just same theme) to put up in a month or two. Also, since the previous couple of stories I posted (Buggy and Deliver) were composed bottom-up from their premise and didn't turn out as coherent as I'd hoped, I've plotted this one ahead of time, mostly completed the second and third chapters (but am tossing the first up there now to light a fire under my own ass to finish faster) and will post the final installments over the coming weekend on the story's very own page: Re-Habilis!

Sunless Skies

"And the stars will show

Where the waters flow

Where the gardens grow"

 

Roxette - Stars

 

 

After a dishearteningly tough mission in Battletech (my spaniel took it good in the meat) I decided to follow through on a decision I regretted ever since being disappointed by Sunless Sea: having already bought its sequel. To my relief though, Sunless Skies reads and plays better... better enough that if you've been curious about the Fallen London / Sea / Skies genealogy, go ahead and skip the first two and grab Skies on sale. (Though really, for a much smarter take on the same choose-your-own-adventure exploration roleplaying caravan management precept, it still can't even remotely measure up to Vagrus: the Riven Realms.)

Look, it's not like I have any compunctions against nitpicking when the mood strikes me, but every once in a while I run across even a basic concept rotted through from the bottom up. Here it's the attempt to mash together florid Victorian-flavored oneiric fantasy text walls with 2D 1980s arcade gameplay. Yes it does feel every bit as jarring as you might think to go from pages of precious poncy tea-sippin' among Her Majesty's subjects at the Maiden and Unicorn beneath the elegiac firmament of Eleutheria... straight to "pew-pew space invaders"

 

I can't avoid the impression that Skies and its predecessors (much like pixelated "retro" fare) staked out a market niche of sophomoric hipsterism, an audience which would like to play video games but also turn up its nose at them, and so will only accept a primitive parody of game-playing so as to maintain that feeling of superiority. Similarly, though the writing demonstrates plenty of linguistic aptitude and familiarity with adventure/horror tropes, every encounter rides the ironic/postironic high horse. Wouldn't want to be caught getting truly invested in a work a fiction, now would we? Chalance is ever so... common. *sniffs contemptuously* So call perception "mirrors" and call willpower "hearts" and make it a steam locomotive floating in the skies to scorn the more obvious (and just as period-appropriate) dirigibles (see space dudes not-in-space) then just ladle on a couple of repeating gimmicks ad nauseam: making fun of stuck-up old-timey brits (which SYABH pulled off better) and <abstract concept> (hours/souls/etc.) is edible/sapient/iacthulhufhtagn. Just to make sure everyone understands you're above the execution of your craft, slap on some lines like "Piranesi is, of course, bigger on the inside" (cf. "you know how elves are") and you're all set to bilk your thoroughly validated devotees by, say, peddling a $9 soundtrack for a $20 game.

 

Pity.

The creative team obviously boasted some ability. The florid prose can be quite charming when it's not crawling too far up its own ass, a few of the locations/monsters are intriguing, the layers of terrain float enchantingly below you as you chug along and the spacing of towns/hazards (along with intelligible instructions and more balanced resource consumption) makes for a far more workable horse trading core loop than that of Seas. I'll even praise Skies' travel when I talk about the virtue of distance. But the combat is both dull and annoying, the caravan simulation's pretty shallow since you rarely plan longer than one stop ahead, and engaging writing grows out of combining simpler elements (like my spaniel taking it in the meat) not strained LOLrandomness.

 

Still, unlike Sea, I have to grudgingly admit that Skies does actually... function... so long as you're willing to save-scum and not waste your life starting over every time you miss a cannon shot.

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P.S.: Don't get me started on their wokey abuse of the royal "they"

We are not amused.

edit 2024/10/13

Forgot to mention one bit of idiocy: why would you ever make a game about floating without taking the third dimension into account?

Necroville

"She runs through the fields of daisies

Yeah it's just a shame that they eat their own babies

Who cares, cause the air is free

When you get there will you kiss the dead for me"

 

Acid Bath - Scream of the Butterfly

 

 

In The Robots of Dawn Asimov's protagonist (hailing from an overcrowded Earth) levels a strange accusation against a planet where humans are universally wealthy, healthy and live to four hundred with a population density of one per hundreds of square kilometers, attended by slews of robots. It's the old Brave New World chestnut about losing the human spirit, somehow always intertwined with human misery. Their longevity has made them risk-averse and complacement, y'see. Naughty-naughty, how dare you not shuffle off your mortal coil at the appointed time.

You could pick many contrasting viewpoints, but my own mind recalls a fairly obscure 1994 text titled Necroville by one Ian McDonald. While hardly a masterpiece (its plot is... not much of one) it does seem underappreciated as a set of vignettes on human adjustment to rebirth or immortality. For, y'see, nanotech can recreate the dead. Endlessly. From there you of course immediately run into the discontinuity / ship of Theseus / Star Trek transporter argument, but also an entire tirade of human stupidity misusing such technothaumaturgy. Because of course a simian savanna brain is entirely built around the mindless animalistic rush to combat rivals, procreate and elevate one's progeny in social rank before yourself expiring around thirty or forty. Aggression, thrill-seeking, philoprogenitiveness, subsistence, mating rituals and contests, sadism and masochism and humanitarianism (a.k.a. favor-currying) are all thrown off their rails by removing the (pun intended) deadline.

But more to the point, McDonald manages to convey that the driving force of the new society is none of that individual, existential struggle to come to grips with an extended (or duplicated/extended) existence, but the economic exploitation of this new development. Asimov missed or ignored that it's how you're treated by the mindless infinite glut of others and otherness out there which determines the quality of your life, destroying any personal growth regardless of your personal quality or how long you have to develop it. A 400-year-old (or a 400-times reborn techno-zombie) is no less intrinsically disposable than a 40 or 4-year-old, depending on the interest others develop in murdering you after you've outlived your usefulness to them, and it turns out resurrection (here likened to longevity) by providing a convenient workforce actually amplifies disposability. Not just for the dead themselves but the planet as a whole. No matter how long you prolong your mental development, how many facets of existence you delve and transcend, how bodhisattva-like you manage to grow, nobody cares about you except insomuch as you can be exploited for their own instinctive power-mongering.

 

What's that you're asking? Does this discussion have anything to do with current political arguments about baby boomer medical costs? I'm sure I don't know what you mean.

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P.S. As Necroville was purchased for me by my grandmother and great-aunt on the same rainy day as the other author's short story collection, I can't help but note Robert Sheckley also hinted at the resurrection/disposability issue in Immortality Inc.

(And apropos of nothing, using nanotech to make plains-apes seems just the worst possible use of post-human technology.)

Gods of the Terror

"That's not a polar bear, the slope of the skull is all wrong."

 

My correction there drew an eye roll from the seat next to me... then an exasperated sigh and reach for the heavens when it was repeated almost verbatim by one of the TV show's characters a couple minutes later.

Comparative anatomy powers: activate!

I was equally jazzed at the subsequent blink-and-you-missed-it glimpse of the monster's humanoid phalanges. Rare is the art / effects department capable or willing to invest such work in details which, let's be brutally honest, almost none of a TV series' audience will appreciate.

 

But I do find it regrettable in retrospect for The Terror to have opened with hints of a "creature feature" to hook its audience, as that severely undersells the show's complexity. Where should I start? The, if not world-class, at least professional acting of every last bit player? The grandiloquent but believable period cast? The Inuit presented as positive characters but never diving headlong into some politically correct superiority complex? The rare splashes of low-key dark humor growing naturally from the plot and personalities? The decor, which initially put me off as low-quality but soon grew to impress me through its consciously theatrical set design? The refusal to pull punches while also never sinking to a slasher flick's cheap reliance on gore? The sun dogs? One observation surprised me more than most, and it may be better illustrated by a slightly simpler example. An illustrated example.

See, I also recently read through a comic called Gods of the Game. Six teenagers in 1987 get transported to a magical medieval world as an RPG party. At only 120 pages long it suffers from some pacing issues (after a disproportionately lengthy introduction in our own dimension, the last chapters feel a bit rushed, similar if inverted to some other examples I've given) and the solidly clichéd set-up immediately had me polishing my scoffin' fangs. Then, weirdly... it pulled me in. Clean style, not skimping on the backgrounds, decisive plotting. Something about the very readiness with which the author adopts all the standard gimmicks manages to come across as neither mercenary pandering nor naïve / blasé complacence but an endearing love of the genre shining through on every page. And, as another reader commented at some point, she managed to cram a startling amount of characterization into so few pages. As the example which most stuck with me, here's how the story handles the inevitable moment when the popular athletic girl joins the geeks' game: a weird, morose younger girl just bluntly invites her, to the slack-jawed consternation of every male in the room. And that tells you more about their personalities than pages of exposition.

Even the "don't go meta" criticism fails to stick, for much the same reason that it's not belabored into some startling plot twist. So what're you left with? Adventure. Characters adapting to new situations according to individual personalities. Gimmicks and phlebotina permutating into trials and solutions.

I hadn't realized how much I missed adventure stories.

I don't mean the "kitchen sink" approach to adventure you see in most cRPGs where you absolutely have to fight every monster in the monster manual in sequence, or the alternative of straining to turn every goblin stabbing into some supposedly grandiose social commentary like "racism against goblins is bad, mm'kaaayy?" but a story merely taking a limited premise unto the great unknown and allowing it to run its course while fleshing out naturally afferent details. You don't have to save the world. You may not even save yourself. The story gets away from you. You just do the best in the situation at hand. And, in its multifaceted problems, in its self-conscious refusal to bow to clichéd expectations of redemption or salvation, that's what The Terror in turn boils down to: an old-school adventure story, but one expertly developed beyond its stock elements.

That adventures now come as surprises probably says a lot about the state of pop culture.

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P.S.: Having never read the novel on which it's based I can't speak to how much of the adaptation's quality was inherent in the original and yes, I did see that AMC's trying to cash in The Terror's well-deserved warm reception with more (unrelated) seasons under the same title, but sequelitis warns me off any such cash-grab.