Teut Teut Universalis

"Listen, it's time I let you in on a little secret, Marge. The right house is the house that's for sale. The right person is anyone."

The Simpsons S09E09 Reality Bites

 

 

Well, having abandoned my previous playthrough when Freakin' Pomerania kicked off the Thirty Years' War early, I chanced a few more attempts with the Teutons and finally lived the tell the tale.

 

Normally I'd bumrush the Livonian Order right out the gate for early territorial gains (look, if I don't do it, the Danes or Muscovites will) which stands a good chance of also netting me the profitable Riga, and also befriend Lithuania to forestall a Polish-Lithuanian offensive. Problem with that being I'm not quite adept enough at gaming the politics for war declarations that don't set the whole HRE against me, so it didn't leave much room for expansion.

 

This time I started by allying the Livonians, Bohemia, Hungary and Wolgast (the last being an absolute necessity until I can conquer the province of Netz/Nietz/Notec linking me to my two western provinces.) The key to success turned out to be leaving a diplomat continually currying favors to lower Hungary's opinion of Austria as often as I could. Without Hungary as an ally, Austria did not take off as it normally does, which also generally weakened the HRE far down the line - a double edged sword, as the French made more headway in that direction than I did. (For starters: Alsace got Lorrained.)

One important trick in EU4 vs. EU3: you can juggle the new "powers" currency system by investing in development then rapidly playing catch-up technologically and declaring war on the cusp of institution spread, when empires' tech investment stagnates. In this case I barely scrambled for military tech 8 in time not to get Poled to death. The first big war put me on the defensive but managed to snatch all 6 northern Polish provinces, plus split Stettin with my ally Wolgast, quickly followed by more 1530s land gains in Poland-Lithuania, which damn near bankrupted me but also allowed establishment of that large army with a small state attached.

(Also, since the Livonian Order broke our alliance by refusing to join in the war, it predictably got instantly flattened by Denmark.)

 

Baltic trade started picking up a bit, giving me more cash to play with. Kept Bohemia/Hungary/Wolgast as allies and finagled Switzerland and unfortunately Russia - a devil's bargain, but necessary to protect against Denmark, which has absolutely, intractably hated my Teutonic self in every playthrough. When Protestantism caught up with me I decided to convert, but was forced to devote the next few decades to putting down revolts, paying off my gigantic pile of loans and fighting inflation, and the religious split (along with Bohemia as divisive ally) cost me my Hungarian alliance. A series of Austrian wars left central Europe in shambles.

 

The surprise split of Galicia-Wolhynia from Poland-Lithuania gave me a small but valuable little wedge into their territories. Having to decline a war I was in no economic shape to fight lost me the Bohemian/Wolgast alliances and forced an awkward, desperate, unstable Swedish/Russian/Prussian block to deter the Danes or Ottomans. For a few decades I focused on smaller states, vassalizing Lippe and Ruppin, allying Thuringia, all in an infuriatingly gradual effort at dividing and conquering those nigh-infinite German principalities.

 

In the early 1600s I finally accrued enough leverage to invade Brandenburg and take, among other provinces Berlin. Which is how Werwolfe discovered that even if the "infamy" system was nerfed from EU3 to EU4's "aggressive expansion" it still has its breaking point. That and a last partition of Poland resulted in an almost pan-European coalition against me.

C'mon Bohemia, be cool, we split Poland together!

Dear reader, I don't mind admitting at this point I just exited game and went to bed, and very much wanted to be twelve years old again so I could cry myself to sleep.

...

But, when I fired up EU4 again days later, I survived the coalition by retreating into Siberia, dragging the war out for better terms. In the end I lost my vassals, plus the provinces of Mazovia and Stettin, but kept Berlin and Brandenburg, which was my main goal, so a marginal, technical win.

 

Hilariously, the peace terms worked out even more in my favor in the long run, leaving tiny principalities desperate for a strong ally and letting me re-ally Stettin and vassalize/annex Rupin/Lusatia/Mazovia peacefully. Unfortunately (but predictably) Russia forced me to cut relations with Sweden (and at this point I don't dare lose that historically accurate Russian bulwark against the Ottomans) but luckily a new regional power had grown out of the eastern starting Austrian provinces: Styria! And it hates my Bohemian rival!

Another interesting side effect of the Russian devil's bargain was it cockblocking me from invading Lithuania by guaranteeing its independence for a solid century. Until, that is, Lithuania made the mistake of vassalizing Galicia-Volhynia, giving me a backdoor war declaration which didn't prompt the Russians to intervene. (Basically the reverse of Geneva dooming so many of my Savoyard attempts.) Nabbed me the entire western border of Lithuania, plus vassalized Galicia-Volhynia myself.

 

So, in retrospect, that apparently disastrous coalition turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

The biggest turning point was spotting the Ottoman Empire weakened by fighting the Timurids (thank you, ledger spying!) which resulted in a gigantic dogpile by myself, Russia, Bohemia, France, Spain, Tuscany, Milan, decisively turning the tables against the Ottomans:

With everyone busy, I also managed to pivot and declare war on Bohemia for slight territorial edge against it (luckily the Turkish gains didn't stack much for "aggressive expansion" purposes; no coalition this time.) Sadly, Hungary also regained much of its territory, but my Styrian allies also made out like bandits.

The elephant in the room (as always) is France, which has increasingly encroached into central Europe and moreover allied the equally powerful Spain through the game's last two centuries. Due to my advance into Lithuania, Russia also breaks its alliance with me. From ~1700 on, East Frisia, Milan, and the Timurids served as surprisingly useful future anvils to my hammer against my actual neighbours, and a follow-up offensive against a weakened Ottoman empire as soon as the truce wore off earned me most of the Balkans and Carpathians.

Then things got boring. Having doubled my territory, for most of the 1700s I struggled to consolidate it. The Age of Revolutions itself seems a pause button, as everyone struggles to violently inhere into the system those bloody peasants! Moreover, Russia allied Portugal and France in addition to Spain allied Scandinavia, leaving things at a decades-long detente. (Though I did wipe out Hungary as an afterthought ~1740.)

 

 

The break came when France turned against Scandinavia, which led the HRE at the time, thereby weakening the empire enough for an incursion against Bohemia and Opole. Then, after another Scandinavian war against the English this time, and empire leadership passing to the far weakened Austria, I again declared war on Bohemia in 1780 as a feint to finally and at long last take the Pomeranian provinces from Lubeck ( FREAKIN' POMERANIA, I SWEAR ! ) The last Austrian provinces in the NW fall to France. Styria automatically gets renamed Austria, yielding the odd situation of finishing a war against Austria by congratulating my ally Austria. Le roi est mort, vive le roi, I guess *shrug*

A large empire's economic strength but military weakness is of course its size, and in 1795, taking advantage of the Chinese kingdoms keeping it busy in the East (plus my Timurid ally) I snagged the entire Russian border, fighting it to a draw until it surrendered the provinces from exhaustion. The last three decades are spent gradually chipping away at Bohemia two or three provinces at a time, plus another advance into Russia. In 1800 East Frisia declares war letting me snatch Riga and another Bohemian province as war ally. Milan declares war on Tuscany. In 1806 the HRE finally disbands. Aaaaand, France and Spain finally declare war on me, which would've ended in disaster had I not managed to run out the clock.

So, class, what have we learned?

First of all, Rostock can kiss my ass.

More importantly, I stand by my statement that ths is a game more about classic 4X opportunistic territorial expansion than a coherent, stable "grand" strategy governing your empire, and alliances shift on a dime. Maybe matters might fall out differently if I try some state less infamously militaristic than Prussia, but I'm not holding my breath.

I love a lot of the smaller mechanics improved in EU4 (too many to even describe) and can certainly appreciate the historically accurate attention to detail. Buuutt... the general direction of the series is still too fixated on world conquest instead of delving each individual state's local adventure. A massive "economic base" penalty to small-medium states vassalizing each other, a weakened infamy system, shorter periods of rebellion after conquest, and AI programmed to give itself massive opinion penalties against you if you "have provinces it wants" plus other changes all add up to forcing the consolidation of large empires if anything even faster than in #3, and aside from the designated winners, most stand little chance of survival.

Look at that last map. Not just the HRE, not just Europe, but Africa and Asia as well spontaneously coalesced into massive blobs, wiping out the vast majority of states. I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is one of the last games that should ever have been given a high score counter.

Wince upon a time, ouch!

Vagrus: The Revisited Realms

"And Hell was so cold

All the vases are so broken

And the roses tear our hands open

Mother Mary miscarry but we pray just like insects

And the world is so ugly now "

 

Marilyn Manson - Great Big White World

 

 

I suppose it's as good as any a marker of a game's nerdiness (and concomitantly of your own) when you start spotting Sindarin in-jokes among its nomenclature. Upon reinstalling that-game-that-misspelled-my-name-in-its-preorder-credits (a.k.a. Vagrus: The Riven Realms) I decided to start a new playthrough but stick to my usual chaotic neutral elvish wizard/druid routine.

One of my first lore pages informed me we half-elves (full-blooded elves being unavailable as PCs in this setting) are also known as "pereldin" which tidbit I'd missed the first time around. As in half-elda, from the same root word as periannath. So yeah, if the gratuitous Latin wasn't enough for you, have some Elvish. Wanna sneak some Klingon in there for the full wedgie trifecta?

Oh, I've missed you, Vagrus. To the point your name came up in other conversations.

Intriguing enough to preorder, captivating enough at launch, encompassing most angles of good strategy/RPGs and charmingly dedicated to its setting's immersiveness where most developers tend to play the too cool for school card, Vagrus nevertheless suffered initially from some odd misconceptions about its basic design.

 

The first one's an oldie: a time limit on your campaign, an issue the entire industry should have learned to beware following its unpopularity in the original Fallout, to the point Black Isle had to patch it out of the game. Now Lost Pilgrims also had to go back and patch it out of Vagrus, not that it affected me much since I hit the freeplay option anyway. Steeped in fantasy and RPGs are the devs obviously are, they should've realized that while individual quest deadlines can be great, the hero's journey as a whole must center on the hero and not on external constraints. (Or at least not obviously on external constraints.) Also, there's not much point in buying freeform exploration only to race through an optimized linear sequence to the finish line.

Relatedly, development started in the wake of the survival craze kicked off by the likes of Banished and Amnesia, but getting randomly killed by overpowered events plays out very differently in a long RPG campaign. I can handle disasters changing/defeating my game plan in a five-hour Frostpunk game, but losing anything irreplaceable (like companions) during a fifty or hundred-hour RPG campaign is generally a big no-no. Killing off characters, even if it don't get your legs broke by Kathy Bates, should still be handled with commensurate decorum. If resulting from a momentous quest decision (e.g. me tossing Shadowheart to her reverend mother or turning against my party at the end of Dragonfall) sure, it can make for a memorable moral quandary, but permanently, meaninglessly losing your plucky band to random crits merely prompts reloads. Not to mention it'd lock you out of most quests (which as a rule involve a companion combat step along the way) plus the question of utility:

In contrast to most RPGs with a dozen henchmen overflowing only five slots, where letting one die would still leave you with a full party and you'd only really miss out on its personal quest, Vagrus' companions can also fill one or two strategic support roles ("deputies" to you, pahtnah) boosting your economic / strategic efficiency. There do technically exist placeholders (specialists from House Oquo at Drusian Quarry) for some of these roles, but especially on a first playthrough, not having tested the full extent of their availability, not knowing whether you can support them financially, having painstakingly scraped together a stable caravan size and not knowing how much efficiency you can lose before losing viability, not even knowing what viability means for coming challenges, once again strictly equates losing a companion to forcing a reload.

Lost Pilgrims did address this issue in part. Either I'm making better choices or companions' loyalty/favor currying minigame appears more lenient now, as the pissy little whiners haven't been ditching me like they used to. (I do have to wonder why Vagrus didn't just imitate Mount&Blade: Warband's system where companions could be re-recruited after some time in random taverns.) Also, the addition of Vorax in a truly well-traveled location helps with the crippling early-game scarcity. He's rather useless in combat except to soak damage, but while a meat shield doesn't make companion combat any more interesting, at least it makes it less frustratingly reload-prone.

I'm seeing a decrease in other gratuitous punishments hurled at the player. Highway tax events, while still present enough to remind you to favor off-roading when viable, are less frequent. The "crowded camps" morale debuff for a large caravan which so annoyed me has either been lifted or lifted to a much higher headcount threshold. Basically, I criticized Vagrus at launch as a freeform game with a torque wrench fixed idea for how you should progress (especially early on) which is to say the developers presumed they could read their customers' minds but misread us repeatedly. Most changes I'm seeing two years on unfortunately fall into making the game generally easier, but also necessarily acknowledge the old pitfall of putting players through their paces instead of enabling them to actually... y'know... play! Inelegant, but workable.

 

Elegance lies in the writing and in managing trade routes. The Riven Realms wouldn't stand out for basic fantasy set pieces: fireballs, dragons, zombies, demons, the usual Tolkienish races with unfortunately trite modern feel good spins like orcs as noble tribal warriors, and a generically Romanesque empire. But it excels in actually fleshing out these gimmicks, diving into Latin terminology for the empire's culture, playing up the postapocalyptic setting not merely for pathos but for the new culture's adaptations to current conditions, lending each town you visit its own personality whether via inhabitants or geography or major institutions, and managing the rare feat of acting genre-conscious but not jaded at even the most hopelessly re-trod material.

"They turned into ghouls" would read the lazy blurb for such a location as Tectum Kelvar in most other games. (I assume I'm not spoiling much, given you have to fight said ghouls on your way down.) But as blasé as we've justifiably become about zombies, rare are the writers still willing and able to recall the old creeping dread inherent in the infection itself, in the gradual loss of humanity, in the collapse of the cannibalism taboo and of a society not merely instantly breaking down into biters and raiders, but struggling hopelessly as best it can against the inevitable.

 

I'm edging into mid-game now.

I've also raised Criftaa, Gor'Goro and Finndurarth to level 3 and Renkailon to level 2*, allowing me to begin diving farther into the lore, as at Tectum Kelvar. So far I must say my favorite aspect of Vagrus is how well its RP/expository side blends into a core loop more literal than most. Paying your crew by the day you can never afford to stand still, and the name of the game is multitasking to get the most out of each trip. Tour nearby towns, buy low, sell high, balancing supplies vs. profit margins, balancing passengers and pack beasts vs. upkeep costs over your planned travel range. As you level up, become more cost-efficient, amass more cash to finance longer trips, you begin moving in ever wider circles, and every expedition becomes an opportunity to complete some long-standing quest or another.

 

Back when Civilization was still new on the market, many grew fascinated by "one more turn" syndrome, where you keep telling yourself you'll set just this one more thing to rights, finish this one more battle, build this one more courthouse, until you find yourself ninety turns later at 3 a.m. It's gradually been explained by a mix of short and long-term goals, the turn-by-turn resource and unit management feeding into the greater campaign goal of WOWRLD DOMAHNAYSHUN!!! so that one feels neither stuck nor aimless, but constantly, verifiably, reassuringly, validatingly advancing toward success.

 

RPGs accomplish much the same by mixing long-distance quests with opportunistic flower-picking or gear upgrades. Mount&Blade laid out a particularly clear pattern: move in a wide circuit taking advantage of towns' price differences for different trade goods while also maximizing the number of quests you can complete at varying distances and passing through warzones while also giving your army a chance to recover. Due to its more stringent caravan maintenance requirements, Vagrus does an even better job of pacing your outward spiral and interspersing it with plot-based content. You never lose the impetus to stock up on some salt or mushroom beer for sale at the next town; your focus merely shifts toward feeding the profit from salty shrooms toward a long-term accomplishment, rewarding forward planning.

 

So to advance Nedir's quest I'm still short a couple of spectral residues. Maybe It's time I tried that exorcism in Deven... and if I'm headed to Deven I may as well detour through Auguros Work Camp... and if I'm doing that maybe I'll try the valley of sleepers, see what that's about. Ooooh, looks like Tenebvitris currently offers lots of faction quests for Lumen/Arken though. And if I'm detouring west, I may as well set out light, grab that manticore skeleton for the boners over at Ioscian, angle through Drusian then pick up a larger crew in Larnak/Arken, load up on trade goods and maybe detour back through the Shelter or through the Crimson Gate or rush straight to Auguros depending on fetch quest availability. Beer, obsidian, crystal, marble, metal/salt... oooh, maybe a stack of dried fruit on the way back for the bugs? Remember to pick up another book! And if I do eventually hit Avernum for Nedir, I may as well continue through the Saadirar lands and try to finish off their quest chain, then some skullduggery in Larnak I'll likely be ill-suited to, and then? Who knows?

 

Look, it's a simple fifty-seven step plan...

 

And at every step there awaits not just some perfunctory dopamine-boosting LEVEL UP! reward stimulus or trash loot, but another immersively written foray into the cataclysmic world your character inhabits, a lovable little lost waif to escort back to her uncle, a demonic portal to scout, a tragic tale of another lost settlement, a strange new world or new civil-eye-zation. Rewarding both long-term plans and flexible opportunism, both freeform exploration and page-turning lore delving, arithmetic and spatial orientation, self-conscious in its nerdy appeal, poetic yet rarely self-indulgent, vast yet well-paced, I would say Vagrus should kick off a whole new fad in game design... but decades watching this industry repeatedly collapse onto the lowest common denominator leave me instead merely content to number myself among its dedicated, if small, following.

 

Bite ya later, vagri. I've got a caravan to load.

__________________________________

 

* Technically, leveling up your companions from your own XP pool is a good mechanic, laying more burden of choice on the player to prioritize and rewarding a complex game plan. Intellectually, I approve. Viscerally, I hate it. Feels like I'm lending them my underwear.

 

edit 20204/04/25:

Oh, come on, Kadaath in the outer realms? Seriously? And the elf-like race of Ithil? That's Klingon enough for me. Pants' em.

Cc: Utnapishtim

Around 2010 I was reading something from the 1950s and was amused at realizing the author had been inspired by work from the 1890s. More recently I read something that other worker had worked in 1915, and found it odd to see him reference something from 1775. But is it so long ago? 109 years vs. 140, give or take a generation, still amounts to a house of mirrors. Maybe that's what writers are, prisms through which the incommensurate past may be broken into intelligible wavelengths, and refracted futures focused onto a microscope slide. If you can only point your antenna through the static...

Hearing a bit of hub-bub about the Indian election, I notice all the chatter about religious and economic concerns, corruption, trade, development, etc. still omits politicians' stance on that one tiny detail:

POPULATION CONTROL !!! 

 

 

 

 

 

Twice upon a time, there was a twice upon a time.

"If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself"

"I dedicate this song to my boys who are strong

They just don't go along"

 

Kill Hannah - Unwanted

 

 

I tried the NYTimes Wordle last year for about 100 days. The results weren't terrible, 95% success rate before they cut off my stats to force me to create an account, which forced me to quit altogether. Despite losing my patience and throwing the game several times (the only word I honestly tried and couldn't suss was "ninja" (in my defense, they're sneaky)) I could manage most by the fourth line. But leaving aside my recalcitrant nonconformism, I found the experience reminiscent of text adventure games. Your minds are simply too alien for me to read.

Or maybe I'm weird.

Back when playing City of Heroes, I'd set up a pretty nifty hero base and fang shooed the base teleporters according to both general map directions and target zone levels in a way that made intuitive sense to me. Logging in one evening, I was shocked to find my sole remaining active partner in the guild had remodeled and rearranged the tubes in some utterly incomprehensible, meaningless fashion. I was livid! For something like fifteen minutes I wandered the base back and forth struggling in vain to make heads or tails of why and how he'd scrambled my handy pattern, working myself into a fine lather mentally workshopping just how I'd take him to task for his vandalism. I couldn't make heads or tails of the order he'd chosen. It was insane, it was wrong, it was evil, it was... alphabetical.

Oh.

So maybe I'm weird.

Seeing my car low on gas inflicted on me, as it does on occasion, a twinge of guilt at my consumption of this critical resource. Maybe I should take the bus to the supermarket, maybe I should walk to pick up my pizza, maybe I should walk around the block instead of driving to the woods to walk the trails. At the same time the car had developed an odd vibration when I pressed the brakes. Worried my new brake pads might be faulty, I took it in. Diagnosis: rust. Rusted brakes from not driving often enough.

The company from which I ordered this computer started spamming my e-mail with a-may-zing low-low-offers on brand-sparking-new top-quality systems. I wondered why the sudden flux, when I hadn't heard from them since my purchase a couple years prior, then realized: they can't expect you to buy a second one right away, right? So apparently, two years is the accepted timeframe in which to buy a whole new computer! My last one lasted over a decade, and the switch was prompted by Microsoft forcing planned obsolescence with Windows versions. My previous one seven or eight years. I'm planning on making this one live to fifteen, a couple component swaps notwithstanding. Even assuming the company's 2yr estimate is estimated in their interest and doubling it, buying a new system every four years is something I thought a relic of the '90s when crucial technologies like modems and floppy disks were changing from year to year and components were still routinely being damaged by heat.

But maybe I'm weird.

I felt guilty grabbing take-out or fast food instead of supermarket fare until I noticed the restaurant was packed to overflowing as is every other eatery's parking lot every day of the week. Only then did I remember for half of Americans it's a daily routine.

I felt guilty throwing out a sock or shirt every couple of months, or buying a new pair of sneakers when my old one's heels fall apart, until I ran across the jaw-dropping statistic that I'm supposed to be throwing out 37 kilos of clothes a year! How?!? Even allowing for that average to have been, say, doubled by factory overstock that never reaches consumers, how can you manage tossing a suitcase of clothes every year? Guess I could shop for disposable lead undies or something.

I felt guilty about my electric and water bills until utility companies started including usage statistics on the bills, which put me at about 1/2-2/3 of my neighbours' consumption, this being near a college surrounded by single-occupant, one-bedroom apartments. But as I write this amidst a locally chilly April, I can already hear an air conditioner running across the street.

 

So maybe I never realized how weird I am.

I remember some years ago, having gone back to college, voicing some difficulty finishing a professor's exams within the hour. The girl I was talking to helpfully suggested I tell them I'm disabled. What? Yeah, sure, just go to the counseling center and tell 'em you're disabled. They'll let you take the test in private and take however much time you need.

No, I did not do that. I dropped the course. So yeah, I'm a great big waste, I'm a failure, and maybe I'm weird. Because it never occured to me to weaponize my weirdness. At least not against anyone except myself.

 

You want success? You want this world? You can keep it.

Once upon a time, there was a blogger who considered he probably shouldn't keep these going too much longer 'cause they're wearin' a mite thin.

The Mote in God's Eye

"We have wrought upon ourself and others
With a slow and vicious gun
And although pratfalls can be fun
Encores can be fatal

 

And we don't wanna read the signs that you bore
You know, the kind of sign you hang on a door
Saying "we'll be back" what a crack
Now, don't you think we might have heard that before?"

 

Andrew Bird - Heretics

 

 

Guess I'm on a bit of a Niven kick this year. In addition to The Integral Trees I queued up its sequel for later, re-read Protector (which always felt more packed with ideas than Ringworld, absence of big dumb object notwithstanding) and picked up The Mote in God's Eye while I was at it. Often title-dropped but rarely discussed so that I honestly didn't even know what subgenre of SF I'd be reading, it turned out to be one of the finest first contact stories I've ever run across!

 

Most of the book's flaws come from playing up its setting, which even in 1974 would've been readily recognizable as a space opera space empire with a space navy and space marines... and that's about it. (I'd guess Pournelle's CoDominium normally gives politics primacy instead of relegating it to plot-unrelated backstory filler.) Also, had it limited itself to a five-man band or similar roster, the lengthy introductions may have felt less painful, but a full warship's complement took me until mid-novel to even partially distinguish, especially as their personalities rarely diverge from HelloSailors #1-15. More concisely obstructive, the climax gets interrupted so the daring space captain/prince and the plucky princess can marry... and keep getting married for a whole chapter or two... and if you're waiting for that to acquire some relevance to meeting an alien species, no, not unless you count women hailing from Venus. I kept imagining storyboard space allocated to: "a wedding, a wedding, we're going to have a wedding!"

On the flip-side, that weird pause also demarcates the last third of the novel, one third longer than you'd expect it to run. After the space marines battle valiantly against an invasion plus a plucky band of heroes stumble upon the grand reveal, leading to a climactic chase scene and heroic stand, you'd think a story'd just wind down for a few pages to a sappy conclusion. Mote instead uses the wedding breather to launch into the real pay-off: the stand-off. In the end, the two writers did end up complemeting each other well, as human militarism and political infighting reflects on the moties' own quirk recalling pak mental inflexibility and bouts for supremacy.

A fifty year old novel inevitably suffers from some more or less excusable lapses. For one thing it places heavy emphasis on security to prevent spying and invasions. On closer inspection their security measures are laughable, with lots of spottily supervised physical contact and ship boardings. Given what we now know about miniaturization, letting a potentially hostile alien just pack an overnight bag (including housepets!) and hop on over to our boat sounds crazy. Crazy Eddie even. And if the lack of teleoperation, video conferencing, simulations or automation merely reflects how badly Moore's Law blindsided us all, 1970s epidemiology would certainly have raised an eyebrow at the lack of quarantine. The moties' focus on engineering contrasted with an apparently rudimentary understanding of biology would've also been better served by the explicit absence of a doctor caste as plot point.

 

But overall The Mote in God's Eye does an excellent job of presenting an alien species strange enough to be alien but without reaching for nonsense as originality, at once sub- and super-human, initially inscrutable before discovering their driving psychosis, the proverbial beam in their own eyes. It obviously inspired many of the caste-divided aliens I've run across in later decades' scifi. Motie history itself, though not given enough worldbuilding attention for my tastes, recaps several popular scifi scenarios offhandedly. If anything, the writing lingers on the human point of view for too long and would've benefited from a more decisive shift to motie psychology toward the end, recalling Asimov's The Gods Themselves whose third part I can barely remember, a let-down after the highly thoughtful middle section. Nevertheless, the last three chapters deliver solidly on the ambiguity of a well-executed first contact premise. Neither devils nor angels, potentially both beneficial and dangerous, destructive and self-destructive, the extraterrestrials' handling is ultimately ruled by a game theoretical analysis of possibilities, not idealized expectations.

Despite some gratuitous lulls, definitely worth a read.

__________________________________________

 

(Spoiler) P.S.: If you'll permit me to nitpick the evolutionary angle, at one point it's mentioned that tribes with mediators lived longer than tribes without, falling at least verbally into the group selection fallacy. Selection must operate on units of information transfer across generations, which is to say genes. The precept can work, but it's better viewed as kin selection bias, in which mediator mules would favor the propagation of their genetically similar relatives, as genetically similar as possible. Likely each individual master would have to be served exclusively by its own mediator offspring. (If not this may, in fact, work as an alternate explanation for the mediators' tendency to go off the rails.) Also, as mediators are a master/engineer mix, engineers better able to coordinate with their mediator offspring to propagate their own line would be equally favored by the arrangement. Imagine Heinlein's The Roads Must Roll if the villain had benefited from the unshakeable familial loyalty of several media and public relations operatives.

Of course, that doesn't take into consideration that such kin recognition instincts can be hijacked even in humans (that's what uniforms, anthems, hymns, slang, fandoms and other communal badges and rituals are) but still, an interesting idea.

One 'sup on a time, there was a greeting.

Dear Zachary

"Why should I care how many people I have to kill? I can just make more in my tummy!"

The Order of the Stick #587

 

I would encourage you to find and watch the 2008 Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (in fact, don't even read that Wikipedia page if you want to avoid spoilers) despite normally finding true crime stories at once tedious and overly-dramatic. What's more, as it started as a home movie, so much of the documentary gets tied up in rhapsodizing and eulogizing that to a random disinterested asshole on the internet like myself it might drag. Might. If not for the considerable strength of the material itself. You may remember the apparently famous case (I didn't) but if the info's fresh to you it makes for an incredible story, gripping in the sheer absurdity yet perverse coherence of every new detail.

 

If you don't mind spoilers, a quick summary:

Woman reported for attempted suicide and threats of murdering a previous boyfriend, having birthed three children from previous relationships (and caring for none of them) and subject to eight(!) restraining orders against her lures and shoots her boyfriend to death in the U.S. after he tries to break up with her and flees to Canada, there giving birth to her victim's son while delaying her extradition proceedings for months after months. Despite signs of mental instability and violence while jailed, she is released with her shrink posting the bulk of her bail and the judge going so far as to instruct her on how to dodge the system. She is awarded custody of her child. She tries to frame yet another new boyfriend for her impending suicide then jumps into the sea with her offspring, to both their deaths.

The documentary itself focuses on the failings of early-2000s Canadian law, especially when it came to child protection, so instead try to think on how such a case reflects on our social priorities, starting and ending with the F-word.

 

1) Feminism

Among the literally hundreds of phone messages left to her last intended victim (after two dates) crops up the stock phrase "grow up and be a fucking man" at which point you realize she'd been pulling the same act quite likely her entire life on countless men. So reverse the polarity. In itself, letting criminals go free is not a gendered issue. But too many of the case's details sound even more absurd with genders reversed.

A man with eight restraining orders having traveled across the country to see his recently ex girlfriend, not being placed in custody when she turns up dead, shot by a pistol with a defect like the one he owns?

Highly paid and/or respectable shrinks and judges putting their careers (and half the price of a house) on the line to secure his release?

That man being handed an infant to care for???

The film rightly lingers on the judge's wording when releasing an accused murderer without even paying her full bail: "your crime was specific in nature" and therefore not a threat to anyone else. A murderer who merely murdered her boyfriend did not worry a female judge. #KillAllMen, 2003 edition. Reverse the polarity. Take a media circus like the OJ Simpson trial ten years prior. Even in so farcical a context, stating that a man likely having murdered his ex-wife and her friend was "specific in nature" and therefore not indicative of threat would've sounded insane.

Now pile on with "grow up and be a fucking woman" and take care of me, rando' chick I went on two dates with.

You don't get to pretend that decades' worth of political lobbying to frame women as victims of men and entitled to retribution against men did not frame both this murderer's personal sense of entitlement and the knight in shining armor attitude of the professionals and officials charging to her rescue.

And we've had two more decades of intensified such lobbying since.

2) Religion

Specifically theodicy. At one point a family friend states she has not prayed since Zachary died. Well, she's hardly alone in suffering a crisis of faith when something bad happens. First off, the existence of the supernatural is not mediated by personal trauma, but a matter of rational analysis. Hopes of supernatural aid were true or false regardless of my grandparents' Alzheimer's and it will continue to be true or false when my parents or I myself begin to succumb to it.

Did you as a viewer suffer a "there is no god" twinge watching the documentary's events unfold? But remember, babies die constantly, some in far worse circumstances, starving slowly, agonizingly for months on end, or raped, skinned and disemboweled while their parents are forced to watch awaiting the same treatment. Bluntly put, tragedy-mediated crises of faith demonstrate not moral conscience but a lack of object permanence.

This is not a religious matter. Perfectly mundane evidence amenable to cold-blooded rational analysis right down here on Earth could have warned against the handling of the psychopath in question's case.

What's more, religion served both sides, providing the murderer leverage to try to wheedle her way into her victim's family's new circle of friends via their church.

3) Government

Let's face it, nobody would have given a shit if the case had not led to the death of a reproductive female and infant, had not impacted the supply of wage slaves and cannon fodder for the use of the rich. Otherwise, misery is good, misery exhausts you and keeps you servile, interpersonal conflict keeps you too busy to speak out, and lawsuits feed more of your money into the system. All good.

The case, plus the grandparents' subsequent activism, did result in a Canadian law to protect children. Fine as far as that goes but how far does that go? Zachary might've then lived to adolescence when he can be thrown in prison to be tortured to death on some sadistic bitch's rape claim. Or play Bluto to her other Popeye. Or kill himself when he makes the mistake of ejaculating into a woman who then uses the baby as pretext to enslave him for the rest of his life. "Grow up and be a fucking man" indeed.

It also bears mentioning that well-intentioned as they are, laws to protect children in custody disputes are easily abused when paired with the presumption of male guilt and female innocence which pervades our society. All a woman need do is claim her ex was violent, or less, that she felt threatened. No bullet-riddled corpse or smoking gun necessary. And that brings us back to the question of sex.

 

For one thing, it's hard not to see this prize specimen of womanhood as not just cuckoo but a cuckoo, a brood parasite embodying both the habit of leaving her young to be cared for by others and the habit of abusing their protectiveness to be cared for herself as an invasive chick would. For another, multiple witnesses reiterated the same observation in different ways: the murderer had a tendency to over-act. One name for that in biology is supernormal stimulus. If your target reacts to some sight/sound/whatever, then presenting it a flashier or louder version of the same will allow you to control its reactions. The classic example involves giving birds fake eggs painted the same as their species' own, but brighter! flashier! bigger! and watching them actually favor the fakes over the eggs they've just laid. Fascinating as the broader topic may be, let's consider one deliberately ignored aspect of it.

Babies are cute. We are preprogrammed to care for the cute thing. Otherwise we'd throttle the reeking little megaphones after the two-thousandth random fit of crying and our species would die out. But babies lack the manipulative understanding to truly weaponize their cuteness: when to coo and when to cry, when to feign interest with their adorable oversized eyes and exactly when to throw a tantrum for maximum effect. But women, who retain so many more babyish features than men, have had a bit of time to work out advantageous deployment strategies, not to mention centuries and millennia's worth of industries like fashion and cosmetics increasingly adept at maximizing subliminal manipulation. The grandparents in the documentary note at one point their son and grandson's murderer did have a knack for knowing when to play nice. Their recorded phone conversations undeniably show her playing up the wounded doe act, the quavering, choked voice, the drawling neediness, the unspoken yet evident insistence that she's just... not... getting... enough... and if you want infantile tantrums, well, try hundreds of messages on your phone after the second date.

 

Most of Dear Zachary concerns the victimized family's consternation at government's refusal to prioritize the well-being of a baby over the demands of a woman. You can certainly argue economics or the legal system's inertia, etc., but consider also those in power are susceptible to manipulation of their instincts. Femininity in our species is not merely more heavily neotenized than masculinity, but a host of supernormal stimuli demanding care, favoritism and sacrifice with every well-practiced dash of eyeshadow, with every endlessly rehearsed pout or whine and carefully timed fit of manic screeching or crying jags. Women are in many ways more adept in leveraging childlike behavior for sympathy than children themselves are.

More human than human.

My Life as a Drowid, 6: Pap, Sap and Dunce Caps

"a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial"

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit

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(some BG3 spoilers included)

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The voice is struck dumb. The invader, the deceiver, the manipulator, the spy, the liar, the presumptuous filth claiming beneficence while trampling the boundaries of self has retreated to take its place by its erstwhile master. I only regret that I shall have to end its miserable well-deserved punishment of a life in absolute slavery. In its place, we have birthed an arguably greater monstrosity from the chained heir. This one at least claims it will submit in turn after our enemy's fall. Should it forget this request, I shall forcibly remind it. Now, only the last battle remains.

Behind me stretch scattered aftershocks of an ambling and oft discordant adventure: great foes felled, lairs laid waste whether in forest, fortress, temple or beneath the waves. Yet now I find my mind turning to the multitudes passed by in every town, to the captives and predators, to the aides and collaborators, and no less to my own companions and allies. Were any among them worthy of respect? Or even of attention?

Child of darkness, did not (by your own admission) your own sins in service to Shar bind you to your sordid little cult far more securely than your convenient change of heart? I let you make your own choice beneath the Shadowlands, and it was yours and no more than that. And your life's course for years before was yours and no more than that.

Should I in turn see any value in a pompous pigeon but the heritage she herself struts and boasts at every turn? Be your immortal blood your sole quality, aasimar, let it serve loftier ambitions than baring your flesh beneath the diluting light of the moon's dull gaze.

I'd held hope for the gith when she spurned her corpse-goddess, only to hear her reiterate her worship of a new overlord. Does your knee even un-bend, planeswalker, or does it merely pivot?

I tore down down the mummified master of a horde of rotting abominations hungry for the flesh of innocents. What use, then, to leave the horde in place?

A singing devil. Now I've seen everything.

Should I have spared the musclebrained Rashemi lummox? One does not bring a butter-knife to a battle of razor wits.

Child after child toddles across my path, each with a new complaint more tedious than the last. Am I shirking my druidic caretaker duties on this campaign merely that I might play nursemaid to domesticated monkeys? Has the overworld no labor to which nimble little hands may attend, if only to keep nimble little feet out from under my foot?

Rabble, babble and rotted brains. I have zombies a-plenty without imitators to clutter the ranks.

When this is over, I walk on alone.

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Personally I'm big on world-building but let's admit I'm weird, only quasi-human, a wer-wolfe. Ask most fans of plot-heavy, story-based cRPGs about their favorite memories in the genre and they'll cite characters instead. And hey, I'll gladly join in. My favorites like Planescape: Torment, V:tM-Bloodlines or Tyranny all feature some very memorable NPCs or companions in addition to large casts of believable extras and bit players properly fitted into well-defined social milieus. Even Baldur's Gate 2, which set the heretofore standard, was rightly applauded for the individual traits displayed by its large roster, even if they weren't all very thoroughly fleshed out. T:ToN, NWN2 and especially MotB, Kingmaker and Path of the Righteous, DA:O, AoD or Colony Ship, Vagrus, KC:D, the first PoE, even lower-quality writing like V:tM- Redemption, I could go on and on (have in fact gone on and on) about RPGs which, aside from their other faults or strengths, manage to convey something memorable either by character arcs or cultural development.

So for now let's skip "what" and ask: who or where is worth remembering from BG3?

 

Astarion for his snarking and his story's climax, maybe Minthara for wasted potential, and the hag, certainly, as a good old-fashioned cackling villain owning her cruelty in a myriad ways, developing the mindset, yeah, whoever wrote her did well. The Shadowlands, mildly, if only it had dwelled more on its inhabitants' adaptations to the curse and less on sapphic saviors with no other personality traits.

Aside from that, can you tell me the difference between Balduran culture vs. Elturan as portrayed in your 200+ hours of adventuring? Between a small village and the big city? Between tieflings and dwarves? Between merchants and mystics? Between adorable Shadowheart's sad, needy little girl mannerisms with her ingratiating voicing and any other sadistic thug trying to pull a last-minute redemption and blame the system for everything?

You can skip either individual characterization or world-building but not both, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I can barely name any character or location in any of Larian's games I've ever given a shit about. It was, in fact, one of my earliest complaints, back when I'd only played two of their titles partway, that the company appears incapable of anything but the most overused, lowest common denominator, generic fairytale/RPG filler material, jumbled together with no attention to constancy or consistency. I ask again as I did before: "tell me how anyone thinks they can build an immersive interactive experience around crap like this:"

 

Many adventures I'd hoped I might pursue in a fantasy world, but taking orders from Dumbo ain't one. I'd never really considered the dividing line between "whimsical" and "goofy" but surely it sits only a few pixels away from the line between telling a joke and being a joke. Does anything ruin a story's charm quite like the feel that the writers themselves don't give a shit and are just tacking on random gimmicks in hopes of looking creative to the uninformed and unimaginative via "LOLrandom" filler? One or two such digressions are usually cute, even necessary. Hell, I'd be the first to complain if we went back to nothing but box-filled warehouses and hippie elves. But when you're constantly jumping from ogres to fairies to dragons to dungeons to box-filled warehouses to talking cows to steambots to steamboats to curses to mad scientists to hippie elves to devils to talking pigeons to sex scenes to cauldrons to peasants to kings to talking cats to fuck-it-all-let's-throw-in-a-circus, you've created less a rich tapestry than a nonsensical jumble of loose threads on the floor which you're hoping I'll mistake for a rug. And then fall through into a vast pit of indifference.* I do understand a game this size cannot all remain interconnected, but you could've at least attempted thematic coherence beyond adolescent rebellion. Even Dragon Age managed that, despite being fundamentally at least as trite a pile of cliches as D&D.

But even taken individually, most encounters skew decisively toward infantile moralism. Pretty and nice things are good. Ugly and unpleasant things are bad. The power of friendship trumps any objective considerations. If nothing else, giving Raphael his very own Disney villain theme song should clue you into this M-rated game gunning for customers with a mental age of twelve, and please don't try to pretend that infantilism doesn't also extend to your RP choice in there. Saving the nice little woman from the big mean man is also the strategically sound option to gain a quite powerful healbot on your way out - which is to say you're being bribed to pad your ego by playing the hero instead of being made to choose.

 

On that note, nothing says infantilism like actual infants. Where most games avoid children to avoid making extra character models, BG3 both capitalizes on that lack and tries to get its money's worth with a sizeable passel of Artful Dodgers, Oliver Twists and Baker Street Irregulars. I actually liked quite a few: the wannabe resurrector whom you can coach into zombifying her brother's corpse by mistake, the bored son of a comedian, or the little goblin whom you can taunt about its parents deserving to die only for it to reply "Well, yeah - they was nasty old geezers - wanted to cut 'em a raggedy new smile myself some days." I'll even put in a special good word for Vanra, the little girl you pull out of the hag's belly:

Until that point, it works per the usual fairytale motif: beat up some ugly monster, rescue the pretty young damsel, then if you're not in a rush wait until she hits puberty before fucking her. I was pleasantly surprised though to pass by her mother's house later and hear a few lines of dialogue between the two, struggling to re-acclimate to mundane life an understandably shellshocked kid unable to form sentences and afraid to even go outside. It instantly brought to mind Picard's breather episode after ST:TNG's famous Borg two-parter, a welcome logical follow-up, an unusual hint of awareness from purveyors of mass entertainment that dramatic/traumatic/destructive events are not neatly fixed by an episodic reset or a happily ever after.

Plus, yes, heartwarming to boot. I wish those two the best.

 

But, again, whoever wrote the hag-related quests was rather more insightful or inspired than the rest. For the most part, the kneebiters in BG3 look cute and draw audience sympathy as they would in any sitcom or action movie. And that's about all they do. Some game designers have derided D&D's LCGE alignments as too limiting and simplistic, but Larian evidently dodged even such basic questions for a far more primitive, simpleminded metric of favor and disfavor: cuteness.

- unless it's masculinity in service to a woman, then it's "alpha"

Some juxtapositions are quite blatant (grumbling, bearded old necromancer vs. his cooing young healer daughter, giant-nosed hag vs. curly young mother-to-be, etc.) but various gradations of neoteny play into most of your quests. Even in a rare gender-flipped example such as animal cruelty at the kennels, the good male had to be a beardless halfling to look childlike next to the mean girl:

Shadowheart supplies the most consistent example. I'm normally a sucker for the broken little girl routine, but she over-played it even by my tastes. Her dialogues so single-mindedly pushed the idea of her being a victim (while ignoring what by her own admission were her own numerous victims) that by Act 2 I'd lost interest in her personal quest, and the fact that she defaults to "good" if left up to her own devices when faced with the Nightsong made me despair of her providing any cogent assessment of Sharran worship, instead rehashing some trite little fable about purity of heart. By that point Minthara was replacing her in my line-up anyway, so when her quest came up again in Act 3 I surrendered her to her fellow cultists.

An evil action to have taken, sure. I mean, I assume they'll torture her to death. Or, since I know for a fact from my BG2 Diviner's companion roster that Viconia already owns a Vest of Human Flesh +5, maybe she needs the shorts of half-elf flesh to go with it. *shrug*

But what I did not expect was "disapproves" penalties from every one of my companions**, including Minthara of all people! Because how could a drow matriarch possibly approve of my own drow sacrificing one of our hated half-breed surface cousins to yet a third drow?!?

The real kicker's that if you do hand Shadowheart over, the Daughter of Darkness quest bugs out and doesn't even complete properly. The devs apparently thought it unthinkable that anyone would side against adorable, emo little Shadowheart, who's guilty as sin of more than her share of standard Sharran crimes anyway, including my own tilted windmill of brainwashing. Her against Viconia. Against dignified, stalwart Viconia. Who soloed Jon Irenicus for me with two casts of a third-level spell. And, in-character, I'm surrendering one cleric to get a whole cult on my side?

Take her! Do you want fries with that?

 

At least Astarion fucking owns his evil nature.

 

Another recurring issue is the perennial anti-intellectualism of pop-culture, and to bridge the two, let's bring up this bitch:

 

"A tower full of trinkets" is the accusation hurled by every superstitious, inbred hick in history at ivory towers, ignorant of the nuanced analysis and systematic contextualization necessary to construct and utilize those "trinkets" - plus, Highlander Urkel over there has a throne made out of books! You seriously expect me to side against a guy with a book throne? Not to mention she's twice the pompous twit he is. So yeah, sure as Shadowheart's now a pair of lederhosen, Aylin's a nine volt battery. Distasteful her enslavement may be, but centuries of personal and public intellectual pursuit (foppish, but still) where that idiot jock would only spend her time dancing naked on moonlit hilltops... well, the juxtaposition greatly helps settle my conscience. (edit: yet of course the choice between them is presented as starkly as any cartoon mad scientist strapping a beautiful young damsel to a laser table; no thanks)

While I did not pursue Gale's quest past the meeting with the goddess, I saw much the same attitude in the ensuing dialogue at camp, where most dialogue options push you to talk Gale out of his ambitions, argue to remain slaves to the gods (or remain passive) even though he is absolutely right:

And, what, no dialogue option for a Lolth-sworn drow, despite Lolth's whole schtick being overthrowing at least part of the reigning pantheon? I should be high-fiving Gale by this point.

Extra point deduction for the line about "our time together" somehow presented as counter-argument to his ambitions - especially as I never romanced him.

 

For a more down to earth example try Mystic Carrion's quest. As he wasn't actually advancing knowledge but only playing spirit medium to a few rich clients, I did halfheartedly decide to end his saprophytic existence. At which point I'd assumed the rest of his undead would either join and die in the fight or somehow drop re-dead... not that his operation would just be taken over by some random street-trash ghoul, leaving a mansion full of ravening flesh-eaters to continue plaguing the city. How is this a good ending, when you've only eliminated the intellectual side of the problem? Well, you can't go wrong with beating up a nerd, I guess.

 

In summary: spoon-fed morality, cuteness, romance and beating up nerds. Themes thoroughly tailored to the mass market, which is to say to overemotional, instinct-driven, cretinous apes, whether typified by the cliched giant brain antagonist or by the fixation on mating rituals.

It was annoying enough finding persistent romance dialogues in every companion's scripts, even indulged in a couple of sex scenes, but I had not expected to be taken to task for not settling down by a damn corpse. Unsurprisingly Larian did not include the reply I would actually voice to such a question: that love is an evolutionary adaptation by which individuals are induced toward surrendering labor and self-sacrifice via emotional manipulation, that it is a form of mental control, brainwashing, slavery, and especially in this campaign we've already got more than enough of that going around.

 

And perhaps the saddest part? Larian really is better than this. Hints flit here and there that the writers knew damn well what tedious platitudes they were spewing.

But such moments, sad to say, come sparingly.

 

 

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* -and given this blog's meandering nature and lack of audience, I should know.

** Easily cheated btw; just leave your other companions at camp when you hand Shadowheart over. There's no fighting involved anyway. Also, in retrospect, given I jokingly blamed Viconia (and Korgan) for my chaotic neutral diviner falling into chaotic evil by the end of BG2... and now Viconia's tempted yet another of my characters to evil acts... maaayybe she really is a bad influence?

One sup on a time, there was a bathroom scale.

Splish-splash, we're all taking a bath

"like the water's flow under December's snow"

Longfellow - The Skeleton in Armor (1841)

Dunno whatcher talkin' 'bout Hank, Christmastime's t-shirt weather.

I'd like to remind everyone of a concept increasingly fading from our lexicon: the spring thaw.

This photo was not taken this year.

Y'see kids, you wouldn't know it from looking out the window but at temperate latitudes it was heretofore considered normal for snow to gradually accumulate for weeks at a time over the winter months, especially in upland regions, thawing or sublimating only gradually or partially in late winter and then finally melt altogether sometime in late February or early March when the temperature decisively rose. The resulting meltwater flooding caused occasional problems, but as it turns out, temperatures just above freezing don't help evaporation much either, so what we're getting now with fewer sub-zero days every year is longer and longer months of repeated freezing and thawing and miserable slushy, deformable ground wreaking havoc on infrastructure. Previously, wide, flat sinks like you see above managed the springtime overflow (and were in no small measure supported by it) plus ecosystems have adapted to winter ground cover, as exemplified by the now extensively studied snowshoe hare example. The bunnies don a white coat during winter months to blend against snow. With snow lasting less and less every year, instead of being camouflaged, now they pop out against the scenery like brilliant little lightbulbs, drawing the eye of every fox, hawk, raccoon and coyote like an all-you-can-eat corn dog buffet to a redneck.

Stop posing heroically just because you've finally admitted reality exists. The evidence for global warming was never difficult to understand. It didn't take long for timelapses of melting glaciers to pile up. Any advanced calculations were done for you. Hell, I was bugging my relatives and did a junior year high school science class presentation about it back in the late nineties. It was already old news. For my entire lifetime, you've been able to read evidence not only from atmospheric physics and dwindling albedo estimates, but chemical analyses of soil, ice, air and water samples, biological analyses of wildlife geographic ranges shifting uphill and northwards to deal with warming habitats, hell, even social corroboration. One of the saddest moments came in 2005-ish? when a delegation from (I believe?) Vanuatu addressed the United Nations, meekly begging hat in hand for some measures against rising waves because quite a few of their islands are atolls merely a hand's breadth above sea level, and they're already getting washed away millimeters by millimeters every year. We all knew they'd be ignored. And they've been sounding the same alarm ever since. And they've been ignored.

 

I suppose what I'm really getting at is that the next elected official feeding convenient lies to the degenerate braindead hordes of hillbilly refuse which have denied global warming for a hundred years based on fairy tales about divine providence and are STILL denying it even as it's sloshing against our boots in the middle of January deserves to be held face-down in one of those puddles above until it stops kicking.

Once upon a tine, there was a flat.

Four Lights, Two Sexes, Zero Gods

"Sacrifice to the cause

Turn your code into law

Compensate to validate the loss

To take a thief and nail him to a cross"

 

KMFDM - Anarchy

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"In a country where equestrianism is assertion I suppose one must be equestrian..."

H.G. Wells - The Research Magnificent

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"One does not have to be unusually astute to see that when an obscure woman's charges of sexual harassment have the potential to topple the president of the United States, a major redistribution of 'power' has taken place."

Daphne Patai - Heterophobia (1998) (during the Lewinsky scandal) 

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"Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth."

 

George Orwell - The Prevention of Literature

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"You’re bitching about those kids over some friendly fornication - but do you know what I’m worried about?"
"What?"
"Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit. Think it over."

 

Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

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Last year my inbox treated me to this Kafkaesque little routine courtesy of our overlords at Google:

"Hello,
As you may know, our Community Guidelines (https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "Pillars of Immersion" was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at http://werwolfesden.blogspot.com/2016/10/pillars-of-immersion.html. Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.
We apply warning messages to posts that contain sensitive content. If you are interested in having the status reviewed, please update the content to adhere to Blogger's Community Guidelines. Once the content is updated, you may republish it"

 

You may notice the obviously bot-generated message neglected to point out my guilt. What exactly was the "sensitive content" which warranted censuring and censoring? You'll find nothing on that page but some fairly milquetoast praise of Pillars of Eternity's graphic design, a cartoon skeleton and a weak offhand joke about young Earth creationism. One can't damn well "adhere" to so slippery a prozess, but then what would be the point of ruling fairly and failing to fabricate criminality? Of course, if you'd like the hypocritical icing on that cake, note Google was at that very time arguing it should not be censored by the countries in which its users reside (to wit: all of the countries) but only by whatever tax shelter it bases its regional mailbox headquarters in - in its case Ireland. Was it Ireland then which objected to my praise of crossbow cranks? Or was it California (where Google seats its main power) which objected to my appreciation for rancid zombies? Heaven knows SoCal of all places would never traffic in tales of living dead...

 

Google (likely by automation) soft-censored a random page based on flagging by what (for all I know) could very well in turn have been another crawler bot programmed to do exactly that: flag random pages. The mere possibility that someone somewhere may have taken umbrage at something is enough to justify a conviction. Pretext is result.

 

"We've come to expect never to be offended. What you say is offensive to me" mocked Richard Dawkins during his 2008 tour for The God Delusion "I'm offended by some things. I'm offended by chewing gum. I'm offended by backwards-pointing baseball hats. But I don't try to get a version of the blasphemy law passed to prevent people chewing gum or reversing their cap. So what if I'm offended? So what if my feelings are hurt? Does that give me the right to prevent others from expressing their opinions?"

 

At the time, he was responding to religious uproar over his insistence on discussing religion like any other topic, refusing irrational faith the moral umbrella it so unjustifiably claims. Three years ago Dawkins was instead rescinded his 1996 award by the American Humanist Association, for daring to discuss other topics like any other topics, refusing other brands of irrationality the moral umbrella they so unjustifiably claim. The self-appointed arbiters of humanism are a bit fuzzier on justifying their own support for racist theories (be honest, if "black identity" had been proposed by David Duke, it would be reviled instead of applauded*) or the frankly supernatural precept that females can outright become males or vice-versa by the thaumaturgy of contemporary cosmetic surgery and hormone shots. No weighing of rational arguments was needed. The unilateral pretext of social activism was enough to do what they wanted all along and strike down a colossus bestriding their all too narrow little world of favor-currying - and by such reflected importance elevate their own increasingly farcical organization's status.

 

Last year, after recovering from his near-fatal stabbing by a Muslim terrorist, Salman Rushdie redirected his warning of the threat on free speech also to the dubiously secular historical, sociopolitical and antiscientific revisionism now running rampant in the United States. Sam Harris, J.K. Rowling, John Cleese, Stephen Fry, etc., our culture is now littered with famous left-wing examples unpersoned by rainbow-headed social activists, convicted on one or more counts of intellectual integrity. Desmond Morris might've been the canary in this particular coal mine come to think of it, raked over the coals by feminists from forty years ago for daring to include women in the human race.

 

In 2021 I called upon Samuel Beckett to elucidate the hollow spectacle of mob rule which had gripped most American cities the previous year, as only a master of the absurd could hope to explain the George Floyd riots' pretense of social "justice" by torching your aunt's Honda Civic and braining random bystanders in the streets - as well as the degenerate dregs of academia who lent that millions-strong Peste a transobscurent lacquer of erudite legitimacy by postmodern fabrications. So in that spirit, let me recommend another absurdist on the topic of our current kulturkampf.

 

Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros could be seen as an extroverted version of Kafka's Metamorphosis, its viewpoint character watching helplessly as his society loses its mind, as his every friend and coworker willingly give themselves over to a bestial transformation. A formerly vibrant intellectual landscape is effaced under a single banner of group identity. Once critical, analytical individual minds are lost in the herd. Sound familiar? Rhinoceros aimed its frustration more narrowly than Godot at the intelligentsia, but the various fascist logicians, apologists and theologians throughout 1930s Europe could themselves not have existed but for widespread support among the rabble looking for a pretext to murder their neighbours. And that is what Women's Studies, African-American Studies, Hollywood's gay mafia and the rest of the now endless dogmatic host of celluloid censors or academic millstones supply, much as phrenology and social "darwinism" did a hundred and fifty years ago, or the apologists for Stalinism or for Nazism. They market that all-important perceived legitimacy, casus belli, the pretext to attack. The contagious hordes of our degenerate Peste and their "daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto" of academic and media circles are in fact forced to endlessly legitimize each other. Who else would?

 

Here's the thing though: the same capacity for reason which criticizes nationalism, corporatism, Christianity or the nuclear family will also criticize matriarchal communes, Islam, overpopulation and political correctness. The same skepticism which let me call bullshit on Wiccans or "compassionate conservatives"** twenty years ago protects me from Scientology and PETA. You can argue about whether Stalin was a communist or a fascist, anti-religious or set himself up as a demigod, but to the tens of millions he murdered, to the hundreds of millions he enslaved, it all ended up the same anyway. Stalin was first and foremost the most ardent Stalinist, and all philosophy he preached to the masses served only as pretext for powermongering. And anyone capable of calling into question his justifications had to go. Rhinoceros is particularly apt to remind us of an immutable early step in the rise of any dictatorship: smash the schools, smash the papers. The free press, universities, academia, the fourth estate, the intelligentsia, call it what you will, but it all serves as an unending font of inconvenient critique which any would-be tyrant must muzzle, leash, curb, neuter or put down for fear it might give the masses the wrong idea - that is to say, any idea. The rich and powerful will do this by any means at their disposal, by any pretext.

Do you not understand this?

THE RICH DON'T CARE!

They don't care which big lie they spout to seize power. You think the multibillionaire investors astroturfing your non-profit organization or gutting universities by turning them over from professors to ever more bloated administrations give a flying fuck about your personal pronouns, about your petty, narcissistic little word games? Or which magic sky-daddy you worship? All they care about is an unthinking workforce willing to be worked to death or marched onto the battlefield as cannon fodder.

If they can't do it by nationalistic fervor, they'll do it by proletarian fervor.

If they can't do it by christianity, they'll do it by hinduism.

If they can't do it by promises of a kingdom of god, they'll do it by woke utopianism.

If they can't do it by antisemitism, they'll do it by pro-semitism.

If they can't do it by white power, they'll do it by black power.

If they can't do it by religious sexual puritanism, they'll do it by feminist sexual puritanism.

It does not matter whether they force you to say that Lazarus rose from the dead or you'll be reincarnated as a cow or biological sex is a social construct or extraterrestrials are playing ping-pong at Roswell or JFK was assassinated by Atlantean Keebler Elves. They need to exterminate thought, instill absolute obedience. Anyone who criticizes nonsense must go, anyone who does not simply jump on the bandwagon, worship the fad, toe the line mindlessly at every opportunity must be deplatformed, censored, exiled. Remember the punchline of Aristides' anecdote is not only that he signed his own ostrakon, but that he was asked to do so by someone who knew nothing about him and only wanted to take a swipe at someone nicknamed "the just".

 

Oh yes, they always have a reason. Europeans in 1800/1900/1930 didn't attack Jews "just because" they woke up one morning with that idea. They had reasons, oh yes, those jews were foreign subversives, they were sapping the vital force of the mother/fatherland, they purveyed immorality and decadence, they drank baby blood, they had a million reasons! With zero analysis. Religious reactionaries aren't beating homosexuals to death just because they're bored and have nothing else to do. Oh, they've always had reasons, those gays were all disease-carrying pederasts, didn't you hear? And besides, God hates fags! Didn't you hear!?! "Why do you always make me hit you" the domestic abuser shouts. "Stop hitting yourself" the schoolyard bully shouts. A woman can't harm a man, she's only turning his patriarchal aggression against him. The designated enemy is always a threat, always blamed for the violence.

And of course "minority" groups only want to censor hate speech. Never mind that any group with the power to dictate both public opinion and intitutional access is not marginalized. They're under threat! You are harming some random narcissistic bitch by denying her an invented honorific like the royal "they"; you are an enemy of the public. Google's guidelines state "we need to curb abuses that threaten our ability to provide this service and the freedom of expression it encourages" got that? Google is THREATENED by the notion that men and women are not identical. Google is THREATENED by da lawd's name taken in vain. Google is THREATENED by cartoon skeletons. Google is THREATENED by old cranks. Google is RANCID about the word threatened. If any bystanders get caught in the algorithmic censorship crossfire, well, those are acceptable losses. Pay no attention to the side-effect of fomenting a culture in which those momentarily in power can now silence any voice of dissent, choreograph the ostracism of any individual at any time for any reason or no reason at all; all it takes is the claim that someone, somewhere, is offended by your existence, and you're gone - so ya'd better keep yer head down, keep yer yap shut, keep yer noggin void of any unsanctioned thoughts.

That automated censorship is even considered an option sounds the death knell of free thought. Any hate speech law is by its nature a thought crime law. It hinges on perceived motivation or the parties' implied relative moral standing, very much in the same vein as blasphemy or lese-majeste. Social activist naivete works on the presumption that you will always control the narrative, that you personally will always stand in judgment of others (being after all perennially "on the right side of history") but you won't. History's wheel has trampled greater rabblerousing powermongers than you (ask the Jacobins, ask the Leninists, ask the Templars and Huguenots) and will not slow its roll no matter how many knights say "ni" or "zee" at it. Having served your purpose in justifying censorship and repression by your hollow sophistry, having built the pyre, you will be of no further use to the rich and will take your place upon it.

 

After all, rhinoceros burn as readily as do monkeys.

 

 

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* An apocalyptic streak akin to Christian Zionism runs through all modern "minority" identity politics angles in that White Nationalists, White Supremacists and the like seem to love hearing the very targets of their hatred validate their fractionalist worldview and hasten race wars.

 

** In that context, isn't it funny to see the American Humanists adopt the "compassionate" rhetoric in their very subtitle? Smokescreens block vision from both directions, it turns out.

P.S.: Believe it or not, the joke in my title was accidental. I don't even indulge. I do indulge in ST:TNG, but if you didn't get the reference: There. Are. Four. Lights!