Abortive Cribbing

"Peel off all those eyes

Crawl into the dark

You poisoned all your children

To camouflage your scars"

 

Marilyn Manson - Man that You Fear

 

 

I dreaded what Netflix would make of Cien anos de soledad. Even ignoring its importance to South American audiences, the book is a world classic; if you can't do it right, don't do it at all. But they picked a great team, and for six of eight episodes the lavish sets and charmingly indulgent long takes paint a tangible Macondo dripping with just the right amount of surrealism to ripen the Buendias' personal fables. Less excusable the decision to trim the first season to the first half or two-thirds of the book, especially as it mangled ep.7-8 and embellished unnecessarily the more violent sequences Marquez knew well enough not to inflate. (If short on air time just cut all the gratuitous sex scenes, that's a whole bonus episode right there.) But for once this decision seems motivated by more than just the production crew cashing in on a second season. Those two episodes spoonfeed the show's core perennially-revolving/revolting latin-american audience a pretty blatant life lesson about not being taken in by strutting, pompous generalissimos' hollow promises or hollower causes. Still, does the political angle warrant mistreating the source material? I once again dread their upcoming treatment of the city-of-glass banana republic phase and its politics whenever the second season comes out.

 

Coincidentally, though I do not speak Spanish I couldn't help but catch the occasional mistranslation - then, sensitized to the problem, constantly throughout the show's run. From single words out of place to longer dialogue to stock phrases everyone has probably heard in Spanish, to outright inserting English text gratuitously, I can't help but think any random SpanGlish-slinging Valley girl off the street could've done a better job. WTF Netflix?

 

That befuddlement grew to outright disgust after queuing up the next series, a six-episode adaptation of Il Gattopardo. I suppose I could give the title's rendering as The Leopard a pass, given I've never read the novel and apparently the change dates back over sixty years, bit random as it seems. (I get the phonetic tangle of serval/servant in this context, but why not The Cheetah to keep it closer to the source?) Here the admittedly lavish sets impressed me less than the cast managing to convey subtleties of mannerism, intensity and inflection characterizing the entire dramatis personae's individual station, intellect, will and more squalid tendencies. My compliments to the Italian school of acting, and that is not a compliment paid lightly considering I generally view performers as instruments and only writers (and to a lesser extent directors or composers) as creators.

 

As before though, translation takes nonsensical liberties, even in many cases where the exact same idiom maintains the same usage in both Italian and English, verbatim, yet again and again these were randomly altered in the subtitles! Though tempted to accuse Netflix of captioning by chatbot, I'd think machine output would be more consistent, more precise on a word-for-word basis. Hell, you can feed the script through Google Translate and receive a more faithful rendition. No, this appears a case of old-fashioned human stupidity. Nota bene, I am not merely indulging in literalism. The most egregious example rears up halfway through the final episode, which recapitulates in an elegant exchange of a dozen lines the very crux of this tale of social upheaval. It was decided, in the translator's infinite wisdom, to flip the phrase "and (yet it's) too late" into "I think it's enough for today" (captioning) or "it's late enough" - except even without speaking fluent Italian, anyone can tell the phrase held double meaning. It expresses not merely a father and daughter wrapping up an evening of high society but the gut-punch finisher to a grim realization that society is devolving in autophagic rot... AND IT'S TROPO TARDI to forestall the corruption.

 

Yet even where idiom does not translate perfectly it should generally still be preserved, specifically because it illustrates some cultural divergence, a different attitude or viewpoint. I'd encountered "shikata ga nai" borrowed in Red Mars, but it wasn't until I heard the utter deadpan fatalism with which native Japanese speak it that I registered the expression as interesting.* I've addressed this before with Emily Wilson dumbing down Seneca's plays, vainly straining for wider appeal: nuance like an ancient Roman describing a young man as budding or blossoming tells you far more about the culture in which the play was written than generic descriptors. Part of experiencing great works lies in experiencing the poetry, the greater pique and palette of such turns of phrase which set a worthy audience's mind in motion. Thus Netflix doubly betrays The Leopard, a story concerning not least the loss of quality.**

 

Lest I be accused of monarchism, let me specify I don't see history's great economic struggle as one of rich against poor, but a conspiracy of rich and poor against the middle. I certainly don't think 19th-century aristocracy should have been preserved. Now, last century or two thousand years ago, you'll get nothing but stagnation and decay by reserving all wealth solely to serve the palsied, circumscribed lusts of last aeon's powdered and perfumed dregs. But there's a lovely recurring theme in The Leopard of those who believe themselves in power propping up their own usurpers, unjustifiably secure in the terminology of master and slave, respectability and utility, only for definitions to be shifted. See Fabrizio's repeated attempts to distance himself from his former hired muscle.

 

Yeah, definitions matter. Much of the past decades' insanity consists of linguistic obfuscation of base backbiting. Pretending that "affirmative action" is somehow different from favoritism, or that "mansplaining" is somehow worse than generic condescension, or "microaggressions" are anything other than mundane social slights, or that "rape" covers anything from a gun to your head to a raised eyebrow. America's current administration's having a gay old time shocking popular sensibilities, but though this is clearly an escalation, did you yourselves, the designated opposition, not establish the rules of the game?

You wanted to hate snooty Europeans? So do the rednecks.

You wanted a society based on feelings, where people can be condemned without evidence, because only a designated victim's subjective interpretation matters. They're giving it to you hard and fast. But who ever said it would be your feelings that prevail?

You wanted a society where gender and sexuality can be used as badges of supremacy? Sound the alarums, the boys are back in town. But who ever promised yours would be the shiniest badge?

You wanted a society where people can be promoted based on ethnicity instead of personal quality. Congratulations, you got your supremacist movement. Is it not the color you were shopping for?

You wanted a society where declarations of intrinsic guilt or merit based on righteous beliefs can never be challenged? Where smearing another as a racist, sexist or homophobic witch immediately results in a burning? Where nominal martyrs can get away with any religious atrocities under the moral umbrella of "colonial" grievances real or imagined? Well, if the pointy black hat fits, wear it.

You wanted a society that excuses mob violence so long as it's in the name of a designated righteous cause. Rejoice, the capitol riot traitors have been pardoned. Oh, oops, did you get some collateral damage on your sleeve there?

You wanted to rewrite history books to favor your designated heroes? Well, you're no longer the editor, but the press you set up is still running.

You wanted factual education reduced to social indoctrination. Now pledge allegiance, bitches.

While their delivery may be more crass and low-brow, it's hard to find much in the bigoted powermongering of the current administration which has not in fact been a part of self-appointed "liberal" politics for the past generation. You wanted monarchic fiat to enforce dogma. But who ever promised you it'd be your ass on the throne?

 

What, now lies bother you? Now Harvard is worried about academic freedom? Now, after a decade of #MeToo you're finally bothered by scapegoating and punishment without due process? It's all in the interpretation, is that not the post-modern dogma inculcated in every "educational" institution? That words can mean whatever you want them to, that history is all made up, that physical reality can be ignored in favor of whatever you "identify as" being? That victimhood can be claimed and leveraged like the "noble" lineage of a parvenu? After all the years I've been trying to warn you and you spat in my face like the lord of the manor beating a peasant with his cane, it suddenly dawns upon you tropo 'tards that crookedness=bad?

 

All through the first half of this post, were you not screaming at me "who cares, you nerd!" for niggling over translation accuracy? See, I'd like to know whether the Buendias' diction takes on aristocratic airs as they rise in social rank, or whether Calogero's word choice sounds as aimless and jarring as his larger twists in conversation, or whether the Japanese really say "light!" by way of "you've got the idea"; unfortunately, translations are churned out for those who don't care about meaning. And if you'd protest truth may be negligible at that level of mundane entertainment, I would argue that its pervasiveness far outweighs. Your taste for facile falsehood bioaccumulates up through sociopolitical trophic chains. If you cheat at cards, you'll cheat at stock markets too.

 

You don't care what the reality is, you just want a fancy show. Fine. But do remember you're not the star. You're the third corpse on the right side of history. For a society to condemn the lies of its leaders, it would need show far less than the all-pervasive disdain for truth which you both forcefeed and vomit over each other every day in every aspect of your lives. Is it acceptable to maladapt a phrase or a story in order to get across a message you consider socially necessary? Is it acceptable to dumb it down to sell it up? Look at your newsfeed and I'll ask you again: is lying acceptable?

Here's another random Italian phrase: traduttore, traditore! Basta.

 

 

 

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* Even if your only exposure to Japanese comes from anime, in Princess Mononoke I seem to remember Eboshi delivers a pretty solid shikataganai during San's attack. Which is just one more reason never to watch anything dubbed.

 

** Nor, by the by, is this the first time I've seen the Italian language get hit harder than most. For example when Ennio Morricone received his honorary Oscar in 2007, Clint Eastwood, being already on stage, volunteered to translate for him in real time and false colour. Most striking was Morricone calling for continued improvement in their profession, which Eastwood bowdlerized into some "let's pat ourselves on the back" pablum. Easy enough to catch the carnie at his trick, as the word amelioration also exists in English.

 

P.S.: There's a weird corollary between The Leopard and another book I've mentioned here recently, The Research Magnificent by H.G. Wells. Not only do both follow a similar central theme, but Wells' protagonist and his wife use "Cheetah" and "Leopard" as pet names for each other. Was Tomasi's original translator in English a Wells fan?

Here's lookin' at you lookin' at me, 4

This is... not quite a leopard, nor a cheetah nor serval. This is a dead cat.

It was not always dead. I met it running around for three, maybe four years at longest around 2020 as a stray, sometimes waiting expectantly for scraps (which some locals unthinkingly provided in far too ample amounts, stinking up the neighbourhood when they rotted) but mostly I assume it chased rodents and birds. We never spoke. I don't know what it thought of the changing texture of pinions or the lyrical quality of squeaks. I never asked its carnivorous opinion on the death penalty. It was calm around humans but coyly evasive at their approach. Then one chilly morning it lay stretched motionless on the damp lawn next to the parking lot, rotting, jaws gaped in rigor mortis, no apparent trauma. Maybe poisoned, more likely just a brief lifetime of diseased, weatherbeaten, hardscrabble subsistence in a world alien to it both as wild hunter or civilized pet.

 

The End

Fantasy Revolved

(Loreena McKennitt - Kecharitomene)

 

Well, it's only been two years. I might as well write the third part of this rant, finally. Magical fantasy worlds should better integrate natural adaptation, sure, but the bigger issue is recursive: how does magic in turn affect the world, and vice-versa?

 

Slight aside: once upon a winter I volunteered to write mission dialogue for a startup (and now long vaporwared) game. I was tentatively accepted based on a writing sample and then kicked out a few months later for failing to actually write any missions. Yes, I am one of those rarely gifted individuals who can get fired from volunteer work. Stop pointing and laughing. But though my own failings chiefly caused my failure (my old depression cycle hits hardest in spring) it also confirmed what I'd always suspected: that this is not, strictly speaking, creative work. You're handed down edicts from project leads whose greatest concept of compelling storytelling runs no further than lining up carets and parentheses in program code, or worse indirectly from investors interested only in reinforcing the mass market lowest common denominator, imitating their rich peers' moneymaking scams. And you're told to make all those "boy meets girl" stories or wouldn't-it-be-cool-if notions into flavor text that somehow draws customers and pays off.

 

At one point we were mailed a concept render for a brand new race the bosses thought would look great in their SciFi project. It was, quite literally, a little green man. Space-goblins, yeah that'll make you stand out in the internet age's most crowded field. Sure, I can write some background text for that. See, it involves a magic ring out in space that a little guy with fuzzy feet in space has to go throw into the sun in space. Another bright idea was literally bright: a fire elemental. For a SciFi game. Now, granted, you can write riveting SciFi for creature made of <plasma> as Arthur C. Clarke demonstrated in Out of the Sun, but you have to stretch your concept of environments a bit. A humanoid fire elemental you just pop with your Smith&Wesson laser six-shooter out in the woods behind your log cabin on planet It's-Just-Like-Earth? No. Just. Fucking. No. You don't need me to string words along to that particular effect. Hire some random sixth-grader. (And that, btw, is all you'll get from maximum-likelihood text elongation too.)

 

The bar is set considerably lower for the more childish genre of fantasy, motivating its much wider representation in pop culture. Even most SF is science fantasy with psychic space wizards frowning and grunting and shooting finger-lightning at each other. "It's magic" explains so much... and yet nothing at all. Relevantly here, note magic never changes anything. Oh, sure, you blow up a mountain now and again, but somehow the world about still consists of coyotes chasing rabbits and farmers pitchforking hay and cozy monkey clan social life with mommies and cousins. Magic means nothing until the plot requires it. Bow before status quo!

 

But here's the thing: life adapts. Lucky Lae'zel was wearing her stompin' boots when I hit BG3's gremishka-infested attic, but it got me thinking animals adapted to magic are actually far more likely than we usually see; they need not cast spells but just exploit magical effects. With magic as universal catalyst, you can actually have those impossibly exo/endothermic reactions otherwise making human torches impossible. Except catalysts are by definition applicable to the same reaction wherever available, and most fantasy explicitly describes magic as a universal force pervading all matter or at least all life. If a druid can make a field of barley grow, then the principle of natural selection would still apply: some stalks of barley would absorb that magic better than others and benefit more, seed faster or more plentifully and be better represented in the next generation, especially if the farmer wants faster-growing barley and selects for that trait. After a few dozen generations (and fantasy worlds tend toward deep, deep timelines (if not plots)) you'd get magic-infused barley which is just as hopelessly dependent and maladapted for life without magic as most of our domesticated species are without their irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and flea collars.

 

And then what? How does that evolution feed back into the world's magic?

 

If your magic barley gets better at eating magic than its competitors, and magic is by necessity generally treated as a finite or limited flow resource, then the better species get at eating it, the less they leave available for others, a continued war of attrition like for any other microelement.

Conversely, if magic is a destructive force, those better adapted to avoid it would fare better, and competition would favor those better able to identify and stake out magic-free habitats. No action without reaction.

Can you write a fantasy story about rabbits running rampant because wolves switched to eating magic? Maybe an RPG quest to use your own spellcasting to drain an area's magic before it poisons the food chain?

And does it bio-accumulate? If every rpg is full of dire wolves, dire bears, dire badgers, how does this affect the ecological niche of wolves, bears and badgers? Would there be any normal ones left? Are the dires all eating dire rabbits and dire blackberries? Is that how dire Popeye gets his dire spinach? Conversely, would destructive magic cause worse and worse mutations farther up the food chain? Will you grow a third eye by eating dire wolf meat?

Need trophic chains even remain contiguous with a source of infinite energy flying about? If magic can sustain gigantic dragons, why not a forest devoid of herbivores, where the wolf shall lieth down with the chestnut in harmony? Do magic doggies poop?

Either way, the effect of magic on life would feed back into magic itself, and so on, generation by generation. That in turn would impact social structures. Just as with real-world agricultural revolutions, less labor requirement per caloric unit would shift more workers away from farming... and toward what? Plains-ape social structures are built around hunter-gathering and the need to manage breeding rights. Divination for paternity tests, evocation for population control (an 'acid splash' up the cooch oughta blast the parasite right out of her uterus; 5gp at your nearest midwife (10gp extra for the cure light wounds)) enchantment to impose obedience on children and decrease the monstrous cost of caregiving (no need to spend half an hour re-reading pokey little puppies for every kid; 6 seconds for a sleep spell can take care of an entire creche, assuming you bunk the beds right) and who'd pick up dog shit raising the beasts when you can just summon them from hell?

 

An infinite supply of social engineering would create something more novel than a medieval anytown!

 

But even if that's not your cuppa, then admit at least most fantasy world gimmicks would make no sense. Every RPG is full of the "tomb of suchensuch" - who the hell buries instead of cremating when zombies are real? And would maggots evolve to preserve zombie muscle and tendons intact so they can run their corpsey carriage around dispersing the insects as they pupate? You could implement zombies literally farting butterflies in your game, with all the justification you'll never have for a SciFi fire elemental!

Or take wizardly creations released into the wild. A lab-grown monstrousity might look impressive, but it could easily lack the adaptations and instincts to actually function out in nature. Imagine tracking the mighty owlbear to the forest it invaded... only to find it cowering in fear of windblown pines' motion, starving to death because it doesn't know what acorns and blackberries are and being bled dry by ticks like a ghost moose, especially if clerics have been casting spells of eternal summer and fomenting climate change!

Or take a spell of eternal night. Even if you hand-wave the photosynthesis angle, the lack of light would favor invasion by nocturnal or cave-dwelling species. Your lush mountain streambank, shrouded in dim starlight for a lifetime, would look even more memorable with bleached, blind cave fish replacing the trout and bats out-competing eagles.

 

In only one respect, the pitfalls of a genie's wish, does such storytelling ever acknowledge repercussions.

 

Think it through!

This whole rant can be summed up as that very old, very exhausted, centennially-repeated plea to purveyors of "speculative" fiction: do try to actually speculate instead of rehashing primitive power fantasies. When magazines like Astounding and Galaxy revived the genre of Science Fiction in the mid-20th century, it was by doing exactly that: thinking it through. First by realizing that new technologies worked differently than medieval jousting and something like beta radiation cannot be substituted for simply hitting things with a stick, then by addressing how such differences would affect the human condition. Can't you do that for fantasy?

 

Umm... well, no, I don't think you can. Improve fantasy's coherence and causality and eventually it simply becomes SF with old-timey period-piece trappings. As I've said so many times, SF is a bottom-up build-up of causality whereas Fantasy mimicks the top-down law-giving of religious infantilism, where things work simply because some omnipotent mommy and daddy up in the clouds (or a mean big brother bully down below) want them to work a certain way. Substitute "fate" or "cosmic balance" or some nebulous "will of magic" or "the force" for a more watered-down version. The genre's fans like it that way. It carries a primal, visceral (or primitive and scatological, depending on your viewpoint) appeal. And I doubt you've got enough time before civilization wholly collapses to grace myth with hard F however that may look.

 

But where overlap occurs, I'm sick of seeing it skew eternally in favor of the lower brow. I once said "Magitek can work for elevating primitive supernatural thinking via at least a veneer of rationality. Its reverse, science fantasy, wears thin much faster for degrading a presumably rational setting to primitive, infantile thought patterns." Even if Fantasy as a genre cannot be improved, at least on a small scale can you not occasionally improve one or ten particular fantasies by thinking them through?

One of the surest signs of the end of civilization is losing our ability to laugh at Gilligany/Stoogey morons for their very stupidity, but instead feeling obligated to coddle them as lovable.

 

We've got no sense oaf humour.

Dancing on the Treadmill

"Circumcised for the operation

Full spectrum generation"

Beck - Novacane (sic)

 

Well, I got my second punky encore city to respect my authoritah!

When first commenting on Frostpunk 2, I remarked the oddity of its return to SimCity metropolitan RCI district strategy, when the original Frostpunk had been a noteworthy follower of Banished's cozier village simulator trend. Such a flip warrants remembering some of SimCity's flaws. For one, because you're not placing individual structures, you have coarser control over your city's aesthetic, and the farther zoom also blurs together the few structures whose placement you do control. In a more practical sense, progression can feel flatter after the first few districts, even with the ability to customize each via their two of many upgrades. You're building districts merely to keep pace with your population, not for any greater goal. RCI output feeding into each other's demands, keeping up with your growing mass of Joneses, instead of powering some distinctive escalation can feel like horizontal advancement, can feel like sidegrade-farming, can feel like sideways leveling, can feel like... eewww... level scaling?

 

Well, not literally, but even a vague impression of that moldy old gimmick sends me reaching for the next game on my shelf after twenty years of annoyance. Unfortunately, in that next game it is literal. After my first day's trek to the border in Cyberpunk 2077 I settled into hunting down random crackhead trash and keeping an eye out for police scanner rumbles and fixer gigs. Luckily, newbie island's proven entertaining enough to run a few circles around.

From random ditzes treating the local street corner doom preacher like a tourist attraction to the surprisingly well-paced and well-conceived side quest gigs providing a great deal more entertainment than older RPG "kill ten rats" fare, I've not yet lacked for engaging pique. That is except for every enemy and every piece of loot being exactly level 1 and being unable to find any higher gradations anywhere... until at level 5-9 I spontaneously start spotting harder thugs and second or third-tier loot and suddenly realize: well, damnit, there goes the neighbourhood. We're auto-leveling this shit.

Why?

Why couldn't Watson be a level 1-10 or 1-20 area from the start and just stay thus, a nice place to come home to like Santa Monica in Bloodlines, a low-key dive, a low-yield, low-payoff side attraction, a lazily wretched hive of petty larceny. Conversely in C77, if I were to follow the main quest skipping gigs, I'd presumably advance the plot to supposedly high-threat missions nonetheless filled with lvl 3 mobs to suit my supposed (lack of) playstyle.

Why do developers keep doing this? Why why why, you idiots, why would you numerically flatten an otherwise multilayered virtual world into some monotonous grind removing both risk and reward? Why trivialize the power, plot and personal progression? Why homogenize?

 

To answer that question we need look to a different genre. Old World's 200-turn limit for a score victory annoyed me at first, usually leaving time for one war before the final tally, but it is true that for the most part this serves merely to truncate the victory lap, when nothing changes yet you merely keep conquering city after city indistinguishably one after the next. Granted, there are more artistic ways to draw a finish line, Civilization's spaceship being a classic example, or other capstone projects of that breed. Even better, establish a timeline, adjustable according to player preferences (like Stellaris' early/mid/late classes of galactic events) so that the world's progression is neither frozen nor locked to the player's. Triumph Studios made a particularly good show of layering its threats in AoW4. Individual mob camps or spawners can grow somewhat stronger as time passes, yes, but your greater metric for progress is escalating the class of threat you address from goodie huts through spawners up through multiple-army, multiple-objective war campagins. As they've spammed more DLCs after launch (they're publishing through Paradox now so... yeah) they're added even more gradations between passive mob camps and AI players.

The "umbral abyss" seen sprouting darkly there in the upper left is filled with Lovecraftian tentacle-faces sporadically ambushing weaker armies passing by their entrances like antlions. Acting as a separate map layer (and poor man's teleporter network since they can connect at distant parts of the overland or cave layers) and damaging units in affected regions, it's basically up to you when to mount the time and resource-consuming expedition to clear out one or more of the Abyss' many scattered teleporter islands, which may themselves be barren, offer a couple resource pickups and nodes, or be occupied by spawners or entire cities of the demons. So no matter how close this particular threat sits to my capital (a.k.a. newbietown) it won't be until mid-game that I address it decisively.

 

A variety of challenges, neither completely passive nor forcing any particular order, letting the player organize his own campaign weighing costs and benefits. Could Triumph instead scale every fight to the player's army strength? Umm, actually yeah, very, very easily. Except as I remarked in the case of Battle Brothers or Urtuk, in a more tactical or strategic RPG such an approach rapidly waxes monotonous, and it's simply not a widely accepted gimmick. Ever since Oblivion though, it's in the more FPS-oriented RPG subgenre that autoleveling has refluxed up with such scathing regularity.

 

So don't tell me we're not dealing with different player mentalities, or lack thereof.

A proper sense of escalation is important to those who consider entire campaigns. But twitch-gaming FPS carries a quicker subsapient limbic payoff. A customer base merely shopping for "boom, headshot" will keep chasing that direct hand-eye sensation, not any more deferred or diffuse satisfaction. It wants only a reiteration of exactly the same fight, over and over endlessly shooting the same four enemies three times each. And I do mean endlessly, since RP-lite titles (whether FPS, Diablo-clone, etc.) are also most prone to stretching into endless games. So do endless games create unrealistic expectations? Of what? That the game will be forever interesting or that it will be forever the same? Are you shopping for an interactive adventure or a security blanket?

 

Moving RPGs into FPS interaction has always promised greater immersion, more natural movement and orientation, but such mechanics inevitably call attention to themselves away from the actual content they're supposed to portray. Twenty years ago one could have said the jury was still out, give it a chance... but I think there's more enough evidence by now of the continual pull such twitch-appeal exerts away from planning, management or depth and toward mindlessly repeating the same idealized power-trip moment of hitting the magnetic bullseye, winning a fight which looks hard but is always scaled specifically to feed you the same exact dram of undeserved success.

 

Are RPG mechanics now better represented in other genres not labelled RPGs? All that good old adventuring and alignment-shifting and stat-finessing? (I've pointed out before that "grand strategy" is just a way of saying roleplaying on a population scale.)

 

There's actually a problem currently in AoW4 with the mistwalker event (fairy invasion) which scales poorly with the slow game pace I prefer, hitting with nigh-unbeatable strength much earlier than similar challenges. In more than one match I've seen the mistwalkers wipe the board, killing both myself and the computer opponents one by one, by itself, making victory either impossible or assured. Should this be patched?* Yeah... probably... a bit... but I'd hate to see it lose all of its oomph. I've found it being somewhat out of sync with the rest of the game actually makes it more interesting.

So why am I not seeing a fairy-android rampaging through Watson?

 

Is Frostpunk 2 an RPG? Did Skyrim offer me any more role-playing than championing Reason over Tradition and neutering my city's criminals? And would Frostpunk's audience bother with it if your populace merely built residential, industrial and commercial districts automatically as it grew? When your character starts rolling all the dice himself, and they always come up seven, what the hell are you still clicking?

 

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* edit 2025/04/25: It has now apparently been patched. Damnit Triumph, quit undercutting my bitching.

Eight Simple Rules for Writing My Female Character

Man bad, woman good; repeat the mantra.

 

1) First and foremost, there is only one source of all evil. Man is the enemy and the only enemy is man. No matter how many protagonists are female, antagonists must remain male. This goes for the villain's entire organization, with one exception cf. #3

2) Women are never wrong. Every woman must be supplied with at least one straw-man (preferably several) to correct or over whom to display her superior skills or morality. Every scene must shoehorn in a female viewpoint superior to a male's, regardless whether the topic is science, what to have for breakfast or the very fate of the universe.

 

3) Women never do wrong. If any woman does something wrong, it's either in service to a noble cause ("the ends justify the means" is only a moral pitfall for men) or because she's been driven to wrongness by a man. Any woman enrolled in an evil organization is always an innocent patsy of the man in charge, and she'll flip to the heroic side at first opportunity. That or she's a hypercompetent professional with no stake in her boss' morality... somehow. The Nuremberg defense flies perfectly fine in Femtasia.

 

4) Women never fail. If any female character cannot achieve her goals, it must always come down to interference by male stupidity or male malice, never ever because she herself is less amazing than she thought she is.

 

5) Any character trait or action like insults, greed, selfishness, violence, etc. which would be categorized as abusive if performed by a male serves in a female merely to show what a "strong woman" she is. Better yet, spin off every negative trait as a hard luck backstory showing how any flaw a woman might have stems from being mistreated by men in the past, to reinforce rules #1&3.

6) A woman never suffers in vain. Male extras can get torn apart limb from limb, skinned alive, tossed into volcanoes or at the very least lose everything and get humiliated while the audience laughs at their suffering, but any woman's every plight is a call to action or a condemnation of anyone who would dare mistreat her.

7) Establish female superiority from scene one, either being victimized by a man or all men, or by triumphing over men. Have her execute one in a duel in her first scene, or put up with an incompetent male boss, or shoot to death an entire bar full of disposable males, that is if she's not too busy getting raped (literally or figuratively) to fuel her upcoming rampage against all mankind as complicit in the crime of one man. The audience must know from the start the nature of the enemy.

 

8) Never praise a male. Everything good in the heroine's life must come from women. After escaping her sainted mother and worthless evil pig of a father, the heroine gets mentored by a woman (or, if by a man, must later rebel against him for holding back her greatness) is subverted by and prevails over a male peer/competitor for social status, actively scorns any male figures of authority for their (author-assured) incompetence and finally becomes the world's only hope against The Man.

9) Fish don't need bicycles. If a man offers to help the heroine, she must lambaste the worthless pig for insulting her superior ability. If a man fails to help the heroine, she must lambaste the worthless pig for his unmanly lack of chivalry. If a man ends up helping the heroine, play down the act's utility to her, but play up the righteousness of the gesture. He owes it to her. The worthless pig. (After all, we all know she could've done everything herself if she weren't so busy being superior.) If he dies in the process, she never experiences any guilt over it like male protagonists rampaging in the explicit name of their martyred girlfriends. After all, when a man dies for women&children first, he's just fulfilling his purpose.

10) The heroine gets to make up as many rules as she wants.

 

11) There is no need for independence in Femtasia. All males are either with the heroine or against her, must either be brought to heel or vanquished in the righteous name of ovarian supremacy.

12) As corollary to #s 6 and 8, lowly males are never to be permitted even the slightest toehold upon women's self-adjudicated moral high ground. If you include a male victim, focus on his flaws to drive home the message that he deserves whatever's coming to him, and is therefore not a real victim like a female version.

 

13) An exception can be made to #12 if the audience is assured a man "has a wife and children" or is in some other way actively justifying his worthless existence by servitude toward his superiors in the natural order. A woman on the other hand need only declare her innocence.

 

14) Because women are never wrong (cf. #2) there is no conflict between women. Ever. Women do not argue with each other, or call out each other's behavior, or ever stand with a man against another woman, unless they erroneously view each other negatively due to being misled by a man. All true conflict is a righteous crusade by a concordant holy sisterhood against the monolithic primordial evil of THE PATRIARCHY. Always remember that all men are in together on a vast conspiracy against innocent women, thus any woman caught favoring a lowly male might be a traitor. Don't worry. She'll see the light by act 4.

15) The few times sex in fiction isn't rape, it must be presented as quasi-rape (a.k.a. a prelude to the woman discovering the man's betrayed her somehow) or an act of condescension (magnanimously sullying her pristine form with his primitive bestial touch) or a stamp of divine approval legitimizing his continued existence and action. But it's usually rape.

 

16) Men are descended from apes; women are descended from heaven. All male desires must be presented as animalistic and primitive while female desires are the acme of all that is elevated and pure, even when (like mating rituals and codependence) they could easily be demonstrated to directly mirror the shit-flingingest monkey-girl's concerns.

 

17) As corollary to #3, if a female might be somehow complicit in or benefit from the dirty deeds of males, ensure she voices some cookie-cutter moralism at them to maintain superiority. She's outraged, outraged, do you hear? Now fork over the filthy lucre.

 

18) If any man dares comment on a woman's cuteness or sexiness, it's an opportunity for a fifteen-minute wail and moan about patriarchal oppression. That or just murder him for it. Note this won't stop the heroine from being absolutely idealized in every way from an adorable button nose to gravity-defying rack to high heels costing more than a car, to make-up that remains perfectly applied even if she flies face-first into a hurricane. You're just not allowed to notice it.

 

19) Humor is a single-edged sword. No male in fiction may mock a female but that the scene is repurposed to paint him as boorish and heartless for doing so. Female mockery of males on the other hand is adorable and a transcendent revelation of the human condition. Heaven knows what we'd do without such witticisms as "shitlord" to enliven our cultural landscape.

 

...

Now, if all of the above put you at risk of being called out on plotless, artless, meaningless, endless bigoted propagandistic slurry of such thickness as would gag Goebbels, just remember you stand for the forces of good against evil. Therefore anyone criticizing you can be dismissed as an enemy of the people, fired and blacklisted in the name of The Right side of history.

 

Man bad, woman good; repeat the mantra.

Good Morning Night City!

"See the oil fields at first light"

U2 - Beautiful Day

 

Four and a half years ago, after having preordered Cybepunk 2077 only to watch the whole pre-launch fiasco unfold (abuse of company staff, incompatibility, missing features, crashes galore, etc.) I took a few steps around Night City only to give up immediately. It largely soured me on preordering in general. But, now that a sequel's been announced, I thought I might as well play that original I so pathetically overpaid for.

I suppose I can't blame CDProjekt entirely for my own reticence. For one, it just turns out I hate ads about as much in virtual life as I do in real life, and a cityscape plastered in abrasive, upbeat, in-your-face neon screeching cacodemonia makes me simply want to nuke the place. I'm not criticizing it objectively, mind you. I doubt you could stay true to the genre's Neuromancer / Blade Runner roots without some smatter of decor a la migraine. That's the punk aesthetic. *sigh* I've suffered it before, I suppose. Shadowrun Hong Kong was decent enough, and though not cyberpunk, No Man's Sky bears the same bubblegummy cross, if more low-key.

 

I'm more bothered by every character so far also fitting that mold. Again, I can't criticize them objectively, they're immersive and apt to this setting, but I can only spend so long rubbing elbows with swaggering, body-decorating, semiliterate, imbecile street trash. So when my beefy best bud asked me to visit the ripperdoc after the second tutorial mission... I walked right on past the car, and kept walking. If this is an open world game, let's put that to the test. First order of business was climbing to the top of the nearest parking garage, then along the highway until an offramp put me in the next neighbourhood. Finding myself headed vaguely northwards, I decided to just keep walking, hitting various targets of opportunity as I went.

 

Trying to find my heading itself turned out annoying. Why is there no option for a north-fixed minimap? You should always be thinking about your orientation versus the game world as a whole. Turning maps are for brainless twitch-gamers. At least they tacked on a compass at its corner, but it's still inexcusable.

 

That nuisance was tempered however by finding myself more than able to clamber down from highway ramps to rooftops and awnings and dumpsters to street level. Fully interconnected environments with no invisible walls go a long way toward establishing superiority over the previous decade's crop of Skyrim clones. Thus I spent a cheerful few minutes rather literally monkeying about. Better yet I discovered the hacking minigame and soon found myself hunting half a dozen suitable jacks in a row. Elegant replacement for other games' mithril resource nodes. Then it was on to the first boxing match against the twins, then responding to a police call, which took an embarrasing few reloads. Apparently the AI knows to keep cover or rush you to flush you out. I pick up my freebie software demon at the Kabuki Market, discovering I've acquired enough money and parts to craft a couple of others. Next stop: some good old soul-draining cyberware. A crit bonus nervous system mod would take me exactly to capacity. Guessing that's a hint from the devs, but the wolfman takes no hints! Instead opt for shooting stamina reduction and carrying capacity boosted to level 2 for all the loot I assume I'll be collecting in no time flat. With that and a couple of looted submachineguns I feel ready to take on the world.

 

Heading north led me to, appropriately enough, Northside. Now this is more my kind of place: unvarnished, utilitarian, no need for back-alleys because it need not hide its grime. Sure enough, as soon as I cross the street I run into an unhappy meeting of minds.

While two gangs are busy beefin' or squattin' or thuggin' or whatever it is they do, I take the opportunity to put my newfound cyber to the warfare. Proper application of hacked barrel explosions and one grenade leave me with only 2 wounded enemies to shoot. Then just across the street, two more Maelstrom members are arguing next to yet another exploding barrel; free, effortless loot. Will all mooks in this city come bundled with their very own hackable exploding barrel? That could get boring fast.

 

From there I start getting into the swing of things. Hit a gig nearby, Hippocratic Oath, finally learning how to get multiple rewards in the hacking minigame. Yes, I appear to be gravitating toward netrunner. (Guess I don't stop being an elf wizard just because the wizardry's of the tech variety and the elf is... look I'll figure out how to become an elf eventually, alright?) Two more groups of gangsters with more exploding barrels give me a chance to try other guns, but I'm already getting half the grunt-work done with Overheat instead. Keep a northerly heading, steal me one-a-dem newfangled motorized velocipedes, stop to foil another assault for the piggies and wtf, my very own someone's else's bike just vanishes during the fight? I get the need to despawn unused corpses and vehicles, but doing it right in front of the player's eyes is a bit gauche these days. Sidetrack for another gig, Rite of Passage, got me a swanky new electro-shotty out of it, but the ambush afterwards takes half a dozen reloads to beat. I need more RAM regen.

 

Bypassing the Maelstrom base just dead-ends into the bay. Do I want to continue my northward odyssey? Screw it, let's go for a swim... only to get hit with the lifeguard whistle.

They ain't lyin' either. While the northern border's got some lovely massive industrial architecture, it features nothing to interact with. Apparently I really will have to spend my time hobb(es)ing with the knobs. There is no escape from the gutter. At last defeated, I surrender to the end of the world and call my wheels up to ferry me back into the hardboiled wonderland.

Well, so far so bearable. It was a beautiful day in Night City.

It was 2002, I remember it well

"It was so cold that year

It was colder than hell"

First year of college I took a placement exam, along with most of my incoming class, to try getting out of an introductory course. I was disappointed in getting only a mid-B... and crestfallen at seeing the next-highest grade out of dozens was a 59/100. Where the hell was I?

 

"And things hadn't been good for you for a while"

I had been a ghost in high school. At least I was never seriously beaten. Sure, I'd been slapped upside the head a few times by the bullies, but they tended to steer away from me for the most part. Something about my flat affect and refusal to grovel when cornered made them nervous. But I did not exist. Things like me were not permitted to exist. I spoke too clearly, learned too quickly, hedged too little, had no interest in their idiotic pissing contests. Homework both bored me and made it hard to breathe for the anxiety of getting any detail the slightest bit wrong, so I didn't do it.

 

"Eager and keen to please"

Graduated as a C student. Tested well though. Reaching university age was supposed to be my big break. Free from the idiots at last. And I was thrown into a dorm full of subhuman degenerates whose idea of freedom was not reading existentialism and learning how to culture microbes, but re-enacting Animal House. Slapping me upside the head for being a nerd, marching to sport fields and playing the same exact 3 pop/hip-hop songs as all the rest at a louder volume.

 

"And we were both laughing

'Cause we know how you are"

A few years ago, in my late thirties, I applied for a job only to be derided by the interviewer for not having my Master's degree "and what, you still think you're a 'science guy' right?" he scoffed, making his enmity obvious until I nervously misremembered a procedure, so he could shove me back out the door. You know your kind and I ain't it. Who cares about personal quality when you can stomp around and badger and undermine those you dislike? That's how you build a professional workforce.

 

"We never thought you'd quit on us good"

And I never did, probably never will, yes you can keep beating on losers all their lives, keep satisfying your sadism. You can kill me over and over.

 

"We thought that we knew you

Well I guess that we don't"

But they all knew each other, their own kind. One day the janitor had to go down our dorm hall and wipe down the doors. One or more of us had marked territory, the old-fashioned way, over most of our doorknobs. This was me? This was my great aspiration, to become one with such? And then you go to class and you're told to get into groups for group assignments, so you can make that piece of retard filth look good on his report card. The professors just cheered them all on, all of a kind calling me unkind for noticing it. They forced a roommate on me. He had parties and I wandered the streets at eleven for having no place there.

 

"We called you the black penny, remember that?"

That's the line that got me, playing one more turn muted until 3 a.m. hoping the songs would save my life, terrified I may hear a knock on my door, panicking over each day to come until only cutting myself made it possible to breathe. Would anyone regret the tarnished?

 

"The sea is wide

The streets are long"

No. Noone would write any song about me if I killed myself. Why waste the effort. You've got eight billion redundant replacements. A worker's a worker, so long as he's obedient, not one of the freaks insisting on truth and fairness and improvement.

 

"There's blood on all our hands

With the catalyst gone"

It's not a story of suicide, it's a story of murder, and though I'm still here writing, it succeeded. Over two decades ago, you eliminated me. The world has one fewer researchers, one fewer writers, one fewer dissenters. When it happens you always ask why, seek a singular cause, a defect in the departed. But an event can be overcome. The overwhelming evidence of a lifetime's worth of days cannot, the unchallenged glass-eyed gaze of every monkey on the street. Challenges can be met. The repeated discovery that nothing lies past each mire but more muck, that you can never be more, well...

 

"Are you heavenly or

Just like the past?"

Tall tales from times of yore? Do you delude yourself that society has improved? Check the vocabulary, the clarity of thought, the nuance, the integrity of speakers from past generations against those born into Facebook addiction and hashtag re-linking. Dysgenics is an endemic with many faces, none of them very expressive.

 

"history built on dust"

You win. You won long ago. Take whatever prize you imagine you can find, because you've chosen to get nothing from the likes of me.

"Gro, gro, lisle spire"

A Shock on the Doorstep

"it did not occur to them that this twelve-year-old boy might be as gifted at peace as he was at war"

Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game

 

Leafing through a few HPL stories I found The Thing on the Doorstep stood out enough to look up individually, and was surprised at finding it panned by at least the reviews cited on Wikipedia. To me, while not one of his best it's still one of Lovecraft's better works, and my reason for seeking commentary in the first place echoes that commentary's negative tone: it's not what you expect from him. But I would add: you say that like it's a bad thing!

 

It is indeed surprising to find this one of his last publications (a few months before he died) because its gothic horror tone better fits his earlier career rather than his later, more scientifictitious bent. It also plays up the interpersonal angle uncharacteristically, and there I think it's not given enough credit for character growth, not of the narrator but of Derby, whose soft, pampered upbringing is hardened through his years of psychic sparring into a superhuman effort of will by the end, living up to the superior intellect bestowed him by birth. The horrors of Derby's last act are by bulk left to the reader's imagination, yes, but you are nonetheless meant to imagine them, scrape by agonizing scrape and shuffle. Imagine, and salute!

 

Oh, Howie, you classically bigoted Boston asshole, did you not know you're supposed to manage your audience's expectations? When your middle name is cosmic horror, don't start writing about screwdrivers or they'll criticize how you handle the riveting!* And that brought to mind an example from more recent decades.

 

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy's world-class work, a rare modern SF classic. Unfortunately after that he dove into the 2000s' environmentalist disaster thriller fad, and I'm solidly in the camp viewing that by-the-numbers sensationalism as more detrimental to environmentalism than any amount of public interest it generated. But a couple of years before Red Mars he wrote a book so sadly underappreciated it rates no more than a three-line blurb: A Short, Sharp Shock. Granted it's a hard book to blurb, of a genre (if it can be called so) more obscure than the text itself. Fantasy, yes, but neither of the dark nor high nor low nor urban varieties. Oneiric fantasy strings together semicoherent imagery and recurring themes in the disjointed yet obsessive manner of dreams. It's easier done in movies than print (Mirrormask jumps to mind) and too often falls into Alice in Wonderland mimicry. A Short, Sharp Shock on the other hand rides its uphill romance and creeping multiple threads of horror beautifully, dipping between chase nightmare, body horror, existential dread and bittersweet lulls of contentment. And yet, for all the Mars books' deserved attention, for all the stupider 40-50-60 books' in-genre appreciation, this little short sharp book's never mentioned. The author's other digression from terraforming/environmental themes, the alternate history The Years of Rice and Salt, fares somewhat better.

I've touched on this before with regard to H.G. Wells, whose well-deserved fame is strictly limited to the first decade of a half-century career, despite later books like Tono-Bungay, The World Set Free or The Research Magnificent being arguably better written, more quotable or more psychosocially incisive. They're just, strictly speaking, less high-concept scie fie than his earlier stuff. Even his fans won't touch them. I myself am guilty of this tendency. I've read a baker's dozen or more of Ursula K. LeGuin's SF stories, but not-a-one of her fantasy books despite being well aware the science in her fiction falls so far into the soft side as to dip routinely into science fantasy.

 

In science one might view more skeptically the expert outside his field, but even there we're forced to acknowledge that intellect is by its nature widely applicable. If it weren't, our fang-less, clawless, flabby species wouldn't be here. Bad enough that nomini sancti of every field of human pursuit from labs to offices to recording studios will strike down upstarts and defend their turfs against perceived encroachment, bad enough that every pulpit's wrapped in barbed wire. Must we mere mortals dig more trenches for them, even between fields of fabulism?

 

 

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* See? My audience expects puns. Mission accomplished.

Good for You!

"They say that opposites attract... she's really something and I'm really nothing... How opposite can you get?"

-----

"By 'good' of course I mean good for me."

 

Charles Schulz - Peanuts 1963/11/13 and 1964/01/03 

_______________________________________________

"I need a shy guy, he's the kinda guy who'll only be mine"

Diana King - Shy Guy

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That song caught my attention when I was twelve (guess why guy) but hit it with a polarity reversal and check how it rings. It's one thing to say "oh hey, on second thought that guy hiding behind the potted plant at last night's party looked sorta cute" and another to specifically demand a man broken for your convenience. How would it sound for a male to declare "I want a girl so damaged that her low self-esteem will put her under my complete control" - romantic, huh?* Oh, I'm sure we could think of a few gender-flipped versions... and just as sure they revolve around telling the shy girl how beautiful she really is, like a makeover in a Hollywood movie.

 

The Police's Every Breath You Take has taken some fashionable jabs over the years as a love song that sounds creepy under scrutiny but in Sting's defense, lines like "every night you stay" and "every bond you break" got that jealous mixed message across from the start. It's not meant to register as idealized as the fangirls made it out to be. I do have to wonder though if anyone would ever question that control freak persona had it come embodied in a female vocalist. Read on from that 1964 Peanuts strip to see more of Lucy's narcissism and abuse presented as cute, complete with interminable list of demands, until Linus brings her ice cream so she'll finally call him a good brother and concludes "happiness is a compliment from your sister" - would that sound as cute in reverse? Keeping in mind she's actually the older sibling?

 

It's hardly an accident that men's love songs toward women always sound like "oh baby you know I'll do anything for you" while women's rejoinder runs "oh baby you know you'll do anything for me". Widen your scope to society at large and you'll notice feminism owes its success not to reasoned argument or virtuous role-modeling, but to our instinctive drive to reinterpret in a positive light all the abuse, bullying, psychopathic control, everything we would recognize as negative from a male, so long as it's rebranded as the primordial entitlement of women to be protected and provided for. That instinctive exploitation will not go away no matter how the politics around it shift.

 

 

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* Pretty sure Bug Martini actually ran a few comics like that, purely mocking himself as a loser.