Oxygène

There is only one possible musical suggestion for a French movie with that title.

 

Let's see, where do we begin? In a mesh coccoon inside a high-tech sarcophagus, gradually running out of air. And if that sounds like a prompt for some kooky old text-based adventure game, the feel actually matches fairly well. Please don't spoil your viewing by reading too much of any summary. This is... not a masterpiece, fine, but pretty good Science Fiction, implicitly rather high-concept, the sort of flick where you'd do yourself a disservice to pre-empt your own guesswork as to WTF is actually going on.

 

What can I say without giving too much away? That hiring a horror director for SF actually hit precisely the right note for once? That I was shocked a movie with a trapped starlet didn't resolve to her being tied to the train tracks by a rapist as we've grown to expect from our misandrist culture's nonstop effluvium of cheap propaganda? That it consciously avoids the gratuitous nudity its intimate confines would presume for most low-budget summer thrillers and is far more immersive for it? That you'll never guess who the villain is?

 

Just fire up Netflix and give it a chance. I'll be right here when you get back.

 

...

...

...

 

Done? Did you guess it? I didn't. Not quite. The clone part was easy. But after it became less likely this would turn into some feminist screed, I'd then immediately jumped to the idea she must be an organ bank clone a la Never Let Me Go, and only gradually began to catch on with the gravity trick. And of course, you'll never guess who the villain is... because there isn't one. As in so much good SF, there are only Cold Equations, and generalized human stupidity somewhere in the background, and smart individuals doing their best in an inimical world.

 

I do have to remark "C'etait pas moi, je vous ai pas clones" not only displays the heroine's vigorous mental gymnastics, but is an elegant way of sidestepping the by now woefully overdone clone identity conflict to avoid it derailing the real climax. Kudos to the writer, director, star, everyone involved. Solid work all around.

I notice a couple of you are sticking around for longer than readers would in previous years. Maybe I've improved my writing, but I just think that once the U.S. government got handed over to his honorable lordship BigBalls, reading rants by Werwolfe just doesn't feel so demeaning anymore.

Habeas Corpus Christi

"Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a newer science which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic action. One might easily imagine an alien nucleus of substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily tissue and fluids of other and more palpably living things into which it penetrates and with whose fabric it sometimes completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile, or it might be dictated merely by blind motives of self-preservation."

 

- a passage which sounds like it inspired Deepak Chopra's entire career, from H.P. Lovecraft's The Shunned House

__________________________________________________

 

(alternate titles: Canadian Godfriend or Gap of the Gaps)

 

I rarely bother with all those youtube religious/atheist debates because they inevitably require me to listen to some home-baked Alabammy Foghorn Leghorn trying to sound condescending to us heathens yet spouting something so utterly moronic from his very first syllable that it invalidates anything he could possibly say afterward.

And the top syllable on that list is:

"god"

Now me, I base all my arguments on the principle of blarg. The electricity which runs through this computer is directed by blarg, the national budget should be balanced by blargonomics, all my mathematical equations resolve to the blarg quotient, I sprinkle a bit of blarg on every meal and we should colonize Venus 'cuz blarg said so. And don't ask me what? who? huh? blarg is, blarg works in mysterious ways. Blarg!

If I told you my parakeet has solid platinum feathers and edits all my blog posts, you might reasonably ask to see the beast.

If I told you my car goes 500 km/h you might skeptically launch into convoluted arguments based on how few vehicles terrestrial or aerial achieve such speed, where did I acquire its fuel, where exactly I've clocked it, what my qualifications are as a stunt driver, etc. But the unspoken query behind all that is: wait, wolfman, do you even have a car?* Where is it?

There's a step zero before allowing anyone to base any argument on what a god did or what a god wants: produce your deity. Then we can chop the fucker up and see what he's made of, or maybe buy him a coffee and ask what he wants. The above examples are in fact far more reasonable than any faith; parakeets and cars exist as categories, but no religions have ever produced even one angel, oni or yaksha, much less one of their magic sky-daddies.

 

I could bring up the Sagan Standard or Hitchens' Razor, but really you don't need to read Hume and debate any bishops to call bullshit on the all-purpose religious pig in a poke.

If I say my car goes 100 km/h, sure, consumer-grade vehicles are expected to.

If I say it goes 200 km/h... well, okaayyyy, theoretically, but you might raise an eyebrow. Have I actually tried?

If I say 400, you'll laugh in my face and tell me to pull the other one.

But if I say my car goes warp ten, suddenly you fall to your knees and worship me as a prophet of the almighty grille?

HOW THE FUCK DOES THAT WORK?!?

In bitching out left-wing insanity over the past decade (be it gender Lysenkoism or moral superiority by melanin quotient or especially female supremacism) I've repeatedly pointed out that the same capacity for reason which allows one to disbelieve the existence of fairies allows disbelief of special claims to personal experience and entitlement by special interest groups. Well, reverse the polarity. If you call bullshit on the notion that perfect angels of light and goodness march down Halsted in Chicago for the gay pride parade every year, you're even less able to show they marched around the Dead Sea two thousand years ago. At least the ones on Halsted leave some glitter behind. The same bullshit-sense that allows you to discern a Nigerian prince scam applies if I claim to be in good with some omnipotent prince in the sky.

 

And always, when calling the gullible out on their feeblemindedness, you hear a recurring fall-back position from otherwise well-educated, comfortably middle-class suckers. From centuries ago it might've been electricity, relativity, radiation, or more recently "dark matter" or "quantum" whatever. Mind blown; everything now real. The universe is weird, therefore, well, anything might be possible, you can't prove there's no god. Umm, I don't have to, any more than you somehow have the duty to prove I don't own a quantum platinum parakeet and a quantum Corolla that goes warp ten. (Quantumly.) Not only should you assume hoofbeats come from horses, not zebras, but the existence of zebras in no way proves the existence of unicorns, and even if you found a unicorn it would in no way prove the existence of Yahweh. The fact you or I don't know how the universe works proves nothing except our own ignorance. That negative is not positive evidence of anything, much less of the preferences and demands of some imaginary lawgiver whose existence you've never demonstrated in the slightest. And you have no more excuse for going along with the faithful's big lie than you would with phrenology or the Piltdown Man or the Fiji mermaid - except that priests have been playing you for a much bigger fool than P.T. Barnum ever dreamt, and for far longer.

 

The religious effort to destroy science ignores the fact it would do nothing to prove the existence of their idiotic fairytales - much less justify the demented pretense that you're getting specific instructions on how the world should be ordered. Even if we had no scientific explanations for the world whatsoever, even if we were all Homo erectus a hundred thousand years ago just learning how rocks work, belief in a supernatural agency would still be stupid if its proponents cannot produce the object of their worship. Disproving Australopithecus or carbon-dating, even if you could pull it off, would not achieve that. The proposition that the universe has a creator is no different from saying rivers always flow uphill or pandas write novels. It is a statement about the world around you, and it's up to those making such statements contrary to observable reality to produce said river, produce said panda or

produce

your

deity!

 

"In any case such a monster must of necessity be in our scheme of things an anomaly and an intruder, whose extirpation forms a primary duty with every man not an enemy to the world’s life, health, and sanity."

 

Blarg be with ye.

 

____________________________________________

 

 

* Yes I do and it's a hatchback. Shut up. (And the parakeets died decades ago. (They were green, blue and white-with-blue and they loved millet, very adorable. No platinum.))

No Longer of the Rings Online

Before I get to LotRO's current worthlessness, it may be worth reminiscing on past failures.

It was only two or three months after release. I spent quite a lot of time sitting in front of the Agamaur entrance at level 32, failing instance run after instance run... or more often quitting them in disgust. The first instance cluster at level 24 had gone well enough. Everyone tried and failed and learned and triumphed, playing the instance on-level. But by the time I hit the Lone-Lands, the powergamers had hit max level, which means absolutely every group just wanted to get powerleveled through Garth Agarwen instead of actually... PLAYING THE MOTHERFUCKING GAME!!! It was literally impossible to get a real group. Even if it started with on-level characters, at the first death some retarded cunt would say "hang on I'll get my buddy to run us through it" and that was the end of gameplay. When I went from level 32-40 all by having to quit groups who'd rather cheat than play, I cancelled my subscription.

 

So, with player idiocy, it began.

 

 

1. Turbine

 

At launch LotRO was just one of many, many WoW-clone MMOs on the market, slavishly copying it in most respects. But it did a better job on the stand-and-shoot early MMO mechanics fleshed out by a healthy suite of resource management and status effects and crowd control, plus the game's signature "conjunctions" or "fellowship maneuvers" requiring groups to coordinate for big nukes or heals. Aesthetically it distinguished itself by going in the other direction from the cartoony/weeaboo trend of World of Warcraft or Guild Wars, with better-proportioned character models and staying as true to Middle-Earth lore as it could while still providing lots of uglies to beat over the head. Laudably, it avoided treading on the source material, making clear you are not the center of the story but working in the shadows of the fellowship, removing side threats and carrying messages, etc. The starter zones felt LotR-ish (which has probably done more to save this game over the years by hooking new players than any more recent content) and even early expansions like Forochel or Eregion preserved the dignity of the classic.

 

I wasn't playing when the Moria expansion hit, and everything I heard about it made me continue avoiding the game. The "legendary" item system was a blatant gear-farming timesink atop the existing timesink (weapons with their own inventories; recursive grinding) and when I did finally see the place, I wasn't particularly impressed. The environments were more cut-and-pasted, the monsters more kid-friendly D&D-ish (bigger flaming orcs with spikes on their shoulders) and while Lorien and Dol Guldur walked back some of that idiocy, they also continued a trend started shortly after release of long, tedious cinematics and cutscenes. Nonetheless the Moria instances remain, to this day, some of the game's most interesting, with unique spawning and phase transition mechanics rewarding group coordination.

 

Enedwaith, at least, returned to a more coherent Middle-Earth feel, but it also cemented a long-running trend afterwards of minor zones interposing long faction reputation timesinks between more content-heavy expansions.

 

2. Warner

 

I've said it before but in many respects getting bought up by a megacorp helped the game. The added production values show, and not just in glitz. Rohan and Gondor are both expansive and thoroughly planned out with few or no corners cut, and the writing improved, not greatly but noticeably. Characters' speech patterns and concerns feel far more authentic to their Anglo-saxon roots, and the heroics (with some glaring exceptions like Thrymm) balance most adequately between fable and modern fiction... which, let's remember, was Tolkien's big achievement in the first place.

 

Sadly, Warner Bros. obviously had no other interest in the game but as cross-promotion for those disgusting Hobbit movie maladaptations, and the era (2010-2016) shows a rapid pace of cranking out zone after zone, largely indistinguishable from each other, just to keep the IP in the public's eye. Gameplay dumbed down rapidly during this period.

 

Sadder still, much of the extra funding sank into cinematics and half-baked attempts to diversify game modes, watering down its necessary focus on team dungeoneering dynamics, which deteriorated constantly, dropping fellowship maneuvers, resource management and anything the least bit challenging to make it more "accessible" to mass-market retards. All the new features then proceeded to fail monumentally.

- Mounted combat was never supported by a game engine and netcode which had been optimized for stationary, counter-heavy back-and-forth gameplay. Warsteeds' rubberbanding made them nigh-impossible to control, not to mention it required keeping both mouse buttons constantly pressed.

- Epic battles were supposed to make it easier for players across levels to team up, but in practice it just amounted to long, cutscene-laden minigames having nothing to do with the rest of the game.

- Roving threats, big landscape bosses, were a last-ditch attempt to rebuild the appeal of open-world adventuring. They did help for a bit, but as a lone feature thrown into an otherwise endless solo grind and endgame instance gear grind, rapidly lost relevance.

 

However, this is also a period when news of the game trickled out (thanks presumably to WB's advertising) to many who don't normally play games but were attracted to the Tolkien license, and you'd find, say, some random cardiologist hopelessly blundering through the fields of Fornost, or a writer and lawyer teaming up against wights in Angmar. Though it lost many of the smart players from release, LotRO (very briefly) regained a few even as it lost any better gameplay by which to retain them. When that ended I wrote this and quit for the fourth or fifth time.

3. Standing Stone

 

After Warner lost interest (though I'm not sure if the game's still licensing its Tolkien content through them in some weird deal) some old developers got more creative leeway. Starting with Mordor the effect was ambiguous, with obvious stalling, slower development pace, etc. and a half-assed attempt at yet another new mechanic duplicating the existing hope/dread feature pointlessly. Also, by the late 2010s the game had simply lost the interest of better minds altogether. Where I had been able to find on-level or challenge run groups at least occasionally before, the remaining playerbase did nothing but grind the Dol Guldur arena to powerlevel and play the one latest instance. And has done nothing since.

 

However,

1) They've undertaken the painstaking task of undoing many of the moronic decisions from the past. They've redone skill trees to restore most skills' utility. The legendary item grind was streamlined a bit, more status/conjunction functionality has gradually returned, classes have been refunded some of their lost individual roles beyond "guardian, minstrel, and everybody else is DPS"

2) At first the new content refocusing on the admirable task of fleshing out Middle-Earth did a damn good job of sticking to the Tolkien feel. The Dale-Lands, Iron Hills, the two northern Anduin zones, were for the most part lovely, immersive places to visit. 

But you weren't allowed to stay there. Notice I said "at first" which leads us to:

 

 

4. ??? who the hell is even in charge over there now?

 

Though some half-decent efforts at worldbuilding persist, like new alternate low-level zones in Cardolan or The Angle, these are poisoned by lacking the same cash shop currency rewards as the older zones, and therefore (unless amusement park dollars are removed) have not made a real impact in player experience. But the real break seems to have come during the pandemic, when I can only assume there must have been a major shift in writing staff, entirely for the worse.

 

From 2020, from The War of Three Peaks onward, the vast majority of storytelling, characters, worldbulding, has shown not just incompetence in creating a Tolkienish feel (stop. repeating. "uh-oh!") but active vandalism toward Middle-Earth. The Gundabad expansion was especially terrible (and having gone into some depth here I won't repeat myself) but though the social activist garbage is slightly more muted now, it's no less pervasive. The leveling thread has moved into Umbar and Harad, given the snowflake idiots writing quest dialogue plenty of chances to posture on grounds of skin colour and not just sex.

 

I wavered quite a bit before buying last year's Legacy of Morgoth expansion after a year's absence, knowing pretty much what to expect.

- At the tipping point between expansions, Elladan, Elrohir, Legolas and Gimli are all officiously shooed out and replacement heroine Sigileth (returned from presumed death to show up her brother) makes sure to note she doesn't know some man's name.

- Then you've got a young naive white guy getting lectured by a dark-skinned sage on how Gondorians are a bunch of imperialists who dunno nuthin' 'bout nothin'.

- Of course you immediately run into a matriarchal warlike society.

- "I am fine. These *MEN* were no match for me." quoth one female NPC (emphasis added... but not much)

- Another antivillainess is of course victimized, cast out by her beorning kin.

- No male leaders unless they're villains; all good factions led by blandly idealized "strong women"

- As you're chasing two new villains escaped from prison, both male, you're repeatedly reminded the game's sole remaining villainess is only acting out of revenge for her dead husband. (see rules 3, 14)

- It wasn't enough putting in black elves, of course they're special-er than regular elves, turning into trees by way of fading.

- There's an entire romance quest chain between an ingenuous young male bookworm and a woman talking down to him, particularly funny when he's forced to apologize for the presumption of saving a woman, then having to risk his neck anyway, segueing into pages-long rants about the damsel escaping male aggression, longer than far more important quests, and how independent she is, yes she's very independent, now shut up and listen to her babbling, she neeeeeds it!

- On and on like that. It's hard to miss quests resolving to some "man bad; woman good" face-off:

- Then of course, though the last dungeon brings back some of the heroes, it also features the highly... creative... enemy type of giant orcs led by evil elves from the first age. Because of course. Build up the orcs as impressive, shit on elves. Because that's apparently the brave new frontier of social justice.

 

With the MMO genre collapsed, LotRO stood a good chance to cleaning up the scraps, getting yet another second chance after the endless second chances it's gotten since 2007. But at the same time it tried gambling on that by offering all pre-Gundabad content for free, it also poisoned the well with the idiotic writing and mission design. And sure, I could complain about quite a few other matters:

- every class has a DPS role now

- fights move away from dazes toward interrupts, call 'em quick-time events, meaning away from players needing to be aware of their greater surroundings and exert the minimal self-control not to break a daze and toward button mashing, idiotic twitch-gaming

- last year crafting was paramount, now it's been forgotten and all your loot upgrades are dungeon drops

- infinite teleport skills

- infinite cash from trash loot

- content is being proofread less thoroughly, see an ability placeholder-named "a ranged double attack" or elves from North Carolina

- bugs are cropping up more often - NPC turns hostile in tower mission, NPCs do not spawn in the mission following that, etc.

- heavier emphasis on the "delving" system of solo dungeons, whose difficulty is nothing but idiotic gear-checking, getting nuked from nowhere and having enemies spawn right on top of you, giving them infinite speed to make them impossible to kite, making them aggro regardless of normal aggro radius, all to remove the possibility for crowd control or tactics

- then there's the timesink of making the new bribe loot for faction rep usable as stacks, but wasting any overflow due to progress being locked by trivial turn-in quests

But remember what I said above. During every phase of LotRO's development, no matter how smart or stupid the fights, how time-wasting or exploitative its monetization, its Tolkien license has lent it a tremendous amount of undeserved goodwill. I did try to warn them: parasites die if they kill their host. Shit on Tolkien at your own risk. And a Middle-Earth reinterpreted by Valerie Solanas' understudy does exactly that.

I hadn't known how petty the feminazi vandalism had gotten, but apparently at some point they actually went back and invested time in rewriting a quest in the Glittering Caves so that Gimli now gets K.O.d by a miniboss, only to have a random little girl effortlessly beat the same miniboss.

Yeah.

Fuck this retarded trash.

 

Without the literary tie-in, you were never going to get by as a pure multiplayer game. You never had enough worthwhile individuals for it among the rabble. Simpleminded MMO grinding draws simpleminded subhuman trash, and from the very start it was impossible to get them to do anything other than race for cake, a routine which will captivate none but the most degenerate. Middle-Earth was your selling point, and the latest expansions have less and less tying in to the peoples, events, themes of Tolkien's writing, instead being repurposed so some narcissistic snowflake wastes of oxygen can push to the forefront their original fanfic characters in a social justice warrior wonderland full of knockoff drow and noble warrior orcs.

 

Though they're still plugging away at improving team tactics, level design, skill balance, the few good points are too readily washed out by the stupidity of their attached content. Too little, too late. The game recently upgraded to 64-bit servers, which also functions as an unofficial server consolidation. Combined with the latest instance runs, this briefly made raids possible again. I immediately cautioned the fanboys the excitement wouldn't last, and though it lasted a month instead of the two weeks I'd predicted, group recruitment is already more slapdash with the LFF channel going blank for fifteen or thirty minutes at a time. Whatever windfall LotRO could've reaped as other MMOs contract to oblivion, it's already pissed away by deliberately destroying its core appeal in the name of vapid posturing.

 

Maybe I'll keep logging in now and then to continue wandering about older zones. But I sure as hell don't intend to give these clowns any more money. LotRO's gotten more undeserved second chances than anything else in the industry, and it's long past time to let it die.

Allow me to give you the room-temperature fuzzies:

Are you coming or going? Oh, who gives a peck.

A bit of surfing (thank you BugFinder) seems to narrow this down as Halysidota. Apparently it's a good thing I didn't try to grab it, as the hairs can cause rashes and it may or may not be mildly toxic in its larval form. Otherwise, it's a harmless low-impact broadleaf generalist.

Help, help, I'm being scraped!

Lockstep 6: Porosity

"Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken."

SMAC

 

 

Having polished off newbietown's side-quests I decided to break from Cyberpunk 2077 before continuing the main event. Time fer sum-a-dem stragety. But not only did my insectoid imperialists take me many tries to get right (they depend heavily on early expansion where I usually prefer to turtle) but halfway through my one successful campaign with them, AoW4 decided to wreck its crafting system.

 

When introduced a year go, crafting ran the straightforward old premise of breaking down loot you don't need for parts used in making whatever you want, learning new effects from magic materials in your territory. Uncreative but useful and satisfying. The addition of dragons threw a kink into it by rewarding you for maintaining unused loot for a draconic hoard economic bonus, but it still worked fudamentally the same. The new system now adds a second crafting currency. In order to make high-tier crap, you need to break down high-tier crap. And only high-tier crap. A reminder of how often crafting ends up a half-assed freebie in any genre not built around it.

 

While conceptually sound to prevent hobbits from leaving The Shire with mithril chain shirts and vorpal excaliburses, the lack of permeability between tiers wrecks the very appeal of gradual improvement directed by the player, creating upgrades and not just side-grades. Moreover, they now allow looting items from defeated player armies, which mostly happens in the end-game. All this fabricates three needless problems for a previously functional system:

1) Since your trash loot can only create more trash loot, it tends to just pile up uselessly.

2) By the time you find your first few 3rd-4th tier items, the amount of vespene gas you'd get by dissassembly wouldn't compensate for their own utility, so you're better off just using them even if they're not ideal for your heroes. Meaning your crafting is still stalled.

3) Once hitting the late-game wars you're looting so many top-shelf baubles that you blow through your heroes' demand pretty much instantly. Then ALL loot is worthless.

 

It's especially annoying to see bad decisions made to compensate for other bad decisions. The way AoW4 starves you through the early game then inundates you with overpowered gear later can't help but remind me of Tyranny, a brilliant game in its own right... except, infamously, for its pacing! In the screenshot above, I broke down my stockpile toward my AoW campaign's end. I could afford to outfit several more heroes than I could even recruit, and that's after gorging my existing goons on all the vorpal they could swallow. An inelegant, overcompensating strut to support a crafting system which itself needlessly breaks a principal rule of gaming: allowing the player to invest directed effort into advancement.

 

You may as well have only two item tiers in the game to begin with. Setting a hard limit between (1-2) and (3-4) is like setting timers on when wars can or can't be declared, or level scaling in RPGs or officially declaring all D&D characters must be hopeless one-shottable murderhobos until lvl 10 then unstoppable demigods from lvl 11 onwards. It's designers micromanaging the player. See D&D's skill points built so closely into your class role, upping exactly the same skills every level from 1-20, or DA:O's skill points in the fade, tossing freebies into what should be YOUR progression. But a core element of building either a character or a faction is picking your strengths and weaknesses, advancing different aspects at different rates.

 

If I want to melt down all four hobbits' shortswords and cooking utensils to make one chain shirt for Frodo, that should be my decision, damnit. And don't just throw a pile of mithril chain shirts at me right at Mordor's doorstep; that should be something I've worked towards all along. Not that there shouldn't be different phases to a campaign's progression, but they need more overlap, more permeability. Stellaris has early/mid/late phases, but events don't all just instantly pop up when the calendar flips over. EU4's institutions spread slowly but can be mitigated with a cash buy-in. In fact I've recently jumped into Medieval Dynasty. Much like other sandbox crafting / survival games, it sticks to a gradual climb up a tech tree.

 

Sticks and stones form the very bottom rung. But you don't just use them at the start. Stones begin as hatchet-heads and transition to construction materials. Trees, of which you'll be chopping an ungodly amount for logs, give sticks as a bonus (in addition from growing on every bush) to where I was getting annoyed at them piling up uselessly.... until I discovered I could just toss them into a resource chest for my villagers to grab as firewood instead of using up my precious logs. Then when I start crafting more arrows I'll likely want to save up a few again. See that? A bit of back-and-forth, a bit of leeway, a bit of player decision in allocating scarce resources, a bit of... I don't know... game-playing!

 

(And weirdly, in every other respect except the crafting, AoW4 displays masterful escalation.)

I've got so many old alts I could found my own Altgeria.

Revisionism's Reservoir Host

"So what are you waiting for?
You got what you asked for
Did it fix what was wrong with you?"

 

NIN - Less Than

________________________________________

"The important thing to note is that the aboriginal believed the present world, as a natural and cultural environment, was and should be simply a detailed reproduction of the world of the ancestors. He believed that the entire universe “is now as it was in the beginning” when it was established as left by the ancestors.

[...]

But when we are informed that [Dog–chases–iguana–up–a–tree–and–barks–at–him–all–night–long]* had two wives from the Spear Black Duck Clan and one from the Native Companion Clan, one of them being blind, that he had four children with such and such names, that he had a broken wrist and was left handed, all because his ancestor had exactly these same attributes, then we know [though he apparently didn’t] that the present has influenced the past, that the mythical world has been somewhat adjusted to meet the exigencies and accidents of the inescapably real present.

There was thus in Yir Yoront ideology a nice balance in which the mythical was adjusted in part to the real world, the real world in part to the ideal pre–existing mythical world, the adjustments occurring to maintain a fundamental tenet of native faith that the present must be a mirror of the past."

 

Lauriston Sharp - Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians, 1952

_________________________________________

 

 

Growing up, I always thought the jokes about Jamaicans lovin' tha ganja a bit too much were just comedic exagerration... until I discovered they based their homegrown Christianity on an Ethiopian king from the mid-20th century. Don't get me wrong, he sounds a decent enough king as kings go, but he also doesn't seem to have done anything particularly supernatural in the course of his usual monarchin' routine. On the other hand, the fact that Rastafarians continue to worship him as The Messiah despite croaking in perfectly mundane fashion fifty-one years ago murdered by a military junta like endless millions around the world, well that's, by this point in history, par for the course for any brand of religious insanity. I'm guessing they must just work the martyrdom back into the divinity angle somehow, and keep going. Makes good ad copy. Maybe he'll come back from the dead. I guess by this point, what's one more Osiris on the pile?

 

Now look North a bit. Whatever else Trumpism is, it's also a religious movement. Whether or not they consciously believe him supernaturally imbued, the vast majority of his voters have no inkling of just how exactly demolishing their government will make it work better. He's spewed so many nonsensical campaign promises they don't even bother remembering his constant babble. But they are utterly assured their gestures of obeisance, wearing the hats and chanting the slogans, will induce favor from above. If the rites are observed with due performative fervor, then surely some higher power will shine down upon the faithful! They offered their votes to the booth like blood on the altar, not as a choice but as a grand radical gesture, as a tantrum, as an auto da fe.

 

Whatever its many roots, you don't get to ignore the pot and fertilizer for such madness. Sure it made little sense for Jamaicans to expect much from some rando' king on another continent, but they were sick of their white anglo-saxon protestant preachers and wanted a black messiah. And as for trumpists, even when not painting their charlatan king as best buds with Jesus**, the symbolism and rhetoric employed throughout his crackpot movements like QAnon is explicitly religious, rallying against perceived demonic influence with claims to occult secrets and prescience.

 

But more important than overt dogma, it's the underlying mentality, the recurring etiology of such mental infection, which begs the search for its reservoir host. Imagine doctors' offices start reporting epidemic levels of facial trauma. Black eyes, broken noses, cracked cheekbones, the works, everywhere you look. And one day you suddenly notice you're living next to the University of Punching-Yourself-in-the-Face complete with courses in splitting your own lip and whole departments dedicated to recursive fist angling and tooth-cracking self-chin interactions. Would you imagine the trend to be unrelated to the institution? Those who expect miracles from Trump-as-Jesus have been socially obligated all their lives to treat as true the blatant nonsense spewing from preachers' mouths: that Jesus pirouetted on water and had a Star Trek replicator in his pocket, that snakes peddle apples and some schmuck spent a long weekend camping in on a whale's liver. Why do you throw your hands up in despair at each passing fad in irrationalism while ignoring the entrenched institutions championing irrationalism as a core value? Religion not just is insane, but foments insanity.

 

Now, the interesting question is what comes next, because like any messiah, Trump will not fulfill whatever expectations the imbecile masses might hold of His Holiness. Failed prophecies always prompt a flurry of dogmatic backfilling to continue propping up the delusion. So he tossed a bunch of latinos over the border but you're still waiting for an invitation to your dream job, and the fraudulent department of "government efficiency" has already cost taxpayers more money than it'll ever save*** and His Orange Imbecility has been backpedalling away in panic from his trade war with the entire world... so what now? Well, just like Dog-chases-iguana-etc., trumpists must constantly revise their mythology to ignore the sting of reality, and we know they're very, very good at make-believe. Remember, the loser didn't lose the 2020 election, it was "stolen" instead. So every failure and mistake gets reinterpreted as part of some master plan on the swindler's part.

 

I'm sorry, did I say "master" - I meant "divine" plan. I was curious how rastafarians handled the death of their immortal. Predictably, how every other sect handles the failure of their divinities: pretending that's what they meant to say all along. Selassie's not really dead. Or he lives in spirit. He plans to return. Jesus always meant to die on the cross, standard stuff. Is this a rerun, a spin-off, a sequel? Misery on Earth is just a test to get into Heaven, fossils were deliberately planted to test your faith, drowning everything on the planet was way more efficient than just sending humans a viral infection, there's no evidence of jews leaving Egypt but believe it anyway... meanwhile please try to ignore the price hikes 'cuz "trade wars are easy to win" and try to eat around the salmonella because companies don't need government supervision. Trump's not really failing every single thing he promised, he's just playing fifteen-dimensional chess with visions of the future! It's all part of the divine plan.

 

The magical thinking fostered, legitimized and glorified by religion does not conveniently stop at the church door.

 

To reiterate an observation from five years ago:

"Ever notice the people on Star Trek tended to be smart? The redneck hero with a shotgun doesn't play well in that setting. We know, intuitively, that retards wouldn't live long on their own in a century when half the mundane devices surrounding you can disintegrate you in an instant, when even your pants can teleport you straight into the nearest solar corona in retaliation for passing a wet fart. Modern humans can barely handle automobiles and electric ovens... and you want to give them teleporter-armed spaceships?"

It jumped to mind when reaching this statement in the story of steel axes:

"The totemic ideology can no longer support the inrushing mass of foreign culture traits, and the myth–making process in its native form breaks down completely."

Except those "foreign culture traits" are quite often facts. Metallurgy and geography and actual, provable medicine instead of some wrinkled old hag rubbing you with spit and chanting psalms. Technological advance and realism go hand in hand. They must, because every new technology is a force multiplier for stupidity, and the more interlocking elements in a society, the less room for pretending something works instead of understanding how it works and fixing it.

 

When 99% of the populace did nothing through its short, miserable life but hit dirt with a stick hoping it'll turn into food, pacifying the rabble with delusions may have seemed the lesser evil. But there's a reason we use "voodoo economist" and "cargo cult science" as slurs. Even if you're not religious, you may have fallen back in the past on the apologia that others around you have a psychological need for supernatural belief. But we're now awash in the vomit resulting from imbibing such poison, and you may just have to admit that if we wanted society to survive, believers should long have been left to go the way of those monkeys that ate the red berries.

 

 

_______________________________________________ 

* and that was just one of the guy's names!

** Seriously, just search for "trump jesus painting" and prepare to be amazed.

*** But that's ok, DOGE's real purpose was always not to save money but to destroy the agencies preventing corporations from eating you alive. Hint: if you really want to save some serious cash, look to military contractors!

Now Where Was I Then?

"I cannot see your face
Behind the tracks you claim to have erased
And since your place is gone
I cannot feel where you and I belong"

 

Chiasm - Incision

 

 

Having started ranting so long ago, I'm having some trouble adjusting to how fast games change these days, and the general wealth of options in newer generations of strategy or RPG. More than once I've bitched about something here only to fire up the game in question three days alter and find the developers had already patched the issue. The first I saw growing into its full scope gradually was Mount&Blade, but that took a decade and mostly fleshed out existing features. The DLC spam subscription model, while so often exploitative, has at least inculcated a mentality that games can and should be improved. This was not the case in the '90s or 2000s, when only fan patches made many classics bearable and fan mods were often more popular than the original product, e.g. Half-Life or Warcraft 3.

 

Which is to say, I was finally making some headway on 3/4 difficulty in Frostpunk 2 when the latest patch altered heat management and froze a chunk of my populace to chunks, turning the rest riotous and forcing me to start over. But I'm not mad, 11bit, I'm not mad, that's okay (assholes) because the change is a positive one, giving finer control over heat distribution and setting the stage for playing favorites with various districts, so it's a good thing, it's good, it's good they killed my city.

(*sob*) SOBs!

I don't know when I'll try again. For now I'm busy bein' Skawtish in EU4 instead, then maybe I'll jump into some medieval village life, then maybe an old-school RPG (I'm gettin' the squad management itch) if Rogue Trader's big content patch isn't out yet. Point being, this ain't 1995. I'm not playing "the" game that's all the rage at the moment, but picking my way through a hundreds-strong collection dating decades back. It may be a month before I return to the frostlands, and there's no guarantee I'll remember my friends' faces.

Did I already run the fishing cliffs map? Did I try the machinist/thinker combo yet? Have I run on oil alone? Have I ever sided with the frostlanders? Ponder the road not traveled, future me!

 

But of course even a city-builder's options pale before Paradox' replay/roleplay-oriented strategy titles. The Age of Wonders Pantheon of Nyctimus now contains nineteen werewolves, and it's making me feel senile while creating a new faction struggling to recall whether I've used particular skills and feats. Hence:

Hey, shut up, this is not weird at all. I'm sure perfectly normal, well-adjusted individuals maintain checklists like this! But since every single publisher is most likely already tabulating this information from all its users as part of marketing datamining of its customer base, why not make it available and sortable and cross-referenced for us individually in-game? Display it where relevant. Export it effortlessly in a clean, sorted, sortable format.

 

Why not give us access to our own character sheets?

 

Older cRPGs at least toyed with this idea of letting players export text summaries, and given the march of progress I don't doubt you could squeeze an image or two in there nowadays with little enough added memory usage. It's an issue that never cropped up until replay value itself increased in recent years. With strategy games taking on (or back?) so many of the features of RPGs, and both genres now offering so many options, and city sims following suit, isn't it about time to start offering me a sheet of my own overall character? Cross-referencing a plus, but even little tidbits like "you've sieged Diathma 13 times" might be funny to look up upon returning to the game after a long pause. As opposed to that vague feeling of "shit, I've already done this one, haven't I" halfway through a campaign.

 

To a limited extent, companies have already been doing this for a long time through achievements, but keeping track of your adventures is a personal concern. It's not well served by conflation with pissing contests over the most headshots or the platformiest jumps.

A good measure of a healthy mountain meadow: how many different wildflowers could you grab at once one-handed?

New story's up in its own page: Emotional Labour. This isn't the spite-driven project Re-habilis was. However, I've also taken less time to edit it, so it's still a bit rough, even by my standards.