What's Your Quota?

While they rarely like to admit it, feminists maintain a fallback position very much in keeping with patriarchal protectionism of helpless damsels. Backed into a corner, occasionally one will drop the modern human rights facade and retrench in a classic "soldiers for Hynkel!" stance that women must be favored over men due to their reproductive bottleneck role, much as in Heinlein's quote from three posts back. The principle runs that any society must privilege gestators or dwindle out for low birth rates, thus men must play our primordial role in surrendering our own well-being to women's demands. Men are more conveniently disposable.

 

Skipping past the fact that overpopulation has done far greater harm than underpopulation for at least two centuries now, if your life is an order of magnitude more important than mine because you can incubate parasites, then I have to ask: what's your quota? How many kids're ya gonna shit out? How many jugs of milk will you be excreting per month? How many hours of day-care will you provide per day? How many old-timey cloth diapers will you scrub?

 

And more importantly, who shall enforce that and how? Because we accept without question that our various governments should force men to play out their traditional role as protectors and providers, by being hired for hazardous manual labor, charged more for health or education, through conscription and alimony and shotgun weddings and a myriad other honored institutions, not lurking beneath society's seamy underbelly but all lauded as civic responsibility. And we have no trouble putting an exact monetary value on how much a man owes a woman per month for having ejaculated into her a decade past.

 

I've heard a lot of outrage over the past couple of years from self-appointed left-wingers about the deprivation of abortion rights, and I agree. It is ethically indefensible to force bearing unwanted children, much less to fabricate so much human suffering in the lives of those unwanted children. But I do have to note you yourselves could've tried balancing the equation in the other direction for decades beforehand: stop calling it "a woman's" right to choose and admit no-one, female or male, should have ever been condemned to raise unwanted offspring.

 

"Yes to financial abortion" - would that footnote have been so hard to tack onto your placards?

Just for starters.

"Moose Factory" - ??

While settling some new land for Nova Scotia in my last EU4 campaign, I did a double take:

Wait, seriously?

Oh, Canada...

Resident Alien

Five episodes in, I can't watch Resident Alien. I've been trying but for the life of me just cannot get through more than half a scene at a time. Like presumably many old browncoats I gave it a chance just to see what Alan Tudyk's up to these days. In that respect it plays cleverly on his old SF cred with stiff, awkward mannerisms opposed to Wash's gregarious excitability, and he acquits himself well.

 

Unfortunately the show as a whole invests mercilessly in cringe comedy the likes of which has always turned my stomach, with all characters (especially the lead) feebly struggling to withstand one humiliation after another and failing. It got me thinking on how this setup of an alien among humans has changed over the decades, because it's a very, very old gimmick.

 

I never watched My Favorite Martian or Mork and Mindy but do vaguely recall the old Coneheads sketches from SNL, or ALF or 3rd Rock from the Sun or similar takes from the '80s and '90s. While cultural mishaps are always played up for their comedy of errors sitcom value, more often than not sitcom aliens used to be either innocently unaware of their own weirdness (in the spirit of the Addams Family) and either casually accommodating once made aware or consciously (albeit haphazardly) managing their own acclimation. Or they were at least not obliged to hate themselves.

 

Resident Alien makes a big point of politically correct posturing, starting with a violent ex-boyfriend then rapidly piling on with Native Americans, a little Muslim girl, etc. Yet here every mis-step is not only a crisis but an opportunity for the advanced super-straw-man life form to be dragged down time and again, with the overall message being the usual glorification of primitive emotion over denigrated intellect. Three episodes in he's already lauding tribal ape codependence and being taken over by his new form's emotions, setting up his eventual promotion of human superiority over his own species, 'cuz feels.

 

Whatever happened to acceptance?

 

It's a fitting measure of snowflake hypocrisy that in the same breath as all their performative multiculturalism, they revel so much more viciously and sadistically in actively hounding and humiliating any designated safe target. You're wallowing. The modern love of cringe displays all the parochial mockery and abuse and "othering" from forty years ago taken up to 11 under the hollow pretense of overcoming exactly such tendencies.

Odysseus Is Mad

"Always keep me under finger
That's the spot where you might linger"

Velvet Revolver - Slither

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"That's all I am to you? Protection?" 

Oglaf - Yojimbae (and being Oglaf, do I really need to warn you that it's at least vaguely NSFW?)

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"All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can -and must- be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly and no doubt will keep on trying."

 

Robert A. Heinlein - from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

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"he neither advised with Friends, nor turned over Ancient or Modern Authors, nor prudently submitted to the Correction of such as are, or such as think they are good Judges, but with an English Spirit and Genius, set out upon the Forlorn Hope, meaning no hurt to any body, nor designing any thing but the Publick Good, and to retrieve, if possible, the Native Liberty, the Rights and Privileges of the Subject."

 

Mary Astell - introduction to later editions of Reflections upon Marriage (1706) (yes, I'm being very sneaky with my truncating)

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I recall very little of my grandfather getting his foot broken by the ox wagon: him mumbling commands, the massive placid beast snorting, the yoke clinking and creaking. Mundane. But on this particular uninteresting occasion of hundreds, the animal got distracted, confused, lurched and rolled one of the wheels straight over his foot. The other adults shooed me away while he howled in agony, struggling to prop himself up. I was pretty scared. Not of danger - the ox had stopped again in confusion - but grandpa wasn't supposed to whimper and cry out in pain. Grandpa took care of business, argued and badgered, occasionally got mad, but didn't complain about his lot. Not until Alzheimer's wore him down and he could no longer remember why his foot hurt constantly or that he wasn't supposed to complain about it.

 

On a lighter note, I've had a house sparrow nest above my apartment's deck for the past several years. As an invasive species here, technically I should be doing my civic duty and destroying their nest if not killing them outright... but I just can't bring myself. Being both symbolically and literally "under my roof" I feel a weird responsibility to refrain from harm. (Plus they're too damn cute.) But my observance of the law of hospitality does not extend to interfering in the internecine strife of Class Aves. Every morning until noon over a week or two this spring they'd receive a couple of visits from a male starling, chitter and squawk aggressively at each other, squaring off as they lined up along the railing, the smaller pair squatting defensively and puffing themselves up like angry little beige dustbunnies. Weirdly he never attacked them, so this wasn't predation, and if he'd been stealing their eggs it wouldn't have taken two weeks and they'd have given up the fight once the nest was empty.

Sooo... wtf Sturnus?

Then one morning after much squawking the invader flew away with a little clump of straw in his beak. He'd been robbing my sparrow couple of construction materials! (Yes, male starlings are the ones that build the nest; females bring the sofa cushions.)

 

But here's the thing. I had ample opportunity to observe a score of such face-offs. Though both sparrows reliably showed up to defend their nest from a burglar easily outweighing them both and then some, they queued on the railing with the male sparrow always closer to the starling* and the female sheltered behind him. Only once did she take point. Well, one's better than none. Good on you, chicky, give 'em hell.

 

On a completely non-bird, non-ox topic, having spent quite a few paragraphs and pages over the past decade predicting the fascist upsurge resulting from authoritarian social "justice" policies and especially feminism's unending inquisition, I'm not particularly surprised, now that it's happening all over the developed world, to find the media consensus straining to double down on existing bias: blame men! Take articles like this one, with lines like:

"Lee, the candidate, vows to shut down the ministry of gender equality, speaking to an issue that resonates with men like Lee, the voter, who particularly resents that only men have to do military service."

and

"they blame feminism, many believing that women are preferred for jobs"

Wait, did you seriously say 'believing' as if they're just imagining it? Countries have laws on the books mandating women be preferred for jobs! They have endless college scholarships solely for women to get them better jobs over men! They've been running a decade-long sex-crime witch-hunt to allow any female to order any male fired without evidence and take his place! It's you, the feminists and more broadly (pun intended) the social justice warriors, who've been trumpeting all of this and more as righteous victory over the vile testicular menace all of our lives; you don't get to pretend now that we somehow just came up with the notion.

 

Note the weasel-wording: a man 'resents' the all-male military draft being left untouched by every government's so-called 'equality' offices, as if it's only his interpretation that's at fault and not the practice itself, as if life and death were not measures of equality! Even if your country lacks compulsory military service condemning young men to be tortured and brainwashed for two years it's overwhelmingly men who get pushed into it economically, and noone can doubt that in case of inter-tribal conflict it'll be men tearing each other to pieces while the women on both sides sit back taking bets. As a generic catchphrase you'll always hear about men taking women for granted, which is to say somehow faltering in showering women with favors and attention. But not a one of the endless rando' chicks, dames 'n broads I pass on the street doubts for a second the granted presupposition that I exist to die for her, that I am a disposable commodity to be tallied toward her well-being. Dulce et decorum est pro harpia mori.

If, when your preferred victim of abuse finally mounts the nerve to argue he doesn't deserve to be raised in self-hatred and abnegation, you then still find yourself in a position to scream in bloody outrage 'how dare you defend yourself!' like schoolyard bullies across every publication and Hollywood movie - then in all likelihood <YOU> are the asshole. That's not a hero's line. Instead of acting outraged men are voting for the other guy, try asking yourselves what exactly you've done to court their vote.

 

However...

 

Despite all my disdain for the lunatic caricature now representing "left-wing" politics (remember when the left wing used to stand for the underclass? like... all of it, everyone who's not a billionaire, not just the 0.1%"intersectional" superior breed?) I must concede the basic truth that any man voting for conservative, right-wing, religious, traditional, or in any other way reactionary movement is not only an accessory to tyranny but being swindled into voting against himself. Any backpedaling from modern ideas of individual rights will harm men more than women, because the precept of "women and children first" is a primitive one.

 

Or do you imagine that male sparrow placed himself closer to danger because he was guilted into it by Tumblr feminists? Because some government lawyer appointed their relative spacing on my railing? My grandfather was not injured by feminism. Trust me, in his village half a century ago, with the outhouses and the hauling buckets of well water and the children whittling their own toys and the moonshine with every meal and all that, nobody'd heard of Betty Fuckin' Friedan. They'd barely heard of Betty Rubble. But it was understood that the more dangerous or physically demanding a task, the more it should harm men and be spared women, just as it has since the beginning of time, no negotiating, end of story. Sparrows' brains don't need a line of code explicitly reading "if a male starling comes to rob your nest of straw and twigs, the spa-he-ro should edge 26% closer than the spa-her-ow"; nor have peasants historically needed stone tablets explicitly telling them line by line that large livestock can cause casual yet grievous injury and therefore thou shalt be handled by men, and if anyone risks venomous snakes and thunderstorms and rabid foxes and the occasional wild boar attack out in the fields and woods, that shalt be men too. And if there was heavy lifting to be done... well, you get the idea. We just assume we must assume every risk and hardship, instinctively. We protect our tribe's females because that's what monkey-men do. Nevertheless, religion, patriotism, traditional governance of every stripe has doubled down on our instinctive bias from the dawn of the species, shackling men to protect and provide unto eternity.

 

I don't blame my grandmother. She worked her wrinkled ass off every day I knew her in her own sphere of activity, in conditions harsher than any modern woman endures. But she did outlive her husband by well over a decade. As do modern women by slightly less than a decade. Such egalitarian outcomes fit no ethical principle I know of, yet no politely "progressive" university-educated urbanite will dare question them. And so that backward thinking, that primal presumption of duty and sacrifice, is endlessly exploited by activists who expand the definition of harm to include any and every political talking point up to and including spreading your knees on the subway, because they know we'll accept anything worded as a favor to women. Exactly where we should hope for true progress we find only an even more fanatical primitivism.

 

One of my past jobs involved handling slightly hazardous materials. Despite known increased health hazard to men, every worker in our half-dozen-ish department was male, except for one woman who mostly handled the bookkeeping, procurement, communication and other office tasks. No complaints from me on her performance in that regard. Nevertheless I did a double-take when told she was officially also cleared to do the practical part of our job, and do not doubt she counted toward some government-mandated gender quota to that effect. Said government seemed not to care that no matter what training she'd received, she was too morbidly obese to fit into the protective suit, much less spend hours standing on her feet in that suit. Hell, she broke two office chairs in one year!

 

Most may be too stupid to formulate or verbalize it, but a decade or three's endless such demented pretense of "equity" fuels men's anger toward progressive posturing. Yet again I must remind you feminism only skewed such favoritism even more blatantly in the direction it always lay. Females' exploitative behavior itself predates our society and even our species. Our mass media produce plenty of jokes about backward men refusing to do "woman's work" - I'd rather see men refuse to do men's work. If you don't remember your Trojan War stories, there's a bit at the start where the army's trying to recruit mighty heroes, not all of whom prove particularly eager to sail off on a mad crusade to rescue one princess. Odysseus tries to dodge the draft by pretending insanity, grabbing a plough and mindlessly running it over the same field over and over again. They catch him out by placing his infant son in front of the blade, forcing to him to stop in accordance with sanity.

 

You could say more men are now crossing that threshold from mad into madness, willing to butcher the future by voting for reactionaries. But it is also true that Ulysses' wife Penelope never had to make that decision, only whether her husband or new suitors would be more profitable to herself. Somewhere backstage of my avian burglary drama lurks the villainess of the story, conveniently distancing herself from the conflict she engenders: the female starling, sitting back to judge the quality of plunder her potential mates provide. And she never needed Cosmopolitan checklists to inform her of her entitlement. There's an evident yet universally ignored truth running contrary to modern pushes to enrich women over men: that no matter how rich a woman is, she will demand a husband even richer than herself, who elevates her status even higher in society. Your average female favors no heavy lifting but gold-digging.

"many young South Korean men felt unable to meet society's expectations: find a good job, get married, buy a home and start a family"

Who's that "society" exactly? At the core of the issue, who's expecting a male to provide a nest for the nesting instinct? And protect it from straw-burglars? Men should protest not that they are hobbled from meeting such demands, but that such demands were ever placed upon them.

 

Let's not pretend such issues have ever been rationally, ethically argued, or just deserts apportioned. With all due respect to Heinlein's "pregnant women and young children" suffice to say my 60yr-old grandmother was not pregnant at the time of the accident. We value female well-being higher not from rational consideration, but from unthinking instinct exploited by the unscrupulous for abuse and profit. Nor do such norms come into play "in emergency" but are abused every moment of our lives to induce men to accept poorer quality of life and surrender all their energy toward women's demands, regardless of straits more or less dire. Heinlein left a word out of his diatribe: not "societies" but "human societies" are structured thus, if a human is presumed to be the same social ape running on mindless impulses it's always been. A fairer world would require inhuman progress. Yet there you're once again faced with the insistence of "progressive" movements that there is no place in the future for men, that men (at least heterosexual ones) are the enemy, to be exterminated or put in their place as blue-collar labor, as an impediment to the unfairer sex' magnificence. It's a testament to women's mind-control abilities that they've kept their victims voting for such garbage as long as they did.

 

Still, there is no way but forward. Feminists' overt, unifying hatred of men raises the issue to consciousness but (absent the repurposed Marxist class warfare rhetoric and postmodern sophistry) their core principle, that men should sacrifice and be sacrificed for the benefit of women, has always been the most backward, primeval traditionalism imaginable. With regard to antiquated religious dogma, Bill Maher once asked "can you think of anything else that we still cleave to from the bronze age?" Well I don't know about the bronze age but there's nothing more stone-age than dudebro Grog needing to risk and surrender his very life for reproductive access. Every government and religion has only monetized that impulse (long before any declarations of sentiments did the same) whipping men into a frenzy with imagined threats to their women from foreigners and heathens. The way forward now would have been not primitivist backsliding into patriotism and religion, but expanding the freedom from traditional burdens and restrictions which women claimed in the 20th century to the other half of the population. Traditional family life will only see you working yourself to death for the undeserving, unless an opportunity arises to outright forfeit your life.

 

Let me leave you with a couple film recommendations, anti-war movies having always been just about the only medium or genre in which it's borderline acceptable to express any sympathy for men as persons. You've probably heard of them, as each appears to have made a well-deserved splash.

 

In 1917, the British soldiers muse on why the Germans don't go back home, with one caustically positing: "They hate their wives and mothers." The same wives and mothers who will be cashing in their military pensions long after their death. As if it hadn't been those same British men's own wives and mothers publicly shaming them into leaving home in the first place to rot in the trenches. The very same women demanding an expansion of their own political power were carrying placards with"intern them all" - not only all foreign nationals but any men not joining the war. Female interest, not opposed but colluding with warmongering. But that realization is never allowed to hit home, the film banking on other reversals of expectations, like the extremely long takes lending the protagonists' journey a hauntingly mundane quality despite their danger, and casting major actors in bit parts in counterpoint to the protagonists' insignificance. Aside from that it sticks to a few common war movie gimmicks, like a woman with a baby supplying an opportunity for heroic beneficence.

 

I was more impressed with the new version of All Quiet on the Western Front. Germans may rightly bash it for mangling the source material, and maladaptation habitually infuriates me enough to agree that, fine, maybe you should've changed the title. But most other criticism seems to complain that it's... too much of a war movie. Well... yes? They complain that it throws too much brutish, dehumanizing gore at the viewer, unglamorous and painfully detailed. That... is in fact its subject matter? And that it intersperses such scenes with blatant attempts to humanize the men being butchered. Terrible, I know. How dare. And they complain that it's Oscar bait... because the Oscar bait was supposed to be about transsexual abstract painters with Down syndrome or whatever instead? Well, lemme give ya something to cry about:

It snuck some gender politics in there when you weren't looking. And not the man-bashing type you critics love.

After dressing new dead men in old dead men's uniforms, women are absent from the story. Conspicuously so. Even when one of the soldiers runs off for a night with a random chick, she's only a distant, blurred impression, a rumour in the barracks, though he returns with her scarf as keepsake. Not that it does him any good. The scarf passes from hand to hand as the men die off, being taken up again in the final scene. The same scene lingers a long moment on a theater poster keeping the corpses company, in place of WWII's pin-up glossies. 

 

Soft, pastel splashes, completely out of place among the ruination of man making up the desolate final images. I doubt it's by accident that these idealized emblems of the fairer sex who sent them off to die survive the men who carried them. Oh, I'm sure you could reinterpret the scene however you want. The movie crew were cagey enough not to summon a lynch mob upon themselves. But there are signs, these days, that men are finally waking up to just where they stand in relation to their better halves.

 

Mentally, I've been calling this the "where were you" shot, and it's long overdue.

 

 

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* Granted, the sparrow example may be skewed. Assuming the same male staked out my deck as territory all through spring, he was a certified badass. One quiet morning in early February he took up position on the railing, fluffed himself up, stuck out his chest and give a loud *cheep!* ... Then he looked around in confusion. Deathly silence. No females in earshot. In fact nothing else moved. He turned around, puffed himself up and tried again: *Cheeep!* Nothing. No movement anywhere. Indoors, sipping a hot jar of tea, I was cracking up with laughter. "A" for effort my man, but you've got a lot to learn about females... like the fact they ain't looking for love at minus twenty degrees centigrade!

The Object of the Presupposition

I want you for your body.

You want me for my corpse.

Yet somehow I'm supposed to be the guiltier?

Back Door Shenanigans

(alternate title: "Our Freedooom!" Universalis)

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"She ran underneath the table

He could see she was unable

[...] 

So they came in through the out-way

It was Sunday but a black day "

Michael Jackson - Smooth Criminal

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The Marquis of Baltakhand rushes to the defense of his allies! (Mostly because it's good eatin'.)

Now this is how you farm XP

Unsatisfying sieges were one of the original Mount&Blade's biggest flaws. There'd be one ladder up against a castle wall and the attackers would file up it constantly cut down hoping for a defender to get arrowed in the face just as one of them reached the top to secure a foothold. Bannerlord spiced it up with more convoluted walls with multiple access points. But the AI is programmed to instead bank on hitting you before you can muster reinforcements, so it'll rush an assault as soon as its siege weapons are finished, before they have a chance to breach the walls. In this case (wish I'd've written down the fort's name) a snaking road up to the gate gave me time to destroy their battering ram, leaving the AI to send its soldiers to one side of the fort where the only two ladders were close together. It was a perfect storm, especially as I'd equipped a bow instead of my usual crossbow, and found a flanking vantage point near a barrel of infinite arrows.

I ended up personally downing an eighth of the enemy force, 118 kills in one combat. Yeah, no kidding I skilled up six times. (And yet it was still only worth 13 renown! Come on, if this doesn't earn you a ballad in the taverns...) But due to its mix of army management and RP stats, a setup where the player's personal kill count strongly impacts a battle is unusual for Bannerlord.

 

As a rare departure from the norm of multi-pronged combat, such an occurrence makes a memorable story. But for the most part, providing only one way forward yields dull repetitiveness, and even multiple routes can be undercut by clashing with genre conventions.*

 

For instance I've been thoroughly enjoying Cyberpunk 2077's side quests. Multi-level maps with just enough line-of-sight blocking to make you plan your next move, complex without being needlessly convoluted. In fact Night City as a whole makes for some quaint parkour gameplay, almost always providing a dumpster to use as cover, a back-alley you can cut across, a rooftop from which to open a fight with a terrain advantage or a wall you can jump over. Seriously, fortified ankles: best eddies I ever spent. And its cop scanner and gig missions are most often placed on rooftops with alternate access or inside buildings with back doors or skylights if you just circle around casing the joint a bit. But where skill checks come into play, C77's top-notch level design trips into its terrible decision to level-scale the whole damn game.

At character level 33/60, in a zone mid-way from newbietown to the rumored end-game, I reasonably expected a skill level of 17/20 would see me through any gig requirements, especially as (unlike, say, the cyberpsychos) it's not even meant as a difficult mission. But the level-scaling apparently applies to skill checks as well, counterproductively turning alternate routes into demands for min-maxing. Doesn't help that C77 is very obviously an FPS with some minimally-balanced RP-lite elements.

 

I got thinking about this topic last year while playing Baldur's Gate 3, which in contrast to its older cRPG inspirations supplies plenty of diplomacy and especially stealth alternatives, as well as occasional items and spells as solutions or shortcuts. But its propensity for jump-scare event triggers and unadvertised enemy abilities forces inordinate re-loads to find such alternates by trial and error. Morever, as I noted when discussing its strategic side, this often haphazard intersection of options blurred the line between valid strategy and just cheesing enemy AI, and you were more often than not forced to abuse reloads to even discover what an encounter was about.

 

But if you want a counterpoint in strictly regimented options for advancement, try Iron Tower's games. I switched back to C77 from frustration at having to constantly reload in Colony Ship: A Post-Longwinded Roleplaying Title. Though slightly toned down from Age of Decadence's absolute demand for min-maxing, it's still damn near impossible to do anything outside a path you choose from the start. Even by the end of Chapter 1 (of 3) your skill checks require 6/10 points. Nearing the end of Chapter 2 I'm finding fights increasingly impossible, which also makes it impossible to skill up my weapon-handlling for future fights.

Of course, Iron Tower has a somewhat unusual design philosophy for this era. You're meant to run across occasional impossible tasks depending on your skill setup, each quest a do-or-die proposition, with the campaign as a whole using these individual quests and encounters as alternate paths to the ending. On a visceral level as a monkey with a (joy)stick who just wants to break shit, I'll admit it's incredibly frustrating to run up against so much unbreakable shit. Intellectually though, I can appreciate and even applaud a change of pace from the usual video game power fantasy, from The Elder Scrolls' routine of being head of every guild.

 

If we look from RPGs to strategy genres though, such alternate routes and solutions have been the accepted norm for far longer.

Even in a lighthearted, comedic game like Dungeons 3, the enemy alternates attacks through two entrances toward your town hall. Not too hard to prepare contingencies for both, but it does add some flavor according to your preference for traps or guards or nuking. (For instance, since your army can catch enemy squads en route while launching your own attack, you might leave your usual exit (your Black Gate) completely defenseless and stick a Shelob or two by your back door.)

 

Natural barriers and choke points, diplomacy and tech races, strategy was using all such options as selling points for a generation while cRPGs mostly patted themselves on the back if they included even one big diplomacy option (e.g.: NWN:HotU) And it's always more interesting when it doesn't need to be scripted, when you find a risky move growing out of separate game elements.

My last Europa Universalis 4 campaign was an opportunity to try out the colonial system (I'm lukewarm about it, but that's for another time) and since I'd tried Castille and Portugal in EU3 decided on Skawtland Universalis! I did manage to found Nova Scotia (then lost it to the Americans) had greater success in Africa and South America, but naturally the big question was how (or rather when) to deal with England. I grabbed a couple of provinces during a French invasion as part of the Hundred Years' war, but then got stuck in a diplomatic stalemate for a century. It was only when the American colonies seceded that I saw my big chance... and saw also to my dismay that I had zero chance of my monarch growing up in time to declare war. Experiencing a sudden patriotic burst of republicanism I swapped governments just to be able to invade. (I'd already founded the Anglican church on a whim, so why not go for a twofer in shortsightedness?)

 

But it paid off!

Now, swapping governments is not something you'd normally do on a whim. If nothing else, losing the royal marriage diplomacy bonus can cost alliances. But, due to my relative isolation, I spent nearly the entire campaign allied to France, Lubeck and Sweden, in direct contrast to my chaotic Teuton/Uzbek playthrough(s). I got a +2 position bonus to island nation government reform! And though I only took London and formed babbyBritain in 1783 (almost at the end, for the uninitiated) it still yielded a different route than the New World colonial adventure I'd been gunning for at the start.

 

Choosing between divergent approaches works best when it comes with a slew of other factors, gains and losses, triumphs and sacrifices, allowing the player to weigh their value. Take one of Age of Wonders 4's more recent "intrigue" events:

At some point one of the AI players gets dethroned by The Reaper, which then proceeds on a fairly aggressive program of expansion. You have an opportunity to run a quest chain to rescue the idiot who lost a bet with death... but then do you really care? Questing after all costs you time you could spend expanding your own empire, and The Reaper might just declare war on you before you're even done. So there's a time element but not a fixed one, a RP element (an alliance with Death is just all sorts of badass and I happened to be playing a shadow faction this time around) and a practical political element, as the Reaper's new empire has a physical presence on the game map. It may be a thorn in your side or a powerful ally or just a useful third party keeping others busy while you expand.

 

So, given D&D, the grand-daddy of RPGs, itself started as strategy wargame, why is choice so much more meaningful in Strategy than in RPGs, to the point even the roleplaying angle worked its way back into strategy before RPGs expanded strategically? As with stealth, the issue comes down to genre conventions. In this case min-maxing. Lack of nuance appears to have been a core trait of D&D from the very start, passed down to all its descendants. I don't mean just the often criticized good/evil dichotomy. RPGs are supposed to be about establishing a player identity, but that most often just boils down to having one stat higher than anyone else. The DEX dude disarms traps and the WIS bro casts cure wounds. Even when putting up an alternate entrance, it's as an opportunity for a player to prove superior stat allocation in one particular stat, because that's what feels like success and gets the dopamine flowing. 18 tech ability or GTFO. When establishing a party it's just assumed every stat will be maxed on some character. In single-player, single-character affairs, either you let the player max everything (grandmaster of every guild) or you can't lock content behind a stat check the player may not meet.

 

Strategy has no such limitation, because it has no such intrinsic expectation of single-minded simple-mindedness. It doesn't draw munchkins quite the same way - until you get to online actions-per-minute twitchfests like Starcraft which are in fact no longer strategic. In fact it's assumed you'll cover all your bases (offense(STR), defense(CON) exploration/questing(DEX) tech(INT) economy(WIS) culture/diplomacy(CHA)) to varying extents.

 

 

 

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* This, kids, is called a thesis statement, just like your eighth-grade language teacher taught you. See how it's preceded by a brief, mildly humorous and easily grasped introduction illustrating the point but not belaboring it, how plainly it's stated for intelligibility, how it's slightly offset from larger supporting paragraphs, summarizing to prime the reader for their upcoming evidence to that same point?

Werwolfe am being educational.

 

P.S.: I really wish Iron Tower had a bigger market share. Weirdly, despite their frustrating insistence on min-maxing, they've also proven themselves prone to impose different playthroughs depending on your character's stats, and thus apt to bridge this strategy/RP gap. Unfortunately as what feels like a garage project they blatantly lack the workforce to truly flesh out their games with all necessary options.

 

P.P.S.: Is it just me or does "so they came in through the out-way" combined with constantly asking 'u ok babe?' come across like buttfuckin'? I'm not crazy, right? That's a song about buttfuckin'!

Here's lookin' at you lookin' at me, 5

A lake's plucky squire deigned to pose a bit during a couple of cloudy mornings.

I can never quite tell the grey heron and the great blue apart, despite (or due to?) having seen plenty of both in my life. The long beak and more rust-colored neck/chin is characteristic of the blue, isn't it? So I'm'a guess that. Also, it looked pretty, y'know... sizeable.

(As in, this thing could peck your eyes out without flying, just getting on its tippy-toes.)

It made a big show of strutting, diving and flapping around, and ruffling its feathers to drip-dry with pretty impressive control, which is how I witnessed a freaky detail:

Those two modified decorative feathers on the back of their heads? They can tense and relax those individually! (Also, given how exagerrated they look, I'd guess this is a male?) Man, sure puts a suggestive waggle of your eyebrows to shame.

 

Menzoberranzanothanks

I only caught Strategic Simulations during its years of decline in the late '90s. In the early '90s my attention was mostly captured by my Sega Genesis, with few PC forays into Prince of Persia, The Oregon Trail, Doom, Dune (yes, the original and not the sequel) or later on MW2: Mercs, C&C: RA or Warcraft 2. So SSI's repertoire of D&D games was not, strictly speaking, before my time, but it would also have counted beneath my twelve-year-old self's contempt. I, good sirs, was a super-soldier or generalissimo, not some frou-frou "adventurer" in Errol Flynn tights. Quite.

 

Nevertheless, after my drowid playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, I fancied a stroll through drow-ville, and Menzoberranzan has already sat unplayed in my collection for eight years now. So let's roll up a couple of standard iterations of me and my shadow, with somewhat inflated stats to make this less painful.

Let us boldly go. Queue up a couple of walkthroughs in case I get lost: brief and detailed versions.

 

1) Aaarrgh! Oh sweet holy hell, this character creation intro's painfully bad! The state-of-the-art 3FPS polygon transformations, ye merrie olde 1990s English, the delays before every action so you can marvel at pixels in motion!

 

2) I really, really hope this thing's turn-based, 'cause if this turns into a repeat of Arena, it's gonna be a very shallow dive from me. Oh shit it's not, it's not turn based, horrendous '90s real-time twitchiness incoming!

 

3) Alright, alright, after some fumbling I finally managed to cast armor on myself and click to death a bunch of blobby spastic brown things that might've been either drow swordselves or the cast of Stomp. I've got three hit points left and finally realized I need to put my bracers and ring onto my paper doll even though it lacks slots, and more painstakingly discovered I need to place buckets in my characters' hands to activate them like weapons... and the town is saved! I DID A THING! Guess I need a fighter so I'll recruit Baldassar L. Jackson.

 

4) Aaah, bugbears! Honestly, this wouldn't be nearly as bad in higher resolution. I had a devil of a time finding the well just because it didn't look like anything in particular until you're on top of it, and even inventory items are hard to discern. Moreover, nobody back then knew how to design a game interface. Not only do all interactions take an extra click, but it's confusingly unresponsive. I didn't even realize my character had died until I looked down a fight later. *Sigh* reload.

 

5) I've played plenty of games with bad pathing, but it's been decades since I've played one with zero pathing. Getting a mob stuck behind any object lets you just kill it effortlessly, since shortswords apparently have three-meter reach. I'm gradually learning the fine art of spamming-clicks-then-backing-a-step-away. I try to talk to a gnoll but it attacks anyway, same with a bugbear... so what was the point of that? Find the wounded drow. More gnolls. More bugbears. Random magic scrolls lying in random spots on the ground. Graphics and interface aside, this actually plays remarkably like grindy "action RPG" dross from 10-15yrs later. Took a loooong time for cRPGs to outgrow Gauntlet, didn't it? On the other hand it already featured some mainstays like combat music, the map is quite useful for its day, and my elf had a race-specific dialogue with the drow. Talk to Mr. Wizard aaand apparently the whole campaign's gonna be about Drizzt. Just flippin' wonderful.

 

6) Oh hey I can scribe my scroll collection. Gave Shadow a bow but the clunky lack of inventory automation (arrows don't get automatically re-added to her quiver when I pick them off the ground) makes an otherwise good resource-conscious system a chore. More gnolls... and more gnolls... and even more gnolls... and now verbeeg damage sponges. I'm just getting one-shotted at random intervals and sick of reloading, but damnit, I paid a whole dollar for this entertainment product and I'll at least make it to the Underdark even if it kills me (a hundred more times than it already has.) Hilariously though, even one of my own Stinking Clouds counts as an obstacle completely freezing enemy movement.

7) Drizzt's hideout: pixel-hunting for random beige buttons on random beige walls. Blech... but at least they're relatively easy to see compared to some contemporary examples. (Also, how many damn cooking pots does this guy need?) Apparently I can just rest infinitely like in the NWN games, so I just start spamming fireballs. Leucrotta caves: giant stinkin' pile of dead ends. Also apparently exactly one of each monster type is going to talk to me, for the sole purpose of telling me it'll kill me, including the giant cat-monster thing with hooves. Sure, why the hell not. Also, the automap is detailed for its time, except for one crucial detail: not marking zone transitions!

 

8) Alright, got all four macguffins. Nuke verbeeg, rest, nuke verbeeg, rest, nuke verbeeg, rest, nuk- ah, shit, it's Drizzt, and his cheesy Harlequin Romance origin story... which he'll apparently start spinning to any passer-by who'll sit still long enough to get ear-fucked.  Am I supposed to take this idiot along? I suppose for another chapter or two until I hit the Underdark, I can suffer him. I must admit though that despite the horrendous intro and generally sparse plot, the little writing I do see in this game is actually less annoying than some later cRPGs, which strained too hard at comic relief (e.g. NWN:SOU) or really ladled on the thees and thous (e.g. V:tM-Redemption) etc. Anyway, Mr. Wizard gives me my field trip passes and offers me the scrolls he has lying around... like I wasn't supposed to have already robbed him blind? What kind of n00b crusading hero do you take me for?!

 

9) Check the walkthrough because I have no freakin' clue where to go next, and the next zone is full of goddamn bats. Of course. No cRPG would be complete without. And the Random Ground Scroll Fairy's been busy here too. Also, I've been collecting trash loot all this time but have not run across a single merchant, and just now I realize I don't see any kind of currency. Soooo... yeah? No? No buying or selling whatsoever. A short dive down a mine cart later, I've finally reached the... not the Underdark, just the descent into same, which is yet another nonsensical maze of dead ends filled with swarms of trash mobs, in this case some kind of little demon pigs. Osquips. Yes, fine, whatever, sure, fascinating. Not like they do anything different from bugbears or gnolls or verbeeg or leucrottas or bats or cats or slats (I dare you to prove that's not a D&D monster) except for having different sprites.

Okay, I think we're done here. I apparently leveled a couple of times, not that it mattered. Let's call that "close enough" and say I've gotten my one dollah's worth of sucky-sucky.

 

Conclusions?

To be fair, not as sucky as it could've been. Pretty standard early-'90s point-and-click routine, with the added bonus that your characters have stats and they exposit a few sentences here and there. The monotonous maps and scarce decorations were just standard for the time (and would be reiterated ten years later when the Aurora Engine strained for three-dimensionality at the expense of detail) as were the target practice mobs with no special abilities and random placement in bland mazes. In '94 you were still supposed to revel in the act of playing something electronic in an electronic fashion, in being on the cutting edge of entertainment, in the sheer thrill of *clicking* itself. The simple fact that arrows landed on the ground to be picked up for further use and a quiver went on my character's shoulder would've blown my mind back then.

Forward this trilby to five other people

"Trump's trade war imperils Spanish hatmaker's business with US Orthodox Jews"

- actual news headline

 

Oh noes, not the magic fedoras!

Now, OK, I get Reuters is trying to point out that our presidunce holding the economy hostage so he can extort bribes for special tariff exemptions will have numerous unforeseen consequences in fields you've never even thought about. But you could've just said "hats" and it would've still sounded weird enough. Mostly it reminds me the ramifications work both ways.

 

On a completely unrelated topic: are chain letters still a thing? I have to assume they are, and I'm just not seeing them anymore. Maybe Google or Microsoft's just censoring them out of circulation before they even reach my junk folder. Which I guess would be wrong from a censorship angle (junk folders exist for that reason) but not wrong enough for me to side with spammers. Chain e-mails were a freakin' huge annoyance in the internet's early days almost on par with the standard "enlarge your mortgage" spam. But when they jumped to mind recently I realized something I hadn't considered back in the day: how many of them used religious language like earning favor in the eyes of tha lawd, or "grace" or more commonly curses if you don't forward. And it turns out such stupidity goes back centuries and was indeed from its very inception not merely vaguely superstitious but religious.

 

But then we shouldn't be surprised that tracing irrationality leads back to the fountainhead of irrationality. Is there such a leap from "not breaking the chain" to re-buying the same hat every three years to stay in line with community standards?

 

Yes, side-effects are a bitch. Jews mostly voted against Trump. Or did they? The biggest source of votes for Republican graft and vandalism is the uneducated religious rabble, and promoting the mentality of make-believe, by whatever denomination, promoting the mindset that decisions (sartorial or otherwise) should be based on affiliation to caveman superstitions, feeds that reactionary agenda. Every yutz banging his bowler against the wall voted to go hatless for an entire lifetime before the current robber baron took office.

 

"There are hat factories in the United States, but they are highly specialised in cowboy hats," he said.

... So be jewish in a cowboy hat, I won't give a shit.

 

 

____________________________________

 

P.S.: Forward this post to five people you know or great nondenominational guilt-tripping shall ensue.

Have you ever noticed how many call themselves open books when all their pages are blank?

Medieval Dynasty

"Gdzie telewizji nie ma, radia nie ma, zasięgu brak"

Cool Kids of Death - A Moze Tak

 

I've been in the mood to try out several titles built around old-timey village life themes and thought Medieval Dynasty would serve, along with The Guild, as a quaint but ultimately negative point of reference, an easily dismissed amateurish attempt at something better. After all, the market's littered with dime-a-dozen asset flips. But damned if it hasn't insisted on earning my appreciation. Don't expect too expansive an array of content. Mostly it does a few basics very well. If you wanted an FPS Banished, it's worth a look.

Best daub 'em wattles afore win'r, a-yawp

If you've played such games before, the core elements are straightforward enough: pick up basic resources, make some tools, gather better stuff, build, get wood for sheep, keep advancing through the tech tree, form babby, keep building up your settlement. Classic stuff. But its resource and time management mechanics are uncommonly fine-tuned and its various elements' progression flows more smoothly into each other than you normally see.

 

Setting out in The Oxbow map I sought a spot not too far from NPC villages (foreseeing frequent trade runs) and knew I'd need water/fish but also wanted someplace with a nice view, and settled just west of Piastovia - by dumb luck, almost on top of one of the map's few caves. This has yielded me quite a bit more cash than I'd otherwise have gotten early on (bronze hammers and sickles is how humble Werwolfe pays the bourgeoisie's onerous bills) with the only inconveniently spaced resource being clay. Thus, as I round out my third year I've hit a pretty good balance.

I can finally devote some time and geld to more frivolous exploration and decoration, but until now it's been a scramble to get a working community up and running. From doing everything yourself at the start you gradually begin delegating more and more to the villagers you recruit. Build them a house and then you find you have to feed them, recruit a hunter and you realize everyone needs water, plant some fields then scramble to make tools fer da hoein' an' fertilizin'. I almost started losing villagers recently because I ran out of buckets of all things. I was never stuck, never overwhelmed yet never at a loss for more options going forward. In between all of that you need to find time to run fetch quests for reputation to raise your population limit and make a bit of spare cash to buy recipes.

 

Oh, and mind the wolves.

 

The other half of the game is a first-person-slasher array of kill and fetch quests, slightly more interesting than usual due to the solid resource / inventory / travel time interplay making you plan out your trips. Unfortunately the FPS combat is both twitchy and sluggish somehow, with lightning-fast enemies aggroing on you from behind brush and lauching themselves at you in pinball maneuvers. Combined with poor pathing, massive damage/health ratios and nearly absent attack animations or hit confirmation, combat ends up feeling both annoying and unsatisfying. Suddenly there's something at your feet and your health bar dissappears. (Though I did luck out again. First bandit I killed was a crossbowman out in the open so I could rush him with my stone axe. Then his crossbow got me a kill on a mook with a helm and iron sword, which has gotten me through the next couple of years in style.)

 

Aside from the combat, the interface has some odd quirks. The radial menu for building/crafting is pretty good, but I don't see any point to keeping the clock running while it's open, since you'll frequently find yourself opening it to check costs. And on the downright weird side, in order to even load a game, you're forced to cycle through two extra confirmation screens, including one asking whether you want to play your game in single or multiplayer... every... single... time! Why? I've gone over this repeatedly: the early-2000s dream that multiplayer competitiveness will maintain your single-player game's popularity and sales has long ended, largely because we've all noticed the world's full of subhuman garbage. And if the only point of pretending to have a multiplayer mode is so Epic Games can mine my data, fuck'em! At least keep the multiplayer button from being too intrusive.

 

Aside from all that, the skill trees are also mostly just there to exist, and though you can customize a fair bit (I switched from 3-day seasons to 4, then later to 5) that doesn't extend to mob and resource respawn rates, which default to nigh-instantaneous for animals and daily or seasonal for even the more valuable stuff like metal ores, which respawn faster than trees! But in one aspect in particular, despite its otherwise unexpectedly solid effort, Render Cube nonetheless shows its amateurish side: writing.

Can you not at least slap an "OOC" in front of such lines?

Only a couple of dialogues so far have been written in-character. The rest read like forum troll banter or some middle-schoolers reveling in making "a game" not bothering with consistency or immersion and "going meta" for a cheap feeling of superiority. Pity, because otherwise the world itself is or could've been one of the best village life sims around, and despite some fumbling due attention was paid to quality-of-life mechanics often absent from such games, like auto-using stored resources from a nearby shed without making endless twenty-pace trips back and forth from your construction site.

 

Medieval Dynasty could've been great, but even with its flaws it's still pretty decent.

I've never had the guts to actually taste juniper berries

Are they as miraculous as the gourd doth prophecy?