Beneath the Clouds (again)

It was only after the last page posted a couple days ago that I realized the phrase which sprang to mind for a title was less likely a Werwolfe original (despite the apt illustration bringing it to mind) rather than encountered as the title of a webcomic I read a year or three ago. Favoring it with a quick re-read reinforces the naivete which relegated it to my less frequently accessed memory banks, but also the honest charm which prevented it from being wiped completely.

 

On the plus side Beneath the Clouds feeds you a pretty constant stream of references to Heian-period Japan (fake eyebrows: hot or not?) (Not.) filling but not glutting you with place and occupation names and the like. Also, ghosts are real. Sure, fine. And the art style, albeit nothing too ambitious, does a nice impression of old-timey Japaneeziness.

 

On the minus, the plot's construction carries a hopelessly artificial feel lifted from any introductory creative writing course. You can practically hear the various building blocks like "introduction" and "foreshadowing" and "twist" clattering against each other with every new stage of the heroine's journey. Characters fare little better, with a stock love interest and his counterpart decoy popping up like cardboard cut-outs right on cue, with an equally bland garnish of generic girl power, etc. Worse yet, the author makes no effort to portray social interactions in traditional societies. When dialogues manage not to sound like disinterested summaries of an actual conversation, they sound instead like middle-school cliques sniping at each other.

 

Still, I can't help but like these sorts of unsophisticated but honest efforts, at least when they stick to an interesting core theme. Classism and envy in centralizing, pre-samurai Japan qualified as quaint enough for at least the title to stick in my sulci.

Beneath the Clouds

Unrelated to the picture below: driving down from a mountain resort a long time ago, my father and I caught a little spate of rain. No harm done. It just made the air moist and rich as we serpentined down. Then, gradually, it turned downright misty. The firs had begun releasing the moisture right back into the atmosphere. At just above 1400 meters in altitude we even got to drive down through the exact transition line in the trees where overall air pressure and water vapor pressure equalize, or whatever the hell those needles require to open their stomata full-bore, the entire phenomenon starting and stopping within ten meters' altitude as far as the eye could see. Glorious.

 

One of mountains' more amazing experiences is being able to observe biomes not just interweaving but decisively succeeding each other in the spam of just a few hundred meters.

In the bottom left you can see a couple of scattered, wider broadleafs, but it's overwhelmingly firs/pines gradually shrinking in height as you advance in altitude until giving way to junipers, themselves trickling away into ever-sparser grass as bare rock begins to assert itself toward the windblown peaks.

It's like a whole chapter out of an ecology manual in a single glimpse.

Ixion - and on and on and on

"I don’t mean to be cramping your style
Just come home to me once in a while" 

Clare Fader & The Vaudevillains - Catch of the Day

 

 

It's Surviving Mars - IIINN SPAAAA- wait, wait, uhh... is Mars already in space? It is a planet but not this planet so spacey relative to us but rocks but gravity but atmosphere* but... actually never mind:

It's Frostpunk - IIINN SPAAAAAACE!!!

Not a very helpful error message without a "because" now is it?

Ixion does little to hide its strict Settlers-inspired village simulator genealogy. But where the similar Endzone is straightforwardly inspired by the trend's originator, Banished, Ixion skews more toward the mechanization / exploration themes of Surviving Mars and especially Frostpunk. Most all your resources, in fact, come from outside your city's buildable area, said city being a space station that can teleport between stars -

(Hey, I've been inside this art installation before... Milwaukee Art Museum, about ten years back?)

 

- via a suspiciously gate-like device on its patootie. 

Chevron six locked!

Ah, see, dere's yer problem, Mac, y'only put six chevrons on dis doodad. Ev'rybody knows ya need seven! (But, important plot point, you can engage them ALL AT ONCE!) And you better believe you'll need every chevron, because Kharak Is Burning!

Or maybe we're just re-enacting the intro from Thundarr

Anyway, though a bit derivative beyond the usual genre conventions - 

- Ixion does capture the melancholic atmosphere lacking in more cynically exploitative copycats of the Banished/Frostpunk lineage, thanks not least to Bulwark's secret weapon Guillaume David (how often do you see a game's composer get third billing?) While he takes a bow here and there echoing his lauded work on Mechanicus, the score here is lighter yet still mechanical and expansive, more... "spacey" to once again beautifully suit its spacefaring setting.

 

Sadly, it's gradually downhill from there. Ixion's core measure of player progress, building up your space station and filling it with crew, exploits the appeal of a mobile base of operations to its fullest in finest Homeworld fashion, yielding a true feeling of accomplishment with every new increase in electrical output or new sector. Like Surviving Mars, the visuals follow a futuristic, polished aesthetic, and quite aptly if not outstandingly. The writing is weaker, filled with stock SF episodes, bland heroics and a cheesy, easily hateable villain that won't pose any moral quandaries for its audience.

 

When you get down to gameplay, a fundamentally solid exploration, resource gathering and expansion system is constantly marred by misconceived straining to keep that routine fresh and temporize. First off, the spaceships you send out from your station to gather resources are deliberately dumbed down (dumber than a Roomba but a bit smarter than a Tesla autopilot) to force you to micromanage. They will not avoid hazards despite these being clearly marked, unless you manually deny individual destinations. And hey: quick quiz. You've got a map full of scattered resources. You tell your worker bees to prioritize all equally. Would it make sense for them to gather the closest ones first? Obviously not, since they have secret priorities of their own and will run across the map to fetch one scrap of nothing instead of clearing your immediate area.

 

The hazards you encounter on three of the campaign's five maps provoke just as much gratuitous frustration, since you only discover their individual properties when a ship blows up or your station eats hull damage. Calling this "exploration" ignores the basic idea of investigating the unknown and not simply flattening your nose against invisible walls. Individual science ship events skew similarly toward random nonsense. And don't ask me why you can't click-to-zoom to a particular ship.

 

Inside the station, things are less drastically but more routinely frustrating. Ixion could have been subtitled "a pull-my-finger city sim" since turning on a storage unit somehow blows up an apartment block or mushroom farm across town. Dipping below your available workers and electrical output can cause accidents. Great. Except they made a classical conditioning nightmare out of it, hitting you with a rolled up newspaper. You are not cited a risk assessment so you can make informed decisions. The moment you accept a risk, the game punishes you for doing things it doesn't like. Instant boom. I could have lived with truly random "accidents" but:

Ixion rather maintains a ceaseless and unpredictable stream of gratuitous punishments throughout. No matter how good your gameplay random shit just blows up, injuring and killing your workers** and though you can mitigate this by playing safe, individual buildings' accidents nonsensically scale in severity with the total number of passengers and the campaign chapter reached. Combine this with idiosyncratic resource transport automation and a bug causing said automation to stop functioning (especially for food!) until you reload a save, and you're left with a system not encouraging you to grit your teeth and adventure bravely onward in the face of adversity, but save-scum the shit out of each mission every few minutes.

 

Otherwise, the game could've been great. Resource acquisition and the tech tree are well balanced, prompting you to shift priorities as you open up more of your city map, and the mix of plucky industry and cozy domesticity indoors contrasts beautifully with the inimical lonely infinity without your hull. But when I first fired up Ixion I thought I'd be finishing up my summary by saying "Frostpunk has some serious competition" and... no, it doesn't. Not even close. It has an awkwardly charming but weakly written, amateurish imitator relying entirely too much on artificial constraints on player input and "wouldn't it be cool if" ideas that could've greatly benefited from another few cycles of tester feedback.

***

 

Now we must return to my observation that both Ixion and Endzone share a suspicious number of novel similarities. With both coming out a year-and-a-half apart ('21-'22) I doubt one had time to copy directly from the other. More likely these were just ideas tossed around at conventions, and as means to keep the city sim routine fresh, they're a mixed bag:

- Buildings of irregular sizes, making it impossible to fill your town's grid. Almost everything has a different x-by-y footprint of grid squares, meaning they not only cannot fill the same spaces, but cannot even be reliably added up to the same sums. A quaint space-filling challenge at first, but ultimately not very rewarding. Dead space is dead space. It does not add to the game experience. At least Endzone lets you fill a few squares with decorations.

- Flipping the old resource scarcity precept. It's not the vespene gas that limits you but the ore, needed for constant maintenance. Interesting. Can feel a bit grindy but pre-empts much of the mid-game complacency plaguing strategy genres in general. An expanded interpretation of Frostpunk's coal, I suppose.

- Overdrawing on your workforce kills you. Partly, fighting to stay above a threshold of constant resource depletion penalizes overexpansion, though Ixion goes further to actively punish you for even taking a single step in that direction. Goes in hand with:

- Random death. Workers are weirdly brittle in both cases. This may be an attempt to make you care more about their well-being than Banished's bleakness or Frostpunk's grimness, but mostly it's just annoying, and comes across as underserved punishment of the player. Goes in hand with:

- Socially conscious. Not so much in terms of cozying to racial or other "minorities" but touting egalitarian societies where well-being is actively valued. Neither game's writers were up the the task of conveying such ideas/ideals cogently though, so it mostly results in bland, facetious niceties at odds with your supposedly harsh survival setting.

- Quest system as crutches. In Endzone giving you free resources, in Ixion mostly opportunities to raise crew morale. Slow worker and resource transport reactivity though tends to doom such recovery efforts. Also, a reactive quest system is a bit demoralizing when compared to the basic precept of a quest as a grandiose goal, a fundamentally proactive challenge, boldly going and so forth.

- Economy unmanageable except by maintaining massive stockpiles of everything. Largely an artifact of poor resource transport automation combined with worker brittleness. No brinksmanship permitted, no gambles, tends to sap some of the excitement Banished added to the city sim formula, where you could run decades or generations on a clothing or tool shortage and still recover.

- Decreased tangibility. Surviving Mars or Dawn of Man made a huge show of keeping resources as a physical presence on the map. You could track unit by unit of rock or food as it's dug up at its worksite, in its worker's pockets, added to its storage facility, in the claws of a delivery drone and finally at its consumer. Endzone and Ixion's larger population sizes and rapid resource churn negate this and lose not only the satisfaction of knowing where each egg is in the basket, but some of the accountability necessary to troubleshoot production chains.

 

Overall, it's weird that something like Medieval Dynasty cleaves to the Banished village simulator formula more successfully by simply transposing it to first-person perspective than these two did by trying to build it up. Maybe it also explains Frostpunk 2's decision to return to RCI district management a la Sim City instead, and village simulators will transition to first person from now on.

 

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* I so wanted to write that as "but gas" ... heehee, butt gas

** Note to self: have got to go back and try playing Suspended: A Cryogenic Nightmare again. 

Endzone: A Predictable Part

"Where did you mess up your fur?
And I don't like your braggartish purr
Your cool cat lazy
Is driving me crazy
And your sweet talk is so amateur"

 

Clare Fader & The Vaudevillains - Catch of the Day

 

 

After the end of the world, 's crap!

 

Before getting back to RPGs I wanted to try some of Frostpunk 2's competition to scratch the city sim itch. But as both my choices proved eerily similar in everything except superficial aesthetic, I may as well finish a full campaign of each and talk about them one after the other. First up we have Endzone: A World Apart.

Welcome to Nyctimus, ca. boom-and-a-half.

Quick, find me a woodcutter's hut. What? Come on, it's so obvious, it's right in front of you! ... somewhere. Among the rest of the junkpile. Though it puts a fair bit of effort into detail work on its various structures, Endzone's first impression is of nonsensical clutter. Maybe intentional to suit its Mad Max aesthetic, but forgetting visuals should also enable the player to identify production facilities and storages at a glance. It's not a unique problem (Dawn of Man had it to a lesser extent) but I've rarely been struck by it quite so forcefully, right from the start and never improving.

 

It similarly lacks flair in other respects, never actively terrible yet never showing any particular competence. I muted its one generic bot-extruded music track after half an hour, and for their sake I hope they didn't pay anyone for voiceovers sounding more wooden than a bot. Not that the flavor texts themselves inspire much thespian passion, sounding more like stage directions (be amazed that people used to eat in fast food restaurants) than anything a post-apocalyptic explorer might say. You can imagine how inspired their political messaging sounds:

I feel insulted to agree with your inanity

The interface tracks the same awkward fumbling, as while you're given access to an overtly comprehensive system of stats on resource trends, it contains almost no relevant information (what's my projected wood production and consumption and how is it distributed, how much housing do I have and need) and resources overlap for critical services and construction, leading to a lot of inexplicably stalled production chains.

In practical terms Endzone is a quite straightforward Banished clone, with some added inspiration from the likes of Frostpunk or Surviving Mars in adding an exploration system to the formula. Even there it fumbles, as conflating the exploration and city map results in impractically long distances for your workers, and when struck by any shortage, your recovery efforts will be nigh-meaningless because your peasants will die en route before delivering the food/water/medicine you need. Farmers starve to death, herbalists die from infections, water carriers of thirst. Endzone's distinguishing conceit is basing most of your economy on a single basic resource called "scrap" which is then turned into construction of four secondary resources. But reminiscent of Tropico 4, resource production and consumption rarely track any rational pattern, creating situations in which the same food output which supported 200 settlers with surplus creates starvation among 150, and the main secondary four constantly over/undershoot their marks.

 

Likely to help with those weird fluctuations you're handed a quest system as crutch. Whenever you fall short of a resource, you're "spontaneously" hit with a related production demand and receive a bonus of same upon completion. Except the quest will often demand you build exactly one more of the relevant production building than you already have, when the real issue is almost always that you lack the workers to fill even your existing capacity. Even their spare tire's flat.

Some other quirks include requiring explorers to have badges for exploration, which they gain (you guessed it) by exploration, thus forcing you to clear the map in a single generation. Map creation doesn't let you pick your starting location, prompting a lot of re-randomizing to get a decent spot near a lake. This being a post-apocalyptic game, global warming is apparently in effect because winter gets replaced with droughts as resource scarcity challenge. But lumping loss of water, herbs and most food sources into a single disaster turns it into an off button for half your economy, basically a "skip a turn" card and I've already voiced my distaste for such mechanics in single-player.

However, Endzone suffers not so much from individual flaws as from mediocrity, an overwhelming feel of inept imitation, a by-the-numbers assemblage of modern city sim elements with none of Banished or Dawn of Man's honest charm to compensate for its lacks. I guess there could be worse village simulators around, but I know with a certainty there are more inspired ones.

 

Next time, a suspiciously similar exercise in mediocrity: Ixion!

I'll have you know my attention deficit is quite orderly, thank you.

Amnesia: Rebirth

"Like worms on a hook
That were plucked from the hearts
Of the bodies of gods
That were rotting to dust"

 

Otep - Apex Predator 

 

 

A game about a pregnant gal falling down about twenty flights of stairs.

Also: The Magician's Nephew's gone goth!

Anyway, worship the great mother.

It's not polite to stare.

A Machine for Pigs made a good enough impression to keep me playing through my Amnesia backlog (I'd forgotten all about them until now) with Rebirth. Published a decade after The Dark Descent, it seems from the start eager to show off its more polished game engine, all those larger, more complex, interactable environments and special effects. While its underlying stiff mid-2000s blockiness is more and more difficult to hide these days, they worked it into a generally... well, stiff and blocky, chthonic aesthetic well fitting the cold, off-putting sensation so intrinsic to their survival horror claim to fame. However, while much of that is indeed well-executed, it also contributes heavily to a pervasively damaging over-indulgence.

 

The more lush environments could not help but tempt me to treat this not as survival horror but an open-world RPG, trying to explore every nook and cranny of every zone. (Hey, I like sandbox games. You put me in a literal sandbox. I'm gonna do some sandboxin'! I'm not on trial here!) Indeed, the developers themselves seemed uncertain which way to lean from zone to zone, delighting in immersing you in a massive alternate-universe ruin -

Worship the great mother.

- while struggling to maintain some degree of chill on the back of your neck. Rebirth satisfies more as an improvement on Myst's otherworldly exploration, but this cannot help but clash with its desperation to maintain the series' core survival horror theme. So many scripted events pop up randomly that it becomes tedious struggling not to trigger the next cutscene and the next and the next before you've had a chance to explore. Branching paths just waste time if you cannot fully explore a branch, invisible walls block your path or doors unlock miraculously across the map as you advance unrelated plot points with little hint as to proper order of operations. Most often you're simply thrown into mazes of dead ends, some of which you're expected to navigate while being chased, guessing at identical left or right turns in the dark.

 

The darkness in particular, while it's a constant (and logical) part of the survival horror formula, is taken to infuriating extremes. The strict game mechanics side (using light to lower your fear) works well enough, making you manage two resource pools of matches and lamp oil, with plentiful enough drops for the diligent explorer. But when every single damn zone is darker than the sun don't shine, the simple act of moving around becomes a mind-numbing chore. Cranking the gamma just to see one step ahead is a "game" I'd hoped not to play after the first Diablo. After awhile the entire trial-and-error routine of stumbling around blind while monsters jump out of the walls to chase you stops being a meaningful challenge or high-stakes immersion and just gets aggravating. Especially so as Rebirth lacks a quicksave/quickload feature, substituting an auto-respawn... which plonks you randomly in your current level. As you may guess that's worse than nothing, only compounding the central frustration of blind stumbling. I preferred to keep saving to the main menu and reload manually rather than use it.

 

So when I no longer worried about spoilers and looked at player comments I was not surprised to find Rebirth a bit polarizing, with lots of 1-star and 5-star votes. Take the rage-reviews with a grain of salt though. The various mechanics are not bad so much as overused and over-emphasized. Stumbling through the darkness would be great if such zones had not been over-extended. The puzzles can be frustrating, but hints do drop if you just monkey around with your environment a bit. The chases have some variety thrown in like needing to circle, dive, clear a path or stall for a few seconds. And when you're not faceplanting into walls, the alternate universe makes an engrossing playground of its humanoid yet eerie environments.

The backstory dovetails decently with Dark Descent's hints. Though I can't help but roll my eyes at the basic "spaceships that run on feels" phlebotinum, detailing the notion with objects you can actually pick up and combine in-game helps. I also suspect many who bash Rebirth do so on unspoken visceral reactions to its protagonist's plight of pregnancy. For some its mere centrality, complete with "Call the Midwife" cutscenes will feel overbearing. Others may feel betrayed in the opposite direction, because much like Grieving Mother, Rebirth makes you play through the discrepant weight and beatitude heaped upon childbearing and motherhood (what wouldn't you do?) a horse so high that naught may reach. Naught?

"Why does she look so much like me?"

A thread of Venus figurines and other earth-mother worship runs through the entirety of the plot, subtly shifting from being strictly associated with safe locations in the first cave to... well, play and see. For much of the campaign, I grew increasingly annoyed thinking our heroine Tasi would, much like Lorelai, never question the help she receives or weigh the value of her own well-being against the damage she causes. But while the ending can go several ways, at least one option lets you acknowledge that there are limits to anyone's entitlement.

 

Still, take any gushing praise with a similar grain of salt as well. I have not worried much about spoiling the story because the aforementioned overindulgence takes its toll in that department as well. For one thing, when cutscenes interfere with the rules of the game, we can safely call them intrusive. Being crushed by rubble sounds like a game over, except once or twice it triggers a cutscene. Normally being caught by a creature is bad, but once or twice you have to be caught for a cutscene. And the sheer number of environments and twists and turns occasionally undermines the central light/fear mechanic. Incongruously Tasi experiences no trepidation in some pitch-black areas laden with macabre remnants... so long as the darkness and gore is on that post-cataclysmic alien world which she knows issued all the horrors invading Earth. And the plot stretching over so many oversized zones results in overwhelming foreshadowing and some plot holes, notably Tasi looking for Panacea when diminishing returns and "it takes an ocean" are in fact some of the very first texts you encounter in the ruined world, entire chapters earlier. And just maybe the basic pregnancy/motherhood melodrama could stand to be cranked down a notch.

 

There are some other smaller flaws as well.

Developed shortly before 2020, Rebirth is heavier on political correctness than it had to be. Expedition to Algiers including North-Africans? Well, yes, I should think so. Inter-cultural marriage? Sure, these things happen. The only straight white males appearing as antagonists, and even going so far as to pad one's backstory with justification for "I never liked him anyway" because he's a lecherous racist? While the black man's an unimpeachable saint who never complains even as you condemn him to a fate worse than death and still worries about your well-being? Wow. No. Reel it in there, snowflakes.

Then there are a couple of apparently dropped plot threads, like the laudanum.

Or the oddity of centering a game on a francophone heroine who never drops a line of actual French, even if you switch the text language, yielding a sometimes goofy klingon swearing effect when you just know she's supposed to say "merde"

All in all, I can't call this a masterpiece, and it's been far more frustrating than it had to be. But... if you step back from immediate rage-quits and eye-rolling, this is, interestingly (like Technobabylon) a rare example of a game that just tries too hard, as opposed to the cheap shovelware we're all accustomed to. The underlying mechanics, the plot, the atmosphere, puzzles, exploration, all the elements are solid and developed intelligently... but then just slightly over-developed.

Shallow Time

"If I had to do the same again

I would, my friend"

 

ABBA - Fernando

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"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded - here and there, now and then - are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.""

 

Robert A Heinlein - from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

__________________________________________

 

 

Mentioning my mother and collections of fiction reminded me of struggling to find a few flicks we could both watch and discuss last year as family bonding. She being more diplomatic than myself picked a fair smatter of scifi, anime and other stock geek staples whose plot twists I dutifully predicted. Until, that is, we hit an Agatha Christie adaptation. Long story short, if you want your ass kicked in a trivia/trope contest try quizzing a sixty-something woman on Agatha Christie. There Will Be (tastefully minimized) Blood.

 

But then I've never been a fan of mystery/police/spy genres in the first place. Not even E.A.Poe's Auguste Dupin stories, prototypical as they're viewed of detective fiction. (Well, I tried leafing through The Purloined Letter in high school. Didn't grab me. Don't remember it.) Going through Rue Morgue and Mystery of Marie Roget the "proto" to the typical becomes fairly obvious, with much page space given over to superfluous details or bloviation which modern readers simply would not now accept in any genre except perhaps high fantasy. "Ripped from the headlines" had a long way to go to the now painfully familiar "bing-bong" of Law&Order.

 

Or maybe not that long when you think about it. One of those superfluous details concerns much of Marie Roget's plot happening along the Rue Pavee Saint Andree. Few hiways or byways retain such names now, but it sounded authentic in 1842. Not even two centuries. How short a time ago, historically, it was yet noteworthy for a road to be paved, and in the world's most famous and modern capital to boot! Even that doesn't imply a familiar environment (admittedly I'm also playing loose with a bit of linguistic ambiguity) as the "paving" at the time would've meant cobblestones. The smooth dark-gray roads so familiar to us now mostly proliferated with automobiles over the last century, and may or may not survive that shift to clean energy we won't be making anyway. From my understanding, a big reason we have so much asphalt is that the petroleum industry produces massive quantities of otherwise useless tar as a by-product of drink cups and fidget spinners.

 

"History" sounds long - especially in high school. But as I age I grow more aware of just how feeble a blip civilization has charted. We've all seen diagrams like this attempting to convey the minuscule sliver it occupies in geologic time, or heard the clock metaphor in which all recorded history occupies only the last split-second of a universal/planetary day. But maybe you could more fruitfully compare that duration instead to your own lifespan. Taking Hammurabi as rough milestone (~1800B.C.) you can round off to 4000 years of anything resembling sociopolitical thought as we'd understand it. By the time you hit forty you will have lived through 1% of it. If you're twenty, that's 1% since Jesus and the establishment of the Roman Empire. Even if you stretch history back to the agricultural revolution, retirees can claim 1% of that.

 

Does 1% not sound like much? But what other axes of human existence are only a hundred times greater than you?

If you're 1.6m in height, the Earth's equator is ~25 million times as long.

You are one in soon-to-be 9 billion naked apes on the planet.

Should we even try to compare how much of the extant (and ever-increasing) supply of fiction you've experienced? Or how much of the body of physical science you grok? Or how much of the world's GDP you've got cluttering your apartment?

1% is massive!

 

As a result, history sits less incomprehensibly beyond human experience than other fields of study. Many now laugh at such a passe fad of yesteryear as fidget spinners, but it's almost literally yester-; the population which spun them in grade school has not even hit voting age yet. Randall Munroe runs occasional xkcd gags making you feel old for how many memories (film releases, etc.) happened closer to your birth year than today... but simply finding so many within a single human lifespan says something about the length of our experience relative to cultural shifts, which are themselves anchored to their time and place. Do Agatha Christie stories sound dated with their interwar railcars and corded telephones? But then the entire crime mystery genre may well become 20th-century period fiction given how smartphones have narrowed and invalidated its gamut of plots.

 

Continuing that train of thought, how many of the institutions and ideas you've always taken for granted as permanent fixtures of human life are in fact spring chickens? I don't mean just the obvious ones like teh internets, but literacy, mass production, mental health, or even something as basic as countries. Not that republics of one form or another did not exist here and there, but the tipping point where they became the accepted norm was the wave of revolutions which swept Europe in 1848... and even then it didn't immediately stick. You can argue just how far a head start France, Switzerland, Britain or the U.S. got in such matters, but the world as a whole lived and died more for the country's king than for other permutations of the two.

 

If your great-grandparents are still alive, ask them for stories from their own great-grandparents about it. Peoples, tribes, kinship were acknowledged, sure, but the idea of a nation being based, bottom-up, on its inhabitants' perceived similarity was generally ignored for most of history. Land was owned by nobles and anyone who was not a noble got bought and sold with the land, or died on behalf of the nobles to decide who would own them. For all the the jabber about "pro patria mori" it was not nationalism or patriotism which defined honor, duty et cetera but fealty to a ruling autocrat or oligarchy, and oaths were sworn to rulers instead of abstract borders on a map. That borders defined rulers and not the other way around was still a novel concept by the time asphalt started replacing cobblestones from 1900 onwards. That would be in your grandparents' grandparents' time. In that same timeframe Communism rose and fell as ideology and practice. My own grands were born swearing fealty to The King, spent most of their lives pretending not to hate The Party and died cursing the omnidirectional grift, graft and cronyism of modern multi-party politics.

 

For much of the world autocracy never stopped being the norm, even where pretense of elections is staged.

 

So how confident are you that the era of nation-states, younger than even Poe's invention of the detective, will persist for the rest of your 1%? Here in the U.S. at least there is no devil more reviled by the hillbilly right wing than "globalism" (which is to say anything not wrapped in an American flag) except perhaps those damn dirty liberal elites. The yokels would facetiously cite nationalistic devotion as a primary motivation. Yet they've elected a would-be theocratic emperor to tear the nation down. Maybe you never had a choice in preserving nations past their bicentennial expiration date, but only deciding what came next: an open world in which ordinary citizens have access to global culture and trade, or regression to a neo-feudalism in which everything must go through His Majesty Trump I and Tsar Putin making common cause against their carefully corralled peasantry, at least until Emperor Xi once again claims the throne above the intersecting axes of the universe.

 

And what comes after that... is sticks and stones, because with every 1% energy and material reserves deplete, the biosphere degrades, and history slides back full-cycle toward prehistory. The next 1%, or the 1% after that, appear less and less likely to be recorded.

Mozilla wants us to fly to Barcelona so we can save the world with a big ol' fest in November... y'know, go visit one of the countries running constant anti-tourist protests the past few years. First item on the agenda: an app that ships ice to Eskimos.

Ken Comes Separately

"Is she fine, so well bred
The perfect girl, a social deb

Is she the sort you've always thought
Could make you what you're not?"

Natalie Merchant - Jealousy

___________________________________________________ 

"as Lora saw the expression on Leon's face, she knew why he had brought her here, and knew that her battle was already lost.
The girl floating in her crystal coffin had a face that was not beautiful, but was full of character and intelligence. Even in this centuries-long repose, it showed determination and resourcefulness. It was the face of a pioneer, of a frontierswoman who could stand beside her mate and help him wield whatever fabulous tools of science might be needed to build a new Earth beyond the stars."

from The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke
(original short story version, 1958)

___________________________________________________ 

"But the scenes describing cruelty to women are comparatively perfunctory. The real high-spots of the book are cruelties committed by men upon other men"

George Orwell (in a 1944 essay decrying the literary upswing in power obsession and cruelty)

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I suddenly wish I'd kept at hand my old Animorphs collection (first baker's dozen of the series) but they're currently resting on my mother's bookshelf and I'm not calling her up to quote mine for my no-account blog account. But from the first slim volume or two I recall a character drawing an unfavorable comparison to Arnold Schwarzenegger because "he has muscles in places where other men don't even have places" and we teenage boys fantasizing about swapping out our worthless bodies for cooler animals all had a good laugh over that. It's funny that we should all feel worthless because a stronger man exists. Laugh. It's funny.

 

I don't know what young adult novels and comic books advertise these days (I'd guess... vapes 'n shrinks?) but across the decades they've marketed to their bookish teenage boy core audience's stereotypical obsessions: whoopee cushions, ham radios, portable chess sets, toy soldiers, collectable coins. And, while we're at it, let's target every possible source of anxiety. Alongside olden days ads for paper-boy jobs (after all you'll need the cash to pay for her dinner) and mail-order high school degrees -

- so you don't have to stand there sheepishly with your hands behind your back, bowing your head in shame while a pretty secretary denies you due to your insufficiency (don't you just love the extra knife twist?) plus martial arts handbooks for SECRET ancient Chinese/Japanese/Oriental/far-out-far-east techniques of assuredly superlative deadliness - alongside all that comic books hammered their young audience with assurance that your body's not good enough. The occasional ad for shoe lifts is just the tip of the iceberg.
 

Aww, before guy is sad.

(And they apparently come packaged with broader shoulders and a stronger chin.)

The real bonanza comes in the form of bodybuilding ads. Not just all the generic exercise equipment (of assuredly superlative deadliness) and protein powders but more generic promises that if you send us your money we'll make you into Charles Atlas. It'd be a fool's errand to try cataloguing such rip-offs' staggering breadth and repetition in a mere blog post (plus I assume most are still running) but here's a classic:

(arm candy not included)

1969, just as feminists were burning their bras in protest of men's supposed expectations and blaming men for being sent to Vietnam on their behalf. Yes, that is indeed the future and once governor of California in his first gig stateside, shilling for a snake oil peddler. Just from his Wikipedia summary, Joe Weider was sued/fined at least half a dozen times over a period of three decades for demonstrably false muscle gain claims, never stopped lying, was never made to stop lying, and in reward for all that lying is still treated as a hero to jocks everywhere. And yes, herr governator was still shilling for the scheister as late as 2006, while in office. Republican politics didn't start with the Trump cartel. But I digress. That image ran the very next page after the cover proudly displaying a Comics Code sticker of approval for youth-safe content. Eat it you worthless twig.

 

You've been bombarded all your life with feminists' complaint that the media present "an unrealistic image" of feminine beauty. So long as you keep on the horse blinders they mandate to look only at the female victim side of any issue, always and forever, they're not strictly speaking wrong.

 

But first off, the demands placed on men are far less reasonable and far more often blatantly impossible. If it's not realistic to maintain a D-cup rack with a wasp waist, consider altering your entire skeleton because no woman wants to date a man under 180cm. And yes, losing weight is actually easier than building muscles in places you don't even have places. "You can bend iron bars, tear phone books, smash rocks with your fist" sure takes the wind out of half an hour of pilates, don't it?

 

Second, through all the half-century of nonstop wailing over unfair pressure placed on women, the self-described "egalitarian" feminists have never once even pretended to give a shit that boys are beaten over the head with such suggestions from a far earlier age. Who's more sexualized, Beauty or the Beast? (I refer you to millions of teenage girls' Tumblr feeds.) Nobody has ever questioned whether muscle-man shirtless scenes are harming young boys' self-image. Nobody needs to. We want their self-image harmed. That's how you fabricate a malleable psyche by dating age.

 

Third, while female diet fads are often presented as-is or as the demands of fashion, the male version makes no secret whatsoever of just who ultimately stands in judgment of your worth. Get a degree or the pretty blonde secretary will say you're not good enough. Grow extra bones or the elegant dame won't dance with you. Grow Schwarzeneggerrian musculature or the chick in the bikini won't let you pick her up. If you can't beat the beach bully, your girl will leave you for him. For boys it's not just "the body you've always wanted" but explicitly and proudly "girls will shit on you" and again, nobody sees anything wrong with shoving this down a teenager's throat. Worry solely about Barbie's cup size or be branded a misogynist.

 

Fourth, women were already protected from such psychological abuse before feminists took over. "Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities" dictated the same comics code which green-lit the obscenity above and every over-muscled he-man for decades on end, even as (heavens forfend) it would not allow the words "horror" or "terror" in comics' titles. While sexualized depictions of women have been outright banned over much of the globe for the past centuries (with "high art" as a convenient dodge for anyone rich enough to afford it) nobody has ever admitted that the image of a male hero was itself always sexualized, in every culture and every century, always glorifying women's provider/protector ideal for a mate. Not only must Prince Charming be every bit as physically flawless as the princess or more so, but he must slay dragons, conquer palaces, move mountains or kill/be a superhuman android from the future in order to prove worthy of taking his place in the nuclear family unit. Unrealistic body image? Try an unrealistic image of your entire existence!

Here's lookin' at you lookin' at me, 6

Whozzat!?

Caught this joker making off with full cheek-pouches through the leaf litter, but instead of running out of sight altogether it seemed to feel pretty secure half-hidden, propped up on the edge of a tree stump.

It just maintained a stalwart vigil as I walked around in a semicircle.

And what I first thought a squirrel turned out to be a somewhat hefty (and well provisioned) chipmunk.

Justine, Pothole Puzzles and Speed Runs

"With his arms outstretched

With his arms outstretched

With his arms outstretched?"

GYBE - Mladic

 

A Machine for Pigs reminded me I never played the expansion for The Dark Descent, Justine, so I reinstalled for a bit just to give it a whirl. I can appreciate the very rare, almost unique setup of a female wrongdoer, but aside from that it mostly annoyed me. Unclear success/failure conditions, forced "hardcore mode" with no save files, aborted functionality (the lamp) a late-mission action sequence designed to force a restart, there's little to like. Granted the emphasis is on your puzzles. The first depends on the old observation that gamers never look up, the linking sequence and third are barely puzzles, mostly just blind, mad dashes against a timer of indeterminate length (to force restarts) but the middle challenge obviously took up more development time investment. I suppose if you don't want spoilers you can try it yourself, but it's not really worth the trouble.

You explore some rooms and find four slides to view with a projector and select two. A journal entry feeds you some vague hints about each slide with more or less negative connotations for our heroine, a non-repeatable voiceover and various paintings on the walls supply the rest of their context: specifically a crucifixion and adoration of the magi.

 

But the hints and correlation are so vague as to yield little answer.

Slide with open arms = crucifixion? I guess that's a bad one?

Standing to the right = magi looking to the right at Jesus?

Figure with the sword = presumably a Roman soldier? Journal half-confirms it's bad, but couldn't see it in the paintings.

Kneeling = worship or repentance? I guess that's supposed to sound positive?

 

But then you're still left with the question of how to give the two slides to the captive you must free, and apparently it matters which goes in the top or bottom slot. Based on what information? Are we going chronologically from top to bottom or bottom to top? Why?

 

So I gave up and cheated via a walkthrough, which just bluntly told me the answer without explanation. And so did the next walkthrough, and the next, and I get the feeling nobody actually knows the rationale behind this blurry bit of shadow puppetry. One walkthrough just brute-forced it fourteen years ago and everyone else copied the winning moves without giving a shit.

 

What the point? Justine's completion time is officially cited at 30mins. If you're playing honestly, it takes you half an hour just to search all the rooms for this one puzzle and slot slides, pulling down books from shelves, checking for levers, monkeying with the light-box, squinting at paintings, etc. It reminds me of all the idiots calling Tyranny a twenty-hour game. Yes, if you don't actually give a shit what you're doing, read nothing, invest no attention in the world or characters or plot or exploration and simply copy stats and quest solutions off a cheat-sheet to min-max and nuke your way through the boss fights, you can reduce most anything to a CliffsNotes insult to itself. Except if all you want is a gratuitous feeling of success, you don't need to buy a video game. Jacking off's Free To Play!

 

Speedrunning is not playing.

 

I give developers a lot of shit for padding campaigns with timesinks to drag out those "hours played" quotes for marketing purposes, but must admit they're partly forced to do so by the retarded trash buying ostensible challenges just to cheat their way through with cookie-cutter builds, wiki solutions and speed-speed-speed-speeeeeeedrunz! And then complain the game was too short. Justine is a middlin'-bad puzzle/horror routine, but did any of its buyers even notice? What incentive do devs have to improve elements their customers will ignore anyway?