Grace, Period?

"She's got the time to talk

She travels outside of karma"

U2 - Grace

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"Nor could any social-minded patriot sneeze at her recent somewhat unappreciated effort to maintain the purity of the American Home by barring from the motion-picture industry all persons, actors or directors or cameramen, who had: (a) ever been divorced; (b) been born in any foreign country -- except Great Britain, since Mrs. Gimmitch thought very highly of Queen Mary, or (c) declined to take an oath to revere the Flag, the Constitution, the Bible, and all other peculiarly American institutions."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here (1935)

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***

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"Bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, that every time you violate or propose to violate the free speech of someone else you, in potentia, you're making a rod for your own back [...] About this censorious instinct, we basically know all that we need to know and we've known it for a long time. It comes from an old story about another great Englishman, sorry to sound so particular about that this evening, Dr. Samuel Johnson the great lexicographer, the author of the first - compiler, I should say - of the first great dictionary of the English language. When it was complete, Dr. Johnson was waited upon by both delegations of people to congratulate him of the nobility, of the quality, of the commons, of the Lords; and also by delegations of respectable ladies of London, who tended on him in his Fleet Street lodgings and congratulated him: "Dr. Johnson," they said, "We are delighted to find that you have not included any indecent or obscene words in your dictionary." "Ladies," said Dr. Johnson, "I congratulate you on being able to look them up". Anyone that can understand that joke, and I'm pleased to see that 10% of you can, gets the point about censorship, especially prior restraint as it's known in the United States where it's banned by the first amendment to the constitution. It may not be determined in advance what words are apt or inapt, no one has the knowledge that would be required to make that call and - more to the point - one has to suspect the motives of those who do so, in particular: the motives of those who are determined to be offended; of those who will go through a treasure house of English, like Dr. Johnson's first lexicon, in search of filthy words to satisfy themselves and some instinct about which I dare not speculate."

 

Christopher Hitchens debating free speech in 2006

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"No pixels were harmed in the making of this game." - quipped a much older incarnation of Blizzard Entertainment in the end credits of the first Starcraft in 1998. At the time, it could be interpreted both as thumbing their noses in challenge to the movie industry as computer graphics began catching up in quality, and more importantly at the wave of moral panic over video game violence which the '90s had seen from hordes of knuckledragging soccer-moms and god-botherers. Doom and Mortal Kombat were frequent targets at the time, fueling the censorial climate which directly inspired both The Simpsons' Bonestorm video game parody and the more famous "won't somebody please think of the children" reference to many, many quite literal inspirations. The popularity of many late-'90s splatterfests like Blood or Redneck Rampage owed less to those games' inherent quality (I'd tried the latter in demo form; after the initial novelty wore off you quickly realized it was crap) than to a public desire to snub the self-appointed thought police, much like waving a copy of Playboy until the busybodies throw salt over their shoulders.

Where's that public now?

 

Here in the States (and watched by much of the world) the big story last week was the attempted government ban of Jimmy Kimmel Live and his eventual reinstatement by his corporate overlords, though they did make him debase himself in a choked repudiation of a verbal transgression he did not in fact even commit.* His comedian colleagues and many others in the media, feeling more than a touch of the noose tightening around their own necks, came out strongly in defense of free speech (for once) but I do have to correct them whenever they warn about the danger of bans spreading from this example onward. That already happened. Where were you five years ago, when it was career suicide for media figures on the supposedly freedom-loving "left" to dare criticize the twenty million deadheads rioting in the name a murdered brainless thug? 'Cause much as I despise religious lunacy, I would still have been safer boarding a bus next to Charlie Kirk than next to George Floyd. Yes, it was for fear of the censor's lash that no public figure in polite society dared point out the rioters had picked a piss-poor martyr to champion as pretext for their looting and vandalism. Otherwise anyone could have questioned why the rabble did not thus rise up against the innumerable worthier cases of police brutality, and called mass insanity for what it was.

 

It wasn't just one dictator forcing you then. A thousand news editors and publishers censored their staff, a thousand university professors egged their students on toward violence instead of tempering their "defund the police" mass hysteria, ten thousand greenwashing, diversity-hiring, rainbow-flag-waving corporate middle managers equated any criticism with "creating a hostile work environment" as an actionable offense. Trump didn't make you do that. Hell, not even Biden did. That was all you. Each and every one of you, in your own sphere of influence, decided to play grand inquisitor.

 

Kimmel specifically calls out Trump and FCC chairman Carr for their hypocrisy in trampling their own past statements on the importance of free speech when it suddenly became convenient. Where were all these worthies of the jester's alarm bells, where was Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, John Stewart, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Conan O'Brien and the whole rest of the sympathetic litany Kimmel cites in his own support, through the entire previous decade(s) of policing free speech in the name of social "justice"?

 

For that matter where were you twenty million Kimmel YouTube subscribers earlier this year?

 

Credit card companies decided to strongarm game distribution sites into banning games with sexual content considered violent toward women based on the assessment of a little-known Australian feminist lobby called Collective Shout. Given it was founded by an anti-abortion feminist, I'd guess that under the hood her outfit's at least 40% Jesus-freak by volume, but because the demand was framed as protecting women from men, suddenly censorship A-OK! - and journalists pointing out the seemingly uninformed or outright random nature of some of the bans and the slippery slope issue were themselves censored. One wonders, by-the-by, if rape fantasies are the enemy, why PayPal, Visa and Mastercard bothered banning a hundred video games and not the thousands-strong swathes of dime romance novels in which the audience surrogate damsel is dragged off to the basement of some corporate CEO or imperious sheikh or thousand-year-old vampire but-it's-OK-he's-rich-and-handsome... except that "romance" novels are favored by women and video games by men, and it is always acceptable to attack men. (Even though the conflation of sex with power and violence is more obviously a female obsession.)

 

Note we are talking about pure fantasies here. Quite literally, no pixels were harmed. Thought crime by nickel and dime, money-changers legislating who is or is not permitted to fantasize, based on demographic. Well, good luck keeping revenge fantasies like Inglorious Basterds from the chopping block. You can bet all the same audience which suddenly discovered a love of free speech when Kimmel got suspended had cheered automatically at abusive rhetoric like "All these porn sick brain rotted pedo gamer fetishists" being spat out to justify censorship a couple months before when it flattered their misandrist ideals. Or at least they cheer every time Bill Maher spits out "incels" as a catch-all for society's ills.

 

How do you think the censors get their foot in the door? You wanted to ban the word "nigger" from Huckleberry Finn? Then don't act surprised when "trans" gets the white-out treatment. This is nothing new. Back around 2010 I remember some Cosmopolitan-like article celebrating the rising trend in fetish porn and gay porn, etc. then a sentence later pivoting to hey, but don't think for a second that your straight male fetish for nurses and asian schoolgirls or whatever is permissible, you sick pervert freaks you should be in prison!

How many years did you think it would take for the worm to turn?

And if sexual violence mandates censorship, why not admit that the female sexual ideal of a provider/protector mandates far more violence to prove Prince Charming's worth. Not in paywalled content but in every mass-market thriller where a sex scene must be preceded by at least half an hour of the alpha male ripping other men apart limb from limb until XY blood overflows the screen before he is permitted to copulate as a superior specimen the heroine might deign to consider deserving of her touch. Do those movies not advertise during Kimmel's ad breaks? And did not these same demands for the prenuptial mortification of male flesh permeate every story, through all the decades and centuries when blue movies and skin mags and erotic doodles were banned as immoral? How is it that by eight years old, before I could even masturbate, I was already fantasizing about getting mauled by a mountain lion to prove my devotion to some imaginary girl I couldn't even picture in my head? Will you censor Jules Verne because of that?

 

You are aware that banning pr0n is also part of the Project 2025 playbook, aren't you?

What use is an anti-censorship movement so utterly blind to its own bias, and especially to its own gargantuan blind spot when it comes to swallowing anything sold as female empowerment or protection? When Don's increasingly blatant senility overtakes him as it did Joe last year, when Princess Ivanka inherits the Red Cap throne she will have no trouble making a Kimmel ban stick. She need but squeak girlishly in front of the cameras, squeeze out a few crocodile tears and claim she Feels Threatened by the big mean man, and everyone, from the backwoods hicks with cross-shaped assault rifles to the grungiest Seattle quinoa addicts, will rush to defend her with no questions asked about constitutions. As none of you "on the right side of history" (in the U.S., Canada, France, Sweden or wherever) have ever bothered asking whether it fit your national ideals of freedom to have individuals fired and blacklisted at a word throughout the nearly decade-long #MeToo witch hunt.

 

 

 

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* Kimmel was suspended, it must be noted, on the false grounds that he had attacked a murder victim when he had in fact only mocked (in all of three sentences) those weaponizing the murder for political gain, which, irony of ironies, the Jesus freaks immediately continued to do by weaponizing it to ban him as well.

 

** Interestingly, Disney shareholders have hinted at legal action over the corporation acting against their interests in cancelling Kimmel's profitable show but I'm not hearing about Paypal getting sued over gratuitously refusing profits from products by and for the imagination on the command of a gaggle of Aussie harridans... even as our great temple moneylenders rake in far less defensible profits from sweatshops all across the globe, from laundered arms sales and drug traffickers. Ask yourself rather: once Mastercard buys the FCC, who'll stop them?

 

*** I waited twenty years to link this cartoon, only to find the author pulled it off the web along with all her old work. Hm. Guess we'll have to mention Jen Bateman and personal revisionism some other time. Suffice to say things got a bit meta at this point and would've dragged this post out too much.

"Love the way we communicate"

"I got something to say you know but nothing comes

Yes I know what you think of me you never shut up"

Tori Amos - Silent All These Years

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Spoilers for the TV series Dark and especially the police procedural Criminal follow.

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A few days ago, Wikipedia's front page managed to surprise me by a lone editorial choice:

Female wrongdoing? Is that... a thing? Heretofore, like every other media outlet, Wikipedia has held firm to the dogma of female superiority, refusing to present women as anything other than pure, brilliant agents of progress martyred for their pluck and heroism. But beyond the simple willingness to acknowledge female criminals, consider how rarely you've seen any media, whether factual or fabulist, acknowledge on an even simpler level females as agents of conflict. A documentary called Island of the Sea-Wolves again surprised me with a first-episode cliffhanger in which a low-ranking bitch approaches the den in which her superior in the pack hierarchy has given birth. Will she kill the pups? Be killed in turn? Dun-dun-duuUUN! Now, by the laws of narrative arcs and and knowing a few things about wolf packs, you won't be surprised by the next episode beginning with the reveal that auntie was just stopping by to babysit. But the documentarians' willingness to even float the idea of two females in conflict/competition goes against the grain of traditional nature shows, wherein males are vicious thugs constantly butting heads and females are kind, nurturing mommies unless they need to hunt prey in order to feed their young as kind, nurturing mommies, an' you don't ask no more questions, capisce?

 

The previously impregnable (pun intended) feminist fortress of moral entitlement has been gradually accumulating such minute cracks over the past years, albeit at a frustrating tectonic pace. Straddling docu- and mockumentaries, we have Diane Morgan's hilarious portrayal of the dull in more ways than one Philomena Cunk. Though fundamentally a positive character (sure she's a certified moron but she is Trying to make sense of things damnit) adopting an everywoman as the voice of the terminally befuddled juxtaposes her almost uniquely against occasional male experts on each topic of the week.

 

Or if you're more into games, though Wrath of the Righteous pandered far more than it should have to social justice idiocy, it also included negative female characters like Camellia and Wenduag indicating (unlike, say Wasteland 3 or Deadfire) some self-awareness on the issue of gender relations and the company's next project, Rogue Trader, more conspicuously avoided classic "man bad; woman good" juxtapositions. Cyberpunk 2077 gave me another pleasant surprise if you advance the main quest until meeting your muscleheaded best bud's mother and girlfriend, who turn out to be cut from much the same simpleton cloth as himself. More shocking that the mystical curio shop owner ditz deliberately did not move into his place when he offered because:

Wow. Giving a man some space? In fiction writ large, any such situation would merely present an irresistible opportunity to paint the guy as a heartless monster for not giving his assuredly better half absolute control over every single aspect of his life, cf. every rom-com and dom-com ever written. Then there's Colony Ship, where your potential companion Knurl gives a pretty stark description of how a matriarchal society is established: through the sacrifice of men. 

Few dare to follow this all too rare precept: not only that women are capable of the same crimes as men, but that it is women's greater propensity for emotional subversion and femininity's instinctive entitlement to be protected and provided for which must be scrutinized for harmful and oppressive potential. More shocking when this shows up on television, a more tightly censored industry predictably slower than games to bite back against feminazi control.

 

Dark, a brilliant series in other respects as well (though I still dislike the ending) gave us the character of Hannah, a touchingly vulnerable girl, later a soulful lover and mother... and chillingly illustrative of mundane feminine manipulation. No, not as some femme fatale superspy with torpedo tits and legs up to her armpits, but as a perfectly regular salt-of-the-earth small-town gal with no scruples against lying, cheating, guilting, seducing and betraying anyone around her in order to establish control. 

 

Then there's Criminal, in its various incarnations. The French and Spanish series were weaker, more theatrical, so their swipes against the crime drama status quo were also halfhearted at best. The German series gave us a battered husband, but had to make him an official minority to placate the morality police by upping his oppression score. Plus it still only acknowledges female guilt in adopting stereotypical masculine direct aggression. It was only in the second British season, as their last hurrah, that they dared present the application of femininity as criminal: defamation, lying, projection of one's own faults upon the hated other, weaponizing society's protective apparatus itself by playing the victim. Two episodes out of sixteen, far better than most series ever average. A female child abuser externalizing her guilt. A man falsely accused of rape by a female coworker for no motive more noble than extorting cash through the legal system. That second works particularly well because his character was tempered, in a reverse of Cunk's case, not to appear too sympathetic. He's a self-gratifying yuppie blowhard, yes, but this only outlines the fact that unlikable does not equal guilty. His desperation when it's become clear that even when the case is dropped the system doesn't give a shit that the mere accusation is enough to destroy his life drives home the point of our societal disdain for males' well-being far more poignantly than had the prosecutors suddenly sympathized.

 

But such examples are still few and far between. For every tentatively transgressive episode like Criminal's "Alex" networks can run several days-long marathons in which men are nothing but vicious, cackling villains born to sin. Special Victims Unit is rounding out three decades of top ratings on the precept that men are disgusting pigs deserving of police brutality. The notion that all evil comes from men fuels entire networks like Lifetime. Dark's creators' next series, 1899, immediately dove into "man bad, woman good" rhetoric from its first scenes, probably to redeem themselves in the eyes of bigots. When a no-name video game company becomes the talk of the town out of nowhere, it's a safe bet it just put out a "female protagonist" title fighting evil men for uncritical critic praise. I wonder how many jokes Diane Morgan's obligated to tell about men leaving the toilet seat up to compensate for every episode of Cunk?

 

So I guess in a couple of days we'll be talking about censorship.

Samati

Until a decade ago, I had a habit of every so often deleting (as unworthy or in preparation for offing myself) my collected attempts at writing, which mostly just amounted to undeveloped ideas or scraps of description, exposition and dramatic speeches divorced from any coherent context. Yet every so often I run across an old tidbit "temporarily" copied between folders or to a thumb drive for transfer or editing. I can't say from which stage of development this "Samati" version hails. Originally it spun off from a fantasy story idea. I had envisioned a prehistoric character named "Tianti" who first discovers magic, and one notion of such discovery involved self-projection upon the external environment coupling physical to metaphysical forces by speaking oneself into the world. Grokking unto transference, if you will. I'm sure that sort of thing has endless terms attached by the priesthood of every fairy tale. Then I realized I liked this as a simple, brief vignette:

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“Samati” spoke the boy against the granite wall as the last flecks of sunlight danced upon it.

“Samati” spoke the boy again between the rays of the next day’s sunset, and crawled out over the icy stream to rejoin his tribe.

“Samati” whispered he through the rainy season after the day’s hunt.

“Samati” echoed he the rustling of the dry savanna grasses during the season when the game was far away in jungles which his people dared not enter.

What his tribesmen could not fathom, the fear against which their shaman raised gods, ghosts and ancestors, was the setting of the sun. And so, Samati climbed into the narrow cave each day and faced the nameless, the lack and absence, armed with his name against the unnameable, and the eternal granite as his ally in the face of oblivion.

Life began and ended but Samati never forgot, a disenchanted child, a sullen youth, a dreary man, a pile of bones. At the end of every day, as long as his body had carried him, he had voiced himself against the end of self. Samati in the rocks, Samati on the breeze, inscribed in light upon the hillside, echoed from the depths of the cave along the weak trickle of water.

It was only a short while after by the hill’s reckoning that it too grew old. The yawning chasm cut through it by the river undermined its foundations and the weakened edifice began to settle into itself. The scorching sun had long ago burned away almost all vegetation about the spot, and what little was left would soon die off as water ceased to flow. In the face of absence without new beginning, the cave still echoed, as it had for millennia, the name of self against the unnameable lack of self, the single desperate cry of self-awareness: “Samati”.

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Now for the weird part.

It took a few years after writing the above for me to randomly link-surf my way to the Wikipedia page for Samadhi which, albeit not the most precise match (also note my version runs counter to reincarnation) can also incorporate meditative hyperfocus upon an external construct.

While I may conceivably have run across the term at some point in my early life and reproduced it subconsciously, I've never been into Eastern Mysticism any more than the Western variety. I don't meditate, I don't go yogging, I don't Pali-vous Hin thee Sans crits.

So, no, I doubt I dredged up an offhand reference from anywhere in my subconscious. The term for this is dumb luck. Mundane stochasticity. Randomness. A funny flub, but a flub nonetheless. Spew a few thousand pages of pretentious babble and the monkey clan in your brain will re-type at least a one-liner from the works of Shakespeare.

 

But it's the sort of happenstance from which religious conversions are made. Were I fully human, I would be expected to interpret this unexpected convergence as a sign from above and dive into Hindu mythology, seeking social validation for my brain fart happening to blow the same way as the winds of chance. From the million daily events which can line up randomly with an apparent correlation (and don't) superstitious backbirths latch on to the one single positive accident as proof of supernatural influence, then seek nothing but confirming evidence for their idiotic superstition, and call it God.

Some type of crane fly:

See the halteres?
 

ST: TNG - Dark Page and the sanctity of dwarf minds

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
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Man, it's been years since I've done one of these. Alright, let's see, where can we pick up... oh, here's a good one, and by good I man bad.

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Seriesdate: 7.07

Dark Page

 

Lwaxana Troi, in her last TNG appearance, drops into a coma from bad thoughts, and only a journey to the center of her mind can save her. Which is to say the action's about 30% overextended takes of empty corridors, 30% characters squinting at each other and another 30% grudgingly slow dialogue justified by a telepathic species' difficulty in talking out loud. In other words: filler episode. Even the standard issue bulbous brain case telepath make-up effect looks lazier here than in its '60s Original Series incarnation.

Heeere's Johnny's bulging temples!

Within all these flaws' limitations however, the cast give pretty good performances, from Sirtis in fine form (for once I mean that in more ways than one) all the way down to the child actress who turned out to be Kirsten Dunst shortly pre-Claudia. And it's nice as usual getting more background on a core character. But you do have to wonder why a standard TV serial script about a familiar face's repressed mental trauma required telepathy, when the same routine's been rehashed countless times in countless other series without it. Brain-magic's addition adds nothing to that familiar plot's resolution of "deal with your shit" or even to its setup, which explicitly dodges supernatural causes of Lwaxana's coma as a red herring.

So... why?

Aside of course from the titillation of mental invasion for its own sake, aside from the social impulse to destroy integrity wherever it may appear, to invade and tear apart others' most intimate selves, to wring them bare and helpless and leave them nothing of their own.

And, more importantly, to fabricate a moral imperative to commit this crime. If you don't unravel your mother's innermost self and strip her bare of her deepest experiences, you are killing her! You don't want to kill your mother, do you? DO YOU!? Then rape her mind.

 

But enough about TNG. Turning now to sports... I got nuthin'.

Turning now to turn-based caravan management role-playing games, I've been revisiting Vagrus, the Misspelled-My-Name-In-The-Preorder-Credits Realms to bring my campaign up to date before they put out another zone sometime soonish. This includes running through one of last year's quest packs giving you a choice between two NPC companions: one a brusque, unforgiving, unliving knight of a bloodthirsty order enforcing the laws of the evil slaver empire, the other a polite, personable sorcerer of a trendily exotic background whose superpower just happens to be reading thoughts. Relieved at being handed an easy moral choice, I recruited the rage zombie. I would argue this duality (on its face a simple light vs. dark side routine) reveals rather the unspoken implicit evil of telepathy by the sheer bulk of stereotypical dark side traits the non-telepathic counterpart must carry in balance of that one unforgivable crime.

 

Not that you'd admit it.

 

Moving on to comics, I also tried catching up on The Legacy of Dominic Deegan, which started so promisingly before the pandemic only to devolve over the next couple of years to the stupidest blend of bland moralistic posturing and emotional diarrhea the likes of which had plagued the author's older comic at its worst. It doesn't seem to be recovering either. I glanced at just three of the latest pages before giving up on it again in disgust. If you can't tell, the character proclaiming the sanctity of the mind is supposed to be the villain, and he promptly gets disintegrated on the next page. As to why he deserved it, no doubt the author has provided ample justification, much like TNG's writers, and approaching my pet rage zombie's litany of nastiness, all to craft some tortured convolution of unreason by which erasing individuality is presented as the positive choice.

 

It's an old joke that if you have to start your every statement with "now I'm not a racist but..." you're probably a racist butt. Well if you have to start your every character bio with "she's not a mind-rapist but..." this well worn pop culture trope deserves a bit of cross-examination. I'm amazed, thinking back, just how passively I accepted such plot devices and protagonists in the past, but it takes little digging to hit at least one massive cultural lodestone skewing all our moral compasses on the matter of mental invasion. Religion. We have all grown up being told our every thought is being monitored by supernatural forces, with an eternity of absurdly overcompensating punishment at stake for every stray depolarization, and have been ordered to be grateful and praise the supposedly benevolent tyranny that would deny this most fundamental right of personal integrity. Except (aside from the personal angle) every social advance is a break with the law of the past and must begin as unspoken, sneaking suspicion that the current system may not be entirely right, privately held and evaluated until it can be nurtured by the weight of evidence and reason in its favor. Every authoritarian, every sadistic oppressor yearns for divine omniscience. They've always read your mail, tapped your phone, spied on you through your webcam, tracked your each step via satellite, catalogued every text you've ever sent, bribed your coworkers and cousins to inform on you. As above, so below, the hoi polloi have aped this impulse with candid camera shows and the voyeurism of "reality" TV. Mind-reading follows naturally from that same impulse as the ultimate advancement in dictatorship, and every plot struggling to justify this quintessentially unforgivable transgression, every Inception, every Troi no matter how cuddly, has done more than its part driving our culture's suicidal slide toward the end.

 

If your true character is who you are in the dark, I have no trouble determining the character of those wishing to bake in the blinding light of absolute scrutiny.

I suspect I might be a social drinker. Or at least that would explain why I don't drink.

General something-and-something Knowledge

"Did you know that Mozart died while he was writing the Requiem?

Yeah. Everyone knows that. It was in Amadeus."

Seinfeld S07E03 - The Maestro (1995)

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"I won't have you of all people cheapen what should be an endless pursuit of perfection just because you want the world to laugh with you tonight"

Scrubs S01E05 - My Blind Date (2001)

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Only after seeing a number of episodes in the early 2000s did I remember having numbered among the original target audience for a Family Guy precursor called Larry & Steve back when it originally aired in the '90s, not on Fox but on Cartoon Network, which is how twelve year old me still polishing my English by watching the Discovery Channel and other fresh yet untranslated cable wound up chuckling at the "youth in Asia" joke. (So if you hate my punnery, blame Seth MacFarlane.) Despite The Simpsons' increasing influence, animation in '97 was still firmly presumed children's entertainment, so future Peter and future Brian spend a few minutes bumbling through increasingly destructive physical comedy scenes that would've seemed at home in any old Hanna-Barbera cartoon, boing/awooga sound effects included. And yet, when Larry asks Steve how he feels after getting mauled by a massage bed* the more educated pup answers:

"Like Agamemnon after the fury of Clytemnestra"

Family Guy proper, once it launched, stuck pretty solidly to pop culture jokes and not the classics. S.O.P. for strictly-21st-century-Fox. But I can't help connecting that to another little divergence that Larry lived in an apartment building and drove into the nearby metropolis to shop while Peter lives in a cookie-cutter family home in a small town. "Urbane" is the word we're looking for here, and we'll come back to it in a moment. At around the same time, Frasier acquired a reputation as the smartest show on TV, despite the fact no-one ever held a high-brow conversation on Frasier. They had low-brow chats peppered with snooty references, which tendency Family Guy itself rather skillfully zinged in an early season. But, sadly, that still set Frasier above any competing sitcoms, in whose universes you'd think Wagner or Freud had never existed - and I'm betting still don't. It was also an improvement on the title character's previous incarnation on Cheers, where he played the decoy intellectual love interest destined to be spurned by the princess in favor of a manlier option. "Geek" is the word we're looking for here, and we'll come back to it in a paragraph break.

¶ 

"Geek" has both the original meaning of a carnival freak and a late 20th century one which has been suspiciously wiped from search engines: General Electronic and Engineering Knowledge. Or as it's better remembered, generally possessing any scientific, technical or abstract learning. Linking former to latter was one of the masses' many slams against the perceived weirdness of intellectuals' abstruse interests. While media sources will claim the word's pejorative status faded after Y2K, this is only because its meaning was gradually debased to ignore intellectual competence and refocus entirely on performative membership in fan/hobby circles. By the 2010s you no longer needed to understand The Lord of the Rings, just wear some pointy plastic ears. "Gooba-gabba, gooba-gobble" indeed.

This wasn't just about the engineering department at MIT. Seinfeld's characters were crass, mundane, loudmouthed, middle-class New Yorkies, just a bunch of rudderless jokers, but they nevertheless maintained an expectation of general knowledge. To keep up appearances at least they knew the names of obscure dictators, corrected each others' grammar ("statue of limitations") and kept abreast of at least second-hand culture like Amadeus. "Young Urban Professional" came with some modest expectation of mental competence.

 

I bring this up now because YouTube uncharacteristically pushed a couple of channels I actually found interesting: Jared Henderson boasts an improbably large number of subscribers over his three-year span talking about academia, philosophy and books, while Hilary Layne sits at about a tenth as many talking about the quality of modern writing over the past year. Presumably Google linked Henderson to me because I bitched out Emily Wilson, and Layne due to her somewhat incendiary take-down of "romance" novels hitting a couple points I've made myself, albeit not from the same angle (I'd be curious what she thinks of Yes Sex Scenes) but for the purpose of this post format interests me more than content. Either I missed a conference on reviving the nerd or both are being managed and marketed in a very similar style as reasonable, down-to-earth middle-class intellectuals. They are well-spoken, mild-mannered down to reassuringly cozy puppy prop or cafe au lait mug, well informed... and occasionally a mite huffy. A far cry from the heretofore dominant YouTube format of crying far and wide. They're...

 

Well, they're urbane.

 

Sensibly partitioned subsections for each lecture. Tastefully minimalist infographics and visual aids. They neither rage at the camera nor self-deprecate in standard nerd format. I can only assume there are more like them floating around. Funny to think someone might be trying to bankroll this return to respectability into a trend. Too little and way, way too late. I'd been planning to say I think that term has fallen out of fashion over the past generation when I remembered I need not think when we have The Google. Specifically their word use history thingamajig, Ngram viewer, confirming a sharp drop after 2014:

Just to check whether we might have a trend going, I tried the related "cosmopolitan" as well:

That one at least lasted until 2016, maybe from lingering magazine sales, I dunno. You can try the flip-side "provincial" for yourself. 2015, crash.

 

Now, fine, Google's little collator there has some serious issues, so take it as imprecise at best, but you can try it with some more neutral terms like "apple" or "sawdust" and not get nearly the same decisive swing. No, I do think there's a correlation with the culture war kicking into high gear in the mid-2010s. Except, weirdly, it's negative! During the several years when yuppie moralizing waxed strongest, when nothing could be published which did not toe the latte-sippin' urbanite view of social progress, terms comparing city folk's modern habits favourably versus backward hicks from the sticks... tanked. Exactly when you'd have expected a victory march instead. It's not just that nobody likes you. Even you can't stand being associated with yourselves!

 

However, it was not merely SJW fanatics' ferocity which poisoned the bourgeois well, but their insipid argumentation. The higher regard enjoyed throughout the industrial era by city dwellers always depended to some extent not just on money and manners but on being better informed, better educated, more cultured. Of the many factors contributing to the currently ongoing civilizational collapse, 2013 was far too early in the AI era for large trendy population centers to outright relinquish their role in cultural vetting and dive fanatically into nonsensical postmodernist claptrap about nothing being real and everything being a social construction, Yadda-Yadda we're all sinners repent Yadda-Yadda. Don't read anything by "dead white men" etc. Unlike in '97 it rapidly became obvious to everyone that a well-groomed city street mutt could no longer be counted upon as "well-versed in the works of Chaucer" any more than Huckleberry Hound. So why should anyone listen to Portlandia's Speshul Forces?

 

Urbanity has depreciated much like geekdom. You wanted to deny the primacy of intellect? Here's where that gets you. No, don't pass me the loving cup. I've had quite enough, thank you.

 

 

 

__________________________________________________

 

* Whatever happened to the massage chair craze?

P.S.: Someone was apparently using "covfefe" back in 1958-59... who?! Damnit Google, now I need to know!

Metro 2033

a.k.a. "On a Rail" literally and redux*

 

Hmm, let's see, I did some city sims, a SF RPG, some adventure surviving before that, a big science fantasy RPG this past spring, a couple of Age of Wonders campaigns in between for a dose of high fantasy, what do I want next? Not fantasy... a first-person shooter might hit the spot (as long as my hand doesn't shake) but instead of returning to C77, maybe the next Fallout in line? Or, better yet, Fallout's postapocalyptic FPS competition, from some of Stalker's creators.

 

Oops. As soon as I installed Metro 2033 it became clear it's not quite what I signed up for.

Problems:

1) The stupid logo-spamming menu transition cutscene you're put through every time you start the game.

2) No manual saves. Official save points only. One of the great all-time video game timesinks.

3) The stupid 30-second postcard cutscene I'm forced to sit through when reloading from the next checkpoint lying in bed.

4) Psychic bullcrap right from the start, in a SciFi story. (At least Stalker held off until mid-game.)

5) The tutorial and first chapter is half an hour of cutscenes with a couple skeet-shooting sequences thrown in to remind you you're supposed to be playing a game.

6) Chapter 2 at least lets me move around on my own for a bit, albeit with no jumping allowed. (It upsets the pigs, I guess?) (Turns out to apply to every noncombat area.)

7) Menu system designed to minimize the amount of information on screen, so as not to confuse its core FPS twitch-gamer cretin audience. Weapon keybinds for example are buried five layers deep. Results in a lot of time-wasting clicking back and forth through menu tiers. Shop windows aren't much better. 

8) By zone 3, all I've done aside from scripted skeet-shooting scenes is scrounge around for loose ammo shells and trade them in for other varieties. I'm finally doing a thing on my own like a big gamer boi! 

9) Monsters so far come in standard generic monster shape: hulking goblin-ish things with big jaws and big claws. Oh, and also a generic flying demon-bat thing. No need for screenshots. You know the type.

10) No status feedback. What's my HP? How poisoned am I? Why the hell does my character just keel over and die here?

And how the hell was I supposed to know you can run in what looks like yet another cutscene? And how the hell am I supposed to know later on that you can only burn cobwebs, not cut them? And that simply walking forward after doing so kills you instantly?

 

So, as it turns out, Metro 2033 is (perhaps intentionally, to avoid competing with Fallout 3 which had just come out a year prior) explicitly not an open world alternative to Fallout, but (ironically as I just went through this with Colony Ship) an old-school series of mission maps with scripted events. So, so damn many scripted events! What we have here is another symptom of late-2000s Hollywood envy, when (among other issues) game designers imagining themselves movie directors got so enamoured of cutscenes as to leave very little for the actual player to play. You spend the first few maps walking between endless theater skits and wondering when the action will start.

 

Now, that being said... the cutscenes are pretty good. I don't know about the original, but Metro's "redux" version boasts excellent production values for that time period. Lovingly detailed environments eschew cartoonishness. Dialogues reinforce the bleak setting while not sounding too whiny about it. The underground is dark enough to make you squint a bit and use your flashlight but not stumble blindly everywhere like, say, Doom 3 or Amnesia: Rebirth. Level design, when it at long last comes into play, proves intricate without devolving to unworkable mazes, and even offers enough nooks and crannies to reward a bit of exploration. Navigate some above-ground ruins, shoot up a bandit lair, good times. Monsters are a bit passive when not scripted (in contrast to Stalker's noteworthy improvements in mob tactics) but, eh, it was 2010. So in itself, a linear progression can make an alright game... until... you start climbing from trolley to trolley, so you can be treated to moving cutscenes. And then:

After a level which consisted of nothing but one noncombat chase and some light shopping therapy, you get thrown into a fucking six minute cutscene where your character is hiding prone under a trolley with nothing to look at except some shameless product placement, listening to inane chatter from the army grunts above as you grind along the rails on automatic... at which point I had to take a day off to keep myself from punching my monitor.

 

I'm not entirely sorry I came back to it, because the next zone turned out to be a satisfying stealth-based adventure through a warzone, with some laudable 3D level design to boot.

But immediately after that: more trolleys! Your FPS turns into a rail shooter for no discernible reason, making you man a turret through an entire map, rat-a-tat-tatting soldiers behind sandbags and other rail cars with their own machine guns and more soldiers and more sandbags and more trolleys, and then finally the level ends... and you move on to the next... and you're

still!

on!

the!

mother.fucking!

TROLLEY!!

 

Okay, no.

I'm done, sorry. A linear series of FPS maps would be one thing. Even if you're interspersing a walking simulator with simplistic action scenes where generic goblins just jump out of the walls to be mowed down, eh, it'd be dumb but at least I'm advancing my own adventure. But I seem to be a little over halfway through the campaign and I've spent a third of my time either unable to move my character or with no choice as to where I walk just because I have to follow the next NPC through the next cutscene (Khaaaaaaaan!) I could be watching Black Mirror right now instead of pretending to play a video game.

 

Maybe I'll return to Metro when I get bored next month. I considered skipping to the sequel, Last Light, which came in the same bundle, but broke out laughing as soon as it booted and turned it off again, seeing as even the title screen puts you on another damn trolley!

Oh, fffuck all the way off!
 

 

 

__________________________________________

 

* It occurs to me that many nowadays may not have played the original Half-Life, where On a Rail was a chapter named ironically for centering on electric tram tracks, but which did not literally force you to stay on said rail.

 

P.S.: One good thing to come out of this mess: in looking up a walkthrough when stuck on knife-proof cobwebs I landed on Almar's Guides, which proved exactly the type of straightforward, informative, text with minimal illustrations walkthrough archive I only wish we still kept in the era of infuriatingly time-wasting "Let'sPlays"

While it doesn't cover the genres I normally play, lovely work nonetheless.

Approximately Appropriative

I felt like catching up on Questionable Content, as I've only skimmed it irregularly since it started pandering wholesale to SJW idiocy last decade. Presumably now the author will switch things up and introduce some Christian conservative robots to pander to the new dominant faction. But never mind. One particular page from 2021, as the snowflake wagon was gleefully careening off the political cliff, stands out as emblematic of wokey justice. One character calls against another getting a (very) temporary tattoo because it might be "culturally appropriative" of another demographic. Which happens to be robots.

 

Now, it might be worth mentioning the setting's robots have been around for less than one generation, and the culture being appropriated consists of one teenage girl scrawling random marker doodles on robots' chassis in the back of a repair shop. Which she started doing a couple weeks prior.

 

DO NOT APPROPRIATE THEIR NOBLE HERITAGE YOU FILTHY WHITE OPPRESSOR SHITLORD!!!1

 

I've said it before, but that sort of rhetoric has provided so much hilarity by tripping over itself. Weirdly, our heroine even acknowledges the lack of meaning, which makes one wonder what exactly the first two panels were about, aside from an opportunity to gratuitously browbeat one of her friends. But like other events from that time, like other artistic output from that time like Nimona, it tips the hand of would-be revolutionaries. It's never been about standing up for long-suffering underdogs, but (literally, in this imaginary case) fabricating any political lobby, no matter how flimsy, by which to bludgeon anyone you feel like labeling an enemy of the people.

Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Roleplaying Game

"We're setting off with soft explosion"

The Rolling Stones - 2000 Light Years From Home

 

After the Skyrim open-world craze and with randomizers improving to the point developers are universally leaning toward letting ChatGPT generate their content, Colony Ship stands out as the most recalcitrant of a dying cRPG breed: handcrafted encounters from start to finish, mature setting, fixed skill checks and do-or-die choices. Inspiration from one of SF's golden age big three helps. Nice piece of work overall, but its frustration makes it playable more as unique experience than an engrossing pastime. Holy Hell, I am not doing this again any time soon!

Call Ismael a bitch.

Fifty or so failed attempts had me ready to give up on the game altogether, not to mention I had to restart the entire Heart zone three times over due to continually failing this one damn combat! True to my snarly nature I used Charisma as a dump stat, limiting me to only one NPC companion, but given I hadn't optimized for combat, latter fights turned out to be flat-out impossible without a third gun. Problem: in order to recruit Knurl I had to kill his enemy in The Heart (the ship's engines) but my existing goon Jed refuses to leave The Heart once reached unless you do the fight above. I ended up forced to scrape just enough XP up to Lvl 8 so I could buy the "personal magnetism" feat to recruit Garret the commie pistolero, who ended up dying in that fight for Jed so I could finally recruit Knurl. After that, the fight with Ol' Bub only took 2 tries despite being technically more difficult.

 

Which is to say Iron Tower's design philosophy retains the same upside and downside from its previous title The Age of Decadence: it is highly satisfying to work out a skill gain sequence which will see you through the story's climax, but most often it simply cannot be worked out given the information at hand, forcing you to restart each chapter or cheat off online guides. And the combat's "difficulty" resolves too often to grinding the same fight dozens of times until RNGesus smiles upon ye, in the most annoying "roll to miss" D&D tradition. Worse that you're forced to bounce between maps to skill up, but some zones like the Shuttle Bay or the Heart come with surprise lock-outs or lock-ins.

 

But while the margin of error can seem razor-thin at times, there are just enough options built into the system to let you compensate. I could not manage for the life of me to raise my lockpicking past 7, but vendoring enough junk for another implant overclock to 12 INT let me tag the extra skill at the last second and open the last few containers up to fully max out my gear... after which my route landed me in an entirely anticlimactic finale devoid of combat. But hey: at least I finally got that dual-requirement laser pistol I mistakenly assumed would show up in Wasteland 3.

My usual chaotic neutral elf wizard setup here translated into technocratic overkill, including siding with bitcrafted monks over bickering monkeys. Weirdly though, despite all the cyborg implants and decaying environments, the very reasonableness of the factions' presentation makes Colony Ship register less as antiestablishment cyberpunk than the likes of C77 or Shadowrun. It's not normally a genre given to equanimity or practical argumentation. Plus, populating a place called The Habitat with degenerate hicks makes me wanna tell them to getcher own habatayat! Throwing gratuitous psychic mumbo-jumbo into the mix further dilutes an otherwise relatively hard SF setting. But overall characters act and speak refreshingly... sane, with none of the universal fairytale theatrics we're normally made to swallow - except for those knowingly employing such theatricality in-universe to foment fanaticism. (The Mother's throne is... pure badass.) Every gunrunner you meet is all too aware of both the cut-throat necessities imposed by dwindling resources and thereby the increased value of basic decency. Every leader great and small balances idealism of one brand or another with concessions to necessity. The arguments your character can make during diplomacy checks are based not in arbitrary pies in various skies but the shifting political situation and reasonable expectations of human nature.

 

If only that saner writing did not come bundled with psychic frogs and enforced save-scumming.

 

Too much of the campaign revolves around skill books and foreknowledge of which skill you'll be able to raise in the next chapter. Too many encounters were designed as "bonus bosses" the player need not fight, but with few hints as to which are necessary and which only serve toward bragging rights. Social skills overlap until they may as well have been conflated, and cannot be maintained unless you specialize in them early, in contrast to stealth skills which can be raised from nothing via skill book abuse.

 

On the plus side again, the tactical element is better developed than AoD's single-character setup. You don't strictly need to min-max. I used Jed as a frontline tank and made liberal use of his thunkin' skill, but with cover and flanking being so important and enemies frequently rushing you, my own Johnny Reb dagger saw frequent use throughout the campaign despite specializing in pistols. (It's been knife-work up here, Gimli.) Consumables are highly useful and just scarce enough to make you keep count, in contrast to every other cRPG where they're thrown at you as freebies of modest utility. Best of all, enemies' composition shows little to no redundancy, with every new encounter shuffling the mix of melee and ranged, status effects and defenses, always keeping you on your toes, pretty openly snubbing the likes of Wasteland 2's "not another freakin' badger" tedium. Here and there, when your teeth unclench, when you open a new door only to find your past five hours' painstaking build-up of a particular skill enables you to rescue a trapped scout or effortlessly shoo away a pack of murderous mutations from the bowels of spaceborne hell, when your diligently economized supplies give you just the right power boost to remain standing over your foes' remnants one step away from death, now and then you must admit something beautiful has been achieved.

 

So there's a lot to love and hate here. I somehow doubt Iron Tower's approach could ever have become the mainstream of cRPGs. Ironically it's worth playing precisely as a change of pace, precisely because nobody else is crazy enough to make something this frustrating and creative at the same time. Unsurprisingly, it tends to put many players off, if achievement completion is any indication.

Just under 30% have installed an implant, meaning they gave at least a few missions a chance.

Only 20% have made it to Act 2.

Only 12.4% finish the game... though interestingly, 7.8% of that proportion do so on "underdog" difficulty, well above half, indicating high retention rate for die-hard genre fans.

 

There is some market for intriguing frustration, after all.

FOMO

"Only a lunatic would like to see a skull crushed 

[...]
Who do you blame? It's a shame because the man's slain
He got caught in the chains of his own game
[...]
One day I'm gonna bust, blow up on this society
Why did you lie to me? I couldn't find a trace of equality"

 

2Pac - Trapped

_______________________________________________

"ME AND MY FUCKING GUN!"

NIN - Big Man With A Gun

_______________________________________________

"What maddens me,” he said, “is the democracy of the whole thing. White! I HATE this modern democracy. Democracy and inequality! Was there ever an absurder combination? What is the good of a social order in which the men at the top are commoner, meaner stuff than the men underneath, the same stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by prosperity and opportunity and the conceit that comes with advantage? This trouble wants so little, just a touch of aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an inkling of responsibility, and the place might rise instantly out of all this squalor and evil temper.... What does all this struggle here amount to? On one side unintelligent greed, unintelligent resentment on the other; suspicion everywhere...."
H.G. Wells - The Research Magnificent (1915)

________________________________________________ 

"The ultra-rich people who don't think they have a stake in the common good, and who think they can just jet off to New Zealand if things ever get really tough here. I mean, that's, one, it's just patently delusional, that's like I mean, if you're gaming out those end-of-the-world scenarios, you know, you have to think of who's gonna protect you and who you're gonna... Your pilot on your private plane is not going to leave without his family to go to New Zealand when the world ends, right? So you need to take the pilot's family, is that...? And what about your bodyguard's family, and who's gonna protect you from your bodyguards when your bodyguards understand that you really have no power now, you're just a guy who bought this compound in New Zealand? It's a ridiculous end-game to think that you can privately ensure your survival when the shit really hits the fan. So you have as much a stake in civilization not failing as anyone else

[...]

I mean, do you want to be surrounded by desperate, angry, envious people? Or do you want to be surrounded by people who are basically happy and thriving? And the answer is so obvious, at any level of wealth it's so obvious."

 

Sam Harris - Making Sense #430 

_______________________________________________

 

 

You're right, Harris, the answer is obvious: desperate, angry and envious, all the way. It's all anyone ever wants, and to naively pretend otherwise is suicide and has yielded an inevitable global mass suicide. Powermongering is not a carefully valuated eightfold path to self-actualization. It is mindless animalistic impulse. How does a monkey know whether it has power? It doesn't. All it can do is exert power and measure its status by success in dominating others, and must do so constantly to verify, occasionally upping the ante because it cannot be entirely certain what dominance others might be politicking behind its back. It's safer to pre-empt.

 

Remember that wealth is always relative. It doesn't matter how much you lose so long as everyone else loses more. The rich in a modern society aware of at least a basic notion of individual rights always hit a ceiling in their application of power. What they'd like to do is whip some peasants to death before breakfast, spend lunch amusing themselves at the spectacle of starving beggars waiting for the lord to spit out a crust of bread for their sustenance, and maybe order their thugs to pillage, rape and burn an entire county to the ground for supper entertainment. But they can't, the poor dears, frustrated at every step. That glass ceiling is such a bitch. These pesky legal systems and minimum wages and checks and balances and antitrust acts and constitutional restrictions get in the way of their rightful monkey-business.

 

The end of the world is an opportunity to do away with limits on power, that's all. Put the pilot's child in a noose to ensure his compliance. Order one bodyguard to murder another for treasonous thought-crimes. Promise an orphan a place in your compound, then gut him on a hook from your castle walls when you get bored having your goons gang-rape him to ensure their continued loyalty via that all-important feeling of exerting power. Good, clean fun. Sure, if you accumulate a few hundred billion dollars you might simply bribe enough cops to look the other way to have your way without tearing the whole system down... but that takes time, and subtlety. You might not live long enough to truly reach the zenith of simian aspiration. Safer to eliminate all possible checks on your power rather than check them in turn. And sure, the rabble will turn on you eventually, you'll run out of bodyguards eventually, your own children will seize the throne eventually... but what is eventuality when compared to the more immediate promise of a decade of absolute power? Maybe... maybe even two decades. Imagine that. Just imagine yourself in that position.

 

What self-respecting, self-actualizing monkey would pass up the opportunity, I ask ya?

 

Why else would anyone get rich? What other impetus can you cite? In preindustrial eras, it used to be only the rich could afford medicine and protection to live to a ripe old age. Only the rich could afford books, art and music. But we have MP3s and MP4s now, and my tablet stores a thousand books more than I'll ever read. Pharmacy shelves groan under mass-produced antibiotics. If self-actualization were the goal, then one need not move past a modest, low-pressure middle-class existence, and instead maximize free time to play games, listen to music and maybe do a bit of creative writing. Further accumulation of wealth serves no purpose other than powermongering, and always greater power beyond that.

 

And please, don't accuse me of indulging in any salt of the earth fallacy about the nobility of the underclass. They would if they could. What has rap and hip-hop, the soundtrack of street culture, ever been but a constant stream of demands to buy this track so you can make me rich enough to shit down your throats you pathetic plebs. Consider the other reason the rich cannot afford to miss the grand opportunity: if they don't tear everything down now, some other parvenu will do it five years later. They know better than anyone the dirty truth that they did nothing special to earn their privilege, just drew the lucky straw while remaining ruthless, and conversely that 99.99+% of the populace truly is just like them. Every revolutionary, once successful, will turn dictator in turn. Poverty and humility are Christian values only insomuch as Christians preach them to each other. Any falsified pretext for wealth accumulation like "effective altruism" soon betrays its transparent subterfuge (when I'm king of the world, everyone will be happy) as just that, a pretext, and any pretext will do, so long as it leads to power. The impulse to out-earn others is the same as the impulse to humiliate and torture, merely sublimated for polite company, man. And every man dreams to be a company.

 

I seized the chance to re-watch V for Vendetta's film adaptation before Netflix let its license lapse, and couldn't suppress a smirk at the universal self-delusion one sees in all such dystopian fiction (cf. Equilibrium, Snowpiercer, etc.) the core fiction, in fact, of such dystopias: the plucky fight by the underdog majority against a figurehead tyrant. Oppression is being imposed from above; the poor trampled masses are just waiting for a moment to break free. Sure, how else would you sell movies? Never paint the audience surrogates as guilty; give them a convenient boogeyman, an Emmanuel Goldstein to hate for two minutes at a time. Except, hold on, who's the tyrant's army? Who's the secret police? Who voted the tyrant into power? Who cheered at every rally? Who wore/were the red caps? Look up some statistics collected after such systems collapse in the real world, especially the number of salt-of-the-earth plucky underdog citizens who informed on their fellows to the secret police. Numbers routinely break 20%, 25%, over a third of the populace. Snitches get stitches? Well, it's never stopped them.

 

But we're not talking mere collaboration. The rabble originate oppression. I'd heard Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? as a stock phrase all my life, naturally. Strange that until now I had not known it originated as a song refrain from a failed 1932 Broadway musical. Not a bad little ditty either. I think I like Al Jolson's version so far. Unraveling into spoken word would seem lazy normally but works here within the theme of dissolution. But when you hear the idealized everyman warbling "once I built a tower to the sun" you have to ask, was he not aware he was building a palace for tyrants? That he was aiding the centralization of power for a fatter paycheck than he could get stacking bricks for his neighbour? Or did he think the Empire State building would be filled with mom&pop bakeries and employee-owned bookstores? And ain't it funny all the lines we're leaving out of that "just us chickens" litany?

Like:

"once I skimmed steaks off cow carcasses while butchering them"

"once I bribed the referee to throw out the opposing forward"

"once I was breaking knees for Al Capone"

"once I was a swindler hawking patent medicines"

"once I was an investor, bankrupting businesses for 0.1% interest more than the investor in the cubicle next to me, now I'm jumping out a window"

- all valid early 20th-century Americana!

 

How do you act in your own sphere of influence? Did Diogenes ever find honesty in the marketplace? Is there any monkey in the world that won't cheat at cards? And, as I've said before, if you cheat at cards, you'll cheat at stock markets too. Any teenage girl that lords her new purse over her friends will skin those friends alive once she climbs high enough in the social ladder to do so with impunity. Such opportunities don't come often. Better grab for them while you can. Life's too short to deny yourself the little pleasures.