Fullmetal Passerine

No hawk's getting through THAT!

Broodhollow

"I never heard of a sawmill with a night shift. Explain that to me!"

 

The Sinking City's prohibition-era setting reminded me of one of the endless dead comics littering teh interwebz - but one of the few I really wish would have continued. Kris Straub seemed reasonably famous among the cartoonin' crowd in the 2000s for his space comedy Starslip, but I never warmed up to it. Cheesy romantic over-arching premise with heavily Futurama-derived main characters (Zapp, Bender, Zoidberg) but too one-dimensional and straining at flimsy plots even by parody standards. Through the 2010s however he ran Broodhollow, a far more creative and coherent story which died mid-rising-action after two chapters and 249 pages.

 

A jittery Roaring '20s encyclopedia salesman inherits a haunted antiques shop. He is joined by a plucky ginger love interest, a giant miniature (space?) animal companion and a hero's mentor spouting vaguely off-brand Freudianisms. Comedy ensues, chiefly from the quaintness of the titular town in which the shop is located: its quaint period jargon, its quaint speakeasy serving fake liquor, quaint non-stop string of town holidays, quaint giant mutant flying swarms and skeletons in various closets...

 

As an (aborted) example of storytelling, Broodhollow demonstrates several points easily forgotten these days.

First, that you need not take a setting too seriously to render it believably and tie it into your story's theme. It's easier to place conflicts of tradition and self-reliance, belief and truth-seeking at the onset of 20th-century modernism. (It's also easier to believe so quaint a town might stay off the radar before the electronic era, but that's another conversation.) Its more farcical elements retain proportion and relevance to the characters' plight and thus never feel like "lolrandom" filler.

Relevant to the medium, while a lot of cartoonists have been rushing to incorporate fancier (quasi-automated) detail, shading, and so forth, Broodhollow's level of visual competence just above the early 20th-century newspaper comics it apes allows it plenty of room for goofy cartoonishness ramping toward splashes of higher detail for dramatic scenes.

Also, competent female characters can be portrayed without the need to defeat men for validation at every turn. Aside from the love interest's own efforts, a major threat in the plot is subverted by a not only elegant but quintessentially feminine solution, without resorting to out-doing the menfolk.

On a more philosophical point, it portrays the terror of madness not as violence or perversion but as blankness, erasure, Hollowing, the grotesquery inherent in mental influence as implicit destruction of the individual.

 

But the biggest success of those 240-odd pages comes by portraying horror not only by hauntings and huntings, but in their impact on the mundane. Horror invades the characters' lives, twisting or effacing universal habits and sentiment, infecting with wrongness. The quote above comes late in the story, and hits particularly hard for reminding the reader (who's likely been mentally chasing flashier manifestations) how easily he has brushed aside the low-key pervasiveness of evil influence in Innsmou- sorry, I mean Broodhollow.

 

All in all, denser than it appears and worthier of attention than much longer comics.

AoW4 Factions, 9

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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Wolves! Thank you, finally, they put some damn wolves in the game! I was also surprised to find a text box in the last faction creation window, so these guys are the first to receive a description right from the start. I wasn't ready to get back into character bio blurbs though, so I ended up over-playing the repetitive verbal reinforcement. I also merely rehashed my old City of Villains dominator's bio, but 'yknow what? That's ok. That is oh-kay. I also got into a flexibility kick for a few factions around this time, so their affinity's all over the place. Not quite as satisfying from a roleplaying perspective. Effective though, even if it's not easy scrounging enough Imperium to make it worthwhile.

The Sinking City

Asbestoscape - And So the Story Goes

(you're not getting a Metallica song suggestion unless your sequel turns out much better) 

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Look out, Old Gods, I've got a Tommy gun! And springs!

I thought I'd polish off a quick adventure game in between longer titles, but somehow mixed up The Sinking City with... maybe The Forgotten City? Dagon? Apocalypsis? Scorn? my backlog's getting unmanageable. In any case a first glance at the FPS interface and expansive map revealed this is not the shoestring-budget old-timey point-and-click adventure I had expected. Which is both good and bad, as I discovered when setting out to explore the 3D wonderland a bit before the tutorial quest and, this being me we're talking about, managed to get myself stuck on terrain and die within the first couple of minutes.

Lousy Lake Lachrymose Leeches!

But alright, I told myself, I could stand for a bit of Lovecraftian lurking fear, a creeping immersion into vague hints and portents of gruesome, dehumanizing terrors metastasizing indistinctly beyond the bounds of mundane human experie - WHOA!

The honorable Bob Throg, esq. (probably?)

I'm sorry, I can't hear a word you're saying past that face. My but we're wavin' our Jermyns out in public pretty shamelessly, aren't we? Soooo... not so much with the gradual, creeping, indistinct lurking and vague portending, I guess? That, and there's fish-people and tattooed shirtless cultists walking around town openly and nobody bats an eyelash at bloodthirsty inhuman monstrosities. Thus I replaced genre whiplash with a first impression that these Lovers of the Craft possess all the subtlety of their idol without his talent for flowery escalation, and decided to give the first few quests a chance just so I could write off my old purchase as a lost cause and move on to some better game.

 

Instead, I gotta say, it eventually drew me in.

 

Quite a few stylistic details irked me, especially at first. I've always assumed Innsmouth should be pronounced closer to Inns-muth not -mouth as in chewing. One mob's a blatantly 'roided-out Half-Life headcrab. The writing is decidedly prosaic compared to its infamously purple inspiration. Not bad or jarring, but compared to what The Secret World's writers had accomplished with the same material eight years prior, Sinking's still amateur hour. The shallow and blunt presentation just reinforces my view that everyone really needs to give Lovecraft a rest.

 

Most all its flaws, though, stem from one fundamental design decision. Like We Happy Few and a string of other adventure/RPGs from the 2010s (or more recently the object lesson of Bloodlines 2) there was little reason for this to be an open-world FPS Skyrim clone, or then pile on with MMO-inspired graveyard runs and designated resource grinding zones. That's what the kids these days like, right?

 

The aforementioned rushed suspense is partly mandated by FPS mechanics, but one terrible design choice does not vindicate the other. Combat is easily the worst part of the game, with bad or nonexistent collision and hit confirmation, hitscan abuse, clumsy spawning or pathing. And they got very little variety out of it with only two boss fights, one easily skippable and the other toward the end of the Fathers and Sons chapter illustrating the system's every weakness. You get thrown into it with no chance to scout first. The chamber is gigantic and there's zero indication of what you're supposed to do. No hit confirmation on the boss so it looks invincible. Per genre conventions praying cultists normally have to be exterminated in such fights in order to render a boss vulnerable or stop add spawns but are here irrelevant. There's no indication where the biggest source of damage is coming from unless you're staring at your feet at exactly the correct moment. Outside that, though the four basic mob types and their alternate variants (invisibility, self-resurrection) are interesting at first, their random lurching movements fail to evoke their intended eeriness and simply become infuriating by repetition.

 

The setting of Oakmont itself serves as the main attraction and is indeed a lovely burg. It's got old preindustrial manor houses, dingy apartment stacks, even dingier shoreline wooden shacks. But then it duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates its available inspiration. Huge place for a no-name developer's sophomore effort. Thus it predictably sapped the team's capabilities, forcing them to copy-paste decor ("Men's finest clothing" and "Whately's household chemistry" obviously do a rollicking business with scores of storefronts near you) and the period-appropriate art assets jumble together. The nominal existence of a technology during a particular decade in no way assured widespread availability. (How many rail guns do you own?) In the 1920s, even with internal combustion use exploding and even in this the land of Our Ford and that patent thief Edison, relatively few people had electric lighting or telephones and even fewer cars (relying more on trains and trolleys) especially in a no-name New England port town.

What, no horse wagons for hicks from the surrounding countryside? No bikes? Nobody row-row-rowed a boat in the 1920s? Well, it would've required extra models and animations, but as a result the setting looks a couple decades removed. All the worse as this repetitiveness applies to some quest locations including the "secret" false walls you're supposed to find in the same exact spot every single time.

 

The FPS nonsense interferes with the game's more important detective mechanics as well. Monsters spawn in (and around) in the stupidest possible way, simply teleporting in from the floor, and can do so while your interface is momentarily locked by clicking to examine a clue. And as if everyone weren't incongruously blase about the extradimensional creeps, this clashes with basic walking about town. Cops shooting you if you pull a gun on people out in the street? Sure, makes sense. Unless you were trying to shoot a monster, which they completely ignore to start shooting at you instead of the gibbering abomination from beyond time and space.

 

But that detective angle, along with the cases you uncover, ends up being Sinking City's saving grace. When not spinning its wheels or tripping over itself, it provides a refreshing balance of eyeing supernatural clues in GhostVision!(tm)

Breadcrumb trails have never looked less edible.

- complete with a minigame placing events in (usually fairly obvious) order -

- and perfectly mundane clue-gathering:

Instead of the usual automatic HUD markers just yanking you in every direction, you mark your own map based on street directions, themselves often requiring a look-up in various local registries like newspaper articles. While, again, they erred on the side of caution by unsubtle quest prompts ensuring clues would be more intelligible than poetic, it's a solid foundation for a sequel expanding on this sort of writing/environment integration I myself had coincidentally called for in the year preceding the game's release. 

Alternate completion options may not affect your character's progression, but they're well-conceived as roleplaying quandaries. What more do you want? Colorful bit players, a few historical references, some hard quest decisions I'll split into a separate post, a bit of contextualized comic relief:

Though not a masterpiece, so much of The Sinking City is immersive, engaging, amusing, or otherwise admirable, yet at every turn hobbled by "hours played" padding and over-reach for twitch-gamer mass appeal, by farming random containers for superfluous randomized crafting loot, scanning hundreds of random blank walls with GhostVision, doing corpse runs and most of all alternately rushing and stalling plot development in the interest of getting players into the supposedly more exciting FPS side of things fast and often. Instead of easing in with a bit of sightseeing and vague hints, from the very start you're placing 21 case files by hand on the map (much of it DLC content) throwing you into monster fights. Come on people, pace is not a four-lett... pacing is not a four-letter word!

 

If you think The Whisperer in Darkness should've started with "here's a picture of a Mi-Go, go shoot it" you are missing the damn point!

What a Show, Here We Go

"And where do we feature?"

"Just listen to teacher."

 

The Lion King (Be Prepared)

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"Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent."

- from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

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"Your attitude is simply a hold-over of your religious training. That you have a DUTY toward the dull human race--which probably enjoys being bullied by Windrip and getting bread and circuses-- except for the bread!"

"Of course it's religious, a revolutionary loyalty! Why not?  It's one of the few real religious feelings.  A rational, unsentimental Stalin is still kind of a priest.  No wonder most preachers hate the Reds and preach against 'em!  They're jealous of their religious power."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here 

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"In the horizon of the infinite.
- We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us -- indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom -- and there is no longer any "land.""

 

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science #124

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Where to start? I guess we can ease into this with a game anecdote. It was only recently while re-skimming something I'd said about Rogue Trader "I started as a preacher for lack of bookish origins" that I realized that's probably more true than I'd like it to be, not just in a galaxy far, far away but to mine own self. If living in ye olden days, deprived of other fonts of learning, I probably would've joined a monastery just for the books - then, let's be realistic, gotten myself burned at the stake a couple years later as a heretic. While it maintained its Dark Age stranglehold on intellectual pursuit, Christianity also maintained a de facto prison for intellectual pursuers.

 

Another recent RPG campaign brought my attention to a phrase I had not even heard before: the so-called Black Legend of defamation against the Spanish crown at its peak of global influence. Amusing because it doesn't seem in question that Spaniards were committing atrocities, but apologists would like to point out other-people-did-bad-things-too! - or at most that the bad things were done in a slightly different location or a year or two earlier. Of course it only takes a little perspective to figure a secondary motivation behind this umbrage, beyond Spanish honor, in religious apologism, as imperialist Spain is nearly synonymous with Catholicism. It goes hand-in-hand with those heavily funded Vatican biopics Hollywood has been cranking out the past decade or so, or another trend sneaking its way through various websites of supposedly unaffiliated commentators "spontaneously"arguing the Dark Ages did not quite destroy all knowledge or that later "not all inquisitors" (#NotAllInquisitors) were raving torturers and witch-hunters. Right, sure.

 

While we're at it, let's remember a term which truly has been misrepresented over the centuries: decimation. In modern popular parlance understood to mean "completely wiped out" its original meaning was much milder, the execution of every tenth soldier of a military unit guilty of some form or another of treason, to make the other nine soldiers fall back in line. It never seems to have worked very well within a military unit whose loyalty to each other can easily be wrecked by such internal punishment, but the same psychological torture can serve much better for an outside force deliberately attempting to break the loyalty of families, villages or looser social associations and turn them against each other to make them more susceptible to brainwashing.

 

If a true believer insists "most" inquisitors were merely sent out to "teach" the ignorant masses official doctrine, take it with a fistful of salt rubbed into your wounds. Yes, half or even 9/10 inquisitors may have busied themselves just spewing chapter and verse, yet behind their every word you would see nothing but the afterimage of your parents, their limbs torn and crushed by the tenth inquisitor's torture implements, their minds utterly shattered, choking as they struggled to beg for mercy before finally expiring.

 

Ohh, yeah. You'll listen to teacher.

 

Speaking of teaching, more than a decade ago, having gone back for a university degree, I found myself listening to some classroom chatter about a particular professor's stupid views on an easily-verified and politically combustible fact. Was it global warming, vaccines, animal rights, trickle-down economics? I forget. Something outside his official specialty at any rate, so he was not speaking ex cathedra on the touchy topic. But I do remember a student indignantly exclaiming "can't we get him fired or something?" It gave me an eerie feeling I only later identified with the rise in politically correct insanity in following years. My side wasn't supposed to talk like this. It was the other guys that wrote up blacklists against political subversives. It was those church ladies, not on campus but out in churches, doing church things, they were the busybodies hounding deviants just for shits and giggles.

Right?

...r-right?

Well, "cancel culture" and the wider wokeysition has in the interval amply demonstrated humans' propensity to crusade on any nonsense. And given how many have been fired and blacklisted based on absolutist propositions like the moral supremacy of women or transsexuals, I'm unwilling to pretend this more modern McCarthyism poses any less threat than the version from seventy years ago. When you start job-firing on pretense, how far could the firing squads be? Academics have not fought back against postmodern insanity. Did it even take a tenth of their number fired to ensure the rest bent knee? I suppose the real question of recovery hinges on whether academia has been destroyed or merely decimated, and the cowards who adopted gender Lysenkoism or the false equivalences of 'multiple intelligences' or cultural relativism might find their spines once some of the pressure to conform eases off.

 

Or maybe the pressure's just switching directions. I'm seeing entirely too many TV comedians pretending they love Lent and are looking forward to the sadomasochistic spectacle of Easter. I viewed a presentation recently by a scientist who at the end thanked God among her peers and funders. Bill Maher hasn't dared so much as squeak against religion for years. Sam Harris is willing to make common cause with the religious fanatics in Israel. So there's a distinction everyone has apparently decided to forget between tolerating isolated personal derangement in individuals, and the far more destructive kow-towing to pervasive superstition to placate the mob.

 

Can atheists hold irrational views? Oh, hell yes. I refer you to Portlandia. Better yet I refer you to a series of video lectures put out by the James Randi Educational Foundation on various pseudoscience and quackery posing as official medical research. The most charismatic speaker she ain't, but do note she can rattle off five hours of (quite entertaining in themselves) references to insanity like homeopathy or energy healing, not even venturing outside the field of medicine, yet still barely scratch the surface.*

 

The relevant distinction was never between theist and atheist, but between reason and unreason, and it is very much a matter of degrees. A professor holding one kooky view is far less harmful than a department firing him for that view, especially if not passed off as authoritative. Demanding absolute orthodoxy does not produce reason; it produces a priesthood reciting cant instead of an intelligentsia seeking truth. As you have continually enforced adherence to the dogma of political lobbies like feminism as a prerequisite for participation in academia, you have inevitably regressed to pre-modern academic precursors, to monastic strictures on thought. So perhaps in that light it was inevitable for the entire intelligentsia to collapse into primitive superstition. When biologists become willing to deny biological sex for their thirty pieces of silver, they're only a skip away from averring the legitimacy of supernumerary nipples as witch-sign.

 

But such doublethink already abounds outside academia. There's something particularly perverse in the sympathetic church services held after the U.S. government's murders of civilians in Minneapolis last month, conveniently ignoring that Trump was elected under Christian ideals by Christian propaganda with the express purpose of establishing a Christian theocratic dictatorship. It was Christianity that murdered them, and it is Christianity sending military helicopters to drag children out of their beds in the middle of the night and it is Christianity driving by in unmarked vans disappearing people off the streets of American cities. And there you have another crucial difference between reason and unreason, unbelief and belief. Atheism is nothing in itself. It is a blank, a default. It mandates no action. But the civilizational decline, the destruction of intellect and beauty, the heretic burnings and other atrocities perpetrated by the faithful have throughout history been a direct result of official doctrine, of superstitious piety, meekness, obedience, proselytism, 'purification' and surrender of this world for the illusory hereafter. Of power-mongering in the name of the all-powerful.

Of all the various brands of insanity which have gripped the left wing over the past decades, the final nail in its coffin will be this. Forgetting the most virulent and debilitating mental infection in human history. Forgetting where the left wing got its name, and that the First Estate sits together with the aristocracy in opposition to and oppression of the Third.

 

 

 

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* If James Randi himself never focused on religion, do remember it's not because it was any less bullshit than his usual targets of clairvoyants or psychics (for instance one of his most famous cases was against the Christian faith healer Peter Popoff) but because the topic was too broad for him to tackle with the resources at his disposal.

The game industry needs to make more second-person shooters.

Flickering Cells

"How can I change the path that I'm on?
This is my destiny
This is my life, my own right or wrong
Bring it on back to me
How can I say what it is that I want?
Wisdom speak to me"

 

Syntax - Destiny

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"Aw, man! Brain-bug right up the nose! How plain silly! What are the chances it'd be shooting out of the drain right when my nose was over it? What's the word I'm looking for?

Argh!!!

'Contrived!' "

 

Sluggy Freelance, 28 Geeks Later parody, 2005/07/21

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Walk with me, dear reader, we'll be taking some twists and turns. First, among zombies:

What? This is too a zombie movie! See, they're looking for the zombies, with flashlights, it's totally plot relevant. I rarely bother with the subgenre, but re-viewing 28 Days Later gave me a chance to compare it (quite favorably) against more recent brain-muncher fare like Army of the Dead, whose pile of cliches indicates how hopelessly played-out zombies had become by '21. The most random of these appear to fit no purpose in the story but to fill script pages, like political posturing on immigration, obligatory scene of action girl visiting vengeance upon an obligatorily stupid and greedy male sexual predator, nerd who must prove his manliness, obvious sneering hateable backstabber, and the daddy who must spend all movie making amends to his daughter for just not being daddy enough for her tastes. But even the more genre-specific, like super-zombies, the Bride of Frankenstein or the utter, cartoonish ease with which our designated heroes dispatch endless swarms, all strain so hard at upping the ante it's no wonder they just went ahead and made a Las Vegas song-and-dance number out of the whole mess.*

 

Of course even two decades earlier 28 Days Later was itself trying to dodge being pigeonholed as a "zombie" flick with all due shambling, given the genre's increasing saturation, so instead played up the societal collapse. The lights no longer come on, the water no longer runs, the double-deckers got double-decked, food doesn't get brought in, the tunnels are clogged, there's no cops to keep the thugs in check. No maids sweep away the rubble, no minimum-wage employees put the shopping carts back in their places. You might say these are also cliches used in common with Mad Max and disaster movies but if so it's because they're natural out-growths of a complex world we take for granted, not merely feel-good applause moments engineered by Hollywood. A collapse is a collapse, whether by zombies, thunderdomes, ETs, superstorms or an invasion of redcaps. Our monkey instincts push us to view everything as a social conflict, victory to be achieved by crushing a rival, a personification of evil, a bogeyman, one which can be screamed at and taunted or threatened with sky-waved fist. But the universe itself is death, scratching at this illusory blip of sapient civilization with a myriad tendrils, constantly.

 

Is the blood drop scene in 28 Days Later contrived? No, the contrivance is that it didn't happen sooner, that they'd get so far in the first place without stumbling face-first into an infected blood-puddle, that they didn't get fried by an electrified puddle of water near a still-functioning backup generator or flattened by debris falling off skyscrapers and that no mosquitos passed the infection around. The true contrivance is the universal storytelling convention that nature must step back so the narrative gets resolved by a heroic plot arc satisfying our primitive mammalian social/competitive instincts. A real collapse will come with more hazards than a marketing tagline can express. The whole point of avoiding civilization-destroying contrivances like mushroom clouds, gray goo, global warming or engineered plagues is that once you let rip with a stinker like that, the wind's gonna blow it whichever way it pleases.** The world is bigger than your stupid monkey ambitions.

 

Which is not to say it's completely unpredictable or inexplicable.

The COVID-19 pandemic had its funny moments, like this illustration of sampling error. Unless you believe the small country of Lesotho, completely surrounded by South Africa, actually had so fewer cases than its one neighbour and largest trade partner, or that Africa as a whole had so few cases. In which case I've got some Venusian real estate to sell you. No, it just had few test kits to discover why exactly grandpa coughed himself to death. And despite the lack of hard, positive scientific proof of untested cases, if you have a working brain you can spot the necessary interconnection (geographic, physical) in that image and take the results with the requisite fistful of salt.

 

Contagion, edge effects, cross-contamination, downstream effects, thermoclines, subduction zones, habitats and niches, study the natural world from most any angle and you run into endless examples of matter impacting other matter in very complex ways based on very simple rules. All it takes is a few gradients - of energy, of density, of pressure, of elevation, of whatever. It can be as simple as on/off states.

Conway's Game of Life is one nice way to get yourself into that mindset, and you need not delve any convoluted mathematics to see individual squares or larger structures as rudimentary biomes, organisms, molecules, whatever magnification you want to imagine. Bilateral symmetry is quite easy to achieve and there's even predation of sorts, when an overpopulated, exploded structure swarms out and demolishes anything nearby, or when a glider impacts a stable structure just right to send a new glider off in another direction. It makes a nice rejoinder to the cretinous religious insistence that self-replicating life is too complex to have arisen by itself. Bullshit. Look at repeating, dispersing patterns arising from far less complexity than that provided by carbon compounds. And each individual cell's next state is driven by its surroundings, much as in life.

 

Of course, that's too much information for the average voter, which can only rattle a single isolated binary in its hollow skull at a time. The American presidunce spat out one of his innumerable random bits of idiocy on the occasion of last month's cold snap in the Eastern U.S., claiming as usual that it disproves global warming, and the degenerate inbreds going truck-nuts over his every dribbled inanity picked it up as gospel. Unsurprising as "if it's currently cold in my back-yard there's no global warming" is routinely dredged up as a redneck sound bite as often as "if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" The real explanation was of course simple enough. Europe and the U.S. were two cold fronts isolated in a swirling totality of overheating. Cold air was actually channeled southward by warm, humid air over the oceans. If that explanation sounds familiar, it's because the disruption of the polar vortex by global warming has been explained to the rabble every couple of years for an entire generation when it keeps causing such local cold snaps, over and over again. Looks like a glider impacted something.***

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is a particularly funny phrase for how often it must be repeated because everyone keeps forgetting it. Some things cannot repeat. The Black Forest is gone. The Nemean Lions of southern Europe were exterminated at the dawn of recorded history. And the coral reefs I visited with my parents on vacation a quarter century ago are now dead, and will only get deader along with all the life that depended on them. But the pattern repeats. Our species is death. We are the ravenous, brainless, ever-swelling shambling horde.

 

Our own behavior is just more squares on the grid, lighting up predictably in response to adjacent stimuli. Easy enough to explode if you know where to click. There's a grim comedy to the recent rumours that ICE agents (y'know, the thugs shooting civilians in the back in the middle of the street?) here in the U.S. have not been getting their promised $50,000 signing bonus from their all-star team. Specifically, the comedy always lay in the amount itself, precisely ten times the $5000 promised by the exquisitely Trumpian dictator Berzelius Windrip to every American should they elect him in the 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here. Which (important plot point) of course nobody ever receives. It is only mentioned again to illustrate how disjointed from reality they'd remained even as various characters began being herded into concentration camps while still dreaming of their promised loot. Even the few which did initially make out like bandits rapidly turned the same treatment on each other. A work of fiction? Now adjust that pie in the sky tenfold for inflation. Your recruiters are laughing right in your faces because you're too moronic to see it.

 

"Barlow realized that some things had not changed, that Jack Ketch was never asked to dinner no matter how many shillings you paid him to do your dirty work, that murder will out, that crime pays only temporarily" - The Marching Morons, C.M. Kornbluth

Funny thing about conservatism: you can't conserve when the squares around you start flickering. We'll be piling shopping carts as barricades soon enough. Won't keep the boiling flood waters out, though.

 

Here's one last parting shot: remember that climactic moment in 28 Days when the hero bursts in, rampaging in the jealous rage of any murderous ape rushing to the defense of his mate, the moment when the hero is indistinguishable from the monsters. There's a lot of talk here in the states about the mid-term elections and the possibility of overturning the incipient dictatorship. Of course, there very well may be no further elections. The murderous thugs willing to gun you down at a protest will not shy away from doing the same in front of a voting booth if you look too un-American for their tastes. But if the self-appointed rebel alliance should win, it will still not have ever questioned the myriad ways in which its own obsessions drove politics into the current cesspit. It will retrench in its gender Lysenkoism and identity politics insanity, proselytize its irrational postmodernist anti-realist dogma all the more forcefully. Thus the cycle will only roll over again two years from now and you'll be looking back at these months as the last chance, the single remaining heartbeat of opportunity when you should have taken the shot - at your own heroic selves.

 

You think you can sell the right ad campaign, but how different are you from the morons? 

 

 

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* The zombie tiger though, that was legit coolsauce. Not that it actually does much.

** Compare with a writer who got it quite right, Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and the ease of death in a world of Ice-9.

*** Even if your attention were so feeblemindedly restricted to your back-yard square, you could've compared temperatures on the same day in your back-yard over the past few decades, or average yearly temperatures locally, or the number of below and above average temps in a single year, and almost certainly received the same confirmation that the warming trend continues. In fact you can do that for free through the National Weather Service's records.

My Time As A Placeholder

- was brief.

AoW4 Factions, 8

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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I'm not too keen on dragons as a fantasy trope, so didn't know what to do with this next one. But the hoarding game mechanic fed me an easy gimmick, especially for an earth dragon. I'm just a material dragon boy in a material mammal world. The "wow, birds are dinos?" angle was again too hard to resist.

The Mighty Shovelhead

It's Darwin day. I never bothered with it until I realized how much it cheeses off the fundies, so stroke your beards and let's do another evolutionary topic to make Jesus not roll over in his grave because he's been dead for two thousand years and long-dissolved skeletons don't do that.

 

I stopped watching Jurassic Park movies after the second (and that idiotic gymnastics scene) but corporations being what they are, they've apparently been cranking out increasingly pointless sequels ever since, with increasingly ridiculous dinos that have basically become either goblins or kaiju, it's hard to tell. Or maybe I just don't care to. They must be scraping the bottom of the barrel if at least one recent installment, Dominion(?) included Lystrosaurus of all things, and of course gave it an adorable pug face with humid baby eyes, chubby cheeks and expressive human eyebrows, because you can never say hello to too many kitties.* I assume they heroically murder a laser-armed T-Rex like the ewoks they are.

 

But, for the very same reason Lystrosaurus makes a ridiculous addition to an action movie, it's an interesting evolutionary emblem. Look at the damn thing. Just... look at it. Even without expert reconstructions, from gross skeletal anatomy alone you can guess the piggish little overgrown newt-moles lacked most any big ticket evolutionary adaptations like speed, reach, defense, weaponry, etc. It's one of the most stunningly unimpressive life-forms to have ever existed. And yet, for millions of years at the start of the Triassic, those doofy, quasimodoed stooges ruled the land.

 

For decades, countless learned pates appear to have bent over backwards trying to explain by reason or/of adaptation why Lystrosaurus took over so thoroughly. But so far, the best explanation remains the simplest and least flattering: the waddling clowns just got lucky! They're the classic example of a disaster taxon cranked up to eleven by the biggest disaster before we came along to destroy all of creation. The Permian mass extinction ("The Great Dying") wiped the board of their competitors and predators, and the few survivors reproduced out of control, filling that elusive environmental niche known as "mine, all mine" until reptiles and dinosaurs gradually outpaced and drove them into extinction.

 

The meek really did inherit the Earth, and then God fed 'em to giant salamanders. Ah, the grandeur of a perfect omniscient plan.

 

 

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* Looks like the movie also took some license with the shoulder joint and limb length to make it more action-oriented. Actual reconstructed skeletons look more splay-limbed and stubby. Then again, I'm guessing this is the least of what's wrong with the movie series.

 

By the by, Lystrosaurus wasn't a dinosaur or even any kind of "saurus" at all, but a therapsid cousin to our own proto-mammalian ancestors. Ugh, this was our champion? Man, we really took a beating back in the Mesozoic. Must be why we're destroying everything now. Repressed therapsid trauma.

+100 XP per fish knocked off bicycle

"They're gonna set you up
So they can take you down
They're gonna suck you dry
They've left the blood to be found
They're gonna rip you apart
You're gonna burn at the stake
Cause when it's time to collect
It's only heroes who pay"

 

Ministry - Hero

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"Men are more sentimental than women. It blurs their thinking."

from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

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My recent jaunt through Black Legend produced a mixed bag of somewhat creative quest voiceovers alongside a now extremely tired, overused old plot twist and stock characters like the manic 'killumall' bombmaker NPC. So, yes, per obligatory tropes you also meet Stella, the dashing young heroine off to avenge her mother's death because her father's useless.

 

Naturally, like every other 'strong woman' example you meet in every game, she explicitly tells you she "doesn't need your help" right before you of course have no choice in completing the quest but helping her anyway, you filthy presumably male chauvinist pig, how dare you not lay down your life for those declaring you worthless? At least this time the burgeoning abusive relationship is not designated as a love interest.

 

Whenever one of these almighty action girls tells me she doesn't need my help (since every single fictional female can vanquish twenty men-at-arms at once with both tits tied behind her back) and acts insulted at my very presence, I should have the option to reply:

 

"Great then, fuck off ya bipolar tsundere bitch, why am I even talking to you?"

 

Then let me watch her Leeroy in and get her idiot head chomped off by a dragon like she deserves. That should be worth more XP than running slavishly after her to help her, and yield an achievement reading:

"Turns out the bicycle didn't need the fish, either."

Mystery and Drama on a Leaf

Okay, so the one on the left is a big dipper firefly, Photinus pyralis. Common enough, and not particularly interesting in the daytime. I don't think they're big leaf-eaters even in their larval stage though, and the adults don't eat, so... just sunning yourself? Cool, bro, you do you.

More importantly, I thought bumblebees eat nectar, so what is that bumbler doing to... whatever the third thing is? A soldier beetle? If anything, that's supposed to be the predatory one. Really wish my image quality was better so I could tell what's going on underneath it. Is that its abdomen bent under, or an egg mass or what?

 

Anyway, have you checked your dandelions for drama lately? 

Black Legend

(bam-a-lam)

Welcome to the low countries, ca. half-past... oooh... awk-waaaard.

Ummm, I didn't do it.

Yeah, we're in that period of European history. Bring your own bier.

 

I wanted less cartoony team tactics after Inkulinati and Elemental Evil, so Black Legend's grim, low-key aesthetic drew me in. The average gamer's age may be in the thirties now, but you wouldn't know it from the chibified, bubblegummy, bright and cozy kindergarten atmosphere developers adopt to go along with their sappy plots. But I digress.

 

If you're looking for actual role-playing, with moral decisions, branching quests and so forth, you won't find it here. What Black Legend does offer is an immersive, if linear, meander through the byways of a musket-era low fantasy setting.

I like that everything's been knocked over except the two-story-tall pillar of floppy sacks. Also, how is everyone in this town starving? There must be grain in at least some of these. Add a dog steak and you're living large. Anyway, visit scenic Grant, home among others to Christiaan Huygens (who for some reason does not use a telescope as a weapon) and to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, cozy among his vats of animalcules. 

(You looked less... fermented, in your official portrait.)

Those pips around our character icons represent "unbalanced bodily humors" which comprise the alchemical combat system's main damage source. Stack them on your enemy, cash them in with a special attack scaling with adjacent combos. And they do work, the difference between a basic attack and triple combo being from single digits to triple, up to the thousands by the end-game. Technically there's also a large variety of buffs and debuffs, but since you couldn't address them individually even if such mechanics existed, functionally there are only humor stacks and a generic "debuff" category you can safely ignore. While interesting, it also means the quality of the mobs you fight matters little compared to whether they outnumber you, stacking more counters than you and triggering them before you can even act, and conversely that boss fights are trivialized by you outnumbering the boss 4-1. Flanking gives a nice damage bonus, but the lack of zones of control jumbles combat, especially as mobs are coded to act a bit too randomly to make for interesting tactics.

 

If you're noticing a pattern of interesting but flawed features, you can probably guess most of what I'm saying will fit "indie game" caveats. Some good ideas, some talent, but visibly over-stretched past the developers' means.

 

In a way Black Legend is a less ambitious but more playable take on Mordheim's urban scavenging, and though the interface doesn't interfere nearly as much it's once again a main source of frustration.

- moving takes an extra click

- chugging a pot requires a gratuitous submenu

- a "helpful" feature to speed up turn ends can cost you your last action

- you can speed up animations but as usual the problem is the prep and cleanup phases taking longer than actual motion

- ability icons get re-arranged on your hotbar or inexplicably appear/disappear from class selection

- attack lines occasionally fail to predict range and line of sight

- tooltips do not provide some critical info, like minimum/maximum range

- you initiate fights by entering your foes' field of vision... except when entering the rough area of a boss, whereupon your character automatically walks over to him initiating combat, preventing you from pre-fight preparations

- you get a map and a minimap but only the mini version displays your position

- clicking a portrait just zooms to that character instead of selecting it in the pre-fight screen

 

Individually, such little flaws can be ignored, but a dozen clunky interactions will begin to wear on you after the three hundredth repetition. Then some stuff is just bugged, even years after release, like tiles falsely appearing as occupied or out of range.

 

All in all, you get the feeling someone had planned a piece of period fiction and suddenly decided to make it a video game despite lacking the requisite programming or design expertise. As with Wartile or We Happy Few for example, quite a few mechanics feel tacked on after a design lead read a listicle on "the 10 top ways to keep players' interest" most notably the numerous loot boxes:

- and the constantly spammed "LEVEL UP" behavioral reinforcers. Black Legend uses a combat system I can't remember having tried before, where your ability scores determine your damage and your weapon your available abilities. 

Why yes, ladies, I am happy to see you.

In order to gain more abilities, you constantly need to swap each character to different class/weapon combos every few fights. Less chaotic than it sounds, as you'll still want to follow a general archetype (tank, melee and range DPS, healer) for each of your four, but get more wiggle room for cross-class combos. Interesting. But though this individual skill leveling pretty much removes the need for traditional character levels, the devs decided to keep those in as well. You'll LEVEL UP!!! ~120 times per party member during your campaign, with zero choices to upgrade, each time gaining a minor attribute boost, the whole routine obviously serving as no more than a dopamine drip.

 

Other features also seem tacked on per "industry standards" like map encounters randomized every time you re-enter zone, plenty of recruits even though they're all interchangeable, a few mid-campaign fetch quests to make you trudge through random respawns again (admittedly, less than in other games) infinite loot rendering the unsortable item list at the shop irrelevant. Like the interface issues, none of these would be too severe in themselves, but their self-conscious implementation as operant conditioning does more harm than good.

 

Because there really is a nice game under there.

The decor is solid, the mood grim without becoming maudlin, enemy abilities decently varied, the grand total of two character models (human and dog) reskinned and animated just enough to keep you entertained for twenty hours, weapon and armour both varied and recherche and scaling nicely from basic to ornate, the music, meh, just sounds like bot-generated whooshing, but the voice acting would sound surprisingly good even for a richer project. And the writing, while not taking itself too seriously and having some fun with random Dutch references, manages to stay in character

Yup. We're in the slums.

even in its more tongue-in-cheek moments. 

You think this is a game!?

The loot boxes, if a bit excessive, do keep you exploring the convoluted zones' scenic nooks. Fifteen playable classes add up to a bit of redundancy, but for the most part offer a lot of chances to mix-and-match damage sources for combos. Me being me, I could always cite more minor quibbles like why would you call your incendiary devices "molotovs" when "Greek fire" would have better fit the alchemical setting?

 

But in the end, I enjoyed wandering the canals, alchemisted and guisarmed to the teeth, reading street signs for directions, inflicting Science! upon flagellants. I find myself hoping Warcave made enough cash off this stumbling but promising first effort to stay in business. I'd like to see more from them.

AoW4 Factions, 7

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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Ah, my first dragon. AoW4 rulers need not be the same race as their factions, and in the case of later ruler types like dragons, giants or eldritch abominations, they flat-out cannot be. So it was a nice chance to play an evil orc faction, ignoring Triumph's trendy noble savage reinterpretation of orcs for some good old-fashioned death cult stuff. As with all these early factions the flavor text was added long after the fact, but I like the way it came out. I've done this sort of call-and-response cult leader routine for a couple of others. It suits the "awakened ancient evil" pretty damn well if I do say so myself. All-out necromancy also meshed well with dragon powers making up for the early weakness of relying on skeletons, once I learned not to bankrupt my mana pool raising too many of them.

Hie Thee to Space, Cowboy

"Now I'm lost in a sea of sunken dreams
While the sound of drunken screams echoes in the night"

 

Brandi Carlile - Dying Day

 

 

Continuing my thoughts on space cowboys, I chanced a sub-genre which should have been right up my apocalyptic-minded alley, Jack Vance's Dying Earth books. From the very first couple of short stories I was surprised to find his influence quite palpable in role-playing games -- and only then remembered the D&D spell memorization mechanic is indeed occasionally called "vancian" magic. Not to diminish the touch of Tolkien's fantasy races and Moorcock's chaos/order conflict and even older works, but the general feel of D&D, of "you all meet in a tavern" and the confused mix of tech and magic and quest hooks and magic devices and the adventuring party and bluff checks appears to owe most and most directly to Vance. He may not have originated all of them, but a surprising number of little details like, say grues and de(m)odands, prismatic sprays or the imprisonment spell and such-and-such-wizard's such-and-such-spell made it into game lingo over the decades. Which is not to call these, in themselves, detailed.

 

I've only bothered with the first couple of volumes, and am unlikely to continue. Being published decades apart ('50, '66, '83) those first two at least each read slightly different. The eponymous first is a collection of random short stories and has a more general fairytale atmosphere with alternate worlds, gigantic gods embodied, fair maids riding horses through meadows, a character shrunken and put in a jar, etc. The Eyes of the Overworld is another string of disparate chapters only slightly held together by featuring the same picaresque protagonist, but feels more consciously post-LotR in its more down-to-earth themes. In both cases though it takes very little time to spot weakness after weakness in the writing.

 

In his notion of preindustrial manners and mores Vance seemed content with mimicking Alexandre Dumas, with every single possible character from wizards to fishermen, priests to scullions and princesses to rat-men discoursing up and down, from phrase to phrase and page to page in nothing but the pompous, flowery boasts and imprecations of ancien regime dandies. His world-building is in fact... none of such. The geography could as easily be flipped upside down and jigsawed backwards. Grues, deodands, demons and other monsters are all the same breed of nondescript boogeymen. He may as well have called them all goblins or vampires. Per pulp fantasy routine, impressive-sounding place names and ancient empires lie strewn through the text, most forgotten by the next sentence, and even the few recurring ones no more developed than "place hero visited" with, if they're very lucky, precisely one colorful custom.

 

But to me the most infuriating part was the title: The Dying Earth. You'd think that would have something to do with it. No it does not. About once every other short story, a character might toss in a phrase like 'in this time when the sun is dying' to remind you what the setting should ostensibly concern. "Turjan of Miir" begins with the notion of preserving humanity before devolving to generic spell-slinging and "Guyal of Sfere" manages, by its last couple of pages, to scrape up a thematically appropriate concern for the preservation of knowledge in the face of decay. Aside from that, the entire opus may as well have been set at Scarborough Fair for all it matters. There's nothing to it but the same utterly generic sword-and-sorcery tripe supplied by a thousand other contemporaries. Even the few repetitions of "the sun will go black" make no sense. How often do you think about the sun eventually going orange? Or having shone brighter upon Snowball Earth? Societies which display no other notion of time or history, each isolated tribe utterly unmoored from its global context, somehow all uniformly know and believe this one token scene-setting sound bite, an event so slow they would have no way of tracking it. And it affects their lives not in the slightest.

Had these books not been picked up by DnD, would anyone remember them? Hell, considering even I was willing to try a second volume (more than I did for E.E. Smith) maybe Vance did something right after all. Look at the Numenera setting taking up and running with the 'use magic device' skill displayed by characters pointing tubes of blue whatever at each other in Eyes of the Overworld. Look at the roguish thieving Cugel disarming traps in a wizard's mansion (albeit by poking random furniture with a stick) and it's not hard to see how among the budding pastime of role-playing games in the '70s, players could let their imaginations fill in what became class features. The very vagueness of Vance's random babbling, the half-assed name-dropping of imaginary locales and featureless monsters, invites 'this would read cooler as:' extrapolation. (And probably explains why so many of his fans try to emulate such nonsense sensibilities.)

 

That's probably the best influence bad writing can hope to exert.

 

For comparison, though (so as not to rehash my overused reference to The Time Machine) try a very brief 1949 story by Arthur C. Clarke called The Forgotten Enemy. Here we have, just as the central point unjustly claimed by those Dying Earth buckle-swashes, Clarke's human remnants dwindling in the face of a cosmic shift. But this time the plot stays true to the central theme, the protagonist's circumstances changing according to logical ramifications, the conclusion fully in keeping with the premise.

 

More than other factors, that separates true speculative fiction from space cowboys, space operas, unresearched historical fiction and fantasy worlds whose characters are indistinguishable from adolescents of the writer's own social milieu. Is the setting in fact relevant? Or did the writer substitute the supernatural for incompetence in conveying both the super and the natural?

 

But, conversely, this also demonstrates our need for speculation. Fine, yes, send your cowboys to space. Just don't forget to make the space count for something. Even slapped together as a superficial pretext, the fantastic can spark activity in other minds who will complete the original half-baked idea, in a way that yet another war story or domestic drama simply will not. Half a century of dice and character sheets may not necessarily count as a writer's saving grace, but it's at least a saving throw.

AoW4 Factions, 6

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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Those like myself who grew up reading The Lost World and watching The Flintstones still hold a sense of amazement at the confirmation of the dinosaur>bird lineage. It helped that dragons were put into the game around this same time for an extra big lizard tie-in. On the battlefield, these are some nasty hard-hitting pretty pollys too, so long as I time the first strike salvo correctly. Muskets and astral nuking. Big badda-boom. For a bonus, the dragonkin transformation (extra crits as they lose health) also rewards a death-or-glory charge.

(edit: Looking back on this now, I don't like how much the flavor text ended up sounding like my elvish factions. Oh well. It's probably the antiquity angle skewing my affectations.) 

Harrison Bergeron

"There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

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"Hell emission
Sell emotion
Sick devotion
Down in the gutter"

 

Velvet Acid Christ - Caustic Disco

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It's news to me that (according to TVTropes at least) there have supposedly been various moves to read Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron backwards, as a parody of dystopian fiction. Sounds like a bunch of Lit. students ran out of thesis ideas again. ("See the cradle? See the cat?") I suppose his somewhat flippant black humor would be easy to mistake for parody if you'd never noticed he employed the same in even grimmer contexts.

 

If Vonnegut mocked anything in the field, it was the highfalutin' tone of standard dystopian villains, the bloviating political scholars masterminding the brainwashing of the populace via secretive and sophisticated technological and psychological methods accessible only to some reclusive aristocratic cabal. Here, on the other hand, the end of civilization is not a fiendishly plotting mad scientist. It's a thug with a shotgun, standing up for the average Joe.

 

While Fahrenheit 451 has distinguished itself among famous dystopian works by illustrating the bottom-up anti-intellectual nature of information-age social decline so long before it became obvious, Bergeron closed the gap last decade as the political correctness police began actively enforcing the handicapping of anyone they deemed 'privileged' in the name of 'equity' to the point forcing you to wear a weighted yoke no longer falls outside the realm of their political discourse.

 

But Vonnegut's vision warrants even more recognition vis-a-vis ramping technological invasion of personal attention like infinite scrolling following on the heels of pop-ups and other ever more intrusive advertisement, algorithmically tailored personal content feeds, Linked-In spamming messages that You Are Being Watched and of course, most recently, chat-bots. For a decade I was aware my own attention span was shrinking, that I am increasingly prone to skim rather than read, clicking thoughtlessly back and forth through browser tabs, picking up whatever game quest pops up next. But then I was assuming I'd kill myself soon, so it just seemed a natural part of my decline. Might I presume that mindset illustrative of our entire society's willingness to succumb?

In case you got distracted and missed the point, Bergeron's dystopia imposes never gonna give you up equality by weighing down the strong and fast, by masking the beautiful never gonna let you down, and most importantly by forcing anyone of more than a gnat's intelligence to run around and desert you wear headphones blaring random noises at random intervals, constantly disrupting the thinking of everyone deemed a danger to the peace of mind of peaceful minds. Methods as crass and primitive as befits the system's populist rhetoric. Why just limit, manipulate, subjugate and police thought when you can outright prevent it?

Those computer game random pop-up barbarian attacks I cited last Sunday made me think back to said headphones. In a strategy game, it's a given that some places will be safer than others, that you will define front lines, guarded flanks and pastoral backwaters, that you will shift resources according to a greater, long-term... y'know... strategy? As with other examples like Ixion or cRPGs' overuse of ambushes behind doors or any other system where anything can blow up at any moment, those barbies teleporting in from offscreen seemed to imitate the handicapper general jumping in from stage left with her shotgun.

 

[Kramer bursts in. Audience cheers]

But don't forget why we have this. Because it sells. Because this definition of "fun" which should amuse none older than an infant without object permanence is upheld by 9/10 of our fellow apes. Serenity now.

 

As a last point, it seems many cannot reconcile Vonnegut's socialist views with his egalitarian dystopia. Except of course imposing equality is by no means implied when preventing wealth from imposing inequality. By the way, the rich are robbing you faster than ever. In the end, it turns out the thought-erasing headphones were merely sold in stores, and bought up by an all-too-eager audience.