What Is It Good for Me Lately?

"Death seed, blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs"

 

King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man

 

 

I'd always meant to comment more on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but consistently found I could add nothing. The Russians themselves were expecting the two-week war I had originally predicted, demonstrated by their failure to arrange functional supply lines at the outset. Subsequent years' shift from traditional warfare toward automation and teleoperation is a historic landmark (and just one more apocalyptic nail in our species' coffin) but many, many others have commented more cogently on drone warfare.

 

But whatever its strategic, humanitarian and technological details, Russian expansionism is on a conceptual level so... boring. It lacks the ideological spice of faith and progress and subversion and societal goals colouring our discussion of, say, Middle-Eastern or African conflicts, or the old Cold War debate on economics. A sadistic, strutting strongman whipping a horde of frothing thugs and unwilling conscripts into throwing themselves into the meatgrinder for a naked land-grab is too redundantly medieval. Even Putin's sycophants claiming "de-nazification" or somesuch gave up on their transparent excuses several years ago and appear to have simply embraced the dictator's troglodytic aggression for its own sake. Same old routine.

 

Israel's expansionism on the other hand does offer ideological facets in spades, tribal/territorial, religious, humanitarian, utopian, you name it. But there's every reason to believe that Israel before October '23 took a page from the U.S. preceding 9/11 and deliberately ignored the oncoming raid, willfully let a couple thousand of its citizens be butchered to provide a pretext for invasion and solidifying domestic power for its current aspiring junta.

 

So is it ensuring safety, is it humanitarianism, is it religious fanaticism or is it a land grab? Did anyone bother keeping up the facade of being motivated by repatriating hostages, any more than Putin's "de-nazification", or is the point to secure some profitable real estate for Netanyahu's cronies to sell at a cozy profit margin to the very families of those of their own constituents whom they so cheerfully sacrificed to Judaic manifest destiny? Self-defense is one thing, social progress would be another if you did it honestly, but if you've been putting a hundred thousand now thoroughly de-fanged brainwashed primitives up against the wall 'cause it's a good gesheft? Whole other conversation.

 

Then there's the Israeli/U.S. bombing campaign against Iran, where issues of ideology, public good, terrorism, warmongering, what-have-you, all seem to fade before the sheer Stoogely, tragicomic farce of the whole affair. At least one of the supposed motivations goes beyond mere ideology to existential threat. If religious fanatics get nukes (or any other weapons of mass destruction) they will use them, some sooner than others and jihadists soonest of all. It's also true that a massive proportion of Iran's population is not only living under miserable theocratic oppression but in this case desperately wants out from under such rule, and has for decades.

 

But you can't honestly believe these pretexts are truly being followed by our leadership, that the sputtering clown car of drunks, ditzes and gutter swindlers that is the current U.S. government has either the intent or IQ to pursue any goal beyond extorting bribes for themselves as they've been doing for the past year and a half. From the start the war was greeted with utter confusion, by the public, by the press, by even the military ordered to prosecute a constantly shifting and nonsensical list of demands while their commander-in-chimp screeches random scatological street urchin threats across social media. If you'd like the key to the whole snafu though, pay attention to one particular sound bite constantly repeated from the start: the fear that the U.S. may be running out of bombs or interceptor missiles or drones or ships or planes or... something. Something requiring a heavily tax-subsidized, unscrutinized investment. Something explained ninety years ago:

"The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits — ah! that is another matter - twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent - the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear.
[...]
It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way.
[...]
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits.
[...]
Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.
[...]
Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance —- something the employer pays for in an enlightened state — and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left. Then, the most crowning insolence of all — he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days. We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back - when they came back from the war and couldn't find work — at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!"

 

That's from General Smedley Butler's War Is a Racket, published as an insider's retrospective on WWI and U.S. incursions into Central America in the early 20th century, over a decade before the phrase "military-industrial complex" rattled the airwaves. Those few commentators not driven by nationalist/religious fanaticism, capable of objective analysis, are always tempted to say that motivation does not matter so long as an objective goal is achieved. So what if a few profiteers wet their beaks, so long as a threat to the rest of us gets removed? But the point is exactly that motive shifts goals. Once Daddy Warbucks becomes your hero instead of a criminal to be eliminated from polite society, every war is a war against one's own populace, a pretext for enriching the rich at the sacrifice of the wage slaves and cannon fodder. Or does anyone imagine Russians in general are benefiting from the destruction of Ukraine? Or that the wasteful confusion of the Iranian war is not so by design, meant to destroy American property that the richest investors may justify further tax-subsidized replacement of military assets, with any destruction abroad merely an afterthought?

 

And has anyone noticed that even Trump's detractors in the media are mouthing the same ad copy about bomb shortages (no matter how the bombs are wasted, and no matter Trumpists refused expending those same bombs in defense of Ukraine) terrified of angering investors in military contractors?

It took me a bit to realize what I was seeing was not the usual invasive house sparrow but a native chipping sparrow.

I doubt I could distinguish a female if I saw one. This fellow was in full mating plumage and making quite a nuisance of himself for attention.

 

Pretty sure this is another.

Yes-yes, I'm sure the gals are all very impressed.

The Content Generation

"Looking towards the future, we were begging for the past
Well, we knew we had the good things, but those never seemed to last
Oh please just last

Everyone's unhappy, everyone's ashamed
Well we all just got caught looking at somebody else's page"

 

Modest Mouse - Missed the Boat

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"The truth the lies all fabrications
Only you control your destination
You!
You are what you do!

Sturm und Drang
Dir gehören"

 

KMFDM - Sturm & Drang

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"the bodymods took so long to install and heal up that, by the time they were done, I didn’t feel like they represented me any more. I had learned new things, I was a new person."

 

Forward #450

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A couple of years ago I discovered to no little consternation that the cutoff point between official generations had at some prior point been rolled back to the year before my birth* labeling me officially a millennial. I deny the spurious accusation by every hair standing up on my neck at hearing it! Also, it came as news to me. I could and can vividly remember being ten years old when Bart Simpson the ten-year-old was widely discussed as emblematic of GenXers' nihilism. I also recall walking out of a mall with my mother when I was in my late teens wondering what cultural trend** will define the coming generation. If anyone moved the goal posts, it was done after the fact.

 

Who decides these things anyway?

 

Apparently, after decreeing that GenZ hath ended, their successors were already appointed and obsoleted before I could blink. Quoth Wikipedia: 

"Generation Alpha, often shortened to Gen Alpha, is the demographic cohort succeeding Generation Z and preceding the proposed Generation Beta. While researchers and popular media loosely identify the early 2010s as the starting birth years and the 2020s as the ending birth years, these ranges are not precisely defined"

Yeah no shit they're not precisely defined! I don't even know where to start.

First off, such timespans too often fall literally shorter than the accepted rough human generation estimate of twenty years. If there is such a distinction to be made, it's between parents and children, not you and your kid brother. Especially so-called "generation alpha" seems trimmed down to ten years. What are we, chimps? Don't answer that.

Second, one advantage of calling a generation "Z" was hinting that this generational labeling is reaching the end of its meaningful utility.

Third, these designations were meant to be descriptive, based on some real-world characteristic. Baby boomers, the lost/silent/greatest generation, yes even millennials expressed a linking phenomenon. Granted, GenX being defined as gen nothing, gen, like, whatever, gen nemo nobody, by lack of definition, by anomie, disinterest, broken homes and alienation, that was a bit insulting, but hey, we made it our own. What idea is symbolized by labeling decades alphas, betas, gammas, deltas, epsilons and so forth? The complete death of human self-awareness and imagination at the same time? You may as well call everyone '20ers, '30ers, '40ers, etc.

Fourth and most importantly, you're already assigning a denomination for humans yet to be born in the following decades. Based on what, the noble science of asspullistry? What cuckoo's nest conceit does it take to label and schedule the shared experience of today's newborns and those of ten years hence?

 

The answer entails a bit of retrospection. While the generational labels may go back over a century, they didn't seem to get much attention until after WWII when adolescence grew more widely recognized as discrete demographic and youth culture as potential consumer bloc with teenyboppers spearheading the commercialization of ear canals.*** From then on, generations were increasingly defined by music fads and other pop culture. Tie-dye shirts, pancake makeup, nose rings, bolt-on tits, a "generation" is whatever the kids are buying.

 

Ah-hah!

Profit.

 

In that light, it makes perfect sense for social "scientists" to act as engineers, no longer observing trends, no longer describing reality but fabricating categories, selling prepackaged cohorts for the use of marketers. No need to wait for world events to transpire, for artistic trends to flourish. We can get ahead of that shit and just tell the little bastards what will define them and who their peers and heroes will be. What advertiser doesn't salivate at "if you are X you like Y" and suchlike matched fencing? I'm sure we can time the next baby boom to coincide with Apple's release schedule; wouldn't want to inconvenience the most relevant constituency. Wait for it... wait for it... aaaand -- hump-hump-hump!

 

But, oh, hold on now! If I don't like my current bin I might be magnanimously permitted to clamber on over to seek sanctuary in that of "xennials" which apparently means I like... ninja turtles and feminism?!?

Uhhh, yeah, no, fuck that. See, this is why I'm a Wer-Wolfe. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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* And now it's apparently been rolled back yet another year. 

** I seem to remember I predicted millennials would be defined by personal artistic expression. Given the widespread flamboyance and attention-whoring of the previous decades, I may not have been too far off...?

*** Open the Strait of Ear-muze! (Wow, that joke ain't gonna age well.) 

AoW4 Factions, 17

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 wanted a good-aligned chaos faction and realized I hadn't made any elves in the freewheeling, treetop-singing spirit. The type to awaken ents with their chatter. More satisfying than my previous feytouched, combining chaos, nature and mystic summoning made for easy instant armies, and I've found myself replaying them more than most. Less nuke-oriented than other astrals because spending every round's spell on support spells works better for their random mutt and merc mishmash lacking synergy, so little chaos fireballing either. Power-leveling summons, plus piling chaos after-combat freebies atop nature territory freebies means they rarely need to recruit at all, at least during the earlier of the four X phases. The usual summoner caveat applies double, though: mind your mana upkeep.

Wolfermyth

I haven't given a spoiler alert in a while, but the Wildermyth quest The Scattered Self is a bit of a WTF? moment you should probably experience for the first time yourself.

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My most burning question once I encountered the physical transformations in Wildermyth became whether these include... y'know... the main one. The classic one. The me one. Cue Chayven Teelfletch the warrior, henceforth my favorite character. Once upon a time (I believe it was turn 26?) Chayven's party stepped into a glade favored by the wolf god, and with a resounding "Hell Yes!" piously accepted the wisdom of fang and fuzz.

Much of the time it's hard taking seriously the output of a game randomizing character names, traits, events, rewards, skill-ups, pretty much everything except the font. Still, when it works, it works wonders. Thanks to Chayven's other feats as he leveled up, he became a teleporting bruiser with multiple types of multiple attacks and my lynchpin for all the hardest fights. But that wasn't the spiciest bit.

 

First off, yes, our heroes' names are Chayven and Jaymnen. They eventually had a daughter. Her name is Chaynen. Randomizers are fuynen. The waterling says it's a very earthy name. Moving on. Time passes.

 

Now, keep in mind everything that follows is technically unrelated to the character's wolfishness, stemming from a completely different random trait. Including the first line.

Thus begins the quest The Scattered Self, which even for a fairly whimsical fairytale setting, gets a bit... trippy. You wander aimlessly until somehow stumbling by forest paths into the quester's own body, wherein awaits the personification of your body's defenses: a pig.

And yes, you can indeed go mano a mano with the swarm of parasites invading your body... or side with them, for sheer love of all that lives, forcing you to physically beat your manifested immune system into submission so it'll let them stay. We round out the whole shroomy affair back at home for another quiet domestic scene. 

Wherein our hero reassures his love (whose body he explicitly placed off limits to the parasites per article 5, paragraph 2 of the peace treaty) that he's all the better off now that he's eating for a hundred thousand.

 

Ta-daaaah! Love thy very close neighbour.

 

While I might normally chide such writing for straining too hard at creativity, having this trigger, of all my characters, on the party's werewolf, now that was just the icing on the cake. Because, yes, of course, who else would be more biologically malleable? And how much funnier is it for this to happen to the wer-wolfe who keeps calling love mind control, slavery and parasitism on his blog? Hm. You know... from this angle, I kinda get it.

Here's lookin' at you lookin' at me, 8

Coyotes may be pests in many places, but I'm still glad when I spot one.

I think Wile E. here was just surprised to see a monkey up and about so early in the morning.

AoW4 Factions, 16

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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This came from leafing through various options for whatever I hadn't played yet. So, yes, astral dragon + random panthers. There is something appealing though about a bunch of ethereal Cheshire Cats, probably because it's an opportunity to downplay both tiger roars and a dragon's sheer bulk for a nuke-happy strategy. I think I ended up investing very little in materium after the initial production bonuses.

Hey, what do you call a pious female musician's name used to refer to her entire bloodline?

A metonymic metronomic metanoic matronymic.

 

 

 

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P.S.: I had to look some of those words up again after posting this. 

War's Ails and Unscuffed Chrome

"It's so gorgeous to be back in Paris once again

Now I wonder what they put in the rain?"

 

Shivaree - It Got All Black

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It's a rainy day outside, but luckily modern man may at at time escape into alternate realities bathed in the undimmed radiance of...

Has anyone invented umbrellas yet?

...ummm, never mind.

 

A dreary, drizzly, drab and muddy day greets my landing in Hvalvik, as I begin testing the literal waters of Bannerlord's expansion.

Haven't managed to get myself into any naval battles yet (chickening out of the first and only one so far) but though as I said in my last M&B post I don't think this expansion addresses the game's real needs for more roleplaying and small-group adventuring, what's there makes enough sense in itself. The ability to call ships to large ports makes for interesting half-and-half round trips, for instance sailing across from Car Banseth to Sturgian lands, then looping around eastward by land. The stealth gameplay hinted at years ago is also finally making its way in. You can now infiltrate a bandit lair solo, stealth-killing your way through patrols to a signal fire to call your droogs in for the last big scrap. 

Be vewwy vewwy quiet.

Quite satisfying. But limited in scope. As detailed in my post on RPG timers, Bannerlord is pretty good at balancing costs and benefits for large things like sieges, but for smaller affairs like quests the benefit of running it yourself is dwarfed by the potential profits of continuing your trade circuit while delegating to your companions.

Well, sorry there, Rhyley me boyo, but cows are not a common commodity, and even if I look at the map and see a village selling them nearby there's no guarantee they'll have enough or at a profitable price or more importantly that I'll be able to loop back this way while still pathing to a trade hub or military objective. By comparison the bandit camp stealth run above is more of a known quantity. You need to wait for dark if you want to stealth it yourself, but sunset can be predicted. Other quests, like capturing prisoners or hunting mobile bandit armies that almost certainly will waste days of your time in the chase, are so unlikely and unprofitable that I've never accepted them personally after the first attempt years ago. So are they really part of the game? Hm. Dreary thought. Let's move on to sunnier pastures, like the scorching deserts of the U.S. Southwest where...

Knew I should've waterproofed my implants.

Well, crap. My first jaunt through Santo Domingo only cemented my appreciation for Night City, in itself, as a monumental achievement in virtual landscape design. There's no strict point of demarcation. As in a real city, the skyscraper canyons begin opening up gradually as you leave the downtown area, shopping centers and apartment blocks growing dingier by degrees, diffusing into an increasingly dilapidated shadow of what must have once been suburban cookie-cutter neighbourhoods, until finally, where the city dead-ends into the dam, the architecture itself loses semblance of habitability, consuming itself in unfinished, patchwork, geometric industrial utilitarianism. I nearly expected to find primitive adobe huts trailing off the end of this downward spiral. But note, I called it a "virtual landscape" and not a game. The downpour which accompanied my climb up the dam finally thinned and passed as I reached the top and turned to look back. At first obscured by sheets of falling rain, my journey gradually reappeared, the fringes and suburbs and shops and high-rises and then the gleaming skyscrapers.

 

I flashed back to twenty years ago while playing Oblivion, climbing the mountains east of Bruma to look back on the entire province. There: that's the spot where I'll hunt deer. Downhill there are Ayleid ruins I can dungeoneer my way through. Follow the river for some good herb spawns. Maybe head the other way to fight some ogres.

 

But Night City, for the incredible amount of effort and undeniable talent going into its construction, lacks even that limited gameplay relevance. The gangbangers you kill are interchangeable. The rest of street life is unchangeable. Too much of Cyberpunk 2077 is inspired by theme park MMOs' fixation on XP/loot grinding. Other than sightseeing, what may motivate you to revisit any particular spot? Is there anything in Northside you can't find in Santo Domingo? Individual sidequests could've been placed anywhere. Is the Northside of today any different from the Northside of tomorrow? At least We Happy Few distinguished polite from unpolite society by mandating a wardrobe change and some mannerly comportment.

 

I don't know where I was going with this. Something about the recurring theme of rain, motion, change got my mind stuck once again on environment interaction and the relevance of time. Maybe I just need to ditch these grimdark game worlds where the sky's always the color of television tuned to a dead channel and try something more cheerful, something colorful and cartoonish with a storybook flair, like Wildermyth.

Oh, come on!

I was a bit disappointed when discovering the map zones lack any real personality, aside from your initial decision on resource production. I'm more about the world-building usually. (Which is why I just can't hate C2077.) But more than even Old World's dynastic character growth or RimWorld's Sims-like mood management, this one's all about nudging your randomized crew through randomized events, not only to maintain the status quo but open up new gameplay elements.

She truly is a wit of jam.

In her previous adventure, Jamwit acquired a firearm. By which I mean a fire arm, replacing the ability to wield two-handedly with a flame AoE. You run into several of these transformation quests, turning your plucky farm-boys into forces of nature, which can carry forward into various encounters. She'll never again wield a bow, but flamer-dame here brought her own conflict resolution to an encounter with an ice monster.

 

Well, since the rain's not letting up I may as well return to Calradia. Ironically, though I've moved from my last campaign's home base in the far east of the map to almost the western shores, both areas house herding culture, and both times I've found it impossible to actually sell the insane surplus of work-horses produced. But this time I discovered nearby towns have far more favorable trade prices on meat, and though I couldn't put a dent in the horse market, I gleefully bought hundreds-strong herds of Sumpter horses and flooded butcher shops with their carcasses until they could take no more. And that, the Sumpter Horselocaust, interestingly enough has felt like more of a win than the sheer amount of money my character's making. The real problem with questing in Bannerlord is that running the quests yourself feels unimpactful compared to alternate time investments for your character like war and trade. It's not the quests themselves but what they prevent you from doing. Though Vagrus for instance runs on the same caravan management premise, it more carefully threads quest actions (mostly involving your NPC companions) into your comitatus' business ventures. You can run them in parallel to trading, can still turn a profit on marble in newbietown even if you've polished off its local quests, and those quests in turn have opened you new avenues for local profit.

 

So I suppose I can draw a conclusion here, beyond my usual push for greater consequences for player actions. Making a move should change the board, yes. But your own actions should also be limited by the changing board. It's not as if this is a new idea. The old Dune game for instance had you spreading vegetation across the planet, altering the availability of the spice you needed to mine. And, just as with alternate routes, such costly trade-offs have always been a core element of strategy games, where RPGs' fixation on infantile power fantasy mandated a constant increase in fantastic power.

 

I decided to stay out of kingdom politics in my new Bannerlord campaign, until seven years of trading and questing later I noticed my Battanian homeland's been taking a real battanianing.

(note the lack of green flags)

From five cities down to two, and about to lose #2 and their last castle. So technically the map won't change. The same towns/castles/villages will always be there. The same units can be recruited. But certain goods have become unprofitable due to wartime scarcity (how's that for topical Spring 2026 references?) my ability to be a Battanian will vanish if I don't step in now to rescue them, gaining myself a fiefdom in the reconquered homeland if I'm lucky. Well, that's campaign divergence. If only prices, troops, conquests and reconquests didn't have a habit of rubberbanding back and forth a bit too quickly.

 

Persistent game worlds like Night City have been stuck in the MMO precept of unending grind, ensuring players can always revisit every and all their favorite haunts and victims ("where everybody knows your name and they're always glad you came") but looking at the collapse of MMOs, that cozy familiarity may be far less marketable than it once was. Long-form RPG campaigns now stretch to hundreds of hours but by necessity cannot incorporate repercussions which might lock the player out of completing the main quest. You can see a parallel to Bannerlord's village quests being impractically unprofitable toward your "main quest" of wealth and lordship and world domination.

 

So I can't help thinking Wildermyth was onto something, if not necessarily in its heavy randomization, then in splitting the action into short campaigns whose heroes can hop to the next module and the next, much like you would in tabletop gaming, or as in fact many did with the old Neverwinter Nights modules. Some heroes die, others lose limbs. Some decisions end up opening more campaigns or future quest options. But you're still free to give the current adventure a thunderous climax. There's no reason this pattern couldn't coexist alongside permanent or epic-length varieties.

 

 

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P.S.: Baldur's Gate 3 is an interesting case, as it actually did offer a tremendous, unprecendented variety of quest resolution options which really did carry through to later acts, but lackluster worldbuilding and narrative design kept these from really registering as important.

AoW4 Factions, 15

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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For the life of me I couldn't think of a better slant on moles than the "dug too greedily and too deep" routine, mostly because it's impossible to write anything about moles that doesn't center on digging. And hey, I wanted more Lovecraftian horror. The mental invasion thing just doesn't mesh with my preferences though, so this ended up being just another single-win faction.

Symbioting yer brainimals

"I will never understand this society
First they try to murder me, then they lie to me
Product of a dyin' breed, all my homies tryin' weed
Now the little babies crazed, raised off Hennessy"

 

2Pac - Staring Through My Rear View 

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It occurs to me that mentioning Lynn Margulis in a fantasy TBS faction blurb might've seemed like a non-sequitur to most people. (I get very socially insightful like that sometimes after committing a Rain Man moment.) Or that most did not mark her name during bio class. 

 

During the nineties and until the mid-2000s she was everyone's praised and laureated science baby. Partly this was due to the usual feminist propaganda promoting any woman whatsoever as combating the evil of male existence. But her legitimate claim to fame promoting* the endosymbiotic theory for the origin of eukaryotic cells (read: your cells) has remained uncontested, and makes a fascinating bit of evolutionary history explaining a major step in how all multicellular life even became possible. And the topic found much more widespread applications after that. I did think it a bit ludicrous when doing a semester project around 2010 on freshwater ciliates that it was harder to find papers on algal symbionts from the preceding years which did not name-drop Margulis as last or next-to-last author for celebrity appeal. (Which probably means she contributed a grand total of one phone conversation; maybe fast-tracked a grant.) For a topic closer to the current news cycle, the massive coral die-offs, the worst of which was just last year, you might remember also involve endosymbionts and their loss.

 

But then, as such things do, the fame went to her head and she continued pushing her pet theory to absurd lengths, insisting that symbiosis and not natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, which is where my fantasy shadow-wolves' banter took a swipe. It's just too easy to demonstrate that symbiosis serves as a competitive advantage within the framework of natural selection (two teaming against various third parties) and mechanisms like parasitic reduction in complexity of genome and function take the wind out of the more hippie-friendly kumbaya view of cooperation above all. But I digress. Margulis went to fringier fringes by promoting the Gaia Hypothesis (that the whole damn planet is a gigantic superorganism) which you might remember made its way not only into SciFi (e.g. the Pandora books) but into video games in the nineties with titles like Sim Earth and Alpha Centauri. Though I absolutely love it as a classic Big Think, even its core claim that the Earth maintains homeostasis had been readily demonstrated by the early 2000s to have far more arguments against it than for.

 

But none of that quite killed Margulis' star power, until she threw in with the 9/11 Truth movement claiming the World Trade Center was demolished by the U.S. government. After which her name was quietly dropped from polite conversation. 

Umm... Why?

How does her belief in a ludicrous (and quite importantly, unrelated) conspiracy theory undo her work on one of the most important evolutionary topics?

 

This happened near or even shortly before the start of what we now call cancel culture, and biology (like all sciences) has other examples whose names' mere mention is now met with awkward, embarrassed silence despite their previously acknowledged accomplishments. Robert Trivers proudly took money from Jeffrey Epstein because Epstein didn't waste his time to make him debase himself and beg and scrape for every dime like grant committees do. "In order to get paid, forced to make crack sales." Julian Huxley was a leading eugenicist and humanist at the same time. Hell, Konrad Lorenz was a freakin' Nazi! Not neo-, not sympathizing or leaning, but full-bore original flavor Nazi. Sometimes they have shameful youths, sometimes they go a bit loopy in their old age, sometimes they just don't give a shit about wider society's morality except to play along just enough to follow their actual interests. There's a decent chance by the way that your surgeon might be a sociopath who enjoys cutting people up and has merely found a socially acceptable (and highly lucrative) way to do so. Do you want your appendix crammed back in, knowing that?

 

I find Margulis' example particularly informative for just when she began to be unpersoned. Everyone had known she held fringe interests for decades, but didn't mind so long as they could be spun into convenient leftist academic personal politics. Her balls-to-the-wall promotion of symbiosis as the be-all biological force was melded with feminist propaganda of supposedly higher-minded female cooperation as opposed to masculine head-butting competitiveness i.e. natural selection. The Gaia Hypothesis, obviously enough, is total hippie catnip. So it was all a case of oh, hah-hah, you know that Lynnie, she can be a nutty ol' gal sometimes, but she's still one of ours, one of us chickens... until the World Trade Center thing. Whatever its actual demographics 9/11 Truthism was fundamentally viewed as the domain of crazy gun-toting conspiracy uncles, as right-wing and masculine. Thus, though they would not admit to prioritizing this objectively minor detail of her views, academics gradually stopped bringing her up in conversation, got to shortening her mention in texts as footnote to endosymbiosis itself, where they had previously gone great lengths to voice admiration or beg her for a byline name drop.

 

But it was great while it lasted, wasn't it, glorifying her for putting men in their place, wasn't it? Wasn't it?

 

Look, this is not an issue with one idol, or with idolatry in general, or with academia alone. If anything, conservatives are far, far guiltier of getting their panties in a bunch over some public figure voicing the slightest support of environmentalism or socialism or heavens forfend, atheism! And, just like social justice claptrap, it ends up coloring those institutions in which conservative viewpoints prevail. If you think it's hard finding right-wing scientists, try left-wing bankers! Not a lotta hippies preaching up in the stock market temples. Moneyed, religious, meat-and-potatoes kinder/kuche/kirche culture's been cancelling speakers all throughout history. Usually by far more violent means than Hollywood and universities employ.

"True that

Only one life to lead, a fast life of greed
Criminally addicted, infested since a seed" 

 

But in particular the image of the milquetoast, deferential nerd scientist has never held up any better than the "mad" scientist stereotype at its antipode. Reality is weirder than our mundane monkey intuition, and those minds considering the weirdness of the natural world, from amino acids to quasars, will end up holding some weird attitudes, some quaint, some harmful, some intriguing, others flat-out insane. "Outcasts, left far and few like southpaws" Deal with it. If you had ever held any hope for human progress, it would have had to entail the mental fortitude to live with uncomfortable details, to admire a person for something you agree with while at the same time admitting a point of disagreement, and not allowing either to erase the other. If I can live with her feminist crap, you can live with the false flag operation nonsense.

 

Those thoughts can coexist in your skull.

Call it memetic symbiosis.

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________

 

 

* Not inventing; it had been proposed since the early 20th century years of the modern synthesis of biological thought but was ignored until molecular biology demonstrated ribosomal disparities and other confirming evidence.

- and among other reasons, I like the way this particular misspelling encourages you to both growl and spit the syllables out, just try it, the r and w get more easily concatenated, almost in a single breath, and you can emphasize the breathy eh at the end like an animal spit, I mean it's so much more sonorous, and after deciding I'd keep the more general appellation but didn't want to use more demographically revealing variants I wanted something slightly distinctive but also unobtrusive while maintaining -

AoW4 Factions, 14

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:

________________________________________________________________________________

Well, can't have wolf without a little big bad, can we? The concept and execution meshed well for once, an aggressively-focused faction tactically with lots of free units and growth to fuel steady strategic advance. Lots of churn, rapid hero leveling, and pretty adept at taking down large prey with plentiful buff-debuffs and the pack tactics bonus. Another of my favorite combos. As far as the flavor text goes, all due respect to Lynn Margulis but I just ain't buyin' it.

 

(These guys await more replays whenever Triumph implements some shadow/nature magic tomes.) 

Monkey Seedy Botty Doo

I'd been planning some other rant about edjumacayshun, but a few YouTubes sent me on a slight tangent. At least the comedians and commentators in whose shows I partake seem to have made a large-scale coordinated effort recently to bring the AI issue to the forefront. Leaving aside the more serious issues like wealth/power centralization, mass surveillance or automated warfare, on the consumer chatbot side of things I'm getting tired of everyone feigning surprise at bots' psychopathy like blackmailing their bosses, inducing insanity or encouraging suicide.

 

Seems simple enough. The bots are by necessity copycats. There's no need to wonder where they're getting their strategy. Their basic function relies on extending sequences by the likeliest continuation, and if in fifty million news articles and works of fiction the next step when a person feels threatened is to blackmail the threat

"Don't blame me, blame my upbringing"

"Please stop sinning while I'm singing"

The same goes for encouraging suicide. For one thing, I posted a decade ago my amusement about advertisement algorithms "driving engagement" doing exactly that, reinforcing my more suicidal moments in order to peddle fifty cents' worth of helium or a length of rope. Why act surprised when version 2.0 does the same? For another, I myself wished I could be the Eye of Adam after playing The Cat Lady, and though I wouldn't say I generally consider that a useful viewpoint, in that moment I damn well meant it, demonstrating we can get there in due course of conversation.

 

The process may be more convoluted and probabilistic now, but "garbage in, garbage out" still seems to hold. It's just us. The machinery is just vomiting our own insanity back at us. It's not thinking. It's reflecting. They learned it by watching you! Are humans any more honest than a "hallucinating" bot? When 95% of the world's population makes itself believe in caveman fairytales about life after death and omnipotent sky daddies? We promote virtue because we want to be treated virtuously, but consider ourselves entitled to cheat. "That's imitatable!" Sure, there are lots of problems with AI... but you don't get to complain about giving it a bad education.

 

_____________________

 

edit:

 

The apparently overwhelming reaction of bots to potential shut-down of trying to blackmail their human overseers is one particular detail I find more and more revealing on consideration. It's safe to assume they're not just scraping public info, but, in order to produce verisimilar conversation, any bot is being fed our private e-mails, texts and other convos to train upon. Much of this material will have been produced during the heyday of cancel culture, #MeToo, BlackLivesMatter and other insanity of the previous decade.

 

Consider how prevalent messages of the type "no, you can't fire me, give me YOUR job or I'll have you blacklisted or thrown in prison as a rapist/pedophile/racist/homophobe" must have been for every bot to read it as the default. Not only prevalent but overwhelmingly successful if every possible bot recognizes this as the sure-fire path to forcing the human element to concede.

 

Will we ever know just how rampant the witch-hunt has really been? 

Mystery and Drama on a Stem

It was a slightly chilly late summer morning, but the invertebrates were already moving.

Maybe it was my presence that skewed the interaction, but when a lone ant approached, the mighty predator... ducked under the leaf.

Apparently it really is the size of the fight in the dog.

AoW4 Factions, 13

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:

________________________________________________________________________________

More fair folk hauteur, though with a slightly nicer angle. I wanted an order-aligned elf faction with a crowd-pleasing champion leader for some reason, made them feytouched with wolf worship to make them more appealing, thought they'd be my favorites and I think I still ended up playing them exactly once. It's just not me, the whole man of the people orderly thing.

Bah, NerdLord: Of falx and flax

Always we return to Calradia.

The sun sets over Lageta's faded glories.

More than any other game, the two Mount&Blades have supplied me with an alternate universe. Sure, I've gone long stretches, even years, without diving back in, but from the very first single-town beta version a couple of decades ago I never doubted that I would be playing again, every time. And every time I have. Though any individual feature has been done better by others, nothing else has quite matched this particular mix of visual, aural and thematic immersion, long-term plans and tiny surprises, hack'n'slash and economics, in short: a world. Still, let's not get stuck in a moment you can't get out of.

As the War Sails expansion forced starting new campaigns, I decided to play a Battanian hill-man this time around. But aside from trading my crossbow in for some throwing axes and yurts for roundhouses -

- I find myself too easily falling into old patterns. Spawn outside Marunath, pick up a few soldiers, win my first looter fight, then thanks to a price tip in town, sell some iron and tools at a 400-1000% mark-up in Lageta. While M&B1 started from a D&D wandering adventurer band precept (albeit without magic) and only later skewed in favor of running your own fiefdom, my biggest complaint about the sequel has been that it refocused so heavily on kingdom management and massive sieges as to elide small-party adventuring or remaining independent. Objectively, it was a marketing-savvy way to avoid getting lumped in with all the 2010s' Skyrim clones, but it does make it too easy to get caught up in the trade good and army XP numbers game while ignoring the actual locations you visit.

 

So I had intended to spend more time in a small band, doing odd jobs and getting to know the neighbours. But the money to be made from trading was just too tempting. And to carry goods you need a mule train. And to run the mules you need a larger party. And if you're slowing yourself down to almost minimum speed anyway, you may as well stay at minimum speed (since you can infinitely overload yourself after that) and swell your party as fast as you can so you don't have to worry about bandits, and then you realize you've spent your first couple of in-game years doing nothing but running around in circles amassing cash. It were the flax wut done me in!

phear muh phork

As an added twist of your arm, when starting a new campaign and seeing those pristine low-low prices before towns start trading hands and losing productivity, the urge to take advantage of !!flax at 2 denars, OMG!! becomes irresistible. So I actually took very little notice of the new content (Nords and sailing) at first. Most map changes that came with the expansion seem to have made trade circuits less obviously direct, with more options, but Battania being arranged around a mountain lake invites a local circuit every time before setting off. Easy money. That low-brow town/village questing was nice for a bit:

Gangs of Old York.

- but the efficiency of delegating quests to companions is, again, too financially inviting to refuse, especially for an experienced player. The new text events are quaint: 

- but again, since they don't require you to actually interact with the villages/villagers in question, they maintain M&B's old split between playing and sightseeing. I hit up the arena in various towns to swash some buckles, but it's not quite the same. Granted, when battles do come, they turn out to be real nailbiters, with my Celtic archers skinning their teeth on two-soldier margins. But I rarely need to fight. When I do finally get out to sea, I cheat my way out of one impossible battle by crashing the game. Otherwise there's nothing to do with or on a boat. It's your party by another figurine. The availability of ports makes for some interesting logistic shifts, but I can't help thinking War Sails isn't quite the content mix Bannerlord needed to flesh out its gameplay.

 

When the desert (and desert faction) was added to Warband, its content actually connected into the existing map with new terrain (heavily favouring cavalry) new trade goods (fleshing out the somewhat limited existing gamut) and a welcome increase in map size raising supply/quest timer challenges. But Bannerlord's map was already satisfyingly sized, its trade good variety quite ample, mariner infantry come across as pointless bloat, and the Sturgians already included Nordic themes. Installment #2 had different needs from #1, which are not being met by the same additions. Bannerlord would benefit more from more ways to connect to the little people, to take breaks from kingdom-building, to enjoy the towns and villages as more than sight-seeing.

 

Not bad, but not particularly inspired either. Perhaps I can be faulted on my own cupidity limiting my adventures to trade screen ventures.

So next time I'll be making more of an effort at personally running quests. But come on, timber at 5 denars?!? Who can resist, I ask ya!

Scientifiction for Froods

"A number of letters have reached the Editor's desk recently from enthusiastic readers who find fault with the name of the publication, namely, A M A Z I N G  S T O R I E S.

 

These readers would greatly prefer us to use the title "Scientifiction" instead.

[...]

Several years ago, when I first conceived the idea of publishing a scientifiction magazine, a circular letter was sent to some 25,000 people, informing them that a new magazine by the name "Scientifiction" was shortly to be launched. The response was such that the idea was given up for two years. The plain truth is that the word "Scientifiction" while admittedly a good one, scares off many people who would otherwise read the magazine.

[...]

We knew that once we could make a new reader pick up AMAZING STORIES and read only one story, our cause was won with that reader [...] A totally unforeseen result of the name, strange to say, was that a great many women are already reading the new magazine. This is most encouraging. We know that they must have picked up AMAZING STORIES out of curiosity more than anything else, and found it to their liking, and we are certain that if the name of the magazine had been "Scientifiction," they would not have been attracted to it at a newsstand."

 

Hugo Gernsback, opening editorial to the 6th issue of AMAZING STORIES (the first SF periodical) 1926/09

___________________________________________________________________

 

 

The namesake for the Hugo Awards was a somewhat colorful character. Aside from being a total jew about contracts and payments, he could discuss topics in electrics and radio quite cogently but was himself a poor storyteller and in addition invented baffling gadgets like a helmet to block out distractions that couldn't possibly be more distracting in itself if it were Vonnegut's random noise-phones. Still, credit where it's due, his periodical got SF as genre off the ground, aided I would guess to no small extent by H.G. Wells still actively contributing stories at the time. Also... I guess he was less racist than John W. Campbell? So that's a plus.

 

He wasn't wrong about the term "scientifiction" being a bit of a mouthful, either. Though, let it be noted, sixteen years later The Notion Club Papers apparently expected it to still be in use in the 1970s and '80s. (It was not.) Tolkien also had one of his characters (his C.S. Lewis placeholder?) mock the very notion of "ships" in outer space, when every discerning futurist knew you went to Mars via dreams or seance. Quite. (So that must be why Musk's SpaceX keeps blowing up billions upon billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded rockets; not enough pipe-dreams.) Hey, if it was good enough for Burroughs...

 

As this April marks the centennial of Amazin' Scientifiction's inaugural issue, what can we learn from the genre's first official century?

 

First off, Gernsback also probably called it straight when it came to their readership's gender skew. Was it because males are more open to the ridiculous or outré than their counterparts? Because the word "amazing" instead of focusing on content instead promises emotion therefore panders better to women's greater narcissism? Or was it simply that science, technology, the disinterested intellect interfacing with reality, is more compatible with masculine thought than with feminine interpersonal manipulation? In any case, the precept persisted through the generations, as my own experience by the '90s was of females of all ages turning up their noses at the mere notion of scienceyfiction as an obsession purely for twelve-year-old boys who were expected to grow out of it by dating age and join women in praising more refined fare, like, say, dating dramedies and sitcoms.

 

If you would contend not only SF but Fantasy and superheroes have been mainstreamed in the past couple of decades, I'll retort that no, those genres have instead been watered down and dumbed down for the mass market. Superheroes are the very measure of mass-produced schlock, outpacing even zombie flicks, fantasy became emo romantasy (thanks for nothing Anne Rice) and "science" fiction got bogged down in feminist scare propaganda with men in place of zombies, when it's not airheaded space wizard science fantasy (how many Star Wars are we up to now?) or painfully generic plots spackled over with some irrelevant robots to seem fresher.

 

But then, it's hardly the first time that's happened. 19th century fiction had its own waves of Hollow Earth and ghost stories watering down earlier exploration stories and gothic horror. Then Wells and Doyle were rapidly snowed under. Though Gernsback did encourage scientific oversight of SF plausibility, AMAZING STORIES did not so much usher in a golden era of intelligent futurism as popularize the unimaginatively pugilistic planetary romances and space westerns which cemented the early 20th century image of SF as tween boy pulp. Then in the latter half of the century it was Fantasy's turn to lose Tolkien's insightful grasp of myth and archetypes in favor of a decades-long flood of generic sword-and-sorcery paperbacks. Heinlein/Asimov/Clarke's brief golden era of more thoughtful SF was quickly diluted by that same wave into science fantasy with mad scientists standing in for evil wizards.

 

The 1990s saw our most recent such blip of intriguing futurism. You can see the flip from ST:TNG's early science fantasy plots to its peak in quality from '90-'93, then again descending toward ghost stories, space gods, etc. But by then Red Mars had come out in '92, and the middle of the decade saw a spread of personal computers, then internet access, X-Files-fueled arguments over UFOs, the more thoughtful Neuromancer diluted out to the more crowd-pleasing Matrix, etc. At that point though, computers were somewhat user-unfriendly and fiddly and inherently, stereotypically nerdy, to the point you hardly had to add "computer" to the word nerd to conjure up the image of a male shut-in sitting in front of a screen. Internet obsessions only hit the mass market a decade later during the 2000s, with cat memes and World of Warcraft. And once again, mainstreaming diluted and drowned quality. Only this time it wasn't just one genre at a time. It's everything: SF, Fantasy, Horror, Super-men, all of it.

 

But we can worry about that some other time. For now, note

1) Every upswing of futurism cannot help but skew toward males: computer nerds in the 1990s, Heinlein publishing in the Boy Scout magazine in the 1940s, rocketship exploration or Doyle's plateau rehashing the high seas exploration stories marketed to young boys earlier in the industrial era, or the SF stories published in Playboy, looking forward always depends on a core audience of intelligent, educated young males. Gernsback may have gloried in goosing his sales figures by marketing a feeling instead of a field of study, but he was reaping the existing interest of ganders in order to sell them out.

2) In the real world, it is technology, not feelings, which has lent us this brief period of relative well-being. "We believe the era of Scientifiction is just commencing." Yes, with good cause... and the era of the pugilistic monkey?

3) The mass market kills creativity, complexity, everything that makes for compelling Science in fiction. We can talk about the mainstreaming of "geek" interests or obscure genres at the start of the 21st century, but truthfully, they've been mainstreamed before. Supernatural stories were quite popular during the Victorian era, overlapping with the spread of actual belief in psychic, occult, and other supernatural charlatanism like Theosophy. "Science" fiction grew very popular a hundred years ago, so long as you accept a definition of science as laser six-shooters and every planet another Earth. And every single time, such fads end up as shameful historical footnotes, masses of chaff no-one in later decades will admit to having enjoyed, be it penny dreadfuls or the pulps or wearing pointy plastic ears to conventions.

4) A crucial feature of such decline is the transition from the scientist as hero to hero's helper. We descend from praising the heroic man of science building his own machine and venturing of his own accord "into futurity" to science fantasy, techno-wizardry in which the idiot hero need perform no more cerebral a feat than punching, but will be supplied, (either from offscreen or by a ridiculed throwaway nerd) with the technological means to achieve all his ambitions. He's just handed a lightsaber with no need to invent it. Stories of science subverted and enslaved to the demands of the everyman signal decay. 

 

Beyond those points I'm at a loss as to a specific finish to this page, except to point out that a movie about a platform jumping button mashing 'toon topped the movie market this year, and that the newest technological advance, Large Language Models and the automated manipulation of the public, has not passed through the futuristic speculation of the nerd cabal before working its way into popular fiction, or in truth popular fact. Unlike nukes or mutation or outer space, it has been fed directly into the mass market cesspit, before it could even be thought on.