The Prince-and-Page Matched Set

"I need attention from someone I don't care about to keep caring about those who don't care about me!" 

Sluggy Freelance 1998/03/28 

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"Real niggas do what they wanna do
Bitch niggas do what they can"

 

2Pac - Staring through My Rear-View

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"Mother, did it have to be so tall?"

Pink Floyd - Mother

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Disney's old 1940 Fantasia is mostly remembered these days for Mickey's brief stint as Sorcerer's Apprentice, but a longer and more elaborate of its segments set an ancient Greco-Roman mythscape to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. Unicorns, pegasi and fauns caper through technicolor meadows, leading up to a ball of centaurs and centaurides, headed by Bacchus and crashed by Zeus. It's a marginally more sexualized affair than you'd expect from Disney, animation not being yet relegated to pure child's play in the interwar period. While deprived of visible nipples or genitalia, the horseyboys and horseygals were very clearly naked, and this being a bacchanal, there's zero doubt we're leading up to a whole mess o' horsey-humpin'! First though, the alluring quadrupedal, hexapodal debutantes must be attended in their primping.

A male for every occasion

Many were apparently scandalized in subsequent decades by a centaur with stereotypical exaggerated old-timey negroid features acting as servant brushing a centauride's tail and carrying her train. Okay. But most of the work is done by flights of Cupids/cherubs applying make-up, providing hats and garlands and choreographing dramatic stage entrances for the gals to look as regal as possible... to their intended mates, the far more butch centaurs. And that part has apparently not scandalized anyone in the past 86yrs.

 

So here's my question: did anyone ask the cherubic attendants if they'd like to fuck?

 

Considering that one little cupid peeks between the curtains he's just helped close on a centaur couple gettin' intimate, I'd call the answer quite obvious. But it's funny how even if we've become sensitized to the unfairness of dark-skinned servility, no-one has ever bothered questioning the females' entitlement to be served by flights of castrated, easily-dismissed males for the express purpose of then throwing themselves at higher-ranking males. Were such distinctions presented in any other context, if the centaurides were splitting the populace into worthies and serviles based on racial or national markers, well... let's say Disney's had some editing to do on such topics over its history. But fabricating a eunuch caste for the use of females is as wholesome, as natural, as righteous a proposition as we can imagine.

 

It's a regular feature among the entertainment of modern, polite society to decry and demonize the various pick-up artists conning desperate men with promises of no longer being in the loser category and getting laid, or the various hyper-masculine social media superstars surrounded by bimbo brigades as emblematic of success. But their critics conspicuously refuse to acknowledge that such snake-oil salesmen only promise transition between the categories of loser and fucker. The categories themselves predate our media figures, enforced as always since before the dawn of the species by females as part of their own reproductive instinct, along with the requisite conflict.

 

If you'd like a taste of just how unquestioningly this degradation pervades our species' social mores, try yet another of Bill Maher's semi-regular segments bashing men in service to the Democratic Party's habitual, overt misandry. This time he took a swing at young men still living with their mothers, giving up on starting families. I won't comb the segment phrase by phrase for the endless double standards placing all responsibility on men and all entitlement in the hands of women, but do note, first off, living with their mothers is something women themselves have always taken for granted, including going back if they leave their husbands. I could cite example from traditional village life, and "I'm going back to mother" was a pretty standard female threat by the Flintstones era of television. Only for men has the social safety net always been rescinded at puberty.

 

More importantly, reverse the polarity on the scenarios Maher describes. Imagine hordes of women living with their single fathers into adulthood and middle age, to the exclusion of other inter-gender relationships except for the father's circle of friends, waiting table at their gatherings and keeping house for the father. Even the more repressive Muslim societies where such behavior is directed toward the husband would raise an eyebrow at a father keeping his daughter an old maid for such purposes, especially an unmarried father. In the West, we would reflexively assume an abusive relationship.

 

But the sons in such a situation are themselves blamed as though harming others instead of being victims of a lifetime of psychological abuse from mothers who have had decades to torture them into dependency, who have retained direct and unitary control from infancy, uninterrupted and unscrutinized, propped up by a legal system which glorifies single motherhood as morally superior based on the unchallenged dogma of feminist lobbying. Somehow when discussing older women and younger men it's not the adult in the relationship that's at fault, ever. And even when we deign to glance at this dynamic, the men are not viewed as deprived of living their own lives, but condemned as insufficiently servile toward women at large. The question of the man's own independence is not even raised; only his presumed duty to provide for and protect a wife presumed slightly more entitled to him as a servant than a mother might be.

 

Moreover, make no mistake, this is among other things a form of sexual abuse suited to female instinct. Women who divorce their husbands and wrest solitary control over their sons then construct a sexless marriage to this dependent, obedient animal over whose psyche she has secured unchallenged gaslighting privileges. A mock-husband who will never dare step out of line. A castrated, darling little cherub perpetually flitting about her, helping her primp and choreograph her self-aggrandizement. A male to be denied to make herself feel superior and in illusory control over her own unanalyzed instincts.

 

For peak perversity, consider how much of this state of affairs follows economically from the generations-long practices of denying men university scholarships or social aid in favor of women, and throwing them out of education and work on women's accusations of <SOMETHING SEXUAL> automatically and without recourse. Only to then have media channels like HBO lambaste you as a loser for it by every invective and scatological sputtering they can imagine.

 

All this is normal, Disney-safe, wholesome. Does not every woman deserve both a prince to fuck and a neutered cherub to carry her train?

 

Marrying? It's a wonder men will have anything at all to do with you sadistic cunts.

Here's lookin' at you lookin' at me, 9

I was walking home through a blizzard when I spotted this little guy scampering around the gutter.

Imagine my surprise when it actually started running at my leg. Then when I moved my foot slightly, it panicked and sprinted full-tilt in the other direction. It had probably just headed for the nearest heat source not realizing it was declaring war on King Kong. In a couple of seconds it had burrowed into the soft, shallow snow lining the gutter.

If it was that desperate and disoriented though, I doubt it lived much longer. A big downside of being a minuscule mammal with a hypercharged metabolism is your energy reserves being basically nil.

Fallout: New Vegas

"There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –"

 

Emily Dickinson

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Y'know, they had a saying back in the old days:

- but I don't remember it because we don't really remember all that much from back then. Who wants a history of plenty and gleaming safety when you're dodging shivs and stingers around every corner and hoping you haven't inhaled enough radioactive dust to make your skin slough off? But they also say Vegas was a big deal before the war. Still is. Money-pit back then. Still is. Crooked and run by crime families? Well, yeah. And maybe that's what everyone likes about the place. For all the monsters looking to chew our limbs off, for all the poisoned landscape and contaminated water, the xenophobic cults and sadistic tyrants looking to enslave us, for all the world's changes and our own mutations, everyone, and I mean everyone, can look to that idiotic cap-trap burning pointless electricity through every night and feel reassured, yes, reassured in this universal kinship, that we're all still the same dumbfucks that blew up the world in a pissing contest.

 

This message brought to you by Cram!

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After bashing my head against Bannerlord's Artificial Stupidity a couple of posts ago, I decided to switch to some other looting, roving, first-person RPG, and methought instead of Cyberpunkin', it's been a while since I've fallen out. Or in. Next stop: 2010's New Vegas, farmed out to Obsidian as soon as Fallout 3 demonstrated the 3D adaptation could turn a profit, presumably so Bethesda could focus on the then upcoming Skyrim instead. Could it be anything more than a cheesy cash-grab sequel easily tossed aside after a few hundred rat kills?

I initially started an early level play-by-play as I'd kept for #3, but soon realized their shared technology and interaction would force me to repeat myself on too many minor details. Then I kept expecting to suss out some through-line of incompetence in mechanics, atmosphere or writing which I could mock from beginning to end. To my dismay, then delight, I discovered I couldn't. The more I dove in, the more it drew me in. Though hampered a bit by bugs, clunky motion, industry-standard grindy resource stockpiling and a few terrible decisions (e.g. damage threshold, STR as must-have stat, Bethesda-standard terrible inventory timesink interface) overall New Vegas proves an impressively well-executed game.

 

Avoiding abusing the paid cheat items from the DLCs I heft my varmint rifle and stumble my way through the first few levels in my own ass-backward way, hitting Sloan's easier quests and then Primm (leaving the robot in charge, though, truth be tol', I got no time for any man (or bot) named Slim, 'less 'is last name be Pickens) and even the border outpost (where I have the dubious honor of being sent to kill ten rats or six ants, whichever comes first) before returning to newbietown's newbiequest. Then I spin out for some exploration and random violence: geckos, ghouls, goats, scorpions, coyote dens, a cave here, an irradiated valley there, a ridiculous ghoul rocketeer cult jetted off to anywhere-but-here.

 

By the time I sight the solar farm I find myself pausing every once in a while to admire the windblown dust. Something about this game is beginning to feel very... right. After the random nonsense of #s 2 and 3, the atmosphere seems to have found its footing again. The entire wasteland's not immediately crawling with super mutants. Characters stay in character, which doesn't exclude the occasional bit of in-character humor.

Desperate for desperados

Sure, sure, the theft/morality mechanics still make no sense even within the... let's say lax, limits of video game logic. While Powdering that gang at the hoosegow, how the hell is it still stealing to take any of the convicts' junk? I'm their sworn enemy, I've betrayed their trust and doomed them all, declared open war on them and I outright gain karma by hacking them to ribbons with my machete while they wail in agony, but taking a bottle of beer still costs me karma? Then you've got poor Boxcars who will never again kick a tumbleweed. My condolences. And also my morphine. Apparently feeding dope to a murderous bandit counts as a karmic gold mine. Hurray morals. Even the big supposedly two-sided conflict between Republic and Legion is played much too shallowly, but I'll have to revisit Caesar's Legion when I discuss villains.
 

A few little absurd moments had me rolling my eyes right from the opening cinematic. Headshots do not work that way, the couple of times my dialogue read "I'm not a delivery boy" had me wondering how else you define "courier" and I'm hoping the bottlecap quest won't wax Pythonish in its silliness. I've also been skipping any card/gambling minigames in the interest of time. Then you've got the more severe stumbling.

 

The overly-narrow inventory margin forces me into abusing teleportation just as in Fallout 3 despite having piled on three more strength points - sure, I could avoid picking up trash loot but look, I just assume I'll need thirty pounds of dog meat, four hundred empty bottles and fifteen toasters at some point in this campaign; this is an RPG after all. And, if anything, even my thirty years' worth of metagaming experience underestimated old Obsidian's dedication to making you pick up every piece of litter you run across. I've spent half my time checking the wiki for fear a junk item might have some obscure use, which it usually does. With a better interface, this could've been very entertaining. With Bethesda's gigantic linear list-scrolling timesink and zero tooltips, I'm leaning more toward annoyed. On a related note, as in Fallout 3 interior spaces often feel too "realistically" large and repetitive, but I'll spin that off into a separate topic.

 

It also has its share of more technical issues. The mottled dustbowl aesthetic's a mixed blessing. It allowed them to camouflage a large number of tripwires, land mines and other nasty surprises managing to reintegrate trap-disarming as an RPG staple after moving to FPS. On the flip-side it also turns many quests into pixel-hunting nightmares.

I don't care if you're Hawkeye himself, I simply will not believe you hunted those pixels without cheating and looking up the location on a wiki.
 

Also, entirely too many quests or rewards become unavailable if you clear a location before getting the corresponding marching order from some mook you never knew existed. Quest markers glitch out and mislead you, save files refuse to overwrite and the game still crashes and locks up on zone transitions. So I couldn't explain why none of those very real flaws put a dent in my drive to advance through Fallout: New Vegas' world and encounters until I finally set my mind to enter the city proper. I climbed a rise overlooking the Colorado River. Up ahead was a friendly camp. Might meet a giant mutant fly or two on the way. Farther in the distance was the dam. Nice detour on my way north, and a chance to skirt the bandit-infested ruins. My pack was still fairly light, so I might make it all the way to the city and advance the main quest. By a step, just a step. Plenty of mysteries to uncover on the way. Some dangerous, to be avoided. Others tantalizing. Progress to be made, but not an infinite power trip. Wealth to be gained, but not constantly. Colorful characters, but with interesting motivations.

 

Only then did I consciously articulate NewVegas' charm: it's honest work. Not the more cynically pandering, low-brow, condescending fluff like Fallout 3, Wasteland 2 or BG3, not focus-grouped to death; neither is it the self-indulgent posturing of fresh college graduates imagining themselves "disruptors" upending an entire industry by some sophomoric big idea. It neither strains to keep you mindlessly busy with constant action nor denies the necessity for same in moderation. It neither drags you everywhere by your nose-ring like a domesticated beast executing fixed orders, as Skyrim did, nor purposely punishes you with "rocks fall, everybody dies" GM omnipotence abuse. Nor did it outright settle for mediocrity.

It built on its premise.

 

Where in, say, Wrath of the Righteous or BG3 most NPC companions outright infuriated me by their infantilism, in this game from a decade prior I couldn't find even one I outright disliked. (Though their idiot combat AI had me gnashing my rotten fangs.) I'm enjoying the added immersion of the survival elements, chugging Nuka-Cola and irradiated water, stocking up on doctor's bags, planning on visiting the Doc for an anti-rad treatment, taking time for a good night's sleep. Persistent but not insistent implementation. Vegetation and resource spawns follow different biomes with smoother gradations than Skyrim. Even more importantly, NV downplays the MMO grind mechanics which plagued TES 4&5 and Fallout 3. It throws out level scaling (aside from a noticeable mid-game bump in mob types) in favor of reasonably tiered challenges, renewing that impression of monomythic escalation and distinct transition between the mundane and mystical which the original Fallout so perfectly captured, and which 2&3 threw out. It even dares to weaken the loot&scoot core loop. In contrast to Fallout 3 or Skyrim, you might spend highly variable durations away from Goodboing (or wherever you keep your stash) and some of the most interesting locations, like Vault 22, might not offer much in the way of loot at all.

 

But most important, it prizes its immersion and does not sell it out for cheap gags. NPCs learn your name and reward your past efforts. The wilds feel spot-on bleak and vaults perversely claustrophobic. Mobs cluster around dens and hideouts and other likely spots, not just interspersed statically over the landscape, and occasionally mount half-hearted attacks on civilization - and civilization responds in kind!

I made a lucrative scavenger trade early on when discovering I could follow caravans around and loot their targets as they defend themselves during travel. (Makes me wonder who's running around after my comitatus in Vagrus.) There's even a coherent sense of marching history to the collapse of tribal/raider culture in the face of larger, organized factions like the NCR and Legion, of civilization very gradually rebuilding after a now long-past nuclear war.

 

But I can't help noting all of NV's best features were Obsidian's departures from Bethesda's strict formula. Slight ones. Working within the series' limits. Eventually you feel that formula dragging you down again. I'd post a screenshot of my character's progress, but by level 31 you probably know how that goes. Most skills already at 80 points, a mountain of loot, a brewery's worth of bottle caps even after maxing out my implant quota. Grandmaster of every guild, as usual. Every quest pushing you toward a golden ending. Simplistic good vs. evil conflicts with obvious correct choices. Not much role to play.

 

Yet still. It's a world you don't want to leave. Boots scraping the sun-baked clay, an objective on the horizon, a glance between the foothills for interposed threats, a chug of sarsaparilla, a nod to your companion. Onward. NV falls into that second tier of classic games. It lacks the real oomph of a trendsetting Fallout 1, Morrowind, Starcraft or Half-Life, the artistic flair of a Bloodlines, Tyranny or Torment to fuel roleplaying memories. But, like Dragon Age: Origins or the first Pillars of Eternity, it stands out as a rare, self-respecting, dedicated project all around.

 

I grudgingly admitted Fallout 3 was less of a shit-show than it could've been. I'm wholeheartedly enjoying New Vegas.

 

 

 

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P.S.: Kicking tumbleweeds around is weirdly fun...

Various bumblers

On goldenrod:

On a... what the hell are those white inflorescences anyway? I used to know. They're everywhere. 

Queen Anne's lace?

Eh, let's stick with thistles.

"Bumble on a thistle" is probably an entire photographic genre in itself. Worthy of a dramatic lens flare.

 

A Measure of Mud

Hey, guess what game I'll be talking about in a few days!

Trudging through that dust-bowl brought to mind an old Sylvester Stallone movie titled Lock Up that I caught a couple of times way back when, and which has seemingly faded from everyone's memory. Not unjustifiably, either. Ostensibly a prison movie, but without much to say about justice or prison life, but nonetheless overstating everything it didn't have to say, every damn minute of every damn scene. Dialogue sounds like placeholder for an actual script. It belabored each and every shot and even the soundtrack somehow managed to consistently mismatch its mood. Aside from that it's Stallone flexing his way through a litany of manly cliches in quintessential '80s fashion: power tools, car, tossing a ball, body-slamming, punching, protecting his mate, squaring off against a standard-issue less-manly-therefore-bad villain. If you want a highlights reel, keep in mind they're not lying when they say those are the movie's best scenes. The flick seems to have flopped, badly.

 

Yet somehow I always held a modest soft spot for it. Maybe just because I saw it when I was twelve or something and didn't know better. Maybe its the pretty decent fights with lots of unsophisticated, grunting violence, the sort of which you've seen too little in the post-Matrix decades. But looking at those few scenes now, I think Stallone got upstaged by the real star of the show: that muddy prison yard! It squelches. It stretches across the frame. It encompasses the men's own drab inmate duds and the dun concrete walls. Characters slip and fall in it. It spatters and clings and sits heavy and implacable. This is your world, creature of mud.

Such drab beigeness can be doubly fraught in an interactive medium. Where a movie director can force action in the mud, a game designer risks the player stopping and looking around to ask 'what the hell am I doing here' every minute of gameplay. Indeed, I've bashed a few titles here on the blog for just such hollow environments. But I've more often praised the ones that manage to pull it off. A good designer always has an answer in mind for what the hell you're doing there. As above, he dangles a monument off in the distance to grab your attention and let you get your bearings. Or slopes and sweeps the terrain to make you wonder what's over the next rise. Or supplies suggestive wind/water/traffic motion carrying your attention across the landscape. Even if your immediate surroundings feel empty, you are made to think of something beyond the nothing, made to value the steps you take.

 

The Shawshank Redemption for instance had opera and a library to offset the mud. Lock Up lacked them.

AoW4 Factions, 18

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 had a dragon aspect left over and wanted more nature/chaos interplay, so a bunch of happy-go-lucky halflings seemed about right. In practice though they ended up more brute-force oriented than I'd expected, getting a lot of use out of their Primal stacks. Elusiveness and quick reflexes combined with materium defense buffs but little nuking let fights drag out long enough for those stacks to come into play repeatedly. First-turn draconic vitality then runesmiths piling on the enchanments instead of nuking just drive the strat further in that direction. Strategically, a nice middle ground faction with a bit of everything, steady as she goes. Kinda love the concept too, can really picture the moment of wonder, glimpsing their new overlord through the brush, skittish little savages marveling at the possibilities.

Bah, NerdLord: From Seonon, an Empire!

"Ihr habt nichts zu verlieren doch
Gewinnen könnt ihr viel"

KMFDM - Hau Ruck

 

Dateline: Calradia, 1091. Beaten, bottled in, batty Battania battens down its bottom bastion!

Stalwart Battania, high-flung Battania, Mother Earth's favored flaxen-tressed daughter, land of a thousand pigs and several little ponies, land of... clay... hath been broughte lowe by its fowes. Yet (as such stories go) in the eleventh hour a hale and determined hero named Werwolfe rides to the gates of Marunath to pledge his service to his homeland; then discovers he can't because king Caladog himself languishes in a Vlandian dungeon and thus cannot accept an oath - though he's probably shouting quite a few.

 

Still you can get a fair bit done as a mere mercenary in Bannerlord, even if it mostly relies on Artificial Stupidity. The computer tends to operate with horse blinders on, so even though it'll run from stronger armies, the Battanian plateau's narrow terrain makes it easy to purposely let an enemy army advance past you then chase it into your other allies. Since all my side's remaining lords were concentrated around a single city, this became depressingly repetitive. The same vulnerability which probably dooms Battania when it's just algorithms against each other makes it easily defensible for a human player. Ath Cafal, the village just SW of Marunath, also happens to lie in a cul-de-sac, so enemies would repeatedly trap themselves either trying to raid it or chasing weaker armies in. Lather, rinse, repeat, and thus passed my first year of Battanian military service. All well and good until the king of the Norhern Empire himself parked a larger army than I could handle right outside the town gates.

Note than even though our combined forces (my 170 plus all the parties in Marunath) would easily have trounced King Lucon, they won't coordinate such an attack unless already in the field, and won't step onto the field because they're each individually programmed to stay safe indoors if outnumbered. Catch-22. Not only that, but even when they do the interface is endlessly vague as to which armies will help you or not based on proximity. Laddies and gentlegamers, I don't mind admitting I cheated my ass off at this point, crashing and reloading the game twenty times over until finally managing to bait Lucon away so my idiots would venture out, then looping back to hit him when enough were in range.

 

This would've been easier if I were a lord and could form armies, I thought, until discovering that even after Caladog's return and lordy-looing myself up, none of my peers can recruit enough troops from our meager remaining population to accept an army invitation. Realizing that if Battania is to have an army I must supply it myself, I spend the next year continuing to trap and imprison Vlandians until after grabbing Llanoc Hen Castle we agree to a hefty tribute for peace in Summer of 1092. Building my own Imperial Legion from the Western Empire and splitting it off to a couple of my own underlings, finally I throw my accumulated influence (in part from surrendering prisoners to my King's dungeon) into a desperate gambit to mass our entire force and recapture Seonon from the Northern Empire. It works!

I even have enough influence left over after the victory to squeak through on a 1% margin and claim it for myself. The politics, kid, that's what'll kill ya. 

Home sweet ramshackle, muddy home.

We manage to fight off the inevitable recapture attempt. By winter, with our raiders descending the plateau eastward into the lands about Epic Scrotea, the Northern Empire agrees to a truce. Thus, with a moment's peace and a homestead secured, a middle-aged man's fancy turns from battle-lust to booty-lust. Cue the romantic bagpipes, we're goin' a-courtin'!

 

Now, I'd originally found myself in a meet-cute with one lady Gawen, saving her a couple of times on the battlefield... but as she turned me down turned out to be a lesbian, I decided meet-cutes are dumb and fixed my eyes on a politically convenient marriage to Corein, daughter of king Caladog.

We look cute together. Regal too.

The real clincher was when I saw the good princess' flawless taste in battle-garb.

I'm in love!

We can borrow each other's wardrobe and wolf-whistle in both directions. Though during the war she'd turned me down as beneath her station, after the capture of Seonon it wasn't long before (a quick reload during a failed dialogue aside) she approved her father's approval of my approval of her fine lupine ass.

One wife, please. An' make 'er shaggy.

Technically she only rates 8295 denars, but what the hell, keep the fiver old man, my treat. *wink*

 

While courting and then while we busy ourselves cranking out a couple of heirs, I convince my incipient father-in-law to re-open hostilities with our Vlandian oppressors, having maxed out my underlings' armies until I start to lose money on upkeep. The war drags slowly over the next few years, with gradual, hard-won victories in castle sieges, and a welcome alliance with the Western Empire, the Vlandians' other major enemy. The biggest stroke of luck comes after the recapture of Pen Cannoc, Dunglanys having rebelled against Vlandian rule. Not only does it split their armies for easy field skirmishes, but sets up easy, predictable ambushes when they try to siege it.

Then, when they do retake it, a quick pounce to grab it on the rebound. Thus, seven and a half years after Battania's near-defeat, the latest peace treaty leaves us with far more hopeful borders.

Tho' Car Banseth yet languishes under accursed Vlandian misrule, much of our ancestral realm has now been reclaimed. We set our eyes beyond our borders, where glory and riches (surely) await.

 

So, how was this for an RPG plot? A wealthy merchant returns to save his homeland, outmaneuvers his foes by devious military tactics, seduces a princess (while wearing the same outfit as her (hey, some chicks are into it!)) and claims a title and fiefdom by hiring foreign legionnaires. It's got a plucky underdog angle, patriotic last stands and glorious marches, a courtroom drama scene, the comic relief that your new city's a little bit boggy, one town's heroic rebellion to join its free brethren, and even a love triangle! I've said before (and I'm far from the only one) that Bannerlord has suffered by losing the companion dialogue and small-party adventuring of M&B: Warband, lost some of its monomythic escalation, and sadly, that remains true. Nevertheless it remains a prime example of computer games' potential as creative medium.

 

When the topic is discussed, it's almost always in terms of writing quality, visuals, moral/sociopolitical themes or a really bangin' soundtrack. But all that, while certainly relevant, is unfair if it only treats a game as if it were a movie or a storybook. It's supposed to be interactive, this new electronic medium of the past half-century, it's supposed to be about what you, the player, can actually do. Lay out your own story. An often touted ideal, rarely achieved, yet still the medium's great claim to validity. This? Some AI incompetence aside, this was good roleplaying and good gaming.

 

Health and long life to The Swain of Seonon!

Shrooms

Come on, you can do it, you can do it!

You did it!

 

Bring the fam.

 

We have attained verticality! ...in a drunken sort of jumble.

 

More mycelium means more power.

The little ones are a different species... aren't they? I really don't know nearly enough about fungi but they do shapeshift between growth stages.
 

Tiny cups above tired caps:

Trumpeting their success 

...I have... ZERO freakin' clue here.

Some type of Auricularia?

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

___________________________________

"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. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________

 

* 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:

________________________________________________________________________________

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.

_______________________________________

 

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:

________________________________________________________________________________

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.

 

 

 

____________________________________

 

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

______________________________________________

 

 

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.

 

 

_______________________________________________

 

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.