I faff in the face of danger!

Mister Drab-Pants

Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough vs. its Shivaree cover

 

As I wrap up Wildermyth's campaigns, I find myself looking ahead to which RPG I want to queue up next. Owlcat're dragging their feet with that last Rogue Trader DLC. Or... I've been wanting to replay Mask of the Betrayer for nostalgia' sake, but on firing up NWN2 on my more recent computer I find it utterly riddled with graphics glitches and lockups, so that ain't happenin' yet. Or maybe... Witcher 3's been sitting in my collection forever. I was afraid it wouldn't have enough stuff to kill but I hear it's been remonstered now.

 

To sweeten the deal, my ultra-exclusive-dooper-super edition is offering me fancy duds. The schmanciest! I mean, I guess I could do without the... frilly... feathery... leather flake crap around the neck, but aside from that, as fantasy armours go, it's a remarkably down-to-earth design. As fantasy video game armours go, even more so. Hell, it appears a strict requirement of interdimensional travel to get persistently kitted out in one flavor or another of absurdly baroque furry/ferric finery boasting enough frills to make me look like I've been swallowed by a turkey buffed to an eye-searing gloss. MMOs of course have been the worst offenders over the past couple of decades, needing to consistently bait their audience into the cash shop with statelier and statelier status symbols, but it's not like you could escape it in single-player either, likely thanks to the long tradition of fantasy story illustrations being an ergononic nightmare.

"Everybody got their pom-poms? Let's go tickle evil."

Flanges, frills, florettes, reliefs and embroideries, flared spikes and spiked flares, scutes, flutes and zoot-suits, oh my! Even plain cloth gleamed in the light like it was all triple-thick satin dipped in jewel dust. Flippin' hell, it was harder to find armour in Baldur's Gate 3 not dreamt up by a fifteen year old girl on a Red Bull bender. Let's not even get into Japanese games' costume design.

 

Much as I hate to admit it, there is some backing for this in our historic record, as advertising wealth and power has always entailed an inordinate degree of... well "bling" for lack of a better word. While visiting the treasury exhibition in Vienna, I did a double-take on seeing the so-called "sword of St. Mauritius" realizing it was the only piece on display equipped with an actual handle which might conceivably be gripped for more than five seconds, instead of some knobbly, slippery, jewel-encrusted eyesore. And yes, yes, I Get It, they're ceremonial pieces that were never meant to see more use than a bishop's bible.

 

... but then, is my game character strictly ceremonial? Because I was hoping to take him out for a spin. Maybe track some mud on an ogre's carpet. Maybe both pummel and pommel some bad guys. Maybe track down a dryad and check the armor rating on my codpiece, if you catch my driftwood. But whatever my adventures, one type of character I have no interest in roleplaying is the type of ditz worried about glitz over substance. Must everything be disco, my dear dancing queens? Has society gotten so feminized that our escapist fantasies no longer have room for the sort of grim Yojimbo With No Name who in real life owns ten gray shirts? (No that I!... okay, yes, yes I do.)

 

You really want to tempt me with a collector's edition bonus? Offer me rags! Sack-cloth protection over a comfortable plain beige linen shirt, a pile of mismatched furs and leathers, an unadorned verdigried hauberk dented with a thousand blows, scuffed, blatantly re-soled boots as shapeless as the badgers they were probably made from. And just to meet you art fags halfway, if you must embellish, I will admit there's a sort of busy visual design even wolf-men will abide:

thus, the lotus, from humble mud

The overgrown, the tangled and patchwork and decrepitly layered, the clanking, fluttering dregs of a misaligned loom and cross-eyed cobbler, the heavily downcast dross of a long-crumbled forge all stacked atop each other, the strength of entropy repurposed, portable exposed brickwork, let me clad at least myself as urban or verdant decay embodied, a crumbled brutalist temple tridiunal, and I'll forgive you far more of your foppish frippery.

I took a walk in gusty -20C weather last year and lucked out witnessing some unfamiliar behavior from these all too familiar dung factories, Canada geese. Until then I had never seen how their type handle a "to build a fire" situation.

Apparently they still fear predators more than the cold. Instead of taking shelter they were out on the ice, lined up uniformly, aerodynamically, crops against the prevailing wind like a fleet into the current, feet and head protected, letting it flow over them. Compare to a still protected but less orderly arrangement on a calmer day just a few degrees warmer.

I guess there are degrees of hunkering down in comfort even for a walking down comforter.

Kindred Not

I'd planned to summarize my thoughts on Wildermyth for tonight, but decided I'd rather run at least one more campaign (having finished 4/6) before doing so, and a common weakness instead reminded me of one of the internet's many dead webcomics. (So that'll be next week instead.)

 

Kindred Not tells of a motley band escaping not to but from their world's large militaristic superpower. How's that for a change of pace from the past years' news cycle? Similar to my comments on Tangled River, it opts for a drawing style more popular in the mid-20th century. Clean lines with characters realistically proportioned but somewhat stiffly, theatrically posed. (Dick Tracy always jumps to mind.) Except instead of using it to illustrate a subgenre popular in that era, it uses the previous century itself as setting.

 

The author went to some pains to reference appropriate decor in everything from wallpaper and lamps to cookware and haberdashery. Admirably so, and it makes every establishing shot a treat. But if reference images and preserved historic buildings serve well enough visually, when it comes to practical details she quickly runs into younger generations' difficulty in portraying a society still teetering between industrialization and traditional life. Feeding cow's milk to an infant without boiling it first? My grandmother would've twisted yer ears right offen yer head, girl!

 

And that's the more pervasive issue: not just practical details like the milk, but the mundane tone of life in older societies which modern authors fail to grasp on an intuitive level: the casual acceptance of corporal punishment and other physical violence, the more or less strict separation of the sexes in both labor and leisure, the dictatorial work ethic, what has now become the world of yesteryear was not just furnished differently but acted differently in a myriad subtle or striking ways. I'll have to revisit this topic in wider detail elsewhen, but for Kindred Not's purposes, the very flavor of dialogue constantly torpedoes that visual immersion.

 

It's only looking at such newer works of fiction that it becomes apparent how unaware modern audiences appear to have grown of the officiousness dominating interactions as late as ~1990, much less 1930. The insistent "mister" this-and-that or various honorifics, the weight carried by a "miss" versus "missus" or the strict adherence to greeting formulae, polite society was a lot more... well, polite, in the old days. Politely violent, politely sadistic, but polite nonetheless, and if you're writing period fiction you really need to get into that mindset. There's a scene early in Kindred Not's second chapter where the teenage girl brings her new male acquaintance to a safehouse operated by a family friend. As soon as she opens the door, the new guy grabs her from behind by the shoulder to warn her from divulging too much information. Uhhh... no! Ronan would've punched Caden square in the mouth in that moment, no questions asked, I don't care what early 20th-century country you're emulating for your fantasy. And sadly, an inability to enter that mindset drags many new works of fiction down, Kindred Not included.

 

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Addendum:

A good comparison might be drawn to a page from Erfworld featuring, as its parody du jour, "chief healomancer" Pierce. You can practically hear Alan Alda's halting giggle and self-conscious smirk in every line of dialogue, a particularly interesting case because Alda's Pierce was himself a seventies' impression of fifties mores and the transgression thereof, mixed with roaring '20s stage comedy. Yet Rob Balder vaulted seamlessly across those more than a century's worth of generational barriers. It is never unclear where the lines of propriety lie and how deliberately they're being trespassed. The information age spy attempts modern seduction, feigns fifties pudeur, is teased in the tones of the sexual revolution and the punchline lands straight out of Groucho Marx' lips. Now that is a firm grasp of milieu!

Oh, no! I forgot to help McGruff take a bite out of crime!

Anoxia Station

Indie gaming. Sometimes you get burned.

Anoxia Station boasted an interesting enough hollow earth premise to con me into shilling out a few bucks instead of letting it inevitably drop to the fifty cents it's really worth at most. Whether it's a cynical asset-flip or sophomoric grandstanding, just don't bother.

 

I've already criticized its abuse of dim or no light, but that's the least of its crimes.

 

It tries to shoehorn real-time elements into what is obviously a turn-based base-building strategy game, like a turn timer or rapidly clicking buildings to extinguish fires. It works just as well as it did for M.A.X. 2 thirty years ago. What's that? You've never heard of MAX2? That's right, you haven't.

 

Its creative side has you chasing curios nonsensically in lieu of actual content. Its hollow earth vision is just a random "attack of the giant whatever" litany. Snail, moth, eel, worm. Yeah, whatever. It never makes good on such cheese like more expert approaches.

 

Then there's the interface wrangling, like the mouse pointer being slightly offset vertically. Or frozen mobs taking control of your camera for several seconds at the start of each round for dramatic effect, which then repeats every single turn they remain on the map, per mob. Or the timesink of reassigning leader passive bonuses every single turn. Or the over-exaggerated effects like a full-screen camera shake or flashing during disasters, which will be the first things you turn off only to discover they never completely go away.

 

Then there's its failures as a strategy game, like over-dependence on randomization making even D&D seem reasonable by comparison. Or monsters spawning on a particular tile but getting infinite-range attacks eliminating the relevance of positioning. Or upgraded buildings losing their lower tier's active ability or leader ability for no logical reason.

 

But the straw which finally broke this camel's back was the screenshot above, reaching the end of a mission and not being permitted to leave. I assumed it was because I hadn't finished an objective. Reload and try again, exhaust the damn reservoir, count my turns carefully for a dash to the exit, only to discover myself still blocked, with zero explanation for why exactly it won't accept my order to move onto the exit tunnel square. Do I need to be a turn early, do I need to discover something else on the map, do I need some upgrade? Fuck it. I just stopped caring. One more for the Bozo pile.

AoW4 Factions, 25

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:

________________________________________________________________________________

For the last of my four giants' elemental alignment I thought, rock, materium, crafting, man, I haven't made enough dwarf factions yet. Grumpy-ness lends itself well to a phlegmatic sort of evil you don't really get from the usual rampaging hordes, so this vignette was fun to write. Mind you, I've always hated the portrayal of necromancy in fantasy games, so let me also clarify it's not their magic that makes these jokers evil, but their acquisition of materials. Otherwise the use of post-conscious matter is inherently harmless, no matter if it breaks the moral majority's precious taboos. In practice, they turned out less dependent on necromancy anyway, since the armor bonuses of materium combine quite well with shadow's debuffs to make for some quite invincibly terminator-ish units requiring very little replacement with boney fare in the field. The perfectionist artisan stability/economy bonus made for slow but smooth growth and one of the most cheerful shadow factions you could wish. Maxing an evil alignment is actually harder than it should be given the positive pay-off for such self-interested actions as razing monster spawners. The one truly overpowered aspect though turned out to be the Cult of Tyranny's hostage diplomacy, which basically gives you free relationship growth with as many neutral towns as you can violently vassalize. On the large maps I favor, even with sparse neutral towns, it only takes one early war for hostages to gradually build you up into an economic powerhouse via tribute.

The Machine Stops

"Don't waste time praying

Get on with finding"

 

Syntax - Pray

 

 

Dystopian fiction is one of the newest genres. For most of history, it would've been a largely meaningless concern. You lived and died by the dice roll of monarchic genetics, hoping the next inbred asswipe inheriting the throne wouldn't starve you to death. Only with the spread of popular mandates a century or two ago did the question of society's proper course gain moral and speculative heft. Only as industrialization moved much of the populace beyond subsistence farming and fragile shelter did awareness grow that more and more of what we call life is ruled by an increasingly convoluted network of production and distribution.

 

E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops ostensibly pins its plot to that second point. Like London's The Iron Heel, it counts among the genre's precursors yet is not much read or discussed these days. But where The Heel retains mostly just historical relevance, Forster's prose loses little of its emotional clout or its futurology. In fact, I found myself triple-checking its publication date in disbelief as to how little the intervening hundred and twenty years have dulled its vision. Indeed, the past couple of decades seem to have only increased its relevance.

 

It is overtly very technologically oriented for something from the turn of the previous century, on that point reading as written eighty years later, well into the computer age. Telecommunication, automation, the works. In fact the author seems to have done well not straining too hard at working out the technical underpinnings of devices he describes, but only focusing on the uses to which humans would put advanced technology. So on the topic of lifestyle choices, he somersaults past the 20th century altogether. Food delivery, individual habitation, social media obsession with "lectures" as stand-ins for forums and YouTube channels, even a sort of Wikipedia link-surfing fixation on the superficialities of history all exude an eerie Nostradamned-if-it-ain't-so feeling you get from the other dystopian greats like Fahrenheit 451 or 1984. The rapid-fired mass hysteria blurbs later on even sound suspiciously like hashtag mobs from 2010 onward.

 

Which is not to say I find myself too enchanted by its overall humanist theme. Of all its famous peers, The Machine Stops most closely matches the message of Brave New World, degeneration inherent in comfort, fear of losing TheHumanSpirit(tm) and hammers it home with the usual bluntness of SF:

"The sin against the body—it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend—glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars." 

- to which my cynical self would reply: you make it sound like a bad thing! What is the body but the original, primordial Machine imprisoning consciousness by the demands of instinctive automation seeking nothing but genetic replication?

 

Yet still, ultimately the focus is not on the evils of technology, but on the inherently suicidal surrender of conscious self-guidance and control over society, a message that certainly rings true in the current age of incipient fascism and AI slop consumption. No reasonable reader can deny the book inspired future generations, regardless how few living today may have read or even heard of it. Like Capek's R.U.R., you find all the core ideas already represented; the following century's imitators have already illustrated each scene in a thousand hypostatic facets while rarely reaching past them. Like Arthur C. Clarke's general style, if you now experience little novelty in The Machine Stops' plot, premise or perceptions, I'd say it's because since 1909 it gradually became our very expectation of its subgenre.

The Exceptional Inscrutable Untouchables

"God is an American"

David Bowie - I'm Afraid of Americans

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"Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical--yes, or more obsequious!--than America.  Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns HIS State.  Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio--divine oracles, to millions.  Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse?  Remember the Kuklux Klan?  Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'?  And wartime censorship of honest papers?  Bad as Russia!  Remember our kissing the--well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it?  Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? . . . Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well- informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children?  Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? . . .  Remember the Kentucky night-riders?  Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings?  Not happen here?  Prohibition--shooting down people just because they MIGHT be transporting liquor--no, that couldn't happen in AMERICA!  Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!"

 

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

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Well now 'hey, remember the kkk?' is certainly a line vindicated by history, but it was Lewis' reminder of "liberty cabbage" that made me burst out laughing. I'd indeed read about it in some chapter of eighth-grade social studies or whatnot but had never connected it to my more recent and oft-repeated observation of the 21st century's disturbing tendency so far to reiterate the 20th. A century later, those idiots' great-grandchildren reignited the same questionable wit a couple of years after the 9/11 attacks, railing not merely against their enemies but against anyone who dared question the escalation of the middle-eastern conflict past Afghanistan to Iraq. Thus "French" fries briefly became "freedom" fries in 2003-4, and some idiots even tried to rename french-kissing freedom-kissing, though how much of that latter was sheer trolling is anyone's guess.

 

After some years' hesitation, I'd finally penciled in today's date for some comments on the 2001 terrorist attacks. I thought I was being original. In my social ineptitude, I'd neglected that everyone and his grandma would commemorate this quarter-century mark with a trip down memory lane. So I'll reminisce about "when I heard" etc. some other year if we live that long. Instead, let me be the heartless asshole to point out that in sheer numbers, a few thousand violent deaths are nothing special. The victims in the WTC were an order of magnitude fewer than Americans shot by other Americans that year, and elsewhere in the world violent death, including on a mass scale, is far more common. Call me a sissy, but jumping out of a burning skyscraper still terrifies me less than the far more mundane probability of being beaten to death with a bottle by some knuckledragging piece of street trash that decides I looked at him funny.

 

The event's significance comes from elsewhere, from its motivation by primitive superstition, from its technological element, and from the preceding decades' assurance of Americans' military superiority precluding such danger. That last turns out to mean nothing when your government sits back and deliberately allows you to be butchered so it can use your death as pretext for invasions drumming up some military contractor profits. But Americans were not supposed to be vulnerable to violent tribal incursion, at least not after Soviet collapse. There lay the main shock value.

 

So here we are more than a generation later and the U.S. is humiliating itself with a failed middle-eastern incursion in Iran this time, achieving nothing because it is meant to achieve nothing but drum up profits for military contractors and secure Israel's military junta's grip on internal politics. The Vietnam war is slightly farther before my time than 9/11 might be to some of the younger crowd now, but I certainly remember the pall of abject failure under which American culture still labored in the '90s because of it, and the military's determination to never again embarrass itself thus. It couldn't happen here, not again, just like a mass terrorist attack could not happen here in 2001.

 

Much of the commentary today seems to take the form of wondering what the kids these days think of the event. I don't know. Can the ChatGPT generation even count to 25? But I would hope one lesson that sticks is that no tribe is untouchable. Exceptionalism is head-in-the-sand idiocy. There's no manifest destiny. If it was true for your parents' generation it's true for you, no matter if you cling to different mass delusions. It can indeed happen here, whether it's terrorism, oligarchic oppression, theocratic dark ages, economic collapse, being eclipsed by a larger, crueler world empire, or a comically incompetent tyrant sweeping into power on the masses' stupidity. Especially when the hints become flat, unvarnished promises of an illusory $5000 bribe just like in Lewis' novel. For a bonus, keep an eye on the supposed alternative as well, because entirely too many looking at the opposition's slide into Communist absolutist dogma are yet again, as always, declaring that it can't happen here.

Caterpillars of the Community

Speaking of darkness and sunrises. Once upon an early '25 autumn, the wolfman rose before crack of dawn and drove out to Nature, which in this case took the form of a field of tall grass just past the tree line. The air was cold, utterly quiet, still. Gradually I began spotting a lump on a plant here and there. And more. And more. Turns out many caterpillar species pick that time of year to fatten themselves up before hibernation.

The grassland was absolutely crawling with them, to the point I had to watch my step on the path not to muddy my shoes with their guts. The most obvious, by far, were banded wooly bears, a.k.a. Pyrrharctia isabella, a common sight in North America.

Always comical. 

Lacking experience with larvapidopterans, my website-derived identification may be off, but I think the solid orange ones are Virginian tiger moths. 

There was also a more sparsely-haired, graying variety which I'm having a devil of a time distinguishing due to its indistinctiveness.

It's not a dagger moth or a tussock moth, lacking the appropriate appendages. Closest I can get is the dogbane tiger moth Cycnia tenera (You may notice these all fall into the tiger moth subfamily.)

 

While the hairy ones were more obvious, there was also... whatever this is.

Honestly I could not identify it. Some type of cutworm? But the head and stripes don't match anything. Then I realized I may be looking in the wrong order. Sawflies are wasp relatives whose larvae look a lot like lepidopterans' -

elm sawfly larva from a different walk

- but the distinguishing characteristics (pseudopod number, gripping surface) are not all visible from my photo's angle. I expected the intermittent back markings to be more distinctive, but can't match those to anything.

 

But my favorite was the one that looks like it got an amateur haircut from an eight-year-old.

They were quite numerous, second only to the banded wooly bears. 

And they're further proof that nature has a bad, warty sense of humor.

Apparently it's a salt marsh moth. I just call it ugly. You ugleh!

 

I was able to photograph these in a span of ten meters, sitting still before the dawn chill abated, having arrived just before the sun broke over the treetops to warm them. The little patch of prairie, so silent I could hear nothing but my own breath and footsteps, gave way to a slight rustle of a breeze as temperature gradients shifted. A few birds gave a few tentative chirps over the next minutes. Gradually, noise pollution grew more like a slight pressure than discernible sound. A million tiny bodies were beginning to shift among the grass all about me. Then, hesitantly, after a few more minutes of sun, the humming, buzzing, chittering and cricketing of a busy field amped up to its familiar warm season volume, accompanied by more heartfelt birdsong.

 

Ahh.

 

Life.

Hello Darkness, My Old Trope

"I've come to stumble, curse and grope

Because designers, features lacking

Made a virtue of blind clicking"

- Paul Simon 

 

In the interest of clearing a bit more of my backlog of ten-bucks-or-less indie games, I decided to dive into a strategy title with an intriguing Hollow Earth premise, Anoxia Station... and immediately belly-flopped into the shallow end.

I've restarted the tutorial twice now, not least for being unable to discern which tiles I'm clicking half the time. I will concede a chthonic aesthetic benefits from a dose of claustrophobic encroaching gloom, and as you advance you do uncover some light sources - lava, glowing crystals, the usual fantasy cave stuff and stuffings. Still, it seems especially counterproductive to play up this angle in the first mission which serves, just to reiterate, as a tutorial where the player should be learning what everything looks like and how to navigate the screen, not guessing at 3D models and terrain under shadows and static.

 

My first truly conscious "enough is enough" moment of exasperation with the abuse of low light conditions came back when Doom 3 launched twenty years ago. I had a reasonably modern vid card and wanted to get in on the latest polygon-counting craze for once, like the cool kids do. The fact I paid full release price yet never even bothered finishing it probably demonstrates how badly that impulse backfired, and the disappointment became my mental reference for avoiding flavors of the month from that point on. For a game making as much noise as possible about its fancy new graphics, Doom 3 was inordinately desperate to also hide those visuals in near pitch darkness. Probably because the light of scrutiny quickly revealed it as a by-the-numbers, linear, generic shooter the likes of which had cluttered the market ever since Doom 2 showed 'em how it's done. The predictable yet infinitely redundant jump scares didn't help.

 

And it's not like it was a new problem by 2004 "crank up the gamma" being the first piece of advice you'd get from any other player before booting Diablo a decade prior.

 

Sure, it's not always a cynical cop-out. We are a diurnal species after all, and readily acknowledge darkness as the universal implied threat of predation. Always gives our monkey spines a little frisson. So a horror series like Amnesia is well served by a struggle to light one's way as game mechanic. But even they can take it too far, like forcing you again and again to run around blindly into forks and dead ends during chase sequences. Especially during Rebirth.

Even when it doesn't actively interfere with gameplay, this gimmick can still annoy. When discussing No Man's Sky I thought it absurd that my space-age space-ship lacked space for a simple magnetic compass. Added after release, like most of that game. In Cyberpunk 2077, I find myself asking instead: why doesn't V have a damn flashlight?

I've got electrical wiring up the wazoo (that particular mod was on sale for some reason) and I'm apparently an infinite-watt-hour walking power station. Half my implants glow even if they're internal. My cyber-eyes can do everything but shoot Superman lasers, but they can't perform the function night vision goggles do now? Couldn't I stick a light bulb in my navel or somesuch? Do I need to dig up a smartphone-flashlight from the dark ages to light my way in the dark? And sure, sure, I'll give CD Projekt credit for not abusing it constantly like Frictional. Only a handful of rooms in a handful of quests remind me of the lack, and it's played for due effect. But the incongruity of it is still ridiculous.

 

There can be some active utility in it, of course. I mentioned Fallout NV paired dim lighting with a largely monochrome aesthetic to make trap-finding a part of first-person roleplaying, but even they overdid it. More often than not, dark games are thrilling at first but tend to overemphasize it to the point of gratuitous punishment, or even when playing it for realism push it into unrealistic situations.

 

Reliable exceptions to that caveat tend to feature deep, deep darkness as a function not of level design but of resource management and the day-night cycle. See Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Miasmata. Paired with survival mechanics and a need to travel it encourages the player to make resource-conscious use of night-time while still leaving the option to wait for dawn if he gets too lost. Compare that to a dark level in most games where trial and error (and gratuitous reloads) is the only option. It turns a randomized failure condition into an economic decision, valuating the player's input instead of limiting it.

It's peh-DAHNT, not PEE-dent.

The Iron Heel

I've been valiantly withstanding a two-fisted dose of apocalyptic or dystopian fiction recently, which got me thinking of different approaches to the issue. On one hand, my Fallout: New Vegas campaign continues to entertain.

Ghouls bite. Gentlemen vaporize.

As my unmatched might makes all foes tremble (I don't mean to brag, but I do carry both machete and muh shotty) I've been increasingly venturing among the map's more treacherous culverts where dangers are as often as not environmental instead of interpersonal. Visions of social collapse in the late 20th century clustered around various anxieties that the technological genie which had so rapidly transformed the world could just as easily turn on it. Rockets, nukes, robots, chemicals, or maybe just cars, post-apocalyptic works lead with conveniently inhuman symbols of wrongness. As do more modern fare from among the closely related dystopian genre, like Equilibrium or Snowpiercer. But though that tendency crept in from the start with, say, Metropolis, the great works of mid-century dystopian fiction (1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World) though they present a great many technological marvels, consistently and mercilessly refocus on human misuse of those marvels, on human frailty and viciousness.

 

So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that looking even further back to the century's onset, we find an even deeper focus on dystopia as an inherently social decline. I'd of course heard of Jack London's 1908 The Iron Heel as his famous socialist tract (unless you count The Sea Wolf where the political message is more symbolic) but did not bother with it until now because it doesn't come very highly recommended as a work of either literature or futurism. Though certainly noteworthy in historical context for inspiring the next couple generations, that latter, more refined output rightly eclipsed it.

 

Its main problem is basically trying to do too much at once. It is, for instance, peppered with real-world references illustrating London's grounding in the evidence of human nature, but the footnotes (some a page in length) though fascinating case studies in ruling class sadism, become too pedantic. It's unclear how much of the narrative was retrofitted to the author's need to list real-world outrages of 19th-century labor disputes, but it's more than enough to interfere with the plot instead of supporting it. His attempt to build Ernest Everhard (how that's for a manly name?) into a larger-than-life higher man like Wolf Larsen (still cooler) doesn't transfer well from a maritime frontier setting to office politics and political offices. He cycles too quickly through minor characters for their otherwise well-conceived personalities to pay off for the reader's attention investment.

 

As an apocalyptic procedural, it's hampered by its journal-style limited viewpoint conflicting with the need to describe society-wide changes. Compare to It Can't Happen Here's quite similar tale of a fascist/corporatist takeover of the United States, only far better fleshed out by adding minor viewpoints. Of course, the latter author did benefit from a couple decades' worth of incipient disillusionment with Socialist ideology brought about by evidence of Communist repression. London viewed class conflict entirely through socialist doctrine as rich oppressing poor, while Sinclair, with the benefit of thirty years' added evidence, could admit the rabble "enjoy being bullied" by their lauded strongman dictator.

 

As futurism, the book blows hot and cold. It harps too much on socialism's edenic promises of a "scientifically" inevitable transition from capitalism to proletarian rule. But it shows stunning foresight of Cold War espionage, extrapolated from labor dispute agents provocateur. He foresees quite astutely a mass campaign to consolidate farming by forcing bankruptcy which indeed seem to have come to pass in following decades. But again he fails to predict the role of religious revivals in indoctrinating the masses into worship of wealth as divine favor, placing a conscience-stricken priest as friend of the poor as a major character. He utterly fails to address the coming impact of mass media. Worst, while the climactic conflict in most such works reflects back upon the central theme (be it tech or ray-dee-ay-shun! or class or brainwashing, what-have-you) The Iron Heel's last third or so fizzles into a generic fog of war which could have described most any armed clash and fails to further the narrative.

 

Yet still, London did retain one advantage over other writers, his habitual keen awareness of instinctive power struggle, especially during an easily overlooked point midway through. He sends his hero to speak truth, not to power necessarily but to the middle class refusing to align itself with collectivist ideology, comparing the petit-bourgeois wailing against encroaching trusts to Luddites.

 

"Here are you, a century and a half later, trying to break machines. By your own confession the trust machines do the work more efficiently and more cheaply than you can. That is why you cannot compete with them. And yet you would break those machines. You are even more stupid than the stupid workmen of England. And while you maunder about restoring competition, the trusts go on destroying you.
[...]
You, sir, are a poor gamester. When you squeezed out the three small groceries here in Berkeley by virtue of your superior combination, you swelled out your chest, talked about efficiency and enterprise, and sent your wife to Europe on the profits you had gained by eating up the three small groceries. It is dog eat dog, and you ate them up. But, on the other hand, you are being eaten up in turn by the bigger dogs, wherefore you squeal.
[...]
You don't say that you like to squeeze profits out of others, and that you are making all the row because others are squeezing your profits out of you. No, you are too cunning for that. You say something else. You make small-capitalist political speeches [...] 'Our original principles are all right,' 'What this country requires is a return to fundamental American methods — free opportunity for all,' 'The spirit of liberty in which this nation was born,' 'Let us return to the principles of our forefathers.' When he says 'free opportunity for all,' he means free opportunity to squeeze profits, which freedom of opportunity is now denied him by the great trusts. And the absurd thing about it is that you have repeated these phrases so often that you believe them. You want opportunity to plunder your fellow-men in your own small way, but you hypnotize yourselves into thinking you want freedom. You are piggish and acquisitive, but the magic of your phrases leads you to believe that you are patriotic. Your desire for profits, which is sheer selfishness, you metamorphose into altruistic solicitude for suffering humanity."

 

Yikes!

Gut-punch.

 

There's no warning trefoil for that. It's a perfectly camouflaged Terminator. There's no system in place to alert you the man chanting the same slogans as you at the rally in fact protests only the system's power to prevent him from enslaving you himself. There's no mass-entertainment genre devoted to cranking out summer blockbusters about it.

AoW4 Factions, 24

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:

________________________________________________________________________________

Another faction roleplaying against the usual stigma around death and necromancy.

I didn't check the fine print when selecting a Righteous Oathsworn faction (do-gooders) with shadow magic (which tends toward evil) but Cult of Personality's hero bonus made for cheaper early questing and the Silver-Tongued trait, though again picked haplessly, makes up the economic difference in trading with neutral towns, with Faithful Whispers' reputation gain bonus forming the lynchpin for my greater strategy. On the tactical level, at first this seemed an unworkable combo, but in between failed attempts just as I started playing it, Triumph introduced an actual shadow/order research option. The bottom-tier, melee-range zombies that shadow magic summons normally tend to be pretty useless in themselves, better at eating halberds or as living nukes. Here though, not only did order heal/buff spells turn them into a passable front line, but monkeys' agility (allowing them to pass through friendly units) prevented the swarm from tripping over itself. I ended up needing far fewer high-tier units because I could throw mid-tier units into fights to die valiantly for my noble cause, then zom-zerg my enemies to death with tier 2 spellcasters bringing up the rear. Highly satisfying.

Stock Character Paradise

"Nichts bleibt"

Eisbrecher - Supermodel

 

Barring a pile-up at the airport, this should go up a couple hours before I arrive at my apartment. I've been visiting family over the past month, and though I'd arranged in advance for a backlog of puns and run-on sentences to post during my absence (many thanks also to Secretary of Flexing Hegseth's primitive antics for an easy political segue) I at one point realized I'd be too wiped to write anything after my flight, so let's see... what media have I been consuming during my trip? Let's start with Lynn, the abstract puzzle game inexplicably featuring a strong female protagonist.

gag me with a spoon

Actually it's at least two of them so far, and I'm only a third of the way in. It reminds me of one reason I generally haven't bothered with platformers or puzzlers or tower defenses these past couple decades. Abstraction doesn't sell well, so they pad out their features with pap and sap and cookie-cutter moralism. If I roll my eyes at an RPG telling me I saved the world and won the princess' eternal love (some terms and restrictions may apply) by knocking a pixelated goblin over the head, the same emotional manipulation on behalf of sliding brackets makes me want to gouge them out altogether.

 

As a rule such additions prompt a double double-take. First off, why was the emotive fluff included at all? Second, if you're gonna do it, why must it be the same idiotically trite and repetitive nonsense every time? The little girl is sugar and spice and everything nice, the magic spirit saves and falls in wuv with a wounded manly type, toss in some goblins or something and maybe an evil wizard or cute animal companion? Sure, whatever, pile it on. Come on, even by eight years old most of us were ready for other options.

 

Or at least you'd think so. But what audience age bracket is Death In Paradise targeting? I caught a couple of episodes of it years ago and didn't think much of the old beach cops routine, nor am I much of a fan of cozy murder mysteries. A longer look these past weeks brought my attention to the show's fairly snappy directing, a formula distilled to on-cue entrances and exits, an "I've gathered you all here" ending summation every episode, exactly one-point-five emotions per character per scene, and the occasional pratfall comic relief moment. If a bot's not already copy-pasting these scripts, they're wasting money.

 

Characters naturally follow. The smart guy has to be a diffident, stammering stumblebum solving cases by what appear to be flashes of divine inspiration rather than self-driven ratiocination. Low-ranking males are comic relief failing at life in a new way every episode and tripping over their own shoelaces in scene after scene so that the nearest female may prove herself smarter, faster and superior in every way. The only dignified male is the blatantly post-sexual old fossil of a daddy-figure existing to pat girlies on the head and verbally bitchslap their tribe's other males to put them in their place. Female suspects are as a rule red herrings stepping aside for a guiltier male by the parlor confession scene. If culpable in some way, females must be provided with a greater noble purpose under whose umbrella to operate. She was saving her family. It was self-defense. She was emotionally distraught. She just wuvs too much. Or her antagonist was a beast, was a loser, was a bad businessman losing the family fortune, was guilty of <something sexual> etc. A woman's conflict against a man is an opportunity to ladle negative qualities onto him until we come out convinced any man in fact deserves whatever's coming to him, more time is devoted to her justification for murder, and she herself struts offstage to the soft twanging of emotive strings establishing her moral superiority.

 

In the one instance I've seen so far where women are guilty of killing an innocent man, it's downplayed as an accident. The victim himself is minimized, never speaking a single line or even appearing as a character to prevent us from sympathizing with him - though at least for once he's not demonized to make us believe he deserved it. The emphasis is placed on the killers' emotional vulnerability to exculpate them in the audience's eyes. We're immediately assured of one woman's morally upright contrition, and the other did it all for love, and the reveal quickly transitions into a comic relief ending scene where another woman is praised for having helped a hapless man satisfy his fiancee's demands, to reaffirm the status quo of man bad; woman good. 

 

If this tedious old routine is sounding familiar, don't credit the BBC with it. It's the same exact "man bad; woman good" formula you've been seeing in every Hollywood flick the past fifteen years (and in most of them before that) and I've been pointing it out in games and comics and really... everything. Death in Paradise itself is highly successful. You can tell when they budget extra commercials rivaling the show's own runtime. Not just one but two spin-offs already. Fifteen seasons and counting. Supposedly it's boasted five detectives in sequence over that time, and given the writing's strict worship of formula, I feel confident each and every one will prove the same exact diffident nebbish wringing his hands apologetically whenever scripted in a scene opposite a woman. And there are a thousand more series just like it in the medium of television alone.

 

I've been commenting on this topic for over a decade now, and it's still hard for even me to wrap my head around how thoroughly feminism, that is to say misandry, permeates every creative medium, every public statement and classroom and ad break. No matter if you tell yourself your own country lacks a feminist lobby as visible as in the States, you have been absorbing their abuse from the cradle, whether from Hollywood, the BBC, every "news" outlet, what-have-you. It's the default. It's safe and homey. It's a "cozy" mystery.

 

It's murder. You have to dive into the most oppressive hellholes on the planet like Muslim dictatorships or North Korea to find comparable brainwashing campaigns so unchallenged as to outreach even the universal fairytale conventions about generic toothy, googly-eyed goblins jumping out of the walls at a plucky heroine. Because if I'm being honest, even Lynn's chibified wonderland cannot be called over-done or gratuitous compared to yet another and another scene of a male character stammering ineffectively while a woman cuts him down to size by virtue of her ovarian supremacy.

 

And that's where this post would end... if I hadn't also caught one episode where a daughter is revealed as having murdered her mother. No men involved. Sure, it's not directly bucking the default man bad / woman good juxtaposition, just sidestepping it, but four years ago when it aired I would not have bet on a TV show, especially a successful one, passing up the chance to pivot to a last-minute reveal of a filthy, vicious, malevolent male at the root of all evil. Still wouldn't bet on it.

 

But it's something, damnit. Another tiny crack in the facade.

  

I can't help noting that minor heresy against feminist dogma occurred in the only episode I've seen eschewing the standard mystery boilerplate as well, dodging red herrings or a final summation. Maybe they were just in a hurry? Or maybe the feminist litany of vituperation against and degradation of men is thus revealing its proper place among the primitive, trite, infantile mass-media formulae for the exploitation and manipulation of the ignorant masses, a fairytale for the simpleminded, a pile of stock gimmicks stapled onto any and every work regardless of relevance, like goblins jumping out of the walls.

I've never lived anywhere I could see dark-eyed juncos year-round.

They do overwinter at my current location though. 

Somehow they always cheer me up a bit.

Maybe it's the smaller family groups, or the more calm and measured way they scour the ground for food. Or maybe it's how easily they lose themselves in the ashen and sober, crisped and sere winter landscape. Little wisps of dust and fog tumbling about the rest.

 

This one's about Pete Hegseth

"I know niggas is hard-headed but I ain't got the patience
Don't want me havin' no patience, turn into more patients
More trips to ICU 'cause I see you
Trying to get away with shit a real nigga wouldn't do"

 

DMX - Where Da Hood At

____________________________________________

"You'll never get rich

You sonovabitch

You're in the army now"

____________________________________________ 

 

 

Once upon a time, my family's adorable puppy killed a cat. Strays from the neighbourhood continually trespassed in her yard, no matter how many times she chased them off. She'd tree one occasionally and have to be locked indoors while my father coaxed/carried the furball back down. Then one cat was too slow climbing and she shook it like a terrier having caught a rat, snapping its spine.

 

The adorable puppy was in turn attacked by a neighbour's pit bull while walking down the block, out in the open street. One year it broke her tail. A couple years later, it tore open her flank, thankfully not hitting much but skin and subcutaneous fat so she eventually healed up alright after being stitched up twice. But she's still absolutely terrified of even walking along the other side of the street from the pit bull's yard, and has to be walked to the park by the back road.

 

See the difference there? The Adorable Puppy did murder a repeat offender invading her territory and ignoring all warnings. But she doesn't go after cats in general, making no fuss at the neighbours' pampered housepet since it has the sense to stay on its own side of the fence. In fact when our relatives visit with their own cat, the two animals have always studiously ignored each other like divas at a cocktail party, instinctively accepting some sort of transitive in-group membership via monkey clan. They obviously don't like being in the same house, but neither raises a hackle. T'would be impolitic.

 

The pit bull attacks everything that moves, anywhere it moves, going after a local child on another occasion, who thankfully escaped before it could reach him. And though you'd rightly assume those holding a dangerous animal should take extra care to keep it contained, the same psychosis leading some to buy a pit bull prods them to "accidentally" let it slip out of the yard even more often than most. They want the drama. They want to play the victim when others call them on it as if they and their precious murder-beast are being targeted in a pogrom.

On a completely unrelated topic, the webcomic site Big Head Press has seemingly shrunk a bit over the years, down to its main libertarian adventure yarn and its porn spin-off. A couple of decades ago it also hosted a gargle of similar fare, including The Probability Broach, wherein a medium-boiled detective from a commie hell-topia travels to an alternate-dimension free-market paradise to be shown the wrong of his assumptions on public safety and powermongering, yadda-yadda, you know how that sort of story goes where academics are evil wizards and anyone who's not a shotgun-totin' shitkicker might by some contrivance prove a devious foreign subversive. Given how much of it reads like Robert Heinlein fanfiction, I will admit to having enjoyed The Broach well enough, which did not blind me to some of its more batshit insane moments, more often than not involving Americans' obsession with firearms.

 

"Vaughn's gun didn't do him much good, though."

"Not against a machinegun -- that's what happens when you outlaw handguns -- matters escalate."

Wait, so if you outlaw pit bulls, everyone will manage to find and buy Bengal tigers? How does that track? You gave your character gun N, had him killed by gun N+1, all as proof that N-1 would result in more gun murder? Well, I'm sure it aaall made sense back at the rally...*

 

Most comical the railing against criticism of the gun fetish as sexual sublimation, when the detective's requisite plucky love interest wails for a few pages around the stunning line: "who's sicker, somebody who thinks his gun is a sexual organ, or somebody who wants to take everybody's sexual organs away?"

Umm, the first category, definitely. You're still the crazy one. Your sublimation is unhealthy, and if my Pride-And-Joy were a revolver, I wouldn't blame you for making me at least wear a kevlar condom around town. 

 

There's a particular insanity to the image of a pit bull as call to atavism, as a strongman championing "the hood (at)" or his people, tribe, what-have-you. Much as a religious cretin might in his unbearable ignorance present an agriculturally, artificially selected banana as symbol of God's tailoring of the world for humans, a pit bull is the result of hyperselection for a highly artificial environment, the fighting pit. It exists at the mercy and self-destructive insanity of an entirely different species. In the wild it would show its innumerable disadvantages like its coat or its loss of energy-saving canine loping gait, etc. Wolves are certainly more aggressive than domestic dogs as a whole, but a wolf born with a pit bull's omnidirectional hyperaggression would likely be torn apart by the rest of its pack or would at least be abandoned to its fate when it idiotically runs at a bear or whatever. Most animals value but also understand the limitations of turf and trespassing. T'would be impolitic not to.

 

And for the human species itself, while warrior castes had existed for millennia, mass militarist sentiment among the lower classes was a rare phenomenon until Napoleon's** adept exploitation of our overdeveloped social-climbing instinct, discovering he could pay soldiers, instead of material goods, in artificial status symbols a.k.a. medals a.k.a. the latest spaulders in Word of Warcraft. North-American colonists had guns for immediate necessity, not sport or ideology.

 

But in closing we must in brief touch on Pekingese and try not to lose a finger, because many toy breeds in fact display the same level of aggression as pit bulls, and are undisciplined even by that comparison! Had Chihuahuas the size to carry through on their intent, every tupperware party would end as redly as Cujo's wettest dreams. And as for surviving in a natural state, well... let's just say the local squirrels would acquit themselves better. By analogy, if you scoff at the absurdity of pumping military staff full of testosterone, admit depo-provera's no divine ambrosia either. There's nothing healthier or more natural in recent decades' obsession with feminization, in fabricating a political prop of what should be personal choice, in the feminist movement's desperation to prop up transsexuals and transvestites and metrosexual poodles as morally superior misandrist converts and a show of diversity reducing diversity to a neutered cherub ideal. Feminists' yapping purse-pooches have made at least as much a spectacle of their ideology as libertarian gun nuts, and their market penetration is even greater. Gun Queen Story Hour, anyone?

 

So yes, great, leash the current political insanity. Then also leash the other brand you've refused to address for decades running. As would be politic.

 

 

____________________________________

 

 

* A lot of times this sort of argument hearkens back to increased alcohol consumption during prohibition, naively ignoring that manufacturing a machine gun takes a helluva lot more investment, coordination and precision than mashing some grapes in a barrel and forgetting about the sauce for a while. Bathtub gin is doable. Bathtub anti-air missiles, not so much. The proliferation of firearms is not a grass-roots movement, but the result of very large, very organized, very governmental corporate profiteering.

 

** Though Napoleon tends to be over-credited for this. Pretty sure the Prussians were developing the same system around the same time. 

AoW4 Factions, 23

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've always hated the roleplaying stigma against death and necromancy, so last year I made several Shadow factions playing the evil either up or down as the mood struck me. This ended up my favorite one of the bunch. Shadow/astral have great synergy in terms of spellcasting, though these guys aren't as specialized for pure nuking as my syrons or Cheshire cats. In contrast to my usual summon/buff-heavy routine (though I do miss my beasts 'n weeds) this faction needs a scant few summons to shore up the front line (made up of skeleton cannon fodder in the first place) before they simply debuff and nuke everything in some truly spectacular displays of pyrotechnics (cryotechnics?) especially with various casting point bonuses meaning you can really let rip with the big guns. (Caveat: always starved for mana.) Strategically, the economic side's a struggle but rapid research at least widens my bag of tricks quickly, freebie skeletons ease the recruitment pressure and the Keepers of Knowledge diplomatic bonuses help more than expected. Also, a Defender giant avatar combined with back-row evokers allows for faster than usual early expansion, for a nerd faction. Love it, and replayed it a few times after ascension.

A Fine Frenzy

Erase her despair, you've always been there, you're shorter of hair, you're shorter on hair, la mer des mêres your Venus declare or you're off to the chair, all the spoils of a wasted life through all of my wasted years, through all of my wasted tears off the tourniquet, she still has all her hair but your bones crack in her little teeth, won't you be her leather, Pat's still perky but the old game is not up, Herbert, revert, don't lose sight of the dog that's inside you better yet don't lose consciousness with your back to the bitch, the oldest game is never over, the oldest profession has no borders, will you take your place in the great below her navel gazing, did they warn you of hazing, did they warn you of negging did they warn you of hazel eyes always seeking above is her sun your sun is hersun your sun ishersunyoursun, oh repair, she's always been there she comes, walking down the street race you to the finish line it's in a courthouse guns to your head when you've got nothing left to give sever flesh and bone and offer it to Herbert learned his lesson eventually but did you despair of the aristocratic life commitment it did she have a headache and where did she sleep last night, in the pi nes and you did you sleep in the lake of fire where the tied up, used up and dead to the world end up the hill to fetch a peel it back and doesn't it make you feel better to regiment your bhisti, christie lists her wants to loam your seedy needs, down girl down, down girl down you send him in it, she was up above it all, but when you live with ape men it's hard to be clean track it from the beginning, with beer and bread and a road well traveled the priestess cured wild meat into a hero, always who pay - two or three months does it mutter how much as if every month after, und du hast night gesicko, perverted luste, sons of goddesses ach schweine, sate this liebste meine hands and knees we crawl you cannot stop us all of this for youuuu-hooochie that frail braining you with her heart as big as a whale at the casino she know how to kick the gong around so git to the track and make them dullards fast but it'll never be enough, never be enough, never be enough to fill your head the dormouse said right before the cat meowed and out he cowed, the oxy, oxy ollenfree, all the men she tells youuu-hooo will never be, still gardening her bed of krater-era icons, the blood of your foes burns you at her jealous will you won't you realize she had you made from the start, made man high-grade man, rock superstar, five cars you're in charge of the honeys at the palladium is an imaginary currency at which girlies was laughin 'cause how's that gonna help you get a friend from whose ride to holla, when you gettin' clean of the heroine, where the parents comin' at you with supersonic speeds for the grand kids with guns gonna get it where I can't look at the world the way you look at the world is not enough but it's a start my love you 'til the day that hie die ist die erste stern von alle sad pictures of girls getting bitter sisters you used to have but don't any more than she can give her body it would be impolitic to bring up the soul cages in the fishwoman's yard full of brass watch, a cheque, maybe three weeks to live your fear of biological imperatives, it's relative, it's all in the family, they're hiding inside of me, sie will es und so ist es brauch, was sie will bekommt sie you gonna do right like some other man do it young and stupid the way she likes it's always there, oh despair of seeing her dancing pretty with tears in her eyes blackbird singing in the dead of night for her slice of your pie, deny your goddess three times into the seven day binge, that to surrender magnificently to passion accurst, but Fiduciary Annie's just a girl to me, kinda down, kinda feelin' some feelings you wouldn't believe the good old spells on you, 'cause you're hers if you love her, hers if you hasst her dead disco, dead funk, dead rock and roll was a euphemism for the dead love couldn't go no further her goals, hells' bells knocks me on my knees, rolls with platinum wheels, that don't impress her much ado about the shrew, but the mouse is called immodest if he redirects your female gaze from the glass ceiling where mandy went to med school to the glass floor where every scrub takes three steps toward the door mister, it ain't right babe, no, it ain't right, no, no, to feel so lucky while gettin's good times are killing me was this for real, just an illusion, a toxic pillory to make her numb to your place in the dirt, a toxic pillory to make you dumb to her funny little face, 'cause there's a knife for every day that I've known you, just remember, when you think you're free, you'll never be free, you'll never be free, you'll be the revenging mariner hoping that you'd die holding hands, have you started to turn into somebody else, that always happens to somebody else, you'll always know who you are, from the other side of the sixteen military wives reclaiming your small estate, disorder, disorder the toxicity of your city in the deep dank tarn where your hideous heart keeps beating, straining against Annie's grip for more, more than the chore, more than the bore, more than before, more than a mandate to adore, more than a man dares to restore, the crisped and sere hopes of lone moan before Weir was haunted by ghoulfriends, when they called him unforgiven unto unprofitable intrigues soaring above the beldam's curtain poles where Brunhild gets ever more impatient in her ring of monetized desire, where it's curtains for Marsyas preaching to the choir, down in the park where Paris and Ravana and Nessus and Koschei offer the spoils of a wasted life, allzumenschliche for yoouuuu-hoo've always been their, you've always been their, you've always been their despair.

Oh, despair, she'll always be there.

 

________________

 

 

 

I've been doing fewer of these stream-of-consciousness rambles the past couple of years, for... multiple reasons. One being that song lyrics and other quotes have increasingly hijacked said streams. This time though, it even started with a song, getting back in my car exhausted and drenched with a sudden rainstorm after a walk through the woods but somehow still sweating and struggling for breath, and the stereo piped up with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Despair. The singer's got the type of voice that really hits me (cf. Garbage, Metric, In This Moment, etc.) and so from the first lyrics my miserable drowned rat physical state was wrenched into her meaning, her intonation. And all I could think driving home was how fucking unfair this was, even as I worshipped every lilt and sigh and set it on repeat. I won't even bother trying right now to list every source I ripped off above. Some references even I can't remember after the fact, and this is about 90% random rip-offs by volume. Herbert is an initial and the mother of mothers references both NIN and my favorite comic book. The first few phrases were mentally composed on my way home, most of the rest sitting in a hot bath until my old tablet's text editor crashed on me and erased what I hadn't saved. So it goes. That was three months ago. I finally rediscovered it during another bath and picked up the Poe quote where I'd left off. So it also goes. But the last line was fixed as soon as I got in my car back then. And it still goes.