Thanks for Playing!

I tried Team Fortress 2 again recently after some years' absence. Development having altogether ceased when Valve saw Overwatch's release gut its own playerbase, pretty much zero things have changed. "Competitive" mode is still an idiotically shrunken duel/pissing contest abandoning all the game's strengths trying in vain to copy Overwatch's appeal and not worth the bother. But of course casual 12v12 mode is itself utterly poisoned by retarded trash refusing to fight, AFKing, sitting around spamming emotes or just quitting at the first death. Matches are not decided by relative worth but by which team actually has players... y'know... playing the motherfucking game?

 

It's not as though Valve wasn't always aware of this, but their insane excuse for a solution doing more harm than good remains in effect: automatically switching players from the larger to the smaller team. So after I've spent two minutes healing everyone on the control point for an easy victory, I'm forced to take the place of the dickless bitches I made quit and be punished with automatically losing during the third minute for having played too well. Aaand, uninstall again, that's enough of that.

 

But it's not as if I can get my fix of teamwork any better way. I was permanently banned from Warframe a year or two ago for raging against a griefer deliberately running up behind me repeatedly undoing all our team's quest progress step by step by step - but you can bet no action was taken against the griefer himself. Here's a snapshot match history from League of Legends* from... last year I think?

Unless you believe I was the noobiest noob that ever n00bed a noob at the start... then suddenly became an absolute GAMER GOD!!! for ten or fifteen matches straight... only to again switch to N00b!-mode for no particular reason... then again to god-mode... then again to noob-mode... and so on, endlessly, well obviously something other than my quality as a player is deciding match outcomes. The moment Riot's algorithm identifies you as better, it punishes you by giving you worse teammates, and worse, and worse, until tanking your average to its satisfaction.

 

Now, of course it's important to have balanced teams, but that's the whole point of having "leagues" so that teams can be composed of players of the same general aptitude. GENERAL aptitude. INDIVIDUALLY teaming worse players with better ones merely punishes the better and rewards the worse. Moreover, it shows that Riot's datamining can easily determine who the griefers are, and instead of eliminating those guilty of ruining matches keeps them in the playerbase for the express purpose of punishing their betters. 

 

On a completely unrelated topic, once upon a time I was motoring some Podunkian byways, late morning sometime before lunch hour, sun shining, birds singing, lovely day, when I suddenly slam the brakes! Was it a squirrel, a stray cat, a deer? No, it was some pasty guy, shirtless, tattooed up to his neck (pretty sure there was a swastika in there somewhere) stumbling aimlessly in a daze, sporting the stringy, bug-eyed aesthetic of methamphetamine addiction which you learn to spot as a self-preservation mechanism if you ever sojourn in Middle America. And who knows what else he was on. Far from jumping away from near-collision he draws himself up in surprise, still standing in the middle of the street, and draws back his fist as if to punch the hood of my car... then in the next split-second jerks his head up, blinking at the sun, distracted by some noise in the trees, and stumbles off the road again, straight into the bushes. For the record, I don't particularly give a shit what substances you're on, except as an indicator of likely behaviors including stumbling into traffic and punching cars which should by all rights disqualify you from participation in society. We have more traffic laws than anyone can keep track of. They're very good at punishing the otherwise blameless for "speeding" on empty roads. How useful are they at keeping crackheads from denting my grille?

It's gotten almost impossible to get rubbing alcohol at pharmacies these past years, simple ethyl alcohol, forcing a switch to the less digestible isopropyl. Why? I'm not the one getting drunk off the shit. Why am I being punished? Police those actually guilty of abuse. Why did we spend a quarter century taking our shoes off at the airport? And more importantly, for every convenience and dignity we have always been made to surrender in the name of some greater good, call it firearms or marijuana depending on your political affiliation, you have to ask: yes, fine, but what are you doing with the actual guilty parties you catch? Why are murderers not executed? Why is the car-punching good old boy still drunk-walking the streets? You can't seriously tell me it hasn't harmed others before. Conversely, I've committed no harm condemning me to be subjected to, and endangered by, its presence.

 

Game companies claim to fight cheating while openly cheating to enable griefers. Governments claim to promote the public good while deliberately feeding whatever worst demographic will vote for them, be it crackheads in the city or meth-heads in the sticks. Why? Online games have long achieved, by their very nature, the totalitarian mass surveillance and absolute power real-world soldiers and politicians only envision in their sadism. The griefing and cheating yet pervading all such games, the fact the companies themselves, without being asked, take it upon themselves to cheat on behalf of their worst customers and shield them from repercussions, unerringly reveals the truism of every "people's republic": that all their oppression renders life more dangerous, not less, funneling sadists up the ranks of power. Why?

 

Well, partly for sheer profit by numbers, the "for the people" motivation masking weaponized, monetized mob rule, but also because just like Valve, Digital Extremes and Riot refusing to ban potential customers no matter what harm they cause to their betters, just as their algorithms deliberately employ those griefers to harm better players, governments see value in keeping destructive filth threatening others, a ready stock of easily manipulated lynch mobs and a drain on the prosperity of the now vanished middle class. There is no way to improve any society, real or virtual, without exterminating its worst elements, and that is precisely why those elements are never exterminated, being too useful as tools of control over the greater system. Every ruler wants mindless thugs, scabs and strikebreakers, to throw at principled dissenters. Every ruler wants to be able to decree when an underling should lose a match, and to do so via proxy so as to maintain deniability.

 

Want progress? Exterminate the filth. Eh, screw it, never mind, it's about a century too late to avoid collapse anyway.

. 

 

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* Yeah, I know the game's shit anyway, but it's not like the genre offers better options these days.

I am become derp, destroyer of words.

AoW4 Factions, 22

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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Not sure what syrons are supposed to be other than cheesy super-elves from beyond the moon, so never paid them any attention. In practice though, their caster focus suits me just fine. Combined with mystic potential and wizard king casting, I fell into an easy rhythm cycling buffed spells to blast through fights. Their description turned into one of the more philosophical ones too, and not a little apropos of gaming escapism. I'd still rather have elves though.

The Necromancer's Tale

"This world's all wrong

So let's go where we belong

Pack up the stereo, meet at the burial ground

Contract malaria, meet at the burial ground"

 

The Decemberists - Burial Ground

_________________________________________ 

 

"Something in me recoiled at his expression of joy. How could a man be so happy while both my sleep and waking hours were tormented by whispers from the grave?"

 

It was a dark and stormy night.

No, really.

Hi-diddly-ho, neighbourinos. Don't mind me, just doing a bit of... uhh... gardening... at the witching hour of night, in a graveyard, guarded by a boiling cauldron of mind-altering brew. It's alright. I'm a professional.
 

Which is a weird way to start this, since despite overall enjoying the game I'll repeatedly be accusing its creator of amateurishness. The barrier of entry for garage projects in game design rose steeply to complete unfeasibility in the 2000s' 3D graphic arms race era, but has been gradually dropping again over the past decade as a "good enough" suite of generic engines and assets have become more widely accessible.* If credits are to be believed, The Necromancer's Tale is, more so than even Wildermyth, a mom-and-pop project authored/programmed largely or entirely by one writer and staffed in part by a suspicious repetition of that author's last name.

 

This time though, the strain really shows in some blatant project creep, straining to accommodate far more RPG stats, more NPC merchants, more items including cosmetics, than was healthy for its overall capacity. I would have rather seen more finessing at a smaller scale. The program has locked up a few times, the conversation interface resetting up and down is just visually distracting, oddball auto/quicksaves tied to manual saves themselves overwriting save titles, the mouse pointer is far too easily confused by nearby objects and requires frequent zooming and camera turning to select, pathing... gets you to where you clicked eventually but takes some weirdly unoptimized zig-zags, the repetitiveness of carrying and animating skeletons gets very grindy after a couple of chapters, the entire item system is littered with redundant or useless pickups. And while it's not really at the same level of flaws, it drives my inner librarian nuts that the town map is not aligned to North! Not all art assets are well applied to the setting, like a rather modern-looking indoor flush toilet in 1730. I suppose it's a gray area, as the nobility could've had early models... in London, not an Adriatic Ruritania.

No chamber-pots for our musketeers!

And while dialogue trees are laudably well fertilized, a one-man show simply lacked the means to address all possible interactions, yielding some comically oblivious NPCs.

Then she took an arrow in the knee

For all that, RPG fans (myself included) would gladly have sung the praises of The Necromancer's Tale for its handling of several long-standing lacks in cRPG design: avoiding a strict "chosen one" plot, making the player pay attention to his actions, and most importantly playing the dark side and smoothing out the all too facile power fantasy by a self-conscious stinginess toward spell slots and minions. In fact, the entire first chapter is an extended choose-your-own-adventure character creation device:

And if you're wondering, yes, I did end up answering precisely the right questions to yet again make myself an elf wizard. 

Hey, I gotta be me.

Even afterward, the second chapter is played in adventure game dialogue mode, the third is exploration of the town, you try your first tentative fight by chapter four and only really get into tactical combat by chapter six of sixteen. Overall I preferred Tides of Numenera's version of individual stat pools and investment in consumables (even if it was too easy to cover all bases) but stat investment strategy's still handled quite well here, never locking you out of progression yet definitely making you wary of wasting your four flex points needed to surpass a particularly obstructive skill check once a chapter. It all adds up to highly satisfying dramatic escalation paired with an equally well-considered build-up of your own occult power, from vague inklings to tentative toying and cooking experiments to fumbling first efforts to earning your place as a true force of un-nature. Nothing comes easy for our van Elstrik, but as a result each advance is far more meaningful.

 

Unfortunately, the worldbuilding's very hit-or-miss. The author did some reading, I'll grant (thematically apt literary references pepper your environs) but lacked a coherent feel for preindustrial mannerisms or speech or daily life. Incongruities crop up in every expository paragraph. There was no "pulp" fiction in 1730, books being still quite rare and scant literacy providing no market. Children would've been farm labor or at best shop apprentices. What grates most of all is the constant and absurd repetition of "okay" a quite modern Americanism which only spread to the rest of the world with 20th-century mass-media and cannot be waved away by the universal translation convention. DIY voicing lands all over the map, sometimes spot-on (the more casual anglophone characters) other times groaningly terrible (socialites or any "ethnic" accents like Slavs or Italians) to where it immediately breaks immersion.** Which brings us to the piles upon piles of gratuitous snowflakery, because there. are. a. lot. of those quaint ethnic extras serving absolutely no purpose but to stamp some "inclusivity" form in the writer's brain. It was odd from the start mixing Venice with an imaginary Ruritania, but then you pile on with Irish, German, Austrian, English, Senegalese, Chinese, Turkish, plus various nondescript middle-Easterners or East-Europeans, and the setting loses all coherence, grinding the narrative to a halt again and again and again in performative multiculturalism. With every new pointless character waxing poetic on the virtues of other cultures or voicing anachronistic pacifism and populism, I couldn't help wondering why they didn't simply set their game in such an exotic locale or go for a straight-up fantasy world.

 

The setting would have been served far better by a more coherent portrayal of peasant life and Enlightenment-era craft guilds, of noble privilege and the intrusive and abusive power of the Church, agrarian dependence on the seasons and the whims of nature. Blighting crops and killing livestock are conspicuously absent manifestations of the dark arts here. Instead much of the game is devoted to tediously and redundantly lining up all the standard "woke" saints and devils, be it kow-towing to Islam or Orientalism or homosexuality (seriously, in 1700s Europe?!? gay men were treated as only slightly less unnatural than necromancy!) or a half-black half-brutha noble of spirit, or of course, as always, the most pervasive historical/biological revisionism of all, the feminist variety.

 

Man bad; woman good. Repeat the mantra.

For just a partial taste:

- bad enough to pretend no segregation of the sexes existed, but female sailors? 'nuff said

- said female sailor openly bragging about her promiscuity and conquests? would've gotten run out of town as a harlot, possibly by the local whores for muscling in on their turf (and that would've made a better story)

- female gang leader who apparently needs no male muscle 

- a perfect, victimized mother and evil father

- industrious and matriarchal society of progress

- witch gets automatically redeemed to a peaceful, friendly herbalist by the end because all her negative traits were the fault of men 

- a woman broke a rib <breaking up a fight> on the docks not <fighting> and "Her intent did not seem rude, but rather, efficient."and she's conveniently juxtaposed to a male doctor whose male brother is caught up in shady business and her male superior won't let her investigate the case of the evil males

- when throwing dice, the woman "shows men how it's done"

- ghost story about a husband betraying his wife to her untimely demise; for a bonus, stick in some line about her being too strong-willed for him

- your childhood friends now dating are a sitcom-standard savvy attractive female and bumbling dopey fat male

- a farmer's wife bitching about her arranged marriage as cause for armed rebellion and you get punished with a relations penalty if you reply with a line about personal merit

- a wife that's all business because her husband would run said business into the ground

- a brilliant scientific/mathematical female wasting away in an unhappy marriage to a sleazy husband 

 

Man bad; woman good. Repeat the mantra. As in Disco Elysium, creativity and coherence die instantly on contact with feminism. Sad, because once again there is some evident core talent here. It's just wasted chasing performative, moral majority-approved pablum instead of building on the strengths of the plot. Beyond that, other elements were shoehorned in as industry or pulp fiction standards, like the plethora of sex/romance subplots. Son of a cocksucker, in a story about necromancy of all things? Why!? Dragging these out well into the second half when we should be focusing more on the supernatural also make the last few chapters drag a bit.

 

From a more practical angle, quest/chapter progression tends toward the idiosyncratic or outright nonsensical at times. The Necromancer's Tale sells itself as among other things an "exploration" game, but as I've tried to point out numerous times, beach-combing is not exploration. Repeatedly combing the same beach, even less so. NPCs flicker in and out of existence or utility from chapter to chapter and (per adventure game norm) you constantly have to run around individually checking each one to see if new dialogue options have become available because random schmuck #16 sitting around town just happens to have an "in" you need to exploit to complete your quest (oh, she's his maid? good thing nobody even hinted at her existence the previous eight chapters and fifty times I wandered this location asking everyone what they do for a living!) Actions become available or unavailable depending on chapter (e.g. lockpicking, or curing the beaten Venetian) doors and town gates open at arbitrary times, and there are entirely, entirely too many random "gotcha" moments where you lose faction rep for asking standard adventurer questions, e.g. asking the apothecary about your father's death or merely asking a guard who the fuck he is. Gotcha moments do not serve as a meaningful challenge, but only the author's need to feel superior to his audience.

 

Yet still, given that, given all of that, admitting all of that fumbling, bumbling stumbling so worthy of grumbling, amazingly The Necromancer's Tale still breaks slightly better than even and deserves a playthrough.

It is hard to sufficiently emphasize just how effectively it nails its core feature of a gradual slide toward darkness and imperceptibly waxing mystic puissance. The crafting system is just involved enough to make you work for your reagents. Not only do the florid descriptions of supernatural sensations lend a far more visceral appeal to what would usually be summarized as "cast magic missile" but these mesh with mechanics like your mana pool initially depending heavily on a randomized "winds of magic" bonus which becomes less and less relevant the more your own power puts you beyond the whims of fate. New discoveries chain into each other, like a mystery investigation netting you a tank mook that can pass a couple of strength checks letting you among other things acquire a wraith summon which makes it much easier to farm zombies from bandits trying to ambush you. The spirit world begins to impinge upon your perception, putting you in danger of revealing your powers by accident. Your humanity meter starts dropping... but then, is that a bad thing? Your progress toward the unnatural feels perfectly natural, beginning with the best of intentions, forced into desperate measures by economic circumstance, continuing with verifiable righteousness, overindulging under the moral umbrella of others' worse crimes, growing beyond the pettiness of human morality.
 

I've said that necromancy itself needs a more even-tempered treatment than the primitive, thoughtless disgust with which it's treated. I've praised movies like Maggie which return to the core, low-key terrors of zombification. This is the best RPG treatment of such themes I've seen in a very long time. My favorite moment in the whole game was stashing my swelling army in the farthest corner of the map, in a place of ancient magic, just leaving them to stand, silent and expectant, in the cold, secret, dark reaches of oblivion, their lurid shadows dacing on rock walls as I shuffled among them in my burial shroud grave-lit by my demonic wand, adding the latest two or three zombies to the throng, or picking my tank mook out to sneak him back into town for repairs.

 

For all its faults, there is a lot to be said for a game that can make so much of so simple and unscripted a moment.

 

_________________________________

 

 

* We shall not speak of RPGMaker or other chibified, pixelated retro junk.

** One of the voices sounds like the fishwife from the marketplace on Earth in Warframe?

 

P.S.: To me, there seemed only one logical way to end the story, but if achievement percentages are any indicator, most players did not go the route of eternal darkness, clinging to the more conventional morality of a redemption story instead. The author shows a lot of potential, but it will be wasted if that mass approval lodestone keeps skewing plots toward pablum.

Under Brush

It may be a cliche, but have you ever... watched your step?

This next log seems to have been singed by a brush fire at some point. Note the larva-dug tunnel uncovered on the left.

Not sure if that's the culprit on the bottom right, emerged to adulthood. Poor light conditions. Having a devil of a time identifying its fat butt. Wood-boring is a time-honored and widely adopted profession, but from a bit of image-searching only a couple of subfamilies like Cryptorhynchinae and Mesoptilinae have such... child-bearing hips, let's say.

 

I've always been fascinated by these tiny microcosms. 

A patch of moss, a log or rock, flowers and sporangia, saplings dreaming of the canopy, there's a whole epic in a single footstep.

It brings about a perspective shift when you realize even the tiny flitting fuzzlings we so casually dismiss tower over this world.

Maybe it's how delicate everything looks. 

Or maybe it's the sheer variety of form we so easily pass by, all those alien-looking lichens and mosses which, at least on the surface, appear so unconcerned with the rest of the biosphere's struggles.

"an anarcho-syndicalist commune"

"War and slavery, exploitation
The common basis of a Western nation
Official version, a falsified story
The truth lies buried in a shroud of glory"

 

KMFDM - Glory

 

 

I've said it before, but as chauvinistic garbage goes, there's a particular comedic wealth of pratfalls in the "woke" glorification of The Correct sex/race/sexuality, in just how often the politically correct thugs manage to trip over their own propaganda. I've been trying an amateurish but promising low-fantasy, low-budget RPG called The Necromancer's Tale recently, which I'll address in full later. But among the various "man bad; woman good" moral lessons and other standard snowflakery, one of the various trendily ethnic extras assuring us of non-European superiority stands out for sheer concentrated irrationality.

I'm amused enough at seeing Senegal gradually become everyone's go-to victim nation reference after The Good Place. So nice of the show's writers to teach everyone that word. The laser-focus on "The French And The English" is standard fare for reflexive adolescent posturing in ignorance of other cultures' interplay in maritime empires. As is flat-out ignoring the centuries of existing and continuing Arabic/Muslim oppression of North/East-Africans and central Asia before West-European Christians caught up in the imperial game. But the real cherry on top of the turd comes of having a character self-righteously wail and rail against slavery while praising the glory (of all things) of the Ottoman Empire! Ya randomly lobbed yer lil' ol' pokeball and of all places it could've landed, that's who you pika-chose to name-drop in counterpoint to slaving!?

 

This is not just a matter of "everybody used to do it" oh nonono. It is difficult if not impossible to think of any slavers in all of history more vicious, enduring, conniving and prolific than the Turks! Not Chinese ports, not Viking raiders, not ancient Egypt, nobody. The Atlantic triangle trade provides recognizable talking points (plantations, racial profiling, the middle passage) and ratcheted up to a dedicated industry indeed eclipsing other examples in a couple short centuries in sheer numbers. Astounding and lamentable, yes. But the Turkish love of slavery pervaded not only their own society but the slave networks of surrounding lands as well. If it's more difficult to pin down, it's because it wasn't one vast enterprise, no one gigantic demographic like black plantation labor. The Ottomans just had their fingers in every possible form and channel of slave trafficking spanning from Northern Africa to Western Asia to Eastern Europe.

 

Its most famous feature would be the regular, institutionalized slave tribute of young boys they forced from among victims of their invasions. But then you've got the Red Sea / NE-African slave trade inherited from their Muslim precursors, the fact that their every military campaign doubled as a slave raid, the off-the-books slave raids and other local banditry they funded across Eastern Europe, bankrolling Berber slavers down across the Sahara and Tartar khanates raiding North-eastern Europe, especially Poland, being the biggest players in Mediterranean coastal slave raids alongside their rabid pets off their leashes the Barbary Corsairs (think back, who's Conrad's antagonist in The Corsair?) colluding and trafficking with the multiple (and prolific in their own right) Muslim slaver-states in India, or being the chief sex slave runners and routinely castrating the males they caught, and when the whole game finally started winding down, when Europeans finally forced them to step back, continuing in places like Circassia where they reached a heartwarming compromise of a final solution with their perennial enemy empire to the north: let the Russians handle the genociding while the Turks cozily enslaved the remainder. And yes, just like in, say, Twelve Years a Slave, this institution so pervaded daily life that the Sultan had to occasionally crack down on his own slavers poaching his own subjects to sell back to each other. (Nobody likes a re-gifter.)

 

And if Americans were late to outlaw it, the Turks did not do so for another sixty years afterward. This all and more went on not for three centuries, but for the six-and-change centuries of the empire's official existence, that's if you're not counting the region's pre-imperial view of European heathens and Eurasian native societies in general as rightful slaves of the faithful. It far preceded, it out-lasted, it omnidirectionally out-reached the European version. In fact, given its geographic position, the Ruritania wherein is set The Necromancer's Tale would have been fighting off or fleeing Turkish slave raids as a mundane fact of life for several centuries by 1700!

 

It takes a self-flagellating, brainwashing, politically correct (and dare I say it: slavish) modern education to so bullheadedly, boneheadedly ignore all historical proportion and deliberately glorify such millennial sadism as morally superior. Bloody peasant!

AoW4 Factions, 21

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 to build a giant's faction around brute force, with nasty ogres wading into fights and just hacking away at targets until they drop... and that's exactly what I got. Probably the least complicated faction I ever played. Like the primal halflings, being pretty tough they got a lot more use than others out of their primal buff stacks. They remind me of those cops from Idiocracy somehow. Ah, that's enough o' yer bullshit, sir.

Ripley, Alumnus of Woolloomooloo

"I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library

Line up to the mind cemetery now

What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin'

They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em"

 

Rage Against the Machine - Bulls On Parade

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"It does NOT follow that because a good many of the intellectuals belong to the 97 per cent of the broke--that plenty of actors and teachers and nurses and musicians don't get any better paid than stage hands or electricians, therefore their interests are the same. It isn't what you earn but how you spend it that fixes your class--whether you prefer bigger funeral services or more books. I'm tired of apologizing for not having a dirty neck!"

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

_____________________________________________

"Could you please explain to me why you do not take tea?"

"Take tea," Jillian sneered. "That's exactly why. You 'take tea.' There's a ritual. Etiquette. It's stupid." She sat forward and pointed to the steaming teapot. "It's a beverage. Hot dirty water in a cup. You pick it up and drink it.

[...]

But I thought your side didn't care about Royalty. Vinny said titles and stuff didn't matter to you guys as much as getting the mission done."
Instead of beckoning the serving Doll, Don King leaned very far forward, reached an uncomfortable and rude distance across the table, and picked up the teapot. With deliberate carelessness, he sloshed tea into his cup, spilling and dripping all over the white lace. As Jillian watched him, he banged down the pot and picked up the fine china cup in his whole fist. He raised it up high, spilling more of it.
"To hot dirty water in a cup!" he shouted loudly. Bunny sort of snapped out of her reverie and leaned away from Don King on the couch, looking slightly alarmed. He put the cup to his mouth and gulped it down, spilling some down his cheeks and onto his shirt. Then he held up the half-empty cup again and bellowed, "To etiquette!"
He hurled the cup backhand, hard, and without a glance at where it might land. It struck a column and shattered against a marble mantle. Jillian stood up sharply.
"What was that!" she demanded.
Don King shrugged. "Me not carin' about Royalty." He wiped his dripping face with his sleeve, exaggerating the slovenliness of the gesture. "Ugly, ain't it? Siddown.

[...]

Just as a mouse cannot choose to be a wolf, a wolf can't live like a mouse. You are so clearly a Royal that it pains me to see how you act. You cannot forever deny the way the Titans made you."

"How?" Jillian challenged. "How am I 'clearly a Royal?'"

"Hundreds of little ways. You act rudely on purpose, but rudeness shocks you."

 

Erfworld, Book 1, Epilogue pp. 20-21

(or, substitute that "Superman's always Superman" speech given by the villain from Kill Bill (what was his name again?))

____________________________________________

 

 

I've not bothered watching Rachel Maddow in well over a decade (damn, how much hair dye and collagen is the old girl absorbing on a weekly basis now?*) but that show is where I acquired my taste for longwinded, awkwardly obtuse segues. I also greatly appreciated her not adopting some down-home folksy demeanor to placate the average consumer. Though I can only assume it a universal feature of media marketing, any objective observer must be struck by the frequency with which American celebrities in particular must reinforce their "average Joe" credentials and affect monosyllabic vocabularies. MSNBC's insistence on urbane (there's that word again) middlebrow stars mixing cocktails instead of chugging beer was, in that context, a real breath of fresh air a couple decades ago.

 

I bring this up now because the conjunction of the World Cup and America's big 250 has flooded channels with one transparently dishonest auto da fe after another. Well-read adults with nary a trace of drool on their chins clapping like toddlers in adulation of braindead jocks' high-kicking exploits and waving flags as fake as the plastic one propped up on the moon. As if TV presenters' usual pretense of caring about baseball and American football wasn't bad enough. (Was I ever meant to believe John Oliver watches wrestling? Please.) But, to reverse that train of thought, if watching some Ivy League starched shirt pretend he's jizzing at the mere thought of the next NASCAR race is awkward enough, try selling copies of The Canterbury Tales at a hot dog eating contest.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, Netflix continues its gradual campaign to improve its brand image beyond zombie flicks and sex comedies. A couple of years ago this came in the form of Ripley, previously adapted in glitzier Hollywood fashion as The Talented Mr. Ripley from the story by the same name, which I've never read and will not be addressing. The newer version's an aggressively old school affair, black-and-white, light on effects and camera footwork and heavy on the location shots, characters and acting. It's... excellent, really, and I say that as a SciFi fan rarely bothering with crime dramas. Among its more memorable aspects: the subtlety of the protagonist's portrayal. Despite his repeated successes, Ripley is clever but by no means a superintelligent criminal mastermind, nor the most adept confidence artist. Many times his pathetic desperation, his mental instability, his obvious lack of any coherent grand design, shine through his otherwise sociopathically blank disinterest in anything but climbing over others.

 

The more comedic such moments concern his stumbling attempts to pass as classy. More than a matter of knowing the proper protocol, his intrinsic suspiciousness, over-eagerness, shiftiness, all betray the degenerate gutter rat he really is and always will be underneath all his pretense.** All but the most naive sense something off about the guy. You can hear a similar artificiality in real life in the stilted pretense of respectful speech adopted by cops, all the sirring and the vee-hickle and other polysyllabic posturing so alien to the average flatfoot's mouth that he'd sound more natural reading microwave instructions.

 

It brings my mind around to junior high. For a couple of years I had been gradually drifting farther from my classmates' reliance on slang*** and mindless beat-fillers like "like" but not until 8th grade did I make a conscious decision to avoid the word "cool" - and you'll notice I generally still do, aside from the occasional very pointed interjection. Reliance on terminology expressing no quality of its object, animal calls reflecting only in-group belonging, is not just pointless but open vandalism disrupting thought. Clarity matters. Expressiveness matters. To some.

 

This would have come shortly before Bulls On Parade started rocking the airwaves, and I have to wonder if those Ragers have ever or will ever admit that it was their very own audience that removed the books. "The public stopped reading of its own accord" a savvier observer predicted forty years earlier. As I reached high school, another of those thought-terminating cliches began circling pop culture, one that should still sound familiar: "dead white men." A mighty coalition of the Malcolm-X-worshipping inner city blacks championed by Rage Against the Machine, of feminists, of New Agers and comfortably suburban Asian kids giving teenage rebellion a tentative chance before settling into a lifetime of filial piety, joined by every white kid rebelling against nothing more substantive than homework, all decreed they had nothing to learn from "dead white men" because by the sin of whiteness or of maleness or their most inexcusable deadness, such speakers could not possibly have said anything of relevance to our modern breed. Who needs existentialism, the Bill of Rights and nuclear physics when you can run an entire society on Maya Angelou quotes? Oh, wait, she's dead now...

 

I'm not merely trying to point out the continuation of such rhetoric into the present-day circus of identity politics, but to convey the decline was a long time coming. Certainly since before my own generation. What should have been a break with the authoritarianism of the past, with militarism, with religious brainwashing, with wage slavery, became a myriad piddling dictatorships courting corporate sponsorship and enforcing their own rigid hierarchies of sex or skin color and straining to erase all culture beyond their insipid slogans. Modern revolutionaries have long revealed themselves as not Gavroches but Defarges, driven not by pluck and benevolence but a rudderless animalistic aggression redirected to targets of opportunity "like the flame of a blowlamp" to quote another dead white man. Their intersection with education and intelligentsia has left a wasteland in their wake, a locust swarm of grievance studies departments and diversity consultants and feminist math curricula gleefully completing the work of right wing defunding and religious pressure in destroying both universities and lower education.

 

Both supposedly opposing sides are eager enough to fabricate their own history. The old gilded revisionism painting tidy images of heroic settlers sweeping across an empty American continent scattering a few unworthy savages and kindly giving a home to African extracts was ridiculous in its own right, sure. But what's the point of replacing it with a farcical monster story in which the only crimes in history are those of Europeans and men are descended from apes but women are descended from heaven and drag queens first landed on the moon in Malinese spaceships? Or whatever the fuck they're cooking up next. There is no more honesty in limiting thought to declarations that George Washington Was A Slaveowner than in claiming the Civil War was about "states' rights" and leaving it at that.

 

There you have the horseshoe effect of the tyranny of the majority, whether expressed in pledges of allegiance to god and country or to believe women and yaass queen. Regardless of whether they facetiously claim to support tradition or minority rights, unions or free enterprise, the real enemy of the rabble is always logic, truth and above all intellect. Because, much like honest Tom, they can't fake nobler faculties. And we live by the mind. Mental incompetence poisons everything.

 

You can despise the foppish antiquated claims to noble pursuits, deny any inherent superiority of theater or opera over animation or video games, yet still must acknowledge the nobility of superior plays or games. Are they more original, complex, incisive, challenging, provocative? You can deny any inherent superiority of a particular race but have no place denying the nobler achievements of representatives of that race. Are they more honest or insightful? You can deny whatever authority professors might have once derived by social rank, but not the regal manifestation of expertise in a particular field. To do so is suicide. Such expertise upholds your entire existence, from the most mundane material goods around you to the leashing of hired thugs from killing you for sport.

Your betters will not share your worse interests. It's funny, football wasn't my favorite thing growing up, but I used to like it well enough. Maybe it's because I had a child's tastes, but maybe it's also because matches used to have their results printed in newspapers or be reported play-by-play over the radio. Less pressure to entertain the lizard brain. A match from the '80s or before was a more sedate, well-considered, polite affair. The more widely and constantly they got televised, the more yokels the sport needed to please all at once, the more it shifted toward faster, more violent gameplay approaching the lowest common denominator of a monkey brawl, ignoring more and more risky or injurious plays and outright cheating which would once have gotten players thrown off the field or off a team, in the interest not of the contest itself but of a limbic payoff for the customers. Your excitement bores me.

 

And what is academe, after all, but in the words of another one of those dead white men "a modern school where football is taught" - ?

 

A spectator sport. Buy a ticket and yell some slogans.

 

 

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* Just goes to show wolves can be catty too. Still, is it too much to ask that at least our lesbians age gracefully? Or do all roads lead to Sunset Boulevard?

** Okay, let's say the word we're all thinking at this point: Trump. But I did not want to further derail a long post.

*** Thankfully "dude" was more of a Bart Simpson catchphrase at the time. Thanks for nothing, it didn't stay that way.

Hoist by Disown

They set the show last night visible (mostly) from my window. So I sat with the light off in my pajamas in my recliner and for once attended. In spirit. Guess I can make an exception for their big quarter-millennium bash. Can't say it reawakened any patriotic sensibilities in me. Mostly it dragged my mind back to the start of the nineties, and my other abandoned patriotism. With the Wall down, goods flowed quickly into the collapsed market, both in the form of large predators like Coca Cola or IBM and a general sprinkle of moral perils previously reserved for those with Party connections, fireworks among them.

 

Well, it was more fun than digging light bulbs out of trashpiles and smashing them against the pavement. Just as noisy but sneakier. Felt destructive. Felt powerful. Boom. When you're nine, that counts for a lot. Though fancier rockets were out of our reach, proudly brandished by our dads at New Year, street market stalls quickly flooded with firecrackers cheap enough to buy with pocket change. Tiny little matchstick ones. Even at that age you couldn't miss how derisively low-quality they looked: the flimsy, featureless, misaligned faded yellow paper casings, the lopsided caps, the one in ten or so that didn't light or go off. You heard the occasional horror story about some boy losing a finger, or at least a fingernail (those things were hella weak) but as it never happened within my schoolyard group, we never paid it any attention. Did get a little thrill whenever one popped half a second too early. Which was often.

 

Toss' em outside classroom windows to break up lessons. Toss 'em at stray dogs. Toss 'em into an underpass for a bonus echo. Make sure adults are out of sight first. Maybe get rewarded with some "you crazy kids" screaming from the geriatric contingent. For a couple of years, before kicking cars to set off those newfangled alarms came into vogue, those little yellow terrors dominated the soundtrack of city life. Later I belatedly realized (when hearing one go off still, occasionally) that I'd stopped thinking about them. I wanted a hand-held video game. Monochrome liquid crystal displays the size of your thumb had just hit the market. Tetris blew down instead of up. That was new.

 

Fireworks are a ridiculous holdover, aren't they? A relic of the gas lamp age, when the industrial production of noise and colour lingered just out of reach of the common man. When you needed Gandalf to stop by if you wanted a show more complicated than Bilbo's speeches. Now, your lawnmower can drown out their noise. Any video billboard cycles through more flash and pomp in five seconds than an entire fireworks display in fifteen minutes, and many of them in fact recreate such ritual displays of martial prowess symbolically. Your car's controls are more precision-engineered than the explosion pattern in the sky. For monetized noise, even boomboxes were obsoleted by earbuds. Your phone can treat you to infinitely more colorful displays. The LCDs are no longer monochrome.

 

Ritual is a weird, often offensive, concept.

 

Still, I will admit, I did sit and watch the ones last night.

AoW4 Factions, 20

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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When giants got introduced, I couldn't help playing up the comparison of my ruler to his subjects' size. And what could be funnier than a bunch of little frogs hippity-hopping around their dear leader? Making them evil and carelessly murderous would pair well with an imagined, slightly incompetent sibilance to their chanting, punctuated by random hops. I also wanted to try combining shadow's ice and necromancy with chaos' fire. It went... not great. Still, little frog mages hiding behind my legs blasting enemies with random temperature gradients were both amusing enough and aptly chaotic, and if it lacked synergy at least this odd couple pairing was flexible.

The Warm-Blooded Equations

"Now that we know for sure they're telling lies when they say

Noone gets hurt and therefore nobody dies

You know it's hard to believe anything that you hear

They say the world is round"

 

Garbage - Metal Heart

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"But when the Great Horde attacked our homeland in my grandfather's day, we moved into this region in force. We pushed the Vaegirs back, and made their fortresses our own.
Of course, you know how things go. My father's generation were hard warriors from the cold lands across the mountains, but this generation all has houses in the town and great estates and spend time as much trading as they do practicing archery. The next generation will grow soft on Velucan wine and will lose their lands to the next batch of illiterate hill-raiders to come over the mountains, just you watch. It's how things always were, and how things [will?] always be."

 

Baheshtur, one of your Tartar companions from Mount&Blade: Warband

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"Weary had a block of balsa wood which was supposed to be a foxhole pillow. He had a prophylactic kit containing two tough condoms 'For the Prevention of Disease Only!' He had a whistle he wasn't going to show anybody until he got promoted to corporal. He had a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony. He had made Billy Pilgrim admire that picture several times.
[...]
The corporal found the dirty picture of the woman and the pony in Weary's hip pocket. 'What a lucky pony, eh?' he said. "Hmmmm? Hmmmm? Don't you wish you were that pony?' He handed the picture to the other old man. 'Spoils of war! It's all yours, you lucky lad.'
[...]
Billy was mildly curious as to what could possibly have been kept hidden in such a place. The clerk leered and showed him. It was a photograph of a woman and a Shetland pony. They were attempting to have sexual intercourse between two Doric columns, in front of velvet draperies which were fringed with deedlee-balls."

Pages 18, 24 and 90 of Slaughterhouse Five

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Once upon a time, there was a story. Actually, it was in the August 1954 issue of Astounding Magazine, to employ the more dignified precision befitting Scientifiction. But in getting an itch to re-read The Cold Equations now, I was unpleasantly surprised to find its Wikipedia article devoting all its commentary space to nothing but negative reviews and open attacks declaiming such things should not be said! Interestingly, for something published in '54 and considered a classic and added to the SFWA's best stories list in 1970, Wikipedia's critic reviews start in '77 and then jump straight to the '90s and 2010s. Back to why later, but mark that discrepancy. Moreover, the most valid point of critique makes no appearance: that it's poorly written.

 

Even by SF's lax wordsmithing standards as the no-frills genre of ideas, The Cold Equations is filled with dull, uninformative descriptions, unrealistic dialogue and repetitive restating of redundant rehashing. Oh, to have been an assistant editor at Astounding seventy years ago and taken a thesaurus and a pair of garden shears to that weedy typescript! But editing still saved it, its hard-hitting main point owing most to that magnificent bastard John W. Campbell's refusal to accept trite feel-good moralism. I'll leave you to read a synopsis, or better yet seek the story itself (come on, it's just 20 pages, you'll live!) and move spoilerly on to the unjustified criticism.

 

The standard bitching runs that nobody would engineer a spacecraft with zero margin of error in its fuel or other reserves so as to crash if it takes on an extra passenger. Very well, maybe it's not zero. Maybe you've got ten (or eight) kilograms of wiggle-room for your carry-on luggage. Make it twenty, keep the change. That still won't carry a teenage girl. Or, give it more leeway, maybe it can! Maybe the designers specifically feared some moron would march aboard and designed it with that many kilograms to spare... and then two extra morons march aboard. You'll still have to draw lots and space one. Or maybe it's just one really fat chick! Gonna start filleting her so the main bits can live? Or hey, maybe, maybe! -- the design couldn't even take one full-sized human and the pilot had to be a horse jockey who fasted for three days before embarking! Do you see how straining to move the goalposts absolutely misses the point? You will faceplant into an implacable physical law somewhere, and that's where the story is. One pilot and one stowaway make a good concise core cast.

 

So let's not pretend sincerity in those engineering quibbles. Fans would normally have no problem accepting that a frontier setting uses bare-bones equipment, Conestogas with no spare wheel, or that the shuttle is a purpose-built machine with a very limited scope, used in an emergency solely by trained personnel. Those D-Day landing craft don't look particularly sea-worthy to me either, but hey, they did their exact specific job well enough without worrying whether any divas wanted to take one cruising. Ay, there's the rub. The same audiences cheering openly or at least sighing in self-righteous approval for male sacrifices (remember the ending to Titanic? why didn't she make some room for him on that coldly equated raft?) revolt when the tables are flipped. Females' aristocratic privilege must be preserved. But an overentitled bimbo's hauteur is, to borrow an idiotic modern phrase for once in proper context "just a social construct" fed by her betters' willingness to bow to her demands until she believes trespassing signs don't apply to her, accustomed to smiling and giggling her way out of any trouble. Godwin and Campbell merely placed her in a situation where that illusion dissipated, and drove home the point with every repetition that had the stowaway been male, the pilot would have readily shot him without argument.

 

Here we come back to Wikipedia's critical summary, with opposition to The Cold Equations seeming to increase the more society has been feminized, the more that demented entitlement grew to dominate our social mores until even the fundamental truism that the laws of the universe do not bend to your whims (no, not even if you're cute and nice) became anathema to modern narcissism.

 

Well, if you don't like that, for the love of fainting couches stay away from one Cyril Kornbluth. And most of the public have. Though very much an honorable peer of golden age SF, his is not a name frequently mentioned among the field's greats. At least not these days. I had of course read The Marching Morons, but did not remember until picking up a short story collection now that he was also behind The Little Black Bag, loosely set in the same universe and a lauded classic in its own right. So I kept going. His writing is most obviously, most deeply marked by WWII, with questions of the application of power and violence, and the distaste and necessity for such, cropping up again and again, in more direct or more fanciful ways. If you'd like the more brusque culture shock version, sample Two Dooms, and keep that fainting couch handy.

 

Not that he was by any means a one-trick-pony. You could try The Silly Season for an immersive take on the mercenary mindset of journalism, even if much of its period jargon has fallen into disuse since the heyday of late-industrial "wire" networks. The Rocket of 1955 is a cynical couple-page flash-fiction smirk toward the chest-puffing can-do attitude of the early space race - one having regained its relevance with Musk/Bezos and the like's corporate parasitism of the space program. Shark Ship is an especially memorable, if slightly disjointed, musing on censorship, perversion and the potential of hijacking both instinct and civilizational values.

 

But there's a certain brand of Kornbluth yarn spun along The Marching Morons' spindle, which belies fantasies of human nobility, human progress and the virtue of naive benevolence, the type of SF apt to be written by bitter war veterans and perhaps most famously brought to the public's attention by Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Try The Luckiest Man in Denv if you want military-industrial complex power fantasy human interest. Try The Adventurer if you want a classic plucky downtrodden rebel pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

 

But especially try The Only Thing We Learn, the tale of a mighty space empire celebrating its rich and noble cultural heritage. After the first few pages I thought I'd gotten the gist of the story, some ultraconservative, might makes right, macho glorification of ruthless warmongering, the only civilian, the only intellectual in the flashback being after all a fat, drunken boor. Lucky I didn't toss it aside. Turns out there's plenty reason to let yourself go and give up once you see clearly the arc of history leading your society to its demise. I found myself re-reading the set-up and conclusion. The "winners" are explicitly no better, no mightier or more deserving than their victims; conversely the rich and noble heritage is a gilded revisionist slant on the undeserving. *

The linking tragic flaw here is intellectual dishonesty, misapplying artificial, ossified ethics intended not to address problems but to maximize the speaker's grandstanding, to polish useless sidearms. Again, the civilized do not lose for weakness or fundamental incompetence, but for refusal to face reality. In The Cold Equations, that reality is hard vacuum and gravity. In Kornbluth's various stories it is more often the human animal. He acknowledges, occasionally (which is more often than most) that human behavior operates by animal rules, that it repeats itself unto stagnation and self-destruction, that we are not beautiful and unique snowflakes, that the vast bulk of the species is a subhuman herd of marching morons. That mentalities are physical properties of the physical world, not negotiable social niceties. And any workable solutions to whatever intrigue you find yourself plotting or plotted into will have to be based in observation of such reality, not well-wishes and prosocial platitudes. Crooks, liars, tyrants, slaves, parasites and marauders, all are no mere aberrations which can be stamped out by heroic opposition. They are logical outgrowths of animal nature and opportunity, and will continue arising until either the latter, or better yet the former, are eliminated as roots of the problem.

 

Boy, that's a tough sell these days!

The standard-bearers of modern fantasy sold to the past generations in their youths, the Nimonas and Wesleys and Harrys and the like, proclaim a far more upbeat message: act as stupid as you like because you're special and the universe will reshape itself to suit your tantrums, and social influence is everything. That insanity is itself a matter of physical science, of ape hormones and kin recognition instincts and codependence. You could've addressed it. The naked ape simply decided to look at its own navel instead of looking at itself in the mirror. When reality does hit, you may find yourself forced to reach all the way back to the greatest generation for a dose of smelling salts.

 

"I wish I wasn't flesh and blood

I would not be scared

Of bullets built with me in mind

Then I could be saved"

 

_______________________________________________________

 

* For a bonus, notice how closely the old rebels match anglophone ancestors. For another bonus, I'd bet someone at Games Workshop decades ago was a Kornbluth fan. The self-assured militaristic pomp of The Only Thing We Learn's armada matches too closely the 40K Imperium of Man, and the rebels pilot a fair suggestion of Orkish kludges.

There Wolf's Jalopy

Last week it occurred to me to look and see if Google Maps photographed my car parked in street view. Not that I haven't used street view extensively ever since they implemented it, and I've looked at my parents' house on it, travel destinations, my old grade schools (holy shit, so many massive metal bars on their windows now!) and other stuff. But I don't do vanity searches, and it sort of never occurred to me to indulge in this variant until now, either. But maybe I'm weird.

 

I almost "get" the concept of vanity searches now, seeing myself represented in this objective, disinterested compendium. Sure enough, there my ride sat, in my usual parking spot, jammed up against the curb as I usually park it subconsciously trying to avoid others in this as in all respects. There's a sort of validation in seeing my influence on physical reality thus captured. There, see? I really do exist!

A republic, if you can keep educating it

"When I was a kid, one time I had an old-maid teacher that used to tell me, "Buzz, you're the thickest-headed dunce in school."  But I noticed that she told me this a whole lot oftener than she used to tell the other kids how smart they were, and I came to be the most talked-about scholar in the whole township.  The United States Senate isn't so different, and I want to thank a lot of stuffed shirts for their remarks about Yours Truly."

 

- the villain from Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here

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"And your body is a temple
And the temple is a prison
And the prison's overcrowded
And the inmates know it's flooding
And the body politic is getting sicker by the minute
And the media's not fake
It's just very

...

   ... 

inconvenient"

 

Amanda Palmer - Drowning in the Sound

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"they could have disposed of you as quietly as flushing a dead mouse down a toilet. But they didn’t. Why not? Because they knew their boss didn’t really like for them to play that rough and if he became convinced that they had (whether in court or out), it would cost their jobs if not their necks.”
Jubal paused for a swig. “But consider. Those S.S. thugs are just a tool; they aren’t yet a Praetorian Guard that picks the new Caesar. Such being, whom do you really want for Caesar? Courthouse Joe whose basic indoctrination goes back to the days when this country was a nation and not just a satrapy in a polyglot empire of many traditions … Douglas, who really can’t stomach assassination? Or do you want to toss him out of office [...] and thereby put in a Secretary General from a land where life has always been cheap and political assassination a venerable tradition? If you do this, Ben - tell me what happens to the next snoopy newsman who is careless enough to walk down a dark alley?”

 

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

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Funny how "Trump Derangement Syndrome" has fallen into disuse compared to his first term, as our news cycle and talk shows both are saturated more than ever with his sickening presence. Which, for a consummate narcissist, is very much a case of throwing Br'er Rabbit into the briar patch. You might say our reporters, pundits and comedians are not merely trying to spite him but bringing his crimes to public consciousness, as is their role in society. But even his actual crimes are rarely emphasized for their worst harm caused. Does he hate illegally imported Mexicans? Bad, but you'd still have a government if that were the only issue. Realistically, you could fire every wetback over Rio Grande again out of a circus cannon and, some messy hedges and a severe strawberry shortage aside, both countries would survive just fine. But the methods employed by the Republican Party, the random hooded street thugs driving around in unmarked vans disappearing random pedestrians off American streets? The paramilitary abduction of minors from their beds in the dead of night and zip-cuffing them as leverage against their parents? When the government throws due process and equal protections out the window, then you're into banana republic dictatorship tactics. But then, the last couple of Democratic administrations were already gleefully ignoring any process in declaring the entire male half of the population criminals by birth and promoting the racist rhetoric of identity politics, so let's not pretend you weren't always headed in this direction.

 

But the media have certainly sped up the process, haven't they? Diverting attention. Throwing a fit and obsessing for days or weeks over every single one of the Trumps' distractions like renaming everything after themselves, staging bum fights on the White House lawn or hammering down the walls of what is, in an objective summation, a building, a propagandistic symbol, a Versailles, Forbidden Palace or Sublime Porte to glitz yokels, and not in itself the functional institution it should represent. But the tax he wastes on every single triumphal arch in his own nonexistent honor is peanuts compared to the billions destroyed every day by the corruption running rampant with the destruction of protections against corporate fraud, of public services, plus multiple industries' subversion by and open bribery of government officials, especially the Trump crime family itself, plus the warring for military contractor profits, and for a cherry on top the proposed tax-funded bankrolling of insurrectionists against his own government. You think he's given up on that?

 

Tell me, instead of frothing at the mouth about Epstein, of every competent professional thrown out of a government position to be replaced with some subliterate hick whose only virtue is taking marching orders from the "republican" cartel. Or every department budgeted into nonexistence, and the myriad ways I'll be getting poisoned, run over and thrown out of my home as a result of the government no longer governing. That's the stuff that'll kill you. Literally. Like, a bullet through your head from a knuckledragging thug handed license to kill in the name of establishing a theocratic dictatorship. And that's if you're lucky enough to find them in too much a hurry to have their fun with you. Pointing out where the murderous thugs are lurking? That would be relevant information.

 

But it'd be boring. Everyone knows nothing gets social media channel hits (or sells rap albums) like starting a feud, beef, inconsequential but highly visible slapfight. Preferably one that goes on forever, so both sides can keep posturing as heroes of their respective cause, rioting regardless of whether the home team wins or loses.

 

There was a sudden moment of clarity back around 2017-18 when newscasters discovered, en masse, that the best way to mock Trump is to let him speak for himself and merely repeat his mindless gibbering with the same dignified, deadpan seriousness they'd adopt in reporting a bus crash. "The President issued an official statement declaring the terrorists having recently murdered scores of innocents are... bad dudes, very bad dudes." I had assumed, somewhat naively, that this approach would generalize to our entire political discourse and at last drive into full consciousness the monstrous gulf between what a statesman should be and this overgrown babbling infant pointing a gun at our heads.

 

But it was already too late. The tribal virtue-signaling outrage machine was already in full swing and every criticism could only be voiced if it doubled as championing the privileges of those self-appointed superior breeds among us, the rich in melanin or poor in testosterone. Thus the media, from YouTubers with thirty followers to the biggest names in television, settled into a cozy, mutualistic relationship based on the old comedians' running gag that even if the wrong candidate wins, their profession also wins by being fed more material. Once the public lost all standards, it's all advertising. Once the public stopped caring that they're putting subhuman cretins in charge, insults are no longer inconvenient to those selfsame empowered cretins. So long as they're facile, so long as they merely reinforce the major players' ability to bleed their fanatical followers.

 

So feed the newsies easy headlines to blurb. Knock down a monument, insult a war veteran, grope a debutante, and they'll ignore you looting the public coffers. After all, since the country started electing movie stars, the presidency has been more and more of an entertainment product, a freak show distracting from the depredations of corporate investors. And media's sole remaining purpose is to sell tickets to the show.

 

I did not declare the '24 election the end of the world merely for one incompetent and crooked house-flipper's rise to power, but because it demonstrated his brand of capitalism is how the voters choose to do business. Lie for the hell of it, cheat at every opportunity, mug grannies, take bribes, hire thugs to murder anyone who stands in your way, then rush to church to have all your crimes washed clean for declaring belief in a fairytale. What does one charlatan matter after he's installed a million just like him in every position of power? Except, perhaps, more competent in their villainy.

AoW4 Factions, 19

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

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I wanted to make some bugs. I made some bugs. Other than the hive mentality I was weirdly uninspired by them. Imperialists, adept settlers, etc. made for explosive early expansion. Powerful, but not my style. Never played them again.

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.