Scientifiction for Froods

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

 

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Memento mori in a half-shell

I think this was Donatello?

Weird how the scutes just sort of slough off.

Wait, that beak... was this a snapper? Those guys are assholes, I'm glad you're dead!

Afoot is, apparently, the game

Mentioning foot fetishism twice in the past several posts got me wondering why it's so popular a reference for symbolic naughtiness. After all, I'm sure we could all cite sexual fetishes more morally questionable, or non-sexual transgressions far more harmful than those. So on one hand, maybe that's what makes it safe to reference. On the other, I do think it's also just too comically... random! I mean, come on, feet? Mouths, buttholes, abs, shoulders, hair, napes and thighs, okay, fine, plenty of spots carry some sensual implication by transgression, proximity or suggestion. Feet though? It's like saying "oooh, baby, that patch of skin a hand's breadth below your right shoulderblade gets me so hot!"

 

... and now thanks to Rule 34 I've probably invented "just down the right shoulder" fetish porn. 

Sinking Dagon

Marilyn Manson - Thaeter

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Oh, it was island, not city, d'oh!

 

When I dug up the Lovecraftian FPS detective mash-up The Sinking City from my unplayed back-log and realized it wasn't what I'd mentally pictured, I'd apparently confused it with Sinking Island, the 2007 adventure game published by Microids. So now I remedied that misfire. I needn't have bothered.

 

The first Syberia game earned its status as a classic for its melancholic meander through scenic early 20th-century vignettes, but his other work seems to confirm Benoit Sokal's limitation to that one talent. As soon as you load it, Sinking Island manages to make even the pre-menu splash screen more annoying (much like Metro 2033 did) then needlessly complicates the save/load routine with user profiles. But we all suffer through such nonsense if a game's actual content proves good. Here it proves not.

Your name is Jack Norm, and wow, are you ever. Granted, Kate Walker was a bland everywoman protagonist as well, but such a role better fit the requirement of an audience viewpoint in Syberia's exotic clockwork locales. Sinking Island's tropical paradise attempts to recreate that feel, but all the elements are simply telegraphed: quaint natives and their pagan beliefs, the hated old Scrooge, girlfriend with a bad slavic accent, sumptuous yet repetitive resort with many, many pointless rooms and walkways. For something made in 2007 the graphic detail is both expansive and fluid, albeit stiff and stilted like anything from that era. But bland aural and visual decor aside, it's the writing that really kills the whole mess.

 

I'm trying to make some allowance for a possibly worse English version (though I cannot seem to change the language in any way) so maybe the French cast took a better stab at pronouncing Battaglieri than bat-a-glee-airy or bat-tag-leery. But them's small potatoes. The script, overall, attempts to flesh out an interactive whodunit by putting you through all the steps of an investigation, ignoring that all those steps are in fact painfully dull. For one thing, there are too many of them. Literally. Locales are split into several redundant screens each, which you'll need to traverse every time you want to triple-check whether you've pixel-hunted some patch of screen or a character acquired another line of dialogue. For another, the phraseology could stand to be far more terse. For yet another, your very professional investigator repeats the same questions to everyone.

"Good morning Mr./Mrs. Xyz, I am Boring McEveryman; I'm here to be very beige about this police investigation. Do you like billionnaires YES/NO? Now show me some FEET, BABY! Oooohh, yeeaaaaaah!"

Just kidding. I wish it were that entertaining.

Well if this ain't five kinds of awkward.

I especially like her boyfriend just placidly going through his idle animations while some rando interrupts their dinner to photograph his gal's feet. But for the most part the text's just... bad. Wordy and devoid of substance or flavor, choked with clumsy filler like "too bad the weather is so bad" and repetitive exchanges like

"Do these pearls mean anything to you?"

"No, not really, they don't mean anything to me."

Does that prose mean anything to you? Because it does not mean anything to me. 

 

I suppose a less cynical wer than myself might qualify it all as an attempt at naturalistic dialogue instead of obviously entertaining spicy fiction, but even as such it plonks. You'll find none of Syberia 1's charm here. A few quaint ideas like comparing clues in your inventory can't rescue this hopelessly boring paint-by-numbers routine. No point in continuing past the intro. Worth at most the 79 cents I paid for it, and not a centime more.

 

On the other hand, I also picked up a complete freebie called Dagon (which, the title assures us is "by H. P. Lovecraft" - thanks, here I was afraid I'd picked up the Dr. Seuss version by mistake*) which turned out not to be a "game" at all, stretching even the definitions of "walking simulators" and "visual novels" by merely having you click to advance screen by screen. And yet... I cannot believe I'm even saying it, but this one I really would recommend.

It's an illustrated, well-narrated, full read-through of Lovecraft's short work, word-for-word with some interesting historical background and character notes you can right-click here and there. A half-hour's read and listen and watch. A museum curator's notion of a video game... but it works. It is what it is, its few features handled both professionally and with dedication to the source material. Oh, and the irony of Dagon, of all stories, being illustrated by makers of DLCs for Ultimate Fishing Simulator is almost too precious. Had some 3D models left over, did you?

 

How much more funding went into that tedious piece of catalogue filler above? How much better can you handle a worse concept if you don't go into it as a contractual obligation or a lazy, disinterested cash-grab?

 

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* Y'know, I meant that as an honest joke, but a lot of Dr. Seuss really is kinda... non-Euclidean, in a "Mimsy were the Borogoves" flexible young minds style. 

AoW4 Factions, 12

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 wasn't quite sure what to make of the eldritch update's various gameplay changes, so just as when dragons launched I fell back on orcs as generic minions just as I did for my first dragon. Their aggressiveness worked well with the extra unit summons and crowd control, and a bit of order-affinity support kept it all together. Uninspired concept, but I like the way it plays. And nothing says faith in a higher power like chanting, gibbering, maniacal, bloodthirsty savages.

Pie Dreams Squared

"No denouement to the drama of the real."

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Fry: "How can you people be so blasé? Here you are in the year 3000 or so, yet you just sit around like it's the boring time I came from."
Farnsworth: "Boring? Wasn't that the period when they cracked the human genome and boy bands roamed the Earth?"

 

Futurama S03E15 - I Dated A Robot

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I became so enamored of webcomics to a large extent as work put forth by one or two minds, freer from interference, albeit not from comment section pandering. As a bonus, their slow pace often led to the subject matter outgrowing itself. The following two examples are both slice-of-life (slice of > pie, get it? huh? get it?) a genre that rarely grabs me, and to be honest I was never particularly jazzed about them at the time. Both started in 2007. Both have become more interesting retrospectively.

 

Punch an Pie

Queen of Wands was standard early 2000s fare, lots of generic "they can't censor us now" interwebz naughtiness which inevitably slid into twenty-somethings' dating dramedy as its other gimmicks (wiccan heroine, glorified feminist abuse, etc.) quickly revealed themselves to be going nowhere. After its end, though, the author spun off and handed off one of her characters to another writer for a more consistent slice-of-life routine solidly fixated on the inevitable post-school concerns of sex and taxes. Aside from that, it mostly concerns the heroine's character arc growing out of her lingering adolescent emotional fits and unrealistic expectations and taking more responsibility for her own actions.

 

Octopus Pie

"My everyday anxieties don't seem so unique anymore. They don't play out on this lonesome, poetic level." - mid-series turning point. 

Heroine Eve(rest) Ning (get it? huh? get it?) works a shitty grocery job and gets a wacky stoner roommate, hijinks ensue and then sort of waver and peter out. More interesting for its commentary on contemporary middlebrow yuppie/art culture and its pretentiousness, including a quick jab at what's now termed wokedom shortly before its end. I stopped reading sometime before its middle years, when it kept oscillating unstably between trying to maintain its original sitcom zaniness and increasingly indulgent navel-gazing filled with unrealistic stabs at subtlety and deep meanings or just plain art major fappery - e.g. in this strip according to the author's later commentary: "That Eve is laying flat while he's holding onto her is meant to signify that he's in need." Pardon my derisive snort. I returned when, to my surprise, she posted a couple of new chapters long after the fact, with the cast now aging, pairing off, starting families, looking back on their youth less with nostalgia than bemusement. 

 

Train Dreams

Wait, that's not a comic, how did that get in here?

It's not often I agree with film critics on artsy, slow-moving movies (especially concerning a befuddled everyman stumbling through life) but this one was just solid work through and through. If indeed the character-centered piece it superficially appears, it would be boring as all hell, its protagonist displaying all the charisma of mold. But the show's true star is the changing landscape, physical and cultural, personal and interpersonal. It packs the most detail you'll see in a movie about nothing.

 

I could never get into those pie comics while they were running, but they read much better on a binge. From '90s outrageousness to 2010s socially conscious posturing, from in-your-face cool kids to struggling to keep a middle-aged couple together, from the launch of World of Warcraft to smartphone addiction, it's not always easy to untangle the change in author or the author's personal growth from milieu. Futile efforts? Easily forgotten? Twenty years later, about as relevant as a lumberjack from 1920. But watch years' worth of panels grow into the realization that youthful rambunctiousness has stopped being cute or narcissism no longer satisfies a fading craving. There's a glimmer of hope in there for an entire culture to mature. Instead it feels like the end credits are about to roll. Someone did just launch some astronauts at the moon again. Whatever happened in between there?

Cutting through the Treacle: The Tabletop Fetish

"You said that irony was the shackles of youth"

R.E.M. - What's the Frequency, Kenneth?, 1994

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"Are you being sarcastic, dude?"

"I don't even know anymore."

 

The Simpsons, 1995

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On the lookout for any system to replace the increasingly obsolete D&D routine, I recently gave Gloomhaven a try.

If you get that character reference, you're too old.

To be fair there's quite a bit of potential there, but it's still fairly primitive with a tabletop version apparently not even a decade old. Leaving most of my bitching for some future date, I'm just amazed at how hard the computer adaptation works at preventing me from getting into it with an utterly bewildering interface feeling like it was designed by whichever librarian won the "most anal-retentive" award in 1973.

 

Sure, you've got the usual amateur designer pitfalls like the camera turning on its own or overextended animations for mundane actions like bending over to pick up coins.

 

Then it makes you pause to confirm the beginning of a new round like Battletech and lacks context-sensitive single-click shortcuts or double-clicks, making you separately confirm every action. And you can't click your other card to change action, have to manually un-click your current one. And you can't just spacebar-end a character's turn; must officially pass your remaining card and confirm. And you can restart round on your character's action but not if you're in the 'thinking' step of selecting an action.

 

But even beyond all that inexcusable stuttering, Gloomhaven's design enters a Very Special Boy category few others have managed to crater their way into. You kinda have to see it to believe it.

Yes, it makes you manually confirm your armour soak on every damaging attack. Wait! Oh god, oh god, oh god, did I remember to breathe and perspire this round?!?

 

So screw that, instead I've been devoting more time to Wildermyth, which will warrant more discussion of its greater creativity (even if it does stumble a bit in execution)

If anything even lower-budget and lower-tech than Gloomhaven, invoking 2D construction paper visuals much like Shelter did, and for the same old-timey storybook atmosphere. Or maybe its creators just watched The Secret of Kells one too many times. Look, at least they ain't chibis. It's a rare "back to basics" game which successfully revisits the core interactivity of the medium, placing heavy emphasis on your pieces clacking from square to square on a board and units and buffs being represented by "cards"

- but it's also significantly more playable than the first example, with more informative tooltips and more fluid commands.
 

On a completely unrelated topic, though I've been burned by Kickstarter projects several times (fuck Mark Jacobs) I got two e-mails in the past month from games I'm currently backing. One gaggle of fringe developers lamented their publisher deals all fell through and they're strapped for cash, laying off part of their team. The others bragged they've now implemented dice in their game. Colored dice! Rolling! Sparkling! Rolling sparkling colored polyhedral pixels! Never in the history of the Arr Enn Gee hath The Number been graced with such grace and gravitas!

 

I shouldn't have to reiterate my distaste for retro games, but they overlap so heavily with the turn-based or narrative-driven genres I favor that I keep running into this utterly shallow in-group appeal. I'm not buying a game about spaceships or fireball slinging to pretend I'm sitting around a table with a bunch of other apes. I'm not in it for the hipster meta-enjoyment of pre-post-ironic non-content. I'm not buying an escapist fantasy to pretend I'm pretending, but to pretend. That shouldn't be so fine a distinction. No cards. No dice. No placemats. No putting my little soldier figurines on plastic bases. Get that shit off my screen. 

It's like fetish porn. You know when you've hit the paraphiliac threshold because a minor detail begins replacing the core activity, be it humping or clicking. You expect a pornstar to have feet, you'd find it odd if they were missing, but you can also spot a foot fetish video if one pops up. Both extremes veer off the mark. Something in Gloomhaven's basic design philosophy emphasizes the wrong visual or interactive elements, consistently and intrusively. It makes you pause for cards to flips over, makes you backtrack through actions as if you're taking the time to physically put a card back in the deck, makes you confirm every sub-step of every step of every action every round as if the mechanical manipulation of imaginary cardboard and plastic were in itself your dungeoneering adventure. Wildermyth places you on a table with cards as well, but after that no longer belabors the point. It's still gratuitous, you can tell the fetish element has been included, but at least there's more to it than feet!

 

Yes, grids look like game boards. So? Yes, the small number randomization or random action drawing of tactical games obviously originated with dice and cards before it was electronic. So? An adaptation can never be a carbon-copy. You're making something that has to function here and now, on the screen, by the rules of electronic interaction, not by the rules of drunken munchkins smearing pizza grease onto cardboard. In 1993 Solitaire may well have been the most played game on Windows. There are reasons thats no longer the case!

 

You hit peak absurdity when you see start-ups on a shoestring budget selling Kickstarter stretch goals of dice animations and plastic feelies mailed to its audience. Could you have paid one more programmer for one more month with that cash? Three months? Look over at your neighbours packing their bindles and tell me again if you can afford to deliver a non-functional product for the sake of a handful of foot fetishists, when your entire industry's already in danger of getting automated into irrelevance.

The jerkiest

Turns out pineapple juice, when heated and (I assume) well aerated, will punch little bullet holes in an aluminum pan. At least I hope it wasn't the chicken that did that...

Oh,

Though many tobys yuk on terry oi once tried to sass katchewan but they were having nunavut.

Thou Art Moloch

"Behind the veil is the machine
It steals your soul, devouring all your dreams
My hand is firm upon the wheel
I control, I am the demon"

 

Jamison Boaz & Jason Charles Miller - Resist and Disorder (Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack)

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"The heart, the heart, there was the little yet boundless sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which the crime and misery of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere, and the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms and vanish of their own accord; but if we go no deeper than the intellect, and strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream"

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Earth's Holocaust

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In 1965 Harlan Ellison published "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman, a short ramble against the clockwork pace of mechanized life. It sat in the same issue of Galaxy Science Fiction as a spy story by Robert Silverberg about techno-theocracy and also Laugh Along with Franz, by one Norman Kagan who apparently lost the ensuing inaugural Nebula nomination to Ellison* who kept the narration hopping better than Kagan's more didactic exposition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the difficulty in meshing analytical and creative thought (stupid Vladimir and Estragon never stop bickering) he seems better known as a film scholar.

 

Aside from that, though, Laugh Along with Franz is yet another techno-dystopian tale. Hey, the hippie era had its fixations. Here, it's automation making almost all humans redundant, with the ensuing anomie driving much of the populace to crime, insanity and general monkey-business. Sorry, is that a bit apropos of our current arguments about chatbots?

 

Let's ramble aimlessly about a different SF yarn instead, Robert A. Heinlein's Waldo from 1942, which incidentally later became the name for such teleoperation devices. It's always been one of my least favorite Heinlein works, for the anti-intellectual twist it takes halfway through. Then again, though Wikipedia erroneously describes "the journey of a mechanical genius from his self-imposed exile from the rest of humanity to a more normal life" Heinlein actually (in contrast to, say, Valentine Michael Smith's maculate conception by towering intellects) has his customary mouthpiece curmudgeon explicitly debunk Waldo's mystique as genius, being instead an above-average intellect deriving much of his success in the field of mechanical engineering by hyper-focus and a personal stake in the machinery allowing him to live with myasthenia gravis. Which made only slightly less galling the denouement of the cranky, reclusive brainiac becoming the life of the party and carousing with the reg'lr folks after getting cured of his ailment, as though the hopeless experiential and existential gulf between competent minds and the subhuman norm were a disease of the intelligent, to be doctored back to accursed normalcy by hillbilly magic tricks.

 

Waldo's side plot about energy beams afflicting all humans with weakness is just the water fluoridation conspiracist icing on that cake, but it did mesh for me with the recent episode #466 of Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast, titled "What is technology doing to us?" which does indeed counterpose the nefarious influence of social media and chatbots against human interpersonal relations. As though the abuses of technology, from facebook gossip to nukes, were not the direct result of human effort to out-compete other humans as human social instinct dictates. As though every single Twit were not twittering of its own accord. The customer's always right.

 

'Course, that's an old dodge. Going back 99 years, I'd never bothered watching Metropolis until now. Compared to most stuff from the 1920s it's more cohesive than I'd expected, plus more modern in its action scenes, dramatic face-offs or hero, sidekick and love interest trinity. Though of course, given its outsized stylistic impact, it's hard to tell how much of that was foresight or later life imitating its art. But as far as the plot goes, imagine me blowing a very loud raspberry. Even if you look past a sludge of Biblical references, the story and moralizing are tired cliches not just for 1927, but could've been dismissed as a rip-off of Dickens or fairytales even fifty years prior. The dashing young prince saving the kingdom from an evil wizard who lusted after the queen, aided by a fetching maid pure of heart and defrosting his crusty old father's aging heart, a whopper of a quarter-hour 'think of the children' scene, villain falls off a cliff, holy Mother Goose the triteness just does not stop.

 

Has never stopped, in fact. I've commented before on the absurdity of dystopian flicks like V for Vendetta, Equilibrium, Snowpiercer, etc. pandering to their audience's herd conceit with evil wizards oppressing the salt of the earth multitudes, ignoring the dystopia could not persist without the collusion of those multitudes. The prototypical Metropolis itself places all blame with intellect, with industry, anything outside the plains-ape tribal norm. Even the climactic riot scene paints the murderous rabble as somehow innocent dupes of an inhuman infiltrator, ignoring that they literally built the system of injustice. Their instinct to murder and replace the prince presupposes such princely positions in the first place for the workers' competitive instincts to aspire to; each worker wants to be the one in the palace and for that there must be palaces, even if their own backs break in the gebilding of such.

 

You could, of course, look at the issue at even baser levels: "Who told you to attack the machines, you fools? Without them you'll all die!!" quoth a rightly enraged shift supervisor in Metropolis' lone glimmer of lucidity. No such moment comes in Waldo, where we deliberately sidestep the population pressure creating such ever-increasing demand for energy because the smooth apes reproduce with the speed of any degenerate vermin. Laugh Along with Franz ends in trite primitivism, the hero losing/abandoning his high-tech job to refocus on his relationship with a female as opposed to self-worth by social rank, but the whole pious genuflection before hormonal tyranny ignores the females are the ones imposing the race for social rank in the first place, ignores that without his fancy job she'll dump him in a heartbeat. Ellison's harlequin will not admit the people don't want to be saved from their degenerative drudgery, though unlike other examples here, Ellison was aware enough of human nature to show where that leads his hero.

 

Whose demand fuels industrial supply?

- and no money down!

I've been warming up to Cyberpunk 2077 more and more by ignoring the grind and just wandering about now and then. At least they included a tiny bit of content out in the badlands, away from the video billboard hellscape. Y'know, for us Gangrels. I was especially thrilled when I discovered the composting composition of the hills to the south. A landfill, bigger than the city itself (albeit not all in the game map and summarily rendered) is one element every modern-day setting should include, considering such do in fact exist. I don't mean just the increasingly continental great Pacific garbage patch, but paradisiac spots turned blemishes upon the face of the planet like Thilafushi.

 

It's all good to rail against Apple pushing a new smartphone every year, but where's the outrage against the billions stupid enough to buy it? You rail against chatbots as the new techno-Moloch, but it's not Sam Altman forcing reddit to fill up with AI slop. The users themselves are eating it up. Musk's Cybertruck may be an overpriced, malfunctioning road hazard, but plenty of suckers lined up for the nouveau-Hummer a few years ago. How many cases of makeup does the average ditz run through yearly? Or even monthly? How many plush orangutan dolls will soon be thrown away because millions of monkeys want to do like the monkey they saw? Until they spot the next fad...

 

In over a century of techno-dystopias the masses have been fed exactly the fantasy of victimhood they demand, an unending pretense of wizardly bogeymen exculpating the villagers with pitchforks and torches, the cold, inhuman metal face of science masking the subhuman appetites driving industry's depredations. Is technology dehumanizing? Good. Dehumanization would be the best possible outcome. "Is the rabble also necessary for life?"

 

 

 

 

 

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* Ooops, turns out they were in different categories. Kagan lost to Zelazny, three times at once.

AoW4 Factions, 11

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 the fairies came into play it prodded me to revisit elvishness, more from the edgy, haughty Feanor-grade immortal angle. This "trader at the gates" setup, for its neutrality, actually works quite well for showing a faction's default attitude, much as in #5, the goblin example. Another unfocused faction in terms of affinity, but I remember it working better than others. With the resource bonus from talented collectors and nature expansion bonuses they grow better, and can go offensive or defensive with shadow or materium. The extra naga mobility just doubled(trebled?) down on their adaptability. I can't remember whether this or the other elvish description using the word "eschatologic" came first. I tend to fixate on elvish immortality too much over their other traits, but the poetic weight of endings and beginnings is hard to ignore.

The Truest Lie

So many insist that it doesn't matter if something is not true, believing in it still has value. The topic might be the validity of a political platform or the inherent goodness of plains-apes, or romantic love, but most often it's that other prehistoric millstone around society's neck: religion. You want to "believe in belief" but never admit the self-defeating contradiction of such a stance. That if wishing is not enough, if only pretending it to be true can satisfy, then you have conceded that veracity is indispensible. Faith invalidates itself.

This is a Cooper's hawk as far as I can tell.

They're common enough, but don't make a habit of sitting around posing for pictures.

At -10 or -15 centigrade, though, this one seemed far more willing to tolerate proximity for the heat our buildings give off.

 

Genealogy of The Royal "They"

"My bum is on your lips

My bum is on your lips

And if I'm lucky you might just give it a little kiss

And that's the message that we deliver to little kids

And expect them not to know what a woman's clitoris is"

 

Eminem - The Real Slim Shady

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"Listen closely, LotA: You need to step off the third-person high-horse. [...] If you want to be treated like a person, then don't correct people when they treat you like they treat each other."

 

Schlock Mercenary 2008/11/21

_________________________________________________________  

 

 

Though largely lost in our wider media circus (what with the nonsensical warring and the surrender of all society to robber barons and the primitive superstitious backsliding and suchlike) a court case popped up on the news here in the states as redundant proof that men should avoid women as much as possible. (At least they caught this one before she moved on to killing her children as well; just a man dead, no harm done.) Granted, the age-old 'bitch bites man' headline of a wife poisoning her husband for the cash would have raised no eyebrows if not for the very modern twist of her then going on to publish a (ghostwritten) children's book about suffering through the grief of his death. Now that's the 21st century we know and love! (And you're still whining about the Brothers Grimm being too gruesome for modern audiences? Let mommy soothe you with the tale of murdering daddy if he's not useful enough to her, then playing the victim.)

 

It's all about the sympathy.

 

On a completely unrelated topic I've been revisiting the webcomic Questionable Content, which  instead of regaining some perspective seems to be doubling and trebling down on its woke idiocy with not one but two storylines in the past year pushing, of all things, personalized pronouns. In the latest morality play, two teens start throwing stuff and putting another in a choke hold - for what offense, you ask? 'Misgendering' one of them, it being a 'they' of the male persuasion. We then proceed with a soulful heart-to-heart on the moral imperative to support and coddle tha pwecious fee-fees of the retarded trash physically beating their peers for nonexistent insults. Then the boy they choked out is made to return to beg forgiveness and voice admiration of his assured betters, only to be mocked with an eye-rolling "ugh, boys!" chorus behind his back. Ta-dah. The (apparently happy) end.

 

How do you deal with an entire 'left' wing turned self-justifying petty tyrants and champions of schoolyard bullies? It's been fifteen or so years since the politics of those posturing as progressive ceased resembling anything like equality and dove headlong into a mad gambit to fabricate a new aristocracy pervading our entire society, with its own hagiography and honorifics, entitled to claim offense at a whim and mete out arbitrary punishments. There's a difference between calling yourself a 'they' freely, without retribution, and forcing everyone else to play along with your delusion. There's a difference between getting called a 'faggot' by others as an insult and demanding to be called one as a mark of respect. It's the same insanity we were supposed to be combating by no longer forcing children to pledge allegiance to some magic sky-daddy in the clouds. (Which, oddly enough, we never got around to rectifying before new pledges to new allegiances were tacked on.) A right to live your own life is not the same as a right to dictate others'.

 

Of course, in QC's case, it hopped that crazy-train thirteen or more years ago, when it paired up its old main protagonist with a transsexual. One of their relationship upgrades, for instance, consisted of them sharing a hotel room, and the self-appointed female crawling into the theretofore straight male's bed during the night. Though the tranny was the one breaking social norms, when the other tells the story to his own friends, he's the one reflexively put on trial as a possible sexual predator. Well, that's how you market to an entire generation raised on the likes of Nimona. This is Dick Cheney shooting another man in the face then making him publicly apologize for getting shot. This is Saddam Hussein charging his victims' families for the bullets used in executions. This is every nobleman over the centuries caning a servant then docking his wages for breaking his cane. And it's now the official stance of every right-thinking leftist.

 

Best of all, you need no special qualities to join the ranks of such a superior breed. No analytical skill, intellectual integrity or creativity, no virtues except adherence to a quasi-articulated creed. But it's worth remembering where all this snowflakery started, the reason it has consistently fallen back on ginned up sympathy for the cute, for the easily offended, for the mentally infirm, for men claiming to be women, for those claiming intrinsic protections beyond those available to their fellow apes. Where does, where has rested the stronghold of weaponized, unquestioned victimhood all throughout history? Based on which social divide do we inherit a mentality splitting us innately into those who must provide and protect and those entitled to benefit from those efforts? Did not the damsel wail for violence to be committed on her behalf in every children's tale? Scratch just a few slogans beneath the mob's pentimentod placards and you will find this modern insanity hearkens back to women's primordial entitlement to exploit men, and to dispose of them if profit dictates, all while playing the victim.

Hey, what do you call Sanrio's North-American market share?

Trickle-Dow Nekonomics. 

Game as Service Outage

"She takes a litle time

In making up her mind

She doesn't want to fight against the tide"

 

Garbage - The Trick Is to Keep Breathing

 

 

Let's see, where were we? Night City? 

Nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. I've been jumping in every so often this past year, as one does in these big open world games, but find myself unmotivated to advance in any way. At least in Skyrim, despite putting the main quests off for... almost forever, I could get momentarily jazzed by exploring a new dungeon, crafting new weapons, potions and enchantments, building up my homestead. Cyberpunk 2077's level scaling sours both the combat and crafting, its apartments can't be customized (and once I found the delightfully shabby Northside one I lost interest in others) plus I already got the only car I want.

Quit snickering, it gets three million pixels to the gallon!

The high point so far have been the side-quests, which not only display some nice, professional level design but contain just enough flavor text to each paint an entertaining vignette of life in the city. But as I've been clearing those off board after board, I've been gradually losing interest in mercenary work altogether and launching the game for ten or twenty minutes at a time to just wander around and take in the numerous slices of Night City life, like kids playing virtual hopscotch.

Oh come on, a piece of chalk must cost, like, a fraction of an implant, economize ya lil' shits! Anyway, overall, a modern setting offers less room for the more involved delving of a single, unitary "dungeon" so there's no real feeling of escalation to any of it. Escalation takes more planning.

 

I never did get around to trying Vagrus' new zone. When I left off, I'd just finished a massive inspiraling sweep of the map, polishing off Finndurarth, Nedir and Harvek's companion quests at the same time as cashing in a lot of smaller contracts, battles and investments.

Excess livestock: the best problem.

Gotta appreciate those 400 silver wallet bumps. But knowing I'll need to devote a fair bit of focus to my next twenty-step plan to avoid forgetting crucial details, I parked my comitatus back at newbietown with an empty inventory and clear ledger, and there it's been awaiting my triumphant scheming return for half a year. I'll be saddlin' up some giant ant mounts next time! If there is a next time...

 

There are many issues with the DLC-spam business model as a subset of the game-as-service, microtransaction mentality writ large. Its popularity spread with multiplayer games which ensured almost universal playerbase buy-in. Everyone else is buying the new expansion. Do or get left behind. But single-player lacks that social network addiction as a crutch, leaving only the game's quality as incentive for the next buy-in. How sure are you of your appeal?

 

Then of course there's the issue of demanding your customers pay full price for the bare skeleton of a product, which is why I bought Europa Universalis 4 a decade after its release.

 

Then there's the diminishing returns angle, as latter DLCs get more and more sparse to keep bleeding a supposedly addicted audience with the least effort, which is why I haven't bought the last few years' worth of Stellaris DLCs.

 

At the conjunction of the previous two points you find the limitation of tacking extra features onto a basic system not made for them. I've addressed at some length D&D's problem trying to sell extra classes, modules and settings, when what it so obviously needs is to break down the primitive min-maxing, over-randomized fighter/wizard/thief setup from half a century ago - but the fanboys would never stand for it. Age of Wonders 4 has been scraping that limit with its latter expansions, deftly interspersing yet not touching the core limitations of its six magic affinities.

 

Worse (here we reach my eventual point) you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, because in electronic-land, a full revamp will probably not be playable with older content. These days, that's a problem. Last year when I joked about needing spreadsheets to keep track of various options I've used (or not) as I jump between games every few months, I started by complaining Frostpunk 2 had killed my last city with its heat management patch. Now that seems to be ramping up into a trend. Low Magic Age (one of those perpetually "in beta" types) has barred my level 13-ish party from continuing. Darkest Dungeon 2 wiped my existing "confession" (a.k.a. campaign) at some point. Worst of all, my excitement at a new Mount&Blade expansion (Bannerlord's got vikings now - on boats!) was severely dampened when it forced me to retire the Marquis of Baltakhand, aged though he now be. Even porn games are starting to nuke old saves, and if you think an RPG party wipe is anti-climactic, try getting caught mid-thrust! 

 

While I don't deny the financial necessity for start-ups or fringe developers to literally buy themselves more development time with piecemeal content, add nuking players' saves as further evidence of post-launch content's limited tenability, no matter how well it worked for No Man's Sky. This is especially true as strategy/RPG campaigns have stretched longer and longer. A Frostpunk city represents a couple days' worth of gameplay. Bad enough. But the likes of Rogue Trader or Baldur's Gate 3 boast 200-hour campaigns. Not an option for them. If the basic idea is that such expansions will come after players have had a year or three to get bored of their existing characters, I refer you to my Vagrus example. Some concepts are playable only by extended, devoted effort, after which you might let the experience marinate for a bit before jumping in again. Not because you're bored, but because you're savoring it... or maybe precisely because you tell yourself you'll play once the next DLC comes out, not realizing it'll murderize yer marquis.

 

So, two or three main issues:

 

1) Micro-doses of content can much more easily be added to dumbed-down gamplay where you just end up wandering aimlessly about, as in Cyberpunk. I don't know if those hopscotch brats were there from launch, and I don't have to care. Even if they did anything it wouldn't affect my trade run... because there is no trade run. No planning. Just mindless twitch-FPS dust-ups. But if I saw a DLC drop for Vagrus when my character was mid-circuit, I would deliberately delay buying it, possibly by months (and it went on sale) until I was safe in town with no outstanding warrants and able to accommodate any landscape changes.

 

2) One of the big problems with post-launch content has been training your customers to refuse buying anything at launch pricing on the assumption they'd only be missing out on later stuff 'n junk anyway. Now pile that on with conditioning them to actively dread expansions killing their characters. Bad enough to market a pig in a poke, but when the revealed cat claws your face off...

("Lately, I'm not the only one

I say never trust anyone") 

 

3) As the entire industry is presumably re-tooling to fill games with spammed, dirt-cheap AI slop as content, the artsier fringe must at long last bite the bullet and start marketing itself not as low-budget small-time indie side-show attractions, but as more expensive, artisanal interactive media. Go organic. Advertise your Amish hand-crafting. Charge more. Take more time to develop. Put out singular, coherently-crafted campaigns from start to finish. Move on to the next and hope your work was good enough to earn you name brand trust. Low prices and DLC spam will soon be synonymous with The Slop.

AoW4 Factions, 10

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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Like I said, dragons don't particularly inspire me, and this faction was made just so I could play around with an order dragon. Goats too, for some reason. Didn't like making it, didn't like playing it, can barely remember it.

 

Well, they can't all be winners. 

Le Mot Justified Alignment

"An honest propagandist for any Cause, that is, one who honestly studies and figures out the most effective way of putting over his Message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary folks--it just confuses them--to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people. And one seemingly small but almighty important point he learns, if he does much speechifying, is that you can win over folks to your point of view much better in the evening, when they are tired out from work and not so likely to resist you, than at any other time of day."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here (note, that's his villain speaking)

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Hmm, where shall we start tonight's peripatetic prose on conning? Maybe with the prosaic conman-in-chief? Various Democrat-aligned American comedians have been pulling material in spades from Trump's decline into senility, but as usual, chasing momentary profit masks the more salient, wider point. This is not a 2026 issue. He was a laughing stock even in the '90s. Old or young, Donnie is, was, has always been an incoherent babbling buffoon. Even while he retained "the gift of gab" said gab contained zero substance. At his utmost cogent, he might verbalize a platitude or truism. In any decade, any rational mind listening to a couple of sentences of his verbal diarrhea could spot in him an overeducated moron, a spoiled rich brat never called out on his mistakes, a transparently obfuscating blowhard with a third-grade vocabulary and a three-year-old's grasp of causality. No animal which communicates in that chimpanzee swagger will ever be anything more than a troglodyte. But for that to matter you'd need a public capable of distinguishing the loftiest prose from chimp grunts, and it's not as though Obama's vapid "hope and change" mantra held more meaning than "make rabblerousing great again."

 

On a completely unrelated topic, it was trendy from the late '90s to the mid 2010s to proclaim that women speak twice or three times more than men, with a knowing wink intimating this merely confirms the mental inferiority of men as dumb animals incapable of verbalizing* and presumably communicating in nothing but primitive grunts like Tim the Tool Man. Studies both back then and last year have tended to deflate that otherwise unproven assumption, with, yes, okay, women speaking consistently more, but not by much. Ten percent? Twenty at most? So now if you look up the issue you run across feminist complaints that the trope of women verbalizing more was nothing but patriarchal propaganda to put down women as chatty... even though it was the feminists and daytime talk shows of 20y.a. who popularized it as superior communication. Their revisionism is likely prompted by another realization from the intervening years which appears to have been expunged from search engines in the interest of women's dignity: that their excess speech was not, in fact, communicating anything. It comes from an increase in mundane chatter, the hi-how-are-you-hi-I-am-fine-how-are-you-also-fine-great-bye-bye droning background radiation of social life. Women just feel a need to "touch base" more. Give a guy <A TOPIC> and he'll talk your ear off too.** But for a couple of decades nobody thought to question whether the speech in question was meaningful or not. Meaning is extraneous.

 

So. This is a post about chatbots.

 

I'm seeing more and more exasperated nerds and nerdettes trying to point out that even if a bot can instantly write you a ten-page commentary on any topic, that in no way implies it's logically constructing a coherent analysis. Well, sure, thinks I, what else is new? LLMs are cut-and-paste machines, working at stunningly finer pixel-scale grain than any such effort in history, but by necessity still just outputting a probabilistic extension of a sequence. Ask a bot's opinion on a movie and it will output strings of "cinematography" and "scintillating" and "emotive" and anything else you're accustomed to hear out of a critic's mouth, precisely because you, the asker, are accustomed to hearing them. Ask it to make a movie and it will paste predicted figures onto a standardized backdrop and animate them in accordance with the maximum likelihood of such arrangements. At no point is actual creation involved. At no point does the output reflect reality any more faithfully than the topic's match to existing content. The more a culture interacts via such automated output, the more it will, by necessity, both contract toward the lowest-common-denominator and lose its grounding.

 

But if you take issue with this, be intellectually honest enough to admit the problem is not the supply. It's the demand. The "reality" TV-watching public is too stupid to detect the gradual degradation of communication and cultural capital.

Not uneducated.

Not constrained. 

Not victims of circumstance.

Stupid.

Humanity appears to have achieved Orwell's versificator, a useful tool for placating the proles, the subhuman cattle comprising the overwhelming bulk of the species. Gabbing. Limitless, prompt and bountiful gabbing. Is that a bad thing? Yes, but not for any of the humanitarian reasons you'd like to boast as moral high ground. The people don't want your help. They want the platitudes. They'll never know the difference. They will likely live happier lives for it. So why is the versificator bad? And it is. Disastrous.

 

But admit to yourself where exactly your anger should be directed.

 

 

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* Seriously though, 1800 pages, do I look like I have trouble verbalizing my thoughts?

** I'm pretty sure that if you look closer at men's speech, you'll find the prosocial platitudes replaced with slogans, chants and catchphrases. Sorry, bros, but "wazzaaaaaap" is still very much not a word. All of this is, by-the-by, not getting into the issue of gossip, of the invasive personal/interpersonal nature of women's chatter, which I'm guessing is where the difference and the mis-perception of talking "more" actually lies.

Fullmetal Passerine

No hawk's getting through THAT!

Broodhollow

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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