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

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"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.

 

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* 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:

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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

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"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?))

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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.