Kindred Not

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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Addendum:

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

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

Anoxia Station

Indie gaming. Sometimes you get burned.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

AoW4 Factions, 25

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

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

The Machine Stops

"Don't waste time praying

Get on with finding"

 

Syntax - Pray

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

The Exceptional Inscrutable Untouchables

"God is an American"

David Bowie - I'm Afraid of Americans

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Caterpillars of the Community

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

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

Always comical. 

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

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

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

 

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

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

elm sawfly larva from a different walk

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Ahh.

 

Life.

Hello Darkness, My Old Trope

"I've come to stumble, curse and grope

Because designers, features lacking

Made a virtue of blind clicking"

- Paul Simon 

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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