"Jill said suddenly, „Jubal? How do they get away with it?“
„Get away with what?“
„Everything. That’s not a church-it’s a madhouse.“
It was Jubal’s turn to ponder before answering. „No, Jill, you’re mistaken. It is a church - . . and the logical eclecticism of our times.“
„Huh?“
„The New Revelation and all doctrines and practices under it are all old stuff, very old. All you can say about it is that neither Foster nor Digby ever had an original thought in his life. But they knew what would sell, in this day and age. So they pieced together a hundred timeworn tricks, gave them a new paint job, and they were in business. A booming business, too. The only thing that scares me is that I might live to see it sell too well- until it was compulsory for everybody.“
„Oh, no!“
„Oh, yes. Hitler started with less and all he had to peddle was hate. Hate always sells well, but for repeat trade and the long pull happiness is sounder merchandise."
Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
A charlatan died last week. That the world weeps for him more than it did for Kurt Vonnegut, Christopher Hitchens and Carl Sagan put together proves just how utterly doomed our idiotic species is. I was planning to calmly skip over Billy Graham's death, knowing few details of his life (and as every time I add a post tagged "faithosis" or "FEMale chauvINISM" this blog loses half its meager handful of readers) but the monotone nature of the press surrounding this welcome development begs comment.
I was expecting the drooling troglodytic bible-thumpers on what's called the "right wing" to slip into one of their frequent bouts of mass hysteria over Graham croaking. From the American Democratic Party's mass-media mouthpieces, I was expecting their usual noncommittal, muted, spineless genuflecting before hoi polloi mores. I was not expecting the likes of MSNBC and NPR to also outdo themselves lavishing attention and praise on what should be the first implicit enemy of any self-proclaimed "progressive" social movement. Their motivation is readily apparent in the nature of that praise, as every article, news segment and slavish eulogy makes sure to note, repeatedly and at length, the breadth and perpetuity of Graham's control over American politics.
Those of you who have not lived in the U.S. might find it hard to believe, as American mass-media go to some lengths to mask the stench of their country's superstitious undertow, but evangelists like Graham play a huge role in determining social acceptability. He was a king-maker, a store-brand Richelieu and an irresistible ally to any Man Who Would Be King, and every White House occupier including the Clintons and Obama pandered routinely to the festering, ignorant redneck swarms which Graham represented.
But, though his popularity and political power are undeniable, it's much harder to find mention of anything for which Graham stood aside from building up his power base. Indeed, every amateur biographer seems to gush over the man's self-serving ecumenical bending before public opinion. Nose consistently to the wind, his career seems to have tracked major social movements as they came. When he could best widen his influence as part of the southern evangelical circus with its fire-and-brimstone threats of hell, he did that. Once he came to the wider public's attention and saw profit and publicity in playing a "nice" evangelist, he did that too. When playing the anti-semite and pandering to Nixon's paranoia served him, he did so, and when the civil rights movement became an inevitability he paid lip service to desegregation as well. He sold whatever brand of snake-oil would sell to his target audience of primitive, superstitious cretins.
Vermin like Graham, principal vectors of the mental disease faithosis, have killed more humans than any plague throughout history, by diminishing the powers of reason by which thinking beings can improve their environment. They are the velvet glove to any iron fist, a living consensus of inaction and stultification, cheap populism and power brokering, crippling our intellectual progress and our ability to deal with true crises. Robert Heinlein's future histories sometimes predict a coming dark age by the rise of a 21st century theocracy growing out of 20th century southern evangelism (with Graham-in-all-but-name making frequent cameos) noting the inexorable spread of Graham-brand feel-good born-again willful ignorance. Do you think he was wrong? Oh, in the details, sure, but then again Jules Verne's giant cannon never came to be either. Human footsteps still mark the dust on the moon. Look at Graham's Wikipedia article, so stunningly objective that it repeatedly quotes fanboyish bons mots about him as a Bridge Builder, a Pastor to Presidents, Greatest Living American (will they now call him the greatest dead one too?) and a hundred other uncritical mentions of faith and salvation with all the seriousness of the day's weather.
"Graham preached the gospel to more people in person than anyone in the history of Christianity" we are told by our online consensus of reality, not that he lied to more people in person about imbecilic fairy-tale promises of eternal life and protective daddies up in the sky.
On one point I can agree with Graham and other filthy lying scum like him: the end is nigh. Human civilization is nearing its destruction. Only it won't come from any supernatural sources but from the spread of anti-intellectualism, of which Graham was one of the greatest champions. Scum like him should be memorialized, yes... much like Germany remembers its own barbaric tribal backsliding in the thirties and forties. And if you count yourself an intellectual, progressive, free thinker or any other kind of non-retard, you have no excuse whatsoever not to openly condemn one of the greatest reactionary forces to ever walk the North American soil.
2018/02/27
2018/02/24
Saint Paul of Splendid and Tybir of the Red Cheek
Mich interessiert kein Gleichgewicht
Rammstein - Mann Gegen Mann
________________________________________
Spoilers: Torment: Tides of Numenera (Tybir) ... and I guess a minor one for Dead State if that even counts.
________________________________________
Back when the webcomic Something Positive still had some personality, its "heroes" set out to write a very special theater play, the very antithesis of modern sappy, politically correct tripe. You know, those fictional portrayals of, among other things, "gays as flawless superhumans who resemble a new incarnation of the noble savage more than real people."
I held off playing the zombie survival / base building / RPG / thingamajig Dead State on its release because of the bad press it received (standard release bugs mostly) and while I'll get into the game as a whole at some later date, I will say the patched-up and expanded Reanimated release (while still suffering from some minor bugs and strange design decisions) is quite stable, enjoyable and an interesting take on the old freedom / story trade-off in gaming. It resembles the first Baldur's Gate game in one respect, providing a wide array of possible companions without expanding much on their dialogue trees. Most of these companions play up the "ragged band of misfits" routine: a computer nerd with no social skills, a veterinary student trying to patch up humans as best she can, a couple of semi-competent cops, a trucker, a petty crook, etc. The females naturally tend to be portrayed as more sympathetic than the males.
And then there's Paul Rainier.
Paul is a former Army ranger turned engineer. His combat skills are among the best in the game, possibly the best all-around. He never panics. His jack-of-all-trades noncombat skills lend themselves to supporting any base improvement project. He's clean-cut, clean-shaven, clean-spoken, clean-conscienced. He never takes a day off. He's so stunningly smart and competent that he's always on both the logical and moral side of arguments. He's also, inexplicably, a sub-commander in place of the more fitting Bud. In fact the fucker's so gosh-dog-gonned angelic as to routinely reassure you that even when you contradict him he will gladly support your decisions.
He's also the only openly gay character and as per modern precepts, Paul is a gay martyr. A homo-martyr. A Homartyr. His heroic and benevolent military career was cut short by homophobia. Hell, for extra pathos, your first meeting with him occurs as he's piously burying his dead lover. Jesus fuck. Jesus fuck every apostle. Could you not just have slapped a rainbow-colored halo on this schmuck? Paul's actually so endlessly useful and so painfully personable that even I like him despite my distaste for military murderers and PC babble both. Dead State's basic concept follows the standard post-apocalyptic setting where other survivors are a bigger threat than the zombies themselves. Your would-be companions are usually useless or unlikeable or both... unless they're a nominal minority, and Paul is the... second most ludicrous of the bunch.
Dead State's developer, Double Bear Productions, was founded by Brian Mitsoda, who earned his fame by writing one of the true classic cRPGs, Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines. Though Dead State shows some of that depth, its shameful pandering to political correctness makes me wonder if Bloodlines wasn't a one-off. It also makes me curious about his exact work on Torment: Tides of Numenera, a project sharing a smaller amount of the same weakness for facetious niceness. I haven't played the patch including Mitsoda's personal creation, Oom, but TToN featured its own token ding-a-lingulator, Tybir, and Tybir is... rather less angelic.
He's still very sympathetic. He's a charmer, and even as his dark past is revealed, the player is encouraged to accept and nurture Tybir's mere contrition as character growth and appropriate penance. As I complained in my main commentary on the game, none of TToN's companions approach the edginess of Ignus or Vhailor from the original Torment, or even Dak'kon or Morte. Yet, Tybir's dishonest, self-serving and everything else we expect from a rogue and don't expect to see portrayed as part of the personality of a protected species, a champion of victimology poker. Compare the two gay love interests in Dragon Age: Origins, Leliana and Zevran (both of them rogues to boot) and you'll find nothing is ever their fault and their tales of personal tragedy are outright Dickensian.
Tybir, in contrast, owns his faults (at least eventually) and his entire life history seems as much a matter of his poor personal choices as the winds of fate. Overall a much more believable character than Saint Paul Rainier or most any other nominally homosexual character in modern media. And they still managed to ruin it by the finale.
Auvigne, Tybir's former boyfriend... hit him!
Le *gasp* !!!
Domestic violence! Oh noes! Oh the horror! Oh the humanity!
Oh, brother.
That's right, when he caught Tybir possibly ruining the reputation of the mercenary company they'd painstakingly built up by burning an entire village to the ground, betraying their employers, Auvigne popped him one. These are trained murderers we're talking about, mind you, backstabbing cut-throats. Yet this is the climax of Tybir's story, a smack, every bit as amateurish and whiny and anticlimactic as the same politically correct pandering idiocy I've been railing against in webcomics. That's the quality of writing we Kickstarted with a five million dollar boot.
Do yourselves a favor. If you're all excited about turning your product's plot or characters into an emblem of the latest hot-button issue... don't. If you know what attitude to take before you've even considered the problem, you're probably not capable of making it interesting. You may as well play the provocateur and write a deliberate parody of such cliches instead.
Make him kick a lot of puppies.
Rammstein - Mann Gegen Mann
________________________________________
Spoilers: Torment: Tides of Numenera (Tybir) ... and I guess a minor one for Dead State if that even counts.
________________________________________
Back when the webcomic Something Positive still had some personality, its "heroes" set out to write a very special theater play, the very antithesis of modern sappy, politically correct tripe. You know, those fictional portrayals of, among other things, "gays as flawless superhumans who resemble a new incarnation of the noble savage more than real people."
I held off playing the zombie survival / base building / RPG / thingamajig Dead State on its release because of the bad press it received (standard release bugs mostly) and while I'll get into the game as a whole at some later date, I will say the patched-up and expanded Reanimated release (while still suffering from some minor bugs and strange design decisions) is quite stable, enjoyable and an interesting take on the old freedom / story trade-off in gaming. It resembles the first Baldur's Gate game in one respect, providing a wide array of possible companions without expanding much on their dialogue trees. Most of these companions play up the "ragged band of misfits" routine: a computer nerd with no social skills, a veterinary student trying to patch up humans as best she can, a couple of semi-competent cops, a trucker, a petty crook, etc. The females naturally tend to be portrayed as more sympathetic than the males.
And then there's Paul Rainier.
He's also the only openly gay character and as per modern precepts, Paul is a gay martyr. A homo-martyr. A Homartyr. His heroic and benevolent military career was cut short by homophobia. Hell, for extra pathos, your first meeting with him occurs as he's piously burying his dead lover. Jesus fuck. Jesus fuck every apostle. Could you not just have slapped a rainbow-colored halo on this schmuck? Paul's actually so endlessly useful and so painfully personable that even I like him despite my distaste for military murderers and PC babble both. Dead State's basic concept follows the standard post-apocalyptic setting where other survivors are a bigger threat than the zombies themselves. Your would-be companions are usually useless or unlikeable or both... unless they're a nominal minority, and Paul is the... second most ludicrous of the bunch.
Dead State's developer, Double Bear Productions, was founded by Brian Mitsoda, who earned his fame by writing one of the true classic cRPGs, Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines. Though Dead State shows some of that depth, its shameful pandering to political correctness makes me wonder if Bloodlines wasn't a one-off. It also makes me curious about his exact work on Torment: Tides of Numenera, a project sharing a smaller amount of the same weakness for facetious niceness. I haven't played the patch including Mitsoda's personal creation, Oom, but TToN featured its own token ding-a-lingulator, Tybir, and Tybir is... rather less angelic.
Tybir, in contrast, owns his faults (at least eventually) and his entire life history seems as much a matter of his poor personal choices as the winds of fate. Overall a much more believable character than Saint Paul Rainier or most any other nominally homosexual character in modern media. And they still managed to ruin it by the finale.
Le *gasp* !!!
Domestic violence! Oh noes! Oh the horror! Oh the humanity!
Oh, brother.
That's right, when he caught Tybir possibly ruining the reputation of the mercenary company they'd painstakingly built up by burning an entire village to the ground, betraying their employers, Auvigne popped him one. These are trained murderers we're talking about, mind you, backstabbing cut-throats. Yet this is the climax of Tybir's story, a smack, every bit as amateurish and whiny and anticlimactic as the same politically correct pandering idiocy I've been railing against in webcomics. That's the quality of writing we Kickstarted with a five million dollar boot.
Do yourselves a favor. If you're all excited about turning your product's plot or characters into an emblem of the latest hot-button issue... don't. If you know what attitude to take before you've even considered the problem, you're probably not capable of making it interesting. You may as well play the provocateur and write a deliberate parody of such cliches instead.
Make him kick a lot of puppies.
2018/02/20
Red Planet
Robert Heinlein's stories peaked in the 1960s with Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. In the two prior decades much of his writing was dominated by his publisher's demand for "juvenile" fiction, SF still being mired in its early 20th century pulp planetary romance phase. While keeping things PG-rated understandably dulled the edge off his futuristic libertarianism and libertinism, his irrepressible style shone through. The "Heinlein juveniles" are more serious and thought provoking than most anything pop culture directs at ersatz mature audiences.
Take Red Planet. A young pioneer saves his pet Martian parrot-ball from a fate worse than death. The ensuing adventure manages to combine ice-skating, war-painted oxygen masks, righteous rebellion against authoritarian middle-school educators, bullet train rides and fending off aliengators all before even reaching the main event. Along the way its characters exemplify a gamut of personal freedom and responsibility from the childish to the posthuman, by both pedantic and implicit means. Despite all that heartpounding action-adventure, for fans of Stranger in a Strange Land it will inevitably read much like a marginally non-canon sequel expanding upon Martian biology and culture and Heinlein's idealized individual capable of both careful, patient consideration and decisive, merciless action.
It's a quaint reminder that Stranger was cooking for a dozen years before being published in abridged form no less. Both books were in fact begun around the same time. This likely amounted to a stroke of marketing genius, as youth who grew up loving Heinlein's mysterious Martians in Red Planet would've been perfectly primed when they hit their mid-twenties to have their world rocked by Stranger's iconoclasm, free love and benevolent cannibalism. No wonder students just finishing college started setting up their own Martian nests.
In keeping with its youth-oriented marketing, Red Planet's remarkably dynamic. By itself, the image of the two boys skating at low-gravity speeds along frozen Martian canals, masks painted in garish individually expressive patterns, would make a stunning central visual thread for a movie. That is, if any studio were willing to adapt the book honestly, keeping both Heinlein's outdated science vis-a-vis said red planet and his gun-toting cowboy political rhetoric. Setting aside, its monomythic plot would instantly grab audiences. The hero with his two sidekicks discovers a dire threat to his community, travels strange landscapes, gains a wizard's (read Martian's, but let's not split hairs) aid and guidance, rallies the good people against the bad and at last reinstates the status quo.
The devil's in the details, and classic Heinlein prods toward freewheeling but socially conscious rugged individualism pepper every other page. Damn, the bastard could spin a yarn.
Take Red Planet. A young pioneer saves his pet Martian parrot-ball from a fate worse than death. The ensuing adventure manages to combine ice-skating, war-painted oxygen masks, righteous rebellion against authoritarian middle-school educators, bullet train rides and fending off aliengators all before even reaching the main event. Along the way its characters exemplify a gamut of personal freedom and responsibility from the childish to the posthuman, by both pedantic and implicit means. Despite all that heartpounding action-adventure, for fans of Stranger in a Strange Land it will inevitably read much like a marginally non-canon sequel expanding upon Martian biology and culture and Heinlein's idealized individual capable of both careful, patient consideration and decisive, merciless action.
It's a quaint reminder that Stranger was cooking for a dozen years before being published in abridged form no less. Both books were in fact begun around the same time. This likely amounted to a stroke of marketing genius, as youth who grew up loving Heinlein's mysterious Martians in Red Planet would've been perfectly primed when they hit their mid-twenties to have their world rocked by Stranger's iconoclasm, free love and benevolent cannibalism. No wonder students just finishing college started setting up their own Martian nests.
In keeping with its youth-oriented marketing, Red Planet's remarkably dynamic. By itself, the image of the two boys skating at low-gravity speeds along frozen Martian canals, masks painted in garish individually expressive patterns, would make a stunning central visual thread for a movie. That is, if any studio were willing to adapt the book honestly, keeping both Heinlein's outdated science vis-a-vis said red planet and his gun-toting cowboy political rhetoric. Setting aside, its monomythic plot would instantly grab audiences. The hero with his two sidekicks discovers a dire threat to his community, travels strange landscapes, gains a wizard's (read Martian's, but let's not split hairs) aid and guidance, rallies the good people against the bad and at last reinstates the status quo.
The devil's in the details, and classic Heinlein prods toward freewheeling but socially conscious rugged individualism pepper every other page. Damn, the bastard could spin a yarn.
2018/02/17
Heart-shaped chocolate assault rifles, anyone?
"99 Düsenjäger
Jeder war ein großer krieger
Hielten sich für Captain Kirk"
Nena - 99 Luftballons
____________________________________
"In particular the whole of American life was organized around the cult of the powerful individual, that phantom ideal which Europe herself had only begun to outgrow in her last phase. Those Americans who wholly failed to realize this ideal, who remained at the bottom of the social ladder, either consoled themselves with hopes for the future, or stole symbolical satisfaction by identifying themselves with some popular star, or gloated upon their American citizenship, and applauded the arrogant foreign policy of their government."
Olaf Stapledon - Last and First Men
_____________________________________
"We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very - pissed off."
Fight Club
_____________________________________
Another school shooting. Is it that time of year already? Another day, another mass murder, another dollar. Another school shooting, another bumper crop of concern for mass media to mediate into an extra percent earnings this quarter. Another opportunity for America's good cop / bad cop political circus to massage their fanbase. Another school shooting, another beat of the metronome timing that city on a hill. It's the greatest country on earth.
Or at least it's the greatest show. In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes, except there's one born every minute. Tweet softly and carry a boomstick. Don't say the Nero word. Down with the one-percenters, ridin' dirty in the Bentley, all about the Benjamins, frankly Stronger Together shaking their money-maker like they were shakin' it for some paper trail. Down with the liberal elite giving them ball for debutante ball from behind each fence and farmyard wall. Don't tread on the land of the free samples, freedom-kissing their freedom fries straight off the gun rack of lamb of god we trust bust or boom, boom, boom. Everything's a big production. Hence the crisis of over-production. Free to kill, free to steal, free to waste, free to live in debt or die hard, free to enslave each other in stylish white collars. No time for losers. Don't overthink it.
What do you expect?
An entire culture devoted to fetishizing social power, to "getting ahead" and "upward mobility" and "second place is another word for loser" and "you can't argue with success" and the Forbes 500 list and black power, girl power, queer power, power for the sake of power, has no right to act surprised that it's constantly spawning mass murderers. Indoctrinate children from the cradle that they're nobody unless they're receiving special treatment, and what do you expect? School shootings find a corollary within the snowflake pathology evident in Generation Facebook, each and every youth hopelessly paranoid that if they're not oppressing others they must be, somehow, oppressed. Get rich or die tryin'. Where do you think your sadomasochistic fetishes logically lead?
Hi, kids, do you like violence? Do you like watching pro wrestling in your safe spaces? Offer youth only two self-images: thug or limp rag, sadist or masochist. Why act surprised at the results? Every other word out of our yuge president Trump's mouth is either "Winner" or "Loser" and he is merely a symptom, merely the encapsulation of your pathology, the will of the people. Capitalism has made it this way, old-fashioned fascism will take it away. Happiness is a warm pursuit of property. Suckled on Reaganomics, postmodernized intersectional handicapable oversocial justicars newspeak [redacted] under the ingsoc rug, ensuring everyone gets their two minutes of hate. The goose-steppers see their supposed opposition biting their act and join in the dance.
And the metronome ticks on.
Jeder war ein großer krieger
Hielten sich für Captain Kirk"
Nena - 99 Luftballons
____________________________________
"In particular the whole of American life was organized around the cult of the powerful individual, that phantom ideal which Europe herself had only begun to outgrow in her last phase. Those Americans who wholly failed to realize this ideal, who remained at the bottom of the social ladder, either consoled themselves with hopes for the future, or stole symbolical satisfaction by identifying themselves with some popular star, or gloated upon their American citizenship, and applauded the arrogant foreign policy of their government."
Olaf Stapledon - Last and First Men
_____________________________________
"We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very - pissed off."
Fight Club
_____________________________________
Another school shooting. Is it that time of year already? Another day, another mass murder, another dollar. Another school shooting, another bumper crop of concern for mass media to mediate into an extra percent earnings this quarter. Another opportunity for America's good cop / bad cop political circus to massage their fanbase. Another school shooting, another beat of the metronome timing that city on a hill. It's the greatest country on earth.
Or at least it's the greatest show. In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes, except there's one born every minute. Tweet softly and carry a boomstick. Don't say the Nero word. Down with the one-percenters, ridin' dirty in the Bentley, all about the Benjamins, frankly Stronger Together shaking their money-maker like they were shakin' it for some paper trail. Down with the liberal elite giving them ball for debutante ball from behind each fence and farmyard wall. Don't tread on the land of the free samples, freedom-kissing their freedom fries straight off the gun rack of lamb of god we trust bust or boom, boom, boom. Everything's a big production. Hence the crisis of over-production. Free to kill, free to steal, free to waste, free to live in debt or die hard, free to enslave each other in stylish white collars. No time for losers. Don't overthink it.
What do you expect?
An entire culture devoted to fetishizing social power, to "getting ahead" and "upward mobility" and "second place is another word for loser" and "you can't argue with success" and the Forbes 500 list and black power, girl power, queer power, power for the sake of power, has no right to act surprised that it's constantly spawning mass murderers. Indoctrinate children from the cradle that they're nobody unless they're receiving special treatment, and what do you expect? School shootings find a corollary within the snowflake pathology evident in Generation Facebook, each and every youth hopelessly paranoid that if they're not oppressing others they must be, somehow, oppressed. Get rich or die tryin'. Where do you think your sadomasochistic fetishes logically lead?
Hi, kids, do you like violence? Do you like watching pro wrestling in your safe spaces? Offer youth only two self-images: thug or limp rag, sadist or masochist. Why act surprised at the results? Every other word out of our yuge president Trump's mouth is either "Winner" or "Loser" and he is merely a symptom, merely the encapsulation of your pathology, the will of the people. Capitalism has made it this way, old-fashioned fascism will take it away. Happiness is a warm pursuit of property. Suckled on Reaganomics, postmodernized intersectional handicapable oversocial justicars newspeak [redacted] under the ingsoc rug, ensuring everyone gets their two minutes of hate. The goose-steppers see their supposed opposition biting their act and join in the dance.
And the metronome ticks on.
2018/02/12
Awful Hospital
"Monster movie
Daddy Warbucks up against Bobby Fuller
I fought the war but the war won't stop for the love of god"
Metric - Monster Hospital
I've been deriving inordinate enjoyment from Awful Hospital lately, which is slightly odd given its readily apparent flaws. It starts off as a webcomic rendition of a very low-budget adventure game filled with body horror and gross-out humor, then tacks on RPGish adventuring party members and combat turns, making the audience sit through round after round of "Bob uses rusty knife on zombie" - dull enough when you're actually playing a game, much less reading about it.
(No, really, scroll down to Feb 04 below this if you want to see how boring it is. I may be a hypocrite, but I'm a self-conscious one.)
Its general plot, exposition and dialogues might either be called Wonderland nonsense prose or postmodern absolutist relativism, the all-purpose "everything's possible" always so popular with creators too lazy to maintain internal coherence. Or just call it random crap. Some readers might be put off by the gratuitous bathroom humor comprising much of the early action, or by the pointlessly long digressions into which every other chapter seems to spiral. Still, if you're easily captivated by both world-building and biology as I am, Awful Hospital's dash of both might pique your grokker.
Of course, the odd colon-centric character here and there still ranks much less disgusting than the comic's other major gimmick: audience participation. The internet has placed creators directly in contact with their audience, allowing a route to self-publication free of editorial gatekeeping, a truly transformative advance yet not without its drawbacks. Pandering has only grown in importance and with the audience constantly commenting on every installment of a serialized work, a lot of small-timers spend a lot of time micromanaging their appeal. Awful Hospital sometimes incorporates suggestions from its "comments" section into the protagonist's next course of action, as the many competing voices inside her head. Great way to make the audience feel included and keep the Patreon subscriptions rolling (it pays to rub their bellies while you milk 'em) until you discover most humans are barely sentient vermin unfit to continue wasting oxygen - which is how your heroine ends up romancing a hamburger.
I may be biased. The very notion of interactive theater makes my skin crawl. All the weirder that I'm till following the story (such as it is) through its progression from a jumble of throwaway gags about sapient body parts through tedious play-by-play combat scenes to something resembling causality. Likely this is because whatever its faults, one thing Awful Hospital isn't is yet another webcomic about the sex life of highschoolers or twenty-somethings. When not complete gibberish it's creative enough, despite sullying that creativity with us rabble's inane mutterings. I do have to wonder if such setups don't presage things to come. Incorporating the comments section into a work so very closely approximates Bradbury's TV "family" from Fahrenheit 451, the terminally deconstructed faux-art existing solely to make its troglodytic audience feel included.
Daddy Warbucks up against Bobby Fuller
I fought the war but the war won't stop for the love of god"
Metric - Monster Hospital
I've been deriving inordinate enjoyment from Awful Hospital lately, which is slightly odd given its readily apparent flaws. It starts off as a webcomic rendition of a very low-budget adventure game filled with body horror and gross-out humor, then tacks on RPGish adventuring party members and combat turns, making the audience sit through round after round of "Bob uses rusty knife on zombie" - dull enough when you're actually playing a game, much less reading about it.
(No, really, scroll down to Feb 04 below this if you want to see how boring it is. I may be a hypocrite, but I'm a self-conscious one.)
Its general plot, exposition and dialogues might either be called Wonderland nonsense prose or postmodern absolutist relativism, the all-purpose "everything's possible" always so popular with creators too lazy to maintain internal coherence. Or just call it random crap. Some readers might be put off by the gratuitous bathroom humor comprising much of the early action, or by the pointlessly long digressions into which every other chapter seems to spiral. Still, if you're easily captivated by both world-building and biology as I am, Awful Hospital's dash of both might pique your grokker.
Of course, the odd colon-centric character here and there still ranks much less disgusting than the comic's other major gimmick: audience participation. The internet has placed creators directly in contact with their audience, allowing a route to self-publication free of editorial gatekeeping, a truly transformative advance yet not without its drawbacks. Pandering has only grown in importance and with the audience constantly commenting on every installment of a serialized work, a lot of small-timers spend a lot of time micromanaging their appeal. Awful Hospital sometimes incorporates suggestions from its "comments" section into the protagonist's next course of action, as the many competing voices inside her head. Great way to make the audience feel included and keep the Patreon subscriptions rolling (it pays to rub their bellies while you milk 'em) until you discover most humans are barely sentient vermin unfit to continue wasting oxygen - which is how your heroine ends up romancing a hamburger.
I may be biased. The very notion of interactive theater makes my skin crawl. All the weirder that I'm till following the story (such as it is) through its progression from a jumble of throwaway gags about sapient body parts through tedious play-by-play combat scenes to something resembling causality. Likely this is because whatever its faults, one thing Awful Hospital isn't is yet another webcomic about the sex life of highschoolers or twenty-somethings. When not complete gibberish it's creative enough, despite sullying that creativity with us rabble's inane mutterings. I do have to wonder if such setups don't presage things to come. Incorporating the comments section into a work so very closely approximates Bradbury's TV "family" from Fahrenheit 451, the terminally deconstructed faux-art existing solely to make its troglodytic audience feel included.
2018/02/10
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