Greg Rucka posted an article on his Tumblr a while ago, which was an interview by Dahr Jamail that dealt with climate change, and Jamail's modus operandi on that particular topic is basically to drive the reader into a fit of despair. He has a number of articles about it on Truth Out, all of which deliver the same tone of imminent doom. It's pornography for unmedicated depressives.
It turns out, upon inspection, that there's a cottage industry in this kind of thing. The subreddit for "collapse" is one-stop shopping, but a fair number of names keep popping up there, like Zero Hedge or the Economic Collapse blog: people who appear to be collecting ways in which modern economic/industrial civilization is self-destructing, with a tone anywhere from gleefully anticipatory to a sort of Zen, resigned cheerfulness.
The general thrust of the issue, vastly simplified, is that our present society has problems of such scope that it's difficult to imagine a solution for them that doesn't rely explicitly upon burning the whole thing down and starting over. Lacking that capacity, people then move on to catalog and discuss the ways in which the system might "reboot" on its own. Climate change is a good one, since it encompasses everything from the death of the oceans to toxic algae blooms to refugee migration, but the economy's at least as popular an apocalypse topic, as are odd or lethal diseases and the occasional stirrings of war.
This is the kind of thing that makes it difficult to sleep at night. On some level, if you get your news from the right sources, everything about your life is precarious and fleeting. Civilization is a remarkably thin veneer over a barbarous species, the planet is coughing blood and threatening to quit (there was a big article about how a lot of the leading climate scientists are dealing with symptoms not unlike PTSD), and if you participate at all in anything even remotely akin to modern society, you're a contributor to an imminent global catastrophe, without any real ability to influence or affect the outcome. After a few weeks of this, it began to look as if Mad Max was a predictive documentary.
It's a media bubble, though, and it's attractive to a particular kind of depressive subculture. The idea that these problems are solvable at all is dismissed as "hopium," or a stubborn adherence to optimism in the face of all evidence. The only appropriate responses, within this bubble, are to enter the "prepper" subculture at once or to party for the next few decades until one apocalypse or another wins the race and scours life off the planet.
What's interesting is that these problems, to a greater or lesser extent, are solvable, but we're in a precarious situation due to the lack of political will. Since traditional energy solutions are still somewhat profitable, most of the companies involved throw around lobbyist money to keep them going, and that results in politicians who will defend those companies' lines of work come hell or high water. At the same time, environmentalism and alternative energy are considered left-wing causes, at least in America, and that's all it takes for certain elements of the American political scene to consider them a non-starter. (If the "quiverfull" movement was somehow co-opted by the American left, the American right would be violently in favor of voluntary human extinction by the end of the following week.)
There are currently efforts in place to deal with a lot of these issues, although they're harder to find and are often restricted to science or engineering publications. Algae is potentially big business, as a CO2 sink, biofuel generator, food source, and water purifier; renewable power generation isn't just solar, but also encompasses wind, water currents, hydroelectric plants, geothermal, and biowaste (and yeah, fission reactors, and fusion if that ever gets off the ground); there are LED-lit, high-produce underground gardens being built in old WWII bomb shelters in London, pairing greenhouse farming with "aquaculture" for efficient food production per used acre of space; it turns out you can cut a lot of the CO2 emissions from current power plants with technologies like the Global Thermometer; reforestation would be an effective way to remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere; and there's a lot of work being done with soil sequestration that frankly, I only sort of understand. It looks to me like the big work of the 21st century will be attempting to clean up after the 20th, and if you employed all of the available methods at once, it's entirely possible.
Many of these are happening despite efforts to slow them down, whether it's right-wing trolls in their comments sections (and man, I hope they're paid trolls, because otherwise it's sad as hell), political obstruction by people who shouldn't be trusted to tie their own shoes (the name Jim Inhofe should go down in history as a synonym for "dangerous stupidity"), or simple change resistance. A lot of modern culture will have to go away for many of these clean-up efforts to work; we can't simply dispose of as much as we used to, and once you know what goes into something like a phone or a tablet PC, it looks almost monstrous to always be pursuing the next one. We'd need technology that's built to last, to be easily upgraded at home or heavily manipulable, rather than a unit to be used until something better comes out and then hastily abandoned. We'd need to eat less meat, grow more vegetables, drive less, live closer to our workplaces and business centers, and generally reinvent big parts of the industrial society that was built up on the back of petroleum.
(Also, I'd be surprised if asteroid mining doesn't become a thing in the next few decades, if only because a lot of idle tech billionaires appear to be working very hard to make it a thing. There was a good article in Popular Science a couple of months ago about the relative feasibility of lunar habitats given current technology, and a lot of the progress in renewable generation would be eased if we suddenly had trillions of dollars in new elements.)
It sounds hard, because it is, and there's a certain cynical relaxation in the idea that instead, you accelerate into a crash and see what's left to pick up afterwards. That's the easy solution, because it doesn't involve doing anything, and there are plenty of people who are content to pretend that it also happens to be inevitable. It's apathy as a spectator sport, bred by a couple of decades of self-assured slacker cynicism, and it's infected our society at all levels.
We're going to have to get over that, too.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
the short, pinchy life of scanty the warrior maiden
Sometimes I think about bikini armor, and it's not for the usual reasons.
I grew up on Larry Elmore and Clyde Caldwell art, which has no doubt stunted my development as a man, and they were both fond of the occasional plate bustier and pointy loincloth. Then I ostensibly grew up and ended up in the games industry, where I occasionally get half-clad pixel tits not so much shown to me as launched into my face at high speeds. It's not as good/bad as it once was in that regard, but the tendency still exists.
Obviously the reason behind bikini armor's to attract men (and interested women) to the product and/or service. It works very well in so doing, even if the product and/or service is a complete dumpster fire. (Something got Witchblade through 80 issues before Ron Marz showed up, and it was not the intricate, careful historical drama.) Anything else you hear is generally a hasty excuse made by some dude who doesn't want to admit that the real reason is either "Because it sells" or "Because I really like tits."
That said, within the context of a story, I sometimes wonder about the women in bikini armor. The out-of-story rationale for their outfit's obvious, but in-story, you rarely see it even addressed.
The first character that comes to mind here is the protagonist from Billy Tucci's Shi. The title character's main personal struggle is in reconciling her mother's Catholicism and her current violent existence as some weird modern samurai, killing the shit out of all sorts of random ninjas and monsters, but at no time does she even bring up the fact that she's almost naked from the waist down. It's as if the whole "almost naked" thing is incidental to the process, or at least unworthy of discussion; yeah, of course modern samurai/ninja cross-class fighters go into battle without pants. Don't you know anything about Japan?
Sometimes a dude takes a swing at it, and it's obvious he's not trying. That's when you get the mobility excuse, or how agile the character is because she isn't weighed down by heavy armor. Granted, even the best in-story explanation for the character going into a fight half-naked is going to be interpreted by the audience as "I like naked women," so there's no reason to bring your A-game.
Just the same, sometimes I think about characters as if they weren't fictional, and there were no considerations given to their attire that came from anywhere but themselves, and towards that end, I wonder about the rich inner life of the woman in bikini armor. They generally aren't the kinds of characters who would put up with nonsense, so you have to assume they want to be wearing what they're wearing, which leads to the question of why.
You could go with the cultural excuse; they're from someplace where everybody dresses like that. Edgar Rice Burroughs's original John Carter of Mars books could not be filmed as they were written without an NC-17 rating because nobody, male or female, was wearing much more than bikini briefs. The Dynamite Comics version of Dejah Thoris, as salacious as her covers might seem, is considerably more modest than the source material. By the same token, Red Sonja's scale-mail bikini may be her typical look now, but somewhere along the line her comics forgot that she wasn't supposed to be the only person wearing one.
There are a handful of characters who draw power from nudity, like the chick from the Oneechanbara games, who gets stronger based on how much blood's touching her skin, or Purgatori. Conversely, you get Adam Warren's Empowered, who ends up half-naked a lot of the time because she has a powerful super-suit that's also surprisingly fragile. (That said, Empowered is explicitly a parody in a lot of ways and isn't quite as useful to the project, since it's supposed to be fucking ridiculous.)
Another example I always liked was Alias, from the Forgotten Realms novel Azure Bonds, who had a suit of magic chain mail that happened to leave most of her sternum bare, but which explicitly protected that area. People kept trying to stab her there and being surprised when the blade skidded off.
Finally, there are the characters who are invulnerable, so it doesn't much matter what they wear. Vampirella might count here, although her weird slingshot bikini's looked pretty silly for a long time now, or half the superheroines you care to name. A female vampire might go ahead and take advantage of club wear or other trends that let her go out half-naked, because she's likely to get shot repeatedly anyway. At least, that's the justification that I assume the current Dynamite version of Chastity Marks is using.
It's an interesting challenge, or it could be: come up with a character that happens to be scantily clad, but figure out a way to make it so either nobody notices or everyone's fine with it. I'm pretty well convinced that the bikini-armor lady (or her modern equivalent, the woman with an inexplicably bare midsection) isn't going anywhere, because she's still a really good way to get that 15-28 male demographic to buy your shit, so the only real way to deal with it is to bring the thong-plate dude into circulation.
I'm sorry if that becomes a thing.
I grew up on Larry Elmore and Clyde Caldwell art, which has no doubt stunted my development as a man, and they were both fond of the occasional plate bustier and pointy loincloth. Then I ostensibly grew up and ended up in the games industry, where I occasionally get half-clad pixel tits not so much shown to me as launched into my face at high speeds. It's not as good/bad as it once was in that regard, but the tendency still exists.
Obviously the reason behind bikini armor's to attract men (and interested women) to the product and/or service. It works very well in so doing, even if the product and/or service is a complete dumpster fire. (Something got Witchblade through 80 issues before Ron Marz showed up, and it was not the intricate, careful historical drama.) Anything else you hear is generally a hasty excuse made by some dude who doesn't want to admit that the real reason is either "Because it sells" or "Because I really like tits."
That said, within the context of a story, I sometimes wonder about the women in bikini armor. The out-of-story rationale for their outfit's obvious, but in-story, you rarely see it even addressed.
The first character that comes to mind here is the protagonist from Billy Tucci's Shi. The title character's main personal struggle is in reconciling her mother's Catholicism and her current violent existence as some weird modern samurai, killing the shit out of all sorts of random ninjas and monsters, but at no time does she even bring up the fact that she's almost naked from the waist down. It's as if the whole "almost naked" thing is incidental to the process, or at least unworthy of discussion; yeah, of course modern samurai/ninja cross-class fighters go into battle without pants. Don't you know anything about Japan?
Sometimes a dude takes a swing at it, and it's obvious he's not trying. That's when you get the mobility excuse, or how agile the character is because she isn't weighed down by heavy armor. Granted, even the best in-story explanation for the character going into a fight half-naked is going to be interpreted by the audience as "I like naked women," so there's no reason to bring your A-game.
Just the same, sometimes I think about characters as if they weren't fictional, and there were no considerations given to their attire that came from anywhere but themselves, and towards that end, I wonder about the rich inner life of the woman in bikini armor. They generally aren't the kinds of characters who would put up with nonsense, so you have to assume they want to be wearing what they're wearing, which leads to the question of why.
You could go with the cultural excuse; they're from someplace where everybody dresses like that. Edgar Rice Burroughs's original John Carter of Mars books could not be filmed as they were written without an NC-17 rating because nobody, male or female, was wearing much more than bikini briefs. The Dynamite Comics version of Dejah Thoris, as salacious as her covers might seem, is considerably more modest than the source material. By the same token, Red Sonja's scale-mail bikini may be her typical look now, but somewhere along the line her comics forgot that she wasn't supposed to be the only person wearing one.
There are a handful of characters who draw power from nudity, like the chick from the Oneechanbara games, who gets stronger based on how much blood's touching her skin, or Purgatori. Conversely, you get Adam Warren's Empowered, who ends up half-naked a lot of the time because she has a powerful super-suit that's also surprisingly fragile. (That said, Empowered is explicitly a parody in a lot of ways and isn't quite as useful to the project, since it's supposed to be fucking ridiculous.)
Another example I always liked was Alias, from the Forgotten Realms novel Azure Bonds, who had a suit of magic chain mail that happened to leave most of her sternum bare, but which explicitly protected that area. People kept trying to stab her there and being surprised when the blade skidded off.
Finally, there are the characters who are invulnerable, so it doesn't much matter what they wear. Vampirella might count here, although her weird slingshot bikini's looked pretty silly for a long time now, or half the superheroines you care to name. A female vampire might go ahead and take advantage of club wear or other trends that let her go out half-naked, because she's likely to get shot repeatedly anyway. At least, that's the justification that I assume the current Dynamite version of Chastity Marks is using.
It's an interesting challenge, or it could be: come up with a character that happens to be scantily clad, but figure out a way to make it so either nobody notices or everyone's fine with it. I'm pretty well convinced that the bikini-armor lady (or her modern equivalent, the woman with an inexplicably bare midsection) isn't going anywhere, because she's still a really good way to get that 15-28 male demographic to buy your shit, so the only real way to deal with it is to bring the thong-plate dude into circulation.
I'm sorry if that becomes a thing.
Sunday, May 24, 2015
following the money
I was saying to someone a few months ago that there's a huge difference in perception between hobbyist games enthusiasts--people who may know a lot about games from a player's perspective, but who have little to no behind-the-scenes connections or knowledge that wasn't acquired at least second-hand--and people who are, however nominally, in the industry, who have some exposure to the process by which games are made.
One of the odd things I've come to realize lately, as I move further into the production side of the industry, is that modern video games are a bizarre confluence. On the one hand, it attracts some deeply creative people, who are eager to explore and use the medium's potential, but on the other, it's all essentially software development, which is in large part the most boring thing you have ever seen.
Games do a pretty good job of concealing the latter from the end user, since most of the development process that you'll see as a player will involve cool things like concept art, motion-capture, or modeling, but no behind-the-scenes documentary will ever show you the roomful of people who have all been writing lines of code for the last sixty hours, or the dozen bug testers who've each individually beaten the game six times in the last two weeks.
Once you have some idea of the actual process by which games are created, it affects how you're able to regard the conversation about them. I don't have a lot of patience, for example, with forum warriors who label a company as "lazy," because I'm aware of the immense amount of work, manpower, money, and time it took to get a game to the point where they can have an opinion about it. When some dork asks "how hard would it have been" to do something, I have to bite my tongue on that, because odds are pretty good that if it actually had been easy, it would've been done.
One of the odd things I've come to realize lately, as I move further into the production side of the industry, is that modern video games are a bizarre confluence. On the one hand, it attracts some deeply creative people, who are eager to explore and use the medium's potential, but on the other, it's all essentially software development, which is in large part the most boring thing you have ever seen.
Games do a pretty good job of concealing the latter from the end user, since most of the development process that you'll see as a player will involve cool things like concept art, motion-capture, or modeling, but no behind-the-scenes documentary will ever show you the roomful of people who have all been writing lines of code for the last sixty hours, or the dozen bug testers who've each individually beaten the game six times in the last two weeks.
Once you have some idea of the actual process by which games are created, it affects how you're able to regard the conversation about them. I don't have a lot of patience, for example, with forum warriors who label a company as "lazy," because I'm aware of the immense amount of work, manpower, money, and time it took to get a game to the point where they can have an opinion about it. When some dork asks "how hard would it have been" to do something, I have to bite my tongue on that, because odds are pretty good that if it actually had been easy, it would've been done.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
the places where you build yourself
The conventional wisdom back in the day, about people on the Internet, was that it was a seething mass of predators and liars. Anyone you spoke to there, about any topic, was widely assumed to be producing at least some level of personal fiction, probably with an eye towards stealing your money or coercing you into an unmarked white van.
I never found that to be the case. If anything, the people I knew then were surprisingly honest about themselves and their lives, sometimes far beyond the point at which I was comfortable. Anonymity has a way of drawing that out of you, where you can explore just about anything there is about yourself in relative safety.
It hasn't really changed that much, to go by places like Tumblr or the various successor networks to Livejournal. It's certainly different, and perhaps more immediate, but the basic social mechanics are the same: you connect with people through shared interests, and those people are from all over the world, and sometimes you end up as surprisingly close friends for people who've never met face to face.
I never found that to be the case. If anything, the people I knew then were surprisingly honest about themselves and their lives, sometimes far beyond the point at which I was comfortable. Anonymity has a way of drawing that out of you, where you can explore just about anything there is about yourself in relative safety.
It hasn't really changed that much, to go by places like Tumblr or the various successor networks to Livejournal. It's certainly different, and perhaps more immediate, but the basic social mechanics are the same: you connect with people through shared interests, and those people are from all over the world, and sometimes you end up as surprisingly close friends for people who've never met face to face.
Monday, February 23, 2015
hardcore pornography: a love story
I used to have kind of a problem with porn stars.
The people who came of age in the mid- to late nineties, before the Internet became a common utility and the advent of commonly available broadband, are also the last generation for whom porn was a bizarre, illicit mystery. I had pretty ready access to my dad's stash of Playboys, because he handed them to me about ten minutes after I entered puberty, guided by some bizarre impulse that I hesitate to call wisdom--
--although to this day I think Playboy is a smarter, cleverer magazine than the world wants to give it credit for being, and I would hand a young man with Groin Questions a stack of Playboys without too many doubts in my mind, whereas I would use tripwires and land mines to keep the same young man away from Maxim or Stuff or FHM or their sordid ilk, because one magazine creates an aspiration towards a fictitious veneer of class and style and the other one churns out Axe-doused frat boys with the regularity of a metronome--
--but harder stuff, things that showed actual intercourse, were harder to come by. That was the stuff of the dark closet in the back of the local video store, where the lights didn't reach, casual access was blocked by a pair of swinging saloon doors, and you were fairly certain an alarm would go off if you went inside. Maybe somebody had salvaged a well-thumbed magazine with questionable design choices, where you would look at it with your friends when that was the last company you wanted to look at it in.
(Now as long as you can type "Redtube" you have all the full-color full-contact action your poor eyes can stand and can wank yourself into a shallow coma. I won't lie; the part of me that remembers being 15 is sort of angry about this. I would've failed high school due to being in a dehydration coma, sure, but I nearly did anyway.)
Part of the illicit nature, I think, lent itself to it being easy to think of the people in it as somehow damaged. There was more to it, naturally; growing up small-town American in the '90s conditions you to think of sex as dangerous and sex workers as, if not criminals, crime-adjacent. Whoever these people were in these books, these anonymous naked figures, it was easy to assume that this was not how they'd pictured their lives going. If possible, you didn't think about who they were at all. You spent most of a given day back then--you probably still do, if you're in high school--being reminded about how every single action you undertook in the course of your life would daisy-chain (ha) into your future, so it was easy to think that, whatever paths these people had taken in life, they must've fucked up if they were taking shots in the mouth from Steven St. Croix as a job.
Then the Internet showed up. Asia Carrera was first, of course; I remember discovering her website back in 1998 or 1999 and being amazed that, aside from her proclivity for getting her tits out, she seemed amazingly like she might be a normal, nerdy human being. (A human porn star and a female nerd! Double points!) It cracked the wall. Maybe these people weren't necessarily all products of specific damage; maybe they were people, with strengths and weaknesses, who had come to this brand of work of their own free will, and/or stayed in it out of genuine interest. It's an obvious conclusion, but taking time to reach it is part of why it's kinda fucked up.
Nowadays I check out Stoya's blog fairly often, because she's a gifted writer and not necessarily because she's very good at her day job (Stoya looks like she's having fun in her work, which I appreciate greatly; one of my major problems with modern erotica and pornography is that bizarre tendency to denigrate the performer); both Kayden Kross and James Deen have reasonably entertaining blogs; and I just found out about D&D With Porn Stars, which I'm going to be visiting on the regular in the future.
(I found out about it due to the whole thing with Brandon Morse, which is rapidly convincing me of what may become a new personal truism; if you can't shut up about being a libertarian and/or objectivist long enough to keep it out of your Twitter bio, you may be an irredeemable douchebag. I want to steal Brandon Morse's lunch money and all I know of him is how he chose to react to this.)
I go through a cycle a lot of the time when I read an interview with a porn star, or stumble across their blog; I'm first surprised by how articulate they are, and then ashamed by the surprise. In the end, it's positive; in a world where this occupation didn't exist, it'd be invented almost immediately. It's an attitude that you have to work to get over, I think, and I'm struggling with it to this day.
The people who came of age in the mid- to late nineties, before the Internet became a common utility and the advent of commonly available broadband, are also the last generation for whom porn was a bizarre, illicit mystery. I had pretty ready access to my dad's stash of Playboys, because he handed them to me about ten minutes after I entered puberty, guided by some bizarre impulse that I hesitate to call wisdom--
--although to this day I think Playboy is a smarter, cleverer magazine than the world wants to give it credit for being, and I would hand a young man with Groin Questions a stack of Playboys without too many doubts in my mind, whereas I would use tripwires and land mines to keep the same young man away from Maxim or Stuff or FHM or their sordid ilk, because one magazine creates an aspiration towards a fictitious veneer of class and style and the other one churns out Axe-doused frat boys with the regularity of a metronome--
--but harder stuff, things that showed actual intercourse, were harder to come by. That was the stuff of the dark closet in the back of the local video store, where the lights didn't reach, casual access was blocked by a pair of swinging saloon doors, and you were fairly certain an alarm would go off if you went inside. Maybe somebody had salvaged a well-thumbed magazine with questionable design choices, where you would look at it with your friends when that was the last company you wanted to look at it in.
(Now as long as you can type "Redtube" you have all the full-color full-contact action your poor eyes can stand and can wank yourself into a shallow coma. I won't lie; the part of me that remembers being 15 is sort of angry about this. I would've failed high school due to being in a dehydration coma, sure, but I nearly did anyway.)
Part of the illicit nature, I think, lent itself to it being easy to think of the people in it as somehow damaged. There was more to it, naturally; growing up small-town American in the '90s conditions you to think of sex as dangerous and sex workers as, if not criminals, crime-adjacent. Whoever these people were in these books, these anonymous naked figures, it was easy to assume that this was not how they'd pictured their lives going. If possible, you didn't think about who they were at all. You spent most of a given day back then--you probably still do, if you're in high school--being reminded about how every single action you undertook in the course of your life would daisy-chain (ha) into your future, so it was easy to think that, whatever paths these people had taken in life, they must've fucked up if they were taking shots in the mouth from Steven St. Croix as a job.
Then the Internet showed up. Asia Carrera was first, of course; I remember discovering her website back in 1998 or 1999 and being amazed that, aside from her proclivity for getting her tits out, she seemed amazingly like she might be a normal, nerdy human being. (A human porn star and a female nerd! Double points!) It cracked the wall. Maybe these people weren't necessarily all products of specific damage; maybe they were people, with strengths and weaknesses, who had come to this brand of work of their own free will, and/or stayed in it out of genuine interest. It's an obvious conclusion, but taking time to reach it is part of why it's kinda fucked up.
Nowadays I check out Stoya's blog fairly often, because she's a gifted writer and not necessarily because she's very good at her day job (Stoya looks like she's having fun in her work, which I appreciate greatly; one of my major problems with modern erotica and pornography is that bizarre tendency to denigrate the performer); both Kayden Kross and James Deen have reasonably entertaining blogs; and I just found out about D&D With Porn Stars, which I'm going to be visiting on the regular in the future.
(I found out about it due to the whole thing with Brandon Morse, which is rapidly convincing me of what may become a new personal truism; if you can't shut up about being a libertarian and/or objectivist long enough to keep it out of your Twitter bio, you may be an irredeemable douchebag. I want to steal Brandon Morse's lunch money and all I know of him is how he chose to react to this.)
I go through a cycle a lot of the time when I read an interview with a porn star, or stumble across their blog; I'm first surprised by how articulate they are, and then ashamed by the surprise. In the end, it's positive; in a world where this occupation didn't exist, it'd be invented almost immediately. It's an attitude that you have to work to get over, I think, and I'm struggling with it to this day.
Monday, February 9, 2015
high school II: this time, it's personal
I think I'm getting tired of nerds.
I'm Old now, which is part of it. When I was a kid I always thought of 36 as the cut-off date at which point a man was Old, and now here I am, somehow, despite the sneaking suspicion I would be killed in some kind of hilarious accident before now ("Local Man Fires Cake Frosting Up Nostril, Fills Brain Cavity with Chocolatey Goodness"). I am Old and I have little patience with certain forms of stupidity.
There's a particular kind of reflexive cynicism that characterizes nerds, and I'm often as guilty of it as anyone else. You lash out. You try to hurt something you love before it can hurt you, because you're absolutely sure it will. It, like half the other things nerds do, is a defense mechanism.
It's exhausting, now that I am Old. There's a reinforcement cycle at work on the Internet, spurred on by snark, bloggers, and people like Yahtzee, where you attain status by seeming the most reflexively dismissive. If you accentuate the negative as hard as possible, you win a prize, whether it's by hipster-style appealing to the past ("I liked this better when it was called [x]"), ignoring whatever doesn't suit your prearranged narrative ("These two panels I read out of context on Tumblr prove the entire comic book is the product of a diseased mind"), or making up "rules" out of whole cloth that fiction is supposed to always follow ("Got No Legs Boy is a street-level hero, so any storyline that puts him in space is obviously going to lead to a bad comic").
I sometimes have fantasies of writing a short book, or a few articles, about rediscovering the capacity for critical thought, because it's shocking how many people who would otherwise consider themselves intelligent are incredibly bad at it. I don't know where I'd start or where I'd pull out the authority I need to make it work, which is most of what's stopping me.
Still, it's one more toxic behavior that needs to be confronted, or it's just going to get dystopian. Imagine a fedora stomping on a human face... forever.
I'm Old now, which is part of it. When I was a kid I always thought of 36 as the cut-off date at which point a man was Old, and now here I am, somehow, despite the sneaking suspicion I would be killed in some kind of hilarious accident before now ("Local Man Fires Cake Frosting Up Nostril, Fills Brain Cavity with Chocolatey Goodness"). I am Old and I have little patience with certain forms of stupidity.
There's a particular kind of reflexive cynicism that characterizes nerds, and I'm often as guilty of it as anyone else. You lash out. You try to hurt something you love before it can hurt you, because you're absolutely sure it will. It, like half the other things nerds do, is a defense mechanism.
It's exhausting, now that I am Old. There's a reinforcement cycle at work on the Internet, spurred on by snark, bloggers, and people like Yahtzee, where you attain status by seeming the most reflexively dismissive. If you accentuate the negative as hard as possible, you win a prize, whether it's by hipster-style appealing to the past ("I liked this better when it was called [x]"), ignoring whatever doesn't suit your prearranged narrative ("These two panels I read out of context on Tumblr prove the entire comic book is the product of a diseased mind"), or making up "rules" out of whole cloth that fiction is supposed to always follow ("Got No Legs Boy is a street-level hero, so any storyline that puts him in space is obviously going to lead to a bad comic").
I sometimes have fantasies of writing a short book, or a few articles, about rediscovering the capacity for critical thought, because it's shocking how many people who would otherwise consider themselves intelligent are incredibly bad at it. I don't know where I'd start or where I'd pull out the authority I need to make it work, which is most of what's stopping me.
Still, it's one more toxic behavior that needs to be confronted, or it's just going to get dystopian. Imagine a fedora stomping on a human face... forever.
Monday, September 15, 2014
transdemihuman
In a lot of RPGs, a higher-quality item is indicated by the amount it adds to the numerical representation of base statistics, such as the usual strength/agility/stamina/etc. set or the more JRPG-esque attack/defense/etc. Thus, either way, a superior item is considered better because it makes you a better person somehow: there's something woven into the item that actually makes you stronger, faster, smarter, wiser, or what-have-you.
In most games, by their end point, the character's base stats are dwarfed by those which are given by what they happen to be wearing or using. (There are exceptions--you could probably make a fairly decent "naked" character in Final Fantasy X, and games based on the old D&D ruleset will improve gear by metrics other than raw stat gain--but this still applies more often than not.) Thus, the individual's physical or mental qualities almost do not matter in the face of what they've been able to acquire. A man with weak knees or a ninety-pound woman would be just as dangerous as a hulking seven-foot-tall monster. All that is required is the persistence to get the items and the will to use them.
What got me thinking about this was a conversation about how silly it was for gnomes--which are usually about three feet tall--to be protection-spec warriors in World of Warcraft. The joke was that even the strongest gnome would likely be punched into the ground like a tent spike as soon as a raid boss looked at him or her. Looking at the way stats work in WoW, though, said gnome's getting a solid 95% or more of his or her stats from their equipment. By the time you're at the endgame, it's not just some dude with a sword and shield anymore; you're inside a tiny little magical suit of power armor. If Voltron was three feet tall, it'd still be Voltron.
Which raises the question: in a setting that's drenched with magic to such an extent that it's that easy to make weapons and armor that actively improve the wearer, how difficult would it be to make things that added to creativity or empathy? Could you put on a hat that made you more diplomatic or sensitive? Is every possible (demi-)human quality subject to improvement, and if so, what does that mean for individual achievement? Would people act to shut that kind of thing down, or deliberately eschew them because their "core" is damaged by resorting to them, or would widespread personal self-programming via magical enhancement just be a thing you did now?
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