violent revenge fantasies against ajit pai's stupid-ass coffee mug

I'm not going back to my family's house in Kansas for Thanksgiving, but the run-up to the holidays always makes me think of being there, and how my mom, her SO, and so many of their friends consume media. Being there always subjects me to their of local news, which is all the murder and disaster they can fit into 22 minutes (plus eight minutes of commercials).

It's an invitation to start screaming and never stop, and it produces a siege mentality. My mom lives in a part of the world where, by comparison, fucking nothing has ever happened, but since all she and her friends ever hear about is the worst bit, they think they inhabit a much crueler moral universe than they actually do. Then, to relax, they read or watch modern-day thrillers about serial killers, terrorist attacks, government conspiracies, and/or the eighteen different types of "NCIS." I've ranted about it before, but the average network crime show can get sufficiently weird that the only difference between it and a slasher movie is that the show starts when the cops show up. As John Rogers puts it, the name of this genre is "momcore."

There's a tendency, I think, among people my age and a little younger to do the same thing with politics. If the news is bad, it's all we hear about; if there's some good news, it gets pushed out of the cycle quickly by the next bad thing, or some idiot shows up talking about how "that's great, but what about [my vaguely related pet cause that has yet to be addressed]?" The defeats get dwelled upon, while the victories get downplayed. When things get legitimately bad, then, a lot of people just shut down, or retreat into apathy.

Historically, this isn't as bad as things have ever been. We have a lot of problems, but we've always had a lot of problems, and we've got a better set of tools right now than we've ever had before. It's going to take time, but we can fix all of this. All we have to do is show up.

(It's possible I'm writing this down as a form of self-care, because at this point, I suspect the only thing that will stop Ajit Pai from dismantling net neutrality is if he has a major cardiac event at some point in the next 36 hours. It's not something that can't be fixed, but man, it would be easier if we just didn't break the motherfucker in the first place.)

history thoughts

I'm living in America, and in America, you're on your own. America's not a country. It's just a business. Now fucking pay me.
- Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), Killing Them Softly

There's a historian named Howard Zinn who died not long ago. He's controversial, and there's more than enough room to poke holes in his scholarship (he's definitely wearing biases on his sleeve), but Zinn's A People's History of the United States is an interesting, dense read nonetheless.

I'm long overdue for rereading it, but the general idea behind A People's History is to retell the history of America from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. As such, it's largely a story about revolts, rebellions, and most crucially, labor movements. As a result, it's very sympathetic towards socialists and communists, many of whom are inextricably bound up in the history of American labor.

The general idea I got out of Zinn's work is that early America was basically a modern libertarian's paradise. The government stayed out of business unless forced to do otherwise, and most of the rights, privileges, and benefits that modern Americans take for granted had to be fought for. It wasn't a simple or bloodless process to do so; our forefathers faced violence, jail time, riot cops, hostile law enforcement, and pretty much everything else the status quo could muster up. People had to die to institute child labor laws, which you would think would be a gimme, but no; someone had to speak up to suggest that perhaps ten-year-olds should not be losing fingers and hands in industrial machinery.

It's sort of like how you might read the warning label on a product and laugh at what it specifically cautions you not to do. No, you shouldn't ride a running lawn mower around like a skateboard; yes, the reason that warning is there is because someone tried to do so. Common sense isn't; anything you can think of has been done.

As such, there aren't any "bad" regulations. There might be regulations that are badly written, poorly enforced, or used to justify abusive behavior, but a regulation is generally there because a business cannot be trusted to act responsibly if there's profit on the line. We have the government we have because our forefathers fought for it, against business owners and operators who needed to be forced to act like something adjacent to a human being.

Right now, however, we have a failure of history. We've lived in a world with solutions for so long that people would like to fight to replace them with the problems, because the problems have faded into living memory. You can see that clearly with the anti-vaccination crowd, for example, many of whom have sold themselves a fiction based upon a deliberate misunderstanding. They had the luxury of growing up in a world without certain diseases, and as such, are convinced the diseases were never that bad to begin with.

More relevantly, because we've enjoyed a relatively long stretch of time under the protection of labor laws, although they've been chipped away bit by bit over the last few decades, we now see people arguing that the labor laws are irrelevant, unnecessary, or actively harmful. They only see current abuses, and instead of fixing those loopholes, they argue in favor of pulling the entire system down.

The system's there for a reason, though. The government is made of people, and as such, will never be as perfect or efficient as we want or need it to be, but even a cursory, biased glance at history is enough to convince me that the government is also necessary. People died to make this system possible, and at best, it's disrespectful to throw it out because it's a mild inconvenience. It's a simple answer, and wholly insufficient.

pixel tits

I have a weird admiration for the Dead or Alive games. They make no apologies for what they are, and once you get over the presence of things like out-of-control breast physics (the characters in Dead or Alive 4 look like two cups of gelatin in an overclocked rock tumbler), it's a fun, accessible series of fighting games where even a beginner can do some implausibly amazing tricks straight out the gate. I even consider the live-action movie something of a guilty pleasure, even if the fight choreography is actively terrible.

(Devon Aoki is a better actress than I initially gave her credit for being, but she gets an early fight scene against a big Russian dude who might be three times her weight. The only way she would win that fight is if she brought a rifle company.)

This only extends to the fighting games. The Xtreme spin-off series is a dress-up simulator that follows the franchise's female cast on a beach paradise vacation, rich with before-its-time time-sink grinding for cash, swimsuits, and rapport with NPC characters. You can get pretty much all you're going to get out of it with ten minutes' random browsing on Deviantart. In a few ways, DOA Xtreme is ahead of its time, and feels like a precursor to modern social media/iPhone games, but that isn't to say it's fun.

A few days ago, somebody on Tecmo Koei's Facebook shot his mouth off, explicitly claiming that the reason why the third Xtreme game isn't being released outside of Japan is because of the current political environment in the West. Basically, they don't want to deal with the PR backlash.

This may very well be the actual reason. I've rarely seen a professional gaming company drop the act to that extent, let alone a Japanese gaming company, which suggests some degree of frustration behind the scenes. I wouldn't be surprised if they simply didn't want to jump into the crossfire at this point in time.

That said, if it's in any way a calculated move, I admire it. It's cold-blooded and manipulative as hell, but it's marketing gold, and it's the kind of thing that you could see taught in a class as an example of solid, ruthless marketing.

By saying that the decision to not localize the game is based around not wanting to engage with the current Western environment, Tecmo Koei has neatly flipped the script. Instead of seeming like it doesn't care about its fans, it instead places blame onto an already maligned social movement, the ill-defined, poorly labeled "social justice warriors." Not only does this make Tecmo Koei look like the underdog here, which is a neat fucking trick, but it ensures that at least a few thousand extra Americans will hate-buy the game as some kind of imagined, symbolic middle-finger towards Anita Sarkeesian. Further, as Bob Chapman points out in his latest "Game Overthinker" video, the PlayStation 4 is region-free by default and Xtreme 3 will ship with English language options, so there are no barriers whatsoever to anyone who wants to import the title.

It's impressive. They've turned a minor PR debacle into an equally minor victory in the space of one post on Facebook, and all it took was a canny understanding of how to wind up and point one of the most volatile segments of their potential audience. It's a move worthy of the most vulture of capitalists, and will serve as inspiration for bastards for the next twenty years.

the politics of avoidance

You can generally divide up every E3 according to what's hot that year, and in E3 2006, it was MMORPGs. Every second booth had one in some degree of completion, because World of Warcraft was in the process of taking over the world, and I spent the entire show trying to act like I knew what I was even looking at.

Aside from a brief, abortive swing at Anarchy Online and a couple of Korean free-play MMOs (brief mini-review of Rappelz: tits! thank you, that is my mini-review), I'd avoided the genre entirely out of the fear that it would take over my every waking moment. At this point, though, I could no longer put it off, and picked up a copy of World of Warcraft.

Then I moved to Washington for work in 2007, and not only the job but the industry it was located within fell out from under me, and I spent a few years scrambling for employment. Along the way, I'd stumbled into a membership in an Alliance guild in WoW that was actually a pretty decent place to hang out, courtesy of the community on the old Quarter to Three board.

The leadership in the guild wanted to try out more hardcore raiding than the guild at the time would support, back in the day when "hardcore raiding" meant getting 25 dudes together and getting your face caved in by the tier 5 meat-grinder: Serpentshrine Cavern, Tempest Keep, the ridiculous amount of coordination required for Magtheridon, etc. One day in March of 2008, I was in the middle of a heroic dungeon run when the guild master messaged me, said he was making me the guild master, promoted me, and logged off. To this day, I'm sure he waited to do so until I was verifiably busy.

Part of the next few years has to do with the attendant sense of responsibility that being the guild master involved. A lot of it's under the hood; you talk to pretty much everyone in the guild, you get a lot of random whispers, and you end up with a weird reputation on the server based on who passes through the guild over time. It helps that the guild skews older, and mostly involves casual players, but there were still moments of bizarre drama, including one major schism.

A couple of years later, when account hacking got out of hand during Wrath of the Lich King, there was one dude who, as near as I could tell, was writing his login information on random men's-room walls. About once a month, he'd get hacked, somebody would steal everything valuable from the bank, he'd report it, and all two hundred of those valuable in-game items would get mailed straight to me. It was basically the WoW version of that that unspoken inventory-management game that OCD people play in Resident Evil 4.

It should be said, though, that a lot of my involvement with the game had to do with two major factors: my own addictive personality (to go by family history and genetics, it was either this or a severe drinking problem) and the fact that things weren't going all that great in "real life." At the end of a short day of filling out a dozen job applications and taking a couple of abortive stabs at freelance, there was something freeing about entering an environment where I could beat reasonable sums of money out of anything with a red nameplate that looked at me funny. A lot of the energy that I'd ordinarily be investing in one of several jobs was going into WoW instead, which is why I now have an account with multiple characters above level 80 and over 20,000 achievement points.

It's lucky that I happen to be on a career track where this kind of thing is a warped badge of honor, and that I landed in an area where half the people I run into have similar if not identical experiences; it's difficult to feel too bad about your MMO life decisions when you can randomly run into Halo cosplayers on a bus. I had a job interview once that almost went south because the guy giving the interview was a die-hard Horde player, and I remain steadfastly Alliance.

(Which is a separate rant. The Horde never appealed to me aesthetically, and now, playing their exclusive content is an awful lot like going through a Bioware game on the "asshole" path.)

Yesterday was the guild's 10th anniversary, and March will mark my eighth year as its GM. I was telling people last night that my abiding opinion of the whole thing was that somehow, I didn't break it; due to a lot of people, the guild's managed to stay relatively intact throughout several expansions, and there's only been one major bit of drama. (Two, really, but the second was limited to one person.)

Right now, WoW itself is in a down period. Warlords of Draenor started strong but has turned into a wet fart of an expansion, with very little to do at the level cap, which is doubly damning since the final patch of the last expansion lasted for 14 months. The guild's quiet as a result, which is a little depressing, but I have to remind myself not to take responsibility there.

Things are better for me right now. I've got a day job that works very well with my biases and leaves me with a lot of free time, which has done as much as anything to break my WoW addiction. It was never so much the game itself as the distraction it represented, and were it not for WoW I might be heavily into some other obsession. It was a useful project for that time in my life, and I learned a couple of things about dealing with people along the way.

That's something I don't think people give games in general enough credit for, although you see a lot of it in play with crafting/construction titles like Minecraft. They're a pretty decent anti-drug.

the luxury of despair

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.

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.

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.