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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

a place that people can't be bothered with

Dan Dare #7, Virgin Comics, July 2008. Garth Ennis/Gary Erskine.

This is one of the reasons I'll always have time for Garth Ennis; he has an odd ability to articulate things that I hadn't quite found the words for yet.

There's a tendency in left-wing/social justice circles to accentuate the negative. This is not to say that the negative does not exist, or that it's at all outweighed by the positive; issues such as the death of Mike Brown, both the act itself and the reactions to it (i.e. the orbital fracture myth), prove that we still have a long way left to go as a culture. In my darker moments, I think it'll require an external enemy or a mass extinction before we stop clinging to old tribal allegiances.

That aside, it's easy for modern-day liberals to forget that it's only been fifty years since the civil rights movement. Many people who worked to begin it are still with us, and many of those who actively opposed it are still here as well. Colored-only water fountains and Rosa Parks are still within living memory.

And yeah, there are a lot of ways in which things still suck, but turn it around and it's actually kind of amazing how much progress we've made. A mixed-race man got elected President (and in so doing seems to have driven large parts of the country insane, but that's neither here nor there), Neil deGrasse Tyson is pretty much the current face of American science, and if you're a kid into sports, there's probably a poster of a black guy on your wall, no matter what your personal racial background is.

We've backslid in some serious ways, but we're still moving forward, despite the best attempts of a lot of the retrograde elements of the larger culture. Pop culture right now is weirdly regressive, yeah, but one of the big takeaway points from the 2012 election is that that regressive tendency is a death rattle: it's a product of fear in the face of a coming massive demographic shift.

This shouldn't shut anyone down, but there's a bizarre tendency among progressives of all stripes to wallow in guilt and shame, to sit around and bemoan the state of culture while ignoring the ways in which it has gotten and is getting better. Wallowing doesn't help. Acknowledge the good along with the bad, improve on the good, and keep moving.

dead man's party

I'm the guy for whom the zombie craze continues to exist. Whenever some would-be wag in a forum thread says "Who's still buying these things?" he's talking about me. As long as it's not a god damn found-footage movie, you mention zombies and/or an apocalypse and you at least have my attention.

I cordoned off this weekend to play Dead Rising 3 on Steam, since it finally became available, and it reminds me of my chief criticism of DR2 as compared to the original, which is mostly a matter of tone.

The original Dead Rising was an in-house project at Capcom by Keiji Inafune, before he left the company to make Mighty No. 9, and the next two were made by the former Blue Castle Games, which is now Capcom Vancouver. Both are reasonably worthy sequels, although the engine is and will apparently remain surprisingly janky for what's ostensibly a triple-A game; a lot of sacrifices have clearly been made in order to serve the task of keeping a few hundred zombies onscreen at once.

The odd genius of the original Dead Rising, in retrospect, was that it played itself completely straight from start to finish. Frank West was a meme generator from the word go and you could easily torpedo even the most dramatic scene in the game by showing up to it in a frilly sundress and Servbot mask, but the characters all acted as if they were serious people in a serious situation. One or two of the survivors were idiots (Ronald comes to mind here, or Burt), but almost all of them were stock characters for the genre at worst. The psychopaths you fought--a shellshocked Vietnam veteran in the middle of the world's worst flashback, a drunk hoarder with a shotgun, a survivalist family out to save themselves at the expense of everyone else--were memorable because most of them were believably ordinary people who were pushed too far by the associated stresses of a zombie outbreak. There were certainly exceptions, like Adam the clown, but they could be taken in stride.

DR2 carried that theme forward in its main plot, but the world outside of Chuck's personal storyline was unapologetically ridiculous. Survivors required cash bribes or irrelevant sidequests before they'd join you, several had to be saved from their own stupidity, a few somehow hadn't noticed the zombie outbreak around them, and one required you to strip down to your underwear before she'd allow you to take her to safety. The psychopaths were more random than anything else, such as a postal worker, a dude in a giant mascot costume, and a furry with a chainsaw. It abandons the just-vaguely-plausible atmosphere of the first game in favor of sheer forced wackiness, and it weakens the product as a whole.

Dead Rising 3 has a few improvements overall, but it's a lot easier than the two previous games. Guns are actually effective, much moreso than even the best melee weapons, and survivors can easily be made to inflict so much damage that any fight you can bring them to is over almost as soon as they arrive. Nightmare Mode likely fixes these problems, which I've yet to play, but the main mode feels underwhelming compared to the heavy emphasis the first two games placed on racing the clock.

More to the point, DR3 once again emphasizes the wacky. Los Perdidos apparently had the world's largest high school football team and they were all zombified at once while wearing full uniforms and protective gear, so now you have to deal with football zombies all over the place. The bosses include a cringing Chinese stereotype, a binge-eater who attacks you with her own puke and a sharpened fork, a depraved bisexual wearing chaps and a crotch-mounted flamethrower, and a professional female bodybuilder who's willing to kill Nick because he initially mistakes her for a man. It's just random nonsense masquerading as character design or, I suspect, attempts at cultural satire.

There are a few characters I like, such as an old woman with terminal cancer who asks you to take her to a few places in the city before she dies, but all in all, DR3's narrative design is a hot mess. I can't hate the game--I can't hate any game that encourages me to load Roman candles into a hunting crossbow and use them against zombies--but it's structurally weaker than the first two.

sanctuary

I shouldn't have started my day by reading about current developments in the Zoe Quinn fallout. Didn't mean to, but there it was, and the odd bit of post-article Googling led me further down a dark rabbit hole.

One of the usual comment-section anonymice posted a response to one of the articles, that the "goal"--and I get the feeling these goalposts have shifted somewhat, if they are not in fact actually mobile, like they're glue-gunned to the backs of turtles--was to expose the incestuous connections between games industry professionals and the people who are there to write about them.

Which it isn't. That's a discussion that's worth having, but it's not this one.

This particular conversation is far too mixed up in Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian's perceived, imaginary transgressions for it to be worthwhile; it's about scared boys trying to punish grown-ass women for things that aren't crimes, because they're nerds, gamer culture is their sanctuary, and anything that endangers that sanctuary is something to be taken down with all the tools they can bring to hand; and they're young men, burning with the need to be angry about something, and there's an entire culture built around the generation of acceptable targets.

(If some of these assholes would target white-collar criminals or corrupt politicians, they'd be on the verge of solving actual problems. I've half-written the screenplay already: a couple of hundred script kiddies, driven beyond madness by their balls not being regularly emptied in the manner in which they'd prefer, deliberately targeting someone like Eric Cantor, a man whose entire sense of style seems to be built around imitating the preppy frat assholes from PCU. Where's a Fagin when you need him?)

This urge towards sanctuary is inherently toxic, and it's one of a few ways in which it's manifesting all throughout nerd culture as a whole: the movies are remakes, the books are retreads, the comics are all stuck on sixty-year-old mined-out characters, and the people who want to move forward--including the women who have the temerity to want to participate--get shouted down for whatever reasons can be manufactured.

In point of fact, I wonder if the nostalgia/sanctuary wave isn't why the culture feels vaguely as if it's moving backward. Sarkeesian made a decent point in one of her videos, that the indie games that deliberately ape past titles are also imitating certain unfortunate story trends thereof, like how Super Meat Boy and, more recently, Shovel Knight both deal with a rescue-the-princess plot that was hackneyed even back in the day. We've gone from the female action-hero trend that "Buffy" started in the '90s to a surfeit of square-jawed white manly-ass protagonists and it appears to be entirely on the basis of what marketing would prefer to deal with.

I get sanctuary, and I certainly understand recreational anger. Both of them were pretty much my jam when I was in my 20s. Sooner or later, though, you either need to break out from those or they bury you, and I still haven't quite managed to get away. Once you start using either of them to invent reasons for personal attacks--not even attacking somebody like Sarkeesian's arguments, but her--you've gone around the twist.

You're a nerd; you should intuitively understand when someone has to be stopped, even when it's you. Especially when it's you.

momcore

John Rogers calls it "momcore": that particular genre of mainstream entertainment that encourages its consumers to live in constant fear. The example Warren Ellis uses, when he's in rant mode, is the "CSI" episode where someone gets sodomized with a violin bow; Rogers talks about The Bone Collector, where a woman's boiled alive; and I always think of the episode of "Castle" where the murder of the week is a woman found dead on a children's playground, wearing some S&M gear and covered in a thin coat of caramel.

Last time I was at my own mom's house, she watched an episode of "The Blacklist," where James Spader watched from inside a bulletproof panic room as his friends and associates were executed one by one. I came to a bizarre realization: she's more into horror than I am, and I am really into horror. It's just in a format that's more acceptable to her.

Basically, momcore's set when the credits are rolling. The cops have shown up, somebody's picking up the body parts, and the killer's either escaped or is ostensibly dead. Terrible things have happened and now it's down to our new protagonist--the profiler or detective--to figure out what.

It doesn't map onto horror exactly, but one of the other things about momcore is that in order for it to exist, it needs to portray the "normal" world as a much worse place than it actually is. If you look at the raw stats, the crime rate's falling, violence is down, and we as a species are actually doing okay, but the news and momcore insist that Earth's atmosphere is made up 20% oxygen, 40% nitrogen, and 40% Scary People Who Want You Dead. It's actually worse than the typical horror setting.

There's also an element of randomness in parts of momcore that's truly disturbing when you compare it to horror. One of the things that's always leapt out at me about slasher movies in particular, at least ones that use the classic formula, is that it's all about consequences: you can often tell who's going to live to the credits by what they're doing when they're introduced, and a fair few of them begin with a group of people who do something really stupid. The Hatchet series spends the first ten minutes of each movie establishing why you should not go into the swamp, and then the rest of the movie is what happens when you go into the fucking swamp. (Spoiler: dismemberment, usually.)

Momcore, on the other hand, doesn't establish that sense of due consequence. Part of momcore, in fact, is the fear of a capricious and uncaring universe smacking you down for no reason other than that you're there. The Jack Reacher movie, for example, involves a mystery where a sniper kills an extra few people besides his target simply to confuse the investigation. They have nothing to do with the issue at hand and they're just outside on the wrong day.

There's an intersection between these that someone--hopefully me--could figure out how to exploit and in so doing make fighter-jet money. I need to figure this out.

when work is play

I took a couple of cheat days this week because I was writing. It's an excuse, but I'll take it.

One of the things I used to be able to do, back in the day, was write for fun. Showing the results to people was good for a laugh, but I used to have a lot of projects stuffed haphazardly into my head, and notebooks, and badly-organized desktop folders.

When I ended up with a couple of regular, paying jobs as a writer, one of the first problems I ran into was that I didn't do a lot of writing for its own sake anymore. I could rouse myself to work on a personal project now and again, and my emails and instant messages were often a little more overwrought than they technically had to be, but writing was the day job. I wasn't often inclined to clock out and go do it some more.

I've had some dead time in my schedule lately, though, and writing for fun's a skill I've been meaning to reacquire. Most of the time, it's unsalable dross: deliberately derivative science fiction, a couple of parodies. There were a couple of times over the last couple of years where I tried to write porn, once on a dare and once in an attempt to crack into the thriving dinosaur erotica market, and it developed into a more interesting universe than I anticipated and stopped being porn.

My endgame was always to be a professional novelist, but the problem with that sort of goal is that it's easy to focus on, which often blinds you to all the work you have to do in the meantime. The best way I know of to get that sort of work done, then, is to make sure it isn't work.

the blackmail story, v. 2014

I've told this story before, in an angrier, more self-aware way, but it's probably useful to retell it now, in the way I'd tell it now. It may make it a cheat day for the blogging project, but it's something I can point to later.

This is how I started writing about video games for a living.

another post about the apocalypse

There's a chapter about a third of the way through The Stand--I'm pretty sure it shows up in both the original and uncut versions, but I don't have a copy at hand to check--that talks about the survivors who didn't make it, for one reason or another: a five-year-old kid who falls down a hole, a junkie who finds his dealer's uncut stash and overdoses, a guy who runs himself to death out of grief over his dead family, and so on.

Whenever I reread that book, which I used to do every few years, I tend to linger over that chapter, and over the chapters that are little more than scenes from the breakdown of civilization. They're strong and memorable in a way that the rest of the book isn't, particularly once it gets into King's particular brand of 1980s coke-fueled messianic good vs. evil in the last half, and I'm reasonably sure that those chapters are what sparked my current, ongoing fascination with fictional apocalypses.

One of the things I like about video game storytelling, as dissonant as it can sometimes be, is that with the right design, the player can step into and out of the main plot almost at will. You can look around and see the stories that took place before you got there, and if the level design is strong enough, you don't need journal entries or notes scrawled in blood to do it.

The Last of Us is particularly good about this in a few areas, such as the college campus in Colorado or parts of Pittsburgh. It resorts to the old "survivor keeping a diary" dodge at times, yeah, but there are other areas where you have to figure out what happened by yourself, such as what happened to the kids in Ish's hideout, and it's a more effective moment for it.

I'm playing Fallout: New Vegas for the first time right now, and it's not quite as strong about that as I'd like. Vault 34, for example, might as well just be a cave full of zombies. This isn't to say that it's a bad game for it, but there's something I find appealing about the idea of the post-apocalyptic detective, sorting through a location to figure out what precisely happened there before you arrived. All you get in Fallout, typically, is that there was Something Bad in there and they stacked up a bunch of furniture to block the corridor.

This may be one of the things I revisit if I ever end up making an indie game: scenes from the apocalypse. Start from the short story, then work it backwards. Make the player construct the narrative for you.

six potions a day

After the quest is done, do heroes have to deal with an addiction to healing potions?

In most games I've played, by the end, I'm sucking down whatever restores my health by twos and threes. If it's a magic spell, it's long since become muscle memory; if it's a drug or potion, I'm probably rolling around the world in the rough equivalent of one of those party hats with a beer can on either side of my head.

At the end of it, though, does the hero end up blowing through that massive stockpile of nearly-useless currency on a lifetime supply of Megalixirs that he somehow used up in a year? Is he jonesing for a hit of the good stuff whenever he stubs his toe or cuts himself shaving? After a long adventure full of being set on fire and hit with swords and thrown off cliffs and hit with meteorites, where there were probably non-trivial parts of his day where he was technically more healing potion than person, his brain perched awkwardly atop a rickety stack of flesh being knitted together yet again by another hearty dose of whatever crap is in these things, does he react to even mild injury with a massively overpowered burst of six-digit healing magic that could bring a man back and walking from a smear of charcoal across the floor of a cave?

If I were Terry Pratchett, the old campaigner with a serious healing problem would already have been in my work somewhere. Might still show up.

(This post, and how late and only technically adherent to the terms of my self-imposed challenge it is, is brought to you by my rampant stimpack addiction in Fallout: New Vegas, which was sitting on top of my games backlog for about a year and a half. Taunting me.)

confessions of a part-time game critic

I was walking around Everett, Washington today, on my way to a job interview, and thinking about games criticism.

(You've been to Everett before, even if you think you haven't. There are a fair few towns scattered around the United States that are clone-stamped Suburbs, chunks cut straight off the block of some larger ur-town. Nobody who works there lives there, and vice versa. They feed a nearby city and eschew an individual identity. I've seen worse than Everett, like Council Bluffs outside Omaha, but being there still feels like you could be anywhere.)

As far as I can tell, there are three things holding video game criticism back at this point in time.
1) There's no money in it.
2) There's no audience for it.
3) It's one of the only forms of criticism that I'm immediately aware of that requires an additional level of acquired, exclusive skill before it can be practiced.

The third point's the mildest, but it's significant. To practice film criticism, you first must be able to sit still for two hours. To be a food critic, you first must be capable of digestion. To be a games critic, you must have a reasonable facility with the operation of a single particular software program, the skills from which will not necessarily transfer from one program to another, and after that you have to be a passable writer.

The first's probably the biggest. Virtually everyone I've known who works in games criticism uses it as a side project, a resume-builder, or as a springboard towards a job in public relations, marketing, or games development. It isn't a life position, nor should it be at this point in time. There isn't someone at, say, the New York Times whose entire job is long-form, thoughtful, but most importantly highly visible games criticism; there's no common influence, no big name in the field.

I often bring up Pauline Kael when I discuss this with people, and while it's not a perfect comparison--a lot of film theory and terminology is still sneaking into games discussion when it arguably shouldn't, just because it's the closest and most influential medium--it reflects the absence, and the need, for some games critic to climb above the pack. Mainstream cultural acceptance isn't worth pursuing for its own right (it's been thirty years and most major newspapers still seem determined to ignore games out of existence), but the side benefit thereof is the development of common ground. There isn't a film critic alive who hasn't read Ebert, for example, and that shapes the genre of film criticism in an important way. There is no single games critic who inspires other game critics; it's all a bunch of often-underpaid nerds who are doing it to kill time or fill space.

The closest thing to Kael that games writing has yet produced is probably Kieron Gillen, but the writers he inspired flamed out and went away... and thankfully so, because those were the "new games journalism" guys and they took most of the wrong lessons away from pieces like "Journey into the Cradle." In good criticism, the author is a presence but the subject remains the work being criticized, and "new games journalism" mistook the author and his reaction for the subject. I still have a standing date, if Tim Rogers and I ever end up in the same building, to call him a douchebag and push him down a running escalator.

And finally, there's no audience for long-form, thoughtful games criticism, because we've gone twenty years without it. There are exceptions here and there, like Rock Paper Shotgun, but most of the gamers I know are actively suspicious of games journalism, and rightly so. I've done my time getting martinis poured down my neck until a C+ game turns into a B, and I'd be suspicious too. Most of the money that keeps a games site alive is coming from the companies that produce the products the site is reviewing, via advertising, and that gives marketers a club they don't mind wielding.

One of the projects I sometimes think about is crowdfunding a games site through Kickstarter and Patreon: no ads, no banners, just thoughtful critics who buy all the games themselves, send all the "swag" back, and can afford to make games writing their day jobs. I don't know if it would work, or who I'd hire, but it's an idea in the back of my head that never quite seems to go away.