domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
FtttG
1m ago
Jussay Smol-yay is back in the news this week, with the release of a new documentary The Truth About Jussie Smollett?, which purports to tell an alternative perspective on Smollett's claims to have been the victim of a racially motivated (and homophobic) hate crime on the streets of Chicago, for which he was indicted and convicted for filing a false police report. I think the question mark in the title tells you everything you need to know about the director's confidence in his narrative. Even film critics at progressive media outlets are giving it short shrift.
World of Warcraft is bound up in so many memories of my young childhood, friends I used to have, playing with my dad, my brother, returning to it feels like going back to a city long after everyone you knew there moved out or passed away. And Classic feels (or at least did at the start) like you’re surrounded by so many other people for whom the same is true, trying to get back something that time has taken from them, irreversibly.
Still a great game though.
In just a year since my last time with Fyodor Mikhailovich, I read Gambler last week.
As with Notes from Underground, it holds up amazingly well 150+ years later (give or take all the gentry out and about), with the outchitel MC being a likewise colorful fellow who is entirely ruled by, and unashamed of, his addiction to gambling and pathological simpery. It is morbidly funny to me that gacha games, the scourge of modern vidya, combine the worst of these exact two vices; I offhandedly wondered what Fyodor Mikhailovich would've made of such superstimuli, Alexey (who seemed a rather unsubtle author stand-in) sure seems like the ideal target audience.
Reading about it online after the fact, people seemed to be confused by the abrupt ending with a very rushed resolution of character arcs via a "where are they now" loredump from an in-universe character. I agree that the pacing is weird in places, but to me it seems partly deliberate - there is a certain point ~midway where the book's focus seems to overtly switch from Alexey's simping struggles and general drama around la baboulinka's inheritance to the titular gambling and its consequences for the human race, with all the errant nobility in Roulettenburg (is it still nominative determinism if it's this obvious?) and especially
With this in mind the abrupt ending reads less like a rushed job, and more like a narrative device - the book is explicitly presented as "notes" Alexey is writing during his misadventures in Roulettenburg, which he sometimes abandons for weeks at a time, and has to recount everything for the reader once he takes the pen back up; Mr. Astley (who provides the aforementioned loredump) gives the down-on-his-luck protagonist some money out of pity, but at this point has very little faith that he will use it for anything other than gambling; Alexey in turn is stirred enough by the memories and recollections Astley's words evoke to have a lucid break, feeling genuinely hopeful to try and restart his life, IIRC even mentioning he's excited to put things to paper again... and the book ends, right then and there. YMMV but I felt like the implied, unspoken final relapse was a pretty fitting conclusion.
Despite the themes, the book is surprisingly light reading and has plenty of funny moments - the cringe drama, petty fights and callous mask-off moments between assorted loosely-related people as they wait with bated breath for beloved babushka to finally croak and part with her inheritance show plenty of opportunities for morbid humor, the babushka herself is a riot, and watching the entire trainwreck in slow motion from Alexey's relatively detached POV is very entertaining.
Moving on to Impro sometime next year, as once shilled by Zvi. As an unfettered cringelord amateur actor back in high school who now heavily struggles with creative pursuits like writing, roleplaying and DMing, my expectations are high.
I have long ago dreamt up my ideal game, and started working on it about ten years ago. SInce then, I have learned a lot about making games and even more about how to not make them and I still have nothing playable to show for it. At least it gave me good practice for starting a career in software development.
Here's the pitch: First-Person Kenshi (*) in a low-tech high-existential-horror sci-fi setting.
- Sandbox game, no plot or story whatsoever. You have some freedom in character generation, and then you're just dropped in there.
- Low-fidelity simulated world. Everything that you see in the game is interactable, nothing is mechanically empty set-dressing. There would be economics and politics simulations running in the background for NPCs, but the only way to interact with those is through the NPCs themselves; not through menus.
- Realistic scale, speed and precision. The world is big, there's a lot of space, vehicles move fast, and when you see something impressively big, then it really is big.
- To pay the performance price for the two points above, the world is also largely empty. Many may dislike this, but it suits my aesthetic sensibilities.
- There should be basic survival mechanics - humans need food, temperature matters, injuries don't heal magically, inventory management needs to be done - but it's not meant to be a survival game. The player should be able to just hire a servant to handle all that.
- Optional automations for the player character. I don't want players to ever be forced to do reptitive, mindless actions - you should be able to just do some light scripting to have your avatar do those for you (or hire NPCs to do them).
- The player characters and NPCs to a lesser extent should have a sort of inner world, a collection of notions linked by associations that serves as a sort of semantic database.
- The world would be a large wasteland planet like everyone knows and loves from all kinds of fiction, with dramatic landscapes, ruins to explore and small civilizations scrabbling for survival on the surface. There would be a space layer with some orbital infrastructure and activities and microgravity gameplay. Technology would be constrained by the setting being a sparsely populated economic backwater, even if the game is set many millions of years in the future. The world is under constant threat by economic collapse, war, universal expansion, unfathomable AIs eating whole worlds, moral decay, and god switching off the universe because he's done with it, and the NPCs are aware of it - but all these threats loom at realistic time-scales, which is to say that it's in the far-off future for everyone. It's more background than game mechanic, thematic rather than interactive - how do people deal with the fact that for all their acitivity and thought, it will all come to nought in the end?
- It would be full of cool things I like to see. Spaceships, guns, swordfighting, hiking, stargazing (yes I thought of actual stargazing mechanics), intergenerational contributions to the commons in the face of inevitable annihilation, conversations about one's role in the universe, megastructures, things going fast, big wide open brilliantly blue and golden skies, synthetic aliens, geology, nation-building, and the player free to explore or reject all of it.
Obviously this is all a big technical ask, but over the years I have done little other than tinker up various technical solutions for these various challenges. Some work. Some don't - yet. What I haven't really gotten around to is tying all that together into an actual game, and of course in all my experimentation over the years each individual component ended up being incompatible with most others. It's been a journey, and it's entirely unclear whether I'll ever reach any kind of destination.
(*) A note on Kenshi (https://store.steampowered.com/app/233860/Kenshi/): I had my concept largely worked out long before Kenshi ever became visible to the public, but it does hit a lot of the same bullet points. And then goes a completely different way. Still, it's the closest equivalent to what I want to do. I recommend Kenshi as a game that breaks with many conventions and really strikes out to do its own thing.
ulyssessword
42m ago
It's worth beating the main ending, but I stopped shortly after that. Spending an hour hoping for good rolls so you can test a theory...then another hour running a second test on that same theory wasn't fun.
ulyssessword
55m ago
I just checked, and I could clearly see 34 words on the screen at a time, with another 16 greyed out. The website isn't even compatible with Reader mode, so I can't view it as normal text either.
Sometimes I'm glad I'm not American.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
I had Blue Prince strongly recommended to me, but it just looks a little expensive for a puzzle game.
No_one
1hr ago
Road 96 is an adventure video game played from a first-person perspective. The game's campaign has the player assume the role of several teenage hitchhikers attempting to flee the authoritarian nation of Petria without being arrested or killed
It sounds incredibly naive. If emigration is actually illegal, the border involves things such as
- self-attacking dogs (they chill in their kennels until it's time to maul a border intruder who unwisely tripped an alarm releasing them)
- a 'fake' dummy border, to make the intruders think they've made it
- electric fences, silent tripwires, flare tripwires
- sometimes, patrols unloading at the intruders with machineguns
It does actually get so bad people would hijack aircraft to get out, or fly a hang glider over it, or if they're a pilot, steal their plane. Usually, though, people just left through a foreign country they could travel to but which did not have prison camp style border. In the real world, this was Yugoslavia.
clo
1hr ago
Count one up for the furries. Zootopia is probably the best rubber-meets-the-road film about the prejudice of biological differences. And they get to make that story because it stars talking animals.
During the writing of that movie, there was a significant amount of development done around the concept that in order for the society to work, the dangerous animals were fitted with control collars. In the making of, there's this wonderful deleted scene that they didn't end up including in the movie where an father predator animal is at his son's birthday and getting him fitted with that collar, and for the kid it's this great rite of passage: I am finally an adult - and there's just this sadness in the adult's eyes because they know what is being done to their child.
They didn't keep it in for obvious reasons after a few rounds of story review, but I think about that scene a lot these days.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Been playing Helldivers 2 with some old friends. Lots of fun. I recall some mottizens complaining about it being a bad shooter, which is a sentiment I'm amibvalent about, or about it being a grenade-lobbing simulator, which isn't entirely incorrect, but ultimately I think the game just contains lots of mechanics to recommend itself.
- You can generally make do with common-sense tactics and a little experience; finely honed twitch reflexes or esoteric game-specific knowledge aren't required.
- The theme of "squishy humans attaining superiority through firepower" occupies a sweet spot in between power fantasy and challenge.
- The game makes do with very little hand-holding. You can get killed by the smallest enemy when you don't pay attention. You can teamkill and there are no guardrails against it.
- The game is exceptionally well-crafted, full of lovingly-implemented detail, little nods to realism and in-depth mechanics other games would simply elide.
- There's no woke in the writing. The game's campy lore and plot can be played straight or seen as parody however you like; much like w40k but without the need to fit into a tabletop figurine merchanidse form-factor.
- The game can be approached easily enough by my challenge-averse friends, and once they get into the groove I can slowly ratchet up the difficulty on them.
- A level 1 player can be just about as effective as a level 150 player, give or take some very minor bonuses and, of course, experience. All the equipment that goes into loadouts is side-grades, and there is zero grind required to be able to contribute to a team. All the grind does is unlock more equipment variety.
- Speaking of equipment variety, each and every item in the arsenal is useful. Some are more specialized than others, some are perhaps too niche or slightly underpowered, some are perhaps a little overpowered, but there is overall a good sense of balance in everything.
- There are always multiple ways to solve a given problem, but my problem-solving-averse friends ("I already do that for work and don't need it in my free time!") can just pick the one they're most used to while I get to improvise and experiment.
- You can play a mission or three in the evening and still go to bed well on time. It doesn't take a massive investment of time to play.
Helldivers 2 earned a ton of awards, and I'd say it well deserves them. It really is an usually well-made game.
If any Mottizens want to go on a dive together (and our time zones aren't too incompatible. German time here, I usually play between 21:00 and 23:00), let me know.
I suspect they think they're feminists. Joshua Norton thought he was emperor of the United States.
As far as I can tell they're fandom carnies.
Kaja looks like one of those women who Doesn't Count as far as the People Whose Opinions Matter are concerned, like most autistic "feminists" who think principles trump social skills and status. Occasionally useful, always disposable.
The writing is too "sex pest" to earn remembered approval in real life and too heterosexual to thrive outside it. (I see there's already been drama of the expected variety.)
I would file it under the same category as any "comic-book woman with green eyes, red hair, and Amazonian physique" thing. Even if the protagonist doesn't look the part. She's burlesque enough.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
But we've been here before. Around the late '00s, Disney felt that it was shackled by its perception as a girl brand,
This is weird. To me they are a girl brand, and they've been that way a very long time. I vaguely recall liking Disney when I was a very young child, but it seems like me and every other boy I knew stopped liking them when we were around 10 years old. Not even into puberty yet, but old enough to be interested in more violent, action-heavy stuff. Disney was about pretty Princesses singing songs and wearing fancy clothes. And that was fine, we didn't make fun of girls for liking it, we just weren't interested, for the same reason we weren't interested in any of the other pink brands.
I can see why their corporate executives might want to change that and become some universal brand that appeals to everyone. But institutions have cultural inertia and sometimes they just can't be changed. It's like how almost every country tries hard to get into the World Cup but there's only a few that are regularly good at it. And it's not always about money or resources because tiny countries like Uruguay can be weirdly good at it while the US struggles. Sometimes we just have to accept that things are as they are.
When I went to Disneyland for the first time a few years ago, everything had this feeling of "cute, safe, friendly." Perfect for a stereotypical 1950s family on vacation for 2 young children, and I guess also fun for Disney adult women who want to cosplay as princesses. But the whole Star Wars area felt weirdly out of place, like trying to cram an actually scary haunted house into a McDonalds.
FtttG
2hr ago
Less than a hundred pages from the end of Speaker for the Dead. Still can't really say I'm loving it, and certainly I'm not enjoying it half as much as I did its predecessor.
I have a copy of The Children of Men which I've never read, but I've seen the film adaptation several times and (one major plot hole aside) loved it. Well worth checking out. I believe the author gave it her seal of approval.
Kindles? iPads
The Kindle Fires (I don't know if they use the term "Kindle" for these anymore) are the cheapest way to get a kid a tablet and they went crazy coming out with various kid-themed versions and cases.
Edit: for instance, here's a $100 tablet advertised for kids and themed to the Avengers.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
3hr ago
It's, pardon me, superfluous in idea and idiotic in practice.
See: Heavy troopers being unable to fire from rooftops because they hold their guns at hip level. See also: Sniper being unable to take his shot because there's a lamppost halfway in between him and his target, and leaning left or right isn't possible because it's grid-based, dammit.
You can't actually fine-control where things stand relative to each other, yet first-person shooting depends on exactly such fine control. It's the wrong genre for it!
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
I take some perverse pleasure in remembering the old arguments around ditching the EU was good, actually, because it unburdens thr new writers by what has been, and enables them to be more creative.
I also seem to remember one if our regular posters had a bit about how nerds need to shut up, because corporate executives know better how to make their product appealing to a wider market.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
3hr ago
We had the Witches of Dathomir and they were fine.
Much like The Rise of Skywalker was an incompetent and facial adaptation of Dark Empire, this is once again just Disney remaking the EU but worse.
CanofWorms
3hr ago
Treehouse is a great call
Warrior Apprentice does start slow, but it gets a lot better when Miles get into Dendarii mode. If you got turned off in the first couple chapters, try skipping to chapter five and start from there. On the other hand, if you were still getting bored by the pathos in chapter ten, you're probably better off skipping the book. The main character's a bit bipolar, so Warrior's Apprentice isn't the last time he'll go into a pointed funk, but it's usually paced a lot better. If that's issue, some options:
Cetaganda works without having much knowledge of the setting. I think it leans a little to heavily on the 'throw a grenade in when stuck' approach to plot pacing, but it's got a reasonably good grabber and at worst that pacing errs toward the rushed, so it's a good middle-of-the-pack read. Murder-and-politics mystery in a scifi setting that pushes real heavy on what transhumanism might actually look like rather than Star Trek-style goofiness, though the expectations are a bit dated today.
The Vor Game is much stronger work and a lot faster to the point -- which is good, because it sets up a lot more small plot points for the rest of the series, often in pretty subtle ways -- but it is still very much The Sequel To Warrior's Apprentice. It'll tell you most of what you need to know about big plot, but there are especially some character bits that won't hit as hard without having seen the characters in action before. Great villains, witty heroes, and Miles at his most second-most saving-the-day-by-the-seat-of-the-pants, and necessary reading for the great Memory and Komarr (and, indirectly A Civil Campaign). There's a particular quote about unsolvable problems that'll stick with you.
Barrayar is probably easier as a starting point, and a much faster-paced work with clearer stakes (and a more specific timeline) for the protagonists, along with being set chronologically earlier. It gives a lot more complete an understanding of how fucked up the titular planet is, rather than leaving you wondering if it's Just These Assholes, and the motivation for all the characters is generally resonant even where a reader might know what the actual conclusion to the character's arc is going to be. Downside is that Miles is literally prenatal, and while Cordelia is a good main character, she's drastically different in tone. Also, like Pratchett's Night Watch there's a lot of subtle references to chronologically later works that you don't need to know, but will still miss out on. (Shards of Honor is chronologically even earlier and is readable, but it's the most Star Trek-fan-story of them all, so I wouldn't recommend it as a first read in the series.)
Borders of Infinity is a short story, and does show up enough in the rest of the stories to be worth reading in timeline order, but also they're representative of the highs and lows of the series. Would read before Komarr regardless, but it's a good intro to the pre-Memory Miles character and works with fairly little knowledge of the setting. There's a few stories in the series that are better, but if you don't like this one you're probably going to find getting to the best ones not worth it.
The strength of the Star Trek female fan base has always been slightly surprising to me: it’s military science fiction! That said, I can see it: it’s military sci-fi, but the military solves problems through the power of empathy and diplomacy, Kirk and Riker (my phone literally autocorrected his name to “Romeo,” which is hilarious) are… present, and most stories in Trek are soft science fiction, using alien societies or time travel to explore social structures and personal relationships. TNG always stood out to me as having a remarkable number of episodes about character romance, particularly for the female characters.
Trek also stands out to me for how it’s very formalized and society (in Starfleet — who knows what people do on Earth) is regimented, and I think that’s a factor in geek culture more broadly. Geeks seem to really like dreaming of societies with clearly-defined rules and chains of commands and even uniforms. I have a theory that geeks, often autistic or hypo-social, find the improvisational and non-explicit social rules of society hard to navigate or understand, and wish things were more explicit and systematic. I think this is what psychologically unites ren faire people who dream of m’ladying their way into a woman’s affections (or a woman who would like to be treated like a courtesan), and Trek fans who dream of color-coded uniforms.
Star Trek has ranks and command structures (but is highly non-rigid in social organization for a quasi-military organization — it’s how a progressive imagines a military should operate), Harry Potter has Hogwarts houses with found families based on character traits ordained by a magical hat. Both are about social institutions that provide the security of structure without the rigidity of oppression, with many stories revolving around how morality and justice override authority. There’s a fundamental liberalism at the heart of nerd interests, but one that absolutely finds the improvised social structures that actually characterize liberal society hard to fathom.
But also after a long period of miss after miss, even my geeky friends aren’t into Star Trek. I know more fans of The Phantom Menace than The Next Generation. I remember when I took IT classes and the instructor was appalled when I was the only one in the class who copped to liking Trek. Nerd culture has changed.
I don’t think it was Scott Bakula’s show that killed it — I’ll come out as actually liking Enterprise, but also I liked Voyager so I have terrible taste in Trek. Was it Abrams? I always used to joke that Abrams ruined Star Trek as a job interview for ruining Star Wars. No one should have let this man near a franchise. (While I hated The Last Jedi, I also generally like Rian Johnson, just not for a main episode in a long-running franchise focused on nostalgia.)
The only person in my cohort I’ve ever known as a Star Trek fan was an autistic, asexual girl who seemed to have picked it as her special interest, reading the novels, playing STO, and of course writing fan fiction. I would have liked to have known her better but she was a hard person to get to know.
Forty-Bot
4hr ago
He's being forced to insure the value of his own car even though (presumably) he is prepared to replace it out of pocket in the event of an accident. If the car is paid off this is an entirely plausible problem.
odd_primes
4hr ago
Kids love digging holes. Whether that counts as actual landscaping, however...
As for an actual constructive suggestion, a treehouse or some other type of outdoors semi-permanent structure that would be impractical to install at a rental.
GBRK
5hr ago
Subisides are just a strict loss of monies, and treasuries have abysmal interest rates. The superior growth rate of stocks makes them a means to raise government revenue without raising taxes.
Wasn't it The Grey King that got the Newberry? I mean, it has conspicuous Newberry bait at one point.
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