Grotesque

The gaming community has found its latest outrage. Personally, I think this is overdue, the way the similar problems Adobe is having was. The large companies have merged too much and become far too distant from actually serving their customers. It makes sense that pot would boil over with louder and louder cries from said customers.

In any case, Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed is at it again. Once one of very few companies that were doing a first-person/third person experience (that is, something other than a top-down tactical game) based in history. Games that offered the chance to walk the streets of Alexandria or climb Notre-Dame de Paris.

 Yeah, that was already a bad sign. When Viollet-le-Duc reconstructed the old cathedral under the combined impetus of Haussmann and a public stirred to interest by Hugo, every grotesque created and carved was unique. But go parkour around the thing in the game, and you have the strange experience of encountering nothing but Le Strynge, over and over.

Forgivable in a way. Game assets are a conserved quantity and they didn't want to have to create every single Evangelist (on the spire) and Biblical King (on the facade) as individual models. Also, they were constrained by IP; there are protections to the stained glass, for instance, meaning Ubisoft couldn't just copy the stuff.

And there are artistic decisions I would probably make myself. Such as including the spire, even though the pre Viollet-le-Duc spire was rather smaller, and history indicates it might not have even made it as far as the French Revolution (and was certainly a mess by that time anyhow). But the spire is so much the look of it, part of the essence of the building, you'd lose that frisson if you presented a building without it.

There's a similar artifact in the latest (as yet un-released) game; an ocarina that looks to have been repaired by kintsugi. Well, that technique of repairing pottery with gold would be a decade or two early, and unlikely to be applied to (or work well) with a musical instrument. However, I'd reserve disagreeing with this if it is an artistic choice; the thematic resonance of the broken thing restored by metal to something that is both broken and repaired, old and new, is just full of potential symbolism.

However.

You can't see it very well in this image, but even to I -- who is hardly an expert on Japanese castles -- this leaps out as badly as the xerox grotesques on their version of Notre Dame.

That's the Shachihoko of Nagoya Castle, they are famous, and just as famous is that there are two of them. On the highest roof, and deeply symbolic. Xeroxing them all over the castle to add a little more architectural interest is blind to the reality of the historical buildings, the highly codified styles of Japanese architecture, and their meaning.

According to a rising tide of native Japanese commenters (it tells you how bad it is that Japanese are making public statements about how badly they feel their culture is being served) this is all over the game.

But it isn't entirely creative decisions, and it isn't just laziness (although one can never rule these out). No, there is something else that also was visible way back in Assassin's Creed: Unity (the one set in Paris during the French Revolution.)

In Unity, blame might be cast in the direction of Abbe Barruel, author of one of the first histories to promote the same conspiracy-mongering about the Revolution that Unity also wants us to believe. (Basically the "rich merchants manipulated the stupid peasants into overthrowing a king they actually kind of liked" narrative.)

For Assassin's Creed: Shadows the book and name are even clearer. Thomas Lockley, who is a living historian (and far too happy to get "interviewed" on Ubisoft's pet podcast. His work may be of a higher standard than the Royalists that tainted the Unity story (to be fair, the games needed something to work in the Templars/Assassins conflict -- although oddly, they left that alone in Black Flag, where the pirates were quite happy to have their own story separate from all that conspiratorial nonsense). Still, it all reminds me far too much of the more than one Hollywood product that made use of a certain well-known "Plastic Shaman" rather than talk to actual Indian experts.

There's a narrative here. History is always a narrative, historical fiction even more so, but it is increasingly off-kilter in the AC series; from the Enzo stories being deeply rooted in real currents of Italian history, to the entire game of Valhalla being hijacked from any historical roots or examination to do a lame fantasy Viking retread instead. It is slipping off the slope until it stops having any link to history, and instead is just a theme-park background for the usual wearing hoods and stabbing people game play -- a looter-shooter with wrist blades instead of laser pistols.

Two of the Japanese commentaries I've watched so far were struck -- as struck as I was about the shachihoko -- by the really, really strange rice fields. They had that peculiar incoherence about them we associate with AI now; the shapes were there, but they made no sense. Where's the drainage? What are they doing in the fields in this season and this is clearly not a harvest (unlike what the dialog says). And why are there random bales of rice lying around where they will mildew and get infested by weevils?

There's no sense to it...and this is Japan. Rice is at the base of the economy and society. Taxes are collected in rice. Wealth is measured in rice. There are gods of rice. Ceremonies are based around the growing cycle of...rice.

It isn't like you can't put the whole thing in a game and get it right.

Getting it wrong isn't merely lazy; it is disconnecting your game, from gameplay to story to theme to message, from any attempt to engage with real places, real people, and real history. It is time for Ubisoft to stop claiming they are in any way attempting accurate history. They ducked out when it came to Notre-Dame de Paris, rightly explaining that their game model would be of no use to those reconstructing the cathedral after the fire.

Getting into a shit-throwing contest about how they did their homework and the game IS historical? Stop that.

Respect the rice!

Stimpacks

Finally the improvement is solid. I have managed to drive across town for brunch, as well as shop for groceries. 

And getting a bit of reading done. In my current rotation is a book on the history of NEST, a book on issues in indigenous archaeology, and a book on land rights and environmentalism at White Sands which is really a nice capsule history of the area -- and a lot of the things I want at play in the novel.

Oh, and Albee's book is waiting in the wings. I have yet to find a book I want on the Navaho and uranium mining (the ones I've found so far are only in expensive hard-cover). And there's a few other things I want to read up on.

(Other than, the legend of the Spear of Antioch in the context of the Crusades...a thesis project I discovered and have been enjoying reading).

Oh, and there will be a dual-time element in this book. Sort of. It isn't going to be Oppy's time, or anything like that. It is going to be sketches, done in third-person omniscient. This book has the widest historical scope of any of the Athena Fox stories, one almost Stapletonian in scale (aka Last and First Men). 

So far the sketches on my list include Lucy, the Egtved Girl, someone either in Berengia or Doggerland, an immigrant -- possibly at Ellis Island -- and "Seagull," from pissing on the bus tire to having stew with villagers in the Altai Krai.

***

The world still doesn't mean enough to me. I am finding it hard to engage with anything, but especially with fiction. Still, when my concentration was too bad for anything else I did manage to spend a little time playing games.

Tried out Nier Automata because I had heard the story was interesting. Actually, the story is depressing, and the game pretty much forces you to help it belabor the point (I seriously stopped shooting at the poor little robots unless I really, really had to). It also has a brutal save system, which combined with truly odd control mapping and camera and un-helpful prompts (the game is designed for controller and runs poorly with keyboard and mouse) left me restarting the game from practically scratch FAR too often.

Eventually it just bored me.

On the other hand, between Windows updates and the (very small) possibility that bugthesda actually did some work on it, Fallout 3 actually plays now. I'm finally to the Museum of Technology and really, really thinking about another fast-travel back to Megatown to purchase more stimpacks (threw all my points in small arms and INT -- I'm a total glass cannon).

Nesting Instinct

When a bunch of guys in white suits with close-circuit breathers show up waving geiger counters, someone will probably call them a "NEST Team."

Well, I've decided. The White Sands story is happening on a giant-ass military base and they have radiological people already but there was ongoing NEST training and lectures (Los Alamos is not far geographically. The NTS and Livermore are not all that far organizationally). So this really is real NEST guys taking the opportunity for a little practical exercise.

But that just underlines the directions I'm going with this. To go a bit further over the top. To go ahead and do some of the things that are popular in fiction. And, yeah, I am using many details of the actual White Sands paleontological discovery, but this is a clearly fictional dig with various things changed about it (I mean, besides the lack of a dead body in the original!)

Meanwhile I'm still piteously weak, unable to do much more than eat and sleep (and not much of the former, either). I don't see it plausible I'll be recovered enough to plan a trip for mid-October. But the main reason I wanted to visit the Trinity Test Site was more for the things they don't let you photograph; how built-up it is around there and whether it is at al possible for me to have a chase scene and climax happening there, in a chunk of far-from-deserted desert covered with cameras and sensors and some rather tight security.

I'm making a lot of progress with Jackson, Freeman, Specialist Lopez, the Ray Cats, "depressed" and "greasy" (two key characters that don't have even stand-in names, not yet). And more and more about Dead Guy, but nothing I've worked out so far about what we was working on and why it is secret is telling me how his body ended up in the national park.

My concentration is just about up to reading a bit of my growing stack of references over a meal. Then I go away again, to the point where even playing a game is too much for my concentration and energy (and my lack of interest in, well, anything.)

Did make a distinctive bit of progress with Starfield. Got a bit further on a faction quest, which is better than the main quest but still incredibly bad. A lame sneak session that was so poorly put together I'd actually completed it and was crouch-walking past confused embassy guards before I realized I'd completed it.

There's a bit where you are in a wrecking yard of people scrounging an old battlefield where mechs were employed against nasty alien "bioweapons" (the usual, "this creature killed a bunch of our soldiers so obviously we want to get more of them.") There's a part you need to finish the quest that either costs a bunch, or you can assemble from available scraps. The NPC is so very proud to lead you towards the game's crafting system in hopes that this time, you'll actually get interested in it.

Except that unlike every single other craft-able item, this one requires three other nonsense parts that can only be found on this one quest. In heaps of wrecked warbots with dangerous aliens crawling around the wreckage. You gotta search that old battlefield while not getting eaten.

Well, that sounds cool enough. Except...said battlefield is about two hundred meters, the lootable containers are lit up on the HUD like neon signs, and if you've sunk even one point in jetpack you can hop on top of a wreck and the aliens can't do squat to you.

Except...the things you need are randomized, the loot boxes remain on the HUD even after they are searched, and after two hours walking back and forth across this very very very tiny sandbox searching and re-searching I finally realized the game had never bothered to code it to make sure you'd get at least one of each!

And then it crashed again, locking up the computer so badly no key combination would even get me to Task Manager or otherwise in a position to do a soft quit. I had to power cycle the computer. When it restarted in good shape, I immediately DELETED Starfield forever and applied to Steam for a refund.

COVID Cookbook

Back in the first month of COVID when there was vaccine and everyone was sheltering in place, it was actually sort of fun getting creative and concocting meals out of whatever weird leftovers had been in the back of the cupboard.

I finally caught it, and bad. Stuck at home with nothing stocked up. But I also had severe stomach pains and so I had to be extra creative. The winner was some Irish Oatmeal I'd gotten on a whim a week ago. I could cook that soft and it would stay down.

The other success was a tomato-rice soap. My emergency Nishiki (white rice in a five-pound bag), a can of tomato sauce, bouillon cube and broth packet from my jollof rice recipe (definitely not on). 

I'm firmly in recovery now (after a week of pain). I can concentrate a little, I'm not falling asleep every four hours...

...and nothing interests me. I want to be alive again. See my friends. Go outside. Eat.

But I'm still carrying a viral load, I should still be isolating as much as possible...and over that ugly week I seem to have developed a bit of a food phobia.

Oh, and my New Mexico trip is starting to look like the nest of that wee Scottish mouse.

Western Europe is east of me

Which means Satisfactory 1.0 will be released at 8:00 AM tomorrow morning. Not a lot of time to make sure I've got footage of my previous game!

On the other hand, I'm finding surprisingly little of that world I really want to show off. As with so many things I do -- really, that most people do -- I run around trying out new ideas rather than sitting down to finish the old ones properly.

That, and I suck at videos. Everybody is doing their "farewell to Update 8" videos this week. As part of stirring up interest in what for some of them is going to be a full-time job doing a marathon Let's Play (or even Live Stream) of their first official 1.0 game.

I also finally got a video flagged. Apparently they won't be allowed to see this one in Russia...

I really wanted to do my own music, but that's another thing I start and never finish. Spending some delightful hours rebuilding my DAW and libraries. So many things turned out to be "That version is no longer supported, but we can sell you the next version..."

And not only are there incompatibilities with VSTs (one of the common plug-in formats for DAWs) -- OS9 stuff doesn't work with OSX, Intel doesn't always work with Silicon, since Catalina OSX has gotten insane with the "Are you sure you want to run this software you downloaded from someone that wasn't us?" Since you can't get a pop-up box from inside a DAW, the only way to press the "Yes, run it anyhow" is to drill down to the UNIX shell. Get on terminal and type in a little "sudo xattr -rm apple.hates.independent.developers the_new_plugin.vst"

I started to throw together a little modern Les Baxter thing...but turns out I am rusty in music theory, too. That, and I really, really need my good keyboard. Which there's no room for until I finish the rest of cleaning I've been trying to get to...

Oh -- did I post the video I finally threw together for the recording I did a while back? By the time I finally had a lighting set-up I liked, it was time to move out of that space. (And to add to the difficulties, my old camera couldn't handle the Barry Lyndon lighting levels and I had to shoot on iPhone instead).

But that's the way it goes.

Learning curves...err...Non-Uniform B-Splines...

Learned enough on Sketchup to start working out the floor plan for our new Tool Room. Plus catching up again on Fusion360, where I finally reconstructed a thing for work I'd been getting printed at Shapeways. 

Tried printing it in ABS for extra strength but my Ender3 isn't handling ABS properly yet. Need an enclosure. Possibly a heated enclosure, and that gets into project creep oh so quickly (like my fancy laser enclosure, which is currently wrapped in plastic on a shipping pallet on a very high shelf).

Also earned a wee bit more about Shotcut so I can animate a basic motion and add some smoke and sparks for a YouTube intro.

Yes, I paid a guy on Fiverr to do an animation for me but as so often on Fiverrrrr he ignored what I'd asked for and did his own thing. Often worth the gamble -- it's cheap, and their ideas could easily be better than mine. Well...not this time.

While I was at it with video and audio, dragged up various free VSTi's and the sample libraries I'd purchased so long ago and started installing them into Reaper on the Mac Mini. Thank Zepherus all this nonsense about passwords is meaningless as long as you have your original email address...

Yes, I'm still trying to cut some game videos.

But my last session in Satisfactory, I got distracted polishing the fruit at the bottom of the bowl...I mean, dressing up the entrance and walkways, adding lighting, and basically making things nice around the front of a Compacted Coal plant deep in the Badlands west of the main desert. Which is not just a place I'll probably never visit again, but is in a playthrough that was entirely to try out some ideas to make my foray into 1.0 a little smoother.

It is really hard not to keep working on that world. That's the game in a beryl nut; addictive.

(Just now I watched a few minutes of the final version 1.0 teaser trailer. Had to stop -- so much exciting stuff, I just want to discover it all as I play. Four days now...)

Robinsonade

The literary genre started by Robinson Crusoe has become a fashionable gaming genre. I think it may have happened through a merging of the streams --

 That is, the elements of crafting in survival games (which are themselves often a kind of Robinsonade) and the various "Dad Games" building and management games, right back to Sid Meir's Civilization. 

The big recent change -- and I'd put it pretty much smack between Factorio  and Satisfactory -- came with a move from top-down or orthographic to First Person perspective. That immersion within the world brings back in full the older elements of the Robinsonade; the isolation and self-reflection just below the struggle for survival. The ideas of loneliness, separation from society, and becoming an island on to oneself as what you bring to the table defines your life, purposed and whatever mimicry of society you end up building.

What changes over games spanning the period from Half-Life (which had the loneliness and isolation but no crafting element) through Tomb Raider 2001 (where you can build and upgrade the tools and weapons you use to survive) to Fallout 4 (where the "base building" mechanic is added to the series, allowing you to construct entire villages from scraps) is the theme of "building stuff."

And this is when SF entered the Robinsonade, beginning with Jules Verne and Mysterious Island, where a group of shipwrecked engineers build an entire bamboo civilization starting with a kitchen match, a seed, and one metal dog collar.

The change is to focus. The loneliness is still there, and even some of the old themes of anthropology and social commentary both in reflection on the society the character came from and in the relationships they make with local life forms. But the bootstrapping element, the "building stuff" element, is the more prominent.

It is said that a frontier blacksmith would start with an anvil. Every other tool could, eventually, be made from there (as long as there was access to iron). Whether marooned in open ocean with just a wet suit and a crashed lifepod, or standing alone on the surface of a hostile world having just melted down your landing pod for scrap, you are presented with a wide-open world.

You don't know what you will find as you explore, you don't know where you will find sustenance and the other tools of survival, and you are filled with both dread and joy at the prospect of trying to find a new purpose for your life. But you do have one thing; your anvil.

(Satisfactory 1.0 is just five days away!)