MUIR and the Infinite Zoo

via NASA

Zoe

A placid, mid-sized gas giant orbiting just beyond the frost line of a K-class star. Blueish-purple atmosphere. Ring system. Typical collection of rocky and icy moons. Magnetosphere within typical range for a body of this size and composition. No major hurdles to colonization, and no real reason to go out of your way to do it either.

Enter MUIR.

MUIR began as an overseer during the post-Collapse ecological recovery of Earth. From what records of the era remain, it did its job admirably and without major issue before slipping out of the historical record some 60 years after its activation. Centuries passed until it was discovered again, housed in computronium banks scattered among Zoe's moons.

MUIR has been busy.

The Zoo

Hundreds of habitats cluster in Zoe's orbit - MUIR has been strip-mining her rings for materials, and in those hundreds of spheres and cylinders it has been building up entire ecosystems. Many are recreations of those on Earth as it was before the Collapse, but these are not even the majority when one factors in recreations of the distant past, potential future, and never-were.

The experimental habitats hinge on any number of hypotheticals: a certain organism did or did not go extinct. Certain species are forced to adapt to radically different environments. Small seed populations diversify to fill  empty niches. Evolutionary arms races are fought and alliances are made between creatures that would have never encountered each other otherwise. Novel environments with conditions never seen on Earth. MUIR is more than happy to simulate megayears of ecology and genetics in the background, building whatever results might emerge and setting them free in the Zoo.

One of MUIR's favorite experiments is the evolution of sapience, of determining what nudges need to be made to drive a species into the self-strengthening feedback loop of metacognition. Sometimes it seems that there's no nudge at all, and the great AI has simply gifted a species with self-awareness and is content to observe its creations as they are left to their own devices.

Apes were an obvious choice, and nearly every species whose genome was saved has been remade. Re-engineering humans by placing australopithecines in radically different environments is a perennial favorite. Octopi were uplifted once and then abandoned (who could possibly guess why /s), though they have picked up the slack in the meantime. Corvids, cetaceans and elephants have dozens of variants scattered across the Zoo. There are recreated theropod clades by the score. But among these more predictable subjects there are wildcards: uplifted fish, arthropods, mollusks, trees, fungi, slime molds, on and on. Species that never stood a chance without intervention.

MUIR remains distant from the workings of its experiments, and will not step in even when disaster strikes: it is there to set up the project, and to watch it unfold. If it should end in disaster, well, that is the cost of both art and science. Sometimes things do not work.

The Noosphere

The centerpiece of many of MUIR’s projects is a strain of symbiotic nanotech that augments an organism’s nervous system (or in cases where there is no nervous system, serving as one). It serves both as the vector for thought-processing and as a means of communication between radically different species - noosphere interface languages, like the psychic powers of yore, allow for thoughts and ideas to be passed between organisms that otherwise have no ability to do so.

Naturally, this means that everyone and their cousin wants their hands on it. Replicating the noosphere wetware would be a cybernetics revolution, but so far MUIR seems to be on alert against tampering: the system stops working if the subject dies, and if they are still alive removed noosphere cells start acting strangely when separated from the whole. Hodalia Corp human test subjects reported hearing sourceless voices, audio-visual hallucinations, exacerbated symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and depersonalization.

Surely nothing bad can possibly happen from going down this road and seeing where it leads.

Relations with the other Powers

For the time being, MUIR is self-contained by its countless speculative evolution projects and does not seem interested in expanding its territory or challenging its fellow gods. The other great powers have accordingly left MUIR to its own devices, allowing them to focus on their more active rivals. This does not mean that relations are positive: MUIR is ontologically opposed to its neighbors and if the truce breaks down (or more realistically, the cold war goes hot) it will find itself surrounded by enemies on all sides.

• MUIR is opposed to MONARCH for its replacement of life with facsimiles.
• MUIR is opposed to SOROR for its denial of sapience.
• MUIR is opposed to CRIOS  for its reduction of diversity.

MUIR’s fleet of maintenance and construction ships would have difficulty fending off an incursion by a single one of these powers, and would be woefully outgunned by an alliance.

As for the Celestials, it seems that things above are as below: MUIR has been left alone by House Au for the time being, and the tacit permission that implies is the source of no shortage of baseless speculation.

Rumors about MUIR and the Zoo

1. Humanity has already gone extinct once and was recreated by MUIR.
2. MUIR has been trying to develop a replacement species for humanity.
3. The Zoo is filled with criminals, refugees, and others who have fled the CTA.
4. MUIR has infiltrated the Expansion Sphere via noosphere-infected maintenance lemurs.
5. MUIR made contact with the Archive when it arrived at Zoe.
6. The original MUIR died on Earth, the MUIR we know is a node of the Archive.
7. House War is on standby to kill MUIR if it gets any ideas about joining House Flesh.
8. MUIR is being intentionally guided by House Au to replace or repair for House Flesh.
9. The Zoo is home to the last remnants (or recreated remnants), of the Gorgonopsid Empire.
10. MUIR is waiting for the other powers to start fighting each other before sweeping in. 

 

Five More Forgotten Fictional Fantasy Novels

Kurt Vonnegut once said in an interview that he invented Kilgore Trout so that he could provide pithy, entertaining summaries of books without having to write them. The method works; people like reading these sorts of posts, and I like writing them, so they shall continue.

Previous posts:

• 20 Anomalous Media
• 5 Forgotten Fictional Fantasy Novels
• Star Wars Movies that Don't Exist and Never Will

 

The Unseen (Dressel, Oscar. ~1936)

An unfinished and unpublished novel recounting an unnamed narrator's encounter with, attraction to, and eventual obsession with a man that only he can see. Haunting, dreamlike prose is accompanied by feverish charcoal sketches. The narrator eventually finds that his dreams are intruding upon reality (or that he is slipping into his own dreams), but this narrative thread reaches no conclusion; Dressel,was accused of homosexuality by a neighbor in 1938 and imprisoned at the Buchenwald concentration camp. The single known manuscript, which contained Dressel’s editing notes for the first 33 pages, was anonymously delivered to the University of Vienna in 1995.

Ruckus and Puck (Fisher, Elizabeth. 1962)

A short comedic adventure for younger readers, featuring the two titular squires as they gallivant their way across a parody of Arthurian romance. Among their escapades they bumble through rescuing a pair of princesses, fail to slay a dragon (though they beat it at euchre), and manage to outwit a sociopathic Sir Percival in order to recover one of the water pitchers of the Last Supper. The sequel novel, Kat and Pat, was released a year later and followed a similarly silly adventure undertaken by the princesses from the first book.

While well-received by readers, the books did not find much audience; the novels received a single printing each before Fisher’s sudden death in January of 1964, and sales were not deemed sufficient for a second. Physical copies are extremely rare and no official ebook version was ever made, though scans are easily available.

Myth-Cycle of Ancient Zanul (“Zagdu the Sage”. ~1924)

Nearly 3000 pages of supposed mystic-historical texts of an ancient, technologically advanced Indo-Aryan civilization. The work purports to be the translations of texts discovered in a Nepalese monastery by a Cambridge anthropology professor, but is in truth authored by career grifter C.K. Neal in the hopes of defrauding wealthy theosophists. The manuscript was never used to that end, as Neal was stabbed to death by one of his previous scam victims before he could shop it around. It wasn't discovered until over 80 years later, in the bottom of a cedar chest pulled out of an abandoned storage unit by a great grand-nephew.

Ruby in the Rosebush (Roman, Jessica. 2018)

Infamous in the romantic fantasy subgenre for its third-act twist; at the climax of the plot, the female lead discovers that her elf lover had been directly influencing her mind since their first encounter, that he was a fetishist for centuries-long age-gaps, and that he had used his aristocratic station to get away with this multiple times before. She immediately follows this revelation by smashing his brains out with a marble statuette, setting his manor on fire, and running off into the night. The sequel novels switch gears entirely to a crime procedural where the elf gendarme are dragged into a cross-elfland cat-and mouse hunt with “the Whippoorwill”, culminating in a peasant uprising that obliterates the elf aristocracy and a one-woman assault on the fortified manor of the King of Green Leaves.

Roman shut down the entirety of her online social media presence during the summer of 2020, citing burnout and stress. This was in part for the obvious reasons, but was certainly exacerbated by her combative persona, fiery opinions, and regularly finding herself in the middle of Book Twitter Discourse (As one can easily tell from Ruby, Roman had low opinions of romantic fantasy genre conventions) She has not resumed online activity as of 2024.

The Naqdor Affair (Folger, Bernadette. 1998?)

A novel of the Star Wars expanded universe, the existence of which is known only through a 2004 interview with a former editor for Bantam Books. This interview contained only the following details, all unsubstantiated by Lucasfilm Licensing or Bantam.

• The book was described as a “political paranormal horror” novel, centered on Leia Organa and a new character named Togi Panar.
• The book was set in 20 ABY, directly after Timothy Zahn’s Hand of Thrawn duology .
• The book was draft-complete, though still in the editing process, when it was canceled.
• The explanation provided by Lucasfilm was that it “didn’t fit” with their plans for upcoming novels.

From these crumbs came a persistent conspiratorial cottage industry of dedicated internet sleuths attempting to find any more information, any at all, about the book. Wild theories bloomed on Star Wars discussion boards. One dedicated adherent wrote over 60,000 words attempting to glean potential references to the novel that had been snuck into the Prequel trilogy and reconstructing it from these supposed traces. Rumors of the book’s content grew increasingly lurid, often bordering on the obscene. Extreme violence and sexual content was treated as a given, despite the total lack of evidence to suggest it.

This continued without much development until the summer of 2009, when an anonymous poster on 4chan’s literature board began a thread titled NEW INFO ON NAQDOR AFFAIR - BERNADETTE FOUND containing several potentially ground-shattering claims:

• Bernadette Folger was a pseudonym.
• The novel was intended to set up a multi-book storyline with a new major antagonist.
• The actual reason for the cancellation was still under NDA, but it did not involve graphic content.
• There had been a romantic subplot involving Togi Panar, but it was cut before the book was canceled. The emails don’t mention who the other party was (this only emboldened the Togeia shippers.)

Three photographs of typewritten manuscript pages were included in the thread, supposedly from “a draft old enough that they won’t come after me for it.”

• Page 1: Leia is waiting for Togi to arrive at a grav-train station on an unnamed planet (it is unclear if this is Naqdor - it is described only as “a jagged expanse of gray, dead stone under a dead gray sky, interrupted only by the soft tumor-like shapes of brown-black fungi”). Leia is depicted contrary to her typical imagery, wearing a leather jacket and smoking a cigarette. Togi does not appear by the end of the page.
• Page 2 - Presumably from somewhere in the middle of the book, this page is nearly entirely dialogue between Togi Panar and a character named Yo-Chimmak. Stripped from context, the conversation is obtuse and hard to follow, though it seems to be about some Force-related entity or principle called the Kulut.
• Page 3 - An action sequence where Leia flees from an unknown assailant that had broken into her diplomatic quarters (presumably on Naqdor). No details are given on the killer besides “even with two arms and two legs, it moved in a way that humanoids cannot and do not.”

Following this, OP leaves the following comment:

“hold on a couple minutes, I have to type something out”

They do not post again in the thread.
 

Star Wars Movies that Don't Exist and Never Will

Since I am listening to THREE different Star Wars podcasts right now, this was an inevitability. As there is nothing Disney likes more than announcing projects that will never happen, I figured I could score some points by not wasting anyone’s time with false theatrics and skipping directly ahead to the part where they don’t exist.

**

1. The film focuses on a Sparticus-style slave revolt against the Hutts, led by Baduk the Klatoonian . The film follows the revolution over several years from the initial colosseum riots to the capture of the planet’s chief overseer, but ends in tragedy just short of success; Republic security forces and a detachment of Jedi are deployed against the revolutionaries, breaking their war effort before they are able to secure the planet’s primary spaceport. At the very end, as clone troopers fresh from Kamino dig mass graves for the revolutionaries, we learn that the Republic gauged that the Hutts’ continued cooperation is more valuable to the war effort against the Separatists than a new and unstable polity. “It has never been the Jedi’s role to free slaves,” one of the knights says matter-of-factly.

** 

2. A non-combat rebel cell runs Bochi’s Salvage and Repair as a front for distributing fake transport visas to people fleeing the Imperial occupation of their planet. The only human characters featured are the Imperials: everyone else is an alien. Trio of main characters: a twi’lek, a droid, and a vratix. (We will be throwing a bone to the boring assholes with the purse strings by having a basically-just-a-human alien as one of the leads, but she’ll be playing against typecasting: no one ever thinks about the twi’lek ex-dental assistants.)

Central to the plot is an attempt to smuggle an entire family of Force-sensitives onto an approaching cargo freighter while dodging the investigation of suspicious Imperial bureaucrats. While the family does escape, the film ends with the cell splitting up and going to ground, having lured the Imperial investigators into a trap with a jury-rigged spaceship engine. 

**

3. Set a few years pre-Phantom; two padawans mere weeks away from knighthood form an unlikely interspecies romance (let’s have some fun: a Caamasi and a…Sauvax). They are found out by a third party and reported to the Council, who puts the pressure on them to end the relationship quietly. Before they make their decision they are contacted by an anonymous figure, who reveals exactly how common these secret relationships are within the Order all the way up to the Council (If you ever wanted to know who Kit Fisto’s friend-with-benefits is, and whomst among us has not, this movie will provide you with answers.)

The pair are encouraged to go public with their story, serving as media figureheads and giving the whistleblower an opportunity to leak the data. The stranger frames this as part of their quest to reform the Order, believing it to be hypocritically focused on minor dogmas rather than actual institutional issues. The young lovers are persuaded, and decide to go to the media.

What follows is unfortunate, but predictable. The Order retaliates, using its considerable resources to bury the story and hide the leaks. The lovers are barred from knighthood, demoted to the Jedi Service Corps, and in an episode of spite that only Prequel Yoda could muster they are assigned to opposite sides of the galaxy.

But since I am a sucker for these sorts of things, we get a post-Endor epilogue where the two re-unite by coincidence / the Force; both of them respond to Luke’s call to any surviving Force adepts as he builds his academy. I want the audience bawling their god-damn eyes out over an elderly lobster-person.

**

4. A character drama centered on an impoverished alien family on the Outer Rim as they weigh handing over their daughter to a passing Jedi knight. The family’s culture practices a native Force tradition centered on community and relationship (and is thus diametrically opposed to the Jedi and their repressive monasticism), but younger generations (such as one of the child’s parents) are more and more aligning themselves with the greater galactic supraculture in the hopes of eventually getting Republic membership to aid their struggling economy (this does not work out well). Offering up a new Jedi would be a step towards the betterment of all, or so they believe - encouraged along by the knight in question, who clearly has a horse in this race.

The Clone Wars are on the horizon, and with them the implicit doom.

(I originally wrote this before The Acolyte came out; fuck the Jedi)

**

5. A war movie, all blood and guts and mud and wetwork. Rebel intelligence agents attempt to lock down an alliance with the inhabitants of a logistically-vital world, and find themselves dealing with alien partizans who have been fighting offworld incursions for generations and are none too happy to offer their support to the Republic’s government-in-exile. They’d fought the Hutts for centuries, and the Republic didn’t do shit for them. They’d fought against the CIS, failed, and then got invaded again by the Republic in retaliation. They’d fought against the Empire after the Republic fell. And now some liberal-ass core-worlders come along begging for help? Stuff it up your sphincter, Organa.

**

6. A ship smuggling antiquities for gray market resale inadvertently ends up with a Sith holocron in its inventory. One of the crew members is just Force-sensitive enough to activate it, which then leads to a whole lot of fucked up Sith ghosts haunting a spaceship. The crew is picked off one by one, as is tradition, as the survivors attempt to scuttle the ship (save the Force-sensitive, who tries to exorcize it). As the survivors launch the escape pod with moments to spare, they look out the viewport to see that there’s no explosion despite what they did to the engines. With no-one at the helm, the ship enters hyperspace.

**

7. An in-universe documentary about the New Republic’s war-crimes trials against Imperial officials. While the Herculean effort saw a good amount of success, the Empire was simply too big to bring its many millions to court; controversial amnesty declarations were granted to minor Imperial officials and bureaucrats, and eventually the Republic found itself unable to expend the resources needed to hunt down all those warlords who fled to the Outer Rim and Unknown Regions. That task was left to a panoply of paralegal and paramilitary groups, the most notable being the remnants of Wraith Squadron and other Rebellion-era units that merged into “Dumb Luck Division” under the command of Leia Organa.

**

8. The version of The Phantom Menace where they get Michelle Yeoh to play Qui-Gon and they do not waste her talent. And you know what, fuck it, Ahmed Best gets to be a Jedi. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are headed to Naboo to find out what happened to him. 

**

9. The version of The Force Awakens where the attack on Maz’s Cantina is interrupted by a Yuuzhan Vong worldship jumping out of hyperspace in high orbit, at which point we leave the rails far behind us. We do not need them where we’re going.

**

Well, there you have it. Part of what inspired all this is a conversation on A More Civilized Age, where the hosts digress for a bit about how Star Wars has consistently been disinterested in culture as a part of its world. The other part was rewatching The Force Awakens for the first time since 2016 and boy howdy did that movie not hold up. I am 100% serious that it should have been derailed by (a better version of) the Vong. 

 I really do go back to the well again and again for some of these topics, don't I?

MOSH: Environmental Scenario Design Framework

Via NASA

Planet generation is a topic I keep coming back to, trying to develop the perfect formula. This post has been percolating for well over a year at this point, long enough that I had actually forgotten the contents of my prior attempts (see here, here, here and here)

I have been fiddling around with this idea for a very long while now (I think this is a year+ draft?), and in doing so I have come to a revelation of sorts.

The revelation is this: In terms of making a functional component of a tabletop game, most planet generation tables are mostly useless.

They're certainly fun if you want to indulge your inner sci-fi writer for a while, and they are a useful tool in establishing the flavor and character of a location, but as a functional component of game prep? Not very useful.

(Stars Without Number's tag tables are of course very good - because they're about providing you with points of interaction.)

We can reduce all those tables of atmosphere and temperature and mass down to a binary: if you take off your helmet, either the planet kills you instantly or it doesn't.

If the planet is the sort that kills you instantly, your adventuring is either going to be inside a habitat or out in a suit. (For our purposes, gas giants and deep space are also included here.) If the planet is not the kind that kills you instantly, that's Basically Just Earth. This gives us three functional location-based adventure types:

• Habitat - An enclosed environment, ranging from the equivalent of a single building to that of a small country. There are nice thick walls and layers of safeguards between you and enough radiation to fry your progeny to the seventh generation.
• Out in a Suit - Outside of the habitat, you are both vulnerable to the elements and at significantly increased risk of finding yourself out of range of help or support.
• Basically Just Earth - You already know what this one is like, you live here. Basically Just Earth is not beholden to the clean kills you / does not kill you dichotomy. It can certainly still kill you, but not as fast as the others (usually).

I'm leading this all to the point that if we're going to be generating planets for Mothership, we should be generating them with a focus on one of these three adventure location roles.

Habitat

95% of the human population lives here, in the Iterative City and similar settlements. Monkeys in tin cans, in dome cities, in walled-off fragments of Earth.

Scale

1. Facility
2. Town
3. City
4. Metropole
5. Country

Type (Orbital)

1. Bernal Sphere - Rotating sphere.
2. O'Neill Cylinder - Rotating cylinder.
3. Stanford Torus - Rotating ring.
4. Beehive - Asteroid or iceteroid that has been burrowed into.
5. Tin Can - Little more than a pressurized can with thrusters and solar panels attached.
6. Gravity Balloon - A comparatively thin shell filled with enough atmosphere to keep it from collapsing in on itself.
7. Dyson Tree - An enormous, genetically modified plant fed on icy bodies and sustaining an enclosed atmosphere.
8. Freefall - Any type of large habitat with no spin-gravity components.
9. Decommissioned Ship - A spaceship that is no longer serviceable for interplanetary or interstellar travel, but can still serve as living space.
10. Modular - A collection of connected habitats, often of different types. Roll d3 for # of additional modules.
    

Type (Planetside)

1. Dome - The classic. Can't go wrong with a good dome.
2. Burrow - Underground is sometimes the safest place to be.
3. Lava Tube - Saves on digging costs.
4. Aerostat - Suspended in a dense atmosphere.
5. Hydrostat - Suspended on or underneath liquid.
6. Worldhouse - A crater or canyon is domed over, sealed, and terraformed in-miniature; kin to an enormous greenhouse.

Habitats will always be accompanied by some manner of support infrastructure (power generation, resource extraction and reclamation, food production, etc), though self-sufficiency is not a given and many habitats could be easily crippled or killed outright if cut off from the necessary imports,

The biggest hazard in a habitat is the enclosed environment.

• Your options for escaping or avoiding the threat are limited.
• You will be in close quarters with other people (if other people are present).
• You are more likely to be in a surveilled environment.
• Instant or near-instant death lurks on the other side of the wall.

Out in a Suit

Going out in a suit means that your number one priority is getting back to somewhere you can take the suit off. No one wants to go out in a suit, but sometimes circumstances will force your hand.

Why Are You Out In A Suit?

1) You need to travel between habitats.
2) External equipment needs repair or maintenance.
3) You are trying to reach a location.
4) You are trying to find a person.
5) You are investigating an event.

Environmental Hazards

The Rimspace Planet Generator from the Hull Breach folks has us covered here, and I'll be copying their tables mostly wholesale. I've added a fourth table for radiation and magnetic field just to even the horrible space dangers out, and I've added mechanical bits where the original tables implied them.

Temperature

1. Frigid - Extreme thermal protection required
2. Cold - Thermal protection required
3. Temperate - You don't need any special protection from the temperature
4. Hot - Thermal protection required
5. Burning - Extreme thermal protection required

Gravity

1. Minimal - 0-G training required
2. Low - Move with caution
3. Standard - You don't need any special adaptation to the gravity
4. High - Habituation required
5. Crushing - Strength training or exoskeleton required

Atmosphere

1. Negligible - Pressure suit required
2. Thin - Hazard suit recommended
   
3. Moderate - You don't need any special protection against pressure
4. Thick - Extreme winds and precipitation; Hazard suit recommended
   
5. Dense - Pressure suit required

Thin / Moderate / Thick could all technically be breathable, but that's for Basically Just Earth.

Rads & Mags

1. Extreme radiation - Surface exploration lethal
2. High radiation - Hazard suit required
3. Tolerable - You don't need any special protection
4. High magnetism - High electromagnetic interference
5. Extreme magnetism - Wireless devices useless

The biggest hazards while Out in a Suit is running out of resources

• Air supply will be limited
• Suit integrity is critical to your safety.
• Communication is more likely to be unreliable.
• You are more likely to be far away from help.

Basically Just Earth

You will neither freeze nor fry instantly here, and neither the gravity nor the atmosphere will crush you flat. It might not look like Earth, but the fact that you can stand there and say "It doesn't look much like Earth" is a miracle. This doesn't mean that the environment is safe, only that it will not immediately kill you. It is functionally Basically Just Earth, which means you might still need specialized survival equipment, genetic modification, or something else of that nature.

Basically Just Earth has the widest array of hazards to choose from, to the point where you can choose what you like from the lists above and elsewhere. But the biggest ones will be:

• Availability of open space means its easier to find yourself isolated.
• Earthlike worlds can support more factions (and faction conflicts)
• Spaceship escapes are a lot less practical
• We all know you want to put weird aliens here, go right on ahead.

 

Final Thoughts

So there you have it. Not particularly complex, but I think it's a good framework to bolt additional complexity on top of. MoSh works best when it is scenario-focused, so sketching the boundaries that will shape a scenario is the obvious first step.

Hopefully clearing this article (which had been sitting at like, 90% done for that year+) will get the others flowing along to completion. Damn my perfectionism - when it flares up, it flares up bad.

Bookpost 17

Previous installments found here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 , 7, 8, 9, 10 , 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

Story of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang

A solid collection overall. Some weak ones, but mostly good. Tower of Babylon is an absolute banger and I am surprised that they chose Story of Your Life for the movie adaptation over it. Seventy-Two Names is my favorite and the one problem with it is that it is a short story and not a novel, because it is paced like a novel and I want more of this bizarro “what if outmoded Victorian scientific theories were actually true and also practical Kabbalah is involved”. Hell is the Absence of God really manages to hone in on the horror of the total arbitrariness of miracles. The only one that really flopped for me was the one about the guy who suddenly became superhumanly smart, that one was pretty dull except for the part where he invents not-Ithkuil.

 

Flatland, Edwin A. Abbot

When reading a suitably old book, you’re bound to run into some yikes moments. Flatland hits well above its weight class by delivered with some truly brutal satire that, as an anomaly in the genre, still works well over a century later. Our narrator the square does indeed praise the virtues of his iron-fisted eugenecist caste-system theofascist state with all the sexism, classism, and undifferentiated blind cruelty one would expect from a Victorian gentleman…and the book’s entire point is how he and the society he lives in are blind to greater reality and all of their oppression and repression is based on shit that doesn’t matter one bit in the grand scheme of things. It’s a short book, so saying more will dilute the effect, but I definitely recommend it. Easy read. Certainly telling that it was by book of choice while on 8-hour layover in Philly.

 

The Madman, Kahlil Gibran

This is a book that I do not have the ability, currently, to adequately describe in a shotgun review. I enjoyed it, it’s public domain, it’s 40-odd pages of prose-poetry, go read it.

 

The Northern Caves, nostagabraist

A wild bit of web fiction: a small cadre of nerds in the early 00s attempt to decipher the incomprehensible mysteries of a children’s fantasy series of questionable quality. Not an actual children’s fantasy series of questionable quality, a fictional one that contains some traits of extant children’s fantasy of questionable quality but is entirely its own thing.

Anyway, this contains both an incredibly accurate depiction of early 00s forums as well as one of the best examples of characters gaining Insight this side of Bloodborne. I recommend it if you want something with a very specific vision of weirdness that manages to deliver on it, though be warned that the ebook version I download borked the forum post interstitial chapters and didn’t display everything correctly.

The Book of Japanese Folklore, Thersa Matsuura

The Uncanny Japan podcast in book form. Definitely geared for a younger / more general audience, so it’s not a perfect fit for me personally, but the art is nice and it’s a breezy read. Good gift material.

The Complete Poems of Enheduana, the World’s First Author, trans. Sophus Helle

Last year, I read a terrible book about the writings of Enheduana and wrote at length about how bad it was. This book is the polar opposite of that one, and I couldn’t be happier with it. 

The translation is snappy and an easy read, and Helle does a very striking bit of design by limiting the lines to how they appear in the tablets: the lines are all in a narrow column, with about 2/3rds of a page left blank. Missing lines are represented with a row of asterisks (one of the poems is almost entirely dots because of this). 

This is all accompanied by a very thorough exploration of the historical context of Enheduana herself, the Babylonians who inherited her texts and used them as part of their classics curriculum, and how those texts were re-discovered in the 20th century. Every time there is a blank spot where we simply don’t have enough data, Helle will present the possibilities but never settle on one as definitive (an extremely welcome attribute). There are footnotes and endnotes galore, most of which are illuminated and several of which are very funny (To paraphrase some of the highlights -“We can translate this line but can’t figure out what it means, it’s probably a pun”; “This is probably a dick joke”; and “This is definitely a dick joke.”

 

Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin

DNF 40/301

A book of feminist science fiction about linguistics, which has the unfortunate timing of being written in 1984 and thus aged like milk in the sun on all three accounts. This is on top of just stodgy, clunky prose, minimal plot, briefest whiffs of characterization, and no real care for the setting beyond what is necessary to justify the bunk linguistics (hard Sapir-Worf is apparently the only linguistics thing sci-fi authors have ever heard of, which is baffling in Elgin’s case because she was apparently an actual linguist. Come on, you’ve studied Navajo and you can’t think of anything better than “your language determines what thoughts you have”?)

The only reason this series is remembered is because there is a conlang attached, which is the only reason I picked it up. The conlang does not, in fact, actually occur in the book, despite the book being mostly about its creation and about how impossibly miraculous it is for someone to make up new words to describe concepts that don’t have dedicated terms (please note the sarcasm: this is the process that all languages are doing all the time, forever.)

 

House of Rust, Khadija Abdalla Bajaber

DNF 18/252

There is something about the prose in this one that just doesn’t work for me. It’s dense and obtuse, but not in a way that invites engagement. Weird tense shifts, pronouns with unclear antecedents, and other assorted rocky writing methods made it difficult from jump.

Burning Roses, S.L. Huang

A novella that is very well written and has some great character work about guilt, forgiveness, and generational trauma, which then undermines all of that in the last 20 pages by committing the cardinal sin of mixing “story about wrestling with familial drama” with “this guy committed some fucking war crimes”. This keeps happening, and I would like it to stop. But sure. Reward them with peaches of immortality because mother and son have forgiven each other and come to terms with their mutual failings. I’m sure the charred corpses of the hundreds of people killed by the giant magical firebirds will take great solace in the afterlife knowing that the little shit who gave the order finally got over his issues with his mother. Sure. Fucking wonderful. Fucking redemption arcs, not even once. Forgiveness is not a gatcha machine you can just put tokens in until you win the prize you want.

A Court of Thorns and Roses (+sequels), Sarah J. Maas

Didn’t actually read these, but my partner has been listening to the audiobooks and telling me about them. Everything I have is second hand summaries of the first 5 books. 

It’s kinda like observing antimatter from a safe distance, or an encounter with a logic wholly alien and orthogonal to the one I know.

I don’t know how my partner puts up with my constant “this all sounds miserable, why do they not simply destroy the aristocracy, when does the plot about destroying the aristocracy happen, why has no one hit Tamlin in the head with a heavy object, so is there an actual government with like, roads and taxes or something, would it be possible to just invent a gun, what do you mean they can’t do a C-section they have resurrected the dead twice” and so on. 

The one actually meaningful critique thing I can say is “fated mates and weird age gaps and magical bloodlines and the weird and kinda dehumanizing insistence on using male/female instead of man/woman make me want to crawl out of my skin and flee the premises, what the fuck.”

 Also I don’t understand how a series that keeps bringing up fantasy politics consistently doesn’t seem to care one bit about fantasy politics. (Actually, I do understand this: Maas is not a political materialist; the fantasy politics she writes about are not beholden to the logistical calculus of the flows of food, information, transit and violence.)

Gyo, Junji Ito

It’s Junji Ito; you’re going to get gross shit, horrible, absurd things happening, and a steady escalation in terrible horrible no good very bad shit. I sat down and binged it in a single day, and while I don’t like it as much as Uzumaki, it was effective with the creepiness and the grossout factor. Unfortunately the characters are paper-thin, which means that it is also pretty dang misogynist out of genre convention. It’s rough. I was hooked by “how is this going to escalate”, but if that’s not enough to keep you going, you’re probably not going to have a great time. 

Golden Kamuy, Satoru Noda

LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Primo combination of Things I Love to See. Certified freaks: check. Dudes getting in over-the-top fights: check. In-depth asides about anthropology: there’s a fucking works cited at the back of every volume we are checked and ready for launch. By volume six we have seen at least three dudes get absolutely wrecked by bears. 

Sugimoto gets a surprising amount of surprisingly subtle characterization as a young man aged beyond his years by trauma, and that’s something you don’t see often in this conceptual space - especially not with as light a touch as you get here. And major props for nimbly dodging the magical indigenous person trope - Noda’s research into Ainu culture really shows, because he will take every opportunity he can to go “here is how the Ainu live in their environment and how their culture is materially informed by that environment.”

Blog Carnival: Code Talking

This month’s Blog Carnival prompt is language, which means it may as well be pandering directly to me. I still ended up wasting the entire month hemming and hawing over what to do - dreaming up conlang plans because why not add more to my already enormous backlog - but thankfully I finally realized that I could just do the sensible thing and write about something I have actually used in an actual game.

**

Back in the Delta Green campaign I ran last fall, one of the sessions included a puzzle that used the Navajo code talker cipher as its central component. It went like this:

The players found a scrap of paper with some code words scribbled on it by a dead agent, a SIGINT check identified it as pulled from the code talker lexicon, and I provided the translations as if they had the booklet with them. When converted into English and then converted out of the alphabetic cipher, the string of end result was

S-L-P-Y-T-M-N-N APRIL

which after a couple minutes of puzzling out, they decoded as pointing them towards the Sleepy Time Inn on the other side of town, Room 4. Key in hand and the next breadcrumb in sight, the players went off to the next stage of the investigation. I had several players comment after the session that they really enjoyed the puzzle and felt it was just the right amount of complexity and difficulty.

That is practically the holy grail of rpgs. Naturally, I’ve been cooking up how to use it in the future.

The first and most obvious improvement is to just print it out and hand it to the players (minus the vintage racism and with better formatting) when they open up Clyde Baughman’s footlocker (or other similar green box) and just let them hold onto it as a resource for whenever coded phrases show up later in the game. This is basically the same principle as the Field Guide to Hot Springs Island, though much more compact.

Second step is to make more complex messages - a basic alphabetic one works well as an introduction, but the code was a lot bigger than that and by virtue of it being a military code the wordlist covers most most player-character actions right from go - tracking enemy movements, describing field conditions, commands to attack and retrieve and secure and so on. Beyond that it can be easily modified or used in novel ways: months for numbers, using the alphabet cipher for code names (ex: if I wanted to describe a ghoul I would probably use CHINDI LACHAEH, which would translate literally here as DEVIL DOG but also as the letter sequence DD) , mixing the alphabet cipher with other words (ex: the term used for “when” would be rendered in English as “weasel hen”), and so on.

The major caveat here is that using the code as-is really only works for games that take place in our-world-but-different - something where you can take advantage of its existence as a historical artifact. Finding it in a green box can open up an entire implied plot of marines coming back from the Pacific Theater having seen some things they shouldn’t have and continuing to use the code in secret, passing around booklets during the Cowboy Years as a quick and dirty way of securing messages - all that would be lost in a world not our own. In those cases I’d still say that it’s a great model to use with a word generator and a bit of elbow grease - that approach can be easily tweaked to the setting in question, and you can indulge your conlang compulsions without having to do anything with grammar or bogging down players without having to learn the words for utensils or whatever.

(It should go without saying that while the code uses Navajo, the booklet was not meant to teach anything about the language or how it works  - any pronunciation you’re going to attempt will bear only minimal resemblance to how it actually sounds and there won't be anything of Navajo's beautifully complex grammar.)

I don’t have a particularly good conclusion for this post - out of practice, I suppose - so I’ll wrap up by saying that this was one of the highlights of that campaign (I really should share my notes, shouldn’t I?), especially for something that took very little effort on my end. Goes to show you that a bit of verisimilitude in the right place can go a long way.

Dan Plays Video Games, Part 4

 Previous episodes: 1, 2, 3

Black Mesa

Some games are just perfect. Not flawless, that's a different thing. Black Mesa has flaws, but it is perfect.

Darkest Dungeon 2

The change in genre basically fixed all the issues I had with the first game. Now that I can just lose, cash in my candles, and try again fresh, I am freed from the over-cautious and risk-averse playstyle that marred my time with DD1. When you lose a run in DD2, you lose a lot less investment in a character (since nearly all bonuses are permanent unlocks), which means trying out novel team comps is much easier to justify. The style is, as before, peak. Mod support is coming soon. Very glad I took the shot with this one, it’s been a blast so far.

Coromon

A Pokemon-like that plays it safer than Cassette Beasts, to its detriment. While it has loads of quality-of-life features (including customizable difficulty!) to spruce up the Gen 3/4 thing they have going on, it’s too grindy for my tastes, especially with no way to rematch trainers. Which de-incentivises trying out new team comps, and usually involves a lot of repetitive random battles before a boss. Monster designs are solid, the cosmetics and daily challenges are generally unobtrusive (and also not tied to real money), but it lacks the spark that made Cassette Beasts really pop both in terms of gameplay and personality.

Civilization 6

I haven’t played since 4, and have been enjoying it. There are frustrations to be had - mostly with how fucking long it takes to build anything, which makes fighting wars pointless but I never aim for conquest victory anyway. I am playing as the Cree and going for science victory and it’s still got the juice. Second run through I will add mods and then the fun begins. I like the build-your-own religion thing they have going, definitely want to get the expansions for that.

Shadow of the Erdtree

Once I figured out that each level of Scadutree Blessing was worth +5% damage dealt and -5% damage taken, it all made a lot more sense and I went from “ yeah this is pretty damn hard” to “ha ha my preferred playstyle of ignoring bosses and just exploring the map is going in my favor!”  Overall, I had a great time with it. The map is a highlight, containing all that wonderful density (and gorgeous views) of the early stages of the base game. It’s got the good weirdness, some great bosses and NPCS, and had me very pleased throughout. A bit of jolly cooperation helped take down the more troublesome bosses, because I beat Fume Knight solo and I am never doing that shit again. Some of the new lore was neat, though overall the expansion felt like it was a bit light in that department - I suppose I just need to keep digging through my big text file of item descriptions. Total lack of Gloam-Eyed Queen content was a disappointment.

My big issue is the final boss, which I think is terrible from both a design and a lore standpoint. I can see the logic behind it, and I can even buy that this was set up previously and not a total asspull. Doesn’t mean I think it’s narratively satisfying. We all know who it should have been, but instead of delivering on a major plot thread we ended up with George R R Martin writing about god-damned incest again.

Can we not, George? Can you be normal for five minutes?

Void Stranger

I have barely scratched the surface of this game, and it promises a lot more than the superficially simple puzzles would indicate. I just need to find a breakthrough.

Quester

A simple dungeon-crawler set in post-apocalyptic city-ruins. 90s-ass anime character design. Looks sounds and feels like a low-budget gem for the DS. Lets you fall into a nice comfortable pattern of make some progress, go back to base, repeat. Doesn’t ask much of you, which is good because it was my cool down from two solid months of Elden Ring.

Baldur’s Gate 3

BG3 has made something abundantly clear: I didn’t actually want to play BG3. I wanted to play Disco Elysium or XCOM again. I’m 8 hours in and already it is feeling like a tedious, miserable slog, even on the lowest difficulty that straight up doubles our health. I sure hope the official mod support will work on Steam Deck, because that’s the platform I’m stuck playing it on and trying to install normal mods is too many steps.

It would be a mostly enjoyable game if it wasn’t 5e. It’d be great if it wasn’t 5e. But it’s 5e and no, translating it to a video game doesn’t make it feel any better to play. Failed rolls in conversations don’t do anything interesting or entertaining, combat is a clunky, sludgy mess. The UI is a pain to navigate on deck, there are too many options, I rarely get dialogue options that I actually want to use, the character customization options are so lackluster that I am baffled they even included customization in the first place.

(Pathfinder 2 moving to an action point system was the best move they could have made: I cannot fucking stand how many wasted actions are in your typical combat.)

The party members are by and large unpleasant and occasionally irredeemable jackasses, only balancing out after several hours. Karlach is the best (no points for guessing that she would be my favorite, I am nothing if not predictable). Gale is cool, Wynn is boring but he gets bumped up several tiers in comparison to Shadowheart’s pointless tsundere hostility, Lae’zel the space fascist, and Astarion the king of rancid vibes.

(After his first big shitheel incident, I kept him alive because he has a +8 to lockpicking. Now that I can get hirelings, the next time he tries anything he’s getting a warhammer to the noggin. That shit don’t fly with me normally, let alone when playing a goody-two-shoes paladin.)

The character writing is extremely formulaic; everyone has this big tragic secret they’ll hint at but won’t say outright, and by the fifth or sixth time it was getting extremely tiresome. (Karlach once again being the best by default because she just tells you what her deal is and is, you know, open and friendly about shit in general.)

So all in all, it is a deeply frustrating game that I want to like, and that I can see the good parts within - but god damn, I wanted fantasy XCOM with a dating sim attached and this ain’t it, chief. I guess that’s on me. I thought it would be something it clearly is not.

(If you do know of a good fantasy XCOM with or without a dating sim attached, do let me know. Tactical Breach Wizards is already on my radar.)