jadagul - Tumblr blog

[jadagul]

It feels like being sick gets rougher on me as I get older.

And on the one hand that's an incredibly mundane "no-shit" sort of observation.

And on the other hand it keeps surprising me. I don't remember colds being unpleasant or making me tired!

[jadagul]

I feel like you're re-inventing attention checks for Mechanical Turk.

Everything is Lizardman

Did you know that people who believe in Lizardman are likely to be taller, more likely to be transgender, to have a low IQ, to eat ice cream for breakfast, to be convicted felons, and to watch Matlock reruns?

I made that all up.

But I do believe it's true.

Well, I don't.

I believe it's a measurable effect.

The Lizardman effect is probably multicausal: malicious responders, bad reading comprehension, tiredness causing your finger to slip, insane people who believe in Lizardman.

But think about it. What kind of person "doesn't know" what Coca-Cola is? What kind of person is 7 feet tall, transgender, born in 1931, and a veteran of the Iraq War? It's the kind of person who believes in Lizardman, or maybe it even is Lizardman.

You could just throw out all the responses that say Lizardman is real. Maybe that's not the best approach. What if you try to control for Lizardman? You can look at all the correlations between Lizardman and other variables, and all the correlations between two other variables among Lizardman responders. Maybe there's a pattern.

[jadagul]

I thought Heinlein in Time Enough for Love demonstrated some admirable self-awareness about this. His self-insert actually says "yeah, I'm in favor of bisexuality in theory but I grew up on Earth in the 30s and I grew up being taught to be straight so I'm kinda stuck that way.

And then the entire book proceeds to pretty much only be horny about male-female pairings, and by god is it horny about those. We don't see any bisexuality really, although it's extremely explicitly canon that people are being bi all over the place off-camera. (There's a couple who agree to hook up before being aware of each other's gender, and then one expresses pleasant surprise that it turned out to be a het pairing.)

But honestly when the author comes out and says "Yeah I'm all in favor of gay stuff but I personally just can't get into it, sorry about that" I have trouble, like, holding that against him? (Especially when this was in the 70s.)

Iain M Banks: What is a weapon? What does it mean to use a weapon? Can a person be a weapon? Is there a difference between using a weapon and being a weapon? Is this difference meaningful? What kind of person would choose to be a weapon?

Also Iain M Banks: Here's a sapient starship with a scat fetish.

[jadagul]

the real stick in the eye is that this game was not only reviewed well, it was reviewed glowingly when it came out. which is bizarre to me!

Huh, I'm prepared to be wrong but my memory was that everyone was mad about it!

(Maybe it was just the grognards I was interacting with at the time.)

i fired up civ 5 recently bc i wanted to see how it compared to my memory of it, and if anything it's actually much, much worse.

one unit per tile just... does not work with the idiom of the civilization series! units are not like armies in a GSG, they're like units in an RTS game: grist for the meatgrinder. you build them and throw them at your enemy and if they lose combat, they die. they don't retreat and recover morale, you don't get a chance to reposition and try again, they just go poof. but now in addition to that, you can only fit one unit of a type on a given tile, which means combat is forcibly spread out over a huge space. it's slow, slowed down further by the fact that it now takes a couple turns to fully resolve a fight--i guess the idea is that you can have your injured units fall back, except because of the way units get blocked in now, no you can't!--but you still need tons of units to take cities.

which means they didn't get rid of doomstacks. doomstacks are still logistically necessary to win wars! they just made them really fucking annoying to move around the map.

and on top of that, because OUPT applies to all units, it means you are also constantly having your scouts and workers and other civilian units being blocked in by your own units of the same type, or other players' units of the same type, meaning if you sign an open borders treaty with the AI you are frequently signing up to having your own units' movement being jammed up in the worst way by computer players. and on top of all THAT the units cancel their movement orders if the destination tile is blocked, even if the destination tile is on the other side of the map and you can't see it--which means, basically, any long-distance movement order is liable to be randomly canceled if an AI unit ends its turn on your destination tile.

it feels janky at every single level. the worst possible fix to something that wasn't even really a problem--and if they really wanted to they could have implemented some kind of very basic attrition mechanic. or some other kind of soft cap.

and and and on top of all that, it makes roads and railroads substantially less useful, bc frequently you cannot actually fit all your guys on one road or railroad--but you can't just carpet your territory in roads now like you used to do, because roads cost maintenance per turn. just. ugh. fractally bad decisionmaking! like different people were working at different ends of the design doc and not communicating at all!

the global happiness system means expansion is soft capped early in the game, which makes it feel less like an empire management game than a game of managing four to five cities. since very many units are now hard capped by resource availability now, and expansion is limited, AFAICT in most normal games this means you get like.. two swordsmen? ever? mainly it's strong attack units that are capped in this way, but their defensive counters are uncapped, which means actually playing strategically with your army composition is more annoyance than it's worth. in practice, what this incentives is just building the best trash unit you can afford en masse and throwing them at the enemy, but, of course, see the problems with OUPT.

they took out civics and replaced them with Social Policy trees. but everybody has the same set of social policy trees. and there's a bit of a tradeoff here in which trees you choose to fill out first, but you never then switch those old trees out for new ones like civics. they're just permanent bonuses. so there's no sense of, like, choosing your government type.

and then in BNW i guess they realized people missed that, and created Ideologies, which are just a bonus extra-big social policy tree where you get to pick between liberal democracy, communism, and fascism. but of course there's only three. and this isn't unlocked until the late game.

what they really should have done is added more civics and rather than just having you progress from early game civics to late game civics made all civics contextually useful. and maybe given you some extra civics that were unlocked early in the game so you could strategize around them.

as a part of this change culture is now more load-bearing, but cultural victory is just... weird and stupidly complicated. you have to build tourism, and do archeology, and build wonders that provide slots for great works that your three different kinds of great artist create, and all this other crap. versus domination, where you just conquer the other guys. or science, where you just build your spaceship. it's dumb and bad and awkward.

there's no conquest victory now. only domination. but because of the way domination works, it's now not possible to move your capital manually. this is awful and i hate it! let me move my capital, damn it!

buildings no longer go obsolete, which means that if i am founding a city in the year 1973, i still need to build a City Walls in it before i can build a Military Base. this feels ridiculous. and the series already kinda has this problem where it feels like late game it takes forever to get a city really up and running--don't make it even worse by making me build shit from classical antiquity before i can build modern facilities!

the AI is not very bright. they don't expand very much. on big maps, most of the map will remain empty most of the game, at least up through mid-level difficulties i usually play at (that are supposed to be "standard", so I assume the game is balanced around them)

diplomacy is irritatingly primitive. there are few ongoing agreements. declarations of friendship all last a fixed amount of time. the AI is constantly interrupting you to tell you it doesn't like you or it does like you or you and another AI player all like each other. just expose an opinion modifier and be done with it! harun al-rashid and i don't need to pass notes like it's grade school!

they nerfed the range of air units and especially nukes. which feels really weird. the 20th century saw the invention of strategic bombers that had a range of thousands of miles. why can mine only reach cities right next to my own? why do my nuclear missiles have a pathetic range? sure, sub-launched nukes are a thing, but they're only one part of a proper nuclear triad. there's no MAD anymore!

especially because the world congress can order you to stop building nukes and there's nothing you can do about it. you can't defy world congress bans and suffer a penalty. international law has some kind of magical force that even if you are the undisputed hegemon you cannot help but obey. this is very stupid! especially because they could not think of anything interesting for the world congress to do, so it's all shit like banning random luxury goods.

all the stuff i do like--the city-states, the hex grid, the core idea of the trade route system--is swallowed by annoying bullshit. to take the trade route example: you can make money by setting up trade routes. it can be quite lucrative! and you have to protect your trade routes from bandits and shit. but the menu for issuing trade route orders is a mess--way too much scrolling, you can't sort by lucrativeness of destinations, you have to constantly re-issue trade route orders, and the last trade route a unit was on isn't highlighted, or sorted to the top or anything like that. so it's lots of scrolling around, it's very annoying, and it's repetitive as hell.

the real stick in the eye is that this game was not only reviewed well, it was reviewed glowingly when it came out. which is bizarre to me! yes, it looks nice. the art is good and the music is pretty. but it feels awful to play! it is on almost every single metric less fun than civ 4! civ 3 is more fun, and civ 3 was terrible. i hope to god firaxis was bribing people left and right for good reviews because the only alternative explanation i can think of is that everybody who was reviewing strategy games in 2010 was also in the grip of a brutal glue-sniffing habit.

[jadagul]

Now, I do understand that that "that that" that post complained about was upsetting to people.

But personally, I think that that "that that 'that that' that" that that "that that" post inspired was woefully insufficient.

Rather, I think that that "that that 'that that' that" that that poster posted should have been "that that 'that that' that that" instead.

[jadagul]

The choir-brained part of me is surprised by the idea that you might only know songs in one language.

If you count remembering a single verse or chorus, I know songs or other vocal music in: English, Latin, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Sanskrit; and at various points I've also sung in Russian and Tamil, and probably some others I'm forgetting.

Submitted by @sky-the-snail-fanatic

[jadagul]

"No enemies to the left" is a bad political principle.

"No friends to the right" is much worse.

[jadagul]

I realize this isn't entirely fair of me, but I always get annoyed when I tell someone I'll respond to their email "tonight" and I get an email at like 1:30 AM saying "hey, I haven't gotten a response yet!"

Chill out, there's like three more hours left before I go to bed.

[jadagul]

Hm, this is a good post but I think at least for me it's totally wrong.

Specifically, I don't think you can factor the "queer" out of the phrase like that. "Magical sun siren" would have been twee and a bit cringe but also maybe cute and I'd have read further. "Magical queer sun siren" was an instant no for me; I think the "queer" recontextualizes all the other stuff and makes it much more red-flag-y for me.

Excerpts from dating profiles I swiped left on:

"If you're a white man who's lucky enough to match with me, make sure to bring offerings".

"I heal my ancestral trauma by dominating white men and making them do things that improve the environment."

(These were two different profiles, seen within the space of a day or two.)

[jadagul]

"I'm a magical queer sun siren."

Excerpts from dating profiles I swiped left on:

"If you're a white man who's lucky enough to match with me, make sure to bring offerings".

"I heal my ancestral trauma by dominating white men and making them do things that improve the environment."

(These were two different profiles, seen within the space of a day or two.)

[jadagul]

That's not Civ 2; that's Test of Time. Totally* different game!

Actual Civ 2 doesn't run on modern Windows, because it's 16-bit, and 64-bit Windows just flat-out refuses to run 16-bit software.

But I have gotten to run mostly-fine in WINE.

i would enjoy the civ series a lot more if it didn't have, like, a paper-thin pseudo-historical skin on it. i guess i'm no fun, but george washington fighting the aztecs doesn't feel like a game about history. it feels like weird nonsense mad libs.

the crazy thing is that SMAC showed a reskin of the basic civ concept was a terrific delivery mechanism for lore and a fun new setting. not just far-future science fiction either. you could do something with fantasy like Lords of Magic, or a postapocalyptic setting, or a more focused historical setting. but the cartoony theme park version of world history just doesn't engage me in the same way.

i think this is also why i find the civ scenarios a lot of fun. they're much more focused and structured in terms of narrative. they scratch that 4X gameplay itch without ripping all the signifiers from their historical context in a way that leaves them meaningless and empty.

[jadagul]

Oh yeah, I can't really talk informedly about modern Civ. I may well have ten thousand hours between Civ 1 and Civ 2, but I played Civ 3 like twice and couldn't get into it because it was Wrong. I did the same thing with Civ 4, though I think it might be...better?

Part of my problem though is that they, as you say, added production values and epicycles etc. Civ 2 is a streamlined enough engine that you could imagine stepping through an entire turn by hand. (And like, I've basically done that. When I'm reallocating production in a city I'm generally calculating out what the effects are gonna be before I change stuff.)

Civ 4 has too much stuff going on. And like if I knew the system better I'd know more of the stuff, but I don't think it's supposed to be possible to calculate everything by hand.

But I do have the thousands of hours in Civ 1 and 2. And when people talk about "Civilization", I'm always going to think of this:

Or maybe this if we're being fancy and moden:

i would enjoy the civ series a lot more if it didn't have, like, a paper-thin pseudo-historical skin on it. i guess i'm no fun, but george washington fighting the aztecs doesn't feel like a game about history. it feels like weird nonsense mad libs.

the crazy thing is that SMAC showed a reskin of the basic civ concept was a terrific delivery mechanism for lore and a fun new setting. not just far-future science fiction either. you could do something with fantasy like Lords of Magic, or a postapocalyptic setting, or a more focused historical setting. but the cartoony theme park version of world history just doesn't engage me in the same way.

i think this is also why i find the civ scenarios a lot of fun. they're much more focused and structured in terms of narrative. they scratch that 4X gameplay itch without ripping all the signifiers from their historical context in a way that leaves them meaningless and empty.

[jadagul]

Oh, sure, the Paradox games are much more historically informed and informative. They also didn't start coming out until 2000. I was playing Civilization in 1992. And neither Europa Universalis nor Age of Empires exists without Civilization coming first.

And obviously it's not trying to model, like, the way specific historical civilizations interacted in specific history. (As you say, George Washington can lead his army of chariots against the Aztecs. Or the Romans.) But it does a surprisingly good job at a bunch of very-broad sweep of history stuff, in the basic shape of what pieces showed up when. (I remember asking my mom why magnetism got you better boats, and she was like, if you read the historical essay that shows up with the technology you might find out. And I did!)

And this isn't, like, what you need to know about history. But a couple pieces, like the tech tree, gave me a birds-eye orientation that other stuff could slot into productively.

---

As a side note, I have mixed feelings about the "lumping" complaints, at least in early iterations. Civ 1 had fourteen civilizations available. Grouping them into loose categories, we have

Early "western civ": Romans, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks

Modern Europe: Russians, Germans, French, English

Asia: Chinese, Indians, Mongols

Africa: Zulus

New World: Aztecs (early), Americans (modern).

So like, yes, Europe is super overrepresented relative to, like, total populations. It's a collection of "civilizations that random Americans in 1991 might recognize and/or feel some connection to", with a clear intention toward representation: they have at least one from every continent, e.g., but it's weighted toward the Western Civ syllabus.

But when the game was made I bet they didn't even really expect to sell it outside the United States; remember that it was utterly unlike anything that had come before. (Apparently it was the first computer game that really kept selling longer than a year?)

i would enjoy the civ series a lot more if it didn't have, like, a paper-thin pseudo-historical skin on it. i guess i'm no fun, but george washington fighting the aztecs doesn't feel like a game about history. it feels like weird nonsense mad libs.

the crazy thing is that SMAC showed a reskin of the basic civ concept was a terrific delivery mechanism for lore and a fun new setting. not just far-future science fiction either. you could do something with fantasy like Lords of Magic, or a postapocalyptic setting, or a more focused historical setting. but the cartoony theme park version of world history just doesn't engage me in the same way.

i think this is also why i find the civ scenarios a lot of fun. they're much more focused and structured in terms of narrative. they scratch that 4X gameplay itch without ripping all the signifiers from their historical context in a way that leaves them meaningless and empty.

[jadagul]

Clearly you should look at Master of Magic and Master of Orion, except no you shouldn't, they're thirty years old and feel like it.

More to the point, this is never a feeling I had but I kind of learned history from playing Civilization. (The original one. Rome on 640k a day. When you loaded it from the DOS prompt, it asked you to press 1 if you had a mouse and 2 if you didn't.)

My dad got it for Christmas when I was five and it took me three months to convince my parents to let me play it. I basically learned to read on that thing. So when I think about how historical events relate, I still have a mental image of the civ tech tree in my head.

But you're not wrong. It doesn't function at all like real history did.

i would enjoy the civ series a lot more if it didn't have, like, a paper-thin pseudo-historical skin on it. i guess i'm no fun, but george washington fighting the aztecs doesn't feel like a game about history. it feels like weird nonsense mad libs.

the crazy thing is that SMAC showed a reskin of the basic civ concept was a terrific delivery mechanism for lore and a fun new setting. not just far-future science fiction either. you could do something with fantasy like Lords of Magic, or a postapocalyptic setting, or a more focused historical setting. but the cartoony theme park version of world history just doesn't engage me in the same way.

i think this is also why i find the civ scenarios a lot of fun. they're much more focused and structured in terms of narrative. they scratch that 4X gameplay itch without ripping all the signifiers from their historical context in a way that leaves them meaningless and empty.

[jadagul]

I feel like in a literal sense the answer might be "patriarchy".

Is there a term that covers the idea of a political economy where instead of the lowest rung of baronial hierarchy, power is devolved onto, like, independent smallhold farmers and (in modern times) small business owners/landed and property-owning patriarchs, who run their personal domains as a kind of despotism? This encompasses both the (idealized) phase of westward expansion in American history and, like, Commonwealth Iceland. It is often, but not always, associated with agrarian societies--the modern equivalent of this idea associates it more with like car dealerships than forty acres and a mule. But it's not egalitarian: it comfortably coexists with forms of social hierarchy, including extreme ones like slavery.

You know the thing? Is there a word for that?

[jadagul]

i hate that "that that" is grammatically correct. why is english the joke language

[jadagul]

I had been thinking that in response to the original prompt, because it's an interesting difference, right? Modern religions often focus on orthodoxy, believing the right things; but ancient polytheisms didn't care about that. They cared about orthopraxy, which is doing the right things.

Ancient polytheistic religions were fairly functional and transactional. They didn't spend much if any time thinking about "belief"; at least in the Mediterranean, atheism basically didn't exist, and the closest you got was believing the gods didn't care about you. (Bret Devereaux writes about this, and other differences between D&D religion and real historical polytheisms, here.)

Cultures do ritual sacrifice because "it works". (Yes, it doesn't "work" in reality, but it "works" in the sense that the cultures are performing these sacrifices and surviving, therefore the sacrifices are at least compatible with surviving as a culture.) And that comes before the theory, honestly; but the purpose of ritual is to make things happen. They're tools. And "just as a hammer and a wrench do not very much care if you think the ‘right things’ about hammers and wrenches, so the ritual does not care if you ‘believe’ in it, or have the ‘correct’ doctrine of it, so long as – like the wrench and the hammer – you use the tool properly."

And then the sacrifice is an exchange.

Do ut des is Latin and it means, “I give, so that you might give.”  ... The key here is the concept of exchange. The core of religious practice is thus a sort of bargain, where the human offers or promises something and (hopefully) the god responds in kind, in order to effect a specific outcome on the world.

So then we can ask, what was the theory for why this stuff worked? And that varied.

Now, why do the gods want these things? That differs, religion to religion. In some polytheistic systems, it is made clear that the gods require sacrifice and might be diminished, or even perish, without it. That seems to have been true of Aztec religion, particularly sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl; it is also suggested for Mesopotamian religion in the Atrahasis where the gods become hungry and diminished when they wipe out most of humans and thus most of the sacrifices taking place. Unlike Mesopotamian gods, who can be killed, Greek and Roman gods are truly immortal – no more capable of dying than I am able to spontaneously become a potted plant – but the implication instead is that they enjoy sacrifices, possibly the taste or even simply the honor it brings them (e.g. Homeric Hymn to Demeter 310-315).

Now you can see how e.g. the Aztec take relates to the "gods need belief" thing, but it's also very different, because the Aztec gods needed sacrifices. They don't care about the belief, they care about the stuff and the actions.

So the "gods need belief" thing is sort of a weird fusion of ancient polytheisms, which posited gods who needed or wanted sacrifice, with modern religions, with their focus on belief and orthodoxy. So it can basically only happen in a modern-invented pagan or polytheistic religion—which is, presumably, why we see them popping up in mid-century sword and sorcery stuff. It's a vague recreation of the shape of ancient polytheisms, but filtered through a very modern take on what religion is and how it works.

Do you happen to know the origin of the fantasy trope in which a deity's power directly corresponds to the number of their believers / the strength of their believers' faith?

I only know it from places like Discworld and DnD that I'm fairly confident are referencing some earlier source, but outside of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, I can't think of of any specific work it might've come from, 20th-c fantasy really not being my wheelhouse.

Thank you!

That's an interesting question. In terms of immediate sources, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the trope's early appearances in both Dungeons & Dragons and Discworld are most immediately influenced by the oeuvre of Harlan Ellison – his best-known work on the topic, the short story collection Deathbird Stories, was published in 1975, which places it very slightly into the post-D&D era, though most of the stories it contains were published individually earlier – but Ellison certainly isn't the trope's originator. L Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber also play with the idea in various forms, as does Roger Zelazny, though only Zelazny's earliest work is properly pre-D&D.

Hm. Off the top of my head, the earliest piece of fantasy fiction I can think of that makes substantial use of the trope in its recognisably modern form is A E van Vogt's The Book of Ptath; it was first serialised in 1943, though no collected edition was published until 1947. I'm confident that someone who's more versed in early 20th Century speculative fiction than I am could push it back even earlier, though. Maybe one of this blog's better-read followers will chime in!

(Non-experts are welcome to offer examples as well, of course, but please double-check the publication date and make sure the work you have in mind was actually published prior to 1974.)