Star Wars - Meandering Thoughts

I just finished watching The Force Awakens. I’ve been a Star Wars nerd for almost twenty-two years now, and I was swept away by the hype machine for this move – I won’t pretend it’s perfect, but I thought it was really good. I’d like to meander through my thoughts on this.

Spoilers.

Musings - Sex & Love in Sci-Fi/Fantasy

I watched Back to the Future again over Thanksgiving, and I realized there were similarities to El Goonish Shive.

(Bear with me on this one.)

I like sci-fi/fantasy elements that change love and sex. Think about how much sexuality changes if the body becomes an Eclipse Phase-style sleeve for the mind, and people can easily change their bodies. If the body is more like a phone case than core hardware, how does sex change? Do people start artificially heightening arousal with hormone injections?

Or the same deal in a magical setting – 2^nd edition D&D had the girdle of masculinity/femininity as a cursed item. You could make an entire campaign about finding one to help a queen transition.

Even though a bunch of stories have these elements, though, they don’t really explore them. Either they’re story-of-the-week innovations, to be forgotten by the next episode, or the writers don’t want to dive into the cultural implications of change. Sci-fi is historically used for allegories and exploring technology, but it usually doesn’t take a look at the small and personal.

Which is where El Goonish Shive comes in for me. Early on, the then-main protagonist was turned into a girl, and in trying to get changed back, the female persona was split into a separate character; that character has since been an integral part of the story, and the easy availability of shapeshifting and gender-changing for the protagonists has shaped their attitudes about sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

(Whoof, that was a long sentence.)

I love EGS because it does exactly what I want: It looks at how sci-fi and fantasy elements change love and sex. Looking at grand sociological or technological changes is interesting, but it doesn’t get more personal than seeing how sex changes.

Kinda the same for Back to the Future – even throwing out the incest angle, how much harder does it get to have a relationship with someone from thirty years ago, who you have to hide the future from? What’s the closest equivalent to sex with an AI that thinks at 33.86 * 10^15 operations per second? Whatever the equivalent of sex is, how mind-blowing would it have to be to completely occupy that AI’s mind, like a human’s during an orgasm?

And that brings me to superheroes.

Almost every superpower – telekinesis, precognition, super strength, duplication – could get used in sex. I guarantee it. (Rogue still has it rough, admittedly.) And given modern fetish culture, you’d probably have baseline humans looking for matches with their specific power fetish. There might even be a powers dating site.

I want to read about the people using that site. I want to know what makes Captain Supreme swipe left. I want to read about how Masked Marvel isn’t just her powers, and if you bring them up instead of her traveling or philanthropy when you message her, she’s not going to respond. I want to know how Valkyrie deals with the social stigma around online dating.

Hmm. Maybe I want to write about that.

Halo 5: Let's Talk

Halo 5 is about a conversation. 

(Spoiler warning. Also, note that these are hot takes, I’m still mulling this over.) 

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While I don’t think Halo 5 did very well at its dialog or bringing forth characterization, the structure of the story is spectacular. It’s longer than Halo 4 but more focused, to the point that I can even now recount the core beats of the entire plot (not common for me). And distilled down to the bones of the plot, it’s an extremely compelling narrative.

Halo 5’s raison d’être is a conversation. And, breaking my heart, it’s a conversation that doesn’t really happen. Talking with John about her plan, and trying to convince him to join her, means so much to Cortana that she can’t accept the outcome. So she puts it off, and off, until by the time John’s gotten there, the gulf between them is too wide. Both of them have their hands outstretched, but only to pull the other to their side.

This game exists for 26 sentences, when Cortana and Chief finally see each other again.

And that’s it! The rest of the game only exists to give context to those sentences, and to move us from that conversation into the next game. All of Fireteam Osiris’ story can be boiled down to “reach Chief” and “show the consequences of Cortana’s plan, and pace its reveal,” while Chief’s arc is just “talk to Cortana.”

Plus, in a first for the series – although it can’t last – the core conflict is never violent. At no point does Chief take up arms against Cortana, and even though Locke probably has orders to take out Cortana, it isn’t a focus. It feels morally significant that, even if they fight later, this game is reserved for grieving for the loss of her. Tomorrow, the battlefield; today, the goodbyes.



… Admittedly, though, that grief isn’t expressed very well. A lot of the emotional weight of this story only comes through when you fill in the gaps in the dialog and characterization. I love Halo 5’s story structure, but the moment-to-moment realization of it is very flat.

I’ll probably keep posting about Halo 5 for the next few days – I’m still chewing it over in my head – but when it struck me what this game was about, I needed to write about it. 

Quick postscript: Your mileage may vary. Personally, I considered Cortana’s ascension to be the culmination of two major plot threads in the Halo universe – Cortana’s own alienation from humanity and what it expects of her, and the way humanity has treated its Spartan and AI creations in general. I can absolutely see concerns about how this is the second Halo game in a row to troperifically handle Cortana, the series’ leading woman – first by ramping up her emotions, now by making her the dark goddess – but it rings honest and story-rich to me. Your mileage may vary, though.


(All screenshots taken from the in-game cinematics.)

Maths and Morality in EU4

I play a lot of Europa Universalis IV. Like… 950 hours worth. (Admittedly, I have fallen asleep with it running once or twice, but still.)

The game’s all about conquest and expansion, and because it’s rooted in the real world, it’s impossible to avoid questions of morality. (They took away the Attack Natives button from EU3, but even still, no one’s fooling themselves that colonization is peaceful.) If you’re trying to justify the morality of it, you’ve got three real options: You’re out for your own greed, you’re trying to make the world better than real history, or you’re defending yourself or your cause.

(If you've got an empire this size, you probably can’t justify the next war as self-defense.)

I’ve been reading about Irish nationalism and thinking about the American Civil War; enforced unity’s been on my line lately. 

So I made maths.

--

Current Morality = Taxation + Production + (Gov. Type * total development) + (Humanism * total development) – (Unrest * potential damage) – [(Culture / Discrimination) * culture’s development] – (Religion * Negative Tolerance * religion’s development) – [Nation * nation’s development * (0.1 + Unrest)] – (% War * Damage)

Morality over Time = Taxation + Production + (Gov. Type * total development) + (Humanism * total development) – (Unrest * potential damage) – [(Culture / Discrimination) * culture’s development] – (Religion * Negative Tolerance * religion’s development) – [Nation * nation’s development * (0.1 + Unrest)] – (% War * Damage) - (Lives Lost *0.005454) – (War Damage₁ + War Damage₂ …) – (Forced Conversion * converted development) – (Displaced Natives * population)

(If you mouse over each variable, there’s a small explanation.)

--

Notes:

• This is still a gross simplification. It falls back on quantifiable economic indicators, rather than societal advancement.
• These equations tend to use EU4’s own internal logic. I don’t know whether a human life is worth 0.0054 ducats, but that’s the value EU4 uses. We’re also limited by conflated effects, like how unrest reduction can represent a police state as much as people being contented.
• I’ve tried to touch on struggles of humanism that don’t get much play in the actual game, like questions of how indigenous people and women are treated.
• Fine, yes, the header image was probably the result of a bug. I don't think there were actually three million artillerymen at that battle.

Passenger Snails and Dumb Fun

This is dumb, but I had fun making it. https://www.facebook.com/PassengerSnails/

(Passenger Snails: We're there for you. Eventually.)

Alt-Cat

I decided I was tired of alt-tabbing while trying to write... so I spent two hours writing a program to stop that. Efficiency! It registered when you control-T or alt-tab, and instead pops up a message box with an inspiration/berating quote.

Then I realized I could do this with kittens and dog gifs instead, and wrote the best six lines of code ever.


^t::
Run, http://theoldreader.com/kittens/600/400/
return

!TAB::
Run, http://omfgdogs.com/
return

--

If you want to use the code, feel free. I used AutoHotkey, which is a pretty simple coding language. We used it in QA for setting up console command macros, auto-clickers, etc. It's simple enough that even a liberal arts major like me, with only one semester of C++, could use it.

Notes:

• OMFGdogs was made by @eataudio.
• The random cats javascript was set by knyar (http://knyar.net/), with cat pics posted to Flickr under Creative Commons licenses.
• You can find the file as a .exe at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9ZXbwoBXipdekpVSjRXRkx5Q1U/view?usp=sharing

History is Complicated

("Marina Ginesta" by Source (WP:NFCC#4). Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marina_Ginesta.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Marina_Ginesta.jpg)

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Look.

This is Marina Ginestà in 1936, a seventeen-year-old French expat in Barcelona, where she is a reporter for the Soviet Pravda.

Had I learned about her in high school, I would have been told that she was an example of how civilians and youths were pulled into the war in a variety of ways. I would have learned that everyday people were forced to choose sides, or had atrocities visited on them. The history of plain folk.

Had I learned about her in the past few years, I would have thought of her as a member of the International Brigade, part of a movement that was ill-prepared and ill-treated by the Soviet Union, a movement of romantics that believed in a cause so much that they were blinded to its crimes. A monolithic entity.

I think that I am growing wiser. Having seen this photograph this morning, I see a child half-grown and fighting with a pen; someone who must have dealt with the betrayal of the Soviet Union’s treaty with Nazi Germany, and the later betrayal of its totalitarian regime; who had seventy-eight years of life after the photo that defined her life for most who know of her. I see someone who fought with fear, and doubt, and pain, and courage, and hope, and pulled decisions from this cocktail that rebounded off other people’s decisions to gain speed and more speed until they smash into other decisions and the result is history.

--

Look.

This is what history is made of.

“History is the diary of a madman” only if you assume that just one person is writing it, with mood swings wrenching the world he writes between communism, fascism and social democracy.

History is not the diary of a madman, history is a piece of binder paper getting passed around in a class. History is written by billions of humans writing over each other, scratching out what the last person said, scribbling questions before passing it on, and grabbing it back to change their mind. History is Franz Ferdinand passing Sarajevo a note saying “Do you like me?” and a classroom of 1.8 billion deciding how to react to the checked box.

History is a speech tournament with a nation’s worth of speakers debating, arguing, yelling over each other, bargaining, compromising, and throwing up their hands until the 19th Amendment passes – then it’s those same speakers going to the nearest Denny’s, and asking each other “What’s next? Was that enough? Did we fix the problem? Are we healed?”

History is complicated, and constant, and never quite finished.


--


Coda:

Y'know, I think I have a problem with being verbose... well, I already knew I had one, but today I ended up writing several hours to get most of a page in order to say "history is complicated, yo."