Cloudpunk: lost like tears in rain

 

…loading //:: Ice_breaker.Mc

 

The genre of cyberpunk has an unspoken rule. Wikipedia defines the genre as lowlife and hightech, which functionally speaking is fine. The bvgroti has his own stipulations. The bvgroti is a fanatic. He reads gibson like it’s scripture. Adhering to it harder than a computer does a line of code. Bvgroti knows that cyberpunk is when tech breaks society, and consequently society becomes incomprehensible and incohesive. A cyberpunk protagonist who has any idea of what’s going on? Yeah? Nice oxymoron, you Wilson.

 

I was given Cloudpunk by a friend; they didn’t say why, but they said it was up my alley: they were right.

 

Access-grant: #error%353* message: please report to admin

 

You play as a delivery driver, just arrived in the city, working their first night on the job for an illegal delivery company: cloud punk. The city is falling apart. Systems fail at random and the city engineers have no idea what’s going on. If you smell social allegory, I have some good news for you cupcake, your brain isn’t totally fried yet. Lets stick some trodes.

 

The gameplay isn’t complicated, you have a hover car, you fly it about the city, picking up and dropping off packages while heavy synth music and rain hammers down from on high. You meet characters along the way, they all have a lot of personality squeezed into a few fleeting lines. You get out your car and walk around sets of interconnected platforms, where you can buy noodles and watch the ceiling of clouds pulsate in swirling mauve tinted patterns

 

Days later I'm talking to a friend pointing out how so many of the characters in this game are very obvious sci-fi references, he hadn't noticed. The hardboiled android detective Huxley is my favorite character, when i tell him he goes quiet for a moment, at the time I didn't really notice.

 

The game is pretty even though it’s rendered in chunky pixel form. The character models don’t really line up to their head art, but none of that bothered me, it uses its style to go for scale, having large busy environments that won’t melt your gpu because their pixels are the size of your fist. What it does with the environment is smother you with ambience, it’s very immersive, better than any stimsim.

 

The emphasis on the game is not the challenge, the way it keeps you engaged with the story is the decisions the player is given; i don’t think the decision affect the story in any meaningful way, but they clearly affect other characters, and i can’t help but care a bit about them; asking the player to make judgment calls about individuals with limited information and with questions that often exist in gray scale. It shouldn’t work, but the questions are often actually interesting and with no clear answer.

 

My favorite was the quarantine block. There is a gas leak in a city block, you have room for three people in your car, there are six people to choose from, the company wants to make sure the job pays for itself. Some of the people are horrible, there is a CEO who doesn’t know what company he runs, a rude scientist, a haunty posh woman (Mrs Octavia Butler). Then there are the nice but poor people, a retired army sarg, an android fresh out the box, and a kind doctor.

 

To my shame I left the new android behind and took the posh woman. I had dropped her off at an apartment earlier in the game. I had met her husband, an android; they had both been so privileged that they barely saw me as a person, but they were happy together and that meant something to me. If i hadn’t known them, would i have picked differently? I didn’t know the others; they could have had family too… fuck.

 

Each delivery is its own little story, and they often link back and reference one another. There’s a lot of emphasis on android and automata as second class citizens, it’s used mostly as a race allegory, and the story is very quick to stress the wealth divide and how exploitative the system is. It leaves one with a lot to think about, and while cruising around the city; that’s what I was doing, quietly mulling over the things i’d been seeing, the lite challenge supports the story by giving it room to breathe, it’s good game design.

 

This all culminates in the driver meeting the city's emergent Ai consciousness and being asked to sort the mess out. How? Delivery and choice making, of course. Needless to say the story is loaded with the feels, I was surprised at how moving it was, that each character with so little dialogue manages to connect so easily with me. It’s a lovely short little game. Best experienced and not taken secondhand.

 

 

 

 

 

Eu4: the true essence of an untamed opium addiction

 

Listen, in my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some lousy advice and I hadn't really thought about it until now. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember you’re a fuck-up and will never amount to anything. 

It all came to a head about a week ago, slumped in bed at about four in the morning when my pet woke me from a reverie, most serene, about the declaration of the Islamic catboy-republic. It was then that the lurking shadow that had stalked me for weeks was unmasked. I had a problem, I was getting too into Europa universalis 4 (Eu4) and would have to take drastic measures. 

It started with a sale two years ago, the game was going for something petty, under a quid, though the real cost would be far higher. I played some of the tutorial and it didn’t really click, so like the one ring it was lost to time, until a hobbit, or hard drive clean up, found it. I was making space for trashy third tier video-games when I realized it was still installed, just sitting there, waiting patiently for my return. 

I have to explain something if we’re to proceed. I love strategy games, I love them too much. It's an open ended brain sink, and my thoughts will churn through hypotheticals and tactics whether I choose to or not. I am only ever a miss-click away from falling back into a hole and losing thirty hours to the game itself and a month of productive thinking spent strategizing. 

So, when I start up a simulation of the medieval world, with grand strategic objectives and considerable mechanical depths, I may as well have been smoking opium. 

It took three false starts before I got the hang of things, and even then I was an ass-clown. The game is not forgiving and has a learning curve like the white cliffs of Dover. 

I was playing as the ottomans, as the game informs you they are easy enough to start out with, and I’m quite fond of Islamic history. So anyway, I bungle the seizing of Albania, Greece, and Constantinople along with a number of territories out east. My economy is in shambles, my armies are few and without manpower, and I am without allies. I was unaware of half of those issues at the time though, because I was too busy diving through a sea of menus and screens trying to figure out what corruption is, and why and if I should care about the privileges of the merchant class. 

Things go from bad to worse, when Hungry seized most of the Balkans, including Wallachia and I only got scraps by joining in on their unfettered conquest of rage. It’s easy enough though, say’s I; I’ll just fight them for it. 

Six glorious years later a thing called Poland/Lithuania is kicking my teeth in like the casual I am, I reload a save rather than allow the diplomatic wedgy to continue. This is the first of seven attempts to topple that alliance over the course of two hundred years. I would reload after each attempted war, and come to think of them as the imagined war of ottoman humiliation. They account for half my playtime, roughly. 

I got better at managing the economy, it's easy when you're not a person-of-different-ideological-stance, I built larger armies that were bigger and more huge militarily, along with some heftier horde and sizable soldieries, and I picked off smaller isolated nations at moments of weakness, slowly growing into a regional power. 

Despite this, the other thing the ottomans were good at was melting Mamluks, which ruled over Egypt and the Levant, historically they fell in three years, in my game they only ever lost a single province to me, during a protracted multi-lane war between, myself, Persia, Russia and the polish commonwealth and them (which we technically lost) I had gotten good enough to levee large number instead of using those filthy stupid tactics. I could trade bodies until only my troops were left but this was slow and costly. Thought it allowed me to gobble up Persia and Georgia and oh god do you see the problem?

This is barely a third of the wars fought, I still haven’t gotten around to talking about how the game is even played, what any of the menus do, how things like tech and ideas work. The game even in its simplified based form is a sprawling mess of menus and sliders to juggle. 

It’s immensely satisfying to balance a country's budget, to go from being thousands of ducats in debt to becoming an economic powerhouse over the course of a few decades of good management. It tickles my dopamine receptors to the point where my day to day drudgery is merely a vehicle to fantasize about my next fix. 

It even invaded my inner sanctum of dreams where there is normally a baseline of deranged rambles (I'm not joking), then my sleep consisted of pouring over menus and tweaking sliders as I angled for my next shot at those Shitlords the Hungarians. 

It was becoming mentally exhausting, and I was denied any satisfaction in simpler things. So I did what I had to. I deleted my save files, not just the current one, but every backup and what if. Then, I uninstalled the game, and got ready to sweat it out.

For another two nights the dreams kept up, but without the hope of the save files to come back to, the fever broke and I became myself once again. A third night passed and I awoke feeling less like a caliph and more like the smuck I am. It wasn’t good, but it was necessary. 

I am just taking every day as it comes now, trying to stay clean. It’s been a week since I got my life back and I’ve not looked back. Choose life! Choose to not play Eu4. I kind of want to go again but maybe this time I’ll play someone else? The need is still there burning through me. But for now, just for today i’m clean, and hopefully tomorrow too, and every tomorrow after that. 

 

World of warships: mid-way for anime discourse?

 

World of boats? World of warships? Worship warships. Descent into the Maelström by Edgar A Poe describes boats or something, and that big old swirly boi in Norway: before this year AD 2022 I'd never heard of this story, but now the first two books of the year I’ve read have both referenced it. Not only does this confirm the Mandela effect as real but that it specifically targets Norway! Gothic themes! And liminality! as its textual mediums.

Last night I got back from fetching a rich and succulent slice of my brownie to find two friends engaged in the debate that had defined my understanding of modernity: anime ye or nay? Silently I press my face to the door of this conversation and peer in. one argues it’s good init, and that they like it; the other argues that it’s kind of got some awful tropes and is generally problematic, so they avoid it.

Corithians 13:11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

I was once a weeb, a long time in a galaxy far far away. This debate was one I had found myself pondering from time to time. It is my Descent into the Maelström by Edgar A Poe. I sit on the swirling edge of an infinite abyss that reaches far down into the underland. I must throw myself from my heavy boat and cling to a barrel to survive.

 

As a woke cuckold with weebish tendencies I am in the perfect position to spear this debate. But I find myself unkeen to pick apart this we(e)b in all its intricacies. So I hold my silences and boot up the world of warships.

 

The game is about boats and bots in boat and they do shooty at each other and you grind for new boats to shoot at each other with. The phrase “lead your shots” has been said to me in excess of fifty times.

 

What is problematic? It’s generally raised as a synonym for questionable, more specifically, the question is one of moral integrity and the discomfort a piece of media causes in its representations.

 

I fired a salvo at a boat, and some of the shots hit. The aiming was fairly intuitive, it made sense to me; I realize I am unsatisfied with any experience that is too convenient. I consider driving nails into my hands to increase the challenge.

 

When they spoke of anime, I’m not sure they meant all of the animated media japan produces; maybe they did? But if i was willing to whittle down to a more streamlined interpretation: the epicentre of the problematic weeb shit is in the shounen genre. It is here in that matrix of adolescence that the world holy trifecta of violence, lust and emotional immaturity comes to hang its hats.

 

The boat I'm in is hit by a string of shots, she’s on fire and taking on water. I press R and now that’s not a thing apparently, cool.

The seinen genre is the next age bracket up from shounen. It’s still fairly fightly fighty, but tends to have less horny and more complex themes: don’t get me wrong it’s still probably problematic.  Berserk is the stand out of the genre and it’s got some pretty nasty allusions to sexual assault; as to whether it’s just for shock value or if it adds to development of the text is largely up to the readers judgment… it is a question, and causes discomfort and… fuck it’s problematic

My positioning is piss poor, a pair of cruisers flank me on either side, as I chase one the other fires a volley of torpedoes into my stern. A third ship is peppering with me and my health is whittled down fast. I go full send on the throttle and prepare for a desperate ramming manoeuvre.

 

It occurs to me that only a hardened weeb bothers to dissect the shifting attitudes in weeb sub-genres, only someone who had immersed themselves into the genre could split hairs as such, and that only someone who acknowledges the flaws in the genre could then give an appraisal of their impacts. To bring up berserk’s shittyiness is almost sacrilege. I am not in a perfect position at all. I am alien to both parties here. I am too critical of the genre to relate to the causal enjoyer, but too steeped in my crusty weebism to relate my understanding to an outsider.

I feel my ship pulled into the Maelström by Edgar A Poe. it’s slick oily abyss coats the surface of my person and I sink down, and down. Pulled under into the crushing pressure, alone and isolated. In Disco Elysium there is an empty land in the world, called the pale yonder; it is a stretch of white abyss and coats much of the surface of the world.

 It occurs to me that whether a blackened sea or white desert, anything so unbroken and absolute is a void which threatens to consume all. The interplay of voids now are like the pages in a manga, but is there a true synthesis going on? Or does each void only serve to bring the other into sharper relief: the Maelström by Edgar A Poe?