Control

CONTROL NOTES

I bought Control in, let’s see, 2020, and just finished it. See, stuff in a Steam library does get finished sometimes!

So, what is it? You are a young woman named Jesse Faden, and you arrive at the massive brutalist concrete monolith that houses the Federal Bureau of Control, which is in charge of investigating and containing the paranormal. You meet a creepy janitor, then you swing by the Director’s office, and find that he just killed himself. Uh oh! Naturally, you pick up the pistol, which turns out to be a kind of Excalibur thing: because it didn’t kill you, you are now the Director.

Oh, and the FBC is under attack from an extradimensional force called the Hiss.

Control is heavily influenced by the SCP Project, and and a nod to the more light-hearted Mystery Flesh Pit National Park.There’s a lot of creepy atmosphere, but the mixture of paranormal horror and bureaucratese is also pretty funny.

This is one game where you should find all the collectibles, because the lore for the game is great. Curiously, many of these are short live-action films starring the cheerful, bow-tied research head, Casper Darling. There are also somber reflections from the former Director Trench, and weird communications from an apparently non-human Board.

The first few hours are the best, as you are thrust into this story and organization, it’s not clear if they are good guys or not, and both the organization and the Altered World Events its studies are weird. One of the neater touches: once Jesse becomes Director, pictures of her appear in her office and throughout the building. There is no explanation, and it wouldn’t be an improvement to have one. (There is a payoff to the mystery promotion later in the story.)

What do you do in the game? Mostly fight Hiss monsters, clearing new areas of the building, rescuing the survivors. Also pursuing your own mission… it’s revealed early on that Jesse’s brother Dylan was kidnapped by the FBC when they were both children, so Jesse wants to find what happened, and find Dylan.

At first you use the Director’s gun, the Service Weapon; but then you get paranormal powers, starting with telekinesis. You get a few more as the game proceeds, such as a quick dash, a shield, and later on levitation. Both gun and powers have cooldowns, so typically you alternate between throwing furniture and rocks at the Hiss, and shooting them. More powerful monsters appear too, such as Hiss that fly up to you and explode, or bulky ones that fire grenades at you, which you can grab and throw back at them.

The game is kind of a spiritual successor to Half-Life 2: monsters, special powers, mild puzzles, Interfering in Realms Beyond Man’s Ken. Only with a badass female protagonist who can talk. And of course way better graphics.

One thing they didn’t learn from Valve, though: navigation. The FBC’s building, the Oldest House, is a sprawling concrete nightmare, and it’s often quite unclear where you should go. I had to check walkthroughs too often, and even that was difficult sometimes: even with a picture of the destination, it’s not always clear how to get there.

Also bad: personal and weapon mods. Enemies drop them when they die, but if your pitiful number of slots are full, you’re out of luck. You can’t (say) pick up a mod and keep it for later or even replace your current mods. (There is probably some way to do this, but the game never bothers to teach you. If only games had some concept of “inventory”…)

The absolute best thing about the game, though: difficulty settings. Rather than just a range of Easy to Masochist, you can tweak health, enemy damage multipliers, etc., as you like. Without much shame, I used a setting for Immortality, which allows Jesse to take damage but not to die. Yes, it’s terrible for learning to use the combat effectively, but I wanted the story much more than the combat. And I hate having to give up a game because I can’t get past one nasty level. (It’s psychologically curious, because you do feel bad if you take damage, so at least you learn what not to do. You do still have to defeat all the enemies!)

The best level is something called the Ashtray Maze– a rush through a constantly shifting building, with a heavy metal soundtrack.

The story as a whole works, but I did find the last few hours (except for the Maze) less satisfying. Rather like HL2, in fact, you do something that is supposed to stop the Hiss invasion, only it doesn’t, or it just leaves a bunch of them to clean up. There are two DLC missions, so maybe I’ll head back into the FBC.

I read one review that complained that Jesse was too undeveloped a character, and another that praised her for being herself almost as weird as the Oldest House. I agree more with the latter. She could be accused of hiding things from the player… but it’s lampshaded earlier on that she has her secrets, and I wasn’t bothered by that. And I like the way that she just goes with the flow as stranger and stranger things happen.

Two French jokes

These popped up on Mastodon, and they’re both clever and silly. I will explain them, but in white text so you can skip that part.

The first one goes back at least five years; I don’t know the originator. Darth Vader goes into a bakery and orders three breads and two apple tarts. Why?

PAIN PAIN PAIN TARTE TATIN TARTE TATIN

Note: Read aloud, this sounds like the Imperial March. Note that pain and tatin both end in an emphasized [æ̃].

Second, this chart. I don’t know who created it, but the post is from one Tichodrome Colvert. This one might sneak up on you— it seems incomplete at first.

Notes: The four cells are chat (cat), chien (dog), rat, rien (nothing).

ZBB down, no, up

If you check here for status updates on my sites… one, good for you! It’s the best place to put status updates!

Two, the ZBB is down while phpBB is upgraded and possibly other rejiggering takes place. It probably won’t be long… I’ll update this when it’s done. (Also thanks to bradrn who’s actually doing it!)

We’ve been having weird errors… they go away if you retry, but that gets old fast. I don’t know the root cause, but one possibility, Plan C at this point, is out-of-date software so that’s what we’re trying.

Edit: Looks like it’s up! Thanks, Brad!

Sedarisland Diaries

I just wolfed down Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, by David Sedaris. This 500 page book is merely a selection from the 156 volumes of his diaries, and there’s another volume, A Carnival of Snackery, which continues to 2017; I read it a few years ago.

If you’ve never read Sedaris, the best place to start is here, his reading of Santaland Diaries on Morning Edition. It’s a brilliant piece recounting his weeks being an elf at Santaland in Macy’s, told with a dry acerbic humor that never gets nasty. You can also find it in his collection Barrel Fever. If you read the New Yorker you’ve probably seen his slice of life essays, usually focusing on his numerous exuberant family or his much more stable longtime partner Hugh.

As edited, the books are far from autobiography; typically he selects episodes or thoughts that appeal to his sense of human eccentricity. This can be supplied by people he knows, or sees in the street, or reads about, or not infrequently himself. If anything is weird or surprising or pathetic, when people give in to an excess of emotion, he wants to know about it. Reading the book is like eating candy: it’s light but fun and it goes by far faster then you’d expect.

The first volume is the most interesting, because you can see Sedaris going from a broke, weird ne’er-do-well to a well-off celebrity writer. For the first half of the book, he takes odd jobs, mostly involving manual labor, and spends his money on drugs and drink. The introduction says he cut out most of the first few years: “fueled by meth, a typical entry would go on for pages– solid walls of text, and every last one of them complete bullshit. …It’s like listening to a crazy person. The gist is all you need, really.” Then he moves to Chicago and gets along better– he’s writing, he graduates from the Art Institute, he ends up teaching a writing course.

Reading his account of Chicago made me realize how different a real urban environment is from the suburban and then semi-urban life I’ve had. He mentions all sorts of encounters with beggars, scammers, and street lunatics, talks about fights under his window and people throwing things at him in the street.

Then moves to New York. In the space of two years he works as an elf, meets Hugh, does off-off-Broadway plays with his sister Amy, Santaland blows up, and he gets a book contract. And by the end of the book he’s living in France and recounting dinners with celebrities. And sober. 

I got the impression from his early books that the early Sedaris was extremely eccentric– he had OCD, for one thing, though apparently he was able to channel this into smoking instead. Apparently he gave up smokes too, recently. Though from those New Yorker pieces, it seems he also took up walking and litter-collecting with maybe more enthusiasm than seems entirely necessary.

I enjoyed the second book of diary entries too, but it’s also far less personal, and has no character arc. A lot of it is impressions and eccentricities collected on his book tours.

A back cover blurb calls him “sidesplitting”, which is entirely wrong. He’s not a comedian, but a raconteur; they could put his picture in the dictionary for “wry”. I like him a lot, but it is kind of intellectual comfort food. But we need a lot of that these days.

If you are a Sedaris fan, by the way, you’ll enjoy this interview with Hugh.

Puter borked, long live the puter

It’s beginning to look like a server farm in here.

So, this is fifteen or twenty years of Mac Minis. The culprit this time is the dark one on the right, which I bought just three years ago. A couple of days ago it started to download an update, and got stuck. I rebooted it, then left it on all night. No dice.

I took it to the Apple store; they were able to confirm that power was getting to the components, the disk drive was OK, and there was plenty of disk space. They suggested that I reinstall MacOSX, and I did, twice. Still no dice— it hangs at “Estimating time remaining.” They provide a helpful support page which suggests trying all the things I did try. From googling, no one seems to know what this problem is or how to really diagnose or fix it.

The hero of this adventure is the little black box in the center. That’s my TimeMachine backup. I fired up the old Mini, the one in the back, and was able to confirm that the last backup was readable. For safety’s sake I copied all my important data to the old Mini. It has not only all my writing, but all the records of our condo association. (The old Mini is excruciatingly slow, and if I recall correctly its hard drive isn’t reliable.)

The next recommended step was to erase the bad machine and start over. But I don’t trust it any more, so I decided to buy a new Mini, which is the one at the left (the one that’s actually on). I was able to transfer everything from the last backup to it, including installed programs. (The major ones I use are Word, Excel, and Photoshop Elements, and they all work— though I had to change my Adobe password and re-enter a code for Elements.) There was a glitch with Mail— at first it looked like I could send but not receive mail— but now it’s happy. Of course that’s essential since everything in modern life depends on e-mail, including things like resetting passwords.

I still have a few problems: Apple doesn’t recognize my Apple ID and the servers are down when I try to fix that. My Wacom table isn’t working. The transfer seems to have retained my passwords but not cookies, so there was a bit of hassle to reestablish access to WordPress, Patreon, etc.

So at this point I can say it’s gone fairly smoothly, but there was a lot of stress. Plus the condo association is a mess again. Ugh. So not much else got done this weekend.

Anyway, lesson for y’all: back up your stuff. And that means not just having a regular backup, but testing it periodically to make sure it’s readable. I should really have a Plan B, i.e. an off-site backup; thinking about that. (I don’t consider The Cloud to be a backup plan.)

Book out; comics reviews

In case you don’t check out zompist.com regularly and look here instead, there are new things to note.

One, the Almea: Industrial Age book is out! It looks great and it’s a nice hefty thing. Check the link for a description.

Two, I reviewed two new comics, Time Before Time and The Authority. (The first is really good; the second is pretty good.)

Colombiana

For some reason Youtube kept serving me slices of Colombiana, a 2011 crime & revenge thriller written by Luc Besson and starring Zoe Saldaña. Finally it came to Netflix and I watched the whole thing. I just read a bunch of reviews and wow, it gets mixed reactions. But I enjoyed it, mostly for its over-the-top action sequences. And Zoe Saldaña.

Apparently Besson wanted to write a sequel to Léon: The Professional but quarreled with the film company, and wrote this instead. 10-year-old Cataleya watches her minor gangster father and his mother murdered in front of her. She escapes– by the stratagem of pinning the murderer’s hand to a table with a knife– and makes her way to the American Embassy. Her father had given her a computer chip which he says is her passport, and it is– she’s flown to the US. She eludes the feds and finds her uncle, declaring she wants to be a killer.

And she does! She grows up to be Zoe Saldaña and spends the rest of the movie taking her revenge. As it happens, I saw most of the good action sequences as Youtube clips; as it also happens, there’s really not much more than those sequences. That is, the non-action parts are kept to a minimum. At root it’s a bunch of bits where Zoe kills a bunch of bad guys who deserve it, showcasing not only her Catwoman-style grace, but an uncanny ability to stay several steps ahead. This is a woman who knows all about Chekhov’s gun, and in fact stashes several copies of it for where she might need them.

(Does everyone still know that trope? Chekhov is famous for saying that if you see a gun in the first scene, it should be used by the end of the story. Besson for sure learned that lesson. Everything here is set up first and pays off later.)

Is this deep? No, and the people who don’t like it complain mostly about the plot and the contrivances… this in a world where the top grossing movies are about men and women in spandex with magic powers. I think it helps to think of this as a Catwoman flick. For instance: Cataleya gets herself thrown in jail; then, late at night, goes through the vents to kill one of her targets. And to do this she changes into a catsuit, which she’s thoughtfully hidden in her hair. This is a trope that goes back more than a hundred years, and it makes no sense at all. If catsuits made sense for thievery, actual thieves would wear them, male and female. They’re restrictive, offer no protection, and make it hard to pee– jeans and a T-shirt would make more sense. But they look great on a beautiful woman and they scream “spy/assassin”, so who cares?

On the other hand, there’s a scene toward the end where Cataleya faces off against Mr. Murderer (Jordi Molla). They have run out of bullets and have to fight hand to hand, improvising weapons. As action, it’s fine, but what I liked about the scene was how un-superpowered it was. They look desperate and exhausted– a nice touch.

I also like Molla’s approach to the character. He’s a brutal thug, but he almost never raises his voice, and his hallmark is approaching Cataleya, both times he meets her, with a twinge of sympathy. There’s also a moment where Cataleya has unexpectedly gunned down a bunch of his mooks, and Molla just sighs. It’s been a bad day and it’s getting worse. It makes him one of the best #2 guys in movies. (Certainly better then his #1, who’s every stereotypical Latino gang leader.)

One reason I liked it, probably, is that I don’t see that many movies any more. One thing that I think isn’t widely recognized: you have to see a certain amount of a genre before you like it; but if you see too much of it you’ll dislike 90% of what you see. If you’ve seen hundreds of action flicks, the accumulated tropes are annoying rather than amusing, and you start to laser-focus on flaws. But I like a good action sequence and I respect the pared-down nature of Besson’s script. There’s very little padding: it sets things up, moves from action to action, and doesn’t add complications just to add screen time.

The Authority

This might go into a Bob’s review later, but I just want to get my thoughts down.

(L to R: Jack, Swift, Jenny, the Midnighter, the Engineer)

I first met the Authority through a crossover with Planetary. I’ve slowly been finding volumes and finally got the first one, written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Bryan Hitch.

First, what is it? The Authority is a super-team led by Jenny Sparks, “the spirit of the 20th century”… she was born on Jan. 1, 1900 but stopped aging at 19. She’s had a lively career, aided by power over electricity. The other members are Jack Hawksmoor (who has special powers deriving from what city he’s in); Swift (she flies, mostly); the Engineer (has nine pints of nanoparticles she can arrange at will to create clothing, guns, machines, even clones); the Midnighter (para-Batman); Apollo (sun-powered para-Superman, also Midnighter’s lover); and the Doctor (a shaman).

The particular conceit of the book is that the Authority are planet-level superheroes: they are powerful enough to stop an entire invasion of Earth. Which they do about three times in Volume 1. A typical threat: an entire alternate Earth is ruled by humans and aliens who want to conquer our planet for, um, unseemly reasons. It takes just four issues to stop them.

As befits beings taking on cosmic threats, the Authority are pretty cavalier about property damage… though they always help clean up afterward. They have none of the old-school DC squeamishness about killing. They also have a certain social conscience– they believe, at least, in making the world a better place, using superhuman technology to help the world, etc. And though they grew out of a UN group, they don’t really answer to anyone.

And how is it? In brief: I like it, but I don’t love it. I don’t think the book entirely works. Why?

First, it’s actually pretty difficult to tell stories about near-deities. Only world-level threats will work, and the ones Ellis comes up with are pure fantasy, thus hard to relate to. To justify the ultraviolence, they are completely evil; but that’s ultimately not very interesting. The villains in his other works, Planetary and Transmetropolitan, are far better creations.

Second, I think Ellis does best with a single protagonist. Transmetropolitan focused on Spider Jerusalem, Planetary on Elijah Snow. They had character arcs, they had personal goals, they discovered things, they had opinions on what they saw. This gave these works focus and motivation. By contrast Authority tries to talk about the whole team, but no one gets much airtime, no one really gets a personal story, no one is changed by what happens. We don’t even get to know Jenny Sparks very much.

And related to the first point, Jerusalem and Planetary were both underdogs. Their opponents were far stronger, so they had to be far cleverer. The Authority has only enough bad moments to make its stories four issues long.

That doesn’t mean it’s bad– the characters are all likeable, they do their jobs, they wisecrack entertainingly. Hitch’s art is appropriately grand, so we can believe in these super-mega-threats. Maybe it would have worked if Ellis had had the time to build these people up for a mini-series each. Or allowed either the humans or the villains more humanity. There’s more pathos and feeling in each standalone issue of Planetary.

Ironically, the Planetary-Authority crossover works better than most of the actual Authority stories, because it gives us both an outsider’s perspective, and a hint– a version of the Authority from another alternate Earth– that shows that Ellis was well aware of the thin line between protecting the planet with no oversight, and taking it over.

Since I have kind of an ultra-left sensitivity these days, I have to warn you that a few of Ellis’s ideas haven’t aged well. There’s a terrorist leader who’s a Fu Manchu clone, though maybe this is more the artist’s fault. The Engineer uses her nanomachines for clothes– which means she has a shiny metal body but is basically nude… well, superheroes and superheroines are basically drawn naked anyway, just with painted-on clothes, but it’s kind of adolescent. And the alternative-Earthers are nasty sexual abusers, along the same lines Alan Moore uses way too much.

The second volume was mostly written by Mark Millar. I read it first, and found it kind of bombastic. It doesn’t really solve the above problems– except in one story arc where the Authority is completely defeated and replaced by the G7 nations, using a redneck cyborg supervillain with 1200 superpowers. I mean, OK, kudos for creating a situation where the Authority faces something that actually makes them sweat. But the details are even more problematic. P.S. they do get their revenge.

The Authority is now owned by DC. Reading their Wikipedia page, like reading that of most long-running comics, is kind of depressing. The tendency with any media property is to just keep it going, replacing creators when needed. And that may create some great works! But the assemblage makes less and less sense.

Coming: Almea: Industrial Age

For more than three years, I’ve been working on Almea+400, my project to document the next four centuries of Almea, past the old “now” of 3480. I’m about halfway through: we’re up to the year 3678.

I’ve been working on a book covering the 3480–3678 period, and I received the proof copy this week! Here it is, next to its illustrious predecessor, the Historical Atlas of Almea.

(The cover art is a placeholder— I’m redoing it even as we speak.)

Now, the Historical Atlas covers 30,000 years… Almea: Industrial Age covers just 200. Why? Well, because modern times are complicated. Imagine trying to summarize our comparable 1800–2000 period in a dozen pages. I have to cover modernity in general, several continental wars, religious upheavals, oil problems, colonialism, the struggle between capitalism, socialism, and fascism, and more. Plus culture: the books, music, and movies everyone is consuming.

In the modern world, we can’t just concentrate on Arcél and half of Ereláe any more; no part of the world is unimportant. There are two new continents to cover, Lebiscuri and Curym. There are some surprising revelations about the ancient period once known as the iliu-ktuvok wars.

Almea is a fantasy world, so I address questions like, how do the elcari adapt to modern manufacturing; how do the flaids deal with capitalism; what do the iliu think of oil pollution or nuclear war (hint: they’re opposed); can a ktuvok empire compete with industrial Eretald? Plus there’s a powerful ancient source of magic to deal with.

When can you get it? Soonish! I’m reviewing the text now, and finishing the cover. I’ll need to order a new proof and make sure my name is spelled correctly. But if all goes well, it should be available by mid-November.

I plan to make it available in both color and black & white, since color printing is pretty expensive. I don’t know if a Kindle version makes sense… maybe, since there’s a lot of text.

Ancient Africa

It’s getting rarer to find books that blow my mind, but this one did: Ancient Africa: A global History, to 300 CE, by Christopher Ehret. I wish I’d had it when writing the Middle East Construction Kit. (Ehret’s book came out this year.)

Ehret’s thesis is that Africa is far more central in world history than has generally been recognized. Most histories consider it as a marginal and passive region. But recent archeology has found that a lot was going on, and Africa was a pioneer in many areas.

The conventional view is that iron working didn’t develop in Africa till 100 BCE, and didn’t spread to East Africa until 1000 CE. These numbers turn out to be off by millennia. Carbon dating has placed furnaces found near the Benue river to 900 BCE, and near Lake Chad to 1000 BCE. Even more spectacular: sites in the Central African Republic and in Cameroon have been dated to 1800 to 2200 BCE– which would make it about as early as Anatolia, usually considered the first ironworking center.

(Wikipedia suggests that this is controversial, but it seems to be caviling among archeologists over the carbon dating… it sounds like there are too many sites involved for the old dates to be maintained. If anyone has special knowledge, I’d like to hear about it!)

Also surprising: though pottery goes back to 18,000 BCE in China and 12000 BCE in the Amur region (north of Manchuria), the third invention of ceramics was in Africa around 9500 BCE, in what is now Mali; and the fourth was too, around 8000 BCE in Sudan. This is a few millennia before pottery in the Middle East.

Next: about twelve major crops originated in sub-Saharan Africa: watermelons, bottle gourds, muskmelons (ancestors of cantaloupes and Persian melons), cowpeas, pearl millet, lablab bean, sorghum, finger millet, country potato, roselle, tamarind, and the castor oil plant. Most of these are not well known in Europe, but they spread to India, China, and Southeast Asia.

It seems that the donkey was also domesticated first in Africa, in Somalia, by 5000 BCE, a millennium earlier than in the Middle East.

Africa is also good for broadening our ideas on early gender roles. Mesopotamia and Canaan were highly patriarchal; it’s already interesting that Egypt was far less so. But African women have been more powerful from early times (Ehret thinks they were the innovators in ceramics). There are traditions of queens in Meroë and Angola, and matrilineal societies are common. In many regions a young man seeking to marry had to ask not the woman’s father or brothers, but her mother and aunts– and perform bride-service to them for months or years. Women generally owned the fruits of their labor, whether in crafts or trade, and thus were not dependent on men.

One thing I wish I’d known before writing my book was the importance of Nubia. I didn’t repeat the traditional view, which saw Egyptian culture as spreading south from the Middle East; but it now appears that Egypt + Sudan has been a bilobed unit for millennia, and Nubia led the process rather than following it. The earliest large state may have been Qustul, near the second cataract, around 3500 to 3200 BCE, contemporary with the Naqada culture in Egypt. (Egypt was unified in 3000.) Imagery from Qustul anticipates that of Egypt, including sacred boats, a Horus figure, figures brandishing maces, and the crown later symbolic of Upper Egypt. (Again, it seems some scholars aren’t convinced; but the theory that all the influence was southward is on the defensive.)

The one thing I’m skeptical about is Ehret’s linguistics. He investigates words as indicators of shared technology, which is fine, but he applies dates to various proto-families not based on inscriptions, and that’s pretty sus. (Languages do not change at a steady rate, so glottochronology is discredited, and nothing reliably replaces it.) He also seems to trust the present-day spread of languages as indicating their historical placement as well, as if people only move when they’re determined to make a new subfamily. A glance at the history of Europe, Central Asia, or Southeast Asia should show the shakiness of this idea.

The book is quite short (under 200 pages of text), which makes it a fast read, but maybe too fast– a little too much is simply asserted without explaining the archeological or linguistic basis, or addressing objections.