Bookpost: Luddism, anarchism, bunnies, hacking, slashing

[roadrunnertwice]

I've still got a backlog of 2023 reviews to write, so for the next little while I'm gonna end up breaking the boundary and posting a mix of stuff from this year and last year.

Richard Adams — Watership Down (re-read)

July 1, 2023

Believe it or not, this book still absolutely rocks. Rare to go back to something I liked in middle school and find gold.

(Well, ok, there's a scattering of the kind of casual prejudice you'd expect from an English dude in the 1970s, so just brace for that. There's not a ton of it, but like... "...a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight." 😑 GTFO.)

Anyway!

What stood out to me most on this re-read was the concision and confidence of the pacing. I was on the lookout for how this was done, and one example that stood out was like... certain character relationships kind of just snapped into place. Not all of them! Hazel's position of leadership is sort of constantly being tested and contested and adjusted, and that process is a pillar of the story. But take Bigwig and Keehar — they're just best friends immediately without more than a couple paragraphs about it. The reader just rolls with it, because yeah sure obviously these two guys would get married the week they met, and then that's a load-bearing relationship for a lot of the subsequent action, and it works out fine. Just like... very good decisions about when to zoom in, and when to just floor it.

Also, the myths and folktales embedded throughout the story actually functioned as such! Many writers have attempted this stunt, and it nearly always reads fake as hell, but all the El-ahrairah stories are genuine badass trickster tales that it's easy to imagine being re-told and variously embellished.

Gavin Muller — Breaking Things at Work

July 21, 2023

Lots to think about!

It’s open propaganda, so handle w/ care, and I’m curious to hear some other perspectives on some of the intra-Marxist conflicts he summarizes. That said, I DO feel he’s spot-on about accelerationism being total horseshit, and don’t feel a need for any alternate perspectives about that. (For one thing, begin as you mean to go on, because the way you teach yourself to act is simply the way you will act; for another thing, capital has been accelerating for centuries now, and if enhancing the contradictions was gonna work, it already had ample time to do so.)

Margaret Killjoy — A Country of Ghosts

Aug 12, 2023

I liked this! Reminds me of 19th and 20th century didactic SF, in a good way. Helps that it’s a fairly gripping war/travelogue story straightforwardly told.

I mean to go back and give The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion (and its sequel) another shot, but: one thing I think bugged me about it but which I didn’t correctly identify at the time is that the didactic mode just puts excessive pressure on a novella-length work. That’s not nearly as much a problem with even a short novel, though.

Bonus Level: Beglitched (re-play)

First few days of September, 2023

Ruth was playing through this, and I always get real excited when she gets into a video game — a rare chance to share that particular interest with her!

So anyway, I played it again too, and man, what a good-ass game. It uses match-3 and Minesweeper to tell a story of adventure and intrigue and betrayal! Who even does that?!

Bonus Level: Death of a Wish

Apr. 27, 2024

A follow-up to Lucah, Born of a Dream, which I played and enjoyed in a complicated fashion.

I think this is a vastly better video game! Both these games aspire to a visceral but highly technical style of combat, demanding careful observation, situational awareness, ahead-of-time loadout planning, quick reflexes, and unhinged aggression and risk-taking. But I went back to re-play a bit of Lucah after finishing Death (I did some stuff Wrong on my original playthrough, such that I beat Maria and got the true ending but never actually fought Messiah or completed track 8, so I'm gonna do that), and it's simply not nearly as good. Pretty much every change I can identify was for the better:

• Parry evaluation is more generous, doing a much better job of guessing player intent. Parries in Lucah had a tiny fucking time window and required a microscopically accurate impact angle, and frankly the graphical style of these games (which I love) does NOT have enough detail to support that demand. Death's implementation feels like it matches the rest of the game's level of abstraction, while still being tricky enough that you're gonna frequently whiff it and get punished.
• Relatedly: parries and breaks got unified into a single system of "guard damage," with enemies' guard meter visible so you can actually tell what effect you're having. I think making it so parries don't immediately break the enemy's guard helped justify making them easier to pull off, and it's all to the good.
• There's now a tiny window of invincibility after a successful parry, too, which mitigates the source of Lucah's most infuriatingly unfair kills, where I'd nail a parry but get one-shotted in the exact same frame by another two enemies whose attacks were synced like one frame off from the one I was parrying. This makes it actually feasible to go toe-to-toe with two or three enemies who refuse to stop bunching up! It's still stupidly dangerous and you're probably getting stomped, but if you execute perfectly it's at least physically possible now!
• No more stamina bar. I'm generally in favor of stamina mechanics, but this was the right call. Lately I'm working on this theory that stamina, as a mechanic, is actually about positioning, and Death has enough other positioning-related mechanics that stamina would have been working at cross-purposes with. (Wildly varying attack ranges, poison-trail projectiles, the entire rank and combo system...) It improves the momentum and lets you focus harder on reflexes and execution, and it's just a better fit for the quantity of aggression the game's aiming for.
• More interesting and flexible loadout config. This is already getting kind of long and the changes are a bit complicated, but suffice it to say, I felt like I had a wider selection of valid equipment sets in the late game this time, and more reasons to switch between them.

I also think this follow-up tells a more effective story — it shows a lot more willingness to risk being seen, IMHO. It's still oblique and obscure, don't get me wrong, and it definitely still feels like ...I think the playful term of art is "OC brain-rot," where you've been living with this cast of characters in your head for fifteen years and the palimpsest of origins and rewritten origins and spiderwebbed relationship graphs and past lives is starting to become incomprehensible. But like, listen, I love that shit. You know you do too. And this iteration does a much better job of inviting the player/reader inside the mess.

(That said, someone please help me understand what in the hell Anna and Naomi had to do with the state of the nightmare this time around?? I thought Naomi's rebuilt memory had turned into Lucah, but now it looks like Lucah had a physical existence under their own name prior to the nightmare (or at least prior to the second nightmare?), and the rebuilt Naomi is still sort of here, so I must have completely misread that? Plus I guess I didn't successfully melt Maria at the end of the first game after all because she's still kicking it as "Sister," although I guess she's gone full corrupt mode, but maybe that's because of how even "real" people can die repeatedly in here and get rewound to prior states under certain conditions, just like nearly the entire cast did, twice? Oh my god. It's worse than Silent Hill up in this thing.)