A Contemptible Struggle

 

Time for another depressing one that has nothing to do with games. Sorry!

Thing is, I’ve been thinking about the Cornell case a lot this week. In addition to thinking about the crime itself, and the environment that produced it, and our benighted political and cultural climate, I keep thinking things like, Well, who cares what I think? I’m a nobody, and does anybody really need another man to weigh in on this right now? But there is one aspect of this that I do need to push myself to write about, and even if my tiny platform only reaches a dozen men, some of those men probably need to hear it. We mustn’t fall into the trap of assuming that all of our friends, everybody who’s “like us” in some cultural sense (has the same hobbies, the same interests) shares our values and knows what we know.

* * *

If somebody I’m close to—a friend, a cousin, a friend’s kid, whatever—were accused of a heinous crime like this, I think, to be truly honest, that I would reflexively reach for exculpatory explanations. I would have, deep in the pit of my stomach, the fear that the accusations were true, but I suspect that that fear would only strengthen my desire to explain, to rationalize, to excuse. I would not reach for explicit victim-blaming, knowing how vanishingly rare false accusations are, but I expect that I would grasp for an explanation along the lines of “This must have been a misunderstanding.” There must be more to this story. I know him, and he wouldn’t do that.

Again, though, that’s if the accused were someone close to me. One of the things I find most sordid, depressing, and alarming about this story is how many men, including quite a few men with large platforms, men in positions of authority or credibility, have reflexively reached for explanations like these (or worse) despite having no relationship whatsoever to the accused.

I hope it goes without saying that if someone close to me were a victim of a crime like this, I would reflexively defend and support her. In a situation where everybody involved is a stranger to me, though, my response isn’t emotional, although it is a kind of second-nature reflex just by nature of having read about or heard about crimes like this so many times. I know the statistics. I know what my female friends and family members went through during their college years (which I suppose does make it emotional, to some extent). I know what frats are like. I immediately assume not only that the woman is telling the truth but that the men aren’t the only guilty parties, that they’re beneficiaries of a corrupt culture that abets and protects them.

What does it say that so many men instead react to this story as though the accused were all their brothers, their sons, their dear friends? Why do they feel so strongly that These nice boys wouldn’t do that? Why not reflexively think of the woman, equally a stranger, as their friend, their sister?

Some of these men, of course, are themselves rapists—some are rapists who know what they are, and want to stamp out any accountability for crimes like theirs; some are rapists who don’t believe that’s what they are, and are alarmed to find things that they themselves did when they were younger, and perhaps still do (coerce or trick or drug women into sex that isn’t what they think of as forcible rape but also isn’t in any sense consensual), now correctly described as rape. These men are scrambling to defend themselves more than they’re thinking about the accused. (I think this is what’s going on with a lot of the big names on Twitter and elsewhere in social media defending the accused or casting aspersions on the accuser.)

But there are a lot of men who are genuinely, if misguidedly, concerned for the accused, and for some broader idea of “justice” and, God help us, men’s rights. To some degree this is a consequence of decades of diligent far-right activism, the relentless promulgation of a fantasy narrative of totalitarian feminism and political correctness run amok. But that alone can’t explain it, and it certainly can’t excuse it. You can’t earnestly believe in a “war on men,” or believe that women receive disproportionate help and support in our society such that things need to be proactively counterbalanced to make things fairer for men, if you have any genuinely close relationships with women. Which suggests that none of these men do have such relationships. And whether it’s the misogynist attitude that precedes the inability or unwillingness to form those relationships or vice versa, it’s clearly of a piece with the fact that so many men see seven (or fifty-seven) strangers as their brothers and the woman those men abused as something less, or nothing at all.

If your reflexive response to hearing about or reading about this story was to feel sympathy for the men, to be concerned that they were being treated unjustly, to be indignant about their names being publicized, please reflect on that for a moment. Why are their feelings, or their treatment, or their good names more real to you, more important to you—why are they more human to you—than the woman they assaulted? What do they have that she lacks?

Fandom Is a Disease

Yes, this is one of those things where there's some online discourse that piques my interest (in this case, the conversation about whether it's bad, or how bad it is, to continue being a Harry Potter fan in light of J. K. Rowling's ongoing embrace of international supervillainy) but I don't get around to writing about it until weeks later when everybody else has moved on. In this case, I wasn't sure I should write about it at all, because my thesis is obnoxious and probably unconstructive, but whatever, it's fun, here we go.

And yes, “Fandom Is a Disease” is a needlessly provocative title. But still. Fandom isn't a terrible disease, in the big scheme of things. It's hardly ever terminal. But it is a disease, a disorder. At its usual worst, it's like leprosy used to be back in the bad old days, where nobody who doesn't also have it wants to interact with you and you end up living in a sad little colony of similarly afflicted outcasts. More often, it's like herpes is nowadays, where if you do a good and conscientious job of managing it, most people don't even need to know that you have it, although maybe you're still most comfortable in congress with other folks who do. Some people find community in their afflictions; some people even find merit in them. Tuberculosis used to be sexy. It made you fetchingly wan and enervated!

This metaphor, it should be clear, has legs. Fandom is contagious, it's sometimes debilitating, it can be embarrassing (particularly when sex is involved), some people are more susceptible to it than others, and it's generally curable but every now and then some poor soul gets a particularly stubborn case, maybe a drug-resistant strain, and just has to live with it forever. But for the most part, it comes and goes. Some people get recurring cases, or lifelong cases, often of rare and obscure conditions. Some people are prone to catching everything all the time. Most people catch something at least every once in a while—if you never catch anything, ever, you're probably living in a bubble. You need to get out more.

Like many people, especially people my age, I caught the Star Wars bug as a kid. It was ubiquitous back then, and there was no known treatment. I had a very grave case of it for many years. In my early teens, we got it under control for a while, but I had a serious flare-up when The Phantom Menace hit theaters. Thing is, at that point I was a little older, a little stronger, and the second epidemic strain was a lot weaker than the first. My immune system was up to the challenge. The prequel-trilogy relapse wasn't nearly as severe a case as my childhood bout with the original trilogy and the Expanded Universe, and in fact, when it eventually abated, I was thoroughly inoculated. I had a bit of a fever when The Force Awakens came out, but it broke quickly; I never even bothered watching The Rise of Skywalker. I was cured. (Do I still have fondness for Star Wars? Sure. Did I still watch, and love, Andor? Absolutely. But I enjoyed it for itself, on its own terms, rather than as a Star Wars fan.)

Harry Potter fandom is like conjunctivitis. It's normal enough for kids to get it, although it's still pretty gross; it's pretty weird to keep getting it as an adult. It's really weird to have it all the time. The chronic forms are absolutely treatable. There's no excuse for living with it for longer than a week. Yes, some kinds of conjunctivitis don't come from touching shit. But this one does. This is a case of pink eye that you keep getting via contact with shit from the world's most influential and committed transphobe. Grow up, wash your hands of her, and stop touching that shit.

Names for the Future

I've written before about naming things in fiction (or worldbuilding, if you will), and I've written, albeit somewhat narrowly about a couple specific fictional worlds, about the default whiteness of the future. Now I'm going to tie those two threads together: When dreaming up a science-fiction setting that's somewhere in our ostensible future, how should one name things and people? What kind of pitfalls are there?

* * * 

The first of the latter is obvious, already discussed in my second link above: Don't just project your own cultural context into the future. Even setting aside how unrealistic and chauvinistic this is, it's boring as hell, because writers have been doing it forever. A ton of classic SF is like this, including some of our most beloved and influential works, like Star Trek, which committed the cardinal (if not original) sin of having all humans be from Space America and using alien species to represent foreign cultures. Despite not being set in our future, Star Wars did much the same—the good humans are mostly white Americans, the bad humans are most white Brits, and (even before the most egregious racial caricatures of Japanese and Jamaican people arrived in The Phantom Menace) the aliens are foreign.

So, you know, don't do that. But what are the alternatives? You've always got “just make it up” as an option—separate your future setting so far in time or space from our world that the traces of existing human cultures are gone or at least illegible. But that's actually very difficult, because it's really hard to imagine a culture entirely disconnected from your own. Language is such a powerful vector of culture that, you know, how can you write anything in English and not bring a bunch of Anglo-American cultural baggage with you?

Easier (and consequently more popular) is to think about how we get from our present day (or maybe our past, in an alternate-timeline setting) to your future, populate your setting with people descended from the people of the present, and use their names (or names derived from those, or otherwise from their cultures, if you want to get fancy with it). And it's just good for the setting in general, for your understanding of what you've imagined, to have a sense of the transition from now to then, rather than “the future will be just like now, but with phasers and warp travel and no money.”

A couple examples of how other folks have done this:

The names of the pilots in the game Brigador communicate a lot of the backstory. It's not too strict, not too didactic, but the patterns are easy enough to see—a lot of the Nobreans have Brazilian, or plausibly Brazilian, names (Portuguese, German, Japanese, etc.); the Spacers have a bunch of Finnish and (posh) English ones. This is a universe where the Global North and Global South both went to space, but at different times and in different relationships to capital. It's sketched out pretty loosely, but it's highly effective.

The Expanse does something similar (caveat: I've watched the show but haven't read the books). To some extent, the population of the Solar System is just an extrapolation from the Earth's current population—there are people of Chinese and Indian descent everywhere, including some of the most powerful figures of the setting—but there are are some specific touches that tell part of the backstory. Indian and American (specifically Texan) influence shape the culture of Mars, and the show's casting of Belter characters makes clear, in an understated way, that the most exploited people of the future are the descendants of the most marginalized of today (the two most prominent roles for Black actors on the show are Belters, and Belter extras and minor roles lean non-white more than characters on Earth or Mars).

And there's Dune, of course, which does some bigtime handwaving about the 20,000-year gap between its publication and its setting but is still explicit (in a way that the films have, unfortunately, somewhat effaced) about the cultural descent of its characters, particularly the Fremen, who represent a purposefully, conservatively preserved Arab culture (albeit with a few other influences; “Sietch Tabr” is derived from two Cossack terms) where other people have gone through more of a melting pot. Other terms in the setting suggest the wider influence of Arabic (bashar, jihad, caid, amal, etc.) as well as Persian (padishah, siridar), Turkish (kanly), and various Western European languages (landsraad, levenbrech, faufreluches). In medicine (the Suk school), religion (prana-bindu), and science (axlotl, s'tori) we see Asian and Native American influences, but the military–political feudal hierarchy clearly has foundations built on European and Middle Eastern cultures; we also see this in family names (Atreides is Greek, Harkonnen is Finnish, etc.).

* * * 

Now, if you're imagining the future of humanity, as those examples suggest, you have a bunch of options, and they depend a little on the scope of what you're creating. You got a cosmopolitan space empire with relative freedom of movement, and you don't want to do any extra legwork? You can probably just extrapolate from Earth's present-day demographics and call it a day. Lots of Indian names, lots of Chinese names, lots of Hispanic names, you're good. And if you're looking at a fairly narrow setting, like a single colony planet, just pick a couple groups you find interesting. The colony was established by a Franco-Congolese corporation, the first wave of colonists were Congolese and Filipino, and they later brought in some Egyptian specialists to work on an agricultural project. There's a francophone elite, most people speak a new creole, there's an Arabic-speaking minority, maybe you've got some religious groupings that cut across class lines in interesting ways, etc.

In between, though—say you're developing a whole sector for a Mothership (or Stars Without Number) campaign with a dozen systems, a whole bunch of planets and moons, a whole future history to think about. Who originally settled this place, and for what purpose? How many independent settlements were there? Were there multiple waves of colonization or waves of immigration to established colonies? You can get way out in the weeds on this, if it tickles you (as always in worldbuilding), and imagine secondary and tertiary cultures developing from present-day societies and then meeting on the extrasolar frontier and influencing each other in new and different ways.

But you can also keep it pretty simple. Think of that racist-ass backstory for Starlancer and Freelancer. The setting for the latter being almost entirely American, British, German, and Japanese (with a few Mediterranean pirates on the margins) may be terrible, but the mechanical premise works for quickly spooling up a playable region of space. Pick origins for three or four original colonies of whatever flavor (pure corporate feudalism, a mix of state and corporate identities, whatever—it depends a lot on where your setting lands on the continuum from hard SF to space fantasy), bring in some second- and third-wave migrants, imagine how everybody interacts and how things develop.

Personally, I think it's fun to imagine who on our Earth gets second (or third) pickings in space. Forget about all the countries (or multinational unions) that have advanced space programs right now—the Americans, Russians, and Chinese went out there first and grabbed all the plum spots near Earth; the Europeans and Japanese were right behind them. Now pretty much all of the usual suspects for cultures/names in SF are out of the picture. Who's up next? Look at projections of economic growth and send a couple rising economic powers to the stars. How about Indonesia and Brazil? How about South Korea, Mexico, and Turkey? Nigeria and Ethiopia? Or go even more speculative, and imagine Egypt getting the United Arab Republic back together, the Democratic Republic of Congo experiencing a high-tech transformation, India balkanizing and an independent Dravida Nadu going into space, or whatever else strikes your fancy.

* * * 

There's another dimension here that kind of cuts against what's future-historically probable, and might cut against what's fun and interesting to you, but that's worth considering, and that's the fact that, if you're reading this, you probably work in English, and most or nearly all of your own audience is engaging with your work in English, many of them coming from a place of English monolingualism or near-monolingualism. Diversity and historical plausibility are great for verisimilitude, but consider the phonology and orthography of the languages your names are coming from. Some are, in practice, a lot more easily grasped by your audience than others.

On the orthographic front, English speakers struggle with languages that use the Latin alphabet but include unfamiliar letters, use a lot of diacritics, or use familiar letters to represent unfamiliar sounds. Think Vietnamese or Polish. Do Trần Thanh Mẫn and Đỗ Văn Chiến sound much like those letters would in English? (Pop those names into Translate and find out!) Do Krzysztof Gawedzki and Mieczysław Grydzewski look pronounceable in English at all, at least to the average American? (My grandma was Polish, and maybe yours was too. Imagine otherwise!)

On the phonological side, native English speakers struggle with tone even when they can hear it, and there's no way to communicate tone in writing without diacritics that mean little or nothing to English speakers (Vietnamese strikes again). The singular Chinese (and Korean, and Vietnamese) name 李 gets transliterated into English in a dozen different ways (Lee, Li, Lei, Ly, Lý, Ri, Rhee, I, Yi, etc.); meanwhile, the entirely different names 羿, 易, and 伊 are also transliterated as Yi. Also 余 and 于 sometimes! And maybe 衣? (I do not speak any Chinese at all and am leaning pretty hard on Wikipedia here, bear with me.) You also see this to some extent with Wu, Wang, Liu, Chen—a lot of the most common Chinese surnames. And it's made even worse by given names (one of the most common Chinese given names, 丽, is also transliterated as “Li”).

All of which is to say that, if you're using Vietnamese names or Polish names, your readers are going to stumble over them (or just wildly mispronounce them, or both). If you're using Chinese names…well, you're not really using them, in a sense. You're only using part of the word, and you're flattening a whole dimension of sound and meaning away into nothing. So although it might work against your vision of a futurologically realistic setting, consider massaging things so that you're pulling from languages that are easy for English speakers to get their heads (and tongues) around.

Happily, if we refer back to those speculative third-wave space programs, Turkish, Indonesian, and Swahili are all, being or having been trade languages or bridge languages binding together diverse populations, among the easier non–Indo European languages for English speakers to grasp in general, not just phonologically. For languages more closely related to English, there's Spanish, of course, but also a lot of Indian languages, including Hindi/Urdu. Korean is phonologically a bit trickier than Japanese (and syllable-timed, like Japanese), but it's not tonal. Portuguese is more difficult than Spanish, but it's close enough that Americans think they get it even when they don't. Arabic and other Semitic languages (like Amharic) aren't easy for English speakers to pronounce well, but good transliteration (and familiarity via the news, unhappily) mean they don't struggle too much.

And all the major Nigerian languages are tonal. Can't win ’em all. At least they're not monosyllables!

Populating an Alien Ecosystem (with Gameable Stuff)

I've been running a homebrew adventure for my Mothership crew that began life as a response to one player's yearning for a Scavengers Reign TTRPG experience but has turned, both in development and at the table, away from being a wilderness-crawling survival adventure and toward being more of a horror mystery (which, incidentally, has made it more suitable to pitch for the Jump-9 Writers Grant, which I'm probably gonna do). Still, I put a bunch of work into coming up with zany alien life for the players to puzzle out and the PCs to interact with. I started out by coming up with a fairly novel planetary setting, then sketched out a few biomes the PCs might traverse, came up with a few broad-strokes ideas about what flora and fauna looked like (basic body plans, colors), and then got down to coming up with a bunch of details about the first biome they'd be in. Using various tools, particularly this handy generator based on Sebastian Romu's work and the very charming Exquisite Biome by Caro Asercion, I cooked up a half-dozen animals and a dozen plants.

As is so often the case with this kind of detailed game prep, it was a lot of fun, but the juice wasn't worth the squeeze in terms of gameplay outcomes. I had a ton of information, but a lot of it was totally extraneous, and what wasn't extraneous was often imperceptible to the PCs, or perceptible only if they took a sustained interest in something. And how were they supposed to know what to study in depth? I came up with some clues about interactions among my xenobiota (this crab-like invertebrate is drawn to this plant-like organism; the bark on this “tree” seems to be consumed by some other lifeform; these things seem only to grow near these other things) but the only way to get that information across was to either hope they asked the right question or make an exhausting info dump. There were other problems, too—turns out my friends, bless their hearts, are squeamish about murdering vertebrate animals.

I need a system that's more player-directed. Give them a broad sense impression of their environment, then let them ask questions and have their interests or needs drive what gets created (or fleshed out) ad hoc. What looks edible? What could we use as a parasol? Can we turn any of this into a prybar? Consequently, I need simpler, faster tables for generating lifeforms. This'll be handy for the game I'm presently running, but it'll be essential for a more open-ended, more squarely Scavengers Reign–inspired campaign, which is something I do want to return to. I want these rules to:

• Be usable at the table without interrupting the flow of the game. A couple die rolls, some immediately gameable results. Should be worth using for more in-depth prep, too, but it's essential to just be able to roll a fistful of dice and instantly be able to tell the players something that's evocative and that they can act on.
• Produce a range of sensory impressions. What does it look like? Does it have an odor? Is it making sounds? (“What does it feel like?” and “What does it taste like?” are important too, but they can and should wait for a more methodical investigation, which helps reduce the number of rolls that have to happen all at once.)
• Give results for lifeforms analogous to plants, fungi, and invertebrate animals that have a high probability of being useful to the PCs. No need to be “realistic” about it, especially when Scavengers Reign (where practically everything is useful or interactive) is the North Star. It is a game, after all. (And perhaps there's a good lore justification for a high degree of usability and combability with human anatomy or technology…)
• Give results for lifeforms analogous to vertebrate animal that are interesting without demanding that the players go hunting, and ideally encourage nonviolent interaction (but also sometimes encourage the players to guard against being hunted).
• Occasionally provoke stress checks. Gotta keep the players on their toes.

 

* * * 

 

The sensory qualities are pretty straightforward. I've already been trying these out at the table, where they work great; they probably aren't enough to bring things to life from first principles, but given that I already have a good sense of what plant-like stuff and animal-like organisms generally look like here, these prompts are enough for an off-the-cuff description of something new.

 

d20 colors (2d10 for photosynthetic organisms; this is under a K-type main sequence star):

1. White
2. Ultraviolet (appears black or dark purple to human vision)
3. Violet
4. Periwinkle
5. Azure
6. Teal
7. Olive green
8. Lime green
9. Gold
10. Saffron
11. Amber
12. Orange
13. Vermilion
14. Scarlet
15. Amaranth
16. Maroon
17. Infrared (appears black or dark red to human vision)
18. Black
19. Pink
20. Powder blue

 

d10 textures:

1. Smooth and rigid
2. Smooth and soft
3. Abrasive
4. Ridged
5. Scaly
6. Stippled
7. Sticky
8. Velvety
9. Spiny
10. Porous

 

d10 animal sounds:

1. Trilling
2. Chirping
3. Barking
4. Roaring
5. Shrieking
6. Singing
7. Trumpeting
8. Wailing
9. Rattling
10. None

 

d5 plant sounds (or maybe d10, with 6–10 being none):

1. Creaking
2. Clacking
3. Rustling
4. Rattling
5. Whispering

 

d10 odors:

1. Fragrant, like floral perfume
2. Resinous, like pine sap
3. Sweet, like ripe berries
4. Sharp, like citrus fruit
5. Minty, like…mint
6. Burnt, like coffee or woodsmoke
7. Yeasty, like rising bread or old socks
8. Acrid, like cleaning fluid
9. Pungent, like garlic or horseradish
10. Putrid, like rotting matter

 

d5 (dominant) flavors:

1. Sweet
2. Salty
3. Sour
4. Bitter
5. Umami

 

d5 intensities (for odor or flavor; might be better as a weighted scale on a d10):

1. None (or imperceptibly weak)
2. Weak
3. Distinct
4. Strong
5. Overwhelming

 

Working out what organisms are useful to the PCs is a little trickier. I might want to weight these differently, and I might want a roll to determine how many parts of an organisms are useful, and which parts (a plant analog might have tasty but nutritionally empty leaves, nutritious but unpleasant-tasting bark, and poisonous roots, for instance). On the other hand, that might be something I can just leave to player initiative/discretion. As a rough first draft, at any rate:

 

d10 useful/harmful qualities

1. Inedible (can't be digested)
2. Inedible (repulsive, possibly emetic)
3. Inedible (toxic)
4. Edible but neither flavorful nor nutritious
5. Edible and flavorful but not nutritious
6. Edible and nutritious but not flavorful 
7. Edible, flavorful, and nutritious
8. Has pharmacological properties
9. Can be processed into tools
10. Can interface directly with the human body

Everybody Is an Imposter

I've been following recent events in Yemen with great interest. And I just watched Lawrence of Arabia (for the first time ever, shame on me). And it's 9/11, of course, the 25th anniversary of that fatal wound to American empire that we're only now finally getting around to dying of.

So I'm thinking a lot about the Middle East and imperialism and historical destiny and all that. A bunch of dudes in flip-flops are stunting on the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces, with all their F-15s and Abrams tanks. The Saudi military and their Yemeni proxies and their mercenaries, are, of course, frauds, as a fighting force goes. Imposters. And of course the Yemeni government (the actual, if internationally unrecognized, Yemeni government affiliated with Ansarallah, the so-called Houthis) are a bunch of imposters too, in a sense. In more than one sense—in that they're not recognized as the legitimate government of the country (despite governing areas containing the vast majority of the population), and also in that they have little or no training in statecraft or experience running a government or anything like that. But they manage. And in that, they're not so different from the Saudis. Or the Americans.

When Lindsey Graham died a couple months ago, lots of stories about him circulated. My favorite, the one I think is most telling, is this, a recounting in his own words of his long climb up the ladder of power:

When I was first elected to the House, I looked for the they. They who run things. They who know how things really work. They who know what they are doing. But I couldn’t find the they. I went to the Senate. But there was still no they. And then I started to get invited to the White House, and to closed-door briefings, and to meetings with top officials. No they. What I finally realized is that there is no they. There is only we, and we usually don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.

It's imposters all the way down. Pete Hegseth is more obviously a fraud as Secretary of Defense (or War or whatever) than past officeholders, and Donald Trump is more obviously a fraud as President of the United States, and the SAAF are more obviously a poor simulacrum of a real military, and so on and so forth, but these phenomena (and our panoptic media environment) are all just pulling back the thinnest veneer of credibility from a bunch of shit that's always been this way. Was Lyndon Johnson a serious statesman? He blundered ever deeper into the Vietnam War and destroyed his legacy because he didn't want people to think his dick was small. Was the U.S. military ever a credible hegemon, or did it just coast for decades on the empty threat that if you bombed every American base in your vicinity off the map, something much worse would happen to you than a dried-out neo-Nazi alcoholic calling you names and drone-striking a few wedding parties?

This is all scary and grotesque and disorienting, but it's empowering too. Empowering politically, because the people in charge, who want you to think that they're wise and capable masters of the universe and that the pathetic little likes of you couldn't possibly handle the pressure and the responsibility and the complexity of what they deal with (and that you can't ask for, or even hope for, things to get meaningfully better), are mostly clueless dipshits, and any random American grabbed off the street could probably do a better job than they do, and don't let them tell you otherwise. But empowering personally, too. You want to write a book, start a band, create a game, but you're not a real writer, not a real musician, not a real designer? Sure you are! You're already better at all of that stuff than George W. Bush ever was at being president. I believe in you.