Orks in Space

I haven't unpacked my camera gear yet, but I suppose I could just write for the hell of it. You know. Like I used to. I've been getting into tabletop gaming, if for no other reason than computer/console gaming seems to be losing its appeal at an alarming rate. One could say it's being leached away.

There's been a lot of games out lately that I just can't be bothered to care about. Call of Duty is a franchise that was beautifully resurrected in the original Modern Warfare. I still get chills from the mission in Chernobyl, creeping through the Zone of Alienation in a Ghillie suit. Unfortunately, no other game has ever lived up to the sheer amazingness of the MW. MW2 was like a half-assed attempt by the developers to mail it in, offering a half-baked campaign with twice the flair and half the gritty story of the original. Multiplayer was a complete wash, a trend that has continued to the present day in the latest iterations. There's no tactics, just run run run, shoot. Or maybe knife. Some of the shit with knives from MW2 was insane. I know because I pulled a lot of it. Flying up a ten foot flight of stairs, toes barely touching, shrugging off bullets as my knife - seemingly of its own accord - finds the most vital regions of my enemy, ending his virtual life in the blink of an eye.

I mean, really. To a fifteen year old mind, that's practically pure porn. But it doesn't interest me in the slightest anymore. There's no consequence, no teamwork, and no soul. I'd rather watch a bunch of rocks tumbling down a cliff.

But anyway, back to tabletop games. Or rather, one tabletop game in particular: Warhammer 40k. I've always been peripherally aware of it. My first experience with the actual tabletop game was almost five years after I'd played through Relic's rendition of the game universe in Dawn of War (with requisite expansions). For a lot of players, jumping into the tabletop is a matter of deep contemplation, as each faction offers a diversity of abilities, as well as options for building and painting models.

For me, it was instantaneous. No consideration required. I would command the Orks, and we would win.

Like all games, Warhammer 40k is rife with options and choices for those who want an easy victory. Typically the Space Marine factions (tangent: if you haven't already, play the demo for Space Marine. Fucking good game) have unique chapters that offer benefits that just wouldn't fly otherwise. I didn't want an easy faction though. I wanted to be that badass foe, that menace that makes generals sweat at night. I wanted to be the horde of mongols that come swooping down from the hills, burning and pillaging.

On the table, it's a sight to behold. Most people play factions that favor small, powerful squads of specialists.  They often start the game in one corner of the board, systematically picking and guarding objectives like a team of SEAL operators. All of that goes out the window when they see my horde. I don't start in a corner. There's so many goddamned orks that I take a whole side of the board to myself. It's like Ghengis Khan and Erwin Rommel teamed up, and they're coming down to get you, so you better prepare your anus.

It's like playing chess, except your opponent only gets a queen and two bishops. And you get thousands of pawns. Actually, wait. No. It's not like chess at all. The kings in chess don't get transdimensional artillery.

The other reason that the tabletop game is so appealing is because of the strategy involved. It's a deep, turn-based strategy that makes the brain eat itself in consideration. Games like Starcraft are only two dimensional in their strategies. You build a bunch of units, and then cram them up your enemy's ass - hopefully in the correct formation that ensures he dies and you don't. There's tactics, but eventually it evolves into maximizing plays and forcing exploits in the game engine. There's no consideration for long-term goals, or deadlines before victory or defeat. There's no time to really worry if your actions were correct. The consequence of failure is a quick return to the lobby, and another 20-second wait before the next matchup.

Games like Warhammer 40k put you in the vice. A misstep could put your powerful shooters into the assault range of a bloodthirsty mob of assholes. A carefully tuned army, trained and perfected for hunting soft-skinned Orks, will suddenly and completely collapse in the face of heavy armor. It's like Sun-Tzu's fucking carnival, and I love it.

Another aspect of the tabletop is building and painting models. I'm absolute rubbish when it comes to painting, but the practice has had a peripheral benefit. I was promoted to a computer technician at work, and that means I spend a lot of time with very long screwdrivers, tiny screws, and very tight spaces. For my first few months, I was an absolute klutz, dropping screws and losing tiny bits all the time.

After about a month of painting, I can balance a tiny screw on the end of my screwdriver without much fuss. My hand tremors are more or less under control, and the quality of my work has improved twofold. All because of a dumb geek hobby.

But yeah. Anyway. Orkz.

Brought to you by the letter "A"

There couldn't possibly be enough music in the world.

Please plug in the charger

I'm surrounded by devices meant for communication. I check my phone habitually, updating myself on what's going on everywhere, at all times.

I'm studying the means of accelerating human communications. It's only now that I realize - what's the point?

The means are there. The message isn't.
The phone is proof enough. A fistful of cash a month for the reassurance that everything is fine and I'm not needed anywhere.

It's akin to being a telepath, but all I hear is noise. Nothing useful. I'm attuned; in communion. But all that's out there is pointless static.

Nothing you say could make less sense

They say it comes in threes. Three bad years. Three bad months. Three bad days.

Grandfather passed away. After ten months of agonizing dementia, the body finally caught up to the mind. We wanted to grieve and mourn, but all anyone could feel was relief, and release.

I was asked to write the eulogy. Initially, they wanted me to present it too, but I told my parents to find someone else if they planned on doing anything else that day. In the end, I think it worked out for the best. Family we haven't seen for decades showed up at grandpa's funeral. The whole family tree, basically. It was interesting, and we told a lot of stories.

Then when I got home, there was the whole bit about Osama bin Laden getting nailed by Navy SEALS. There was a lot of cheering and celebrating. I don't know why. So much emphasis was put on nailing this one guy, this one insignificant life. I asked ten years ago if the US was motivated by revenge for Sept. 11. Now we know the answer. If Osama bin Laden paid the price for 3,000+ dead Americans, I can only imagine what karmic retribution is in the pipe for all those dead and displaced Iraqis.

And then the election (see, all in threes). I'm not at all surprised by the outcome. The Conservatives have a strong backing in the nationalist elements of Canada. There's been some pretty bad things done on the world stage in Canada's name, and I guess that kind of sally-forth bullshit struck a chord with Canadians who've, for generations, toiled thanklessly in the diplomatic slog of UN and multilateral negotiations.

Now we have four years to live with the consequences. A lot of people have told me they couldn't be bothered to vote because every party is full of shit. Yeah, that might be true, but those same parties are the ones making the laws to tell you what to do, and how to live.

My vote might not have been a winning one, but I'd like to think it counts as a protest against jerks in suits telling me what to do and when.

Just a thought.

More music

So, in an effort to get back into the writing groove, I've been on the hunt for new bands.
You know, it never ceases to amaze me how badly people fail at categorizing music. There's such an overweening desire for bands to fit neatly into genres - for marketing I guess.

This is probably why I'm in favor of free sampling, because you can never trust a band by its genre, and listening to something you think you might hate might result in something you actually enjoy.

Case in point - a band called Amplifier, whom I was told was like a "heavy A Perfect Circle."
No. No, it's a lot more like Pink Floyd had a kid with an old school ice-box, and the result was some seriously chilled out epic rock.



I seriously just finished playing Sins of a Solar Empire for three hours while listening to these guys. If you can find a place that sells it, I recommend their album "The Octopus."
I guess it's kind of a big deal wherever you can find it.

Wide

I've been looking for a wider perspective. The cost is substantial, and could possibly set me back from 2013.

But it also opens the doors to new possibilities.

Snake-eyes, always

I don't mean to gripe, but sometimes I wonder.
If bad luck,
is really so much better than no luck at all.

Writer's Block

I don't know what happened. But it's like somebody's clamped shut the valves and all I can hear is a constant buzzing in the back of my head.

Frontier, Part III

We got through another section tonight. The encryption process seems to line up with the polymorphic code we found at the end of the last segment. Inserting the code at the right intervals reduced encryption complexity by a factor of twelve. It's like... the more we get, the faster we can access the rest.

This one was different though. No Albedo. No ships. No colonists.

The recording was... hazy. Scratchy. Like it was different from the others. Judging by the hands that kept appearing in the line-of-sight, it was still Ark, but the quality of was just... well. It was shit. We couldn't make anything out.

Well, not initially anyway. As the recording went on, the quality gradually became better. It was an alien planet - topography like nothing we had ever seen before. Jagged indigo cliffs with veritable seas of gray, untouched ash between them. The only light came from a main sequence white dwarf, barely visible on the horizon. Every few steps, Ark would stumble. From our analysis, the ash appeared to be volcanic. Likely pretty slippery. But something was wrong. After falling a few times, Ark's path became slewed, almost like he wasn't sure where he was going. After falling for about the fifth time, Ark just... stayed down.

At this point, the researchers paused the playback. This whole scene was so different from the others that they weren't even sure it was authentic. Attempts to pull up context ended up spewing garbage code throughout the server buffers. The whole thing was a mess, but I had a feeling that there was a point to it.

We resumed playback 12 hours later. Ark remained motionless on the ground, eyes up to the stars. Planetologists on the team noted the lack of atmospheric colouring. Whatever planet Ark was on, was essentially in a vacuum. Even with the sun up, it was very easy to see the stars.

It was about hour four when some of the research team noticed an eerie effect in the playback. The stars began cartwheeling across the screen at incredible speeds. Mathematical analysis concluded that it was a time lapse, even though the tiny white sun never moved. This revealed that the planet was tidally locked, though Ark's reasons for being there were still a mystery.

It was hour 20 when something finally happened. A giant black smear opened in the middle of the screen, blotting out where the stars had previously been tracing their way. Out of the maw came a slender, tubular vessel, angular nacelles glowing with incandescent heat as it exited the slip. Slowly the ship descended, settling down out of Ark's field of few. A few tense moments went by before a metallic face appeared in the corner of Ark's vision. It was vaguely human, though mechanical joints and fine, filigree-thin tracery plotted from the corners of the eyes, the mouth, and the ears to the back of the bald head. Instead of eyes, the face had two luminous blue optics. Even with the degraded quality of the recording, we could see that this was a Third-Gen Immortal. After staring at Ark, whoever-it-was seemed to hunch over and lift him up. The recording was jarred slightly, and we finally saw something that made our blood run cold.

Ark's body was decayed and covered with the same volcanic ash that coated the entire planet. His central chest cavity seemed to be badly scored, but what looked like industrial tools. One of his legs had been brutally amputated just below the knee.

It wasn't until later that week that the numbers had come back. He'd been left on that planet for just under a century. Left, seemingly, for dead. It was only after the recording was complete that a bit of code dropped into the context, arranging it all from useless heaps of junk code into more and more mathematical and cybernetic algorithms.

And wedged right in the middle of the math was a tiny, seemingly hand-written message.

"This cruelty wasn't expected or looked for. I will remember you.
And I will find you."

The cybernetic algorithms patched together to form a real-time, three-dimensional schematic of Ark's body at the time the recording was made. Extensive damage to his entire body, most of it so messily done that his internal nanomachinery wasn't able to fix it. An inch deeper into his chest, and whatever industrial tool the assaulter had been using would've penetrated Ark's biological core, killing him outright.

We'd heard about breakaway colonies that actively hunted Immortals. But this was the first time we'd been exposed to this kind of... brutality and cruelty. We shared a private moment afterward. We were shaken. Shaken, because the horror we thought we'd left on Earth had still, somehow, made it to the stars.

Frontier, Part II

The first segment decoded last night, and we've been running it through translation since then. It was a montage of collected writings, recordings, and thoughts, stored in multi-layered formats that built layers of context as one dug down into them. It appeared to be chronological in order, the first of these "memories" was a scratchy video recording.

It was shot from low orbit above Albedo. We could see the Chalcedony Sea, though it was smaller and clearer back when this was shot. Digging into the file, we developed context. The recorder, whom we assumed to be Ark, decided to land his ship off the coast of the Chalcedony Sea, roughly where Calico - our planetary capital - exists today. From first-person reference in the file, we determined that even at this point, Ark was an Immortal. He was one of three on the voyage from Earth, and with him were some thousand human beings - our ancestors.

We were watching our own founding as a colony.

I remember the looks on the research teams' faces. They could see parts of themselves in the faces of these recorded colonists. Each one was faced directly by Ark, each one was spoken to. Named. One Thousand Names. None of us were willing to say it, but we were all thinking it. This was our history. Our heritage. Never before had we cared to think of it, but here, we were living it through the memories of an ancient, space-faring soul.

The second file recovered seemed to be a remembered poem. Spoken words mixed with unresolved images.

"Icey vie. Beyrn tru Heigh. Irula san gyre, Beyrn tru Heigh."

The language was undecipherable, but each word evoked an image of, what appeared to be, sunrise on a different planet. The pictures were diffuse, but two were clearly identifiable. Earth. Albedo. In each, there appeared to be a shape in the picture's right, a dark outline too blurry to be identified. Context inverted the colour of the pictures, and revealed hand-written notes scrawled across the face of the sun.

"I was here with you, though now only I remain.
Perhaps one day, there will only be sunrises, and no one to witness their beauty.
For now, I remember you, and I am content.
We don't see it now, but every sun sets."

The third file recovered was an analytical sample. We'd seen ones like it before. Albedo's water levels, trace elements, metallics, metalloids, mineraloids, and one statistic we hadn't seen before. Ultradense. Context revealed yet more handwriting.

"Forgiving terrain for impacts. Meteroids average roughly 300 cm in diameter. Material suitable for Immortal component manufacture. Nanite precision is refined to less than one-ten-thousandth micro-arcs, finer than even Nemesis average precision. Recommend colony research applications for nano-technology. Applications could be far-reaching beyond just Immortal benefit."

The scrawl of the letters forms a crude outline. Two hours of computer processing revealed it as a crustaceomorph nanite, bristling with tiny appendage-tools. These, we'd seen before too. Children were injected with them on their third birthday to augment their immune system. Throughout their life, these tiny machines mended tissues and destroyed infected cells using tools finer than gene-surgeon's scalpel.

At last, we reached the end of the decrypted block. More poetry and hazy memories. What was more useful was a strand of polymorphic code at the end of the section. It kept repeating a linear numeric sequence:

"001002001003"

What could it mean?

Frontier, Part I

Albedo was the quintessential extrasolar backwater. 70% lime-salt desert, oceans so backish that no terran fish could even hope to live, dry dusty summer storms (it was always summer), and an atmospheric humidity that made the skin on your arms peel just thinking about it. Still, it was home. And as far as homes went, this one was pretty private. Considering it was the only station still transmitting within about 50,000 light years, one could say it was almost exclusive.

The last we'd heard from Earth had been more than three years earlier. Calamity. Death. Every frequency was the howling of thousands, lives abruptly cut short. Still, the Immortal convoys that came through our space brought news that it wasn't a complete wash. Humanity had been taken to the brink before. Billions died then. Reports this time said only a few thousand. It was a sign of the times when we could rejoice at mere thousands disappearing, but this wasn't the heyday of humanity.

If anything, we'd beaten the knell of extinction - twice. Nemesis was a black spectre that haunted us still, but we'd managed it, and even taken some from it. The Immortals were evidence of that. The Monolith invasion was a second, far more vital blow. An alien invasion headed by an insane Immortal, the only objective: to build a replica weapon to destroy all remaining humanity. It was the stuff of nightmares, but even then, we persevered.

The cost had been steep. The Immortals especially, had lost a large portion of their oldest and brightest. Second Generation members, they'd been called. People so old that they could remember what Earth looked like without Nemesis. We remember when a First Gen immortal, Sol, had visited this planet. Didn't look like much, but he left us with a record of one of the dead. Ark, they'd called him. Rumor was he was from Albedo, but hadn't been home in nearly a thousand years. That would've made him one of the founding members of the first colony, back when Albedo was the outermost fringe of thousands of human colonies that exploded across the Outer Reaches.

The record was encrypted, and even now our best computers are working to decode it. All we know at this point is that certain sections are time-locked, and based on the rotation and position of Albedo, certain records will open. The first is due to open in a few weeks time; we'll see what exactly Ark has to show us.

Hammertime

So, Dead Space 2.
Superior in every way to the original, up until (what I assume) is the final boss.

What a fucking cop-out. I just ran like fuck, blew all my ammo to survive, and now you're going to pit me in a battle of attrition? I just killed enough fucking space zombies to fill this station three times over, but nooo. It's now a battle of wits, and all I have are guns!

If rage was a weapon, the battle would be over already.

Pending Attention

So. Lights Out Asia is pretty good. But don't take it from me. Just listen.



It's good having something new to listen to while I'm writing the hojillion essays that are due this week and next.
Strangely, I'm not at all bothered by the work. Last two months have been stress, but now I've bullied everything into an arrangement that works.

Oh, also. Third draft of Caymen should be done by the end of March. I still need to find a picture or make a drawing or something for the cover though. Black and white, and e-reader friendly. Maybe I'll get out and shoot some pictures one of these days.

True forms

From an evolutionary standpoint, I guess it only makes sense. The fossil record proves it. We're only vectors for all the permutations of DNA, though given through to different paths, and to accomplish different roles.

From the judgment engine of the human mind to the bio-mechanical perfection of arthropods, I'm seeing greater and greater levels of connection. Revulsion towards insects gives way to a kind of deeper fascination. Carapace joints and compound eyes - evolutionary designs that we're always and already emulating in almost every way. Unsatisfied with our skins and our eyes, we're always wrapping ourselves up in the trappings of other things. Even our faces are cowled - subsumed even - within the falsity of something else. We cannot be ourselves, or even just be. We cannot think or speak without it falling to our purpose. Everything must be judged worth or unworthy. Desirable or undesirable. This is the evolutionary prerogative. Keep what we may, and discard the rest.

So what is a man's true form then? Soft skin clad in metal carapace, teeth of apatite and aragonite. Or perhaps it's something much more sublime, much more lucid. Perhaps the true form of man is his disappointment. His desire to be something more than he is.

Perhaps the hatred of insects isn't revulsion from their shape so much as it is jealousy.
It would be only natural.